Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The five books on the table were all the same paperback, The Stingray Shuffle, by Ralph Krunkleton. The women had been on a Krunkleton kick lately.

  “I think this was his best book yet,” said the Latino businesswoman, getting off the phone.

  “Me, too,” said the redheaded commercial artist. “All those crazy orange harvesting machines.”

  “I loved how Roscoe ran right out the back of the plane with the Medflies,” added the attorney with cropped blond hair. “Never saw that coming.”

  “Wait till you find out what happens to the five million dollars,” said the petite veterinarian.

  “Shhh! Don’t tell me! I’m not there yet!” said the self-assured aerospace engineer, flagging down a waiter for another pitcher.

  The club went way back, started quite by accident in 1971. It was a Monday morning in July, an office waiting room filled with crying, screaming children who occasionally broke free and had to be chased. They were in Gainesville, the middle of Florida far from ocean breezes, and the room was muggy with the musk of spent diapers. The air conditioner didn’t work, and a single electric fan whirred unevenly atop a crumpled stack of Southern Bride.

  A clerk slid open the reception window and looked at her clipboard. “Samantha Bridges?”

  A tall, young blonde stood up, an infant strapped to her chest and a two-year-old girl by the hand. She capped a bottle of milk and stuck it in a pocket in her demin overalls.

  There was a short discussion at the window. The clerk shook her head.

  “Sorry? What do you mean you can only send him another letter?” Samantha’s voice was beyond loud, but the other women didn’t seem to notice, bouncing tots on knees. Another day in paradise at the office of child-support enforcement.

  “I waited two hours for you to tell me you can only send another letter? He’s ignored all the others!”

  The clerk told Sam that if she would have a seat, a supervisor would get to her when he was free.

  “In another two hours?”

  Samantha went back to her chair and sat down and got out the milk bottle.

  “Mommy…” said the two-year-old at her side.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Mommy…” Her mouth was still open, but she had stopped talking.

  Samantha patted the infant on her chest, trying to get a burp. “What? What is it, dear? Are you okay?”

  The girl threw up in Samantha’s lap. Samantha looked down, and the infant regurgitated on her shoulder. A dozen children wailed all around. Her checking account was empty.

  Samantha raised her eyes to a blank spot on the concrete wall and tried to imagine an afternoon at the beach.

  The other women in the waiting room had all been there. Each had that hardened, dazed, lack-of-sleep look usually only seen on men at the end of extended military campaigns. One of the women had once dated a Navy SEAL, who told her about going through some kind of grueling test called Hell Week. One week, she thought. Big deal. If you really want to toughen them up, have ’em trade places with single moms.

  Samantha returned to her apartment on the campus of the University of Florida, where she lived in a wing of married student housing nicknamed “divorced student housing.” There were day classes and night waitress shifts and midnight feedings and more trips to the support office. Summer became fall. Samantha began recognizing some of the regulars from the support office at her apartment building. They became a group. Teresa Wellcraft, Rebecca Shoals, Maria Conchita, Paige Turner. And Samantha—everyone called her Sam. She was the tallest, a full six feet, blond hair in a semishort soccer-mom cut. She had also played soccer. And lacrosse. And basketball. And batted cleanup on her high school softball team. That’s where the self-reliance came from. Sam viewed the world in a resting state of unfairness and it was up to nobody but her to change it. She never let anything pass. Rudeness, bad service, Sam was all over you. She favored sweatpants and sports bras and majored in law enforcement.

  Paige was the smallest, and she let everything pass, and Sam was always stepping in and defending her, which only embarrassed Paige all the more.

  “Please, let’s just go,” said Paige. “It’s no big deal.”

  “No! Not until this fucker honors his competitor’s coupons!”

  Paige had grown up inland, and her Okeechobee twang was mistaken for southern. She was the classic girl next door, big brown eyes and no hint of guile. Her hair was always in a ponytail. She would have been more comfortable never saying a word and not joining the group, except Sam pressured her, and she felt more comfortable acquiescing. She wanted to be a veterinarian.

