Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Serge zipped up a windbreaker to cover the bloodstain and grabbed his camera. He peered out the door and saw the officer not paying attention, gazing over the balcony’s railing down into the lobby.

  Serge backed up to the doorway with the camera and started taking pictures into the room. The officer heard him and turned.

  “Hey you! You’re not supposed to be in there! Get outta here!” The officer pointed down the stairs.

  “Sure thing.”

  Susan was behind the front desk, taking a statement from the hotel manager, when the manager pointed at Serge coming down the stairs. He said offhand, “That’s him right there.”

  Serge saw the woman in the sheriff’s uniform over at the hotel desk, spinning toward him, going for her gun. But Serge already had his gun in hand, hidden under the windbreaker, and he pulled it and had it sighted on her immediately.

  “Freeze!” he shouted. Susan stopped, her hand on the pistol, still in the holster.

  They stared at each other, respective heartbeats blocking out everything. Serge saw the name plate on Susan’s uniform. S. Tchoupitoulas.

  “You’re Suzie. Samuel’s girl.”

  She nodded, looking down the barrel.

  “Say hi to your dad for me,” Serge said. He lowered the barrel and tossed the gun underhand, and it landed at Susan’s feet. He turned and casually walked toward the door of the Purple Pelican.

  Susan drew her own gun and held it in a two-handed grip. “Freeze!”

  He kept walking.

  “I’ll shoot!” Susan shouted with more verve and determination this time.

  Serge turned to face her from the doorway. “No you won’t.”

  He turned his back to her again and ran out of the hotel. Susan raced to the door, but the street was empty by the time she got to the sidewalk.

  Saffron spent two pissed-off hours searching another subtropical hotel room and canvassing another parking lot for a car he couldn’t find. Time for the honest, direct approach; the truth never hurt. He marched into the office of the Angel Fish Inn.

  After Saffron’s explanation, the clerk told him that his high school classmates Sean Breen and David Klein must have skipped their reunion, because they had just taken a seaplane on a sightseeing flight out to Fort Jefferson.

  “Where’s that?” asked Saffron.

  “The Dry Tortugas.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You go to the end of Key West, and you swim another seventy miles.”

  Saffron looked around the office at vibrant oil and acrylic paintings of queen, blue and French angelfish. The hands of the office clock had a rock beauty and a clown fish on the ends.

  “Does everything in this town have a theme?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the clerk.

  Saffron had the windows rolled down as he followed the map around Stock Island to the seaplane office. He unconsciously tapped along with “Hot Fun in the Summertime” on the Alpine stereo.

  The white gravel crunched under his wheels as he drove through the parking lot of an old marina. He could see the seaplanes tethered on the far end, but he still hadn’t found the office.

  A man in sandals and a Blue Parrot T-shirt walked out of a plywood shack that Saffron had thought was a failing snack bar. The man lowered a corrugated PVC shutter over the front of the hut.

  Saffron was halfway to the man when he saw the burnt-orange windsock under his arm.

  “Sorry, we sent the last flight out twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Had to cancel the others. Storm front moving in.”

  Saffron pulled a thousand from his pocket.

  “I mean, we’re now boarding.”

  Sean’s sinuses said the barometer was appropriate when he and David skimmed over the Marquesas Atoll at a hundred feet. The sky empty and bright except for the string of popcorn clouds toward Cuba. Three dolphin swam in a pod near the northwest shore of the atoll. A flock of gulls took off from the mast of a half-submerged, rusty wreck.

  Their pilot looked like Jack Nicklaus on a bender. His cobalt-blue golf shirt was untucked and his sunburn line ended a half inch below the white sun visor. He worked the plane’s pedals with designer sandals made from old tires and was otherwise wistful, laconic and punctual.

  He had a case of Budweiser under his pilot’s seat. The pilot saw Sean looking worried at the beer. “That’s in case we run into the shrimpers,” he said, and said no more.

  They all wore headphones; the pilot had big red ones with a microphone he didn’t use, and Sean and David had smaller models, yellow and blue. Sean noticed all the primary colors were represented but kept it to himself.

