Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  No reaction time. The engines drove the boats into each other head on, and the fiberglass hulls shattered in a thunderclap.

  The other skiffs scattered, each boater having a second to run all the waterways through his mind and place his bet. The main part of Cockroach Bay is an open dogleg of water, but the shores and western section are labyrinthine with mangrove islands and oyster bars.

  Two boats shot into the Hole in the Wall Pass, making a run for Tampa Bay at Buoy Pass. The one heading toward Dung Islet would try to pull his boat ashore in the mangroves and hide. The one that cut in below Big Cockroach Mound wagered on escaping through the pass at Snake Key.

  The DEA boats were bigger, drafted deeper and had it all over the skiffs in horsepower. They could run them down in short order, but if the shallower, shorter skiffs made it to the mangroves, they’d maneuver around the DEA at will.

  Two fishermen from Riverview raced toward a clearing wide enough to take boats of excessive beam. But stretching just under the water was a thin, granite-hard oyster bar. In this tide, the fishermen calculated, it was six inches below the surface. Enough for their hull, as long as it stayed up on a high-speed plane, but not enough for the propeller. The DEA boat was gaining. Too late to change course; they were meat.

  Thirty yards apart. The DEA boat closing fast. One fisherman crouched in the back of the skiff, leaning over the engine. Two agents sat up on the bow, bracing themselves, less than five yards range and still closing, almost near enough to reach out and grab the fishermen.

  The next step became obvious. The skiff was too close to the sanctuary of the mangroves for the DEA boat to head it off. The agents were going to ram it from behind and send it out of control into the mangroves. Or ride right over the top of them.

  The fisherman up front worked the power-tilt and the engine began lifting up from the water at an angle. Then it stopped, something hung up. The fisherman in the back of the skiff reached all the way over the twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude with both arms and grabbed it under the head. He jerked it hard and the mechanism came free. It shot a rooster tail of spray and the propeller popped out of the water and spun at high frequency in the air just feet from the agents’ faces.

  The pilot of the DEA boat knew the second he saw the gray-white through the water.

  The fisherman up front held the propeller in the air, thinking in split seconds. He had yanked it out of the water at the last possible moment. Pulling it up too soon would have dropped the skiff off its elevated plane, and the hull would crash onto the oyster bar. Wait too long and the engine’s lower unit would have smashed into the bar.

  The DEA pilot didn’t have time to curse before he was thrown over the windshield. The agents on the bow were tossed in the water as the oyster bar peeled open the underside of the hull. The two-hundred-horsepower Mercury sputtered and sank thirty feet behind the boat, where it had snapped off, and water poured in the transom.

  The fisherman dropped the engine on the mark, and, at the precise second the skiff threatened to sink down into the water and muck, it roared back to life atop the surface and disappeared into the mangroves.

  A new player, a green airboat from the sheriff’s department, skimmed into the entrance channel of Cockroach and took south.

  The two fishermen who’d set off for Dung Islet had landed on another island southwest. There was no shore, only a mangrove-root barricade around a half-acre circle of sand. The anglers fought and high-stepped their way through the roots with arms full of white bricks. A DEA helicopter buzzed the islands, but the fishermen had pulled their boat into a cove of red mangroves and the whole small island sat under a cover of sabal palms and sea grapes and black mangroves. The dense canopy darkened the middle of the island, with countless flecks of light dancing through the branches onto the sand. When the wind blew the trees, it made a disco-ball effect.

  The fishermen dropped the bricks in a pile and went back for another load. They heard the airboat and crouched. The airboat slowed as it approached the cove with the hidden skiff. The older fisherman absolutely despised cops, having done time twice. One time for killing his wife, back when you could do it and still get out of jail young. Despite the short sentence, and the fact he’d shot his wife four times in the head, he blamed all his life’s problems on the cops who arrested him. He raised a.38 with a six-inch barrel through the mangroves.

  They couldn’t see the airboat yet, but the roar of the aircraft propeller told them where it was.

  The deputy was sure he’d seen the boat come in here, and he scanned the mangroves as he idled across the water. His gun was drawn.

