Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (125 page)

Elizabeth Sinclair stood at the top of the stairs and looked around for her ride, but all she saw was this goofy Winnebago. Then she saw Marlon, Escrow and Pimento get out. They were all in shorts and rumpled T-shirts. Escrow’s shirt had a pointillist rendering of Newt Gingrich’s face above a motto:
GO NEGATIVE EARLY
!

God, she thought, is it too late to go back?

Marlon ran to the bottom of the stairs. “Thanks for coming…. She’s in the
Orange Crush
.”

“In the
what
?” asked Elizabeth, climbing in the back of the RV. Marlon drove off the runway and picked up Southern Boulevard.

Fifteen minutes later, Elizabeth came up front and flipped open a cell phone. She interrupted a college friend at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse. It was an emergency. The friend left her date and climbed in her black Jag.

They met Sinclair’s friend, a world-class psychiatrist, at her Mediterranean home on the north end of Palm Beach, near the inlet. The
Orange Crush
was rousted twice by police in the swank neighborhood before it pulled through the twelve-foot box hedge that formed an arch over the driveway.

Sinclair introduced everyone, and then they left Jenny and the psychiatrist in the house and waited in the Winnebago, playing the Florida version of Monopoly.

The psychiatrist came out of the house two hours later as Escrow was putting hotels in the Everglades.

“Rory, can I talk to you a minute?” she asked Sinclair. They walked back to the porch.

Marlon and Pimento looked at each other. Rory?

“She’s traumatized,” said the psychiatrist. “She shouldn’t be going anywhere, but I can’t get her to cooperate. She says she’ll run away if I try to take her off that bus or whatever it is. She’s developed a dependence on those guys.”

“She
is
messed up.”

“Something happened back there on the road, but she won’t say what. I’ve written a prescription in case she becomes agitated. You’ll have to keep the bottle—she’s in no condition to self-medicate.”

“Hold on. I’m not riding with those guys!”

Her friend gave her The Look.

Marlon watched the two old college buddies hugging in the driveway, and Sinclair got back in the Winnebago.
The governor looked at her as she settled in the passenger seat. “Rory?”

“Nobody calls me that!”

As the psychiatrist watched the Winnebago pull out through the shrubbery arch, she thought she could hear the men inside chanting something.

“
Ro-ry! Ro-ry! Ro-ry!
…”

DETECTIVE MAHONEY’S WIFE
hadn’t taken him back, and he was paying by the week at the Gulfstream Inn on Biscayne Boulevard.

The Gulfstream had three stories, and Mahoney was on the second. The first was taken up by the Sailfish Diner, a smoky short-order grill favored by cops and cabbies on the lobster shift, and the staircase was next to the cash register. On the wrong side of the water from Miami Beach, the Gulfstream was one of the few art deco holdovers that hadn’t been renovated. It had a white, curved, streamlined facade with window AC units and rust streaks. There were clusters of filthy glass blocks and a buzzing green
GULFSTREAM
neon sign. The
F
flickered.

Mahoney’s room was in back, with a view of the alley. It was a tiny dump, but he made himself at home as best he could. He brought a black-and-white TV, a portable hi-fi record player and a stack of jazz records on the old Verve label. He put a photo of Broderick Crawford on the dresser.

Mahoney sat at the modest writing desk watching TV in a white tank top. Also on the desk was an open can of Vienna sausages and a large jar of Mr. Mustard with a butter knife sticking out. There was a glass of straight bourbon, no ice. He lit a Chesterfield and set it in a plaid beanbag ashtray.

The TV showed a huge wave rolling toward a beach, and the theme music to
Hawaii Five-O
came on. Mahoney smiled for the first time all day.

“
McGarrett, Five-O!
” Jack Lord barked into a phone. Mahoney grabbed a case file off the bed and opened it in his lap.

Mahoney had been obsessed with the case for years. He studied the smiling mug shot for the thousandth time and read the name on the fingerprint card: Serge A. Storms. It was the biggest fugitive case in Florida that nobody had ever heard of. Serge was a suspect in several murder cases, including two at the 1997 World Series in Miami. Mahoney had once tracked him down to a rental home on Triggerfish Lane in Tampa, and there had been a chase and a showdown. Serge escaped.

