by Tim Dorsey
25
T WO A.M., THE DOORBELL RANG AT 887 TRIGGERFISH LANE.
Jack Terrier came down the stairs rubbing his eyes. “Who can it be at this hour?” He looked out the window but didn’t see anyone. He was just about to close the curtain when he noticed something flicker.
“What the hell?”
He quickly opened the front door and began stomping the flaming paper bag on his welcome mat. When the fire was out, Jack raised his leg to look at the bottom of his slipper.
“Son of a bitch!”
A twig snapped. He looked up. “What the—”
Then he saw stars.
WHEN JACK TERRIER came to, he was in a familiar place. His mouth was taped shut and he was tied securely to a chair sitting on the pitcher’s mound. The Little League field was dark, but he could make out two figures standing in front of him. A tall one and a shorter, plumper model to his left. They wore panty-hose masks and T-shirts with something written in indelible ink.
TEST PATTERN AVENGERS.
The tall one had a gun, and the fat one had a beer.
“You know why I love baseball?” said the tall one. “Because it’s a game of history, that’s why.” He unrolled a spool of outdoor extension cord, plugged it in at the concession stand and ran it back out to the pitcher’s mound.
“You know who played right here on this field? Palma Ceia Little League?…What? Not even a guess? I’m disappointed in you. It was the one and only Wade Boggs!”
The plump one killed his beer. “You ought to listen to the man. He knows all kinds of cool stuff.” Burp.
The tall one disappeared into the dugout and came back carrying a large electric machine and a paper sack. Jack recognized the device. He had one in his own garage. A pressure washer.
“All the greats played in this town during spring training, back when you had access to the players and could get so close to the action you could smell the rosin bag. Not like today’s antiseptic spring-training mini-stadiums. They played at the old Al Lopez Park, named for Tampa’s patron saint of baseball. And you know what they did to that park? Huh? Do ya?” The tall one suddenly grabbed Jack by the throat. “They knocked it down for a football parking lot!”
The chubby one grabbed his partner by the arm. “Easy, easy. He didn’t do it.”
“You’re right. Sorry.” He stepped back. Then he reached down and took something out of the paper sack and attached it to the end of the pressure washer.
“These washers are amazing,” said Serge. “You know they generate fifty to a hundred times the pressure of a regular garden hose?”
When everything was all hooked up, the tall one took a step back. “This is for the children.”
He turned on the pressure washer.
TWO POLICE OFFICERS arrived at the Little League field shortly after dawn.
They froze in horror when they saw the pitcher’s mound. A Water Wiggle whipped violently on the end of the pressure washer, occasionally striking the corpse in the chair with a meat-tenderizing thud.
They cut the power to the pressure washer and ran to the mound, but it was far too late. One of the officers picked up the Water Wiggle and turned it over to look at its face. It had the regular crossed eyes and goofy smile, but someone had added fangs dripping blood.
26
M AHONEY! GET IN HERE!”
Mahoney appeared in Ingersol’s doorway with a box of pushpins. “You called for me, Lieutenant?” Ingersol held up some pages from Mahoney’s investigative notebook. “What the hell is this stuff?”
Mahoney bent forward and squinted. “That’s my doodling.”
“This is some pretty sick shit. I don’t even know what half of it is.” Ingersol set the notebook down and turned to a page covered with flaming chariots, winged swordsmen, seven-eyed goats’ heads, crucifixes, 666’s, tongues of fire and race cars.
“Mahoney, do you belong to some kind of doomsday cult you’re not telling me about?”
“No.”
“I don’t want to come to work and find out you’ve poisoned a bunch of people with Kool-Aid so you could catch the next comet to the Resurrection.”
“That’s crazy stuff,” said Mahoney. “I’ve just been getting into the Book of Revelations.”
“Revelations?”
“Powerful writing. And it’s starting to come true.”
“You’re not reading this on state time, are you?”
“It has law-enforcement relevance. When Armageddon breaks out, we could be looking at some serious overtime.”
