16 Tiger Shrimp Tango (8 page)

Pouty lips went to Johnny’s ear. “It’s getting late,” she said just before noon. “Let’s go back to your place.”

Johnny practically knocked people over dragging her by the hand for the nearest emergency exit.

After running six red lights, Johnny parked his gull-wing Porsche GT1 behind a beach house. The couple stumbled and giggled together as they struggled up the front porch steps facing the dunes and bright sun over the Atlantic. Liquor, anticipation. She embraced him hard, and they crashed against the gingerbread trim next to the front door. Her mouth went to his ear again. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but my secret fantasy is to . . .”

The rest was inaudible except to Johnny’s eardrum. Bubbles hit his brain. Johnny fell one way, and Sasha the other, both landing on their asses. They stared at each other a second, then giggled even louder. Johnny dug in a pocket for house keys with renewed urgency. Yes! The streak is over!

Sasha got up and looked around. “Where’s my shoe? I lost a shoe . . .”

Johnny’s trembling hands fumbled with the keys, dropped them, and fumbled again. Sasha wandered in unsteady circles on the porch. “Where are you, shoe? . . . Come here, shoe . . .”

Keys hit the ground again. Anxious fingers snagged them but had trouble aligning the end of the key with the lock. “Let’s
goooooo
, focus!”

“Here shoey-shoey . . . Where are you, shoey? . . .” Sasha staggered around the corner of the house. “Motherfuckin’ shoe, where are you!”

The lock finally popped. Hooray. The door creaked ajar, but Johnny wasn’t looking inside. He stared off the side of the porch. “Sasha, the house is open . . .
Sasha?
. . .”

Then he finally looked though the front door.

“What on God’s earth? . . .”

In the background, squealing tires.

T
he cops arrived fifteen minutes later.

Johnny sat on the top porch step, face in his hands again. Shoulders shaking with sobs.

A detective approached the officer in charge of the crime scene. “Magruder, what have we got here?”

“Seems pretty open-and-shut.” The sergeant closed his notebook. “Our pal Mr. Vegas here spent all night in one of the local clubs with some young thing he had a chance meeting with yesterday afternoon, and he came home this morning to find his place stripped to the walls.”

“Another dating bandit?”

“Except a new wrinkle.”

“How’s that?”

“This one was female.”

They became distracted by a louder bout of weeping from the porch steps. The detective jerked a thumb sideways. “What’s his problem?”

The sergeant shrugged. “He’s been crying off and on ever since we got here.”

“Doesn’t he know insurance covers this?”

The sergeant raised his voice in Johnny’s direction. “Mr. Vegas, just call your insurance company . . . The important thing is you’re safe. She didn’t even touch you.”

The crying became deafening wails.

“Wow.” The detective turned toward the sergeant. “He must have really loved that furniture.”

FORT LAUDERDALE

Fingers impatiently tapped a counter in a strip mall. Hanging from a pegboard: chew toys, catnip, fish pellets, and electronic dog collars that create an invisible fence around your yard.

An employee rushed back to the register through a vortex of animal-waste aromas that combined to smell exactly like all pet stores everywhere.

“Sorry for the delay.” He wiped something green on his shirt. “How may I help you?”

“This is a rescue intervention,” said Serge. “You’ve seen those news stories about heroin-addict mothers forgetting baby strollers on escalators while they shoplift?”

The employee scratched his head. “I’m not following.”

“I need you to take in a hamster.”

“We don’t buy hamsters,” said the clerk. “They’re multiplying fast enough as it is back there. Unless you bought it here and it’s sick or something, then I’ll need a receipt.”

“No, I didn’t buy it here and I don’t want to sell it.” Serge reached in his hip pocket. “I want you to adopt it. His current owner needs parenting classes. He’s passed out in the Firebird right now . . . Oh, and he may have a drug problem.”

“Your friend in the car?”

“The hamster, too. He’s being raised in a toxic environment. And when Coleman lost consciousness a few minutes ago, that was my big chance to save him, so it’s not really a kidnapping, right?”

“But I don’t think—”

Serge set the furry critter on the counter. “His name’s Skippy.”

The clerk looked down, then quickly up again with an odd expression.

“What’s the matter?” asked Serge.

“That’s not a hamster.”

“What is it, then?”

“A mouse.”

“Does that affect the adoption?”

“Well, we can always use mice.”

“Good.
Great!
” Serge bent down to talk to the rodent. “Hear that? You’ve found a loving new home, where you can get clean and sober.”

“Yeah,” added the clerk. “We feed them to the snakes.”

Serge’s eyes flew wide. He snatched the small animal off the counter and clutched it to his chest. “Not Skippy!”

“But it’s just a mouse.”

Serge crashed backward into a sales display. Tiny aquarium castles plunged to the floor. “What kind of monster are you!”

