Bad Monkey

by Carl Hiaasen

  Neville said, “How you know Mistuh Chrissofer?”

  “I heard he’s building a fancy tourist resort down on the beach.”

  “Yeah, mon. My beach.” Neville stopped talking and finished his beer. The American ordered him another one.

  “You sell him that land?”

  “He tore down my house and put up a fence with a got-tam padlock. Ain’t no hoppy situation, mon. It was my hoff sister made the deal. Nobody axe me.” Neville went through the story of the sale. He couldn’t tell if the American, like others, thought he was crazy.

  The man finished listening and said, “That’s a lot of money, Mr. Stafford. You could have been rich.”

  “In wot way?”

  The American broke into a warm smile. “Exactly. My name’s Andrew.”

  His grip was firm when he shook Neville’s hand. He said he lived on Big Pine Key, in the southernmost part of Florida. Neville said he had been twice to Miami and once to Fort Lauderdale, to have a mole on his neck removed. The American told him about his own house, about the hot-pink Gulf sunsets and the small wild deer that roamed the island. The deer were no larger than dogs, the man said, which Neville found fascinating.

  “Every evening they’d come into this clearing to eat sprouts and twigs,” the man named Andrew said. “I’d sit on the deck and watch them do their thing until it got dark.”

  “Ain’t no deer on Andros dot I ever saw,” Neville remarked. “Only pigs.”

  “But then some guy named Shook from upstate New York, he bought the lot next to mine and started putting up a huge house, a ridiculous fucking house. It’s way too tall for the building codes but obviously he paid off somebody,” the American went on. “Worst part? He doesn’t even intend to live there, Mr. Stafford. Can’t abide the heat and mosquitoes. All he wants to do is unload the monstrosity on some clueless sucker, take the money and go back north.”

  The American seemed deeply bothered by what his neighbor was doing to the land. Neville had never run into a tourist like Andrew, although he’d met a few like Mr. Shook.

  “Wot ’bout dose lil’ deer?” Neville asked.

  “They don’t come anymore. They can’t eat plywood.”

  The man went still. Neville asked him what he was going to do.

  “What are you going to do?” the American said.

  Neville told him about recruiting the Dragon Queen to put a voodoo hex on Christopher Grunion. “But it dint woyk,” he added. “And, at de end, she trick me outta my monkey.”

  “I’m not sure she got the best of that deal.”

  “Dot’s true.” Neville had to laugh.

  “Movie stars, right? Nothing but trouble. Can I show you something?” The American took out a gold badge and held it close to his lap, below the bar counter, so that no one but Neville could see it.

  “You police?” Neville whispered.

  The man named Andrew put the badge away. He said, “Law enforcement authorities in the U.S. are very interested in Mr. Grunion—and that’s not his real name. We believe the Curly Tail Lane project is being financed with moneys obtained illegally, by fraud. We also believe he’s quite dangerous.”

  Neville nodded. “Yeah, dot asshole shodda gun at me.”

  “Really? When did this happen?”

  “Big fucking gun, mon. Outside his house up Bannister Point.”

  “Shit.” The man anxiously glanced at his wristwatch.

  Neville drained his beer bottle thinking he and the American had something in common. Both were beset by greedy intruders destroying something rare, something that couldn’t be replaced.

  The light bulbs hanging from the beams of the conch shack flickered and dimmed; soon the island would lose electricity. Neville wondered where Driggs would take shelter during the hurricane. Not with the voodoo witch, he hoped. What kind of demon skank would teach a monkey how to smoke?

  “Foyst time I gon see de Dragon Queen, I bring a private ting belong to Chrissofer.”

  “What was that?” the American asked.

  “A sleeve from a fishin’ shoyt like you got on dere, ’cept it was blue. Dragon Queen supposed to pudda coyse on de mon and take care my prollem on Green Beach. But den notting hoppen—”

  “It was a sleeve?” The man named Andrew planted his elbows on the bar and pressed the knuckles of his hands together. To Neville he looked a bit pale.

  “Yeah, a sleeve dot been toyn off. It was in Chrissofer’s garbage.”

  “Torn off or cut off?”

  “I tink cut.” Neville made a scissor motion with his fingers.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Wot’s mottah?”

