Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (47 page)

Serge ran up to him hyper and insane-looking, and Barry took a step back. Awfully jumpy, Serge thought, must have some kind of nervous condition. Serge asked to get his ticket autographed, and he carefully wrapped it in three hot dog napkins, put it in a special compartment in his wallet, and ran away.

In the bottom of the ninth, the Marlins, piece by piece, assembled a tiny rally. A pop fly scored the tying run, and the crowd came apart.

The seventh game of the World Series was going into extra innings.

In the bottom of the eleventh, the Marlins loaded the bases with two outs.

David and Sean were talking about what hotel they wanted to stay at, South Beach, Biscayne Boulevard, the Holiday Inn at the racetrack.

“That reminds me,” said Sean, “I still have to cancel the reservation at the Purple Pelican in Key West, unless we want to run into that Veale guy I told you about.”

Through the roar of the crowd, the words “Purple Pelican” and “Veale” came unexpectedly to Serge and he turned and studied Sean’s profile. Serge’s face suddenly lengthened with realization.

Just then, Marlin Edgar Renteria singled up the middle, driving home the winning run of the World Series, and the stadium exploded. Fans leaped on each other and onto the field. Fireworks shot from the scoreboard behind the outfield stands. Coleman hugged Serge and lifted him off the ground.

David and Sean bounded down the aisle steps two at a time toward the exit, trying to beat the traffic.

“Put me down! Put me down!” Serge yelled at Coleman. “They’re getting away! It’s those guys! They were here the whole time!” Serge pounded on the top of Coleman’s head with his fists, but Coleman kept hugging him.

After Serge finally got through to Coleman, they charged into the aisle. A beer-wobbled Coleman missed the edge of a step and fell into the back of Serge’s legs, taking him and three other people down.

The people wanted an apology but Serge pushed them back down on the steps instead. “Come on, Coleman!”

Dar-Dar jumped around, double high-fiving two of the Latins. Through the cheering, he heard Serge screaming for Coleman, and Coleman yelled back, calling Serge by name.

Coleman? Serge? The targets Saffron had telephoned him about? A fire erupted in his soul. Dar-Dar climbed over two rows, fighting and shoving his way toward the aisle. “Satan’s vengeance is nigh!”

Some of the Marlins ran along the outfield wall, smiling and waving up at the crowd. A stage was erected in the infield for televised presentation of the championship trophy.

The tallest Latin said to the others, “Let’s wait till the traffic clears.” He sat down in his stadium seat and sipped his soda.

By the time everyone reached the concourse, rivers
of people snaked out of the gates in all directions, and nobody could find anybody else.

“Let’s get back to South Beach,” Serge told Coleman. “They said they might stay there. We’ll comb the strip.”

Grenadine knew his only hope was for Serge and Coleman to leave by the same gate he’d seen them enter. Mo thought he’d never spot them in the mob, but there was Coleman, yelling “Woooooooooo!” and thrusting a finger in the air: “We’re Number One!” Serge reached back and grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him along.

They chose a yellow ’72 Corvette in the VIP lot. People streamed by both sides of the car as Serge shattered the steering column; some noticed what he was doing but ignored it—there was a traffic jam to beat. Grenadine crouched behind the bumper, placed the magnetic homer and walked away against the tide of people.

Serge beat most of the pack, but when they turned onto the MacArthur Causeway, he merged with a new crowd. Partyers who had watched the game on TV and were heading to South Beach for postgame celebration. Some carried bail money.

The traffic exceeded eighty across the causeway, honking horns and flashing lights, people hanging out windows waving Marlins and Cuban flags. Coleman saw this and began climbing out his own window, still yelling “Woooooooooooo!” As Coleman started falling out of the car, Serge reached across the passenger seat and hooked his fingers into
the elastic waistband of Coleman’s underwear, jerking him back inside.

