Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  The sticks of dynamite were now damp, and instead of blowing Joe to smithereens, they blew out their end caps in a brilliant stream of sparks that knocked Joe down and spun him across the stage like a Chinese pinwheel.

  “Watch out! He’s coming this way!” yelled Escrow. He and Marlon timed their jump perfectly, and Joe spun under their feet and down the steps.

  After Joe had finally burned himself out in front of the Port-O-Lets, people’s eyes began to return to the stage. Fresco was aiming his gun at Marlon.

  “Looks like the ball is back in my court!” He began squeezing the trigger.

  “Whoooaaaa!” yelled Blaine Crease.

  The rest of the margarita glass had chosen that moment to give way, and Crease came flying out in his canoe, running over Fresco and cascading off the stage into the crowd.

  The injured lay everywhere. People screamed and stampeded from the stage. Others ran toward it with plastic cups, to catch the runoff. Smoke rose from the side of the stage. Joe Blow reignited and began spinning again in the crowd. Marlon was yelling for the pile of Stones security to get off him. Hundreds of shoulder-borne parrots took off in confusion and pooped and flew into buildings. One of the cops turned to another. “I hate these Buffett things.”

  SERGE had been able to dive and knock the woman’s arm as she squeezed off a shot, resulting in the shattered margarita. Then he kicked the rifle away and pinned her to the floor and began to pummel.

  Something was wrong. She wasn’t resisting. Just lying there limp, taking the fists. She didn’t make a sound and didn’t seem to feel pain. Serge stopped, and the woman angled her head, looking at Serge with a flicker of understanding.

  Serge studied her face, too.

  He sat her up.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  40

  FOR ELECTION NIGHT headquarters, Marlon rented Centro Asturiano, the old Latin cultural hall. Tatum’s people were waiting it out in a hall at the Convention Center. The scene was the same at both. Balloons and streamers. Hats, political buttons, noisemakers, liquor and Doritos.

  The candidates themselves were nowhere to be seen. They sat ensconced in their respective hotel rooms with only their closest supporters. Staff members had laptops plugged into the phone lines, getting a direct feed from the secretary of state in Tallahassee. The candidates remained still, but everyone else was involved in nervous activity. Elizabeth gave Marlon a shoulder rub.

  Centro Asturiano erupted when Marlon took the lead on a bunch of small-town returns.

  The Convention Center shook when Tatum pulled ahead on big-city precincts.

  Then Marlon, then Tatum, back and forth, deep into the night.

  Various controversies arose. Ballot irregularities. Missing signatures on absentees. Fisticuffs were reported outside churches and VFW halls. Then all hell broke loose.

  A shaken Jimmy Carter appeared on CNN outside a post office in Palm Beach, flames in the background. “I’ve never seen anything like this!”

  Carter had been scheduled to observe elections in a remote mountainous region of Central America controlled by death squads, but he was rerouted instead to Palm Beach County because the election there was expected to be more primitive and unstable.

  Precincts kept trickling in, the lead seesawing.

  SERGE made excellent time racing across the state. He arrived in Miami an hour after sunset and pulled over on the side of the MacArthur Causeway. He pointed to a waterfront property on Star Island, not too far from Loco Benny’s old place. It was set back from the seawall, and a single house light twinkled through the palms.

  “They’re all there,” said Serge.

  The Brazilian woman nodded.

  Inside the home, Frank Lloyd Sirocco, his wife, Anita, and their attorney-agent were nearing the bottom of a bottle of Smirnoff. The TV was tuned to election returns, and they fell apart laughing every time Marlon fell behind. They also had a tape recorder running, in fulfillment of their $1.2 million book contract.

  “What about those four women who told the journalism teacher they’d been molested?” asked the lawyer.

  “Addicts. Friends of mine. We paid ’em with skag right after their interviews,” said Anita. “Remember, he didn’t find them canvassing the area. They called him. And they met at neutral sites. He didn’t do his homework.”

  “How did you two team up in the first place?”

  Frank and Anita grinned at each other. “That’s really a funny story,” said Frank. “Anita and George were going through a divorce, and I realized we’d screwed up the contracts. We would have to dissolve the company just to pay off Anita’s share of the split.”

