by Tim Dorsey
“Ahem,” said Serge.
“What?”
Serge made a twirling motion with his left hand. “You can fast-forward.”
“It’s my story.”
“It’s offtrack.”
“You get offtrack with your history.”
“But history is a key element of the death monologue.”
“Partying is just as important to me.”
Serge turned and smiled at Sasha. “Will you excuse me a moment?”
She watched Serge walk over to Coleman, and the two began arguing in brusque whispers that she couldn’t make out. They both stopped and smiled back at her like everything was cool, then more harsh whispering.
They began wrestling, mildly at first, then rolling violently on the deck. Serge’s legs got Coleman’s head in a scissor lock.
“Serge, stop. I can smell your butt.”
“Stick to the story. We have a guest.”
“I’ll grab your nuts.”
“You better not . . . Ahhh, let go!”
“You let go!”
“Okay, at the same time . . . Ready? Let go . . .”
They did. The pair stood and smiled at Sasha again. Except she couldn’t see Coleman’s smile because his T-shirt was pulled up over his face. “Everything’s cool.”
“Yeah, we’re good.”
Serge returned to his seat, and Coleman pulled his shirt back down. “So right now your friend Gustave is standing on a block of ice inside the barrels. Yesterday, Serge used a sharp pick to carve out a cavity in a block, which we got at the liquor store. Then he rubbed a wet rag over the top of the ice to get it slick and melty so it would fuse together with a second block that he placed on top of it and stored in a freezer back at the warehouse. Finally, after Gustave was sealed in the tube, Serge and I poured in a bunch of mixers that we also got at the liquor store.”
Serge looked at Sasha. “I see you have a question. You can go ahead and speak.”
“I don’t get it. What’s going on? What are we doing now?”
“Waiting for the ice to melt,” said Serge.
“Because the mixers were Coke,” said Coleman. “And inside the ice-block cavity are twenty rolls of Mentos.”
“Look,” said Serge. “The ice just melted.”
A dozen jets of soda foam shot high into the night.
“That’s got to be a record,” said Coleman.
“And it’s not stopping.”
“Must be hitting other rolls deeper in the ice,” said Coleman.
“Excuse me,” said Sasha. “So he’s going to drown?”
“No,” said Serge. “That’s why I drilled all those air holes. Otherwise the thing wouldn’t be safe.”
She watched the relentless fountain of suds form a pretty pattern over the water. “Then what will happen to him?”
“The real tragedy is that the carbon dioxide from the soda evacuates all the oxygen in the barrels, and of course you can’t breathe carbon dioxide because you’ll suffocate. It’s like committing suicide by putting a plastic bag over your head, except this . . .”—Serge looked toward the tube, where the fountains were subsiding and foam sheeted down over the sides.—“. . . is more like assisted suicide.”
Sasha began absorbing the full scope of Serge’s mental condition. Normally, one in her position would be shaking uncontrollably and stuttering: “W-w-w-what are you going to d-d-d-d-do to me?”
Instead, Sasha took measured breaths. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m not going to do anything to you,” said Serge. “In fact, I’m letting you go. It’s part of my plan . . .”
A deeper voice: “I said, ‘What are you going to do to me?’ ”
“I just told you—”
Coleman elbowed him. “Her hand is rubbing the side of her breast.”
“Oh, so that’s what it is?”
“Is what?”
“She’s into bad boys. It’s a sexual paraphilia.” Serge stood and began unhitching his shorts. “Would you like to see what I’m going to do to you?”
Coleman raised his hand. “I would.”
Without looking back, Serge put a foot in the middle of Coleman’s chest and shoved him backward into the water.
Coleman bobbed to the surface, “Serge!”
“Stay, Fido.” Serge dropped his pants to the deck and charged.
Sasha came at him with equal velocity. They crashed together in the middle of the boat and hit the hull hard. They smacked and kicked each other. Arousing profanity. Bruises, bloody lips. Their naked bodies slammed one side of the boat and then the other, over and over, fighting for the top position and making a racket like a flopping, just-caught marlin trying to get back in the sea.
It became so loud that lights came on in all the seawall mansions. But instead of grabbing the phone for the police, they grabbed binoculars and video equipment. The predatory lovers finally reached a quivering, simultaneous conclusion. Serge jumped up, grabbed his shorts and casually flicked a wrist as he walked away. “That’s what I’ll do to you.”
The still-nude Sasha sat up panting. “Will you call me?”
“Who knows?” Serge pulled Coleman aboard. “I got a nutty, nutty schedule.”
“But I’m a witness. You can’t just let me go.”
“That’s precisely what I’m going to do.” He steered the skiff back toward the boat ramp.
“No, you’re supposed to take me hostage and tie me up again,” said Sasha. “And stick a gag ball in my mouth, and do other unspeakable acts with the devices in my purse. I promise I won’t scream.”
