by Tim Dorsey
“…I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight-hold on…”
“This is too cool,” said Lenny. “It’s like we’re on the exact same page. I need another joint.”
Lenny grabbed a doobie paper-clipped behind the visor and tried to light it but couldn’t. “Same thing on the pier. I need a new lighter.” He pulled into a convenience store.
Back on the road, he lit the joint on the first try with a small, windproof acetylene torch on a keychain, $9.99.
“You shouldn’t waste your money on crap like that,” said Serge, playing with the laser pointer on his own keychain.
“In the long run, paraphernalia pays for itself,” said Lenny.
“I used to know someone like you,” said Serge.
“What’s he like?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh,” said Lenny. They stopped behind a Rolls-Royce at a red light, waiting to turn onto Gulf Boulevard.
“Why were you trying to fake a suicide the other night?” asked Lenny. “Need to ditch some business partners? Meet your wife in the Bahamas to split the life insurance? Jump bail?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Serge.
“It’s obvious. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant, too. Not like the guys who dive from short bridges and leave stupid notes or torch their boat in the Gulf at night and row ashore in rafts and they’re suspected right away and turn up two weeks later in Cancún. But nobody can survive a fall from the Skyway, so you have to be dead. Your prints are all over the car you left up there. And best of all, they got your fatal jump on videotape on the bridge surveillance cameras. Except the part about what was inside Santa’s belly. Where’d you get a black parachute, anyway?”
“Pez Easter egg coloring.”
Lenny nodded.
“Wonder why this light’s taking so long,” said Serge. He stretched his neck to look forward in traffic.
Their lane had the green arrow, but the Rolls-Royce ahead of them didn’t move. Then the arrow was red again.
“Goddammit!” said Serge. “Now the light has to cycle again. What’s going on in that car?”
Serge grabbed the top of the convertible’s windshield and stood up. He grumbled and sat back down and fidgeted. The driver of the Rolls was talking on a cell phone while simultaneously trimming nose hair with tiny scissors. Serge could see the driver stop to inspect his nostrils in the lighted mirror on the back of the sun visor, then resume trimming.
“Try to hang on,” Serge whispered to himself, twisting nervously in his seat. Then he noticed the Rolls’ two bumper stickers: “God is my copilot” and “Get a job!”
“You know, that’s pretty unsafe, putting a sharp object in your nose at a red light,” said Serge. “You never know when someone might rear-end you.”
Serge reached over with his left leg and tapped Lenny’s gas pedal, and the Cadillac lurched forward and popped the bumper of the Rolls. The windows of the Rolls were up, but everyone near the intersection could hear the terrible screaming anyway.
“You might want to pull around him,” Serge told Lenny. “I think there’s some kind of problem in that car.”
They crossed the bridge at Johns Pass as a casino boat headed out to the edge of territorial waters.
“I love how we’re holed up in the room,” said Lenny. “I do it as often as I can. What about you?”
“Only when I have to.”
“I mean for fun,” said Lenny. “You know, you want to break the routine, so you drive across town and check into a seedy motel and pretend you’re on the run. Act mysterious, arouse people’s suspicions, maybe rock star the room. There’s a lot of style you can put into being a fugitive. It’s a damn American art form!”
“Turn here, David Janssen.”
“Where?”
“Here!”
Lenny checked his watch as Serge sprinted in and out of the video store and vaulted back into the passenger seat without opening the door. “Two minutes, eight seconds,” said Lenny.
“Gotta get it down under a deuce,” said Serge.
They skidded into the parking lot of a thrift store, and Serge raced in. Two minutes later, he hurdled back into the car and threw a T-shirt in Lenny’s face. Lenny held the shirt out and read the front. “ Treasure Island Police Athletic League.” Serge had an identical one, and he had already stripped off his other shirt and was wiggling his arms through the holes of the new one.
“Put that on,” said Serge. “Whenever I’m fleeing and eluding, I hit the thrifts for local law enforcement T-shirts. Makes traffic stops go much smoother.”
