Clownfish Blues Read online

  “You’re a cop!”

  Serge and Coleman looked at each other and doubled over with laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Us? Cops?” More laughter. “That’s rich! A regular hoot!”

  “But your blue Windbreakers . . .”

  “I’ve been known to pick up avocations.” Serge took off his jacket and threw it on the couch.

  A finger perspired on the trigger. “If you’re not police, then who are you?”

  “Highly wanted fugitives.” Serge tapped the side of his head. “You have to admit it’s pretty clever. Who would ever think of looking for a fugitive as a negotiator in a hostage standoff?”

  “It’s some kind of trick! This is the last time I’m going to tell you to get out!”

  Serge walked over to the television. “Anything good on?”

  “Are you insane?” said the man. “I have a gun here!”

  “So do I.” Serge briefly raised his tropical shirt, then lowered it. “See? We’re off to an excellent start! Show-and-tell, gun for gun. We’re bonding! That’s what dudes always do the first time they visit each other’s crib. ‘Let me see all your coolest shit.’ If you were at my place, right now we’d be looking at View-Masters and a prize collection of souvenir flattened pennies, but since it’s your pad, we could be heading to the garage and an industrial cooler full of do-it-yourself shrunken heads, because America was founded on the principle of never judging a hobby. In the idiom of the times, the Founding Fathers called it ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ but we all really know they were worried about Franklin’s big kite-flying drunk-fest coming up and wanted to give themselves some cover from the wives.” He walked toward the gunman until the end of the military rifle stuck in his gut. He extended a hand. “My name’s Serge.”

  “Jesus! You really are crazy!”

  “Come on!” Serge left his hand hanging in the air. “What’s your name?”

  The man sighed extra hard. “Good grief.” He quickly shook. “Rogelio. They call me Rog. So will you finally leave?”

  “We’re going backward now,” said Serge. “I thought we were hitting a groove comparing our toys. Plus, I already told you, I can’t leave. They’ve probably figured out my identity and are setting up the sniper nest as we speak.” He sat down on the sofa and grabbed the remote control. Coleman plopped next to him with a joint.

  “Whoa! Wait, wait, wait! What are you doing?” Rog ran over to the couch. “You can’t stay! This isn’t how it works!”

  “You’re acutely wound up.” Serge clicked the remote. “Have a seat and chill . . . Ooooo! The Road Runner! My favorite!”

  Rog eased himself into a chair. “Okay, what is it you really want?”

  “What? Oh, sorry, the coyote just put on that special helmet with the roller skate on top so he can do a headstand and zip across the canyon on that tightrope. Normally, I’m against hard drugs, but when it helps the writers create such masterpieces . . .”

  “Excuse me . . .”

  “. . . Like the time he painted a railroad tunnel on the side of a mountain and a locomotive comes out and runs over him. Clearly influenced by the 1903 Parisian Surrealist movement—”

  “Excuse me!”

  “You were saying something?”

  “Yes!” said Rog. “What do you want?”

  Serge leaned toward the television. “Just to continue my Route 66 pilgrimage through Florida. In this week’s episode, we’ve stumbled into your unassuming town and become hostage negotiators. That’s the formula: new city, new gigs, sex during commercials.” He suddenly pointed atop the TV. “Wow, you’ve got one of those cool new cable boxes that streams just about everything ever filmed. Let’s binge-watch Route 66!”

  Rog grimaced with a whimpering sound. “What can I do to make you leave?”

  “I don’t know,” said Serge, absentmindedly examining the sleeve of his Windbreaker. “Maybe release the hostage?”

  The phone rang and Rog jumped.

  Serge answered it. “Helllllloooo?”

  “What’s going on in there?”

  “Hey, boss, I’ve established a rapport, but it’s going to take some time.”

  “We need the hostage out as soon as possible, for good faith, then you can continue working on him.”

  “All right, boss.” He hung up.

