Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  “I’m pretty sure Tatum’s hurt,” the chief of staff told the ring announcer. “I want you to stop the fight.”

  The announcer laughed. “Are you kidding? We’re live on national TV! Do you know how much money we’re making?”

  “Stop the fight!”

  “Forget it!”

  The rest of Tatum’s staff was now out of their chairs, and a major brouhaha ensued at the officials’ table.

  “Stop the fight!”

  “No way!”

  “I’ll stop it myself!”

  The chief of staff went for the ring. The announcer tried to block him but was shoved to the ground. Tatum’s entire camp blustered past the officials’ table and started climbing into the ring. Several WWF wrestlers saw the ring announcer get shoved, and it offended them. They came pouring in from backstage—Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock and The Undertaker—and they began beating the tar out of Tatum’s people. The staff tried to use its sheer numbers and pile on Austin and The Rock. More wrestlers came running out. The Mean Street Posse, X-Pac, and Taka & Funaki. The entire ring was encircled in pandemonium. The folding metal chairs came into play. Wham! There goes an aide-de-camp. Wham! There goes an undersecretary. Wham! There goes the chief of protocol, his face a crimson mask.

  The play-by-play man and the ring announcer sat at the press table, yelling in their respective microphones.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this! The officials are trying to restore order!”

  “It’s a donnybrook! It’s a donnybrook!”

  Inside the ring, Pimento had Jackie in a hammerlock but left himself open for an elbow to the solar plexus. Jackie turned the tables. She immobilized him by constricting his head between her athletic thighs. Six separate struggles raged outside the ring.

  “It’s a free-for-all!…”

  “It’s all-out war!…”

  Someone in the audience came running down the steps toward the ring, screaming like a maniac.

  The ring announcer looked up and saw something so bizarre and unnatural that it could only be part of the official wrestling script. He was afraid he had missed something in one of the meetings, so he improvised.

  “Oh, my God! Ladies and gentlemen! It’s the Puppet Lady! It’s the Puppet Lady!…”

  Marlon looked toward the aisle. “Babs?”

  Babs was both crying and screaming as she climbed into the ring with her large, wooden Punch-and-Judy set. “Let go of him! You’re killing him!…”

  Jackie had Pimento in an upside-down hold. She slowly stood up, gripping him around the waist with his head still between her thighs, preparing to drop him on his skull in a classic piledriver.

  “She’s going for the piledriver!” shouted the play-by-play man. “She’s going for the piledriver!”

  Babs was crying her makeup off again as she planted her feet, grabbed the ends of the puppet strings in her hand and began twirling Punch-and-Judy in a circle over her head like a Mexican bola. When the marionettes had reached a ferocious velocity, Babs slammed them into the side of Jackie’s head. Jackie was staggered. She dropped Pimento mid-piledriver.

  Babs ran over and hugged Pimento and stroked his hair. “Are you okay, baby?”

  Wham!

  Jackie hit Babs over the head with a chair.

  Babs went skidding across the canvas facedown. She pushed herself up and slowly turned around. The crying had stopped. Her face was twisted and her teeth bared. She pointed at Jackie and said a single word: “You!”

  “Come and get it!” said Jackie.

  The two women charged like bulls from opposite corners and met in the middle of the ring in a savage, bone-crunching collision. They began to fight with such fury and speed that the human eye couldn’t keep up with it, spinning across the ring like Tasmanian devils.

  “It’s no-holds-barred!…”

  “It’s a death match!…”

  The wrestlers outside the ring stopped and watched in horror when they noticed what was happening. Stone Cold, The Rock and X-Pac winced and tightened their sphincters.

  Tatum’s Tallahassee staff used the diversion to organize a pincer attack.

  Wham! A tax attorney caught Stone Cold in the back of the head with a tortoiseshell briefcase. From the opposite direction, a team of state auditors made a flanking move and charged the other wrestlers in the flying-wedge formation.

