Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  A week at sea, Minimum was finally appearing natural behind the helm as he piloted the yacht into the deep, narrow channel between the fort and Bush Key. He took the small ship on a curling course first northwest and then west-southwest.

  Minimum yelled against the wind: “I hear there’s killer lobster at the reef, but they’re off limits under federal law.”

  The yacht was so sturdy, the deck barely moved in the mild, open-Gulf chop on the way to Loggerhead. Minimum’s sailing jacket was open and the tail fluttered behind him. He turned the wheel with facility, an illusion of ruggedness. Saffron sat on his hands, deceptively harmless.

  Sean and Dave were running out of money. They wouldn’t be if Sean hadn’t outsmarted himself and hidden the five hundred dollars of traveler’s checks where he couldn’t remember.

  “I told you I hid it!”

  “Where?”

  “If I knew…” And so on.

  Saffron picked up on the friction, but the words sailed downwind and out of earshot. When the wind died for a moment, all he heard was the last line of the conversation.

  “When we get the money from where you hid it, we’ll be set,” said David. “It’s our ticket out of here.”

  Bingo. Saffron fast-tracked his plans.

  Minimum anchored the yacht in soft sand and twelve feet of water and the reef was between them and Loggerhead. They were even with the lighthouse.

  Loggerhead faced them broadside, but the map told them it was a long sliver of island that came to a point on the southwestern end where the Gulf Stream filed it down. Minimum was in the water first. Sean and David next, and Saffron, who kept his shirt on to swim. They drifted over purple sea fans and orbs of brain coral. Staghorn and elkhorn coral, tube sponges, grunts, damsels, yellowtail snapper, tangs, parrotfish and even a flying gurnard.

  A tarpon big enough to win the tournament at Boca Grande drifted feet from Sean. The silver wall startled him, which drove off the fish. Two black rays with seven-foot wingspans swam in slow motion between them.

  As the four paddled, the coral came closer to their stomachs. Sean raised his mask and saw the beach twenty yards ahead. They worked their way over to a fissure and swam to the beach.

  Sean imagined he was a shipwrecked sailor from the 1800s finally reaching safety, and what he saw was exactly what such a mariner would have found. It was a few dozen yards across the narrow part of the island to the lighthouse. Inside was one ranger, high up and asleep.

  Sean and David said they wanted to go to the southwest end; they wanted to be able to say they’d reached the real end of the state. Saffron wanted to tag along.

  Minimum said he would rest on the beach near the lighthouse. He pointed out an approaching squall line in the distance, to the west, and told them they didn’t have a lot of time. Then he lay down for a nap.

  Sean and David walked the few hundred yards to the bottom of the island, studying the low beach brush. The wind whipped up at once, and they looked out at a low-slung gray front coming in fast over a bright blue sky.

  “We’re almost there,” Sean said. They reached the end of the island in another minute and took turns standing on the tip of the state, their feet dipping into the water at the sharp, sandy point.

  “Forget ‘southernmost point’ in Key West,” Sean said as David took his picture with a disposable waterproof camera. “This is The Spot.”

  “You’ve run out of Florida, assholes.”

  Saffron was pointing a Glock 9mm.

  “Where’s the five million?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The five million dollars that Veale gave you.”

  “Who?” asked David.

  Sean showed recognition. “You mean that crazy doctor?”

  “Right.”

  A faint yell came from up the island. Minimum ran toward them shouting they had to get off the island and back to safe harbor at Fort Jefferson. The storm was rolling in too fast.

  Saffron concealed the gun against his side and faced Minimum, thirty yards up the beach. With his back to Sean and David he raised his shirttail and slipped the Glock back in the holster. “Be right there.”

  He turned back to Sean and David. “No scene. Not one word to him or I’ll fuckin’ shoot all three of you. What’s stopping me?”

  It was a tense and bizarre swim back out to the boat. Minimum wondered what was up, the other three repeatedly stopping, looking at each other. The sky was black on the ride back toward Garden Key. No rain yet, but twenty degrees cooler.

