by Tim Dorsey
“Me? What? Huh?” Crack displayed upturned palms. “Just working on my article. I heard some folklore about a sugar kingpin who supposedly went missing in the 1928 hurricane, along with some artifacts of historical significance and maybe a couple coins.”
“I’ve heard the same.” The sergeant smiled. “And that’s exactly what that is. Folklore.”
“But I also heard that children playing out in the sugarcane fields have found a few of these coins over the decades since the storm.”
“Another bit of fanciful folklore,” said the sergeant. “In all the years, we haven’t known a single actual child who found anything. And do you think little kids can keep something like that a secret? They’d bring it to school and show it all around in class, and by the end of the day it would be confiscated by a teacher for depriving others of their education.”
“But I’ve learned so much about the history of this sugar guy from the Dominican that it seems more likely—”
The sergeant held up a hand. “My advice to you? And I mean this politely: Forget about your article. We’ve got a nice friendly town here, and we mean to keep it that way. Visitors are always welcome, especially all those college football scouts. But what we don’t need is a bunch of people running around like headless chickens with metal detectors, trespassing and digging up the whole place. Do you see how it could get messy?”
“Well, it also won’t do my magazine’s reputation any good if we direct people here and nobody finds anything.” Captain Crack stood and stretched. “Not all of these article ideas pan out. Guess I’ll just be getting back to West Palm.”
“You seem like a reasonable person,” said the sergeant. He shook Crack’s hand. “Stop in anytime.”
Crack left the office, and the sergeant picked up the phone. “I need you to follow someone . . . Yeah, Dodge Dakota with a magnetic sign on the door for a boat-towing service . . .”
Captain Crack tapped the steering wheel to a country music tune about only being able to trust his dog anymore. The pickup truck passed vacant concrete buildings of pink, green and blue. He checked his rearview. Just as he thought. A police tail. But it was a loose one, not meant for strict surveillance as much as making sure he kept his word to leave town.
A few minutes later, Highway 98 said goodbye to the last building, and Crack left the city limits. He looked up in the mirror again, and watched the police car make a lazy U-turn in the road and head the other way. The captain drove another half mile through nothing but cane fields, then made a sharp left onto a road usually used only by the sugar company. After a few zigzags, he navigated a wide route back into town. He deliberately parked out of sight behind a small business near Main Street.
Bells jingled.
A pawnshop owner named Webber looked up from a newspaper. Finally, he thought. Not a kid, not police, but a real customer. He folded the paper. “How can I help you?”
“Gold pieces.”
“Only have a few.” Webber opened the back of a glass display case. “But a real nice one came in a few years ago. Just haven’t been able to sell it because, well, the economy around here. Saint-Gaudens double eagle, 1907. If you don’t know, it’s one of the—”
“I know the coin,” said Crack. “How’d you come by it in these parts?”
“I’m sorry, but that information is confidential.” Webber set the coin on the counter for Crack to examine. “We strictly protect the privacy of all our customers.”
“It was a kid, wasn’t it?”
The pawnshop owner’s head jerked up straight on his neck. “How’d you know?”
“Been doing my research. I’ll bet you’ve had a number of kids bring these in over the years. What can you tell me about them?”
The owner stepped back with hands on his hips. “Mister, what’s really your business here? You didn’t come to buy a coin.”
Crack opened his wallet. “How much?”
“You’re really going to buy it? You haven’t even looked at—. . . I mean I usually have to work harder for a sale.” He glanced at the gold circle still sitting on the counter. “In that condition it books for . . .”—Webber adjusted the number upward in his head mid-sentence—“. . . seventeen hundred.”
Crack pulled money from the billfold. “Would you settle for, say, two thousand? In cash.”
Webber scratched the top of his head. “You sure have a funny way of negotiating.”
“There’s a catch.”
“That, I assumed.”
“I’ll also need the name and address of the person who sold it to you.”
Webber paused again. “So you really believe kids are bringing these coins in?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Because the police think I’m fencing stolen collections.”
“That’s because they haven’t done their homework. Do you know anything about an early sugar baron around here named Fulgencio Fakakta?”
“Everyone’s heard the stories,” said Webber. “Especially the part about his hidden treasure lost in the Great Hurricane . . . Wait, you’re not looking for . . .”
“I never said anything about treasure. You did.” Crack leaned down to the counter. “Why? You don’t believe that these kids found pieces of the baron’s stash?”
“Not really,” said Webber. “As I was telling the cops, from the dates on these coins, that’s when there were all these juke joints—”
“I’ve read up on the local history,” said Crack. “The name and the coin? Do we have a deal?”
Webber considered the stranger a moment, then began writing on a blank sheet of paper.
“On second thought,” said Captain Crack, pulling out more bills. “Make it an even three thousand.”
“Another catch?”
“I was never here.”
Webber handed him the paper. “You’re already a ghost.”
“One more thing.” Crack gave him a business card. “If any other kids come in here with more coins, call me and I’ll buy them. Same price and terms.”
“You got it.”
Bells jingled.
