Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (51 page)

Captain Bradley Xeno got to be a captain by simply buying a boat, which Serge thought was a hell of a loophole. Serge insisted on addressing him as “Ensign,” and Xeno hated him the second they met.

This put Serge in the company of every other paying customer Xeno ever had. Xeno owned a thirty-foot Wellcraft and made the payments by shuttling tourists on abbreviated snorkeling trips out to crappy, polluted reefs with no fish.

Standard reef trips by other boats ran a pleasant three to four hours, but about an hour and fifteen minutes into his excursions Xeno couldn’t stand the thought of strangers on his boat any longer. He’d run everyone out of the water, race back and dump them on the dock, bewildered and bitter.

Considering it took forty-five minutes just to get to the reef, passengers had barely learned how to blow the spit out of their snorkels before they were mar
shaled back into the boat. He didn’t allow talking on board.

Sometimes he’d wait at a dive site too long, giving passengers time to notice and ask, “Hey, where are the fish?”

At which times Xeno would say, “You want fish? Go to Red Lobster!”

He always had a week of stubble, because it made him feel studly. His glasses were green mirrors with a caution-yellow frame. He wore the tight mid-thigh shorts of football players at training camp.

He sold tickets out of a Duval Street booth and moored the boat at Cow Key Channel.

Serge and Coleman showed up in their beards. Xeno took one look and said, “No drinking until after diving.”

Coleman opened a sixteen-ounce Bud in front of Xeno and guzzled it empty in one pull. He smiled at Xeno. “I’ve just finished diving for the day.” He pushed past the captain and jumped into the boat, landing with a loud, flat-footed thud.

Xeno cringed. “Be careful!”

“There a problem, Ensign?” asked Serge.

Xeno turned back around and saw Serge and made a mental note to cut the trip even shorter today.

During the ride out, Xeno sighed and made facial contortions, constantly registering annoyance with everyone.

When Xeno told a single mother to “watch your
damn kid,” he began an inexorable slide toward Serge.

Six miles out, near the reef, the small boy spotted something on the southern horizon, toward the Gulf Stream.

Serge checked with his binoculars. Five miles away were a half-dozen skinny men in rags on what looked like a bunch of bathtub toys lashed together.

“Rafters,” said Serge. “They don’t look good.”

“Fuck ’em,” said Xeno. “They come here to steal our jobs and end up sucking unemployment out of my pocket.”

Xeno turned around and saw the end of a.38 snub-nose between his eyes. “Go pick ’em up,” said Serge.

Steam was practically coming out of Xeno’s ears as the six Cuban refugees climbed into his beloved boat, laughing, saluting and chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Serge asked the single mom to walk her little boy up to the bow, and she did.

“What was that for?” said Xeno, cranky.

“Take your clothes off.”

“You can’t be serious!” said Xeno, dressed in rags, standing out on the raft. “I could die.”

“It’s all for the better,” said Serge. “Like you just said, these refugees are just gonna take your job. You’ll end up a displaced worker, and then I’ll have to pay
your
unemployment out of
my
pocket.”

As Serge untied the rope to the raft, Captain Xeno pleaded. Serge responded by singing Tom Petty. “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.”

Serge cast off the rope that had connected the raft
to the Wellcraft, and Xeno slowly floated out into the Gulf Stream.

Serge yelled, “We don’t like bigots in this country!”

“Yeah,” yelled Coleman. “We don’t like Cubans either!”

Serge turned and gave him the stink eye.

“Sorry,” said Coleman.

Serge was now off the chart, medication-wise. Under the spirit and letter of U.S. law, he was no longer competent to stand trial.

Instead of cruising to the nearest port, he piloted the boat back to the reef.

He handed out masks, snorkels, fins and safety vests to the refugees, who listened carefully and nodded, believing this might be naturalization training. What began as a celebration soured to befuddlement for the Cubans, who found themselves back in the water, forced to learn how to snorkel at gunpoint.

