by Dorsey, Tim
The third agent grabbed the Dodge salesman by the hair and smashed his face on the bar sideways. In front of his face the agent slapped down a warrant from Paraguay in connection with eleven terrorist bombings. It had a picture of the Dodge salesman and the name Che Mendez, also known as “The Wolverine,” also known as “The Dingo,” also known as “The Yellow-Banded Carpet Weevil.”
“It’s the end of the road, Che,” said the agent.
A thick Spanish accent came out of the Dodge salesman. “¡Viva la revolución!” And they dragged him out the door.
“Let’s go to another bar,” said Coleman.
The next-to-last island on the Overseas Highway used to be Key West’s barnyard, raising cattle for the residents, and it was named Stock Island.
Serge turned the LeMans north from US 1 onto Cross Street and took Fifth Street until he came to Cow Key Channel.
He drove across the parking lot to the dock and turned the car off. Coleman could see something had Serge shook up as he looked out at the cement-block building.
“It’s gone!” said Serge.
“What is?”
“Cow Key Marina!”
Coleman looked at the peach-colored building and the fraternity brothers milling around by the Jet Skis, holding credit cards. Serge got out of the car and walked around with Coleman.
“This is where they filmed the movie!” said Serge. “Peter Fonda blew up a boat right there. That was during his Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry period. And over there is where Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton talked about murder. The shutters were painted with sailfish. Now it’s a fucking snack display.”
Coleman nodded.
Serge walked to a place in the gravel, pointing down. “This is where the tiki hut used to be, where Margot Kidder and Elizabeth Ashley got in a fight. I was out here in the eighties and a guy drove up in a Torino and pawned it for a six-pack. Then he walked home.”
“Far out,” said Coleman.
“This is a really bad sign,” Serge said.
He moped on his way back to the car, and didn’t speak as they drove to the dive boat docked a few blocks away.
Twenty-five
Captain Bradley Xeno got to be a captain by simply buying a boat, which Serge thought was a hell of a loophole. Serge insisted on addressing him as “Ensign,” and Xeno hated him the second they met.
This put Serge in the company of every other paying customer Xeno ever had. Xeno owned a thirty-foot Wellcraft and made the payments by shuttling tourists on abbreviated snorkeling trips out to crappy, polluted reefs with no fish.
Standard reef trips by other boats ran a pleasant three to four hours, but about an hour and fifteen minutes into his excursions Xeno couldn’t stand the thought of strangers on his boat any longer. He’d run everyone out of the water, race back and dump them on the dock, bewildered and bitter.
Considering it took forty-five minutes just to get to the reef, passengers had barely learned how to blow the spit out of their snorkels before they were marshaled back into the boat. He didn’t allow talking on board.
Sometimes he’d wait at a dive site too long, giving passengers time to notice and ask, “Hey, where are the fish?”
At which times Xeno would say, “You want fish? Go to Red Lobster!”
He always had a week of stubble, because it made him feel studly. His glasses were green mirrors with a caution-yellow frame. He wore the tight mid-thigh shorts of football players at training camp.
He sold tickets out of a Duval Street booth and moored the boat at Cow Key Channel.
Serge and Coleman showed up in their beards. Xeno took one look and said, “No drinking until after diving.”
Coleman opened a sixteen-ounce Bud in front of Xeno and guzzled it empty in one pull. He smiled at Xeno. “I’ve just finished diving for the day.” He pushed past the captain and jumped into the boat, landing with a loud, flat-footed thud.
Xeno cringed. “Be careful!”
“There a problem, Ensign?” asked Serge.
Xeno turned back around and saw Serge and made a mental note to cut the trip even shorter today.
During the ride out, Xeno sighed and made facial contortions, constantly registering annoyance with everyone.
When Xeno told a single mother to “watch your damn kid,” he began an inexorable slide toward Serge.
Six miles out, near the reef, the small boy spotted something on the southern horizon, toward the Gulf Stream.
Serge checked with his binoculars. Five miles away were a half-dozen skinny men in rags on what looked like a bunch of bathtub toys lashed together.