  Coleman tugged his pal’s arm. “Serge, why do you keep calling him ‘boss’?”

  “I’ve been studying a cultural phenomenon lately. It’s another one of those little unofficial things that messes with people’s social equilibrium.”

  “Like clipboards and orange cones?”

  “Exactly,” said Serge. “Those are two things that inexplicably bend people to your will. Same with calling someone ‘boss.’ It’s like handing a little kid one of those giant swirly lollipops. The general public doesn’t even realize it’s happening, but on a subconscious level: ‘Why yes, I guess I am kind of like the boss. And I’ve only known this person a few seconds, but for some reason, I really like him.’ Then it completely flips the hierarchical paradigm. Once I saw these moving-company guys call their customers ‘boss,’ and after that they were just flinging credenzas into the truck while the homeowners happily served them cold drinks.”

  The phone rang again.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “We’re sending in the robot.”

  “You got a robot? Cool! I’ll leave the front door open . . . Hey, Coleman, they got a robot!”

  “Cool!”

  Serge hung up and smiled at the armed resident. “Now, where were we?”

  “You mentioned a hostage,” said Rog. “What hostage?”

  “They told me you were holding your girlfriend.”

  “Holding her?” said Rog. “I’m not holding anyone. In fact, I can’t get her to come out.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Serge.

  “Locked herself in the bedroom,” said Rog. “Totally pissed at me. Then she goes and makes a false 911 call to fuck with me.”

  Serge whistled. “I’ll take decorative soap any day.”

  Coleman got up on unsteady legs. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Last door on the right,” said Rog.

  They heard a mechanical whirring sound as a small remote-controlled device rolled into the room on tiny tank treads. A fiber-optic antenna rotated.

  “Serge, it’s the robot,” said Coleman. “Can I take it with me?”

  “Knock yourself out.” Serge stood and turned to Rog. “Let me talk to her. I have a way with the ladies.”

  “You don’t know my girlfriend.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Rog shrugged. “Can’t get any worse. Her name’s Maria.” He led Serge down the hall . . .

  . . . Meanwhile, outside. Officers filled the mobile command unit parked at the curb. The lighting was dim as they crowded around a flat-screen monitor.

  “What am I looking at?” asked the sergeant.

  “Not sure,” said the officer working a joystick. “I’ve lost orientation control on the robot . . . Hold it, what’s this?” Coleman giggled on the toilet, aiming the optic antenna inside the bowl. “It looks like— . . . No, it couldn’t be . . .”

  “Something’s not right,” said the sergeant, picking up the phone for the local FBI office.

  “Special Agent Braun here.”

  “Agent Braun, this is Sergeant Duffy over in Sarasota County. We’ve got a tactical situation here and the hostage negotiators just went in.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Did you send them?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question,” said Braun. “Are you telling me you let people inside the box without knowing who they are?”

  “Oh no, we definitely know who they are. Obviously. They had Windbreakers. Just curious, uh, if they might be yours.”

  “Did they say they were FBI?”

  “Not in so many words. But they mentioned our guy was on a terrorist watch
list.”

  “We always want to cooperate any way we can,” said Braun. “But you know I can neither confirm nor deny any Homeland Security operation while it may still be ongoing.”

  “Just thought I’d ask. Thanks.” The sheriff hung up.

  “What did he say?” asked a nearby corporal.

  “Could go either way,” said Duffy. “Get the SWAT team ready . . .”

  . . . Inside the FBI office. “Someone’s running an operation right under our noses,” Braun told his assistant. “You know how I hate to be the last to find out. Call the other agencies . . .”

  . . . Inside the house. Knocking on a bedroom door.

  A female voice from the other side. “Go screw yourself!”

  “Maria, my name is Serge. I’m a hostage negotiator.”

  “Hostage negotiator? What are you doing here?”

  “Some cops outside got this crazy idea in their heads just because you called 911,” said Serge. “It would be much better for everyone if you opened the door so we could talk face-to-face.”