  They saw each other at the same time. The deputy raised his pistol, but the fisherman already had his level.

  He shot the deputy off the airboat. The deputy fell in a foot of water, losing his gun, and the airboat kept on going.

  “I hate fucking cops,” said the ex-con, climbing out of the groves. He stopped six feet in front of the deputy, pointing the gun.

  The bullet had torn into the deputy’s side, just below the ribs. It had missed everything vital and there wasn’t excessive bleeding. The fisherman standing over him fired again. The deputy turned reflexively and the bullet clipped his spinal cord. He lost touch with his legs. He lay bleeding in the water and groaned and with great effort pushed himself up into a sitting position.

  The fisherman was tall and narrow with a Marine recruit haircut, his scalp nicked in places. His was the skin of the unintelligent, ravaged by sun, alcohol, nicotine and infection. An oversized wallet stuck out of encrusted jeans with a long chain looping to his belt. His T-shirt advertised intolerance. His corneas had a turbid fogginess and his teeth showed abject neglect. The tattoos had faded to the color of veins.

  The other fisherman looked young, Hispanic and scared.

  With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, the fisherman fit a filterless Camel in his lips and lit it with a Zippo, exhaling through his nose. He took another drag.

  “Cops fucked up my life. And now looky what I got here. A helpless cop.”

  Another drag. “Got a wife?”

  “Widower.”

  “That’s too bad. Any kids?”

  “A daughter,” said the deputy.

  “How old?”

  “Ten.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Susan.”

  “Little Suzie. My, my. Ten-year-olds are lip-smacking good. Think I’m gonna go look her up after I kill you. Get me some of that! Hoo-weee.”

  Another drag on the Camel, exhaling as he talked.

  “I’m sure you got a wallet on you, should be an address in there. Head over to your house, meet little Miss Suzie. Does it bother you you’ll never see her again? I’ll bet you’re thinking about that right now.

  “Shoot, she won’t have a momma or a poppa anymore. Well, orphans taste that much sweeter. And you won’t be anywhere to protect your precious little daughter anymore.”

  His voice became serious. “Don’t worry, ’cause I’m gonna kill the bitch right after! God, you’d love to have your gun right now, wouldn’t you? Stupid fucking cop.”

  He aimed and cocked the revolver.

  “No!”

  The fisherman, caught by surprise, turned to the kid. The kid said, “You’re a piece of shit!”

  The fisherman laughed, then mocked him. “I’m no good. My fishing buddy doesn’t love me!” He pointed the gun back at the deputy and cocked it again.

  A handful of mud hit the side of the fisherman’s head.

  He yelled at the kid, “Goddamn you little fuckin’ bastard!”

  In a rage, he swung the gun at the kid and marched three deliberate steps, sloshing through the water. The kid backstepped and fell. The fisherman raised the gun fast, and a shot echoed through the mangroves. Then another. And another. Evenly spaced a second apart, the deputy firing like a machine. Long after the fisherman was dead, still firing the gun he had pulled from his ankle holster, emptying all fifteen shots from the automat
ic. Then pulling the trigger of the empty gun another dozen times.

  The deputy dragged himself over to the body and started punching. “Motherfucker!” He found a rock and bashed the fisherman’s face to pudding before the kid pulled him off.

  The deputy dropped his head and shook. The kid came out of the cove pulling the skiff with about half the cocaine still in it.

  The deputy told him to stop and pointed the automatic.

  “Gun’s empty,” the kid said as he cleared branches away from the engine.

  “Stop!” the deputy yelled again.

  The kid turned and saw the deputy had found his service revolver.

  “You won’t shoot me,” the kid said. The kid used a radio in the skiff to report the injured deputy. Then he cranked the engine, took off and never looked back. The deputy had already lowered his gun.

  The youth steered his coke boat on the most difficult escape route, up by Camp Key toward Little Cockroach Bay. He pulled the engine up and got in the water to walk the boat through the shallowest parts.

  He knew the water because this was where he took his canoe when he wanted to be by himself. He’d bring heavy work gloves, a hammer and chisel, a jar of cocktail sauce and a box of Saltines. He’d lean over the side of the boat and chip his dinner off an oyster bar. This was when you could eat shellfish out of Tampa Bay and not wonder if it would kill you. He’d lie there, watching the sun go down over St. Pete, kept company by the roseates at the other end of the bar popping oysters loose with spoonbills.

