Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The tall Latin stepped over the driver and up to the cash register. He pulled a ten from an eelskin wallet and handed it to Ellrod. “Three Cokes and two Jumbo Meaty Dogs.”

  Ellrod’s legs vibrated under the counter, but he managed to make change. After a half minute, he ran to the window and watched the limousine merge into southbound traffic on US 1. The windows were down and he could see three men sucking soda straws.

  Sean Breen ran his finger down the triple-A map on his lap, a steady flow of crunchy Chee-tos going to his mouth with the free hand. In the driver’s seat, David Klein had a thing going with a bag of the puffies.

  Fifteen miles south of Miami. Sean said, “Cutler Ridge.” He looked up from the map and out the window. “Can hardly tell Hurricane Andrew came through. You should have been here five years ago. That business tower there. You could see in all the offices. The east face was gone.”

  Twelve more miles they hit Florida City. The turnpike came in from the northeast and dumped onto US 1. The end of civilization on the mainland. The peninsula had twenty more miles until the bridge to the Florida Keys, but the only thing left was a two-lane road south through the mangroves. The final building before the wilderness, the Last Chance Saloon, had a “Go Marlins!” banner over the door between the wagon wheels.

  Sean and David thought professional wrestling in Florida wasn’t what it used to be.

  “Jack Brisco was my favorite,” said Sean. “His trademark was the Figure-Four Leg-Lock.”

  “Those were the days, when the fundamentals meant something.”

  “Like the sleeper hold.”

  “Remember you had to apply an antidote hold after the sleeper knocked the guy unconscious?”

  “Yeah, and one time this masked wrestler wouldn’t let anyone in the ring to apply the antidote to his opponent, and Gordon Solie was going crazy in the announcer’s booth, yelling, ‘Brain damage is setting in!’ The guy went into a coma and came out of it the following week to win the battle royal.”

  David’s face turned serious. Ahead, a dark lump sat in the lane. David winced as it passed under the car, and relaxed when it cleared the undercarriage.

  He looked in the rearview. “Gopher tortoise,” he said. “Ain’t gonna make it.”

  David pulled over and walked back toward the tortoise, which had reached the center line. He stood on the shoulder, waiting for opportunity. Heavy traffic blowing by, but a break coming up. One more car to go and he could run out and carry the tortoise to the other side.

  Serge leaned forward in the passenger seat and tuned the radio in the canary-yellow ’72 Corvette. His yellow beach shirt matched the car and was covered with palm trees; his two-dollar sunglasses had ruby frames and alligators at the corners. The first four radio stations were Spanish, then blues from Miami, then Serge found the frequency he wanted as they passed the Last Chance Saloon.

  “I just want to celebrate…another day of living!…”

  Serge talked over the radio. “And what was the deal with Coral Key State Park? The place was a deathtrap. If it wasn’t for Flipper, someone would have died there every week. Can’t believe nobody sued.”

  “Dolphins like to wear hats,” said Coleman, a joint dangling from his lips as he drove. On his head was one of those afro wigs painted in a rainbow. He was wearing novelty sunglasses with slinky eyeballs, and they swung and clacked together when he turned to face Serge.

  “…I just want to celebrate…yeah! yeah!…”

  “What’s that in the road?” asked Serge.

  “Don’t know,” said Coleman. “Looks like something fell out of a car and that guy’s trying to retrieve it. Some kind of case…. Well, not today, fella!”

  Coleman swerved over the center line, like Jerry Lewis running over Spencer Tracy’s hat in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

  “…I just want to celebrate another day of living!…”

  And Coleman popped the turtle.

  The pair turned around and saw a guy jumping up and down in the road, shaking his fists in the air.

  “You sick fuck! Why’d you do that?!” Serge shouted. “You killed a living thing!”

  “I thought it was a helmet,” Coleman said.

  “A helmet? We’re in the Keys! This ain’t fuckin’ Rat Patrol!”

  Serge plucked the joint from Coleman’s lips—“Gimme that!”—and flicked it out the window. He ripped the slinky-eyeball glasses off Coleman’s face and tossed them in the open gym bag at his feet. The glasses landed on the packs of hundred-dollar bills and next to the Smith & Wesson.38.

