Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (44 page)

“Shit!” said the leader. He raised his arms to get the room’s attention. “Okay, we gotta leave now. Nobody move…and count to ten thousand. What’s that state you say to count slow?”

“Mississippi,” said Brooklyn.

“Mississippi, that’s it,” the leader said. “Let me hear all of you!”

The staff: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”

The Mierda Cartel sprinted for the elevators.

Sean and David stood in silent shock upon entering their magnificent four-hundred-dollar room at the Palm Beach Surfside. They just stared out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and the tops of the palm trees barely peeking up over the balcony. Then they shook hands vigorously and back-slapped and insulted each other.

The room came with three courtesy newspapers, and they were soon spread over the beds, all turned to the sports sections, World Series coverage.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Sean.

“Who would have thought that back when we planned the trip…”

“If Cleveland wins tonight, we’ll be forced to go to game seven in Miami…”

They lapsed into a silliness that they only exhibited around each other and that had marked every reunion since high school.

“There’ll be no choice.”

“We couldn’t help ourselves.”

“Decades of genetic memory.”

“A tractor beam grabbed us.”

Laughing until hurting, dopamine everywhere.

Sean pointed at one paper that predicted scalping at one to two hundred dollars a ticket.

David pulled two Michelobs from the half-size room refrigerator. “Remind me to go to the convenience store to replace these. Otherwise they’re five bucks each.”

Sean admired David’s drive and achievement. David’s varsity good looks and poise still made him the most popular man in any room. He was the proverbial man that the women wanted and the men wanted to be like. In social settings, David always recognized and included Sean, who otherwise would have been happy to sit on the rim of the action.

David knew that Sean would say he was crazy if David ever told Sean that he secretly looked up to him. He viewed Sean as a considerate, honest family man with effortless character that exceeded his own.

That didn’t stop David from teasing Sean mercilessly about his job.

David had the exciting position at the state attorney’s office, but it was Sean who got the press.

First was a small profile article in
Tampa Business Times
, then the cover of
Tampa Bay
magazine and front-page articles in both
The Tampa Tribune
and the
St. Petersburg Times
.

While still the most junior advertising executive at Turbo-Image Corp., Sean had been dubbed “the Wiz
ard” and “the Magician” in the media, and “Houdini” around the office.

As custom at Turbo-Image, the newest executives got the undesirable accounts. Sean was dealt the legislative reelection campaign of Mo Grenadine, following his problems in the hot tub. In-house, the account was considered a dog with fleas.

Nobody expected success—just the motions of work so Turbo could bill the hours. Sean went at it with an appreciation for the absurd, and he employed the Big Tobacco Theorem: Tell reality-defying lies with a straight face. He didn’t consider it dishonesty but low comedy.

Sean launched a media campaign that blamed Mo’s arrest on unspeakable acts of the newest threat to America: Urban Homosexual Terrorists. He said scientists had linked gun control to child molestation.

Sean wrote Mo’s speeches and platform as those of a smug, sanctimonious sonuvabitch. His scripted attacks on the unfortunate, unpopular and downtrodden were the stuff of burlesque.

When Mo was reelected in a landslide, Turbo-Image was reviled on the editorial pages and praised in the business sections. Political wags proclaimed Sean a genius for setting up voter registration booths outside monster truck shows.

The senior executives at Turbo considered it a fluke. But when a scandal-pocked minister from north Tampa arrived at the offices of Turbo-Image with flames licking at his career, he would settle for none other than Sean Breen.

This wasn’t funny anymore. This time his goal wasn’t satire but sabotage.

Sean highlighted all folly and foibles in capital letters. The minister’s coterie of bottom-feeding sycophants asked why Sean’s press releases and speeches kept repeating the words “embezzlement,” “extortion,” “mistresses” and “tax evasion” in big, bold letters. And besides, they said, Sean was black! But the minister silenced them, saying that on their brightest day they couldn’t comprehend what Sean was doing.

What Sean was doing was trying to sink the preacher. Press releases said that piles of cash diverted from church accounts were in “safekeeping from Satan.” Luxury cars, diamonds, furs and beach houses bought with church funds were used to shelter the donations from “agents of the devil.” Paid-off bimbos became salaried financial advisers whose advice was so valuable that God had told him not to reveal it lest secular institutions find out. He told the faithful to show that they were appalled by the media’s bias toward the Antichrist—and asked them to write large checks directly to the minister’s personal checking account.

The minister’s bank account ballooned to seven digits while he was in jail on a five-hundred-count indictment.

