Coconut Cowboy

by Tim Dorsey

  Underneath the house, Elroy continued leading the way with a collapsible camping shovel. “Where’s Slower?”

  “Back here. I think I got a splinter in my butthole.”

  “I ain’t breaking out the tweezers, so deal with it.”

  The shovels snapped into open position, and a familiar routine of flinging dirt began.

  “Elroy—­”

  “Don’t even start again about why we’re the guys who always have to crawl under houses.”

  Slow closed his mouth.

  Another spade full of dirt flew. Elroy realized the hole was taking longer than usual. Because only two shovels were in play. He looked around with his flashlight, then barked the loudest whisper he dared without waking Jabow. “Slower! Where are you?”

  An echo from a distant part of the crawl space: “Digging the hole. I was wondering where you guys were.”

  “You dolt! . . .”

  Martin got down on his hands and knees—­“Steve owes me big-­time”—­and shimmied under the house . . .

  A shovel hit something. Elroy’s hands swept dirt away from the previously buried cash. “Hand me that bag.” New cash went on top of the old.

  Martin continued crawling with stealth, led by the sound of curt whispers up ahead. Occasionally there was a flicker from a thin flashlight, then darkness again. He reached in his pocket for the pistol.

  “Is that the last of it?” asked Elroy.

  Slow turned the canvas bag inside out. “It’s empty.”

  Elroy’s arms began herding displaced soil back into the hole. “Let’s fill this sucker up and get the heck out of here.”

  Slow felt something pressed against the back of his head.

  “Nobody’s going anywhere!”

  A startled Elroy raised up and smacked his head on a floor beam. “Ow, shit! . . . Who’s there? . . . Jabow, did we wake you?”

  “It’s Martin from the bank. I believe that’s my money.” He shoved Slow down in the dirt. “Somebody better start explaining fast.”

  “Your money?”

  “Yes!”

  “Look, man, we just do what we’re told.”

  “Who gives your orders?”

  “Anyone on the city council. Until we work our way up to the big table in Lead Belly’s, they get to bust our balls and run us around everywhere, like the other night at that farm with the airplane and Christmas lights.”

  “A stellar piece of work that was.” Martin stretched out his shooting arm. “Turn on your flashlight . . . Not in my eyes—­at my hand . . . See this? Don’t think I won’t use it. Now start filling that bag back up. Then we’re going someplace a little nicer and having a long talk.”

  “Whatever you say.” Hands furiously clawed the ground.

  Martin smiled maliciously. “That’s better—­”

  Wham.

  Thud.

  “Martin?”

  Silence.

  Elroy clicked on his flashlight again. Martin lay motionless in the dirt. Behind him was Slower, smiling and wielding a shovel. “I found my way back.”

  “What made you hit him?”

  “I saw him pointing that gun at you,” said Slower. “Figured that wasn’t good.”

  Elroy snatched the pistol from Martin’s listless hand. “Slower, this just might be the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Really?”

  Elroy tapped Martin on the cheek. “Tables are turned, city boy. Now we’re going to have that talk—­but on my terms.”

  “He’s ignoring you,” said Slower.

  “He’s just still unconscious,” said Elroy. “Shake him.”

  Slower did. “Still not moving.”

  Elroy slapped his cheek harder. “Martin! Wake up!” He shined the flashlight. “Oh no.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fuck me,” said Elroy.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Look at his face,” said Elroy. “Blood’s coming out his nose.”

  “So he has a nosebleed. No big deal.”

  “It’s a huge deal. You hit him in the back of his head, not the face,” said Elroy.

  “And now blood’s coming from his ears,” said Slower.

  “Exactly. His brain is bleeding.” Elroy grabbed a wrist for a pulse. “No, no, no! Not this!”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?” said Slower. “I just hit him once.”

  “This isn’t like the movies where ­people in bars bash each other over the head with bottles and keep on fighting,” said Elroy. “You hit a guy in the head even once with something hard like a shovel, you can easily kill him.”

  “Didn’t mean to.”

  “This is definitely the stupidest thing you’ve ever done!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you have any idea who this is?”

  “Yeah, Martin.”

  “Steve’s cousin,” said Elroy. “They’re doing serious business with the city council. And they’re dangerous characters. Landing planes secretly at night: What did you think that was? . . . Don’t answer. The important thing is that nobody can ever find out about this. He just disappeared. Swear to me you’ll never speak a word.”

  “I’m not saying anything,” said Slower.

  “Me neither,” chimed his brother.

  “Okay, let me think. We have to get rid of his body.”

  “Let’s just throw him in the woods somewhere.”

  “No, they’re always finding those. It has to be a place he won’t ever, ever be found.” Elroy looked straight down and nodded to himself. “Grab your shovels.”

  “Why?”

  An hour later, they crawled out from under the house.

  “I never want to do that again,” said Slow.

  “Shut up!” snapped Elroy, reaching in his pocket. “Here are the keys to the Mercedes. We need to ditch it. There’s one kind of place to abandon cars where it will look like a million other suspicious things might have happened. ­People are always ditching cars there for the same reason. Follow me.”