“Look, they pay me shit.”

Serge ran out the door to a jingle of bells.

Coleman sat up in the backseat when Serge peeled out. “What’s going on?” He looked around the car. “Where’s Skippy?”

“Taken into protective foster care.” Serge skidded around a corner. “And we should probably change his name to Mickey.”

“Why?”

They took off in the Firebird. It was noon along the countless finger canals that characterized the city.

A landscaping crew was putting in yeoman duty. Three trucks with trailers and the heavy rigs. Constant buzzing and sawing and people riding other noisy things around. A tiny one-man tractor grunted to a stop.

A ’78 Firebird pulled up to the curb.

Serge approached the man climbing out of the safety cage. “What are you going to do with that?”

“Probably make mulch.” The man wiped sweat and dirt off his forehead. “Why?”

“How much?” asked Serge.

“You want to buy it?”

Serge nodded.

“Okay, fifty bucks. No, a hundred.”

Serge opened his wallet. “Split the difference at seventy-five, and you help me load it in the car.”

“Cool.”

The yardman deftly maneuvered the tractor into position behind the Firebird. He threw a black-knobbed lever, flipping down the front-loader claw and dropping the item into the trunk. The car’s back end bounced on the suspension. Not a remote chance of closing the hood, so it was tied with twine.

Serge dusted dirt off the top of the fenders. “Got a business card?”

“Sure, it’s somewhere in here”—going through one of those thick hoarding wallets on a chain. “There we go.” He handed it to Serge. “What kind of work are you thinking of having done?”

“Stump removal.”

“Huh?” The landscaper narrowed his eyes, staring at the trunk of the Trans Am and the protruding, recently purchased stump.

Serge grabbed his door handle. “Pleasure doing business.” They drove away from the competing whines of small gas-powered engines.

The phone rang. Serge recognized the number in the caller ID.

“Hey, Mahoney, what’s going on?”

“Mahoney mulled the lowdown he was about to lay on Serge like a dirty ward boss with a case of the crabs and a day-old racing form.”

“Mahoney,” said Serge. “You’re doing third person again.”

“Serge was a sharp cookie, like a broad in a gin joint who sees all the angles, from acute to obtuse—”

“Mahoney, look, if it’s about the cases, we’ve been working round the clock. I just picked up a stump.”

“Serge made as much sense as wearing a belt with suspenders.”

“What I could use is a little help on your end,” said Serge. “Call some of your old contacts and get all the police reports with similar dating-bandit MOs. As for the newest victim who hired you, I already told you I only need—”

“Mahoney was sly to Serge’s jones and ready to roll Romans like loaded crap dice that always come up boxcars.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Serge grabbed a pen. “I’m ready for that phone number.”

Mahoney gave it.

“Thanks, I’ll let you know how it works out.”

“. . . Like a one-legged unicycle jockey . . .”

Serge began closing the phone—
“ . . . Scootily-bop . . .”
—and hung up. He immediately dialed again.

“Hello?”

“Yes, I’m calling about the yellow Corvette for sale in the paper.”

Chapter Eight

MEANWHILE . . .

C
heeto-encrusted fingers tapped a keyboard in an otherwise sterile cubicle.

A mug shot popped up on the screen.

An e-mail was forwarded.

Another file of random statistics opened.

It was an anonymous cubicle, and it could have been anywhere, but this one was in Tallahassee. The man behind the keyboard had an engraved brass nameplate on his desk: W
ESLEY
C
HAPEL
. It sat on the front of his desk, which was pressed against one of the walls of the cubicle, and the nameplate could not be seen. But that was okay because Wesley wasn’t a people person, which meant he was perfect for his job.

Here’s what Wesley did: He made sense out of nonsense.

And he was the best the company had, sifting and crunching and correlating the white noise of meaningless numbers and GPS coordinates until patterns emerged. One entire floor of the company housed huge mainframes filled with raw, non sequitur information that had been dragnetted from every corner of the Internet. Some were free public records; others databases purchased from numerous companies who valued their customers’ privacy.

His was one of a growing number of firms in a field that had endless buyers lining up for a geometric progression of knowledge. The nascent industry had plenty of niches in which companies could specialize. They variously offered millions of searchable newspaper and magazine articles, indexed scientific papers from leading research universities dating back to 1888, legal precedents and up-to-the-minute Shepardized case law for all fifty states and the federal districts.

Wesley’s company specialized in prying, and it easily had the longest line of clients clamoring for their product: networks wanting to know the volume of cable subscribers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, test marketers seeking the median age of people who bought laundry detergent with credit cards, municipal planners looking for the neighborhood that voted least so they could locate the new sewage transfer station.

