Gator Wave

by David F. Berens

  The scene was almost as bad as that wretched day when he lost Ned. The inferno raged out of the building like Beelzebub himself was trying to escape—maybe he is, Troy thought. People were streaming out of the building like ants as Ian rammed the police SUV into park. He was about to jump out when Troy snapped out of his stupor.

  “Backup, dude,” Troy yelled. “You gotta call for backup. Get the fire department out here. Heck, get all the fire departments out here.”

  The FDLE officer wavered for a second.

  “I know you wanna be the hero,” Troy said, “but this is bigger than you. You gotta call for help on this one.”

  Ian Bass stared at the burning building, the flames flickering in his eyes. For a long time, Troy didn’t see him move a muscle, not even to blink.

  “You’re right,” he finally said, leaning back into the vehicle.

  He picked up the CB radio mic, snapped the power on and hailed the Sheriff’s station.

  “Puckett,” he shouted over the chaos, “I’ve got a … a, um, 10-70 or wait, it’s a 10-73, hell, I don’t know. It’s a damn big fire down at Woody’s. Whole back side is going up.”

  “Are they barbecuing or somethin’ down there?” The Sheriff sounded as if he might have been asleep.

  “What? Barbecuing?” Ian snapped. “No, sir. It’s burning. Fire everywhere. Roof’s going to fall in soon. Better hurry. I’m going in to see if anyone’s stuck inside.”

  He flipped the mic aside and slammed the door shut.

  “No!” yelled the Sheriff. “Do not go in. The fire department is on the way. Ian? Are you there? Repeat. Do not go inside!”

  But Ian Bass was ducking into the building through a wall of flame. Troy Bodean wondered if the fire would reach the Explorer and cook him alive while he sat in the parking lot. He could feel the heat through the tiny crack Ian had given him for air. It was as if someone was trying to dry his hair through the slit with a blow torch. Then he remembered the door had been flung open when they turned around. He twisted his body around and put his feet up against it. He kicked hard, but only succeeded in sending a jolt of pain into his knee. For a few long seconds, he just lay flat, waiting for the ache in his compromised ACL to subside. Through all the hysteria outside, he swore he could hear someone howling the lyrics of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

  45

  Molotov Cocktails

  Dante Caparelli was surprised how quickly the scene inside had gone from rowdy to explosive—literally. Something smashed to the right and fire burst up onto the wall. A bottle? Jeezus, Dante thought, somebody’s throwin’ frickin’ Molotov cocktails in here. Before he could take another step, two more flaming bottles smashed around the stage. But for all the fire, the stupid idiots beside the stage were still fighting.

  “Sully, see if you can get to the phone and call the—”

  He was interrupted by a bottle flying past his head and slamming into the cigarette machine. He and Sully hit the deck and for the first time in his life, Dante regretted not having the carpet redone. Even in the smoke-filled foyer, he could smell the mold and rot in the black sticky berber. Orange and yellow fire swarmed over the machine and the smell of old Winstons wafted through the room.

  Dante raised himself up on his elbows and screamed into the air. “Who the frick is throwin’ those?”

  But, his voice was not loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the bar fight, the band—who were not playing, but rather throwing things at each other—and the screaming of dancers trying not to get hit by a flying missile of flame.

  “Sully, you idiot,” Dante growled, grabbing the man’s shirt sleeve and twisting it tight. “Do something!”

  The New Yorker grinned under his thick mustache. He would later recount in his statement that he was used to this kind of thing in the Big Apple and that he thought his time to prove himself to his boss had finally come. He reached around behind his back and produced the pistol that he’d found under the old man’s seat in the car. It wasn’t much of a gun, but, a few well-placed shots could go a long way in a situation like this. He scanned the room, but the smoke and the haze coming from the now furious walls of fire made it difficult to see. Close to the stage, he could just make out the figure of a lanky man with a hat on. It clicked in his mind. The drummer. He’s gotta be the asshole responsible for this mess.

