Andrew Yancy was on the other end, and he got straight to the point:
“Caitlin, I’ve got a heart-stopping bulletin. Your dad’s not dead.”
“This is your idea of funny? You sick mother.”
“He’s hanging with Eve in the Bahamas—I tracked him down last week. He wasn’t elated to see me, I won’t lie. There were harsh words and gunplay.”
Wrapped in a towel, Caitlin perched her bottom on the edge of a sofa. Simon was making inane hand gestures attempting to elicit information.
“I don’t believe a word you’re telling me,” Caitlin said to Yancy. “Where in the Bahamas?”
“Andros Island. He’s been using a fake name. They bought a beach, he and Eve, and they’re trying to build a resort—I’ve given all this to the FBI, by the way. Don’t waste a plane ticket, because they’re going to haul your old man back here and lock his ass up. So this is sort of a good news, bad news call, but I did promise you we’d speak again.”
Caitlin experienced an odd mingling of emotions, none of which was joy. “But I saw the arm in the coffin with my own two eyes. You’re telling me it came from somebody else?”
“Oh no, the arm was definitely your father’s. He had it removed by a surgeon. That was key to the whole scam, see? So everyone would think he’s dead. The feds were getting ready to bust him, so he decided to have a quote-unquote boating accident.”
“No. Way.”
“Nick said he planned to let you in on the secret, when the time was right. But my feeling is that, being next of kin, you deserve to know now. I’m thinking you and Simon might want to scale down your financial plans.”
Caitlin said, “Who does that? Cuts off their own freaking arm!”
Her husband waved at her and whispered, “I saw a really heavy flick about that! Rock climber fell down a crack—”
“Go, Simon! Get out!”
The cell phone sailed past his ear, and Simon retreated to his mini-gym. After Caitlin calmed down, she picked up the phone and spoke Yancy’s name. He was still on the line.
“So, what about the money?” she asked. The deadness in her voice reminded her of how she used to sound in the heroin days. “The insurance part, I guess that’s history.”
“This is a lot to digest,” said Yancy. “One day you’re grieving for a lost parent, the next day for a lost inheritance.”
Caitlin could hear the annoying clank of the weight machine in the other room. “So what happens to Eve? Sneaky lying bitch. We sat down together, just her and me, and she never told me Dad was still alive. What, like I’d rat him out or something? Know what I think? I bet it was her idea for him to give up a perfectly good arm. Sounds like her.”
“Eve’s in trouble, too,” Yancy said.
“Good! You mean like jail?”
“Oh yes.”
“Awesome!”
“We’ll see.”
“Then who gets all Dad’s money?”
“The lawyers do,” Yancy said. “Good-bye, Caitlin.”
“Wait. Why are you laughing?”
Before putting his phone away he listened to a brief voice message from Neville Stafford saying Stripling was still on Lizard Cay, a big relief. Neville wanted to know when the police were coming to arrest the man. Yancy had been working to make that happen, but today he had a mundane job to do.
From the car trunk he removed his improvised roach-herding device and the portable vacuum. Alone he entered Stoney’s Crab Palace. Tommy Lombardo, the coward, had texted to say he wouldn’t be there; obviously he wanted Yancy to be the bad guy.
Brennan intercepted him at the door. “Not again. Are you kiddin’ me?”
Shrimpy-smelling fingers twirled a hundred-dollar bill under Yancy’s nose. He poked Brennan hard with the snout of the vacuum and ordered him to behave.
“But it ain’t gotta be this way. Nilsson and me was like brothers!”
“Save your cash,” Yancy advised. “I see oppressive legal fees in your future.”
The widow who’d gulped the fish hook had tragically lost her uvula. A chopper hired by her offspring had flown her back to Jacksonville for follow-up treatment at Mayo. Brennan said that overlooking the hook had been a freak accident and he insisted that Yancy inspect his current stock of whole yellowtail snappers, seven fish. None featured honed tackle in the gullet, and Yancy made a terse notation before returning to his roach hunt.
“Aw, come on, what the fuck?” Brennan whined.
“This is coming from the top.”
“Of Hotels and Restaurants? You mean like the director?”
“Higher still,” Yancy said.
The downed widow was a Tea Party patroness who’d funneled ludicrous sums to the governor’s election campaign. From her hospital room she had phoned the executive mansion and angrily warbled her story, and now Brennan was to be punished for serving barbed seafood.
Among many violations on the premises Yancy cataloged twelve live cockroaches, twenty-six dead flies, rodent droppings too abundant to count, a drum of rancid mayonnaise, a can of Comet stored beside the Parmesan cheese and, in a small bowl of slaw, one human toenail clipping. Over Brennan’s objection Yancy wrote up another emergency closure of Stoney’s.
“But we got a wedding party Saturday! Goddammit, I’m calling Lombardo.”
“Take your best shot,” Yancy said.
“It’s that skinny chick who was dating Phinney. She’s marrying that little Russian knob.”
“Madeline? Oh, perfect.”
Yancy drove to the T-shirt shop in town and saw an Out to Lunch sign on the door. Rogelio Burton met him at Pepe’s for coffee. Yancy told his friend about the many twists in the Stripling investigation, and Burton was uncharacteristically blown away.
“Christ, I’ve heard of guys doing a finger before but never an arm!”
“It’s trailblazing,” Yancy said.
“So is you chasing this asshole through a hurricane. Best part is, you brought a date.”
“That’s not for general publication, Rog.”
Burton advised him not to have high hopes for obtaining murder warrants on Stripling, as the evidence was less than overpowering. The detective also wasn’t stunned to hear that the feds were still dicking around with the Medicare indictment, and that no decision had been made about how and when Stripling should be taken into custody.
Yancy told Burton about his latest Plan B—that he intended to give Key West prosecutors an affidavit about the night Stripling socked him and dumped him in the canal.
“That’s an attempted murder, cut and dried.”
“I’m not disagreeing,” Burton said. “But, Andrew, you as the star witness? No offense, but the state attorney isn’t what you call a risk taker. I don’t see Billy Dickinson hanging a whole case on the testimony of a guy who sodomized a big-shot doctor at Mallory Square.”
“It wasn’t sodomy. It was a dry colonic.”
“And now the doctor’s wife, who you were boning behind his back, torches the house next door to yours. Please tell me you didn’t put the idea in her head, ’cause I know how much you hated that place.”
“No, that was all Bonnie,” Yancy said. “But I’ve got to say, the new view from my back deck is pretty fucking fabulous. You should swing by after work on your way home.”
Burton sipped his coffee. “Plus she’s a fugitive on sex charges. Wait’ll that turns up in the Citizen.”
“Dickinson won’t have to lift a finger,” Yancy went on. “All he’s got to do is put me in front of the grand jury. Stripling gets indicted and then there’s a warrant, which is all I care about right now. The Bahamian cops snatch his ass, put him on a plane to Miami. He’s a flight risk, so no bond, and there he sits in jail while the FBI puts the heat on Eve, who’ll eventually cave. She, not me, becomes the star witness against Nick. What?”
“Nothing. I hope that’s how it goes down.”
“They nail this fucker, Rog—the guy who shot poor Charlie Phinney on the streets of Key West, horrified tourists all over the place—what else can Sonny do? He’s got to give me back my job.”