Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (127 page)

JOE BLOW WALKED
out to his car with his morning cup of coffee.

“Who do you like in the Senate race?”

“How do you feel about the casino amendment?”

“When was the last time you had your teeth cleaned?”

He sped out of the driveway, sideswiping a Florida Cable News van.

Joe Blow had finally had it. He decided things would be different from now on. The press corps didn’t know it yet, but they wouldn’t have Mr. Average to kick around anymore!

The next day, Joe set about deliberately and radically changing his entire existence. He bought an electric car, paid off his credit cards, canceled his cell phone and stopped patronizing fast food. He went to a thrift store and bought a Beta-format VCR.

The media tracked his every move. Soon, financial analysts began noticing new consumer trends and fundamental changes in lifestyle across the country. They mirrored Joe’s transformation.

Joe was frustrated. He was frustrated he couldn’t escape the middle-of-the-road, and he was frustrated he couldn’t find any tapes for his new VCR. So he turned off the TV, began talking to his family, stopped drinking beer and went to bed early each night reading a book.

The country followed.

Whether power of media suggestion or paranormal phenomenon, every attempt Joe made to depart from the mainstream quickly became the norm. He was changing the way we lived. And, with the exception of the VCR, it was all for the better.

It only brought more media attention. The hounding was relentless, the glare too intense. Joe came home from work, and the street was filled with the reporters’ new electric cars. The
Tampa Tribune
began running a standing box on the bottom of the front page every day, chronicling Joe’s daily activities. It was called “Blow by Blow.”

ANOTHER
long day. It was after midnight. Escrow had just taken everyone’s orders for sodas and was now rooting around the cooler in the dark. Pimento had locked himself in the tiny lavatory again, staring at his reflection in the mirror: “Who
are
you?”

Marlon saw something ahead in the road and leaned over the steering wheel. “What the heck is this?”

“What’s what?” asked Elizabeth, looking out the windshield.

Up ahead on a dark, open stretch of US 1, a pair of sheriff’s cruisers sat in parking lots on opposite sides of the road. They faced the highway with their high beams on.

Bright light filled the RV as it drove through the crossfire of headlights. Marlon pulled the Winnebago over in front of a closed drugstore. “Escrow! Get the sheriff on the phone!”

“It’s after two in the morning.”

“Goddammit, Escrow!”

Escrow grabbed his cell phone and dialed. He got in
formation, which patched him through to dispatch, which told him there was no way in hell they would call the sheriff at home at this hour.

Escrow covered the receiver with his hand and relayed the message.

“Get the shift commander!”

Escrow got the shift commander, who told Escrow the same thing.

“He says the same thing.”

“Escrow! You tell him that if the governor isn’t talking with the sheriff in two minutes, I’m gonna fuck him for ten generations!”

Escrow uncovered the receiver. “This request comes directly from the governor, who would personally appreciate your help in this matter of utmost political urgency…”

Sinclair was startled. Marlon was half crazy, veins popping and heart pounding.

“What is it?” she asked.

Marlon pointed at the Atlantic Country sheriff’s cars in the driver’s-side mirror. “They’re looking for motorists DWB.”

“DWB?”

“Driving While Black. That’s how they park when they’re race-profiling. Shine headlights in cars to see what color they are.”

The sheriff came on the line. Escrow handed Marlon the phone.

“Sheriff Corrigador here. How can I help you, Governor?”

“Call off your boys! They’re shining their lights across the road!”

“I don’t follow…”

“Don’t play the country hick! They’re profiling!”

“Now, Governor, there’s no such thing down here.” He said it with a lazy patronizing drawl.

Marlon caught himself and took a full breath and matched the sheriff’s poise. “Of course there isn’t such a thing. But for some crazy reason your campaign manager told me last year that you do it all the time. He even made a joke that there was no way to prove it in court, and he laughed. And you know what? I laughed, too.”

“Then where’s our problem, Governor?”

“Pull ’em off, Sheriff.”

“Now you listen here. We’re polite enough in this country, but you’re quite a ways from home. You can come down and visit and we’ll be sweet as pie, but we don’t take to it when you start actin’ like you know what’s better for us than we do.”

“Pull ’em off or this is your last term.”