  Once Minimum was under way, he felt more confident about the weather and took time to change into long sweatpants. He threw extra pairs of sweats to the others. He handed out cups of coffee in mugs with the logo of Vista Lago Estates.

  Sean awoke as he usually did when he slept in the middle of the day, not knowing when or where he was. He looked around in alarm at David and Saffron, who had regained consciousness earlier from the barbiturate-spiked coffees. Minimum stood on the fantail and stared down at them with a Barbie in his mouth.

  The three were spread out sitting down on the swim platform, handcuffed behind their backs. Their ankles manacled and eight feet of chain connecting their necks to cement blocks. David in the middle; Saffron on the right.

  The top of the fort was barely visible above the horizon, and David figured they were anchored about five miles off the far side of Loggerhead. It was still an hour until sunset, but the low-pressure front made it appear later. The sun peeked out under the cloud ceiling.

  Minimum was on his knees behind the stern and breathing harder.

  From the edge of David’s sight, he noticed Saffron focused on Minimum and slowly lifting up his shirttail with handcuffed hands, going for his gun.

  Minimum gave a sickening grunt and without warning leaned over the transom with the gaff and toppled Saffron’s cement block into the water. The terror generated voltage inside Saffron and the veins in his neck and face popped to the surface; small blood vessels in the whites of his eyes broke. He was yanked off the platform and disappeared beneath the water.

  Minimum, breathing even harder, leaned over again, reaching toward David’s cement block.

  David’s eyes bulged and his system flooded with endocrine and steaming surges, and he saw Minimum liked it.

  Minimum leaned forward with the gaff, and stopped halfway, to prolong. He reached farther until the tip of the gaff touched the block.

  David had worked his feet up under him, and when Minimum was at the farthest point of his lean, David thrust upward. He intended to head-butt Minimum, but didn’t get his legs set right and missed.

  David’s forehead would have hit Minimum in the mouth except Barbie was there, and he hit her square in the feet.

  Minimum stumbled backward and clutched his throat like Kennedy in the Zapruder film. David was standing up straight now and could see into the boat. Barbie had fallen out of Minimum’s mouth onto the deck.

  Except she had no head. It was lodged in Minimum’s trachea like a Titleist golf ball. He reeled and staggered and finally tried to give himself a Heimlich. He charged at the railing and in his panic hit it far too hard and low, and he flipped over into the water.

  David and Sean watched astonished as Minimum fought and splashed on his back in the Gulf, unable to drown because he was choking to death. He drifted west, gradually moving less until only an occasional twitch, and then completely still, a log of flotsam in the sunset.

  David looked around for leverage to break the handcuff links. He steadied himself for balance when the front tossed up a series of chops that pitched the boat. He looked over at Sean and saw him trying to stand. As the yacht rolled, Sean’s cement block slid closer and closer to the edge of the swim platform until it fell in the water.

  Sean was gone.

  David was thinking in numbers now and it was simple math: Sean had two kids and a wife. He didn’t.

  David kicked his own cement block into the water.

  Twenty-eight

>   Salt water flooded into Sean’s nostrils as he was pulled by his neck to the bottom of the Gulf. When the cement block stopped, Sean hung upside down eight feet above the ocean floor. Alongside was a dead Saffron. Sean’s body jolted with glands that seared his insides and made muscles spasm and contort.

  He felt as if his heart had burst and his chest cavity were full of boiling blood. He had gotten only a quick breath on the way down and it was long gone. Thirty feet under, the pressure stabbed his eardrums, and his lungs crushed. His mind was in hell.

  There was large movement next to him as David’s block hit the ocean floor, landing between Sean and Saffron.

  David twisted through the water until the hands behind his back found Saffron. He had overestimated his air supply and it was already depleted. His chest started to thrust.

  Upside down and disoriented, David found it harder than he’d expected. Blindly, he turned Saffron around little by little, a few inches of his shirt at a time. David’s fingertips felt around behind him frantically. He grabbed Saffron’s belt and turned him some more. His lungs were about to blow; he didn’t even look to see how Sean was doing. He felt a leather strap a little lower on Saffron and followed it to the middle of his back and the holster. There was no time left, but he couldn’t rush and drop the gun or it was over.

