Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Chester “Porkchop” Dole was flipping channels on his TV and complaining about the lack of quality programming when he accidentally glanced up at the safety monitors.

  He screamed.

  Chester dove for the radio and knocked over the microphone. He’d never used the radio in six years at the bridge. He pressed buttons and switches until he got deafening feedback, and pressed more until it stopped. He keyed the mike and begged for help without protocol. He forgot to release the microphone button to hear a reply. When he heard no reply, he panicked and gripped the button harder. Everyone in the greater Tampa Bay area who owned an emergency scanner turned up the volume.

  “Help! Help! I’m at the bridge! Oh, please! Why won’t anyone answer me! Why are all of you doing this! For the love of Jesus! Fuck me!” Followed by long, loud crying.

  On the wall was monitor number five, and on the screen a man in a tux and a young woman in a strapless evening dress with a large, dark stain on the side of her head walked apprehensively up the bridge. Ahead was a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the side, parked southbound. The Chrysler’s passenger stood between the vehicle and the bridge railing. He flicked a Bic lighter and held it to a strip of rag hanging out of a wine bottle and tossed it in the open passenger window.

  A fireball. The car crackled and was engulfed, sending swirls of sparks up into the bridge’s suspension.

  As Johnny Vegas watched a lunatic Molotov his own car, he thought the man might as well take a flamethrower to Johnny’s romantic life. He hadn’t lost his virginity yet. Some decent oral foreplay, but that wasn’t official under Queensberry rules. When the Chrysler’s driver climbed onto the bridge railing, Johnny’s heart skipped. Pleeeeeeeease don’t jump. It’s almost impossible to get a woman amorous after something like that. Men, sure. They’re in the mood after mass executions. Literally, there is no wrong time. But Johnny knew women were different. He had been on the business end of enough aborted trysts to know that far less than this can throw a woman’s emotions tottering out of that carefully nurtured trajectory needed to get her through the window of opportunity and into the sack.

  A highway patrol car skidded to a stop behind the Chrysler and the trooper jumped out. “Why don’t we talk about this?” he said calmly. Back on the patrol car’s radio, Johnny heard a frantic, sobbing voice: “Oh, sweet God in heaven! Please, somebody answer me! Mother! Mother, where are you! Why did you leave me, Mother?”

  Back in the safety booth, horror swept up the spine of Chester “Porkchop” Dole, and a cold, sallow flush hit his face. Dole could handle the drama on the bridge. What unraveled him was the knowledge that the smooth boulder of fate was about to roll over his nineteen years of public service. The safe routine of his job had been varied, the universe altered.

  A journeyman state employee, Dole had the bureaucratic survival instincts that told him how to lateral most responsibility, dodge most blame, cover most ass. But there was one error so costly it was to be avoided above all else. It was known as Death-by-Headline. No matter what you do in public life, no matter how gravely you blow it, make sure it’s in a nebulous way that takes a lot of obscure argot to explain. Even if you get a bunch of people killed, as long as they die in eight-syllable words with no convenient puns, alliterations, rhymes or homonyms. There’s nothing worse than screwing up in a way that makes a snappy, pants-around-the-ankles newspaper headline that wins some poor copy editor the hundred-dollar prize for the month.

  Dole saw just such a headline coming together on the screen. The Chrysler’s driver, dressed in a complete Santa Claus outfit, leaned forward, spread his arms wide and dove off the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

  “Shit!” Johnny Vegas said under his breath as Santa disappeared over the side. Then a light went on in his head. He would turn this to his advantage. Yes, he thought, I’ll console her. I still have a chance to hump her till she craps the bed by being incredibly sensitive and caring.

  Johnny took off his coat and draped it around If’s shoulders. He patted her head and leaned it against his chest. “Now, now,” he said, “everything will be all right.”

  They turned around and started walking back to the Porsche. They heard a deep air horn from behind. A semi tractor-trailer had come upon the scene too fast and couldn’t stop. Johnny and If pressed themselves against the guardrail as the truck blew by. The truck ran over the Porsche, flattening it out like a beer can, and dragged it a quarter mile.