New accounts to Turbo-Image came quickly and furiously. The more Sean tried to blow the campaigns, the more successful he became.

The Rapid Response corporation sought a makeover for its flagging Florida chain of convenience
stores. Sean renamed it “Addiction World” with signs showing a smiley face with Spirograph eyes. He introduced the Addiction World combo box: a six-pack of beer, a pack of cigarettes and a lottery ticket. The men’s pack also had a copy of
Hustler
; the women’s pack a coupon for a pint of Häagen-Dazs from the freezer.

Managers were skeptical but followed Sean’s directive to create entrance bulwarks of wine, malt liquor, tropical coolers, rolling papers, cigars and diet pills. Addiction World earnings went vertical, and imitators soon followed: Stoked Stores, Buzz Mart and Drink-n-Drive.

The only account that didn’t work out wasn’t Sean’s fault.

The Florida Department of Agriculture needed to change public perception in Tampa Bay. It was getting excessive grief for fighting the medfly by essentially carpet-bombing the area with the insecticide known as malathion.

Sean proposed a campaign featuring Malley the Dancing Malathion Bear. Early focus groups showed he was so right, residents would start putting malathion on their cereal. A low-cost character actor was suited up as a tap-dancing panda and began rehearsing. Instead of a cane, he held a spray wand used for ground application of the insecticide. He pulled the sprayer’s trigger at prearranged points in his dance routine, and the footlights lit up a mist over Malley’s head reminiscent of
Singin’ in the Rain
.

Except the stage crew made the mistake of using real malathion during rehearsal.

Television news crews assembled for Malley’s debut at the Li’l Bucs preschool near Tampa Stadium. By the time Malley tapped his way out in front of the five-year-olds, he looked drunk. Malley careened off the teacher’s desk and fell to all fours, projectile-vomiting out the mouth hole of the bear mask.

The actor gasped for air, but the catch on the bear’s head was stuck. Paramedics finally cut off the bear’s snout with a circular saw used in traffic extrications. Tots shrieked, and news cameras recorded Malley’s exit on a stretcher.

As the
Serendipity
drifted farther from shore and the batteries went dead, Stinky and Ringworm decided the only rational option was to finish off the booze.

When they awoke the next day, they were on another boat.

It was a big boat, and the two were sitting down on the swim platform. Cement blocks sat next to them. There were chains around their necks and their hands and feet were tied.

The boater kneeled behind the transom. He stuck a Barbie in his mouth. The boater’s pulse rate seemed to rise. Without warning, he reached over with a gaff and toppled a cement block off the swim platform. Stinky was jerked by the neck off the platform and beneath the waves.

Ringworm stared up into the eyes of a long-gone
fetish aficionado getting off. Ringworm visited a land of panic that few ever know; he flopped around the platform, a fish on a hot sidewalk. The boater’s breathing became more labored. He reached over again with the gaff. This time he pushed the block up on its edge to a teetering point and held it.

Ringworm’s eyes locked on the cement block as it balanced precariously. The boater pushed the gaff and the block slipped and splashed into the water.

Serge crossed the Royal Palm Bridge onto Palm Beach at one o’clock and by one-ten had abandoned the car on the side of Worth Avenue.

“We don’t need to live like this,” he said of the car and everything. “We got more than forty grand left.”

They took three shoulder bags from the trunk and walked up the avenue.

“Say whatever you want about Palm Beach,” said Serge, “but ya gotta admit they have some bitchin’ shrubbery.”

They window-shopped for a block and Serge waved them into a boutique. “We have a wardrobe situation to fix.”

Coleman held an Armani up in the mirror and Sharon checked out an Anna Sui. The staff blanched. Near the entrance, Serge found a silver service. “Ooooooo. Com-ple-men-tary coffee.”

The head salesman, on bum patrol, asked Serge pointedly, “Can I help you?”

Serge tried to guess the man’s weight as he took an extra-slow sip of coffee, forcing up the salesman’s blood pressure.

“I’d like to see something that screams Miami Beach!” said Serge with caffeine confidence.

“Sir,” the salesman said with a sweep of his hand that dismissed Serge, “I don’t think you—”

“You don’t think what?” Serge yelled, and stuck ten thousand dollars in the man’s face. “Look at this wad, fuck-wad!”

For the next hour, they enjoyed free champagne and cigars as they spent the whole ten large.

Serge modeled a white number with a pink Ralph Lauren T-shirt. “Am I Don Johnson yet?” he asked.