  They had been flying about a half hour, and there was no longer any evidence of man. The last few mangrove islands dribbled off when the loggerhead turtles appeared, dozens of them scattered across the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico, wiggling tiny flippers as the Cessna’s shadow ran over them.

  David checked the horizon over the cowling of the seaplane and saw it first. It reminded him of that smooth black thing on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  This far out in the Gulf, in a world without corners, a long rectangle the size of a shopping mall started to rise out of the sea in the middle of nowhere and halfway to nowhere else.

  As they got closer, Fort Jefferson took form, a brick hexagon. Jack Nicklaus banked and began his landing approach by circling the fort, which revealed a grassy courtyard inside three stories of masonry. It had a moat, bridge, dock, pockets of coconut palms and a sandy beach against the moat wall on the south side.

  A collection of sailboats and yachts was anchored in the harbor, and the pilot split them with his landing. He cut the throttle back, and the plane fell, giving Sean and David a down-elevator feeling in their stomachs. The pontoons hit the water hard, seemed to bounce, and settled in as the Cessna taxied to the beach.

  The front of the pontoons wedged into the sand. Jack Nicklaus jumped down into the ankle-deep water. Sean and David climbed out more slowly.

  David stood on the left pontoon, handing gear to Sean in the water. “This isn’t the kind of place people end up by accident.”

  Sean slipped and fell to one knee. “But sometimes by mistake.”

  Charles Saffron’s pilot was a talking machine. Lanky and activated, with curly, uncombed hair and a handlebar mustache. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties and had overslept his entire life.

  “It’s the whole Indiana Jones, Banana Republic, Romancing the Stone thing!” he said, flying happy. “Your own slice of paradise.”

  Most passengers want to sit in the copilot’s seat when its available, but Saffron took one look at the pilot and went directly for the back of the plane. The pilot was somehow mellow and wired at the same time, and was too distracted to take offense by the reaction from Saffron, who was reminded of Mark Fidrych, the Detroit Tigers pitcher who talked to baseballs.

  “Man, this is the beginning and the end of Florida. It’s our answer to the top of Mount Everest, the bottom of Death Valley and last call at Rick’s.”

  Don’t call me “man,” the voice inside Saffron’s head said, and he opened a camouflage dry box in his lap.

  “Man, the craziest things happen out here! You should hear the stories!”

  No I shouldn’t.

  “First it was a fort, to protect shipping in the gulf, like Gibraltar. Can you dig?”

  Nope. Saffron took pistols out of the box and loaded them.

  “But soldiers caught yellow fever and fell like bowling pins. They quarantined them on a sandbar. Too much!”

  Saffron inspected calibration of the sights.

  “Then it was a prison. Guess what? A bunch of the prisoners went crazy. I know I would. They tried to swim over a hundred miles to the Everglades. Never found.”

  Halfway out to the Tortugas, the pilot said, “My name’s Tom Johnson. But they call me Crash Johnson.”

  Crash had a habit of turning completely around to face Saffron in the backseat when he spoke.
He detected Saffron’s apprehension.

  “Aw, this thing flies itself.”

  Saffron thought if it did, I’d have already shot you.

  “The USS Maine sailed from here for Havana. That’s where it got blown up. It started the Spanish-American War. You like history?”

  Nope.

  “Like the guy who shot Lincoln, right? There was this other guy, a doctor who didn’t know who he was, and he fixed his broken leg. They threw him in jail anyway, ’cause they were that mad. Guess where they sent him?”

  I have no idea.

  “Right! Fort Jefferson. You can go in his cell—it’s on the tour. You know that tortugas means turtles in Spanish? Or is it Mexican?”

  Crash scratched his chin.

  “Anyway, you probably wonder why they call it the Dry Tortugas out in the middle of all this friggin’ water….”

  Not once.

  “There ain’t no fresh water! You can die of thirst out here!” said Crash. “You see the pattern? People who come to the Tortugas have the kind of bad luck usually only seen in Greek plays.”

