Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The smiling salesman looked like no private dealer Serge had ever seen. His table was ninety feet long and staffed by eight salespeople in uniforms. He had two computerized cash registers and three VISA machines. A stack of background registration forms sat on a bottom shelf, holding up dust. The dealer wore a camouflage vest with mesh pockets, straps, clips, rings and secret compartments. He had a button pinned to the right breast pocket that read “Holy Moly is Right!”

  Serge and Coleman squinted down the sights of assault pistols, which they accidentally pointed around the convention floor at other shoppers, who absentmindedly pointed guns back. Five salesmen clustered around Sharon, fitting her with a new line of sexy feminine body armor that made her look like Barbarella. She strolled and spun, modeling.

  “It’s you,” said Serge.

  Serge slapped a fifty-pack of hundred-dollar bills on the glass display case. Without even showing his false driver’s license, Serge walked out the door with TEC-9 and MAC-10 burp guns, two Peacemakers, three hunting rifles, scopes and Sharon’s Kevlar ensemble. He picked up a muzzle suppressor and the dealer showed him how to make it an operational silencer—“It’s your Constitutional right.”

  In the high-rise offices of New England Life and Casualty, financial miscreation had reduced the company to a skeleton staff of agents, secretaries, mistresses and owners’ nephews. None had left the forty-second-floor office yet, even though it was eight at night. None dared move an inch.

  The only activity in the office was four Costa Gordan men in linen suits pacing. They had machine guns, small Israeli models with straps over the shoulder like purses. The leader had a Colt Python.357 with a laser sight, and kept dialing a phone number without success and cursing. The yuppie staff were surprised they could see no chest hairs or gold chains.

  Costa Gorda was a small island nation in the Lesser Antilles. It was so small, in fact, that it existed only on paper, and it rented a post office box and a conference room on the island of Grenada. The sole purpose of Costa Gorda was to create jurisdictional confusion for shell corporations, offshore bankers, dummy partnerships, shadow firms, tax shelters and eighty-year-old Nazis. During the holidays it sold cheese wheels by catalog.

  One of Costa Gorda’s biggest clients was the Mierda Cartel, the sixty-eighth-largest cocaine producer in the world. Which was last place.

  The law-abiding residents of Grenada acted intimidated, out of pity for their local cartel, which received unrelenting derision from the rest of the established cocaine world. At ribbon-cuttings, never an introduction; at banquets, never a trophy. In the yearbook they were named “most likely to be extradited.”

  The rare modicum of respect came when they flew into Tampa International, where they were mistaken for the thirty-fourth-largest cartel in the world.

  Now, forty-two floors up, they had the complete attention of the New England Life staff.

  At unequal intervals, the four stuck tiny crystal injectors in their noses and hit small amounts of blow, filling the office with an irregular nasal syncopation. They had broken into the liquor cabinet an hour ago and each carried a personal fifth at his side. They cranked up the stereo in the cabinet, “Hot Stuff” by the Rolling Stones.

  One of the men half-stood, half-sat on the edge of a secretary’s desk, trying to make time. Two looked west out the floor-to-ceiling window, mesmerized by the lights on Bayshore Boulevard and at MacDill Air Force Base. The tallest sat behind the office’s largest desk in a high-back leather chair, still trying to work the phone, still swearing. The epoxy used to patch the six bulled holes in the back of the chair didn’t quite match the burgundy.

  One Costa Gordan found an ottoman on casters. He put one foot on it and pushed himself around the office skateboard style. Then he got up on it with both feet and hung ten, sailing across the marble floor. “Look at me, everyone. I’m surfing!”

  A secretary with big red hair and a Brooklyn twang finally told the leader, “You have to dial nine to get out.”

  “Fuck!” said the leader, then smiled at the secretary.

  This time the call connected and he spun the chair around, disappeared behind its back facing out the window. It was a quick conversation with an unmistakable tone. He slammed the receiver. “Damn!”

  The leader walked to a spot in the middle of the office and turned slowly around the room with the Magnum so the laser sight scanned everyone’s face.

