Stoat realized what was bothering him about the manhunter’s eyes: They didn’t match. The left eyeball was artificial and featured a brilliant crimson iris. Stoat wondered where one would procure such a spooky item, and why.
“Are you going to start talking,” the man said, “or just stand there looking ridiculous.”
Palmer Stoat talked and talked, nude and dripping in the shower stall amid the broken glass. He talked until the dripping stopped and he had completely dried. He told the one-eyed stranger everything he thought might help in the manhunt—about the tailgater in the black pickup truck; about the cruel trashing of Desie’s Beemer convertible; about the break-in at his house and the perverse defacing of his trophy taxidermy; about the swarm of dung beetles set loose inside his sports-utility vehicle; about Boodle’s abduction and the ensuing eco-extortion demand; about the resort project turning Toad Island into Shearwater Island, and the ingenious wheeling and dealing required to get a new bridge funded; about the mocking note from the stranger in sunglasses at Swain’s, probably the damn dognapper himself; about the severed ear arriving soon after, by FedEx, followed by the paw in the cigar box; about the governor agreeing to veto the bridge; about how Stoat was expecting the lunatic to free his beloved Labrador any day now, and also his wife—
Here he was interrupted by the man with the crimson eye.
“Hold on, sport. Nobody said anything about a woman hostage.”
“Well, he’s got her,” Stoat said. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure. That’s why the situation is so dicey, why it would be better for you to wait until after he lets Desie go.”
The man said, “What makes you so sure she’ll want to come home?”
Palmer Stoat frowned. “Why wouldn’t she?” Then, as an afterthought: “You don’t know my wife.”
“No, but I know these situations.” The man handed a towel to Stoat and said: “Show me this room where you keep your dead animals.”
Stoat wrapped the towel around his waist and tiptoed through the shattered glass. He led the bearded man down the hall to the den. Stoat began giving a stalk-by-stalk history of each mount, but he was barely into the Canadian lynx saga when “the captain” ordered him to shut up.
“All I want to know,” the man said to Stoat, “is what exactly he did in here.”
“Pried out the eyes and left them on my desk.”
“Just the mammals, or the fish, too?”
“All of them.” Stoat shook his head somberly. “Every single eyeball. He arranged them in a pattern. A pentagram, according to Desie.”
“No shit?” The captain grinned.
“You don’t find that sick?”
“Actually, I admire the boy’s style.”
Palmer Stoat thought: He would think it’s cute. Him with his moldy rain suit and funky fifty-cent shower cap and weird fake eye. But then again, Stoat mused, who better to track down a perverted sicko than another perverted sicko?
“You shot all these critters for what reason, exactly?” The man was at the long wall, appraising the stuffed Cape buffalo head. Being so tall, he stood nearly nose-to-nose with the great horned ungulate.
“You shot them, why—for fun or food or what, exactly?” he asked again, twirling the bird beaks on the platted ends of his beard.
“Sport,” Stoat answered warily. “For the sport of it.”
“Ah.”
“You look like you do some hunting yourself.”
“On occasion, yes,” the man said.
“Whereabouts?”
“The road, usually. Any busy road. Most of what I’m after is already dead. You understand.”
Dear God, thought Palmer Stoat: Another professional hit man. This one shoots his victims on the highway, while they’re stuck in ‘traffic!
“But certain times of the year,” the visitor added, “I’ll take a buck deer or a turkey.”
Stoat felt a wavelet of relief, perceived a sliver of common ground. “I got my first whitetail when I was seventeen,” he volunteered. “An eight-pointer.”
The one-eyed man said, “That’s a good animal.”
“It was. It really was. From then on I was hooked on hunting.” Stoat thickly laid on the good-ole-boy routine, and with it the southern accent. “And now, hell, lookit me. I’m runnin’ outta wall space! The other day I got a black rhino—”