by Carl Hiaasen
“But I hoyd ain’t no Bahamasair today,” she said.
The American man said, “We’re flying private, ma’am.”
On the ride to Moxey’s, Yancy once again thanked Neville for saving his life. Neville asked what would happen next.
“Soon as I get back to Florida, I’ll speak with the FBI,” Yancy said. “Tell ’em where they can find Mr. Stripling—the guy you call Grunion.”
“Wot if he’s dead from the stobbin’?”
“Then all that’s left is to arrest his wife and find the rest of the money.”
Rosa spoke up: “No, Andrew, that’s not all. Mr. Stafford might have to deal with the authorities here.”
“Yeah, they could be a pain,” said Yancy, “but I’ll fly back and tell them exactly what went down. How you stopped Stripling from shooting me.”
“You’d do dot?” Neville said.
“It’s a promise, man.”
Neville felt better. Having an American policeman on his side would be good.
“Wot about my beach?” he asked.
Yancy said he wasn’t sure. “If Stripling bought it with the Medicare money, prosecutors in Miami might file a claim on it.”
“But the land’s mine.” Neville was perplexed. “Egg stayin’ dot trailer. I cont move back till he’s gone.”
“Egg’s heading to prison, too,” Rosa said. “For what he did to me.”
Neville didn’t know all that had occurred at the Dragon Queen’s shack, but he’d never forget what he saw when he and Yancy opened the door. It would be fitting for Egg to spend time at Fox Hill as a prisoner instead of a guard. Neville pictured him being taunted in the showers by the other inmates, the ones he’d hurt with the marlin billy. Much sport would be made of his monkey wounds.
After they arrived at the airport, Yancy asked Neville to call as soon as he got information about Stripling’s condition. “Dead or alive, I need to know. Meanwhile don’t talk to anybody about last night at Bannister Point. You already tell Coquina?”
“No, mon.”
Rosa said that was good. “For her and you.”
“I dont won hafta move ’way. Home is home, you unnerstahn.”
“You won’t ever have to leave,” Yancy said.
“I be hoppy ’f dot’s true.”
“It’s true, Mr. Stafford.”
Rosa went to the ladies’ room. Neville asked Yancy about his own difficult situation back in Florida, about the large house being constructed on the land where the little deer lived—the deer that were no bigger than dogs.
“You gon stop dot fella and make ’im rip de place down?”
Yancy smiled in a tired way. “Wish I could, but it’s probably too late.”
“I hope not,” Neville said.
Yancy said good-bye and shook his hand. Rosa did the same when she came back. She told him to take good care of Coquina, and to put Driggs on a strict fruit-and-fiber diet—no more conch fritters! Yancy said it was time to go. He and Rosa picked up their bags and went inside the terminal building.
Standing at the chain-link fence, Neville saw several overturned planes on the turnaround section of the tarmac. He also noticed, undamaged, the single-engine seaplane belonging to the man he knew as Christopher. A few white men and some local teenagers were out clearing the landing strip of hurricane litter. Soon the American policeman and his girlfriend would be able to take off, if they had a pilot who would fly them. The weather out west, toward Florida, looked all right.
The car belonging to Coquina’s mother was a rust-freckled Taurus with a Salt Life decal on the back window and a fickle alternator. Neville tried the key seven times before the ignition turned over. Then, barely a mile from the airport, the engine quit. Neville got out and popped the hood hoping for something as simple as a loose wire. He fiddled with various connections but nothing worked.
Neville heard a car coming the other way and decided to flag it down. As the vehicle came into view he noticed first that it was yellow, then that it was a hardtop Jeep Wrangler, of which there was only one on the island. Neville stopped waving and backpedaled for cover behind the broken-down Taurus.
But the Jeep was moving too fast. Both occupants looked squarely at Neville as they swerved around the stalled sedan and sped on toward the airport. The bastard that Neville had stabbed in the back sat upright in the front next to his woman, who was driving. Their taut expressions displayed not a flicker of recognition, only annoyance at the roadway obstruction.