  Maria filled the conversation voids left by Paige and then some. She cared about people and wanted to let every one of them know it. At length. Before the pregnancy, she had volunteered at hospices for the terminally ill, where lonely residents pretended they were asleep when they saw her coming. Her personal passion was clothes, and her fashion sense was that unfortunate combination of wrong and bold. She also had trouble with makeup, rooted in her philosophy that more is more. She was big and gangly, almost as tall as Sam. She had flunked out of fashion design and went on to probation in graphic design.

  Rebecca had the artistic side that so tragically eluded Maria. She excelled at painting and could pick up a musical instrument for the first time and become competent in an hour. She was the reluctant beauty, the one in the group the men hit on the most. Medium height but curvy, with nice cheekbones, bedroom eyes and the kind of exquisite auburn hair with natural body that caused other women to make up things about her behind her back. It didn’t bother Rebecca. Nothing did. She was the flower child of the group, barefoot, daisies in the hair, undeclared major.

  Teresa was the brain, Phi Beta Kappa, insanely organized with cross-indexed filing systems and a gravity-well memory. She used big words. Propinquity. Weltschmerz. But all that was overshadowed. There was no other way to say it. Teresa was a fatso. She also bit her nails to the skin, yo-yo dieted, checked constantly to see if the stove was off and quit smoking every week. She had a knack for tinkering, which led to her double major in chemical and electrical engineering. For Christmas she installed dimmer switches in everyone’s apartment.

  The women quickly discovered they had several things in common. Number one, assholes in their pasts. Number two, a surplus of guts. Not man guts, where you charge a pillbox, dive in a raging river or punch a biker outside the Do Drop In. This was woman guts. Quietly enduring when there is no acceptable alternative but to endure.

  Third thing in common: They loved to make chili, which they did every Friday, seven sharp. The weekly cook-off was the best thing they could have done. Being a single mom at a major football university was the formula for clinical depression, like being in prison with a view of Bourbon Street. Marking time until the next get-together made it all seem a little less hopeless.

  The fourth thing in common, however, that was the primary reason these five particular women bonded so tightly. They agreed never to talk about it. Ever.

  After a month of chili Fridays, the book club was born of necessity. They loved reading, but there was no time with the kids, not even for literature classes, which forced them to pool notes.

  “Who knows what Moby-Dick’s about?”

  “Man wants to kill fish. Fish kills man. Lots of details about boats.”

  “The Jungle?”

  “The rich are mean.”

  “Invisible Man?”

  “White people are mean.”

  “Clockwork Orange?”

  “The British are mean.”

  “Brave New World?”

  “The future is scary and weird.”

  “Naked Lunch?”

  “Junkies are scary and weird.”

  “The Sun Also Rises?”

  “We should be in Paris.”

  The remaining semesters dragged out like a stretch for robbery, but they all somehow managed to stumble through to graduation, where they hugged and took a hundred snapsho
ts and swore they’d always stay in touch and promptly lost contact for twenty-five years.

  3

  The Sunshine State has a mind-bending concentration of “cash-only” businesses. These aren’t your shade-tree auto detailers or flea market kiosks selling houseplants and nunchuks. These involve amounts of currency that require luggage.

  On a day near the end of 1997, there were two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three cash-crammed briefcases floating around the shallow-grave landscape of Florida. Some were under the seats of limousines, some were underwater in ditched airplanes, some were handcuffed to South American couriers flying up to buy Lotto tickets, some were clutched to the chests of perspiring men in street clothes sprinting down the beach, ducking bullets.

  One briefcase was different from the others. Really superstitious people said it was cursed, just because everyone who ever touched it wasn’t breathing anymore. Whatever you believed, it was still filled with five million dollars.

  The briefcase, a silver Halliburton, now sat between two patio loungers next to a motel pool in Cocoa Beach. A pair of men lay on their backs and sipped drinks from coconuts.

