Mercedes 1 Brady Hartsfield doesn’t need long to figure out how he’s going to poison Jerome Robinson’s canine pal, Odell. It helps that Brady is also Ralph Jones, a fictional fellow with just enough bona fides—plus a low-limit Visa card—to order things from places like Amazon and eBay. Most people don’t realize how easy it is to whomp up an Internet-friendly false identity. You just have to pay the bills. If you don’t, things can come unraveled in a hurry. As Ralph Jones he orders a two-pound can of Gopher-Go and gives Ralphie’s mail drop address, the Speedy Postal not far from Discount Electronix. The active ingredient in Gopher-Go is strychnine. Brady looks up the symptoms of strychnine poisoning on the Net and is delighted to find that Odell will have a tough time of it. Twenty minutes or so after ingestion, muscle spasms start in the neck and head. They quickly spread to the rest of the body. The mouth stretches in a grin (at least in humans; Brady doesn’t know about dogs).