“Rafters,” said Serge. “They don’t look good.”
“Fuck ’em,” said Xeno. “They come here to steal our jobs and end up sucking unemployment out of my pocket.”
Xeno turned around and saw the end of a.38 snub-nose between his eyes. “Go pick ’em up,” said Serge.
Steam was practically coming out of Xeno’s ears as the six Cuban refugees climbed into his beloved boat, laughing, saluting and chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Serge asked the single mom to walk her little boy up to the bow, and she did.
“What was that for?” said Xeno, cranky.
“Take your clothes off.”
“You can’t be serious!” said Xeno, dressed in rags, standing out on the raft. “I could die.”
“It’s all for the better,” said Serge. “Like you just said, these refugees are just gonna take your job. You’ll end up a displaced worker, and then I’ll have to pay your unemployment out of my pocket.”
As Serge untied the rope to the raft, Captain Xeno pleaded. Serge responded by singing Tom Petty. “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.”
Serge cast off the rope that had connected the raft to the Wellcraft, and Xeno slowly floated out into the Gulf Stream.
Serge yelled, “We don’t like bigots in this country!”
“Yeah,” yelled Coleman. “We don’t like Cubans either!”
Serge turned and gave him the stink eye.
“Sorry,” said Coleman.
Serge was now off the chart, medication-wise. Under the spirit and letter of U.S. law, he was no longer competent to stand trial.
Instead of cruising to the nearest port, he piloted the boat back to the reef.
He handed out masks, snorkels, fins and safety vests to the refugees, who listened carefully and nodded, believing this might be naturalization training. What began as a celebration soured to befuddlement for the Cubans, who found themselves back in the water, forced to learn how to snorkel at gunpoint.
Serge leaned over the side of the boat, talking to the refugees with the revolver in one hand and a waterproof fish guide in the other. He tapped the plastic fish card twice with the gun barrel.
“Can any of you identify a sergeant major?”
The Insurance industry has raised invasion of privacy to a level that makes the FBI salivate. So when Charles Saffron wanted info, he didn’t have to look beyond his own company. New England Life trampled individual liberty with such delight that it did so even when it was easier and cheaper not to.
Saffron dialed his Tampa office from the presidential suite in the Ocean King Resort at the bottom of Simonton Street. He tracked Grenadine down to a spate of phone calls billed to his home number and placed from Shrimpboat Willie’s Motel and Grill in Key West.
It couldn’t be this simple, Saffron thought, standing in Grenadine’s second-floor room fifteen minutes later. He didn’t even need to use a credit card; the warped door popped open with a firm tug. And now, staring at him from a yellow legal pad on top of the television:
“Serge/Coleman [underlined], Purple Pelican, Room 3, 10/27.”
He scrambled out the window and lowered himself hand over hand on a hurricane tie-down cable when he heard the Costa Gordans breaking in.
In room 3 of the Purple Pelican, Coleman was giving his new ceramic toucan water pipe a test spin. He crossed his legs in the middle of the floor and put
his mouth over the end of the toucan’s bright orange beak. The bird made the unmistakable bubbling sound as it filled with hash smoke. Coleman raised up and took a deep breath and tried to hold it as best he could, but he began sneezing it out his nose and then lost the whole thing in a massive coughing fit.
He sat there dazed in the illegal cloud. “Lung capacity ain’t what it used to be,” he said to himself. “Wonder why that is.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?” asked Coleman.
“Southernmost Blintz.”
“Munchies!” said Coleman. “Come in!”
Three Latin men entered the room and whipped Israeli submachine guns with silencers from their jackets. The three swept the ends of their guns from side to side as they sprayed the center of the room.
The silencers gave the guns a deceptively gentle purring sound as the ceramic toucan shattered and the colorful glass splinters showered the room. When they were done, they dragged Coleman’s body out of the way and propped it in a corner, and then began pulling the place apart.