Back in the motel room, Lenny shoved more bottles and cans down into the ice-filled tub. Coke, Sprite, orange and grapefruit juice, Bloody Mary mix, Budweiser, Heineken, Absolut, Finlandia. Serge arranged a row of Florida keepsakes along the back of the writing desk. Above them he taped an autographed black-and-white photo of a scuba diver to the wall.
“Who’s that?” said Lenny, shotgunning a beer on the way out of the bathroom.
“Lloyd Bridges,” said Serge. “The immortal Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt. Originally, Nelson operated out of Marineland in California. But later he went freelance, and they shot several episodes in the Florida Keys, which made him technically eligible for inclusion in my shrine.”
Lenny reached into the shrine and started to pick up a Flipper thermos, but Serge slapped his hand.
“It’s burned into my mind,” Serge continued. “The end credits of every episode, Bridges sailing off in his boat, the Argonaut, and then the trademark emblem of Ziv Productions.”
“You have a good memory.”
“That’s because I don’t smoke that shit you do. I wouldn’t want to be abnormal.”
Lenny looked again at Bridges’s smiling face in the yellowed photo and the inscription, “To my pal, Serge.”
“This is all very interesting, but why put his picture up?”
“Inspiration. It’s important to build on the shoulders of the giants.”
Lenny poured vodka, lit a joint and took some speed.
Serge duct-taped the edges of the curtains to the wall, taped over the message light on the phone and the battery indicator on the smoke detector.
“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.
“Establishing theater conditions. I hate it when people watch a great movie at home with a bunch of lights on. Wrecks the whole medium. If there’s any other light source in the room except the film, it completely ruins it for me.”
Serge unplugged the pine-scented nightlight in the bathroom and taped over the blinking “12:00” on the VCR. Lenny took a small brush out of a nail polish jar and painted his joint with a brownish liquid.
“What are you doing?” asked Serge.
“Putting hash oil on this doobie,” said Lenny. “I’ve been refining the technique. The speed counteracts the dovetail-drowsiness of the weed and the depressant effect of the alcohol. The booze files down the rough edges of paranoia from the pot and hyperagitation from the amphetamine. And the marijuana heightens self-awareness to prevent you from pulling something stupid that the liquor and pills are trying to talk you into.”
“What if you, like, didn’t do any of that stuff, then you wouldn’t have to worry about neutralizing all the bad effects?”
Lenny looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”
Serge popped Goldfinger in the VCR, and Lenny got ready for another pill.
“Look! Look!” said Serge, pointing out the scene where Bond meets Goldfinger in the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Serge’s yelling startled Lenny, and he inhaled the pill and began choking. He staggered, clutching his throat with one hand and bracing himself against the TV with the other.
Serge hit pause on the remote, stood up without urgency and gave Lenny a roundhouse kung fu kick in the solar plexus. The pill flew out and plinked off the TV screen.
“Now the movie’s ruined,” said Serge. He went over to the writing table and immersed himsel
f in the tedium of taking apart and reassembling the homing signal receiver for the fifth time since they got to the motel.
“What are ya doin’?” Lenny asked.
No answer. Serge wore safety goggles, and the soldering iron gave off a tentacle of smoke when he touched it to a capacitor.
Lenny reached under the bed and pulled out a sturdy nylon travel bag with zippers, pockets, compression bands, D-rings and Velcro.
He suddenly had Serge’s attention by the short hairs. “What’s that?” Serge asked, unplugging the soldering iron and coming over to the bed.
“My special bag,” said Lenny. “It’s got more little pockets and compartments than I have stuff.” He dumped the contents onto the bed. “Take out all my crap and-boom!-molded rubber bottom and insulated sides. It becomes a cooler-perfect for the barfly on the go!”
“Cool!” said Serge.
“I got something even better,” said Lenny. “Put out your hands and close your eyes.”
“They’re closed.”
“No peeking,” said Lenny.
“I’m not peeking! Hurry up, already.”