Once they were out of sight, Neville placed both hands over his heart and thanked the Lord Almighty for his good fortune. Obviously the murderous fugitive had no idea who’d speared him from behind with a fishing rod.
Minutes later Neville heard an aircraft lifting off from Moxey’s. He looked up and saw the floatplane, as white and graceful as a gull. The man known to him as Christopher wouldn’t have had enough time to make that flight, no matter how fast his woman was driving.
So it had to be Yancy, the American policeman, on board. Yancy and his girlfriend.
The fact was confirmed minutes later when the yellow Jeep reappeared, racing back from the direction of the airfield. This time Neville didn’t wave at the Striplings as they passed, but he didn’t bother to hide, either.
Rosa fell asleep on Yancy’s shoulder but he kept awake, his eyes on the pilot. The flight to Miami was only forty-five minutes through a light chop. To the north, beyond Grand Bahama, towered a bank of muddy clouds, the last tailings of Hurricane Françoise.
Riding on small planes never failed to put a tune in Yancy’s head, and this time it was “Mozambique.” Claspers didn’t ask for details of Stripling’s crimes or say much of anything at the controls. Yancy figured he was preoccupied devising a story for Nick or the FAA, depending on which way he decided to play it. After the Caravan touched down at Miami International, Yancy offered him a one-hundred-dollar bill for fuel. Claspers shook his head and pointed to a gold AmEx clipped to the sun visor. The name imprinted on the card was Christopher Grunion.
When the plane taxied to a stop, Claspers tugged off his earphones.
“So, what are your plans?” Yancy asked.
“I’m not sure. Too old for prison and, man, I do like to fly.”
“It won’t be my call. The feds can be prickish, as you know.”
Claspers said, “I had no idea he murdered anybody. Swear on the Bible, the Koran, whatever.”
“Hey, I believe you.”
“Then I was thinking maybe you could help. Put in a good word.”
“Sure, but here’s the situation,” Yancy said. “Technically I’m not a cop. I’m a restaurant inspector.”
“Fuck a duck!”
“It’s just a temporary reassignment. The badge I borrowed from a colleague.”
“Other words, you count dead flies at the Pizza Hut. This is who I got for a character witness.”
“I’ll be a detective again in the very near future. Meanwhile, let’s not disparage the tireless civil servants who keep our public dining establishments free from vermin.”
“You don’t mind,” said Claspers, “I got a shitload of paperwork.”
Yancy woke up Rosa. They climbed out of the plane and jumped from a pontoon to the tarmac. A brief snag occurred upon re-entry when a Customs officer asked Yancy to unzip his footwear, tight nylon booties that were tailored for water wading though not ideal for travel. The fishing shoes smelled vile but the Customs man intrepidly probed their sweaty interiors in search of contraband.
Afterward Rosa called a cab to take them to the parking garages, where they kissed good-bye and set out separately to locate their cars. Twenty minutes later Yancy was in his Subaru heading up the interstate to the FBI office in North Miami Beach. He wasn’t dressed for the occasion, and in fact looked like a man who’d spent the night in a hurricane. Again the booties were a liability.
Getting past the reception desk required dropping the name of a well-regarded Miami police lieutenant for whom Yancy ha
d once worked. Eventually he ended up in an interview room with the two humorless street agents he’d encountered at Nick Stripling’s funeral. They remembered Yancy with manifest unfondness, so he rather enjoyed dropping the bomb.
“Mr. Stripling isn’t dead. I just left him in the Bahamas, bleeding from a fresh hole in his back.”
The posture of the agents improved. They began to fashion questions. One of them asked who stabbed Stripling. Yancy said he didn’t know; it was a drunken dispute.
The other agent asked if Yancy had traveled alone to the islands.
“Yep,” he said, which was technically true. Rosa hadn’t told him to leave her out of the recap, but that was his intention. The FBI needed to know only the basics, beginning with Stripling’s whereabouts.
The taller agent was Strumberg and his partner was Liske. Their suits weren’t the same shade of gray but the cut of the lapels looked identical. When Yancy told them about Stripling’s self-amputation, they tried to act as if they heard such stories every day.