Mahoney had gotten so close to the case that he’d developed a grudging admiration for the guy. Serge was a regular encyclopedia of Floridiana. It was one of the many ways he was a genius and insane at the same time. Storms traveled in low-life circles, and his victims were mostly dirtballs, scam artists and predators. The people started rooting for him. Everywhere Mahoney went looking for witnesses, he found people who revered Serge like a folk hero, a tropical D.B. Cooper. At one point, Mahoney began getting postcards from the guy. He expected the usual taunts a detective receives when a criminal learns he’s on the trail. Instead, he got travel tips and a suggested reading list. Mahoney checked all the books out of the library, in case there were any clues. But all he found was a bunch of novels that were now on his all-time favorites list. Willeford, MacDonald, Buchanan, Garcia-Aguilera—Florida crime fiction supreme. Right after he arrested the guy, he was going to thank him and borrow some books.

Hawaii Five-O
ended and the news came on. Mahoney put down the file and adjusted the antenna. The first story was about the string of bodies turning up with a bunch of pithy slogans written on them with Magic Markers.

The anchorman dubbed them the Bumper Sticker Murders.

“Great,” said Mahoney. “Here come the copycats.”

Sure enough, over the next few days stiffs would start turning up all over the state with clichés scribbled in Magic Marker. A road rage victim in Jacksonville:
FORGET ABOUT WORLD PEACE…VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL
! A hooker in Pensacola:
SEX IS LIKE PIZZA. WHEN IT’S GOOD, IT’S REALLY GOOD. WHEN IT’S BAD, IT’S STILL PRETTY GOOD
. A psychiatrist strangled by a patient in Sarasota:
DOES THE NAME PAVLOV RING A BELL
?

Mahoney went over to the window. He cranked it open and stuck his head out into the alley. Down the north end of the street he had a glimpse of the skyscrapers in the Miami skyline. His new sidekick, a stray cat he’d named Danno, jumped up on the sill, and Mahoney gave him a Vienna sausage.

Mahoney stared down the alley at the city lights and petted the cat.

“Book ’em, Danno!”

THE
roadways were getting cluttered. Political posters and signs on sticks everywhere—roadsides, front yards, tacked on utility polls, hanging from overpasses.

The marketing techniques were getting refined. There had been a trend away from conventional political consultants and the traditional campaign philosophy of “getting our message out to the people.” Surveys showed the people were allergic to messages and re
fused to listen, even if the president was on TV saying the water supply was radioactive and giant spiders were running the government.

The strategy shifted from “the message” to brand recognition after it was learned that most campaigns were decided during the selection of color scheme, typeface and logo. Campaigns began aggressively headhunting at Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. They spent heavily on focus groups and test markets. Conference rooms full of average citizens ate potato chips and pickle spears while campaign workers auditioned fonts and swatches.

It was discovered that simple equaled good. A maximum of two colors, and icons less complicated than a trapezoid. Also gone were the slogans. Now just one word, usually nonsense, that bypassed the conscious and treble-hooked the brain stem. Candidates saw their polls rocket.

Gomer Tatum and Jackie Monroeville were a day behind Marlon, driving down US 1 in a limo. They had just entered Indian River County. Tatum stared at the political picket fence in the median.

A green-and-white sign. Garamond typeface. A starfish.
JACKSON FOR MAYOR! SHAZAM
!

A blue-and-yellow sign. News Gothic type. A musical note (b flat). V
OTE
O’M
ALLEY
! F
ARFEGNÜGEN
!

A red-and-black sign. Bodoni sans serif. Bowling pin.
REELECT WILLIAMS! BIBBIDY-BOP
!

Between debates, Tatum was on a frenetic schedule of rubber-chicken gigs and impromptu drop-ins.

They crossed the Vero Beach city limits.

“What’s this coming up?” said Jackie. “Stop here!”

Tatum’s driver pulled into the parking lot of Vista Isles East, and Gomer got out with a fat, cheerful expression.
The residents recognized the magnetic
TATUM
signs on the door, and the limo was pelted with rotten fruit and smooth landscaping stones.

“Unfriendlies!” yelled Tatum. He dove back in the limo as a fetid eggplant splattered on the tinted window.

“
LOOK
at you!” Jackie shouted at Tatum in the backseat of the stretch, smacking him in the gut. “No wonder they’re throwing produce! We need to bad-ass your image!”