  “We’re going to have a little party,” he said.

  He dumped two ounces of coke out on an onyx credenza. In the background, from left to right, a Costa Gordan skated fast across the office floor on an ottoman, arms straight out, flapping for balance.

  A Lamborghini Countach sped past the Desert Inn in Yeehaw Junction, heading east. Charles Saffron punched furiously at the cell phone’s button, still unable to reach Mo Grenadine.

  He threw the phone down and it rang instantly. He picked it back up. “Hello!”

  “We want our fucking five million.” The accent was Costa Gordan. Saffron backpedaled with excuses.

  “What are you doing heading for the east coast?” said the Costa Gordan. “Trying to run like a dog?”

  “No, I’m tracking the thieves—to get your money back,” said Saffron. “I’m getting close. Any day now.…What’s all that music? Is that my Stones CD?”

  “Saffron, you goat-fucker. We’re gonna cut your cojones off and stuff ’em…”

  “Your signal’s breaking up,” said Saffron, holding the phone at arm’s length and making static sounds with his mouth. “I’m losing you. I can’t hear…” And he hung up.

  Back in Tampa, Saffron’s employees were lined up single-file and made to snort coke at gunpoint. They were then forced into a second line, where a smiling Costa Gordan was pouring shots.

  The cartel cycled everyone through both lines three times and sent them to their desks. Some of the staff swayed and forgot the no-talking rule. The leader had to keep threatening with the gun for them to shut up, and they’d look surprised, put hands over their mouths and giggle.

  One of the employees raised his hand.

  “This isn’t school!” the tallest Latin said incredulously. “We don’t take questions!”

  “Yeah, but I’m real curious,” said the accountant, his head lolling from the shots. “How do you smuggle cocaine?”

  “Yeah, what do you hide it in?” asked the secretary.

  “That’s a secret!” said the Costa Gordan.

  “I saw in the newspapers where they call you the Keystone Cartel,” said someone else.

  “The lies of Yankee pigs!” said the Costa Gordan.

  “Do you hide it in your underwear?”

  “Do you swallow balloons on tiny strings that come up your throat and are tied to your back teeth?”

  “Shut up! Everyone! Right now!” said the Costa Gordan, waving the pistol fast around the room.

  “I think you should pipe it in a slurry in long tubes.”

  “You should get a running start and run right up to the border and throw it really hard.”

  “You should sew it inside chickens.”

  “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!”

  There was a tremendous crash. They all ran to the west window, now a jagged opening. Wind gusted through the hole high above downtown Tampa, knocking loose sharp triangles of safety glass, and they followed the rest of the window to the pavement.

  Forty-two floors below on Ashley Street, a Costa Gordan in a suit lay on the sidewalk in a bed of glass ground to diamonds. The roof of a parked Jaguar was caved in from an ottoman.

  “Shit!” said the leader. He raised his arms to get the room’s attention. “Okay, we gotta leave now. Nobody move…and count to ten thousand. What’s that state you say to count slow?”

  “Mississippi,” said Brooklyn.

  “Mississippi, that’s it,” the leader said. “Let me hear all of you!”

  The staff: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”

  The Mierda
Cartel sprinted for the elevators.

  Seventeen

  Sean and David stood in silent shock upon entering their magnificent four-hundred-dollar room at the Palm Beach Surfside. They just stared out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and the tops of the palm trees barely peeking up over the balcony. Then they shook hands vigorously and back-slapped and insulted each other.

  The room came with three courtesy newspapers, and they were soon spread over the beds, all turned to the sports sections, World Series coverage.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Sean.

  “Who would have thought that back when we planned the trip…”

  “If Cleveland wins tonight, we’ll be forced to go to game seven in Miami…”

  They lapsed into a silliness that they only exhibited around each other and that had marked every reunion since high school.

  “There’ll be no choice.”

  “We couldn’t help ourselves.”

  “Decades of genetic memory.”

  “A tractor beam grabbed us.”

  Laughing until hurting, dopamine everywhere.

  Sean pointed at one paper that predicted scalping at one to two hundred dollars a ticket.

