Have Cigar, Will Travel

Chapter 1

Boggles

Mike couldn’t resist. He stood at the end of his futon barefoot, in khaki cargos and an untucked, faded Flying Lizard raceteam tee holding his iPhone and a holstered .45 caliber Springfield in his left hand. Down below, poking out from under his comforter: the scrubbed-pink bottom of a women’s slender size 10. He just couldn’t resist.

Reaching down his free hand, Mike played the high-arched foot bottom as if he were plucking a violin’s strings—pizzicato—and watched with suppressed laughter as the pink skin wrinkled, the peaked, nicely tapered toes curled and the foot retracted, briefly, under the covers like a Florida snapper turtle’s head inside its shell. Seconds later, and still smiling, Mike watched the involuntary foot ease back out into view, partly. Mike took pity and tugged the comforter down to cover it from a raging A/C’s frigid air thinking, Goddamn. Even this girl’s toes are cute.

He let Helen sleep, however, with only a passing second thought about early-morning sex, went to the bedroom door, pried it open already hissing Shhhhh! to his waiting—eagerly waiting—friends and quietly pressed the door closed behind him before dropping to his knees.

On their first night together Mike had apologized to Helen for the noisy bedroom air conditioner. But it turned out his new girlfriend liked it. Its white noise helped her sleep and, more importantly, its rattle drowned out the scratching of four sets of nails that usually began around 6:45 a.m. Mike didn’t need an alarm clock. He had two dogs.

Gypsy, the smiling dog Mike now held in a playful headlock—she loved to wrestle—was a stray 65-pounder he’d found on Tampa’s Hillsborough Avenue one day a couple of years back. Gypsy had a smooth red-brown coat with a ridge down her back that stood up when she got angry or territorial—which was usually at the sight of any other dog within 100 meters of where she happened to be standing. People often asked if Gypsy was a Rhodesian Ridgeback but, in actuality, she was just a God-only-knows-what mutt. Obviously she’d just recently had a litter of pups when Mike found her and, as his saintly West Tampa vet Dr. Barck—no, really—explained at the time, it wasn’t uncommon for people to keep the puppies and pitch the mother. After all, the mother dog wasn’t cute anymore. At any rate Mike found the now-named Gypsy running frantically across a strip-center parking lot that October day. She looked lost and, well, frantic. But when Mike whistled to her, the dog’s ears perked and her brown eyes met his with a doleful look that said, pled: Will you help me? Will you save me from this awful fate? Please. When Mike whistled the dog, smiling gratefully, ran straight to him. How many strays do that? This is going to be a great dog, Mike thought at the time, tousling her head much as he was doing right now. Besides it was Mike’s birthday. And Gypsy would turn out to be the best gift he’d ever received. Not that he had anyone to thank for it, except possibly the dog gods.

There was only one problem. Gypsy, it turned out, had heartworms. Her condition was treatable, and she was now cured of them obviously, but the whole thing set him back about $800, and several weeks of anxiety trying to keep a grateful, happy, excitable young dog quiet and calm while her heart got rid of its demons. It was the old story. One day Mike was rescuing a dog or cat he’d never laid eyes on before; the next he was shelling out hundreds of dollars to make them healthy again. Not that he ever begrudged the critters, or Dr. Barck. What he begrudged was shelling out $35 for a copay to a human doctor who invariably told him his two-week flu symptoms were in their latter stages and didn’t warrant antibiotics; go home and take some Tylenol. Sniff.

In contrast to Gypsy, Shane, Mike’s other dog, was royalty. He was a full-blooded Rough Collie—a Lassie dog—that weighed 100 pounds. Mike’s current set of wheels included, Shane was the most beautiful thing he’d ever owned. Not that Shane was a thing and not that Mike owned him. They were best friends, sharing the same house, that’s all. Shane had arthritic hips (more vet bills!) and was something of a moocher but…in addition to his beauty, Shane was perhaps the sweetest creature, human, canine or otherwise, Mike had ever known in his 34 years on earth. Mike was Shane’s third owner and the fact that two other members of the human race had turned this giant sweetheart away, out of their self-centered lives, boggled Mike’s mind. Was the dog too big for them? Were his creaky hips too much for them to care for? Did it bother them when, seated at the dinner table, Shane rested his long triangular chin on their thigh and looked up at them with baleful brown eyes while his wet nose pulsed warm breath—one of Shane’s most endearing traits in Mike’s book. Want a piece of steak, baby? Of course you can have a piece of my steak! You want one too, Gyps? Sit! (Gypsy didn’t know how to sit.) But then again Mike was a sucker when it came to animals, and not a Boggle.

