Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (38 page)

The sky was orange marmalade over Tampa Bay as the sun fell below the St. Petersburg skyline. The underlight caught some cirrus clouds, glowing pink-red.

Happy hour was under way at the bar Hammer-Time on the Courtney Campbell causeway. A typical Friday after-work Tampa crowd. Lots of Trans Ams in the parking lot. The bar’s name was bent in red lights over the door. Just below it was a stuffed hammerhead shark wearing sunglasses and painted with electric-lime tiger stripes.

Souvenir T-shirts covered the ceiling, and the tables were old surfboards. The owners had bought up dozens of taxidermied fish—wahoo, cobia, amberjack—painted them wild like the shark out front and stuck them on the walls. A standing clientele coagulated traffic around the bar, and waitresses circulated with racks of test tubes filled with shots.

David Klein had been at the window table for two
hours, before the crowds, because he liked the view. He had a Coke and was halfway through a paperback.

David saw two sailboarders and the news helicopter doing traffic reports, and his mind drifted the way it did before sleep.

He thought back to the case he’d finished prosecuting that afternoon, another ATM stickup, open-and-shut, jury out twenty minutes. Where were they all coming from? Wave after wave of assailants. Carjackers, rapists, muggers, child abusers and people who’d simply decided it was time to start shooting. He averaged three death threats a month.

He thought back to Tampa High. David was seventeen, driving a carload of football players out into the county after another win. Out to the bootlegger on the Hillsborough River.

The sheriff’s deputy was aware of the bootlegger, and when he saw the football players at that hour on that county road, he knew the reason.

He summarily pulled them over, found the moonshine and arrested everyone. He also charged David with reckless driving.

David’s teammates laughed, but only as much as was polite, when David said he’d be their lawyer. He spent hours alone in the courthouse library.

In court, the prosecutor and judge were irked that the teens pushed for a trail instead of paying the misdemeanor fines. David’s four teammates sat at the defendant table, two in letter-man jackets. Fourteen
other players and cheerleaders sat in the wooden pews.

David asked the judge to combine all the defendants, but to separate his reckless driving charge into a separate trial.

The judge looked at the prosecutor, who shrugged. No objection.

The prosecutor put the deputy on the stand, and he described David driving over the center line, which everyone knew was a pretext for a search, but one that held up every time.

“Your witness,” the prosecutor said, patronizing David.

“Was I speeding?” asked David.

“No.”

“Were any other cars present?”

“No.”

“Did you stop me for any other reason?”

The deputy lied about the moonshine suspicions. “Nope, just driving over the center line.”

“No further questions,” said David.

“The state rests,” the prosecutor said with a smugness that made it clear this was beneath him, a game of legal putt-putt golf.

“The defense requests a directed verdict of acquittal based on the 1948 precedent of
Penrod v. Florida
in this circuit…” David handed copies made in the courthouse library to the judge and prosecutor. “…in which the judge ruled that driving down the center of a county road is a generally accepted safety measure in rural Florida, and without any other ev
idence is not in and of itself sufficient to support a charge of reckless driving.”

The judge finished reading the court opinion and looked up at the prosecutor. “The state have anything?”

“But he was weaving too!” said the prosector.

“Too late,” said the judge. “You had your chance on direct, and you rested…. Case dismissed.”

“Okay,” said the prosector, “now on the moonshine charges…”

“Your honor,” interrupted David, “defense moves the alcohol charge be dismissed as it is the fruit of a search without probable cause, based upon the deficient traffic citation.”

“The fruit?!” exclaimed the prosecutor. “Really, your Honor, do we have to—”

The judge stopped him by holding up his hand. “He’s right. Dismissed.”

The judge looked at David and let a smile slip on his lips. “It’ll be interesting to see which way you’re gonna turn out.”

A voice popped the daydream. “What are you reading?”

David looked back from the bay and saw Sean, who pulled out the empty chair across from him at Hammer-Time. David looked down at the book he’d forgotten he was holding. He turned it over to show Sean the cover. A drawing of a giant bug with a coke spoon hanging from his neck and submachine guns in its six arms under the title
The Cockroach Bay Story.

“I remember that case,” said Sean. “It was like the
typical eighties Florida crime story. Every cliché you ever heard about the Wild West cocaine frontier.”

“That’s it.”

“Book any good?”

“I guess,” said David. “Most of the facts are right. It’s got the parts about the accidental coke drop and that big free-for-all when all those people found it.”

