by Carl Hiaasen
After Ryskamp ended the briefing about the Potussies, a female agent named Jennifer Rose stayed behind in the room. She told him she had something to report from Casa Bellicosa.
“Just a rumor, but you need to hear it,” she said.
Ryskamp closed the door. “Is this a security issue?”
“Potentially. There’s a new hire on the wait staff, a South African named Spalding. Yesterday I overheard him tell another server that Mockingbird is having a ‘super-sloppy hot affair.’ He claimed he saw the man.”
“The First Lady’s sleeping with someone here in Palm Beach?”
“Worse. On the property.”
“Oh, fun.”
“Up at the White House, too,” Jennifer Rose said. “According to the kitchen gossip, it’s a traveling hump fest.”
Ryskamp wouldn’t have been shocked if the story checked out, but there was a limit to what could be done. Mastodon and Mockingbird were seldom in the same room, much less the same bed. Regardless of whom they were screwing, the Secret Service’s mission was to keep them safe from harm. Keeping them safe from scandal was supposed to be somebody else’s job.
“The rumor’s strictly from Spalding?” he asked Agent Rose.
“It’s been floating around, but this was the first time I picked up the name of the supposed boyfriend.”
“So who is he? We’ll need a background check right away.”
“Actually, we won’t,” said Jennifer Rose.
“We’ve already got a file on him?”
“Everything, Paul.”
“Uh-oh.”
“The First Lady’s lover is Agent Josephson. Supposedly. Allegedly.”
“Great. Cute. Perfect.” Ryskamp banged a fist on the desk. “Fuck!”
“At least he’s not one of yours,” Jennifer Rose said. “Still, I figured you might want to kick it up the ladder—”
“Whoa.” Ryskamp raised a hand. “Has anyone actually witnessed Mockingbird and Agent Josephson in the act?”
“Of fucking their brains out? Not that I’m aware.”
“Kissing? Holding hands? Exchanging sultry glances?”
Agent Rose shook her head. “But we haven’t questioned any of the staff yet.”
“And we sure as hell ain’t gonna start now,” said Ryskamp.
“What about Josephson?”
“I’ll have a talk with him, Jen.”
Among the other agents it was common knowledge that Josephson was actually Ahmet Youssef. They also knew why his name had been changed.
“You’re not in his chain-of-command,” Jennifer Rose pointed out.
“True, but I am in the brotherhood of men who’ve made astoundingly poor decisions about women.”
She smiled and asked Ryskamp if he’d be joining the after-work bitch session at the bar on Clematis. He said no, he was going home to watch a hockey game.
But as soon as she left, he locked the door, took out a calculator, and began working up the numbers for an early retirement.
* * *
—
Joel’s ankle was sprained, not fractured, but he still scored a full-siren ambulance ride to the hospital. Angie’s pickup was charred to a husk, smoldering on bare rims. A sheriff’s deputy who gave her a lift back to Lake Worth said Pruitt would be arrested soon; officers were staking out his apartment building.
As soon as she got home, Angie emailed pictures of her burned pickup to the insurance company. She had a tricky job scheduled for the next morning—a momma skunk with four kits had taken up residence in the backyard of a retired Wall Street broker and his wife, who together had fled to a suite at the Breakers. The couple lived in a gate-with-a-guard community, so Angie planned to rent a truck and attach the magnetic “Discreet Capture” signs that Joel had designed for the pickup. Fortunately, not all her wrangling equipment had melted in Pruitt’s firebombing; at home she kept a spare pole for noose jobs, and plenty of extra traps and transport kennels.
Spalding called and asked to meet for a late drink. Angie said she was too tired.
“But I got some face-time with the First Lady! Don’t you want to hear about it?”
“Maybe later. Like on my death bed.”
“In person she’s super hot,” Spalding went on excitedly, “even hotter than her modeling pictures. And she smells just incredible.”
“A grateful nation thanks you for your service.”
“And, yo, I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sure she’s shagging one of her Secret Service guys!”
“Really? I heard it was Orlando Bloom.”
“Hey, what’s with the snark?”
“Sorry,” Angie said. “Somebody blew up my pickup tonight. I’ll call you in the morning.”
After hanging up, she realized she was no longer interested in having sex with Spalding; he’d never made a move, and now the window had closed. It was nothing he’d said or done; possibly the allure of his accent had worn off. Maybe it was that simple.
Jerry Crosby had given Angie his private cell number, so she texted him saying that Pruitt had torched her truck. Because of the late hour she didn’t expect a reply, yet the phone rang almost immediately.
“What the hell happened?” Crosby asked.
“I got a call from a fake number with a fake mouse emergency. Pruitt must’ve been waiting when I got there. He threw a Molotov cocktail in the back of my pickup. The worst part was my stepson was with me.”
“Are you guys okay?”
“We jumped out and ran like hell,” Angie said. “Joel sprained his ankle. The truck’s fried.”
“When did this happen?”
“Couple hours ago.”
The chief said she was lucky to be alive. “Did you get a look at his face?”
“No, he had one of those freaky Halloween masks. The county’s got deputies waiting at his place right now.”
