No Sunscreen for the Dead

by Tim Dorsey

  Another school day ended, and a varsity jacket joined Ted on the sidewalk. “Just keep smiling and don’t turn around. They’ve got a Camaro on you a block back.”

  “That seems excessive.”

  “They’ve decided you’re a promising asset, so the vetting is about to get intense,” said Mark. “That’s why I can’t meet you like this anymore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They just took our picture with a zoom lens. They’re going to be taking photos of you and anyone you talk to for a while. See who shows up most frequently, who your closest friends are, and then check them out,” said Mark. “This is the first day we’ve picked up a tail on you at school, so they’ll only have the one picture of us together. You’ll probably never see me again.”

  “But how will we get in touch?”

  “You’ll find out.” Mark trotted away.

  Another month went by. Someone out for a morning jog saw a football lying on a front lawn.

  Ted was walking home with his books when he dropped into a convenience store for a Coke. An Impala drove by taking photos. Ted approached the soda case.

  A girl with straight brown hair and bell-bottoms walked up next to him and grabbed a Dr Pepper. “Don’t look at me. I’m your new contact. I’ll distract the clerk, and you go out the back door. A car’s waiting.”

  Ted stepped into the alley behind the store and was practically mugged. Agents threw him in the backseat of a sedan and pushed him to the floor. They went to the safe house.

  Ted was sitting at a table upstairs when the girl in bell-bottoms walked in. “We saw your football.”

  “He wants me to join the navy.”

  “We were anticipating something like that. Another reason they targeted you: nearing draft age with no money for college. I’m guessing he wants you on a submarine.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “They’ve been working on this for some time. Looking for homegrown American kids whose backgrounds would pass a security check,” said the girl. “Navigational charts, right?”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Join the navy.”

  Two days later, Ted went into the convenience store as instructed. And right out the back door again into the sedan.

  They all sat around the table in the safe house. The bell-bottomed girl was named Fawn. “Here’s the plan. Tomorrow you enlist down at the local office and request subs, and you’ll get it. Do your patrol, do everything you’re asked, just act like a regular sailor. But don’t mention any of this to anyone. The right people will know, but you won’t know who they are.”

  “What about the navigational charts?” asked Ted. “I’m supposed to keep a coded diary.”

  “Forget the charts and codes,” said Fawn. “But do keep a diary. An honest one of boring stuff going through your head. Nothing about the sub. When the time comes, you’ll hear from us.”

  So Ted joined the navy and went to boot camp, got all his hair cut off, and one autumn morning carried a duffel bag up a gangplank. He’d seen pictures of the missile subs, but in person it was a wonder of the world. They were loading torpedoes on the forward deck as he climbed aboard.

  He did his three-month tour and came back into port with a bunch of new friends and great stories of pressurized toilets.

  Sailors streamed off the sub onto the dock, looking forward to seeing wives and kids. One of his new shipmate friends had a bounce in his step. “I’ve got a son I’ve never seen!”

  “Congratulations.”

  “You want to meet him? He’s with his mom where the families are waiting.”

  “Love to,” said Ted.

  The pal led him into a stern building on the submarine complex and down a hallway. Ted pointed back. “But the others are going that way.”

  “I know a shortcut.” He opened a door.

  Ted froze, and they pulled him into the room. Armed guards were posted outside.

  “Have a seat,” said a lieutenant commander in a snow-white officer’s uniform. It seemed to be the dress code. White uniforms with gold shoulder stripes all around the table.

  “I’m Commander Larson, and I’ve heard a lot about you. We’re Naval Intelligence working with the FBI.”

  Ted didn’t reply.

  “Do you have your diary?”

  Ted nodded and dug through his duffel bag. “Here it is.”

  Another officer unrolled a navigational chart on the table. Just like the one Ted had seen in the sub, except with different coordinates and lines already drawn on it. “We’ve decided to come at it from this angle. Memorize what you see here.”

  Another officer handed him some drawings.

  Ted glanced over them and looked up. “Shortwave sets and model rockets?”

  “Some of your interests. It will seem normal, doodling in your spare time,” said Larson. “Tell your handler, Tofer, that you embedded some coded stuff into those pictures to help with your recall. We want you to copy these drawings in your own hand in the back of your diary . . .”

  Ted returned home and did as he was told. Tofer was impressed, and his Soviet superiors even more so. After time ashore, Ted went back out on another patrol, and the process repeated.

  In the last year of Ted’s enlistment, he sat in the same room on the sub base, hunched over his newest diary and copying more drawings. “I hope this is doing some good.”

  “More than you realize,” said Larson. “Thanks to your disinformation on our boomers’ routes, we now know where their fast-attack subs will be waiting, which helps us track them. Plus we’ve started connecting the dots in Tofer’s Florida network and uncovering agents we never would have found otherwise.”

  “I had no idea.” Ted continued scribbling. “But what do the Russians want with Florida? I’d think Washington, D.C.”

  “Most people aren’t aware of all the sensitive military installations the state has,” said Larson. “Eglin, Boca Chica, Patrick Air Force Base near the Canaveral station, where we launch our defense satellites. And we run most of our kinetic operations from Central Command in south Tampa. You know what a honey trap is?”