  He came up with the pistol, and kicked away from Saffron. He bumped into Sean, this time luckier, and he quickly felt the chain at Sean’s neck. He groped in the dark water and pressed the gun to the chain and pulled the trigger. As advertised, the Glock fired underwater.

  Sean shot to the surface. He sneezed and inhaled water through his nose as the chops washed over his head. David doubled over below the Gulf, grabbed his own chain and fired again. He popped back up next to Sean, and they struggled, trying to tread water. Sean thought they’d escaped from the ocean floor only to drown on the surface, but David managed over the next few minutes to shoot through both their handcuffs.

  They ripped the tape off their mouths and swam to the anchored yacht, Serendipity II.

  When the radio call from the Fort Jefferson ranger’s station came in to Key West, Susan Tchoupitoulas asked if she could fly out on the Coast Guard rescue helicopter.

  The duty officer said the core of the storm was still on the way, but it was her call.

  The chopper made time despite the headwind. A petty officer turned the searchlight down into the harbor, where there was growing confusion. Three marine biology students chased a dome tent that had pulled up its stakes in the wind and blew across the beach, a three-hundred-dollar nylon tumbleweed. Half the anchors had pulled loose from the soft bottom, and the boats blew toward the others. Collision sirens and klaxons went off. Several fired their engines and backed around in the close quarters in a high-stakes game of asteroids.

  “This looks awful,” said Tchoupitoulas.

  “Actually, this is pretty tame for the Tortugas,” said the petty officer.

  In contrast to the pandemonium in the harbor, two park rangers escorted Sean and David calmly across the moat bridge to a clearing between the palm trees. The chopper lowered a rescue sling.

  It hovered and Sean and David squinted in the downblast. Sean came up first. David was in five minutes later. The helicopter banked and accelerated. It cleared Bush and Long keys and flew out of the leading edge of the squall into the clear, toward Key West.

  Sean and David were fine, but Susan told them they couldn’t expect the sleep they coveted. They were material witnesses and low-order suspects, although she expected that to disappear after questioning. Things had gotten wiggy in Key West with the discovery of the dead serial killer from Tampa and the escape of the other suspect. A state legislator was killed under suspicious circumstances, and then four more bodies, all members of a cocaine cartel whose trail mysteriously ended in a post office box in Grenada.

  Now add a dead manufactured-housing salesman and a Tampa insurance executive. Susan said it all seemed to spin around room 3 at the Purple Pelican. Below the helicopter, a catamaran sailed in the opposite direction toward the Tortugas, Blaine Crease in a safety harness.

  Sean and David wrapped themselves in blankets and sipped cocoa on the copter. They gave exhaustive statements until after midnight at the police office, where they reclined in Police Athletic League jogging suits and ate fried calamari from the Crab Shack.

  At one point Dave nodded toward Susan’s badge and said, “Some last name.”

  “The T’s silent,” she said, jabbing back.

  As midnight approached, Sean and David begged to go to sleep or have a beer or both.

  Susan promised if they could hang with it another hour, the department would take them to dinner the next day, expenses be damned.

  “Good,” said David, “because this guy lost our traveler’s checks.”

  Sean and David slept in past checkout at the Angelfish Inn. So late that upon waking, it was time to plan sunset activities. The phone in the room rang.

  Susan Tchoupitoulas looked more disarming in cutoffs and an oversized jersey. It said “Fighting Conchs,” her high school’s nickname. Her hair was out of the small ponytail and brushed down, not quite long enough to touch her shoulders. She didn’t need makeup.

  When Susan saw Sean and David, she stood up from her outdoor table atop the La Concha Inn, the only high-rise on the island.

  “Mallory Square is such a zoo,” she said. “This is a little better.”

