by Tim Dorsey
“Of course.” Serge checked wall sockets for left-behind electronics chargers. “You can’t stop often enough in the old Florida bars because many will be converted into gentlemen’s clubs before you know it.”
“I like to go in those, too,” said Coleman. “I can always spot them from the neon.”
“Because that’s the rule. They don’t even need a sign. Any building with pink or purple neon: They’re required to have strippers in quantity.” Serge locked the front door and headed back through the dining room. “And I can’t get enough of that name. Gentlemen’s club. It’s Orwellian for the new chivalry: ‘Please, let me hold the door for you, right after I finish staring at your snatch for a dollar.’ That’s the exquisite psychology of advertising, like calling a fried-chicken buffet restaurant ‘Skinny Boys.’ ”
“Or, you know, like partying,” said Coleman, nodding and smiling.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, partying. Supposed to be birthday cards and brightly wrapped presents and pin the tail on the donkey. But, man, instead you’re really getting seriously fucked up, completely hammered, ripped to the nuts, shit-faced and puking all over furniture and lawn statues, paralyzed, grabbing people—‘What are these fucking frog statues doing here?’—but then you snort some radioactive coke and come back stronger than ever, man, first-string all-star team! More bong hits and lines and tequila, and you give each other shotguns with a real shotgun barrel until you’re blind and forget how to speak and can’t go to the bathroom right, like when you’re a veteran and really know what you’re doing.” Coleman stopped and nodded again. “The word ‘partying.’ What you were just talking about. Get it?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was talking about.” Serge rolled his eyes. “Very insightful.”
“So what are we doing now?”
“Road trip!” Serge walked over to the closet door.
“He’s making those noises again,” said Coleman.
“Probably heard me say ‘road trip.’ Some people get excited.”
Serge turned the knob and pulled the door open quickly. “Ready to rock?”
A bound and gagged man slumped in the corner. A little smiley-face Band-Aid on an earlobe. Still screaming under the duct tape across his mouth.
Coleman finished the beer in his left hand. “I think he wants to say something.”
“Probably itinerary requests for our trip.” Serge leaned down and ripped the tape off.
“Owwww!”
“Where do you want to go?” asked Serge. “I can’t make any promises because of my zany schedule. Unless they sell souvenirs. My weakness, but it could be worse. Actually it will be. Suggestions?”
“Please don’t hurt me! I’m so sorry!”
Serge glanced at Coleman. “Haven’t we heard that before?”
“Many times.”
Crying now. “I’ll give you money,” said the man. “We can go to an ATM.”
“Oooo, bad memories there,” said Serge. “Remember last time?”
“I was wrong! I apologize!”
“You’re just saying that now because you think I’m not a patient person.” Serge grabbed a roll of duct tape and pulled out a long stretch. “But back when you thought I was patient, you took advantage and dumped all your negativity on me. And you knew it was going to stick in my stomach, and then my day’s ruined. Not to mention the broader implications for the national fabric.”
“I was just in a bad mood. I didn’t mean it.”
“Of course you did,” said Serge. “You were still yelling as I patiently walked away, thinking you were home free. But that was just because ATMs have surveillance cameras. You never guessed that I’d outflank you to your car and wait. Because I’m patient.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Stand up,” said Serge.
“I think my kneecap’s broken.”
“You’ll soon forget all about that. My promise to you.”
“But I—”
Serge swiftly wrapped fresh duct tape across the captive’s mouth. “Coleman, help me get him out to the car.”
Moments later, the trunk slammed on the Gran Torino. The muscle car screeched backward out of the driveway and tore east on U.S. 1.
They reached Mile Marker 104. Coleman’s head turned as they went by. “You’re passing the bar.”
“We’ll be back.” Serge pointed over his shoulder at the thuds coming from the trunk. “This one kicks a lot. I can’t leave him in the saloon parking lot like some of the others who went limp. Banging sounds from trunks in parking lots tend to raise questions because some people don’t have enough to do.”
“Then where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
It didn’t take long. Around Mile Marker 107, just after the fork to Card Sound, Serge pulled onto an unmaintained dirt road and plunged into the darkness of the mangroves.
Soon the car stopped. Crickets and frogs.
The trunk popped open.
Serge reached in and sat the hostage up. “Surprise!”
Coleman fired a joint onshore, scanning the dark water. “So this is the surprise? Lake Surprise?”
“Good recall.” Serge jerked his guest out of the car and threw him to the ground.
“He’s shaking like crazy,” said Coleman. “And just wet himself.”
“Better now than later. Seriously.”
“Why? Does that have something to do with what you’re planning?”
“It always fits together.” Serge swept an arm across the natural vista. “Everything’s connected. The Hindus know all about this.” He stood and slowed his breathing.
“Are you thinking of round things?”
“Yes. They’re coming through like a vision. And I’m seeing . . . peanut butter cups? Hmm, the path to enlightenment isn’t what I expected.”
The hostage noisily flopped in the muck, attempting to escape like a landed fish trying to work its way off a dock.
Serge blinked rapidly a few times. “Damn, made me lose the peanut butter cups.” He walked back to the trunk and began unloading supplies.
