Bad Monkey

Yancy resumed shooting casts at an imaginary point between Grunion’s eyebrows. Flinching and ducking, the killer slogged back toward the sandy mound where Eve fretted. For extra coaxing, Yancy thwacked the Gotcha against the nape of Grunion’s crispy poncho, and on the subsequent cast he stuck him in the right earlobe—a keen display of aim from seventy feet in a crosswind. Yancy set the hook using a sharp strip that broke the tippet and caused Grunion to bellow vituperatively. The pink-and-white fly remained loyally embedded, sparkling in the cocksucker’s punctured ear like a dainty shrimp-shaped stud.

Once safely on land, Grunion pushed the dog at Eve and, cupping his wound, stalked back toward the house. Eve followed a few paces behind, cradling Tillie and pausing intermittently to glare across the flats at the would-be abductor of her precious princess.

Yancy hurriedly waded north, reeling in his line. The homicide investigation that he’d hoped would resurrect his law enforcement career was foundering, torpedoed by bad luck and a deficit of careful planning. He expected the bright yellow Wrangler to appear any moment on the coast road, an enraged Grunion tracking him toward a fateful landfall. The man would have armed himself, probably with the 12-gauge Beretta he’d swiped from Yancy’s home in the Keys. Yancy himself was a sitting duck. A graphite fishing wand, no matter how artfully deployed, was useless against a screaming load of buckshot.

However, Grunion never returned. Nor, evidently, did Eve summon the island police, for Yancy came ashore unmolested. Riding the bicycle through a fresh rain toward Rocky Town, he concluded that the widow Stripling and her consort must have dismissed him as a crank, fly anglers being notoriously irascible if their solitude is violated.

He was on his way to the motel when a thunderclap chased him off the road, into an open carport attached to a small abandoned house. The slab floor was littered with rusting Red Bull cans and green shards of Kalik bottles that threatened his bicycle’s bald tires. Still, the place was dry and its roof offered material protection from the sudden electrical storm, a summertime sensation that Yancy had learned to fear and respect during his Florida childhood. One afternoon, while camping at Cape Sable, he and his father had witnessed a lightning bolt incinerate a flock of turkey buzzards roosting in the boughs of an old pine, which then flared like a sparkler and split down the midline.

The sky over Lizard Cay had closed in and the rain began to slant. Cars passed every few minutes, slowing for puddles, though none of them were yellow Jeeps. Yancy set his fly rod against a wall and stayed perched on the bicycle, pondering what to do. The sensible move would be to return to the Keys and construct his homicide case the old-fashioned way, with forensics, paper trails and dodgy self-serving witnesses.

To remain on Andros was to risk spooking Eve and Grunion, which would screw up a prosecution beyond salvation. The trip certainly hadn’t been a waste—Yancy had established that the couple was hiding out together, apparently investing the late Nicholas Stripling’s Medicare plunder in a resort development remote from the noses of U.S. authorities.

In the downpour Yancy no longer could see the road except during bursts of lightning. Overhead the beams of the carport began to drip so he adjusted his position, clearing away more broken glass and clutter. From somewhere inside the house came an unhappy squeak and the sounds of scuttling, which Yancy attributed to rats. His shoulders tensed when he caught a whiff of spiced tobacco smoke.

Peeking through a rotted-out doorway, he spied an unexpected shelter mate—the voodoo woman’s monkey, bedraggled, sopping, undiapered. The animal squatted in a corner sucking on a meerschaum pipe that he clutched blowgun-style with four tiny fingers, the dirty kernel of a thumb clocking in an agitated motion. The whitish bowl of the pipe was carved into a miniature topless angel of the voluptuous style found on bowsprits of old sailing ships.

If the taxi driver’s story was true—that the monkey was featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies—his descent from stardom had been steep indeed. Yancy hoped the little bastard had forgotten the painful pinch he’d inflicted upon him the night before during the scuffle aboard the voodoo skank’s scooter chair.

The animal’s expression betrayed nothing as he sucked on the pipe. Then a boom of thunder—or perhaps Yancy’s stare—caused the mangy desperado to bark sharply and flash brown-stained chompers.

“Chill out, little man,” Yancy said.