16 Tiger Shrimp Tango (14 page)

The still-nude Sasha sat up panting. “Will you call me?”

“Who knows?” Serge pulled Coleman aboard. “I got a nutty, nutty schedule.”

“But I’m a witness. You can’t just let me go.”

“That’s precisely what I’m going to do.” He steered the skiff back toward the boat ramp.

“No, you’re supposed to take me hostage and tie me up again,” said Sasha. “And stick a gag ball in my mouth, and do other unspeakable acts with the devices in my purse. I promise I won’t scream.”

“Jesus,” said Serge. “Okay, okay,
maybe
I’ll give you a call and we can go get some ice cream, but no promises.”

“Yes, ice cream. And then you’ll force me at gunpoint to lick it off your—”

“Enough!” Serge held his hands to the sky. “Out of the boat or I swear I won’t call.”

She reluctantly climbed over the side into three feet of water. “I’ll do anything for you.”

Serge threw her clothes in her face. “Now that has possibilities.”

Sasha slipped into her top. “Name it.”

“I’ve been hired to help some scam victims. And even though I’m starting to crack cases left and right, my boss has been getting on me just because I keep forgetting to retrieve the money.” He pointed back at a large metal tube standing on a shoal in the bay. “I’m easily distracted.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go back to the streets, and if I get a case I’m having trouble with, I might give you a call to see if you know anything.”

“So that’s the reason you’re deliberately freeing me?”

“No, that idea just popped in my head when we were cumming. I do some of my best thinking then.”

“So what’s the real reason?”

“To tell all the other scam artists working this state that there’s a new sheriff in town.”

Coleman raised a beer. “And I’m the deputy.”

Chapter Sixteen

SOUTH AMERICA

T
oucans and parrots squawked from the edge of the jungle.

The mountains fell steeply before gently sloping into an apron of dense green foliage that ended in the sandy coastline along the unpatrolled border of Chile and Peru.

Surf rolled in from the Pacific, before an explosion of mist on the rocks. There was a piece of driftwood here and there, crabs darting out of holes, and a tiny beach villa pressed back against the jungle. It was the only sign of a human hand.

Curtains billowed out the living room window.

Inside the sparsely furnished bungalow, a tall, wiry man sat shirtless in dry swim trunks. He had ultra-short blond hair, a week’s growth after shaving his head. He was wearing the trunks because he was going for another mile swim in the ocean. That accounted for the muscular shoulders and pecs that were disproportionately developed for the rest of his torso. The swim, though, would have to wait.

The man’s job was to wait. Just live in the villa. The only task: Check in once a day on the Internet at precisely 2:35
P.M.,
like a nuclear submarine coming up to periscope depth and raising its antenna to get instructions from satellites. And like those subs, the vast majority of the time there were no instructions. The important thing was 2:35.

Because if a message did come, it would be dropped seconds before, to be read as quickly as possible and immediately deleted. Employing another espionage trick, the messages were never sent, so they could never be intercepted. Instead they were saved as drafts in an e-mail account, and the villa’s occupant had the password.

The villa’s previous occupant also had the password, and liked to take those ocean swims. But he was gone, at the hands of the current resident. Nothing personal. Orders. The earlier resident had received a message at 2:35 and went to Miami to handle a situation. But he got sloppy and became compromised. The person now at the villa’s computer had also been in Miami as backup, prepared to sanitize any mess that might develop, and there had been a big one. That’s how he inherited the bungalow.

It was a strange juxtaposition, the occupation and the house. The remote spot on the beach lent itself to decompression. Just the waves and the birds and your thoughts. It reminded the man of the assassin played by Max von Sydow in
Three Days of the Condor,
who found tranquillity by meticulously painting tiny cast-iron soldiers from forgotten wars.

2:34.

Fingers tapped the keyboard. An Internet account opened. Moments later, an e-mail popped up in the draft folder. He read it quickly. This time there was also a photo of the target, but he didn’t need to save it because he would be receiving a hard copy later that day in a briefcase exchange. He hit delete. The swim trunks would stay dry. Something had come up. Florida again. The flight left in two hours.

He went to a louvered closet. At the bottom was an already-packed carry-on of essentials for just such an occasion. Then he opened a round wall safe and thumbed through passports of various nationalities and names. He decided on Bolivia.

Dark clouds rolled in from the ocean, and wind carried the salt mist. He shuttered up the beach house and climbed into his Jeep, holding a mental image of the face he’d seen on the computer.

