Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (46 page)

Coleman was on his stomach on the bed. Sharon sat on his back, straddling him and holding the.380 automatic with a straight-armed, two-handed grip. Pointed at the base of his head.

“I’m gonna blow your brains out and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she said in a husky voice, breathing heavy. “Gonna shoot you in the skull in less than thirty seconds, send your brains out your eyes and nose.”

She barked through clenched teeth: “Can you feel it coming? Huh, can you? Think about what it’ll be like….”

She pushed the barrel against his skull, Coleman weeping now.

“Here we go. Time to die. Ten seconds left….”

Serge was unprepared; he had no weapons and it was too far to get the jump on someone with a gun.

“Cry, fucker, cry!” Sharon tormented him. “Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Time’s up!”

Serge grabbed the only thing he saw on the bathroom counter and charged the bed. Sharon heard him and spun. It became a split-second race. Sharon raised the barrel and Serge planted his feet.

The only alternative had been a hairbrush, so Serge had grabbed the miniature World Series souvenir bat. He had it in both hands and swung for the fences. Sharon fired.

The bat broke in two across Sharon’s forehead as she pulled the trigger. The shot flew by Serge’s left ear, and Sharon fell backward off the bed unconscious.

Serge looked around and picked up his tackle box.

Sharon drifted back from the ethereal, and her brain hung in a shroud as she opened her eyes halfway. She could feel some kind of tube running down her throat. Serge was kneeling over her and there was a hissing sound, like an aerosol can.

When the hissing stopped, Serge pulled the tube out of her throat and held a can up to her face.

Sharon read the label, “Fix-a-Flat,” as she felt the rubber cement sealing up the inside of her lungs.

She mouthed without a voice: “No fair.”

“Tonight’s the night!” read the outbreak-of-war headline atop the
Miami Herald
. Sean turned to the sports section and threw the rest in the backseat, joining the Styrofoam cups, napkins, burger wrappers, coffee lids and an empty quart of oil. David took Southern Boulevard to the Palm Beach International Airport and turned south on Interstate 95.

Two virgin Thirst Mutilators perspired in the cup holders.

“I remember the first time I went to Miami,” said David. “I was a little kid. We went to the Seaquarium and I got a white plastic dolphin from one of those injection-molding machines under a see-through dome. It was supposed to be Carolina Snowball, the famous albino.”

“I remember the last time,” Sean said. “A squad of squeegee guys held my car hostage after midnight on Biscayne Boulevard. Then I got lost in the Omni parking garage. Car burglar alarms were going off
all over the place. The only open door led into the mall and it was empty and dark and this guy started shadowing me. I had to run around like
The Fugitive
.”

David tried the radio. “Fight the Powers That Be” came on and the two began to chicken-neck as they passed the Lantana exit.

“I love Public Enemy,” said Sean. “Remember that Florida State student who did mushrooms and barricaded himself in the capitol demanding to talk to Flavor Flav?”

“You know, you still snore,” said David. “I mean bad.”

“Why do we still live here?” asked Sean. “The crime is crazy. Kids who think they’re vampires and serial killers from Ohio…”

A Buick passed in the left lane with C-4 explosives and two bodies in the trunk.

“A personal question?” asked Sean. “You gonna have kids? I mean it’s just incredible. The way it changes you…”

“Is this trip gonna turn into a chick movie?”

“Sorry. I just can’t get the theme from
Muppet Babies
out of my head.”

Dave saw the black limousine coming up in the rearview and fly past in the far left lane doing a hundred.

“Seriously, why do we stay in this state?” Sean asked.

“Co-dependency,” said David.

“Look around,” said Sean. “A lot of people don’t seem right. Like that guy.” Sean pointed at the
Honda next to them. “That’s one scary-lookin’ dude. We don’t have any idea what he’s up to.”

“You’re coming unwrapped,” said David.

Every ten seconds the guy in the Honda threw a chunk of concrete down the embankment, each piece containing ground-up bits of corpse.

“I mean, you ever think how many undetected murderers drive down this road, past this very point every day?”

The answer was seventy-three. While they were talking, they passed seven graves just inside the woods along the interstate. Only two would be discovered in their lifetimes.

A Lincoln raced by on the inside lane. Mo Grenadine looked down in his lap at the homing monitor and followed it south.

The three men in white linen suits disassembled and cleaned automatic pistols in their laps. With one hand, the driver worked on the Walther laid out on a towel across his legs. He got a searching look on his face and turned to the man in the passenger seat. “Call it!”

The passenger looked up from his gun parts, apologetic. “Air biscuit.”

The head of the man in the backseat shot up in alarm, and all three rolled down their electric windows with military precision.

Fifteen seconds later, the driver yelled, “Clear!” They simultaneously rolled up the windows and faced back down at gun parts.

