Bad Monkey (42 page)

The following afternoon, when Yancy stepped off the plane, the first thing he saw on the tarmac at Moxey’s was a pickup truck with a wood coffin in the flatbed. The driver said the dead man was called Egg though his real name was Ecclestone. He’d been found sprawled on Prince Hill, near the graveyard. Heart attack most likely, the driver said. The corpse was being flown back to Nassau, where Mr. Ecclestone
was from. None of the freezers on Lizard Cay were large enough to hold a person that size.

Yancy said he was a friend of the deceased, and he asked the driver if he could say good-bye. The driver lifted the lid of the coffin. It was Egg inside.

He was stark naked, the monkey bites still visible on his sad-looking cock. Both his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. Yancy could see that a chunk of tongue had been bitten off. From each of the goon’s nostrils trailed a crust of dried blood. Whatever killed him wasn’t a heart attack. Dr. Rosa Campesino could have solved the mystery if Egg had been lucky enough to die in Miami. For show, Yancy flicked one of the thug’s crimped ears and said, “Adios, wild man.” The pickup driver offered a respectful nod.

Down at the waterfront a crowd was collecting. Yancy didn’t see Neville though it looked like most of the island’s population had turned out to watch a Bahamian patrol boat escort a barge to the government docks. Upon the barge sat a light-blue Contender, outriggers drooping, the hull showing a stoved hole with the diameter of a garbage-can lid. The bridge of the damaged fishing boat had been covered with a yellow tarp, meaning the accident victim, or victims, were deceased and still aboard.

Yancy was working his way through the onlookers when he felt a sharp tap on one shoulder—it was Neville. He wore amber sunglasses and a faded Peter Tosh T-shirt.

“Come along,” he said to Yancy.

“I’m right behind you, brother.”

The ride in his skiff was choppy but the breeze felt good. Andros was so vast that it made its own weather, and a squall line thickened over the center of the island. Yancy was eager to hear Neville’s story even though he knew the ending. He’d known it the moment he laid eyes on the monkey.

To manage the bumpy waves Driggs balanced up front in the hinged pose of a surfer, his ropey arms extended. Yancy smiled though he remained wary, for his shins still bore the beast’s claw marks from the attack at the vacant house. Yet today Driggs wore a different look, and it wasn’t just the new bling.

Near the channel marker Neville cut the engine and dropped the
anchor and let the wind push the bow toward the cut of the bank. The tide was dead low. Yancy stood to snap a picture with his phone for Rosa.

The Super Rollie had uncannily come to rest upright on the flats, its spoked wheels glinting. As they looked out across the ocean, the empty scooter chair was the only object above the waterline all the way to the horizon. Yancy could envision his photo as an artsy advertisement in some medical-supply catalog.

Neville told him everything he’d seen the night before, everything he’d heard later in Rocky Town.

“It’s big woo-doo, mon.”

“Sounds more like Stripling seriously pissed off his wife.”

“Was me who paid fuh dot coyse on ’im! Finally it hoppen!”

“What about Egg?”

“Dot I dint do,” Neville stated somberly. “Dragon Queen got mod and spike ’is rum. I told ’im stay ’way.”

“Well, she’s done her last voodoo dance.”

“Yah, mon,” said Neville. “But Philip need a new toxie.”

Yancy had a few questions but there was no one left alive to answer them. He asked Neville if they could take a ride down the coast before returning to the dock. He wanted to see the place where Eve Stripling, surely believing she was free, had at a fatal velocity steered the
Lefty’s Revenge
into a coral outcrop known to islanders as Satan’s Fist.

It had happened only a few minutes after she rolled her husband off the stern into night waters churned by sharks, the fatal splash witnessed by a local fisherman and his pet monkey. The makeshift ramp used to launch the scooter chair was discarded by puzzled authorities, who had no inkling of its purpose. It had been found on board the impaled Contender along with Eve, whose brains were splashed all over the interior windshield.

Neville couldn’t picture the man he knew as Christopher going overboard without a fight, even having only one arm and a severely injured spine. Yancy surmised that Eve had incapacitated her husband with painkillers before wheeling him onto the boat. The sharks she’d chummed had finished the job, interrupted momentarily when Neville motored up on the scene and made his daring grab.

As they prepared to set out for Satan’s Fist, Yancy remarked that Driggs looked like an honest-to-God movie star.

Neville craned forward. “Same ting as if I found it at de bottom of de sea.”

