Clownfish Blues

Chapter 24

Midnight

The vintage Florida-shaped sign was dark at the motel, which meant it was open.

Coleman dumped a bag of weed on the dresser of room four. “What are you looking at?”

Serge gazed out the window at the part of the sign advertising color TV. It was one of the old signs where each letter of the word color was a different color. Serge liked that every time. Then he looked back across the room at their own television with thirteen channels of black-and-white snow.

“Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm! . . .”

Coleman removed pot stems and glanced over his shoulder. “I think he wants to tell you something.”

“Almost forgot about him.” Serge returned to the center of the room and the aisle between the two beds, where a chair had been repositioned. In it sat a trim and tanned young man in a golf shirt. Not exactly by choice. Nylon rope fastened his arms and ankles to the chair with complicated nautical knots.

“You talking to me?” asked Serge.

The captive nodded anxiously.

Serge grabbed a corner of the duct tape and quickly ripped it off the mouth. There was a brief scream, but Serge didn’t even notice anymore.

“Please don’t hurt me!”

“Why would I hurt you, boss?”

“I, uh, well, I’m tied up.”

“That’s right, boss.” Serge whacked him upside the head with a rolled newspaper. “Being tied to a chair is a subtle hint that your day probably isn’t building toward the usual laugh track.”

“But why me? What did I ever do to you?”

“Gee, I wonder.” Serge placed a fresh stretch of duct tape across the mouth. “Concentrate hard, boss.”

Coleman began puffing up a spliff as thick as a roll of quarters. “I don’t think calling him boss will make him like you this time.”

“You can never allow jerks to take you out of your game.” Serge set a clipboard down and placed orange cones around the chair.

“Mmmm! Mmmm!”

“Shut the hell up!” Serge pressed the barrel of a pistol against the man’s nose. “Can’t you see I’m conversing!”

Coleman stuck his eye in the opening of an empty prescription bottle. “Serge, you got any more of your pills?”

“You know I never keep count of that junk.”

“Damn.” Coleman began going through a suitcase.

“Why do you take those things anyway?” asked Serge. “It’s my anti-psychotic medication, completely lacking in recreational value.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Coleman. “One of the first rules of the drug culture: A pill is a pill.”

“Mmmmm!”

Serge violently ripped the tape off again. “What now!”

“Y-y-you take anti-psychotic medication?”

“Not for weeks, boss. Nothing to worry about.” Serge pulled something from his pocket. “Now, back to your obvious confusion about this little pinch you’ve found yourself in. Recognize this?”

“Uh, it’s pieces of a cell phone?”

“I smashed it pretty good, but that was post-mortem.”

“Don’t understand.”

“A couple days ago, we were in a bus-stop shelter to escape the rain, and you deliberately swerved your car to spray us with water.”

“I did?”

Another whack with the newspaper. “I can’t begin to emphasize how important that phone was to me. I could look up any Florida historical fact, retrieve photos of the most obscure landmarks, hover over the remotest scenic roads in three dimensions, receive ten parameters of live telemetry from weather buoys in the Gulf Stream, and I even heard a rumor it makes phone calls.”

“Wait a minute,” said the hostage. “You’re the guys I drenched? This is all about a wet phone?”

“I recognized your license plate when you crashed earlier tonight,” said Serge. “‘SCRW U’? So I’m guessing you’re a regular on the dickhead rodeo circuit.”

“It was just a joke.”

“I’m in stitches. Especially the part where you also drenched that mother and her kids.” Serge reached in the dresser and pulled out a plastic spray bottle. “But since you love the art of comedy, I’ve got a better joke.”

“W-what’s in the bottle?”

“Just harmless water.” Serge reached into the dresser again.

“Hey!” yelled the captive. “That’s my new Galactic Quadrennial XLZ5000 smartphone with Triple Vagueness Technology!”

“So it is.” Serge held the phone in one hand and aimed the spray bottle.

Squirt.

“No! Not that!” yelled the man. “I’ll give you anything!”

Squirt.

“Wait! Stop! Before it’s too late!”

“Why should I?”

“Because I have all my contact information in there.”

“My phone did, too,” said Serge.

“Yes, but . . . I’m important.”

Squirt, squirt, squirt, squirt . . .

“No! Stop! It burns!”

Squirt, squirt . . . “Hey, boss,” said Serge. “Did you forget to charge the battery today? The screen just went black.”

“Noooooooooo!” The man hung his head in sorrow. “You destroyed it. You’re mean.”

“Mean?” Serge picked up the pistol again and pointed at himself. “You will soon wax nostalgic for that kind of tenderness.”

