Bad Monkey (Andrew Yancy, 1)

by Carl Hiaasen

Mrs. Mendez was an unbearable harridan. Her features were a riot of futile surgeries, and she laughed like a mandrill on PCP.

“They had an opening, so I made a call. The other fella, he got sick and quit.” “He died, Sonny.” “Okay, he died. But first he got sick.”

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.

Unlike his camp mates, he failed to outgrow an adolescent preoccupation with his own genitalia, and this too hampered his career.