Serge leaned over the side of the boat, talking to the refugees with the revolver in one hand and a waterproof fish guide in the other. He tapped the plastic fish card twice with the gun barrel.

“Can any of you identify a sergeant major?”

The Insurance industry has raised invasion of privacy to a level that makes the FBI salivate. So when Charles Saffron wanted info, he didn’t have to look beyond his own company. New England Life trampled individual liberty with such delight that it did so even when it was easier and cheaper not to.

Saffron dialed his Tampa office from the presidential suite in the Ocean King Resort at the bottom of Simonton Street. He tracked Grenadine down to a spate of phone calls billed to his home number and placed from Shrimpboat Willie’s Motel and Grill in Key West.

It couldn’t be this simple, Saffron thought, standing in Grenadine’s second-floor room fifteen minutes later. He didn’t even need to use a credit card; the warped door popped open with a firm tug. And now, staring at him from a yellow legal pad on top of the television:

“Serge/Coleman [underlined], Purple Pelican, Room 3, 10/27.”

He scrambled out the window and lowered himself hand over hand on a hurricane tie-down cable when he heard the Costa Gordans breaking in.

In room 3 of the Purple Pelican, Coleman was giving his new ceramic toucan water pipe a test spin. He crossed his legs in the middle of the floor and put his mouth over the end of the toucan’s bright orange beak. The bird made the unmistakable bubbling sound as it filled with hash smoke. Coleman raised up and took a deep breath and tried to hold it as best he could, but he began sneezing it out his nose and then lost the whole thing in a massive coughing fit.

He sat there dazed in the illegal cloud. “Lung capacity ain’t what it used to be,” he said to himself. “Wonder why that is.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” asked Coleman.

“Southernmost Blintz.”

“Munchies!” said Coleman. “Come in!”

Three Latin men entered the room and whipped Israeli submachine guns with silencers from their jackets. The three swept the ends of their guns from side to side as they sprayed the center of the room.

The silencers gave the guns a deceptively gentle purring sound as the ceramic toucan shattered and the colorful glass splinters showered the room. When they were done, they dragged Coleman’s body out of the way and propped it in a corner, and then began pulling the place apart.

The purple bar of hotel soap shaped like a pelican made a metallic ping when it hit the stainless-steel tray. Dr. Sheldon Killjoy had dropped it there with what Susan Tchoupitoulas thought looked like a pair of salad tongs.

“They
are
salad tongs,” said Killjoy.

The Southernmost Morgue on Atlantic Boulevard shared space with a clothing-optional laundromat and the Unofficial Jimmy Buffett Museum, which was facing torrential litigation.

Susan asked Killjoy about the soap extracted from the off-color Mo Grenadine lying before them.

“Still looks accidental,” said killjoy. “That bar of soap is nothing. You wouldn’t believe what I find. Once there was a string of Christmas lights, and another time four pounds of quick-dry underwater concrete…”

Susan dumped out a large brown envelope on the
vacant slab next to Mo’s. It held the contents of Mo’s pockets: five pennies, a ball of brown thread, a matchbook from a scuba shop, two loose antacid tablets and a room key for Shrimpboat Willie’s.

A young woman in a one-piece swimsuit and beach that pushed open a pair of shutters at the pass-through office window. She had a four-foot inflatable salt shaker under her arm and a pair of pop-top earrings in her hand. “Do I pay for these here?”

“No,” said Killjoy. He pointed with a bloody latex hand holding a liver. “The gift shop register is at the end of the next aisle.”

Susan refilled the brown envelope, except for the room key, and put it on Killjoy’s desk. “Thanks, Doc.”

A Mickey Mouse toothbrush stuck out the corner of Serge’s closed mouth as he walked down the second-floor hallway of the Purple Pelican and hummed “Smuggler’s Blues.” He wore a gamboge bathrobe with a pelican over the right breast, and he wondered when those two guys with the five million were going to show up. He had been checking with the desk clerk far past the threshold of harassment.

