“Robots rule! What do you think?”
“Danger, Will Robinson.”
“And I used Play-Doh for the seals.” Puff, puff, puff. “Your turn to put up.”
Serge took a deep breath before spitting out words rapid-fire like an auctioneer. “Alachua, Baker, Bay, Bradford, Brevard, Broward . . .”
“Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm!”
Serge grabbed a tape dispenser and flung, ricocheting it off Clyde’s soon-to-be-bloody nose. “We’re trying to be five-year-olds, motherfucker!”
A pot cloud exhaled toward the captive. “Serge, could you hand me those two eye buttons? I want to glue them on my robot to make him wacky.”
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Coleman squirted Elmer’s Glue. “By the way, what are you planning to do with him?”
Serge reached into a shopping bag. “I’ve given this one a lot of careful thought.” He pulled out a small blue box.
“Alka-Seltzer?” asked Coleman.
“No, a generic brand called Fizzing Circles because I wouldn’t want to cast a pall on the good people at Alka-Seltzer.”
“That’s a weird name.”
“Apparently, someone’s tightening up trademark infringement laws, because generic names are getting pretty strange in order to keep their legal distance. You need look no further than the cereal aisle. I swear these are all real: Fruit Rings, Square Shaped Corn, Circus Balls, Crispy Hexagons, Pranks instead of Trix, and a knockoff of Life cereal called Live It Up. Children see right through those bowls of bullshit.”
“So what’s the plan with the tablets?”
“Stalled for now,” said Serge. “The first hurdle was how do I get enough tablets in him without them activating before the Big Fizz? I finally found a solution, but the technique was so tediously long that I grew weary of the wit involved. So I went hard the other way . . .”
Serge grabbed a bottle of glue off the table and reached in his grocery sack again. Then he went over to the hostage with the safety scissors and began snipping off his clothes. “Sorry, I know this must be one of your favorite T-shirts because of the slogan on the front: ‘I’m Not a Gynecologist, but I’ll Take a Look.’ Damn, that’s funny.”
Serge stopped snipping and began smearing glue across Clyde’s bare chest. He opened a product from the supermarket and placed the pieces in a careful arrangement. “Now we just wait for the drying process.”
Chapter 6
Four Years Earlier
Tequesta, Florida.
The northeastern tip of Palm Beach County on the ocean. Named after the Native American tribe who lived, loved and built shell mounds here for two thousand years until ancestors of the current residents put a stop to that, clearing the way for golf.
It is a quiet, affluent bedroom community with many dockside homes and waterways, making it popular among sportsmen. Most prefer sailing out into the Atlantic under the bright sun for their recreation, but some are nocturnal. Night scuba diving is an exciting change of pace, with all the local reefs. So is night fishing.
On a Tuesday evening, just after eleven o’clock, a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler with twin Mercury engines cleared the jetties at Jupiter Inlet and began bouncing across the waves out to sea. The continental shelf off this coast is among the narrowest on the whole U.S. seaboard, sometimes barely a mile wide before precipitously dropping off hundreds of feet, where they call it deep-sea fishing.
The Whaler continued cresting small swells. Four heavy-duty spin-casting rods swayed in their holders like radio antennae. The boat’s only occupant, a loner named Remy Skillet, also had two rifles and a shotgun. He was going shark fishing. He felt a slight pain in his mouth and thought of missed dental appointments.
A mile out, on the edge of the continental shelf, Remy cut the engine and drifted with the current. All lines went in the water, along with a dumped bucket of bloody chum that spread a grease apron off the stern. Seasoned anglers understand that the sport requires mental stamina, and Remy had the kind of patience of someone who brings guns with him to fish. He began blasting the water with an assault rifle before he realized he was shooting at his own chum slick, now glistening under the moon. He opened another beer. He was so far offshore that the lights of the oceanfront homes formed a single, horizontal thread of light, which was his only indication of where black sky left off and black water began. The ocean wind was more loud than stout, and carried a salty mist from the bow slapping the waves. The salt made Remy reach for another beer. That’s when the shark hit the bait.
It was a seven-foot mako, gauging from dorsal to tail, and it began swimming back and forth under the boat, bending one of Remy’s thickest rods to the breaking point. This required the shotgun. The water exploded off the port side, then the starboard, then port again. The next blast was decidedly louder than the others, and Remy took a step back and stilled his weapon. “That couldn’t have been my gun. What was it?” Then he turned around and recoiled even more. “Holy shit!”
Remy’s face glowed in the orange light as a fireball mushroomed into the sky a few hundred yards away. What remained after that was some kind of vessel, at least forty feet long, but it was difficult to determine much else because it had burned practically to the waterline. Remy started up his engine and headed in the direction of the explosion.
Minutes later, Remy idled his boat as it circled the smoldering wreckage. He felt his vessel bump something, and it wasn’t the other boat. He looked over the side and couldn’t see anything at first, because it was black. Not the water, but the scuba suit that the floating dead guy was wearing. Then he saw a second body in a wet suit, and a third, all bobbing in the waves. The toll ended at four, the last guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt with scorch marks.
Remy scratched his head. “What on God’s green earth happened here?”
Then more confusion as one of the previously motionless bodies began to thrash. Remy fell into his captain’s chair. “Jumpin’ Jesus!”
In all the excitement and beer, Remy had completely forgotten about the shark on his fishing line that he’d dragged over to the scene and that was now devouring the bodies.
“Stop that! Stop that right now!” He racked his twelve-gauge.
Blam! . . . Blam! Blam! Blam! . . . Blam! Blam! . . .
A steadier hand could have accomplished the objective with less ammunition, but Remy was still able to get the situation under control. The last shot sent the shark away from the bodies and diving under the boat . . .
In the days to follow, Remy would be arrested as the prime suspect, mainly because all the victims were presumed to have died from multiple shotgun blasts.
“No, really,” Remy told them. “I was trying to preserve the evidence.”
“How’s that?”
“A shark was eating them.”
“You do realize it’s now impossible to determine how they died? And we wouldn’t even have been able to identify two of them if it weren’t for tattoos.”
“Am I in trouble? . . .”
But right now, as the bodies were still bobbing around Remy’s vessel, he had another question. “Where’s that last Schlitz?”