Chapter 20
Fort Pierce
The gold Plymouth Satellite rolled up to the corner of Avenue S and Seventeenth Street. Serge got out and looked at another sign.
Garden of Heavenly Rest.
For a cemetery, it was sparsely populated. No big monuments or even large headstones. The rows of modest markers and slabs were widely separated in an otherwise sunny grass field where kids would have room to play ball. Coleman looked side to side as they walked past graves. “I’m guessing you have a cool story to drag me out here.”
“One of the best stories yet!” Serge continued on until they reached the middle of the field. A single grave sat in the grass, surrounded by a small brick walkway. The whitewashed slab was raised slightly higher than the others, although the headstone was still only knee-high. It was the only one where people had been by recently to leave flowers. There was a candle. Some had left rocks on the headstone in the Jewish tradition.
Serge got down on a knee and placed his page over the letter Z. He began rubbing. “Hurston’s undeserved obscurity had become so complete that her grave was unmarked for years and nobody could precisely pay their respects. Then the story takes a hairpin turn, extending beyond the grave to Zora’s proper place in the public’s awareness.”
“It was only right,” said Coleman.
“The year? Nineteen seventy-three. The person? Alice Walker.” Serge rubbed on. “Walker was still nearly a decade away from writing her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple. But back in the early seventies, the budding writer, still only twenty-nine years old, stumbled across Zora’s works and became intrigued, even obsessed to the point of visiting Florida to get the vibes of Zora’s life. She started in Eatonville, where she learned Zora was buried anonymously somewhere in Fort Pierce. So she drove out here to the coast and—this part I love—she fibbed that she was Zora’s niece to get locals to open up
about her ‘aunt.’ To her surprise, most had never heard of her, even those now living near Zora’s last home. Finally, with a history-researching tenacity to which I can only aspire, she located the lost grave and bought this headstone for it.” Serge began rubbing the words on the next line: A Genius of the South. “Two years later, Walker wrote a watershed article for Ms. magazine, ‘Looking for Zora,’ using her grave search as a vehicle to showcase the forgotten literary lion. That first-person piece slowly but surely rekindled interest in Hurston’s work until she now stands in the pantheon. Oh, and she’s from Florida!”
The gold Plymouth left the cemetery and headed south on U.S. 1, down through Jensen Beach and Stuart.
“Where to now?” asked Coleman.
“Our next stop,” said Serge. “But first I need to make a stop before our next stop.”
He pulled into a strip mall and opened the door.
“I’ll wait in the car,” said Coleman.
“As a general rule, that’s the best plan.” Serge went inside . . .
Coleman was unconscious when Serge returned, head resting against the passenger window and trademark drool stringing down from his lower lip.
Onward, south. Hobe Sound, Tequesta, Jupiter.
Coleman stirred from his liquid-induced nap. “Hmm, huh, where am I?”
“Still in the car.”
Coleman reached down between his legs and popped a Schlitz to restore chemical equilibrium. “Did you get your meerkat back at that pet store?”
“No,” said Serge, racing south into Juno Beach. “I didn’t have any clue that they’re like a thousand bucks, and they’d have to order one. Plus the pet-store guy told me that meerkats may be social creatures among themselves, but they’re a little confused by the whole pet concept. Some never conform to domesticity, constantly screeching and jumping on lamps, and the ones that do work out will keep peeing on your clothes to mark you as their owner.”
“That’s messed up,” said Coleman.
“Not exactly the definition of a support animal,” said Serge. “I want a pet to wind me down.”
“You’ll figure something out.” Coleman took a long swig of beer. Suddenly: “Ahh! Shit! What the hell?” The can of Schlitz went up in the air, Coleman batting and bobbling to catch it, foam everywhere.
“Are you spraying beer all over my car again?”
“Not my fault.” Coleman finally got a handle on the can and pulled his neck way back in alarm, looking down in his lap in terror. “What the fuck is that thing?”
Serge glanced over. “Say hello to Mr. Zippy, my new ferret.”
“Ferret?”
“When a meerkat became a non-starter, the pet-store dude suggested a ferret because they’re roughly the same size and cuteness factor, easier on the wallet, and they don’t pee on you. Not much.”
The ferret began chattering at Coleman. “Get him off me! Get him off!” Beer flew again.
“You’re frightening Zippy!” said Serge. “You need to win him over. Give him that Cheeto.”
“Where?”
“Where else.”
“Oh.” Coleman picked it off his shoulder and tentatively extended a hand. Mr. Zippy snatched it, munching away. Then he climbed over the shoulder of a wide-eyed Coleman. “Where’d he go?”
“To explore the back seat.”
“You’re just going to let him run loose in the car?”
“It’s what I’d want if the roles were reversed,” said Serge. “Now back to live action! Our next stop is some more Florida connective tissue, this time leading from Hurston. In her now-acclaimed 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora depicts the hard life of African Americans along the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee early last century, culminating with the Great Hurricane of 1928—”
The ferret jumped on the dashboard and ran along the windshield, then jumped down and disappeared again.