Serge had bought eighty-nine-cent plastic flip-flops at Eckerd’s, to prevent athlete’s foot in the European shower, and they slapped wet on the varnished wood floor. A towel was wrapped around his wet hair like a turban, which he had learned how to do as a child watching Haji on
Johnny Quest
.

Serge opened the door and had the feeling of a
foreign object in his heart. Coleman sat in the corner, his face shot off. Three Latin men in white suits with submachine guns were tossing the place.

They saw him.

He ducked from the doorway and pressed himself against the wall next to the door.

Normally, unarmed people facing three men with machine guns will run for their lives, and the Costa Gordans didn’t think otherwise as they charged out the door. Serge clotheslined the first one with an elbow to the Adam’s apple.

He then slammed the door on the other two and jumped to the opposite side of the doorway, grabbing the fallen Costa Gordan’s machine gun on the way. The door swung back open into the hall and the other Costa Gordans ran out, looking the wrong way.

Serge shot blind through the back side of the door. Wood splinters, purple chips of paint and sawdust fluttered to the balcony floor.

He dragged the two bodies into the room. The third, who wasn’t dead, clawed at his injured throat, and Serge knocked him unconscious with a glass pelican ashtray.

Serge walked over to Coleman and sat down on the floor next to him. He put a foam Marlin on Coleman’s head and one on his own, and he stared at the ceiling.

The door creaked open. Charles Saffron walked in pointing a gun.

“If that’s how you’re gonna be, I’m definitely not buying any magazines,” said Serge.

“I want the money,” said Saffron.

Saffron looked down and saw the machine guns. “Silencers,” he said. “All the better.”

He grabbed one of the machine guns and reached behind him to return the pistol to a concealed holster in the small of his back.

Serge, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to his buddy, didn’t care anymore. He told Saffron about Veale hiding the briefcase and the two guys at the World Series and the Purple Pelican.

Still holding the machine gun on Serge, Saffron dialed his office again and fed in the stray data.

Saffron emitted a series of “uh-huhs” as he received dossiers on Sean and David, including phone calls that morning from the Angel Fish Inn.

“It all checks out,” said Saffron, and in that moment, Serge knew he was dead.

He asked Saffron, “Can you take a last photo of us?” He scooted over, put an arm around Coleman’s shoulder and smiled.

Saffron was repulsed by the sight. Coleman’s corpse had begun to attract dog peter gnats. “No way!” said Saffron.

“Please,” pleaded Serge. He picked up the camera and held it toward Saffron. “It should be focused already.”

“I said no!”

Serge pressed the shutter button and the xenon bulb flashed in Saffron’s face, blinding him. Serge dove and came up with a machine gun. Saffron yelled and fired without aim.

Events moved slower and slower until time stood still, hanging a moment in the air like a pole vaulter atop the bar. Saffron was between shots, wildly off target; Serge had just reached Saffron’s chest with the sight of the machine gun.

No air was moving. It was one of those slightly chilly days where you need a light coat on the street. But inside, with the sun filling the window, there was a cozy greenhouse effect. The light came in at a slant, making a bright tube of dancing dust. The temperature reminded Serge of a day with his mother in the early sixties, eating a tuna sandwich in the backyard.

Serge unconsciously bit a little on his tongue as he concentrated in a millisecond, aiming, ready to fire, when he felt an absolutely dumb-luck shot thump his chest. Under Serge’s adrenaline, it was but a light tap.

Serge quick-inhaled half a breath. For some reason he pictured the view from the Seven Mile Bridge and thought what a great trip it had been as he hit the floor face first.

Susan Tchoupitoulas found the room at Shrimpboat Willie’s trashed. Part of it was the ransacking by the Costa Gordans, the rest was Grenadine’s lifestyle. The mattresses and pillow were gutted, and the top of the dresser was littered with empty beer cans, dirty underwear and crushed pretzels. The lamp-shades were smeared with jerky-treat grease. A yellow legal pad was torn to confetti. A shred of paper caught her eye. It read “Serge/ Colem—” and was ripped right below.