“Okay, you got me back. You destroyed my phone.” The captive looked down at the rope around his chest. “We’re even now, so you can untie me.”

“You really are a comedian,” said Serge. “We’ve only begun your lesson.”

Coleman chugged a bottle of Old Crow. “Can I watch this time?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“Cool!” For the occasion, Coleman began constructing an even bigger spliff with a quilt of eight gummed-together rolling papers. “This is going to be so excellent!”

“But you might want to pace yourself,” said Serge. “This is going to take a while.”

“Then we should throw him a going-away party.”

“Brilliant idea!”

Coleman froze. “The world must be coming to an end.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m two-for-two. First, you almost never let me watch. And now, during one of your experiments, we’re also going to party?”

“I always say to enjoy your work.” Serge grabbed his keys. “We need to go shopping. Lead the way.”

“To the Party Store! . . .”

Meanwhile . . .

The condo was new construction with lots of reflective glass that, at the proper angle, appeared a metallic shade of sapphire. In the sales brochures, the window material was touted to cut down on harmful UV rays and unwanted glare so lucky residents could enjoy views of the Atlantic Ocean and Port Everglades. It didn’t mention that in another direction was a very loud international airport.

The current owner of the top-floor penthouse suite was about to have a sit-down meeting. Actually more of a throw-down.

The front door opened with the bluster of involuntary circumstance. “Let go of me!”

Goons held the man fast by both arms. He was a bald sixty-year-old, just under five feet tall, with bronze, cracked skin. He recently learned on an Internet ancestry website that he had one-quarter Argentine blood, which was a pint and half. His doctor told him to eat more fish for iodine. His name was Jacinto. He was still wearing his work shirt with a pink flamingo button: Play the Florida Lottery.

The goons slung him to the floor.

“What’s the meaning of this?” said the old man, sitting up and rubbing his ribs.

The alpha male in the room stood at the tinted windows with his back to everyone, looking out across the ocean. He wore a lightweight pale suit and was known for his dramatic pauses in conversation. His name was Rogan. His dreadlocks reached the middle of his back.

Everyone else knew that this was the part where you didn’t say anything until Rogan spoke first.

Rogan liked ships, for some reason, and kept the rest of the room waiting as he watched a freighter with a Liberian flag clear the inlet. Still looking out the window: “What took you guys so long?”

“Had to search everywhere for him,” said one of the goons. “Found him in an Argentinean seafood restaurant.”

Rogan took a seat on a leather sofa and stared down at his involuntary guest for a short eternity. Finally, an educated voice with a British accent: “You look like you want to say something.”

“You! . . . You killed my nephew!”

“Didn’t realize he was a relation.”

“It’s all over the news,” said Jacinto. “His head wrapped in lottery tickets!”

“My guess would be that someone was trying to send a message.”

The goons chuckled, and Rogan squinted at them from behind designer prescription glasses. They settled down. He removed the glasses, which put the goons in motion. One helped the diminutive man into a chair while the other poured him a stiff three fingers of rum.

Jacinto took the glass in trembling hands and sipped. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

Rogan leaned quietly. “What part of our agreement did you not understand?”

“He was just making a little on the side.” Jacinto blew his nose. “All the other stores do the same ticket-scan trick.”

“I’m sure you remember our agreement. And the agreement hinged on making sure that everything else you did would be totally legal, beyond scrutiny, because the last thing in the world we wanted was even the slightest bit of attention,” said Rogan. “It might just be me, but I thought I had made myself quite clear on the importance of that particular detail.”

Jacinto nodded obediently. “You did.”

A fist came down hard on the arm of the sofa. “Then why the fuck am I out seventeen stores that are on every TV channel? And you have the stones to accuse me about your cousin?”

“His nephew,” said a goon.

“Shut up!”

The goon lowered his chin, trying to hide in his chest.

“Now then, Jacinto, do I not pay you enough? Do I stutter? Do I look funny to you? I’m just trying to understand the lack of respect.”

Jacinto sat mute, offering up respect in spades.

“Let’s get back to live programming,” said Rogan. “The only reason that it’s just your nephew—and not you as well—who’s unavailable to join us so enjoyably today is because you have other stores. I need those stores. And I need all the other stores. I need you to see how serious I am.”

Indeed, those stores conducted a bustling brokerage business in buying up winning tickets for a percentage. But they also accomplished something of greater importance to Rogan.

Money laundering.

There are a number of reasons why people launder money: avoid taxes, creditors, ex-spouses who threw all their clothes on the lawn. But Rogan was happily married, had no debt and paid the IRS in full. Rogan made his particular fortune from the import-export business. Drugs came in; money went the other way. It was all part of a larger Jamaican organization out of Kingston, which had embedded Rogan in the Fort Lauderdale condo. He specialized exclusively in making dirty cash sparkle.