  “Pull over,” said Serge. “I’m driving.”

  Twenty miles west of Key West, mangrove islets scattered across jade shallows. Toward the Gulf Stream, the green gave way at once to a cold, ultramarine blue that ran to the horizon. It was noon, a soundless, cloudless day, and the sun broiled.

  At the far end of the silence began a buzz, like a mosquito. It stayed low for a long time and then suddenly swelled into a high-precision, motorized thunder that prevented any train of thought, and a forty-foot cigarette boat slapped and crashed across the swells far closer to the flats than was smart.

  Orange and aqua stripes ran the length of the speedboat, which had the logo of the Miami Dolphins on one side and a big number 13 on the other.

  Behind the wheel was twenty-two-year-old Johnny Vegas, bronzed, built and smelling like a whorehouse. Because he was wearing Whorehouse Cologne, one hundred dollars an ounce on South Beach. Long black hair straight back in the wind, herringbone gold chain around his neck. His workout T-shirt had the sleeves cut off and a cartoon on the front that made a joke about his shlong being big. On the back was a drawing of a woman in a bikini with a bull’s-eye on her crotch. He wore the curved sunglasses of a downhill skier.

  Johnny’s mouth alternated between a thousand-candlepower shit-eating grin and running his tongue over his gums with cocaine jitters. He kept the coke in a twenty-four-karat gold shark amulet he’d bought in a head shop on Key West, Southernmost Bong and Hookah. It now hung from the gold chain. He threw two toggles near the ignition and “Smoke on the Water” shook from sixteen waterproof speakers.

  Johnny lived off a trust fund generated by a life-insurance-for-the-elderly program targeting anyone who had ever been, known, seen or heard about a military veteran. He exercised daily in his Bal Harbor condo, and it showed—not muscle-bound but defined at six feet, one-ninety. On weekends he cruised for chicks in the boat, and he had the tan of a professional beach volleyball player.

  Other people bought jerseys with the numbers of their favorite Miami Dolphins players. Johnny customized the cigarette boat for his favorite, future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino. He soon found that people assumed it actually was Marino’s boat, and that Johnny was a tight friend. Johnny often said, yes, it was Marino’s boat. Would you like to come aboard, little girl?

  In romance, Johnny was a selective man. He wouldn’t just go for anyone. He was attracted to a very specific type: horny, young, binge-drinking women in T-backs. Any event with a hint of spring-break attitude, Johnny’s boat was there.

  He ranged from Fort Lauderdale to Islamorada in the Keys, where fast boats held effective parties on an offshore sandbar. That was as far as Vegas would take the cigarette. The cocaine he bought for the World Series the night before had taken him the rest of the way down the Keys.

  No sooner had he arrived, he was on the business side of Key West, heading out to sea. As the propeller cavitated, Johnny unconsciously fingered the coke talisman hanging at his sternum. At sixty miles an hour, he strained to see as the air pressure flattened his eyeballs, but he had to keep up appearances for the woman clinging to her white leather seat. She didn’t really mind, with a tight belly full of Captain Morgan.

  She was maybe twenty, a student at Key West Community College, majoring in flirting her way onto expensive boats with powder parties. She was thin, with a deep tan, sun-lightened brown hair, and a cute Georgia face. And she’d learned nothing in l
ife is free when she’d gotten thrown overboard by an Argentinean tycoon on whose yacht she had been partying and whose knee she’d been grabbing before she said, “Sorry, I have a boyfriend back at school.”

  That morning Johnny had been idling the boat past Mallory Square when he spotted her sitting in a bikini with legs hanging over the seawall, having shown up ten hours early for the sunset celebration.

  He tapped his left nostril; she nodded eagerly and boarded. They did two lines at the docks and slugged rumrunners as they passed Sand Key lighthouse.

  Johnny’s plan was to head south from Key West, pick up deeper water, and chart west. The uninhabited Marquesas Atoll sat twenty-five miles father with a sandy beach, perfect for scoring.

