by Tim Dorsey
“Getting too crowded,” said Serge. “I found a better location.”
The Buick flew through Islamorada and Key Largo, back over the bridge to the mainland, Coleman bugging him for food the whole way.
“You just had a McMuffin.”
“I can’t taste it anymore.”
Serge acquiesced and hit a drive-through in Florida City, then raced straight into the heart of the Everglades.
Coleman reached in his Arby’s sack. “Want a sandwich?”
“Why’d you get five?”
“It was five for five dollars.”
Serge turned off the Tamiami Trail and onto a dirt road with a chained-shut gate. He hopped out with a pair of large bolt-cutters, glanced around and grabbed a link of the chain.
Coleman walked up with a soda cup. “Where are we?”
Serge leaned into the cutters. “Government research center.” The chain snapped. He pushed the gate open.
The Buick drove down the deserted road. Coleman’s nose twitched. “It stinks.”
“It’s supposed to.”
The road opened into a clearing. It looked like an abandoned movie set. Broken-down vehicles, rusty refrigerators, steamer trunks, fifty-five-gallon drums, some partially submerged in a pond. Coleman saw what looked like shabby mannequins draped in a variety of positions. They parked and Serge opened the trunk.
Coleman came up beside him. “I still don’t know where we are.”
Serge pulled a pair of hankies from his pocket. He covered his nose and mouth with one and handed the other to Coleman. “Necro-studies.”
“What?”
“The cadaver farm.”
“Cadaver?…You mean those mannequins are really…Oh, gross!”
“Forensic detectives face a particular problem in Florida. Decomposition is too aggressive, so the regular textbook decay tables are useless. Had to establish a local lab to come up with their own figures. The Everglades are ideal. Perfect breeding ground for everything that can ravage a corpse. Heat, moisture, bacteria, more insects than you can count. Some with little pincers and mandibles that bore right through the skin, others that get in through body cavities. It’s amazing how they know right where to go. Rodents, crabs, snakes. Oh, and birds. Don’t forget them. They go for the eyes.”
Coleman steadied himself against the car. “I don’t feel so good.”
Serge reached in the trunk and grabbed wrists. “Get his ankles.”
They hoisted Troy Bradenton out of the Buick, lugged him twenty yards and set him down behind the bumper of a tireless Impala. Serge retrieved a crowbar from the Buick and began working on the Impala’s trunk. “A body that lasts three months in the Virginia winter might be down to the wishbone in weeks….”
Serge put his weight into the bar. The trunk popped.
Coleman jumped back. “There’s already a body in there!…And some stuff’s moving—” His hand flew to his mouth.
Serge poked the second corpse with the crowbar. He bent down and grabbed Troy’s wrists again. “Coleman, give me a hand…. Coleman?”
Coleman was holding his stomach. His cheeks bulged.
“Stop fooling around!”
Coleman reached for the ankles. “What if somebody sees us?”
“Today’s Saturday. I have the place to myself on weekends…. Lift!”
Coleman grunted. “Yeah, but what if someone happens to come off-hours?”
“Not a chance. This is a government operation.”
The new corpse fell on top of the first. Serge slammed the trunk lid. “I love science.”
They climbed back in the Buick.
“I still think the mangroves would have been better,” said Coleman. “They might find him here.”
“They’ll definitely find him,” said Serge, starting the engine. “That’s what makes it so perfect.”
“What do you mean?”
Serge began driving back out the dirt road. “They used to have one body in the trunk; now they have two.”
“So?”
“Everything’s backward at the cadaver farm. They may be dealing in dead bodies, but it’s still a bureaucracy, which means the cardinal sin is to lose inventory. If they come up with a high count, they don’t think they gained a body; they think they lost paperwork. And in civil service, that could be someone’s ass. So they’ll cook the numbers.”
“What if they don’t?”
“These are professionals. It’s why we pay taxes.”