  “Do you have a car, Mr. Stafford?”

  “No, mon. I got a boat, but—”

  “Never mind.” The American slapped some cash on the bar and disappeared up the road, into the swaying shadows.

  Neville picked up the man’s expensive fishing rod and made his way to Joyous’s apartment where after a quick poke he lay awake, listening to the coconut trees shake and wondering if the American was really a policeman, and if the things he’d said were true.

  Twenty

  Agent John Wesley Weiderman, five pounds lighter after his bout with spoiled shellfish, had intrepidly returned to Florida on the hunt for Plover Chase. He was armed with a promising new lead supplied by the fugitive’s husband, a retired dermatologist who’d contacted the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

  Dr. Clifford Witt had uncovered a series of credit card charges made by the suspect under the alias of Bonnie Witt and posted on a Visa account to which Dr. Witt had access (online password: nookyluv2). The purchases, all made in Key West, included groceries, lip gloss, blond hair coloring, domestic beer, condoms, dental floss, a car rental, four jerry cans, ninety-seven dollars’ worth of gasoline and a room-service charge at a Best Western on South Roosevelt.

  “We run out of cash so we had to go plastic,” explained the man inside the hotel room, number 217.

  He gave his name as Clyde Barrow, and he seemed unflustered by having a lawman at the door. Then again, Agent John Wesley Weiderman adhered to a low-key approach.

  “Do you know a woman named Plover Chase?” he asked.

  “She left me, dude. Hit the bricks.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Back on the run, I guess. Once an outlaw, whatever.”

  “Let’s start with your real name.”

  The man said, “Okay, okay, you got me.”

  He was doughy and sunburned. He wore a black muscle shirt that said: OLD KEY WEST—A DRINKING VILLAGE WITH A SLIGHT FISHING PROBLEM!

  “I’m Cody Parish,” he said.

  Agent John Wesley Weiderman didn’t respond immediately. He was assessing the judicial prospects of his case, which were suddenly dimmer.

  “Yo, as in Cody Parish the victim?”

  “Got it,” said John Wesley Weiderman.

  It was the person with whom Plover Chase had notoriously swapped sex in exchange for good school grades. Now he was all grown up. He was, in fact, losing his hair.

  “Ms. Chase and me, we hooked up again after all this time. Actually, she tracked me down on Facebook. Talk about a true-life fairy tale—it’s all in my diary, I mean everything.”

  “May I read it?”

  “First I better get with a lawyer,” said Cody. “See, it’s gonna be a book and then probably a movie. That’s why I need to be careful nobody steals the good stuff and leaks it.”

  The agent asked Cody if Plover Chase had abducted him against his will. Cody said, “She’s got something way more lethal than a gun. You know what they say—pussy is undefeated. That’s from Merle Haggard himself.”

  “So she didn’t threaten or physically harm you.”

  “Stompin’ my heart to pieces, doesn’t that count?”

  “It was her English class where you first met, right? Back in the day.”

  “Not regular English but AP English,” Cody said. “That means, like, super advanced.” />
  “Got it.” John Wesley Weiderman didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body.

  “I love her the same now as I did back then. It’s like nothing ever changed, time standing still, whatever.”

  “Why do you think she left you this time?”

  “Dude, come on. Why do they do anything they do? Yesterday she shows up in a green convertible, packs her shit and off she goes up the highway. Monster hormone attack is my theory.”

  The agent didn’t doubt that Plover Chase was gone; there were no women’s clothes in the closet, no lipstick tubes or makeup items in the bathroom. On the unmade queen-sized bed lay a sad stack of men’s magazines, raw jerk-off material that even a loser like Cody would have concealed had a female been in the vicinity.

  “Any idea where she went?”

  “Not really,” said Cody. “Home maybe?”

  “Was your family aware that you two re-connected?”

  “Dad passed six years ago and Mom’s in assisted living, thinks she’s Shirley MacLaine. And guess what, bro, I’m thirty years old and I can bone whoever I want, long as she’s legal age and says yes. And Ms. Chase, she said yes, yes, yes, and more yes, please, Cody baby! Bottom line, I didn’t break any laws.”

  John Wesley Weiderman pointed out that it was illegal to aid and abet a wanted criminal.