“Jesus,” said Serge. “Okay, okay, maybe I’ll give you a call and we can go get some ice cream, but no promises.”
“Yes, ice cream. And then you’ll force me at gunpoint to lick it off your—”
“Enough!” Serge held his hands to the sky. “Out of the boat or I swear I won’t call.”
She reluctantly climbed over the side into three feet of water. “I’ll do anything for you.”
Serge threw her clothes in her face. “Now that has possibilities.”
Sasha slipped into her top. “Name it.”
“I’ve been hired to help some scam victims. And even though I’m starting to crack cases left and right, my boss has been getting on me just because I keep forgetting to retrieve the money.” He pointed back at a large metal tube standing on a shoal in the bay. “I’m easily distracted.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to the streets, and if I get a case I’m having trouble with, I might give you a call to see if you know anything.”
“So that’s the reason you’re deliberately freeing me?”
“No, that idea just popped in my head when we were cumming. I do some of my best thinking then.”
“So what’s the real reason?”
“To tell all the other scam artists working this state that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
Coleman raised a beer. “And I’m the deputy.”
Chapter Sixteen
SOUTH AMERICA
Toucans and parrots squawked from the edge of the jungle.
The mountains fell steeply before gently sloping into an apron of dense green foliage that ended in the sandy coastline along the unpatrolled border of Chile and Peru.
Surf rolled in from the Pacific, before an explosion of mist on the rocks. There was a piece of driftwood here and there, crabs darting out of holes, and a tiny beach villa pressed back against the jungle. It was the only sign of a human hand.
Curtains billowed out the living room window.
Inside the sparsely furnished bungalow, a tall, wiry man sat shirtless in dry swim trunks. He had ultra-short blond hair, a week’s growth after shaving his head. He was wearing the trunks because he was going for a
nother mile swim in the ocean. That accounted for the muscular shoulders and pecs that were disproportionately developed for the rest of his torso. The swim, though, would have to wait.
The man’s job was to wait. Just live in the villa. The only task: Check in once a day on the Internet at precisely 2:35 P.M., like a nuclear submarine coming up to periscope depth and raising its antenna to get instructions from satellites. And like those subs, the vast majority of the time there were no instructions. The important thing was 2:35.
Because if a message did come, it would be dropped seconds before, to be read as quickly as possible and immediately deleted. Employing another espionage trick, the messages were never sent, so they could never be intercepted. Instead they were saved as drafts in an e-mail account, and the villa’s occupant had the password.
The villa’s previous occupant also had the password, and liked to take those ocean swims. But he was gone, at the hands of the current resident. Nothing personal. Orders. The earlier resident had received a message at 2:35 and went to Miami to handle a situation. But he got sloppy and became compromised. The person now at the villa’s computer had also been in Miami as backup, prepared to sanitize any mess that might develop, and there had been a big one. That’s how he inherited the bungalow.
It was a strange juxtaposition, the occupation and the house. The remote spot on the beach lent itself to decompression. Just the waves and the birds and your thoughts. It reminded the man of the assassin played by Max von Sydow in Three Days of the Condor, who found tranquillity by meticulously painting tiny cast-iron soldiers from forgotten wars.
2:34.
Fingers tapped the keyboard. An Internet account opened. Moments later, an e-mail popped up in the draft folder. He read it quickly. This time there was also a photo of the target, but he didn’t need to save it because he would be receiving a hard copy later that day in a briefcase exchange. He hit delete. The swim trunks would stay dry. Something had come up. Florida again. The flight left in two hours.
He went to a louvered closet. At the bottom was an already-packed carry-on of essentials for just such an occasion. Then he opened a round wall safe and thumbed through passports of various nationalities and names. He decided on Bolivia.
Dark clouds rolled in from the ocean, and wind carried the salt mist. He shuttered up the beach house and climbed into his Jeep, holding a mental image of the face he’d seen on the computer.
MEANWHILE . . .
“And here’s another thing about the people who don’t read.” Serge hit the gas when the light turned green. “They’re the same ones who think you’re a moron if you don’t text. I don’t text because of a philosophical code against the growing depersonalization predicted by Alvin Toffler and George Orwell.”
“I don’t text because my thumbs are too big,” said Coleman.
“But the non-readers are texting away like it’s the war effort,” said Serge. “They’d eliminate the debt if we could convert that energy to durable goods and stick it on cargo ships. It’s half the gross national product.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Car insurance,” said Serge. “Watch any channel on TV for any length of time, and every other commercial is a British lizard, an upwardly mobile caveman, a calcified chick named Flo, the anthropomorphic jerk named Mayhem who tricks you into accidents, the guy in a hard hat who hits cars with sledgehammers, the character who played the president in the show 24 saying, ‘That’s Allstate’s stand,’ ‘Nationwide is on your side,’ ‘Fifteen minutes could save you some shit.’ ”
“I like Mayhem,” said Coleman. “He makes me not feel so bad about breaking stuff.”
