The Stingray Shuffle Read online

  “Isn’t that lying?”

  “You’ll be doing God’s work.”

  “Preston, obviously you’re not completely blameless, but we know how it is,” said his father. “You’re a devout young man. You go to church. You’re just the type they’re looking to lead astray.”

  “She had sex before marriage, so she’s a harlot,” said the minister.

  “But I had sex before marriage, too.”

  “Because she used her harlot ways. You were obviously seduced.”

  “Well, there was a little of that.”

  “Of course there was. Now go and do the right thing.”

  Preston was convincing. She had gotten him into this, and now it was up to him to prevent a double tragedy. Preston saw it as a test of character, kind of a proud moment. His parents even helped; they had both of them over for Sunday dinners and talked about the future.

  Becky bought the act, even started looking at wedding and nursery stuff. A few months later, she went up to Preston’s dorm room with exciting news. She had the sonograms—it was a girl!

  The door to the room was open. She approached slowly. “Preston?” She looked inside.

  Empty. Stripped to the walls.

  Becky drove to his parents’ house and rang the doorbell. His mother opened the front door, but the screen door on the outside stayed latched.

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s Preston? His dorm room is empty.”

  “Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “We don’t know anyone named Preston.”

  “…I don’t understand…what—?”

  “Never come back here, tramp!”

  The door slammed.

  They had shipped Preston across the country to finish up at another college in Nevada. That was years and years ago. Where was his daughter today? Preston had never really given it any thought. He went on to postgraduate work in the East, then teaching, building an impressive résumé of being fired from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country. He could pull the hypnosis-for-sex stunt as a student, but it was receiving less than enthusiastic applause now that he was on faculty. Women from other parts of the country began showing up on campus looking for him, pushing strollers. In three short years, he was drummed completely out of the teaching field.

  His life fell apart in short order, and he ended up living in a Reno flophouse working nights and weekends as a dishwasher. He called his parents for money.

  “Didn’t you hear?” said his mother. “We gave it all to the church. And we sold the house, too. We’re going to become missionaries. Isn’t that great news?”

  A week later, Preston saw his first stage hypnotist. He was taking a break from scrubbing tureens, standing in the swinging kitchen doors, watching this incredible guy onstage. Some poor salesman from Omaha was making out with an inflatable woman.

  Preston returned from the men’s room at the Flash in the Pan, tucking in his shirt. An ecstatic teenager emerged behind him and ran to her friends.

  “Scoot over,” said Preston.

  Xolack the Mentalist was onstage bending spoons.

  “How do you do that, anyway?” asked Andy.

  “Do what?” asked Preston.

  “Get all these women to fuck you. I thought you couldn’t get people to do things under hypnosis they wouldn’t do in real life.”

  The audience down the hall grew angry. “Hey! He’s using his hands! He’s not even trying to hide it!”

  “You mean the Svengali effect?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called. I just watch a lot of TV.”

  “The popular notion you can’t get someone to do something against their nature is a myth. If you rearrange the context, you can get anyone to do anything.”

  “Bullshit,” said Spider.

  “True story,” said Preston. “The CIA was messing around with hypnosis about the same time they were losing people out high-rise windows on LSD. They were able to get one of the office secretaries to pick up an unloaded gun, point it at another secretary and pull the trigger.”

  “How do you know they didn’t hate each other?” asked Andy. “Secretaries can be vicious.”

  Preston shook his head. “It’s all documented in government files released under the Freedom of Information Act. These guys were reckless cowboys. They had no idea what they were fooling around with. They should have left this stuff to the universities, where we handled it cautiously and professionally.”

  “By screwing your students?” asked Bruno.

  Preston ignored him. “Did you know you can place a cold needle in the palm of someone’s hand and tell them it’s red-hot, and it will leave a burn mark?”

  “You’ve done that?” asked Saul.

  “Hundreds of times.”

  “People actually leave your stage with burns?”

  Preston nodded proudly.

  “You guys are a bunch of rubes,” said Spider. “I don’t believe any of this hypnosis garbage!”

  Preston whispered: “Parsley.”

  Spider’s eyelids snapped a couple times like he had just awoken from a long nap. He looked around the table. “What’s going on? Why are all of you staring at me like that?”

  The others tried to keep straight faces, but when Andy cracked up, they all fell apart.

  “Is somebody going to tell me what’s going on?” Spider demanded.

  Andy wiped tears of laughter. “Sorry, we’re really laughing with you. Preston hypnotized you to think you were a one-armed juggler…”

  “With a complex,” added Saul.

  “That’s ridiculous!” said Spider. He held out both his arms, like evidence.

  They laughed even harder. “You should have seen yourself,” said Jeff. “Trying to pick fights with everyone, holding one arm behind your back.”

  “You’re making this up! All of you! I’ve never been hypnotized in my life!”

  That just made them laugh more.

  “Who ever heard of a one-armed juggler? Fuck all of you!”

  Spider stood up and marched away from the booth. Preston yelled parsley, and Spider tucked his right arm behind his back and stormed out of the restaurant.

  18

  It was a dark and starry night down the long, straight road through the mangroves, miles from anything. A white Mercedes sat at the dead end.

