Standing in another field were the cops, taking notes in the waning light. Forensic cameras flashed. Two detectives glanced at each other and simultaneously raised knowing eyebrows. The extremely deceased victim lay on his back. He had been sliced wide, abdomen to throat, and none too carefully. All internal organs missing. Well, not missing, just not where they were supposed to be. Gloved crime-scene techs reached into the surrounding grass, collecting strewn kidneys and liver and something that would be labeled “unidentified.”
“If I wasn’t standing here, I’d swear this was staged with fake props.” The detective bent down for closer inspection. “Like a horror movie.”
“One thing’s for sure,” said the second detective. “We’ve got ourselves a case of severe overkill, which means it was a crime of passion.”
The first detective stood up again. “I can’t even begin to think what kind of weapon did this.”
“Weapon? Singular?” replied his partner. “I’d say we’ve got everything from a machete to spiked clubs and concrete saws.”
They both looked back across several hundred yards of grazing land, toward where they had pulled off State Road 60 near the drive-in. Sparse traffic began turning on headlights. “What kind of sick—”
An out-of-breath corporal ran over. “Sir, I think we have an ID on the victim.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Found his wallet behind that palm.” A shaking hand held out the driver’s license.
The first detective grabbed it and squinted. Then his eyes widened. “Roscoe Nash? Not from the newspaper articles.”
“The same,” said the corporal.
The detective made a two-fingered whistle to get everyone’s attention. “Listen up. I just learned who our special guest is here. Roscoe Nash. And I’ve changed my assessment of the attack. The killer didn’t go far enough.”
They all formed a circle and looked down again, laughing heartily.
THE PREVIOUS MORNING
A jet-black 1978 Firebird Trans Am drove past the state fairgrounds east of Tampa. The original Phoenix bird design that covered the hood had been painted over with a winged skull. The wings were in the shape of Florida.
Coleman pulled deeply from a bong he’d fashioned out of colorful hamster tubes.
Serge glanced over from the driver’s seat. “You realize there’s a hamster out there not getting his exercise.”
Coleman raised his head and exhaled. “No, he’s still in there.”
Serge’s neck jerked back. “You left the hamster in your bong? Why on earth would you do something so disturbing?”
“So the little fella can get righteously baked!” Coleman twisted apart the tubing and tapped his furry little friend out into his lap. “Ow! He bit me!”
“Serves you right.”
“Naw, he’s just got a mondo case of the munchies.” Coleman reached in a bag of Doritos and held out a chip. “See how fast he snatched it from my hand?”
“What next for the poor animal? LSD?”
“I considered it,” said Coleman. “But he’d need to be around others of his kind who are more experienced for a soothing environment to avoid a bad trip. And of course I’d have to take the running wheel out of his cage because no good can ever come from that on acid.”
“I got a crazy thought,” said Serge. “How about not giving drugs to rodents in the first place?”
“Then what’s the point?”
“What do you mean, what— Just forget it.” Serge looked this way and that. “Where’d he go?”
“Under my seat. I set him free to explore.” Coleman packed the bowl again. “If I was that small, that’s where I’d like to be.”
Serge momentarily closed his eyes with a deep sigh.
“Serge?”
“What!”
“Explain to me again about our new job.”
“Okay, listen carefully for the fifth time.” Serge took his hands off the wheel and rubbed his palms together. “I’ve decided to totally rededicate my entire life to being a private eye. Your life, too.”
“Is this like all your other rededications?”
“No!” Serge pounded his fist on the dash. “Those were all spur-of-the-moment impulsive flights of silliness. Like my last idiotic idea of becoming a house hunter. Where’s the challenge?”
“You don’t even need a very accurate gun.”
“But this is completely different. This time it’s bone-deep, the whole reason I was placed on earth. I’ve been putting a tremendous amount of contemplation into it.”
“For how long?”
“About a half hour since we finished watching that detective movie back at the motel.”
“Which movie?”
“Coleman, it was the highest-grossing detective movie ever filmed in Florida.”
“You mean Ace Ventura: Pet Detective?”
Serge winced and hit the dash again. “That’s why we must become private eyes. Maybe they’ll make a movie about our dashing exploits and fix that blasphemy.”
“Where are we going to get our cases?”
“I’m thinking Mahoney.” Serge ran a red light and waved “sorry” to honking drivers. “Now that he’s opened his own detective agency in Miami, our timing couldn’t be more perfect.”
Coleman took the bong from his mouth. “Mahoney talks funny.”
“I can’t get enough of his Spillane-Mitchum-Hammett patter,” said Serge. “And he’s carved out a nice little niche for himself: helping the victims of scam artists. There are thousands of dupes out there who are either too embarrassed to go to the police, or if they do report the cons, they find out no laws were broken because they did something stupid and gullible.”
“Gullible?”
“Coleman, did you know the word gullible is not in the dictionary?”
“Really?”
“Jesus, Coleman. It is in the dictionary, right next to your picture.”
“Really?”
Serge shook his head to clear the dumbness in the car. “Anyway, word’s starting to get out about Mahoney. When there’s no place else for victims to go, they go to Mahoney. He’s been able to make a number of impressive asset recoveries for his clients, but I’m sure I can amp that success rate by persuading the less cooperative miscreants who won’t listen to reason. Because I’m a people person.”
“You said thousands of victims?”
Serge nodded hard. “Florida is the scam capital of the nation, a perpetual daisy chain of old and fresh schemes that boggle the imagination. Ponzis, odometer fraud, counterfeit paintings, foreign lotteries, priceless costume jewelry, bodies stacked in single graves that are resold, repair your credit, learn to dance better, stuff envelopes at home for three hundred dollars an hour, get that new-look cosmetic surgery by a doctor who blows town when the job is only half done, leaving your face with that new ‘Picasso’ look. One dude mass-mailed fake dry-cleaning bills to restaurants for soup that was never spilled. But the amounts were so small, a bunch of them just paid, and the guy made a killing. Other brazen crooks waltz into low-end mortgage offices with fake ID and documents to take out equity loans on homes they don’t own. Someone else sold hole-in-one insurance.”
“What’s that?”
“Charities are always holding fund-raisers with fantastic contests like sinking a basketball from half court for fifty thousand dollars. Of course they can’t pay because they’re charities and it would dampen the fund-raiser. So it’s very common in the insurance industry to offer single-day policies against potential long-shot winners. In Florida, with all the golf courses, it’s holes-in-one. So this grifter exclusively sold such insurance, undercutting all the legit companies, and whenever someone hit a hole-in-one, he’d dissolve the company and move on. The scams never end in this state, and that’s why there’s gold in them thar streets for us and Mahoney.”