by Tim Dorsey
“Drugs. They have their own built-in satellite delay, like when CNN’s interviewing a correspondent in Beirut. You’re living three seconds behind me.”
“What are you talking about?”
The knife suddenly appeared in Serge’s right hand. He tossed it out the door, then grabbed her wrists, did a spin move and came around behind her, twisting both hands up against her back.
“Ow! You’re breaking my arms!”
“This is yoga. You’re way too tense.”
“Let go of me!”
“You need to relax and get in tune with the Earth, like Native Americans who worship the Great Spirit.”
“Let go of me!”
He twisted her arms higher. She screamed.
“Will you worship the Great Spirit?”
“What about my money?”
“Let me teach you about the Great Spirit, then you can come on the Night Launch. And if you behave, maybe I can arrange a little allowance.”
“You fucker!”
He twisted more. A louder scream. “Okay, okay! Stop! I’ll do it!”
“You gave me your word. I’m letting go now.” Serge began loosening his grasp. “But one false move and I’ll clobber you. I have three seconds.”
He let go and jumped back.
Rachael spun around and steamed with fists clenched by her sides. But she didn’t attack.
“Auspicious start,” said Serge. “Now follow me and I’ll teach you the ways….”
Serge led her out the door and into the yard. “Sit right there in the dirt.” She grudgingly complied. He picked up a long stick. “First you need to recognize that right angles symbolize the discord of the White Man. That’s why I’m using this stick to draw a big circle around you, representing the spiritual cycles of peace and harmony that connect us all.” He completed the circle. “Then you stay perfectly still in the middle and shut the fuck up!”
Serge went back inside, filling additional luggage with his books and National Geographics.
“Taking all that with you?”
“Decided to blow this place,” said Serge. “Anything of sentimental value, better grab it now.”
“Shit.” Coleman ran to the fridge and opened a beer. “How do you know so much about women?”
Serge hoisted a strap over his shoulder. “You just have to remember that inside they’re all still little girls. See? Isn’t she adorable?” They looked out the door: Rachael sitting in the dirt, cursing, lighting a Marlboro and wiping drug mucus off her upper lip.
Coleman looked toward a moaning sound near their feet. “I think he’s coming to.”
“We’ll just have to bring him along.” Serge pulled the pistol from his belt, gripped it by the barrel and cracked the top of Jimmy’s dome. Moaning stopped. “But that’s it. Membership’s now closed. This Night Launch is getting too popular.”
Rachael stood when she saw Serge and Coleman approach, dragging Jimmy by the ankles. “What about my money?”
“After the Night Launch clears the tower,” said Serge. “You can come out of the circle now.”
She grumbled and followed.
Serge glanced at her hand. “And no smoking in the car.”
“Bite me!”
“Guess you don’t want your money.”
“Dammit…. Wait up!” She took a quick series of drags and ran after them, flicking the butt into a pile of yard waste. A lifeless rat began to stir.
SIX
SOUTH TAMPA
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
Martha Davenport sprang up in bed. “What’s that?”
“Our burglar alarm.” Jim rolled over and squinted at a digital clock. Four-thirty.
“Think someone’s downstairs?”
He squinted again, this time across the room at the most advanced alarm keypad on the market. “Says it’s the garage.”
“Jim! Do something!”
He climbed from the sheets, walked across the room and locked the bedroom door.
“That’s it?”
“Okay…” He reached up in the closet and climbed back into bed with something.
“Jim, are you going to show him you won third place?”
Jim set the bowling trophy between their pillows and snuggled under the sheets.
“Jim!”
The phone rang. He grabbed it.
“This is Proton Security. We show a motion sensor in the garage.”
“So does our keypad.”
“I’ve already called the police. Are you in a safe place?”
“I think so.” Jim got out of bed and peeked through curtains. “I’m looking down at the garage.”
“Anyone there?”
“No. He’s already at the end of the street with my lawnmower.”
The police response was efficient and polite. A young officer filled out the report. “Anything missing besides the lawnmower?”
“The motion sensors.”
The officer finished and handed Jim a yellow copy. “For the insurance company. Make sure all your doors are locked.” He tipped his hat.
It was quiet again in the Davenport bedroom. Jim turned his head on the pillow. Martha was staring back.
“What?”
“You know.”
“Where are we going to move?”
“Anywhere.”
“Martha, we can’t sell the place every time something happens in the world. First Triggerfish Lane, then Manatee Drive and now here.”
“Jim! A dangerous criminal was in our house!”
“The garage.”
“Next time it will be the house. But you don’t care.”
“Honey, petty theft happens everywhere. It’s okay—”
“Don’t start with that!”
“With what?”
“Being calm.”
“You want me to get excited?”
“I want you to do something!”
Jim grabbed the remote and turned on the TV.
“Are you deliberately trying to start a fight?”
“I’m checking the news. Maybe there’s something on that guy in the windshield at the Skyway.”
“Exactly what I’m talking about. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”
“They were just old people who couldn’t drive.”