  He raised the gun and fired. The pop was barely audible under the crashing of bodies into tables and chairs. The man he’d shot froze. Got him, Sully thought. But then his target stumbled, fell to the ground, crawled a few feet, and then collapsed. Below the smoke cloud at the ceiling, he could see he’d shot Jeffy “Fast Fingers” Farmer, the lead guitar player. Dammit, wrong guy. He felt a slight twinge of sadness for Jeffy’s soon-to-be widow and their three snot-nosed rugrats, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it.

  He looked past where Jeffy lay and saw another rangy man swinging something around his head. Without hesitation, Sully aimed and fired again. He was rewarded with another direct hit. His second target fell to his knees, dropped the mic stand he had been holding and slumped face forward to flop on top of Jeffy. Unfortunately, he could now see that he hadn’t taken out the drummer, but rather the keyboard player, Rick “Ivory Tickler” Kevinson. As far as he knew, Rick didn’t have a wife or kids, but he did have three cats that might not get any kibbles tonight.

  With some of the noise dying down, Sully could hear a voice yelling—no, singing—to his right. In disbelief, he rolled over to see a man standing on top of the bar, holding a bottle with a towel stuffed in the neck, and a zippo lighter about to touch it off.

  “Ha!” Sully yelled. “Gotchu now you son of a b—”

  He was about to pull the trigger when a black Army boot the size of a Volkswagen Beetle slammed up into his hand. He was certain that all of his fingers were broken as well as most of the bones in his wrist. The pistol flew up and away from him and disappeared into the smoke.

  He clutched his hand and looked up to see who had kicked him. At that moment, Harley Doug’s bowling ball of a fist smashed into Sully’s face, crushing his nose and sending brilliant sparkles dancing in his eyes.

  “You bastard,” Harley Doug growled. “You killed Jeffy and Rick.”

  Sully tried to tell him that he hadn’t intended to kill those guys, but rather the maniacal drummer. Unfortunately, all that came out through his swollen lips was a bloody, mucus ball that Doug mistook for him spitting at the man.

  The second punch turned out the lights in Sully’s vision.

  While Sully had been assassinating members of Big Dick and the Extenders, Dante had been inching through the bar, hiding under tables and behind overturned chairs. He couldn’t see far, but the occasional flash of light guided him toward the source of the liquor bombs being thrown around the building. Of course, they were coming from the bar—a veritable ammo dump of high octane alcohol. The balls of crashing fire flying all around the bar continued to soar over Dante as if J.R.R. Tolkien’s Balrog had dropped into Woody’s for a drink. But as he army-crawled up under the lip of the bar between two wobbly stools, he got a good look at the source of the fiery barrage.

  It’s that frickin’ drummer, he thought, gritting his teeth under pinched lips. Above his head, he could hear the man’s boots clomping around on the yellow-varnished bar top. Over the storm of noise, he could also make out the guy’s ranting. Something about taking them all down with him. He’d see them all in hell. Blah, blah, blah.

  Dante had heard this kind of thing a million times. When faced with death, a person has a distinct reaction. To Dante’s thinking, there were about four of them. Most people that come to the realization that they are about to die, will usually cry hysterically and beg for mercy through dripping snot. Some do the opposite and go far away into their minds, quiet and soulless. And then there are those who will bargain for their lives. The family had turned quite a nice profit with those types.

  But the fourth kind, the kind that this drummer was clearly a pa
rt of, was the rebel. This was the type of person that decided if he was going out, he was going to go out in a blaze of glory. And not only that, he was going to try to take someone out with him. This kind of idiot was the most dangerous kind, resigned, frenetic, emboldened, and reckless. If he got lucky, he’d take down someone before he got his final reward.