The sheriff broke into a big laugh. “Oh, how precious. You’re still just a boy. This here’s an elected post, and we have a nice, well-oiled machine in place that takes care of things like that, so don’t you go worrying your little head about it.” He laughed again. “Son, you just don’t seem to understand how things work.”

“I’m not your son, and I’ll explain exactly how things work,” Marlon said evenly. “There are four veteran circuit judges in your county who are going to retire in the next three years. Instead of serving their full terms, and risk the party losing the seats in open elections, they’re going to resign three to twelve months ahead of time. That way I can appoint their successors from our party, who will be virtually unbeatable running as incumbents. How am I understanding things so far?”

The sheriff didn’t answer.

“Now, I have a list of four very powerful party members in your county—possibly even members of your oily machine—who are just dying for those juicy judgeships. In fact, Governor Birch even privately promised them the seats last year. But I’m gonna have to call ’em and say, ‘Fellas, there’s an unfortunate situation in the sheriff’s office that threatens to embarrass the state party as a whole, and I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to get around to those appointments for a while because I’m too busy trying to fix that problem—unless of course there’s something the local party can do to expedite the process.’…So you tell me, Sheriff. Does this
boy
seem to understand how things work?”

There was silence on the line and then it went dead. Marlon turned to his side mirror. A minute passed. The squad cars cut their lights and backed off the street.

Marlon started up the RV again and pulled onto the highway.

“I don’t have a good feeling about that,” Escrow said with an armful of sodas.

“I’m with him,” said Elizabeth. “You did the right thing, but you should have gotten some allies together first instead of sticking your neck out alone. You spent a lot of political currency.”

“As Lyndon Johnson said, what good is political currency if you can’t spend it?”

Jenny was sleeping a lot from her medicine, and Marlon’s yelling on the phone had awakened her. She slowly made her way up front with the others and sat down next to Elizabeth and yawned and smiled at her. Elizabeth smiled back.

Escrow handed out sodas. “Mountain Dew. Pepsi…. Who had the Surge?”

Pimento raised his hand.

Elizabeth was still smiling at Jenny, but her expression changed as she studied her face. “You remind me of someone.” She suddenly got a startled look. “Jenny!…You’re
Jenny Springs! THE Jenny Springs!
”

Jenny looked away in embarrassment.

“What happened to you?” asked Elizabeth. “You vanished from the face of the earth!”

“Who’s Jenny Springs?” asked Escrow.

Sinclair looked at Pimento. “You’re the fact guy. Tell him.”

Pimento told him as they rolled south on US 1. He finished his Surge and was about to crunch the soda can.

“I’ll take care of that for you,” said Escrow. He held open a clear plastic litter bag.

“Why, thank you.”

Only it wasn’t a litter bag. It was a Florida Department of Law Enforcement evidence bag. Escrow sealed it and wrote in grease pencil: “Fingerprint analysis.”

The streets were so deserted at three
A.M
. you could hear the mechanisms in the traffic lights clicking as they cycled. The RV ran a yellow near Pompano Beach. One of the RV’s windows was down and the stereo on. “Age of Aquarius” wafted through the intersection as they headed for Miami.

The music faded out until only the clicking of the traffic light could be heard again in the intersection.

Ten minutes later, there was a whoosh of wind through the intersection. A red Ferrari blew through a red light at a hundred, and its illuminated vanity tag disappeared toward Miami.

THE
rising sun was large and orange, still near the horizon, and out of its center came a snow-white seaplane
with lavender trim, a Grumman G-73T Turbine Mallard, the first flight of the day from Bimini. It flew low over the art deco hotels on Miami Beach and belly-landed in Biscayne Bay. A woman on a Jet Ski raced next to the left pontoon, then angled away as the plane taxied to the ramp at Watson Island. A limousine waited on the side of the MacArthur Causeway.

Dempsey Conrad was on his cell phone before his feet touched ground. “Where are you?”

“Pompano, I think,” Marlon said on the other end. The call had awoken him.

“We need to talk. Meet you in two hours on top of Pier 66.”

Marlon grabbed the alarm clock off the nightstand and looked at it. “Oh, man.” He fell back against the pillow. He reached to replace the clock but missed, and it fell on the floor.

Ninety minutes later, Marlon and the gang were at the front desk, booking a block of rooms on the sixteenth floor of the Pier 66 Hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

The concierge became flustered. “You’re Jenny Springs!”

