Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Nobody knew what was happening to C. C.; everyone in the bar was just yelling for the boy to run.

  Art Tweed broke from the back steps and sprinted and met the child halfway on the beach. He scooped him up and turned and shielded the boy with his body and ran back to The Florida Room. There was a big cheer when Art bounded up the steps. Lots of back-slapping, even Zargoza.

  Everyone’s attention went back to the beach. C. C. was clicking an empty gun now, still twirling and grabbing his throat with his free hand. They could make out something stuck in his neck, and blood running down his shirt. The foreign object was big and colorful.

  The wind picked up again all at once, gusting hard, like when the hurricane had begun.

  “The eye’s passing,” said Serge. “We’re getting the backside now. Everyone take cover!”

  In the midst of the gale, they noticed someone else was now out on the beach, moving from the condo toward C. C. Flag.

  “You sonuvabitch!” the new person yelled as he approached Flag. “You stay the hell offa my property!”

  Malcolm Kefauver, the incredible shrinking mayor of Beverly Shores, had just nailed Flag in the throat with his last lawn dart.

  The dart had missed Flag’s major arteries, but he was getting light-headed from the sight of his own blood. He twirled out into the water and fell to his knees. Waves crashed over him, and he rolled in the shallow surf like a porcupine fish.

  The mayor of Beverly Shores advanced toward the water, taunting him. Flag’s wound wasn’t mortal, but his buoyancy was now a problem. He was in danger of being carried off by the surf. Flag was on his back, losing the fight, and another wave crashed over him and dragged him farther off the beach. He was in only two feet of water, but he was tossed like a cork. With a last, great effort, Flag rolled onto his stomach and dug his fingertips into the sand. Thus anchored, Flag slowly clawed his way back toward safety.

  Flag was most of the way out of the water when the incredible shrinking mayor ran right up to him at the edge of the surf and resumed shouting. He yelled in a measured cadence—one word to emphasize each time he stomped on Flag’s fingers—“Let…go…of…my…beach!”

  Flag shouted and pulled his hands back to his chest in pain. A large wave knocked the mayor on his back and swallowed Flag.

  Flag was quickly a hundred yards out, and his cries were sucked into the growling wind as he bobbed steadily toward Mexico. The mayor turned and headed back to the condo. The wind gusted harder, and the mayor had to lean at an acute angle. He made it to the stage set up on the beach for the Proposition 213 rally and grabbed one of the corner lighting poles for balance. He tried to rest a second. The wind kept picking up, eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour. The mayor had continued shrinking since his election and his suit was baggier than ever, catching an enormous amount of wind. Hundred and ten. Hundred and twenty. The Proposition 213 banner over the stage tore loose and flew away.

  The guests in The Florida Room had to shut the door again, but Serge and Zargoza took turns watching through the hole where Zargoza had shot through the lock.

  When the wind hit one-thirty, the mayor’s feet went out from under him, but he held on to the lighting pole with both hands—flapping horizontally like a yacht club pennant.

  At one-forty, it was too much. His baggy suit was fully deployed, and the mayor lost his grip. He sailed out over the Gulf, never touching the water, dipping and lifting and looping like an autumn leaf carried up and away in a strong breeze.

  “Look, he’s flapping his arms,” said Zargoza.

  “That’s only making it worse,” said Serge. “It’s giving him more lift.”

  There was a long moment of quiet, and Serge continued staring out the hole in the door until the mayor faded to a speck and disappeared. When Serge finally turned around, he saw Zargoza pointing a gun at him again.

  “You realize this is a cry for help,” said Serge.

  “Shut up! I’m tired of your talk!” snapped Zargoza. “I’m taking the money and getting out of here…. Sorry…”

  Zargoza leveled the revolver at Serge’s heart and thumbed back the Colt’s hammer. He stiffened his arm and began squeezing the trigger.

  There was a bang and Serge clenched his eyes shut. But he didn’t feel anything. He slowly opened them and inventoried his body. Nothing. He looked up and saw Zargoza with a silly grin on his face. Serge’s eyebrows twisted in puzzlement. Zargoza was still grinning as he fell forward and hit the floor.

