Bad Monkey

He didn’t have the spine to admit that he’d lost his detective badge and gotten busted down to roach patrol. Too well he remembered his father’s heartsick reaction after he was canned by the Miami Police Department, a crushing setback that had occurred shortly after Yancy’s mother was lost to cancer. Yancy couldn’t bear to hear such disappointment in the old man’s voice again.

“Maybe we can fish together in the fall,” he said.

“I’m going on a steelhead trip to BC. You’d have a ball, Andrew.”

“Sign me up.”

Somebody was knocking on Yancy’s door. It was Miguel, the bee guy. He was wearing a full-on beekeeper suit, including a hooded veil.

He winked behind the mesh at Yancy and said, “Excuse me, sir. Tonight we will be removing a serious motherfucking honeybee hive from the structure next door. Until then perhaps you should stay inside. Unfortunately, the bees have been disturbed.”

“I appreciate the warning.”

Miguel winked again and cut his eyes toward the construction site. Evan Shook was watching from his Suburban, in which he had sealed himself against the ruthless swarm.

“A risky situation,” Miguel said, “but we are utmostly professionals.”

“That I can see.”

“Your neighbor, Señor Shook, he was stung many times. Lucky for him he is not allergic.”

“Nor am I,” Yancy said.

“Still, I would not take chances. Do you have any pets? Smallish children? You understand I must ask these questions. Would you be owning a pacemaker?”

Yancy was happy to play along. “No, sir. And I live here all by myself.”

“Excellent. We will be done by midnight.” Miguel went through the motions of handing Yancy a business card. “In case you are ever likewise troubled with bees. You can phone day or night. Also I am on Skype.”

“Good luck with that hive,” said Yancy.

“Vaya con Dios.”

“Seriously?”

Miguel smiled. “Shut your fucking windows, Andrew.”

Yancy buttoned up the house and headed down to Key West, where he’d set up lunch at a terrific Cuban place on Flagler with an ex–Border Patrol agent now working for Homeland Security. The man owed Yancy a favor and he stepped up big-time, bringing a printout that detailed the recent foreign travels of Mrs. Eve Stripling.

Caitlin Cox had said her stepmother was in the Bahamas, not Paris, at the time her father’s boat went down off Marathon. Caitlin’s proof was Eve’s phone bill, which showed numerous roaming charges from a wireless company based in Nassau. To Yancy, Caitlin had admitted stealing the bill from the mailbox at her father’s home in the hope of establishing the identity of Eve’s secret lover. Caitlin was certain such a man existed because she’d spotted her stepmother buying a swimsuit and designer flip-flops at a Bal Harbour boutique, two days before Nick Stripling’s funeral. Caitlin was there shopping for a black dress.

Mindful of her motive, which was gaining access to her late father’s wealth, Yancy nonetheless found the tip intriguing. Caitlin’s suspicions seemed to be partially confirmed in the records provided by his Homeland Security connection—Eve Stripling had in fact gone to Paris, although for only a week. Then she flew back to the United States, clearing Customs at JFK before taking a nonstop to Nassau. It was nineteen days later that she returned to South Florida on a private seaplane that landed at Watson Island. There she paid duty on thirty-four hundred dollars of women’s clothes and a ten-karat-gold men’s wedding band, which, according to her declaration documents, had cost a whopping one hundred and ninety-nine bucks. Yancy assumed it was the same gold band Eve had switched out for Nick Stripling’s expensive platinum one before burying his abbreviated remains.

Interestingly, she’d bought the replacement ring in the Bahamas before returning to Florida and reporting her husband missing at sea. The purchase made no sense unless she’d already known that Nick was dead and that his ring finger had been recovered, attached to his floating arm.

Yancy felt so energized by this disclosure that he picked up the twenty-eight-dollar meal tab, even though he’d barely touched his picadillo due to a suspicious-looking olive. Of late he was subsisting mostly on Popsicles and so-called energy bars, which came hygienically machine-sealed in foil although they settled in his stomach like bricks of industrial glue.

His friend from Homeland Security got up and said, “Thanks for lunch, Andrew. But anybody asks, we never talked.”

Yancy grinned. “Hell, I don’t even know your name.”

A squall blew across the island and Yancy drove around Old Town waiting for the rain to quit. On Fleming Street he passed Fausto’s grocery and thought of Bonnie, a.k.a. Plover Chase. With improbable ease he rejected the impulse to dial her number. Perhaps he was finally, at age forty-two, growing up.