Hammerhead Ranch Motel

by Tim Dorsey

  Zargoza took another sip of grapefruit juice. He finished the Times and picked up a Weekly Mail of the News World left on the next lounger by a British tourist. Zargoza lifted the grapefruit juice again, gulped and put it back without taking his eyes off the tabloid. He couldn’t believe the stories.

  First, a coke brick explodes in a car driven by a college student. Then the same student crashes through the glass dome of the Florida Aquarium. Finally, an unidentified Latin male with a shotgun is killed in the doorway of a condominium by an eighty-year-old woman with a hundred-year-old gun. The stories had the Diaz Boys’ fat fingerprints all over them. Shit, Zargoza thought, the British are covering this better than we are. He looked over the articles again. They all had the same byline, correspondent Lenny Lippowicz.

  He turned the page and saw another story by Lippowicz about a frantic treasure hunt in Key West for a briefcase full of drug money. A giant headline: “The Five-Million-Dollar Curse!”

  “AAAAHHHHHH!” Zargoza screamed and dropped the paper like it was on fire.

  Panic turned to anger. Zargoza picked up the paper and shredded it, crunching the pieces into a ball and slamming it to the ground. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”-spitting the words as fast as he could, losing breath, standing there shaking next to his lounger.

  Tommy Diaz had terrible timing.

  He drove up in a red Audi, and got out looking shaken.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Zargoza.

  “I almost ran over two guys duck-walking in your driveway!” said Tommy, sitting down on the side of the lounger next to Zargoza.

  “You always were a shitty driver,” said Zargoza. He reclined again and closed his eyes. Minutes passed. Tommy looked at the patio around the loungers, wondering what the deal was with all the torn-up newspapers. Zargoza finally sat up again and faced Tommy.

  “Do you have any concept of subtlety? Any aptitude at all for the soft touch? Is there a feather in that quiver of yours, or is it all sledgehammers and battering rams with you guys?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Zargoza threw up his arms.

  They were distracted by a loud racket. Some hammering and a buzz saw. Both turned and looked out on the beach behind the Calusa Pointe condominiums next door. They saw a furious level of construction as if the Seabees were building a Coral Sea airstrip. Half the noise was coming from where a massive temporary stage was being erected. The rest of the noise was from people getting plywood ready for the hurricane.

  “What’s that about?” asked Tommy, pointing at the lighting masts going up over the stage.

  “It’s their stupid anti-immigration rally tomorrow,” said Zargoza.

  Two workers hung a large cloth banner across the back of the stage. “Proposition 213: Because they just don’t look right!”

  “Chowderheads,” muttered Zargoza. He grabbed the grapefruit juice and chugged the whole thing and wiped his mouth with the back of his arm.

  Tommy Diaz didn’t say anything. He set a small object down on the cocktail table.

  “What’s that?” asked Zargoza.

  “It’s a beeper,” said Tommy.

  “I know it’s a beeper, you dumb shit,” Zargoza said. “When I say ‘What’s that?’ I mean, what is it in the technical context of ‘Why should I give a flying fuck?’”

  “It’s going to make us rich,” said Tommy.

  “What? You’re putting up microwave towers?”

  “No. We stole these. A whole semi full. When we unload them, we’ll make a fortune.”

  “It has zebra stripes,” said Zargoza.

  “They all have zebra stripes.”

  “All?”

  “All thirty thousand,” Tommy said proudly.

  “Jesus, you got thirty thousand beepers with zebra stripes. How do you ever expect to unload them?”

  “Because they’re Motorola,” said Tommy. “People want quality.”

  “They don’t want zebra stripes.”

  “Yes they do.”

  “No they don’t! Maybe they want their favorite color, but not this nightmare. It’s hideous. Might as well be covered with 666s.”

  “Maybe some people won’t like it, but there’ll still be plenty of other customers.”

  “Look, you got only two markets for this thing,” said Zargoza, counting off on his fingers. “One, zoologists, and two, that hooker chick in Get Christie Love. That’s it. End of story. Fade to black.”

  Tommy Diaz was crestfallen. “What am I gonna do with ’em?”

  “That’s your problem,” Zargoza said as he lay back down and closed his eyes.

