Free SS 18: Shark Skin Suite: A Novel by Tim Dorsey

and depressed economics of the sketchy river district. Spiderweb cracks spread across the old lath-and-plaster walls.
    As the sun reached its zenith, heat seemed to well up from the ground. One of the upstairs transom windows was open, and a large plantation fan whapped out of kilter. Below the fan sat a high-usage oak desk chronicled by numerous overlapping coffee-mug stains. Next to a half-empty bottle of rye were the current tenant’s propped-up feet, wearing old oxfords with an Adlai Stevenson hole in the sole. The office door had a pebbled-glass window with flecked gold lettering: M AHONEY & A SSOCIATE S, P RIVATE I NVESTIGATIONS.
    A single fedora rested atop the hat rack in the corner.
    Mahoney leaned back in his chair and flipped through a deck of playing cards with girlie pictures. Attractive, topless women back when their eating habits were healthy. He slapped down the queen of spades, who covered her key parts with Japanese foldout fans.
    A pith helmet Frisbee’d through the air and landed on the hat rack next to the fedora. Mahoney peered up with a steely glint. “Doctor Livingston, I presume?”
    “What, this?” said Serge, looking down at his new Rudyard Kipling ensemble. His right hand held a capture pole with a rope loop. “It’s my new safari suit.”
    Mahoney flipped over the queen of hearts to find a pinup with a feather boa.
    Serge pointed. “Do I see coffee?” He reached for a cold mug atop another brown desk circle, and drained it in one long guzzle. “So I decided to treat myself to new threads. Bet you’re dying to know why I went with the big-game hunter look. I’ll tell you! Every lawyer and future lawyer needs an exotic sport to cement his image, and I’m going on that big python hunt in the Everglades. But I know what you’re thinking: The python hunt is over—and what a travesty! They barely caught anything. Here we are supposedly in the middle of some apocalyptic invasion of Burmese pythons slithering through the suburbs in such staggering numbers that there must be an eight-hundred-pound snake under every kitchen sink with a poodle-shaped lump in its stomach, and state officials offer eye-popping cash prizes to unleash our entire population, which musters at the rallying points like that scene from Jaws where they post the bounty on the shark, and a million people show up at the docks with ridiculous fishing equipment like axes and shotguns. And then our great python hunt is over, and we only come up with sixty-eight of the suckers. We’ve had more than our share of national shame over the years, but sixty-eight is just embarrassing—”
    Serge was interrupted by a heavy scurrying sound across the floor. Mahoney looked down at the edge of his desk. Coleman crawled around the corner and glanced up with a grimace.
    “Don’t mind him,” said Serge, pouring another mug of coffee from Mahoney’s checkered thermos. “He just received a shipment of drugs from the Internet. I warned him you never know what you’re getting when you order off the Web.”
    Coleman emitted a panicked, scratchy whine, then spun around on his knees and scurried back out of sight.
    Serge chugged the second mug. “I found the box Coleman received in the mail and looked at him: ‘Dude, they’re pet meds. You have heartworms or something?’ But he just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m taking ’em anyway.’ And now we have this.”
    The scurrying sound disappeared down the hallway. The queen of diamonds flipped over.
    Serge slammed the empty mug on the desk. “When we arrived at your office, I got worried because this place was built before modern code enforcement, which means the window ledges are really low and Coleman could easily tumble out. But then I started thinking about the meds he got in the mail and it reminded me of a trick you can play on cats. It’s mean if you actually do it to animals, but it’s an act of mercy where Coleman’s concerned.”
    The scurrying returned from the hall. Coleman