Hurricane Punch

by Tim Dorsey

  Coleman scooted his stool closer. “Do they have that hot chick from Channel 2?”

  “Yeah, but don’t get your hopes up. Usually they’re miles off target and have to act like they’re taking a beating.”

  “Who’s the other guy out there behind the reporter?”

  “Where?”

  “Left side of the screen,” said Coleman. “The homeless dude drinking a beer.”

  “Gotta love this state,” said Serge. “Once I saw a Geraldo-type screaming bloody murder into the camera like his arms were being torn off, and then this old lady from one of the condos strolls behind him walking her poodle.”

  A plate of food sat in front of Coleman. He popped a sesame-battered shrimp into his mouth and chased it with a swig of Tsingtao beer. “Serge?”

  “What?”

  “How’d you know this place would be open?”

  Serge cracked an egg roll. “Chinese restaurants never close during hurricanes.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Watch storm coverage. Reporters are constantly driving around looking for interviews at the last business still open. And it’s always a Chinese restaurant. Always.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the Chinese are an impressive people. They just took up capitalism a few minutes ago, and they’re not stopping for anything. Notice how they’ve already zeroed in on America’s fat ass weakness for buffets.”

  “Chinese buffets are my favorite,” said Coleman. “Everything’s fried.”

  “They have our number. We better watch out.”

  Coleman’s teeth ripped the skin off a wing. “How come we’re alone at the bar? The rest of the place is packed with students.”

  “Because there are no three-for-one well specials, beat-the-clocks or hand grenades. Just real-world drink prices.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We will not be bothered by academia.”

  The TV showed slow-motion replay of a reporter in a motorcycle helmet taking an ugly spill from a pier.

  “That station’s boring.” Coleman chomped another wing. “I want to see the Channel 2 chick.”

  Serge got the bartender’s attention again. The remote clicked. Next station: a Chinese restaurant on Fowler Avenue. “Why are you still open?…”

  “Keep going,” said Serge. The remote clicked again. A beach scene and a woman in a bullfight-red parka. The jacket was open halfway down the front to expose her shirt, soaked and clinging, the way it had been since they’d sprayed it with a hose before the rain started.

  “…Steve, the storm’s really beginning to pick up. It’s extremely dangerous out here now. The only people left are emergency management officials patrolling the streets in amphibious military half-tracks….”

  “Look!” yelled Coleman. “It’s the Party Parrot! It’s the Party Parrot!”

  A man in a parrot costume had run out behind the newswoman, jumping up and down and waving a WPPT-FM bumper sticker over her head. Network technicians tackled him. The screen abruptly went to test pattern.

  “The Party Parrot cracks me up!” said Coleman. “Don’t you just love him?”

  “We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.” The TV cut to a man in a three-piece suit sitting at the front of a boardroom. “You’re sacked!”

  “What’s this program?” asked Coleman.

  “The Mogul,” said Serge. “British knockoff of Trump’s show.”

  The program segued to another scene. The man from the boardroom was now waving out the pressurized window of a space-age teardrop hanging from the bottom of a rapidly ascending experimental rare-gas balloon.

  Coleman signaled for another beer. “What’s going on now?”

  “That’s the premise of the show,” said Serge. “He fires people, then does an expensive stunt.”

  “Why?”

  “The direction of society. We worship rich people who buy celebrity.”

  “I don’t recognize him.”

  “Neville Gladstone?” said Serge. “He’s the media tycoon buying up everything in the state. That’s what really pisses me off. Never even set foot here, then he grabs Florida Cable News and slices coverage in half so he can add a bunch of stupid shows: The Mogul, Xtreme Poker, Gotcha!”

  “I love Gotcha!” said Coleman. “Did you see that one prank where this bum’s in a mall and pulls a dirty diaper from a trash can and starts licking? It had been planted with melted chocolate or something. All these shoppers got sick anyway. You have to be really smart to think up stuff like that.”

  “This has been a production of Gladstone Media…. Stay tuned for Florida’s Funniest Surveillance Videos…”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Welcome back to our Storm Team Five Special Hurricane Report, your one-stop information source for complete landfall coverage, with continuing live broadcasts from Kirk in Clearwater, Wade in Sarasota, Chad in Fort Myers, and the rest of the Storm Team: Mary with the shelter roundup, Biff with canceled sports, Flip down in the Channel 5 Weather Bunker, and Ernie driving the Hurricane-Buster Mobile Command Unit…. Let’s go to Ernie at the mouth of Tampa Bay…. Ernie?”

  “Alex is really blowing now! Despite our vehicle’s heavy armor, he knocked us off the road like a toy and down into this ravine.”

  “Can you get a video shot outside the Hurricane-Buster?”

  “Negative. The wind won’t let me open the hatch. We’re trapped.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much is happening…. Let’s go to Chad….”

  “Hank, it’s a beautiful day at the beach as the hurricane completely missed Fort Myers. I was almost in danger.”

  “How close were you to death?”

  “Less than a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “Better go back inside…. Mary?”

  “Order was restored this morning at the downtown shelter. As you can see behind me, just the usual scuffles—”

  “Hold on, Mary. Ernie’s back…. Ernie?”