Soon, Serge himself was tripping on Miami. On the left, little bridges spurred from the causeway for Palm, Hibiscus and Star islands. “Al Capone lived on one of those islands when he had cooties,” said Serge. On the right, the illuminated downtown skyline gave him goose flesh. Serge imagined he was in all those great movie and TV chases over the same bridge. He looked over at Coleman, who was pretending to pick the foam Marlin’s nose, and it broke the spell.

“Look at that building lit up all green.” Coleman pointed at the skyline. “How do they do that?”

“Green lightbulbs,” said Serge.

On South Beach, young people danced and disrobed in the back of pickup trucks cruising Collins Avenue. Five guys ran around an intersection with a giant Cuban flag. Serge’s mind was on the money. He walked from the Park Central Hotel to the Clevelander, crossing to the beach side of the street, and waited for Sean and David. He sat on a bench with an open view of sidewalk traffic in front of the hotels and cafés. The Colony, the Beacon, the Avalon, the Starlite, the neon colors so evenly varied Serge thought they must have had a meeting.

Coleman bounded into the street. He grabbed a corner of the Cuban flag and ran around the intersection, picking up the chant, “
Cuba Libre!
”

Mo Grenadine sipped decaf at an outdoor table at
the News Café watching Serge and Coleman and reading an overseas paper. It was after midnight, but people were still lined up nearby for souvenir flash photos in front of the Versace estate.

When the Lotus was found, police appealed to the press for publicity. Blaine Crease immediately went on Florida Cable News, hanging from a blimp over the stadium, describing the killers as the criminal geniuses of the nineties, masters of disguise and escape.

Only three cars were stolen outside the World Series, a BMW, a Mercury Marquis, and a yellow Corvette, and police were looking for all of them.

Susan Tchoupitoulas of the Key West Police Department opened a briefcase at the kitchen table on Olivia Street, and pulled out a sheaf of paperwork. In the bundle was a bulletin from Miami. Murders at the World Series, complete with vehicle descriptions and suspect profiles. It said they were last seen heading south.

Susan made a few notes on a legal pad.

Former Hillsborough County deputy sheriff Samuel Tchoupitoulas wheeled himself into the kitchen
of his Olivia Street home in Key West. He’d heard his daughter, Susan, come home from work.

“Hey, Sergeant,” he called out with a smile, wheeling through the doorway.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Sergeant S. Tchoupitoulas, putting the paperwork back in the briefcase. She got up and walked over and gave him a hug.

He tried to decipher the look on her face.

“Any problem with the Bubbas today?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she said.

The Bubbas on the force persisted as a small but definable number of ill-tempered and unprofessional officers. Through seniority and the inbred, small-palace politics of Key West, they bullied residents and tourists alike with impunity.

It was the cross all the good cops in Key West bore. Sergeant S. Tchoupitoulas had an additional challenge. Although she could run a six-minute mile and do every last duty of a police officer better than most of the department, she was still a woman. Which meant she had to put up with a strain of sexual innuendo that Susan found more lame than crass. Offend me, she thought, but at least make me laugh.

Friends and relatives didn’t understand why Susan couldn’t complain or file a sexual harassment suit. Her father knew exactly why, and asked her to quit the force. But he told her he’d be proud whatever she wanted. She wanted to be a cop. Like her dad. And cops didn’t sue cops.

So that afternoon, when a Bubba escalated from unclever remarks to a hand on her breast, she didn’t
complain. She bent his pinky until she heard the sound of a piece of chalk snapping.

She chose not to tell her father about the incident, and the officer with the pinky splint sure wasn’t talking.

Susan gave her father a second hug. “I have to go back in the office.”

It was an outside chance but one that her responsible nature wouldn’t let her leave uncovered. The suspects were southbound, and the permutations were endless. There was Homestead, or they could head into the Everglades or the migrant camps in Immokalee. They could always double back.

Or they could come to the Keys.

Her starting point would be tracking the yellow Corvette, but she assumed it had already been ditched. Maybe they were working their way through a series of cars.

