Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

He reached for the radio dial and took his foot off the brake pedal. The G90 began rolling toward the mansion gates.

“What about Pruitt’s dogs?” Angie shouted.

“They’re safe and sound,” Skink called back, “at your apartment.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off the car as it peeled out of Casa Bellicosa, disappearing in the stream of southbound headlights on old A1A.

Chief Jerry Crosby walked up behind her and said, “Who was that?”

“Some smart-ass Uber driver.”

“Jesus, look at your dress.”

“Yeah, a real tragedy,” Angie said. “I heard you had a busy night, too.”

“Probably my last shift in this uniform. I’m going back to the office, clean my gun, and get toasted. What about you?”

“I’ve gotta go stock up on Purina,” she said.

UNCOILED

“Where’d you get this?” asked Giardia, fingering the large emerald.

“Found it in a flower bed where I work,” Spalding said.

“Bullshit.”

The pawnbroker spun around to lock the door. Spalding was nervous; the man’s crusty red tuxedo jacket had a gun-shaped bulge under one arm.

Giardia said, “The hell am I supposed to do with one earring?”

“The stone’s worth twenty grand.”

“Says who, fuckstick?”

“I got it appraised at a Jared’s,” Spalding said.

“Ho! And that’s how stolen gems get priced?” Giardia’s grin was disturbing. It looked like he’d brushed his teeth with tapioca.

He said, “I’ll give you a thousand.”

“Fifteen hundred,” Spalding came back.

“Twelve-five, and motor your amateur ass out of here.”

Giardia handed over the money and placed Fay Alex Riptoad’s emerald earring in the safe.

“How about a receipt?” Spalding asked.

“Sure.” The pawnbroker blew his nose into a Kleenex and dropped the moist wad in front of Spalding. “There’s your motherfuckin’ receipt, junior.”

When Spalding got into his car, he re-counted the cash and then laboriously swabbed his hands and arms with Clorox wipes. He was late arriving at Angie’s apartment, where she’d been waiting to introduce him to her new rescue dogs.

“Fritz is the Labradoodle. The Bichon is Marcel, but don’t call him that,” she said. “Call him Spike.”

“Because?”

“Marcel is no name for a dog. I think it fucked him up.”

“Does he bite?” Spalding asked.

“Not anymore.” Angie opened the kennel doors and the dogs galloped to Spalding. They were wagging their butts, sniffing his slides, licking his toes.

“Hi there, guys!” He knelt laughing and stroked their heads.

Angie was smiling, too. Joel and Krista were supposed to be dog-sitting, but they had spontaneously decided to go to Nassau and get married.

“You’re a natural,” Angie said to Spalding. “Fritz gets a cup-and-a-half of the dry food in the morning, same for dinner. Only three-quarters for little Spike. He’s got gout. I left his pills on the counter.”

“When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. Couple of days.”

“Key West is super chill,” he said. “I wish I was there.”

“Paul’s loving it. Thanks for watching the pups.”

“Anything for Lady Tarzan.”

“And thanks again for the soup-bowl sorcery. Very smooth.”

Spalding had been one of the servers assigned to the head table at the Commander’s Ball; it was he who’d hidden Angie’s note to the First Lady at her place setting. He hadn’t expected anything in return, so he was happily surprised when Angie gave him Fay Alex Riptoad’s lost earring, which she’d retrieved from a hedge at Casa Bellicosa before departing.

“Don’t worry, that old buzzard will make out like a bandit,” Angie had said when she put the emerald in Spalding’s hand. “Jerry Crosby says the rich always over-insure their jewelry.”

Spalding hadn’t decided what to do with the pawn money. He was thinking of flying home to Cape Town for a surf trip, since he now had some free time. Like all the clubs on the island, Casa Bellicosa had been furloughing staff since the night of the python apocalypse. Cell-phone video of Chief Crosby shooting a thirteen-footer out of a kapok tree at the Pilgrim Club had gone viral, killing the Palm Beach social season as dead as the Burmese. Every scheduled gala had been canceled, or re-booked in a competing county. It was almost worse than the pandemic. Now the membership at Casa was in revolt, lawsuits raining down like dung-tipped spears on Mastodon’s company.

“Here we have the doggy treats,” Angie said, shaking the box. “Only two per day, no matter how pitifully they beg.”

Spalding asked if she had Hulu.

“Yeah, but no porn. In your honor I turned on the parental controls.”

“Rude,” he muttered.

“Also, this is a skank-free zone. You’ll have to take your babes somewhere else to hose off.”

“Okay, that’s enough. Have a great trip, drive safe, and bring me some fritters from Louie’s. Now let me carry your bag to the truck—”

“No, sir.” She hugged Fritz and Spike, and promised Spalding she would Skype him one night from Mallory Square.

“Angie, I’ve got a question. You’re going to the Keys, right? As in ‘romantic getaway’?”

“That’s the plan.”

“So how come you’re wearing those same old ugly-ass khakis?”

“Because I’ve got to make a stop on the way down,” she said, hoisting her duffel bag. “Oh, and this is important, Spalding—do not let those dogs poop on the shuffleboard court.”

—

On the way to the airport, Diego Beltrán asked the ex-police chief about the cloth jewelry bag sitting on the console in the car.

“Have a look,” said Jerry Crosby. “It’s for my wife. Tomorrow is her birthday.”

Diego took a slender box from the bag. Inside was a thin gold necklace with a cream-pink conch pearl—the one Crosby had plucked from the sooty gravel in the train tracks on that day with Diego.

“That’s pretty cool, Chief,” Diego said. “She’ll love it.”

He didn’t ask about the other railroad pearl, the unlucky one that had turned him into a hated homicide suspect. It had been released to the heirs of Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons in a sealed baggie indelicately stamped EVIDENCE.

When Diego thanked Crosby for the lift to the airport, the ex-chief said, “It’s the least I can do. Can I ask why New Jersey?”

“Lots of other Diegos up there. Easy to blend in.”

Crosby didn’t bring up the young man’s suicide attempt at the jail. He considered it a minor miracle that someone was on duty who knew how to pump a stomach.

“You got a job lined up?” he asked.

“I’m going to work for the Census Bureau,” Diego said.

“Perfect.”

“Now that I’m legal, right?”

“Welcome to the American dream,” said Crosby.

The county had freed Diego Beltrán thirty-two minutes after prosecutors received a call from Homeland Security, which had received a call from the Justice Department, which had received a call from the White House. Deputies had hidden Diego in the back of a Stanley Steemer van and smuggled him out through a rear gate; the demonstrators, not knowing he was gone, continued chanting themselves hoarse.

Diego never returned to the ICE detention center where the other boat migrants were being held; instead he was transported directly from the jail to a Holiday Inn Express in Delray Beach. The next morning his lawyers informed him not only that the State Attorney’s Office had dropped the stolen-pearl charge, but also that immigration officials had pre-approved his yet-to-be-completed request for asylum, due to the political violence in Honduras that had claimed the lives of his uncles.