  They replaced the lattice and drove away from the house.

  Twenty miles east, Elroy’s nerves finally began to uncoil. “Looks like we dodged a real bullet.” They continued on through God’s country. Slower drove the Mercedes past a hill with the flashing red beacon of a cellular tower on top. Inside the car’s console, a phone glowed back to life.

  Three hundred miles south, in a forty-­eighth-­floor Miami penthouse, a text alert jingled. A man in a bathrobe checked his phone’s display and pinched his lip. “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

  Chapter TWENTY

  HOMOSASSA

  Just after nightfall, three traveling companions sat cross-­legged on the ground.

  “I love camping!” said Serge, arranging freshly gathered kindling wood into a small pyramid. “This is just like Easy Rider! My favorite parts were them bonding around their fires! And I’m going to make this the best campfire ever! Coleman, give me a light . . .”

  “Serge?”

  “What is it, Matt?”

  “But we’re in a motel room.”

  “Right, I love camping but need A/C, TV and Wi-­Fi.” Serge flicked the lighter. “To balance it out, I picked one of the worst-­rated budget motels in the area so we could really rough it.”

  “No, I mean I don’t think a campfire in the room is a good idea.”

  Serge held the flame in front of his face. “It just says ‘No Smoking.’ ”

  “I’m afraid I’m with Matt on this one,” said Coleman. “Remember the fire I started in that one room?”

  “You’re right.” Serge let the flame go dark. “That didn’t go well at checkout.”

  He grabbed his lap
top, hit a few keys, then set it on the floor between them. It began playing a YouTube video of a campfire.

  “Much better idea,” said Matt.

  “And now that we’re living off the land, let’s again resurrect the art of conversation that’s been lost in the age of technology. I’ll turn on the TV.” A news report about a small tornado with great cell-­phone video from a viewer.

  “Television is roughing it?” said Matt.

  “It’s not a flat-­screen,” said Serge. “That’s pretty uncivilized. I’ll pick the first topic. The conspiracy of cable news. They’re all in it together.”

  “I don’t know,” said Matt. “CNN may be neutral to the point of banal, but Fox and MSNBC couldn’t be more philosophically different.”

  “And that’s what they’d have you think, but here’s when the secret mind control dawned on me: I’d be watching one station, and it would go to a commercial. I don’t want to watch a commercial; I need more data on celebrity misbehavior, so I’d switch the channel, and there would be another ad, and another on the third station, sometimes the exact same commercial. First it was just frustrating. No, I don’t want to leave the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer where five ­people are talking at once, and then I’m stuck in a bunch of ads for airlines I didn’t even know existed. How many CNN viewers can be flying to Korea? I never want to let accusations fly before I check my facts, so I monitored the trend for twenty-­four straight hours, and the bombardment of commercials took its toll. I don’t want to know that since I had chicken pox, the shingles virus is already in me. I don’t need to reverse my mortgage. I still don’t want to fly to Korea. In the end it became obvious that they were all colluding—­despite the smoke screen of political differences—­to synchronize commercials.” Serge raised an index finger. “That’s how it always starts.”

  Coleman grabbed the remote and clicked to another news station.

  “ . . . Post-­menopausal intercourse doesn’t need to be painful . . .”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  “Serge, are you okay?”

  “Just a flashback. And now I’m oddly attracted to Asian flight attendants. Next topic: strange circumstantial emotions that defy explanation, like when you realize you’re on the wrong street and have to turn around in someone’s driveway, and for no reason at all you feel outrageously guilty, hurrying up to get the car in reverse like a thief, hoping they don’t peek out the windows. And then, ‘Oh my God, they’re peeking out the windows! The shame is too great! I must get the hell out of here!’ So you fishtail backward from their driveway and take out the mailbox. But you were already back on a public street and the mailbox was technically on city easement, so it’s clearly not your fault: ‘Those assholes in that house made me tense.’ ”

  Matt raised his arms and yawned. “I’m getting tired.”

  “And I need to blog today’s developments,” said Serge. “Did I mention that this is the county where Tom Petty had his musical awakening in the sixties?”

  “Every half hour.”

  Serge grabbed his laptop, and the others grabbed pillows . . .

  Hours later, Coleman woke up and crawled out of the bathroom. “Is Matt awake?”

  “No, still sleeping like the proverbial baby.” Serge tapped furiously on his laptop. “That’s what I hate about youth: the ability to immediately conk out. I probably close and open my eyes at least a hundred times before I drift off.”

  “I’ve noticed how you keep popping up and down,” said Coleman.

  “First, I jump up to check if my wallet’s where I left it . . . Then I close my eyes again: Did I actually see where my wallet was when I got up just now, or became distracted and simply imagined that I looked? . . . I need to put my wallet someplace safer . . . Did I just fall asleep and only dream that I checked on my wallet? . . . I need to leave myself a note where I just hid my wallet in case I forget in the morning . . . But if a burglar breaks in and finds the note, it will lead him straight to my wallet . . . Where should I put the note? I know: I’ll hide it in my wallet.” Serge stopped typing. “Where’s my wallet?”