  “I’ve seen spy movies,” said Ted.

  “After your info began paying off, it led us to one of their agents from Belarus working in a convenience store just a few blocks up the road from the main gates of the Tampa base. A drop-dead sexy young woman. And the store was in the perfect location where a hundred guys from the base stop by every day for smokes or whatever. We stepped in before the bleeding began. From there, we checked every convenience store anywhere near a base, and you wouldn’t imagine how many honey traps we picked up.” Larson shook his head. “To think this all started when some young high school kid just walked in off the street at his local FBI office . . .”

  Ted finished his enlistment, joined the clerical staff of that very FBI office, and started feeding Tofer fake information about the character flaws of the staff.

  One agent was reported to enjoy a particular strip club, which led to an undercover stripper from Romania, who led them to another cell. Another agent was said to have a taste for the sauce, which led to more spies posing as barflies. At the local dog track, Russians consoled an agent who was cursing and tearing up losing tickets.

  A large chart with photos and colored string remained permanently up in the “secure” room at the FBI office. It resembled a spiderweb depicting a significant Soviet network across the state. In the middle of the web, a single point: Tofer. He was like Patient Zero, the first infected person that started an epidemic.

  On the outer edges of the chart were red circles around certain mug shots. From time to time, the Bureau approached their targets, trying to turn them. If it didn’t work, arrest. Other times, if a target knew enough but wasn’t suitable for double-agent work, they simply disappeared into protection programs after agreeing to blab.

  The Russians didn’t know what was happening. The missing agents had them jumpy, changing routines, making mistakes. They ne
ver realized that most of their Florida operation had been effectively neutralized. Thanks to a secret weapon called Ted.

  After the Soviet Union broke apart, the FBI operation was indefinitely suspended. They gave Ted a medal in a secret ceremony.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m in Florida, so what else? Retire,” said Ted. “I’m kidding. I’m still too young.”

  They shook hands and parted ways.

  Chapter 25

  St. Petersburg

  A cue ball clacked, and balls scattered across the pool table.

  Ted finished his story, and Tofer stared silently at him in a corner of the Flamingo Bar.

  “You were working for the Americans all along?” said Tofer. “You betrayed me?”

  “You betrayed your country,” said Ted. “I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

  “I was so sure about you.” Tofer bit his lip. “What did I miss?”

  “You didn’t do enough research,” said Ted. “Yes, being without a dad made me more susceptible. But you also didn’t know my dad. He loved this country. I did what he would’ve wanted me to.”

  Tofer’s heart began pounding. “Then why was I never picked up?”

  “It was considered,” said Ted. “But I thought what was the point since you’d been deactivated. I convinced our guys to leave you out in the field because who knew what the future might hold and what use you might be?”

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me all this.”

  “What are you going to do, share it with the Russians? I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to learn the damage you did.”

  Tofer took a deep breath and settled down. “Believe it or not, you’ve actually made me feel better. I’ve been regretting my actions for decades. If I wrecked their operation, even unwittingly, then I couldn’t be happier.”

  “Life is strange.”

  “I still need your help,” said Tofer. “I need you to hide me.”

  “And I still think you’re overreacting,” said Ted, standing up from the table. “But why not? You can come live with me until your nerves settle down or we figure out if something really is going on.”

  Boca Shores

  “Guys and gals!” Serge yelled into the swimming pool. “You need to settle down. Coleman isn’t supposed to be a role model. He’s a cautionary tale.”

  “Where is Coleman?” shouted a voice in the group.

  “I thought he was with you,” said Serge.

  A voice from the black distance: “I’m out here!”

  “Where?” yelled Serge. “Keep talking and I’ll track your voice again.”

  “Okay . . . Beans, Dexies, Benny and the Jets, study buddies, rojo, Tussin, velvet, tweak, angel dust, wet, moon rocks, moon blast, black beauties, China white, brown sugar, mellow yellow, orange sunshine, blue cheer, red devil, shrooms, caps, hillbilly highway . . .”

  An old woman dropped her cane and stepped up on the bottom rung of the railing. “I see him!”

  All eyes turned in the direction she was pointing.

  “He’s in the lake!”

  Serge covered his face. He painfully looked up at the splashing, waving figure out in the middle of the black water next to the turned-off fountain. “Will you get out of there?”

  “But the water’s great,” said Coleman.

  “But it’s fresh water!” said Serge.

  “So what? I’m having a blast!”

  “Coleman’s having a blast!” came a voice from the crowd.

  “Into the lake with Coleman!” shouted another.

  Whiskey in plastic cups sloshed, and a circle of seniors rapidly toked revived joints before joining the thundering herd down the shore.

  “Stop!” yelled Serge. “You don’t understand! Fresh water in Florida means alligators.”

  “But it’s a man-made lake,” yelled a former civil servant from Buffalo.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Serge. “It’s their job to find fresh water in this state. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to retrieve a golf ball.”

  They began diving in. Splash, splash, splash. Hooting and hollering. The joyous upheaval in the water drew a dark form down from one of the banks.

