Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  “Objection!” said the prosecutor, jumping to his feet in courtroom 3C, Palm Beach Judicial Circuit.

  “What grounds?” asked the judge.

  “Your Honor, this is a simple trespassing case. A bum sleeping in a train car at a museum. The court has already been overly generous letting this man represent himself, but now he’s abusing the privilege and turning the proceedings into an utter travesty.”

  The judge turned to Serge at the defense table. “What do you have to say?”

  “The historical underpinnings of this case go directly to my motivation. I must be given wide latitude to establish my state of mind in order to defend myself against these unfair but highly imaginative charges.”

  “Your Honor,” interrupted the prosecutor. “It’s clear the defendant needs psychiatric attention. He’s already wasted enough of the people’s time and resources.”

  The judge looked at the defendant. “Tell me, are you Henry Flagler?”

  “Of course not,” said the defendant. “That would be crazy.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Serge. Serge Storms.”

  “I’m going to allow it,” the judge told the prosecutor. “After hearing your legal arguments for the last few years, I find the change of pace rather refreshing.”

  The prosecutor sat down and fumed. The judge faced the defendant again and got comfortable in his big chair. “You may continue.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. Now where was I? Oh, yeah. Henry looked south and saw Florida, an empty canvas. The Spanish, French and English had been at work on the place for three centuries with nothing to show. The massive St. Johns River, just below Jacksonville, was the natural barrier preventing serious progress. The first crucial thing Flagler did was bridge that gorge. It changed the whole ball game. He began laying train tracks like nobody’s business and built a string of luxury hotels down the coast. Northerners came in droves. By 1904, Flagler’s railroad ran all the way to Homestead, south of Miami, the very bottom of Florida. Most people would have stopped. But did Flagler?”

  Serge turned toward the prosecutor’s table. “Did he?”

  The judge was grinning now. He looked at the prosecutor. “Well, did he?”

  The prosecutor rolled his eyes. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “That’s right!” said Serge, slapping the defense table. “With the Spanish-American War just over, that freed up the sugar and pineapple crops in Cuba. Flagler could load it all on ships and sail to Key West. If only he had a train station there. But surely a railroad couldn’t be built a hundred miles out to sea, facing the open ocean and hurricanes, right?” Serge slapped the table again. “Wrong! Flagler heard of a man named J. C. Meredith, who was doing new things with reinforced concrete down in Mexico, and brought him in on the project. Ten thousand workers came south. The cost blew the mind. This was something on the level of the pyramids, the Manhattan Project and the moon program. But no government was behind it—just one man. They said it couldn’t be done. Flagler’s Folly, they called it. And it looked like they were right.” Serge began pacing and gesturing. “All types of setbacks and geological barriers—they had to invent new kinds of engineering on the spot. Flagler himself was falling apart, almost blind, a year to live, tops. Didn’t look good. But on January twenty-second, 1912, The Extension Special, pulling Flagler’s private train car, rolled into Key West as bands played and schoolchildren cheered and threw roses on the tracks.”

  Serge looked around the courtroom and dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief. “As he pulled into the station, Flagler said, ‘I can hear the children, but I cannot see them.’” Serge sat down at the defense table, buried his face in his arms and began sobbing.

  The judge cleared his throat. “What does the court psychiatrist have to say?”

  “Your Honor, the defendant obviously needs treatment. He’s on a variety of medications, and when he takes them, he’s fine. But when he stops, he has episodes, like the other day at the museum.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Only to himself. There’s nothing violent in his record…”

  “Nothing yet,” interrupted the prosecutor.

  “…Only a string of night burglaries,” continued the psychiatrist. “Cypress Gardens, Trapper Nelson’s Pioneer Home, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Estate.”

  “What does he do? Take stuff?”

  “He leaves stuff.”

  “Come again?”

  “He leaves stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Little historic artifacts and souvenirs he’s collected over the years. He finds them at swap meets or on the Internet or even with a metal detector,” said the psychiatrist. “He told me he wants to make sure they’re preserved by the appropriate authorities.”

  Serge raised his head and nodded urgently in agreement.

  Over the prosecution’s vociferous objections, the judge suspended sentence and ordered the defendant to perform fifty hours of community service polishing the brass on Henry Flagler’s private railroad car. Then he headed for his chambers, chuckling to himself, “Wide latitude.”

  8

  The sun hung just below the Atlantic horizon on another clear Florida morning. Cigarette wrappers and cellophane bags blew across a grimy alley on the sour north end of Miami Beach. Another ocean gust, and a Burger King cup started rolling toward the gutter and was flattened by an all-weather tire. The tire belonged to a white Mercedes Z310 that drove down the alley and backed up to a service door behind a strip mall. Five men in tropical shirts got out and unloaded brown cartons from the trunk and carried them in the back door of The Palm Reader.

  The owner checked his wristwatch. A minute till ten. He parted the strings of beads under the Employees Only sign and walked to the front of the store, flicking on fluorescent lights that revealed a skimpy, outdated selection of dusty books. He checked his watch again. Ten on the nose. A long line had already formed outside. The man flipped the CLOSED sign over, unlocked three large bolts and pushed the front door open.