  “Behind your laptop,” said Coleman. “Have you been on the computer this whole time?”

  Tap, tap, tap. “I’m surfing fetish websites.”

  “I didn’t know you were a pervert.”

  “Here’s an all-­points bulletin,” said Serge. “Everyone’s a pervert. It’s just a question of how in fashion your uncontrollable quirks are.”

  “What about prudes?”

  “Especially prudes,” said Serge. “That’s why they’re prudes. They secretly have a good idea what they’ll find if they start rummaging around the dark closets in their subconscious.”

  Coleman staggered over. “Can I see what you’re looking at?”

  “Sure, but I’m afraid you’ll be bored.” Tap, tap, tap. “Although I freely admit I’m as perverted as the next guy or gal, my interest in these searches has nothing to do with sex.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “When you mention fetish, ­people think of the obvious: bondage, bestiality, latex, feet, dudes with staggering collections of unlaundered and alphabetized panties that force them to knock out non-­load-­bearing walls for industrial shelving space.” He refreshed the browser. “But what’s most fascinating is the stuff that’s so far afield from any normal sexual appetite that it’s a jarring non sequitur.”

  “What am I looking at?” asked Coleman. “There’s just a lot of steam.”

  “Psychrophilia,” said Serge. “Arousal from extremely cold objects. This guy is packing all his most prized everyday possessions in dry ice.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “It’s only the start.” Tap, tap, tap. “One of the most riveting aspects is the specificity of the subject matter, like an endowed college chair. There are separate websites for Girl Scout troop moms in high-­top sneakers, tattooed chicks playing the cello, androgynous squirt-­gun fights, encasing oneself in Bubble Wrap, sniffing subtropical fruit—­seedless or regular, but not both.”

  “What’s that guy doing?”

  “Forniphilia. Sexual arousal from posing as a piece of furniture,” said Serge. “He’s a TV stand. See the Zenith on his back?”

  “I had no idea all this was going on.”

  “Most ­people don’t,” said Serge. “It’s an accident of unsynchronized human evolution. Our imaginations have outpaced our animal urges . . . A perfect analogy is cooking. Primal instinct programs us to eat for survival, but nature never intended green-­bean casserole with those crunchy onion things that you’ll never encounter outside of the holidays if everything’s going right. Likewise, the sex chefs give us this . . .”

  Coleman scooted closer to the screen. “A hot babe in work boots smashing lightbulbs?”

  “That’s a new one on me.” Serge grabbed his notebook as the video progressed. “Now she’s going for the niche markets, stomping energy-­saving bulbs . . . fluorescent tubes . . . outdoor floodlights . . .”

  “Can I try?” asked Coleman.

  Serge relinquished his chair. “Be my guest.”

  Coleman moved the cursor to start another video. Two minutes in: “Oh my God! Look at this!”

  “What is it?”

  He covered his eyes. “I can’t watch any more.”

  “What can possibly be that bad?” said Serge, turning toward the screen. “Jesus! That’s one of the most unnerving things I’ve witnessed in my whole life! What kind of fucked-­up potty training did these ­people have?”

  “Turn it off!” said Coleman.

  “Wish I could,” said Serge. “But I can’t let this go unaddressed. I’m all for live and let live—­to a degree—­but this is just wrong. And it’s happening in Florida. I can tell from the palm trees out the window.”

  “I thought she was just going to step on lightbulbs, but then she
went on to ants.”

  “And who hasn’t stepped on ants?” said Serge. “But when she progressed to grasshoppers, I knew this wasn’t trending well.”

  “Next came lizards,” said Coleman.

  “Lizards!” said Serge. “They’re my friends. I’d catch them as a kid, but just to put in my pocket. And as an adult, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rescued them from buckets of water or swimming pools.”

  “I had a pet hamster.”

  Serge clutched himself and bowed his head with closed eyes. “I’m rarely this disturbed.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Research.” Tap, tap. “Okay, here’s an article out of Miami. A woman was arrested on animal cruelty charges in what’s apparently called ‘crushing videos.’ Authorities uncovered a sex website run by a fishing-­boat captain. One of the women killed a bunny, blew cigarette smoke and sprinkled pepper on the body—­more sexual white-­noise static. Then this other woman gave a guy a hand job while using the other hand to cut a chicken’s head off with hedge clippers.” Serge grabbed his stomach. “I may be sick.”

  “But they got arrested, right?” said Coleman. “Everything’s okay now?”

  “For the Miami website, but not this other one we just saw.”

  “But it’s on the Internet. How can we find these ­people?”

  Tap, tap, tap. “Here we go. A way to order DVDs through the mail. It’s got a PO box near Ocala.”

  “That doesn’t help.”

  “Ye of little faith.” Serge stood up and grabbed a pen. “I’m going to leave a note for Matt. He doesn’t need to see this . . . Where’s my wallet?”

  THE NEXT DAY

  A bustling lunchtime crowd in lobster bibs filled the rib joint.

  The city council sat around three pushed-­together tables, topping each other with jokes.