  The phone in the living room began ringing again.

  “Shouldn’t we answer that?” asked Rog.

  Serge shook his head. “This is the most delicate part of the negotiation.”

  A muffled voice from the other side of the door: “Is that Rog out there?”

  “Standing right next to me.”

  “Hey, baby,” said Rog. “I can explain.”

  “Get away from me! I hope you rot!”

  Serge tilted his head, and Rog took the cue to return to the living room.

  “He just left,” said Serge. “Can you please open the door? . . .”

  . . . Outside, Sergeant Duffy turned to a corporal. “Well?”

  “They’re not answering the phone. And we lost transmission from the robot.”

  “I don’t like the looks of this.” Duffy checked his wristwatch. “We’re going in. Tell the SWAT team they have two minutes . . .”

  . . . “Please open the door,” said Serge.

  “Do you know what that asshole said to me in Pottery Barn?”

  “Tell you what,” said Serge. “You come out, and I’ll take you to Pottery Barn.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Okay . . .” The bedroom door creaked, and she stepped into the hall just as Coleman emerged from another door with a broken robot under his arm.

  Maria looked inside the bathroom. “What in the name of God happened to my guest towels!”

  Coleman grinned. “Sorry . . .”

  . . . The sergeant gave the signal. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Tactical officers in black gear stormed toward the house.

  Serge yelled out a window: “Hostage coming out!”

  “Stand down!” yelled the sergeant.

  Maria stomped out the doorway and across the lawn. A SWAT member darted forward and grabbed her arm to pull her to safety, but she just jerked away. “Don’t touch me!”

  There was a commotion in the street as other officers attempted to detain her for debriefing. “You men are all alike!”

  An emboldened Rog stuck his head through a crack in the door. “And don’t come back, cunt!”

  “What!” Serge screamed, and yanked him back inside. “Rog, a Pottery Barn can test even the strongest man’s limits, which is why you always see them crying in the parking lot. But I cannot abide this level of misogyny . . .”

  Out in the street, Sergeant Duffy huddled with his corporal. “What do you think now?”

  “That negotiator must be for real. He got the hostage released faster than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said the sergeant. “I got nineteen years in for my pension. Can’t afford to mess this up.”

  “The only other explanation is they simply bought Windbreakers.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Duffy was also privately thinking: He called me “boss.” For some reason I really like this guy.

  “Then what’s the plan?” asked the corporal.

  “We wait . . .”

  . . . Serge sat back down on the couch. “What a day! . . . Rog, where are you going?”

  He pointed at the front door. “Leaving. This is far too weird for me.”

  “Come back in here and sit down with us,” said Serge. “I insist.”

  “But I want to give up now.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “No, really, I’d like to turn myself in now.”

  “And I need to discuss your manners with women.” Click.

  Rog raise his hands. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”

  “To negotiate.”

  Aventura

  Panel trucks arrived in the parking lot of a worn two-story strip mall in Aventura. The competition between the nail and beauty salons was heating up. More and more pink neon had recently been placed in the windows to advertise new services involving wax, cucumbers and heated stones.

  Men in short brown pants opened the backs of the delivery trucks. They loaded boxes on handcarts as two gangs of employees stood on the sidewalk, giving each other the hairy eyeball. The men wheeled their cartons through the doors of the salons, escorting identical shipments of the latest laser equipment to battle the heartbreak of female mustaches. The two staffs exchanged a salvo of cursing in a foreign language, then rushed back inside their establishments to play with the new stuff.

  The delivery trucks left. A Honda Civic arrived. A young woman entered a door between the two businesses and went up the stairs.

  A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled. A door in the back of the waiting room opened. It was one of the founding partners, Jacklyn Lopez. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  She led the woman down the hall and opened the door to Brook’s office.

  “Danny, great to see you,” said the lawyer, standing and giving her a hug.

