Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,78

here one night and put something way worse than this thing under your sheets.”

Pruitt answered with a slam of the door. Angie loaded her snarling detainee into the transport kennel and drove out the Bee Line to a stretch of pine scrub near the motorsports track, where she let it go.

Then she went home, showered, put on some normal clothes, and went to meet a man who was rumored to know a man who was rumored to be unusually comfortable among snakes.

* * *

—

He lived alone on a small tree island, surrounded by shimmering Everglades marsh. His camp couldn’t be seen from the air or water. Tall, lush hardwoods shaded the hammock when the weather was hot, and shielded it from biting north winds during the short so-called winter. The funky black soil that anchored the ferns and gumbo limbos stayed moist throughout the year.

Although the old man had only one good eye, he could navigate comfortably in the dark, sometimes guided by the lights of the big jets lining up to land at Miami International. He traveled in a flat-bottom johnboat powered by a small outboard, so it ran shallow and quiet through the creeks and saw grass prairies. There was nobody else for miles, anyway.

The man owned a diesel pickup, elevated for off-roading. He kept it at a Miccosukee village on the Tamiami Trail, a historic cross-state highway which the government belatedly was elevating in sections, to let more needed water flow south. The Indian settlement was only forty minutes by boat from the tree island. On Mondays and Fridays the man tied up to a piling, got into his truck, and drove to Dade Corners to meet his connection for frozen rabbits, which were shrink-wrapped on pallets over dry ice.

Other nights he cruised slowly up and down the narrow dirt levees, lamping the wetlands with supercharged LEDs racked on the roof and bumper of his truck. If he saw other hunters he pulled off to the side, rolled up his windows, yanked the shower cap down over his face, and pretended to be asleep. Often wildlife officers patrolled the same dikes, but they knew who the man was and they let him be. He owned none of the required licenses or permits; the only identification he carried was a counterfeit Arizona driver’s license bearing a photograph of Jackson Browne and the name George W. Hayduke Jr.

The predawn return drive to the Miccosukee settlement was usually devoted to collecting fresh road kills, mostly small gators and coons, that the old man would skin and salt for his own meals. If the bed of the truck was full, he piled the bloody carcasses next to him on the passenger side. Occasionally, when the traffic thinned, he would stomp the accelerator and lean his six-and-a-half-foot frame out the window crooning while he emptied a pistol into the sky. On those nights his silver beard was clotted black with mosquitoes by the time he reached the Indian docks. There he carefully transferred his cargo, living and dead, to the johnboat. Because of the added weight, the ride back to the tree island always took longer. Once ashore, the one-eyed man used a sled made from mahogany limbs to move the frosted pallets and holding containers inland to his hidden campsite.

Only one person, his sole lifelong friend, had ever visited him there. The friend didn’t stay long. He was shaken by what he saw.

“You’re too old for this shit,” the friend said.

“I’ve been working out.”

“They could kill you in your sleep.”

“So could a heart attack,” said the one-eyed man. “Haven’t you been following the news? The country we both fought for is getting ass-raped by a paranoid, draft-dodging, whore-hopping—”

“There’s no TV out here. How the hell do you even know what’s going on?”

“Because I’ve got a generator, a laptop, and my very own Wi-Fi hotspot. These days I stay painfully informed, watching rat-toothed politicians drag the planet into a smoking death spiral.”

“You told me you gave up a long time ago,” the friend reminded him.

“It’s no longer possible to look away and live with myself.”

“So this ‘operation’ is how you cope?”

“Oh fuck, no. I cope by micro-dosing.”

“What’s that?” the friend asked.

“LSD 25. Fifteen micrograms, every other day.”

“Now you’re scarin’ the shit out of me.”

“Like old times.” The old man grinned and lifted the denim patch where his left eye used to be. A mottled, whitish form protruded from the scarred socket.

“What’ve you done now, captain?”

“I’m incubating an iguana egg.”

“Lord Almighty,”