They continued down the coast on A1A. Jackie saw a sign.
JENSEN BEACH DEAD SLEDS
. “Stop here!”

The driver pulled into a dusty parking lot, and Tatum got out.

Two men emerged from a dilapidated aluminum building, a four-hundred-pound biker named Tiny and a rail-thin speed freak named Fats.

“Hi, fellas—”

They grabbed Tatum by the collar and lifted him off his feet, pinning him against the side of the limo.

The chauffeur turned back to Jackie. “Want me to call the police?”

“I’ll handle this,” she said, quickly changing into leather hot pants. “These are my people.”

The bikers were pushing a lug wrench up Tatum’s nose when Jackie’s door opened. Two slender, taut legs swung out of the limo. A pair of white cowboy boots settled in the dust. Jackie stood up in her shorts and a fringed suede vest, and she put her hands defiantly on her hips.

“Which one of you shit-kickers is man enough to strap me on a hog?”

BY LATE OCTOBER
, the expansion Florida Felons football team had carefully assembled a ten-game losing skid.

During the third quarter of a forty-point ambush by the Redskins, Helmut von Zeppelin’s skybox was gutted by a carbide-tipped firebomb that shattered the shatterproof window and set the polar bear rug ablaze.

For security reasons, Helmut had to view the next game through binoculars from a greater distance. He bought one of Goodyear’s backup blimps, and von Zeppelin watched his team
from
a zeppelin.

“They can’t touch me up here!” Helmut declared during halftime of a fifty-point drubbing from the Saints, a moment before a rifle shot pierced the dirigible’s skin near the tail.

The pilot heard a hissing sound and checked his gauges.

“I have to take her down.”

“We’ll miss the second half!”

“Sir, I think they’re shooting at us.”

“Amazing,” said Helmut, standing behind the pilot with his binoculars. “What kind of gun can reach us way up here?”

“Maybe a Tac-Ops Tango-51.”

“What’s that?”

“Sniper rifle.”

Helmut leaned with an elbow against the back of the
pilot chair and shook his head in respect. “I’ll have to get me one of those.”

The pilot struggled with the controls, but he couldn’t hold the yaw. He checked the gauges again. The blimp had begun to rotate clockwise.

“Hey,” said Helmut. “This isn’t the way back to the airfield.”

“We’re not going to the airfield,” said the pilot, letting go of the steering yoke. “The puncture must be spewing air sideways. Too much torque. I’ve lost attitude control.”

“What now?” asked Helmut.

“Ride it out—nothing else we can do.”

“How long till we’re down?”

“About a half hour.”

“Are we going to crash?”

“Yes.”

“Will we be killed?”

“Possibly.”

Helmut looked out the window. “Hey—I can see my house!”

The impotent blimp swiveled slowly in the breeze across the central Florida landscape as it lost altitude. News vans began to converge from eight counties, forming a convoy behind the blimp’s shadow in the road.

A phone rang in the blimp. Helmut answered. It was from New Jersey.

“You’ll get your thirty million!” shouted von Zeppelin. “It’s hit some kind of political pothole!”

At 4:37
P.M
., a bank of fail-safe computers tripped a sequence of alarms, and corporate jets were scrambled as the blimp crossed into Disney World airspace.

The news vans stacked up at the entrance to buy tickets, then raced to Pleasure Island. A small Japanese child
pointed at the sky. Everyone looked up. A giant vulcanized air bladder came flatulating across the treetops in a slow spin.

“You have to give me more time!” Helmut told New Jersey on the phone. “These politicians are a pain in the—”

Helmut heard a low-syllable-count death threat.

“You don’t intimidate me!” yelled Helmut. “I was threatening people when you were—”

The phone call was cut off as the blimp crashed into the side of Planet Hollywood, and Helmut was saved when he was thrown through the ruptured side of the cabin and into a Barcalounger once owned by George Gobel.

In the parking lot, Florida Cable News correspondent Blaine Crease was weeping on live TV.

“
The humanity! The humanity!
”

IN THE HIGH-RISE
offices of the
Palm Beach Daily Intelligencer-Picayune
, overlooking fabulous Lake Worth, the newspaper’s editorial board heard a rumbling sound. It grew to a thundering racket, and they all ran to the window.

