Bad Monkey

The person on the aft deck was grunting as if moving bales. Something heavy made a splash near the stern. Neville figured the smugglers were dumping their load, yet he counted no other splashes. Soon the triple outboards thundered and the boat sped away, cutting a long, foamy stitch in the sea.

Neville struggled to pull up his anchor, which had snagged on the ledge of the hogfish hole. He started the motor and backed upcurrent with the rope in one fist. When the anchor came free, Neville hauled it aboard.

Then he aimed his flashlight and chugged toward where the other vessel had been. It wasn’t clear why the smugglers had spooked, but they were a jumpy breed. Neville expected to see a fifty-pound bale of grass or a bundle of cocaine floating in the tide. What he found instead was something else, and a dread turbulence of sharks drawn to the surface by buckets of rotting fish heads.

The following afternoon, when Yancy stepped off the plane, the first thing he saw on the tarmac at Moxey’s was a pickup truck with a wood coffin in the flatbed. The driver said the dead man was called Egg though his real name was Ecclestone. He’d been found sprawled on Prince Hill, near the graveyard. Heart attack most likely, the driver said. The corpse was being flown back to Nassau, where Mr. Ecclestone was from. None of the freezers on Lizard Cay were large enough to hold a person that size.

Yancy said he was a friend of the deceased, and he asked the driver if he could say good-bye. The driver lifted the lid of the coffin. It was Egg inside.

He was stark naked, the monkey bites still visible on his sad-looking cock. Both his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. Yancy could see that a chunk of tongue had been bitten off. From each of the goon’s nostrils trailed a crust of dried blood. Whatever killed him wasn’t a heart attack. Dr. Rosa Campesino could have solved the mystery if Egg had been lucky enough to die in Miami. For show, Yancy flicked one of the thug’s crimped ears and said, “Adios, wild man.” The pickup driver offered a respectful nod.

Down at the waterfront a crowd was collecting. Yancy didn’t see Neville though it looked like most of the island’s population had turned out to watch a Bahamian patrol boat escort a barge to the government docks. Upon the barge sat a light-blue Contender, outriggers drooping, the hull showing a stoved hole with the diameter of a garbage-can lid. The bridge of the damaged fishing boat had been covered with a yellow tarp, meaning the accident victim, or victims, were deceased and still aboard.

Yancy was working his way through the onlookers when he felt a sharp tap on one shoulder—it was Neville. He wore amber sunglasses and a faded Peter Tosh T-shirt.

“Come along,” he said to Yancy.

“I’m right behind you, brother.”

The ride in his skiff was choppy but the breeze felt good. Andros was so vast that it made its own weather, and a squall line thickened over the center of the island. Yancy was eager to hear Neville’s story even though he knew the ending. He’d known it the moment he laid eyes on the monkey.

To manage the bumpy waves Driggs balanced up front in the hinged pose of a surfer, his ropey arms extended. Yancy smiled though he remained wary, for his shins still bore the beast’s claw marks from the attack at the vacant house. Yet today Driggs wore a different look, and it wasn’t just the new bling.

Near the channel marker Neville cut the engine and dropped the anchor and let the wind push the bow toward the cut of the bank. The tide was dead low. Yancy stood to snap a picture with his phone for Rosa.

The Super Rollie had uncannily come to rest upright on the flats, its spoked wheels glinting. As they looked out across the ocean, the empty scooter chair was the only object above the waterline all the way to the horizon. Yancy could envision his photo as an artsy advertisement in some medical-supply catalog.

Neville told him everything he’d seen the night before, everything he’d heard later in Rocky Town.

“It’s big woo-doo, mon.”

“Sounds more like Stripling seriously pissed off his wife.”

“Was me who paid fuh dot coyse on ’im! Finally it hoppen!”

“What about Egg?”

“Dot I dint do,” Neville stated somberly. “Dragon Queen got mod and spike ’is rum. I told ’im stay ’way.”

“Well, she’s done her last voodoo dance.”

“Yah, mon,” said Neville. “But Philip need a new toxie.”

Yancy had a few questions but there was no one left alive to answer them. He asked Neville if they could take a ride down the coast before returning to the dock. He wanted to see the place where Eve Stripling, surely believing she was free, had at a fatal velocity steered the Lefty’s Revenge into a coral outcrop known to islanders as Satan’s Fist.