The man finished listening and said, “That’s a lot of money, Mr. Stafford. You could have been rich.”
“In wot way?”
The American broke into a warm smile. “Exactly. My name’s Andrew.”
His grip was firm when he shook Neville’s hand. He said he lived on Big Pine Key, in the southernmost part of Florida. Neville said he had been twice to Miami and once to Fort Lauderdale, to have a mole on his neck removed. The American told him about his own house, about the hot-pink Gulf sunsets and the small wild deer that roamed the island. The deer were no larger than dogs, the man said, which Neville found fascinating.
“Every evening they’d come into this clearing to eat sprouts and twigs,” the man named Andrew said. “I’d sit on the deck and watch them do their thing until it got dark.”
“Ain’t no deer on Andros dot I ever saw,” Neville remarked. “Only pigs.”
“But then some guy named Shook from upstate New York, he bought the lot next to mine and started putting up a huge house, a ridiculous fucking house. It’s way too tall for the building codes but obviously he paid off somebody,” the American went on. “Worst part? He doesn’t even intend to live there, Mr. Stafford. Can’t abide the heat and mosquitoes. All he wants to do is unload the monstrosity on some clueless sucker, take the money and go back north.”
The American seemed deeply bothered by what his neighbor was doing to the land. Neville had never run into a tourist like Andrew, although he’d met a few like Mr. Shook.
“Wot ’bout dose lil’ deer?” Neville asked.
“They don’t come anymore. They can’t eat plywood.”
The man went still. Neville asked him what he was going to do.
“What are you going to do?” the American said.
Neville told him about recruiting the Dragon Queen to put a voodoo hex on Christopher Grunion. “But it dint woyk,” he added. “And, at de end, she trick me outta my monkey.”
“I’m not sure she got the best of that deal.”
“Dot’s true.” Neville had to laugh.
“Movie stars, right? Nothing but trouble. Can I show you something?” The American took out a gold badge and held it close to his lap, below the bar counter, so that no one but Neville could see it.
“You police?” Neville whispered.
The man named Andrew put the badge away. He said, “Law enforcement authorities in the U.S. are very interested in Mr. Grunion—and that’s not his real name. We believe the Curly Tail Lane project is being financed with moneys obtained illegally, by fraud. We also believe he’s quite dangerous.”
Neville nodded. “Yeah, dot asshole shodda gun at me.”
“Really? When did this happen?”
“Big fucking gun, mon. Outside his house up Bannister Point.”
“Shit.” The man anxiously glanced at his wristwatch.
Neville drained his beer bottle thinking he and the American had something in common. Both were beset by greedy intruders destroying something rare, something that couldn’t be replaced.
The light bulbs hanging from the beams of the conch shack flickered and dimmed; soon the island would lose electricity. 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?
“Foyst time I gon see de Dragon Queen, I bring a private ting belong to Chrissofer.”
“What was that?” the American asked.
“A sleeve from a fishin’ shoyt like you got on dere, ’cept it was blue. Dragon Queen supposed to pudda coyse on de mon and take care my prollem on Green Beach. But den notting hoppen—”
“It was a sleeve?” The man named Andrew planted his elbows on the bar and pressed the knuckles of his hands together. To Neville he looked a bit pale.
“Yeah, a sleeve dot been toyn off. It was in Chrissofer’s garbage.”
“Torn off or cut off?”
“I tink cut.” Neville made a scissor motion with his fingers.
“Oh Jesus.”
“Wot’s mottah?”
“Do you have a car, Mr. Stafford?”
“No, mon. I got a boat, but—”
“Never mind.” The American slapped some cash on the bar and disappeared up the road, into the swaying shadows.
Neville picked up the man’s expensive fishing rod and made his way to Joyous’s apartment where after a quick poke he lay awake, listening to the coconut trees shake and wondering if the American was really a policeman, and if the things he’d said were true.
Twenty
Agent John Wesley Weiderman, five pounds lighter after his bout with spoiled shellfish, had intrepidly returned to Florida on the hunt for Plover Chase. He was armed with a promising new lead supplied by the fugitive’s husband, a retired dermatologist who’d contacted the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
Dr. Clifford Witt had uncovered a series of credit card charges made by the suspect under the alias of Bonnie Witt and posted on a Visa account to which Dr. Witt had access (online password: nookyluv2). The purchases, all made in Key West, included groceries, lip gloss, blond hair coloring, domestic beer, condoms, dental floss, a car rental, four jerry cans, ninety-seven dollars’ worth of gasoline and a room-service charge at a Best Western on South Roosevelt.
“We run out of cash so we had to go plastic,” explained the man inside the hotel room, number 217.
He gave his name as Clyde Barrow, and he seemed unflustered by having a lawman at the door. Then again, Agent John Wesley Weiderman adhered to a low-key approach.
“Do you know a woman named Plover Chase?” he asked.
“She left me, dude. Hit the bricks.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Back on the run, I guess. Once an outlaw, whatever.”
“Let’s start with your real name.”
The man said, “Okay, okay, you got me.”
He was doughy and sunburned. He wore a black muscle shirt that said: OLD KEY WEST—A DRINKING VILLAGE WITH A SLIGHT FISHING PROBLEM!
“I’m Cody Parish,” he said.
Agent John Wesley Weiderman didn’t respond immediately. He was assessing the judicial prospects of his case, which were suddenly dimmer.
“Yo, as in Cody Parish the victim?”
“Got it,” said John Wesley Weiderman.
It was the person with whom Plover Chase had notoriously swapped sex in exchange for good school grades. Now he was all grown up. He was, in fact, losing his hair.
“Ms. Chase and me, we hooked up again after all this time. Actually, she tracked me down on Facebook. Talk about a true-life fairy tale—it’s all in my diary, I mean everything.”
“May I read it?”
“First I better get with a lawyer,” said Cody. “See, it’s gonna be a book and then probably a movie. That’s why I need to be careful nobody steals the good stuff and leaks it.”
The agent asked Cody if Plover Chase had abducted him against his will. Cody said, “She’s got something way more lethal than a gun. You know what they say—pussy is undefeated. That’s from Merle Haggard himself.”
“So she didn’t threaten or physically harm you.”
“Stompin’ my heart to pieces, doesn’t that count?”
“It was her English class where you first met, right? Back in the day.”
“Not regular English but AP English,” Cody said. “That means, like, super advanced.”
“Got it.” John Wesley Weiderman didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body.
“I love her the same now as I did back then. It’s like nothing ever changed, time standing still, whatever.”
“Why do you think she left you this time?”
“Dude, come on. Why do they do anything they do? Yesterday she shows up in a green convertible, packs her shit and off she goes up the highway. Monster hormone attack is my theory.”
The agent didn’t doubt that Plover Chase was gone; there were no women’s clothes in the closet, no lipstick tubes or makeup items in the bathroom. On the unmade queen-sized bed lay a sad stack of men’s magazines, raw jerk-off material that even a loser like Cody would have concealed had a female been in the vicinity.