Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Serge maintained his fifteen miles per hour, and Coleman waved like the Queen of England at Veale as they passed his house and kept going.

  At the sight of them, Veale let out a sound one would expect to hear if somebody jumped on a small animal with both feet. A startled Van Damme bolted to the end of the leash, yanking Veale’s trigger finger and firing the gun, blowing off one of Van Damme’s back legs. The police officer gave a single whoop of his siren and jumped out with gun drawn.

  Serge and Coleman returned in the Barracuda the next morning, staking out Veale’s house for his release from jail. A late-model Camaro screeched up to the curb in front of them, blocking the view.

  As president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, Charles Saffron’s job was to captain the company through treacherous financial straits. As a self-styled man of adventure, he sent the company’s assets headlong into the world of cocaine trafficking, extortion, tax fraud, arms dealing, the occasional murder of a material witness, and campaign contributions to the Republican and Democratic National Committees.

  While Saffron paid acute attention to his criminal enterprises, the company’s legitimate ventures headed for the reef. But legitimate losses were only money; illegitimate losses could cost his life.

  Saffron’s largest off-the-books endeavor was money-laundering for the cartels, and he spent many an afternoon bouncing large deposits back and forth between Tampa and Caribbean islands.

  His relationship with the cartels had begun on a steamy July night in the Florida Keys in 1989. Saffron was at a cockfight in a tin building on one of the isolated, quarried islands in the back country between Sugarloaf and Key West. By four A.M., the crowd had dwindled to a sweaty clutch of people in light cotton shirts, holding cigars and shot glasses. After the place closed up, Saffron stood behind the open trunk of his Cadillac getting at a bottle of brandy. The moon was in first quarter and Saffron could see the shadow of a slumping man being dragged out behind the building and into the parched mangroves. Saffron followed quietly to a clearing and hid behind a gumbo-limbo tree.

  The slumping man had already been beaten, and now one of his four assailants stepped up. He pressed a gun into his stomach and fired, and the man groaned faintly. The man’s belly had acted as a silencer. The assailants apparently didn’t want him dead yet; they still wanted to talk trash, and they babbled at him rapidly and angrily in Spanish.

  Saffron stepped out from behind the tree. “Can I play too?”

  The surprised men swung their guns at Saffron.

  In Tampa, Saffron was an imposing figure. He was in his late forties but still in shape. He was just over six feet and his hair was black. His face was attractive but hard and rocky. A small scar ran from the underside of his lower lip. It added to his ruggedness.

  But Saffron wasn’t in Tampa anymore. He was big and hard enough, but the men with the guns looked first at his hands, which were soft, with trimmed fingernails. He was holding a bottle of brandy.

  One of the men smiled and made an insulting aside to his friends. Saffron heard the word “gringo.”

  Saffron walked up to the man and gestured toward the sidearm in the man’s waistband and then toward the dying man. “May I?”

  The man smiled broadly under a Pancho Villa mustache. He took out his gun, cocked the slide and handed it butt first to Saffron. The others kept the guns pointed at Saffron.

  “Hold this,” said Saffron, and he slapped the bottle of brandy hard into the gut of the man handing him the gun. He turned and shot the injured man five times, fast, in the face, not worrying about the noise. The 9mm rounds boomed across the flats.

  “Goddamn that was fun! Got anyone else you’re pissed at?” said Saffron.

  But the rest of the gang were startled by the noise. “Jesus! María! Vamos!”

  They ran for their Jeep Cherokee, but the first guy there took off and left the rest in the parking lot, so they caught a getaway ride with Saffron.

  There was much tension as they drove to Key West, but on Boca Chica one started laughing and then they all did and the brandy made the rounds and thin cigars were lit.

  The sun was coming up as they hit Roosevelt Boulevard on Key West, and Saffron saw the first charter boat captain walking down the dock with a mug of coffee. The captain was dubious about the group but not about their two thousand in cash, and he couldn’t cast off fast enough.

  On the trip, Saffron hammered out a business arrangement. After that deal and a few more went profitably for all concerned, word got around the cocaine world and different cartels came calling.