  “It’s bedlam! It’s bedlam!…”

  Meanwhile, Pimento and Babs had gained the upper hand. They had simultaneously bounced Jackie and Gomer off opposing ring ropes, then switched off and caught their opponents in twin sleeper holds. The crowd went bananas. When Jackie and Gomer were neutralized, Pimento and Babs slung them through the ring ropes, taking out the flying wedge of accountants before they could do any more harm to the WWF.

  The crowd had never been louder. Rolls of toilet paper flew. The network’s switchboard lit up, wanting to know if the Florida Phantom and the Puppet Lady would become regulars.

  Stone Cold Steve Austin and Tampa native The Rock climbed into the ring and raised Pimento’s and Babs’s arms in triumph. They were joined by the rest of the wrestlers, who hoisted the couple on their shoulders.

  Marlon and Elizabeth laughed and applauded ringside. Marlon looked over at Escrow, who was ashen and hyperventilating, and gave him a playful nudge. “See? I told you everything would work out. You worry too much.”

  As Pimento and Babs were carried up the gangway, Pimento got a strange feeling, the same one he’d had in the Miami Arena. He looked up toward the rafters. Something wasn’t right….

  Other wrestlers took the ring as the regularly scheduled preliminary matches began. Crew members had to bring out a new set of folding metal chairs because the others were all bent.

  Escrow was in the rest room. He had his coat over his arm; his collar was open and tie loose. He bent into the sink and splashed cold water on his face. A distant roar from the arena echoed into the rest room. The man at the next sink had a shaved head tattooed on top with a flaming pentagram.

  “Dammit! I’ll bet they just gave the match to the British Bulldog. I hate the Bulldog!” He punched the metal paper towel dispenser, creasing it deeply. He turned to Escrow.

  “You look like a Bulldog fan!”

  Escrow cowered and shook his head no.

  “You sure?”

  This time he nodded, rapidly.

  “We’ve got to do something about the Bulldog!” The man pulled a baggie of heroin from his pocket. He tapped some into his hand and snorted. “That’s better. Now I can handle the Bulldog.”

  “Say,” said Escrow. “Can that stuff knock someone out? I mean like if you slipped it in their drink?”

  “Can drop a rhino if you use enough.”

  “Would you sell me some?”

  “I have a few dime bags.”

  Escrow opened his wallet and the man grabbed a fifty. “That should get you started.” He handed Escrow five tiny packets of white powder, and Escrow stuffed them down a hip pocket.

  Back in the arena, Marlon, Elizabeth and Jenny laughed and applauded as Too Cool did a synchronized jive dance after knocking out the Bulldog.

  The barrel of a Tango-51 poked out through a small window high up in the arena. Inside the room, a man sat on boxes of scoreboard lightbulbs, scanning the front row through the rifle scope. Jenny…Elizabeth…Marlon. The rifle stopped. The safety came off.

  More flashpots ignited, and electric motors began lowering a steel cage over the ring.

  A sweaty index finger twitched on the trigger of the Tango-51. Suddenly, the door to the lightbulb room opened. The gunman turned around.

  “Who are you?…Wait! No! I can explain!…Aaaahhh!”

  The shirt on the man’s limp body was unbuttoned. A Magic Marker scribbled across his chest. The i was dotted with a heart.

  Someone stepped out of the lightbulb room and silently slipped away on a catwalk. He wore a robe with a name on the back.

  THE FLORIDA PHANTOM.

/>   “HOMICIDE, Mahoney,” said Mahoney, flashing a badge.

  “Metro-Dade.”

  “You’re a long way from your sandbox,” said the head of Ice Palace security.

  “It’s all one big sandbox now.”

  “Amen.”

  “What have we got here?”

  “A stiff. Crushed monocle next to the head. Magic Marker on the chest.”

  Mahoney lifted the sheet. Written across the nipple line:

  TAMPA: AMERICA’S NEXT GREAT CITY!

  “You’ve seen it all, haven’t you?” asked Mahoney.

  He nodded. “I got a week till I retire. But now they’re teaming me up with some rookie who wants to throw away the rule book and do things his way. He’s gonna get me killed.”