  The memories served him and he skirted every submerged bar on the plane. He ran along a seawall behind a remote strip of old waterfront homes and turned into the mouth of the Little Manatee River at Goat Island. Two miles upriver, he pulled the bilge plug and sank the skiff in a deep snook hole under a broken bridge. He waded along the shore of a bayou, pulling a small Styrofoam cooler in the water behind him with a rope. He climbed up the incline where the bridge on the Tamiami Trail crossed the river.

  A thirty-six-year-old auto mechanic took seventeen kilos home from Cockroach Bay, pried up the floor-boards in his lawn mower shed, dug a hole five feet down and dropped them in. They sat untouched for three years. During that time the mechanic developed a constellation of facial ticks, stayed home more than the average house arrest, cultivated a malignant strain of dandruff, and became therapeutically dependent on quick-release anti-anxiety medication. In the middle of one night in 1987, the third in a row without sleep, the mechanic dug up the bricks and talked to them until dawn. That’s when he poured gasoline on the bricks and himself. His neighbors said the fire left nothing but a five-foot crater.

  Twenty-four bricks went to a twenty-three-year-old bachelor, a rising advertising executive in a flats boat with power trim, jackplate and twice the horsepower he would ever use. Unlike the mechanic, the ad exec broke out his stash immediately, and the party lasted until early December. The stuff ended up on every level, nonporous surface in his apartment. At first it was only his close, trusted friends. That lasted two days. Then it was open to secretaries, clerks at the mall, every neighbor in his complex and people off the street. The occupancy of his one-bedroom unit never dipped below fourteen. The incident was featured in an article in Business World magazine when it took down the entire ad agency, which experienced a rash of unplanned pregnancies, white-collar accidents requiring emergency-room treatment and absenteeism that eventually spiked at 92 percent. The executive moved back in with his parents in Ohio.

  A refrigerator repairman from Wimauma named Zach had never even seen cocaine in his life. Now he was staring at two hundred grand of the stuff, piled on top of the VCR in his single-wide trailer on the edge of a cow pasture. After two days he thought, what the hell, a little dab’ll do ya. He tore a hole in the middle of one brick and sniffed at the little spot of white at the end of his index finger. Then snorted harder. He found a straw in the utensil drawer and stuck it in the torn hole in the brick. The sheriff’s department received predawn complaints of someone riding a cow down State Road 674.

  Since the mid-seventies there have been numerous published studies all involving a box holding a bunch of mice, a wedge of cheese and a pile of cocaine. In all the studies, the mice eventually stayed up round the clock doing the coke until they were found starved to death next to the untouched cheese.

  Zach was the human version. He left the trailer less and less, until he stopped leaving at all. He ordered out for pizza and Chinese, then ceased that. His entire daily routine consisted of snorting coke and peeking out windows. Coke-thinking told him it was a good time to clean all his guns.

  Deputies approaching the trailer at night saw shafts of TV lights flickering out dozens of bullet holes in the front of the residence. Zach’s wasted, perforated body lay on the couch. The deputies backed out as soon as they opened the front door and called in a haz mat team. Ripped-open bricks of coke were strewn through every room, and all the furniture was coated with a thick, white film as if someone had gone through the trailer shucking sacks of flour in the air.

  Rumors swept across Florida’s Gulf Coast about a fortune in buried coke out in Cockroach Bay, and soon the whole mangrove flats—desolate bastions of the nature lover—were overrun by a motley crew of every asshole in the bay area who could lay his hands on a motorboat, canoe, Jet Ski, sailboard, or raft. They camped on the islands, threw trash everywhere, did nothing useful, played repetitive, bad music on tape decks and otherwise turned the bay into a Grateful Dead jamboree gone to sea.

  The digging went on for months. The Florida Marine Patrol posted guards at the offshore Indian mound at the mouth of Cockroach Bay. That was after a pickup full of Gators fans drove to Tallahassee for the annual showdown with the Florida State Seminoles with a dug-up skull on the hood.