  David pulled two Michelobs from the half-size room refrigerator. “Remind me to go to the convenience store to replace these. Otherwise they’re five bucks each.”

  Sean admired David’s drive and achievement. David’s varsity good looks and poise still made him the most popular man in any room. He was the proverbial man that the women wanted and the men wanted to be like. In social settings, David always recognized and included Sean, who otherwise would have been happy to sit on the rim of the action.

  David knew that Sean would say he was crazy if David ever told Sean that he secretly looked up to him. He viewed Sean as a considerate, honest family man with effortless character that exceeded his own.

  That didn’t stop David from teasing Sean mercilessly about his job.

  David had the exciting position at the state attorney’s office, but it was Sean who got the press.

  First was a small profile article in Tampa Business Times, then the cover of Tampa Bay magazine and front-page articles in both The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times.

  While still the most junior advertising executive at Turbo-Image Corp., Sean had been dubbed “the Wizard” and “the Magician” in the media, and “Houdini” around the office.

  As custom at Turbo-Image, the newest executives got the undesirable accounts. Sean was dealt the legislative reelection campaign of Mo Grenadine, following his problems in the hot tub. In-house, the account was considered a dog with fleas.

  Nobody expected success—just the motions of work so Turbo could bill the hours. Sean went at it with an appreciation for the absurd, and he employed the Big Tobacco Theorem: Tell reality-defying lies with a straight face. He didn’t consider it dishonesty but low comedy.

  Sean launched a media campaign that blamed Mo’s arrest on unspeakable acts of the newest threat to America: Urban Homosexual Terrorists. He said scientists had linked gun control to child molestation.

  Sean wrote Mo’s speeches and platform as those of a smug, sanctimonious sonuvabitch. His scripted attacks on the unfortunate, unpopular and downtrodden were the stuff of burlesque.

  When Mo was reelected in a landslide, Turbo-Image was reviled on the editorial pages and praised in the business sections. Political wags proclaimed Sean a genius for setting up voter registration booths outside monster truck shows.

  The senior executives at Turbo considered it a fluke. But when a scandal-pocked minister from north Tampa arrived at the offices of Turbo-Image with flames licking at his career, he would settle for none other than Sean Breen.

  This wasn’t funny anymore. This time his goal wasn’t satire but sabotage.

  Sean highlighted all folly and foibles in capital letters. The minister’s coterie of bottom-feeding sycophants asked why Sean’s press releases and speeches kept repeating the words “embezzlement,” “extortion,” “mistresses” and “tax evasion” in big, bold letters. And besides, they said, Sean was black! But the minister silenced them, saying that on their brightest day they couldn’t comprehend what Sean was doing.

  What Sean was doing was trying to sink the preacher. Press releases said that piles of cash diverted from church accounts were in “safekeeping from Satan.” Luxury cars, diamonds, furs and beach houses bought with church funds were used to shelter the donations from “agents of the devil.” Paid-off bimbos became salaried financial advisers whose advice was so valuable that God had told him not to reveal it lest secular institutions find out. He told the faithful to show that they were appalled by the media’s bias toward the Antichrist—and asked them to write large checks directly to the minister’s personal checking account.

  The minister’s bank account ballooned to seven digits while he was in jail on a five-hundred-count indictment.

  New accounts to Turbo-Image came quickly and furiously. The more Sean tried to blow the campaigns, the more successful he became.

  The Rapid Response corporation sought a makeover for its flagging Florida chain of convenience stores. Sean renamed it “Addiction World” with signs showing a smiley face with Spirograph eyes. He introduced the Addiction World combo box: a six-pack of beer, a pack of cigarettes and a lottery ticket. The men’s pack also had a copy of Hustler; the women’s pack a coupon for a pint of Häagen-Dazs from the freezer.

  Managers were skeptical but followed Sean’s directive to create entrance bulwarks of wine, malt liquor, tropical coolers, rolling papers, cigars and diet pills. Addiction World earnings went vertical, and imitators soon followed: Stoked Stores, Buzz Mart and Drink-n-Drive.

