Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen Page A

carrying.”
    Madeline paused before answering. “Maybe twelve hundred bucks?”
    “Last time you said it was a grand.”
    “Well, I didn’t go through his fucking wallet and count it!” She took a slurp of vodka.
    “You also told me he got the money from a dope deal.” Yancy was watching her eyes, which flitted everywhere but in his direction. “Who was he selling to, Madeline?”
    “I never met the dude. What difference does it make?”
    “Maybe Charlie overcharged him. Or maybe the stuff turned out to be stinkweed and the customer got pissed off.”
    “No, no, that’s not it,” she said. “Everybody in town knew Charlie was carrying that money. He wouldn’t stop talkin’ about it. They probably followed us to the Half Shell that night and waited outside.”
    Over the years Yancy had interviewed enough witnesses to know when one was winging it. Usually they were just trying to cover their own asses, a practice also favored by law enforcement professionals although Yancy had never quite gotten the hang of it. He told Madeline she had two minutes to come clean, and right away she began toshake and cry. Yancy scooted his chair closer and put an arm around her.
    “Everything I told the cops is true except about the cash,” she said. “Charlie didn’t get it from sellin’ grass.”
    “Did he steal it from someone?”
    “No! He would never .” Her breath was stale and her hair smelled like an ashtray.
    “Then where’d he get the money, Madeline?”
    She pawed at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “It’s pretty fucked up,” she said.
    “I need to know before I can help.”
    “But you’re not even a real cop.”
    Yancy gritted it out. “I’m on loan to another department, that’s all. Temporarily assigned. Now tell me the whole story.”
    And Madeline was right. It was fucked up.
    On the charter docks of South Florida there had evolved among a handful of unscrupulous captains a method of duping inept out-of-towners for extra money. The key prop in the scam was typically an Atlantic sailfish, caught on a previous trip and stored on ice in an aft hatch inaccessible to the paying clientele.
    Once the boat was at sea, a mate first baited the outriggers and then the flat lines, which were trolled closer to the boat and often enhanced with a skirted plastic lure. Thus began a sporting day, with high hopes among the unsuspecting anglers. When the time was right, one of the mates would distract them with a clamorous false sighting of jumping porpoises or a cruising hammerhead shark, which the customers always pretended to see as they didn’t wish to be regarded as clueless rubes.
    Binoculars were handed out and the anglers were directed to the bow of the ship in order to improve their view. At this juncture the mate would remove the dead sailfish from the cold hatch and covertly hook it to one of the flat lines. Once the jelly-eyed corpse was dropped in the water, the forward motion of the boat carried it back into the frothy wake.
    A cry of “Fish on!” would go out, and one of the hapless sports—usuallya hungover husband—would come lurching back to the cockpit, snatch the rod from the mate’s grasp and begin reeling like a madman. The boat’s towing of the limp billfish created enough natural drag to test the flabby muscles of most novices. Later they would brag to their pals back home that they’d whipped the sonofabitch in five minutes flat. As further testament to human vanity, no suspicions would be voiced over the odd fact that their trophy sailfish, a species renowned for its acrobatics, never once jumped out of the water.
    At boatside, the mate would cap the charade by pretending to wrestle the prize into an unlocked fish box, where the entire party of numskulls could peek at it and snap pictures to their hearts’ content. The coup de grâce would occur back at dockside when the captain persuaded the lucky angler to have his catch mounted, later to be displayed on the paneled wall of his