by Tim Dorsey
Nobody knew it was all a mistake. The magazine had recently been acquired by a German media conglomerate, which purchased the latest spelling and grammar-check software and dismissed its editors and writers, replacing them with distracted high school students in Walkman head-sets. The tabular charts on the new software had baffled a student with green hair, who inadvertently moved all of Tampa’s crime statistics a decimal point to the left.
JIM AND MARTHA DAVENPORT were a perfect match. She had long, flowing red hair and the patience of a firecracker. He had selective hearing.
Martha was forty-two, a year older than Jim, five-six with large hips but the perfect weight. Her lips were full, and she unconsciously favored shades of lipstick that matched her hair and freckles. Jim was five-ten with a curious physique. His frame was narrow, except for the shoulders, which were spread and bony, and he required big suits that hung all over him like a Talking Heads video.
Martha drove past the Ocala exit and checked on the kids in the rearview. Debbie was working on her sulk. Melvin wore thick glasses and read a science book, how to make a compass with a glass of water and a sewing needle. Nicole leaned forward in her safety seat, discovering her toes.
Martha set cruise control on seventy in the right lane. They entered the gravitational field of Tampa Bay. An electric-lime bullet bike shot past on the left. Another ninja bike flew by on the right, in the breakdown lane, followed by a speeding red convertible full of shirtless, tattooed rocket scientists.
Martha watched them accelerate and disappear. “They endangered our family! If I had a gun—”
“That’s why you don’t have a gun.”
“Can we get a Suburban?”
“You know how much they cost.”
“They have more armor to protect the kids. Look how the people drive here.”
An Eagle Talon raced by on the right, cutting across the minivan with inches to spare. Martha hit the brakes.
“What kind of a place are we moving to?”
Jim grabbed the magazine off the dash. “Great weather, sandy beaches, beautiful state parks, historic Latin quarter, barely perceptible crime rate…”
They reached the city an hour before sunset. The moving van wasn’t due until morning, so they had to put up. Martha drove slowly, hunched over the wheel, scanning roadside motel signs. Econo, Budget, Value, Thrift-Rite, El Rancho.
They rolled through an intersection, the gas stations on all four corners boarded up with squatters in lawn chairs selling velvet paintings, country music lawn statuary, counterfeit Beanie Babies and slightly fresh seafood. Outside a pawnshop, a homeless man and a woman in a leopard miniskirt wrestled over a VCR.
“Doesn’t look safe.”
Jim pointed. “There’s a Motel 9.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a big chain,” he said. “They’re not going to let anything happen to us.”
The Davenports checked in and unpacked. A half hour later, Jim and Martha strolled onto their second-floor motel balcony.
“See? It’s beautiful!” said Jim, and they held hands as the sun set behind the Starvin’ Marvin.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, a deep boom awakened the Davenports.
“What was that?” asked Martha, bolting up in bed.
“Thunder?” said Jim.
Martha walked to the window and peeked out the curtains. “There aren’t any clouds.”
TEN MINUTES AFTER midnight at the Breakers Hotel. Not the one in Palm Beach. The one in Tampa next door to Motel 9 with three cars in the lot and a flickering neon sign advertising free local calls and in-room porn.
Room 112. Mr. Rogers on TV.
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighbor—”
Ka-boom.
A twelve-gauge blew out the picture tube of the twenty-inch Sony.
A tall blonde ran out of the bathroom with white powder across her face. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. It just went off,” said the man holding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand and a Schlitz in the other.
“It doesn’t just go off!” yelled the blonde.
“This one did.”
Dogs started barking.
“Gimme that,” she said, reaching for the gun.
“No!”
“Yes!”
She jerked it out of his hands, and it went off again, blowing out the ceiling lamp. They ducked as glass fell.
More dogs barked.
“Okay, now that time it was your fault,” said the man.
