Four days after the Mafia man came to murder him, Mick Stranahan got up early and took the skiff to the marina. There he jump-started his old Chrysler Imperial and drove down to Gables-by-the-sea, a ritzy but misnomered neighborhood where his sister Kate lived with her degenerate lawyer husband and three teenaged daughters from two previous marriages (his, not hers). The subdivision was nowhere near the ocean but fronted a series of man-made canals that emptied into Biscayne Bay. No one complained about this marketing deception, as it was understood by buyers and sellers alike that Gables-by-the-sea sounded much more toney than Gables-on-the-Canal. The price of the real estate duly reflected this exaggeration.
Stranahan’s sister lived in a big split-level house with five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a putting green in the yard. Her lawyer husband even bought a thirty-foot sailboat to go with the dock out back, although he couldn’t tell his fore from his aft. The sight of the sparkling white mast poking over the top of the big house made Stranahan shake his head as he pulled into the driveway—Kate’s husband was positively born for South Florida.
When Stranahan’s sister came to the door, she said, “Well, look who’s here.”
Stranahan kissed her and said, “Is Jocko home?”
“His name’s not Jocko.”
“He’s a circus ape, Katie, that’s a fact.”
“His name’s not Jocko, so lay off.”
“Where’s the blue Beemer?”
“We traded it.”
Stranahan followed his sister into the living room, where one of the girls was watching MTV and never looked up.
“Traded for what?”
“A Maserati,” Kate said, adding: “The sedan, not the sporty one.”
“Perfect,” Stranahan said.
Kate made a sad face, and Stranahan gave her a little hug; it killed him to think his little sister had married a sleazeball ambulance chaser. Kipper Garth’s face was on highway billboards up and down the Gold Coast—”If you’ve had an accident, somebody somewhere owes you money!!! Dial 555-TORT.” Kipper Garth’s firm was called The Friendly Solicitors, and it proved to be a marvelously lucrative racket. Kipper Garth culled through thousands of greedy complainants, dumping the losers and farming out the good cases to legitimate personal-injury lawyers, with whom he would split the fees fifty-fifty. In this way Kipper Garth made hundreds of thousands of dollars without ever setting his Bally loafers on a courtroom floor, which (given his general ignorance of the law) was a blessing for his clients.
“He’s playing tennis,” Kate said.
“I’m sorry for what I said,” Stranahan told her. “You know how I feel.”
“I wish you’d give him a chance, Mick. He’s got some fine qualities.”
If you like tapeworms, Stranahan thought. He could scarcely hear Kate over the Def Leppard video on the television, so he motioned her to the kitchen.
“I came by to pick up my shotgun,” he said.
His sister’s eyes went from green to gray, like when they were kids and she was onto him.
“I got a seagull problem out at the house,” Stranahan said.
Kate said, “Oh? What happened to those plastic owls?”
“Didn’t work,” Stranahan said. “Gulls just crapped all over ‘em.”
They went into Kipper Garth’s study, the square footage of which exceeded that of Stranahan’s entire house. His shotgun, a Remington pump, was locked up with some fancy filigreed bird guns in a maplewood rack. Kate got the key from a drawer in her husband’s desk. Stranahan took the Remington down and looked it over.
Kate noticed his expression and said, “Kip used it once or twice up North. For pheasant.”
“He could’ve cleaned off the mud, at least.”
“Sorry, Mick.”
“The man is hopeless.”
Kate touched his arm and said, “He’ll be home in an hour. Would you stay?”
“I can’t.”
“As a favor, please. I’d like you to straighten out this lawsuit nonsense once and for all.”
“Nothing to straighten out, Katie. The little monkey wants to sue me, fine. I understand.”
The dispute stemmed from a pending disbarment proceeding against Kipper Garth, who stood accused of defrauding an insurance company. One of Kipper Garth’s clients had claimed eighty percent disability after tripping over a rake on the seventeenth hole of a golf course. Three days after the suit had been filed, the man was dumb enough to enter the 26-kilometer Orange Bowl Marathon, dumb enough to finish third, and dumb enough to give interviews to several TV sportscasters.