Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (45 page)

Coleman, coming to, felt someone playing bongos on his bare stomach.

“Wake up! It’s World Series Day!” said Serge. “We need to tank up on breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

Some people fall asleep smoking in bed. Coleman had fallen asleep eating potato chips. He’d rolled around in the night, and he awoke in a film of vegetable oil, covered with crumbled-up chips like a breaded drumstick.

Serge ordered eggs Benedict and orange juice from room service. Coleman ordered the same and added three Bloody Marys. Sharon had meth and Marlboros.

Serge went to the mini-fridge and opened the freezer section for ice cubes. He saw a cardboard box with little holes in it.

He pulled out the frozen caiman and waved it in front of his face like a gator-pop.

“What the fuck!” Serge’ said to Coleman. “Why’d you put this in the freezer?”

“I thought it was some kind of dessert or candy that needed to be kept cold, like taffy.”

Serge smacked the caiman’s tail against the dresser, and it shattered like an icicle. “Unbelievable,” he said and tossed it underhand into a satchel of dirty laundry.

Room service arrived. Coleman poked at his eggs Benedict tentatively until Serge said it was Mc-Muffins with secret sauce; then Coleman scarfed it up.

Serge called a bellhop and Coleman drank the last Bloody Mary and said he’d be in the bar.

Serge was tipping the bellhop and valet when shouting and general disagreement came from the Jacaranda Room and the Palm Beach society wedding inside. An heir to a bacon-bit fortune was marrying an heir to a sequin fortune. There were live peacocks, a hundred-foot-long ice sculpture of the Republican National Convention, and a life-size oil portrait of the bride and groom propped on a gigantic easel near the guest book.

Coleman thought it was just a really formal bar. He signed the pub’s guest book and went in for a drink. Someone said Coleman had to leave. There were words. Shoving. Coleman lost his equilibrium.

It wasn’t a quick fall, the kind where the person is smart enough to go straight down with minimal consequence. It was one of those stumbling, windmilling affairs that never ends well. Struggling for purchase,
Coleman pulled down a waiter’s sterling tray of champagne flutes and fell through the oil painting.

When Serge got there, the bride was crying and a gaggle of tuxedos had Coleman pinned against a column from the Ottoman Empire. Serge got chest to chest with the largest one, where only a few people could see his pistol as he handed over a roll of bills in the three thousand neighborhood. Before the tuxes could react, he and Coleman jumped in the Lotus waiting at the curb with Sharon.

Coleman lit a Churchill joint as they rolled down A1A toward Miami and the World Series. Serge punched up “Rocky Mountain Way” on the CD.

“…
Bases are loaded and Casey’s at bat
…”

Inexplicably, the song changed to “Convoy.” A few seconds later, “Afternoon Delight,” and a few seconds more, “Muskrat Love.”

Serge transfixed on the stereo, thinking gremlins. Then he noticed Coleman, who had discovered a remote control for the stereo somewhere and was pressing buttons.

The remote landed in a roadside lagoon and Serge manually clicked back to Joe Walsh.

“Where are we?” asked Sharon.

The pot told Coleman to free-associate: “…We’re on the road to ruin, the highway to hell, going to hell in a handbasket, on the wrong side of the tracks, the last train to Clarksville, a bridge over troubled water, off the beaten path, between a rock and a hard place,
at the school of hard knocks….” Coleman took another Bob Marley.

“…in Palookaville, dire straits, under the gun, up shit creek, the last resort, the end of the line—”

“Gimme that!” The joint followed the remote control out the window. “Enough weed for you!”

Sharon piped up, “Why do we have to go to the stupid World Series anyway? And where can we get some coke?”

Coleman: “I have a joke. An ant climbs up an elephant at the Miami Zoo and starts fucking the elephant…”

Serge squeezed the steering wheel and by force of will did not grab a gun.

“…but the elephant, you know, doesn’t notice ’cause ants are really small. And a coconut falls out of a tree and hits the elephant on the head, and the elephant goes, ‘Ouch!’ And the ant says, ‘Take it, bitch!’”

Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Pompano Beach. Salt air, sun, ocean’s edge. Their hair blew back like a rental car commercial. When they got into Fort Lauderdale, Serge drove up the strip to the Bahia Mar Marina and parked.

“Why are we stopping?” asked Sharon.

“To pay tribute,” said Serge.

“To what?” asked Coleman.

