Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,13
wildlife officer. Being overqualified did not elevate her prospects for a proper wage, but over time Angie saved enough money to repay her father for the tuition to veterinary school. He never responded except for cashing the check. Later, when she went to prison, she didn’t bother writing him. By then she was single again, Dustin having dumped her a few years before she fed Pruitt’s hand to the alligator.
Angie sometimes wondered if they’d still be married had she stuck with those damn yoga classes. God knows she tried. The crowded, windowless studios made her claustrophobic, and that mandatory loop of Eastern chimes was so annoying. Why the fuck couldn’t they play Pearl Jam?
“I’m not cut out for this, Dustin,” she’d said after one blazingly sweaty Bikram session. “Serenity is overrated.”
He didn’t get angry; that wasn’t his style. Instead he took up with one of the community’s freshly divorced, self-discovering female yoga fanatics that traveled in packs, ever-alert and lithe as meerkats.
Looking back, as Angie too often did, she regretted overlooking other signal differences between Dustin and herself. For one thing, he disliked being around animals; he claimed their presence interfered with his meditations. Joel would have loved to own a dog or a cat, but dear old dad wouldn’t even buy the kid a hamster. That, Angie knew, was a red flag missed.
One time Dustin had chased after a small garter snake in the yard, swinging at it frantically with a 24-inch carbon steel crowbar. He’d missed the snake completely but pulverized three toes on his right foot.
Angie was reminded of the incident by the sight of a similar crowbar—definitely not her ex-husband’s—on the floor of her rented storage unit. This one had been used to snap the hinges on the lid of the freezer.
“What’s inside that black bag in there?” the cop asked. He happened to be one of the same pair who’d answered the burglary at Angie’s apartment.
“Dead coyote,” Angie replied.
“And that thing?”
“Juvenile otter.”
“What the hell?” the cop’s partner said, with exaggerated disgust.
Angie explained that she was in the business of removing so-called nuisance wildlife from human environs. The coyote had been shot by a horse trainer, and nobody at the stable wanted to handle the corpse for fear of rabies. As for the poor little otter, it had failed to outrun a pit bull mix owned by an eccentric obstetrical nurse in Greenacres.
“Most of my trade is alive,” Angie felt compelled to add.
“Then how come you collect the dead ones and freeze ’em?”
“I don’t collect them, sir. There’s a place way out west, some woods near Loxahatchee, that’s where I bury them. It’s a long drive, so I usually wait until I’ve got a full truckload.”
The cops said they’d never met a woman in her line of work. Without comment Angie acknowledged that most critter-removal companies were owned by men.
Mr. Sanford wasn’t much help. To the police he proclaimed: “I had no idea she was using our premises for this!”
“Oh, Johnny, that’s bullshit,” Angie said. “When your granddaughter’s pet bunny croaked, who showed up on my doorstep with the shoebox?”
Sanford lowered his eyes and licked his mustache. The first cop said to Angie: “You’re on an epic bad-luck streak, ma’am. Any chance this incident was connected to the break-in at your apartment?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“What else you keep in this freezer?” the second officer asked in a serrated tone. “Maybe a leafy green substance?”
“No, sir,” said Angie. “There’s only one item missing, by the way.”
“Which would be…?”
“A dead Burmese python.”
“No shit? How big?”
“Eighteen feet, eleven inches.” Before unspooling the tape measure, Angie had laid out the Lipid House specimen in the parking lot and carefully aligned the severed head with the neck.
She added, “One person couldn’t carry it alone.”
The first cop snorted. “Then how the hell’d a girl your size drag it in here all by yourself?”
“Two sturdy youths from the neighborhood agreed to help me. Ten bucks each,” Angie said. “I told them it was a rubber prop from a movie set. Otherwise they wouldn’t come near it. Somehow it fit in the bottom of the freezer.”
The second cop asked where the python had been found.
“The island of Palm Beach,” said Angie, “winter enclave of the sun-drenched one-per-centers.”
“How’d the damn thing die?”
“I decapitated it with a machete.”
The first cop frowned again. “That’s some sick shit.”
“It’s a state-approved method of euthanizing, sir. You can check it out online.”
“Wait—so whoever broke in and stole your dead snake, they jacked the head, too?”
“They did