  Anita chuckled and picked up the story. “So Frank goes to George and starts hinting around about killing me. And George gets all mad and tells Frank, ‘We may be getting divorced, but I still love her, and I’ll kick your ass if you ever say anything like that again.’”

  Anita and Frank got the giggles. Frank caught his breath: “I go to plan B. I call Anita and say, ‘Let’s kill George,’ and she says, ‘Fine by me.’”

  “We all flew down to the Keys together,” said Anita. “George didn’t know it, but Frank and I got tickets under assumed names. I killed him in the room, and then Frank came in and cleaned it up with his professional expertise. We flew back to establish our alibis during the Patriots game.”

  The TV showed Marlon falling behind again, which was hysterical.

  Back on the causeway, Serge kept a lookout while the Brazilian woman put on a mask and snorkel. He pulled into traffic as she slipped into the black night water of Biscayne Bay.

  IN a twentieth-floor hotel room overlooking downtown Tampa, Escrow sat on the edge of a bed typing on his laptop. He jumped up and ran to Marlon.

  “We need to lodge a protest. Reform Party candidate Albert Fresco has polled ten thousand in Palm Beach. Those are your votes. The citizens got confused by something called the Reticulated Lawn Beetle Ballot.”

  “No protests,” said Marlon. “That’s how the ball bounces.”

  “But—”

  “Forget it!”

  Escrow fumed. “I need to get out of here.” He left the room in disgust.

  The returns updated at ten P.M., the numbers rolled over. Marlon took the lead, 2,876,352 to 2,876,021. Jackie Monroeville got on the phone to Tallahassee, demanding they skip the regular count and go directly to a recount.

  Escrow burst back into the room in a panic. He ran up to Marlon carrying two blue canvas bags marked PALM BEACH and held out his arms.

  “Hide these!”

  “I hope you haven’t done what I think you’ve done.”

  “Who would have thought they’d ever miss them?” said Escrow. “How was I supposed to know they’d have Jimmy Carter?”

  There was a knock at the door. Escrow looked around in panic again and then jumped inside a closet with the canvas bags. An agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement walked in the room. “Is there a Gottfried Escrow here?”

  A whimpering sound came from the closet. The agent opened it.

  “What are those?” asked the agent, pointing at the blue bags in Escrow’s hands.

  “Never seen them before.”

  “You’re under arrest,” said the agent, frisking him.

  “You’re making a mistake!” said Escrow. “I’ll have your job!”

  The agent felt something in Escrow’s right hip pocket, and he reached inside and pulled out several packets of heroin.

  “What do we have here?”

  “I can explain. I was going to use that to drug a dangerous fugitive and then turn him over to you.”

  “Of course,” said the agent. “That’s what everyone uses it for.”

  Escrow’s body went flaccid, and they had to carry him out of the room in a bedspread.

  The eleven-o’clock returns came in. Tatum pulled ahead by nineteen votes. At midnight, it was Marlon by twelve, then Tatum by seven, then Marlon by one. At three A.M., nobody w
atching a computer screen or TV set could believe their eyes. With a hundred percent of the votes counted: Marlon 2,942,726, Tatum 2,942,726.

  The constitution of the great state of Florida left only one option in such an unlikely event. The race would be decided by media circus. Every available TV camera in the state was turned on and began searching for anything with a pulse and a law degree.

  Then, at four A.M., the shocker.

  An agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement walked in the front door of the Palm Beach courthouse with the missing bags of ballots he had recovered from Gottfried Escrow. The ballots were dumped on a giant, flood-lit table in the elections office. TV cameras began rolling as the nail-biting count got under way.

  They were almost finished but had to start over after the Republicans successfully filed a protest against a Democratic observer standing behind one of the counters going, “Forty-two! Seventeen! Twenty-nine! Six! Nine hundred and eight!…”

  The count had almost been completed again when a press conference was hastily arranged in Tallahassee. The Florida secretary of state was about to step in front of the cameras, but the drama had been too stressful for her, and she had overdosed on rouge.