However, Yancy knew they were stoked because they called in an assistant to take down what he was saying. The assistant’s laptop needed recharging so there was a period of lame small talk while she got on the floor to locate an electric outlet. Strumberg asked how Yancy had lost his detective job.
“Aw, come on. You guys know what happened. They let you have free Internet, right?”
“The media can exaggerate.”
“Not this time,” Yancy said. “In defense of a woman’s honor I waylaid her husband with a portable vacuum. The gesture was unappreciated and, unfortunately, witnessed by the proverbial throngs.”
The assistant’s laptop beeped to life, and the important phase of the interview continued. At one point Liske asked Yancy to draw a map of Lizard Cay. Yancy politely suggested that a satellite photo would be more accurate. The assistant found one on a classified government website and zoomed in on Bannister Point.
Yancy placed a fingertip to the screen. “That’s the house your subject is renting, but he won’t be there much longer. You should call whoever you need to call and have him arrested. But that’s probably not going to happen this afternoon, is it?”
“There’s a strict diplomatic process,” said Liske, “we’re obliged to follow.”
“Then you might lose him.”
“Not for long,” Strumberg asserted. “How badly was he hurt?”
“This morning I saw him in a car at the airfield. And if he’s well enough to ride in a car, he can ride on a plane.”
“How do you know he hasn’t already left the island?”
“His pilot flew off without him,” Yancy explained, “at my instruction.”
“You hijacked his aircraft?”
“Not with a weapon—and I prefer the word ‘commandeer.’ The pilot didn’t know who Stripling was until I told him. He might be in a mood to cooperate.”
“We’ll see.” Liske looked at Strumberg. “Stripling could charter another flight to Nassau. From there it’s a straight haul to London or New York.”
“Or even easier to come here,” Strumberg said. “Hell, we know the man’s got brass balls. If he cut off his own arm, as you say.”
Yancy informed the agents that the Nassau airport had gotten trashed by the storm. “But I’m guessing the runways will open by midafternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest. I were you guys, I’d be putting on my Bluetooths and workin’ those phones, because that fucker’s probably got a fake passport. Ask Immigration to look up a Christopher Grunion.”
The quick-typing assistant piped, “Could you spell that name for me, please?”
Overall Yancy thought the debriefing went as well as he could have hoped. Although the FBI agents were riveted on the Medicare case, they showed more than polite interest in the two murders committed by Stripling in Florida. Such heavy allegations could boost him to the top of the fugitive list and, in Liske’s priceless phrasing, “incentivize” the Bahamian government to apprehend him. It would help if a homicide warrant was waiting in Monroe County or Miami-Dade, the jurisdictions where the shootings took place. That would be Yancy’s next project.
Back in the car he plugged in his phone and called Rosa. She was already at work, elbow-deep in an autopsy. The spare key to her house was hidden inside a fake cactus next to the back door. Yancy let himself in, fed the fish, showered and fixed a peanut-butter-and-cucumber sanwich. He left messages for Rogelio Burton and Sheriff Summers, telling them that he had big news and that he was on his way back to the Keys.
The cell rang in his hand—Tommy Lombardo at the health department.
“Hey, I know you’re supposed to be on vacation and all—”
“No, I’m working,” Yancy said. “What, they got a roach emergency in the Bahamas?”
“That’s hilarous, Tommy. It’s a murder case.”
“Sure, it is.”
“I’m back in the States. What do you need?”
“You, Andrew. There’s been, huh, a complaint filed on Stoney’s. Worse than the usual, okay? Some widow from Ponte Vedra wound up in the ER with a three-aught hook in her watchamacallit. That pink wormy thingy hangs down in your throat?”
“The uvula,” Yancy said. “She got a fish hook stuck in her uvula. I’m betting she ordered the Cuban yellowtail.”
“Man, that’s amazing. How’d you know?”
“Brennan doesn’t check the gut for hooks when he cooks a fish whole.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s a bumblefuck.”
