Bad Monkey

Or he could pack up and run. Purchase a new identity, find another place to hide and start over as an international fugitive. Which, talk about exhausting. He didn’t want his face on the Interpol website. He wanted to stay dead.

It wasn’t impossible for a clever person to get lost and stay lost in the Bahamian out-islands—if you were blessed with a spouse who was content to sit around weaving straw handbags or painting kindergarten faces on coconut husks. Keeping Eve settled would require a locale that offered shoe shopping, Pilates, sushi bars, a hair salon and a dog groomer.

A city, in other words. And living in a city would be risky.

Plus, Stripling had already ordered another Contender to replace the one he sank in the Keys. The new boat was a thirty-six-footer, sky blue, with beast triple Mercs and a sixty-gallon bait well. Delivery was due any day. He was naming it Lefty’s Revenge, in honor of his lost arm. A goddamn fish-slaughtering machine is what it was—Nick would be able to run from the east side of Andros all the way to Cay Sal and back on a single tank.

But not if he was hiding out in Geneva or São Paulo.

He could think of just one major move that would solve everything and keep the status quo: Silence Andrew Yancy before he got to Florida and met with the feds.

It was the only way Stripling could stay officially deceased, safe on Lizard Cay. Yancy and his Cuban girlfriend, or whatever she was—they were the only ones besides Eve who knew enough to bring Nick down.

“We gotta find that cocksucker,” he said to his wife.

“You can’t even walk, Nicky. And, please, it’s a hurricane outside!”

“In the morning I’m talkin’ about. First thing.”

She said, “You’re hurt. We’ll need to get out of here.”

“Where the hell is Egg? That’s who we get on Yancy’s ass. Call Egg, okay?”

“He’s not answering the two-way. Here, let me find you some dry pants. Not even the radio’s working, honey. We should get some sleep and wait for the storm to blow through.”

Stripling said, “It’s all your fault, this whole clusterfuck. Now put down your drink and roll me to the damn bathroom.”

In the morning Nick felt even worse. The puncture in his lower back was oozing a fluid that didn’t resemble blood. So severe was the pain that his facial muscles had seized into a grimace. But the cell phones still weren’t working and there was no Internet connection, making it impossible to contact British Air. Eve proposed that Claspers should fly them to Nassau right away, so they’d be certain to get seats on the first flight to London.

But all Nick could talk about was hunting down Yancy before he escaped. Which, no way was that shithead going to sneak out of Andros today. Bahamasair was still grounded from the storm, and none of the local boats were crossing to Florida, not with the Gulf Stream running fourteen feet.

As long as Yancy was stuck on the island, Nick said, Egg would be able to track him down and kill him. Now just find Egg!

Eve said, “First things first, honey.”

She dosed her husband with Clorazepams and Tylenol 2s, left over from a knee operation, before assisting him from the Rollie to the Jeep. On the back seat sat a pair of Louis Vuitton suitcases and Tillie the dog, fussing inside her tartan travel case. During the ride to the airfield Stripling sustained a bitter monologue about people who said white-collar criminals were soft, pussies, when here he was an amputee, possibly crippled from the waist down, staring at life with no parole if he got busted.

Say the word “outlaw” and everyone thinks bank robber, but did John Dillinger cut off a limb to trick the FBI into thinking he was dead? No, sir, he went to the movies and got shot full of lead. Which, these days, any fuckwit with a ballpoint pen and a Halloween mask could rob a bank. The average take was a whopping four grand, less than Stripling spent every year on periodontics.

Despite the hordes of health-care scammers working in South Florida, Nick rated his felonious speciality as elite. Defrauding the United States government of millions of dollars was no job for morons, he said. The Medicare system was chaos times ten.

Faking all those claims required cunning and precision that was foreign to the thug world. Every patient name and Social Security number had to belong to some real person, which meant hacking a medical data bank or paying off a clerk. Then the stolen names had to be transcribed correctly down to the middle initial, no typos! Same with the Socials, otherwise a government computer in Atlanta or Bethesda would spit the forms right back. Just the paperwork would make you nuts, sixteen fucking copies of everything—and, Jesus, you had to be sharp with the math.