Serge stopped and got out of the car, locking the gate behind the Buick. He jumped back in and gunned the engine, sending up a thick cloud of dust as they whipped back onto the Tamiami.
A half minute later, another car appeared out of the cloud. A brown Plymouth Duster.
The Buick neared the end of the Everglades. It flew through the flashing red light at Dade Corners and kept on going for the turnpike. Serge and Coleman began seeing evidence of western Miami. Heavy industry, quarries, refining plants, paint-sample test institute.
“Hold everything,” said Coleman, watching something go by his window. “Turn around!”
“What is it?”
“Just turn around. We’re getting farther away.”
Serge veered off the right shoulder, making a liberal U-turn in the grass on the opposite side. “What’s the flavor of this wild-goose chase?”
“We passed a medical supply depot,” said Coleman. “The warehouse with the barbed wire around all those industrial tanks in the back lot. I think I saw nitrous.”
“Laughing gas?” Serge slammed the brakes and the Buick squiggled to a stop down the middle of the empty road.
“What are you doing?” said Coleman.
“I’m not going on some drug safari!”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you read where those two guys in that van passed out and died from nitrous.”
“Because they were abusing it.”
Serge yanked the stick on the steering column. “I’m turning around.”
“No fair!” said Coleman. “We already got to do what you wanted to.”
“What are you, in second grade?”
“I didn’t kick the guy to death. I didn’t have to come out here and help you.”
Serge stewed a moment. “Okay. Since you appeal to my sense of fairness. But I’m not waiting forever.”
The Buick drove another hundred yards and pulled over next to chain-link with a red-diamond warning sign: VICIOUS DOGS.
They got out and walked to the fence. “You’re right,” said Serge. “These are medical tanks. Oxygen and nitrogen. And there’s the nitrous….”
Two Dobermans galloped across the storage yard. They jumped up on the fence and snapped teeth at the level of Serge’s face. “Hello, puppies.”
Coleman walked up next to Serge, pulled the dog whistle from his shirt and blew. The Dobermans yelped and scampered off to hide behind a stack of empty pallets.
Four hundred yards back, a brown Plymouth Duster sat quietly on the shoulder of the road with a clear view of the tiny Buick parked in the distance. Hands rested on the steering wheel. They were inside tan leather gloves, the kind with holes cut out for the knuckles. The hands came off the wheel. The driver’s door opened, then the trunk. Out came wading boots and a bolt-action Remington deer rifle. The boots started down the shoulder into the swamp.
“Where are your bolt-cutters?” asked Coleman.
“Trunk.”
Serge climbed up on the Buick’s roof and sat with his legs crossed, leaning forward with rapt curiosity. Coleman snipped away at the chain-link fence, the dogs repeatedly charging, Coleman dispatching them each time with another blast from the ultrasonic whistle.
A half-mile north of the highway, an eye pressed against the scope of a deer rifle. The 10X-magnification compressed the view, eight hundred yards of sawgrass and cattails, then two Dobermans, a fence and, finally, Serge, sitting yoga-style on the roof of the Buick. A finger curled around the trigger.
Serge wa
s amazed. He had never seen Coleman put together such linear purpose. After a few minutes, Coleman had snipped a Coleman-shaped hole in the fence.
There was a faint pop in the distance. The car window shattered beneath Serge.
“What did you do to my car?” said Coleman.
Serge leaned forward and looked down at the empty window with jagged pieces of glass around the frame. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did. All your weight.”
“Hope you’re not expecting me to pay for that.”
“Forget it. I was tired of rolling it down anyway….”
“Coleman!”
“What?” He turned around. The Dobermans were almost on him. He blew the whistle. The dogs ran under a forklift.
In the unseen distance, wading boots sprinted away through the reeds, back toward a brown Plymouth Duster.
Coleman stuck the whistle in his mouth, climbed through the hole in the fence and wrapped his arms around a four-foot-tall chemical tank. He returned through the fence, tooting the whistle all the way, and slid the cylinder into the Buick’s backseat.