“Absolutely. The maritime law of salvage.”

Stripling’s wrist was fatter than the monkey’s neck, so with a jeweler’s screwdriver Neville had removed several links from the watch-band. Now the Genève Tourbillon fit Driggs splendidly as a collar.

Yancy said, “Nobody’ll try to steal it, that’s for sure.”

“No, he fuck ’im up bod.”

“It’s a gorgeous watch, Mr. Stafford. This will do wonders for his self-esteem.”

“Yah, mon. He hoppy fella.”

The monkey did seem uncharacteristically mellow, as if his demons were lulled by the inner ticking of the rose-gold timepiece. He plucked leisurely at his nicotine patch as he eyed the marooned Rollie, its tires licked by the tide.

Neville said, “I dint tell a soul wot hoppen out here loss night.”

“And why should you?” Yancy shrugged. “It’s over. Everyone’s dead.”

“Yah, dot’s right.”

“I assume there was nothing left of the bastard.”

Neville scratched the silvery stubble on his jaw. He looked uneasy.

“Don’t tell me,” Yancy said.

The fisherman flipped open the Styrofoam cooler. “Here’s wot de shocks dint eat.”

“Oh Christmas! Of course!”

It was Nick Stripling’s other arm.

Thirty-one

The sheriff, not wishing to be seen with Andrew Yancy, insisted on an off-site meeting. They agreed that Yancy’s house was the safest place.

“Is this any way to treat an international crime buster?” Yancy said.

Sonny Summers squeezed out a chuckle. “Walk me through this mess, okay?”

They sat in the cheap lounge chairs on the backyard deck. The sheriff was known to sweat like a warthog so Yancy had preemptively chosen a shady spot.

“The man who murdered Charles Phinney is dead. Would you like the official version first?”

Sonny Summers said, “Oh, why not.”

“Nicholas Stripling and his wife perished two nights ago in a boating accident off the coast of Andros Island. Foolish Americans, sporting around in unfamiliar shallows.”

“Okay. What really happened?”

Yancy popped a beer and delivered a nearly complete account.

“Oh, fuckeroo,” the sheriff said, and grabbed a bottle for himself.

“There’s a karmic symmetry you’ve got to appreciate. Not quite Shakespearean, but close.”

“Were you on Andros when this happened? Did you—what’s the word—contribute to these events in some way?”

“No, Sonny. I was here on Big Pine.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

Yancy set up his pitch. “If Stripling hadn’t drowned he’d be going
to prison. Nobody in the States knew where he was until I told them. Nobody had a clue he was alive.”

The sheriff rolled the chilled beer bottle between his palms and stared at the scorched patch of land where Yancy’s sex criminal ex-lover had torched his neighbor’s extravagant spec house.

“Sonny, are you even listening? I flew to the islands on my own dime and found this shitweasel. He almost blew my head off pointblank, you understand? I risked my freaking life to solve this case.”

“You want your badge back. I get it.”

The muddy response reminded Yancy that he was talking to a politician. “But there’s a big ‘however,’ right? I can smell it.”

“However,” said Sonny Summers, “the situation isn’t that simple. Yes, you did some first-rate police work. Ballsy, man.
Scary
ballsy. But what you just told me, man, I can’t put that in a press release.”

“No kidding. Who said anything about a damn press release?”

“Oh, I’ll need a good one,” said the sheriff, “the day I rehire you. See, you’re what the media calls a controversial figure. And now Bonnie Witt’s plastered all over the
Citizen
again, just when I thought this shit was fading away.”

“Meaning Mallory Square.”

“Everything, all of it,” the sheriff said in a beleaguered tone. “Consorting with a fugitive, whatever.”

“Like I knew? Come on, Sonny.”

“Some people are saying this arson was all your fault. Just bar talk, but still. They say you put Bonnie up to it because that house”—Sonny Summers nodded grimly toward the burned lot—“was screwing up your precious sunsets.”

“Absurd.”

“Look, we’re shipping her crazy ass back to Oklahoma. Maybe in a year or two, if you can stay out of the damn headlines, I’ll bring you back on the force.”

“But I thought you were going to quit and run for attorney general.”

Sonny Summers shifted his bulk. “Then I’ll be sure and tell the new sheriff to put you on the short list for detective. Same rank as before. Meanwhile, I hear you’re tearing it up on roach patrol. Gang-busters is what Tommy Lombardo said.”