Ingersol sat back in his chair and paused for effect. “Mahoney, you know the department is cracking down on doodling. Last year it cost us something like ten thousand man-hours.”
Mahoney nodded.
“But I’m going to overlook it this time because you’ve been productive and because the crackdown was mainly aimed at the guys drawing all those breasts and bearded clams.” Ingersol shook his head. “Mahoney, what’s wrong with men?”
“That’s the big question on the street.”
“Got anything new for me today?”
“The McGraws struck again. Take a look at this.” Mahoney handed him a file of crime-scene photos.
“Holy Jesus!” said Ingersol.
“That used to be a biker with the Riders of Eternal Doom. Sold them some bad mescaline…”
“…which was actually good mescaline?”
“Right. And then they knocked him unconscious and backed their car up on him.”
“Looks like they patched out on his face.”
“Looks that way,” said Mahoney.
“What about our informants?”
“I’m beating the bushes, but nobody’s dropped the dime, and the McGraws don’t have a consistent M.O.”
“M.O.? This isn’t The Rockford Files. Speak English!”
“Modus operandi.”
“That’s Latin.”
“Method of operation.”
“Witnesses?”
“Just a few vague encounters, fuzzy descriptions, stale memories.”
“Sounds like your marriages.”
“Good one, sir.”
“Mahoney, I don’t like you. You know that.”
“I don’t like you, either.”
“Then we have a lot in common. We should get along fine.”
“Sir, they’re getting awfully close to Tampa. If only I could—”
“Forget about it. I know you and this Serge thing! You’ve been completely obsessed with the case for three years now.”
“Four,” said Mahoney. “But it seems like only yesterday…”
“No! Not a fade-out!” said the lieutenant. “Don’t you dare do a fade-out!”
“You want to forget, but the nightmares won’t let you…”
“God! I hate it when you do a fade-out!”
“Yes, it’s all coming back to me now…”
MAHONEY WAS A rookie, working undercover, when he hooked up with a crew just off a string of successful society robberies from Boynton to Palm Beach. Silent auctions, charity balls, foundation galas. They were pros and they hit fast and hard, only taking the best stuff. Flawless jewels, precision watches, expensive artwork, stuffed mushrooms. Everyone set up surveillance on Alligator Alley and the Tamiami Trail, expecting the gang to make for the Gulf Coast and more easy pickings.
They were headed for the Gulf all right, but only Ma-honey guessed the right road. The gang avoided the usual routes across the bottom of the state, instead heading into the Everglades from West Palm Beach, past Lion Country Safari and into sugarcane country with the migrant trucks and prison work vans.
It was a hot Monday. The gang had struck three more times over the weekend.
Mahoney picked up on something the others missed. All the scores were at the most historic venues in town when more lucrative targets sat nearby. The Biltmore, White Hall, Vizcaya. People got roughed up, folding tables tossed, but none of the antique fixtures received as much as a smudge. And there was a
stray thread that didn’t make any sense. After the Palm Beach job, the gang was spotted at the old island post office; one of them ran inside and took a photo of the giant portrait collage over the door—a kind of Sgt. Pepper’s cover of the island’s history. Henry Flagler, John F. Kennedy, Marjorie Merriweather Post, architect Addison Mizner, boxer “Alligator” Joe Frazier et al. Nobody could figure it, but Mahoney knew right away. He had a touch of the same disease.
Mahoney drove halfway across the state to the landmark Clewiston Inn on the underside of Lake Okeechobee and set up shop behind a glass of whiskey in the Everglades Lounge.
“Louie, another round.”
“It’s Pete,” said the bartender, filling Mahoney’s glass.
“Thanks, Louie.”
The bartender walked away. Mahoney held the rocks glass in front of his mouth and idly rattled the cubes around in the sour mash, admiring the faded mural on the wall over the bar. Egrets, ibis, sawgrass.
Four guys walked in and grabbed stools. But another stayed out in the hall, examining the black-and-white photos on the wall of half-century-old ground breakings and sugar-queen pageants.