  “Well, it’s kinda our problem. They’re all in room ten.”

  Zargoza sprang up. “What!”

  “Easy, easy. We had to get rid of the truck. It was bringin’ a lot of heat.”

  “Bringin’ a lot of heat? As opposed to what? Dropping some kid through the roof of the aquarium?”

  “We weren’t thinking right on that one. We were drinking and I got a little dizzy from the helium.”

  “Jesus! You’re all over the papers. And if you go down, I go with you. You guys need to lay low for a while. Watch some cable TV. Catch up on Law & Order. You staying in room ten?”

  “Can’t,” said Tommy. “It’s full of beepers.”

  Zargoza’s head fell to his chest in frustrated exhaustion.

  Tommy got a funny look on his face, like he was debating whether to say something. “You didn’t happen to come across five million dollars by any chance?”

  “Five million? Are you kidding?” said Zargoza, and he laughed artificially.

  “You wouldn’t hold out on us, would you?”

  “Never!”

  “Word on the street is it’s from the Mierda Cartel,” said Tommy.

  “Mierda?” said Zargoza. “That means shit in Spanish.”

  “Apparently they didn’t research the name well enough.”

  They both lay back down on their loungers and closed their eyes. They were quiet a few minutes.

  Tommy finally lifted his head. “I notice you don’t carry a beeper.”

  17

  Serge hunched over and turned a jeweler’s screwdriver, the last step in reassembling the homing signal receiver, which he was doing for the eleventh time in three days. He turned it on again. Nothing again.

  “Dammit! What’s the deal?” He grabbed it in his right hand and smacked it on the writing table a few times. He stopped and waited. Still nothing. He had it over his shoulder, ready to fling at the wall, when the indicator lights began flashing and the beeper began beeping.

  Serge looked out the window of room one. Zargoza was walking by on the sidewalk with a briefcase, every few steps spinning around in paranoia like a street crazy.

  S erge ambled down to the jetty next to Hammerhead Ranch. A few dozen people fished at the end of the rocks, a wide mix of heritage and walks of life, getting along famously. A rapper with a Snoop Dogg T-shirt showed a skinhead how to tie off a new lure. Serge’s theory was that you could end the world’s troubles by going to the hot spots and handing out fishing poles.

  He watched the people with saltwater casting rigs and buckets and stringers. Three men without shirts cast from the last rock of the jetty. Waves rolled in every minute, threatening to sweep them off. But there was a large tidal pool at the base of the rock, which sucked the waves down and blasted a spray high in the air in front of them.

  To the left, on the beach side of the jetty, children and families played in the swim area, roped off with buoys. A small boy with a new dive mask was facedown in the knee-deep water, studying shells and schools of tiny translucent fish that changed direction abruptly and in unison.

  Midway on the jetty, Zargoza had climbed down the boulders to the water line, where there were no other people, looking around nervously and jamming a metal briefcase in a cranny between the big rocks.

  Serge arrived on top of the jetty without a sound and called down to Zargoza. “Nice weather.”

/>   “Auuuuuhhhhh!” Zargoza yelled, jumping up in surprise. He put his hand over his pounding heart. “Don’t do that!”

  “You’re the owner of the motel, aren’t you?” asked Serge.

  “Who wants to know?” said Zargoza, climbing back up the boulders.

  “I’m a guest. Room one.”

  Serge smiled broadly and Zargoza didn’t like the looks of it.

  The car thieves and Sid and Patty had been child’s play. But he hadn’t fully appraised this Zargoza cat yet. Might be a more worthy adversary. Serge decided to bide his time and draw the thing out in a war of nerves, maybe even use a little “rope-a-dope,” and his mind suddenly unanchored and floated back thirty-three years to Miami Beach, a young underdog named Cassius Clay going crazy at the weigh-in, pounding on Sonny Liston’s limo at the airport, then beating Liston like a rug at the Convention Center…

  “Hello? Hello? Anybody home?” asked Zargoza.

  Serge snapped back to the present. “Sorry. I was in Miami.”

  Zargoza took a step back and gave him a wary look, but they were interrupted by a loud mechanical noise. They both turned and looked up the inlet. It was a growing buzzing sound, high-rpm engines like dirt bikes. Or Jet Skis.