As in boggles the mind. It was a term an increasingly cynical Mike had coined for the human race: Boggles. Loosely translated as…Fucking Assholes. And it was the reason that Mike Shoemaker, private investigator, Tampa, Florida and environs, had no inhibitions about charging his clients the rates he did. And furthermore now commanded. I’m not a charity organization, Mike would tell a first-timer. Which was another way of saying: Take it or leave it. I couldn’t care less. What, you married a blonde trophy wife half your age and now you think she’s cheating on you? Gee, imagine that. You wrote your prodigal son out of your will and now he’s threatening to blackmail you over some indiscretion in your past? Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Your alcoholic daughter’s gone missing and, having neglected her for the thirty-some-odd years of her life you now have no earthly idea where she might be? Or why she ran off? My rate is $50,000 for such cases, with $25,000 up front. My attorney Stuart Kent will draw up the contract. I have a rather expensive Italian sports car at the moment and your down-payment will pay off the balance of the loan, thank you very much. I’ll have your daughter back to you in two weeks, assuming she’s still among the living. Or in one identifiable piece.

But at the moment on this Tuesday morning, Mike wasn’t thinking about Boggles. He had a superior species to walk, and they were already scratching at the paned front door of his little Seminole Heights bungalow. But first he had to plug his iPhone in and leave it on the kitchen counter, because of its faint pulse of a charge. And then he had to clip his concealed Springfield to his belt, under his black tee. Mike had made more than a few enemies over the past few years. You never know…

Shouting in whisper, for Helen’s sake, Let’s go for a walk! Mike hooked leashes to Shane and Gypsy’s tagged collars and led them, or was led rather, through the door, across the screened porch to its unlocked screened door, down three concrete steps to the walkway and from there to the sidewalk, the fringe of grass and Crest Avenue in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood.

From there the threesome turned left, toward the Hillsborough River.

Chapter 2

Symbols

One morning about five years ago B.D. (Before Dogs) Mike was walking through wet grass along the inner edge of the little ribbon park across the road from his house. It was a Sunday. The sky was grey, the river, flowing just to his right, was grey. Mike’s mood was grey.

He’d had his own one-horse private investigation firm for two years now. Prior to that, following his discharge from the Army, Mike had worked two years for a start-up security consulting firm with offices out on Rocky Point, on the edge of Tampa Bay. The company’s founder and president was one of Mike’s former C.O.’s. This gig followed four years of living dangerously in wonderful travel destinations such as the mountains of Afghanistan and the sinus-drying climate of central and southern Iraq. Oh joy. Prior to the Army Mike had spent four rather rudderless years in college, graduating from the U with a bachelor’s in beer consumption and business administration. Which is to say a degree, left by itself, that was about as useless as one in English, or philosophy. Or basket-weaving. Earning a Master’s seemed to lie inevitably in his path but the thought of spending yet another two years in school made Mike gag. So he took the summer of 2001 off and went sun-bathing. Often in the nude.

To earn spending money he took a job, if you can call it that, his parents certainly didn’t, at a big-box bookstore. Why a bookstore? Mike assumed it had something to do with the fact that English, not his boring business classes, had been his favorite subject in college. That and philosophy. Two real practical subjects. Or it may’ve been due to the fact that he still had a massive crush on his drop-dead gorgeous second-semester freshman English instructor April Quinones. A headshot of the beautiful blonde with the to-die-for legs had once appeared in a campus magazine, and Mike had cut it out and tucked it inside his wallet. He’d carried it into battle with him. She was to die for, literally.

And she taught English at Miami-Dade Community College, right? English teachers read books! Maybe, in line with his recurring fantasies, she’d come in the store one day and he’d, by chance, bump into her. But my last name isn’t Quinones anymore, she’d inform him. I’m divorced. Heaven! I’m 21 now! I’m a man!

All Mike’s latent adolescent fantasies ended on a Tuesday morning in September when Clare, a semi-cute co-worker whom he’d fucked a few times, came running up to him at the book-search computer station and said, in a panic: Mike!...They’ve flown planes into the World Trade Center!...It’s a terrorist attack! Adding, oddly and irrationally: Do something!

It wasn’t so odd after all. In fact he took Clare’s advice. The next day Mike eschewed his minimum-wage job at Barnes and Noble and waited outside the South Miami Army recruiting office until they opened at ten. Then he did what his father had done before him, and his grandfather and great-grandfather before him. He enlisted.

It was time to play grown-up.

Four years later Mike was discharged as a 1st Lieutenant with a Silver Star. Had he stayed in he easily would have made captain, and then major. But the idea of becoming an Army lifer appealed to him about as much as grad school. So he accepted the offer to move to Tampa and work for his old Army boss’s security company. It was easy work and the pay was good, and his duties alternated between making Powerpoint pitches to corporate decision makers and standing behind a skirted folding table handing out business cards and glossy flyers at conventions in places like Las Vegas and Seattle. The job picture his former C.O. had painted for him in the beginning, a picture that’d seemed as seductive and soothing as a Renoir nude following four years of brutal warfare, soon began to chafe however. He missed the action. Some action. Any form of action.

