Bad Monkey

“You, Andrew. There’s been, huh, a complaint filed on Stoney’s. Worse than the usual, okay? Some widow from Ponte Vedra wound up in the ER with a three-aught hook in her watchamacallit. That pink wormy thingy hangs down in your throat?”

“The uvula,” Yancy said. “She got a fish hook stuck in her uvula. I’m betting she ordered the Cuban yellowtail.”

“Man, that’s amazing. How’d you know?”

“Brennan doesn’t check the gut for hooks when he cooks a fish whole.”

“How come?”

“Because he’s a bumblefuck.”

“I need you pronto back in the saddle, Andrew. This one made the Citizen. The widow lady, she’s got an in with the governor.”

“Let’s have lunch later in the week. Pick a place that won’t poison us.”

Rosa got home from the office at five-thirty. They didn’t go out for dinner and they didn’t make love. The autopsy she’d completed was that of a girl who had died on her birthday. Only eight years old and the parents had left her alone while they went to play the slots at the Miccosukee casino, way out on Krome Avenue. The girl was doing laps in the backyard pool when her appendix ruptured, no one there to hear the cries for help. She made it back to the shallow end but the pain doubled her up, and that’s where they’d found her—the parents, so shitfaced they couldn’t remember where they’d left their car keys.

Yancy spent the night holding Rosa on the bed. She cried and said not every day at her job was so awful, and all he could say was close your eyes. At dawn she was sleeping when he kissed the top of her head and slipped out the door.

First he drove to Johnny Mendez’s residence and placed the crooked ex-sergeant’s gold badge inside the mailbox. The Siamese was licking its paws on the hood of the Lexus, while the gargoyle visage of Mrs. Johnny Mendez watched him from the porch. She wore inappropriate heels and a sheer morning robe that revealed a gruesome topography of misspent liposuctions. Yancy felt a prick of sympathy for Mendez; embezzling from Crime Stoppers might have been the only way to pay for his wife’s cosmetic overhauls. Yancy honked once and sped away.

In Homestead he steered off the turnpike at the speedway exit and drove to the apartment building where his grandmother had lived. From the road he could see the window the burglars had broken on the day of her funeral. Whoever lived in the unit now had a small child; a tricycle stood on the walkway by the front door. Yancy called his father in Montana and left a message asking how the fishing was. He didn’t mention where he was calling from.

On the drive to the Keys he kept the radio off. His thoughts tumbled in the quiet, and the miles slipped away. A fender bender on the Snake Creek drawbridge had backed up traffic, so Yancy stopped for a grouper sandwich at a café he knew to be clean. His muted phone showed two more calls from Tommy Lombardo, though nothing from Neville Stafford on Lizard Cay.

As soon as the highway cleared Yancy was back in the car, still thinking of Neville and the incident at Bannister Point. Yancy worried that Eve Stripling might have recognized the old man from Rocky Town, and that her husband would send Egg to murder him. Yancy wondered how long it would take the FBI to make a move.

His backup choice was Sonny Summers, despite the sheriff’s fear of the severed-arm case. Yancy thought Sonny might be persuaded to speak with the Bahamian authorities if he saw a chance for down-range glory—assisting the capture of a runaway murderer.

Halfway across the Seven Mile Bridge Yancy heard a siren. A ladder truck loomed in the rearview, and he slowed to let it pass. Fires were so infrequent in the Keys that Yancy assumed the emergency was another head-on.

He was coming over the pass at Bahia Honda, leaving a second voice message for the sheriff, when he saw a churning spire of black smoke. It was rising on the Gulf side of Big Pine, far from the highway, which meant it wasn’t a car crash. Some poor bastard’s home was ablaze.

Yancy wondered if it was somebody he knew.

Twenty-six

Dear Diary,

All these years I’ve been wondering what ever happened to her, and tonight she walked into the Olive Garden and re-stole my heart. She said, “Cody, you can do better than this.” I said, “You look awesome, Ms. Chase.”

And she did look awesome, even hotter than I remembered from school. I’m pretty sure she got her boobs done.

“Can we go somewhere private to talk?” she asked.