The purple bar of hotel soap shaped like a pelican made a metallic ping when it hit the stainless-steel tray. Dr. Sheldon Killjoy had dropped it there with what Susan Tchoupitoulas thought looked like a pair of salad tongs.
“They are salad tongs,” said Killjoy.
The Southernmost Morgue on Atlantic Boulevard shared space with a clothing-optional laundromat and the Unofficial Jimmy Buffett Museum, which was facing torrential litigation.
Susan asked Killjoy about the soap extracted from the off-color Mo Grenadine lying before them.
“Still looks accidental,” said killjoy. “That bar of soap is nothing. You wouldn’t believe what I find. Once there was a string of Christmas lights, and another time four pounds of quick-dry underwater concrete…”
Susan dumped out a large brown envelope on the vacant slab next to Mo’s. It held the contents of Mo’s pockets: five pennies, a ball of brown thread, a matchbook from a scuba shop, two loose antacid tablets and a room key for Shrimpboat Willie’s.
A young woman in a one-piece swimsuit and beach that pushed open a pair of shutters at the pass-through office window. She had a four-foot inflatable salt shaker under her arm and a pair of pop-top earrings in her hand. “Do I pay for these here?”
“No,” said Killjoy. He pointed with a bloody latex hand holding a liver. “The gift shop register is at the end of the next aisle.”
Susan refilled the brown envelope, except for the room key, and put it on Killjoy’s desk. “Thanks, Doc.”
A Mickey Mouse toothbrush stuck out the corner of Serge’s closed mouth as he walked down the second-floor hallway of the Purple Pelican and hummed “Smuggler’s Blues.” He wore a gamboge bathrobe with a pelican over the right breast, and he wondered when those two guys with the five million were going to show up. He had been checking with the desk clerk far past the threshold of harassment.
Serge had bought eighty-nine-cent plastic flip-flops at Eckerd’s, to prevent athlete’s foot in the European shower, and they slapped wet on the varnished wood floor. A towel was wrapped around his wet hair like a turban, which he had learned how to do as a child watching Haji on Johnny Quest.
Serge opened the door and had the feeling of a foreign object in his heart. Coleman sat in the corner, his face shot off. Three Latin men in white suits with submachine guns were tossing the place.
They saw him.
He ducked from the doorway and pressed himself against the wall next to the door.
Normally, unarmed people facing three men with machine guns will run for their lives, and the Costa Gordans didn’t think otherwise as they charged out the door. Serge clotheslined the first one with an elbow to the Adam’s apple.
He then slammed the door on the other two and jumped to the opposite side of the doorway, grabbing the fallen Costa Gordan’s machine gun on the way. The door swung back open into the hall and the other Costa Gordans ran out, looking the wrong way.
Serge shot blind through the back side of the door. Wood splinters, purple chips of paint and sawdust fluttered to the balcony floor.
He dragged the two bodies into the room. The third, who wasn’t dead, clawed at his injured throat, and Serge knocked him unconscious with a glass pelican ashtray.
Serge walked over to Coleman and sat down on the floor next to him. He put a foam Marlin on Coleman’s head and one on his own, and he stared at the ceiling.
The door creaked open. Charles Saffron walked in pointing a gun.
“If that’s how you’re gonna be, I’m definitely not buying any magazines,” said Serge.
“I want the money,” said Saffron.
Saffron looked down and saw the machine guns. “Silencers,” he said. “All the better.”
He grabbed one of the machine guns and reached behind him to return the pistol to a concealed holster in the small of his back.
Serge, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to his buddy, didn’t care anymore. He told Saffron about Veale hiding the briefcase and the two guys at the World Series and the Purple Pelican.
Still holding the machine gun on Serge, Saffron dialed his office again and fed in the stray data.
Saffron emitted a series of “uh-huhs” as he received dossiers on Sean and David, including phone calls that morning from the Angel Fish Inn.
“It all checks out,” said Saffron, and in that moment, Serge knew he was dead.
He asked Saffron, “Can you take a last photo of us?” He scooted over, put an arm around Coleman’s shoulder and smiled.
