The Hunting Trip Read Online Free

same services at no charge, plus a finder’s fee of ten percent of the purchase price on whatever the shoppers bought. This is what the Plus-Two meant.
    Mary-Louise and Amos Frathingham were going to join the jaunt out of the goodness of their hearts, and at no cost to themselves.

II
    ACTIVITY BEFORE THE TRIP
    [ ONE ]
    102 Country Club Road
    Foggy Point Country Club
    Foggy Point, Mississippi
    9:30 a.m. Sunday, September 7, 1975
    P hil Williams—who was forty-five years old, weighed 185 pounds, was not quite six feet tall, and was a victim of early-stage male pattern baldness—was sitting at his computer with a six-inch-long light brown cigar clamped in his teeth when the telephone on the credenza behind his desk rang.
    Phil said, “Oh, shit!” and reached for the receiver.
    Williams was an author—the difference between a writer and an author is that the former is just about anyone with a typewriter and the latter someone who not only has actually published a book, or books, but manages to support himself with the proceeds therefrom—and really disliked being distracted when he was plying his trade.
    Telephone calls are well-known for their ability to distract.Knowing this, Williams had two telephone lines installed in his domicile at 102 Country Club Road. One had five extensions scattered around his three-bedroom, four-bath, pool-with-pool-house, three-car-garage, 3,100-square-foot home, and the second was installed only in his home office.
    Moreover, the number of the instrument in his office was not only not published in the telephone book but was known to only a very few people. They included his son, Philip Wallingford Williams IV, known as “Little Phil,” who was, incredible as it might sound, the food critic for
The Dallas Afternoon Gazette
, the largest newspaper in Texas, and the fifth largest in the nation; Phil III’s editor, Chauncey S. “Steel” Hymen, vice president, publisher, and editor in chief of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, Publishers since 1812; his literary legal counsel, the legendary Gustave “Rabbi” Warblerman; his literary agent Jennifer “Big Bad Jennie” Waldron; and a very few friends and acquaintances, including Bobby “Fender” Bender, proprietor of Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts, who maintained Phil’s twenty-year-old Jaguar.
    â€œWhat?” Phil snapped into the telephone.
    â€œWhy don’t we go to Scotland for ten days and shoot some pheasants with Bertie?” his caller responded.
    Phil recognized his caller to be Randolph “Randy” Bruce, as much from the question as the sound of his voice.
    Among things said about Mr. Bruce was that he owned half of downtown Muddiebay and that if one of God’s creatures had fur or feathers, and wasn’t a dog or a milk cow, ol’ Randy hungered to shoot it. Muddiebay (population 260,000) was twenty miles distant across Muddiebay Bay from Foggy Point.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œA week from tomorrow.”
    Phil considered the proposal for ten seconds, and then said, “I’ll have to ask the Angry Austrian.”
    The Angry Austrian was Mrs. Brunhilde W. Williams, a native of Vienna, Austria, who had been Phil’s wife for almost twenty-six years, which sometimes seemed longer. Much, much longer.
    â€œSo ask her.”
    â€œI am never so foolish as to awaken the AA,” Phil replied. “When she does so herself, I will ask and get back to you.”
    â€œCome by the house at one-thirty. Our plane leaves Muddiebay International at quarter to three,” Randy ordered, and hung up.
    Randy was prone to give orders and to rudeness, both of which Phil understood and to a degree tolerated. Randy was not the first rich socialite he had known. There had been a plethora of them in his youth at the seven boarding schools Phil had attended, and then been sent home from.
    [ TWO ]
    S hortly after ten, Phil thought that by now his wife