“Isn’t it amazing that’s the same place we go fishing?”

“I know. I’m now at the part where everyone starts dying like grassy-knoll witnesses.”

“It looked like you weren’t at any part, looked more like staring out the window to me.”

“Trying to forget work. These animals. They’re like a different species.”

David knew what Sean was going to say next. The state was rapidly dividing into two types of people. Those who made parents worry for their children, and those who didn’t. David ascribed it to the fact that Sean had little kids. He also knew he was right.

“Now back to business,” David said.

“Right,” said Sean. “The annual fishing trip.”

“The same one we have not been having for years. The tradition continues.” Every year the same thing. Big talk. The big fishing trip. And then the big canceled fishing trip. Always something. Wedding, car accident, births.

“But this year…”

“Absolutely,” said Sean.

“All the way to the Keys,” said David. “I know a skiff rental place.”

“I know these out-of-the-way cabins.”

“It’ll be a roadtrip.”

“
Easy Rider
.”

“
Route 66
.”

“Lewis and Clark.”

“Jack Kerouac.”

“
Thelma and Louise
.”

David stopped and looked at him.

“Can I be Thelma?” said Sean.

“Okay, here’s the plan before we cancel it again this year.”

“We’re not gonna cancel it!” said Sean.

“It’ll be the A-tour of Florida,” said David. “We drive over to Cape Canaveral for a space shuttle launch. The next day we head south along the coast to Palm Beach, and hang there for a day. Then the same thing the next day in Miami Beach…”

Sean finished the thought: “And finally we drive all the way to Key West and break some fishing records…”

“Most Bait Wasted, Career,” said David.

Laughter distracted them.

It was girls’ night out at the next table. Five secretaries sipping stadium drinks, rum and Coke. They giggled and one took her bra off under her shirt to win a bet. One of the secretaries, the one with medium-length wavy black hair, saw David looking and held up her drink toward him and smiled. David smiled back and turned away to gaze at the pelicans skimming the bay. Two men on the make walked up to the secretaries. The women gave them good-
natured patience, let ’em make their pitch. David heard the women groan at a punch line before the men were dispatched.

Another suitor approached the table. Green down vest and pointy cowboy boots. This one was getting a brisk rejection from the woman with the black wavy hair. He grabbed her wrist and she pulled it away. He took a step back and appeared to relax, ready to leave it alone.

But instead he grabbed her arm again, twisting it behind her back and pushing her head down to the table.

“I’ve had it with you, bitch!” the man yelled. Everyone froze. The only sound was the man’s voice and U2 on the sound system, “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

“You’re fuckin’ him! I oughtta break your fuckin’ neck!”

In times of duress, when others might be nonplussed, David went to a different place. He stopped thinking verbally and began thinking in numbers. Not literally numerals. But distances, time, odds, spatial relationships, computer-modeling, assigning weights to outcomes, coefficients of opportunity. Extremely fast. It was what had made him such a successful quarterback. His effectiveness, however, depended on factoring out emotion. That was a challenge this time because the woman with her face pressed to the table was his sister, Sarah.

“You slut!” the man yelled, twisting her arm.

“Let me guess,” said David, standing. “You were never very bright, even as a child.”

Everyone looked at David like he had lost his mind. This guy was Paul Bunyan.

“What did you say?” the man growled.

“Oh, nothing,” said David. “Just that it must be difficult going through life always the least intelligent person in any group.”

“What?”

“But there’s always hope,” said David. “They have specially trained chimpanzees that can help you with daily tasks. I hear they’re really smart.”

The man let go of Sarah’s arm and walked toward David. “I’ll kill you!”

The man stepped right up to David, chest to chest, to scare the hell out of David before flattening him. The man pulled back a fist, but as he did, David gave a quick lean forward and head-butted him in the mouth. Bip! David got a little cut in the forehead, but it smashed the man’s teeth up good. Hurt like the devil.

The man was ready to kill for real now. But instead of punching with his pulled-back arm, he reflexively went first to his injured mouth. That gave David time to pull his own fist back, and he piston-punched the man in the kidney. The man was off balance, his central nervous system telling him that things were going very badly on two fronts.

While the man was busy sorting it out, David didn’t even have to be imaginative about the end. He picked up a chair and swung it sideways. In the mov
ies, the chair splinters. In real life, bones splinter. The man put up an arm to shield himself, and it broke in two places before it was deflected away. The chair went on through and fractured his skull and collarbone. David wasn’t done. He was down on top of the man, punching away. Would have killed him too if Sarah and Sean hadn’t pulled him off.