The driver finished reassembling his gun and tapped on the wheel along with a Spanish radio station. The announcer came on at the bottom of the hour. The driver heard something that caught his attention. “World Series!” he yelled. “
El Series Mundo!
”

“
Series Mundo! Series Mundo!
” the others shouted.

The driver had taken the antikidnapping driving course in Bogotá during Cartel Safety Week. He hit the brakes and twisted the wheel, putting the Mercedes in a spin. The gloss-black limousine slid sideways across three lanes of traffic and into the median. Other cars sideswiped and ran off the shoulder.

“
Series Mundo! Series Mundo!
”

When the Mercedes was halfway across the median, the driver pulled the wheel back and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. He crossed to the opposite side of the interstate and headed toward the turnpike, to the baseball stadium.

The radio’s volume was beyond its capacity for fidelity, and the speakers rattled like castanets inside the Yugo. A wall of fast, untuned guitars and lyrics about religious desecrations and infanticide.

Dar-Dar, lead singer for the Crucifixion Junkies, switched to the outside lane. He jerked his head violently, and his sweaty hair swung and slapped on the dashboard. He punched the armrest over and over. “Die, motherfucker! Meet Satan in all his killing glory! Bow down for the slaughter!”

The DJ announced there would be plenty more
music-without-hope still coming up on World Series Death Jam Weekend!

Dar-Dar stopped pounding. “World Series?”

He came upon a massive pileup on the interstate, where police were taking statements about a black limousine. Dar-Dar drove the Yugo slow down the breakdown lane and took the exit, working his way around Opa-Locka until he was pointed at the baseball stadium.

Traffic backed up to the turnpike. Lines at the stadium entrance gates were long and chaotic. A Latin man in a white suit peeled hundreds off a roll and said “Three” to a fast-talking scalper in one of those big, floppy Dr. Seuss hats. The Latins walked off to the gate and, next in line, a young man with an inverted cross on his forehead stepped up to the scalper. He raised an index finger and smiled. “One, please.”

David and Sean didn’t budget enough time for traffic. It was nearing first pitch when they made the exit at Northwest 202nd Street. David turned the wrong way and ended up on the side of the stadium where the parking lots were full and closed. Sean saw the Dr. Seuss hat first. It was on top of the only person in sight, and he was waving them over with a hand that held four tickets.

“Ask him how much,” David said, pulling to the curb.

Sean rolled down the passenger window. “How much?”

“Homes, a buck each. Box seats behind home plate.”

A buck, thought Sean, wow. This guy must not be having any luck; he’s totally disgusted with the whole process. But Sean could see himself doing it, practically giving away extra tickets he couldn’t sell minutes before the game, saying, “Aw, just give me a dollar.” Sean pulled two single George Washingtons from his wallet and held them out to the scalper.

The scalper looked at Sean like a foot had sprouted from his forehead.

Sean might as well have pissed on the scalper’s shoes. Here, homeboy, two fucking dollars, bite me! The insult was so aggressive the scalper was taken by surprise. He didn’t know whether to go for his piece or run. He studied Sean for a clue but the little guy was ice cold, like James Bond. Probably had a gauge below the window.

The scalper suddenly laughed. “No, man, a buck is a hundred dollars!”

David leaned over. “A buck for both.”

The scalper cringed for effect and quickly made the exchange.

“Shrewd negotiating strategy,” David told Sean as they drove off. “Knock him off balance. Let him think there’s no reasoning with us…”

“Shut up,” said Sean.

“I mean, why even try to act street-wise when you can go for the much more intimidating surreal farce.”

“I said shut up.”

They asked the first security guard they saw where to park.

“Just keep driving around the stadium until you see someplace where cars are still parking,” said the guard.

“Thanks,” said David. “For a second I was worried there was no procedure in place.”

They left their car somewhere in Broward County and hiked back to the stadium. Their seats were seven rows from the top of the stands behind the right-field foul pole, Section 433, Row 24, Seats 1 and 2.

“Hey, these are nowhere near home plate,” said Sean. “That guy wasn’t telling the truth.”

David gave Sean the same look he had gotten from the scalper.

“How are we gonna get her body out of the room?” Coleman asked. “We’ll have to go through the lobby!”

“Relax,” said Serge. “We’re in Miami Beach. Everything’s backward. To get away with this, we need to
try
to attract attention, and then we’ll be ignored…. I gotta go to the store.”

Serge ran a fast errand to a specialty shop on Washington Avenue. Back at the room, he dumped a sack out on the bed.

Sharon was still wearing her Barbarella body armor, and Serge left it on. He fastened a handcuff around one of her wrists. He put a zippered leather
hood with a Spider-Man design over her head and covered her crotch with a strap-on fluorescent wiener.