  The only account that didn’t work out wasn’t Sean’s fault.

  The Florida Department of Agriculture needed to change public perception in Tampa Bay. It was getting excessive grief for fighting the medfly by essentially carpet-bombing the area with the insecticide known as malathion.

  Sean proposed a campaign featuring Malley the Dancing Malathion Bear. Early focus groups showed he was so right, residents would start putting malathion on their cereal. A low-cost character actor was suited up as a tap-dancing panda and began rehearsing. Instead of a cane, he held a spray wand used for ground application of the insecticide. He pulled the sprayer’s trigger at prearranged points in his dance routine, and the footlights lit up a mist over Malley’s head reminiscent of Singin’ in the Rain.

  Except the stage crew made the mistake of using real malathion during rehearsal.

  Television news crews assembled for Malley’s debut at the Li’l Bucs preschool near Tampa Stadium. By the time Malley tapped his way out in front of the five-year-olds, he looked drunk. Malley careened off the teacher’s desk and fell to all fours, projectile-vomiting out the mouth hole of the bear mask.

  The actor gasped for air, but the catch on the bear’s head was stuck. Paramedics finally cut off the bear’s snout with a circular saw used in traffic extrications. Tots shrieked, and news cameras recorded Malley’s exit on a stretcher.

  As the Serendipity drifted farther from shore and the batteries went dead, Stinky and Ringworm decided the only rational option was to finish off the booze.

  When they awoke the next day, they were on another boat.

  It was a big boat, and the two were sitting down on the swim platform. Cement blocks sat next to them. There were chains around their necks and their hands and feet were tied.

  The boater kneeled behind the transom. He stuck a Barbie in his mouth. The boater’s pulse rate seemed to rise. Without warning, he reached over with a gaff and toppled a cement block off the swim platform. Stinky was jerked by the neck off the platform and beneath the waves.

  Ringworm stared up into the eyes of a long-gone fetish aficionado getting off. Ringworm visited a land of panic that few ever know; he flopped around the platform, a fish on a hot sidewalk. The boater’s breathing became more labored. He reached over
again with the gaff. This time he pushed the block up on its edge to a teetering point and held it.

  Ringworm’s eyes locked on the cement block as it balanced precariously. The boater pushed the gaff and the block slipped and splashed into the water.

  Eighteen

  Serge crossed the Royal Palm Bridge onto Palm Beach at one o’clock and by one-ten had abandoned the car on the side of Worth Avenue.

  “We don’t need to live like this,” he said of the car and everything. “We got more than forty grand left.”

  They took three shoulder bags from the trunk and walked up the avenue.

  “Say whatever you want about Palm Beach,” said Serge, “but ya gotta admit they have some bitchin’ shrubbery.”

  They window-shopped for a block and Serge waved them into a boutique. “We have a wardrobe situation to fix.”

  Coleman held an Armani up in the mirror and Sharon checked out an Anna Sui. The staff blanched. Near the entrance, Serge found a silver service. “Ooooooo. Com-ple-men-tary coffee.”

  The head salesman, on bum patrol, asked Serge pointedly, “Can I help you?”

  Serge tried to guess the man’s weight as he took an extra-slow sip of coffee, forcing up the salesman’s blood pressure.

  “I’d like to see something that screams Miami Beach!” said Serge with caffeine confidence.

  “Sir,” the salesman said with a sweep of his hand that dismissed Serge, “I don’t think you—”

  “You don’t think what?” Serge yelled, and stuck ten thousand dollars in the man’s face. “Look at this wad, fuck-wad!”

  For the next hour, they enjoyed free champagne and cigars as they spent the whole ten large.

  Serge modeled a white number with a pink Ralph Lauren T-shirt. “Am I Don Johnson yet?” he asked.

  The clothes cost eight of the ten thousand. Then Serge whispered in the manager’s ear. The manager nodded and Serge stuck the other two grand in one of the manager’s inside coat pockets. The manager held a private conversation with the salesman who had tried to roust Serge. There was a disagreement and the manager shouted down the salesman, who walked up to Serge and said nothing.