“Did he now.”

“He tells me you bring a firearm on these restaurant inspections. Is that true?”

“It sets a certain tone.”

“But you haven’t actually shot anything, right? Rats and so forth.”

“Not yet, Sonny.”

“Try not to. That’s my advice.”

“Thanks. You’ve always been like a father to me.” Yancy was barely holding it together.

The sheriff said, “I’ve got to ask—where’d they find Stripling’s other arm? I mean, after all the screwed-up shit that happened with the first one.”

“I was there, remember? Chauffeuring it up the highway on your secret orders. That was the start of it all.”

Sonny Summers wanly acknowledged the fact.

“Stripling’s right arm,” said Yancy, “was recovered in the water near the spot where the boat wrecked.”

Where Yancy had dumped it from Neville Stafford’s fish cooler, a detail with which he chose not to burden the sheriff.

“And the sharks ate the rest? They’re sure about that?”

“Sonny, they were big fuckers. Bulls and lemons. Whatever was left of Stripling, you could probably scoop it with a guppy net.”

“I’ll call Key West homicide—they’ll be jazzed about closing the Phinney case. We can set up a joint press conference tomorrow. Our prime suspect is dead, et cetera.”

All of a sudden it was
our
suspect. Miraculously Yancy held his tongue.

He said, “The right arm is being sent back to Miami to be buried with the left one. There’s plenty of room in the coffin.” Caitlin Cox was handling the arrangements. Yancy had hung up on her when she’d asked whom she should call about her father’s life insurance.

Sonny Summers put down his beer bottle. “Okay, then. Anything else?”

“Just my police career is all. My self-worth and future sanity.”

“Be patient, like I said.”

“You ever spent a day on your knees counting mouse turds?”

The sheriff winced. “Enough already. Good Lord.”

Later Yancy trailered his skiff down to Sugar Loaf and poled the Gulfside flats. He’d forgotten to bring a fishing rod, but that was all right. The sun on the back of his neck felt good enough. A salty clean breeze on his cheeks. For a while he staked up to spy on a great blue heron wading along the mangroves spearing minnows and shrimp.

When he got back to Big Pine, the FBI men were waiting in front of the house. They’d made the trip in a new black Tahoe, pretty sweet for a government ride. Yancy remembered his dad always drove a puke-green utility vehicle, standard issue for the park service.

“Howdy, gentlemen,” he said to the partners.

While he rinsed his boat they inquired about his latest trip to Andros Island. Agent Strumberg divulged that they’d spotted his name on a list of travelers provided by Homeland Security. Yancy explained that in the absence of prompt federal action he’d returned to Lizard Cay to check on Nicholas Joseph Stripling.

Agent Liske warned him that he was acting recklessly. “You could jeopardize our whole case. We’re getting very, very close to making a move.”

In a bombshell whisper Strumberg divulged that the seaplane Stripling was leasing had turned up in Colombia.

Yancy started laughing. The agents stiffened.

“What’s so damn funny?” asked Strumberg.

“It’s too late to catch that asshole!”

“Just watch us,” Liske said.

“Guys, you’re killing me.” Yancy turned off the hose and dried his hands on his pants. “Your suspect, Mr. Stripling, is deceased.”

“Shit,” said the FBI men, one after the other.

Yancy brought them into the house and fixed a couple of iced teas. For himself he unwrapped a grape Popsicle. The agents found the circumstances of Stripling’s demise somewhat mind-bending. Strumberg walked out to the Tahoe and started making calls. Yancy put on some music, a Springsteen concert.

Liske surprised him by saying he’d seen Bruce twice at the Meadowlands. “The band can’t be the same without Clarence.”

“I hear it’s still a great show.”

“The gun—is that loaded?” He pointed at Yancy’s Glock on the kitchen counter.

“I’m fully permitted,” Yancy said. “The Russian mob is very active in Key West.”

“Is that cannabis?”

Near the sink lay a half-smoked doobie.

“Medicinal,” said Yancy. “Self-prescribed.”

Strumberg returned, having confirmed the details of the fatal boat accident in the Bahamas. Eve Stripling’s corpse had been identified at the scene. Fingerprints taken from the hand of the recovered arm matched those from Nick’s long-ago arrest as a car-crash scammer.

“Incredible,” said Liske. “Just when we’re about to nail the sonofabitch, he really dies—and the exact same way he wanted us to think he died before.”