The clothes cost eight of the ten thousand. Then Serge whispered in the manager’s ear. The manager nodded and Serge stuck the other two grand in one of the manager’s inside coat pockets. The manager held a private conversation with the salesman who had tried to roust Serge. There was a disagreement and the manager shouted down the salesman, who walked up to Serge and said nothing.

Serge punched him in the face, waved to the manager and left.

On Worth Avenue, a man got out of a Lincoln and retrieved a metal box from the bumper of an abandoned Barracuda. He parked outside a clothing store and read the sports section.

Coleman had gone Parisian and Sharon chose a low-cut red affair from Milan. They caught a taxi to
Palm Beach Exotic Motors, where the outfits drew a first-class welcome.

Exotic motors rented dream cars for nightmare prices. They looked at a Bentley Mulsanne, a Diablo roadster, a Viper, a Pantera, a Hummer and a De-Lorean.

“We need a good stereo with a large-capacity CD changer for our soundtrack,” said Serge. “Did I tell you I’m a location scout for the studios? I can’t work without tunes.”

The salesman showed Serge something in a white, low-cut Lotus Esprit convertible for a thousand a day. A custom four-seater with fifty CDs in the trunk changer.

Serge presented another stolen Visa, but he had no photo ID. It was back at the hotel, said Serge, and they had to get to a tea.

“Sorry,” said the salesman.

Serge stuck five hundreds in the man’s shirt pocket and patted it.

“Drive carefully,” the salesman said.

They raced the Lotus over to the Breakers Hotel and Serge checked in as a location scout for Paramour Studios. He asked at the desk how to get to Au Bar, the place where William Kennedy Smith and his uncle Ted hung out.

“We’ll go and pretend we’re Kennedys,” Serge told Coleman. He lifted a pair of blank “Hi, my name is…” tags from a table outside a conference room in the hotel. “We’ll write fake Kennedy names, and then act like we forgot to take off the tags.”

Coleman tapped his head with a pen, trying to think of what name to use. “Don’t use the actual name Kennedy,” Serge advised. “Use one of the in-law names. It’s more plausible, and we’ll get the brainy chicks.”

The three strolled into Au Bar, and the waiter smiled and said, “You forgot to take off your name tags”—leaning a little closer to read them—“Mr. Shriver…and…Mr. Schwarzenegger.”

“I’m gonna mingle—I wanna find a
real
Kennedy,” said Sharon, and she disappeared in the crowd.

Sharon rushed back to the table. “Quick, give me a hundred.”

“Sure thing,” said Serge. “The same day that I give you a tongue bath.”

“No, really,” said Sharon. “I need a hundred fast. A waiter said he’ll give me a personal introduction to some Kennedys, but I have to tip him big first.”

Serge handed her the C-note, and Sharon ran off and paid the waiter, who walked Sharon over and introduced her to Serge and Coleman.

Serge punched up the Talking Heads version of “Take Me to the River” on the CD player, cruising the Lotus along Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, toward the Flagler Bridge. It was early in the evening, and Sharon leaned over forward and flicked a lighter below wind level. The car rode smooth enough for her to heat the heroin she’d bought at the techno dance club they’d hit after Au Bar. Serge
crossed the bridge, drove to the ocean side of the island and turned south.

He yelled over his shoulder, “I’ve already counted five Rolls-Royces coming the other way, in case we’re keeping track of such things.”

Sharon found Serge’s round tin watercolor mixing tray. The pockets around the rim contained dried paint residue, and Sharon had tapped out the heroin into the pocket reserved for lemon yellow. As it melted, it took on the hue of the paint.

Sharon dipped the syringe in the depression and drew up the plunger. Her respiration increased, Pavlovian. She didn’t want marks to show, so she spiked a vein in the rose tattoo on her ankle. A dark purple drop of real blood beaded up next to a tattooed drop on the end of a thorn. She drew back on the plunger and a few cc’s of her own blood squirted into the cylinder. Mixing with the translucent yellow in the clear tube, the blood formed tangerine blobs that floated in slow motion like a lava lamp. She reversed the plunger’s direction and pushed it all home. She read the warmth in her leg as the beginning of the rush, but it was just the temperature from melting the opium.

Before she could get the needle out, she fell back against her seat. Her face turned sideways, against the headrest, looking out to sea. Sailing, above the grime of life, and the waves rolling in from the Atlantic broke on the shore in a symphony. Coleman pulled the syringe out of her ankle, refilled it and stuck it in the inside of his elbow, sending in a warm
broth of horse and HIV. Serge raced the Lotus past Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.

“Marla Maples took a leak on the beach right there,” said Serge, pointing. “At least that’s what the newspaper in the supermarket said.”