  That’s how it’s beginning to feel, thought Saffron.

  “See that island over there? Know what sailors used to do? They’d step on all the birds’ eggs and the birds would lay fresh ones in a few hours. Instant breakfast! Hey, you know what I think?…”

  Saffron wanted to carve a design in his own forehead with a scuba knife, but they were preparing to land and it would be over soon. Crash circled the fort an extra time on the approach to the harbor, because he couldn’t explain all the historic features the first time around.

  They landed far more smoothly than Saffron expected and parked on the beach next to another seaplane.

  Crash climbed down and opened Saffron’s door with effervescence. “Welcome to the nineteenth century!”

  The moat wall was about eight feet across, wide enough for two-way foot traffic. Sean and David threw their gear under a palm tree and went for a walk on the wall to get the lay of the fort.

  They began clockwise from the southern beach. The moat wall acted as a breaker for the surf from the Gulf, and it created distinct ecosystems on each side. On the left was typical open-sea terrain. A giant manta ray flapped slowly by an anchor from a forgotten galleon. A territorial barracuda ran off smaller fish at one corner of the moat wall. They could see tarpon fins at another.

  To the right, the wall protected colonies of sea horses, squirts, urchins and anemones. A pulsing jellyfish floated by, a small hot-air balloon. A tourist coming toward them was walking his fish, literally. He broke off pieces of bread and threw them into the moat as he strolled. A fish snagged each piece of bread, keeping perfect pace with the man’s stride.

  Saffron wanted to know whether Sean and David were on the other seaplane, and he tried to strike up a conversation with Jack Nicklaus. He determined he needed dynamite to get the time of day. On average, he thought, the pilots were pleasant.

  After five exhausting minutes, Saffron got a rough description of Sean and David, and he left without punctuating an end to the chat.

  Saffron grabbed a sandwich from his collapsible cooler and started around the moat wall counterclockwise. He remembered how much he hated pimiento and started breaking pieces off the sandwich and throwing it to the fish in the moat.

  The two men ahead on the moat wall fit the description he was looking for, and Saffron used the novelty of the trained fish to engage Sean and David in superficial talk. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to drop guard in the Tortugas. There was the automatic bond of extraordinary effort to get this far from anything else.

  Sean and David discovered others in the Tortugas weren’t the old poolside gang from the Hilton. This was a slightly hardier confluence of lifestyles. Millionaire adventures in yachts, marine biology students from the University of Florida, net fishermen from trawlers and a band of park rangers who inhabited a corner of the fort like a sect of monks.

  Most urgent to Saffron was whether Sean and David had found the money. If not, he’d hang back and let them lead him to their car. If they had found it, the money undoubtedly had been moved and Sean and David were a flight risk. In that case he’d have to accelerate plans and initiate confrontation with overwhelming force.

  Saffron wanted to construct a discussion that wouldn’t appear too curious but would spring loose clues that they suddenly felt incredibly wealthy. New home, travel plans, premature retirement, kept women.

  Saffron decided their answers were ambiguous and ambivalent. Could go either way. David was moving and Sean planned to leave his job. But he detected no wild new rhythms often found in lottery winners, like a nascent heroin habit.

  On the other hand, they might have found the money and be playing it cool.

  “Hey, guys!”

  Oh no, thought Saffron. Coming down the moat wall in flippers and knee-length beach jams was Crash Johnson. His nose white from zinc sunblock. The beach jams were bright cadmium orange, and Saffron noticed they were covered with smiling octopuses wearing sailor hats.

  “Sixteen million bricks, that’s how many. They started building in 1846. I like to hang out on the roof. I pretend I’m the king,” Crash said, putting his hands on his hips like Yul Brynner. His voice was nasal because of the swim plugs in his nose that were connected by a thin strip of pink rubber looping from nostril to nostril.

  “That other island with the lighthouse is Loggerhead Key,” he said, looking west four miles. “It’s the very end of the keys, of all Florida in fact.”

