Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Bob hurried off with his musical case.

  Spider chain-lit a Viceroy. “I didn’t think it was possible, but Bob may just make us long for the days of Bad Company.”

  Bob climbed onstage and pulled a stool up to the microphone.

  The emcee motioned for a soft spotlight. “Ladies and gentlemen, Caesars Palace of Hoboken is proud to present Steppenwolf!”

  Bob leaned to the microphone. “Get your motor runnin’!…” He began playing the pan flute.

  A cell phone rang in the corner booth. Spider answered. He mostly listened. He hung up.

  “Who was it?” asked Preston.

  “Our agent.”

  “Jesus, Spider, you’re white as a sheet!”

  “That was the call we’ve been waiting for our entire lives.”

  “What call?”

  “We’ve made it. No more playing dumps like this. We’re going right to the very top.”

  “You don’t mean…”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  21

  “They’re in a pink Cadillac, for Chrissake!” Ivan yelled into his cell phone. “How hard can it be to find?…Shut up! That was rhetorical!…Look, here’s what you’re going to do. Tell all your hookers and pimps on US 1 to keep their eyes open for a pink Eldorado. They’re out there twenty-four hours anyway. If the Caddy ends up anywhere on US 1 from West Palm to Miami, at least a dozen of your people will see it…. What do you mean, how do I know they’ll end up on US 1? They’re scumbags!”

  A metal clanging sound.

  Eyelids fluttered in morning sunlight.

  Clang, clang.

  Lenny sat up in the rigid motel bed and looked around.

  Serge was at the sink, shaving, singing Estefan, “…I live for lov-in’ you. Ooooooo, la, la, la—la, la, la, la…”

  Lenny rubbed his eyes and went over to the window. He pulled back a burlap curtain. Cars raced by on US 1, past a big sign out front, SAHARA MOTEL. Someone had thrown a brick through the camel. He looked across the bent fence at the source of the clanging, the body shop next door.

  “Where are we?”

  “Riviera Beach,” said Serge. “My hometown.”

  Clang, clang.

  “This motel is on the skid,” said Lenny.

  “I know. Isn’t it great?” Serge pointed at a wall. “And they still have the original cheesy beach painting from the sixties.” Serge grabbed one side of the frame and began pulling.

  “You’re stealing the painting?”

  “Yes, this is The Thomas Crown Affair,” said Serge. “Why do they have to bolt these things to the wall?”

  Lenny came over and tugged from the other side, and the painting came down along with two drywall anchors and a tiny cloud of plaster dust. Serge reached in his shaving kit and pulled out a travel squeeze bottle and began squirting red liquid on the bedsheets.

  “What’s that?” asked Lenny.

  “Chicken blood.” Serge squirted the pillowcases and splattered the wall.

  “It looks like someone got hacked up in here.”

  “Exactly,” said Serge. “Takes their mind off the missing painting. Works every time.” He stuck the bottle back in his shaving kit. “C’mon, we have to check out.”

  “I think I need a shower,” said Lenny. “I can smell myself.”

  “No time,” said Serge. “We have to get to the hideout.”

  “The what?”

  “The hideout. We need to lay low until the heat is off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re on US 1 and this is a very distinctive car. The network of hookers and other human cockroaches has no doubt already been alerted to be on the lookout.”

  “So that’s why you covered it with that thing.”

  Serge tucked the painting under an arm and picked up the silver briefcase. “Let’s rock.”

  They went around behind the motel. Lenny pulled the beige tarp off the Cadillac, and they got in.

  Serge made a quick left onto North Thirty-seventh Street and pulled up to the curb in front of a small clapboard house, number 28.

  “Is this the hideout?”

  “I wish!” said Serge, snapping pictures without getting out of the car. He lowered the camera to change the f-stop. “No, this is Burt Reynolds’s childhood home. His dad was police chief here, and the family used to have a restaurant on Blue Heron Boulevard by the old drawbridge.”