“Don’t be blaming me! You’re the one who can’t do a simple thing like guard this asshole.” She pointed at the bed and the drunk businessman who had been abducted outside a titty bar and driven around for three hours, forced to make repeated ATM withdrawals and ride in the trunk during the interspersed drug buys.
But the businessman was too tanked to be afraid. In fact, he never stopped talking, and the kidnappers began to regret their hostage selection.
“I can fix you up with a nice, clean, low-mileage Camaro,” said the hostage. “No credit? No problemo!”
“Shut up!” screamed the woman.
The male kidnapper walked over and looked closely at the man’s face. “Hey! I know him! He’s the guy on TV!”
The hostage smiled. He was “Honest Al,” the lying sales manager at Tampa Bay Motors. Twenty times a day he could be seen on local TV, banging the hood of an odometer-tampered Hyundai. “No credit? No problemo!”
Al became cranky. “Can I go now? I gotta be back at the lot in a few hours.”
“Shut up!” screamed the woman.
“I’ll give you some more money,” said Al. “I have to be there by nine. Got some people coming back to look at a flood-damaged Cadillac. Except they don’t know it’s flood-damaged. A couple of stupid Puerto Ricans.”
“Hey!” snapped the male kidnapper. “That’s not very nice.”
“Screw nice,” said Al.
“Shut up!” screamed the woman.
“You guys are losers!” said Al. “I’m leaving!”
Al got up from the bed, but the woman took two quick running steps, planted her feet and slammed Al in the face with the butt of the shotgun, sending him back on the mattress with a spurting nosebleed.
“You don’t have to be mean to him,” said her partner.
“We’re robbing him, you stupid fuck!”
“He’s just annoying. He hasn’t given us any real trouble.” The man tapped a bag of cocaine over the dresser. The coke had gotten moist and wasn’t coming out of the baggie well, and he tapped harder and the whole thing fell out in a big chunk and disintegrated in the carpet.
“That was all we had!” yelled the woman. She got down on her hands and knees and snorted the rug.
“You getting any?”
She raised her head. “A little.”
He joined her.
“You’re such an oaf, Coleman.”
“You used my name.”
“Yeah, it’s your name. Coleman. So what?”
“He heard you.”
“So?”
“So now we have to kill him.”
“We’re not killing shit,” she said.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” said Al.
The woman stood up and slapped Al.
“Do you have to do that?” said Coleman.
“You’re the one who wants to kill him.”
“He can testify against me.”
“Like I care.”
“All right, let’s see how you like it, Sharon.”
“Stop it!”
“Sharon, Sharon, Sharon…”
“Don’t push me!”
Coleman climbed on one of the beds and jumped up and down. “Sharon, Sharon, Sharon…”
The motel room door flew open. Standing against the dark parking lot: a tall, lanky man in a tropical shirt.
“What the fuck was all that shooting?”
Sharon and Coleman pointed at each other.
Coleman jumped down off the bed and ran up to him. “Serge! She used my name in front of the hostage!”
“You idiot!”
“Oh, I just used your name, didn’t I?”
Serge looked at Sharon, nose back in the rug.
“Can I ever leave you two unsupervised? And look at the coke all over the place! Don’t you know we’re in the middle of the War on Drugs?”
“The War on Drugs?” said Coleman. “I think I marched against that once.”
“Why don’t you get high on life instead?”
“And be like you?” said Sharon. “No thanks! Wandering around the parking lot like a lunatic…”
“I told you! The space shuttle was visible on the south-southwest horizon at seventeen degrees for four minutes and twenty-three seconds! I can’t believe you didn’t want to see it!”
“Can I go now?” asked Al. “If you take me by an ATM, I can give you guys and the hooker some more money.”
“Hooker?” said Sharon. “Hooker!”
“Mister,” said Serge, “for your information, that’s a coke slut.”
“Hooker!” Sharon screamed. She picked up the shotgun and bashed him in the forehead again with the butt. When she did, the gun discharged, blowing out the mirror over the sink.