He ran up with a pen. “Here, sign my arm. I’ll have it tattooed.”

Jenny blushed and wrote.

They got in the elevator. As the doors were closing, two arms came through the opening with a pen and piece of paper and got stuck. The doors bounced back open. “Jenny. Can I get your autograph? ‘To Ernie.’” The doors closed again on the arms, and bounced back open.

Jenny signed her name, the arms withdrew and the doors closed.

They rode up to the rooms, and Marlon opened his
with a magnetic card. They were awestruck by the views. “You blew the wad,” said Escrow. “I’m impressed.”

Pimento fiddled with the plastic sign on the doorknob. “‘Do not disturb!’ ‘
No molestar!
’—ever get the idea some things aren’t translating right?”

They unpacked and regrouped at the elevators, and caught one to the revolving bar another floor up on top of the hotel. There were some empty cocktail tables facing Bahia Mar. Marlon sat next to Elizabeth.

“Have you thought about it some more? The campaign could really use you.”

She smiled. “Answer still has to be no…. Besides, you already have Escrow.”

They glanced at Escrow, tapping a swizzle stick to the Muzak, wearing a
FREE ERLICHMAN
! T-shirt.

Elizabeth looked back at Marlon. “Deepest sympathies.”

Pimento stood at the window, hands on the glass. “I remember these views. The strip, the marina, the Yankee Clipper, Port Everglades. My folks must have brought me up here when I was a kid…. I wonder if they can make this thing spin faster. I’ll go ask.”

A new voice: “There you are!”

Everyone at the table turned.

Dempsey Conrad and Periwinkle Belvedere marched deliberately from the elevators.

“Marlon, who are all these people?” asked Dempsey. “I recognize Escrow and Pimento, but who are these two—these
women?
”

Belvedere chimed in with a sideways grin. “That’s Elizabeth Sinclair, my former top aide. We had a disagreement on her style of client relations, so she left and started her own firm. Now she’s trying to put me out of business.”

Dempsey laughed. He took Elizabeth’s hand and gave
it a genteel kiss. “Honeypie, you got moxie, I’ll give you that. But why would you want to go up against Perry?” He winked at Belvedere. “That just ain’t where your talents lie.”

“Where would they lie?” Elizabeth asked with a poker smile.

“Well, like at Perry’s parties. I’ve seen you—you’re a terrific hostess. You look great!”

“Thank you.”

“Seriously, it’s not that easy. You should be very proud you’ve made it this far, so don’t take it too hard when your company fails. I’m sure Perry will take you back—you put women half your age to shame.”

“Thank you.”

“And who’s this?” asked Dempsey.

“This is Jenny Springs,” said Elizabeth.

Dempsey went to kiss her hand as well. “Nice to meet you, Jenny Spr—Wait. Not
the
Jenny Springs?”

“That’s her,” said Elizabeth.

“I was one of your biggest fans!” said Dempsey. “What happened to you?”

Belvedere cleared his throat.

“Sorry,” said Dempsey. “Almost forgot why we’re here.”

He turned to Marlon. “Son, first I have to say I’m awfully proud of you.
Awfully
proud. But I think you’re handling von Zeppelin all wrong…Perry and me understand what you’re doing, but Helmut’s a different story. You need to go visit and make nice-nice with that asshole. And while you’re at it, maybe ease off a couple of other things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the issues, for example. All I’m saying is give ’em
a little rest. Stick to personal attacks and photo ops. Just for a few days. You don’t want people’s heads to start hurting.”

“Can’t do it.”

Dempsey smiled at Belvedere. “A fighter, just like the old man.”

Belvedere broke in. “Marlon, your father and I agreed early on not to interfere, since you’ve obviously got the Conrad instincts. But now big money is coming into play….”

Dempsey tapped Perry’s arm. “The boy’s got a head on his shoulders. We’ve made our point. I’m sure he won’t let us down. Isn’t that right, Marlon?”

“I promise I won’t let you down.”

“See? There ya go!” said Dempsey. “Y’all have nice day.”

He smiled again at Elizabeth and gave her hand another kiss. “You take care, sweetie, and don’t bankrupt Perry too fast. He’d look kinda funny wearing suspenders and a pickle barrel.”