Back at the department, Susan logged into a network of law enforcement computers and ordered spreads of all vehicles stolen in the last twenty-four hours south of the turnpike junction at Florida City.

Several spit out. A Ford Tempo, a Chevy Cavalier, a Coupe DeVille, a panel truck from Glotski’s Bakery, a LeMans and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, which was on a promotional tour in the Keys when it was taken for a joyride over the Seven Mile Bridge by four high school students in Marathon.

She requested fingerprint results, and she filed them and cross-filed and tapped into the FBI computer and found a match with a murder scene at the Orbit Motel in Cocoa Beach. Roaming police com
puter systems was like surfing a secret Internet, except it was much, much slower and utterly disjointed. Susan kept making keystrokes down blind alleys, but the morsels she did find encouraged her to keep going. Three hours of trial-and-error later, she had a positive print match with the panel truck found ditched on the edge of Florida Bay, the room at the Orbit Motel and two small-time goofballs from Tampa. She couldn’t believe the connection hadn’t already been made, but then again she could. In coming years, police agencies would be universally connected for instant identifications. For now, however, the cops were at the mercy of meager local budgets, low manpower to input the data, and incomplete networking. In 1997, it still took days and sometimes weeks to make fundamental connections.

Her computer was downloading. Two criminal jackets and mug shots came up on her screen.

The phone tips had started coming into the Key West Police Department minutes after artist’s conceptions of Serge and Coleman first appeared on Florida Cable News that Monday morning. The callers placed them all over the island, at the time when Serge and Coleman were still in Miami. One tip had them giving tours at Hemingway’s House, another overcharging for a transmission near Searstown, and still another said they were on the naval base, training dolphins to plant bombs on the hulls of ships.

By Monday night, however, the calls began to come in with the cadence of credibility. Two calls put
the suspects in a Cuban lunch counter and two more around the corner on north Duval Street.

Susan alerted the shift commander to what she had found on the computer and made a hundred enlarged copies of the mug shots. She grabbed them and ran out the door.

Dar-Dar drove with his elbows south on US 1. In one hand was a Bic lighter, and in the other a crucifix stationery stamp that heated quickly in the flame. The light ahead had turned red and he slowed to a stop. He realigned the rearview mirror to see himself and, for purposes of scar maintenance, pressed the heated stamp into his forehead. The smell of singed flesh filled the car and he let out a yodeling scream. Drivers around him responded by leaning on their horns, agreeing that the light was too long.

Just past the intersection, Dar-Dar pulled into the Rapid Response convenience store. The body of a flabby redneck lay in a pond of blood on the floor and had two hot dog spits sticking out of his chest. Dar-Dar stepped over the body and grabbed a pack of candied peanuts. He walked down the chips aisle toward the rest rooms, carrying a small wire cage containing two pigeons.

Clinton Ellrod was on the phone to the police. He put his hand over the receiver and yelled to Dar-Dar, “Hey you! No biting off the heads of birds in the rest rooms!”

Dar-Dar turned and stood still for a moment. He put the peanuts back on the shelf and walked back out of the store with the pigeons.

As a child, Coleman probably would have raised his feet up when he crossed the drawbridge at Jewfish Creek, putting him officially in the Florida Keys. Instead, he placed a tiny square of paper with a grinning fiddler crab under his tongue.

“What’s that?” asked Serge.

“If it’s Monday, this must be acid,” said Coleman.

“Oh, you’re gonna be a treat!”

Coleman saw a mural of triggerfish and fan coral on the side of a building. “Dive trips, $25.”

“Can we go? Please, can we?”

The cattle boat cast off from Key Largo for the afternoon snorkeling trip at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park.

The boat ran without wake through cuts in the coral. No margin for error. A deep, narrow channel, and on both sides, bright expanses of rock a few inches under the tide.

Once in deeper water, it throttled up and ran twenty customers out to the dive site. They anchored at the underwater Christ of the Deep statue, whose face and arms reached upward from the ocean floor, toward shafts of light.

