“My God.” Despondently she folded the letter. “I can’t hardly believe it.”
Clinton Tyree snatched her under the arms, drawing her face close to his. “What I can’t believe,” he rumbled, “is that your boss had the piss-poor, shit-for-brains judgment to come fuck with me. Me of all people.”
His crimson eye jittered up toward the stars, but the good eye was fixed steady and lucid with wrath. “Anything bad happens to my brother from all this nonsense, someone’s going to die a slow, wretched death involving multiple orifices. You get the picture, don’t you?”
Lisa June Peterson nodded.
The ex-governor eased her to the ground. “Try some fox leg,” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“I advise you to eat.”
“Maybe just a bite.”
“People speak of me as Skink. You call me captain.”
“OK,” said Lisa June.
“Any reason you need to be home tonight?”
“No. Not really.”
“Dandy,” said Clinton Tyree, stoking the campfire. “That’ll give us time to get to know each other.”
The flight from Fort Lauderdale to Gainesville took ninety minutes, plenty of time for Palmer Stoat to reflect on a productive half day of work. With a two-minute phone call he’d made forty grand. The woman on the other end was the chairperson of the Miami-Dade County Commission, who had obligingly moved to the bottom of the night’s agenda an item of large importance to Palmer Stoat. It was a motion to award the exclusive fried-banana concession at Miami International Airport to a person named Lester “Large Louie” Buccione, who for the purpose of subverting minority set-aside requirements was now representing himself as Lestorino Luis Banderas, Hispanic-American.
To avoid the unappetizing prospect of competitive bidding, Lester/Lestorino had procured the lobbying services of Palmer Stoat, whose sway with Miami-Dade commissioners was well known. Once he had identified the necessary loophole and lined up the requisite voting majority, all that remained for Stoat was to make sure the fried-banana contract was placed far down on the agenda, so that the “debate” would be held no sooner than midnight. The strategy was to minimize public input by minimizing public attendance. A sparse crowd meant sparse opposition, reducing the likelihood that some skittish commissioner might get cold feet and screw up the whole thing.
It was a cardinal rule of political deal fixing: The later the vote, the better. So stultifying was the average government meeting that not even the hardiest of civic gadflies could endure from gavel to gavel. Generally, the only souls who remained to the wee hours were being paid to sit there—lawyers, lobbyists, stenographers and a few drowsy reporters. And since the shadiest deals were saved for the end, when the chamber was emptiest, competition was fierce for space at the tail of the agenda.
Lester Buccione had been elated to learn that the fried-banana contract would be taken up last, in tomb-like tranquillity, and that for this favor the chairperson of the Miami-Dade Commission had demanded only that one of her deadbeat cousins be hired as a part-time cashier at one of Lester’s new fried-banana kiosks. So pleased was “Lestorino” that he had promptly messengered to Palmer Stoat’s home a cashier’s check for the $40,000 fee, which divinely had mended Stoat’s tattered confidence—five-digit reassurance that the planet had not skittered off its axis, that the rightful order of the urban food chain had not been perverted, despite the harrowing madness that had ruptured Stoat’s personal universe.
He had been fingering the check from Lester Buccione, savoring its crisp affirmation, when out of the blue his missing wife had telephoned and asked him to charter another plane to Gainesville. Right away! And Palmer Stoat had thought: Thank God she’s finally come to her senses. He would fly up to get her and then they would go away for a while, somewhere secluded and safe from the demented dog dismemberer, the lascivious bald cyclops, the sadistic Blond Porcupine Man, the doll-stroking Clapley…
The plane landed at half-past two. Stoat searched for Desie inside the terminal but she wasn’t there. One of his cell phones rang—Stoat carried three—and he snatched it from a pocket. Durgess was on the line: No luck so far with the rhino, but good news about Robert Clapley’s cheetah! They’d found one in Hamburg, of all places, at a children’s zoo. The cat would arrive within days at the Wilderness Veldt Plantation, where it would be caged, washed and fattened up in advance of the big hunt. Anytime you’re ready! said Durgess, more perky than Stoat had ever heard him. I’ll inform Mr. Clapley, Stoat said, and get back to you.