Bad Monkey (Andrew Yancy, 1)

by Carl Hiaasen

Yancy’s unmarked Ford was well air-conditioned but he still brought a box of Popsicles, which he positioned beside the disjoined limb in the cooler on the passenger side. He was a pathologically impatient driver, and sucking on

iced treats seemed to settle him. Bonnie had started Yancy on the Popsicle habit because she’d found it terrifying to ride with him on Highway 1. Mango was Yancy’s favorite flavor beside Bonnie herself. These were the sorts of sidecar thoughts with which he tormented himself.

hirsute

Suspended without pay, Yancy quickly ran out of money for his lawyer and had no choice but to resign from the department, in exchange for not being indicted. Sergeant Mendez denied all wrongdoing but was quietly reassigned to the K-9 division. Soon thereafter he was bitten in the groin by a

Belgian shepherd trainee named Kong, and he required three operations, culminating in a scrotal graft from a Brahma steer.

harridan.

He and Bonnie hadn’t slept together since the night before the vacuum-cleaner incident.

need my badge back.” “Why didn’t you just punch him like a normal person? Why’d you have to go and sodomize him with a Hoover?” Yancy shrugged. “You always said he had a bee up his ass. I was only trying to help.”

One, you’re even more beautiful today than you were then.” “That’s a mug shot, Andrew. And, FYI, a dyke named Smitty had just given me a full-on cavity search, which is why my eyeballs are bulging in that photo.”

“His parents threatened to sell his Jet Ski if he didn’t testify. Apparently he’d kept a journal

of everything we did and how many times we did it. His writing was quite jaunty and explicit—I should never have turned him on to Philip Roth.”

Bonnie refused to come back to Yancy’s house. From her line of questioning it became depressingly clear that she thought him capable of murdering somebody and hacking the corpse into pieces. Yancy took this as a sign that he’d failed, over their time as lovers, to showcase his best qualities.

His next stop after lunch was a Burger King. Compared to Stoney’s, the place was as immaculate as a surgical suite.

Ninety-two hundred acres had been patched together as a refuge for the remaining deer. Being unable to read, they frequently meandered beyond its boundaries.

Now the coat hung too loosely on his frame, Yancy having dropped so much weight since becoming a restaurant sleuth. The paradox wasn’t lost on him—he’d worked many bloody crime scenes and never once felt queasy, yet the glimpse of a desiccated rat carcass in a vat of stale muffin mix left him poleaxed with revulsion.

So far, the only good thing about the job was that nobody complained if he didn’t show up. The restaurant owners were relieved not to be inspected,

and they made no inquiries to Yancy’s supervisor regardin...

he strenuously avoided graveyards. A morgue full of chilled stiffs was no problem, but for some reason a field of sunlit tombstones gave him the willies.

Yancy wondered if the mortician had prorated his embalming fee, since there was only one limb to bury.

stevedore.

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.

sponger

She had a mashed-up nose and the overbite of an ancient tortoise.

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.

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

A mental picture of Dr. Clifford Witt masturbating bug-eyed with a noose around his neck caused Yancy to wonder if Bonnie’s husband had actually enjoyed the vacuum-cleaner assault that had cost Yancy his detective job.

At one point they passed a white-tailed deer so small that it had to be genetically defective. Ipolene decreed it was a sure sign of toxic waste spillage, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if the humans living on the island were similarly stunted.

It was Evan Shook’s belief that Mr. Spillwright would be so blown away by the exotic seascape that he would make an offer on the spot, providing he didn’t collapse in a wheezing phlegm-fest before reaching the top of the steps.

Brennan, he’s been working like a dog.”

“Which is probably what he’s serving for an appetizer,”

“Where are you going? Brennan wants you to try the chowder.” “Not until they find a vaccine,”

“Nobody said he was Alvin Einstein.” Yancy thought it was fortunate that Phinney and Madeline hadn’t pooled their genes.

Undaunted, Rosa ordered them veal with penne pasta. She wore

a fresh touch of lipstick but no other makeup, which Yancy found wildly beguiling. This he recognized as the onset of infatuation.

“Last week I did a post on a man who had a clarinet up his colon,” she reported. “That’s not what killed him, by the way. It was a single gunshot to the head from a jealous lover. She played the oboe.”

Yancy took a safe-looking can of ginger ale from the refrigerator. He popped the tab, sat down at the kitchen table and waited patiently for Dr. O’Peele to start gabbing.

Let’s hear more about Mr. Stripling.” O’Peele shook his head so violently that his cheeks flapped. “Request denied!”

Where did Nick get all those Medicare numbers?” “He bought a list of, like, ten thousand names,” the doctor said. “Some clerk that worked

at one of the hospitals. Mount Sinai or Baptist, I don’t remember which.” As Yancy had suspected, Midwest Mobile Medical was a ghost-patient operation, billing comical sums to Medicare for electric power chairs, stair lifts, walkers and other durable home-care items that would never be delivered. The senior citizens whose IDs had been hijacked remained in the dark because the government checks were mailed directly to Midwest Mobile.

Yancy pondered the sublime irony of being wounded in the

same nether region where he’d targeted Bonnie Witt’s husband. “Looks like Fido got a mouthful,” Rosa remarked, “and you didn’t have much to start with.”

Years later, at Nick’s funeral, all the time Eve stood sobbing by the coffin she was actually thinking of poor little Flash, whom her parents had coldly refused to replace. Every tear she shed that day was for her lost turtle, not for her husband.

The owner of Big Luke’s Lobsteria was Luke Motto, a former Thoroughbred jockey who stood five-two. He was called Big Luke because he was the tallest among six siblings.

Santeria

simian.

Neville was in no condition for romance, so he tried to break up with all three of his girlfriends on the same afternoon. Each of them said he was stupid and crazy and no damn good—yet they wouldn’t throw him out. Neville suspected that the women still clung to hope that he’d change his mind about the mountain of money he was refusing to accept for his family’s land.

Brophy Dawkins was a burly country-music star whose hit single was “Jesus Don’t Speak Jihad,” a defiant post-9/11 anthem.

A pilot friend of Claspers’s had been morbidly afraid of centipedes and refused to remove his heavy woolen socks, even while bathing. Eventually the poor bastard ended up on crutches, grounded. Later a photograph of his ravaged feet was featured in an illustrated atlas of fungal infections.

He wondered if something was mentally wrong with him for being content with what he had …

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?