“But if it’s not one thing…”
Jim clicked over to the Channel 7 Action First Eyewitness Report. Flashing police lights at one of their neighborhood convenience stores. Little plastic flags on the ground marked bullet casings. Martha opened a book. “You can stay. I’m moving.”
“We can’t move now.” He clicked the remote. A major house fire behind a Dairy Queen in Sarasota.
“Why can’t we move?”
“We’re renovating. We’ll never get our price with the place torn up.”
“What will it matter if we’re murdered?”
“You’re overreacting.”
The bedroom briefly brightened.
Martha sat up. “What was that?”
“Police helicopter.”
“And I thought she was crazy.”
“Who?”
“Our old neighbor,” said Martha. “She warned us about the grid streets: When everything’s laid out straight, it’s easier for criminals to dart in and out from the main arteries and elude cops. Puts every psychopath on the west coast within striking distance.”
“Honey—”
“Heard she just moved into a serpentine neighborhood.”
“How about this? Let ’em finish the work on the house. Then, if you still feel the way you do, we’ll move to a street that curves. Why don’t you try getting some sleep?”
“Can’t.”
“Thought you were over that.”
“You’ve just been out like a light. But I’ll be up at some crazy hour looking down from the window, and there are all these people there.”
“Where? Our front yard?”
“No. A block over on that main drag that cuts through our neighbo
rhood. Just walking up and down the sidewalks all night. What can they be doing?”
Jim shrugged.
She threw the covers off her legs and went over to the window. “It’s like this entirely different species crawls out after we go to sleep at night.”
Jim got up and walked up behind his wife. He wrapped his arms around her. “I promise it’ll be okay.”
Martha rested her head back on his shoulder. “You know what’s really underneath it all?”
“I do.”
“And you’re not worried?”
“Baby, the home invasion was ten years ago.”
“But there’s one McGraw left—and he swore he’d get even with you for killing his cousins.”
“That was self-defense.”
“Jim, you did what you had to. It doesn’t change the threat.”
“But he’s still in prison.”
“For how long?”
“A long time. Besides, there’s a law requiring authorities to inform victims before a prisoner’s release.”
Martha took a deep breath. “Maybe I should make another appointment with the doctor.”
“That’s a good idea.”
They held hands again and stood in front of the window. Jim looked up. “The moon’s beautiful tonight.”
Martha looked down. A man wheeled a gas grill up the sidewalk. “The Fergusons just bought that.”
MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
North Florida might as well be south Georgia. It actually is, at least where the St. Mary’s River carves a tongue of land almost down to I-10 between Baker and Nassau counties. Undiscovered territory. Oaks, moss, national forests, a couple of speed traps between the flea markets in Lawtey and Waldo where U.S. 301 slices down the state from Jacksonville. God’s country. Only a single industry to speak of. But they never closed.
The lights burned bright at one of the franchises. It was just before sunrise, though still quite dark from a blanket of anvil thunderheads drifting across the rolling farmland. No rain yet. One of those violent, nervous skies that just waited.
The lights, more specifically, were floodlights, perched on tall poles around the perimeter, pointing down inside the property like a backwoods high school football field. Sometimes they even played a little sports at this place, except right now all the athletes were locked in their cells. Union Correctional maximum-security prison. But everyone called it Raiford.
The stillness broke. Motion in the yard. A tight formation of guards moved toward the front gate. They entered a narrow walkway of Cyclone fence and razor wire. In the middle, one head stood above the others. Ankle chains shuffled. The prisoner wore a fresh, cheap suit with too-short pants; the jacket creased from where wrist manacles attached to the waist restraint. A hockey mask covered the face because of his classification as a biter.
Normally an inmate wasn’t restrained upon being released. And there weren’t half as many guards. But this was Tex McGraw, the biggest, meanest, nastiest in a long, tainted bloodline of infamous McGraws. Tex hadn’t seen freedom since the early nineties, wrapping up a stretch for extremely aggravated battery. Much had happened in the meantime, including the notorious McGraw Brothers home invasion in Tampa, foiled by an unassuming family man on Triggerfish Lane. Tex was helpless in his cell when he learned of his cousins’ demise. Now, approaching the prison’s front gate, there was but one all-consuming thought on his mind. The guards continued anxiously. The one in back carried a cardboard box of the prisoner’s meager possessions.
It began to rain.
Correctional work was the unimaginable. Getting hit with feces, blood, urine; at any turn, the chance of your arm being yanked through metal bars and sliced sixty stitches wide with the melted point of a toothbrush. The guards coped by mentally compartmentalizing the nightmare and leaving it at the gate on the way home. But this was one day they were glad to be locked inside. Someone out there was going to end up dead.
Florida had no choice. New laws required inmates to serve a minimum 85 percent of their sentence. McGraw had just completed 130, including time added for bad behavior. Every last day gone. Not even the possibility of supervised parole.
The guards reached the front of the yard. The tower opened the gate. Rain became a deluge. Half the team held Tex’s limbs fast; the rest quickly undid locks and buckles. They finished the last cuff and shoved him out of the prison. Tex turned around.
“Boo.”