After seeing David’s gold assistant state attorney badge, the cops treated him like royalty. They cuffed the unconscious lumberjack.

Sean was driving. He looked over at David in the passenger seat and back to the road, then looked at David again. “Sometimes you scare me.”

David was nonchalant. “Animals. Where do they keep coming from?”

“Let’s go fishing,” said Sean.

Veale was at the dining room table with his wife and daughter, going over plans for the daughter’s wedding in two weeks. He looked over his wife’s shoulder at the TV in the other room and pregame coverage of the World Series.

“George, are you paying attention?”

George nodded.

He started hearing the voice before they did, the one calling him.

Then they all heard it: “Calling Captain Cavity!”

As his wife got up to investigate, Veale felt an oncoming four-wheel-drive panic attack. He had missed the twenty-four-hour deadline.

“George, there’s two scary-looking men in our yard,” said his wife. “Get rid of them!”

George and his daughter got up and joined her at the window.

Through the iron gate, the three saw Coleman out on the sidewalk, wearing army boots, skimpy silk
running shorts and no shirt. He stood with legs apart and arms akimbo like Superman, and fixed a threatening mug on his face. Behind him, Serge leaned against a rusted-out Barracuda parked in the street.

Most intimidating was the giant tattoo on Coleman’s chest that they could read even from the house: “Crucifixion Junkies.” It was the name of a local death metal band, but the Veales didn’t know that. They thought he was another bay-area devil-worshiper.

“We want our money,” yelled Serge.

“George, do you know these men?!” asked his wife.

Veale said, “Hide me,” but his voice was so high only dogs could hear it.

“George! Do something!” his wife yelled.

“Yeah, George, do something!” Serge yelled from the street.

So George got down on the floor and made himself into a ball.

“I’m calling the police!” his wife announced.

Serge and Coleman told the police that they were George’s friends and only wanted to see if George could come out and play. “Isn’t that right?” Serge yelled to Veale, who was hiding behind the stump of the Canary Island date palm.

The officer told Veale’s wife that he was sorry. But since George refused to cooperate, or even come out from behind the stump, all he could do was tell the men to leave. He tipped his hat.

Veale’s wife and daughter took matters into their
own hands and went shopping in Hyde Park.

After the women left, Serge and Coleman circled back to the house and walked through the unlocked door. George, in the living room, took off running.

Serge tackled him again on the Mexican tiles.

“George, we’re not going to cut off any more fingers. We just want to show you something.”

Serge pushed a videocassette into the VCR, and George watched himself with a fishbowl on his head.

“Now let’s go for a ride, George,” said Serge.

But George made himself back into a ball. So Serge and Coleman put him in a large laundry basket and carried him out to the Barracuda.

As Serge drove, he talked to Veale in the passenger seat. “Why haven’t you paid us? You know it’s the right thing. I can’t believe you were intentionally trying to avoid us.

“Tell you what I’m going to do, George. I’m a motivational kind of guy. I deeply believe in inspiring the people around me, giving them a clear reason to do things.”

Serge pulled out several sheets of paper stapled together. “We took the liberty of going through your mail. As a free service, of course, no charge. This was from your caterer, your daughter’s final wedding guest list. About a hundred and fifty names, addresses too.”

Serge pulled out ten rectangular boxes wrapped in brown paper, the size of videocassettes.

“These are the fishbowl chronicles,” said Serge. “I’ve addressed them to the first ten people on the
wedding list. Every day you don’t pay, I address another ten tapes.”

Serge pulled the Barracuda over to the curb, stepped out and dropped the ten tapes into a mailbox. George screamed, jumped out of the car and jammed his arm into the mailbox up to his neck, scraping off wads of skin, and got stuck for a half hour.

With the three bikers on the sailboat and out of the way, the unveiling of Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles, Phase V, went off without a snag. McJagger thought it wise to keep the Ohio visitors in their buses, preventing contact with the park’s residents. A phalanx of yard workers cleared one intersection of a blockade of electric scooters.

The mood at the park returned to interminable funk. Minimum closed the pool again and ordered the breakage of forty water heaters.

On October 14, just after noon, Minimum stood in the driveway of Trailer #864, the Aloha model, browbeating an eighty-year-old woman to tears over the maintenance fee. A crowd gathered and heckled him.