  Paul and Jethro had plenty of money in the briefcase but not a valid credit card between them. Which meant no reputable inn would give them a room, so they paid cash through a slot in inch-thick Plexiglas at the Orbit Motel.

  The old Honduran night manager had made change without ambition. The motel office contained an empty water cooler and the smell of burnt coffee but no coffeemaker; two molded plastic chairs, one with a puddle of something and the other holding a sleeping man in a plain T-shirt who cursed as he dreamed. On the wall a framed poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch. “Hang in there.”

  Paul fidgeted as he waited for his change. He straightened a stack of travel guides with space shuttles on the cover. He fiddled with a display of business cards for taxi companies, Chinese restaurants, bail bondsmen, someone who called himself “The King of Wings,” and a fishing guide named Skip.

  Paul took his change and leaned toward the slot. “Can we get a wake-up call for eight?”

  “I’ll get the concierge right on it,” said the manager, not looking up from his Daily Racing Form.

  Paul held one of the travel guides up to the Plexiglas. “Are these free?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  The Orbit was not rated in any of the travel guides. Not even listed. Just as well. The landscaping was long dead, replaced by broken glass, cigarette butts and dejection. The water in the pool had turned the color of iced tea and occasionally fizzed. The 1960s neon sign out front featured a mechanical space capsule that used to circle Earth, but it had shorted out and caught fire over Katmandu.

  Until the previous Thursday, Paul and Jethro had been just like any other law-abiding citizens wandering the state fat and happy. That’s when Hurricane Rolando-berto came ashore in Tampa Bay. One of the state’s two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three briefcases was in the path of the hurricane, which threw it up for grabs like a tipped basketball.

  At the time, Paul and Jethro had been staying at another quality lodge, the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. The night before the big blow, Jethro had seen someone creeping around in the dark behind the inn, constantly looking over his shoulder, hiding something. But so was everyone else, and Jethro didn’t give it much thought.

  It began to nag at him during the storm. The next morning Paul and Jethro went down to the shore and joined the mob that assembles after every hurricane to collect prehistoric shark teeth and washed-up guns. The pair scanned the ground as they climbed through seaweed-draped power lines and uprooted trees.

  “Whatever it was, he wanted to make sure nobody would find it,” said Jethro. “I swear it was right around here somewhere…. Wait! Look! There’s something shiny down there! Help me move these bales of dope.”

  Paul and Jethro popped the latches on the briefcase and raised the lid. They slammed it quickly. Their hearts raced, eyes glancing around to see if anyone had been watching.

  Decision time. This wasn’t Girl Scout cookie money. People would come looking for it. They should probably go to the police. Yes, that was the only right thing. How could they even think of doing anything else? They might even be allowed to keep it. Maybe get a reward, too. On the other hand, they’d have to report it to the IRS.

  Paul started counting the money as they fled on Interstate 4. They were in a baby-blue ’74 Malibu, speeding across Florida to catch a cruise ship for the Bahamas. The law allows someone to take up to fifteen thousand in cash across the border. Paul passed that threshold thumbing through his second pack of hundreds, practically the whole briefcase to go. Inbound Customs was tough. But outbound on a cruise to Nassau was another matter. You didn’t even need a passport.

  Paul and Jethro ran through the ship terminal at Port Canaveral and up to the ticket window. The next cruise left on Friday. It was Wednesday. Nothing to do but wait and freak out. They decided to keep the briefcase with them wherever they went—walking along the shore, around the pool, down the pier, jumping at every sound. They needed liquor.