Mahoney picked up his glass and went out and stood next to the man, not looking at him. The man flicked a Zippo open and shut from nervous habit. Click-click.
“Nice photos,” said Mahoney.
“Not bad,” said the man. Click-click.
“I knew one other person who flicked a lighter like that,” said Mahoney. “George Clooney in Out of Sight.”
“I loved that movie! That’s when I started carrying around the lighter,” said the man. “They set most of the film right here in south Florida.”
“Trivia footnote,” said Mahoney. “Michael Keaton played the part of the same federal agent in that movie and Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Two completely different studios and directors. The only link was that they were both adapted from Elmore Leonard books containing that same agent.”
“I could have shot Tarantino when he rewrote Rum Punch and moved it to California,” said the man. “I was waiting for the Riviera Beach scenes. That’s where I grew up.”
“Riviera Beach? Me too!”
“I lived near Flagler Drive.”
“Then we were practically neighbors!”
“Get outta town!”
“Name’s Mahoney,” said Mahoney, holding out his hand.
The man extended his own. “Serge.”
They shook on it.
That’s how Mahoney got in the gang. The others were suspicious, didn’t want anything to do with him. What did they really know about the guy? But Serge was adamant—swore up and down vouching for Mahoney. He was one of his homeys.
Two days later, a cheap motel on the Tamiami Trail. They had widened the highway several times and tractor-trailers rattled the room. Their next caper was a hospital charity ball at C’ d’ Zan, the palatial winter estate of circus magnate John Ringling on the shore of Sarasota Bay. It was a costume ball.
The sun set. The crew was already dressed, sitting around a table loading weapons. The Marquis de Sade filled clips with bullets. Baby Face Nelson racked the slides on automatic pistols. Jesse James slammed a magazine home in a Mac-10. Dracula screwed a silencer on a Beretta. The headlights of a Kenworth swept across their faces as it thundered past, bullets dancing on the table.
“I don’t like my costume,” said Serge.
“Me neither,” said Mahoney.
“I told you—it was all they had left,” said Baby Face. “There was a big run on outfits for the ball tonight.”
“Maybe I can make my own,” said Serge.
“Too late,” said Dracula, standing up and pumping a shotgun. “Let’s hit it!”
They piled in a Cadillac and were quiet on the way over. Two retired couples in an Oldsmobile pulled up next to them at a stoplight. Dracula turned and nodded. The light changed. They went.
The party was in full swing when the gang arrived. Czar Nicholas was hitting on Joan of Arc at the punch bowl. Marie Antoinette and Kaiser Wilhelm were on the porch smoking. The gang mingled and made small talk with Louis XIV and Louis Pasteur. Except Serge and Mahoney; they were mollified by the Venetian and Turkish flair of the thirty-one-room manse and sauntered around the perimeter of the ballroom, inspecting stained glass, the cypress ceiling, the chandelier that used to hang in the Waldorf-Astoria.
Suddenly, Baby Face Nelson pulled out a tommy gun. “This is a stick up!”
A few people laughed and went back to their conversations.
“I’m serious!” yelled Baby Face.
They ignored him, refilling champagne flutes.
Baby Face finally had to pistol-whip Chiang Kai-shek to get their attention, and Dracula started going around the room with a pillowcase, collecting jewelry and wallets.
Unbeknownst to the gang, Mahoney had tipped off his superiors, and agents were staked out incognito.
“Drop it!” said J. Edgar Hoover, aiming a snub-nose at Baby Face.
Baby Face laughed.
Hoover fired a warning shot; Baby Face dropped it.
That was the signal for the other agents. John Wayne, Buffalo Bill and Zorro pulled guns on the other members of the gang, who quickly surrendered.
“This ain’t all of them,” said Hoover.
The agents scanned the room, overlooking the men in the Mr. Ed costume.
“What’s going on?” Serge asked from in back.
“Hold on,” said Mahoney. “My eye holes are off.”