  “I can’t thank you enough for all your work helping my grandmother with her landlord situation.”

  “My pleasure,” said Brook. “But you didn’t have to come all the way up here to tell me that.”

  Jacklyn had a stern expression. “It’s something else. You’re not going to believe her story.”

  “Then you better have a seat,” Brook told Danny. She went back behind the desk and took her own. “Now, what is it?”

  Danny sat up straight. “There are some stories going around my community. Actually they’re not stories; they’re true.”

  “So tell me a true story,” said Brook.

  “There’s a family I want you to help,” said Danny. “But they’re afraid to come in, so I’d like you to help persuade them.”

  “Why are they afraid?”

  “They’re illegals,” said Danny. “Migrant workers.”

  “I see.”

  “Last week the picking season ended in Homestead. They packed everything they had into a station wagon and set out for Immokalee to follow the jobs. But they were stopped by police, ostensibly because all their bags of clothes blocked the rearview mirror.”

  “Wait,” Brook interrupted. “You said they were illegals who were stopped by the police? They weren’t turned over to INS for deportation?”

  Danny shook her head. “The officers just searched the vehicle and seized four thousand dollars, their whole life savings.”

  “On what grounds?” asked Brook.

  “They claimed the money was proceeds from illicit drug trafficking,” said Danny. “Except they didn’t find any drugs in the car.”

  “Then what was their basis for impounding the money?”

  “A dog barked at the cash.”

  Brook’s expression changed. “There’s got to be more.”

  “There isn’t,” said Danny.

  “What were they charged with?”

  “They weren’t. They just let them go,” said Danny. “The father didn’t even have a valid driver’s license or proof of insurance. That alone should have caused him to be detained. It�
��s traffic stop one-oh-one.”

  “Now I’m totally baffled,” said Brook.

  “Don’t you see? The police wanted them to leave,” said Danny. “Word’s getting around on the street about this new scheme to rob illegals under the pretext of fighting the War on Drugs. Everyone knows what’s going on. Just not the people living comfortable lives.”

  Brook got out a fresh yellow legal pad and clicked a pen. “Okay, so what does everyone on the street know? Start at the very beginning.”

  “Forfeiture laws were implemented to take away the profit motive of drug dealers and prevent them from furthering their smuggling enterprise. Who isn’t for that?”

  “It would be a very short list.”

  “Except it didn’t remove the profit motive; it just shifted it.”

  “Where?”

  “To law enforcement. They get to keep a lot of the stuff,” said Danny. “Sure, there’s a general fund where it’s supposed to go to remove the temptation, but there are ways around it. Few people realize how many top public officials are driving around in sporty luxury cars that were originally bought with cocaine money.”

  Brook stopped writing. “That can’t be true. Where’d you hear all this?”

  “From the newspapers. The ACLU wrote an editorial. Doesn’t anybody read anymore?”

  “Not really.” Brook put pen to paper again. “And the ACLU will never win a popularity contest in this state, or any other.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” said Danny. “But I learned something else. A certain percentage of drug defendants had good lawyers who got them acquitted on the smuggling charges, then won appeals to get their seized property back. The police lost their stuff. So unscrupulous officials figured they had a better chance of keeping the forfeited goods if they just let the drug dealers go and never charged them. What criminal who just got a free walk on hard time is going to come back and appeal a forfeiture?”

  “This is actually happening?” asked Brook.

  Darkness descended over Aventura. Shouting down on the street outside the law office. Colored lights and screeching tires.

  “You do the math,” said Danny. “An incident begins with a trafficker getting pulled over, and it concludes with the criminal driving away, and the cops keeping all his money. That’s like a bribe.”

  “Technically it’s extortion,” said Brook. “But I have to be honest: This is painful for me to listen to.” She tilted her head toward the photo on the wall. “My dad was a firefighter, and both his brothers wore the badge, along with a bunch of other relatives and neighbors. None of them would ever conceive of this conduct.”