“We can go now,” said Coleman. He turned as the Dobermans were almost to the car. The whistle blew. They ran back through the hole in the fence.
Serge threw the car into gear and nodded. “So that’s why you carry the whistle.”
“Dogs just don’t like me.”
THE BUICK FLEW south on U.S. 1. Serge accelerated across the drawbridge from the mainland to Key Largo. He looked at Coleman. “What’s the matter?”
Coleman scratched his arms. He glanced in the backseat. Then scratched again.
Serge grinned. “You can’t get in the tank, can you?”
“There were always other guys before. They had equipment.”
“What were you planning?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tap a little hole with a pick and a hammer.”
“Are you insane? Those things are highly pressurized. It’ll blow the pick right back through your forehead!”
“What about a really tiny hole?”
“You don’t know anything about physics, do you?”
“Will you help?”
The Buick pulled into a strip mall and parked at the first of fifty scuba shops on the island. The store was empty except for a single employee behind the cash register. The nineteen-year-old salesman had sun-bleached hair, a surfer’s tan and half-mast marijuana eyelids. He was totally stoked.
“Uh, listen,” said Serge, lounging against the counter. “We need some valve work on a tank.”
“No problem-o.”
“Except it’s not really a scuba tank. It’s for medical purposes.”
The salesman shook his head. “No oxygen tanks. I can’t work on anything flammable.”
“It’s not oxygen. It’s something else, but it’s inert.”
“What?”
“Why don’t I just show you?”
Serge and Coleman wrestled the tank into the store.
The salesman started giggling and pointing at them. “You dudes are gonna do nitrous!”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhh!” Serge set the tank in front of the counter.
“Don’t worry, dudes. I do this all the time. One of my specialties.”
“How long?”
“Half hour. But it has to be cash. The owner’s kind of weird about this.”
Serge and Coleman killed time wandering the store. They gazed into a glass case of hulky metal wristwatches with five-hundred-foot crush depths. Coleman picked up a Speedo box. “So you’re really going to marry Molly?”
“Isn’t she special?”
Coleman opened the box and stretched the trunks in front of his face. “I just don’t see you two together.”
“There’s a soul-mate connection,” said Serge. “I can’t explain it, but she’s definitely the one.”
The Speedo ripped. Coleman stuck it back in the box. “What if she isn’t the one?”
“Then we shake hands, say no hard feelings, and I drop her some place with no phones for five miles. Word on the street is you need a big head start….”
“Nitrous tank’s ready!”
They went in the back room. The salesman beamed proudly at his art. “Okay, you’re gonna love this. Easy connections, that’s my trademark. Here’s where your regulator goes”—he attached a rubber hose that ran to the mouthpiece in his other hand—“and this is your auxiliary port with universal mount.”
“What for?” asked Coleman.
“So you can fill other tanks. Regular scuba or the minis. You can’t take this giant thing to parties. Suggest you get one of those little emergency tanks we have. Fits in your pocket. Five minutes of air…” The salesman stuck the regulator in his mouth.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” said Coleman. “That’s my gas!” He jerked the regulator away and stuck it in his own mouth.
“C’mon. This is a quality job,” said the salesman. “Gimme a bump.”
“All right, but just a little.”
A short while later, Coleman picked up the tank and stepped over the passed-out teen. They got back in the Buick and continued west. More bridges, Tavernier, Upper and Lower Matecumbe. They started across the Long Key Viaduct.
“Coleman, check this out.” Serge wiggled his finger inside a hole in the driver’s door. “I think I feel a bullet…. Coleman?”
Coleman was slumped against the far door with the regulator in his mouth, a puddle of drool on his shirt. Serge plucked the rubber mouthpiece from Coleman’s lips, and it came out with the sound of someone popping a finger in a cheek.
A minute passed; Coleman sat up. “What did you do that for?”