  There were four of them. Lots of colors, expensive swimwear and shirts with designer markings. Luxury dive watches on their wrists even though they weren’t divers. Huge scuba knives strapped in spring-loaded scabbards on their calves even though they never had any use for them. They did doughnuts in their personal watercraft, accompanied by “Wooooooo!” and “Yahoooooo!” Then another flat-out run in formation across the mangrove flats and toward the jetty. A rapidly approaching jackass armada.

  “No nautical training, no understanding or respect for maritime courtesy,” said Serge. “Everyone with a boat knows the unspoken code you live by. The waterways were the last refuge of honor.”

  Zargoza nodded gloomily. “Now I know how the outlaw bikers felt when these dingleberries started showing up on Harleys.”

  On the first pass, the Jet Skiers snapped two fishing lines. Then they had the courtesy to come back and snap three more. By the third pass, they had driven every fish out of the inlet. People on the jetty slammed down their poles. The Jet Skiers whipped around the end of the jetty, and only providence saved them from the submerged boulders they didn’t know existed. They ran over the swim ropes and through the family bathing area, forcing a mother to snatch her two-year-old out of a blow-up turtle and dive toward the beach. They passed between shore and the small boy in the swim mask with his head down in the water.

  The Jet Skiers stopped up the beach and one pulled a small fabric cooler off his shoulder. He opened it and tossed beers to his buddies. They killed them fast and chucked the empties in the water.

  “Did you see that?” said Zargoza. “They almost ran over that kid. And they littered.”

  Serge walked over to a garbage bin and pulled out a few soda cans and filled them from the faucet at the fish-cleaning table. He walked back and rejoined Zargoza out on the rocks. They could hear the high whine of the engines on their return trip. The Jet Skis rounded the end of the jetty one by one.

  “I love Florida sunsets,” said Serge. “Every time the sun goes down it gives me renewed hope for tomorrow.”

  Serge made practice swings with his arm, gauging the weight of the can. He lobbed the aluminum cylinder in a practice shot and it splashed ten yards out from the rocks. “Now you try.”

  Zargoza made practice swings of his own to get the feel.

  Serge studied his stance and motion. He pointed at the Jet Skiers yelling and doing more doughnuts at the end of the inlet. “What’s happening to this country?”

  “No sense of sacrifice,” said Zargoza. “They live right up to the edge of their means, buying Jet Skis they ride two days a year. Fancy cars, Rolexes, all show. They eat their seed corn.”

  “In Texas, they have a saying for people like that,” said Serge. “Big hat, no cattle.”

  Zargoza got ready with the soda can. He reached his arm back.

  “Say, you hear anything about the cursed five million dollars that’s in the papers?” asked Serge.

  Zargoza became unnerved and bricked the shot ten feet off target.

  Serge walked over and grabbed Zargoza’s arm like a golf instructor, and he swung it in a slow pendulum to demonstrate technique.

  “The mistake people often make is to try to add too much velocity. That way you lose accuracy,” said Serge. “What you want to do is put all your effort into aim. At the speeds they’re going, they’ll supply all the velocity you’ll need. Finesse it. Air it out in a nice arch like Rip Sewell’s old ephus pitch for the Pittsburgh Pirates.”

  Zargoza reloaded with another can. The first Jet Skier approached, and Zargoza let it fly. The skier didn’t notice as it missed wide and long.

  The next Jet Skier was about to go by. Serge tossed the can in a two-handed lob from between the legs-a basketball free throw out of the fifties. The sound was a sickening thud as the can broke across the bridge of the man’s nose and knocked him backward off the Jet Ski like a horseback rider hitting the bottom branch of a tree.

  The jetty broke into laughter.

  The other three Jet Skiers circled and grabbed their friend out of the water. One skier pulled him aboard, and then the other two moved toward the rocks where Zargoza and Serge stood. They went for their scuba knives. Zargoza produced a pistol, and the men beat a panicked retreat, leaving the fourth Jet Ski bobbing nose down in the water.

  “You know,” said Zargoza, tucking the pistol back in his waistband and turning to Serge, “you’re a lot of fun to be around.”

