Torpedo Juice

by Tim Dorsey

  “She’s heading for checkout.”

  The woman got in line at register three. Serge and Coleman pulled into register four. Serge held up a Redbook with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. Drive Him Totally Wild with Ordinary Household Products, Page 132. He peeked over the top. The woman was looking at Serge; he peeked back down.

  The cashier rang up chicken and flowers. Serge thought the eighty-year-old woman bagging his groceries looked familiar. She was going slow.

  “Doris?”

  “Serge?”

  “What are you doing here? I thought you’d retired.”

  “I had,” said Doris. “But then I got wiped out in the stock market. That accounting scandal with Global-Con…”

  “Son of a—!”

  The old woman was tired. She stopped and grabbed the end of the counter, then started bagging again.

  Serge went over and gently held her arm. “Why don’t you take a break. I’ll bag these myself.”

  “No, I have to keep going!”

  Coleman was reading a tabloid. “Hey, Serge, look at this article. ‘Leading psychic reveals: Hitler kicked out of hell, starts rival inferno’…”

  Serge began helping Doris bag. “You must have some money left.”

  “Not enough to live on.” She sniffed the flowers and put them in a sack. “The worst part is that bastard Donald Greely has started building a mansion just up the road, rubbing our noses in it.”

  The woman at register three zipped her purse and began pushing a cart of bagged groceries toward the door.

  “Doris, I want to get back with you on that.”

  Serge and Coleman hurried out of the store and reached the parking lot just as the woman finished loading bags in her Pathfinder. They ran to the Riviera. Serge grabbed his binoculars.

  “Look,” said Coleman. “She’s getting back out of her car. I think she’s seen us.”

  “You’re right. She’s coming over here,” said Serge. “This could ruin everything. It’s too premature for us to formally meet before I’ve had a chance to study her at the gym and through open windows of her house. On the other hand, you never know. She could be the one!”

  The woman was almost to their car. Serge grabbed the flowers and got out, hiding the bouquet behind his back.

  She stopped a few feet in front of him. “Have you been following me?”

  Serge broke into his broadest, most charismatic smile. “Yes!”

  “I thought so.” The woman reached in her purse.

  Serge whipped the flowers from behind his back and proudly held them out. “This is for you.”

  The woman pointed a keychain cannister at Serge. “And this is for you.” Squirt.

  The flowers hit the pavement. Serge stomped on them as he reeled. “Ahhhhhhh! My eyes! I’m blind!”

  She kicked him between the legs. “Pervert!”

  Coleman jumped out of the car. “Serge! Where are you?” He ran around the Buick and found his partner bunched on the ground. Coleman bent down and helped his buddy up into a sitting position. “What happened?”

  “She’s not the one.”

  11

  A LOUD CRASH.

  The petite woman in the back of the No Name jumped.

  The man sitting on the other side of the table reached for her hand. “Just somebody dropping something.”

  Anna hyperventilated.

  “You need a beer.” The man got up and went to the bar. He returned with two drafts. Anna grabbed hers in shaking hands and guzzled till it was gone.

  The man grabbed her hand again. “Jesus, easy…”

  “I can’t take this. I need Valium.”

  “I can get you some.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Take a rest.”

  “No. I haven’t told anyone yet. I have to get it all out….”

  ANNA CREPT TOWARD the duplex.

  “Don’t go back in there!” yelled Val.

  Anna didn’t listen.

  “I’ll keep the engine running and your door open. You just run right out….”

  Anna reached the porch. She cautiously unlocked the door and pushed it open with a creak. Stillness. She eased through the dark living room, no sign of Billy. The bedroom door was closed. That was good. The stuff she needed was in the bathroom. She went down the hall.

  Anna got closer and heard water running. The door was ajar, a ribbon of light. She pushed it open.

