Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones by Levine, Paul (best fiction books to read TXT) 📗

said, plopping down in one of the two matching client chairs, the oak armrests stained by years of sweaty palms.

Oh, the vegans. No animal products whatsoever, including dairy, eggs, and honey. I pictured a bunch of skinny busybodies, eating their tofu and raising hell with your basic steak-and-lobster guys such as my very own carnivorous self.

"What do you have for me?" I asked.

She consulted her pad. "Roberto Condom is in the waiting room," she said, stifling a laugh. "With all the legal work you do for him, you'd think he'd ask for a name change, too."

"What's wrong with 'Roberto'?"

She wrinkled her nose at me. Droll wit is so seldom appreciated. "Anyway, you gotta get moving," Cindy ordered. "You've got Rusty MacLean at three, his place. Then Christina Bernhardt at five, her place."

"Very funny, Cindy."

Chrissy's place was the Women's Detention Center, where she was being held without bond. At least for now.

"Bobby, you look great!"

"No sé, Jake. They want to revoke my probation."

"What? Are you looting lobsters again?"

My client gave me his pained look. "Jake, mi amigo, I was setting them free from their traps. Don't you remember our defense?" He let his voice slip into a pretty fair impression of my impassioned closing argument. "Roberto Condom, protector of the environment, friend of flora and fauna, mammal and crustacean alike."

"We might have won," I reminded him, "if the Marine Patrol hadn't found three hundred deceased lobsters iced down in your pickup truck."

Roberto shrugged. That's life. He was in his mid-thirties, toreador thin, with slicked-back black hair, a pencil mustache, and long curving sideburns that resembled the blade of a scythe. He wore a bird's-egg-blue linen shirt with puffy sleeves, and pleated white slacks. Though he looked like a gigolo in a 1940s movie, Roberto Condom was more at home in a swamp than in St. Moritz.

As a thief, Roberto was a specialist, and his especialidad was stealing living things. He never boosted a car, but he had rustled cattle from ranches near Ocala. He never rifled a cash register, but he had once broken into a pet store and stolen every tropical fish in the place. He poached sea turtle eggs, which he could sell for a hundred bucks a pop to botánicas in Little Havana where they were believed to be aphrodisiacs, water spider orchids from Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, and live ostrich chicks from Lion Country Safari. At this very moment, Roberto Condom was wearing hand-sewn ostrich-skin cowboy boots that would run you a thousand bucks, unless you brought your own ostriches to the bootmaker.

Roberto disdained mundane crime, especially drug dealing. Which was how I'd gotten him off when a partner double-crossed him and stuffed condoms—yeah, I know—filled with cocaine inside seven hundred boa constrictors Roberto was smuggling into the country. Before the boas left Bogotá, someone had jammed the packets of cocaine inside their rectums, then sewed the orifices shut, a job I have never seen advertised in the "Help Wanted" section. When the constipated and ornery snakes were discovered by Customs, Roberto was charged with drug importation as well as cruelty to animals. Roberto showed up for trial with Bozo, his pet six-foot boa, curled around his neck, pleading that he loved snakes and would never do such a thing. The jury was out only twenty minutes, and Roberto walked. At Christmas, I was rewarded with a snakeskin jacket that looked familiar, but it took me three months to figure out that I hadn't seen Bozo in a while.

"So if it's not lobsters, what?" I asked. "Stone crabs, sponges, starfish, wood storks? You're not stealing live coral from Pennekamp Park, are you?"

"Jake!" Again feigning insult. Then he fingered his necklace of alligator teeth, and I knew.

"Gators. You're poaching in the Everglades."

"Chíngate! I'm no poacher. I have a license."

"Which limits you to six gators a season."

"Six," he sniffed. "How can a man make a living? I get two hundred dollars a hide, then some fancy store in Bal Harbour sells one purse for twenty times that."

"Nobody said life is fair."

"Verdad. Even if you shoot a big caimán right in the eye, it'll flop around in your boat for hours. You gotta stick a wire in its spine to kill it, and then you'll be up to your knees in gator shit."

"If that's an invitation to your next hunt, forget it."

"I'm just saying that your everyday working guy like me has it tough."

"Okay, so you're Lunch-Bucket Jose. How many hides they catch you with?"

"Solamente fifty-seven."

"Jeez, a serial poacher."

"Three days' work. This time of year, it should be more like a hundred. I tell you something funny. The water level's been down in the Glades for six months."

" 'Course it has. It's the end of the dry season. Wait a few weeks, and it'll rain every dog day afternoon."

"Yeah, but the dry season hasn't been that dry this year. Something's screwy. The gator holes are parched. Damn few turtles and ducks for them to eat, and fishing's shot to hell. I called the Water Management Office, pretended to be one of those Audubon Society types. They said they'd look into it, but you know how government is."

I filed the information away in one of the dusty recesses of my mind, wondering how we would use it. As usual, my client was a step ahead of me.

"So I'm thinking, Jake, maybe I was doing the gators a favor."

"How, by plugging them through the eye with a three hundred Weatherby?"

"Beats starving to death, verdad? Jeez, I'm just speeding evolution along. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, in a way, I'm a visionary, ahead of my time."

I remembered what Charlie had said about Chrissy's case. "So what do you want, Bobby—probation, community service?"

"Hell, no! I'm a goddamn hero. They should give me a medal."

Cheekbones and Chic Bones

So-Be-Mo," Rusty MacLean said, giving each syllable a little push. "South Beach Models. Catchy, no?"

"Catchy, yes," I agreed.

We were sitting in his office on the third floor of an Ocean Drive Art Deco