  Lenny fired up the morning fat one. “Why are you so into Burt, anyway?”

  “Because we’re homeboys. I grew up on Thirty-fifth Street, two blocks over.”

  “Far out.”

  “Think of it,” said Serge. “Just two streets. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  Lenny shook his head.

  Serge held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “It means I was this close to being in Boogie Nights.”

  A hooker approached the car. “Hey, sugar.”

  Serge pointed at the house. “What time’s the next tour?”

  “The what?”

  He snapped a couple more quick pictures and looked around the yard, then back at the hooker. “Where’s the historic marker? They’ve put one up, haven’t they? Don’t tell me someone stole it!…Yeah, that has to be it. There’s no way they’d let Burt’s place go unmarked…” He raised the camera again. Click, click.

  “Wait,” said the hooker, slowly backing away from the convertible. “This is the pink Cadillac. This is the car!” She quickly pulled a cell phone from her leopard purse.

  “We’ve been made!” said Serge, starting up the car. “To the hideout!”

  22

  Well after midnight on the island of Palm Beach. The streets were empty; the people with five-hundred-dollar sweaters tied around their necks had all gone home. Waiters mopped and turned chairs upside down on the tables at Ta-boo, a popular piano bar on Worth Avenue.

  It had been quiet outside, but now the windows shook, and the help looked up to see a purple Jeep Wrangler fly by with a pulsating stereo producing the kind of sound used by surgical instruments to pulverize gallstones. The Jeep continued west, past the showroom windows, Cartier, Tiffany, Gucci, Saks, ten-thousand-dollar purses, framed autographs of Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson, handcrafted figurines depicting the Boer War. Past Via De Mario, Via Roma, Via Parigi, Renato’s and the Everglades Club. Across Hibiscus Avenue, weaving erratically over the yellow center line. But the car was local, and the attention of the police was directed elsewhere, outward, defending the social perimeter from the unwashed mainland people.

  The Jeep rounded the corner at South Lake and turned up a winding slab driveway to a private waterfront residence inspired by the Acropolis. The Jeep’s doors opened; two men in loafers got out. Cameron and Brandon, home for semester break from the Ivy League. They had started vacation as a group of four frat brothers, but the other two had been beaten to pâté in a Miami Beach traffic misunderstanding and were respectively undergoing orthodontic surgery and groin reconstruction.

  “Don’t forget the beer.”

  “Whoops.”

  They were fairly good-sized boys, 215 pounds each at the start of the year, now 240 with the anabolics—stars of the sculling team and Greek intramural touch football. Everything was going their way. They had just made it home without a DUI, and that called for a celebration. Time to get out the speedboat.

  According to the manufacturer’s literature, the thirty-three-foot Donzi Daytona can reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour, but it was only going sixty when it ran over the pelicans in the darkness under the Royal Palm Bridge and spread a wide wake across the Intracoastal Waterway.

  “Do you think we’re going too fast?” Brandon yelled over the wind and spray.

  “What?” yelled Cameron. “Go faster?”

  He pushed the throttle forward and headed for the next bridge, Flagler Memorial. The draw spans were up and a yacht was coming the other way.

  “There’s a bunch of cars stopped up there,” said B
randon. “Can you do a rooster tail?”

  “In my sleep,” said Cameron. He slowed and hit a switch, raising the pitch of the propellers, and a small geyser of water shot a couple feet into the air behind the boat.

  “This is going to be so great!”

  They didn’t go under the draw spans, instead picking a solid span three to the left. When they came out the other side, Cameron slammed the throttle all the way forward, and a giant rooster tail shot thirty feet in the air, up onto the bridge. Ninety gallons of salt water flooded the interior of a convertible BMW, killing the electronics and the engine.

  Cameron and Brandon looked back and saw the Beemer’s headlights flicker and go out. They were still giggling as they idled the yellow-and-white boat up to the seawall just past the bridge. That was the thing about Palm Beach—all the best off-limits places were wired tighter than Fort Knox. You couldn’t get near them from the street. A different story from the water.

