by Dorsey, Tim
Contents
Also by Tim Dorsey
Triggerfish Twist
Florida Roadkill
Hammerhead Ranch Motel
The Stingray Shuffle
Orange Crush
About the Author
About the Publisher
Also by Tim Dorsey
Florida Roadkill
Hammerhead Ranch Motel
Orange Crush
Triggerfish Twist
The Stingray Shuffle
Cadillac Beach
Torpedo Juice
The Big Bamboo
Hurricane Punch
Atomic Lobster
Nuclear Jellyfish
Gator A-Go-Go
Electric Barracuda
When Elves Attack
Pineapple Grenade
The Riptide Ultra-Glide
Dedication
For Henry and Linda Losey
Epigraph
It takes a village.
—Hillary Clinton
It takes a village idiot.
—Don Imus
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Praise
Copyright
PROLOGUE
MY NAME IS EDITH GRABOWSKI. I’m eighty-one years old, and I had sex last night. I wanted to tell you that up front and get it out of the way because that’s what all the TV people want to know. They giggle and use cute nicknames for sex when they ask. I don’t think they’re getting any.
I’d never been on national TV in my life before last week, and now I’ve been on six times in four days. In a few minutes, it’ll be seven.
I’d also never been to Los Angeles. We’re in the greenroom right now, but my husband, Ambrose, says it’s blue. He’s wrong, but I don’t say anything. That’s how you make a marriage last.
We’re newlyweds. But you knew that already unless you’ve been on another planet or just come out of a coma. We were married on the Today show by Al Roker, because he has a notary license. They say ratings went through the roof. We’re rich now, too.
One of those network hospitality ladies in a blue blazer is asking me if I’m okay again. Do I want a pillow or some juice? I tell her I’m fine. She pats my hand and smiles that stupid false smile the stewardesses give you when you’re getting off the plane. You just want to smack her.
They usually want to know about the sex right after they ask how on earth we stayed alive. They still can’t believe we didn’t all die. What’s not to believe? We just…
Uh-oh, here comes another woman in a blazer. This one’s blond. Am I all right? Of course I’m all right! I can take care of myself. That’s how I got to be eighty-one. I’d like to see you make it. And don’t touch me!
It’s like this every time, every show. Just because I’m eighty-one, they treat me like some kind of magical little pet that can only understand four simple commands and will crap itself if they don’t watch out. I’m the one who gets the most questions on camera because I say what’s on my mind. Fifty years ago I was just pushy, but now I’m a “character” or a “live wire.”
The networks go nuts over any story where an old person shows spunk. That’s why you hear so much about Florida these days. They might as well just move their studios down there. Seems every other month one of us from the bingo hall makes the rounds of the TV shows. Last time it was that seventy-six-year-old woman from Boca Raton who bit the pit bull.
That’s true. She was walking her poodle, Mr. Peepers—TV made a big deal about the name—and some lovely neighbors raising pit bulls in their backyard car-chassis farm left the gate open. Anyway, the pit bull wouldn’t let go of Mr. Peepers, so she bit its ear and it ran off yelping. The way the media reacted, you’d have thought she cured cancer or invented a car that ran on tap water.
So I guess it’s my turn. I don’t mind telling the story again, but they always bring up the sex, like at the mere mention of it I’m going to do a handspring for them.
Or maybe: “Yippeeeeee!”
I shouldn’t complain. I’m having the time of my life. I’m married to the man of my dreams. I’ve had a crush on Ambrose since I was seventy-eight.
They just told us to get ready here in the greenroom. They say we’re about to go on. We have notecards about possible questions. About what kind of neighborhood it was.
They say it was such a quiet neighborhood. It’s always a quiet neighborhood. Then the whole place goes berserk and everyone acts surprised. But they shouldn’t. If you ask me, it’s just people. Even the quietest streets are just two or three arguments away from a chain-reaction meltdown.