  The Orbit Motel did not have a bar or restaurant, only a bank of vending machines dispensing Ho-Hos and French ticklers. So Paul and Jethro made a series of trips up the beach to the many conveniently spaced tiki bars that now outnumber pay phones in Florida. They returned to the pool patio and used straws to suck pink froth out of coconuts with paper umbrellas. Six empty coconuts sat beside each lounger. The Orbit Motel was not the kind of place to beat back a panic attack. It had that tropical OK Corral glow, a washed-out dustiness of light and color, the air hot, still and silent, except for occasional gusts that pushed a brown palm frond across the concrete with an unpleasant scratching sound. The ice machine had been dusted for prints. Two men came out of a room carrying a large TV and an unbolted window air-conditioning unit, got in a Firebird with no tag and sped off.

  Paul and Jethro were an unusual alliance. Jethro was president of the Hemingway look-alike club in Pensacola. Paul was afraid of people and ran a detective agency. He was Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.

  “What was that?” said Paul.

  “Just a car door.”

  Paul wiped his forehead. “I’m not gonna make it.”

  “Courage is the ability to suspend the imagination.”

  “What?”

  “We need to keep our minds occupied. Hand me the travel guide.”

  Johnny Vegas was a golf pro.

  As of Thursday.

  Vegas’s tanned, six-foot frame rippled in all the right places beneath a tight mercerized-cotton shirt, stretched over broad, firm shoulders and tapered to a trim waist under an alligator belt. He had that squinty Latin thing going that drove women wild. His black hair was longish and currently organized for the Antonio Banderas effect.

  Johnny had decided to begin teaching golf when he met his first pupil. Her name was Bianca, a tall Mediterranean model in town shooting a swimsuit photo spread for truck tires. Bianca broke golf etiquette by wearing a bikini to her first lesson. That made them even. Johnny didn’t play golf.

  Johnny had met Bianca an hour earlier on the beach behind the Orbit Motel. He was standing near the shore wearing two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, holding a surfboard. Johnny was standing on the beach with the surfboard because he didn’t know how to surf. Bianca walked up.

  “You surf?” she asked coyly, cocking her hip.

  “Of course not,” Johnny said with playful sarcasm. “I just stand here with this board.”

  Johnny didn’t have a job. Didn’t have to. The scion of an insurance mogul, Johnny had a bulging trust fund and the kind of lifestyle not seen since Joe Namath wore mink on Broadway. He also had a secret. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Johnny had never gone all the way. Oh, he wanted to. So did the women. It had just never worked out. It was always something, some kind of bizarre interruption. Johnny had learned the hard way that if getting a woman in the mood was an art, then keeping h
er there was a fucking science—the whole fleeting phenomenon more rare, delicate and unstable than suspending a weapons-grade uranium isotope at the implosion point. The least little vibration and everything tumbles. Or detonates.

  That was Johnny’s love life. Hotel fire, civil unrest, military jet crash, ammonia cloud evacuation, George Clooney sighting. In addition to being a trust-fund playboy, he was Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.

  A few months earlier in Miami, Johnny had picked up a Cuban dreamboat with a perfectly positioned beauty mark that made him swallow his own tongue. They had met at a trendy salsa club in Little Havana and were back at her place within the hour. She grinned naughtily as she gave Johnny a private dance, peeling off her clothes piece by piece, tossing them aside with aplomb. Johnny sat at the foot of the bed, ripping open his trousers like a stubborn bag of potato chips.

  She finally flung her panties over her shoulder and sauntered toward Johnny. “You’ve been a bad boy.”

  That’s when they heard the sirens. Flashing blue and red lights filled the bedroom. The woman ran to the window.

  “What is it?” asked Johnny.

  “I can’t believe it!” she yelled. “It’s the feds! They’re taking Elián!”

  “Who’s Elián?”

  “This is so unfair!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go. I need to be alone tonight.”

  Seven months later, Johnny was back at the plate. He had landed a drop-dead attorney in a serious pantsuit and glasses, her brunette hair in a no-nonsense bun. She strolled up to him at a political cocktail party, slipped off her glasses and shook down her hair. “What do you say we blow this Popsicle stand?”

  A half hour later, Johnny was lying in bed on his back, the woman climbing aboard.

  The TV was on. Tom Brokaw. The woman heard something and looked over.