  Five men in tropical shirts got out of the Benz and went to the trunk. Ivan, Igor, Pavel, Nikita and Leonid, all former KGB now gone freelance, working for themselves in the land of opportunity, most recently running The Palm Reader bookstore in Miami Beach before landing a contract with Mr. Grande. South Florida was a natural fit for them. Lots of ex-spooks around, CIA, MI6, Mossad, and nobody held grudges. Couldn’t afford to. With constantly shifting political terrain, they depended on each other to network for gigs. Still, there was a loose hierarchy. The Russians were considered among the best. Most of them.

  These five began their intelligence careers in different branches of the service, but soon distinguished themselves. Pavel accidentally sat on a plunger, blowing up an elite demolition team. Nikita was the helicopter pilot who misjudged crosswinds during a labor riot and sent a commando unit rappelling down the chimney of a Ukrainian steel foundry. Assigned to protect an emissary to Kazakhstan, Leonid offered him an after-dinner mint—no, wait! That’s my suicide pill! Igor was driving a specially equipped limo in the big May Day parade, past the VIP bleachers on the Kremlin Wall, trying to get something on the radio when he inadvertently flipped up the machine guns and took out the back two rows of a marching band. Their leader was Ivan, who had done something either less stupid or grossly more stupid than the rest. He slept with the wife of someone in the Politburo.

  Only one thing to do with people of such intelligence: put them on the torture squad.

  Ivan’s boys were well suited to their work, able to blithely perform tasks that made even the most veteran agents queasy. After all, someone had to work with the electric prods and p
liers and train the sexual attack dogs. But there were the good times, too. They had been together a decade now, and when they started reminiscing—oh, the memories. Like how about the time Nikita drank too much vodka and passed out and got raped by one of the German shepherds? Whew! They laughed until they cried about that one!

  Tonight would be another for the scrapbook. The Mercedes had made good time across the state and now sat at the end of Cockroach Bay Road on the southeast shore of Tampa Bay. The nearest house was four miles; the only reason the road went this far was to reach one of the most remote boat ramps in the state. There were no streetlights and rarely any traffic this far back except the occasional pickup with blood-spattered upholstery engulfed in flames. You stayed far away from here at night unless you were getting rid of human evidence, which faced accelerated swamp decomposition and what detectives liked to call “animal interference.”

  On this particular evening, all was quiet except croaking frogs and the weeping coming from the trunk of the Mercedes. Ivan unlocked it.

  “But I’m only an insurance adjuster! Please let me go!”

  They carried him to the shore, which had that low-tide smell. They drove long stakes into the muck and began tying the man down.

  “Please don’t kill me!”

  “You work for Buccaneer Life and Casualty?”

  The man nodded.

  “Tell us what we want to know.”

  “But I don’t know anything! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Nikita walked over to Ivan, standing by the Mercedes. Ivan lit a cigar. “Has he said where the five million dollars is yet?”

  “No, but I think he’s about to crack.”

  “What method are you using?”

  “Crabs.”

  Ivan winced. “Terrible way to go.”

  “The worst,” said Nikita. “Let’s go watch.”

  They strolled back over to the insurance man.

  “Tell us what we want to know!” snapped Nikita.

  The man couldn’t stop crying.

  “All right then!” said Nikita. “We’ll just leave you to the crabs!”

  The man whimpered a couple more times, then stopped and looked side to side at the little mangrove crabs dancing around the shore, darting in and out of their sand holes as each wave from the bay advanced and retreated on the rising tide. The insurance man looked up at Nikita. “That’s it?”

  “Don’t even try asking for mercy!”

  “Okay,” said the man.

  “Why isn’t he scared?” Ivan asked Nikita.

  “He’s so scared he’s in shock!”

  Ivan bent over and picked up one of the little crabs, which repeatedly pinched his thumb and forefinger.

  “Watch out!” said Nikita. “Built to scale, those claws have the crushing power of a great white shark!”

  The crab continued pinching Ivan. “I barely feel anything.”

  “Maybe it sliced clean through your nerve endings.”

  “It’s not doing anything.”

  “That’s because it’s just one,” said Nikita. “They’re like piranhas. It’s all in the numbers. Imagine hundreds of those crabs!”

  Ivan stared at his hand. “It’s just leaving little red marks.”

  “But imagine hundreds of little red marks!”

  Ivan smacked Nikita in the back of the head. “You idiot! They’re the wrong kind of crabs!” Ivan pointed at the insurance man. “And he knows it. He lives around here.”

  “What now?”

  “Break into the insurance office,” said Ivan, handing Nikita his car keys. “Get the Mercedes.”

  “Right.” Nikita jumped behind the wheel as the others waited on the side of the mangroves.

  They noticed the Mercedes’s engine was racing, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Does he have it in neutral?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The Mercedes was backed too close to the boat ramp, and the rear tires were spinning on algae.

  “Nikita! Give it more gas!”

  Nikita gave it more gas.

  “I think he’s starting to go backward.”

