Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen Page A

“but I’d fly all night to see that little whorehopper strapped into the electric chair and lit up like Dodger Stadium.”
    “These days most of them opt for lethal injection.”
    “Are you telling me they get a choice?”
    “I’m afraid so,” Rolvaag told him. “What’s that noise?”
    “One of my ewes, trying to pop triplets.”
    “Can I call you back?”
    “No, I’ll call you,” said Joey Perrone’s brother, and the line went dead.
    Fuckwit, reprobate, horndog, whorehopper—an impressive litany of contempt for Chaz Perrone. Rolvaag reported Corbett Wheeler’s suspicions to Captain Gallo, who shrugged and said, “Hey, nobody wants to believe their little sister was a clumsy lush. Did he know about the DUI?”
    “I didn’t ask.” Rolvaag could name plenty of friends who’d been busted for drunk driving, and not one had ever fallen off a cruise ship. “What if Wheeler’s right about Perrone?”
    “Then you’ll figure it out, too, and make us all look like geniuses,” said Gallo, “hopefully by Friday.”
    Rolvaag knew better than to mention the nail marks on the marijuana bale until the DNA testing was complete. The procedure wasn’t inexpensive, and the captain would be miffed that Rolvaag had ordered it without his approval.
    Gallo handed him the letter from the Edina police chief. Rolvaag folded it back into the envelope. “Is three weeks enough time?” he asked.
    “Didn’t you hear what I just said? Friday, Karl, and then we move on.”
    “I’m not talking about this case,” said the detective. “I’m giving my notice. Is three weeks enough?”
    Gallo sat back and grinned. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll play along.”
    Chaz Perrone parked his Hummer on the levee, a half mile from the spillway. He kept the AC running and slurped coffee as he stared blankly across miles and miles of Everglades. A breeze fluffed the saw grass and combed ripples in the dark water. Coots tiptoed through the hyacinths and lilies, a young heron speared minnows in the shallows and a small bass went airborne to take a dragonfly. The place was thrumming with wildlife, and Chaz Perrone was miserable.
    Nothing about nature awed, soothed or humbled him—not the solitude or the mythic vastness or the primordial ebb and flow. To Chaz, it was all hot, buggy, funky-smelling and treacherous. He would have been so much happier on the driving range at Eagle Trace.
    Red Hammernut was the one who had insisted that Chaz stick to the program, in case Chaz’s supervisors at the water-management district decided to check up on him. It was also Red who’d bought him the Humvee, after Chaz had griped for months that the dirt roads were tearing up the shocks on his midsize Chevy.
    Chaz had chosen bright yellow for the Hummer on the theory that such an intrusive color would freak out any panthers that might be lurking in the sector of the Everglades to which he was assigned. Chaz was terrified of being ambushed by one of the big cats, despite the fact that no such attack on humans had ever been recorded. Furthermore, the animals were nearly extinct, perhaps only sixty or seventy remaining in the wild.
    When a fellow biologist reminded Chaz that the odds of being mauled by a Florida panther were roughly the same as being struck by a meteorite, Chaz announced he was taking no chances. When informed that the cats were color-blind and would therefore be oblivious to the blinding hue of his Humvee, Chaz wasn’t entirely disappointed. Girls seemed to go for the yellow.
    He climbed out of the driver’s seat and was promptly engulfed by mosquitoes. Grunting and flailing, he struggled to insert himself into the heavy rubber waders that he’d purchased from a high-end hunting catalog. The commotion spooked a turtle off a rock, the splash causing Chaz to spin around and glare at the telltale rings on the surface. When he was seven, his mother had presented him with a baby dime-store terrapin, which he’d named Timmy and later flushed down