We can hear the audience applauding. They want the story. Can’t say I blame ’em. So did we. I mean, me and my girlfriends—we were just trying to stay alive. We didn’t see a tenth of what was going on. Same with everyone else. Things were happening all over the place. Everyone only saw a small part of the whole picture, but we were able to compare notes at the rehearsal dinner and pretty much piece it together. The entire wedding party was involved in some way. My bridesmaids were all with me, trapped as we were. Ambrose probably saw as much as anyone, riding up front in the big chase after the shootout. His best man was Jim Davenport. Poor Jim Davenport. He was such a nice, gentle man. Still is, but I don’t think he’s ever going to be right again. It was just one thing after another; I don’t know how he held up. The ushers, Ambrose’s neighbors—they saw a good bit, too. Then there was Serge. Serge had actually been Ambrose’s first choice for best man, but nobody knows where he disappeared to after the gunfire started, and the explosions and all the car wrecks and the electrical transformers blowing up and strippers running naked in traffic and nearly half the city burning down.
They just gave us the one-minute signal in the greenroom.
Well, story time again. Probably the best place to start is Jim Davenport, seeing as he was in the middle of almost everything that went wrong.
Yeah, we’ll start there.
And I guess we should start with the one question everyone’s asking these days. Not just the TV people, but folks everywhere. They all ask the exact same thing…I’ll shut up now and let the narrator take over.
1
SO WHAT’S UP WITH FLORIDA?
Talk about a swing in reputation. Forty years ago the Sunshine State was an unthreatening View-Master reel of orange groves, alligator wres
tlers, tail-walking dolphins and shuffleboard.
Near the turn of the millennium, Florida had become either romantically lawless or dangerously stupid, and often both: Casablanca without common sense, Dodge City with more weapons, the state that gave you the Miami Relatives on the evening news every night for nine straight months and changed the presidential election with a handful of confetti. Consider that two of the most famous Floridians in recent years have been Janet Reno and the Anti-Reno, Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Is there no middle genetic ground?
And yet they keep coming to Florida. People who maintain such records report that every single day, a thousand new residents move into the state. The reasons are varied. Retirement, beaches, affordable housing, growing job base, tax relief, witness protection, fugitive warrants, forfeiture laws that shelter your house if you’re a Heisman trophy winner who loses a civil suit in the stabbing death of your wife, and year-round golf.
On a typical spring morning in 1997, five of those thousand new people piled into a cobalt-blue Dodge Aerostar in Logansport, Indiana. The Davenports—Jim, Martha and their three children—watched the moving van pull out of their driveway and followed it south.
A merging driver on the interstate ramp gave Jim the bird. He would have given him two birds, but he was on the phone. Jim grinned and waved and let the man pass.
Jim Davenport was like many of the other thousand people heading to Florida this day, except for one crucial difference. Of all of them, Jim was hands-down the most nonconfrontational.
Jim avoided all disagreement and didn’t have the heart to say no. He loved his family and fellow man, never raised his voice or fists, and was rewarded with a lifelong, routine digestion of small doses of humiliation. The belligerent, boorish and bombastic latched onto him like strangler figs.
He was utterly content.
Then Jim moved his family to Florida, and before summer was over a most unnatural thing happened. Jim went and killed a few people.
None of this was anywhere near the horizon as the Davenports began the second day of their southern interstate migration.
The road tar at the bottom of Georgia began to soften and smell in the afternoon sun. It was a Saturday, the traffic on I-75 thick and anxious. Hondas, Mercurys, Subarus, Chevy Blazers. A blue Aerostar with Indiana tags passed the exit for the town of Tifton, SOD CAPITAL OF THE USA, and a billboard: JESUS IS LORD…AT BUDDY’S CATFISH EMPORIUM.”
A sign marking the Florida state line stood in the distance, then the sudden appearance of palm trees growing in a precise grid. The official state welcome center rose like a mirage through heat waves off the highway. Cars accelerated for the oasis with the runaway anticipation of traffic approaching a Kuwaiti checkpoint on the border with Iraq.