  Val leaped out of the car when she heard the shrieks. Anna stood paralyzed in the bathroom doorway. Red arterial spray over everything. On top of the sink was a box. On top of the box was Billy’s head. The autopsy would later find the work had been done with a hacksaw, begun, at least, while the victim was still alive. A slim wire ran into Billy’s mouth, attached to a miniature recording device—the kind police make informants wear—which was now broadcasting from somewhere near the top of Billy’s throat. The box was on top of the sink so the head could look at itself in the mirror. Billy’s surprised eyes, frozen open in a look of eternal terror, gazed at the reflection, where someone had written in blood, “How smart are you now?”

  Anna came flying out the front door and fell to her knees with dry heaves. Val ran and met her in the middle of the yard. She struggled to understand Anna’s hysterics. The message eventually got across.

  “We have to call the police!”

  “You’re right.” They ran to the car and Anna reached in her purse for a cell phone. It rang in her hands. They both jumped.

  Anna apprehensively put the phone to her head. “Hello?”

  It was her sister-in-law, Janet. Screaming.

  “Calm down, I can’t understand—”

  “They killed everyone!”

  “Who?”

  “They shot Rick….”

  Her brother. A punch in the chest.

  “…I found him on the kitchen floor. And they shot Randy. And Pedro and his wife!…” Then more shrieking.

  Janet’s collapse somehow spurred Anna to get it together. It was the Rick in her. “I’m coming over….”

  “I’m not at home. It’s not safe,” said Janet. “You and Billy need to hide.”

  “Billy’s dead.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Just found him,” said Anna. “We’re at the house.”

  “Get away from there!”

  Anna looked across the front seat at her friend. “We’re not safe here.”

  Val started shaking and fumbling with the gear shift.

  Anna opened her door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Something’s started that I can’t tell you about. You need to get out of here. But don’t call the police.”

  “What about you?”

  Anna looked toward the driveway. “I’ve got the Trans Am.”

  Her friend sped away and nearly took out the stop sign at the corner. Anna kept her sister-in-law on the phone as she ran up the driveway, juggling her purse, digging for keys.

  “Where are you?”

  Janet looked around the pay phone outside a truck stop on I-95. “Flying J.”

  “Don’t move. I’m coming over.” Anna revved up the Trans Am and screeched backward into the street.

  Janet was still sobbing. “Rick told me there was nothing to worry about. Just said not to speak to anyone without a lawyer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The indictments today. Didn’t you hear? It was on the news.”

  “Indictments?”

  “We all got one. This was only pot for Chrissake! Rick promised nobody gets rough over that. Just coke.”

  The picture snapped into focus.

  Anna vividly remembered the day it all began. It was windy down at the municipal marina. The women wore scarves. They loaded picnic lunches while the guys argued over their new knots. Rick and Billy had just bought the sailboat. The wives were against it at first, but the idea grew on them as they thought of all the time the couples would be spending together. They imagined rai
sing kids.

  That’s when the strangers approached. They started talking to Rick and Billy from the pier, complimenting the vessel. The women didn’t like the men, didn’t exactly know why, just didn’t. The guys hit it off.

  After that, the other men always seemed to be hanging around the marina when the couples came back from sailing. Rick and Billy started going out for drinks with their new friends. Then phone calls at the house where Billy would go in another room and close the door. The husbands developed a sudden interest in night fishing.

  Anna knew something was up, so Billy got the shoe boxes down from the attic and showed her the cash. “It’s just pot….”

  That was five years ago. Rick and Janet got a bigger house, and another place in the Keys they rented out. Billy got a gambling habit and another lease on the duplex.

  Rick changed. He became smart with money. They were living well, but not spending nearly what was coming in. Rick was putting it somewhere. Billy changed, too. Cocaine, the dog track. Then the women from the bars that Billy always swore were the very last time. Finally his temper, which steadily grew worse and spilled into phone arguments with the guys from the pier.

  Rick tried talking to him, and Billy said he’d change. He changed into a liar. Rick didn’t know what to do. From time to time, he passed money to his sister on the side.

  Now the indictments…

  “What are we going to do!” Janet yelled in the phone.

  The Trans Am squealed around a corner. “Stay calm. I’ll be right there.”

  “I can’t take it anymore!” Janet leaned weeping against the pay phone. Truck drivers heading into the coffee shop couldn’t help notice the drama. That hot little number in distress who obviously needed a knight.

