Bad Monkey (7 page)

“Temporarily.”

“That sucks.” Fitzpatrick’s face was boot brown except for a white goggle stripe from his sunglasses. His forearms were like glazed cudgels, his hands scarred and scaly.

“They got me doing restaurant inspections,” Yancy said.

“No way. You aren’t the one that shut down Stoney’s?”

“Listen, man, that kitchen—it was crawling with
everything
. So gross.”

“I love that place,” said Fitzpatrick.

Yancy placed the small gray shark tooth on the bar.

Fitzpatrick picked it up between a thumb and forefinger and turned it in the light. “Nuthin’ special,” he said.

“What kind is it?”

“Looks like a bonnethead. Maybe a baby lemon.”

“But not a bull shark or a tiger, right?”

Fitzpatrick shook his head and chuckled. “Not this little runt, no.”

“That’s what I think, too,” said Yancy.

Bonnetheads, the smallest species of hammerheads, averaged only about three feet in length. It was unlikely that any shark so small would be far offshore feeding on a human body, competing with the monsters.

“Where’d the tooth come from, Andrew?”

“That arm you snagged.”

“No shit?” Fitzpatrick examined it once more. “Don’t make sense, unless the dead guy’s boat sunk in the shallows. Which I heard he went down off Sombrero Light.”

“Let’s say he drowned in deep water and the body washed up on a flat.”

“
What
flat?”

“Let’s just say.”

“Still don’t explain how his whole arm got twisted off the way it did,” said Fitzpatrick. “I never seen a bonnethead could do that. You?”

“Nope. I don’t believe it’s possible.”

“So what is it you think happened? Tell me.”

“I’m not sure.”

“But Sonny’s keepin’ you on the case.”

Yancy gave a misleading wink. “Let’s not advertise it. Want another beer?” He ordered a couple more Budweisers.

Fitzpatrick asked if other body pieces had been found. “A leg or a head? Whatever.”

“Nothing but that arm.”

They were interrupted by a pushy fellow in a papaya polo shirt who recognized Fitzpatrick from a fishing website and wanted to go “load up” on mahi the next day. Fitzpatrick said he was booked until the Second Coming, but he provided the name of another charter captain.

When they were alone again, Fitzpatrick turned to Yancy and said, “How you doing on roach patrol? It’s got to be different.”

“Look at me.” Yancy flapped his shirt collar to display his new pencil neck. “Every time I walk into a joint, all I can think about is maybe some guy in the kitchen is greasing his ass with the pizza dough. Crazy shit like that, swear to God. I can barely stand the sight of food.”

“Come on, man, you gotta eat. Let’s get some conch fritters.”

“Go for it. I’m full.”

“Promise me you won’t shut this place down, too. I’m dead serious—you’d start a damn riot.”

Yancy said, “You knew Randolph Nilsson, right? The last guy who had my job.”

“Yeah, he was married to my second wife’s third cousin. Or maybe it was my third wife’s second cousin. Anyhow, I’m the one scattered his ashes out by the Mud Keys. He was only fifty-three at the end. But life ain’t fair, right?”

“No, Keith, it’s not.”

Two more bottles of beer appeared on the bar counter, along with a platter of raw oysters. Fitzpatrick turned to scout the room, which had filled with lobster people and locals. His gaze fixed on a rangy, black-haired kid sitting beside a hard-looking blonde at a corner table. The kid wore a tight T-shirt and a scraggly pubic goatee. In his mouth bobbed an unlit cigarette, and both arms were extravagantly tattooed in a Neptunian motif. He gave Fitzpatrick a smirking salute, and the captain nodded back.

“Who’s the Tommy Lee impersonator?” Yancy asked.

“He used to mate for me,” Fitzpatrick said, “till a couple weeks ago.”

“What boat is he on now?”

“The S.S.
Jackoff
.”

“Gotcha.”

“Mr. Charles Phinney, he don’t need to work no more. Or so he informed me the night he quit. This was after I chewed him out for not hosin’ off the tackle and wipin’ down the teak. He says, ‘Fuck you, old man, you can stuff this shitty job.’ ”

“Now he’s buying you beer and oysters,” Yancy said, “and dating hookers.”

“Showin’ off is all. He said he come into serious money, but that could mean he won eighty-five bucks on the Lotto scratch-off. Now all of a sudden he’s Donald fucking Trump.”