“Travis McGee,” said Serge. “
The Deep Blue Goodbye, The Busted Flush
.”

“Randy Travis? Where?” said Sharon.

“No, Travis
McGee
, errant knight of the John D. MacDonald classics! This is a fucking shrine!”

“I didn’t think there was anything worse than the World Series,” said Sharon, “but you’ve found it.”

She got out and slammed the door, announcing she had to use the facilities. As she walked away, she leaned her head back and shook her hair, which she had begun doing for prurient effect and which was now unconscious habit.

Serge grimaced and turned to Coleman. “We’re gonna kill her right now. I can’t take this.”

He pulled out the.380 but the silencer wouldn’t fit. He tried again with the 9mm, but the threads didn’t match it either. He tossed the silencer over his head into the backseat and pointed to the floor by Coleman’s feet. “Hand me that grapefruit.”

Sharon rejoined them out on the pier. They were alone. Serge took photos, and Coleman read the plaque at slip F-18, moving his lips and following with a finger: “…fictional hero & salvage consultant…designated a literary landmark February 21, 1987.”

Sharon sat on the edge of the slip. She was never discreet about boredom and had the air of a child twisting at her mother’s arm.

Serge moved behind her, removing the pistol and grapefruit-silencer from his camera bag, positioning them an inch behind her head. He glanced around, still alone. Perfect. She’d fall forward into the water, into noisy chops lapping the seawall.

He began to squeeze the trigger.

From behind them, a lively “Hey there!”

Serge let off the trigger and concealed the gun. The wind and waves had drowned out the idling motor until it was right on top of them, on the other side of the walkway, in the Intracoastal Waterway. A cigarette boat, aqua and orange stripe, number 13, with a tanned young man happy as a puppy dog.

Serge studied his face. Not Dan Marino, he thought.

“Y’all partying?” the man asked, looking only at Sharon. “My name’s Johnny!”

He tapped a nostril and raised his eyebrows in a question mark. Sharon was on her feet. She told Johnny to hold on and ran to the car to fetch her beach bag, which contained her beach drug paraphernalia. She sprinted back with the bag and jumped in Johnny’s boat.

“You kids go have fun,” Serge said. “We’ll just wait here.”

He pulled stolen Bavarian binoculars from the camera bag and watched them motor away.

The boat planed up, but suddenly stopped in the middle of the intracoastal behind a seven-million-dollar Italianate mansion. Sharon bent over in a storm of coke-snorting activity that surprised even Johnny.

He tapped more coke onto the top of a first-aid kit. “Go for it!”

From the pier, Serge saw Sharon give Johnny a shove and grab him by the hair, shaking his head back and forth. She punched him and then pulled
him down on top of her as they disappeared below the gunwales.

At first Johnny thought not only am I
not
scoring, I’m getting my ass kicked. Then he realized, as Sharon unzipped his pants, that this is it! After all those other times, I finally get some, and a wild tiger no less!

Sharon cursed and clawed Johnny.

Johnny was lost.

Unnerved and inept, he tried to follow her lead at dirty talk. He fumbled with a breast and stuttered, “S-s-son of a bitch, bastard, crap…”

“Ow, shit! What the hell? Ouch! Fuck!” yelled Sharon.

“Uh, damn,” said Johnny, “fuckin’-A, farts…”

“No! Shit!” she said. “This isn’t part of the sex! Something’s biting me! Damn! Ouch!”

Neither Sharon nor Coleman nor even Serge had realized that caimans are cold-blooded, and when frozen they go into suspended animation. Serge’s caiman had thawed out in his luggage and scampered around the trunk, settling in Sharon’s beach bag.

Sharon leaped off of Johnny and looked down to see the foot-long reptile with no tail and a death grip on her ankle, trickles of blood running onto her foot.

Back on the dock, Serge watched through the binoculars as Sharon ran around the cigarette boat, Johnny chasing her and shooting at her feet with a fire extinguisher. “That’s a new one,” said Serge.

She dove over the side and the caiman let go and swam away. Johnny drove the boat alongside
Sharon, pleading for her to get back in, but she ignored him and swam the entire way to the pier.

Back at slip F-18, Sharon demanded, “Gimme your coke!” Johnny submissively handed it over, and Sharon went back to the car, having nothing more to do with him. He stared down sadly at his swim booties, thinking his losing streak would never end.

Serge gave Johnny a one-armed hug around the shoulder. “Consider yourself lucky,” he said. “That woman is bad news with a four-inch headline.”

