Bad Monkey

“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.”