Bad Monkey

“My name’s Evan. You want some water or a soda? It’s hot as blazes out here.”

“No, thanks. There’s beer in the fridge.”

Plover Chase had a nice figure and her legs looked naturally tanned, a feature Evan Shook appreciated. His wife got herself sprayed twice a month at a salon in downtown Syracuse, and she came out looking vinyl. Also, the stuff tasted like insecticide.

“Andrew’s the one who told us it was okay to crash at your house,” the fugitive confided. “Sorry about that.”

“I think he likes to play practical jokes.”

“Have you met his new girlfriend? The surgeon?”

Evan Shook heard himself say, “Yes, she’s down here a lot.”

Which was untrue.

“What’s she look like?” Plover Chase asked. “Good. She looks good.” Evan Shook had never set eyes on the woman, but he said it anyway. “She’s got long brown hair.”

“Scale of one to ten?”

“Eleven.”

“Whoa, daddy.”

“They seem pretty serious,” Evan Shook added.

The fugitive was looking at him over the tops of her sunglasses. “Like, how do you mean? Move-in-together serious, or get-married serious?”

“Well, you know Andrew.”

“Yes, I certainly do know Andrew,” she said.

Behind them, the construction site was a cacophony of hammers and table saws and sanders—even a boom box playing salsa music from Miami, heavy on the horns.

“Where you from, Emmett?”

“It’s Evan.” He spelled it. “I live in New York State.”

“So you’re down here really just to get that house built,” Plover Chase said. “All by your lonesome.”

“My family’s up north, that’s right. I fly back and forth most weekends.”

Yancy’s stalker crossed her killer legs, and Evan Shook found himself sidetracked by unwholesome fantasies.

“So this mansion you’re putting up, Evan, it’s basically a real estate investment?”

“When I’m here, I stay at the Casa Marina. That’s down in Key West.”

“And that’s where you go at night,” she said, smiling, “after a long hard day at the job site.”

“They have a nice bar. Cool and private.” He pointed. “Watch out, there’s a horsefly on … well, right there.”

“That would be my décolletage.” She flicked the insect away, and with a knuckle wiped the blood dot. “How old do you think Andrew’s girlfriend is?”

“I don’t know. Young for a doctor,” Evan Shook said. “Want to come by the Casa later for a drink? They’ve got a country band that’s not bad.”

Plover Chase sat up and swung her lovely feet to the deck. “Andrew’s somewhat famous around Key West. But you probably know that already. Infamous, I should say.”

“For what?”

“You don’t read the papers when you’re in town? Shame on you.”

“There’s a place on Duval where I buy the Times. But, really, I don’t pay much attention to the local news,” Evan Shook said. “So tell me what Andrew did to get his name in the headlines.”

The woman laughed and said never mind, it’s water under the bridge. Then she said good-bye and picked up her beach dress and disappeared into Yancy’s house.

Evan Shook walked back to the Suburban thinking about the justice system. The prisons of America had become so overcrowded that hard-core cutthroats were being turned loose daily, only to strike again. Where was the logic of locking up a hot-looking babe like Plover Chase for a crime of “exploitation,” whatever that might be?

So Evan Shook didn’t dial Agent Weiderman. He still had some mulling to do.

In the meantime he called Mrs. Lipscomb back at the Pier House. He told her that the price for the carved poplar moldings was as low as he could go, regretfully, without taking a loss on the order. She put her husband on the line, and Evan Shook listened to him whine and huff about switching to fiberboard before he eventually surrendered and said okay, what the hell.

“Give her what she wants,” Ford Lipscomb sighed.

“Sir, I feel your pain. But it’s gonna look special when we’re done.”

After hanging up, Evan Shook made a U-turn in the Suburban and drove past the house next door, where the pigtailed fugitive was unloading from her car’s trunk a set of red jerry cans that are normally used to transport gasoline.

Clearly she was struggling with the fact that Yancy had a brainy, beautiful new girlfriend.

Evan Shook pretended not to look at Plover Chase as he rolled by, goosing the accelerator. Sometimes it was best to let nature take its course.

Eve Stripling removed from her prone, moaning husband a broken piece of a composite-fiberglass rod blank manufactured by the Sage company. The jagged point had perforated the disc sac between the fifth lumbar vertebrae and first sacral vertebrae, at the base of Nick Stripling’s spine, leaving him in bald agony, unable to stand.

Eve rushed inside to fetch the Rollie scooter chair, into which Nick one-armedly hauled himself, spitting mud and cursing his wife for not letting him shoot Andrew Yancy in the den. She guided Nick into the house and spent an hour icing his wound, which failed to restore the functionality of his legs. There followed an animated discussion that ricocheted between the subjects of urgent medical care and Eve’s gross culpability for Stripling being ambushed.