  A man in a Pennzoil cap walked up from behind. “Ma’am, is everything okay?”

  Janet jumped and screamed. “No! Get the fuck away from me!”

  “Jesus. You got it, lady….”

  “What’s going on?” said Anna.

  “I have to get out of here!”

  “No, stay put,” said Anna. “You’re in the open. You need to be in public.”

  “I have to go! I can’t handle this! I’ll call back.”

  “Don’t hang up!”

  “I have to!”

  “Okay, you know that place Rick and Billy have? The piece of land they go duck hunting and have that aluminum building where they work on their motorcycles?”

  “I know it.”

  “Meet you there.”

  12

  S ERGE COMBED HIS hair as he drove. He pulled up to a stop sign, tilted his head back and squeezed a Visine bottle.

  “How are your eyes?” asked Coleman.

  “Still sting a little, but I’m not blinking as much.”

  “She got you good.”

  “Was worth it,” said Serge, capping the bottle. “I discovered her problem with men before we got too deep into the relationship.”

  Coleman lit a joint and pointed with the lighter. “Another midget deer.”

  Serge eased onto the brakes. “They’re endangered. That’s why I won’t let you drive on this island.”

  “But they’re so cute. I want to take one home. It would be neat having it roam around the trailer to keep me company. Do they make a lot of noise?”

  “You can’t take care of yourself.”

  Coleman looked at the road again, then at the joint in his hand, then back at the road. “Serge, I think I see a big dragon. Can you check?”

  Serge hit the brakes again. “Iguana.”

  “It’s huge.” Coleman put his face to the windshield. “I’ve never seen one that size. Must be five feet.”

  “Closer to six.” The lizard slithered into someone’s azaleas. Serge stepped on the gas. “Exotic pet breed that got loose on the island. No natural predators and a plentiful food source, so they just mate and grow to unforeseen sizes. Hundreds now.”

  Serge drove around a bend on Watson Boulevard and pulled up to the No Name Pub. They went inside and grabbed a pair of stools in the middle of an argument.

  “Flotsam!” said Bud Naranja.

  “Jetsam!” said Sop Choppy.

  “But the boat sank!”

  “But they threw it overboard first!”

  “What a great place,” said Coleman, slowly looking around. “I didn’t even know it was here.”

  “Bet it beats those weeklong benders where you never leave your trailer.”

  “They have their moments.”

  The bartender came over and automatically set bottled water in front of Serge.

  “I’d like a draft anything,” said Coleman. “But not lite anything.”

  The bartender stuck a tall glass under a tap. “What’s new, Serge?”

  “He’s getting married,” said Coleman.

  “You’re kidding! Congratulations!”

  “Who’s the lucky gal?” asked Bud.

  “Don’t know yet. We’re still doing recon.”

  Sop Choppy laughed. “What about Brenda?”

  “We’re just friends,” said Serge. “She doesn’t like me that way.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Sop Choppy. “She’s crazy about you, always coming around and asking if you’re back in town.”

  “Not my type.”

  “What do you mean ‘not your type’?” said Bob the accountant. “She’s every guy’s type.”

  “Brenda’s got some great qualities,” said Sop Choppy. “College degree. Big tits.”

  Serge shook his head. “The soul-mate vibe just isn’t there.”

  Coleman was turning his eyelids inside out.

  “You’re going to freeze that way,” said Serge.

  Coleman flipped his lids back. The Stones came on the juke.

  Serge hopped off his stool and began strutting to the music. “Can you feel it, Coleman? You’re sitting in the greatest place in the world—the last frontier in America! Dig it everybody: It’s the Florida Keys! We’re weirdness on a stick!”

  The gang: “Hooray!”

  The petite woman in the back of the pub tensed up at the noise. “What’s going on over there?”

  The man sitting across from her turned around. “Oh, that’s just Serge.”