  Which would be a first. Because, despite the boat and the exercising and the cocaine and cologne and money, he never got a babe in the sack. Not once. It was always something. Boat fire, waterspout, sand crabs, Coast Guard search, language barrier, drug overdose and, with rampant frequency, the sudden and complete change of heart. There was even the can’t-miss time a statuesque brunette model came right up to him on the dock and said, “I fuck guys with fast boats.” They were three miles offshore and she’s topless, taking off her bottom, when she hears something. A hydroplane pulls up, a man opens the cockpit, and she gets in and leaves.

  This time would be different. This time with—what was her name? One of those double, singsong deals. Something Sue. Betty Sue? Peggy Sue? Ah, to hell with it: more cocaine for everyone!

  Indications to the contrary, Johnny wasn’t obnoxious, just immature, and the older residents of his condominium regarded him as a lovable, goofy pet. They also had no faith in his seamanship. They worried that someday he’d hit an awash coral head and there would go Johnny, cartwheeling across the Gulf Stream at eighty miles an hour until he was embedded headfirst in the sand like a javelin. So they broke it down for him. Stay in the blue water and out of the green water. Over and over: blue water good, green water bad.

  Johnny and ’Sue raced due south of the Marquesas in solid-green water and skirting closer to yellow and white. The water was clear as a swimming pool, and patches of sand and coral ran starboard. Between two islands was a channel that cut across the flats as if someone had poured a river of lime Jell-O. He looked down and saw the shadow of his boat racing next to him on the seafloor, and he pretended he was the Flying Dutchman.

  The bottom was soft, and Johnny’s boat plowed a hundred-yard trench that bled off the violence of the grounding. The stop catapulted ’Sue onto the deck on her hands and knees.

  “Are we stuck?” she asked, the boat’s deck as solid and unmoving as Nebraska.

  “Oh, no no no!” said Johnny. He tossed a mushroom anchor over the bow with forty feet of line, which was thirty-nine too many, and the excess coils of rope floated by where ’Sue was sitting.

  “How ’bout some more cocaine!” said Johnny, creating a diversion. He tapped the amulet on the fiberglass console. ’Sue poured another rumrunner out of Johnny’s titanium tactical party Thermos, having spilled the last one down the left side of her bikini top. Johnny took off his shirt.

  The stereo blared “Funky Cold Medina.” They climbed up on the bow. Dancing sloppy, not holding each other, rubbing chests. Johnny thought of his buzz and ‘Sue and the music and how he was gonna finally get laid. He closed his eyes and saw an infomercial for Veterans’ Health and Life on the inside of his eyelids, and he smiled.

  There was a splash in the water off port, and Johnny and ’Sue tumbled back together on the bow.

  “Jesus, Harry and Joseph!” he yelled.

  They looked overboard, out in the blue water, where their boat should have been. They expected to see a bale of dope or an airplane wing, but instead saw a large blob covered with seaweed and algae and gunk, a long-dead manatee or Kemp’s ridley turtle.

  They stared a half minute, and their crunched-up faces released at the same time with recognition. Out in the water was a man, bloated and distended, chain around his neck. ’Sue gave a prolonged, blood-clotting scream, which Johnny took to mean she was no longer in the mood.

  It took a few minutes but ’Sue had started to calm down, just sniffling and her chest heaving a little. Johnny thought, Yeah, there’s a blown-up old dead guy all putrid and shit a few feet away, but I got the smooth moves! He put his arm around her shoulder, to console her, and began sliding his hand toward her breast.

  A procession of sports cars and RVs was making the grunion run down from Florida City to the drawbridge onto Key Largo. Because of speeding, reckless driving and head-on crashes, the Florida Department of Transportation had erected a bunch of warning signs and built special passing lanes.

  One of the signs read “Be patient. Passing lane one mile.” Next to it, an Isuzu Rodeo towing a Carolina Skiff jackknifed trying to pass a Ranchero. The Rodeo slid upright to a stop on the left shoulder, but the skiff rolled, sending four cases of Bud and Bud Lite clattering across the road. The rigid column of high-speed traffic became disorganized, like a line of ants hit with bug spray. A Mustang swerved left, flipped and landed half submerged in the water next to the causeway; a Mercury spun out to the right and slid down the embankment sideways, taking out thirty feet of endangered plants. Motorists ran to check on the people in the Isuzu but retreated when the Mercury’s driver pulled a nickel.45 out of the glove compartment. He opened fire on the Rodeo, across the street, which returned fire with an SKS Chinese military rifle. The Rodeo’s bumper sticker said, “Hang up and drive!”

