Mangrove Squeeze

• Title Page
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• Chapter 35
  
• Chapter 36
  
• Chapter 37
  
• Chapter 38
  
• Chapter 39
  
• Chapter 41
  
• Chapter 42
  
• Chapter 43
  
• Chapter 44
  
• Chapter 45
  
• Chapter 46
  
• Chapter 47
  
• Chapter 48
  
• Chapter 49
  
• Chapter 50
  
• Chapter 51
  
• Chapter 52
  
• Chapter 53
  

"NUTTY ... SLAPSTICK ... PLENTY OF SLY, SUNNY SASS."

—
New York Daily News

"Shames lines his characters up like pinballs, then takes careful aim as he knocks off first one and then the other. The result is ... a wonderful pastiche of insightful humor and human foibles."

—
The Orlando Sentinel

"Shames's sense of place is unerring, but it is his people that make his books unforgettable."

—
Hartford Courant

"The collision of Shames's characters is an over-the-top comic thriller guaranteed to please the reader page after page."

—
Abilene Reporter News

"Between Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, and a handful of others, it's getting harder and harder for a Florida crime writer to stake a claim in the Sunshine State. And yet, that's exactly what Laurence Shames has done through six thoroughly entertaining novels."

—
Booklist

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Laurence Shames

http://www.LaurenceShames.com

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for my mother, Helen Ruth Shames
with love and gratitude

A man who has been the indisputable favorite
of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a
conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces
real success.

—
Sigmund Freud

While creating the character of Suki, I was repeatedly visited by images of two beautiful Key West women. M. F. and N. McC., you know who you are.

On all matters of nuclear physics and homemade explosives, my valued adviser was Dean Athanis. All technical mistakes are his fault.

Four books into a wonderful relationship, I am almost running out of ways to thank my editor, Brian DeFiore— except to say that my respect and affection for him have deepened with each project. As for Stuart Krichevsky, staunch ally for a mere fifteen years and counting, let me say that our conversations have been at least as enriching as the contracts. Well, almost. Mollie Doyle—you have been splendid.

Finally, for her endless patience, kindness, and capacity for joy, I thank my wife, Marilyn. You are, not to put too fine a point on it, the world's greatest human.

"Reservation?" said Sam Katz. "Whaddya mean, you have a reservation? This is my house."

The tourists looked unhappy and confused. It had been a long day and full of disappointments. Up north the roads were icy; they'd had to get up before dawn to make the first flight out of Lansing. Miami was not as warm as they'd hoped; they'd lied to themselves, pretending it was warmer than it was. The traffic on Key Largo was as annoying as the traffic anywhere else, and the sun had set before they reached the pretty part of the drive, south of Seven Mile Bridge. A fatiguing and deflating start to a vacation; and now the husband leaned across the counter with its registration book, its heavy silver bell. "You're telling me," he said, "this isn't a hotel?"

"Hotel?" said Sam Katz.

He was tall for an old man, with dark and soupy eyes that turned down at the outside corners, making him look sad sometimes, other times amused. His fluffy white hair, translucent at the edges, burgeoned out and back like Einstein's, and his shoulders sloped down at a steep angle from his neck. He wore a hearing aid except when he was listening to Mozart or Glenn Miller on his yellow Walkman. "Don't be ridiculous, young fella. I grew up in this house."

The wife glanced furtively around the office. There was a black metal rack stuffed with promotional brochures for snorkel trips, sunset sails. There was a cardboard stand that held applications for credit cards. Meekly she said, "But the sign outside—"

"Sign?" the old man said. "Who puts a sign? My parents built this house. They came from Russia."

The husband had a book with him, a guidebook. He put it on the counter and started riffling through it.

Sam Katz paused a moment, then continued. "Okay, Poland. The boundaries back then, who knows? A mishmosh, Europe. They came in a wagon. I was seven, eight years old. I had no coat, they had me wrapped up in a tablecloth."

The tourist had found his page. But then he sneezed. He was wearing shorts. He'd changed into them in a men's room at Miami airport. His leg hair had been on end the whole way down the Keys.

Sam Katz said, "Gesundheit. Whaddya think, it's summer?"

The tourist turned the book around and pointed it at Sam. "Look, it says right here. Mangrove Arms, 726 Whitehead Street, corner of Rebecca. Charming Victorian, recently refurbished..."

Now Sam looked unsure, abashed, unsettled by hard evidence. He blinked at the guidebook and his skinny shoulders sagged, his shrunken neck shifted in the neatly buttoned collar of his yellowing white shirt. He bit his lip, cleared his throat.

He was greatly relieved to hear his son's voice through the open doorway near his back. "Dad? Dad, I hear someone?"

The tourists were even more relieved. They exhaled and fell silent

In a moment, Aaron Katz appeared.

He had his father's soft brown eyes, down-turned at the corners. He was smallish, wiry, and it seemed at first that he had bluish hair and some appalling skin condition that made him look like a cheap garden statue come to life. On closer examination, he proved to be totally covered in fine gray dust, a residue of plastering or of sanding or of grout. Renovation; physical labor—he was getting to love it because it wasn't what he was used to and it wasn't what he was good at. A loose staple had ripped the elbow of his shirt. He had Band-Aids on four fingers, and he wore them proudly—emblems of the awkward joy of change.

Until just a few months before, he'd been a very well-paid desk guy, a rising star in the arcane Manhattan world of mergers and acquisitions. Then a few things happened. These things did not seem obviously connected, yet in Aaron's mind they were joined by mysterious ligaments such as held together the stanzas of an Oriental poem.

At work, his department shrank, and Aaron, himself secure, was told to do the firing of his junior colleagues. At home—over takeout Thai, as he vividly remembered—he came one evening to the simple and sickening realization that he and his wife were not working toward the same life, after all. And his father—a widower for six years and a man with one son only—started running stop signs, losing the keys to the house in Merrick, confusing one decade with another. Either Aaron took him in or he would soon end up in a pale green room playing Colorforms among demented strangers.

Somehow these strands wound together in a noose, and quite suddenly it had seemed to Aaron that his only choice—not the decent choice or the honorable choice but the only choice—was to fire himself as others had been fired, to leave his marriage and bundle up his father and try to build a different life from the soggy boards and salt-rusted nails of an old compound in the tropics.