Tim Dorsey Collection #1
Page 56
The TV screen showed a diehard band of exiles waving Cuban and American flags. They had tables and chairs and beach umbrellas set up just outside the entrance gate. Buses from Immigration and Naturalization rolled through gates topped with barbed wire.
A young female correspondent in a red dress spoke to the camera: “Demonstrators have turned out to boost the spirits of the latest wave of Cuban freedom fighters to be brought to the detention center.”
Two buses turned slowly into the compound, and the camera zoomed in on a third bus, where a bearded man was trying to climb out a window.
“I’m an American!” yelled Captain Xeno, dressed in an immigration jumpsuit.
The protesters erupted in cheers. Flags waved furiously. “Libertad!” someone yelled.
“No, I mean it! I really am an American!”
“Yes you are, my brother!” yelled someone in the back of the crowd, and the group exploded in cheers again. Captain Xeno disappeared into the compound.
David said to Susan, “Excuse us for a moment.”
“Where are we going?” asked Sean.
David, standing, smacked Sean in the back where Susan couldn’t see. “We’ll be right back,” said Sean, and they both went to the men’s room.
When they came out, David sat back down, but Sean remained standing. He stretched and yawned. “Sorry to be a party-pooper, but I’m spent.”
Sean left and Susan turned to David. “You always this obvious?”
David smiled. “I’ve got a restaurant in mind.”
The Key West Police Department paid $127.42 for dinner at Louie’s Backyard and drinks on the Afterdeck Bar and nothing for the stroll on the beach.
Twenty-nine
Late the next day. David didn’t speak as he pumped gas at Dade Corners, a fueling/convenience megaplex outside Miami on the edge of the Everglades that carried shellacked alligator heads. Airboats filled the parking lot and newspaper racks showed photos of the Marlins victory parade.
David capped the tank and climbed behind the wheel. They started across the ’glades back toward Tampa.
“If you don’t want to talk about it…” said Sean.
“I don’t.”
“Because if you did…I mean, I think she’s perfect for you. You need some stability.”
David turned on the stereo, Allman Brothers, and they began counting Indian concessions on the side of the Tamiami Trail.
The Allmans sang about being born in the backseat of a bus on Highway 41. David told Sean they were singing about this road, the Tamiami Trail, US Highway 41. Halfway across the swamp, they passed the last Gray Line tour of the day, pulled over on the south shoulder. Its sixty riders taking snapshots of a white wooden shack with a sign that read: “Ochopee, smallest post office in the United States of America.”
“Did you notice about the trip?” Sean said.
“What?” asked David.
“No fish.”
Out through the windshield, the sky was blood red over Naples, and in the rearview a deep violet above Miami as the Chrysler split the Everglades without another car in sight.
Back about forty miles, where the two-lane road started its western run across the swamp, a humble gopher tortoise had begun crossing the Tamiami Trail in the fading light. Its world suddenly became much brighter as the high beams of a black Mercedes limousine lit up the road.
The limo was on cruise control doing a hundred. In the driver’s seat—actually sitting up in the driver’s window outside the limo and driving with his right foot—a man was taking photographs of the magnificent sunset over Naples. The sun barely down, crimson shafts now sprayed up into a furnace of clouds. The limo’s steering column was shattered and hot-wired, and an impound ticket from the Key West Police Department lay crumpled on the floor.
At the last second, the driver noticed he was about to hit the turtle. In a reflexive evasive maneuver, he jerked the wheel with his foot. The car yanked hard left, missed the turtle and violently threw the driver back in the window, tossing him around the front seat at will—“Whoooooooaaaaaaaa!”—as the car left the road and pounded through the sawgrass.
The driver grabbed the wheel and fought to hold it steady as he climbed up from the floor mats and back into the seat. The limousine crested the lip of a gator hole, but he managed to turn it back onto the pavement and into the proper lane.
“Geez, that turtle came out of nowhere,” the man muttered to himself, loading a.357 Magnum. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d hit it.”
The limo raced west across the Everglades, closing distance, Serge looking out at the end of his high beams for a Chrysler.
Acknowledgments
A respectful nod to my agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Paul Bresnick, two of the most dangerous men in the New York literary establishment.
Praise
Florida Roadkill
“A TWITCHY, EDGY ROMP
THROUGH FLORIDA’S SEAMY SIDE.”
Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“SCATHINGLY FUNNY…
It’s an updated version of ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,’ told by an author who apparently learned his literary skills from Hunter S. Thompson…There are no sacred cows in Dorsey’s book; everyone is scrutinized under the same satirical spotlight. Tourists, drug-runners, rednecks, bikers, developers, gun nuts, satanic rockers, and the Promise Keepers all get their comeuppance in this wildly hilarious look at the Sunshine State.”