“I give up,” said Serge. “Let’s save ammo and call the police ourselves.”
Dogs started barking again. This time there were sirens, too.
Serge sighed and went over to Al.
“Is he hurt?” asked Sharon.
“He’s dead,” said Serge.
“What?”
“Must have been the recoil from the blast. Broke his neck.”
“But I only meant to hurt him.”
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
The dogs were getting quieter but the sirens louder.
Serge canted his head toward the window. “That’s the two-minute warning. You know the drill.”
The three grabbed different parts of Al by his clothing, hoisted him to hip level and shuffled out the door. They threw him in the trunk and sped away without closing the room. Serge gunned the ’65 Barracuda and raced without headlights down a service alley behind Motel 9, just as two squad cars pulled into the Breakers.
Serge avoided the expressway and zigzagged across town on darkened industrial roads through the hobo-land of the underpasses.
“I hope you two are happy,” said Serge. “Now I’m gonna miss the Marlins’ highlights on ESPN. I think they’re going all the way this year.”
“No chance,” said Coleman. “They’ll never get past Turner’s Braves.”
“Will so!”
“Will not!”
“Are we going by any place we can get coke?” asked Sharon.
Serge drove to the Port of Tampa and pulled into a vacant twenty-four-hour al fresco Laundromat where all the coin slots had been pried with screwdrivers. They heaved the body out of the trunk.
Serge dragged Al by the ankles across the concrete floor.
“What are you planning?” asked Sharon.
“He was drunk, right?” said Serge.
They nodded.
Serge pulled the body up to the vending machines. “So when they do the autopsy, he’ll have a high blood-alcohol content, right?”
They nodded again.
Serge laid Al on his back and spread Al’s arms wide in front of a soft-drink machine. He stepped back, doing rough trigonometry in his head. He leaned down again and slid Al a few inches closer to the machine. The machine had a warning sticker: a big rectangle tipping over on a stick man with lightning bolts coming out of his head. The sticker said not to tip the machine in the event a product did not dispense.
Serge tipped it.
The machine went over with a crash and the sound of hissing soda cans. A cocktail of Pepsi, Mountain Dew and blood began to pool, only the man’s fingertips sticking out from under the sides of the machine.
“There,” said Serge. “Not only will we not get caught, but he’ll always be remembered as a dumb-ass.”
They jumped back in the car and grabbed the expressway.
“Where are we going?” asked Coleman.
“Back to the house.”
“But—” said Coleman.
“But what?”
“I want to party.”
“Yeah,” Sharon agreed. “We want to party.”
“Don’t you think you’ve already had a pretty big night?”
“It’s still early,” said Sharon.
“Yeah, it’s still early,” said Coleman.
“Early?” said Serge. “It’s getting light out.”
“That’s as early as it gets,” said Coleman.
2
T HE DAVENPORTS WERE up at first light. Jim pulleyed open the thick curtains before stepping onto the balcony. There was dew on the railing and diesel sounds from the interstate and a dozen police cars behind the motel next door. At the truck stop across the street, a line had already formed outside a Winnebago of ill repute.
The Davenports carried luggage across the parking lot.
Martha pulled up short at the Aerostar. “Someone keyed the van!”
Jim ran a finger along the scratch. “You’re right.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“You’re right and I love you.”
“Sometimes you make me so mad.”
They climbed in the van; Jim hopped on the expressway. He threw a quarter in the automatic toll booth, but the red light didn’t change. He drove through. A wino scurried from the underbrush and pulled a quarter out of the plastic basket, where he’d stuffed a rag in the coin hole.
The Davenports got off the expressway and headed into south Tampa. None of them had seen their new home yet, except in pictures. The deal was prearranged and underwritten by Jim’s company, an expanding Indiana consulting firm that had asked for volunteers to move to new branch offices in Phoenix, San Antonio and Tampa. Long lines formed for Arizona and Texas. Jim wondered why he was all alone at the Florida desk.
