Bad Monkey

The Dragon Queen crowed uproariously. “You bring me dot boy Driggs fuh payment, I put a jumbo coyse on your white devil.”

Neville was torn. “Led me tink wot to do. I come right bok.”

Outside, Driggs squatted on rash-covered haunches beneath the gumbo-limbo tree where Neville had left him. It was a repugnant scene that would alter both of their lives. The Huggies diaper lay shredded on the ground, and Neville’s bicycle seat was slathered with fresh shit.

Neville’s outrage swelled as he appraised the stinking mess. “I fed up wit your foolishness!” he snapped. “Come den, let’s go see your new momma.”

The monkey stopped gnawing on his leash and looked up. His upper lip wormed into a reflex sneer, but his rosy bald brow furrowed in consternation.

“Dot’s right,” Neville said. “Dis is good-bye.”

The owner of Big Luke’s Lobsteria was Luke Motto, a former Thoroughbred jockey who stood five-two. He was called Big Luke because he was the tallest among six siblings.

The Lobsteria was Yancy’s first official stop after a ten-day sick leave (ordered by Lombardo), during which Yancy went fishing alone every morning. For privacy he chose the Content Keys, and wore only his boxers while poling the skiff. The salt air hastened the healing of his gouged ass and also the mangrove scrapes on his limbs. His headaches ceased shortly after the bruises disappeared. As a treat he landed several good bonefish and an eighty-pound tarpon. Twice Rosa drove down after work and stayed the night.

“You double-clicked that fucker,” Big Luke said accusingly.

“I’m afraid not.”

They were arguing about German cockroaches, which Yancy was required to count during all restaurant inspections. The pest census was a challenging aspect of the job although Tommy Lombardo, Yancy’s instructor, had provided little guidance. For reasons unclear to Yancy, the state of Florida required that live roaches and dead roaches be tabulated separately. Perhaps a deceased roach was deemed less repellent to diners than a crawling one, but in truth the contamination differential was negligible—insect parts versus insect droppings.

Yancy himself favored dead roaches because live ones were too quick, a coppery flash disappearing beneath a shelf or baseboard. During his first week on the job, and uncertain of protocol, Yancy included in his live-specimen tallies only those he was able to corner and kill. Many others escaped, and he was nagged by a sense of falling short in his duties.

So, to the dismay of unsanitary proprietors such as Luke Motto, Yancy developed a method of herding and capturing live roaches that allowed a more precise accounting. In his right hand he wielded a billiard cue to which he’d bolted the head of a badminton racket. In the other hand he carried a DustBuster, a lighter, updated version of the device he had ingloriously deployed against Dr. Clifford Witt in Mallory Square.

One brisk pass through the kitchen of Big Luke’s Lobsteria filled the vacuum with a pulsing, melon-sized mass of roaches that Yancy neutralized by vigorously shaking the filter compartment until the captives were too addled to mount an escape. He then dumped his catch on a butcher-block cutting board, and got down to business with tweezers and a thumb-activated ticket counter he’d bought on Amazon for $2.99.

“That one right there—you did him twice!” Luke Motto insisted.

The total of live roaches was up to sixty-eight, which in Yancy’s view qualified as an infestation. “And I haven’t even checked the pipes under the sink,” he remarked through his hospital mask.

“Don’t!” Luke Motto bleated.

“I got five bucks says we break two hundred today.”

“And I got a C-note and a free shrimp hoagie says you cut me some slack.”

“If you had half a brain, Luke, you’d spend that money on an exterminator.”

With every click of the counter, Yancy dropped another dizzy roach into a large Ziploc baggie. Lombardo hadn’t instructed him to preserve the insects as evidence, so he didn’t. Customarily, after presenting his inspection report to the disgruntled owner, Yancy would dispatch the roaches by placing the baggies under a tire of his car and flattening them on his way out of the parking lot. It wasn’t an authorized technique for disposal, but so far none of the restaurateurs had lodged a complaint.

“You can’t just barge in here and shut me down!” Luke Motto protested. “This ain’t Nazi Russia!”

Yancy tuned him out while completing the order for a temporary suspension. He offered the phone number of a Marathon pest control company and told Big Luke he’d be back in three days for a re-inspection. Then he squashed the roaches with his Subaru and drove to Duck Key to view the condominium belonging to Eve and Nicholas Stripling.