  “We’ve lost a lot of good men just before retirement like that.”

  Mahoney pulled out his flask and took a hit, then offered it.

  “I’m on the wagon.”

  “Wanna fall off?”

  “Makes sense to me.” He took a slug.

  “What else makes sense?”

  “Not putting foil in a microwave.”

  “What else?”

  “The victim was no wrestler.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Top of his skull flattened.”

  “Sounds like the piledriver.”

  “Easiest hold in the world to get out of. No reason at all he had to die.”

  “You know what that makes this then?”

  The security agent nodded sadly. “Another senseless killing.”

  37

  JOURNALISM PROFESSOR Wally Butts couldn’t get through to Marlon. He broke the speed limit all the way from Starke to Tampa. Three hours till execution.

  He drove to the Ice Palace and spotted the Orange Crush in the parking lot just as the wrestling match was letting out.

  Butts knocked on the door of the RV, then pushed Escrow aside. “Governor, he’s protecting his daughter.”

  “Who is?”

  “Frank Lloyd Sirocco.”

  Butts’s cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his jacket. “Hello?…Yes, it is…. I see…. I see…. Why can’t you just tell me right now?…I see…. Yes, we’ll be there.” He hung up.

  It was an out-of-town attorney. He said he was representing the daughter of a Death Row inmate, whom he was not prepared to identify on the phone. He said he had to see the governor and Butts in person. He was driving over from Lakeland, and they agreed to meet halfway, to save time. The attorney said he’d bring the daughter.

  THE state troopers were the first to arrive at the Hillsborough River State Park, thirty minutes east of Tampa in the middle of nowhere. It was after dark and the park was closed, but the troopers unlocked the gate. A black Lexus came around a lonely bend and pulled into the park. The troopers waved them over to the picnic tables just inside the entrance.

  A man and a woman got out. The troopers frisked them and used handheld metal detectors.

  The Orange Crush pulled in the park.

  Elizabeth and Jenny were asleep in back. Escrow and Pimento were up front, but Marlon told them it was a confidential legal meeting and they would have to wait in the Winnebago. Marlon and Butts climbed out and took seats at one of the picnic tables, opposite the man and woman. There were no lights in the park, and no moon. One of the troopers parked his patrol car facing the table and put his high beams on.

  The attorney held up a hand in the surreal light. “Before anyone says anything, I need to have immunity for my client.”

  Butts: “What for?”

  “You’re interested in the Sirocco murder case? If my client has information that she hasn’t divulged earlier…”

  “Right,” said Marlon. “Obstruction. Accessory after the fact.”

  “I need it in writing,” said the attorney. “Blanket immunity for anything my client says here. I’ve prepared the papers.”

  The lawyer pulled a document from his briefcase, and Butts pulled a video camera from his.

  “What’s that?” asked the attorney.

  “We need to get this on tape.”

  “We didn’t agree to that.”

  “A man’s life is at stake.” He looked at his watch. An hour left. “We don’t have time to fool around!”

  The attorney looked at the woman. She nodded.

  “Okay, you can tape.” The attorney handed the document to Marlon. He signed it on his lap and handed it to Butts for the witness signature.

  When the attorney got the paper back and made sure everything was in order, he nodded at the woman. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m Angela Sirocco, Frank’s daughter.” She stopped and looked at the attorney. She had trouble going on.

  “I know this is hard,” said Marlon, “but did George Braintree rape you?”

  She nodded.

  “So your father’s trying to protect you?”

  She nodded again.

  Marlon and Butts shook their heads at each other. “Jesus.”

  “Your father’s willing to die to protect your reputation?”

  “No,” said Angela.

  “What?” asked Marlon, confused.

  “He’s protecting me, all right. But not my reputation…. I killed George Braintree.”

  Bang. The answer almost gave Marlon and Butts whiplash. Of course. It all fell into place.

  The attorney held up the document. “We had a deal now—anything said here…”

  Marlon nodded, still stunned.

