by Tim Dorsey
Dedication
For Larry “Montana” Fletcher
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Two Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Tim Dorsey
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
2017
“Don’t shoot guns into the hurricane.”
Elsewhere this would go without saying, but Floridians need to be told.
This was an actual warning issued by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office just north of Tampa Bay as a major storm approached. After all, a local man had just been arrested for DUI when he tried to order a taco in a Bank of America drive-through.
The alert was a reaction to people posting plans on the Internet for a party to shoot at the hurricane and make it turn away. The sheriff’s notice even included a scientific diagram showing how the vortex of the core could curve bullet paths to come back and hit the shooter.
“Shooting at a hurricane!” said Serge. “That’s the most brainless thing I’ve ever heard!”
Coleman looked out the rear window of their muscle car racing over a bridge. “Why is everyone else driving the other way?”
“Because they’re evacuating. It’s the smart move.”
“Then shouldn’t we be evacuating?”
“Absolutely not,” said Serge, turning on tactical silicone windshield wipers. “They have to flee because they don’t know what they’re doing. We’re professionals.”
“How’s that?”
“Everyone else gets ready for storms according to the official instructions.” Serge reached under his seat. “Which is fine if you want to survive. But if you’re taking it to the next level, all that jazz will just slow you down. Hurricanes are the marrow of Florida history, and my history always goes bone-deep. That’s why I prepare for storms with an encyclopedic set of state guidebooks, every conceivable new gadget, and bags of provisions exclusively from the candy and snack aisles. Think about it: Little kids are programmed to thrive and that’s the first place they go. That’s how a pro has to think.”
“I’m still not sure.” Coleman flicked a Bic. “We’re like the only car heading this direction.”
“I’ve taken every conceivable precaution,” said Serge, absentmindedly waving a pistol out the window as Coleman did a bong hit. “What can possibly go wrong?”
1928
The bloated, decaying body rolled into the ditch.
It fell onto its back, cloudy eyes still wide open, creating a frozen expression that bookmarked the last thoughts from a long, brutal life of hardship, hunger, harrow and few complaints. The final thought in those eyes: What kind of shit now?
“It creeps me out the way he’s staring like that,” said a voice at the top of the ditch.
“He’s staring at God,” said someone else, grabbing a pair of lifeless ankles.
Another body tumbled down the dirt embankment, and another, and so forth. The dead were all African American, just like the dozens of perspiring, shirtless men laboring with shovels.
The shovel gang most likely would have pitched in anyway, out of a sense of community, but this time they didn’t have a choice. They occasionally glanced back at the white lawmen with shotguns propped against their shoulders and pools of tobacco spit at their feet.
“What are you looking at—!” The next word was impolite.
It actually should have been quite a nice day in late September. The sky was clear as a dream, and a cooling breeze swept over the fields covered with thousands of tulip-shaped orange wildflowers. The wind made the acres of bright petals sway as one, back and forth, like an immense school of tropical fish. Then the sun rose higher, and the breeze left. The air became stubbornly still, baking in that Central Florida humidity so thick it seemed to have weight. But worst of all:
It stank.
Blame history. It doesn’t bother to knock. It doesn’t even come in the front door. It’s like those newspaper articles about a car that crashes through the wall of a bedroom in the middle of the night. This was before storms had alphabetical names, and it was called the Great Hurricane of 1928. Later it would become the forgotten storm. The victims didn’t have money.
It began the afternoon of September 15. All the fancy weather instruments that now give residents a head start on hurricanes had yet to be invented. You’d be chopping carrots for a stew, and then a hurricane was just there. But if you were really paying attention over the years, there was one early-warning system. The Seminoles.
Something about pollen and a rapid blooming of the sawgrass. The Indians watched the plants down in the swamp, and when a low haze in front of the setting sun got that weird color, they seemed to know the exact moment to make for high ground. Many scientists have looked into the phenomenon and scoffed at the notion. But the Seminoles were always dependably on the move before each Big Wind, so they’d figured something out.
This time, the tribe had come up out of the Everglades on trails leading to the ramshackle towns of South Bay and Belle Glade, then made a right turn toward West Palm Beach. There was no panic in their march. Simply a parade of native families out for a very long stroll. Some of the townsfolk remembered a similar migration two years earlier, before a lesser hurricane, and decided to follow the Indians out. But most stayed put.
On the morning of September 17, the storm that had peaked at category five made landfall at the Jupiter Inlet lighthouse in northern Palm Beach County. More than a thousand homes were destroyed along the coast before it continued churning inland, unimpressed . . .