Down in the parking lot was the biggest Harley they’d ever seen. The rider set the kickstand and climbed off. A second, larger rider crawled out of a sidecar. They went in the building.

The editorial board turned and watched the elevator and waited.

The doors opened and out stepped Gomer Tatum, head to toe in leather, with a little Prussian helmet perched atop his bulbous head. The editorial board didn’t give a shit. They craned their necks to see around him. Tatum finally moved and Jackie stepped out of the elevator, wearing her cowboy boots and hot pants again. Oh, and she still had her leather riding gloves on. The editorial board liked that.

Tatum shook hands and walked to the front of the boardroom, and Jackie took a seat by the window, propping her feet up on the sill and cracking her knuckles inside the gloves.

“Gentlemen!” boomed Tatum. “Governor Conrad is soft on the death penalty!”

Tatum looked over at Jackie. She nodded in approval.
The editorial board also looked over at Jackie. She nodded at them, too.

Tatum continued: “While our schoolchildren are forced to eat stale pizza squares and fish sticks for lunch, murderers have been treated to a five-star menu of last meals under the Conrad administration. Just listen to this list: Delmonico steak, lobster, ribs, Cajun blackened mahimahi”—Tatum began salivating—“rack of lamb with curly fries, Denny’s Grand-Slam breakfast…Gentlemen, if I’m elected, I won’t just fry ’em. I’ll fry ’em
hungry
!”

THE
Orange Crush
headed south on US 1. It was a weird stretch of road. People living permanently in motel rooms, arguing at bus stops. Boarded-up restaurants. Body-piercing joints. A sign: “Psychic on duty 24 hours.”

Gottfried Escrow had an “action item” that he just couldn’t seem to clear from his clipboard. “Get Frank Lloyd Sirocco’s death warrant signed.”

Marlon kept putting it off.

“Tatum’s killing you on this. You have to get an execution in,” said Escrow. “If you don’t warrant Sirocco soon, we won’t be able to smoke another one until after the election.”

“I’m still ahead,” said Marlon. “I can win without it.”

“Tatum’s in your margin of error! Every day he hammers on this, he chips away at your lead.”

“I have faith in the people.”

“I give up,” said Escrow. “Here, sign this other crap.”

Escrow fanned a stack of papers on the dashboard of the
Orange Crush
, and Marlon scribbled quickly at stoplights. Official proclamations. Appointments to ceremo
nial boards. Don Knotts Appreciation Day. The last item on the bottom of the stack, with just the signature line showing, was Sirocco’s warrant.

Escrow checked his clipboard. “We got nothing for the rest of the day except your commercial shoot.”

“That thing’s today?” Marlon said with apprehension.

“You’re not going to back out, are you?”

“No, I gave my word.”

“Good,” said Escrow. “I’ll call Ned and tell him we’re on.”

NED
Coppola was the undisputed king of the thirty-second political TV spot.

Single-handedly, he had reinvented the medium. Nobody but nobody could strike a chord so deeply with so many people in so short a time. The images, the words, the emotions—they flowed and built and exploded in operatic grandeur. All in a half minute. Wham bam, in and out, leaving some viewers weeping, others in the glow of a religious experience—but all compelled to rush out and vote with a blind fervor. Sometimes Ned produced commercials for both sides in a race. Viewers would see one spot, then the other, and were left severely conflicted and often gained weight.

Ned was outrageously expensive, and everyone gladly paid. To hire anyone else was to automatically forfeit a deciding chunk in the polls. Ned wasn’t just the leader in his field; he was deity.

He hated every moment.

Ned was an extremely distant stepcousin by divorce of Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola, and all he ever wanted was to follow, however far behind, in his famous semirelative’s footfalls. He aspired to produce cel
luoid art, not the manipulative schmaltz that all the campaigns called genius.

But while Ned was without peer in the political world, he couldn’t get arrested in Hollywood. Not a toe in the door. And with good reason. Ned’s talents hit a kind of a ceiling at the thirty-second mark. Anything longer than a Bicentennial minute would come off the reels with stupefying results. Ned flourished at MTV sprint distances, but he had no cinematic endurance whatsoever. It was almost mystical. People who saw the rare footage couldn’t believe it. How could this be the work of the same person?