He punched up “Dark Side of the Moon” on the CD changer. The heavy-reverb guitar and cash registers of “Money” shook the car as Coleman’s head fell backward over the headrest and he saw a shooting star.

Mo Grenadine folded the
Palm Beach Post
over to NFL coverage. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers finally had a winning record, which was being vaunted as one of the great all-time underdog stories of the sports world, along with the 1969 New York Jets and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. Mo reached under the seat without looking, into a complimentary box of jerky sticks, and peeled one open. He threw the wrapper in the pile of cellophane on the passenger seat.

He dropped Visine and looked over the top of the newspaper at a martini bar on Clematis Avenue called the Atomic Olive. Every five minutes a large iridescent olive over the door belched a mushroom of smoke. A white Lotus sat at the curb. The small magnetic box had been under its bumper since Au Bar.

An hour earlier, the occupants of the Lotus had come out of a bookstore/coffeehouse across the street, where Carl Hiaasen was autographing stacks
of green books. Waiting in line, Serge wagged a latent tail.

Now, a commotion on the outdoor patio caught Grenadine’s attention. A bouncer yelled at a man taking pictures. The bouncer grabbed for the man, who jumped back out of reach and snapped more pictures.

The bouncer began a slow march toward the photographer that reeked of homicide. The man walked backward, taking pictures of the bouncer.

A tall blond ran from inside the club and jumped on the bouncer’s back, and both began to spin with great centrifugal force. A man with a fish hat ran onto the patio with olive spears in both hands and stabbed them deep into the bouncer’s buttocks. The photographer opened the Lotus’s trunk and threw in the camera. He pulled out a TEC-9 and emptied the thirty-two-shot magazine in the air in three seconds, throwing the crowd into fits of nostalgia. Everyone else froze, and the three hopped in the Lotus without opening the doors and sped off.

Twenty-seven cars from the West Palm Beach Police Department and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office responded to the report of automatic weapon fire at the Atomic Olive. It would have been child’s play locating a white Lotus, even in Palm Beach, except martinis caused the patrons to identify it variously as a Maserati, a Ferrari and “a Trans Am with everything.”

Serge was three blocks away at an all-night knick-knack plaza, buying more postcards, lapel pins and
a live caiman—a small South American crocodile sold to Florida tourists as faux alligator. They drove back across the Royal Poinciana Bridge to their room at the Breakers. Serge handed Coleman the caiman in a small rectangular cardboard box with little holes punched in it and told him to put it away.

Coleman turned the AC on full and reclined on the bed. He worked the remote control diligently, unable to punch up the World Series. Looking at herself in the mirror, Sharon felt a touch of class and refinement for the first time in her life as she squirmed out of the thousand-dollar dress and spit a cigarette into the toilet. Serge opened the courtesy fridge and scanned the price list. “Twelve dollars for mixed nuts! What do they do, make your dick hard?”

The TV was going back and forth from C-Span to off.

“You idiot!” Serge confiscated the remote control. He turned on the baseball game with one punch of the remote, opened the door and threw it in the pool.

Sharon was on the phone with the Psychic Pals Network, asking if they’d end up with the five million dollars or get caught for killing the dentist. Serge grabbed his head with both hands. “I’m surrounded by morons!”

He ripped the receiver from Sharon’s hands and told the Psychic Pal, “I predict you will be raided by the IRS in ten minutes,” and hung up.

The Indians were on top three-zip in the third. Coleman scooped miniature liquor bottles out of the fridge and dumped them in a pouch he created by
stretching out the front of his four-hundred-dollar shirt. He climbed back onto the bed with Serge. They put on their foam Marlins and settled in for the game.

Sharon walked over and stood in front of the TV set, naked. “I’m bored,” she said in a sultry voice.

Serge picked up the TEC-9 from the nightstand and pointed it at her. “Move.”

Mo Grenadine had a wire running down from his left ear into a palm-size crystal TV. In the darkness of the Breakers parking garage, the two-inch screen dimly lit the Lincoln’s interior. Grenadine saw the Marlins and Indians each add a run in the fifth before hotel security ran him off.

Sean and David switched to Cokes in the Surfside’s bar as they watched the Indians carry their lead through the sixth, seventh and eighth innings.

On a sixty-inch home theater screen in a Palm Beach penthouse, the Indians celebrated the final out of the sixth game, pushing the World Series to a seventh. The sliding glass door of the penthouse was open. On the oceanfront balcony, Charles Saffron wore a powder-blue bathrobe and paced with a portable phone, fielding a long-distance death threat.