Under the bed Susan found an electronic gizmo that glowed green when she pressed the “on” switch. An arrow pointed north to a green dot on the four-inch screen.

Back in her police car, Susan’s attention was split between driving and watching the screen of the homing device, which led her up Elizabeth Street to a LeMans parked next to the Purple Pelican.

The desk clerk looked at the photos of Serge and
Coleman that Susan was holding and said, “Those guys!” He pointed overhead to the balcony. “Room three.”

Susan went to her car and called for backup. Her old partner Jeff showed up first, followed by the original Bubba, Lieutenant Turdly.

Tchoupitoulas suggested they set up a perimeter but Turdly said, “Step aside, little girl,” and blustered up the stairs. Saffron had left the door half open.

“Sir, I think we should…”

This time he brushed past her with an elbow to her ribs that was quick, subtle and unwitnessed.

“What a mess,” said Turdly, patting his stomach and marking the target for the surviving Costa Gordan, who had recovered from his throat injury and was raising a machine gun.

“Watch out!” Susan yelled and aimed her gun, but Turdly’s considerable displacement blocked the doorway and prevented a clean shot.

Susan belly-flopped on the floor behind the lieutenant, knocking the wind out of her. She fired between his legs, hitting the Costa Gordan in the mouth.

Turdly didn’t say a word at first, then: “You think you’re hot shit!” and shoved her into the door frame as he left the room.

Serge didn’t know if he was in heaven or what. He was there on the floor, hearing voices, a gunshot echoing through a canyon, and a deep voice, “…think-
think-think you’re-you’re-you’re hot-hot-hot shit-shit-shit.”

There wasn’t any tunnel or bright light or disembodied flying around the room. Serge just stared up from the floor unable to move. He tried to yell for help, but it was like in a dream when nothing comes out, and he was truly scared. He got his fingertips moving a bit first and then his neck and mouth. His panic thawed enough so that he thought better of calling out. About the time he could lift his head off the floor, his chest hurt like he’d been punched by a gorilla.

His shirt was moist with a large red stain in the middle. Saffron’s shot had been luckier than he’d first thought. It was a ricochet, and it had glanced off his breastbone, causing heart arrhythmia and knocking him out.

The others had just left, and Turdly had placed an underling Bubba on guard on the balcony outside the room.

Serge zipped up a windbreaker to cover the bloodstain and grabbed his camera. He peered out the door and saw the officer not paying attention, gazing over the balcony’s railing down into the lobby.

Serge backed up to the doorway with the camera and started taking pictures into the room. The officer heard him and turned.

“Hey you! You’re not supposed to be in there! Get outta here!” The officer pointed down the stairs.

“Sure thing.”

Susan was behind the front desk, taking a state
ment from the hotel manager, when the manager pointed at Serge coming down the stairs. He said offhand, “That’s him right there.”

Serge saw the woman in the sheriff’s uniform over at the hotel desk, spinning toward him, going for her gun. But Serge already had his gun in hand, hidden under the windbreaker, and he pulled it and had it sighted on her immediately.

“Freeze!” he shouted. Susan stopped, her hand on the pistol, still in the holster.

They stared at each other, respective heartbeats blocking out everything. Serge saw the name plate on Susan’s uniform. S. Tchoupitoulas.

“You’re Suzie. Samuel’s girl.”

She nodded, looking down the barrel.

“Say hi to your dad for me,” Serge said. He lowered the barrel and tossed the gun underhand, and it landed at Susan’s feet. He turned and casually walked toward the door of the Purple Pelican.

Susan drew her own gun and held it in a two-handed grip. “Freeze!”

He kept walking.

“I’ll shoot!” Susan shouted with more verve and determination this time.

Serge turned to face her from the doorway. “No you won’t.”

He turned his back to her again and ran out of the hotel. Susan raced to the door, but the street was empty by the time she got to the sidewalk.

Saffron spent two pissed-off hours searching another subtropical hotel room and canvassing another parking lot for a car he couldn’t find. Time for the honest, direct approach; the truth never hurt. He marched into the office of the Angel Fish Inn.

