Bad Monkey

Yancy gritted it out. “I’m on loan to another department, that’s all. Temporarily assigned. Now tell me the whole story.”

And Madeline was right. It was fucked up.

On the charter docks of South Florida there had evolved among a handful of unscrupulous captains a method of duping inept out-of-towners for extra money. The key prop in the scam was typically an Atlantic sailfish, caught on a previous trip and stored on ice in an aft hatch inaccessible to the paying clientele.

Once the boat was at sea, a mate first baited the outriggers and then the flat lines, which were trolled closer to the boat and often enhanced with a skirted plastic lure. Thus began a sporting day, with high hopes among the unsuspecting anglers. When the time was right, one of the mates would distract them with a clamorous false sighting of jumping porpoises or a cruising hammerhead shark, which the customers always pretended to see as they didn’t wish to be regarded as clueless rubes.

Binoculars were handed out and the anglers were directed to the bow of the ship in order to improve their view. At this juncture the mate would remove the dead sailfish from the cold hatch and covertly hook it to one of the flat lines. Once the jelly-eyed corpse was dropped in the water, the forward motion of the boat carried it back into the frothy wake.

A cry of “Fish on!” would go out, and one of the hapless sports—usually a hungover husband—would come lurching back to the cockpit, snatch the rod from the mate’s grasp and begin reeling like a madman. The boat’s towing of the limp billfish created enough natural drag to test the flabby muscles of most novices. Later they would brag to their pals back home that they’d whipped the sonofabitch in five minutes flat. As further testament to human vanity, no suspicions would be voiced over the odd fact that their trophy sailfish, a species renowned for its acrobatics, never once jumped out of the water.

At boatside, the mate would cap the charade by pretending to wrestle the prize into an unlocked fish box, where the entire party of numskulls could peek at it and snap pictures to their hearts’ content. The coup de grâce would occur back at dockside when the captain persuaded the lucky angler to have his catch mounted, later to be displayed on the paneled wall of his real estate office or perhaps in the family den. A tidy deposit would be forthcoming, divided by the captain and mates, and a few months later the client would receive via UPS an exquisite six-foot sailfish, painted cobalt blending to indigo and airbrushed with lateral dashes of silver and gold. The replica, manufactured by the taxidermist from a standard plaster cast, would be fixed in a lifelike leaping pose, its sharp bill aimed toward the clouds and its tall dorsal fin regally flared.

Of course by then the real sailfish had been recycled profitably and eventually dumped overboard, having decomposed to chum after five or six fake captures. It was a scam to be saved exclusively for the most witless of tourists, but it worked often enough to have been passed along over decades among a certain low-pirate class of sportfishing crews.

Charles Phinney didn’t learn of the trick from Captain Keith Fitzpatrick but, rather, from a stranger who’d approached him one evening at the Garrison Bight Marina while he was hosing down the Misty Momma IV. There was, however, a twist.

“It wasn’t a dead sailfish they wanted him to hook on the line,” Madeline told Yancy. “It was a dude’s cut-off arm!”

“Jesus.”

“I told Charlie it was the grossest thing I ever heard and he’d be crazy to do it. But he was gonna make three thousand cash.”

“Three grand?”

“I’m not shitting you,” said Madeline. “So he said okay.”

“And got paid?”

“Same day, in hundred-dollar bills. He made me swear not to tell anyone. He said they told him it was only a practical joke, no big deal. The arm came off a dead body from some mortician school.”

By now she was lapping a third vodka tonic. Yancy felt like having a stiff one, too, but he wanted to be able to remember every word. He’d write it all down as soon as he got home.

“The night before,” she said, “in Charlie’s apartment? We were so fucking nervous we got stoned out of our heads. I mean baked, okay? He had the … you know … in this big ice cooler, I’ll never forget—”

“Wait, Madeline, who gave Phinney the arm?”

“Someone brought it to the dock that same night, when he was alone on the boat. Anyway, the cooler—Charlie asks do I want to see the you-know-what and I said no freaking way, you asshole. But he takes the thing out, right? And it doesn’t look real but at the same time it’s too gross to be fake. And we both, I don’t know why, we just start laughing. He’s swingin’ the thing around like a baseball bat and I’ve got this half-calico kitty cat, Sheeba, all the fur on her back is stickin’ up. Charlie and I both just fell out, it seemed so damn funny. Sounds pretty fucking twisted, I guess, but it’s not like we put it up on YouTube or nothin’.”