Home > Work > Squeeze Me (Skink #8)
21 " Mockingbird sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same man she’d married; he looked like a different person now—as if someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue. "
― Carl Hiaasen , Squeeze Me (Skink #8)
22 " In a place like South Florida, such heart-bound faith in the justice system could best be described as quaint. "
23 " Don’t you get it? It doesn’t fucking matter whether he’s right or not. That’s the scary part. "
24 " Next "
25 " I bet he’s MSNBC. They’ll try to bust him out. Happens all the time. Don’t you pay attention to the news?” The chief didn’t need to ask which network she’d been watching. He said, “We’ve got no evidence Beltrán is a gang member. And it’s MS-13, not MSNBC. "
26 " It’s the bare minimum,” the man said, “assuming you believe in democracy. Voting, reading, paying attention—those would be the fundamentals. "
27 " His arctic nod suggested that he’d rather be waxing his nut sack than trailing Fay Alex around. "
28 " Tonight’s feature starred the commander-in-chief himself. Angie had been summoned to Casa Bellicosa to unfasten a screech owl from the presidential pompadour, which the low-swooping raptor had mistaken for a road-kill fox. "
29 " She fell asleep anticipating another enigmatic dream. Tonight’s feature starred the commander-in-chief himself. Angie had been summoned to Casa Bellicosa to unfasten a screech owl from the presidential pompadour, which the low-swooping raptor had mistaken for a road-kill fox. When Angie arrived, the commander-in-chief was lurching madly around the helipad, bellowing and clawing at the Velcro skull patch into which the confused bird had embedded its talons. The owl was still clutching a plug of melon-colored fibers when Angie freed it. Swiftly she was led to a windowless room and made to sign a document stating she’d never set foot on the property, or glimpsed the President without his hair. A man wearing a Confederate colonel’s uniform and a red baseball cap stepped forward and hung a milk-chocolate medal around Angie’s neck, after which she was escorted at sword-point out the gates. She "
30 " The country we both fought for is getting ass-raped by a paranoid, draft-dodging, whore-hopping— "
31 " Since becoming chief, he’d also been well served by an uncommon immunity to condescension. "
32 " The sitting President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors, but in Angie’s view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn’t turn the tide if he came back from the dead. All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time. More disappeared every day; nothing ever changed except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up and pave. "
33 " had begun to drizzle, so they relocated to a latticed gazebo used for waterfront weddings and the occasional renegade bris. "
34 " The most desirable sea mollusk on the planet is the queen conch, too scrumptious for its own good. Once abundant throughout the shallows and coral reefs of South Florida, the slow-growing snail was nearly wiped out by fritter-crazed divers in the 1970s. Domestic harvesting of the species was outlawed. Today, the United States consumes eighty percent of all commercially sold conch. Most of it comes from the Bahamas and Caribbean islands, where the spiky, porcelain-lipped shells are plucked from the bottom one at a time by free divers. A small pick or screwdriver is used to punch a hole in the tip, severing the tissue connecting the animal’s tough, coiled body to its mobile lair. The flesh—a slimy, unappealing muscle—is then pulled from the shell and tenderized with a mallet. "
35 " All because my husband doesn’t trust anyone with an Islamic name. Or Jews, or blacks, or Asians, or Hispanics, or Mormons, or whatever. God, it’s exhausting to keep track. With my accent, I’m amazed he married me. "
36 " About one of every ten thousand Strombus gigas specimens produces a small colorful pearl, the gastric equivalent of a glamour kidney stone, though only a very small percent are gem quality. "
37 " The family was jolted when, at age fifty-three, Huff Cornbright perished on an autumn steelhead trip to British Columbia. Swept downstream while wading the Dean River, he foolishly clung to his twelve-hundred-dollar fly rod rather than reach for a low-hanging branch and haul himself to safety. "
38 " Katherine "
39 " Under what circumstances,” she’d mused to Martin the hairdresser one Sunday morning in bed, “could you envision Jesus Christ, a humble carpenter, hawking rosaries at the Vatican Gift Shop? "
40 " Throughout the long deep-state witch hunt—the doctored Minsk defecation video, the phony tax-evasion probe, the counterfeit porn-star diaries, the bogus Moscow skyscraper investigation, the hoax penile-enhancement scandal, the fake witness-tampering charges, and both fraudulent impeachment trials—the Potussies had remained steadfast, vociferous, adoring defenders. "