  The good news—Dante coughed in the thickening smoke, wondering if there actually could be any good news—was that this kind of victim was usually flying blind, no plan, no exit strategy, and no brain. It was likely that this guy had his sights set on distant targets, spots in the bar where he could fling more fire to the distant dingy edges of the building. Dante decided to wait until he saw two bottles shoot out from over his head and then he’d make his move. He grabbed one of the legs of the nearest stool and jerked it back and forth until it broke free. He knew it would because Sully had repaired—or at least claimed to repair—this particular stool several times.

  He crawled up to his knees, pain lancing into both of his hips. He cursed his age and decided maybe it was finally time to look into what his doctor had called “total hip arthroplasty” for both of his degenerative joints. A clear bottle with a royal blue label—probably the Sambuca, Dante thought—arced over his head, directed toward the stage. It smashed into the bass drum and burst into a ring of flame like a New York City bum’s barrel had been overturned. The next projectile he saw made Dante cringe. The glass bottle with a mustachioed face molded into the side contained the expensive, and quite tasty, Rey Sol Anejo Tequila. He’d paid over five hundred dollars for that bottle and now it was sailing through the air with a bright flaming tail chasing after it. It smashed into the dusty, unused jukebox by the front door and sent the shattered remains of old 45 records flying.

  Dante jumped up faster than he would have thought possible, and true to his roots as a young New York Yankees fan, he swung the broken stool leg like a 19-year-old Mickey Mantle hitting his longest home run. The makeshift bat caught the unsuspecting drummer on the back of his calves and hit the man with such force that he did a complete backflip and landed face down, sprawled down the full length of the bar.

  Dante raised the stick to hit him again, but then caught sight of someone else crouching down behind the bar, just a few feet away, under the dangling receiver of the telephone. Recognition finally clicked in as he squinted through the ashy air. Cinnamon. Holy Christ, Cinnamon was trapped behind the bar, sobbing and trembling uncontrollably while this madman was conducting his arsonous assault.

  Dante put a hand to the side of his mouth to shout at her and ask if she was okay, but the words never came out. He hadn’t noticed the cowboy hat-wearing drummer grab a bottle from the well. He lit it and smashed it on the top of Dante’s head. The old man never heard Cinnamon scream as he dropped to the floor.

  Cinnamon Starr watched in horror as the raving lunatic drummer smashed Dante with a bottle of cheap rum. Thankfully, the white strip of cloth the man had tried to light wouldn’t catch fire. But, he hit the owner of Woody’s so hard, Cinnamon was sure that he’d killed the man. When she suddenly realized she was screaming, she clapped a hand to her mouth and blinked away the tears. Something inside her snapped. It was the little girl inside her who’d been bullied back in high school for having developed awkwardly during her Freshman year. Little did those adolescent pricks know that she would eventually fill out into the Senior class’s “Most Attractive” girl—back before it was deemed politically incorrect to award such things.

  She decided she’d had enough from this dude and began to form a plan to take him out.

  46

  Dazed And Confused

  Troy Clint Bodean could only watch in horror as his most recent bar of choice on the sleepy little island of Islamorada blazed up into a towering inferno of fire. The old painting of the wood-sided car on the front of the building was curling and flaking off in pieces that floated around and settled like Autumn’s first leaves. The steady stream of tourists, strippers, and random locals had stopped flowing from the building’s warping front door. The glass had shattered into a million pieces and smoke billowed out, the demons escaping hell.

  Troy had tried the door a few more times only to find it locked. It had popped open at fifty miles per hour on the highway, but not here parked safely in the only handicapped space on the lot. He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate, but that only left him coughing and sputtering from the heavy smoke. He wondered if Cinnamon was still in there. He couldn’t say where she was and he hadn’t seen her come out with the others. At this point, he wasn’t sure there was much else to do but watch it all burn to the ground and wait for the dogs to come.

  Somewhere in the distance, he heard a siren start yelping into the night. He leaned closer to the open window to see if he could tell where it was coming from and how long it might be before they arrived. As he did, he caught sight of a man sitting in the car next to the police SUV. It was dark enough that he couldn’t make out much more than the fact that the guy was rocking back and forth and making odd, gasping sounds. He glanced up at the nudie bar and then back at the guy. Surely, he wasn’t doing what it looked like he was doing. Troy brushed the sophomoric thought aside and began to yell out the one inch crack at the guy.