In Trailer #865, a widower in a walker went to the closet and put on his Eighth Air Force bomber’s jacket with a small flak tear under the arm. He reached behind a pile of newspapers and military yearbooks and grabbed a lever-action Winchester.

A few onlookers noticed the gun barrel through a screen on Trailer #865. They whispered and the crowd slunk out of the line of fire. Minimum, con
centrating on his intimidation, was the only one without a clue.

The doctor said the shot couldn’t have hit Minimum’s kneecap more directly or done more damage, even though the veteran told police repeatedly that he was aiming for his heart.

After at least six months of rehabilitation, Minimum would be able to get around with just a leg brace. Until then he’d have to use…

“No, not that!” said Minimum.

The residents hooted at Minimum as he hobbled around the complex with a walker. At the clubhouse, some tried to hook the legs of his device with their canes.

As for the veteran, that was something McJagger wanted to talk to Minimum about. McJagger, at his desk, harrumphed with impatience as Minimum moved like an escargot with the walker. He struggled to get into a chair.

“You comfy?” asked McJagger.

Minimum nodded.

“Good.” He threw several newspapers hard across the desk and Minimum put up both hands to stop them from hitting his face.

“Look at those goddamn headlines. ‘Shooting trial opens: Aging vet’s last mission.’ ‘Retirement parks—hell on earth?’ ‘Gray Panthers blast Vista Isles.’ They’re making this guy out to be a hero. CNN even named a new syndrome after him. It’s a goddamn nightmare. I got a twenty-million-dollar new phase about to go in the tank because of you. You’re fired!”

“But what about all I’ve done for you?” said Minimum, on the business end of fear for the first time in his life.

“What about how you’ve treated all those old people!”

“But you wanted me to. I made you rich!”

“Oh! Blame others! That’s the high road, you groveling little shit. You’re weak; you can’t even walk right anymore. You’re yesterday’s news,” said McJagger. “How do you put it? You’re out on the streets!”

Minimum sobbed without regard.

“Jesus Christ,” said McJagger. “Be a man!”

Minimum fell to the floor and crawled around the desk. He grabbed McJagger by the leg and wouldn’t let go, weeping on his socks.

“For the love of God!” yelled McJagger, trying to shake free. “Okay, okay, you’re not fired. But you’ve got to disappear for a while, at least until the trial’s over. The best thing we can do is make sure this guy doesn’t get convicted. Get this off the front page.”

“But he tried to kill me!”

“Don’t cry to me. I’m on
his
side. Did you see the man’s war record? Purple Heart, Flying Cross, thirty-six bombing runs over Germany, shot down twice, prisoner of war, tortured. I read the paper—couldn’t believe how much money you swindled him out of. You’re a sick man!”

“I gave the money to you!”

“That man is a real American hero! Cripes, you’re just a little worm. Your kind has no values.”

“But he shot me!”

“I would have shot you. I
will
shoot you if you don’t shut up,” and McJagger pulled the .45 from under his desk.

“Maybe you can sign some kind of affidavit,” McJagger thought out loud. “Say you shot yourself cleaning your gun. It was a lovers’ quarrel. A gang-related drive-by. Jealous husband. You were trying to buy drugs. Claim you’re mentally unbalanced, mildly retarded. A transvestite…”

McJagger opened his desk drawer again and pulled out a zippered bank bag and threw it at Minimum.

“That’s five grand and the keys to my Hatteras in Cape Coral, sleeps six. Take it and get lost,” said McJagger. “Jesus, I’m running out of boats here.”

Minimum rubbed his forehead where the bank bag had hit him.

“And if you see those bikers, tell ’em I want my sailboat back!”

Sean Breen and David Klein drove north from Tampa on Interstate 75. It was a warm Sunday morning and they were in Sean’s Chrysler. David bought the gas when they stopped at a Cracker Barrel for biscuits.

They had open country driving through the Withlacoochee State Forest, slightly rolling, which is a mountain chain in Florida. Lots of pastures and hardwoods connected by strings of billboards for topless truck stops a hundred miles away.

It was a vintage 1985 New Yorker with a maroon interior, factory stereo. Eight hundred dollars of recent work on the air-conditioning. Mileage: unknown. David gave Sean relentless grief about trading it in. To hear Sean tell it, the car was good for another two hundred thousand, as long as he changed the oil on time.