Denver Rocky Mountain News
“I LOVED THIS…
Thomas Pynchon hacks it out with Hunter S. Thompson; referee, Elmore Leonard. But much more, too. I was close to being sick with laughter at times, other times just close to being sick. Great fun.”
M. John Harrison, author of Signs of Life
“VERY FUNNY…
action-packed … fast-paced and colorful … Events come thick and fast.”
St. Petersburg Times
“THE CHARACTERS IN TIM DORSEY’S
RAUCOUS NOVEL WOULD BE SHOT
ON SIGHT IN ANY OTHER STATE.”
The New York Times Book Review
“FLORIDA ROADKILL OUT-HIAASENS HIAASEN.
It is deranged, depraved, and dead-on.”
Les Standiford, author of Presidential Deal
“AS ENTERTAINMENT, THIS ROLLICKING,
OVER-THE-TOP NOVEL IS A BLAST…
Dorsey’s cast of dangerous oddballs chase, rob, shoot, and kill their way from Tampa to the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas…Floridian readers may laugh or wince as Dorsey skewers the state’s foibles and stereotypes.”
Publishers Weekly
“TWISTED HILARITY…
a compelling page-turner … a book that, if it was not funny, would be very, very frightening … Tim Dorsey is one sick bunny.”
Belfast News Letter
“OVER-THE-TOP OUTLANDISHNESS…
a rubbernecking joy ride through the underbelly of the Sunshine State…Florida Roadkill is a high-wire act without a net that will leave readers alternately laughing and feeling squeamish…It has elements of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Hunter Thompson, Edna Buchanan, and James W. Hall, but Dorsey has put his own spin on what has cried out for resuscitation, the Florida crime novel.”
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
“A ROLLICKING RIDE…
FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS…
Tim Dorsey has written a tight, speed-demon book full of way-alternate sex, lots of drugs and rock ’n’ roll, all gassed up with high-octane hilarity…Dorsey does a bang-up job with wacko characters and some amazing plot turns.”
Nashville Tennessean
“DARK YET WILDLY FUNNY…
Imagine the violence of Edna Buchanan married to the skewed worldview of Dave Barry; now you’re ready to meet Tim Dorsey…His delightful novel belongs in the hands of anyone who likes the mix of Florida setting and black humor in the work of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and Laurence Shames.”
Booklist
�
��JITTERY, BIZARRE, AND UTTERLY CHARMING…
Dorsey has muscled in on the big guns’ territory and ripped the place upside-down and inside-out…Roadkill reads like Quentin Tarantino wrote it on a rum-and-speedball binge after baking too long in the ferocious August sun. Except Tarantino’s characters are a bit tame in comparison to some of Dorsey’s mangy minions.”
Miami Herald
“A GOOD WRITER WITH PLENTY TO SAY…
To Dorsey’s eye, the Florida [that] residents love is awash in racism, smut, dope, corruption, and casual murderous violence. You can tell he loves it still.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FLORIDA ROADKILL. Copyright © 1999 by Tim Dorsey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2006 ISBN 9780061833021
Version 05102013
Library of Congress ISBN: 0-380-73233-5
20 19 18 17 16 15
Dedication
For Eugene Morse
Epigraph
Let us consider that we are all partially insane.
It will explain us to each other.
—Mark Twain
Contents
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PRAISE
COPYRIGHT
Prologue
Florida’s beauty creates the illusion of civilization.
It is a thin but functional veneer, like fake-wood contact paper stuck to flimsy particle board. Glistening condos, palm trees down the median, corkscrew water slides and waiting lines of retirees spilling onto restaurant sidewalks at four P.M., hoping for a shot at an early-bird $3.95 Sterno tray of Swedish meatballs. Spring training, mermaids, trained whales. Brave New Disney World, where commercial microbiologists try to isolate the DNA responsible for bad thoughts and free will. Space shots and orange juice with more pulp and roadside hot dog vendors in T-backs causing traffic mishaps at the latest apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who chose to appear this time in squeegee residue on the plate glass of a financial tower on U.S. 19.
Late one Thursday toward the end of the twentieth century, a white Chrysler New Yorker drove up the Florida Keys on the way to Tampa. Behind a secret panel in the trunk was a spare tire, a jack and a metal briefcase containing five million dollars. Under the bumper was a homing device. The Chrysler’s innocent occupants didn’t have a clue.
A small concrete booth painted a graffiti-resistant government tan sat near the base of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Its green-tinted windows beveled outward like an air traffic control tower. The Skyway spanned the mouth of Tampa Bay with a massive arch that climbed so steeply into the thin, clear air that motorists said it was like taking off in a DC-10. Pleasure boats made small white trails through the wave caps far below.