Jim checked street signs as the van rolled down Dale Mabry Highway.
“I think we’re getting close.”
Drama built, everyone’s face at the window. Antique malls, dry cleaners, Little League fields, 7-Elevens. Just like neighborhoods everywhere, but with lots of palm trees and azaleas.
Jim made a right. Almost there. Martha liked the sound of the street names. Barracuda Trail, Man O’ War Terrace, Coral Circle. When they got to Triggerfish Lane, Jim made a left. Their mouths fell open.
Paradise.
The sun was high, the sky clear, and children played catch and rode bikes in the street. And the colors!…lush gardens and hedges, pastel paint schemes. Teal, turquoise, pink, peach. The houses started at the bayfront and unfolded chronologically as development had pushed inland. Clapboard bungalows from the twenties, Mediterranean stuccos from the thirties and forties, classic ranch houses of the fifties and sixties. It used to be a consistent architectural flow, but real estate in south Tampa had become so white hot that anything under two thousand square feet was bulldozed to make way for three-story trophy homes that now towered out both windows of the Aerostar. Half the places had decorative silk flags hanging over brass mailboxes. Florida Gators flags and FSU Seminoles flags. Flags with sunflowers and golf clubs and sailfish and horses. Jim pointed ahead at a light-ochre bungalow with white trim. A restoration-award flag hung from the wraparound porch.
“There she is.”
Martha’s eyes popped with elation, and she hugged Jim.
The moving truck was already unloading in the driveway when they pulled up in front of 888 Triggerfish. A grinning Realtor stepped down from the porch and walked to the van carrying a jumbo welcome basket of citrus jams, butters, marmalades and chewies, wrapped up in green cellophane.
“Welcome! Welcome!” The Realtor pumped Jim’s hand, then Martha’s. “Gonna love it here in Florida. Couldn
’t live anywhere else!”
Jim went out on the lawn and triumphantly pulled up the FOR SALE / SOLD! sign.
A boy on a skateboard stopped at the end of the driveway. “You bought a house on this street?”
The Realtor grabbed Jim by the arm. “Let’s go inside.”
“What did that kid mean?”
“Guess what!” said the Realtor. “The cable’s already hooked up!”
Heart be still, Martha told herself as she walked between bougainvillea in terra-cotta pots atop pedestals flanking the porch steps. She stopped and turned slowly. A cedar porch swing. Three verdigris eights next to the door and a stained-glass window over it. Little fish swam in the painted glass. Triggerfish, Martha decided.
She walked inside, carrying Nicole in her car seat, and it just didn’t quit. Cherry hardwood floor and a yellow brick fireplace. Jim stood in the middle of the empty living room with hands on his hips. Melvin ran upstairs and claimed the cool bedroom overlooking the porch, and Debbie sulked up the stairs and kicked him out.
Martha stopped and gazed at Jim in the center of the room. There had always been something about him. People said he reminded them of Tom Hanks, although there was little resemblance except for the eyes and slightly curly dark hair. It was a certain sympathetic quality. The disarming smile. A vulnerability that made people want to take care of him.
There was yelling upstairs.
“No fair!” shouted Melvin.
“Life’s not fair!”
A door slammed.
Another voice from the porch: “Hellooooo, new neighbors!” Heavy panting.
Martha gave Jim a look—What can this be?—and opened the door.
“You must be the Davenports!”
A woman with a low center of gravity jogged in place on the welcome mat. Her sweatsuit was covered with Dalmatians. “Sorry, can’t stop running. Have to keep the heart up for at least thirty minutes…” She tapped the stopwatch hanging from her neck and kept panting. “Saw the moving van. Your car. Had to say hello. I’m Gladys. Gladys Plant. Of the original Tampa Plants.” She held out her bouncing hand for Martha to shake.