He even contemplated re-enlisting. It wasn’t like Bush’s wars were going to end anytime soon. Then one day, by chance, he found himself having drinks with three middle-aged guys who’d had the neighboring table display back on the convention floor. It turned out they ran a private investigation/security consulting firm in upstate New York. The more they drank and the drunker they got, the heavier they pitched the idea of Mike coming to work for them. They were looking for young blood. The work would occasionally—though not always—be exciting and—best of all—he’d get to carry a gun. Whadda you say, dude? All you’ve got to do is pick up and move to Buffalo, New York.

Mike passed. But it planted a tropical seed. He’d socked some money away by now. Why not start up his own investigation company in his adopted city of Tampa? He discussed the idea with his old highschool buddy Stuart Kent. Stuart had set up his own law practice in Tampa after graduating from Stetson Law School. Stuart and his partner sometimes needed investigation work done. He promised to throw anything that came along Mike’s way.

This is great! Mike thought. I’ll be my own boss. There’ll be occasional danger. I’ll get to carry a gun! It’ll be like Iraq…just without the asshole Baathists.

Two years in Mike was having serious second thoughts, however. A guy had charged him fifteen-hundred bucks to create a website, and he got the occasional email or phone call and worked the even less occasional divorce case. But it was nothing like he’d envisioned. True to his word, Stuart hired him to do investigative work for his firm from time to time. But more and more lately Mike got the feeling his old friend was throwing him bones—scraps—anything!—just because he felt sorry for him. It was humiliating. Mike’s patience with himself was growing thin, and his bank account thinner. 2008 was right around the corner and times were getting desperate.

Mike even went so far as to contact his old boss at the security firm and float the idea of coming back to work for him. His former C.O. was receptive to the idea—conditionally. Mike would have to sign a contract committing himself to an employment period of a minimum of five years; otherwise he’d incur a hefty financial penalty. And all that hopeful business about being his own man? He could fucking kiss it goodbye.

So Mike was walking through the wet grass that Sunday morning along the grey Hillsborough river mulling over his grey future when, at his back, there was a splash. Not a leaping-bass kind of splash but one caused by something much bigger. That’s an understatement. It was the kind and size of splash an obese man in XXL trunks makes belly-flopping into a pool. Mike wheeled and watched thinking: gator. What else could it be? He’d never seen a fresh-water alligator up here, in river’s brackish reaches, but you never know. Gators can be found anywhere in west-central Florida, including strolling down a subdivision sidewalk or devouring one’s backyard shih tzu.

Mike walked to river’s very edge, left hand crossing over to his right hip’s concealed Springfield, just in case, and waited for a long, tail-wagging, green-black prehistoric exoskeleton to surface about twenty meters distant, at river’s midpoint. But…nothing. Another of nature’s mysteries. Mike shrugged. Turned to the south, resumed his troubled walk. Where was I…?

Two steps in there was another splash. Mike wheeled right again. This time I’m watching till I see the fucking thing, Mike told himself. He also now realized the sounds were coming from further out in the river than he first realized. He watched. He waited. Then, finally, he saw it. It was right in front of him about 30 meters’ out.

A blueish-grey dorsal fin broke the surface. The fin’s back was curved, its tip rounded. It was a dolphin. A dolphin had swum five miles up the Hillsborough River from its end point at Tampa Harbor! Mike watched in amazement as fin broke the surface again. A second later, slightly farther out, it surfaced again. Wait a minute, Mike thought. How could it…?

Fin followed fin again. There were two. Two of them. Two dolphins! Swimming side by side northbound, upriver. What an incredible sight!

Mike’s hands were shaking as he got out his flip-phone and speed-dialed the TPD non-emergency number. A sergeant answered and Mike told his amazing—amazing to him, at least—story.

Well, they can’t go any further than Hillsborough Avenue, the cop correctly pointed out, cause of the dam. They’ll be OK. They’ll turn around and find their way out. At any rate, it’s Sunday. There’s nothing we can do.

Useless, Mike thought, snapping his phone shut and pocketing it. He wasn’t so sure—about the OK part, that is. There was no posted speed limit along this stretch of the river and Mike had seen enough assholes in speedboats, not to mention one guy who owned a small hydroplane, bouncing through the very center lane of the river the two dolphins now jointly occupied, to worry their carcasses might just wash up at water’s edge tomorrow sliced through by propeller blades. Mike watched the beautiful creatures a moment longer before turning and walking home. He very much did not want to witness the potential tragic end of today’s miracle.

The red light was blinking on the wall-mounted landline when