Crosby said, “Waste of time. They won’t find him.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s already in jail.”
“What? Hold on. Since when?”
“Nine-thirty this morning,” said Crosby. “I had him picked up for threatening a law enforcement officer. That phone call at the restaurant yesterday—it pissed me off, Pruitt’s shitty attitude. And you were right, he was easy to find. Same address as his driver’s license.”
Angie was stunned. “So it wasn’t him who burned my truck.”
“Nope. He’s been locked up all day.”
“Then what the fuck, Jerry?”
“Do you have any enemies that are into firebombs?”
“At least one, obviously. But I’ve got no idea who it is.”
“Call me if you get a name,” the chief said.
Before lying down in bed, Angie groped under the mattress and took out the Taser. It looked like a Hasbro toy. She placed it on the nightstand, turned off the light and lay on her side with a pillow tucked between her knees, like when she was a little girl.
She slept poorly, awakened by a nightmare in which she was wearing a gossamer ball gown and climbing a snarled old banyan tree. Perched in the topmost bough was a one-eyed roaring bear, and the bear’s eye was a rosy pearl.
Angie sat up panting in the darkness, and told herself again that dreams don’t mean a damn thing.
THIRTEEN
Strangling Prince Paladin was by far the worst crime Uric Burns had ever committed, and he was pleased with himself for not feeling bad afterward. Strictly business, as Michael Corleone would say. The second Godfather was Uric’s favorite movie. Next on the list was Scarface, even though Pacino’s accent was fucked up. Uric knew plenty of tough Cubans, and none of them talked that way.
Prince Paladin was the tallest partner Uric had ever had, but he was otherwise dull and forgettable. He’d never mentioned tha
t his real name was Keever Bracco, and Uric wouldn’t have remembered it, anyway. They had only been working together a few weeks before the fateful python job.
The men had first met at Giardia’s shop, where Uric was unloading a stolen scuba tank and the Prince was pawning a stolen Blu-ray with Avatar stuck in the disc feed. They began chatting, and Uric said he had a break-in planned that night in Gun Club Estates.
“Need a driver?” Prince Paladin asked.
“Can you lay off the weed?”
“Yeah, for three hundred bucks.”
“Two-fifty,” said Uric. “And if you show up stoned or drunk, I’ll pulp your balls with a claw hammer. Hit the shower, bro. You smell like a fuckin’ grow house.”
The Prince stayed sober behind the wheel, and Uric emerged from the burgled house carrying four AKs, a half-dozen loaded handguns and an antique crossbow that brought a rare smile to Giardia’s blighted face. Uric ended up paying the Prince the full three hundred he wanted, which predictably he blew on chronic. He was an okay driver, a semi-diligent lookout, and strong enough to move jumbo household appliances. The break-in at Angela Armstrong’s apartment had been the pair’s fifth job together, which in the realm of petty street crime practically made them an old married couple. For Prince Paladin, the divorce was harsh. He never saw it coming.
Uric Burns’s path to a life of crime had been untraditional. He grew up in an unbroken home with hardworking, affectionate parents, and an older brother who seldom picked on him. In high school, Uric made Bs and Cs, played intramural soccer, and worked on the yearbook. He had plenty of friends and dated three nice girls, one of whom favored him with a surprisingly skilled hand job after the senior prom. There was nothing in Uric’s past—no abuse, abandonment, family alcoholism, trauma, or tragedy—that would have caused anyone to predict he would one day quit his Furniture/Bedding sales job at BrandsMart to become a break-in artist, car thief, shoplifter, freelance shitbird and, ultimately, a killer.
In reality, Uric’s transition from working-class citizen to career felon was nothing more mysterious than unbound laziness, and the appeal of setting his own casual hours. He thought of himself as canny and cautious, for he’d never been shot, knifed or even diddled in the county jail. The unusual cleft in his forehead was of mundane origin; it came from the corner of a hurricane shutter that a previous cohort, wrecked on meth, had heedlessly tossed from a third-story landing. Uric knew he could have been killed, and the dent in his skull was a daily reminder of the risks posed by choosing unreliable partners. As soon as the Prince had revealed himself to be weak of resolve, a potential snitch, Uric saw him as a ticking time bomb. End of story.
Such was Uric’s pride in his own survival instincts that he was embarrassed to have walked into Tripp Teabull’s trap at Lipid House. Fright would have been a more useful reaction, but Uric acted super cool. He was confident he could talk his way out of the situation, though he’d barely gotten started when Teabull told him to shut the fuck up. The two muscle-shirted dudes who hauled him downstairs were even less interested in conversation.
During the long, uncomfortable ride, Uric began to comprehend he was in deeper-than-usual shit. The feeling would grow stronger with each passing hour. It wasn’t the first time he’d pissed off the person who had hired him, or been stiffed after a job. It wasn’t even the first time he’d been locked in a car trunk for a night.
It was, however, the first time anyone had strung a rope around his neck and led him like a lame horse across a bridge. The nervousness changed to relief when he saw his own white van parked on the other side. That meant the goons weren’t going to kill him; they were just going to kick his ass and let him go.
