“Where does it stand now. Bob? Between you and the twins.”
“Limp is how it stands,” Clapley said. Nervously he tightened the sash on his bathrobe. Stoat noticed a fresh scab on one earlobe, where once there had been a diamond stud.
“Here’s the thing. The last couple days were wild, real carny stuff,” said Clapley. “Truth is, the rhino horn didn’t do a damn thing for me except ruin a perfectly good bourbon. But the girls, Palmer, they think it’s some kind of supercharged jingle crack… ”
“But they were stoned, anyway.”
“The point is,” Clapley said, raising a hand, “the point is, they think it was the rhinoceros powder that gave ’em the big wet high. They believe, Palmer, and that’s ninety percent of what dope is about: believing in it. And these are not—let me remind you, pardner—these are not the most sophisticated ladies you’ll ever meet. They escape from a dull, cold, miserable place and end up in beautiful sunny South Florida, a.k.a. paradise. Everything’s supposed to be new and exciting here. Everything’s supposed to be better. Not just the weather but the drugs and the cock and the parties. The whole nine yards.”
Through the tinted glass Stoat studied the two nude women in the tub, their impossibly round implants poking out of the water like shiny harbor buoys. The bright sun was brutally harsh on their facial features; puffy eyelids, puffy lips. Their sodden, matted hair looked like clumps of blond sargassum—Stoat could see by the dark roots it was time for refresher dye jobs. He heard Clapley say: “They want more.”
“They used it all up?”
Clapley nodded grimly. “And now they want more.”
“Bob, that shit is extremely hard to come by.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t. You have no idea.”
“Problem is, they’re supposed to get their chins done next week,” Robert Clapley said. “I’ve got the top chin guy in the whole goddamn world flying in first-class from Sao Paulo. But the girls—get this—first thing this morning they announce: No more sex and no more surgery and no more Barbie wardrobe until we get rhino dust. That’s what they call it, rhino dust.”
“How adorable.” Palmer Stoat, stroking his own artificially sculpted chin. “My advice, Bob? Deport these ingrates straight back to the motherland, then get on with your life.”
Clapley looked pained. “You don’t understand. I had plans for these two. I had a timetable.”
“Bob, you can always find new Barbies to climb your little staircase to heaven. Florida’s crawling with ’em.”
“Not like these. Not twins.”
“But they’re not really twins, for Christ’s sake—”
Robert Clapley seized Stoat’s arm. “I have too much invested here. And not just time and money, Palmer. This is an important project to me. They”—jerking his head toward the hot tub—”are important to me.”
A project, Stoat mused. Like customizing Chevys.
“Christmas,” Clapley was saying. “We’re right on schedule to be finished by the Christmas holidays—everything, head to toe. That’s how close we are.”
“They’re hookers, Bob. They’ll do whatever you tell them.”
“Not anymore.” Clapley wheeled away from the window. “Not without the rhino dust.”
Palmer Stoat followed him into the living room. “I’ll make some calls. I can’t promise anything.”
“Thank you.” Clapley sagged into an over-stuffed chair.
“But I’m not responsible for what might happen. They could croak smoking that stuff. They could fall down dead right before your eyes. Where’d they get such a damn fool idea?”
“TV probably. For some reason they decided to put the shit in a pipe. They were sucking it out of a glass pipe. Then they were sucking on me—”
“Enough. I get the picture,” Stoat said.
“Then Spa Boy showed up and they were sucking on him, and he was sucking on them… ” Robert Clapley clicked his teeth. “Oh, it was a regular tropical suckfest, Palmer. You should’ve been here.”
“No thanks. I had my own excitement.”
“Yeah?” Clapley gave a halfhearted leer.
“That’s what I need to talk to you about. The dognapper.”
“What now?”
“He sent me a paw,” Stoat said, “in a Cuban cigar box.”
Clapley grunted. “To go with the ear? Man, that’s cold.”
“Here’s what else, Bob. He’s got my wife.”