“Coleman, grab these ropes.”
“What do I do with them?”
Serge seized the man by the hair and dragged him screaming back to the designated spot onshore. “Tie one stretch of rope to each hand and ankle.”
More equipment came out of the car. Serge got down on his knees and hammered giant tent stakes.
“Serge, I finished tying the ropes.” He stood proudly. “How did I do?”
Serge stared a moment with his mouth open. “Coleman, I meant his hands and ankles.”
“Oh.” Coleman looked down at his own wrists and feet. “But you didn’t say that.”
“Jesus Christ.” Serge resumed hammering. “Him this time. And please ask any questions along the way.”
Coleman loosened a knot. “Serge, why are you hammering?”
“Apparently for nothing.” He stood up and looked around. “This muck is too soft. We’ll have to lash him to the mangroves.”
“Then what?” asked Coleman. “Alligators will eat him?”
“This is salt water.”
“Little crabs will swarm and pick his bones clean?”
“Not the right species on this island.”
“I was kind of hoping for crabs.”
Serge found a large root of a red mangrove grabbing down into underwater silt. Tied a double hitch. “We won’t be here to see anyway.”
Coleman sagged. “I knew you were going to say that.”
Serge secured another line. “What’s with you always wanting to watch? I told you how sick and abnormal that is.”
Under Coleman’s breath: “You’re the one waxing the dude.”
“I heard that,” said
Serge. “We’re not going to get into this discussion again.”
Coleman stretched out his arms with dangling ropes. “I need a little help.”
Serge sighed, then went over and untied his buddy. They connected the lines to the ones he had already fastened to the mangroves, and tied the captive spread-eagled on the bank.
Coleman fidgeted. “Is the part where we go to that bar coming up soon?”
Serge headed back to the trunk. “Almost there.” He loaded up his arms and started walking back.
Coleman scratched his head. “How are those things going to kill him?”
Serge turned on his camcorder. “Patience.”
CATFISH, PART II
After landing his prize horned owl, Catfish never got another whipping from Cecil and took up in his father’s boot prints. A natural trajectory of local tradition. They were all God-fearing, hardworking people of the earth, good providers for their kin. But not slick like those eastern boys who made all the rules. So they navigated around them. First was the moonshine, then tobacco, which was legal unless you ducked taxes, which they did at every turn; then toward the end of Cecil’s days, growing some of the wickedest bluegrass marijuana in the state. Until the next thing came along, which was just around the corner. They called it the Kentucky way.
Cecil died quietly around ’83, and was buried under a lone oak on a bluff overlooking the gold dome of the state capitol in Frankfort. Cecil bought the plot thirty years back and told his son that Daniel Boone’s tombstone was a rock’s throw away. After the funeral, Catfish actually threw a rock, and his father was right.
The Kentucky State Police bought some new helicopters with fancy thermal-spotting equipment. Pot groves were set ablaze everywhere, and the growers burrowed deep into the hills. Catfish temporarily wrote off the weed trade as too risky, and eventually surfaced an hour north with a rusty single-wide wedged deep in Woodford County behind the vine-covered ruins of an eighteenth-century bourbon distillery. Deep thickets made the trailer invisible, which wasn’t on the Realtors’ list of high points. But it was on Catfish’s. He began with the marijuana again, but low-key, only a few scattered plants in each location, which could be written off to nature because, well, it was a weed. The helicopters buzzed on by.
The old distillery lay ten miles northwest of Lexington and in another universe.
Extremes.
Appalachian poverty and international Thoroughbred wealth.
There were many such run-down trailers strewn about those hills, and people got used to the recreational, liquor-fueled gunfire at the moon that echoed across the horse pastures of many current and former Derby winners. Familiar names: Claiborne Farm and Calumet and Three Chimneys. Brookshire Farm had chandeliers in all the stables. The barns of a sheikh from the Arabian peninsula featured copper roofs, and a 747 jumbo jet with Arabic lettering sat on standby along a modest runway of the nearby Bluegrass Airport. A Florida connection would soon form in the hills around that airport, except there already had been one. Little known, but documented: In the immediate hours after the 9/11 attacks, when all aircraft in the nation were grounded, one small private plane was secretly in the air with the president’s blessing—a flight into the Bluegrass Airport carrying young members of a royal family who were students in Tampa and who immediately boarded a well-guarded jet for their homeland. And that weekend, more bullets at the moon.
William Shatner lived there.
Catfish’s trailer technically lay on the outskirts of a small hamlet called Versailles. But don’t walk into a bar and pronounce it correctly like the French, or you’ll be stared down as a damn communist or, worse, a fed. It always has and will be Ver-sales. The police found most of Catfish’s pot plants and burned them in a big pile on a Saturday night and drank beer and stood close, but it didn’t matter. The newspapers had already begun reporting emergency room ODs from some newfangled drug called Oxy. Catfish found two specific nuggets deep in one article. The pills were going for up to eighty dollars each on the street. And an unusual number of the prescriptions had been filled in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. He gassed up the Durango. Time to dip a toe in that raging river of tropical drug cash. It was the Kentucky way.