It was the source of unrelenting bitterness for Ned, who poured his frustrations into the campaigns, which only improved the quality of his work and made him that much more popular and pissed off.

Ned’s business office was a condo penthouse that occupied an entire fiftieth floor on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. His studio was in an office park just over the Broward line in—where else?—Hollywood, Florida. He spent the mornings in the penthouse taking calls on his portable phone and the afternoons directing at the studio.

On this particular morning, Ned paced around his penthouse balcony in a white terry-cloth bathrobe with the monogram NIC.
I
for Ingmar. His hair was dark, shaggy and unmanaged, because he was going for “The Oliver Stone.” He was inexplicably tanned for someone whose nebbish accountant looks suggested a lot of scurrying around under fluorescent lighting. He was tall and lean, but his features were on the small side and heavily weighted toward the vertical axis of his face, leaving his cheeks and jaw without a whole lot to do. Although not unattractive, the overall result prompted suspicion that his mother had been on something during the pregnancy.

The penthouse’s tiled terrace wrapped all the way around the building, and Ned made hyperactive laps as he talked on the phone. The views were astounding, and Ned saw none of it. To the east, the clear Atlantic; north, waterfront golf courses; west, Biscayne Bay and uptown Miami; south, the art deco jewels Delano and Dilido. He snapped the phone closed in frustration, then opened it and dialed again.

“Chad, Coppola here, what did ya think of my new treatment?…I see…I see…Well, did you read the whole thing?…I see, just the title…But the title is the hook,
Thelma and Louise II
…. Of course I know you can’t have a sequel when the main characters are killed—so get this: They had parachutes!…Hello? Chad? Hello?…”

Ned hung up and dialed the number for Paramount Studios.

“Is Brad there? This is Coppola.”

The studios had stopped returning Ned’s calls months ago, and recently had stopped accepting them as well. So Ned started introducing himself simply as Coppola.

“Brad—Coppola here…No,
Ned
Coppola, Frankie’s cousin…Hello? Hello?…”

He dialed MGM.

“Harrison, Coppola here…Yeah, I know you told me not to call anymore, but you’re going to thank me after you hear this…Okay, I’ll make it quick. Four words that will slay the Academy:
Apocalypse Then and Now
. Martin Sheen opens a health food store in Monterey…. Hello? You still there? Hello?…”

He dialed Universal.

“Isaac, Coppola here…. Right, the Coppola you never wanted to hear from again…. Just hear me out.
Hoffman goes for his master’s in
The Postgraduate
…. I disagree. No, it is
not
the stupidest idea in the world…. Okay, try this one on:
More Terms of Endearment
…. Hello? Hello?…”

Ned threw the phone in disgust on the sofa, and it bounced off a stuffed pillow into his hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium. The wall phone rang.

“Coppola here…Oh, hi, Escrow…Yeah, we’re set for this afternoon…See you then….”

THE
Orange Crush
arrived at Eagle Studios a few minutes ahead of schedule, and Ned gave everyone the quick tour. Most of the studio was taken up by the set, where stagehands wheeled away a backdrop of Washington crossing the Delaware and replaced it with the 1980 Olympic hockey team. There were movie cameras everywhere, arrays of lights and boom microphones, makeup trays, and an old-fashioned cone megaphone next to a tall director’s chair with
COPPOLA
stitched on the back.

Ned showed them the prop room. On one wall, shelves of baseball gloves, American flags, high school trophies, priests’ collars, facsimile bills of rights, plastic apple pies, plastic hams, plastic mashed potatoes, plastic cocker spaniel puppies, cowboy hats, crutches, baskets of combat medals, Norman Rockwell paintings and Gutenberg Bibles. On the other wall, the racks of costumes: police officers, kindergarten teachers, firemen, crossing guards, soldiers, varsity lettermen, nuns, Boy Scouts, factory workers, Red Cross volunteers, grandmothers and Abe Lincoln.

A director’s assistant approached. “Ned, it’s time to get Marlon ready.”

Marlon was taken to a small room with a star on the
door, where he was dressed in a sky-blue long-sleeve shirt and sky-blue pants.

“Are you sure this is right?” Marlon asked, lying back in a chair as the makeup went on.

“Shhhhh!” said Escrow. “Ned’s very temperamental about his work.”