They pulled into the hospitality center’s angled parking slots; doors opened and children jumped out and ran around the grass in the aimless, energetic circles for which they are known. Parents stretched and rounded up staggering amounts of trash and headed for garbage cans. A large Wisconsin family in tank tops sat at a picnic table eating boloney sandwiches and generic pork rinds so they could afford a thousand-dollar day at Disney. A crack team of state workers arrived at the curb in an unmarked van and began pressure-washing some kind of human fluid off the sidewalk. A stray ribbon of police tape blew across the pavement.
The Aerostar parked near the vending machines, in front of the NO NIGHTTIME SECURITY sign.
“Who needs to go to the bathroom?” asked Jim.
Eight-year-old Melvin put down his mutant action figures and raised a hand.
Sitting next to him with folded arms and dour outlook was Debbie Davenport, a month shy of sweet sixteen, totally disgusted to be in a minivan. She was also disgusted with the name Debbie. Prior to the trip she had informed her parents that from now on she was to be called “Drusilla.”
“Debbie, you need to use the rest room?”
No reply.
Martha got out a bottle for one-year-old Nicole, cooing in her safety seat, and Jim and little Melvin headed for the building.
Outside the rest rooms, a restless crowd gathered in front of an eight-foot laminated map of Florida, unable to accept that they were still hundreds of miles from the nearest theme park. They would become even more bitter when they pulled away from the welcome center, and the artificial grove of palms gave way to hours of scrubland and billboards for topless doughnut shops.
Jim bought newspapers and coffee. Martha took over the driving and got back on I-75. Jim unfolded one of the papers. “Says here authorities have discovered a tourist from Finland who lost his luggage, passport, all his money and ID and was stranded for eight weeks at Miami International Airport.”
“Eight weeks?” said Martha. “How did he take baths?”
“Wet paper towels in the rest rooms.”
“Where did he sleep?”
“Chairs at different gates each night.”
“What did he eat?”
“Bagels from the American Airlines Admirals Club.”
“How did he get in the Admirals Club if he didn’t have ID?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“If he went to all that trouble, he probably could have gotten some kind of help from the airline. I can’t believe nobody noticed him.”
“I think that’s the point of the story.”
“What happened?”
“Kicked him out. He was last seen living at Fort Lauderdale International.”
The Aerostar passed a group of police officers on the side of the highway, slowly walking eight abreast looking for something in the weeds. Jim turned the page. “They’ve cleared the comedian Gallagher in the Tamiami Strangler case.”
“Is that a real newspaper?”
Jim turned back to the front page and pointed at the top. Tampa Tribune.
Martha rolled her eyes.
“Says they released an artist’s sketch. Bald with mustache and long hair on the sides. Police got hundreds of calls that it looked like Gallagher. But they checked his tour schedule—he was out of state the nights of the murders.”
“They actually checked him out?”
“They also checked out Gallagher’s brother.”
Martha looked at Jim, then back at the road.
“After clearing Gallagher, they got a tip that he has a brother who looks just like him and smashes watermelons on a circuit of low-grade comedy clubs under the name Gallagher II. But he was out of town as well.”
“I hope I don’t regret this move,” said Martha.
Jim put his hand on hers. “You’re going to love Tampa.”
Jim Davenport had never planned on moving to Tampa, or even Florida for that matter. Everything he knew about the state came from the Best Places to Live in America magazine that now sat on the Aerostar’s dashboard. Right there on page 17, across from the feature on the joy of Vermont’s covered bridges, was the now famous annual ranking of the finest cities in the U.S. of A. to raise a family. And coming in at number three with a bullet—just below Seattle and San Francisco—was the shocker on the list, rocketing up from last year’s 497th position: Tampa, Florida. When the magazine hit the stands, champagne corks flew in the chamber of commerce. The mayor called a press conference, and the city quickly threw together a band and fireworks at a river front park; the news was so big it even caused some people to get laid.
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 headsets. 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 h
ips 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.”