Rogan had begun by washing his funds the traditional way through various banks around Miami, because that’s what they were there for. Then drug enforcement agents clamped down, and the white-collar class who kept bankers’ hours caught a severe case of testifying. So Rogan and the others in his field had to improvise. First they moved down the financial food chain to check-cashing parlors, but that still generated too wide a paper trail for the growing law enforcement field called forensic accounting. A colleague named Hingis was doing life in the Atlanta federal pen for that one. They tried used-car lots and sandwich shops and dry cleaners, and that worked to a point—that point being more people went to jail.

Then came the lottery explosion. It all began by act of legislature in 1988, which seemed to dovetail nicely with the end of the cocaine explosion. Even the state wasn’t prepared. They started with a small series of simple games, and had to keep adding and adding to feed the insatiable appetite of a gambling tapeworm the size of the monsters from Dune. More games debuted. Lucky Money, Mega Millions, Cash 3. And extra drawings during the week, and more drawings within a single day, and so many scratch-off tickets that they were ending up in birthday cards and Christmas stockings. Nothing was ever enough.

This is how serious the fever got. It was enough to sustain a lottery magazine on how to beat the odds. At first blush, it sounds absurd because as any roulette player can tell you, past performance has no bearing on future random outcome. So here’s what the editors did: They bought all kinds of Ping-Pong balls and extremely accurate scientific scales. They were able to detect excruciatingly tiny, but nevertheless distinguishable manufacturing variations in the weights of the balls. Then they tracked the frequency of winning numbers, correlated weights, and published the results. Over the long haul, the numbers became less random. Jacinto carried the magazines in his stores.

And now, with so many people playing the legal numbers racket at such a crazed rate, money launderers had the perfect cash blizzard to hide inside. What better way to explain unexplained income? Word spread from Miami to Bogotá, Barranquilla and Bolivia. Planes began landing.

“. . . One thing you probably didn’t realize,” Rogan told Jacinto. “The day your store was raided, some agents also paid me a visit. Can you comprehend how upset that makes me? . . . Please nod once for yes.”

Jacinto did.

“They asked many prying questions about my livelihood,” said Rogan. “I do not regularly have people interrupt my lunch with such questions. Do you know why?”

Jacinto shook his head.

“Because I’m a careful man. I have a careful life. Such a thing requires much time and effort,” said Rogan. “And all that work was undone the minute you started scamming scratch-offs. They’ve identified most of our straw buyers and are attempting to connect them back to me. But in the end, they will have nothing. Do you know why they will have nothing?”

“Uh, because you’re a careful man?”

“Because they will no longer be able to locate any of the straw buyers.”

Gulp.

“You are beginning to understand,” said Rogan. “I simply asked that my instructions be followed, but you did not follow them, and now somewhere in some office, they have started a file with my name on it. I like that even less than interrupted lunch. From now on you will follow my instructions, and you will not be told again . . . You may nod now.”

Jacinto nodded fast.

“That is very good,” said Rogan. “You may stop nodding . . . Now then, I have another piece of business in which you might be useful. I have begun noticing a drop in brokered tickets, even before all these raids. Not much of a decrease, but enough that it’s no accident. And in my business experience, that usually means one thing. Someone is moving in on my territory. That is not a good thing. You wouldn’t happen to be involved, would you?”

“No! I swear!” Trembling again as Jacinto downed the rest of his drink. “I would never! . . .”

Time for one of Rogan’s dramatic pauses, which caused the old man to suddenly become verbally incontinent. “On my mother’s grave! I give you my word! Please! Listen! I heard some talk on the street! Some people are going elsewhere! I don’t know where! I didn’t know anything. You have to believe me!”

“Talk on the street?” Rogan said calmly. “That is very interesting. What else did this talk indicate?”

“Nothing!” said Jacinto. “All I heard is that some lawyer is supposedly behind it. Someone trusted in the Latin community. That’s it!”

“See how easy that was?” Rogan turned toward two of the goons. “Check out this talk on the street. I would like to have an appointment with this attorney.”

The pair raced out of the room.

“My day is improving,” Rogan told the old man. “That is a good thing . . . But you still seem to have a look on your face.”

Jacinto desperately tried to change the look on his face so that it was no look, but that just made it a bigger look.

“I think I get it now,” said Rogan. “You have one last question: Of all the stores that were raided, why did my nephew have to be the one to pay? . . . Go ahead, ask.”

“W-w-why did my nephew have to pay?”

“Because he was on TV.”