  When he did, it revealed Country, standing directly behind him with one of the TEC-9s the Diaz Boys had kicked away.

  “What have you done?” Serge yelled.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” said Country.

  “I had everything under control,” said Serge. He got down on the floor and rolled Zargoza onto his back. He slapped Zargoza’s cheeks lightly. “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Zargoza barely opened his eyes.

  “Look! I turned the TV down like you asked. Can I get you anything?”

  Zargoza smiled calmly and started to close his eyes.

  “Wait! Wait! Don’t go yet! Listen, buddy, since we got to know each other so well, why don’t you tell me where the money is—so I can make sure it gets to your favorite charity.”

  Zargoza smiled a little broader and said in a weak voice, “You always did make me laugh.”

  When Zargoza closed his eyes that last time, Serge’s yell of anguish shook the heavy wooden shutters of The Florida Room.

  After Zargoza died, Serge, Art and the Diaz Boys sat down at the tables, guns all over the floor, not having the spirit to fight each other. There was a bond from the common goal of saving the boy, and of the ordeal that still lay ahead. The storm was back up to full strength, whipping around and under the bar again.

  They looked over each other’s faces with resignation.

  Art floated the question. “What do we do now?”

  Serge picked up the remote control and hit the volume button. “We watch the rest of Key Largo.”

  Time went by in exhausted silence until the sound of the wind outside wasn’t as loud.

  “Storm’s passing,” said Lauren Bacall.

  “A torn shutter or two, some trash on the beach,” said Bogart. “In a few hours there will be little to remind you of what happened tonight.”

  Epilogue

  Hurricane Rolando-berto was more remarkable for its insurance totals than loss of life. Prompt evacuation warnings by all but one of the local media outlets averted certain tragedy. Several stretches of the beach roads remained impassable for a week. Tow trucks dragged palm trees out of the streets, and the state flew in snowplows from New England to clear sand drifts. The Department of Insurance threatened to freeze the assets of six companies that tried to pull out of Florida.

  In the hours immediately following Rolando-berto, a rookie police officer who lived on the island and owned an all-terrain cycle responded to the 911 distress call from Hammerhead Ranch. Everyone had decided not to mention Country’s shooting Zargoza. The officer wrote diligently in his notebook for five minutes before he shouted for everyone to stop talking at once.

  “Hold it. Hold it!” he said. “Let me see if I understand. The motel owner was really a gangster. A guy named Lenny was pretending to be Don Johnson. The short fella over there wants to be a private eye from the forties. And this guy thinks he’s Hemingway. Do I have all this straight?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “What kind of a crazy motel is this?” asked the cop. “Is there anyone here who’s what they’re supposed to be?”

  “I am,” said Serge, raising his hand. “I’m a one-hundred-percent, made-in-Florida, dope-smugglin’, time-sharin’, spring-breakin’, log-flumin’, double-occupancy discount vacation. I’m a tall glass of orange juice and a day without sunshine. I’m the wind in your sails, the sun on your burn and the moon over Miami. I am the native.”

  And with that he grabbed two of his special bags and dashed out the door.
r />   The remaining guests unlatched the shutters and propped them open. It was getting light out as sunrise approached. The air was still and cool and sandpipers scurried along the edge of the water. A dorsal fin moved offshore in the calm surface. The generator still had plenty of fuel, and, like at all good parties, everyone eventually ended up in the kitchen. They raided the refrigerator to cook breakfast.

  The mother of the boy Art saved continued to profusely thank him. Said her name was Sally and it was so hard raising a boy alone. Tommy Diaz started the CD jukebox and picked the Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed, cuing up the whole album. “Gimme Shelter” boomed through the bar, making everyone jitterbug and jive as they walked around.

  Emergency-management officials set up a triage center at the old Coliseum in St. Petersburg to handle an unusually large number of cut and bruised old men found wandering the streets in a confused state in the wake of the hurricane.

  About half were ultimately identified as nursing-home patients who had apparently strayed from their facilities. The other half were members of an entertainment troupe who had parachuted out of a WC-130 shortly before the storm.