Eighteen snorkelers in the water. Serge and Coleman in the boat.

Serge paced and took pictures. Coleman sat on the swim step, feet in the water, drinking from a plastic milk jug containing a batch of screwdrivers. The dive operators, a young man and woman in their mid-twenties, thought Serge was harmless eccentric. Tall and thin, he had short, prematurely gray hair and lancing blue eyes. For some reason he was wearing long pants. And he was driving them nuts with all his questions: local history, marine biology, nightlife, politics. He only stopped asking questions when he was jotting in a leather notebook or taking more pictures.

Coleman was another story. He was the fuckup in the operation, no doubt about it. He had a chubby head that was a little too big for his body, and sunken, small eyes. In his resting state, ignorantly content. He was studying his hands, slowly turning them over and back.

Yelling came from the water. “Get off the coral!”

Others looked. A man was standing up to his waist in the water, exposing a bleached upper body. He was oblivious, adjusting his mask and destroying the reef.

Four other divers joined the yelling, almost in uni
son. “Get off the coral!” And next, everyone, including the dive operators and Serge: “Get off the coral!”

He continued to stand there, all fat and happy, not paying attention.

“He’s from France!” someone in the water yelled. “He doesn’t understand English!”

“Really? I speak French,” said Serge. “Get off the
fucking
coral!” He pulled the Smith & Wesson from the gym bag and shot the water around the diver.

The tourist looked up, saw he was taking the gunfire he’d been expecting ever since landing at Miami International, and dove in the water.

“Eurocentric bastard!” said Serge.

The dive operators were staggered with fright, but most of the people in the water began clapping.

Serge smiled and waved at them with the hand that still held the gun. He tossed the.38 into the gym bag.

Serge walked over to the dive operators and said quietly, “That was pretty dramatic, but there was really no harm. And when we get back to the dock, we’re going to get in our car and drive out of your lives. Or you can try to call the authorities on that radio or maybe make a stink back at the pier. In which case I will make sure our lives are entwined forever.”

The two sprinted out of the dive shop. Coleman was hallucinating carnivorous sea horses, and Serge pulled him by the arm to keep him on track. The shooting on the reef was justifiable, of course. That
Frenchman had been stepping all over the coral. But he knew the French were a powerful people, and they would try to make an example of him.

The Corvette was on the far side of the lot, so they ditched it and jumped in a running panel truck delivering rolls to the convenience store next door.

Coleman thought Key Largo was ten miles of hell and sobbed. But Serge was getting excited, picking up the cues of building anticipation for the hundred-mile drive out to sea. Poincianas lined the median, and there was that squarish concrete tower on the right, whatever it was.

Plantation Key was more of the same, but by Islamorada the views began to open up, and Coleman settled down. One drawbridge spanned varying depths laid out in gradations of indigo and turquoise. Cocount palms angled out over the waves and charter boats lined up at a dock. Scales by the highway hung a swordfish, sea bass and bull shark.

Serge pulled over at a coral sculpture of a blowing palm, a monument for the victims of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. Coleman had gone into himself, entranced. Serge showed him Cheeca Lodge and the tiny Pioneer Cemetery that sat in the middle of the beach. A small square plot of nineteenth-century headstones and a cherub with a broken wing, surrounded by sunbathers.

They ditched the bakery truck in the Cheeca parking lot and switched to a restored red LeMans. Coleman told him the upholstery in the LeMans was
alive with fire-tipped flagella. Serge pushed him in anyway and sped off.

Serge downshifted to climb the steep and high Channel Five Bridge. Coleman darted his eyes around, paranoid, preparing to light a joint. As they hit the crest of the bridge, Coleman deemed it safe and lit up. The drag was deep and calming.

Coleman blew the joint out of his mouth and yelled and crawled down to the floor to hide. Two Blackhawk military helicopters flew by slowly at window level on each side of the car, ported machine gun barrels glistening in the sun.