Now, a few days later, the digging of massive, macabre pits continued with a sense of urgency. Fear of disease swept the survivors, and in the immediate aftermath the locals were on their own. Many of them were about halfway up the east side of the big lake, which would be Okeechobee, in an empty place that would soon become known for its mass grave, which would be Port Mayaca.
The same frantic scene was replaying itself miles away, in opposite directions, at two other South Florida locations. Even as mass graves go, there wasn’t remotely enough room. At least two and a half thousand dead by most accounts. Some said more than three. The nation’s worst toll ever, save for the Galveston storm in 1900.
Here was the problem with the hurricane of ’28: the storm surge. That’s often the case, and almost without exception, the deadly waves come from the ocean. But this time around, death didn’t come from the sea; one of the strongest hurricanes in recorded history made a direct hit on the nation’s largest freshwater lake sitting within a state. Who saw that coming? There was no dike, and the storm’s rotatio
n easily shoved much of the lake’s contents south, in an inescapable ten-to-twenty-foot wall of water that blanketed hundreds of square miles.
In the following hours and days, the water began to recede, and then came the snakes, but that’s another story.
As the overwhelming scale of death became clear, they started digging a second grave pit on the other side of the lake in some unknown place called Ortona, and then a third in West Palm Beach, just off Tamarind Avenue. It was back-numbing work for all those residents pressed into service. But here’s what really pissed them off: The bodies of black victims filled the pits as fast as they could be thrown in on top of one another. Each white person got their own private pine box.
Then those boxes were loaded onto wagons and taken to the nearby Woodlawn Cemetery for proper burial.
A shotgun man stuck two fingers in his mouth for a shrill whistle that got everyone’s attention. Shovels stopped.
“You three! Over there!” The shotgun waved east. “They need more help!”
A trio of drained men trudged toward a separate pile of work, and stared down at a pale corpse.
“Great. The pine boxes,” said one of the larger men, named Goat. “I don’t mind burying our own, but this is bullshit.”
“Just grab him,” said a stubby but deceptively strong neighbor. He went by “Stub.”
The first worker began lifting the body by the armpits, then suddenly dropped him and jumped back.
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” said Stub.
Goat just pointed with a quivering arm. “He’s got a bullet hole!”
“Where?”
“In the forehead.”
“Jesus, you’re right!”
They composed themselves and lifted him into a box, providing a better view. “Wait a minute, I know this guy. It’s Mr. Fakakta.”
“Who’s that?”
“Sugar man,” said Goat. “Lived in that big colonial house out past the bend by the ice plant.”
“That big place in Pahokee was his?”
“Ain’t doing him no good now.”
They grabbed the next body, a woman, and just as promptly dropped it.
“She’s got a bullet hole, too,” said Stub.
“That’s his wife,” said Goat.
“What on earth is going on?”
The pair quickly scanned nearby bodies. “There’s his son. Head almost blown off . . .”
Stub was Catholic, made the sign of the cross. “Ave Maria.”
Goat glanced back twenty yards and watched a stream of brown juice shoot from between gapped teeth. “Think we should tell the deputy?”
“Definitely,” said Goat. “Some monster murdered this whole poor family—”
A shotgun blast went skyward.
Everyone froze.
“Shut up over there and get back to work!” barked the lawman.
The pair nodded respectfully, then began hammering penny nails into the lid of a pine box. “Screw ’em.”
Part One
Chapter 1
2017
“Help me!” yelled Coleman. “I’m trapped again!”
“Hold on. I’ve got my own problems.” Serge pushed away a piece of plywood and crawled out from under a debris pile of dresser drawers, chunks of ceiling and a toilet lid. He stood to examine all his scratches and bruises, but saw nothing major. He looked around. “Okay, Coleman, where are you?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“No, I mean just keep talking and I’ll follow your voice.”
“Okay,” said Coleman. “Hey, Serge, I just realized that ‘slow up’ and ‘slow down’ mean the same thing. That’s fucked. I’m still stoned.”
Serge cleared a path, pushing aside fractured furniture. “Keep talking.”
“Have you seen my weed anywhere out there?”
Serge cast aside a torn-down kitchen cabinet and lifted a soaked mattress. “There you are.”
Coleman sat up, and his face suddenly reddened as a cord from mangled window blinds tightened around his neck.
Serge flicked open a pocketknife and sliced the thin rope. “Don’t you know that’s a choking hazard?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” Coleman rubbed his neck. “It just got me.”
Serge stood again and stared thoughtfully at the bright, panoramic view out the front of the building where the wall used to be. “It got everyone.”
Coleman checked his own bruises. “Is it over?”
“All over but the shouting,” said Serge.