  “A good reputation is the best advertisement. That’s what I always say,” Saffron always said.

  Saffron had short, coarse black hair and finely chiseled features. Unfortunately they looked like they’d been chiseled by Picasso, and he intimidated many people. He wore expensive suits that weren’t flashy but drove a Lamborghini Countach. He ate lunch every other day at the club atop his bank building. He hated his cell phone and carried it everywhere.

  The first and only office of New England Life was in downtown Tampa. In late 1997, Saffron started out his office window and thought about third-quarter losses posted in no small part to the five-million-dollar payout to George Veale III. As point man for the corporation’s money-laundering liaison with a Costa Gordan cocaine cartel, Saffron was getting nervous.

  Costa Gorda had been calling on the hour since a duffel bag of American currency had not arrived on a tourist flight from Miami. In the first call, Saffron had sounded light, talking about debt-to-earning ratios, unanticipated claims and sunken capital. The Costa Gordans talked about exploratory surgery with a pruning saw, making Saffron’s testicles retract into his lungs. When the subsequent calls came in, his secretary alternately said Saffron was in the executive washroom and out of town, and then both.

  Saffron declared the payout to Veale a complete blunder, and the claims adjuster was given three months’ paid vacation in Costa Gorda, most of which he needed to recover from a fractured femur. Even if the claim was legit, they still couldn’t afford to pay, Saffron screamed. Drag it out, go to court, appear on Larry King. They weren’t even in the insurance business anymore. All the legal money was gone, a deterioration begun with claims from Hurricane Andrew and finished with Saffron’s greedy, headlong speculation in the joint underwriters market.

  No, this was cocaine money, and one thing you never, ever do with cocaine money is give it to some fucked-up dentist in Tampa who cuts off his fingers. If it gets to the point where you were about to pay claims with it, you simply dissolve the company and pay off creditors, and all the ones at the head of that line were from Costa Gorda.

  Saffron wasn’t screaming this new mission statement at his staff. He was yelling into a cellular phone while driving over the bridge from downtown Tampa to his postmodern waterfront house on Davis Islands.

  The phone asked a question.

  Saffron yelled back, “Who cares what really happened! What it means is we’re screwed. You and me both. We’ve been had. This is a bogus claim!”

  “So you want me to investigate for fraud? Check the guy out?” asked the man on the phone, private investigator and state senator Mo Grenadine.

  “No, I want you to get the money back. Steal it. Whack the guy if you have to!” said Saffron.

  “That’s not my field,” said Grenadine.

  “Why the hell do we pay you a twenty-thousand-dollar private investigator retainer?”

  “You pay me to push legislation that favors your company,” said Grenadine.

  “And what have we gotten for our money? Jack shit. Not one of your bills ever passes. Not one!”

  “It’s the homosexual agenda—”

  “Save it for your shitkicker listeners,” Saffron hollered. “You go get the money or you’ve had it.”

  “You mean you’ll withdraw support for my family-values campaign?”

  “It means you go to jail! We’ve been taping everything,” Saffron said and hung
up.

  Grenadine lay spread-eagled on his bed and didn’t move for ten minutes. After, he searched around in his closet for his cheating-husband homing device—a modified stolen—car directional finder that allowed him to skip countless stakeout hours and go straight to the love nest.

  The next morning he drove to San Clemente Street several hours before Veale would be released from jail, walked up to a red Aston Martin in the driveway, and stuck the homing device under the bumper.

  He climbed back in his car and waited at the end of the block. A Barracuda pulled up two houses in front of him and nobody got out. Minutes later, a Camaro screeched up in front of the Barracuda, and a dangerous woman opened the door.

  “Christ,” Serge muttered in the Barracuda.

  A furious Sharon in chartreuse hot pants slammed the door of the Camaro and stomped up the street toward Serge’s driver-side window. A long mane fell over the shoulders of her tight football jersey that was cut off just below her breasts—no bra. The tattoo on her left ankle was a rose dripping blood from its thorns. Her eyes were covered with Terminator sunglasses, and a cigarette dangled from her lips hooker-style.

