1
Christmas was coming, and I had killed a man.
Either of those facts was enough to make me want to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head for a long, long time.
Not to mention the fact that I was having feelings for two men, when I’d never expected or wanted to love even one man again, ever.
Not to also mention the fact that I’d agreed to take care of an unknown, free-wheeling iguana today.
It was all too much for any one person, especially this person. I figured I had every right to put the brakes on my life and refuse to go on. To just stand up and yell, “Okay, time out! No more life for me for a while. I’ll get back to you when I’m ready.”
Instead, I crawled out of bed at four a.m., just like I do every friggin’ day, and gutted up to face whatever the day would bring. It’s a genetic curse, coming as I do from a long line of people who just keep on keeping on, even when anybody in their right mind would step aside for a while.
I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you know who. I’m a pet-sitter on Siesta Key, which is a semi-tropical barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. Until almost four years ago, I was a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. My husband was a deputy too. His name was Todd. We had a beautiful little girl. Her name was Christy. We were happy in the way of all young families, aware that bad things happened to other people, but blocking out how exquisitely tenuous life really is. That all changed in a heartbeat. Two heartbeats, actually—the last of Todd’s and Christy’s.
I’ve read somewhere that some excavators in Siberia found an intact wooly mammoth that had been entombed in ice for millennia. A butterfly was on the mammoth’s tongue. I think about that wooly mammoth a lot, because life’s like that. One second you can be blissfully standing in golden sunshine with butterflies flitting around you, and the next second, whap! The world goes dark and you’re totally alone and frozen.
I went a little bit crazy when that happened to me. To tell the truth, I went more than a little crazy. My rage was so great that the sheriff’s department wisely decided that sending me out in public with a gun on my belt was like dropping a piranha in a goldfish bowl. But grief held too long eventually becomes a memorial to yourself, and you have to let it go.
When I was able to function again, I became a pet-sitter. I like pets and they like me, and I’m not often in situations where I might revert to the old fury that buzzed in my veins for so long. I can’t say I’m completely free of either the grief or the craziness that goes with it, but I’m a lot better.
At least I was until I killed that man.
Not that he didn’t need killing. He did, and the Grand Jury agreed that he did. Actually, they agreed that I had killed him in self-defense and that it was a damn good thing I had, given the awful things he had done and would have done again, but that didn’t change the fact that I had to live with knowing I’d killed somebody.
Killing changes a person. Ask any combat veteran responsible for enemy deaths. Ask any cop who’s had to take out a criminal. You can justify it, you can know that it was your job, that it was necessary, and that you’d do it again in the same circumstance, but it still changes you, even if nobody else knows it.
That, plus the fact that Christmas would be here in exactly eleven days, was causing me to avoid almost all human contact.
In my line of work, avoiding human contact is actually pretty easy. If a pet client is new, I have one meeting with its humans when we sign a contract and make sure everybody understands exactly what I will and will not do for their pet. I’m pretty much a pushover when it comes to pets, so I’ll do whatever they need, but I try not to let the humans know that right up front. They give me a key to their house, a security code number if they have an alarm system, show me their pet’s toys and favorite hiding places, and tell me what they want done in the event they both die while they’re away. Living in a retirement mecca where the majority of the inhabitants are over the age of sixty-five makes that an issue that comes up more frequently than you’d think. Sometimes it’s the other way around; they tell me what they want done with the pet in the event it dies while they’re away. That also happens more frequently than you’d think. Once we’ve all made sure we’re in accord about what’s best for the pet, they leave and I don’t have any more contact with them until they return.
That’s my modus operandi and it’s practically set in stone. The fact that I’d deviated so much from it when I agreed to take care of an iguana that day was a mystery. His owner had called the night before and talked me into taking the job even though he wasn’t one of my regular clients, and even though it is absolutely against my professional standards to take on a pet without first meeting both pet and owner. We’d had a bad connection and I’d had to strain to hear him. To this day, I’m not exactly sure what he said that was so persuasive—his husky Irish accent, maybe, not full-blown faith-and-begorra Irish, but with enough of a lilt to make my mouth want to smile. Or maybe it was just that I have a soft spot in my heart for iguanas because my grandfather had one.
I said, “The iguana is in a cage?”
“No, no, he runs free. I don’t fancy cages.”
I nodded at the phone. My grandfather had felt the same way.
He said, “Somebody will be there to let you in. All you have to do is put out fresh vegetables. He dotes on yellow squash, and there’s some romaine and red chard. I’m forever in your debt for doing this, miss. Leave me a bill and I’ll get a check off to you the instant I get home.”
“You want me to go just the one time?”
“Yes, that’s all. Oh, and this is very important—his name is Ziggy. Zig-ee.”
He gave me his address on Midnight Pass Road, and rang off before I could get a phone number. When I looked at the notes I’d scrawled, they were pathetic. I’d written Ken Curtis (?) Vegs Yellow sqsh Ziggy.
Except for the address, that was it. I hadn’t even verified the caller’s name, and he had said it so fast I wasn’t sure I’d caught it right. I pride myself on handling my business in a professional manner, but any half-assed amateur could have handled that call better. I consoled myself that it would be an easy twenty bucks. Iguanas don’t have to be walked or groomed, so all I’d have to do was put out some veggies for him, and I’d be out in no time.
The weather for the last few days had been what southwest Floridians call cold and wintry, meaning night temperatures had dipped into the high fifties, and the days’ highs hovered just below seventy. For tourists and seasonal snow-birds, the cold weather was a major disappointment. For thin-blooded year-round locals like me, it was an aberrant misery.
My apartment is above a four-stall carport, with a long covered porch running its length. The porch faces the Gulf of Mexico, where time and capricious tides have carved a narrow hiccup of beach-front property that shifts and transforms itself every few months, making it an undesirable spot for developers and investors. When I opened the French doors next morning and stepped out on the porch, it was so chilly I could see my breath in the pale light of a coconut sky. Rain clouds were building purple mountains over the Gulf, but they looked several hours away. At least that’s what I told myself when I decided to take my bike instead of the Bronco. The truth is that at that pre-dawn hour, when the birds are still sleeping in the palms, oaks, pines, and sea grape, I feel invincible on my bike, gliding down empty streets and breathing in the salty air as if I were a bird myself.
Siesta Key is eight miles long, north to south, with one main thoroughfare named Midnight Pass Road. Sarasota Bay lies on our east side, and the Gulf of Mexico is on the west. (Two drawbridges connect us to Sarasota, so one of our favorite bitch topics is how long we had to wait for a sailboat to pass when a bridge was up.) About seven thousand permanent people call the key home, but during “the season” from October to May, our population swells to around twenty-four thousand. Except for times when our streets are clogged with sun-bemused snowbirds, tourists, or carousing students on spring break, we’re a fairly laid-back bunch.