Carl Hiaasen – Native Tongue

Sitting in Kingsbury’s house, it gave him great comfort to feel again these magnificent potent chemicals flooding his system. With nourishment came strength, and with strength came confidence. Pedro Luz was afraid of nothing. He felt like stepping in front of a speeding bus, just to prove it.

Churrito pointed at the intravenous rig and said: “Even monkeys aren’t that stupid.”

“Put a lid on it,” Pedro growled. He thought: No wonder these dorks lost the war.

“Stuff make you bulls shrink up. Dick get leetle tiny.” Churrito seemed unconcerned by the volcanic mood changes that swept over Pedro Luz every few hours. To Francis Kingsbury he said, “Should see the zits on his cholders.”

“Some other time,” Kingsbury said. “You guys, now, don’t get into it. There’s work to do—I want these assholes off my back, these fucking burglars, and I want the files. So don’t start up with each other, I mean, save your energy for the job.”

Pedro Luz said, “Don’t worry.”

The phone rang and Kingsbury snatched it. The call obviously was long-distance because Kingsbury began to shout. Something about a truck accident ruining an important shipment of fish. The caller kept cutting in on Kingsbury, and Kingsbury kept making half-assed excuses, meaning some serious money already had changed hands.

When Kingsbury hung up, he said, “That was Hong Kong. Some cat-food outfit, I set up this deal and it didn’t work out. What the hell, they’ll get their dough back.”

“My uncle had a fish market,” remarked Pedro Luz. “It’s a very hard business.”

Without warning Mrs. Kingsbury came into the room. She wore terry-cloth tennis shorts and the top half of a lime-colored bikini. She nodded at Churrito, who emitted a low tomcat rumble. Pedro Luz glowered at him.

She said, “Frankie, I need some money for my lessons.”

Under his breath, Churrito said, “I give her some lessons. Chew bet I will.”

Kingsbury said, “I just gave you—was it yesterday?—like two hundred bucks.”

“That was yesterday.” Mrs. Kingsbury’s eyes shifted to Pedro Luz, and the bottle of fluid on the hanger. “What’s the matter with him?” she asked.

“One of them crash diets,” said her husband.

Churrito said, “Yeah, make your muscles get big and your dick shrivel up like a noodle.”

Pedro Luz reddened. “It’s vitamins, that’s all.” He gnawed anxiously on the end of the tube, as if it were a piece of beef jerky.

“What kind of vitamins?” asked Kingsbury’s wife.

“For men,” said Pedro Luz. “Men-only vitamins.”

As always, it was a test to be in the same room with Mrs. Kingsbury and her phenomenal breasts. Pedro Luz had given up sex three years earlier in the misinformed belief that ejaculation was a waste of precious hormones. Somehow, Pedro Luz had acquired the false notion that semen was one-hundred-percent pure testosterone, and consequently he was distraught when a popular weightlifter magazine reported that the average sexually active male would squirt approximately 19.6 gallons in a lifetime. For a fitness fiend such as Pedro Luz, the jism statistic was a shocker. To expend a single pearly drop of masculine fuel on a recreational pleasure was frivolous and harmful and plainly against God’s plan; how could it do anything but weaken the body?

As it happened, Pedro Luz’s fruit-and-steroid diet had taken the edge off his sex drive anyway. Abstinence had not proved to be difficult, except when Mrs. Kingsbury was around.

“I don’t like needles,” she announced. “I don’t like the way they prick.”

Again Churrito began to growl lasciviously. Pedro Luz said, “After a while, you don’t even notice.” He showed Mrs. Kingsbury how the IV rig moved on wheels.

“Like a shopping cart,” she said gaily. Her husband handed her a hundred-dollar bill and she waved goodbye.

There she goes,” Kingsbury said. “Pedro, did you show your little buddy the golf painting? The one we did at Biltmore?”

“I saw,” Churrito said. “In the living room.”

“Those are the real McCoys,” said Kingsbury.

Churrito looked perplexed. “McCoys?”

“Her tits, I mean. How you say, hoot-aires? Kingsbury cackled. “Now, about this afternoon, these assholes—I’m not interested in details. Not at all interested.”

That was fine with Pedro Luz. He’d skipped the details the last time, too, when they had roughed up the old lady at the condo. Although Churrito had nagged him to lighten up, the beating had been therapeutic for Pedro, a venting of toxic brain fumes. Like the rush he got while pinching the heads off Joe Winder’s goldfish.

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