  “I got the hatch open. I’m sticking my head out…. Wow! Did you see that sheet metal?”

  “Way to duck, Ernie…. Ernie?…We just lost Ernie…. Biff?”

  “No games on tap.”

  “Flip?”

  “Check out this excellent graphics software we just bought! I can rotate the 3-D map on every axis. And these buttons make cool animated tornadoes. Look at ’em all!”

  “Flip, how many tornadoes has the hurricane spawned?”

  “None. I was just showing you the buttons. Want me to crash them into something?”

  “Wait, we’ve got Ernie back…. Ernie, what’s the latest?”

  “Hank, this is an unbelievable display of nature’s fury. I’m using all my strength to raise the camera out of the hatch…. Any second now you’ll be seeing the first historic footage of Alex’s landfall….”

  “We see it, Ernie, absolutely incredible! Try to get an interview with that shirtless guy drinking a beer….”

  Serge stared up at the TV and grimaced.

  “What’s the matter?” Coleman wiped beer foam. “Thought you liked hurricane coverage.”

  Serge rubbed his leg. “It’s not that.”

  “Your knee again?”

  “Acts up in this weather.”

  “You said you were glad to have it.” Coleman waved for the bartender. “Helped you track hurricanes.”

  “I was making lemonade.”

  “It starts in the joints.”

  “I am not getting old!” said Serge. “Jesus! You’re just like my psychiatrist!”

  “What did your psychiatrist say?”

  “That I have to come to terms with the aging process….”

  “Sounds like a good psychiatrist.”

  “…And I should get a job.”

  “I’d get another psychiatrist.”

  “No, as much as I hate to admit it, she’s right on both counts. But like she also said, forty-four really isn’t that old.”

  “For
ty-four!” yelled Coleman. “Holy shit! I didn’t know you were forty-four. That’s almost fifty, which is almost sixty, which is almost dead.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Sunshine. How old are you?”

  “I’m…I…I don’t know.”

  Serge gave him a dubious glance.

  “Hey, getting old bothers me, too,” said Coleman. “Know how I handle it?”

  Serge returned to his newspaper. “You get fucked up?”

  “Near the end they give you morphine. I’m looking forward to that.”

  Serge turned another page. “You might want to bottle some of that excess ambition for the afterlife.”

  “You’re awfully cranky today.”

  “Sorry.” He closed the paper. “Didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “What’s the matter, buddy?”

  “Everything lately. My birthday, the psychiatrist, the knee, Porsches.” Serge gazed toward the buffet and a room full of sprite youth. “On top of all that, they say I’m losing my edge.”

  “Who is?”

  “I hear talk.”

  “What kind?”

  “That I’m mellowing out, not killing motherfuckers as fast as I used to.”

  “People can be cruel.”

  “What did I ever do to them?”

  “But that’s just talk,” said Coleman.

  “It’s also in print.” Serge lifted his newspaper to reveal a magazine underneath. Florida Law Enforcement Quarterly. It was folded over to an unsettling charcoal illustration of a faceless humanoid trapped in a box. The figure was grabbing its head, which had storm clouds in the brain region.

  Coleman leaned. “What’s that?”

  “Article warning about the psychological perils of profiling serial killers. The writer just got released from a mental hospital in Miami after obsessing about a suspect and getting too far inside his head.”

  Coleman tapped a spot in the body of the type. “It mentions you by name….” His lips moved as he read. He stopped and sat back. “Wow. I can see why you’re so sore.”

  “What the heck does he mean, lunatics like me don’t have a good shelf life? Our abnormal brain waves age us twice as fast?”

  “It means you’re”—Coleman stared painfully into space—“almost seventy.”

  “Thanks. I know what it means.”

  “Why don’t you just kill a few people and make them happy?”

  Serge pounded a fist on the bar. “That’s the whole problem: Everyone has the wrong idea. I don’t want to do what I do. I need a very good reason. Unfortunately, people in this state keep providing them. But I am not a serial killer!”

  Coleman pointed at an info box in the magazine. “Says here you’re number twenty-six all-time, just about to pass Dahmer. And you’re way up to eleven on the active list.”

  “This isn’t about keeping up career stats.”

  Coleman read on. “What’s ‘sexual dysfunction’?”

  Serge pounded his fist again.

  “Look at the writer’s name on the top of the article,” said Coleman. “It’s Agent Mahoney. Isn’t that your old friend?”

  “Not after this hatchet job.” Serge snatched the magazine back and shredded it. “I’m going to show them. I’m going to show them all!”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Remember the Elvis Comeback Special?”

  “You’re going to be Elvis?”

  “The Elvis of comebacks!” Serge stood quickly and threw currency on the bar. “They ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

  Coleman chugged the rest of his beer and ran after him. “Is that what the guy in our trunk is for?”

  Serge accelerated toward the front door. “I’m tired of driving people around like that. They think I’m their fucking chauffeur.”

  Coleman jogged to keep up. “But I don’t think he wanted to come with us.”

  “Should have thought of that before he broke the social contract.” Serge burst outside into the driving rain. The door closed behind them, and the power went out.