  Serge strutted faster. The regulars: “Go, Serge, go!…Go, Serge, go!…”

  “I’m a cold Italian pizza, I could use a lemon squeezer! Yowwww!” Serge did a split at the end of the bar, popped up and started strutting back toward them. “These islands have always attracted a ragtag, bottom-of-the-barrel cast of life-bunglers….” He made a sweeping gesture at the bar. The gang smiled and waved at Coleman.

  Serge stopped and placed a hand on a shoulder. “This is Bob the accountant, not to be confused with Shirtless Bob here. How’s the car coming?”

  “I just bored out the—”

  “That’s wonderful. And here’s the well-read biker named Sop Choppy, a regular doubting Thomas who’s in charge of debunking all the phooey that’s slung around this joint, and this is Bithlo Tice, who runs an unethical towing service, and Odessa ‘Odey’ Goulds, same deal but with plumbing, and Trilby Mims, who’s on total disability (wink), and Belle Cutler, a bouncer in the private room at the Cheetah Club who takes payoffs to look the other way on rim jobs, and Loughman Mascotte, who can never let himself get fingerprinted for some reason…”

  “Shhhhhh!” said Loughman, hunching over his beer, holding a hand up to his face.

  “…And Darby Felsmere, who has a bunch of washing machines and doorless refrigerators marked offshore with GPS coordinates that he uses to supply the restaurants with lobster, and Ogden Ebb, who was about to lose everything in the divorce but instead talked his wife into faking his death at sea and splitting the insurance, and Noma Lovett, who’s also Lawtey Pierce and Sewall Myers according to the unemployment checks, and ‘Daytona Dave’ DeFuniak, the one-hit wonder who had that big song back in the seventies, ‘Island Fever,’ which caught the draft behind the Changes in Latitudes album an
d topped out at number thirty-nine and he’ll even sing it for you if he gets drunk enough…”

  “I’m burnin’ up, with that island fe—”

  “…But not now. And Scanlon Elerbee, who peddles caffeine tabs as bootleg speed over the Internet to fraternities, and Yulee Richloam, who sells inferior roadbed to the state, and Perky Sneads, who signs off that roadbed for the state, and Eddie Perrine, who’s in between gigs and has a job, and Bud Naranja here, who keeps getting fired from newspapers and abandoned his car on the side of U.S. 1 next to the chamber of commerce…”

  “I know that car,” said Coleman. “Some guy’s living in it.”

  Daytona Dave raised his hand. “That would be me.”

  “…And finally we have Rebel Starke,” said Serge, “who eluded a massive manhunt in Tennessee.”

  “Wow, you’re really a fugitive?” said Coleman.

  “Tell him,” said Serge.

  “Not as bad as it sounds,” said Rebel. “Was living in Knoxville at the time and got mixed up with this cult that was deep into Sartre and Kierkegaard, only it was really about door-to-door cleaning products. Anyway, I get this existential license plate for my car: UNKNOWN. A year later, they put in those cameras that automatically take pictures of drivers who run red lights. If they can’t make out the license number in the photo, they manually type in, you guessed it, ‘unknown.’ In the first month I get like a hundred tickets. I went down to city hall at least a dozen times, and they always said they’d fix it, but I was still being pulled over two and three times a day. It was easier to just move.”

  There was a series of loud crashes out the back door, metal garbage cans falling over.

  “What was that?” said Coleman.

  “Roger.”

  “Roger?”

  “Classic Keys story,” said Sop Choppy. “You may think we’re crazy, but you’re looking at the solid citizens, the ones who bend in the wind….”

  “Only two social rules on this island,” said Bud. “Don’t mess with the miniature deer and don’t steal the No Name dollars off the walls. Otherwise, anything goes. People who aren’t used to the freedom lose their minds.”

  “Like Roger,” said Sop Choppy. “Used to be a lawyer, good one, too. Then he started deep-sea fishing down here. It was the eighties, so naturally he hung out afterward with the other guys at the Full Moon and the Boca Chica. Roger didn’t have a single bad habit, never even tried pot. But after three or four trips down here, he’s into everything. Drinking till dawn, snorting lines of blow as wide as your thumb. One weekend, he never goes home at all. His wife starts calling the police, and they find him barricaded in a suite at the La Concha.”