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

crawled back around the desk. Mahoney noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt. A long strip of duct tape ran down the length of his back.
    “Serge, help!” said Coleman. “I’m stuck underneath something really low.”
    “You’re doing fine,” said Serge. “Just proceed as you are and you’ll be out from below it in no time.”
    “Thanks, Serge.” The crawling noise returned to the hall.
    “No window falls for Coleman today.” Serge stood and gathered his capture stick. “Well, snakes are a-waitin’ . . .” He scratched his temple with the end of the pole. “But I’m a kill-free animal lover, so what will I do with the hundreds of Burmese pythons I’m sure to nab?” He stopped scratching and grabbed his pith helmet off the hat rack. “Guess I’ll mail them back to Burma.”
    A black rotary desk phone rang.
    Mahoney let it ring at least nine times, as he always did, because an answered phone held finite possibilities. But a ringing phone was limited only by imagination, and Mahoney dreamed out loud: “Foggy piers, leggy dames, filterless cigarettes, brass knuckles, a lake being dragged, a villain with a monocle, a hooker trying to better herself with typing classes . . .”
    “Jumping Judas!” yelled Serge. “Answer the thing already! You don’t know how batshit that makes me!”
    Mahoney sneered and grabbed the receiver. “It’s your dime. Start gargling . . .”
    “Please, we need your help. Last Saturday night . . .”
    “The story had all the elements,” said Mahoney. “Sympathetic victim, ruthless grifters, juicy revenge angle. I snagged a fresh toothpick and chewed on the tearjerker until my pie hole had the taste of a stripper’s breath after a week’s run on the broken dreams end of Reno, and my guts twisted up like the inside of the same stripper’s stomach after the ninety-nine-cent sunrise special in a Hoboken hash house . . .”
    On the other end of the line: “What?”
    “We’ll take the case.” He hung up.
    Serge was waiting. “Are you going to tell me?”
    “Park the caboose.”
    Serge sat down again. Mahoney laid out the tribulations of his newest client.
    Serge leaped to his feet. “That son of a bitch! Where did this happen?”
    “Cigar City.”
    Serge ripped the duct tape off Coleman’s back, and they split for Tampa.
    SOUTHWEST FLORIDA
    An eighteen-foot fishing boat idled without wake down a canal that threaded between the backyards of some of the earliest ranch homes in the state.
    The couple in the boat were the Loseys. The name on the boat’s stern: T HE L OW S EAS. Another day in retirement paradise. The couple chatted about an item in the morning paper on the death of an original Tarzan chimp near Orlando. They passed a home with a protest sign on its seawall: P ICK O N S OMEONE IN Y OUR O W N T AX B RACKET .
    The boat reached the end of the canal and throttled up the Caloosahatchee River. “I didn’t know chimps lived that long.” The river led to the Gulf of Mexico and many of the finest mangrove fishing grounds surrounding the islands of Lee County, home of Thomas Edison and the “World’s Largest Shell Factory.”
    More and more boats headed down the canals and merged in the tributary, which was spanned by several large bridges that connected Fort Myers to Cape Coral. Most local residents didn’t even know it, but Cape Coral is the largest city between Tampa and Miami, in terms of square miles, which was 120. Of greater note are its 400 miles of canals, more than any other city in the world, including Venice. Pet reptiles have gotten loose and multiplied.
    It was a planned city, designed to attract northern retirees with all those canals. About half the place was filled out by people who decided their golden years needed a boat. The rest of the city is still waiting. That’s mainly the west side, where platted streets have occasional houses between large fields. It’s also the part of town where the most well-known thoroughfare is called