  The others watched curiously as the sedan slowly slid down the boat ramp and into the water. It was three-quarters under when the panic hit—Nikita struggling in the dark bay with his safety harness and the shorted-out child-safety locks. Then a gun started firing out the roof, letting the air pocket escape, and down she went.

  “Well,” said Ivan. “That was certainly different.” He turned to the adjuster. “You know the way back to town?”

  He nodded.

  “Untie him.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone,” said the adjuster, tied up again, this time to an office chair in the headquarters of Buccaneer Life & Casualty in downtown Tampa.

  The Russians didn’t answer. They dumped out desk drawers, pulled paintings off walls, smashed vases and cut the stuffing out of couches and chairs.

  “What are you looking for? Maybe I can help.”

  No answer. They ripped acoustical tiles from the dropped ceiling and pulled up carpet. They checked the toilet tanks, unscrewed wall sockets. They gouged the drywall with a fire ax. They used an acetylene torch to cut into the plumbing and electrical conduits.

  “No use,” said Igor, wiping insulation dust off his shoulders. “It’s not here.”

  “What’s not here?” asked the adjuster.

  “The file on the five million you paid out in September.”

  “In the filing cabinet.”

  Ivan looked sternly at the others. “You didn’t check the filing cabinet?”

  They removed their hard hats and shrugged.

  Ivan walked over to the cabinet and retrieved the thick file. It had everything—names, dates, addresses, bank accounts. Then it ended abruptly.

  Ivan walked back to the adjuster. “It’s not complete. Just stops cold. There’s no current address for the guy.”

  “I know. He fled. He was last seen at a local bank. Witnesses told police he made a withdrawal and stuffed the money in a silver briefcase.”

  Ivan cursed under his breath and turned to the others. “I thought you interrogated him!”

  “We did.”

  Ivan looked at the adjuster again. “Where is he now?”

  “Six feet under. They never found the briefcase.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Couple months ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In a motel room in Cocoa Beach.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know which motel, would you?”

  “The Orbit. Room two fourteen.”

  “And you just happen to know all this because…?”

  “It was in the papers.”

  Ivan dropped his head in exasperation and closed his eyes. He slowly looked up again. “Why didn’t you tell us this down at the boat ramp? You could have died!”

  “Your guys never asked,” said the adjuster. “They just kept saying, ‘Tell us what you know!’ What the hell does that mean?”

  Ivan looked at the others. “Do we have to go over this every time?”

  “I think it’s a trick,” said Igor, putting his goggles back on and firing up the acetylene torch again. “Pull down his pants. I’ll find out what he really knows.”

  “Igor! Turn that thing off before you hurt yourself!”

  Leonid stepped forward holding the live electrical conduit. “I think Igor’s right. It sounds like a trap. Let me attach these wires to his nuts, just to be safe.”

  “Bend him over,” said Pavel, squeezing the trigger on the concussion drill.

  “I can’t believe you guys!” said Ivan. “You’re the most perverted bastards I’ve ever met! Leonid, what’s with always wanting to put wires on a guy’s nuts?”

  Leonid grinned and blushed. “I’ve never seen it done before.”

  “Can I use the torch if I’m extra careful?” asked Igor.

  “No! No! No!” yelled Ivan, pounding h
is fist on the file cabinet. “We kill him normal! Nothing fancy! Nothing sick! He keeps his pants up! That how all the trouble started last time.”

  The men sagged with disappointment.

  “Igor. Shoot him,” said Ivan.

  “All right,” Igor said reluctantly. He turned the valve on his acetylene torch. Only he turned it the wrong way and a flame shot out and caught some drapes on fire.

  “Sorry.”

  They stood and watched the curtains burn.

  “Is somebody going to put that shit out, or do I have to do everything?” said Ivan.

  Igor grabbed the fire hose off the wall and hit the drapes with a stream of water. He also hit Leonid, holding the five-thousand-volt electrical conduit, who departed the planet in a bright flash and a shower of sparks.

  19

  “We’re in Cocoa Beach,” Ivan said in his cell phone. “We’re at the motel right now, Mr. Grande.” He slid bills through a slot in thick Plexiglas.

  “Yes…. Yes, sir…. As smooth as can be expected, except we lost two men…. No, it couldn’t be helped….”

  Jethro and Paul locked up their motel room and headed out with their silver briefcase. They walked past the office window of the Orbit Motel.

  “I don’t think I can make it,” said Paul. “I’m gonna crack up for sure.”

  “Relaxation,” Jethro said as they reached the edge of A1A. “That’s what golf is all about.”

  The traffic let up and the pair started across the street for the driving range.

  Ivan held the cell phone with one hand and stuck a paper cup under the water cooler with the other. “…Yes, sir…. Yes, sir, Mr. Grande….”

  Pavel tugged on Ivan’s sleeve and pointed out the window.

  “…Yes, sir…. Hold on a second, sir….”

  Ivan covered the phone. “Not now!” He nodded with importance at the phone in his hand. “I’m talking to You Know Who!”

  He uncovered the phone. “No, sir…. There’s no problem….”

  Pavel kept looking out the window and kept tugging. Ivan swatted him away.

  Serge and Lenny locked up their motel room. They ran past the office window.