AHMM, May 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Don't shoot,” the cowboy wailed. “I believe you. Don't shoot.” There was a clatter as his rifle was tossed aside.

  “FACEDOWN ON THE GROUND. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD.”

  “Okay, okay. I'm down.” And he was, apparently—his voice sounded muffled by dirt and pine straw.

  Two minutes later the moon had reappeared, and the man, still facedown, was securely tied with strips of red bandanna.

  Lewis's ears were still ringing from the sound of the gunshots. “I promise,” he heard Freddie Clark say as he searched through the cowboy's pockets, “never to make fun of your microphone—I mean megaphone—again.”

  “Or my knot-tying,” Lewis replied. The smoking pistol had been thrust into his waistband, and felt so heavy it threatened to pull his pants down. He was kneeling beside the pine tree, using the rest of the bandanna strips to bind the still-unconscious redhead's wrists together around its trunk.

  At the sound of Lewis's voice, the cowboy swiveled his head. “You!” he blurted.

  “And I don't believe you've met my friend Spider-Man,” Lewis said.

  Freddie nodded a greeting, then froze as he apparently found something in the man's coat pocket.

  “Pay dirt,” he exclaimed, pulling out the cell phone. He switched it on, watched the reception bars, and grinned. “Houston, we have communications.”

  “I can't believe this,” the outlaw muttered, spitting out dust and pine needles. “You're just . . . boys.”

  “We're not boys,” Freddie said, punching in 9-1-1. “We're Boy Scouts.”

  He winked at Lewis and held the phone to his ear.

  Copyright © 2012 John M. Floyd

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Fiction: SPRING BREAK

  by R.T. Lawton

  * * * *

  Art by Kelly Denato

  * * * *

  “Here's how I see the situation,” Beaumont interrupted while unfolding a map from the airport rental kiosk and blotting out half of the passenger side windshield as Yarnell drove out of the lot, “Spring Break is just a bunch of college kids working off their stress of higher education by means of massive alcohol and miniature bikinis.”

  Yarnell had to ponder that for a moment. He'd never been to Florida for spring break, but then he'd also never attended college, so maybe he hadn't been eligible for that particular activity back then. Seemed to him that some people made choices about their own future, and others, well, they merely had things happen to them as they went along. And right now, looking back on his own past, he wasn't sure where he stood on that part of living.

  Still studying the map, Beaumont continued voicing his own thoughts out loud as other vehicles whizzed by, going someplace in a hurry. “The cops will be so busy with all them partygoers, that nobody will even notice us. We can burglarize this place and be gone before anyone knows we were there.” He motioned suddenly with his free hand. “You gotta take a left up here and get onto the interstate, otherwise we're liable to end up in some backwater swamp staring at alligators.”

  Yarnell spun the wheel counterclockwise at the last moment and sliced rapidly across two southbound lanes of traffic which now put him on course for the interstate on-ramp. As far as he was concerned, alligators belonged in a zoo where they couldn't latch on to unsuspecting tourists. “You know, a quicker heads-up would have been nice,” he managed to say before straightening out the steering wheel again.

  Behind him, two cars cut off in Yarnell's sudden lane change braked hard, smoking rubber on hot asphalt. A minor chain reaction quickly ensued. Horns blared, cars slid. One of them did a one-eighty and was now traveling backwards.

  Glancing quickly in his rearview mirror, Yarnell was pretty sure he would've seen some upraised fists or other gestures if it wasn't for the multitude of dark-tinted windows in them other vehicles. He didn't know how anybody could see to drive at night with all that dark glass to look through. But then with palm trees, vast stretches of glaring sand, bright tropical-clothed locals, and all the different accents and languages which had assaulted his ears since he'd arrived in Jacksonville, this whole place had the feel of a foreign country anyway. And him without a passport. How had he allowed himself to be talked into coming down here?