  First there was silence, then the sniffling started, and Johnny closed his eyes for what he knew was coming. If’s crying erupted, building in hysteria until she emitted a shrill, warbling sound previously only heard in rutting minks.

  The ends of The Little Mermaid slippers poked across the front-door threshold and into the moderately humid eighty-two-degree December morning. Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, a little older than the temperature, bent down on the step of her Beverly Shores condominium to get the paper. She read the top headline, “Sad-Sack Santa Swan-Dives in Seasonal Sunshine Skyway Suicide.” She turned back into the house, closed the door and shuffled across the living room to the kitchen. The television set was on the local morning show Get the Hell Out of Bed, Tampa Bay! As she passed the set, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole was on the screen being interviewed live about his vain but heroic efforts radioing for help after keenly observing the Skyway jumper. It was such an impressive TV performance that Dole probably would have salvaged his career. Except he was absentmindedly holding his “Ask someone who gives a shit!” coffee mug prominently for the cameras.

  Mrs. Ploomfield’s condo sat on a thin ribbon of barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico. It towered thirty stories and, with the other condos, formed a wall along the shore. The only road running up the island was Gulf Boulevard, and across the street was an old Florida neighborhood of single-story concrete houses with white tile roofs. The landscape was flat, bright and hot. The yards were mostly white stones, with palm, hibiscus, bougainvillea, croton and schefflera. Some homes had sets of windows wrapped deco-style around the corners. Front doors were jalousie, and everything was whitewashed. Address numbers over the doors were flanked by pink sea horses or blue sailfish or yellow scallops. Herons wandered through yards, pecking on windows for handouts.

  The condominium residents thought they lived in paradise. The only problem was everyone else. All those cheesy houses across the street and that awful Hammerhead Ranch Motel next door that they couldn’t manage to close down.

  Mrs. Ploomfield lived at 1193 Gulf Harbor Drive in a first-floor unit of Calusa Pointe Tower Arms. There was little traffic this morning, only a brown delivery truck at the curb. A man stood outside the passenger door and checked the address against his clipboard. He leaned in the van and grabbed a floral arrangement in a ceramic manatee and a two-foot-long box of chocolates, red and green, with thick gold ribbon. He headed for unit 1193; a second man stayed behind the wheel and idled the engine.

  Mrs. Ploomfield had just gotten back to the kitchen table with the newspaper. She was scooping out canned niblets for an aged Chihuahua when the doorbell rang.

  “Coming,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, and she began cross-country skiing in her slippers across the terrazzo. A few minutes later, she arrived. She cranked the jalousie. “Who is it?”

  “Florida Flowers ’n’ Fudge.” The man crouched down to see Ploomfield eye to eye through the slowly opening slats of translucent glass. “I have a delivery.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Is this eleven ninety-three?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a growling.

  The man bent down even lower to look through the jalousie, and he saw a small dog.

  “That looks exactly like Toto, the mutt on TV.”

  “It is Toto, and he’s not a mutt. I take care of him for my friend, weatherman Guy Rockney. Now, I want my candy and flowers. And I don’t like your attitude one bit.”

  “I hate that fucking dog.”

  Mrs. Ploomfield’s
hemoglobin seized up like a piston, and it took several moments before she reconstituted. “What? What did you just say? I want your name right this second, young man. I’m going to ruin your life!”

  “I go first,” said the man. He ripped open the candy box and pulled out a sawed-off Remington shotgun with a twelve-shell drum clip.

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. She slowly cranked on the jalousie window. It was a quarter closed when the man racked the shotgun and the clip fell out. Shells rolled across the concrete porch.

  “Hee, hee, hee! You dropped your bullets,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, still cranking arthritically. Half closed. The man leaned down and began reloading, a little faster than Ploomfield had expected.

  “My goodness,” she said, cranking faster. Three-quarters closed.

  The man racked the shotgun again, but in his hurry the top shell of the magazine was not aligned to the feed lever, and it jammed. Mrs. Ploomfield finished closing the window and began shuffling back across the room.