“And yet we’re still not manufacturing anything you can hold in your hands,” said Serge. “There’s your downfall of a global superpower. When space aliens visit centuries from now, they’ll whisk the dust away and conclude that America was dominated by a race of tiny-thumbed people who drove badly.”
“We’re not?”
“You may have a point,” said Serge. “And think about this: the simultaneous rise of texting and car insurance. Coincidence?”
“Last night’s episode of Glee warned about texting and driving,” said Coleman.
“Those Glee kids just keep on caring,” said Serge. “But the nation’s plight is now bigger than any teenage chorus line can handle. Technology has just passed our survival instinct, and the country is spinning on a stationary existential axis of make-believe importance: We text about a Tweet of a YouTube video posted on Facebook with a clip of Glee about not texting that we just texted about. Instead of actual life, we’re now living an air-guitar version of life.”
“Yow! Watch out!” Coleman lunged and grabbed Serge’s arms in an attempt to take over the steering wheel. The Firebird swerved across the lane. “Don’t you see it!”
“Coleman, get your fucking hands off me!” Serge swatted the arms away. “You almost made us crash. What’s gotten into you?”
He grabbed his chest. “You almost hit that weird beast in the road!”
“Coleman, it was a hooker.” Serge looked sideways with an odd expression. “And she’d already made it through the crosswalk.”
“You sure it was a hooker?”
“No question,” said Serge. “We’ve lived in Florida long enough that you should be able to identify them now without flash cards.”
“It must have been the snakes coming out of her head,” said Coleman. “That means it’s kicking in.”
“Why? What did you take?”
“I don’t remember,” said Coleman. “But it must have been good shit. That’s a sign of good shit: You don’t remember taking it and then see monsters and almost crash.”
Serge stared at him with scorn, then faced forward. “We need to buy insurance.”
“More head-snakes,” said Coleman, face pasted to his passenger window. “Where are we?”
The Trans Am raced due south on a major artery. They passed an open-air drug supermarket with handshake exchanges of bindles and cash, then pawn and beauty-product shops with door buzzers and baseball bats under the counters, a run-down motel full of police cars responding to aggravated domestic violence and an escaped monkey that had been in the news. More prostitutes, guys drinking from brown bags, shopping-cart pushers, slumped-over bus bench urchins, and run-on-sentence conspiracy preachers. The intersection people beckoned drivers at red lights to roll down windows for one-dollar flowers, bottled water and an underground newspaper written by hand. The area had become so notoriously sketchy that civic leaders snapped into action and fixed everything by installing new rows of expensive, decorative light posts.
“I absolutely love Orange Blossom Trail,” said Serge. “Also known as OBT and south Orlando’s red-light district, but that’s a bit judgmental.”
“Two dudes are having a sword fight with broken-off car antennas.”
“Ooo! Look, look!” yelled Serge. “They put up those supercool new light poles that tell people they’re in the wrong part of town.”
“The poles are bending toward the car and growling.” Coleman nodded. “Good shit.”
“I always seek out those poles,” said Serge. “They steer you to interesting new friends . . . Like this guy.”
A light turned red. The Firebird stopped. A bearded man on the curb made a rolling-down motion with his hand. Serge cranked the glass open. “What’s the good word, my fine fellow statesman?”
“Can I have a dollar?”
“Sure thing.” Serge uncrinkled a George Washington from his wallet and passed it out the window.
“Appreciate it.”
“Hey, wait,” said Serge. “Where’s my underground newspaper? I saw you give one to that other driver.”
“It was my last. Actually my only. Handwritten. That way no stray copies can fall into the wrong laps. That’s how they got Charlie.”
“Serge,” said Coleman. “The light turned green . . . I think.”
“Let ’em go around.” Serge hit his blinking hazards and turned back to the man. “Then what else do you have?”
“Let’s see.” The man reached in his back pocket with a quizzical expression. He removed a wad of paper. “Oh, yeah. I drew this last night.”
Serge took it through the window. Coleman looked at the page, then screamed and flattened himself against the passenger door. “Swarms of locusts with scorpion tails, people’s intestines sliced out, nuns with wooden rulers . . .” Quietly weeping in his hands now. “Serge, please make this stuff wear off.”
“It’s not the drug you took,” said Serge. “He really did draw this . . .” Then at the man: “And not too bad, if I do say so. What’s it represent? The Apocalypse from Revelation?”
“No, I was just doodling in the hardware store up the street.” The man wiped his brow. “They have air-conditioning. I get some of my best inspiration in there.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” Serge tucked the picture in his pocket and handed the man another dollar. “What’s the word on the street?”
“They just caught another monkey.”