Tripp Teabull hated the sight of Uric’s filthy Dodge on the property, and he probably didn’t want Uric coming back to get it. That would explain why he’d ordered the van brought to the bridge.
Sweet, Uric said to himself. Least I won’t have to hitchhike home.
Which was the second-to-last thought to enter his mind.
The last was: Aw fuck.
* * *
—
Teabull had been awaiting a call from Angela Armstrong ever since Mauricio had told him about her unannounced visit. With Uric and the Prince now gone, Teabull believed that the young wildlife wrangler was the only person out of his sphere of control who knew the true circumstances of Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons’s death at Lipid House. When Angela failed to make contact after a few days, Teabull decided to send a preemptive message. He hired a reputable Hialeah arsonist to drive to Palm Beach County and firebomb Angela’s pickup truck. The explosion was to be ignited in her presence, maximizing the psychological impact.
Afterward, Teabull met up with the torch artist in the parking lot of a Walgreens.
“Well?” Teabull asked.
“Easy peasy.”
“Did she freak out?”
The arsonist chuckled and showed his rubber mask to the caretaker.
Teabull grimaced. “Mitch McConnell?”
“Scary shit, right? The store was all out of Nixons. You got my money, chico?”
Teabull had not ordered Angela Armstrong killed because—unlike the death of Uric and his dipshit partner—hers would have drawn plenty of police and media attention. He hoped she was sharp enough to connect the burning of her truck to the Fitzsimmons matter, and would be deterred from future meddling.
If not, she still had no way of proving what had really happened to Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons. Without the testimony of the python thieves, Teabull thought, nobody would ever believe Angela Armstrong.
He was wrong about that.
At dawn on the morning after the firebug-for-hire bombed Angie’s pickup, Palm Beach Police Chief Jerry Crosby sat watching and re-watching street-cam video of a white 2014 Malibu SS jouncing at a stupid speed over a railroad crossing. The impact popped a plastic logo off the car and flung open the trunk. Out flew a flexible mass that resembled an intricately embroidered hawser; it uncoiled in midair before landing in the middle of the street on the other side of the tracks.
The Malibu kept going. Moments later, a line of flashing lights approached from the opposite direction—a ten-vehicle motorcade, mostly black SUVs, which rolled to an organized stop. Motorcycle cops followed by armed men in plain suits swarmed both lanes to surround the road obstruction, which was unidentifiable in the video. Crosby knew what he was looking at: an enormous headless snake. He wondered which of the SUVs was carrying the First Lady of the United States.
After hiding the thumb-drive of the video, the chief drove to the SunTrust bank. His stakeout team was already in place—six officers in three unmarked sedans, and a pointlessly masked sniper on the roof. Inside the lobby, the branch manager and tellers waited anxiously, coached on how and when to duck.
Ten o’clock came and went. No sign of Uric Burns. At eleven sharp Crosby’s cell phone rang. It was Angie Armstrong.
“You got him?” she asked.
“Not yet. He’s late.”
“Shit. Shit.”
The chief said, “Maybe he chickened out.”
“Impossible. Nothing would scare that moron away from a hundred grand. If you told him it was powdered with anthrax, he’d still show up.”
“Then where the hell is he, Angie?”
“Something major must’ve happened. Something not good.”
“We’ll give him till noon,” Crosby said.
“Don’t bother. If he’s not there by now, he’s not coming.”
She was right. Uric Burns wasn’t on his way to the bank. He was hanging dead from a weed-choked bridge in a bankrupt development called Blue Pelican Shoals.
The bridge, which connected two of the bare subdivided tracts, crossed a tea-colored drainage canal that for marketing purposes had been renamed Soldier’s Creek. Stocked with feisty peacock bass, the waterway was popular with l
ocal fishermen, one of whom had made an errant cast and snagged the pants zipper of Uric Burns, whose body had theretofore gone unnoticed due to the short length of the homemade noose. The dead man wasn’t swinging above the water but rather appeared cinched to the bridge rail, his slack form resting high against one of the support columns. Attached to his crotch by two #1 treble hooks was a bullet-shaped bass lure called a Zara Spook, realistically painted to mimic a native leopard frog. The lure was connected by thin braided line to a rod and reel belonging to a teenaged boy who was skipping school.
The boy looked up from the canal bank to see what he’d snagged, dialed 911, cut his line with a knife, and walked away. It was the third dead body he’d found while fishing, but such was the reality of a childhood spent outdoors in Florida. It was a testament to the teen’s passion for angling that he’d never considered getting a new hobby.
* * *
—
“You’re not one of my lawyers,” Diego Beltrán said to the woman.
“I lied to get in here.”
“Why?”
“I have a personal interest in this case,” Angie said.
“Your hand’s bleeding.”
“I punched out a guy.”
“Just now? Who?” Diego asked.
“One of the demonstrators.”
“Right in front of the jail?”
“He got up in my face,” Angie said, “which was rude.”
“Those screamers are out there all day and night. I can hear ’em from my cell.”
“No way. These walls are too thick.”
“Then I hear ’em inside my head,” said Diego, “which is even scarier.”
“Well, the one I hit—he’s in the back of an ambulance with a headache and a splint on his nose. I’m betting he’s done for the day.”