  Nobody found a gram, and the flats resumed normalcy.

  Eleven months later, however, the curse continued. A team of senior archaeologists from Gainesville, reconstructing apocryphal pirate stories, searched the islands on the southwest side of Cockroach Bay with metal detectors.

  After six hours, they found a buried crab trap and a penny from 1971. Then one of their headphones beeped and the display lit up red. Digging revealed the detector had pinged on the metal zipper of a scuba bag and the two lead dive weights inside, along with thirty pounds of white brick.

  Later that night, back on land, police reported foiling a brazen heist at the Museum of Natural History, twelve naked elderly men in white beards carrying the complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex out the front door on their backs.

  The last twelve kilos ever recovered had gone to a twenty-two-year-old named Serge A. Storms. He was caught immediately.

  A marine patrol officer was standing by the guardrail where the Tamiami Trail bridge crossed the Little Manatee River. He’d seen Serge coming ashore with the cooler and was expecting to find undersized snook or maybe illegal stone crabs. When he saw the cocaine in the cooler, he was so flustered his hand couldn’t find the snap on his holster on the first try.

  Hillsborough Deputy Sheriff Samuel Tchoupitoulas testified for the defense during the young man’s cocaine trial and again at sentencing. Based on his statements, Serge A. Storms only got a year and a day at Starke. The things they do to someone Serge’s age up there would last him the rest of his days.

  Thirteen

  The subtleties of mast and boom escaped Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm, and the sails stayed furled. The fifty-horsepower Johnson outboard was different; it was a small internal combustion engine, and they thought of it as a stripped motorcycle hanging off the back of McJagger’s sailboat.

  Ringworm manned the helm, and the three motored down the coast of southwest Florida in tattooed cellulite majesty. The boat had everything. A generator, stocked freezer, full kitchen, air-conditioning.

  First they went naked. Then they dined on filet mignon and racks of lamb with their hands, and kept their spill-proof nautical coffee mugs filled with Maker’s Mark. They lay on the deck until
they got too hot, and they dove into the Gulf until they were cool. Then back spread across the deck. Munch a chunk of leftover pheasant lying around, some more booze, and when it got too hot again, back in the water.

  These were pirate days. Laughter filled their lives. Lots of “Yo-ho-ho” and “Shiver me timbers.” Cheese-Dick made an eye patch from a piece of Naugahyde. Stinky sat on the bow with a brandy snifter filled to the brim like a bear with a hive of honey.

  They hugged the coast, less than a mile offshore, and watched the New World go by. Stilt homes at Midnight Pass, the twenty-four-hour pier by Venice, the lighthouse outside Charlotte Harbor, and the shorebirds of Cayo Costa and Captiva.

  At night, they sat under the stars and watched lights twinkle from Fort Myers Beach. There was a cool breeze and they were still naked, but sunburns kept them warm. And they were overcome by a strange, almost paranormal feeling they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. They were clean.

  Three silhouettes sagged in deck chairs in the moonlight. The engine was off, and the sailboat left an opalescent wake of microscopic sea critters as it rode the Gulf Stream quietly toward the Florida Keys. The name on the stern was Serendipity.

  The next day everything went south. Stinky was the first to awake, before dawn. There was no land anymore, no more food, and they had run out of gas. He was sure they were in the Bermuda Triangle, and he panicked. He grabbed the metal box of emergency gear and emptied it on the deck. He dumped green dye in the water, flashed a mirror at the sky and blew a referee’s whistle. He strapped on a bandolier of flares and threw a strobing distress beacon overboard. He set off smoke charges on the bow, stern and midships. Ringworm and Cheese-Dick awoke choking and confused in a cloud of smoke to the air horn Stinky was blowing.

  McJagger’s sailboat had every essential and useless piece of radar, sonar, laser, loran, radio, telephone, and satellite-tracking, course-charting, weather-forecasting, fish-finding doodad ever overpriced at a marine store. To the bikers, it was all ballast. And in a crisis, ballast went overboard. They ripped out the big floating black globe of a compass in front of the helm and over it went too.