That was four years ago.
Back to live action: an anonymous motel room with the curtain pulled tight along U.S. Highway 1 in South Florida.
Catfish sat on the edge of the bed in deep thought as dozens of stranded Sterno bums wandered the beach in bib overalls. He was considered to be one of the top bosses in the Kentucky Mafia. Which didn’t exist. But anytime three or more people of any ethnic or geographical group commit three or more crimes, it’s the Polish Mafia, or Albanian Mafia, or Eskimo Mafia. And since the nicknames appeared in the newspaper, it had to be true.
The only other person in the motel room besides Catfish was his undependable right-hand man, Gooch Spivey, who had aspirations as a poker champ and used to stutter horribly as a youth until learning to overcome it with long pauses of intense concentration that appeared as if he were trying to levitate objects with his mind. It drove Catfish batshit.
“What are you . . . thinking about?”
“Can you not fucking do that?”
“Do . . . what?”
“Shut up!” Catfish ran both hands through his hair. At least the pauses came and went, and that gave him something to look forward to.
Gooch broke out a deck of airline playing cards to kill time.
Catfish looked up. “Gooch, why are you wearing mirrored sunglasses indoors. And a black cowboy hat?”
Gooch shuffled cards. “All the top TV champions dress like this on Extreme . . . Poker.”
Catfish tightly grabbed fistfuls of bedspread on each side of where he was sitting. “I’m going to have to kill myself.”
“ . . . Why?”
Teeth gnashed. Then a cartoon lightbulb came on. Catfish grabbed a notepad. “Forget Interstate 95. That’s history. We need to come up with something that moves unnoticed between Florida and Kentucky by another route. What does Florida have?”
“Oranges?”
Catfish shook his head. “Agriculture inspections . . . What else?”
Gooch cut his deck and shrugged.
Catfish rested the tip of his pen on the pad. “Let’s look at it from the other direction. What does Kentucky have?”
“Bourbon?”
“No good. ATF. They can be worse than the DEA. What else?”
“Horses?”
“No, they—” Catfish stopped and grabbed a road map from his suitcase. “You might have something there.” He traced up the spine of Florida with a finger. “That’s it. That’s how we’re going to do it.”
“We’re going to put the drugs in horses?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Catfish began refilling a duffel bag with all the pills and cash on the table. “We need to get everything back in the Durango and clear out before they track us here. We’ll be exposed for this one trip, but if we make it, we’ll never have to worry again.”
“How long will we be exposed?”
Catfish glanced toward the map he’d left open on top of the TV. A spot was circled a bit north of Disney. “I was never good with those mile scales. Two or three hours?”
* * *
A Dodge Durango rode through the night with little traffic. And no streetlights. That was the plan.
Catfish had picked up U.S. Highway 27 west of Plantation and headed north toward Lake Okeechokee. Just the moon and the emptiness of wind-flowing sugarcane fields that created a landscape from a movie where lost tourists fall victim. The only other rare vehicles were cattle trucks overloaded with migrant workers that raced past them next to the drainage canals full of fertilizer and gators. Route 27 was the spinal cord of Florida, practically vacant since the interstates, which took them up through towns with main streets that had the same early-evening closing hou
rs since 1957. The only signs of life were the parking lights of local police cars on side streets, waiting for the local delinquents. Clewiston, Sebring, Clermont, Leesburg. An odd time to be passing through the sticks, but a Durango was the right vehicle to fit in.
Just after 2 A.M., Catfish pulled off 27 and turned into the countryside. Four-lane blacktop became a narrow, tree-canopied country road that dipped and rose across some of the few hills in all of Florida. Ten miles later, a wooden-plank fence began running along the side of the road. Painted white. The Durango gradually slowed and pulled onto the grass.
“What are you doing?” asked Gooch.
“Finding a quiet spot.”
“Then what?”
“We go to sleep.”
Chapter Eight
KEY LARGO
Loud music. Jukebox. Loud people. Bikers.
And others—locals, tourists, nomads—not exactly a melting pot but more like another of those polygonal tolerance zones common throughout the Keys.
A mug of draft beer tipped over.
“My bad,” said Coleman.
“That’s now a hat trick,” said Serge. “I’ll get more napkins.”
“I’ll get another beer.”
He returned with a foamy draft in an ice-cold mug. “This bar rules,” said Coleman. “People don’t mess with you if you’re just trying to enjoy yourself.”
“You mean like that time you started howling at the top of your lungs, then took off your shirt, twirled it over your head, and danced like a drunken orangutan until they made you leave?”
“Exactly.” Coleman wiped suds off his mouth with the back of an arm. “That bar was way too uptight.”
“Coleman, it was a department store.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“The lingerie section no less.”
“So that’s why so many chicks were around. I thought I was just popular.”
“You did draw a crowd.” Serge idly peeled the label off his bottle of water. “But you’re right about one thing: This bar does rule. The Caribbean Club, established 1938 on the shore of Blackwater Sound by the great Florida pioneer Carl Fisher as a so-called poor man’s fishing vacation camp. Last project before his death.”