“Oh,” said Serge. “George Bush must be down here bonefishing. They’re just sweeping the area for terrorists.”

Coleman didn’t blink for five minutes.

Serge named the islands as they drove over them: Long Key, the Conch Keys, Duck, Grassy, Fat Deer, Crawl. They started out with brief glimpses of sea between long islands, and then it reversed, and they were touching down on brief islands between long, high bridges.

They were halfway out to Key West, approaching the Seven Mile Bridge. Serge told Coleman it was the longest bridge in the world. Just before the span, Serge looked over at one of his favorite restaurants but didn’t stop. He saw the fifties-style sign over the lunch counter that was open to the highway. The Seven Mile Grill, one of those pieces of roadside Americana that the rest of the country lost when they put in the interstates. It was so popular he didn’t
wonder about the black limousine in the parking lot. Three men in white suits sat on stools, backs to the highway, eating the fish platter. Fried grouper with hush puppies and french fries on wax paper in plastic mesh baskets, coleslaw in paper cups. They had napkins tucked in their collars, and three machine guns rested on the counter; nobody in the place was moving. They tipped well and got sodas to go in souvenir can coolers depicting Pigeon Key.

Coleman told Serge the sky was convex, like a big blue punch bowl. He said the clouds were making sounds like a Wurlitzer organ. It dawned on him that their car had many, many moving parts.

At the beginning of the Seven Mile Bridge, Coleman was trying to get in the glove compartment. By the end he was tearing up the inside of the car like a cat on the way to the vet.

“Let’s get you off the highway,” said Serge.

He turned off US 1 and drove up Big Pine Key until they were back in the woods, and he kept driving. They approached the bridge across Bogie Channel, and Serge pulled over on the left. There were two other cars and a building partially obstructed in the trees. Coleman couldn’t see any signs as he got out of the car and followed Serge through a flimsy screen door.

“The hallucinations are back,” said Coleman. “There’s money everywhere. We’re rich!”

He saw thousands of scribbled-on one-dollar bills that covered the walls and ceiling of the No Name Pub. As remote and hidden as it was, the bar re
mained in another decade. Back when Zane Grey visited fish camps and ferries carried Studebakers across gaps in the Overseas Highway. Serge grabbed Coleman’s hands, which had torn down some of the money. The bills read, “Billy and Sally’s honeymoon,” “Green Bay Packers rule!” and “Support mental health or I’ll kill you!”

Serge apologized to the bartender and handed her the bills. It was a tiny place, the size of a living room, wrapped in an L around the bar. Children had taken over the single pool table.

“Look at this menu,” he told Coleman. “Beer food from around the world. Pizza, chili, tacos, Philly cheese steak, calzones, smoked fish, barbecue…”

Coleman was looking up at the large animal head over the bar. A sign said “Largest Key Deer on Record, Shot at No Name Pub.”

“It’s a joke,” said Serge. “That’s the head of a regular deer. Real key deer are these miniature things. They’re endangered, only a few hundred left. On this island we’re on, Big Pine, they’re like sacred cows in India. There’s nothing these people wouldn’t do to protect them. A little ways up, death threats are spray-painted in the road for anyone who messes with ’em.”

Serge told Coleman about the times he’d come out to the No Name Pub years ago, how there used to be an antique mechanical baseball game that used steel balls, and an old stuffed deer that stood over the bar wearing a bow tie. He’d watched a Super Bowl here,
when everyone wore 3-D glasses to watch the Coke commercials….

Coleman interrupted, still staring up at the head. He whispered that the deer was telling him “to do bad things.”

Serge suggested they leave and paid the tab. They drove farther, over the Bogie Channel Bridge onto No Name Key. It was a dead end, unsettled island with no utilities and a few dirt roads leading to places that didn’t want visitors. This was body-dumping country, plenty of elbow room to deal with Coleman.