  THE NERVOUS HOURS

  No idle chatter. Everyone huddled tight wherever they were, staring up at creaking beams. The hurricane spun west over the lifeless landscape. It rattled empty roller coasters at Busch Gardens and ripped canopies from ticket booths. Torrents raged down water slides. A brief twister skipped across Rhino Rally.

  The storm continued its unnegotiable course, sweeping over the University of South Florida. Landscaping surrendered. A diverse stew of debris from unsecured dorm balconies sailed over the campus: patio chairs, potted plants, pristine textbooks, name-brand laundry. Fast-food signage shattered in chain reaction down Fowler Avenue. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Domino’s, the trademarked fonts broken down to individual letters, swirling together and forming a ransom note in the sky. The last to go were the yellow-and-red Asian characters above a popular buffet. Inside, electricity was out and air stagnant, the storm growling and hissing all around like a living thing, no natural predators, alone way atop the Florida food chain. Students filled cold plates in the dark.

  Four freshmen who’d arrived in a Jeep Grand Cherokee finished their third helping and headed back for more.

  “Let’s smoke another joint first.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside.”

  “Don’t you see what’s going on?”

  “We’ll stay close to the building.”

  “The dope will get wet. If we don’t get killed first.”

  “Look!”

  The dining room suddenly brightened. Everyone turned. The rain had stopped. Residual drops teamed up and trickled down the front windows. The scene outside had gone from perpetual motion to still life.

  “The storm’s over. Let’s get high.”

  “It’s not over. It’s just the eye.”

  “Cool. We’ll get high in the eye.”

  The level head in the bunch was outvoted, and they tiptoed past the restrooms to the ser vice door.

  “This is going to be so excellent!”

  They glanced around one last time, then clandestinely opened the door and slipped onto the receiving dock.

  “Who’s got the lighter?”

  “Yo.”

  “Fire it up!”

  That’s when the first of them saw it. His horrible scream directed the others to the ghastly sight. They scrambled back inside. The eye left, and the wind resumed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FIVE HOURS LATER

  The back side of the hurricane was long gone, somewhere out over the map near Kissimmee.

  The streets of Tampa had come back to life, busier than ever with added emergency-response activity, like a stepped-on anthill. Urgent, efficient movement in every direction. Police, fire, EMTs. Power-company people in cherry pickers repaired sagging tension lines. Officers in reflective vests directed sightseeing traffic through lightless intersections. The water level on the flooded side streets continued rising. Someone zipped by on a Jet Ski.

  Four college students shivered on a receiving dock behind a Chinese restaurant. They sat bundled in coarse government blankets. Cops everywhere. A uniformed officer handed them cups of hot cocoa. Detectives in suits took notes and evidence. Others lifted the sheet over the facedown victim for more photographs.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said a hom i cide veteran.

  “I have,” said his partner. “But it happened to a tree.”

  “You drinking again?”

  “Remember that famous photo from Hurricane Andrew? Two-by-four smack through the trunk of a hardwood like it was a banana. People have no idea the power these storms generate, or they’d never risk going outside.”

  “Like our friend over there.” The detectives looked back at the white sheet rising above the deceased like a circus tent. A third detective joined them and shook his head. “Two-by-four clear through the chest. That had to smart.”

  A white Lincoln with blackwall tires pulled up. The chief of police got out with a carl
oad of assistants. The detectives un-slouched.

  “How are we coming?”

  “Still working on it, sir.”

  “Any more witnesses?”

  “Just those kids over there who found the body in the middle of the eye. But they didn’t see anything.”

  “What were they doing out in a hurricane?”

  A detective reached into his pocket and produced a clear evidence bag with a soggy dropped joint.

  The chief shook his head. “Wonderful.” He bent down and lifted the sheet. He was about to drop it when something stopped him. “This guy looks familiar. Who is he?”

  The chief didn’t get a response. He looked up. They were all staring away.

  The chief quickly straightened with authority. “Okay, spill it.”

  “Just got the victim’s ID.”

  “You going to tell me anytime soon?”

  A younger detective glanced nervously at the others and cleared his throat. “Sir, remember that sex offender who was in the news after getting released from prison?”

  “Which?” said the chief. “I need a daily racing form to keep track.”

  “The one who claimed the community kept harassing him and sending death threats? Then somebody sent that video to the TV station of the guy lurking around an elementary school, which should have violated his probation. But his lawyer successfully argued the school was closed for teacher training. The guy didn’t know that, but it still worked.”

  The chief ’s eyes were closed. He was massaging his temples. He opened his eyes. “I want this wrapped up fast. The press is going to have a field day.”

  “No problem.” The lead detective opened his notebook. “Already have preliminary cause of death. Think I can rush it through and get the M.E. to sign off by sunset. All kinds of debris flying around a hurricane. Just a coincidence who the guy was.”

  “You’re saying this was an accident?”

  The detective nodded. “What else could it be?”

  A new voice: “Murder.”

  Everyone turned. A thin man in a rumpled fedora walked toward them. His necktie had jazz instruments.

  The chief’s patience left town. “Who the hell are you?”