After Saffron’s explanation, the clerk told him that his high school classmates Sean Breen and David Klein must have skipped their reunion, because they had just taken a seaplane on a sightseeing flight out to Fort Jefferson.

“Where’s that?” asked Saffron.

“The Dry Tortugas.”

“Where’s that?”

“You go to the end of Key West, and you swim another seventy miles.”

Saffron looked around the office at vibrant oil and acrylic paintings of queen, blue and French angelfish. The hands of the office clock had a rock beauty and a clown fish on the ends.

“Does everything in this town have a theme?”

“What do you mean?” asked the clerk.

Saffron had the windows rolled down as he followed the map around Stock Island to the seaplane office. He unconsciously tapped along with “Hot Fun in the Summertime” on the Alpine stereo.

The white gravel crunched under his wheels as he drove through the parking lot of an old marina. He could see the seaplanes tethered on the far end, but he still hadn’t found the office.

A man in sandals and a Blue Parrot T-shirt walked
out of a plywood shack that Saffron had thought was a failing snack bar. The man lowered a corrugated PVC shutter over the front of the hut.

Saffron was halfway to the man when he saw the burnt-orange windsock under his arm.

“Sorry, we sent the last flight out twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Had to cancel the others. Storm front moving in.”

Saffron pulled a thousand from his pocket.

“I mean, we’re now boarding.”

Sean’s sinuses said the barometer was appropriate when he and David skimmed over the Marquesas Atoll at a hundred feet. The sky empty and bright except for the string of popcorn clouds toward Cuba. Three dolphin swam in a pod near the northwest shore of the atoll. A flock of gulls took off from the mast of a half-submerged, rusty wreck.

Their pilot looked like Jack Nicklaus on a bender. His cobalt-blue golf shirt was untucked and his sunburn line ended a half inch below the white sun visor. He worked the plane’s pedals with designer sandals made from old tires and was otherwise wistful, laconic and punctual.

He had a case of Budweiser under his pilot’s seat. The pilot saw Sean looking worried at the beer. “That’s in case we run into the shrimpers,” he said, and said no more.

They all wore headphones; the pilot had big red ones with a microphone he didn’t use, and Sean and David had smaller models, yellow and blue. Sean no
ticed all the primary colors were represented but kept it to himself.

They had been flying about a half hour, and there was no longer any evidence of man. The last few mangrove islands dribbled off when the loggerhead turtles appeared, dozens of them scattered across the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico, wiggling tiny flippers as the Cessna’s shadow ran over them.

David checked the horizon over the cowling of the seaplane and saw it first. It reminded him of that smooth black thing on the moon in 2001:
A Space Odyssey
.

This far out in the Gulf, in a world without corners, a long rectangle the size of a shopping mall started to rise out of the sea in the middle of nowhere and halfway to nowhere else.

As they got closer, Fort Jefferson took form, a brick hexagon. Jack Nicklaus banked and began his landing approach by circling the fort, which revealed a grassy courtyard inside three stories of masonry. It had a moat, bridge, dock, pockets of coconut palms and a sandy beach against the moat wall on the south side.

A collection of sailboats and yachts was anchored in the harbor, and the pilot split them with his landing. He cut the throttle back, and the plane fell, giving Sean and David a down-elevator feeling in their stomachs. The pontoons hit the water hard, seemed to bounce, and settled in as the Cessna taxied to the beach.

The front of the pontoons wedged into the sand.
Jack Nicklaus jumped down into the ankle-deep water. Sean and David climbed out more slowly.

David stood on the left pontoon, handing gear to Sean in the water. “This isn’t the kind of place people end up by accident.”

Sean slipped and fell to one knee. “But sometimes by mistake.”

Charles Saffron’s pilot was a talking machine. Lanky and activated, with curly, uncombed hair and a handlebar mustache. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties and had overslept his entire life.

“It’s the whole Indiana Jones, Banana Republic,
Romancing the Stone
thing!” he said, flying happy. “Your own slice of paradise.”