  “If it isn’t Martha Stewart,” said Serge. “What’s today’s tip, Martha? How to turn that cozy guest room into a dingy garage?”

  “Fuck a duck,” said Sharon.

  “Wordsmith,” said Serge.

  Serge saw a cab drop Veale off in his driveway. “Quick, get in before he sees you,” said Serge, and Sharon crawled in the backseat.

  “You buttholes were gonna stiff me! George told me all about the insurance scam yesterday at the club!”

  Serge ignored her and lifted a pair of stolen Bavarian binoculars. Veale was in the house less than fifteen minutes. When he hit the street again, he had shaved off his beard. He wore a curly blond wig, his wife’s, under a Devil Rays baseball cap. He had on a full-length trench coat. He threw two suitcases and a gym bag into the Aston Martin and took off.

  Serge and company followed him down MacDill Avenue to Kennedy Boulevard and east over the drawbridge to downtown Tampa. Veale parked in a loading zone at the Florida National Bank tower and walked inside with a suitcase.

  “What’s he gonna do, rob the place?” asked Sharon.

  “Dressed like Harpo Marx?” said Serge. “My guess is he’s about to make a withdrawal.”

  Through the front window, they saw Veale approach a teller and throw the suitcase on the counter like he was checking luggage. The teller appeared to talk excitedly, shaking her head from side to side, and a bank vice president appeared. After a curt discussion, the vice president motioned for Veale to follow him around the corner and out of view.

  Minutes later, Veale reappeared on the street with the suitcase, having come out a different door.

  Serge had planned to jump Veale outside the bank, but Veale surprised him. He was in his car and gone thirty seconds after they spotted him, getting on Interstate 4 at Malfunction Junction.

  Two blocks east of Tampa International Airport, the death metal band Crucifixion Junkies blew an electrical fuse. The bass player accidentally spilled a beaker of chicken blood into his amp during a song urging violence against pacifists.

  Tampa was—maybe still is—death metal capital of the country, and the Junkies were working their way up the pile. An alternative newspaper, The Gotham City News, praised the band’s recent performance at the Ritz Theatre in Ybor City for its “delightful banality.” Their guitars were crucifixes.

  The five men had identical stringy, sweat-soaked hair. Because of low-paying gigs and unwise home economics, the quintet could only afford to practice in a U-Store-It shed in an industrial park next to Tampa International.

  The Junkies’ shed was number 9 in a row of garage-type units with roll-down doors, and they had just locked themselves in for the third time.

  With the door rolled down, the power outage left them in darkness, and the five bumped into each other and stubbed toes and cursed.

  The lead singer flicked a Bic lighter.

  “It’s hot as hell in here,” griped the bass player. “Why can’t we practice with the door open?”

  “I told you, because of noise complaints from the airport!” said the singer.

  The singer had an inverted cross burned into his forehead. He had done it himself by heating a stationery wax stamp from a religious store.

  A cell phone rang and the lead singer picked it up with the hand that wasn’t holding the lighter. The conversation was short and one-sided. The voice on the other end, Charles Saffron’s, gave him two names passed along by Mo Grenadine. Told him to consider it an offering to the devil. And an easy five grand.

  After he hung up, the bass player started bitching again. “This storage shed sucks! Why do we have to get so sweaty? Why can’t we have a decent place to practice?”

  “Because we are the servants of Satan!” yelled the singer. “We are the embodiment of pure, merciless evil! We are the fucking lords of hellfire!”

  The Bic lighter started burning the singer’s hand. “Ouch! Owww! Ouch!” He dropped it, and the fucking lords of hellfire were bumping around in the dark again.

  Twelve

  It wasn’t called The Cockroach Bay Story until it became a paperback and the subsequently forgettable TV movie of the week starring Jan-Michael Vincent as the misunderstood-cop-fighting-the-system and Suzanne Somers as the feisty-but-vulnerable love interest who didn’t exist in the real story.

  It was 1984, early November.