MEANWHILE . . .

“And here’s another thing about the people who don’t read.” Serge hit the gas when the light turned green. “They’re the same ones who think you’re a moron if you don’t text. I don’t text because of a philosophical code against the growing depersonalization predicted by Alvin Toffler and George Orwell.”

“I don’t text because my thumbs are too big,” said Coleman.

“But the non-readers are texting away like it’s the war effort,” said Serge. “They’d eliminate the debt if we could convert that energy to durable goods and stick it on cargo ships. It’s half the gross national product.”

“What’s the other half?”

“Car insurance,” said Serge. “Watch any channel on TV for any length of time, and every other commercial is a British lizard, an upwardly mobile caveman, a calcified chick named Flo, the anthropomorphic jerk named Mayhem who tricks you into accidents, the guy in a hard hat who hits cars with sledgehammers, the character who played the president in the show
24
saying, ‘That’s Allstate’s stand,’ ‘Nationwide is on your side,’ ‘Fifteen minutes could save you some shit.’ ”

“I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.”

“And yet we’re still not manufacturing anything you can hold in your hands,” said Serge. “There’s your downfall of a global superpower. When space aliens visit centuries from now, they’ll whisk the dust away and conclude that America was dominated by a race of tiny-thumbed people who drove badly.”

“We’re not?”

“You may have a point,” said Serge. “And think about this: the simultaneous rise of texting and car insurance. Coincidence?”

“Last night’s episode of
Glee
warned about texting and driving,” said Coleman.

“Those
Glee
kids just keep on caring,” said Serge. “But the nation’s plight is now bigger than any teenage chorus line can handle. Technology has just passed our survival instinct, and the country is spinning on a stationary existential axis of make-believe importance: We text about a Tweet of a YouTube video posted on Facebook with a clip of
Glee
about not texting that we just texted about. Instead of actual life, we’re now living an air-guitar version of life.”

“Yow! Watch out!” Coleman lunged and grabbed Serge’s arms in an attempt to take over the steering wheel. The Firebird swerved across the lane. “Don’t you see it!”

“Coleman, get your fucking hands off me!” Serge swatted the arms away. “You almost made us crash. What’s gotten into you?”

He grabbed his chest. “You almost hit that weird beast in the road!”

“Coleman, it was a hooker.” Serge looked sideways with an odd expression. “And she’d already made it through the crosswalk.”

“You sure it was a hooker?”

“No question,” said Serge. “We’ve lived in Florida long enough that you should be able to identify them now without flash cards.”

“It must have been the snakes coming out of her head,” said Coleman. “That means it’s kicking in.”

“Why? What did you take?”

“I don’t remember,” said Coleman. “But it must have been good shit. That’s a sign of good shit: You don’t remember taking it and then see monsters and almost crash.”

Serge stared at him with scorn, then faced forward. “We need to buy insurance.”

“More head-snakes,” said Coleman, face pasted to his passenger window. “Where are we?”

The Trans Am raced due south on a major artery. They passed an open-air drug supermarket with handshake exchanges of bindles and cash, then pawn and beauty-product shops with door buzzers and baseball bats under the counters, a run-down motel full of police cars responding to aggravated domestic violence and an escaped monkey that had been in the news. More prostitutes, guys drinking from brown bags, shopping-cart pushers, slumped-over bus bench urchins, and run-on-sentence conspiracy preachers. The intersection people beckoned drivers at red lights to roll down windows for one-dollar flowers, bottled water and an underground newspaper written by hand. The area had become so notoriously sketchy that civic leaders snapped into action and fixed everything by installing new rows of expensive, decorative light posts.

“I absolutely love Orange Blossom Trail,” said Serge. “Also known as OBT and south Orlando’s red-light district, but that’s a bit judgmental.”

“Two dudes are having a sword fight with broken-off car antennas.”

“Ooo! Look, look!” yelled Serge. “They put up those supercool new light poles that tell people they’re in the wrong part of town.”

“The poles are bending toward the car and growling.” Coleman nodded. “Good shit.”

“I always seek out those poles,” said Serge. “They steer you to interesting new friends . . . Like this guy.”

A light turned red. The Firebird stopped. A bearded man on the curb made a rolling-down motion with his hand. Serge cranked the glass open. “What’s the good word, my fine fellow statesman?”

“Can I have a dollar?”