The guards jumped and slammed the gate shut. The safest place in the state was now inside Raiford. The officer with Tex’s belongings heaved the box over the top of the fence. It broke open in the mud, scattering toiletries, amphetamine-laced candy bars, a Bible with a shank in the spine and dozens of ten-year-old newspaper articles about a reluctant hero named Jim Davenport.
Tex left it all in the puddles and began trudging south.
The guards watched intently as the ex-prisoner’s outline faded into the driving rain. They began to untense. Suddenly, a maniacal roar echoed across the open field. Lightning crashed, momentarily illuminating a distant, hulking figure with fists and face raised straight up at the storm.
And he was gone.
The guards went back inside. They passed the thick, shatterproof glass of the processing office, where other personnel handled paperwork on inmates, both coming and going. One officer tapped a keyboard, dispatching release reports for local law enforcement to notify victims.
Tap, tap, tap. “Uh-oh…Hey, Stan, my computer froze again. What was that thing you said to hit?”
“Control, alt, delete.”
“Hit delete?”
“No. Control, alt—”
“Oops. Already did it. Where’d that file go?”
SEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING
Serge considered breakfast the most important meal of the day. It had to be celebrated when the fishermen and crab-trappers ate: before first light. Hence his initial Night Launch stop after the Bradenton overpass. They were just beyond the mouth of the bay on St. Petersburg’s transitional Thirty-fourth Street. Pawnbrokers and car-title-loan hustlers had crawled in like hermit crabs, filling the exquisite architectural shells of landmark restaurants, gas stations and motels. Predawn derelicts wandered through traffic, froze in headlights and raced back to the curb in a game of Homeless Frogger. Serge could have spit.
But the drive was more than worth it for the surviving jewel. Serge turned off the road and parked in front of a concrete chicken. He ran for the front door and pulled up short. Coleman crashed into him. “Why’d you stop?”
“I absolutely love the moment I first enter Skyway Jack’s. Smoky aroma from the grill, din of a community coming to life, dockmen, construction workers, fiduciaries, reading the sports section, debating the direction of our republic.” He threw open the door and spread his arms. “Good mornnnnnnnning, Florida!”
Silence and stares. Serge lowered his arms. “Probably not fully awake yet. I was hoping for a bunch of high-fives running down the aisle.”
Conversation resumed. A waitress led them to a back booth. Serge ordered his “usual”: steak, bacon, toast, hash browns, grits, southern biscuits and sausage gravy, sliced grapefruit, pancakes, whipped butter, orange juice, tomato juice, coffee and three eggs, sunny-side up, which he seasoned with heavy salt, heavy pepper, heavy Tabasco sauce. “Shoot. Ruined them again. Excuse me? Can I get different eggs? And more coffee…”
“Serge,” said Coleman. “All the waitresses’ T-shirts have fried eggs over their boobs.”
“It’s Skyway Jack’s. Used to be next to the bridge before they lost an eminent-domain fight when the state widened lanes.”
Replacement eggs arrived. Serge grabbed toast for yolk dipping. “Coleman, don’t you see what’s happening?”
“Breakfast?”
“The magic of life On the Road! Kerouac, Easy Rider, Oklahoma Sooners! God bless America! And it’s not even light out yet. Nothing more invigorating than getting a jump on the sun! The three of us family-bonding like N
orman Rockwell: me with the maximum-excellent breakfast and two newspapers, you spiking your OJ with Smirnoff, Rachael ordering nothing, smoking outside and offering truckers reach-arounds.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Not in my hands anymore. The launch rules all.”
Serge worked through food with exclusivity, entirely finishing each item before moving to the next. He left a big tip along with a handwritten note of local travel advice, then paid at the cash register and finished his morning tradition with toothpick and mint. They collected Rachael from behind a Dumpster, got back in the Comet and headed west to pick up the route along the coast.
“Quiet back there!” Serge fiddled with the radio. “Want me to have an accident?”
“She won’t get back on her side!”
“I am on my side!”
“Stop touching me!”
“You spilled my drink!”
“Serge, will you make Rachael—”
“Knock it off!” yelled Serge. “If I have to pull over!”
“Look,” said Rachael. “On the floor.”
“What is it?”
“I think I found some dope.”
“Let me see.”
“What do you think?”
“Doesn’t look like dope.”
Serge banged his head on the steering wheel.
“What could it be?”
“Maybe a clump of weeds that fell off my shoe or something.”
“Shit.” Rachael threw the dope out the window.
A brief spell of quiet, except for the mild rumble of an old brick street beneath the tires.
Something slammed the back of Serge’s seat, pitching him forward. He checked the rearview, Rachael and Coleman wrestling and pulling hair.
“That’s it!”
Two minutes later, Coleman and Rachael stood silent and respectful beside the car.
“You two going to behave?” said Serge, aiming his gun.
They nodded.
“Okay then…”
Whisper: “You started it.”
“You did.”
“Enough!” Serge tucked the pistol away. “But if I hear another word.”
The sky gave up traces of light. Serge reached through the front window of the parked Comet and found Eric Burden on the radio.