Bad Monkey

Neither man could be bothered with seat belts, so their skulls spidered the windshield at exactly seventy-one miles per hour when Delta Force—showing misplaced faith in the performance-enhancing attributes of cocaine hydrochloride—attempted a cinematic off-road evasion and crashed into a banyan tree. The impact ejected from the Tahoe’s rear hatch a navy-blue golf bag belonging to the husband of the pregnant carjacking victim. The golf bag spilled a full set of Callaways, three sleeves of Bridgestone balls, a speargun and an embalmed human arm, which was sent in its own ambulance to the medical examiner’s office.

Ironically, the stream of emergency vehicles sped directly past the Denny’s on Biscayne, where a couple armed with a stolen 12-gauge shotgun (strictly for protection) was waiting in a rented compact for the grave robbers.

After another hour passed with no contact, Eve Stripling said: “I can’t believe those assholes took the three hundred bucks and bailed.”

“What part can’t you believe?” grumbled the man beside her, the man who was now officially a boyfriend.

“We should’ve offered ’em five on this end,” she said.

“Or maybe we should have said you two shitheads get nada till we get the arm.”

Eve puffed her cheeks irritably. “Okay, honey, so they ripped us off. What the hell do we do now?”

“Call the pilot is what we do. Tell him we’re on the way.”

Neville’s friends on Andros said he was crazy not to take the money from the sale of his family’s property and build a fine new beach house on another stretch of seafront. They couldn’t understand his militant opposition to the future Curly Tail Lane Resort, which they gullibly believed would bring new jobs and a geyser of tourist dollars. Words didn’t flow easily from Neville and he struggled without success to explain his churned feelings, the gutting sense of loss. His three girlfriends sniped relentlessly on the subject of his stubborn foolishness, to the point that he began to miss the sulfurous company of Driggs.

The monkey had been sighted around Rocky Town in the Dragon Queen’s motley entourage of spurious half cousins and walleyed supplicants. Meanwhile the unwanted American, Christopher, showed no effects of major voodoo. Neville was distraught to see on his former homestead a tall pile of casuarina trees that had been felled in order to widen the beach; their scraggly dead roots looked like unclenched claws. Neville was halfway over the chain-link fence when Christopher’s hired goon burst from the trailer swinging a cricket mallet and snorting like a gored hog.

Neville hopped on his bicycle and rode off shaking a fist. He hurried to confront the Dragon Queen but his angry knock on her door went unanswered. Through an open window he spied on the table an empty rum bottle and a puddle of hardened yellow wax where a candle had melted. Mingled with a smell of cigars was the familiar funk of unwashed simian.

He aimed his bike toward the wharf and wound up at the conch shack cooling his palms around a bottle of Kalik. Like many native-born Bahamians, Neville wasn’t intractably aligned against progress, yet he was wary. Despite its nautical proximity to South Florida, Andros hadn’t been overrun like Bimini or Freeport because its long western coast was inconveniently shallow and short of natural harbors. The island’s vast middle interior was mostly boggy wilderness, a stifling outback. A slender Andros economy relied on vegetable farms, which fed most of the Bahamas, and on scattered coastal fishing settlements such as Rocky Town. One overabundant resource was fresh springwater; seven million gallons a day were shipped from Morgan’s Bluff to Nassau, a place that many Androsians were content to avoid.

In Neville’s view, the Curly Tail Lane extravaganza looked like another crooked Bay Street deal. That some people (his own half sister included) had been bought off was a certainty. The traditional outcome of such high-flying enterprises was, of course, bankruptcy. Christopher would be jacked up and jerked around until he ran out of patience and then money. Thereafter he would bitterly abandon the Bahamas and his half-built tourist trap, which would sit moldering in the heat until another foreign sucker came along. Green Beach was destined to be a perpetual construction site unless Neville could act swiftly to regain dominion.

A third beer was sweating on the bar before him when he spotted the Dragon Queen. Trailed by a handful of scrofulous attendants, she was motoring down the main road on a tricked-out wheelchair that gave the appearance of a mobile throne. Balanced on the steering yoke was Driggs, festively grinding his diaper against one of the rearview mirrors. He tolerated a batik head wrap that matched a flamingo-pink number worn in cool regality by the Dragon Queen. As they drew closer Neville could hear her singing low and froggishly. Her expression was governed by a style of wraparound shades once favored by the Haitian secret police.