  At least with the loud horns honking at him in traffic—that was a familiar sound—he could feel a little more like he was back home driving in the big city. Who knew, though: If he applied himself, he might be able to get used to all the differences he found down here. He probably should have brought along a pair of cargo shorts to help him blend in with the natives, but then his knobby knees hadn't seen the sun since he was a kid, so maybe not. Any way he looked at it, he felt off center.

  “You sure you got the right place figured out?”

  Beaumont rotated the map ninety degrees and studied it some more.

  “Yep, I Googled the guy for his address before we flew down here. He's got a high-rise condo along the beach, Atlantic side. Right in the middle of where all this spring break stuff is supposed to be going on.”

  Yarnell felt a twinge of his old paranoia kicking in about hurry-up jobs, but mainly he just didn't like being this far from the old neighborhood. It gave him special concerns when he was out of his home territory and didn't have the luxury of thoroughly analyzing all the ins and outs of what he was about to get involved in. At a minimum, he much preferred a few days’ advance notice, which allowed him time to internalize everything and get all his concerns settled to his own satisfaction.

  “You know, there might be more than one guy in Florida with the same name?”

  “I got the right guy.”

  “You're sure this is the guy that's the famous treasure hunter?”

  With the compass displayed in the rental car's rearview mirror indicating they were headed south, Beaumont rotated the map another ninety degrees to orient his map with the north directional arrow at the top of the accordion-folded page. Now the map's arrow for north was pointed at Beaumont's stomach and the two of them were looking at place names upside down. Beaumont stretched the paper tighter and tried to shake out some of the interior wrinkles. The car's air conditioner going full blast caught the map and ballooned up the middle like the top of a giant mushroom. He quickly folded the outside edges toward the center so as to make a smaller air surface.

  “Don't sweat it, Yarnell. I read all about the man in National Geographic, plus a couple of them other magazines that interviewed him. He's the same one found those Spanish galleons what sunk off the coast a few hundred years ago in a hurricane. Bad storm caught the fleet by surprise. Gold bars, Spanish doubloons, cannons, the whole works went down. Several million dollars’ worth of stuff was just lying there in the sand waiting for him to lift it up from the bottom of the ocean.”

  “Which the articles said he did?”

  “Yep, and by now that stuff is all cleaned up and ready to be sold. But first, he's gonna display it to the general public for historical purposes.”

  Yarnell turned his head to the right . . .

  “Only your plan is to lift it from him before he gets a chance to show it off, yeah?”

  . . . at which time his hands inadvertently rotated the steering wheel slightly in the same direction as his nose was now facing. The passenger's side of the car slowly drifted over the white line.

  “Yeah. Now keep your eyes on the road. We don't need an accident or nothing to draw heat on us.”

  Quickly, Yarnell snapped the outside tires off the narrow asphalt shoulder and back into his driving lane. He tried not to think about what might be lying in wait for him in all that dense jungle vegetation if he went off the road. Back home, if rumors were to be believed, the alligators were onetime pets flushed down the toilet, which meant they ended up in sewers under the city, where they were conveniently out of the way. But here in Florida, for some reason, people let the damn things run around free aboveground.

  Beaumont consulted his upside-down map again. “A few more
miles down the road, then take the exit, go back under the interstate, and head for the beach.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Yarnell watched Beaumont rotate the map twice more before they got where they were going. The wording was still upside down, but at least now the map no longer blocked half the passenger side windshield. As far as he was concerned, half the place names were in Spanish anyway, so even if he could read them, he couldn't pronounce the words.

  With the sun having already set long ago somewhere over Florida's steamy interior, Yarnell finally parked their rental car in an empty slot along a busy street which ran parallel to the beach and about one block inland. Several condos and tall hotels lined the beachfront with their backsides standing to the ocean.

  “Which one we looking at?”

  Beaumont gestured across the street. “Right there, sign says Daytona Beach Dunes.”