Marlon was taken to wait in the green room, where Ned’s stable of actors sipped champagne from plastic cups and snacked on trays of cold cuts and Triscuits. Everyone else was pacing, reciting lines. A bad English Shakespearean actor, a bad Hollywood Method actor, an off-off-Broadway stand-in, a waitress with dreams, a bellhop with migraines, a chorus line floozy, a body double, a foul-mouthed octogenarian, child-size midgets smoking cigars and Erik Estrada.

Marlon was finally brought to the set, which now had a plain sky-blue backdrop that matched his shirt and pants.

Ned sat in his director’s chair. He clapped his hands twice, and a stagehand placed a large box on the set and directed Marlon to sit on it. He handed Marlon a Gutenberg Bible. They started filming.

“Cut! Cut!” Ned yelled. “Hate it!”

The stagehand took away the Bible and put the plastic cocker spaniel on Marlon’s lap, and they started filming again.

“Cut!” Ned yelled. He got out of the director’s chair and began marching back and forth with his hands behind his back. He grumbled and insulted his crew and invoked the names of Hollywood greats.

The stagehand took away the puppy and handed Marlon a beach ball.

“Cut!” Ned yelled. “This ain’t fuckin’ Olin Mills!”

The stagehand took away the beach ball and put an Army helmet on Marlon’s head.

“Make him stand,” said Ned.

Marlon stood. They filmed for thirty seconds.

Ned smiled and bunched together the fingertips of his right hand and kissed them like a chef. “Perfect!”

Marlon looked down at his light-blue pants and shirt. “The helmet doesn’t go.”

“Trust me,” said Ned.

“What about the background?”

“We add all that later with computers.” Ned raised the cone megaphone. “That’s a wrap!”

Everybody shook hands as they prepared to depart, and Pimento asked Ned to autograph his scrapbook. “I’m a huge fan. Loved watching you work.”

“Why, thank you,” said Ned, faking humility. He signed Pimento’s book boldly.

“You were incredible,” said Pimento. “Very
Godfather
.”

Ned looked up. “
Godfather!
That’s my favorite movie! My stepcousin made it!”

“It’s obviously in the blood,” said Pimento.

“You really think so?”

Ned was so touched by Pimento’s praise that he invited everyone back to his penthouse so he could spend more time with Pimento and hear more praise.

“We’ll have to pass,” said Escrow. “We’ve got a full schedule.”

“Marlon, please,” said Pimento. “Just for a little bit.”

ESCROW
fumed as he sat with folded arms in a fiftieth-floor penthouse on Collins Avenue. He glanced at the fish tank and saw a tiny skeleton popping in and out of a bubbling treasure chest, next to a phone.

“The studios are run by yes-men entrenched in a
Titanic
mentality!” Ned told Pimento as they sat in Coppola’s office. The walls were covered with family photos, mostly of Ned as a child on the sets of his famous cousin’s movies. “Everything has to be a big-budget action film! You’d never get a
Last Picture Show
made today!”

“I hear ya,” said Pimento, studying a photo of little Ned shaking hands with James Caan, covered with bullet holes.

“You appreciate film. Tell me what you think,” said Ned. “
Midnight Cowboy II
. After Ratso Rizzo’s funeral, Joe Buck opens this wacky delicatessen on Miami Beach.”

“It’s got comeback vehicle for Jon Voight written all over it.”

“That’s what I keep telling them, but I can’t get the time of day.”

“Hollywood-types.”

“I got a million of ’em. Every one, solid gold.
Citizen Kane II
—some kid pulls the sled out of the furnace, and get this: It’s a
magic
sled!…
Kramer vs. Kramer, K2: The Next Generation
—not even a nibble!”

“They’re too busy cranking out
The Flintstones, The Mod Squad
and
Lost in Space
.” Pimento stopped to admire a photo of little Ned in the Philippines, sharing a banana split with Brando. A lightbulb came on. “I got an idea! Why don’t you come with us?”

“What for?”

“Bring some cameras. Film the whole campaign from the bus. It’d be like a Merry Pranksters thing.”

“You may have something,” said Ned. “I’ve been waiting years for a project like that. A close-to-the-bone docudrama. I’m sick of this political hackwork.”

“I’m the press secretary, so consider yourself credentialed.”

“Great. Give me a couple of days to wrap up here, and I’ll meet you on the road.”