Saffron was repulsed by the sight. Coleman’s corpse had begun to attract dog peter gnats. “No way!” said Saffron.
“Please,” pleaded Serge. He picked up the camera and held it toward Saffron. “It should be focused already.”
“I said no!”
Serge pressed the shutter button and the xenon bulb flashed in Saffron’s face, blinding him. Serge dove and came up with a machine gun. Saffron yelled and fired without aim.
Events moved slower and slower until time stood still, hanging a moment in the air like a pole vaulter atop the bar. Saffron was between shots, wildly off target; Serge had just reached Saffron’s chest with the sight of the machine gun.
No air was moving. It was one of those slightly chilly days where you need a light coat on the street. But inside, with the sun filling the window, there was a cozy greenhouse effect. The light came in at a slant, making a bright tube of dancing dust. The temperature reminded Serge of a day with his mother in the early sixties, eating a tuna sandwich in the backyard.
Serge unconsciously bit a little on his tongue as he concentrated in a millisecond, aiming, ready to fire, when he felt an absolutely dumb-luck shot thump his chest. Under Serge’s adrenaline, it was but a light tap.
Serge quick-inhaled half a breath. For some reason he pictured the view from the Seven Mile Bridge and thought what a great trip it had been as he hit the floor face first.
Twenty-six
Susan Tchoupitoulas found the room at Shrimpboat Willie’s trashed. Part of it was the ransacking by the Costa Gordans, the rest was Grenadine’s lifestyle. The mattresses and pillow were gutted, and the top of the dresser was littered with empty beer cans, dirty underwear and crushed pretzels. The lamp-shades were smeared with jerky-treat grease. A yellow legal pad was torn to confetti. A shred of paper caught her eye. It read “Serge/ Colem—” and was ripped right below.
Under the bed Susan found an electronic gizmo that glowed green when she pressed the “on” switch. An arrow pointed north to a green dot on the four-inch screen.
Back in her police car, Susan’s attention was split between driving and watching the screen of the homing device, which led her up Elizabeth Street to a LeMans parked next to the Purple Pelican.
The desk clerk looked at the photos of Serge and Coleman that Susan was holding and said, “Those guys!” He pointed overhead to the balcony. “Room three.”
Susan went to her car
and called for backup. Her old partner Jeff showed up first, followed by the original Bubba, Lieutenant Turdly.
Tchoupitoulas suggested they set up a perimeter but Turdly said, “Step aside, little girl,” and blustered up the stairs. Saffron had left the door half open.
“Sir, I think we should…”
This time he brushed past her with an elbow to her ribs that was quick, subtle and unwitnessed.
“What a mess,” said Turdly, patting his stomach and marking the target for the surviving Costa Gordan, who had recovered from his throat injury and was raising a machine gun.
“Watch out!” Susan yelled and aimed her gun, but Turdly’s considerable displacement blocked the doorway and prevented a clean shot.
Susan belly-flopped on the floor behind the lieutenant, knocking the wind out of her. She fired between his legs, hitting the Costa Gordan in the mouth.
Turdly didn’t say a word at first, then: “You think you’re hot shit!” and shoved her into the door frame as he left the room.
Serge didn’t know if he was in heaven or what. He was there on the floor, hearing voices, a gunshot echoing through a canyon, and a deep voice, “…think-think-think you’re-you’re-you’re hot-hot-hot shit-shit-shit.”
There wasn’t any tunnel or bright light or disembodied flying around the room. Serge just stared up from the floor unable to move. He tried to yell for help, but it was like in a dream when nothing comes out, and he was truly scared. He got his fingertips moving a bit first and then his neck and mouth. His panic thawed enough so that he thought better of calling out. About the time he could lift his head off the floor, his chest hurt like he’d been punched by a gorilla.
His shirt was moist with a large red stain in the middle. Saffron’s shot had been luckier than he’d first thought. It was a ricochet, and it had glanced off his breastbone, causing heart arrhythmia and knocking him out.
The others had just left, and Turdly had placed an underling Bubba on guard on the balcony outside the room.