They were like the business world’s version of the Elias Sports Bureau. You know, those people who ESPN quote on
SportsCenter
when they want to know the last year in which the Red Sox gave up an extra-inning blown save on an inside-the-park homer against a switch-hitting platoon infielder born south of the Mason-Dixon with the nickname “Jukes.”

Wesley never needed to reorder business cards, because he didn’t get out much; his were still tucked neatly in a bottom drawer, embossed with the company’s previous name, Event Horizon, Inc. The moniker was an astrophysics term for the point of no return where all matter and even light itself cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. It was meant as an analogy for the moment when the interstellar nebula dust of Internet gibberish is pulled together to form actionable intelligence. The name was way too highbrow for the buyers, and people kept on driving past the building, having no idea or concern about what was going on inside. So the name was changed to Big Dipper Data Management. All the new clients liked the mental image of a soup ladle. The founder of the company had thought up both names, because he’d recently purchased a telescope.

Oh, and they had a new client. Law enforcement. Most of the police upper brass was old-school and couldn’t grasp the utility. But the new whiz kids who retrieved deleted files from the laptops of pedophiles—they all sent word up the chain: This is the future.

It started at the beginning of the methamphetamine explosion, back before honest citizens needed a U.S. passport and long-form birth certificate to buy over-the-counter sniffle remedies. At the encouragement of police, state lawmakers hired Wesley’s company and used the supporting data to show an undeniable statistical relationship between pockets of violent street crime and volumes of cold-medication sales, which led to pioneering legislation drying up the basic ingredients for drug labs.

That opened everyone’s eyes. Cold remedies? What about cold
cases
? Everyone remembered all the previously unsolved murders that had been cleared at the dawn of DNA. This looked like a silicon version of genetics, and another step forward in the march of technological justice.

The theory: We’ve got all these electronic files of credit-card purchases, utility bills, tollbooth hits, property taxes, airline tickets, car titles, etc., etc. Obviously too circumstantial to hold up in court, but what if we mashed all those records together, filtering for time and place. In the coldest of cases, it might at least narrow the field and generate a short list of those who deserved a closer look.

For instance: a rash of mystery rapes hit the Pensacola area in the late nineties. Then nothing for years. Police figured the assailant either moved, died, went to prison, or was shipped out with the military.

Then, in 2004, Pensacola authorities noticed a bulletin out of Jacksonville. Serial rapist. As they read, chills. Almost identical details: sliding-glass-door entry, panty-hose mask, one-sided serrated knife, even the exact verbatim instructions to each victim that they had withheld from the press: counting to one hundred, then back down again, before attempting to loosen the same kind of knots.

The Pensacola police got in touch with Jacksonville, and they decided to meet halfway. Literally. Tallahassee. They hovered over Wesley in his cubicle. First, he set the parameters for Pensacola during the six-month period of the first attacks, which pretty much created a list of everyone who had produced personal ID for anything, only about 1,850,000 people. Then he percolated that list through the last month’s info in Jacksonville—looking for those who had been in both places during the two time periods—which brought the number in the overlapping circle down to 2,379.

“Damn,” said the lead investigator. “I though we might have had something.”

“We do,” said Wesley. “That’s a workable number.”

“Workable?” said the detective. “It’s over two thousand.”

“That’s nothing the null sets can’t neutralize.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“The null sets are the silver-bullet statistics.” Wesley typed even faster as he spoke. “You say the attacks stopped in Pensacola in ’98 and resumed in Jacksonville in ’04? So what we do is take our list of two-thousand-some-odd suspects, flip the filter, then kick
out
all the names who had any hits in either city during the intervening six-year quiet time when the assailant was supposedly in jail or whatever . . .” He stopped typing for a dramatic pause, then pressed a final button.

The investigators leaned toward the screen. The number 2,379 quickly spun south. A thousand, 500, 80, 15, until it finally came to a stop: 1. And a suspect’s name. The last piece of data was a video-store rental no less. Chevy Chase vacation comedy. Detectives made some calls. Unbelievable. A seaman at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola had been shipped overseas, then six years later he was transferred back to another base in Jacksonville.

A dozen police vehicles were waved through the security gate and skidded up to the barracks. Military prosecutors arrived, and in less than five minutes the joint interrogation burped up a signed confession. The state of Florida wanted to take custody, and the navy said they were always happy to assist local law enforcement, but first they’d like to hold on to him for another hundred years.

FORT LAUDERDALE

Serge strolled the aisles of the home-improvement store, sucking coffee from a tube under his shirt.

“What are we looking for?” asked Coleman, slurping from his own tube of vodka.

“I’ll know when I see it. Just keep your eyes open for gigantic iron corkscrews.”

“What are those?”

“They’re hurricane tie-downs you twist into the ground and secure stuff when you don’t want to retrieve your aluminum shed from someone’s living room on the next block. That’s always an awkward visit.”