“Sure thing.” Serge uncrinkled a George Washington from his wallet and passed it out the window.

“Appreciate it.”

“Hey, wait,” said Serge. “Where’s my underground newspaper? I saw you give one to that other driver.”

“It was my last. Actually my only. Handwritten. That way no stray copies can fall into the wrong laps. That’s how they got Charlie.”

“Serge,” said Coleman. “The light turned green . . . I think.”

“Let ’em go around.” Serge hit his blinking hazards and turned back to the man. “Then what else do you have?”

“Let’s see.” The man reached in his back pocket with a quizzical expression. He removed a wad of paper. “Oh, yeah. I drew this last night.”

Serge took it through the window. Coleman looked at the page, then screamed and flattened himself against the passenger door. “Swarms of locusts with scorpion tails, people’s intestines sliced out, nuns with wooden rulers . . .” Quietly weeping in his hands now. “Serge, please make this stuff wear off.”

“It’s not the drug you took,” said Serge. “He really did draw this . . .” Then at the man: “And not too bad, if I do say so. What’s it represent? The Apocalypse from Revelation?”

“No, I was just doodling in the hardware store up the street.” The man wiped his brow. “They have air-conditioning. I get some of my best inspiration in there.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Serge tucked the picture in his pocket and handed the man another dollar. “What’s the word on the street?”

“They just caught another monkey.”

“It’s getting embarrassing.”

“No kidding.” The man stuck the dollar in his pocket. “Busting up mailboxes and lawn statues all the way to Altamonte Springs. It just wasn’t right.”

“Like the famous Tampa Bay monkey,” said Serge. “He was becoming a regular D. B. Cooper.”

“I read about him,” said the bum. “Sightings all the way west to the St. Petersburg exercise trail, but police think that was just a copycat in a monkey costume, jumping out and dancing in front of Rollerbladers before darting back into the woods.”

Serge stared at the ceiling and scratched his chin.

“Serge.” Coleman peeked out one half-open eye. “Is that why you made me wear that outfit?”

“It was you guys?” said the bearded man.

“Why text when you have imagination?” said Serge. “What about Casey Anthony?”

“Just scraps of rumors and dubious innuendo. Harder to find than the monkey.” He pointed north. “She’s been reported everywhere from a Magic basketball game to a Ruby Tuesday’s . . .” His arm swung south. “And someone swears they spotted her at the Tupperware Museum.”

“Wait a sec,” said Coleman. “You’re pulling my leg. There’s no such thing as a Tupperware Museum.”

“Oh, but there most certainly is,” said Serge. “From the old days. Roadside-attraction gold.”

“You’re really serious?” said Coleman. “Tupperware?”

“Not only that, but the histories of Orlando and Tupperware are intertwined farther back than Disney.” Serge turned to the homeless man. “What was Casey supposedly doing there?”

“In the gift shop buying a gelatin mold.”

“Must be a false sighting,” said Serge. “From all reports, Tupperware isn’t how she likes to get her freak on.”

“My thinking, too,” said the man. “Unless she’s into something so twisted we have yet to fathom.”

Serge began rolling up the window. “Still, all leads must be followed.” The light turned green again. He switched off his emergency flashers and sped south.

Coleman sagged in his passenger seat with his head lying atop the window frame. “I don’t see hookers anymore.”

“Because we crossed the skank equator back into family land,” said Serge.

“The places with baby strollers where you don’t let me smoke dope?”

“Until I say otherwise.”

“This sucks.” Coleman idly flicked his lighter. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Can’t,” said Serge. “Mahoney’s idea. Wants us in position again. He’s trying to track another scammer with that Big Dipper company. Credit-card receipts, turnpike cameras, crime reports. Then they did a geographical probability cone like a hurricane chart pointed at Orlando. But like a hurricane, it’s a cone of uncertainty.”

“What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

“Sit on standby and wait for his call like a nuclear submarine.”

Coleman flicked the lighter again and waved it in front of his eyes. “So what’s all that jazz about Florida and Tupperware?”

“Some of our richest heritage unknown to the general public.” Serge grabbed the coffee tube under his shirt. “Remember the home parties when you were a kid?”

“Those seriously rocked!” said Coleman. “Outrageously huge celebrations . . .”

“. . . Neighbors descended from all over in reverent awe like someone had discovered a glowing meteorite in their backyard,” said Serge. “But what got lost in that Tupperware gold rush were some of the earliest shots in a watershed social movement.”