Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,10
ever got outside these walls.”
Teabull wanly made a one-armed motion toward the goldfish pond. “I’ll make sure Mauricio posts some men along the bank.”
“Please do that. It’s unusual for us to make two dives in a private body of water and not locate the victim. Mrs. Riptoad gave you my direct number, right?”
“Yes, of course. Twice, actually.”
As he watched Jerry Crosby drive away, Teabull was clammy and gut-sick. He felt much better after making a phone call.
* * *
—
Joel had gone back to his father’s house, though not before cleaning Angie’s apartment and re-stocking the kitchen. She turned on the television, muted the volume, removed a fresh syringe from the refrigerator, kicked off her clothes, and gave herself a tetanus shot in the hip.
Goddamn opossum.
She should have worn the canvas gloves. Rookie mistake, reaching barehanded into a crevice of a hoarder’s cluttered attic. Contrary to popular lore, cornered opossums don’t always play opossum; this one had sunk its teeth into Angie. For a professional wildlife wrangler, getting chomped by one of nature’s slowest, most nearsighted creatures was embarrassing.
My own damn fault, Angie thought, buttering her punctured left forearm with antibiotic cream. She’d released her captive in an orange grove near Bluefield. It was a calmed critter now, as was the hoarder.
Angie’s phone rang, as it usually did at six p.m. Her nightly death threat.
“Hello, Pruitt,” she said.
“Listen, bitch, I’m gonna hunt you down and rip out your fucking spleens!”
“Only got one, pal.” Last night it was her livers, also plural.
“Yeah, then after? I’m gonna chop off your legs and feed ’em to my dogs!”
“Not the Bichon, for God’s sake,” Angie said. “They’ve got tiny stomachs, Pruitt. Give ’em to that big-ass Labradoodle instead. Name’s Fritz, right? Feed ’em to Fritz.”
“Fuck you, lady! Your time’s up.”
“Have a pleasant evening, sir.”
Pruitt was the reason Angie had lost her job as a wildlife officer and gone to prison. One spring evening, while Angie was patrolling the lee shore of Lake Okeechobee, she watched aghast through binoculars as an obviously drunken fuckstick drove an airboat over a baby deer standing in the shallows.
The fuckstick was Pruitt, and he wasn’t too intoxicated to circle back and collect the dying fawn for dinner. As soon as Pruitt unsheathed his butcher knife, Angie moved in for the arrest.
Then—somewhere between the crime scene and the boat ramp—Pruitt lost one of his hands by forcible trauma. Angie told the paramedics that her prisoner had slipped the zip ties and jumped overboard, startling a large alligator. Pruitt’s version of the incident was quite different. He claimed that Angie had sought out the reptile, into whose gaping maw she’d inserted Pruitt’s left fist, the one that had been holding his knife.
Angie eventually resigned, pleading guilty to one felony count of aggravated assault and one misdemeanor charge of illegally feeding wildlife. The gator in question was a popular dock denizen nicknamed Lola. Over the years she’d received so many chicken bones and marshmallows from clueless tourists that she eagerly approached every occupied vessel she saw, expecting a handout.
Which is literally what she got, in Pruitt’s case.
Ironically, the amputation served to benefit the poacher when he went to court for killing the deer. Not wishing to be viewed as a hard-ass on the handicapped, the judge sentenced Pruitt to probation and a token $100 fine. However, his beloved airboat was confiscated, and that—more than the missing hand—fueled his ongoing fury toward Angela Armstrong. Every new call displayed a different area code and phone number, Pruitt being skilled at spoofing caller IDs. His punctuality was also impressive, and somewhat uncharacteristic of redneck whack jobs.
Still, after so much time and still no attempts on her life, Angie found it hard to take the man seriously. She did, as a precaution, keep tabs on Pruitt’s whereabouts, job status, bank loans and registered vehicles. Fortunately she still had data-savvy friends at the sheriff’s office. The info on Pruitt’s dogs came from veterinary vaccination records.
Angie showered and drove to Applebee’s with an eye on her rearview. Nobody followed her. She sat in a corner, and ordered a salad and iced tea. When the server inquired about the bandage on her arm, Angie told him she’d had a gaping skin biopsy. It was a line devised to end the conversation, yet instead it elicited an over-long monologue in support of homeopathic cancer remedies. Angie made a mental note to wear long-sleeved shirts in public until the opossum bite healed.
She skipped dessert and returned home. The door