  Five Look-Alikes were sent against their will to geriatric care at Vista Isles, where they were soon placed under psychiatric guard and sedated with Thorazine for demanding they be allowed to travel to Pamplona. Five Alzheimer’s patients went on a tour of Europe and performed flawlessly for the centennial celebration of Ernest Hemingway’s birth.

  The heavy rain from Rolando-berto filled the Myakka River to flood stage as it wound through Sarasota County. Johnny Vegas had taken his four-by-four into the state park. He was on an idyllic bird-watching hike deep into the hardwood hammocks and palmettos with a pretty twenty-two-year-old nature mama. For once, it was a constructive activity for Johnny, an educational experience, a communion with the environment in the company of a wholesome, healthy woman. Johnny had met her on-line, in the Horny Hot Singles Chat Room.

  They were eight miles down the trail when the woman and Johnny began exchanging silly double-entendre small talk. Hot damn, thought Johnny, I’m gonna be in those tight beige L.L. Bean hiking pants before you can say—he checked his Audubon field guide—man-o’-war frigate bird.

  Johnny started buttering her up. “There’s just such a fresh, open-meadow feeling about you.”

  She giggled and threw him a coy glance.

  “You’re like a field of lilacs.”

  She gave him another look. Was she touching her breast like that on purpose?

  “You’re like little kittens and all-natural ice cream.”

  She stopped on the trail and started taking off her backpack. At last he had arrived at Score City.

  “You’re such a refreshing change from all those loser girls these days with tattoos….”

  She froze in the trail. Oh no, thought Johnny. He gave her a fast up and down and saw just a tiny bit of green ink peeking out from under the right side of her shorts. “Did I say tattoo?”

  “Yes, you did! And you’ll never see this one,” she said, slapping the right side of her ass. She reversed direction on the trail, angrily marching past Johnny in high gear back toward the four-by-four.

  “Poop!” Johnny said to himself. Not only am I not scoring, but now I have to walk eight miles back to civilization in stinging silence.

  A phone rang.

  Johnny pulled the cell phone off his hiking belt. “Talk to me.”

  It was If. “Oh, hi there!” said Johnny. He never thought he’d hear from her again after the night they got stranded on top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

  They had a nice convivial confab. Turns out, If was just her nickname. Her real name was Inez Fawn Rawlings—I. F. Rawlings in her Tampa Tribune byline—a Vassar grad, Northeastern intelligentsia, rising reporter. She thought that Johnny, though not too mature or bright, looked dreamy in his tux that night at the aquarium. She would make the other women sick with jealousy when she showed up on his arm at the annual Tampa Bay media awards banquet. She told Johnny she had been nominated for the area’s highest journalistic honor, the Hubert Higgins Memorial Award, named after one of the area’s finest local writers, who was killed protecting a teenager from a mob attack on a lunch counter sit-in during the sixties. Actually, it was the former Hubert Higgins award. It was supposed to be named after Higgins in perpetuity, but in response to a tremendous outpouring of grief over a recent tragedy, it was changed this year.

  I’m up for the Toto!” If told Johnny as they entered the banquet hall at the Performing Arts Center in downtown Tampa. She wore a sheer black dress, backless, almost down to her divide, with the thinnest of straps. She held Johnny’s arm tight and waved and smiled at her friends, trying to get their attention, make them mad. She leaned up to Johnny’s ear and whispered: “Winning journalism awards gives me better orgasms.” She gave the center of his ear a quick poke with her slender tongue. Johnny’s legs went to rubber, and he almost went tumbling, but If caught him and they made it to the table with their place cards.

  The lights went down and the four-ounce portions of boneless glazed chicken were served. After dinner, the sea of faces turned to the podium, where master of ceremonies Blaine Crease worked his way through a prodigious list of honors.

  In the late twentieth century, a new corporate philosophy to all but blow the shareholders had ravaged newspapers and TV stations, bleeding off staffing, experience and standards until what was left of the profession was a karaoke rendition of itself. The Old Guard of journalism came to the rescue by increasing the number of awards and self-congratulatory fetes until journalism officially passed bowling for most trophies per calorie burned.