Most passengers want to sit in the copilot’s seat when its available, but Saffron took one look at the pilot and went directly for the back of the plane. The pilot was somehow mellow and wired at the same time, and was too distracted to take offense by the reaction from Saffron, who was reminded of Mark Fidrych, the Detroit Tigers pitcher who talked to baseballs.

“Man, this is the beginning and the end of Florida. It’s our answer to the top of Mount Everest, the bottom of Death Valley and last call at Rick’s.”

Don’t call me “man,” the voice inside Saffron’s head said, and he opened a camouflage dry box in his lap.

“Man, the craziest things happen out here! You should hear the stories!”

No I shouldn’t.

“First it was a fort, to protect shipping in the gulf, like Gibraltar. Can you dig?”

Nope. Saffron took pistols out of the box and loaded them.

“But soldiers caught yellow fever and fell like bowling pins. They quarantined them on a sandbar. Too much!”

Saffron inspected calibration of the sights.

“Then it was a prison. Guess what? A bunch of the prisoners went crazy. I know I would. They tried to swim over a hundred miles to the Everglades. Never found.”

Halfway out to the Tortugas, the pilot said, “My name’s Tom Johnson. But they call me Crash Johnson.”

Crash had a habit of turning completely around to face Saffron in the backseat when he spoke. He detected Saffron’s apprehension.

“Aw, this thing flies itself.”

Saffron thought if it did, I’d have already shot you.

“The USS
Maine
sailed from here for Havana. That’s where it got blown up. It started the Spanish-American War. You like history?”

Nope.

“Like the guy who shot Lincoln, right? There was this other guy, a doctor who didn’t know who he was, and he fixed his broken leg. They threw him in jail anyway, ’cause they were
that mad
. Guess where they sent him?”

I have no idea.

“Right! Fort Jefferson. You can go in his cell—it’s on the tour. You know that
tortugas
means turtles in Spanish? Or is it Mexican?”

Crash scratched his chin.

“Anyway, you probably wonder why they call it the Dry Tortugas out in the middle of all this friggin’ water….”

Not once.

“There ain’t no
fresh
water! You can die of thirst out here!” said Crash. “You see the pattern? People who come to the Tortugas have the kind of bad luck usually only seen in Greek plays.”

That’s how it’s beginning to feel, thought Saffron.

“See that island over there? Know what sailors used to do? They’d step on all the birds’ eggs and the birds would lay fresh ones in a few hours. Instant breakfast! Hey, you know what I think?…”

Saffron wanted to carve a design in his own forehead with a scuba knife, but they were preparing to land and it would be over soon. Crash circled the fort an extra time on the approach to the harbor, because he couldn’t explain all the historic features the first time around.

They landed far more smoothly than Saffron expected and parked on the beach next to another seaplane.

Crash climbed down and opened Saffron’s door with effervescence. “Welcome to the nineteenth century!”

The moat wall was about eight feet across, wide enough for two-way foot traffic. Sean and David threw their gear under a palm tree and went for a walk on the wall to get the lay of the fort.

They began clockwise from the southern beach. The moat wall acted as a breaker for the surf from the Gulf, and it created distinct ecosystems on each side. On the left was typical open-sea terrain. A giant manta ray flapped slowly by an anchor from a forgotten galleon. A territorial barracuda ran off smaller fish at one corner of the moat wall. They could see tarpon fins at another.

To the right, the wall protected colonies of sea horses, squirts, urchins and anemones. A pulsing jellyfish floated by, a small hot-air balloon. A tourist coming toward them was walking his fish, literally. He broke off pieces of bread and threw them into the moat as he strolled. A fish snagged each piece of bread, keeping perfect pace with the man’s stride.

Saffron wanted to know whether Sean and David were on the other seaplane, and he tried to strike up a conversation with Jack Nicklaus. He determined he needed dynamite to get the time of day. On average, he thought, the pilots were pleasant.

After five exhausting minutes, Saffron got a rough description of Sean and David, and he left without punctuating an end to the chat.