Hammerhead Ranch Motel

by Tim Dorsey

  T he heavy rain from Rolando-berto filled the Myakka River to flood stage as it wound through Sarasota County. Johnny Vegas had taken his four-by-four into the state park. He was on an idyllic bird-watching hike deep into the hardwood hammocks and palmettos with a pretty twenty-two-year-old nature mama. For once, it was a constructive activity for Johnny, an educational experience, a communion with the environment in the company of a wholesome, healthy woman. Johnny had met her on-line, in the Horny Hot Singles Chat Room.

  They were eight miles down the trail when the woman and Johnny began exchanging silly double-entendre small talk. Hot damn, thought Johnny, I’m gonna be in those tight beige L.L. Bean hiking pants before you can say-he checked his Audubon field guide-man-o’-war frigate bird.

  Johnny started buttering her up. “There’s just such a fresh, open-meadow feeling about you.”

  She giggled and threw him a coy glance.

  “You’re like a field of lilacs.”

  She gave him another look. Was she touching her breast like that on purpose?

  “You’re like little kittens and all-natural ice cream.”

  She stopped on the trail and started taking off her backpack. At last he had arrived at Score City.

  “You’re such a refreshing change from all those loser girls these days with tattoos…”

  She froze in the trail. Oh no, thought Johnny. He gave her a fast up and down and saw just a tiny bit of green ink peeking out from under the right side of her shorts. “Did I say tattoo?”

  “Yes, you did! And you’ll never see this one,” she said, slapping the right side of her ass. She reversed direction on the trail, angrily marching past Johnny in high gear back toward the four-by-four.

  “Poop!” Johnny said to himself. Not only am I not scoring, but now I have to walk eight miles back to civilization in stinging silence.

  A phone rang.

  Johnny pulled the cell phone off his hiking belt. “Talk to me.”

  It was If. “Oh, hi there!” said Johnny. He never thought he’d hear from her again after the night they got stranded on top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

  They had a nice convivial confab. Turns out, If was just her nickname. Her real name was Inez Fawn Rawlings-I. F. Rawlings in her Tampa Tribune byline-a Vassar grad, Northeastern intelligentsia, rising reporter. She thought that Johnny, though not too mature or bright, looked dreamy in his tux that night at the aquarium. She would make the other women sick with jealousy when she showed up on his arm at the annual Tampa Bay media awards banquet. She told Johnny she had been nominated for the area’s highest journalistic honor, the Hubert Higgins Memorial Award, named after one of the area’s finest local writers, who was killed protecting a teenager from a mob attack on a lunch counter sit-in during the sixties. Actually, it was the former Hubert Higgins award. It was supposed to be named after Higgins in perpetuity, but in response to a tremendous outpouring of grief over a recent tragedy, it was changed this year.

  I ’m up for the Toto!” If told Johnny as they entered the banquet hall at the Performing Arts Center in downtown Tampa. She wore a sheer black dress, backless, almost down to her divide, with the thinnest of straps. She held Johnny’s arm tight and waved and smiled at her friends, trying to get their attention, make them mad. She leaned up to Johnny’s ear and whispered: “Winning journalism awards gives me better orgasms.” She gave the center of his ear a quick poke with her slender tongue. Johnny’s legs went to rubber, and he almost went tumbling, but If caught him and they made it to the table with their place cards.

  The lights went down and the four-ounce portions of boneless glazed chicken were served. After dinner, the sea of faces turned to the podium, where master of ceremonies Blaine Crease worked his way through a prodigious list of honors.

  In the late twentieth century, a new corporate philosophy to all but blow the shareholders had ravaged newspapers and TV stations, bleeding off staffing, experience and standards until what was left of the profession was a karaoke rendition of itself. The Old Guard of journalism came to the rescue by increasing the number of awards and self-congratulatory fetes until journalism officially passed bowling for most trophies per calorie burned.

  Crease was deep into the “best lighting on a weekend anchor desk” stretch of the honor roll. An elegant woman came up to If and whispered, “You got the Toto! I was backstage. I saw the engraving in the trophy.”

  Johnny thrust a fist into the air in front of him. “Yessssss!”

  Crease built his pace. Only one more category before the climax of the night, the Toto. If and Johnny leaned forward in anticipation. Crease moved into the copyediting awards, announcing the best headline on a breaking weekend news feature.

  Rookie copy editor Kirk Curtly heard his name called out and arose with his Montblanc graduation gift clipped securely in his jacket pocket. He walked up to shake Crease’s hand and accept the solid-gold-plated trophy.