  The brothers only banged the prow of their father’s boat into the seawall four times as they moored and climbed over the wall into the backyard.

  “You remember the beer?”

  “Yep. You remember the spray paint?”

  Brandon rattled the can in his right hand.

  Cameron pointed. “There it is!”

  “This is going to be so excellent!”

  It was a huge yard, and their target of opportunity stood alone in the middle. They stumbled across the grass and giggled some more and began spray-painting something ungrammatical about a rival fraternity sucking donkey dicks.

  They finished and stood there looking at the dripping paint. They felt empty. That’s it? This is as fun as it gets? They stood there some more, in case it would change, drinking and smoking, but no luck. Cameron got an idea. What if they broke something? That usually felt good.

  They climbed some stairs and smashed a pane in the back door. They found their way around inside from the moonlight coming through the windows. Brandon put a cigarette out on a century-old sofa. “What’s a train car doing out here anyway?”

  “Do I look like a fucking conductor? Here—help me break this.”

  Legs snapped crisply off the antique divan.

  “Let’s go get the baseball bats,” said Cameron.

  “Good idea.”

  They ran back to the boat. The brothers always took baseball bats with them in case they came across someone in traffic who needed a licking, but they also brought gloves and balls, on the advice of their attorney father, to disprove premeditation.

  They found some more Budweiser and decided it would be a good idea to bring that, too. Soon they had returned with the bats and beer, ready for a successful future.

  “Hold it,” Cameron said in the middle of the train car. He stopped and peed on something.

  “That was great! Watch this!” Brandon dropped his trousers.

  “You’re going to pinch a loaf?”

  Brandon nodded.

  “Radical!”

  Brandon finished his business and pulled up his pants.

  Cameron raised the baseball bat and smashed the arm off an Elizabethan chair.

  “Let me see that.” Brandon shattered the cherry top of a library cabinet, gold-edged books spilling. The end of the bat got stuck in the hole through the busted-up wood. He braced his left arm against the cabinet to free the bat. “Hold it a second. There’s something shiny in here.”

  He swept the rest of the books off the shelves, and Cameron helped him pull the shelving out. In back was a silver briefcase. They opened it up.

  “Holy God!”

  They picked up the briefcase and headed out of the train car.

  Brandon spun around. “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “I heard something.”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “Up there.”

  They were in the sleeping compartment. The top bunk was down, holding a big pile of blankets.

  “I saw it move!”

  “I did, too!”

  The blankets shifted some more and a sleepy head finally poked out and looked around.

  “Dig it!” said Cameron. “Some old bum is sleeping in here!”

  “I hate bums!”

  “Get a job, bum!”

  Movement in a second bunk. Another head poked out. Then a whisper: “Serge, someone’s in the hideout.”

  “Look! There’s two of ’em!” said Brandon.

  “You know,” said Cameron, picking up his baseball bat and slapping it in an open palm, “they’re trespassing.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Brandon, slapping his own bat in his hand.

  “We’re going to teach you bums a lesson!”

  Serge raised his hand. “Pardon me, but I think you’re making a mistake—”

  “Shut up, bum! If you don’t have any respect for yourself, why should we?”

  “Yeah! You make us want to puke with your laziness, your begging on street corners…”

  “Your rude, unambitious, filthy lifestyle and your disgusting habits…”

  “Time out,” said Serge, sitting up and making a T with his hands. He pointed out in the hall. “Which one of you brought the dog in here?”

  “What dog? There is no dog,” said Brandon.

  “But there’s a big pile of shit on the floor,” said Serge.

  “Oh, that’s Brandon’s,” said Cameron.

  “Will you shut up, bum?” yelled Brandon. “You interrupted me! Now I can’t even remember what I was saying!”

  “You were talking about my disgusting habits,” said Serge.

  “Right!” said Brandon. “You sicken us! We don’t want your kind near our island!”

  “We’re going to make sure you two think twice before you ever break in here again!”

  The pair advanced and raised their bats.

  “Don’t even think of asking for mercy, bum!”

  They stopped. Brandon tapped Cameron. “Is that a gun in his hand?”

  Serge had their undivided attention. Brandon’s and Cameron’s eyes were open as far as they would go, their mouths taped. They were tied to straight-back chairs, wondering what all the pails were for—dozens of open buckets around their feet, filled with some kind of granular material.

  Serge sat on the other side of the room, legs crossed, reading a copy of Historic Railroader Monthly. He was a lot more clean-shaven and fit—and armed—than they had expected a bum to be.

  Serge looked up. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

  They nodded quickly and hard.

  “And that lesson,” said Serge, “is that you never really know whom you’re fucking with, so best not to do it at all.”

  More nodding in agreement.

  Serge patted the briefcase on the floor next to his chair. “And thanks for returning this. The little sucker almost got away from me again.”

  He got up and walked over to one of the brick walls, gently touching the surface. “This is a pretty historic place itself. We’re out by the switching yards near the old West Palm depot. The mainland—I’m the local now. This used to be a major warehouse until they boarded it up twenty-five years ago. This room here was a giant humidor used to store cases of cigars that were boxcarred over from the factories in Tampa.” Serge ran his fingers along the doorframe. “It’s held up pretty well. The seals are in good shape. Except we’re not going to keep anything humid. We’re going to do the opposite.”

  He picked up one of the granule-filled pails so they could read the side: “DampRid.”

  “This stuff is incredible,” said Serge. “Sucks all the damn moisture out of the air. I mean all. If you reside in Florida, you can’t live without it. Until I found this stuff, my shower curtains were mildewed, the cabinets full of mold, all my album covers warped. But no more!”

  An empty five-gallon bucket sat near the door. Serge picked up one of the smaller pails of granules and tipped it slowly so the water that had collected in the bottom trickl
ed into the larger bucket. He repeated the process until he had drained all the pails. Then he grunted as he hoisted the big bucket.

  “That sure is heavy,” said Serge. “I’ll be right back.”

  He dumped the bucket outside the room, then crossed the warehouse and opened a jimmied door to the street. Lenny was under a broken awning, toking a roach down to his fingertips.

  “Hi, Serge.”

  “How’s lookout duty?”

  “No problem except I’m almost out of dope, so I’m trying to conserve.”

  “That’s being responsible.” He went back inside.

  Serge repeated the pail-emptying exercise a dozen more times over the next twenty-four hours. He also drank two entire eighteen-packs of Perrier. Cameron and Brandon stared in terror as Serge knocked back another bottle and thumbed through his magazine. He set the empty green container on the floor. “You’re looking at me like, ‘Is he crazy or something, drinking so much water?’ No way—you have to make sure you take a lot of fluids in here or you’ll dehydrate, and you don’t want to die like that. It has a way of creeping up on you. Did you know that toward the end, you cry tears of blood?…Hey look! Here’s our train car!”—pointing at a photo in his magazine. “The one we were in last night. It’s called the Rambler. Bet you’re glad you got a chance to see it, huh?”

  Serge got up and paced like a cheetah. “Actually, we’re lucky to have that car at all. In 1935, the Florida East Coast Railway sold it off to the Georgia Northern Railroad, along with a bunch of other stuff. Henry would have turned in his grave. They used the Rambler a few years and sold it again, and it eventually disappeared. When people finally realized its historic value, it was nowhere to be found.”

  Serge stopped walking and fanned himself with the magazine.

  “Damn, it’s hot in here!” Then he smiled. “But it’s a dry heat.”

  By the fourth day, there wasn’t any more movement from the two young men. They were technically still alive, able to hear and understand, but that was about it. Serge had moved them up to the top of the warehouse, out on the flat pebble roof, where they now lay naked on top of two ultrareflective silver survival blankets. Serge walked to the edge of the roof and looked down; Lenny was still on lookout, helping a bag lady cross the street. Serge went back to his captives.