  “Only thing I abetted was rockin’ her world. They gonna send me to the penitentiary for that?” Cody was striving to appear indignant.

  “A jury might see it your way,” said the OSBI agent, “but good lawyers cost money. Maybe by then you’ll be rich from selling your journal, right?”

  Cody Baby didn’t appear to be emotionally pulverized by his lover’s abandonment. He was, however, troubled by the possibility of being prosecuted.

  “Listen, I just remembered,” he said. “There’s a guy lives on Big Pine Key, Ms. Chase had a thing with him for a while.”

  “I spoke with the gentleman. He used to be a police detective.” John Wesley Weiderman wouldn’t soon forget Andrew Yancy baring his ass to present his alleged wild-dog bites.

  “Well, that’s where she might be,” Cody said without rancor. “With him.”

  “He told me their affair was over.”

  “Maybe he’s not the one calling the shots. Obviously you never met Ms. Chase.”

  “Someday,” said the agent.

  “She wasn’t too jazzed about the dude gettin’ another girlfriend, okay? She acted all like isn’t-that-nice, but I could tell she was seriously frosted.”

  “So you think she went to win him back.”

  “You know how whacked chicks can get. The guy’s new girl is a doctor, ’kay? Ms. Chase couldn’t deal with that, is my theory. It’s all in the diary. I do a hundred words every night, not longhand but on my iPad. That still counts, right?”

  “For sure.”

  Agent John Wesley Weiderman fully realized that pursuing Plover Chase was an unfair burden on the taxpayers of Oklahoma. Her capture would not make the state a safer place. It would instead make a tabloid celebrity of the ex-schoolteacher, and possibly a best-selling author of her now-grown-up victim, whom John Wesley Weiderman perceived as a grubby oversexed slacker. What a circus that would be, Plover Chase returning to Tulsa in handcuffs. Plus the waste of a perfectly good jail cell.

  But Agent Weiderman was a follower of orders, and there were worse places to be sent than the Florida Keys. He’d diligently scouted the health department’s website and located a relatively clean seafood joint, where for lunch he had eaten grilled mahi served with Cuban plantains and black beans. It was maybe the best meal he’d ever eaten that wasn’t a rib eye.

  “What about those jerry cans?” he asked Cody Parish.

  Parish gave a loose-jointed shrug.

  “On the Visa bill were four six-gallon gasoline containers from Ace Hardware.”

  “Weird.” Cody said Ms. Chase must have purchased the items on a day she went out alone.

  “Have you ever known her to be violent?”

  “No way,” Cody said. “But, like I told you, we were in major love.”

  “Maybe she feels different about Mr. Yancy.”

  “There’s a wild streak, for sure. It’s all in my diary.”

  “We’ll be in touch about that,” the agent said. He headed toward the door.

  “You catch her, don’t let on it was me that told you where to look.”

  “Of course not. We protect our sources.” Which is what John Wesley Weiderman was trained to say, and almost always they bought it.

  Flip-flops slapping on the floor, Cody Parish trailed the agent to the stairway. “Twenty gallons’ worth of gas cans, what do you figure that’s all about?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  Cody’s spotty lips moved as he redid the math in his head, six times four. “Maybe she’s just stocking up for the drive home. Doesn’t wanna waste time stopping at service stations.”

  John Wesley Weiderman said, “I didn’t think of that.”

  Because only a chowderhead would think of that. People used jerry cans for fueling lawn mowers or ATVs, but there was no good reason to carry four of them unless you had a bigger job in mind.

  Rosa Campesino seldom thought about Daniel, her ex-husband. What brought him to mind now, while she sipped wine with Eve Stripling on the porch of an Andros Island beach house, was a whiff of syrupy men’s cologne.

  Beast Down it was called, Daniel’s favorite. She’d never met another man who wore the stuff. However, Rosa knew it wasn’t Daniel talking on the phone in the next room because Daniel was dead, having witlessly steered his two-thousand-dollar mountain bike over a cliff. The autopsy had been performed with competence in Bozeman, Montana. As a professional courtesy the report had been faxed to Rosa, who’d made copies for the paddleboard instructor and each of the three other women Daniel had been fucking during the marrriage, the lubricious details unearthed by Rosa’s divorce attorney.