  Crease was deep into the “best lighting on a weekend anchor desk” stretch of the honor roll. An elegant woman came up to If and whispered, “You got the Toto! I was backstage. I saw the engraving in the trophy.”

  Johnny thrust a fist into the air in front of him. “Yessssss!”

  Crease built his pace. Only one more category before the climax of the night, the Toto. If and Johnny leaned forward in anticipation. Crease moved into the copyediting awards, announcing the best headline on a breaking weekend news feature.

  Rookie copy editor Kirk Curtly heard his name called out and arose with his Montblanc graduation gift clipped securely in his jacket pocket. He walked up to shake Crease’s hand and accept the solid-gold-plated trophy.

  Up in the closed-off balcony was recently terminated state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole, a Remington .30-06 scoped rifle, and one of those bottles of Jack Daniel’s with a handle. He drank the bourbon out of a filthy coffee cup that read, “Ask someone who gives a shit!”

  Everyone in the banquet hall heard a clear-as-day but enigmatic phrase yelled from the direction of the balcony. “Write this headline, motherfucker!”

  Shots rang out and the podium was strafed. People screamed and scattered. Others dove under tables. Dole leaned over the railing to get a better angle on the fleeing Kirk Curtly, who was now three Kirks in Dole’s rifle scope, thanks to the miracle of modern alcohol. Dole leaned too far and went over the railing, doing a half-gainer onto Johnny’s and If’s table, collapsing it. If began crying and threw down her napkin. “My special night is ruined!” And she ran away.

  Johnny snapped under the strain of involuntary virginity. He began beating the hell out of the half-conscious Dole, which was the image the cameras caught when the TV lights went on. Johnny didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become an instant media hero.

  An hour later he was in a bar on Zack Street drowning his sorrows. At 11:07 P.M.—seven minutes after the eleven-o’clock newscast began—a statuesque blonde came over to Johnny. “That was you I just saw on the news, wasn’t it? You were great! So big and brave!” She leaned closer and suggested they call it a night and go back to her place. She didn’t have to ask Johnny twice.

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked. “The movies?”

  She smiled. “No, I’m not in movies
, but I love to watch movies.”

  Hubba-hubba, Johnny thought. He got up and put an arm around her waist and they strolled out the door and into the streets of downtown Tampa.

  “So, what kind of movies do you like?” asked Johnny.

  “You ever see The Crying Game?”

  C C. Flag was never found. Neither was the mayor of Beverly Shores, and the crime scene tape remained across the door of his condominium at Calusa Pointe from when Mrs. Edna Ploomfield was blown up through his floor.

  Neighbors began hearing movements and a voice from the unit—someone having one-sided conversations in the middle of the night. One of the bolder residents, a retiree named Cecil, knocked on the door.

  A tall, lean man with dark sunglasses answered. He flipped open a billfold to display a gold police badge. Cecil leaned forward to read it, but the man flipped it closed. The man had a clipboard in his other hand, and he began writing on it without making an introduction.

  “What is your name and address?” he asked Cecil, who stood nervously outside the door, trying to peek around the man into the condominium.

  “Would you have any information we can use about the mayor or Mrs. Edna Ploomfield?”

  Cecil shook his head.

  “You wouldn’t be trying to obstruct this investigation, would you?”

  Cecil shook his head again, more vigorously this time.

  “Good. We’ll call you if we need you,” Serge said and closed the door, and Cecil walked away confused, glancing back at the unit a couple of times.

  Serge tossed the badge on the dining-room table and flopped down on the couch. Florida Cable News was on the tube. Serge propped his feet up on the glass-top coffee table and resumed writing on the clipboard. The key to life, Serge knew, was the diligent keeping of lists. The clipboard was Serge’s newest tether to reality. There were so many loose ends in Serge’s life, relentless injustices, endless chores, unphotographed historic sites. He felt a sense of control over things he had no control over by listing them. At the top of the clipboard: “Find 5 million.” After that, in smaller letters, “Visit Fort DeSoto, buy batteries/film, Egmont Key (rent boat?)”