Yancy was fond of shellfish but he couldn’t even look at the plate. It was tragic, what his new job was doing to him. “Was Phinney working on the
Misty
the day you caught the dead arm?”

“He was,” Fitzpatrick said. “That useless sonofabitch couldn’t even get it unhooked.”

When Yancy looked back, the kid and the prostitute were heading for the door. Fitzpatrick slurped an oyster. He said, “Took me a month to teach that fucking retard how to rig a bait.”

“You’ll hear from him again.”

“Don’t say that, Andrew.”

“When the money runs out, he’ll come begging to get back on the
Misty
.”

Two gunshots rang out from the parking lot. A woman began shrieking Phinney’s name.

“Or maybe not,” Yancy said.

Six

The typical Key West murder is a drunken altercation over debts, dope or dance partners. Premeditated robbery-homicides are rare because they require a level of planning and sober enterprise seldom encountered among the island’s indolent felons.

Charles Phinney was already dead when Yancy reached his side. He lay fish-eyed and soaked with blood, the pockets of his black jeans jerked inside out. His companion, who turned out not to be a hooker, said the killer rolled up on a blue moped, shot Phinney twice, stole his cash and took off. She said the man wore a camo sun mask and a red or orange rain poncho, which would have drawn notice anywhere except Margaret Street on a Friday night.

Because of the location of the crime, the city police—not the sheriff’s office—would be handling the investigation. Uniformed officers taped off the intersection at Caroline and kept the crowd back while a paramedic pounded for show on Phinney’s chest. Keith Fitzpatrick, whose leathery face had drained to gray, hung around until the kid’s body was loaded into an ambulance. Then he said he was going home and drink himself to sleep.

Yancy remained at the scene with Phinney’s girlfriend. Her name was Madeline and she worked at a T-shirt shop on Duval. She said the shop was owned by Russian gangsters, and that’s who killed Phinney.

“They must’ve heard him braggin’ about the money,” she said.

Yancy asked how much he was carrying.

“Thousand bucks, maybe.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“A job.” Madeline sniffed and looked away. Tears streaked her chalky makeup.

Yancy said, “What was he dealing—coke? Meth?”

Madeline turned back with a narrow look. “You a cop or something?”

“I’m on sabbatical.” Which was true enough.

She wiped her eyes. “I never seen anybody get shot before. Goddamn.” She said she and Phinney had been dating only a month or so. “He was selling pot,” she added.

Yancy noticed her reading his reaction, trying to figure out if he believed her.

He said, “So what happened was he made a big score and quit his job on the
Misty
.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“And you really think your bosses killed him for a grand?”

Madeline seemed to be reconsidering her theory. “Will I have to, like, go to court?”

“If there’s a trial, sure.”

“Thing is, Charlie was talkin’ all over town. The Russians weren’t the only ones knew he had a wad.” She shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody that shot him.”

Yancy overheard one of the city detectives say that the blue moped was a rental. It had already been found, abandoned in an alley off Southard.

“I can’t afford to lose my job,” Madeline said. She wore her bleached hair in a spiky crop. Her hands were rough and her eyes were old-looking. Yancy figured she had fifteen years on Phinney.

“You got a smoke?” she said. “I’m comin’ apart here.”

“I quit a long time ago. Sorry.”

“Oh. You’re one of
them
.”

Yancy picked a virgin Marlboro off the pavement. It was the same one Phinney was mouthing when he’d walked out of the oyster bar, the one he had paused to light when the robber on the moped shot him.

Madeline took the dead man’s cigarette from Yancy’s hand and said, “Why the hell not?”

•  •  •

That same night, 264 miles away, a man on the eastern coast of Andros Island lightly tapped on the door of a woman known as the Dragon Queen. When she let him in, the man, whose name was Neville, said, “I need some woo-doo on a white mon.”

The Dragon Queen sat down in a flaking wicker chair. “What de hell’s wrong wit your boy dere? He dont look right.”

“Dot’s not my boy,” Neville said. “Dot’s a monkey I look ahfta.”

He’d won the animal in a game of dominoes with a sponger from Fresh Creek. The sponger told him it was the same monkey from the Johnny Depp pirate movies, which were filmed nearby in the Exumas. Neville named his new pet Driggs and he fed him too much deep-fried food. Before long the monkey got wrinkled and tufts of fur began falling out. He defiantly refused housebreaking so Neville made him wear disposable baby diapers with holes cut out for his tail. Now the nearly hairless creature was hugging Neville’s left leg and chittering in dread of the voodoo woman.