“I need you pronto back in the saddle, Andrew. This one made the Citizen. The widow lady, she’s got an in with the governor.”
“Let’s have lunch later in the week. Pick a place that won’t poison us.”
Rosa got home from the office at five-thirty. They didn’t go out for dinner and they didn’t make love. The autopsy she’d completed was that of a girl who had died on her birthday. Only eight years old and the parents had left her alone while they went to play the slots at the Miccosukee casino, way out on Krome Avenue. The girl was doing laps in the backyard pool when her appendix ruptured, no one there to hear the cries for help. She made it back to the shallow end but the pain doubled her up, and that’s where they’d found her—the parents, so shitfaced they couldn’t remember where they’d left their car keys.
Yancy spent the night holding Rosa on the bed. She cried and said not every day at her job was so awful, and all he could say was close your eyes. At dawn she was sleeping when he kissed the top of her head and slipped out the door.
First he drove to Johnny Mendez’s residence and placed the crooked ex-sergeant’s gold badge inside the mailbox. The Siamese was licking its paws on the hood of the Lexus, while the gargoyle visage of Mrs. Johnny Mendez watched him from the porch. She wore inappropriate heels and a sheer morning robe that revealed a gruesome topography of misspent liposuctions. Yancy felt a prick of sympathy for Mendez; embezzling from Crime Stoppers might have been the only way to pay for his wife’s cosmetic overhauls. Yancy honked once and sped away.
In Homestead he steered off the turnpike at the speedway exit and drove to the apartment building where his grandmother had lived. From the road he could see the window the burglars had broken on the day of her funeral. Whoever lived in the unit now had a small child; a tricycle stood on the walkway by the front door. Yancy called his father in Montana and left a message asking how the fishing was. He didn’t mention where he was calling from.
On the drive to the Keys he kept the radio off. His thoughts tumbled in the quiet, and the miles slipped away. A fender bender on the Snake Creek drawbridge had backed up traffic, so Yancy stopped for a grouper sandwich at a café he knew to be clean. His muted phone showed two more calls from Tommy Lombardo, though nothing from Neville Stafford on Lizard Cay.
As soon as the highway cleared Yancy was back in the car, still thinking of Neville and the incident at Bannister Point. Yancy worried that Eve Stripling might have recognized the old man from Rocky T
own, and that her husband would send Egg to murder him. Yancy wondered how long it would take the FBI to make a move.
His backup choice was Sonny Summers, despite the sheriff’s fear of the severed-arm case. Yancy thought Sonny might be persuaded to speak with the Bahamian authorities if he saw a chance for down-range glory—assisting the capture of a runaway murderer.
Halfway across the Seven Mile Bridge Yancy heard a siren. A ladder truck loomed in the rearview, and he slowed to let it pass. Fires were so infrequent in the Keys that Yancy assumed the emergency was another head-on.
He was coming over the pass at Bahia Honda, leaving a second voice message for the sheriff, when he saw a churning spire of black smoke. It was rising on the Gulf side of Big Pine, far from the highway, which meant it wasn’t a car crash. Some poor bastard’s home was ablaze.
Yancy wondered if it was somebody he knew.
Twenty-six
Dear Diary,
All these years I’ve been wondering what ever happened to her, and tonight she walked into the Olive Garden and re-stole my heart. She said, “Cody, you can do better than this.” I said, “You look awesome, Ms. Chase.”
And she did look awesome, even hotter than I remembered from school. I’m pretty sure she got her boobs done.
“Can we go somewhere private to talk?” she asked.
I told Arnelle the hostess I was taking a ten-minute break, but there was no way. Ms. Chase grabbed my hand and led me to her car. We drove to the Bank of America near Oral Roberts, and I got the most epic BJ of all time. She parked in the tellers’ drive-through so nobody could see us, and I swear I almost kicked out the windshield.
After zipping me up she told me how she’d walked out on her husband and drove all the way from Florida just to find me. She said she couldn’t stay long in Tulsa because there’s still a warrant left over from what happened all those years ago between me and her.