“There’s a bullet hole. I told you I didn’t break your window. Somebody was shooting at us. It shattered the glass, traveled across the car and lodged here.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve been getting an odd feeling lately that I’m being followed.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“How do you explain the bullet?”
“South Florida,” said Coleman. “Probably a stray from all the people shooting for reasons that don’t concern us.”
“Think so?”
“Remember that celebration after the Miami Heat playoffs where they shot those guns in the air, and one of the slugs came down and dropped that guy sticking videos in the overnight box?”
“Guess you’re right.” Serge looked off the south side of the bridge. “I spy…another waterspout!”
“I see them all the time in the Keys.”
“The conditions are just right in the Gulf Stream.”
“Maybe it’ll bring us good luck.”
A few miles back, a brown Plymouth Duster began crossing the Long Key Viaduct.
25
The night before the wedding
S ERGE WAS A WRECK. He paced back and forth at a boat ramp on the northwest end of Big Pine.
The sun started down over the Gulf. A wavering orange furnace reflecting off the incoming surf. All three types of clouds in attendance. A bank of stratus burned red on the western sky. Straight and high above, wispy cirrus glowed pink from the underlight. To the east, a front of purple and gray cumulus from an approaching storm. Serge stopped on the boat ramp and raised his camera. He snapped the shutter as a lone gull crossed the center of the bright ball filling his zoom.
Serge always had to wait until the very end. Once the sun touched the horizon, it would go fast, quickly halfway down, then a brilliant arc on the rim of the earth. Finally, a last pop of light and it was gone, leaving Serge consumed with the same postcoital emotion he had after every session of strenuous sex: He wanted a pizza.
Serge had to stay till the end because he was still hoping to see the elusive Flash of Green that John D. MacDonald had written of so eloquently—an extremely rare emerald ignition over water at the exact moment of sunset. Diehard Floridians were always chasing it. Some people, like Serge, went years without success. A few o
ld-timers said they’d seen it two or three times. There were many competing theories for the flash. Others thought it was just a fairy tale. Serge was not one of them.
On this particular evening, Serge stood beside the ramp and took the last of his photos as the sun dipped deep into the sea. Almost gone. Time to look for the flash. He let the camera hang from the strap around his neck and crossed his fingers. “Please, please, please…” He squinted at the last bit of light wavering on the horizon. It disappeared.
Serge gasped and put a hand to his mouth. “Oh, my God. I saw it! I finally saw it!” He turned and began running across the island toward the No Name Pub. “I saw the flash! I saw the flash!…” Serge noticed a big green spot down the road ahead of him. Serge stopped and held a hand up to his face, a green spot in the middle of the palm.
“Shit, of course. The sun was almost solid red at the end. It’s just a damn reverse-image afterspot on my eyeballs from staring too long.” His shoulders slumped as he trudged on toward the pub. “Now I’m depressed.” He reached the parking lot and looked up at a tiny jetliner, its lengthy contrail catching light from over the horizon to form a bright streak across the darkening blue sky with a green spot in the middle.
The No Name was rockin’. J. Geils on the juke. Early Whammer Jammer stuff. Serge opened the screen door.
“Serge!”
He grabbed a stool and sagged at the counter. Jerry the bartender came over with a bottle of water. “Why so down?”
“I just saw the Flash of Green.”
“That’s great!” said Jerry. “I’ve never seen it and I’ve been looking forever. Where? On the north shore?”
“It’s still here.” Serge reached out with his finger and touched a point in the air between their faces. “It’s just a damn spot on my eyeballs. There’s no magical flash.”
“Yes, there is. It’s an atmospheric condition. You just stared too long.”
Serge noticed a commotion at the pool table. “What’s going on over there?”
“Bar bet. They’re working on Coleman.”
Serge looked at his hand again. “I think I’ve done some kind of damage.”
“It’ll fade.”
Serge picked up his water and headed for the pool table, where three guys were gripping Coleman’s head from different angles, trying to dislodge the cue ball stuck in his mouth.