  The top floor of the hotel had an indoor lounge in the middle and a wraparound deck outside. Susan was at her favorite table at the northeast corner. Except it wasn’t a real table; it was one of those cocktail deals, and their knees mashed together underneath. Sean was worried if he leaned too hard on the ledge, he might break loose a barrel tile and kill someone eight floors down on Duval Street.

  “Hope you have a good restaurant in mind,” she said. “I get to eat on the department tonight too.”

  Susan fulfilled her second promise, to fill them in on everything. There was no real investigation to jeopardize, because just about everyone was dead.

  Susan told them about the missing five million dollars and the string of murders all over the island by and among drug enforcers and Florida lowlifes.

  “What about us?” asked Sean.

  “Looks like mistaken identity,” she said. “We checked the records and room three at the Purple Pelican was your room before you canceled. There are no other links. As far as we’re concerned, you’re in the clear.”

  She took a sip of her Coke. A crowd of visitors from the suburbs of America filed onto the deck. In another corner, a two-piece band backed by a tape-deck set up. The crowd, fresh from the theme parks of Orlando, began shouting for “Margaritaville.”

  “People think these criminals were geniuses, especially that idiot Blaine Crease,” said Susan. “They left a slick of evidence a mile wide.”

  “What about that doctor I met?” asked Sean.

  “It appears the guys named Serge and Coleman killed him in Cocoa Beach and took the five million,” Susan said. “They dropped a bread-crumb trail of hundred-dollar bills all down the coast. The serial numbers matched the bank in Tampa.”

  “So where’s the money?” asked Sean.

  “We’ll probably never know,” she said. “Serge and Coleman hid it somewhere. Doesn’t really matter. It was all cocaine money, so nobody’s making a stink. Everyone connected with the insurance company is running for cover.”

  A man who looked like Weird Al Yankovic sat on a stool holding a guitar. The tourists pressed closer and quieted.

  Susan continued: “The district attorney’s office says it’s almost better if the money is never found. A Costa Gordan holding company has put in a claim for the cash. Everyone knows it’s drug money, but the DA says the holding company has a better than even shot arguing that Saffron and New England Life stole it from them and it should be returned.”

  “What about those Latins?” asked Sean.

  “You mea
n Uzbekistanians. Part of the new Russian mob in south Florida. They rented a postal drop in Grenada and tried to go native.”

  Susan looked at the singer in the corner and back at David. “I used to love Buffett.”

  Yankovic, in a bright shirt with parrots, began strumming. “Nibblin’ on sponge cake…” The crowd went goofy.

  “Let’s go inside,” Susan suggested.

  They settled in at the bar with green frozen drinks. The TV was on Florida Cable News. Blaine Crease bobbed in his harness on the prow of the catamaran. In the background was Fort Jefferson, and next to him in a second safety harness was a young man in octopus beach jams.

  Crease spoke dramatically at the camera. “Tonight we have an exclusive interview with Crash Johnson, The Hit Man’s Pilot!”

  Crash leaned into Crease’s microphone. “Hi.” He smiled and gave a quick wave.

  “As the personal pilot to Charles Saffron…” began Crease.

  “I wasn’t actually his personal…”

  “But as the pilot who spent a great deal of one-on-one time flying with the murderer…”

  “He really didn’t talk much.”

  “When did you first realize he was a time bomb, the infamous Keys Killer?”

  “When you told me. Remember? Just before we put on these harnesses.”

  “Harnesses?” Crease laughed.

  “Yeah, right under your suit there.”

  Crease cleared his throat.

  “They used to have fresh water out here at Fort Jefferson, but you know what?” asked Crash. “All the cisterns cracked…. Guess what Tortugas means?…”

  Crease broke in: “The murderous events of the last few days have taken their toll in the Florida Keys, including this brave young air force veteran who endured a life-or-death flight…”

  “When was I in the air force?”

  “…and is clearly disoriented. That’s our report this evening from the killing waters of the Dry Tortugas.”

  “Thanks, Blaine,” said the spunky anchorwoman. “And now to the Krome Avenue immigration and detention center west of Miami….”