Carl Hiaasen Read Online Free PDF Page B

flattened!” she’d screamed. “You could’ve killed my little boy!” Another time, when Fry was in the fourth grade, she’d watched a motorcycle blow through the school zone and nearly strike one of his classmates. Honey had hopped into her husband’s truck and trailed the biker to a tourist bar on Chokoloskee. When the man emerged two hours later, his motorcycle was missing. The next day, a purple plume of smoke led park rangers to a high-end Kawasaki crotch rocket, burned to scrap on a gravel road near the Shark River Slough.
    Honey understood that every dickhead she encountered was not necessarily a menace to her son, yet still she struggled with a rabid intolerance of callousness and folly, both of which abounded in South Florida. It exasperated Fry and his father, who couldn’t understand how she’d turned out that way.
    Honey had tried many doctors and many prescriptions, with imperceptible results. Eventually she came to believe that her condition was one that couldn’t be treated medically; she was doomed to demand more decency and consideration from her fellow humans than they demanded of themselves. What her husband wrote off as loony obsessiveness, Honey Santana defended as spells of intense and controlled focus. While denying she was mentally unsteady, she never claimed to be normal, either. She was alert to the uncommon impulses that took hold of her like a bewitchment.
    “Yes, ma’am, I’m trying to reach a Mr. Boyd Eisenhower.” Honey held the receiver in her left hand. In her right was a ballpoint pen, poised over a paper napkin.
    “What was the last name?”
    “Eisenhower,” Honey said, “spelled just like the president.”
    “I’m sorry, there’s no employee here with that name.”
    “This is RTR, correct? In Fort Worth, Texas?”
    “That’s right. I show an Elizabeth Eisenberg in Accounting, but no Boyd Eisenhower.”
    “He’s in the telephone solicitations department,” Honey said.
    “That would be our call center at Relentless, but there’s still no Eisenhower listed. Sorry.”
    Honey hung up. The guy who’d tried to sell her a ranchette on the Suwannee River had apparently given a fake name, or at least a fake surname. It occurred to Honey that Boyd wasn’t something that a man would make up for himself.
    So she waited ten minutes and tried again. As she’d hoped, a different switchboard operator answered. Honey identified herself as an investigator with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. There’d been a bad rollover in Denton, she said, involving a man who claimed to work for RTR.
    “Unfortunately, his driver’s license melted in the fire,” Honey said. “We’re just trying to confirm an ID.”
    “What name do you have?” the operator asked.
    “Well, that’s the problem. Right now the poor guy can’t remember anything except his first name—Boyd,” Honey said. “He was doin’ about eighty on the interstate when he swerved to miss a rabbit and flipped his car like seven times. Gonged his melon pretty bad, but he finally came out of the coma.”
    “Did you say ‘Boyd’?”
    “That’s correct.” Honey spelled it for the operator. “Is it possible to do an employee search by first name only? If not, we can send an officer over to look through your payroll records.”
    “Hold on, I’m scanning the directory,” the operator said.
    “I sure appreciate this.” Honey laid on a touch of what she imagined to be a mild Laura Bush accent. “I tell ya, the guy must have a real soft spot for bunnies—”
    “I found only one Boyd,” the operator said. “Last name is Shreave. S-h-r-e-a-v-e.”
    Honey Santana scribbled it on the napkin.
    “But the thing is, he doesn’t seem to work here anymore,” the operator added. “Says here on my screen that he left the company as of today.”
    “What a weird coincidence. Did he resign, or get fired?”
    “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any additional information. You say he’s gonna be all