  The sky slipped from black to deep gray over the Florida Keys, but the sun was a good half hour under the horizon. A twin-engine Beechcraft flew north two hundred feet above Cudjoe Key and the radar blimp called Fat Albert that was reeled in and moored. The pilot looked down on a flock of ibis heading east and wisps of ground clouds moving over the shallows. All his transponders were turned off.

  At that moment, an identical plane took off from Key West on a vector that would intersect with the first Beechcraft fifty miles off Chokoloskee. The air force was already trying to contact the first pilot and had scrambled a chase plane.

  When the Beechcrafts were on top of each other, the Key West pilot switched off his transmitters and the first pilot flipped his on, using the same electronic signature. The Key West plane continued on into the western Everglades and landed at a suspicious makeshift runway in the Corkscrew Swamp. No contraband, papers in order.

  Except the chase plane didn’t follow the decoy. The switch was imperfect; there was the slightest shift in signal that couldn’t be explained by electronic anomaly. The radar operators stayed with the first plane.

  The pilot was heading for a dawn drop among the countless islands off Homosassa halfway up Florida’s west coast, but now it was taking frantic evasive action trying to shake the air force prop-jet.

  It flew recklessly under the center spans of the Sunshine Skyway bridge across Tampa Bay, causing rear-enders in the stunned rush-hour traffic. The chase plane radioed the Beechcraft without response. It dipped wings and pulled alongside. The Beechcraft went on autopilot.

  Cockroach Bay drafts just a few feet deep and is generally accessible only to flats boats. Cool mornings on the changing tide are ideal. Great snook, maybe even tarpon in the passes in June.

  Seven boats sat still in the water, damp with dew. A johnboat, skiffs, bass boats. Most had poling platforms. Everyone using electric motors or push poles and talking in whispers.

  One angler spotted redfish near some mangrove roots. He baled the orange line three times into his right hand and shallowed his breath. His heart sped as he hesitated a last moment before presenting a black-and-red, one-eyed fly lure he had tied the night before.

  He let out the line from his right hand as he increased the whipping action of the cast, back and forth over his head. He looked up and over his shoulder as he brought the line around for the last time.

  The fisherman stopped and the line fell limp in the water, the lure bouncing off the roots and snagging. The
fisherman continued staring back over his shoulder at the sky. Something was zooming down toward Cockroach Bay at the end of what appeared to be a large, colorful streamer. The fisherman grabbed his binoculars and could see that the object flapped two arms.

  Before the pilot had jumped, he had tethered three duffel bags to his parachute harness with D-rings. He banked the plane in autopilot so the Beechcraft would be a hundred miles offshore when its fuel tanks went dry and it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

  The bags added five hundred pounds of cocaine to the job of the parachute, and when it popped open, half the shroud lines tore out of their stitching. The canopy sucked inside out like an umbrella.

  The pilot hit the water with such force that the marine patrol would later scoop much of him out with pool skimmers. Only one other fishing boat had noticed the pilot; everyone else too busy with their rods or reading the water. When the middle of Cockroach Bay exploded, they thought they were taking howitzer fire.

  After a pause to gather bearings, they started outboard engines to investigate.

  The duffel bags had ruptured, as well as most of the tightly wrapped wax bricks inside. It looked like a cocaine piñata. Eighty-six one-kilo blocks had stayed intact, and it was first-come-first-served.

  All the fishermen knew each other, but nobody said a word or exchanged looks as they scooped in the white bricks with trout nets.

  In less than five minutes, all the bricks had been retrieved, but the flats boats were a jumble of bumper cars in the center of Cockroach Bay, pointed every which way, anchor lines twisted up. A new boat appeared from Tampa Bay and raced into the narrow entrance channel to Cockroach Bay. Then another. Both blue, numerous radio and radar masts.

  “Shit! DEA!” one fisherman yelled.

  The fishing boats came to life in a cacophony of different rpm’s and levels of engine maintenance. They shot out in all directions, some without pulling anchor. Two boats opened up and went off at forty-five degrees from each other. Their anchor lines caught and jerked them around to face each other.