  Up in the closed-off balcony was recently terminated state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole, a Remington.30-06 scoped rifle, and one of those bottles of Jack Daniel’s with a handle. He drank the bourbon out of a filthy coffee cup that read, “Ask someone who gives a shit!”

  Everyone in the banquet hall heard a clear-as-day but enigmatic phrase yelled from the direction of the balcony. “Write this headline, motherfucker!”

  Shots rang out and the podium was strafed. People screamed and scattered. Others dove under tables. Dole leaned over the railing to get a better angle on the fleeing Kirk Curtly, who was now three Kirks in Dole’s rifle scope, thanks to the miracle of modern alcohol. Dole leaned too far and went over the railing, doing a half-gainer onto Johnny’s and If’s table, collapsing it. If began crying and threw down her napkin. “My special night is ruined!” And she ran away.

  Johnny snapped under the strain of involuntary virginity. He began beating the hell out of the half-conscious Dole, which was the image the cameras caught when the TV lights went on. Johnny didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become an instant media hero.

  An hour later he was in a bar on Zack Street drowning his sorrows. At 11:07 P.M.-seven minutes after the eleven-o’clock newscast began-a statuesque blonde came over to Johnny. “That was you I just saw on the news, wasn’t it? You were great! So big and brave!” She leaned closer and suggested they call it a night and go back to her place. She didn’t have to ask Johnny twice.

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked. “The movies?”

  She smiled. “No, I’m not in movies, but I love to watch movies.”

  Hubba-hubba, Johnny thought. He got up and put an arm around her waist and they strolled out the door and into the streets of downtown Tampa.

  “So, what kind of movies do you like?” asked Johnny.

  “You ever see The Crying Game?”

  C C. Flag was never found. Neither was the mayor of Beverly Shores, and the crime scene tape remained across the door of his condominium at Calusa Pointe from when Mrs. Edna Ploomfield was blown up through his floor.

  Neighbors began hearing movements and a voice from the unit-someone having one-sided conversations in the middle of the night. One of the bolder residents, a retiree named Cecil, knocked on the door.

  A tall, lean man with dark sunglasses answered. He flipped open a billfold to display a gold police badge. Cecil leaned forward to read it, but the man flipped it closed. The man had a clipboard in his other hand, and he began writing on it without making an introduction.

  “What is your name and address?” he asked Cecil, who stood nervously outside the door, trying to peek around the man into the condominium.

  “Would you have any information we can use about the mayor or Mrs. Edna Ploomfield?”

  Cecil shook his head.

  “You wouldn’t be trying to obstruct this investigation, would you?”

  Cecil shook his head again, more vigorously this time.

  “Good. We’ll call you if we need you,” Serge said and closed the door, and Cecil wa
lked away confused, glancing back at the unit a couple of times.

  Serge tossed the badge on the dining-room table and flopped down on the couch. Florida Cable News was on the tube. Serge propped his feet up on the glass-top coffee table and resumed writing on the clipboard. The key to life, Serge knew, was the diligent keeping of lists. The clipboard was Serge’s newest tether to reality. There were so many loose ends in Serge’s life, relentless injustices, endless chores, unphotographed historic sites. He felt a sense of control over things he had no control over by listing them. At the top of the clipboard: “Find 5 million.” After that, in smaller letters, “Visit Fort DeSoto, buy batteries/film, Egmont Key (rent boat?)”

  The condo was a great setup, and Serge knew it would have to end all too soon. The sunsets were stunning from the balcony, and that was important to Serge. It had a cozy little walk-in kitchenette and a breakfast bar, where he liked to take his scrambled eggs and juice with the morning paper. He paced all day in the condo like a caged cheetah, barefoot on the shag carpet, talking to himself while holding the clipboard or newspaper or TV remote or all three. The AC was down as low as it would go, constantly giving Serge that just-showered feeling. He even liked the thick carpet under his toes, although to him Florida would always be terrazzo country.

  The sun was on its way down again. According to routine, Serge dropped the clipboard and picked up his camera and walked out on the balcony. He leaned a little over the rail and looked north and saw a small crane lowering something on top of the sign next door at Hammerhead Ranch. A small neon top deck was being added to the old sign, so that it would now read “The Diaz Boys’ Hammerhead Ranch Motel.”

  The three surviving Diaz Boys stood proudly in the road watching the sign go up. “I’m glad we finally got out of the cocaine business,” said Tommy Diaz with a large hoop of room keys around his neck.