  “I really like those shoes,” Eve Stripling said.

  “Thank you. They’re seriously comfy.”

  “What happens when all that shiny red color comes off the bottoms? Do you have to, like, get ’em spray-painted?” Rosa said, “That’s a darn good question.”

  This was when light chatter filled the air, before things fell apart. Eve was holding a tiny cinnamon-colored dog, probably the same runny-eyed furball that Andrew had saved from drowning.

  “How much longer will Mr. Grunion be on the phone?” Rosa asked.

  “He’s tied up on a business call,” said Eve. “How about some more wine?”

  Rosa said sure. She looked at her watch—still plenty of time.

  “Maybe you could tell me how the units at Curly Tail Lane are priced, pre-construction. My husband and I are interested in a couple of two-bedrooms facing the water. We’d pay cash at closing.”

  “No financing?” Eve looked more amused than excited.

  “We’ll have to do the deal back in Florida,” Rosa continued, “at the office of Andrew’s trust managers. They’re the ones who move the money around.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, we can Skype your people in from Nassau.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Eve. “I don’t think we’re interested.”

  Rosa held steady. “Not interested in an all-cash deal? Seriously?”

  “Honey, there’s nothing serious about any of this, and we both know it.”

  The dog jumped down and curled up in a corner. Eve opened another bottle of merlot. Waves rumbled out across the reef line, the wind thrashed the palms and Rosa tapped the toe of one of her French sandals.

  She said, “My mistake, Eve. I thought you and your husband were in the business of selling condos.”

  “Thing about this place, it’s easy to make friends if you treat the right people right. I’ll give you a for-instance. We made a good Bahamian friend at the Immigration office, and guess what? She says nobody named Rosa Gates cleared through Nassau the last few d
ays. Not Fresh Creek or Congo Town either. There was a Rosa Campesino—”

  “I kept my maiden name,” Rosa interjected, although she knew it was over.

  “Did your ‘husband’ keep his maiden name, too? Because there’s no Andrew Gates on the entry list, either.” Eve with her stretched white jeans and tanned feet was rocking on a wooden swing, not in a lazing tempo.

  She said, “Guy named Andrew Yancy came through Nassau on his way here to Lizard Cay. He used to be a cop down in the Keys. I’ve met the man, so just cut the bullshit.”

  Rosa set down her wine glass. “Tell Mr. Grunion I’m sorry to have wasted your evening. Clearly there’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “Oh, give it up.”

  Calmly Rosa reached for her handbag and rose. “Too bad,” she said.

  Eve Stripling cocked her head. “Honey, you’re not goin’ anywhere.”

  At that moment a door to the house flung open, uncorking a fresh gust of Beast Down mixed with sweat. The smell was so strong that Rosa feared she might gag.

  Against the wind he ran; uphill, downhill. Yancy was no athlete, not anymore. His lungs heaved, his legs cramped. The pocked pavement was strewn with sharp pebbles that gouged his feet.

  Simple pain he could take; blood, too. It was the fucking up that was unbearable to contemplate, his own potentially disastrous failure to see the obvious.

  An approaching vehicle turned out to be Philip’s taxi heading back toward town, reggae thumping from the open windows. The van was dark except for the glow of a joint that Claspers the pilot was smoking in the front next to Philip. Yancy waved both arms but he was too gassed to shout. As the taxi sped past, Yancy noticed a hunched dark shape on the roof—Mr. Stafford’s monkey, clinging grimly to the luggage rack.

  Yancy ran on until he spotted a kid’s bicycle lying beside a chicken pen in front of a cinder-block house. The windows of the place had been boarded for the storm, and through a crack Yancy saw light and heard voices. Uprighting the bike, he pedaled away on half-flat tires, his knees bumping the handlebars.

  Egg loomed as a foremost concern when Yancy approached Bannister Point. Yancy reviewed his own rudimentary disabling skills, cop skills, understanding that he’d never fought a man of Egg’s size whose reflexes hadn’t been slowed by drugs or booze. Tonight Egg would be on full alert and sober as a hangman, not easy to surprise and bring down. In consideration of the goon’s recent dental woes, Yancy planned to aim first for the jawbone.