Johnny remained pitiful.

“This’ll cheer you up,” said Serge. “Coleman’s got a joke for you. You like animal jokes?”

After an inland loop to get around Port Everglades, Serge drove down to Miami Beach and the stretch of new condo construction on Collins Avenue.

They turned onto Ocean Drive. Serge said, “Hey, there’s the Carlyle. That was one of the opening scenes in the
Miami Vice
pilot. Don Johnson and Jimmy Smits stood right there!”

Sharon threw a cigarette out the window and into a gold Cadillac Eldorado parked with its top down. She thought, If I kill these guys, I can keep all the money. And if I do it soon, I won’t have to go to the stupid World Series.

Serge was thinking that game seven was only a few hours away. He’d have to kill Sharon soon if they were going to enjoy baseball at all tonight.

Serge said the Metropolis Hotel on South Beach was an architectural treasure, but Coleman thought
it looked like tutti-frutti ice cream. Shell white trimmed with raspberry, lemon and lime sherbet. Five stories and curved windows on all corners. The name on the hotel was backlit with blue neon and bookended by bronze sailfish.

The hotel’s patio was one in a series of trendy sidewalk cafés, where tedious weirdness passed for style. Two men with pierced nipples connected by jumper cables. That sort of thing.

“Al Pacino shot that guy in
Scarface
right there!” said Serge.

“Look at all the wedgies,” said Coleman.

Valets worked the curb like pit crews at Daytona. Serge jumped out of the Lotus and tossed his keys in a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook, but they sailed over the valet’s fingertips into a twenty-dollar salad.

“Sorry,” said Serge, waving at Jumper-Cable Men.

Bellhops rolled up with a luggage cart. Sharon was in her Kevlar body armor. She attracted two body builders from Caracas who rushed up to perform synchronized pectoral popping.

The lobby of the Metropolis was an art deco orgy. Twin rows of bromeliads flanked a line of domino tables with lacquer inlays. The terrazzo floor was a coral-and-alabaster checkerboard. With the two bellhops and a femme fatale in tow, and another Man Friday parking his Lotus, Serge strode through the hotel like The Great Gatsby.

Coleman had detoured to the bar, hewn from coquina rock and lit by a bronze Charles Atlas holding a glowing orb on his back. The mauve, stiltlike chairs
were aesthetically grand and orthopedically suspect. Coleman tried one out and decided he was a bean bag man. He ran to catch the others at the elevator.

The three squinted when the bellhop opened the room. The elevator had been ancient, slow and dark, and the hallway a catacomb. But the room faced Miami Beach and the large wall of glass that wrapped around the corner of the hotel poured in the light. Serge took a deep, satisfied breath; he placed the tackle box on one of the beds and disgorged the contents onto the spread. Coleman popped a Coors. Sharon, excited, pressed her hands against the window. Old coconut palms lined the concourse across Ocean Drive, and along the shore was a row of brightly colored lifeguard shacks shaped like flying saucers. The Atlantic was dark blue and choppy, but the sky clear and warm. It was a world overrepresented by sex, twelve-step programs and unnecessary surgery. Sharon’s world.

Serge shaved in the bathroom mirror and scripted Sharon’s demise. He’d bait her into going out of the room, maybe say he was going out too, and double back to prepare the trap. Lay out the polyurethane tarpaulin to catch the blood and stuff.

“I think I’m gonna head to the beach and take some pictures,” Serge said, sticking his head out of the bathroom. “Probably be gone at least two hours.”

Perfect, they’ll be separated, Sharon thought as she lit one cigarette with another. I’ll double back and kill Coleman, then set the trap for Serge.

“What are
you
gonna do?” Serge asked Sharon.

“I think I’ll do some shopping, maybe lay out on the beach,” she said. “Probably be gone a couple hours.”

Perfect, Serge thought.

They left at the same time, both overacting casualness. Sharon got in the elevator and Serge said, “I think I’ll take the stairs for exercise.”

“Good for you,” said Sharon. “Well, see you later.”

“Have fun.”

Sharon hid on the mezzanine and Serge hid in the stairwell.

Serge returned to the room first and found Coleman clicking a remote control at an unplugged TV set.

He heard a key in the door. “Shit, she’s back. Don’t tell her I’m here,” and Serge ran in the bathroom.

He heard quiet talk and then nothing for an extended period. Eventually there was a whimper and more quiet talk, and Serge peeked around the corner.