The car began making a ker-chunk noise and puffs of smoke shot out the edges of the hood, but Sean continued driving.

“Don’t you think you should pull over?” asked David.

Sean reached forward and turned off the air conditioner and the problem stopped. He rolled down his window.

“Why do you keep this car?” asked David. “How many miles has it got?”

“I don’t know,” said Sean. “The odometer’s broken.”

“So it’s got a million miles and you have to have the air conditioner fixed every year, and a few months ago it failed the emission test. What was that? Another five hundred dollars?”

“Nine.”

“Nine hundred!” David said and whistled.

“I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it,” said Sean. “I feel comfortable in it. It’s like an old baseball glove.”

“The rearview mirror is out of alignment in your baseball glove,” said David. He reached up and
turned the mirror slightly and it popped off the windshield in his hand.

“Whoops.”

David tossed the mirror over his shoulder into the backseat. He turned and grinned with guilt at Sean, who glared back.

“They make a special glue,” said David. “Sticks right to the glass.”

“And you’ll be finding where they sell it.”

They took Exit 63 at Bushnell in south Sumter County and hooked back under the overpass. Sean drove briefly through the rural countryside until he saw large American flags. Florida National Cemetery.

They drove through tight grids of tombstones that formed different patterns depending on your angle. They only gave way to more fields of tombstones.

“It’s over there,” David said, pointing.

They parked on the road and began walking. Only one other person was in sight. An elderly woman knelt at a grave in the adjacent field, holding a rosary. Sean and David were in the newest section. They could tell because the tombstones ended in a ragged, nongeometric edge, and the land beyond was being backhoed and prepared for the advancing wave of white tablets.

In military cemeteries, plots aren’t purchased in advance and spread out willy-nilly. They are dug in strict chronological order.

David and Sean walked through time as they checked the inscribed dates of death. 1988. 1989. 1990.
The pair slowed when they got to 1991. Up until then, the dates of birth had been mostly in the early part of the century as World War II and Korean vets died off. But now they began seeing a growing frequency of birth dates in the early 1970s mixed with the 1920s. The Gulf War. “A lot more than I thought,” said Sean.

Most of the tombstones had crosses carved at the top. A distant second were six-pointed stars. There were rare Eastern Orthodox symbols. Following a series of eleven consecutive crosses was a Star of David and the name Reuben Klein.

David stopped and looked down and was quiet. Sean was glad he’d come, but he was uncomfortable because David’s nature had been to aggressively avoid talking about his parents.

David started talking. “When he had his stroke, it looked like he would make it. I went with the whole family. Spent as little time as I could. Then my sister called and said I should see him. What she meant was if we had anything to say, there wouldn’t be another chance. She knew why we didn’t get along. It was because of the way he treated her. He didn’t
mis
treat her. He just didn’t treat her right. He was the colonel, very military, he was always cold and hard and never any affection or emotion. I could take it, but he treated Sarah like she was a buck private too. We always fought over it and when I was sixteen I took a swing at him and he decked me. After I left for college, I never said more than two words together to him, and that was only when I visited
Mom. Seemed fine with him; he never called or wrote.”

Sean had never heard David talk remotely like this. David stared down at the tombstone the whole time he was talking.

“Sarah begged me to go back to the hospital and fix things. What do you fix? There was never anything there. I went early one Monday, but he was sleeping, tubes in his nose and mouth and arms. Machines tracking everything. He was helpless as a baby, and he slept like one. I sat there. Before I knew it I had been there two hours, and I left.

“I went to an artist I knew through a friend and told him I needed something quick—I’d pay extra. That Friday I went back to his room and this time he was awake. But no expression except maybe wondering what the heck I had wrapped in the brown paper. I held it up at the foot of the bed and took the paper off.”

It was a painting of a beautiful P-38 Lightning flying over the Pacific Ocean. Tendrils of clouds seemed to zip by the plane, below the right wing and under its trademark twin nacelles. The sea was deliberately fuzzed up because David had rushed the artist and told him to cut corners on the background—he had to have the painting by the weekend. But the out-of-focus sea actually created a nice depth-of-field effect. On the horizon were traces of an island chain. The archipelago was anonymous in the painting, but the plane was not. Its numbers and markings were those of Klein’s plane, and the pilot, though tiny, had Reu
ben’s black hair and determined face. It was a clear sunny morning just after his twentieth birthday, and Reuben Klein had life by the tail as he roared through the wide-open sky.