“Jesus, Serge, how can you drive with that going on?”
“It’s actually quite comforting.” A calm grin crept across his face. “After the storm, Zora described the formidable task of dealing with almost three thousand bodies, so many that it took at least four burial sites . . .”
The Plymouth entered West Palm Beach and navigated south on Tamarind Avenue, into an economically scuffling section of the city, or, among the whites, the other side of the tracks. They parked on the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street.
“Hurston’s novel described the mass burial activity here, but the site became so forgotten that even those who knew about it didn’t have the exact location, and a warehouse was almost built on top of it. Luckily, community leaders stepped in and hired a Miami firm that used ground-penetrating radar to discover a seventy-by-thirty-foot trench.” Serge placed paper against stone. “This is the granite memorial they erected in 2003.”
Coleman curiously watched Serge.
“What?”
He pointed. “Where’d you get that?”
“This?” Serge looked down at something new on his chest attached to shoulder straps. “From the pet store. It’s like those things that moms wear to carry infants.”
Mr. Zippy poked his head out the top of the canvas pouch and looked around.
“He’s growing on me,” said Coleman.
Back to the car. A couple miles south on Dixie Highway, another stop.
“There’s the Norton Museum of Art. Remember? From the Everglades mural?”
“We’re going there?”
“No, other side of the street.”
“On one condition,” said Coleman.
“Now you’re setting conditions, are you?”
Coleman told him what it was. “. . . Pleeeeeease!”
The pair walked through a grand stone archway into Woodlawn Cemetery.
“Because of segregation at the time of the hurricane, the mass grave for the whites was here. Unlike the others, they got pine boxes . . . How’s it working out over there?”
Coleman smiled and looked down at the pouch on his chest. “I think Mr. Zippy likes me.” A burst of chattering and then a tiny head disappeared. “So you came to see another mass grave?”
“Not this time.” Serge led the way through the ancient grounds until stopping at a stone with the name Charles William Pierce.
Coleman gently patted the pouch. “Who’s that?”
“A bonus find unconnected to the hurricane, so how can I not stop?” Serge knelt to rub again. “In 1888, Charlie became one of the state’s first legendary ‘barefoot mailmen.’ Because there was no land route back then between West Palm and Miami, mail carriers would make a six-day, hundred-and-thirty-mile trek, much of it traversed on foot along the beach, hence the name . . .” He turned and began running back to the car. “We’re off!”
“Come on, Mr. Zippy!”
Chapter 21
Four Years Earlier
A loud bell rang nonstop.
The local junior high was dismissed for the day. Kids poured out the doors like the Berlin Wall had fallen. Backpacks, skateboards, cell phones. Someone pushed someone else into the bushes.
A Dodge Dakota quietly eased up to the curb across the street.
A girl texted as she crossed the road.
“Excuse me?” Crack hung out the window. “Miss?”
She looked up. Uh-oh. Stranger Danger.
“Don’t be scared,” said Crack, checking the scrap of paper from the pawnshop. “I’m just looking for my nephew. Do you know a Ricky Aparicio?”
She pointed back at the school gates.
Captain Crack stretched his neck. “Which one?”
“I thought he was your nephew.”
“Been a long time.”
“Red shirt, blue shorts.” She hurried along on her way.
The boy headed north on the opposite side of the street, along with a dozen other loud, laughing kids. Crack started up his truck and drove slowly. Parts of the gang peeled off as they reached the streets to their homes. It was down to just a few when Crack hung out the
window again.
“Ricky! Ricky Aparicio!”
The boy looked over. “Who are you?”
Crack waved with his left hand. “Come over here. I need to ask you a question.”
“Don’t go,” said one of the other boys.
“See what he wants,” said another.
Ricky decided to split the difference and walked halfway across the empty street. “What do you want?”
“Come closer,” said Crack. “I won’t bite.”
“I’m staying right here until you tell me what this is about.”
“It concerns the gold coin you sold to the pawnshop.”
“I didn’t steal it!”
“Nobody says you did.” The captain held out a piece of currency. “I just need some information. I’m writing an article for a hobby magazine.”
“Ricky!” yelled one of the boys on the other curb. “Don’t get any closer!”
“Ricky!” yelled another. “That’s a hundred-dollar bill!”
Ricky got closer. “Exactly what kind of information?”
“I’ve been doing some research on your town, the hurricane and everything, and I think you might have stumbled onto something historic. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars to show me where you found that coin.”
Ricky stood like a statue. A beeping car drove around him.
Crack hung farther out the driver’s window. “Listen, I know what you’ve been taught about strangers. But how would I know all this information about what you found? Besides, all those warnings are for little kids. You’re practically a man now.”
Ricky remained a stone.
“What do you say?” Crack waved the bill tauntingly. “Hundred bucks. Going once, going twice—”
“Okay, okay, but give me the money first.”
“Once you’re in the truck, or you’ll just run away.”
Ricky got in, and the Dodge drove off. The other boys dashed home to tell their parents . . .