Bad Monkey

Still, until his third or fourth year as a detective, he continued to fantasize about capturing the assholes who’d trashed his grandmother’s place on the day of her funeral. In his daydreams the burglars wildly resisted arrest and were always dealt an agonizing lesson, their windowprying fingertips crushed to pulp by a squad-car door or the butt of a pump gun.

In real life those apprehended by Yancy usually surrendered without resistance, aware that their period of confinement would be brief and only nominally tuned to their actual sentence. Savvy thieves understood that the court system went easy on the unarmed and that violence was for fools. Yancy had occasionally tackled or Tazed a fleeing suspect, but never had he been forced to fight off an attack. Although he’d punched his way out of a couple of bars, he held no special skills in self-defense or the martial arts, having quit karate classes at age twelve because they’d cut too onerously into his fishing time.

It didn’t really matter, because the cyclist caught him completely by surprise.

As Yancy was placing the trash can by the road, he heard the swish of air through spokes and he turned to look. A stretch mask obscured the face of the approaching rider but the orange poncho shone even in the deepening dusk. The bike knocked Yancy to the ground, and when he looked up, the stranger was standing over him. The last image to register was a downward-swinging arm with a bulky, ornate wristwatch.

Later, as a throbbing consciousness returned, Yancy surmised that he’d been struck with an old-fashioned sap or possibly a sock filled with coins. The blow landed on the opposite side from the bruise he’d incurred at Eve Stripling’s house, leaving his head with conforming knots, like raw antler nubs.

Now the man in the poncho was dragging Yancy by the collar through the lot next door, past Evan Shook’s spec house. Yancy’s rear end was afire with pain, the friction against the ground having shredded Rosa Campesino’s delicate web of sutures. The far side of Evan Shook’s property fronted a canal, and Yancy sensed what was coming next. His limbs hung uselessly, however, and failed to respond to urgent brain commands. He half-shut his eyes and pretended to be coldcocked.

The masked stranger was grunting and huffing by the time he reached the canal. Awkwardly he tried to heave Yancy headlong, but Yancy’s toes snagged on a ridge of coral rock, leaving him half in and half out of the water. Swearing, the attacker kicked at the soles of Yancy’s feet until Yancy slid like a comatose otter down the bank.

He knew that the man who was trying to kill him—the same man who’d murdered Charles Phinney and probably Gomez O’Peele—would be unable to see him swimming in the murky canal if he went deep enough. His arms and legs didn’t awaken for several harrowing seconds, and his lungs were searing by the time he began to make progress. Fortunately the waterway was narrow and the opposite shore was fringed densely with mangrove trees. Skinny as he was, Yancy managed to slither into the embroidery of roots and poke his head up for air. He was no more conspicuous than a floating coconut or an orphaned lobster buoy.

The burly figure in the poncho stood on the other bank, staring hard in search of bubbles and scanning the length of the canal to make sure that the victim of his beating hadn’t surfaced. Yancy clung to the barnacled mangroves and braced his knees, trying not to create ripples. His bruised skull clanged, and hot pulses of nausea raised the annoying prospect of a concussion. Mosquitoes swarmed his ears and eyes, but he couldn’t slap them away for fear of causing a telltale splash. Eventually his attacker turned and hurried off.

Five minutes was as long as Yancy could tolerate the insects. Gingerly he extricated himself from the roots, dog-paddled across the canal and crawled out. The thick night air seemed almost as heavy as the salt water. Approaching his house, Yancy saw a light go on in the living room, revealing through a front window the masked killer in the poncho. He was handling Yancy’s shotgun, checking to see if it was loaded, which of course it was.

Yancy ducked into Evan Shook’s place and groped his way to what must have been a closet. The door had yet to be hung but still it was a refuge of sorts, a recessed cubby where he could hide and dry out. Maybe take a nap. The closet smelled like raw pine, and Yancy felt sawdust under his feet. His forearms and knees stung from where the barnacles had grated the skin. He touched his scalp and found a syrupy wetness. There arose an urge to strip out of his sopping clothes, and the effort exhausted him.

As he drifted away, a familiar tune entered his woozy head. It was a rocking John Hiatt number, “Master of Disaster.”

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