  Yarnell took in the sign, then the front parking lot, and lastly, the ten-story building itself. He started to put the car in gear and head for the parking lot, which was packed with Cadillacs, BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, a couple of Infinitis, and a Lexus.

  Beaumont stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “We don't want to go in there.”

  “Why not?”

  Beaumont pointed at the condo's front door under the covered entryway. “This is one them ritzy joints. They got a doorman and seventy kinds of security in the foyer. We don't need anybody to remember us as being here.”

  Yarnell put the car back in park. “If we can't even look the place over, then how's your inside man gonna get inside?”

  “Not our problem, he's got it covered.”

  Yarnell thought about that for a while before turning to face his partner. “You know, I didn't complain too much when you showed up at my apartment with two airline tickets and dragged me off, saying, ‘C'mon, I got a quick lucrative job lined up for us.’ And I went along when you promised to explain everything on the flight down here, but then you went to sleep for the rest of the trip. I assume you noticed I don't even happen to have a carry-on bag with a change of clothes?”

  “That's because this is one of them quick deals, like I happened to mention before, and then we fly home. Twenty-four hours tops.”

  “You keep saying that, but I got the feeling you're leaving something out. Like, you still haven't told me who we're working with down here.”

  “Don't worry about it, he's reliable. All we have to do is stand at the bottom of the building and he'll lower the stuff down to us on a rope. It's a good plan. You and I have very little risk on this one.”

  Yarnell idly tapped his left index finger on top of the steering wheel as he internalized this new information. Nobody had told him anything about a rope. Suddenly, his finger froze in the upswing position. With his right hand, he turned the engine off. The air conditioning died away. The blowing fan stopped moving air. Temperature crept up in the closed rental vehicle. “No, tell me you didn't.”

  “Didn't what?”

  “You promised I'd never have to work with that guy again.”

  Beaumont had a look of innocence. “What guy?”

  “You know who I'm talking about. The Thin Guy. That skinny undertaker we found sleeping in a casket at the mortuary we broke into by mistake last Halloween when we were supposed to be burglarizing a jewelry store.”

  With a look of deep exasperation, Beaumont slowly shook his head from side to side. “Nice. I make one little measuring mistake on a job and now I'm gonna hear about it for the rest of my life.”

  Yarnell's left index finger, still frozen in the upraised position, quivered over the steering wheel. “And when you couldn't figure out how to get the mortuary safe open, you agreed to make the Thin Guy our protégé.”

  “He had the combination, and my agreement to his terms was the only way we were getting into the safe that night. A profit is a profit. Am I right?”

  “I can't believe you did this to me.”

  “What do you have against the guy? His ex took everything in the divorce. He's just trying to make a living the same as you and me.”

  “I'm telling you, Beaumont, that man's not right. His mind is wired different than most people's. Something always seems to go wrong when he's working one of our jobs.”

  “You can relax then, this is his job. He planned it start to finish. I checked out all the details and it's a good plan. All we have to do is cart off any treasure he finds up in that condo, then we sell it to a fence I happen to be acquainted with in this area, divide the money three ways and we all go home with something in our pockets. You got nothing to lose but a little time just standing around.”

  Yarnell's mind tried to consider all the ins and outs of the situation. Finally, his left index finger sagged onto the steering wheel. “Okay, I'll go along this one more time, see how things work out, but after that . . .”

  “Good. Now let's go get something to eat. I'm famished.” Beaumont opened the passenger door.

  “What about our rental car?”

  “Leave it here. It's a good parking spot for our business tonight.”

  Beaumont headed down the sidewalk toward an open lot where there was a hand-painted sign and a standalone deep-fry cooker. Two empty plastic chairs and one fold-up card table (but no customers) stood in front of the mobile fry stand. “Sign says they make good conch fritters, and it looks like there's no waiting line right now,” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  Yarnell had to hurry to catch up. “What the heck's a conk?” Maybe there was a reason the place was deserted.

  “It's a type of seafood.”