  The man unjammed the gun and fired with beerad gusto. Splinters of glass sprayed the room. “Oh, my heavens,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. He fired again and again. A large swan-shaped vase exploded in front of Mrs. Ploomfield and a statue of a Persian cat behind her.

  He kept firing and kept missing, all kinds of ugly ceramic shit blowing up. The smoke clouded his view, and the man used the barrel of his shotgun to knock out the triangles of broken glass around the inside edge of the jalousie door. He ducked his head and stepped through the opening. When he looked up, he saw Mrs. Ploomfield reaching into a bric-a-brac shadow box on the wall. Old-fart antique country junk, the man thought. He swept specks of glass off his shirt with the back of his hand and checked his magazine, making sure there would be no jam this time. When he looked up, he saw what Mrs. Ploomfield had been reaching for: In the largest compartment in the middle of the shadow box was her late husband’s antique .45-caliber Peacemaker revolver. She wheeled and shot the man square in the chest, and he fell back through the hole in the door.

  The gunfire drew neighbors from the condo units and the houses across the street. When they saw the van’s driver dragging his dead partner and the shotgun back to the truck, they hit the ground and ducked behind square bushes.

  The driver heaved the body through the passenger door and threw in the shotgun. He walked casually around the front of the van and climbed in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward and turned up the radio. “New Sensation” by INXS pounded out of the truck and off the houses. The driver bobbed his head to the beat as he put the truck in gear and chugged down the street, running over a garbage can as he turned the corner. The neighbors watched the van until it disappeared, then slowly emerged and tiptoed toward unit 1193.

  “I got one! I got one!” Mrs. Ploomfield shouted from her doorway. “I got one of the cocaine men!”

  1

  Lone headlights appeared in the blackness five miles away.

  They were high-beams, illuminating the sea mist through the slashed mangroves and crushed coral down the long, straight causeway toward Miami. The rumble of rubber on tar grew louder and the headlights became brighter until they blinded. The Buick blew by at ninety and kept going, red taillights fading down U.S. 1 toward Key West.

  It was quiet and dark again. An island in the middle of the Florida Keys. No streetlights, no light at all. The low pink building on the south side of the street was unremarkable concrete except for the hastily stuccoed bullet holes and the eight-foot cement conch shell on the shoulder of the road, chipped and peeling, holding up a sign: “Rooms $29.95 and up.”

  No cars in front of the motel; the night manager nodding in the office. The beach was sandy, some broken plastic kiddie toys, an unsafe pier and a scuttled dinghy. The air was still by the road, but around back a steady breeze came off the ocean. Coconut palms rustled and waves rolled in quietly from the Gulf Stream. Parked behind the motel, by the only room with a light on, was a black Mercedes limousine.

  Voices and an electrical hum came from the room, number seven. Inside, personal effects covered one of the beds—toiletries, carefully rolled socks, newspaper clippings, sunscreen, postcards, snacks, ammunition—meticulously arranged in rows and columns. The hum was from the Magic Fingers bed jiggler that had been hot-wired to run continuously. The voices came from the TV that had been unbolted from its wall mount and now sat on a chair facing into the bathroom, tuned to Sportscenter.

  In the flickering blue-gray TV light, a figure sat in the bathtub behind an open Miami Herald. Two sets of fingers held the sides of the paper—a front-page splash about a drug shoot-out in Key West and a missing five million in cash—and smoke rose from behind the paper. An old electric fan sat on the closed toilet lid, blowing into the tub. Something about the Miami Dolphins came on ESPN. The man in the tub folded the paper and put it on the toilet tank. He grabbed the remote control sitting in the soap dish on the shower wall. The slot in the top of the soap dish held a .38 revolver by the snub nose. “Nobody messes with Johnny Rocco,” said the man in the tub, and he pressed the volume button.

  The bather was tan, tall and lean with violating ice-blue eyes, and his hair was military-short with flecks of gray. He was in his late thirties and wore a new Tampa Bay Buccaneers baseball cap. In his mouth was a huge cigar, and he took it out with one hand and picked up an Egg McMuffin with the other. He checked his watch. Top of the hour. He clicked the remote control with the McMuffin hand and surfed over to CNN for two minutes, to make sure nothing had broken out in the world that would demand his response, and then over to A&E and the biography of Burt Reynolds for background noise while he read the Herald editorials. He put the McMuffin down on the rim of the tub and picked up the cup of orange juice. On TV, Burt made a long football run for Florida State in a vintage film of a forgotten Auburn game. The tub’s edge also held jelly doughnuts, breakfast fajitas and a scrambled egg/sausage breakfast in a preformed plastic tray. On the toilet lid, next to the fan, was a hardcover book from 1939, the WPA guide to Florida. Inside the cover, the man had written his name. Serge A. Storms.

  Like now, Serge was usually naked when he was in a motel, but it wasn’t sexual. Serge thought clothes were inefficient and uncomfortable; they restricted his movements, and his skin wanted to breathe. Nudity also cut down on changing time, since he was constantly in and out of the shower, subjecting himself to rapid temperature changes, alternating hot and cold water rushes that reminded him he was alive and cleaned out the pores to keep that skin breathing, feeling new.

  Serge hesitated a second in the tub, mid-bite in the McMuffin. He couldn’t think of what to do next, not even something as simple as chewing. Too many ideas raged at once in his head, and his brain gridlocked. He was paralyzed. Then the congestion slowly unclogged and he resumed chewing. When he realized he could move his arms again, he reached on top of the toilet tank for a prescription bottle. He shook it, but it made no sound, and he tossed the empty in the waste can beside the sink, a bank shot off the ceramic seashell tiles. Hell with it, he thought, I’ll go natural. If it gets too strange, I’ll run to a drug hole and score some Elavil that crackheads use to come down after four days on the ledge. Serge had started feeling the effects of not keeping up with his psychiatric medication.

  And he liked it.

  He got out of the tub and opened the back door of the motel room and walked out under a coconut palm. The breeze dried the sweat cold on his skin. He looked up into the nexus of palm fronds and coconuts set against the Big Dipper and a sky of brilliant stars over the water, away from the light pollution of the mainland. Serge said: “There’s a big blow a-comin’.”

  Serge went back inside and slept all day in the motel tub, and his skin shriveled. Two hours before sunset, there was a loud beeping sound in room seven. Serge awoke in alarm and splashed around as if he’d discovered a cottonmouth in the water. He jumped from the tub and into his pants without toweling off. The beeping sound came from a metal box on the dresser, an antitheft car-tracking de
vice. Serge threw on a shirt and packed a travel bag in seconds. He didn’t close the door as he ran out with shirt open and shoes in his hands. He threw the bag and shoes in the front of the limo and sped away from the motel.

  Serge caught up to the white Chrysler on the Long Key Viaduct and closed quickly as they passed Duck Key. They hit the next island. At mile post 66, they passed the historic marker for the Long Key Fishing Club, whose president was Zane Grey.

  Serge became jittery and started to sweat. He looked over his shoulder and wiped his brow.

  “Damn!” He smacked the steering wheel with both palms. He did a fishtailing U-turn on U.S. 1 and raced back to the roadside marker. He jumped out of the limo with his camera and took three quick snapshots, then hopped back in the driver’s seat.

  He caught sight of the Chrysler again coming off the Channel Five Bridge into the Matecumbes. At mile 73, he saw the resort hotel coming up on the right. Serge stepped on the gas and summoned the will to resist, locking his eyes on the Chrysler. He began to vibrate. His face reddened from backbuild of blood pressure. He finally shrieked and took a hard turn, skidding into the parking lot at the gas pumps. He wound his way through the resort grounds to the waterfront and the Safari Lounge. He burst inside the bar with the camera. The bartender and patrons stopped and looked. Serge took quick pictures of the walls displaying old photos and mounted heads of exotic game the bar’s owner had gotten on hunting trips to Africa with Ernest Hemingway. Then he ran out.

  Back on the road, he was about to leave Islamorada and still hadn’t reacquired the Chrysler. At mile 83, Serge saw the stone Whale Harbor Tower. He banged his forehead on the steering wheel three times, then grabbed the camera.