  “That’s because I’m a people person.”

  18

  Wild green parrots squawked and flew in circles against the bank of clouds that glowed orange and violet at dusk. They swooped in front of the condominium and settled atop one of the tall Washingtonia palms that lined the road, evenly spaced like streetlights.

  Edna Ploomfield watched the parrots at sunset each evening from her back porch at Calusa Pointe. Or she watched the herons. Or the oystercatchers, kingfishers, skimmers, stilts and plovers that strutted at low tide.

  But tonight she ignored them because she was being interviewed on Florida Cable News with Toto about her shooting of one of the infamous Diaz Boys.

  “Tell us again how Toto handled all this,” said correspondent Blaine Crease.

  “He was fine,” Ploomfield said in her little ol’ lady voice. “So then I went for the gun on the wall-”

  “And where was Toto?”

  “On the floor somewhere. So I grabbed the gun and spun-”

  “What was Toto wearing?”

  After the camera lights were turned off, Mrs. Ploomfield said good night and went into her kitchen and freshened up her scotch. She shuffled to her bedroom and set the glass on the nightstand. She climbed into bed, propped herself up with three pillows and watched a M*A*S*H rerun. She turned off the TV with the remote. Then she looked over at the lamp on the nightstand and clapped twice, and the light went out.

  But unknown to Mrs. Ploomfield or anyone else at Calusa Pointe, there was a second clapper in the room. It was under her bed, wired to blasting caps and fourteen pounds of dynamite, and a millisecond after the lamp went out, Mrs. Ploomfield was blown straight up through the ceiling and into the condominium of the incredible shrinking mayor of Beverly Shores.

  Z argoza was sitting in the bar behind Hammerhead Ranch when a tremendous explosion at the condominium next door rocked the place. Liquor bottles rattled and two wineglasses at the edge of the sink fell and broke. Zargoza remembered that two hours earlier he’d seen someone who looked vaguely like Rafael Diaz run out the back of Calusa Pointe and up the beach.

  “Fuckin’ Diaz Boys,” Zargoza grumbled to himself. “I want those beepers out of here!”

  Zargoza got up from the bar and went back to room twelve, where his boiler room operation was winding down fro
m its dinner-hour fever pitch. He gathered his goons away from the telephones, and he half-sat against the side of his oversize desk. He read from a leather organizer, giving the day’s rundown of business and who wasn’t up to quota.

  As Zargoza spoke, a bright red laser dot slowly traced along the wall behind him and settled on his forehead. The goon standing closest to Zargoza tackled him to the ground. Another ran to the window and peeked out. “It’s coming from one of the motel rooms.”

  W hen the door crashed open in room one of Hammerhead Ranch and four men with automatic pistols burst in, Serge was on the far bed, packing the moon rock into his toiletry bag. Lenny was lying on the other bed, having just stuck the keychain laser in his hip pocket. His head was toward the foot of the bed, and he bent his neck backward and looked upside down at the four men sticking gun barrels in his face.

  “What I do?”

  S erge and Lenny sat handcuffed to chairs in room twelve as Zargoza paced and talked to himself and his men played cards. He slugged down sour mash and marched around the room and cursed.

  “You back-stabbin’ chickenshit!” Zargoza yelled at Serge. “We had all that fun with those Jet Skiers-pretending to be my friend and everything-and the whole time you were planning to kill me! Someone sent you after the five million, didn’t they? Well, I don’t have it!”

  Zargoza paced some more, and he grabbed a bag of potato chips away from one of his goons and began chomping.

  “Look how jumpy I am-I’m gaining weight!” He threw the bag of chips back at the goon. “What am I gonna do with these guys? If I can’t handle this, how will I ever keep the Diaz Boys in line?”

  He was interrupted by a loud voice from the back of the room.

  “Fuck the fucking Diaz Brothers!” Serge shouted, veins bulging. “Fuck ’em all! I bury those cockroaches! What did they ever do for us?!”

  Two goons turned their guns on Serge. “We should waste him! Teach him to shut his mouth!” one said. Then, talking to Serge, “For your information, it’s the Diaz Boys, not Brothers.”