Lenny reached out and placed a small plastic cube in Serge’s cupped hands. Serge opened his eyes.
“It’s just a rock in a clear plastic box,” said Serge. “What’s the deal? Does it have a gem inside? A core of Uranium 238?”
“No, it’s just a rock. But it’s where it’s from that’s special.”
“Give.”
“The moon.”
“Baloney!” said Serge. “It’s against the law to own moon rocks-they’re all in government vaults. All eight hundred and fifty pounds from the six landing sites.”
“And where else?” Lenny asked with a smile.
“All except the ones the president gave as personal gifts to foreign dignitaries.”
Lenny’s smile broadened.
“Get outta town!” said Serge, and he punched Lenny in the shoulder.
“I hear it’s from Honduras. Look, it’s got this nifty certificate, too.”
Lenny pulled a wallet from his back pocket. He opened the bill section and removed a piece of paper that had been folded six times and had a circular coffee stain. Serge recognized the authentic Richard Nixon signature.
“You sonuvabitch,” Serge said, and he punched Lenny again. It hurt a little, but Lenny kept smiling.
“How’d you get it?”
“I fronted a guy a lid of weed in Deerfield Beach, and he couldn’t pay me back. You know how it gets, after you have to bug a guy over a pot debt long enough, they start getting mad at you like you’re the one who’s in the wrong. So we’re there in his apartment, stoned again-my weed of course-and I say, ‘Look, it’s been three weeks. Put up, man. Show some good faith. Whatever you got. A lottery ticket, a burrito-I just need some collateral.’ So I follow him into his room and he pulls out his sock drawer, and taped to the back is this rock.”
“What are you doin’ with it here?” asked Serge.
“I’m gonna sell it. I’ve been making some calls to get an auction together. I bet it can fetch at least ten large on the black market.”
“Like hell you’re gonna sell it!”
“Why not?”
“Cuz I’ll kick your ass if you do! You know what you got there? That is the coolest! If I had one, I’d never sell it. I’d keep it in a special container with the rest of my special stuff.”
“Why?”
“To look at. You know, when you get the mood some nights to get your special stuff out and put it on the table, and you sit there and look at it and play with it, move it around…”
Lenny had a puzzled look.
“What?” said Serge. “Didn’t you have any hobbies when you were a kid?”
“So what am I supposed to do with it?” Lenny asked.
“If it’ll bring ten grand, so will a fully authenticated counterfeit moon rock. I can get this certificate touched up at Kinko’s and we’ll run off a bunch. Then we’ll get a few Lucite display boxes with little pedestals inside, like they use to show off autographed baseballs. We’ll sell the rock over and over again.”
“Where we gonna find more rocks?”
A red Audi driven by Tommy Diaz slowed on Gulf Boulevard and turned into the driveway of Hammerhead Ranch.
“Aaaaaauuuuuuuu!” Tommy yelled, and cut the wheel, barely missing two men crouched low to the ground in the parking lot.
Lenny looked up from the pavement as the Audi swerved by, barely missing him. “I think we’re too far out,” Lenny told Serge. “We’re gonna get run over.”
The pair duck-walked to the side of the motel parking lot, picking up rocks as they went.
“How about this one?” Lenny asked, holding up a smooth white river rock used in decorative landscaping.
“Are you still high? At least make some attempt to select one that looks real. That certificate is only gonna fool ’em so much.”
Serge sorted through some rocks next to a garbage can, and he picked one up and held it in front of his face. “Okay, here we go. We’re cookin’ now!”
“How’s that rock better than mine?”
“Look at it! Think basaltic, igneous-use your imagination. This could be from an ejecta blanket on the Sea of Storms. See the perforated texture? Intense heat, geological trauma! A few more of these and we’re in business!”
Serge leaned back down and sorted meticulously through the rubble among the butts and bottle caps.
“You gotta be careful selling space stuff on the black market,” said Serge. “Local cops and even the FBI shouldn’t be a problem, but you don’t want to mess with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Just ask the shrimper who’s talking to rats in his jail cell.”