Mahoney shook around in the horse’s head. “I can see now. Looks like a raid. I think—”
Mahoney suddenly felt the cold steel barrel of a revolver in his back.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re a cop!” said Serge.
“What are you talking about?”
“Remember when I told you I lived on Flagler? That’s in West Palm Beach, not Riviera. You would have known that if you really grew up there. Besides, no self-respecting criminal would ever have gotten into this costume. Put your hands up!”
“I can’t.”
“Right. Okay, start backing up, real slow.”
Baby Face and Dracula were being handcuffed together when Buffalo Bill suddenly pointed across the ballroom. “There they are! They’re getting away!”
The others turned and saw Mr. Ed backing out of the room.
John Wayne and Zorro aimed their pistols. “Freeze, motherfucker!”
“Stay where you are or he gets it!” said a muffled voice inside the horse.
“He’s not joking!” said a different muffled voice.
“Who’s in there?” asked Hoover.
“Agent Mahoney, Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”
“Prove it!”
Mahoney stuck his gold state badge out the horse’s mouth, then pulled it back.
“Okay,” said Hoover. “Hold your fire, men.”
Everyone watched tensely as the horse shuffled backward through the open doors and across the outdoor patio over-looking the bay. When the horse got to the edge of the patio, Serge coldcocked Mahoney in the back of the head with his pistol butt.
The FBI agents saw the front half of Mr. Ed drop like a sack of cement, tearing away the zipper around the stomach, and the back half of the horse dove into Sarasota Bay. The agents sprinted across the patio and began firing into the night water, but it was too late. The business end of a horse suit floated in the moonlight…
MAHONEY FLOATED BACK to the present. “…And that was the last time I ever saw Serge.”
“Okay! Okay!” said Ingersol. “I give up. Pack your bags.”
“Tampa?”
“Tampa.”
27
A FTER JIM DAVENPORT WAS FIRED, he encountered difficulty finding consulting work. Most of the big consulting companies had hired each other and recommended downsizing. Martha took a hard look at the family’s financial situation and asked if she could give it a try.
Martha began interviewing and immediately
landed a high-paying job at Consolidated Bank, which was aggressively hiring because they were critically understaffed due to recent layoffs.
But Jim never gave up. He kept lowering his salary expectations until he found a job on the night shift. Jim and Martha saw each other ten minutes each evening as they made the handoff.
Jim drove into work at sunset, went to his locker and put on his red apron. He pinned a plastic name tag to his pocket: ROBERT. They were still making his JIM tag, but regulations required him to wear something, so he used the tag left behind by an employee picked up on warrants from Tennessee. Jim’s favorite part of the new job was the cheerful co-workers who befriended him at Sam’s Club.
They began arriving shortly after Jim clocked in. There was Orville, a surviving member of Doolittle’s Raiders, and Wilma, a former waitress from Tupelo who had pulled through three bad marriages with a gum-smacking, country-music outlook on life, and finally Satchel, who said he had pitched in the Negro Leagues, but nobody believed him.
“Hi, Robert,” said Orville.
“Hi, Orville. It’s Jim.”
Orville and Satchel reloaded price guns and pushed open the swinging “employees only” doors that led to the sales floor. Wilma arrived and slipped into an apron covered with enamel pins representing years of service at Sam’s Club, stock-car drivers and breeds of show dogs.
“Hi, Wilma.”
“Hi, Robert.”
“I’m Jim.”
Wilma climbed into the driver’s seat of a beeping forklift and burst through the swinging doors with a pallet of mustard jars the size of propane tanks.
Jim bent over and tied his shoes. The intercom came on: “Code Orange. Aisle one-twenty-three.”
Jim grabbed a mop and headed through the swinging doors.
“Jim!”
Jim turned. “Serge! Coleman!”
“What are you doing here?”
“New job,” said Jim. “And you?”
Serge pointed in his shopping cart at bottles of vitamins and herbal supplements.
“I’m on a diet, so I need essential minerals.”
“You look great,” said Jim. “You don’t need to diet.”