Bad Monkey

“You’re right about one thing. Which, I’m not dumb enough to murder a cop.” Stripling said. “But I got no problem killing a goddamn roach inspector.”

Twenty-one

The decision to have his own arm amputated, a perfectly healthy arm—well, first you needed jumbo-sized cojones. Nobody facing a Medicare rap had ever tried it before, Nicholas Stripling was certain. Faking one’s own death, sure, that happened all the time. The fuckwits usually got caught, too, whoring around Mexico or Costa Rica. Thinking they could just go missing without a trace on a whitewater raft or a solo desert hike, and the feds would say oh well and forget about them.

Which, how stupid can you be? The only way to foolproof the scam was to disappear with a trace. Give the bastards something to bag up and truck to the morgue, actual human remains. So when they do the DNA, when they stare at your mauled rotting stump, there’s no doubt in their minds that this poor fucker is dead as a doornail.

Because who’d be crazy enough to cut off his own arm?

Eve had begged her husband not to do it, but he had no intention of going to prison, not even a country-club joint. The feds in Miami were going hard-ass on fraud cases, and three guys Nick knew were doing heavy time, meaning double digits. One of them was an old Cuban gentleman who’d billed Uncle Sam for eighty-two hundred physical therapy sessions that he’d never performed. Stage 3 lung cancer and still they wouldn’t let him out early! Nick Stripling told his wife that he couldn’t do the flu in lockup, and that jail was not a goddamn option.

During the red-hot years of Midwest Mobile, he’d socked away eleven-plus million dollars—and don’t forget this was South Florida, the Medicare-fraud capital of America, where the most experienced dirtballs came to gorge. Stripling had found himself competing against the slickest and slimiest—former mortgage brokers, identity thieves, arms dealers, insider traders and dope smugglers, all who’d switched to home-care durables because stealing directly from the government was so much easier, and the risk so small. Lots of Medicare scammers got richer than Nick Stripling, but still he’d raked in some sweet bank from all those fake orders for Super Rollies (also walkers, electric hospital beds, blood-pressure cuffs, bariatric commodes, wander alarms and sitz baths).

If he got caught the feds would demand full restitution, which wasn’t going to happen in this particular universe. Stripling had made sure his ill-gotten loot was on the wing, moving it from Barbados to Luxembourg to Geneva, then finally back to a Nassau bank account belonging to one Christopher Grunion. The name had been invented by Stripling to enable an unscrutinized investment of his swindled fortune in some prime oceanfront on Lizard Cay. Eve was skeptical until he showed her an article from the Nassau Guardian predicting a flash turnaround of the luxury real estate market, wealthy Asians having discovered the sun-drenched charms of Bahamian life. Which, the Chinese and so forth? Nick was still waiting for the big stampede to Andros, trying to remain patient and optimistic.

The hardest part of his plan, what scared him the most, was letting a twitchy, shot-out pillhead like O’Peele perform the operation. Again, not much choice—no legit surgeon would have agreed to the job. Man walks in says please cut off my left arm. Doctor says what’s wrong with it—gangrene? Melanoma? And the guy says nothing’s wrong with it, I just don’t need it anymore, could you please saw it off?

O’Peele said okay because Stripling was his boss and also because he needed the money. Percocets aren’t cheap when you gobble ’em like Cracker Jacks. And by then Midwest Mobile was going down. Some of the geezers whose ID numbers had been stolen got around to reading their benefit statements, and they started calling Medicare saying they’d never ordered a Rollie scooter chair but they’d sure like to try one. As soon as the FBI began sniffing around, Stripling closed the office and promised new positions in future health-care enterprises to all his loyal staff, including Gomez O’Peele.

Who was grateful for the opportunity to pocket an extra five grand, which is what Stripling offered him to cut off Stripling’s left arm and then beat on the bone stump with a hatchet to make it look like a boat propeller caused the wound.

The operation was performed at the couple’s vacation town house in the Keys, Eve acting as nurse, her husband blitzed on pills and hooked to a morphine drip. The surgical saw and other implements were brand-new—Stripling had made sure of that. Before they got started he had O’Peele pee in a cup, one of those drugstore kits, to prove the doctor was clean for the day. Also: blow into a portable booze tester of the style favored by suburban parents with teenage drivers.