“What happened?”
“They were on a trawler dragging the North Atlantic for shrimp when they snagged a tiny metal box. The shrimper cracked it open and found some personal effects and a few crew patches that said ‘Challenger.’ Their nets had hit a small skid of debris that hadn’t been found after the space shuttle blew an O-ring in ’86. The guy goes back to Cocoa Beach of all places and tries peddling the box around the pawnshops. He’s asking twenty grand, and he ends up settling for something like thirty bucks.”
“Not too shrewd,” said Lenny.
“That’s why they’re the underclass,” said Serge. “So the pawnshop owner calls NASA, and the next thing the guy knows, he’s walking down the sidewalk on A1A when ten agents come out of thin air and gang-swarm him… All that scientific nerd stuff you hear? Total garbage-these boys don’t play.”
They stopped talking and went back to collecting rocks.
A half hour later, Serge was still at it, subjecting every pebble to the same intricate degree of scrutiny. Lenny was totally bored and cranky.
“I think this is a lot more work than we have to go through,” he whined. “At a certain point it’s just not worth it anymore.”
Serge turned around with a handful of rocks. “It’s not a question of whether crime pays. It’s whether you enjoy your job. That’s the key to life.”
A n hour later, Serge and Lenny lay on their backs on their motel beds. Serge held the moon rock above his face, moving it around in the air, making rocket-thruster sounds with his mouth.
Lenny was on the bed next to the window, head toward the door. Serge had given him his keychain laser pointer to play with, and Lenny held it up above him, shooting the beam around the room and out the window.
“This is the coolest,” said Lenny, waving the red light around. “Since we’re gonna sell counterfeit moon rocks, I really don’t need the original. Wanna trade for the laser?”
“Deal!” said Serge.
They each reached out an arm into the little aisle between the beds and did a pinky shake to make it official.
16
It was ninety-two degrees by noon.
Zargoza reclined on a chaise lounge next to the pool at Hammerhead Ranch. He wiped sweat off his forehead and thought, I kn
ow this is Florida, but we’re heading into the holiday season for heaven’s sake. His swimsuit was a golden tan and a short length last in vogue in 1973. He had a sheen of sunscreen butter on his rugged, hairy chest and read the St. Petersburg Times through postmodern sunglasses that looked like welder’s goggles. It was early afternoon, no clouds or haze, and the sun was full strength. A group of children splashed and shrieked in the pool.
Four swimsuit models lay on their stomachs on Budweiser beach towels. Their bikini tops were untied as they read paperbacks with vibrant covers, Done Deal, Bones of Coral, Skin Tight and The Mango Opera. Just behind Zargoza’s chair, a constant flow of Japanese, French and German tourists stopped and posed for pictures in front of the row of stuffed hammerhead sharks and then drove away. Zargoza had a tall, sweating glass of grapefruit juice on the boomerang cocktail table next to his lounger. A cheap transistor radio played “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Zargoza took two Valium, the blue ones, and chased with the grapefruit. He was becoming a nerve case, thinking too much about the five million in the briefcase. Obviously drug money. Someone doesn’t lose that and not come looking for it. And, apparently, someone already had. Taxidermied alive? Ripped apart under a drawbridge? Zargoza shivered at the images. Those weren’t murders; they were messages. Definitely cartel work. It was only a matter of time.
Zargoza hadn’t been sleeping well. He kept waking up in the night obsessing about the briefcase, worrying it wasn’t hidden well enough. He couldn’t go back to sleep until he moved it again, and late each night he ran around the grounds of Hammerhead Ranch in his Devil Rays pajamas, the briefcase in one hand and a pistol in the other, making everything worse. “What was that?” Zargoza would spin around, aiming the pistol at imaginary shadows, dramatic music playing in his head. The curse was getting to be too much. Not to mention the Diaz Boys, the sweepstakes subpoenas and the simmering scandal at the nursing home. Zargoza decided right then to set C. C. Flag up as the fall guy; prosecutors can’t resist the headlines of bagging a celebrity.