  Back in the storeroom, the staff was busy with box cutters, slicing open a dozen cases of paperbacks, 576 books in all, every one the same title.

  The customers were not browsers. They went straight to the counter.

  The owner stood behind the cash register and smiled. “Can I help you?”

  “Uh, yes,” said the first customer. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’d like The Stingray Shuffle.”

  “I think we might have one left,” said the owner, reaching under the counter and producing a paperback. “Yes, here it is. But it’s a rare collector’s item. First edition. A hundred dollars.”

  The customer handed over five twenties, took the book and left quickly.

  The next customer stepped up.

  “May I help you?”

  The customer opened his wallet. “The Stingray Shuffle, please.”

  “We might have one left,” said the owner, reaching down. “Yes, here it is…”

  The line still had a dozen customers left when the owner felt under the counter and found an empty shelf. He yelled toward the bead curtain in the back of the store: “Need some more books up here!”

  One of the workers burst through the beads and trotted up to the register with a fresh box. The others in the storeroom were hard at work with box cutters, slicing secret compartments into the middle of the paperbacks and inserting grams of cocaine.

  A half hour later: “We need more books again!”

  “We’re almost out.”

  “So reorder,” yelled the owner. “Call the distributor.”

  The phone rang in the back room. It never stopped ringing. Always the same question. “Yes, we have that title.”

  But this call was different.

  The employee who answered it got a nervous look. He cupped his hand over the receiver. “Boss! Come quick!”

  The owner stuck his head through the beads. “What is it?”

  “Some nosy person asking a l
ot of questions about books. Really suspicious.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Says he’s a publisher.”

  “You idiot! Of course it’s a publisher! This is a fucking bookstore. Just get rid of him.”

  “Right.” The employee uncovered the receiver and had a short conversation, jotting something on a scrap of paper before hanging up.

  “What did they say?”

  “They wanted an author to do a book signing here.”

  The boss started laughing. “Here?” He broke up again. “That’s a riot!”

  The employee started laughing, too.

  The laughing gradually tapered off, and the boss caught his breath. “How’d you get rid of him?”

  “Said Tuesday would be fine.”

  “What! We can’t have a book signing here!”

  “You just told me to get rid of him. You didn’t say no signing.”

  The boss pulled a gold bullet of coke from his shirt pocket, stuck it under his nose. “Who’s this author, anyway?”

  The employee checked his piece of paper. “Ralph Krunkleton.”

  The boss sniffled and bunched his eyebrows in concentration. “Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton. Where have I heard that name before? Hmmm…”

  The others continued slicing books.

  “…Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton…” The boss looked down at the table full of paperbacks. “Oh, my God! Not Ralph Krunkleton!”

  “Who’s Ralph Krunkleton?”

  “The guy who wrote this book!” The owner snorted up again, and the coke began marching him in a circle. “We don’t need this kind of attention! We’ve worked hard to develop this book as our code title—one of the worst-selling novels in history, one that no law-abiding customer would ever, ever ask for. A signing is the last thing we need—it’ll screw up the entire procedure. And there’ll be press, TV…”

  An employee slit into another paperback. “We’ll need snack mix.”

  9

  At the end of the twentieth century, major drug cartels were displaying enormous ingenuity and limitless finances. Cocaine was found encased in concrete posts, dissolved in soda pop, injected in breast implants.

  But nobody expected what was discovered one cool morning high up the mountains twenty-eight kilometers west of Cartagena. Police were tipped off by farmers in a remote village, who said three strangers had moved into an old warehouse, never came out and appeared to subsist entirely on takeout delivered from God knew where. They heard drilling sounds at night.

  There was no sign of the three men when the policia swarmed the warehouse in a coordinated predawn raid and found precision tools, welding tanks and Russian engineering manuals. But nobody was looking at that stuff. They were staring up at The Tube—the arc-welded, double-hulled, twenty-foot-wide steel cylinder running the entire length of the building. It couldn’t possibly be what they thought it was, not at this altitude.

  Military experts soon confirmed their worst suspicions: a nearly complete military-class submarine that could dive to three hundred feet and carry ten tons of cocaine. The sub was to be built, then dismantled and trucked to the coast for reassembly. The estimated cost: twenty-five million U.S. dollars. The police had to shake their heads with grudging admiration. This was even more ambitious than the previous high-water mark in 1995, when the Cali Cartel attempted to purchase a used Soviet navy sub before the deal was uncovered and scuttled. But that was dismissed as a grandiose scheme doomed from the start. This, on the other hand, was frighteningly close to fruition. There was a wave of relief. Thank heaven they’d arrived when they did.

  A police captain with as much imagination as the cartels deflated the mood. “How do we know there aren’t other subs already in the water?”

  A tall, rugged man in a white linen suit stood on a sandy beach near the southern end of the Windward Islands and looked out to sea with binoculars. It was a beautiful horseshoe harbor of clear blue water, the shore ringed with quaint pastel buildings. Behind the man, the island rose quickly through coconut palms and a rain forest to the volcanic peak of Mount St. Catherine, the highest point in Grenada.