  “You mean like crab and lobster and shrimp?”

  “Yeah, something like that. You grab the table and I'll place our order.”

  Ten minutes later, Yarnell dipped one end of a hot, breaded fritter into a small plastic cup of spicy red shrimp sauce and popped the morsel into his mouth. “It's a little rubbery,” he managed to mutter. “Exactly what kind of seafood is this?” He kept on chewing as he waited for an answer.

  “Remember them old tropical island movies,” replied Beaumont, “where some big native in a wraparound cloth is standing high up on a sea cliff and blowing into a giant shell as a signal of something or other to people down on the beach?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that's a conch shell he's blowing in.”

  In his mind, Yarnell pictured that large spiral shell from the movie. The more he thought about this “conk” thing, the more it had a similar shape to snail shells at the lake back home, only this conk shell was much, much larger. It looked to him like a giant snail, and he didn't eat snails of any size.

  Too late, he'd already swallowed.

  Yarnell pushed his paper plate halfway across the card table. “That's it, I quit. Give me the other half of my plane ticket, I'm going home.”

  Before responding, Beaumont paused while three convertibles filled with noisy spring-breakers cruised past. A coed standing up precariously in the second vehicle flashed him with the top of her bright yellow bikini and smiled. Beaumont's bushy eyebrows raised as his head swiveled to keep pace with the vehicle. A loose beer can discarded from the third car rolled noisily across the concrete, clinked against the curb, and stopped. Then the convertibles disappeared in the flow of steady traffic. His eyebrows went down. He could talk now.

  “Can't do it,” he said. “There's no flights out until tomorrow morning. You're stuck. So, as long as you're here, you may as well be part of the job and make some money. No sense going back empty handed.”

  Yarnell opened his mouth a couple of times to say something, he wasn't sure what, but after turning those last statements over in his mind for a while and looking at them from several different viewpoints, Yarnell decided he couldn't find any flaw in Beaumont's logic. He really was stuck. “Let's just get it over with then,” he muttered.

  “Good choice,” replied Beaumont. He glanced at his watch. “And, right about now it's time for us to be moving into place.”

&nbs
p; Once more, Yarnell had to hurry to keep up.

  Beaumont stopped at the rental car trunk long enough to retrieve two collapsed black duffel bags and hand one to Yarnell. “Keep it wadded up until we see the stuff coming down the rope. We don't want to be conspicuous.”

  Yarnell stuffed his bag under one arm and started to cross the street while there was a break in car traffic. He got one step.

  Beaumont pulled him back just as a herd of spring-breakers on rental motor scooters barreled out of the dark, no lights on, sped past close to vehicles parked at the curb, and disappeared down the road. Yarnell swore he heard a few more discarded beer cans clinking and rolling across cement, stopping at the sidewalk. This time nobody flashed them.

  “Watch yourself,” said Beaumont.

  Yarnell waited until his partner started across, then he hurried to catch up. Once up on the curb on the other side of the street, they faced the passing traffic until they thought no one was looking, then they backed quietly into the bushes on the north side of the condo grounds and disappeared. As far as Yarnell was concerned, all the landscaped plants he was now enveloped in became a vicious jungle as he turned toward the beach. Seemed his hands couldn't keep up with the moving greenery. A strong breeze coming in off the ocean kept batting vegetation into his face until they reached the north side of the condo, where there was a patch of open ground devoid of ornamental trees and swaying bushes. He quickly checked his arms for scratches and bugs. Here, the sounds of music and loud partying from the beach out back seemed a whole lot closer.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “We wait until the Thin Guy lowers the stuff,” replied Beaumont.

  Yarnell leaned his head back and gazed up at the tenth-story penthouse. It was totally dark up there, except for a few stars above the roof line.

  “How long do we have to wait?”

  “Any time now,” replied Beaumont.

  “Hey,” said a slurred voice behind them, “you guys here to watch the human fly?”