  The networks switched back to the scene outside the Palm Beach courthouse. Sirens wailed. Martial law had been declared, and police moved in with riot gear to disperse an angry mob hanging a chad in effigy.

  Just after sunrise, a weary volunteer held up the very last punch card, made a hash mark on a tally sheet and placed the ballot on a tall stack. Officials crowded around to see the results. This time it wasn’t a tie. The networks broke into breakfast programming with the name of the next governor.

  JACKIE Monroeville ran out of Tatum’s hotel room and skipped up and down the halls in her bare feet, screaming her head off.

  “I won! I won! I’m First Lady! Fuckin’ A!”

  Jumping around, swinging her arms. “I knew it!”

  Guests poked their heads out of the other rooms. Jackie ran down the hall shaking their hands and leaving them baffled.

  “I won! Say hel-looooo to the First Lady!” She fell on her back in the hallway and pedaled her feet in the air. “Yahooooooooooooooo!”

  Tatum stepped into the hallway with a drumstick. “What about me?”

  “Oh, you’re governor.”

  He took a bite and went back in the room.

  POCKETS of supporters were crying as Marlon walked up to the podium at Centro Asturiano. A hush fell as he arrived at the mike. A balloon popped somewhere.

  “I want to say how very proud I am of all of you, and how much your support has meant to me…”

  People began clapping, and the applause built until Marlon had to step back from the microphone. They kept cheering. Marlon began looking at them face by face. He started thinking of all the people he had met on the campaign. He thought about his platoon, and his sergeant, Tex Jackson.

  He stepped forward to the mike again, and the cheering subsided. He stared at his shoes.

  “I’m sorry. I let you down.” He walked away.

  Some started cheering again, but it was awkward and trailed off. A woman yelled, “We love you, Marlon!” like that day at the airport in Tallahassee, but he was already out the door.

  Epilogue

  ONE YEAR LATER.

  Everyone had become famous.

  The documentary film The Last Campaign by Ned Coppola was the sleeper hit of the year at art movie houses. The soundtrack, with the Phil Collins title tune, was also a surprise chart-topper. In the summer, the movie was rereleased for wider distribution on six hundred screens nationwide. The updated film featured new footage at the end, showing what had happened to all the characters since the election.

  Marlon and Elizabeth kept the Orange Crush. They had hooked up with an Airstream caravan and were in the process of visiting every state except Hawaii. They became a husband-wife team of guest political commentators on CNN. The film’s epilogue showed them squaring off for charity against Al and Tipper Gore on a special edition of Survivor.

  Gottfried Escrow went to jail for campaign fraud and drug possession. He was serving a two-year term in the maximum-security state prison at Starke, surviving under the protection of jailed members of the Overtown Posse, who had recruited Escrow for a black supremacist gang. The movie showed him being raffled off as a bitch for cigarettes.

  Gomer Tatum became one of the best governors in Florida history. He streamlined government, cut taxes and rammed through a slate of lobbying reforms that closed loopholes for food and drink. He became an expert microbiotic chef, lost eighty pounds and wrote a best-selling celebrity cookbook. The film showed him standing in front of the governor’s mansion in a pair of his old pants, smiling and holding the waistband a foot away from his body.

  Jackie Monroeville was secretly calling all the shots in the governor’s office. She continued her education with night classes at Florida State and blossomed into one of the most erudite and sophisticated first ladies in the country. The film showed her in Paris, where she was the toast of the town, charming everyone and wooing two dozen international businesses to the state against a backdrop of paparazzi flashbulbs.

  Jenny Springs won several Lipton tennis events, then married her new coach and retired. She permanently lost her stutter when she got the results back from her pregnancy test, and was now happily expecting her first child in February. The film showed her in maternity clothes carving decorative gourds on the porch of their secluded horse farm near Ocala.

  Detective Mahoney’s wife had taken him back and thrown him out again three more times. He later resigned from the force, dramatically flinging his badge onto a major’s desk in protest of a “candy-ass” department crackdown on police brutality. He currently resided in an efficiency over the Biscayne Boulevard pawnshop he was managing. The film showed two bouncers eighty-sixing him from “Louie’s” bar.