  The man kept his binoculars trained on the water and for some reason remembered reading that Grenada had 154 TV sets per thousand residents. He looked a little like Gene Hackman and wore an expression of grave concern. Nobody knew the man’s name, but they all called him Mr. Grande, head of the infamous Mierda Cartel.

  The cocaine business had always been a tricky proposition, and everyone knew the risks. The absurd amounts of money made it worthwhile. Except for the Mierda Cartel. It was the sixty-eighth-largest cartel in the world, which was last place, and it was broke. The other cartels fought extradition; the Mierda gang was hounded by bill collectors.

  Everyone naturally assumed that all cartels were extremely rich and ruthless, and the residents of Grenada initially treated their hometown traffickers with the appropriate mixture of respect and fear. But a different picture soon emerged. The cartel was running up tabs all over town. Nobody wanted to say anything at first. They had heard the stories. But when the cartel couldn’t pay for transmission work on a Mercedes, and the mechanic impounded the car—and was still alive a week later—everything changed. The merchants started getting nudgey, and the cartel began avoiding town.

  It was eating at the Mierda organization. The newspaper stories touting the triumphs of the other cartels only rubbed it in. The cocaine business was an intensely competitive one, with a pecking order as rigid as the seating chart at the Oscars. Word of the submarine discovered in the Colombian highlands had reached Grenada, and it got under Mr. Grande’s skin.

  This called for a sit-down.

  Mr. Grande drove his golf cart up the winding road to cartel headquarters, a top secret mountain hideaway concealed in the thickest part of the rain forest, near the top of Mount St. Catherine. He stopped at the mailbox and removed a stack of threatening collection notices. His men were already waiting in the study, submachine guns hanging from shoulder straps. They stood when Mr. Grande entered, and they sat when he sat. When they did, one of the submachine guns accidentally went off, a quick burst of bullets whistling across the room into the saltwater aquarium.

  “Who did that?” demanded Mr. Grande, clownfish flopping on the floor.

  They pointed at Paco.

  “Give it!”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  Paco shuffled across the room, head down, and handed the weapon to Mr. Grande, who stuck it in the bottom drawer of his desk and closed it.

  Mr. Grande then held up the newspaper with the submarine article. He slapped the page with the back of his hand. “This is what we should be doing!” He picked up the phone.

  After a brief conversation, he hung up and turned to his men. “Our problems are solved.”

  Mr. Grande had phoned the cartel that lost the submarine. He knew the raid had put them behind schedule, and he made a persuasive argument to subcontract his own boys for rush delivery of a new thirty-million-dollar sub.

  “Where are we going to get a sub?” asked Paco.

  “Estupido!” yelled Mr. Grande.

  The men crowded around as their boss rolled his office chair over to the computer and logged onto Yahoo! Five minutes later, he stood at the printer. Out came a crosshatch schematic blueprint of the submarine H. L. Hunley. What attracted Mr. Grande was the Hunley’s elegant simplicity.

  “We can build one of these with our eyes closed,” he said. “Then we’ll have all the money we need…and some respect!”

  The phone rang.

  “What now?” said Mr. Grande.

  It was the power company.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he screamed in the receiver. “I could have you killed just for saying that! One word from me and your whole family will be blown up!…Hello? Hello?…”

  Mr. Grande put down the phone, and the lights went out.

  A month later, the Mierda Cartel packed themse
lves into a convoy of pickup trucks and drove down from their mountain headquarters to the coastal capital of St. George’s. The curious townspeople came out of the shops and restaurants as the cartel backed a trailer up to the water. The residents faintly recognized the object on the trailer but couldn’t quite place it.

  One of the cartel stood knee-deep in the surf and motioned to the driver, who watched in the side mirror as he backed up.

  “Keep coming. Keep coming. Keep coming…” He held up a hand. “Stop!”

  They untied the restraining straps, and a large, bulbous object slid gently into the water. Then they opened a hatch on top and the entire cartel got inside except Mr. Grande, who stood on the beach focusing binoculars.

  The onlookers inched forward and formed a semicircle around their local kingpin. Mr. Grande didn’t look at them, but he knew they were there, and he swelled with pride. Finally, respect.

  The craft began its maiden voyage, moving under its own power at modest speed until it reached deeper water and submerged, just the periscope showing. The impressed crowd murmured.

  Mr. Grande had become supremely confident the moment he saw the H. L. Hunley on the Internet. He immediately recognized the shape and knew exactly where he could lay his hands on something watertight to use for the pressure hull. He cajoled Grenada Power & Light to turn the electricity back on and talked a local merchant into extending credit one last time. “You won’t be sorry.”

  The cartel took delivery of the “hull” the next afternoon and worked round the clock with drills, jigsaws and rivet guns, carefully following their computer diagrams. They attached hand cranks to underwater paddles with axles fitted through greased nylon gaskets in the hull, and they employed a similar shaft design for the rudder. They bought plastic fifty-gallon outboard gas containers for ballast tanks, which also acted as the keel. A shuttlecock valve let water into the tanks, and an air-mattress foot pump pushed it out. And finally, they installed a periscope, a hatch and a series of portholes in the hull, which was a fiberglass septic tank.