She rocked forward to squint. “He sure dont favor you, suh. Bettuh talk to de missus and find out who she been messin’ wit, ha!”

Neville let it go. The Dragon Queen was either far-sighted or wasted, possibly both.

“Who dis white devil you wish to be rid of?” she asked.

“He go by de name Chrissofer.”

Neville presented a bottle of Bacardi 8, which he had traded for a bucket of conch meat and two hogfish with the captain of a yacht anchored in the South Bight. It was well known that the Dragon Queen was partial to good rum.

“You got any ting belongs to dis mon?”

“Piece a shoyt.” Neville unfolded a teal-colored part of a sports shirt of the vented style that American sportsmen wore to the bonefish lodges. Neville had recovered the fragment from Christopher’s garbage can.

He said, “I want you pudda spell on ’im.”

The Dragon Queen had a pink batik scarf swirled ’round her head, and a necklace strung with polished bivalves. She took the piece of the white man’s shirt and sniffed it.

“I do dis ting fuh you, he might go’n die,” she said.

Neville thought about it. “Whatever God’s will.”

“Where de white mon aht?”

“Bannister Point. Dey said yestuhdey he go eat lunch aht de conch shack in Rocky Town. ’Im and his woman.”

“He like dot place, huh?” The Dragon Queen opened the rum and filled a stained coffee mug. She didn’t offer any to Neville, which was fine. He was nervous being in the same house, her house, because of her reputation as a wanton man-eater. Three of her much younger boyfriends had fallen dead under murky circumstances. A fourth had fled Andros, supposedly to Cuba. Neville concentrated on avoiding the Dragon Queen’s gaze, which was said to bewitch even the strongest of men.

She asked about Christopher’s woman. “A white lady?”

“Yeah,” Neville said. “She come ’n’ go.”

“Wot her name?”

“I dunno. She keep to huhself, same as ’im.”

“So, tell me why you wish bod fuh dis mon.” The Dragon Queen was smiling now. She had a mashed-up nose and the overbite of an ancient tortoise.

Neville said, “Juss so he get off de island, no matter how.”

“All right, suh.”

She traced her callused brown fingers along the strip of fabric, which was coiled like a boa in her lap. “He not a Bahamian, dis white devil. He not from Freeport or Abaco.”

“No, ma’am, dot’s true. He from de States.”

“Den woo-doo must be extra strong. Cost more, too, you unnerstahn.”

“All right.”

“Bring me nodder bottle a rum.”

Neville nodded. “Dot I will.”

“And next time, you stay ’round to keep me comp’ny. But not tonight.” The Dragon Queen pointed to the door.

Neville’s heart was hammering as he got on his bike and pedaled away down the scraped coral path. The diapered monkey, riding on Neville’s head, maintained his perch by clinging fiercely to Neville’s ears. His tiny fingertips were moist and the nails felt sharp. Neville was grateful for the moonlight that helped him find his way.

Desperation had driven him to visit the voodoo lady. The white
man named Christopher was planning to put up a resort for rich tourists on a stretch of waterfront where Neville lived, where his father and grandfather had lived before him. Recently Neville had been ordered to pack up and move. A letter was delivered saying his half-sister in Canada had sold the family property on Andros and upon closing would send Neville his share of the proceeds, which he didn’t want.

What he wanted was to live and die on the beach, under the shade of casuarinas.

Nobody at the government office in Lizard Cay or even Nassau could straighten out the situation, so with trepidation Neville had turned to the Dragon Queen. He was unaware that his problem lay beyond her supernatural powers and was in fact connected to faraway criminal events in the Florida Keys, including the cold-blooded murder that very evening of a foolhardy boat mate named Charles Phinney.

Neville’s bicycle jounced off a rocky divot as he coasted downhill, and a sharp pinch of pain caused him to cry out. “Bod monkey! Bod monkey!”

But the frightened animal kept his teeth buried in Neville’s scalp until they skidded to a stop in front of the house.

Yancy got home around midnight and rolled a joint. The stuff was called Trainwreck yet it failed to knock him into a proper stupor. Although he’d seen a number of dead gunshot victims, he remained disturbed by the pooled emptiness in Charlie Phinney’s eyes.

A check of his cell phone revealed, to his surprise, three messages from three different women. It had been eons since such a fine thing had happened.