  NED Coppola sat in row 37 of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Midway through the Seventy-sixth Academy Awards, Julia Roberts opened an envelope and called out Coppola’s name for best documentary. The camera cut to a flustered Ned receiving slaps on the back before finally standing and heading for the stage.

  Ned wiped away tears as Julia handed him the gold statuette. He began thanking all the people in the film, but he broke down again and had trouble regaining composure.

  Billy Crystal tried to lighten the moment. “Frankie Coppola warned me about you. That’s why he never lets you do the toasts at the weddings.”

  Ned put a hand up to signal he would be okay. He looked out into the audience and waved an arm for someone to join him. “Get up here! This is your moment, too!”

  Serge bounded onto the stage with Babs Belvedere on his arm. They jumped up and down with endless excitement.

  “What the hell is this?” quipped Crystal. “The kids from Fame?”

  In Miami, ex-detective Mahoney was eating cold Chef Boyardee out of the can and watching the Academy Awards on his small black-and-white TV. He dropped the ravioli on the floor when he recognized who was on stage. Mahoney grabbed his gun and ran out the door without turning the set off.

  On the screen, Serge gripped the Oscar tightly in his fist and pumped it in the air. “Thank you, America! Until next time!…”

  A Note on the Type

  THE TEXT OF this book was set in a face called Leubenhoek Gothic, the versatile eighteenth-century type developed by Baruch Leubenhoek (1671-1739), the Dutch master whose serif innovations last to this day. However, unsubstantiated accounts attribute Leubenhoek Gothic not to Baruch Leubenhoek, the stalwart traditionalist, but to the Hungarian Smilnik Verbleat (1684-1753?), the iconoclastic rebel of typography whose use of upper and lower case set the typesetting world abuzz. It is indeed a compelling inquiry, since Leubenhoek Gothic is widely accepted as the most stunning example of the sturdy hot-face designs typified during the last golden age of typesetting, when the accomplished typemasters were nothing less than international celebrit
ies. Stories abound of Leubenhoek unveiling a new typeface, setting fire to the neoclassical world, only to have Verbleat trump it later that week, triggering celebrations of Romanesque proportion. Such revelry often saw Leubenhoek and Verbleat become quite drunk and take nasty falls that would have sidelined men of lesser constitution. And of course women were always available; Baruch was no slouch, but Smilnik’s reputation for three-ways was unsurpassed. Soon, new fonts appeared, each more daring. The reading world was ecstatic. Then tragedy. In 1739, both were rumored to have been suffering from late-stage gonorrhea when they met up in Antwerp and pitched a heated argument about whether Smilnik’s S’s really looked like F’s and Verbleat crushed Leubenhoek’s skull in with a clavichord.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are owed to my agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Henry Ferris—two people you definitely want on your side in the alley fight that is the book business.

  Praise for Tim Dorsey

  Orange Crush

  “IN THE PARODY/SATIRE/HUMORIST BUSINESS, DORSEY HAS EMERGED AS A LEADER….

  The irreverent, insolent, and always readable Dorsey has turned his probing satirical eye on Florida’s politicians…. The writing is crisp, the pace is deliriously quick, and even if the story’s not completely true, it darn well could be.”

  Tampa Tribune

  “A NEAR-PERFECT BEACH READ…

  High satire with a lowbrow sensibility that inevitably invokes comparisons to Carl Hiaasen…. Dorsey is compulsively irreverent and shockingly funny…. He puts a funhouse mirror in front of the political process and those who feed off it…. For readers with a high threshold for prurience and violence, Dorsey’s books are definitely funny ha-ha. Orange Crush won’t disappoint them.”

  Boston Globe

  “WACKY, VIOLENT…

  Dorsey keeps things fast, furious, and funny throughout…. It’s a quick read laced with gruesome murders, offbeat sex, and an abundance of pop-culture references…. A consistently entertaining page-turner packed with rich details about the beauty and beastliness of Florida…. Florida crime fiction has its stars…. Dorsey, with the publication of his third title…may be in the business of stealing the franchise.”