Free The Mango Opera by Tom Corcoran Page A

eye: COP RISKS LIFE FOR YEARS, STATE SAYS NO THANKS. The opening lines described the revocation of Monty Aghajanian’s badge and his original problem with the car thieves. Perhaps this would shake some action out of Tallahassee. Three cheers for Sam Wheeler.
    Hatch eased himself back into the chair. He pretended to clear his throat and attempted a sympathetic approach. “Tell me about Julia.” He tapped the paper next to her picture. “I want to get a feel for the woman, to understand her personality, her views … enough to consider theories and reject impossibles.”
    “You want the two-hour version?”
    “Five minutes or less.”
    I summoned the daydream. “Where to start? A moral version of the whore with a heart of gold. I mean, she played it tough, streetwise, but she was normal under the facade. Better educated than most of the women who show up in this town. I was around her for a week in ’77 and eleven days’ worth of Mariel Boatlift bullshit in May of 1980. We fell in lust, she went for another guy named Ray Kemp, she lived with him until Mariel, and she went back to Miami. In the mid-eighties she came here with a boyfriend and looked me up. We had rum drinks down at Louie’s on the Afterdeck, said good-bye, and I never heard from her again.”
    “She ever talk about her father’s politics?”
    “Just that he’d been one of Fidel’s boys until the Commies decided that he wasn’t so faithful and put him in the clink. I don’t think we talked about him the last time she was here.”
    Hatch stared off in thought for about fifteen seconds, then heaved himself to his feet, smoothed the wrinkles in his trousers, and readied the cigar he would light the instant he left the porch.
    “Bad things happen in threes,” I said. “You waiting for the third shoe to drop?”
    “You count the dead girl on Stock Island five days ago, you got your three. Or you could count three in one day with that attempted car-jacking yesterday afternoon. You hear about that?”
    I shook my head.
    “Story’s been told fifty times down to the city, and all the deputies got it memorized. Lady at Key Plaza walks out of the pet store. A guy grabs her, he’s waving a big fillet knife, wants her keys and wants her in the car. Cool lady ignores the knife. She unbuttons her blouse to show him her titties. The idiot’s drooling through his fake beard, she nails him with a tear-gas zapper on her key ring.”
    “Catch the guy?”
    “He ran off. Nobody around to chase or identify him except the lady. But like I said, he’s wearing the false beard. She buttons up, walks back in the pet store, and asks them to call the police. Like there was nothin’ to it at all. She’s been in town for years. You know Shelly Standish?”
    I knew Shelly Standish. But I didn’t say so.
    Hatch handed me the cellophane cigar wrapper. “So I won’t litter your yard.” He stepped outside and let the porch door slam.
    He’d walked about fifteen feet when I said, “You recall the victim’s name on Stock Island?”
    Hatch stopped but he was facing downwind, so he didn’t turn. “Sally Ann Guthery. Another one in her late thirties.” He finally fired up his cigar.
    I knew how old she was. Exactly how old she was. A small coincidence we’d discovered. She and I had shared the same birthday. Same date, same year.
    The tall walls that had been crumbling began to fall down on me.

8
    Sam Wheeler swore he would never allow a cellular phone near his skiff unless a client had health problems. “Contrary to bad lyrics and old movie scripts,” he’d said, “you can run and you can hide. Imagine some natty angler on the flats, whispering to his colleagues about rate of return while fifteen permit tail by…”
    To stay in touch with customers and his darling companions—Sam’s term—he kept an old rotary style on the dock, plugged into a jack he’d installed next to his shore power box. When he was on the water he’d stash the phone in a dock