  The Diazes moved out of the driveway and waved at a departing white limousine with the five interlocking rings of the modern Olympics. The International Olympic Committee’s advance team grinned and waved back. They had a decision to make. Once back in Lausanne, Switzerland, they would weigh the rabid bigots, oppressive heat, armed criminals and hurricane against the quality of Lenny’s weed and the stunning sight of City and Country, and they would immediately leapfrog Tampa Bay into the front-runner position for the 2012 Olympic Games.

  Serge watched the Olympic limousine pulling away down Gulf Boulevard, and he strolled back in from the balcony and onto the carpeting. Blaine Crease was on TV, standing at the roadblock that prevented looters from coming on the island. He was interviewing “the man who has cracked this case wide open!”

  The man on TV with Crease tried to hide his face. “Please leave me alone. Get away from me.” It was Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye, who was bad with people but great with inanimate objects, and he was holding the handle of an attractive silver Halliburton briefcase.

  Serge slapped his forehead in astonishment. “How the hell?”

  He was in awe of Paul’s mystical gift. Then he saw Paul break free of Crease and climb into a Malibu driven by Jethro Maddox, who had hung in a palm tree the night before the hurricane and had an unobstructed aerial view of the Hammerhead Ranch grounds when Zargoza went running around in his pajamas hiding the briefcase for the last time.

  Serge went over to his toiletry bag and grabbed his electronic homing device. He banged it on the table and it began beeping.

  Cecil the neighbor arrived at the door with two officers. “Open up, police!”

  Serge grabbed the toiletry bag and ran across the room and, a second before the officers kicked in the door, he jumped down through the hole in the floor made by Edna Ploomfield.

  A s fear of crime continued to grip the residents of Florida in the late 1990s, legislators in Tallahassee examined the problem in exhaustive detail and finally saw it for what it actually was: an opportunity to exploit for votes.

  In a selfless display of bombast, certain lawmakers brought back the tradition of the roadside chain gang. These same legislators then took a valiant stand against tax-and-spend liberals by steadfastly refusing to fund the chain-gang program.

  On the first day of the new year, a group of prisoners in a medium-security detail collected trash down the hot median of I-275 on the underside of Tampa Bay. Their chains had never been purchased, so they walked around freely, and escapes were epidemic. In the middle of the shift, something began making a light beeping sound. One of the prisoners pulled a zebra-striped pager from under his baseball cap and read the alphanumeric message: “Crockett, we’re on!”

  Over a small hill in the highway came the unmistakable theme song of the smash-hit TV show Miami Vice. A dented-up pink Cadillac containing Serge, City and Country flew over the hump and skidded to a stop next to the work detail. Lenny dropped the pager and sprinted up the incline of the median and dove into the convertible as the guard fired a round of buckshot. Serge hit the gas and the car accelerated east toward Interstate 75.

  S ean Breen and David Klein were gone fishing again. Sean had bought a new Chrysler New Yorker with the insurance money after reporting the maniac who had stolen his car at the brush fire down in the Everglades. The new Chrysler was pulling a new, loaded fishing skiff, purchased with the advance on book rights to their harrowing story in the Florida Keys. (“I can see it now,” said their agent. “We’ll call it Florida Road -something.”) They were headed across the state to the Banana River, and the weather couldn’t have been nicer. The sky was blue and clear except for a string of popcorn clouds marching their way across the southern horizon.

  A pink Cadillac convertible pulled up alongside. The driver waved and accelerated past. Sean and David looked at each other and then shook their heads and said together: “Nawwww.”

  Serge steered the Caddy with his knees and fiddled with the homing device. It pointed him directly at Cocoa Beach.

  A hundred miles ahead, a short, rumpled man and his stout friend with the white beard lounged poolside at the Orbit Motel, sipping drinks out of coconuts.

  Country played with the radio, turning up Billy Preston, “Will It Go Round in Circles.”

  “…I got a story ain’t got no moral, with the bad guy winnin’ every once in a while…”

  Serge planned to hang loose and play it by ear. No big rush. If they didn’t find Paul and Jethro right away, there were plenty of things Serge needed to photograph over there. And of course he’d have to give Lenny, City and Country the A-Tour, starting with the John F. Kennedy Space Center, where thousands of people lined up every day to peer inside a bulletproof exhibit case proudly displaying a rock from the driveway of the Hammerhead Ranch Motel.

  Acknowledgments

  Again, a debt is owed to my agent, Nat Sobel,

  and my editor, Paul Bresnick,

  for helping me order in finer restaurants.

  About the Author

  Tim Dorsey was a reporter and editor for the Tampa Tribune from 1987 to 1999 and is the author of the novels Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Orange Crush, Triggerfish Twist, The Stingray Shuffle, and the upcoming Cadillac Beach. He lives in Tampa, Florida. Visit his website at www.timdorsey.com

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