Inside the booth, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole stood at the stainless steel sink and rinsed his favorite coffee mug, which remained in his right hand at all times. It read: “Ask someone who gives a shit!” The window AC unit began to clatter, and Dole whapped it with precision.
On paper, Dole’s job was to monitor the bridge for hazard. In reality, Dole’s job was to preserve his job. A nineteen-year public servant, he was the equivalent of a fat, hundred-year-old alligator. No natural predators left. Just as long as the gator didn’t change his proven routine in a spasm of senility and chase executives around the thirteenth green at Innisbrook. Not to worry with Dole. He was master of the unvaried, safe pattern that didn’t deviate into unknown adventures of genuine work. His attitude toward his job station was that of a felon at the crime scene: Don’t touch anything and don’t stay a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Paperwork wasn’t filled out, reports weren’t read, ringing phones kept ringing. His bosses, a pyramid of progressively paranoid career preservationists, gave him high marks.
Dole stared out the windows, making sure the hand not holding the coffee mug stayed in his pocket. He became an expert on every detail of his solitary outpost that had nothing to do with his job. To the south, the Skyway bridge dominated everything. It was Tampa Bay’s defining landmark, like the St. Louis Arch or the Seattle/Dallas/Calgary Space Needle. Dole studied the Skyway’s twin isosceles triangles of yellow suspension cable all day long—a big sundial, backlit in the morning, bleached bright with vertical shadows at high noon, glowing a burnished orange in late afternoon and then a soft scarlet at sunset. Finally the bridge was the negative image against the indigo sky, and the headlights came on and trickled across the span like illuminated water droplets sliding down monofilament fishing line.
Dole sipped from the mug. Tanker ships sailed in from the Gulf of Mexico, fly fishermen cast on the flats, sailboats tacked around Pinellas Point, and dolphins splashed in the channels. There was the monument to the crew of the USCG Blackthorn, lost in a foul-weather collision in ’80. And the stub of the old Skyway bridge, now a fishing pier. A sign: “Please do not clean fish in restroom.”
Inside Dole’s booth was a bank of nine-inch black-and-white video screens feeding live from remote cameras at various pressure points along the Skyway. They monitored for breakdowns, wrecks, fog conditions, suicide jumpers and terrorism. But Dole wasn’t monitoring the surveillance screens because he was monitoring his portable color TV set, laughing at Toto the Weather Dog doing a funny dance on the anchor desk of a local newscast. Toto was an eight-year-old half-blind Chihuahua who appeared in a variety of anthropomorphic costumes and predicted the weather. Tonight Toto was shaking in a hula skirt in a manner consistent with a sixty percent chance of rain and a UV index of seven, according to weatherman Guy Rockney.
Following a recent spate of fatal tornadoes and windstorms on Florida’s west coast, both the U.S. Weather Service and local television stations faced pressure to upgrade their Doppler radar and other early-warning technology. Four of the region’s major stations spent heavily on new equipment. The fifth, Florida Cable News, picked up Toto at the pound for the cost of the shots.
Florida Cable News saw its audience share increase sixteen percent on segments with Toto. The loss was spread evenly among stations with the expensive new equipment. Those stations saturated the air with ads desperately trying to explain the importance of adequate wind-shear detection.
Toto kept dancing them right over to Florida Cable News.
Early one October evening, the technology i
nvestment paid off. The Weather Service and four stations picked up a quick-forming front moving east of Tampa with funnel clouds. The warnings went out. Hundreds took cover and were saved. Florida Cable News, instrumentally blind to the twisters bearing down on its viewers, sent the audience to bed with a happy little jig from Toto in a spandex aerobic outfit and a promise of a pleasant evening and a sunny tomorrow.
Florida Cable News wasn’t responsible for the entire death toll, just part. Just enough to spell Toto’s demise. The end was hastened when weatherman Guy Rockney joked on the air that some of his viewers had gone on a “Florida Double-Wide Sleigh Ride.”
That did it. Toto and Rockney were history before Rockney could remove his clip-on microphone. It lasted a week. Until the specific gravity of letters and phone calls and, most important, the ratings plunge was too much to withstand. Both were reinstated and the ratings at Florida Cable News rebounded stoutly. The other stations responded by hiring a cast of trained cats, ferrets, chimpanzees and marmosets.
Chester “Porkchop” Dole was a loyal television viewer. He couldn’t be lured away by cheap imitations; he was sticking with Toto, the cheap original. On this December evening, Dole was working the short-straw second shift. But he made the best of it, howling with laughter and pointing at Toto on the little TV. He slapped his knee with the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee mug. He wheezed and coughed and laughed some more as Toto pirouetted in a tutu atop the News-Flash Anchor Desk, and the entire News-Flash Anchor Team chuckled with manufactured sincerity.