Coleman joined him, looking out across the calm waters of Bogie Channel. “So that was the big Hurricane Irma everyone was talking about?”
Serge would have opened the door, but there wasn’t one. He hopped down from the building and walked toward the street. The only sound was the crunch of gravel and broken glass under his sneakers. The air had turned mild and comfortable, nothing to betray what had come before.
Serge placed hands on his hips as he surveyed what had recently been a historic row of quaint old fishing cottages in the backcountry of the Florida Keys. All had been knocked off their foundations, lying helter-skelter practically on top of each other.
Unless you’ve seen the aftermath of a major hurricane, you wouldn’t realize how much of the damage appears to be the result of high explosives. Little pieces of shrapnel everywhere. Slivers and confetti. Most of the other cottages were missing their front walls as well, allowing the wind to go to work inside like sticks of dynamite. Cabin number 7 had no walls at all, just a roof lying on the ground, which had been pushed against the base of a palm tree that neatly cut it open like a jigsaw. The cabin with the least damage, still barely clinging together and listing like a floundering ship off the edge of its concrete slab, was number 5.
Serge looked the other way, toward the landmark two-story clapboard office and bait store at the Old Wooden Bridge Fishing Camp. It had stood apart from the cabins, alone, unprotected, with no trees to shield it on the edge of the channel. Now there was little evidence there had ever been an office, except for the matchbook-size pieces that littered the ground and floated in the water like another bomb had gone off.
Serge wiped his eyes.
“Are you starting to cry?” asked Coleman.
“Why couldn’t it have taken out a Starbucks or some shit? We keep losing all our best places.” He blew his nose. “I’d bet the bat tower on Sugarloaf is gone, too.”
It was.
One of the island’s endangered miniature Key deer sprang from the brush and bounded through the debris like an antelope.
“I’ve never seen one run that fast,” said Coleman.
“I’m sure it has a lot on its mind.”
Coleman turned back around toward their cottage. “Jesus, we could have been killed! Why did you want to stay here and ride out that hurricane? Didn’t you realize it would be this hairy?”
Another doe darted by.
“I knew it would be strong,” said Serge. “But these little deer always figure out how to make it through storms, so I figured how hard can it be? Second, I love cabin number five.”
“It’s your favorite,” said Coleman. “You always kiss the number by the door when you first arrive.”
“I knew that if God would allow just a single cottage to survive relatively intact, it would be Five. I figured this island would get pretty much torn up, so I wanted to spend a final night in that special place. And last but not least, I seriously miscalculated.”
“Wait. Stop,” said Coleman. “You mean we really could have been killed? But you promised me I’d be safe.”
Serge pulled car keys from his pocket. “What was I thinking?”
“Hey, where are you going?”
They don’t call it Big Pine Key for nothing. The day before, Serge had found a spot where he was able to back his car about twenty yards into the woods, surrounded by thick pine trees. The kind of place where the little deer hide.
“It barely has a mark on her,” said Col
eman. “So we’re heading out of here now?”
Serge shook his head and opened the trunk. “It will take a few days for workers to clear the roads, so we’ll be camping until then. Help me with this gear.”
They pitched a tent with sleeping bags behind the row of battered cabins. A small campfire began to glow in a little pit surrounded by rocks. Bottled water and beer cans bobbed in the melted ice of a cooler. Serge returned to the car for a last item and brought it back to the fire.
“What’s that thing?” asked Coleman.
“The beginning of my latest science project.” Serge sat down with a clear plastic storage bin in his lap. He opened his pocketknife again and poked a six-inch grid of tiny holes on the end. Then he taped a small, battery-powered fan over it. Then another grid on the opposite end. “This project has an extremely long gestation, and I don’t know when it’ll come into play, so we might as well use this downtime to get a head start.”
Serge grabbed a soggy package from the cooler. He took the lid off the bin and began evenly arranging the bag’s contents across the bottom.
“Bacon?” asked Coleman.
“Your universal food group.”
“It’s the only thing that goes great with everything,” said Coleman. “Eggs, pickles, ice cream, Twinkies, other bacon. It’s just impossible to go wrong.”
“You can with this pack. It seriously spoiled overnight.” Serge held out a slimy, uncooked strip. “Unless you dig trichinosis.”
“I’ll stick to beer,” said Coleman. “But why are you putting it in that bin?”
“Read it in a medical journal,” Serge said. “In our advanced world of modern medicine, sometimes the best treatment is still low-tech.”
“Treatment for what?”
“I’m not treating anything, just using the principle for my experiment,” said Serge. “All will be revealed in due time.”
Serge finished his task and picked up the bin. He walked over to the edge of the woods, setting it down behind his car . . .
Two Days Later