  Behind the firefight, people got out of cars and crouched behind bumpers or ran for cover in the mangroves. Some jumped in Barnes and Blackwater Sounds and swam away.

  Twenty cars back from the accident, Sean Breen and David Klein opened their doors for shields and prepared to run. Ten cars back, three Latin men sat in a bulletproof Mercedes limousine playing three Nintendo GameBoys.

  One car back was a yellow Corvette. Coleman and Serge stared at the boat in the middle of the road and the foam shooting into the air from the Budweisers.

  As they approached Key Largo, breaks in the roadside brush had given first glimpses of the Keys. Hundreds of yards of tangled branches blurring by, and then a two-foot opening, a subliminal view across the sounds. Unnamed mangrove islands in that unmistakable profile, long and low. Serge thought it was the same profile that in 1513 prompted Ponce de Leon’s sailors to name them Los Martires, the martyrs, because they looked like dead guys lying down. No they don’t, thought Serge, but he was naturally high anyway as he sat in the parked Corvette. The sniper fire was making a racket and it snapped Serge out of it.

  “Beer me,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  “Right,” said Coleman. He waited a few seconds for a break in the gunfire and ran out in the road in front of the car, grabbing one of the few cans that wasn’t blowing suds from the seams. He jumped back in the car and handed it to Serge.

  Serge stared at him. “I meant from the cooler.”

  The Coast Guard petty officer, a serious young man with a galvanized clipboard, recent haircut and pressed uniform, stood on the back deck of Johnny Vegas’s boat and said no unnecessary words as he took down Johnny’s version.

  Johnny eyed the man’s wedding ring, which he noted was quite small and without diamonds. The petty officer hadn’t mentioned Dan Marino. Johnny had been noticing for some time that people in authority weren’t giving him enough respect. It wasn’t that they were rude or patronizing. Worse, he was irrelevant. Maybe I need to work on my image, he thought, and planned to buy a fighter pilot’s jacket.

  Coast Guard and Florida Marine Patrol boats had arrived. A four-man dive team was in the water. The body had been pulled from the Gulf and lay on a stainless-steel table at the stern of the Coast Guard boat. A man with surgical gloves probed the remains; another took photos with a Nikon.

  Johnny sat forlorn with elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands and a rotting buzz in his head, thinking about all the drugs he’d dumped in
the ocean after radioing the authorities on the VHF. ’Sue hunched over in fetal position on the port side with a towel wrapped around her, shivering, occasionally lunging for the gunwales to toss up more of her breakfast of cold pizza. She turned to Johnny with a sad, pleading look, not feeling so attractive anymore. He shook his head with impatience and opened a watertight compartment. “Here,” he said, holding something out to her. “Have a mint.”

  Johnny put his chin back in his hands and stared at the flotilla of partially digested pizza being ravaged by tropical fish.

  Another boat approached from the east, a forty-foot trihull catamaran. A reporter from Florida Cable News stood on the tip of the middle bow holding a microphone, facing back toward the cabin and his cameraman. Behind him, hidden under his suit, he had a brace and safety harness, like a barnstorming wing-walker. He raced at top speed toward news.

  The upstart Florida Cable News network had to compensate for lack of money, experience, and reputation with raw daring. The coin of the realm was the scoop, and they regularly beat all major Florida affiliates by going on the air immediately with a ground-breaking series of premature, unconfirmed, flat-wrong stories.

  But the worse FCN’s accuracy got, the higher the ratings. A cult developed and tuned in to see how factually mangled the coverage had become. The closest thing FCN had to a recognizable personality was correspondent Blaine Crease, a former stuntman who was becoming recognized for exclusively reporting incorrect stories while suspended in a harness. Bouncing on a boat in a harness. Standing atop a fire engine in a harness. Bungee-jumping into precedent-setting slander.

  On the Coast Guard boat the early bets favored a gangland hit, like the mobsters who occasionally popped up in fifty-five-gallon drums in the Miami River and off the Rickenbacker Causeway. Others leaned toward lunacy, remembering the psychopath who’d dumped three women in Tampa Bay in ’89.