A minute later, a red light stopped the Trans Am at a bright intersection with a concrete bus bench advertising affordable cremation.
Serge turned around and reached toward the pair. “This is as good a place as any.” He slashed their wrist straps with a box cutter. Coleman opened the passenger door and leaned his seat forward. They took off running.
Horns honked.
“The light’s green,” said Coleman.
“Everyone’s in a rush.” Serge rolled forward another half block and pulled up to a car wash.
“Why are we stopping?”
Serge raised binoculars. “Because I want to see the rest of my plan unfold.”
“Did you really give them tumors?”
“No. That would be mean.”
“Then what was that stuff you made them drink?”
The binoculars followed the couple as they raced across the street. “Ipecac and magnesium citrate. Both are available over the counter.”
“What are they?”
“The first is an agent to induce vomiting in case you ingested something you shouldn’t have . . .”
“Like the time I ate all those mothballs?”
“. . . And the other stuff is what you take the night before surgery to completely evacuate your bowels. Both are highly aggressive and render the user quite helpless to control the effects. You essentially have to camp out in the bathroom. It’s like the old Robin Williams joke: two exits, no waiting.”
“I’ve been there,” said Coleman. “And that makes more sense because the tumor thing doesn’t sound like it would work.”
“Oh, not only will it work, but it has worked.”
“You’ve done it?”
Serge shook his head. “Little-known police case. This dude in perfect health suddenly died, and they couldn’t figure it out—got classified as unknown natural causes. And it would have ended there, except a second person in the family died. So now there’s an urgent investigation because they think they got a food-contamination epidemic like salmonella and they’ll have to yank chicken wings off grocery shelves, or maybe it’s the beginning of a chemical cluster like Love Canal, where some factory has to buy up all the houses.”
“Which was it?” asked Coleman.
“Neither,” said Serge. “Authorities discovered organ damage in the two victims but couldn’t figure out what was ingested to cause it, so they sent tissue samples away to a lab, and they had no answers either. Then by sheer luck they gave the evidence to another scientist to double-check, and she looked up from her microscope and said, ‘This was no accident. This was murder!’ ”
“How’d she figure that?” asked Coleman.
“Turns out the scientist previously worked at a pharmaceutical company and said she had seen these types of cells before—in deliberately triggered mice tumors. But they never happen in humans. She told the cops to find a connection between a family member and someone who works with lab mice, and they’d have their killer. Sure enough, one of the sisters had just broken up with some asshole who worked in medical research, and he’d snuck in the house while they were away to poison something in the fridge.”
“Far out.” Coleman looked back up the street. “But what about that couple? How is the stuff you gave them instead supposed to teach them a lesson?”
“I’ve set up a behavior model of distilled irony.” Serge watched as the couple slowed down on the sidewalk and grabbed their abdomens. “The first step was to firmly plant the seed in their brains that they’re doomed without immediate medical care. Then the effects of my yummy concoction will fool them into thinking the serum was real.”
“When will it start working?” asked Coleman.
“I think it just kicked in.”
“Let me see!”
Serge handed him the binoculars. “Oooooo, gross. Look at all the people scattering away from them on the sidewalk. Cool.”
“It’s only another block to the hospital, but it will be a very long block,” said Serge. “On the bright side, it won’t be difficult to track them.”
Serge started up the car and began following in the slow lane.
“So what’s the irony part of your lesson?”
“That will unfold when they get in the hospital . . .”
MIAMI
A porkpie hat Frisbee’d through the air, missed the hat rack and sailed out an open window of a two-story office building overlooking the Miami River.
The man who had just thrown it talked to himself in the third person: “Mahoney glared at the empty hat rack like a pile of torn-up betting tickets at the track . . .”
He grabbed a stale cup of coffee and an even staler glazed doughnut.
A rotary phone rang. He swallowed a rock-hard bite and chased it with a swig of cold joe.
“Mahoney, start jawing . . .”
The phone had been ringing a lot lately. Mahoney was cultivating a nice little reputation for rescuing scam victims. The word of mouth was just a trickle, but multiplied by the exponential volume of fraud in South Florida, it amounted to a respectable jingle of pocket change. Calls were coming from as far away as Orlando. He already represented three victims who had been swindled out of donations by the father with the sick boy on Channel 12.
He held the heavy black receiver to his head as he accepted another client. “Mahoney told the dame on the blower that he was all over the case like big hats on the pope, and she could chill like an underboss with a no-show job at the railroad, which doesn’t require a conductor’s jacket and all that it leads to . . .”
He hung up.
The phone rang again. Mahoney usually let the phone ring, but he was thinking about his hat down in the parking lot.
“Mahoney, rattle your molars.”
“Yes, Mr. Mahoney, this is Wesley Chapel from Big Dipper Data Management, and I’ve just detected a statistical trend that I thought you’d want to know about right away . . .”
Wesley began a careful explanation of what he had learned. “And Mahoney listened like a dope fiend watching the Big H start to bubble in a spoon he stole from Mooky’s Diner because he doesn’t have any spoons left in his flophouse, and the neighbors no longer believe he needs to borrow some to play spoons in a jug band . . .”
“What? . . .”
“Lay it on me.”
“It seems that some of the scam artists you’re having me investigate are painting an unusually large radar signature with their data. Statistically impossible.”
“Like the queen yodels.”
“What?”
“Give it to me in English.”
“The only explanation is that they’re all working as part of a larger, organized gang of grifters who travel together. That means if you get another client who might have been taken in by one of the gang, they’ll be much easier to trace. On the other hand, it also means increased danger for any of your men in the field. I’ll keep you up to date as more comes in.”
“Bingle-schnapps.”
Mahoney hung up again. But didn’t take his hand off the receiver. He quickly dialed. Someone answered.
“Hello?”
“Get me Serge, toot-sweet!”
“Mahoney,” said Serge. “Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“Mahoney cogitated on what he was about to reveal, like a pimp deciding how to tell a hooker she’s been sent down the minors to work on her skin flute.”
“Who are you talking to? . . .”
DOWNTOWN ORLANDO
Serge closed his cell phone.
“Who was that?” asked Coleman.
“Mahoney thinks some of our targets are part of a larger, organized gang—specifically the dating bandits and that couple up ahead running for the hospital.”
“Speaking of which . . .” Coleman bent toward the windshield.
The couple reached the ambulance drive-up and made a slippery turn toward the building.
They sprinted into the emergency room, the place where people with urgent needs go to wait. It was packed with rows of un-cheerful people in molded plastic chairs, sitting for hours. A variety of injuries and malaises, but the most common threat was dying of old age.