  “Hey, buddy! Yo. What’s goin’ on over there?”

  The man either didn’t hear Troy, or was ignoring him … or too lost in his pornographic fantasies to care. Troy inched his chin up toward the top of the open window and tried again.

  “Hey there, friend,” he yelled as loud as he could. “How ’bout a little help here?”

  The man stopped rocking and Troy saw the silhouette of his head turn toward him.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head furiously, hoping the man could see him. “Over here. Can I impress upon you to kindly open this door for me? I’ve got friends in there and I need to see what the heck is going on, if you don’t mind.”

  The man leaned forward and Troy could see his eyes now. They were ringed in dark grey patches and sunken so deep in their sockets that he wondered if the man was a junkie on a fix. Maybe that was why he was acting so strange. Tear tracks striped the man’s face. Beyond hope, he reached up and opened his car door.

  Troy laughed and spoke up toward the opening with his lips protruding like a fish gasping for air … or rather, water.

  “I got friends in that building over there, fella. I don’t know what you’re doin’ here, but I thought I might’ve seen a buddy get out of your car and run in there.” Troy pleaded his case to a man with dead eyes. “Yeah, so, if it ain’t too much to ask, would you just help me outta here?”

  The dude stood and stretched as if he’d been on a ten hour drive for a family vacation. He showed absolutely no sign of urgency and Troy decided the guy was definitely hopped up on something.

  He nodded his head down toward the door handle on the outside of the SUV.

  “There it is,” he said. “Right down there. That chrome handle there. Just give it a quick tug. It’s only locked from the inside.”

  The man shrugged and started to mumble and point toward the building. A section of the roof detached and slammed down next to him not five feet away. Smoldering bits of wood and metal steamed as they hit a puddle in front of the black Lincoln Towncar the man had exited. For his part though, he didn’t even flinch.

  Troy strained to hear what he was saying, but all he could make out was that he had brought all of this on everyone and he deserved what he was going to get.

  Even though he wasn’t talking directly to Troy, he thought it might be best to engage him in conversation to expedite his escape from this late model Ford Explorer.

  “Now, now,” he said, trying his best to sound like an old buddy from high school. “This ain’t a time to be worried about blame and such. Why don’t you let me out and we’ll get this whole thing under control lickety-split.”

  The man shrugged and laid his hand on the door handle. He didn’t pull on it though, but simply
stood there, fingers looped through the faux chrome and stared into the flames licking through the empty door frame.

  An impossibly loud shriek echoed out of the building and startled Troy. So desperate it was that he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman who had uttered it. It was the perfect soundtrack to the moment and it spurred Troy to get this thing going.

  “Dang it, dude,” he said and leaned back and cracked his forehead against the window. “Open the dang door.”

  He immediately regretted the head-butt as his vision began to swim and he felt like vomiting. He wondered if he’d given himself a concussion and figured it wasn’t his first and very likely wouldn't be the last one he’d ever get. But the bump against the window did the trick. The man jumped and voluntarily—or maybe involuntarily—jerked on the door handle. It popped open and Troy fell out, directly on his chin. His hands were still locked behind his back and he realized that this was going to be a major problem if he was still planning on running inside.

  “Much obliged,” he said, pulling himself up to his knees. “Say, pardner, would you mind to check up front and see if there’s a key to these cuffs up there somewhere? Usually, the cupholder, or maybe tucked up in the visor.”

  He knew it was a long shot, but the man shrugged and ducked into the front of the Explorer. He emerged with a tiny keyring sporting two silver keys. “You mind to do the honors?”

  Troy turned around and extended his aching hands. He felt the cuffs fall away and then reached out to shake the man’s hand. He flinched and backed away like a stray dog who’d been beat one too many times to trust anyone.