  “But what about all the evidence against Frank?” asked Butts.

  “He was telling the truth when he said his gun was stolen. I took it,” the woman explained. “I forged checks at the bank and got money orders for the trip. Made the calls at the pay phone. I was the only one who knew what I was planning.”

  Butts and Marlon were kicking themselves. How could they have been so dense?

  ANGELA Sirocco and her attorney drove away in the Lexus, followed by the troopers. The Orange Crush waited behind. Marlon had an urgent phone call to make before he was going anywhere.

  Marlon’s head was racing. He grabbed his cell phone and punched in the prison number. It beeped and turned itself off. Dead battery.

  THEY came to get Frank Lloyd Sirocco. His head was shaved, and his knees knocked. A priest told him he was going to a better place.

  ESCROW was on his own cell phone when Marlon told him to get off—he had an important call to make.

  “Sirocco’s innocent. I have to call off the execution.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Gimme that!”

  “How do you know he’s innocent?”

  “New evidence,” said Marlon, holding up the videotape.

  “Well, he probably did something else wrong.”

  “Give me that phone!”

  “I won’t let you!” said Escrow, clutching the phone to his chest. “You’re gonna blow the election!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ll get it,” said Pimento, and the two began struggling.

  “No! No! No! We’re going to lose the election!” Escrow started crying, then made a heaving expression. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Pimento let go and Escrow jumped out the door. He ran to the front of the Winnebago and opened the hood.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Marlon. “Throwing up on the engine?”

  The next thing they knew, Escrow was sprinting into the woods, cell phone in one hand and distributor wires in the other. They were too far out in the dark countryside to walk to another phone in time.

  “Get him!” yelled Marlon, and he and Pimento jumped down from the Orange Crush and dashed into the woods.

  Ned grabbed his camera and ran after them, bounding through the trees, taking branches in the face. “I love it! This is so Blair Witch!”

  They had almost caught up to Escrow when they came to a clearing, and the ground dropped away quickly. They tumbled down the bank of the Hillsborough River. Escrow got up and wen
t to throw the phone in the water, but Marlon dove from his knees and tackled him. Marlon held Escrow down, and Pimento pried the cell phone from his hands.

  “Call the prison!” said Marlon, restraining the struggling chief of staff.

  “No!” yelled Escrow.

  “Hurry!” yelled Marlon.

  “Emotion!” yelled Ned.

  Pimento punched numbers on the phone.

  “You have reached the Florida State Prison at Starke. If you know your party’s extension, enter it now. If you do not know your party’s extension, enter it now…. For further assistance, please call back during regular business hours. To hear our regular business hours, please stay on the line. To not stay on the line, press star-three. All others, press the pound key….”

  “What’s taking so long?” said Marlon.

  Pimento pressed buttons at random. “…You have entered an invalid selection. Please try again…. Due to an extremely high volume of calls, we cannot process your request at this time. Please do not hang up, as this will delay the processing of your request….” Pimento pressed more buttons. “…Hello, this is the voice mail of George Defazio. I’m away from my desk right now…”

  “Aaaaauuuuuu!” screamed Pimento. He reached back and hurled the phone into the river.

  “Brilliant!” yelled Ned.

  THE guards walked Frank Sirocco down a bright hallway. A door swung open and Frank saw the chair. His legs went, and they had to grab him by the armpits to keep him up. The curtain was lowered to block the witnesses’ view as they carried limp Frank to the chair.

  MARLON and Pimento made it back to the edge of the woods and ran to the park entrance on the dark country road. Headlights came around the bend. Marlon ran into the street and put up his arms, and the car skidded to a stop.

  Marlon ran around to the driver’s side. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  FRANK was in the chair, arms strapped fast against oak. The drill was to get the prisoner trussed up as quickly as possible and start the juice; they wanted everything moving so fast that there was no idle time for the prisoner to think about it and make a scene. Frank’s head twitched around like a scared rabbit. Two men pulled the leather buckles tight on his legs and another pulled the hood down over his head.