“She’s ready,” announced Serge, and phoned for the valet. They hoisted her up and carried her slouched between them like a drunk buddy, one of her arms around each of their necks. They headed for the elevator.

Serge and Coleman carried Sharon through the middle of the sidewalk café, ignored except for one of the jumper-cable men, who said to the other, “I want to party with
those
guys.”

The valet held the passenger door of the Lotus open and helped Serge sit Sharon upright in the middle of the backseat.

“We’re going to the World Series,” Serge explained and handed him a hundred.

“Go Marlins,” said the valet.

Serge waved and accelerated the Lotus into traffic as a fire engine headed the other way toward a fully engulfed Cadillac.

Serge whipped the Lotus around two sharp rights and into an alley, and they threw Sharon in the trunk. He checked his Indiglo watch. “We’re late,” said Serge. “Excellent timing.”

Serge’s philosophy was to arrive at the absolute last second for any big event, when everyone else had already parked, the roads were clear, and scalped tickets cheap.

Sure enough, they drove from the causeway over Biscayne Bay all the way to Miramar in zero traffic.

“We gotta ditch this car,” Serge said. “It’s getting too hot.”

At the stadium, almost everyone was already inside. The national anthem played over the loudspeakers and the night air glowed from floodlights. The only parking left was on the south side, but Coleman and Serge had gotten off on the darkened north side, where wasn’t a person in sight. Except for a scalper in a Dr. Seuss hat waving two last stubs.

“Look!” yelled Serge. “Our tickets!”

He accelerated the Lotus, jumped the curb, and hit the scalper thigh-high, breaking both legs. The scalper bounced across the hood and rolled up the windshield like a ramp jump. Serge and Coleman ducked as the scalper flew over their heads, landing dead in the backseat. In fright, the scalper had tightened all his muscles and he still clutched the tickets.

The Lotus continued up the sharp incline of a grassy hill, spinning and slinging sod until it slammed sideways into the stadium.

Serge plucked the tickets from the scalper’s hand, grabbed his gym bag and abandoned the Lotus, and he and Coleman walked around the corner and through the gate. Three minutes before the first pitch, he and Coleman took their seats in the right-field stands, Section 433, Section 24, Seats 3 and 4.

“Sodas! Get your ice-cold sodas!”

A man in a white linen suit held up three fingers, and Sean, David, Serge and Coleman passed money
down the row to the vendor and the three Cokes back up the row.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” said Dar-Dar, a souvenir World Series baseball cap covering the scar tissue on his forehead. He squeezed past Sean’s and David’s knees, carrying a cardboard tray with a hot dog, a bag of peanuts and a beer. “Pardon me, excuse me”—passing Serge’s and Coleman’s knees. He wore a Marlins T-shirt over his black tunic. “Coming through, sorry, excuse me”—passing the Latins, who twisted sideways in their seats to guard their sodas.

The Cleveland Indians took a two-zero lead in the third inning, and the Marlins remained lifeless through the seventh-inning stretch. In the bottom of the inning, Bobby Bonilla crushed a home run into the center-field stands, and the night sky over Dade County filled with screams.

Charles Saffron, sitting in a luxury skybox, was yelling too. He was yelling into a cellular phone. He clapped it closed. The Costa Gordans were calling from the right-field stands, wanting their money.

Saffron flipped the phone open again and punched a number.

“Grenadine, where the hell are you! Where’s the money!”

Grenadine was outside the stadium. He held the small magnetic homing device he had just removed from the crashed Lotus. A dozen police cars were up on the grass, and blue and red lights swept across Grenadine’s face as he talked to Saffron. The back of the coroner’s van was open, one body already inside.
A detective with latex gloves popped the trunk and motioned for the evidence techs.

“We’re staying on South Beach, the Metropolis,” Serge said, making friends with Sean in the next seat. “Incredible place. Preservation people did a great job.”

Coleman had bought a World Series helium balloon and tied it to a box of popcorn, weighing it down.

“Where are you guys staying?” asked Serge.

“Don’t know yet. Guess we could try South Beach,” David said. “We drove straight in from Palm Beach.”

“We just came from Palm Beach too!” said Serge. “Stayed at the Breakers.” He looked intensely into Sean’s face, tilting his head off-center like a basset hound. “Have we met? You look familiar.”

“Don’t think so,” said Sean.

Coleman ate popcorn until the box and the balloon were in weightless balance. He pushed them forward and they floated out over the field at a constant altitude of forty feet. An umpire called time out as they floated over second base, and a sharpshooter ran on the field and knocked the balloon out of the sky with a BB rifle.

“Those are really cool hats,” Sean told Serge.

As time continued running out on the Marlins, a depression settled over the crowd like morning fog. Serge had to pace. He went out on the concourse, searching for souvenirs, and spotted Miami humor
columnist Dave Barry in the liquor line.