An employee in a yellow store vest came around the corner and smiled as he had been trained. Then the smile stopped. “Are you guys okay?”

“Great!” said Serge.
Slurp, slurp.

“What’s with the tubes?”

“We have medical conditions,” said Coleman.

Serge nodded earnestly. “We’re in self-help.”

The employee sniffed the air. “Do I smell liquor?”

“A lot of things smell like liquor,” said Serge.

“Yeah,” said Coleman. “Like other liquor.”

Serge pulled up his shirt. “I’m clean. This is a clear plastic bladder that sports fans strap to their bellies with Velcro to sneak alcohol into arenas and stadiums. I learned it from Coleman, but I use it for coffee strictly due to my on-the-go needs.”

Coleman raised his own shirt. “This is water. You can’t test it because of my rights.” He lowered his shirt.

“We need your assistance,” said Serge. “Usually I can immediately lay my hands on anything in this place, like garage-door openers to activate bad stuff. You’re the expert: Do you think personal electronics can really bring down a 747?”

“What?”

“Of course you can’t speak on the record.” Serge slurped and rotated his head for answers. “Where are the hurricane tie-downs?”

“You trying to secure a shed?”

“Bigger!”

“A metal garage?”

“Needs to be bigger than that!”

“What on earth are you tying down?”

“That’s classified.” Serge briefly flashed a
Miami Vice
souvenir badge. “Give me the big mothers. Plus a short metal plumbing pipe like you’d use to rough in a showerhead, and your strongest plastic fasteners for electrical cables. Jigsaw, baseboard, paint, thumbtacks, balsa wood.”
Slurp, slurp.
“And can you escort us through checkout? Had some recent problems there. Our pictures might be on some flyers.”

Moments later, several employees whispered as Serge and Coleman walked out the door with plastic bags in their hands and four enormous iron corkscrews perched over their shoulders.

MIAMI BEACH

Neon glowed in an artistic rainbow from the landmark Art Deco hotels along internationally famous Ocean Drive. Red, pink, green, blue, orange, yellow, as if the owners had held a meeting.

Farther north on Collins Avenue were the larger, old-guard flagship resorts. The Delano, the Eden Roc, Fontainebleau, Deauville. At a newer, lesser-known resort in the middle, the clientele finally calmed down around three
A.M.
Some asleep, some passed out, some sitting up in bed with the TV remote, determined to squeeze out more vacation value.

By four
A.M.
, most of the lights had gone dark up and down the hotel’s thirty-story facade.

At 4:02, the first phone rang. Room 1911. A couple from Manitoba celebrating their copper anniversary, which was number seven. The wife answered from REM sleep and a dream about the national cricket team.

“Uh, mmmm, hullo? . . .”

“Ma’am, this is the front desk . . .”

Seconds later, the wife hopped onto the bed screaming in panic. “Kevin! Wake up! Wake up!”

He opened one eye on the pillow. “What is it?”

“An emergency! We have to get out of here!”

They dashed into the hallway. There was a white box on the wall and a sign:
I
N
C
ASE OF
E
MERGENCY,
B
REAK
G
LASS.

Glass broke.

In the next room, two former classmates from Syracuse on a girlfriend trip. The phone rang.

“W-what? Hello? Huh? . . .”

“This is the front desk. Please stay calm, but we have a serious emergency. There’s been a highly poisonous chemical contamination to your floor from the air system. We need you to evacuate your room immediately . . .”

“But how did—?”

“Ma’am, there’s no time. We have too many rooms to call. The hazardous-material teams are on the way. In the meantime, we’ll need the total cooperation of our guests. Once you get to the hall, grab a fire extinguisher and spray yourselves down with the foam. That will temporarily neutralize the contaminants’ effects on your skin.”

“What will it do to my skin?”

“You don’t want to know right now, but there’s only a remote chance of amputation. And after you’re covered with foam, take the stairs—not the elevator!—and hurry to street level and exit the hotel onto the sidewalk. Once there, strip off all your clothes as fast as possible. By then, the hazmat teams should be waiting with the hoses to properly complete the decontamination procedure.”

The women dashed into the hall. Ten other people were already there, half covered with foam, the other half flapping their arms in whimpering panic. “Spray me next! Spray me next!”

Other doors flung open. More guests in the hall. A second extinguisher was broken out of its harness. The stampede began. No! Not the elevator! They burst into the stairwell, a race of sudsy people down landing after landing, until they reached the bottom and sprinted out onto the sidewalk.

Clothing flew with abandon into the night air.

Traffic on Collins Avenue was sparse at that hour, but even the most jaded motorist couldn’t help but rubberneck at the sidewalk festivities. A silver BMW coupe rear-ended a Miata.