They got out of the car, and Serge sat on the hood. Coleman became mollified by a series of objects. A rock, a twig, a land crab. Coleman said wavy lines were coming off the end of the road, and Serge said that was real. A miniature deer came out of the woods and stood in the road facing them. It had long since become tame through food handouts. It smelled a smorgasbord on Coleman and walked toward him.

Coleman screamed. Before Serge could do anything, Coleman had grabbed the.38 out of the car and shot the deer until the air was full of fur.

It was Serge’s turn to scream. He thought of the townfolks’ reaction and imagined Coleman and him as the “after” photo of the Mussolinis.

He pushed Coleman into the car and hit the gas.

Mo Grenadine thought it was the first time he’d seen a brick fireplace next to a bright window view of tropical plants. A sailfish hung over the mantel
and a cat rubbed his leg. He threw the cat a piece of jerky, but it was rejected.

The homing device sat on the table; a bright dot slowly approached from the east.

Grenadine fiddled with the remains of the steamed shrimp and ordered another beer. The restaurant sat back in the banana trees and he hadn’t noticed it on the side of US 1 until it was too late and he had to backtrack. The Jamaican paint scheme had caught his attention, vibrant green and yellow, and a funky sign on the roof: Mangrove Mama’s.

The dot on the homer was accelerating. Grenadine chugged the beer as the dot passed through the middle of the screen—his position—and kept going west. He left a twenty on the table and ran to his car.

The dot became stationary and Grenadine shook the homing device. But there it stayed. He slowed as he crossed Sugarloaf Key. He recognized the lodge, to his right. That old dolphin Sugar, who had lived in the pool out back for years, had died and it had made every paper south of Orlando. Grenadine was getting close to the dot, and he slowed and turned in the dirt road next to the lodge.

He approached an isolated an isolated airstrip—where they had filmed part of a movie when they needed a place with smuggler atmosphere. Over the tops of nuisance pine trees he saw the bat tower. It was a louvered gothic structure from the 1930s. Another developer’s folly, but a creative one, put up in a vain attempt to colonize bats that would dine on mosquitoes.

Grenadine pulled around a bend in the road. He
parked the car and walked quietly on the gravel with his binoculars. First he saw the parked red LeMans, and then the full bat tower came into view. At its base, a slightly plump man had his arms and legs wrapped around one of the pylons, hanging on for life only a foot above the ground, and a taller, thinner man was trying to pry him off.

“Is it just a matter of time?” asked Sean. “Are we safe in this state, or have we just been beating the odds?”

“You’re paranoid,” said David, at the wheel, crossing Tavernier Creek. “I saw an article in the newspaper. It said Floridians are overly fearful of crime. There was this study that found residents fear violent attack about fifteen times greater than the rest of the country, when the actual threat is only ten times greater.”

“That’s comforting,” said Sean. “Last year Karen and I were coming out of a video store just after dark. She was eight months’ pregnant. Looked like she was about to pop, she walked like a freakin’ penguin. These two guys followed us out. I didn’t think anything of it ’cause I can’t fathom the mind that would prey on someone that obviously pregnant.”

“What happened?”

“I put Karen in the mini-van and was about to walk around to my side when I realized the guys had disappeared. I looked around and I finally bent down and looked under the car. There were two pair of feet on the other side. They were crouched down waiting
for me to walk around. I got Karen back out of the car and we went back in the store as fast as we could. I can’t tell you how frightened I was until we were back inside. But you know, once we were there, I started to get this feeling like I’ve never had before. I was so angry I wanted to kill those guys with my bare hands.”

“I woulda helped,” said David. “You found the traveler’s checks yet?”

“No!”

“Just asking.”

“I told you I hid them and I can’t remember where. It’ll come to me.”

“Okay, okay.”

The conversation stopped in a truce, and a minute later David asked Sean if he’d get the guidebooks back out. It was the division of labor; whoever wasn’t driving would read from history and travel books, looking up facts and legends about whatever place they were driving through. They were traversing the causeway between Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys.