Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Florida was on fire and Johnny Vegas didn’t care.

  He was in room four of the Rod and Gun Lodge in Everglades City, trying to score with a lithe spokesmodel for fattening beer products he’d picked up at an MTV promotional show-your-ass-athon in Miami Beach. The Florida Marlins had just won the World Series, whose rich celebratory tradition often peaks with fans mistaking police cruisers for piñatas. When the spokesmodel began nibbling Johnny’s ear on Ocean Drive, he didn’t want to take any chances. The specter of mob misbehavior inspired Johnny to shove her in his Porsche and immediately put a hundred miles between them and Miami. They headed west into the glades on the Tamiami Trail. Johnny stopped at a megaplectic convenience store frequented by airboat operators and survivalists with inscrutable politics. He purchased cheese, bread, crackers, a four-dollar bottle of champagne, plastic cups, Vaseline, duct tape and ribbed Day-Glo rubbers, and he winked with conspiracy at the cashier. Back on the road, Johnny cranked up Sheryl Crow.

  “…I think a change…would do you good…”

  He sped past Miccosukee Indian chickee huts on the two-lane shoulderless highway, flawlessly filling the plastic cups with champagne to demonstrate the sports car’s fine European suspension; the model squeezed Johnny’s crotch, stress-testing his sleek Italian slacks. They pulled in at the rustic mosquito lodge on the western edge of the Everglades, surrounded by miles of nothing but peace. The buzz of crickets relaxed Johnny as he stuck the key in the knob of their room.

  It had been a dry, brittle autumn, and a rash of lightning strikes sparked forest fires in sixty-six of sixty-seven counties. The winds drove the blazes across highway breaks. Civic events were canceled and motels evacuated from Tallahassee to Homestead. A fire line advanced on the mosquito lodge.

  Gigi the spokesmodel returned from the hotel bathroom naked, but her eyes watered hard.

  “What’s that smoke?” she asked between coughs.

  “Nothing,” said Johnny. “Just a pig roast or a citronella tiki torch, to keep bugs away.” He leaned her back on the bed and tried to stroke her breast with a gentle, feathery touch, but she kept bouncing around from full-body hacking. More smoke came through the window seals and under the door. Johnny started coughing, too, and he grabbed a handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose as he prepared to penetrate.

  Gigi stopped him. “I can’t breathe!”

  Johnny pulled her off the bed and pinned her on the varnished wood floor that had historic character.

  “I saw a public safety message once where Dick Van Dyke said to get down below the smoke line,” said Johnny.

  “To survive,” said Gigi, “not to make love!”

  The was a sharp knock on the door. “Emergency management! Anyone in there?”

  “Yes! Help!” said Gigi.

  “No! Nobody’s here!” said Johnny. “We’re okay. Go away!”

  “Mandatory evacuation! You have to come out!”

  “We’re fine!” said Johnny. “I’ll sign a waiver. Slip it under the door.”

  The officials opened the room with a pass key. They wrapped Gigi in a towel and administered oxygen as they led her to an evacuation van. Johnny straggled behind, clenching his fists. “I was this close. This close!”

  Johnny followed the van in his convertible Porsche to the command post outside the burn zone, where Gigi was checked out by field medics, who gave her bottled water and fire safety pamphlets, and she turned and gave Johnny a stare that could freeze hydrogen.

  The black Mercedes 420S limousine was doing a hundred when it clipped the gopher tortoise, which spun on the heel of its shell and tumbled violently as it skipped down the road. It came to rest. The tortoise poked its head out of the shell and looked around the edge of the Tamiami Trail in the Everglades.

  Serge had seen the tortoise and tried to avoid it. He lost control of the limo and bounced through the sawgrass a bit before coaxing it back on the pavement. The limo’s steering column was missing its plastic collar, and Serge’s ignition key was a slot screwdriver. A crumpled tag lay on the floor from the Key West Police impound lot. Serge thought he should probably ditch the limo, since it would draw attention, but he didn’t because, one, he was nuts, and two, it had gizmos.

  The sun went down, a deep red beach ball over Naples, and Serge raced through the glades waiting for the back of a white Chrysler to show up in his headlights. In the Chrysler’s trunk was five million dollars in drug money. It was in a metal briefcase hidden behind a panel over the wheel well, unknown to the car’s innocent occupants. In fact, nobody knew it was there except Serge.

  Serge speculated there was more missing drug money around Florida than buried pirate treasure. The illegal drug industry flows hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of Florida every year. It’s all in cash. It’s moving around constantly. It must be concealed every step of the way or ditched in an emergency. And most of the people hiding and retrieving it are on drugs. They do a few lines or bong hits and go back and say, “I could’ve sworn it was under this rock…or was it that one?”

  This time around, someone had tried to make off with five million in cartel money being laundered through a Tampa insurance company. That someone was dead now. Serge had seen to it. But before Serge could move in, the man had tossed the money in the trunk of an acquaintance’s car….

  The Miami Herald sent three reporters to Key West and two more up to Canaveral to cover the story. Eleven bodies so far. One sap shotgunned in a Cocoa Beach motel room, three tied to cement blocks in the ocean, another floating with a doll’s head in his windpipe, and four more machine-gunned in a Key West bed-and-breakfast, three of whom were members of the Russian mafia from Fort Lauderdale. A man was run over outside the stadium in Miramar by a car with a dead stripper in the trunk. Rumors said the killings were over five million in a missing briefcase. Nobody knew whether the briefcase or the money really existed, but that didn’t stop everyone in Key West from clearing out of the bars and tearing the island apart. As more and more bodies turned up, another rumor began to circulate about the money.

  It was cursed.

  Sean Breen and David Klein headed home fishless again, their record intact. The breadth and complexity of each fishing failure was increasingly impressive. This time they had gone all the way to the Keys and spent a couple thousand to not catch fish.

  They had overlearned the sport. They studied drag and line and leaders. There were tides and feeding patterns and how to read the water. They boned up on “the presentation of the lure” like it was a plaque at a Rotary luncheon. Too much thinking and not enough fishing.

  They didn’t care. Fishing wasn’t about catching fish. It was about trolling the flats with a silent electric motor, watching the barracudas and sharks and tarpon. And the colors: down in the Saddlebunch Keys, ten miles from Key West, the bright pastel green puddled up in the cracked cakes of clay…fluorescent aqua near the mouth of Newfound Harbor…raw umber shining off the coral through the shallows at Ramrod Key.

  They had a heck of a fish story to tell when they got back, except that everybody had heard the whole thing already on the news. The big fiasco down in the Keys. They got special commendations from the mayor and a gold trophy from the city council for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and staying alive in the cross fire while the bad guys bumped each other off. It was a chance for local officials to put smiling faces on the tourism nightmare. All that was behind them now.

  Sean and David were one hundred ninety miles from Tampa, crossing the Everglades at dusk. They had just passed Ochopee, home of the smallest post office in the United States, when they saw a commotion up ahead. There were men in the road and a bunch of cars parked askance on the shoulders. They noticed a glow on the horizon, and their headlights caught wisps of what they first thought was fog. There was a line of blinking amber lights ahead on wooden barricades. A sweaty man with a reflective yellow vest and a blackened face stepped into the middle of their lane and put his arms out toward the c
ar, ordering them to stop. David and Sean pulled over and saw a firefighting team on the side of the road taking water; some were tended by paramedics.

  A wildfire was raging across the Everglades, and a stout northeastern wind had whipped it toward the Tamiami Trail. Soon flames came into view and scrub burned to the edge of the pavement. A National Guard helicopter swooped overhead. A team of firefighters staggered out of the smoke in a sawgrass ditch and collapsed. The firefighters who had been resting got to their feet and disappeared into the smoke. Tourists who had been stopped by the roadblock took snapshots and video. A young man in Italian slacks cursed and pounded his fist on the hood of a Porsche.

  David and Sean stood on the side of the road next to a panther-crossing sign. They watched the fire jump to the other side of the road, and the highway became a tunnel of flame filled with smoke. The wind gusted and shifted again to the east, and the fire leaned toward them. The resting firefighters got to their feet and motioned the motorists back to their cars. They yelled for everyone to evacuate east. The fire would be burning where they now stood within twenty minutes.

  Sean and David turned and started back to the Chrysler. It was the first time they noticed the black Mercedes limousine parked behind it. They were a few yards away when the Chrysler’s headlights suddenly came on and the engine roared to life. They jumped back as the car lurched off the shoulder of the road and sped past them. Firefighters ran into the highway, waving for the driver to stop. They dove out of the way as the Chrysler splintered the wooden barricades and disappeared into the wall of flame.

  2

  Near the end of 1997, at longitude twenty degrees west and latitude ten degrees north, the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean reached a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and vapor filled the air. The trade winds blew robustly and the barometric pressure dipped. Convection began to convect. The earth rotated, as it has for billions of years, and the force of the spinning imparted the Coriolis effect on the atmosphere. Nobody was there to see it happen, but lots of air and water molecules started turning slowly like a child’s top the size of Iowa.

  Three thousand miles east of Florida and four hundred miles west of Dakar on the coastal tip of Africa sit the Cape Verde Islands. There are fifteen islands in the chain, ten large and developed, five not. In Cape Verde they grow coffee beans, bananas and sugar cane, and they catch tuna and lobster. They won independence from Portugal in 1975, and many residents practice animism, the belief that everything in nature has a soul. The monetary unit is the escudo.

  Four of the five smaller islets of Cape Verde are uninhabited. But on the fifth is an aboriginal, nonviolent people who live in thatched huts atop stilts on the beach. The people are simple hunter-gatherers, subsisting on fish and mollusks and, until this century, a hairless feral dog that ran wild on the island.

  Because of Cape Verde’s remoteness, its tiny indigenous dogs have experienced quirky evolution, much like that of the Galapagos turtles, and they’ve developed extremely sensitive inner ears to detect predators. In the year 1897, a terrific tropical cyclone threatened the island late one night after everyone had gone to bed. When the barometer plunged from the impending storm, the painful pressure in the dogs’ delicate ears caused them to screech and jump up and down across the island. The villagers were awakened by the yelping little animals twirling on their hind legs in the middle of the village. Then they noticed the leading edge of the hurricane coming ashore.

  The storm demolished every hut, but the entire population had enough warning to move upland to the center of the island and was spared. The good-luck dogs were given an indefinite reprieve from the island people’s cuisine.

  Exactly one hundred years later, at the end of November, the last month of the official hurricane season, the village chief brought out the ceremonial dog after dinner. It had been a light hurricane season for the islands, and there had been no need to press the dog into service. He lived the good life in his own hut and had grown quite fat on the grateful and excessive amount of food the island people provided. Tonight, however, the chief had a feeling in his bones. The sky was strange, the fishing futile, and the birds were flying into things.

  Following a dinner of stewed mollusk, the chief arrived with the sacred dog in a bamboo cage. The dog was dressed in his ceremonial costume. The inhabitants of the island were a carefree people, and the only thing they wore was a thong woven from palm fronds and bound tightly between the legs. The dog’s costume was a smaller version.

  The chief placed the cage atop a tree stump and said the magic incantations. He lifted the door of the cage and the dog scampered under a bush and started chewing off the painful thong. There was no dance of the dog in the village circle. The chief raised his arms and decreed that the sacred dog had spoken: All was safe on the island.

  Shortly after midnight, the village was awakened by a newly formed hurricane ripping huts off their stilts. Everyone was able to climb to safety, due to well-timed panic and mad scrambling. But dog was back on the menu.

  A childless Colombian couple named Juanita and José Cerbeza moved into a four-bedroom million-dollar waterfront home in Tampa’s prestigious Culbreath Isles community.

  The residence had been the original model home for the Tampa Bay Tile Company. It had a Spanish tile roof and a circular driveway of brick-red paver tiles that curved around the giant fan of a traveler’s palm. The front porch was a colorful mishmash of broken porcelain and pottery set randomly in the mortar. The spleen-shaped swimming pool had a rim of violet ceramic bullnose tile and a large patio of glazed Mexican tile. From the pool was a clear view of Tampa Bay over a seawall capped with coquina tile.

  The moving van arrived Saturday night. The Cerbezas began hand-to-hand combat Sunday morning.

  José was a small, powerfully packed man with a falsetto voice and explosive temper. In contrast, Juanita was a woman of impressive avoirdupois, and if she could ever hold José still, she’d squeeze the breath out of him. Necessarily, José’s strategy was jab-and-run, and he danced around Juanita and darted in and out of the reach of her bologna arms, registering sharp jabs in the kidneys that caused her to make the birthing sounds of a Cape buffalo.

  The clash was the age-old balance of the natural order, size against speed, and it was a fascinating thing to watch. However, early on a Sunday morning in one of Tampa’s toniest neighborhoods, the residents had yet to acquire an appreciation for a South American midget screaming Spanish profanities like Frankie Valli and sucker-punching a fat woman into submission between the jacarandas.

  The police drove Juanita and José away in separate patrol cars.

  Hours later—calm restored and bail posted—the couple was released at sunset for a tearful reunion outside the Orient Road Jail. They took a cab back to Culbreath Isles and embraced again on the red-tile driveway before going inside.

  An hour later they were back at it on the front lawn, and a careless José got a little too close. Juanita began crushing him in a Kodiak hug.

  Neighbors with cell phones filled the sidewalks as Juanita caved in José until his cries became mere peeps. Before police could respond to the eleven simultaneous 911 complaints from Culbreath Isles, a black Beemer pulled up to the house and cut the headlights. The engine and parking lights stayed on. Two men in gray jogging suits got out. They raised their right arms, fully extended, and aimed SIG 9mm automatic pistols, the P-210 model with the attractive scored wooden grip. They fired ten to twelve shots each, and the silencers gave the gunfire a docile, metallic ka-ching ka-ching sound that made it seem not quite real to the neighbors.

  The BMW sped away, and the neighbors slowly approached to inspect the lifeless pile of José and Juanita.

  The Diaz Boys were crazy.

  Three brothers and a cousin, they had smuggled, trafficked, extorted and strong-armed their way around Tampa Bay for fifteen years. They were the last of their breed. The average shelf life of their peers was three years, and the Diaz Boys had outlived them all. The Garci
a Brothers, the Rodriguez Brothers, the Uptown Gang, the O’Malley Triplets, the Caballero Siamese Twins and Octopus Boy.

  The Diaz Boys were lucky, because it certainly wasn’t brains. They were the statistical exception that proves the rule, and they were completely psycho. Whenever a light touch of sophistication was required, they kicked the door in. Their brazenness survived the odds the way the occasional drunk can weave across a freeway and not get splattered.

  Florida still had its scars from the cocaine eighties. Prison expansion, after-care centers, foreclosed waterfront mansions, luxury yachts in dry dock. Like Germany after the war—lots of people fleeing to South America, abandoning cars, houses and artwork. Stashes of currency and gold were plastered into walls or buried at the base of a crooked tree. With a single haul of coke worth up to a hundred million dollars, smuggling methods became the stuff of Florida lore. Expensive airplanes and speedboats were ditched after a single shipment. When customs agents began giving “swallowers” laxatives at the airport, surgeons sewed the coke into their legs. Law enforcement had thought they’d seen it all.

  Then came disposable real estate.

  Smugglers set up “moles” in posh waterfront Florida homes with docks. The moles were married couples, and they’d live at the home about a year. They were given a sailboat and told to use it often. Every expense paid. All they had to do was blend in and keep a low profile until the day their “uncle” visited and went sailing with them at sunset and came back after dark with the boat riding much lower in the water.

  It was simple in theory and profoundly problematic in practice. The people the Diaz Boys recruited could not for the life of them keep it together a full year. They went loopy from the wealth and drugs, partying and attacking each other in front of the neighbors. They tried using local talent—gringos—but the results were the same except the screaming on the front lawn was in English. Hundreds of thousands invested in one mole house. Poof! Wasted in a single violent incident that traumatized the whole block and ensured the couple’s every move would be watched closely from then on. The Diaz Boys had had it. In the last year alone, there’d been five aggravated batteries and a DeLorean driven into a swimming pool. When José and Juanita Cerbeza didn’t last two days in Culbreath Isles, the Diaz Boys had already made their decision.