Read Online Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen - Free Book Online Page B

airplane.
    And, really, that was the most Twilly ever hoped for, that the bastards would get the message. Most of them did.
    But not the litterbug. Twilly decided he’d been too subtle with Palmer Stoat; the man needed things spelled out plainly, possibly more than once. For days Twilly tailed him, and wherever Stoat went, he continued to toss garbage out the car window. Twilly was weary of picking up after him.
    One afternoon Stoat and his wife returned from a senator’s wedding in Jacksonville and found a note under a windshield wiper of the Range Rover. The note said: “Quit trashing the planet, fuckwad.” Stoat gave a puzzled shrug and showed Desie. Then he crumpled the note and dropped it on the pavement of the parking garage.
    When Stoat sat down in his sport-utility vehicle, he was aghast to find it full of dung beetles. One pullulating mass covered the tops of his shoes, while a second wave advanced up the steering column. Massing on the dashboard was a third platoon, shiny brown shells clacking together like ball bearings.
    Despite appearances, dung beetles actually are harmless, providing a unique and invaluable service at the cellar of the food chain; that is, the prodigious consumption of animal waste. Worshiped by ancient Egyptians, the insects are almost as dearly regarded by modern cattle ranchers. In all there are more than seven thousand known species of dung beetles, without which the earth would literally smother in excrement. This true fact would not have been properly appreciated by Palmer Stoat, who couldn’t tell a ladybug from a cockroach (which is what he feared had infested his Range Rover). He yelped and slapped at his thighs and burst from the vehicle as if shot from a cannon.
    Desie, who had been standing in wait for her husband to unlock the passenger door, observed his athletic exit with high interest. In a flash she produced her cellular phone, but Palmer whisked it from her hand. No cops! he exclaimed. I don’t want to read about this in the newspapers. Desie wondered what made him think such nonsense would rate press attention.
    On his own phone Palmer Stoat summoned an exterminator, who used a canister-styled vacuum to remove the bugs from the Range Rover—a total approaching three thousand, had anyone endeavored to count them. To Desie, they sounded like pebbles being sucked through the hose. After consulting an illustrated field guide, the exterminator correctly identified the intruders.
    “A what?” Desie asked.
    “Dung beetle. A common bovine dung beetle.”
    “Let me guess,” Desie said dryly, “how they get their name.”
    “Yes, it’s true,” the exterminator acknowledged.
    Stoat scowled. “What’re you saying? You saying they eat
shit
?”
    And still he missed the whole damn point.
    The very next afternoon, on his way to the driving range, Stoat tossed a Kentucky Fried Chicken box. At the time, he was stopped for the drawbridge on the Seventeenth Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale. Stoat casually leaned across the front seat and heaved the chicken box through the passenger window and over the bridge railing. Waiting three cars back in traffic, Twilly Spree watched the whole thing; saw the cardboard box and fluttering napkin and gnawed-on drumsticks and coleslaw cup tumble downward, plopping into the Intracoastal Waterway. That’s when Twilly realized that Palmer Stoat was either unfathomably arrogant or unfathomably dim, and in either case was in need of special instruction.
       
    On the morning of May 2, the maid walked into the bedroom and announced that Boodle, the dog, was missing.
    “Oh, that’s not possible,” said Stoat.
    Desie pulled on some clothes and tennis shoes and hurried out to search the neighborhood. She was sobbing when she returned, and said to her husband: “This is all your fault.”
    He tried to hug her but she shook him off. “Honey, please,” he said. “Settle down.”
    “Somebody took him—”
    “You don’t know