  As Crash spoke, the three couldn’t take their eyes off the thin rubber strip under his nose, and Crash scrunched his neck and bent his knees to get lower and lower into their line of sight.

  “You need to bring dishwashing liquid to take a bath. Did you know regular soap won’t lather in salt water? It’s like rubbing a smooth stone on your skin. Found that out camping here three days once.”

  They stared at the pink rubber and Crash stood back up.

  “Well, gotta go snorkeling.” He waved.

  Saffron hated him. The stupid bastard obviously had no money but was content as all outdoors, and Saffron was furious at the lack of justice in the world.

  “Where were we?” he said to Sean and David.

  Another voice interrupted, from the beach: “Shrimpers!”

  It was Jack Nicklaus, and he was running for the seaplane.

  Others on the beach sprinted across the sand for a row of beached dinghies and pushed them off in what looked like an emergency escape.

  Around the corner of the fort, across the water, came the mechanical sound of general calamity. It had the backbeat of Creedence Clearwater.

  “What kind of a verb is chooglin’ anyway?” asked David.

  A small, tattered diesel boat appeared. The crew of wildcat shrimpers laughed and hooted.

  Jack Nicklaus pulled the case of Budweiser from under his pilot’s seat and ran for the dock. Most of the dinghies had turned around and were racing back to the shore from the yachts and sailboats in the harbor. Loaded down with bottles of Beefeater and Stolichnaya. They joined the pilot on the dock.

  As the shrimp boat pulled to the pier, the yachtsmen ran alongside, handing bottles over the railing before the boat had stopped.

  A large shrimper in blue waders came up on deck carrying two five-gallon buckets. The others filled hefty plastic sacks from the buckets containing shrimp.

  The yachters held up the giant bags of shrimp like the heads of their enemies; the shrimpers already had most of the bottles open. The one in waders announced, “All the best liquor and no mixers. I’ll give a whole bag of shrimp for a single Coke.” A man wearing Top-Siders and a Rolex ran for a cooler like the shrimper’s own butler.

  Soon, the western breeze would carry the scent of shrimp grilling across the beach.

  From the moat wall, Sean, David and Saffron saw Crash talking with some shrimpers, gesticulating at different parts of the fort in a one-man stage production of history. The sh
rimpers laughed hard, slapped Crash on the back and invited him onto the boat.

  Twenty-seven

  Fred McJagger’s yacht was anchored on the south side of Tortugas harbor, and Max Minimum had zipped ashore in a dinghy when he saw the shrimp trading.

  Minimum brushed butter on the shrimp snapping and popping on a grill at the south end of the beach. He ate them with the Channellock pliers he’d found in a toolbox on the dinghy, which was aground between the pier and the coal docks. Those shrimpers made a stupid trade, Minimum thought.

  The barbecued shrimp was succulent, and Minimum threw his trash on the beach. He went inside the fort to get tourist information and maybe take the tour of sights and mock the toil of history.

  Sean and David climbed down a circular staircase from the top of the fort and ducked as they entered the low-ceilinged visitor center. They sorted through pamphlets.

  “You guys like to snorkel?”

  Sean and David turned to see Minimum.

  “I came down here on my boss’s yacht,” Minimum said. “He sent me away from the office because I was making too many damn sales. They said they needed to let all the paperwork catch up.”

  He stopped to chuckle. “But I’m all alone and I wanted to do some snorkeling. I need some dive buddies.”

  David said there were always people diving near the moat wall.

  Minimum shook his head negative. “I mean the real stuff. Out at Loggerhead.” He cocked his head west.

  “There’s a great reef on the far side called Little Africa because that’s what it’s shaped like. I hear it’s amazing, probably the finest in the Keys ’cause it’s so isolated. Wanna go?”

  Sean and David hesitated.

  “Come on! You’ll love it. I can’t go alone,” he pleaded. “Safety rules.”

  Sean and David looked at each other and shrugged. Why not?

  “Good, good!” said Minimum. “Meet me at the dock in ten minutes.”

  “Can I come too?” Charles Saffron asked from the doorway.