  “This is the best party we’ve ever had!” yelled a woman behind the fountain.

  “What’s that?” said someone else still up on the pool deck.

  “It’s a gator! . . .”

  “And it’s heading for Coleman! . . .”

  It was indeed. Coleman just continued whooping and waving up at the pool deck.

  “Behind you!” yelled Serge.

  “What?”

  Two of the residents near Coleman spotted the reptile from the trademark eye bumps tracking through the water. They were among the more fit men in the park, thanks to a local spa. The gator wasn’t that big, they thought, and they were fortified by Coleman’s turbo-cocktails. They moved in for the capture.

  Serge was already sprinting down the bank and dove in the water, swimming breakneck. He arrived simultaneously with the old men, who were drifting into serious misadventure. When Serge broke the surface of the water, he could see they were about to make the grave error of grabbing the gator by the tail, the worst place possible. But Serge knew his Florida biology. A gator’s jaws have a massive biting force of more than two thousand pounds per square inch, but very weak muscles opening the mouth. That’s how alligator wrestlers can amaze crowds by holding the animal’s closed jaws tucked under their chins.

  Just as the old men grabbed the tail, Serge’s right arm got the gator in a headlock. It was only a four-footer, but still enough to inflict nastiness. The reptile thrashed.

  “Everyone out of the lake!” yelled Serge, maintaining his grasp.

  “Boooo!”

  “I’m serious.”

  They just laughed and splashed him.

  “There’s some duct tape in the clubhouse,” said one of the men at the tail. “We can seal its mouth.”

  “Good thinking,” said Serge. “Then we’ll release him on that far bank.”

  “No,” said the old man. “I think we should keep him!”

  Coleman turned around. “What are you doing there? What’s with the gator?”

  Serge rolled his eyes skyward in exasperation. He considered options of least resistance. Getting the raucous crowd out of the water was now a fool’s errand.

  “Okay, first things first,” said Serge. “Let’s carry him inside and find that tape.”

  They lugged the gator up through the reeds and across the patio into the clubhouse.

  Back in the water: “Ahhhhh! Ahhhh! Help me! Dear Jesus!”

  “Coleman’s in trouble!” a woman yelled from the bank. “The swans have him!”

  The residents began splashing and shouting at the birds, and someone else grabbed the swimming pool rescue stick, helping pull Coleman free from his feathered foes. He briefly staggered around the mucky bottom. Then, like a house cat sitting in the middle of an empty room, he got another non sequitur urge to be somewhere else. He climbed out of the lake and all the residents followed like ducklings, winding their way around the pool and returning to the hall.

  “Coleman,” said Serge. “Is that blood trickling down by your ear?”

  “A large bird grabbed me by the top of my head. I hate that when I’m high.”

  Soon the party was back in overdrive. Music blared louder, and Coleman delivered an encore performance as the happy, dancing bartender. DJ Coyote Jim turned on his light show to Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith . . .

  A hundred yards away, Earl stepped out of his guard shack, removed his hat and scratched his head. He had regularly heard party noise from the clubhouse, but not like this. The growing volume of whatever was happening had piqued his curiosity and now got the better of him. It was against the rules, but he raised the gate arm and hung a Back in 10 Minutes sign.

  Earl entered the rear of the hall and approached tipped-over dining tables. Where did his eyes even begin? Soggy people jitterbugg
ed under strobe lights. Chef’s salad splattered the walls, a shirtless Coleman stretched out across the bar for body shots of Patrón. A circle of residents openly passed joints by the steam trays, and someone drove by in a mobility scooter, blowing a noisemaker at him. An alligator with its mouth taped shut scampered across the dance floor.

  “What the hell?”

  “. . . Walk this way! . . .”

  “Hey, handsome.” A relatively young widow handed Earl a drink of pineapple juice and Absolut.

  “I’m on duty.”

  She took the guard hat off his head and put it on hers. “So am I . . .”

  A half hour went by. Coleman was now out cold, but it didn’t stop the body shots. Someone had tethered the alligator in a corner with a strong rope, untaped its mouth, and the residents took turns tossing him Swedish meatballs.

  “I can’t watch anymore,” Serge told Lawrence. “They’re old enough to make their own mistakes.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out for air.”

  He walked up the street and cordially waved as he passed the guard booth. “Good night, Earl.”

  “Good night, Serge.”

  Earl resumed having sex in the shaking guard booth, and Serge left the park on foot for a night stroll.

  The booth continued creaking in the darkness. Suddenly piercing headlights swung around the corner, catching Earl like a thief. He had wide, guilty eyes until he shielded them and recognized the Oldsmobile.

  “Stay down,” Earl told his partner. Then he raised the guard arm and stuck his head out the window. “Nice night.”

  “Are you okay?” asked the driver. “You’re sweating like crazy.”

  “Just had to change someone’s tire.”

  “Okay, take care.”

  The Oldsmobile drove around the lake and parked at a trailer.

  “This is your retirement place?” asked the passenger.

  “Home sweet home,” said the driver.

  And Ted and Tofer went inside.

  Chapter 26

  The Next Day