Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (52 page)

Saffron grabbed a sandwich from his collapsible cooler and started around the moat wall counterclockwise. He remembered how much he hated pi
miento and started breaking pieces off the sandwich and throwing it to the fish in the moat.

The two men ahead on the moat wall fit the description he was looking for, and Saffron used the novelty of the trained fish to engage Sean and David in superficial talk. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to drop guard in the Tortugas. There was the automatic bond of extraordinary effort to get this far from anything else.

Sean and David discovered others in the Tortugas weren’t the old poolside gang from the Hilton. This was a slightly hardier confluence of lifestyles. Millionaire adventures in yachts, marine biology students from the University of Florida, net fishermen from trawlers and a band of park rangers who inhabited a corner of the fort like a sect of monks.

Most urgent to Saffron was whether Sean and David had found the money. If not, he’d hang back and let them lead him to their car. If they had found it, the money undoubtedly had been moved and Sean and David were a flight risk. In that case he’d have to accelerate plans and initiate confrontation with overwhelming force.

Saffron wanted to construct a discussion that wouldn’t appear too curious but would spring loose clues that they suddenly felt incredibly wealthy. New home, travel plans, premature retirement, kept women.

Saffron decided their answers were ambiguous and ambivalent. Could go either way. David was moving and Sean planned to leave his job. But he
detected no wild new rhythms often found in lottery winners, like a nascent heroin habit.

On the other hand, they might have found the money and be playing it cool.

“Hey, guys!”

Oh no, thought Saffron. Coming down the moat wall in flippers and knee-length beach jams was Crash Johnson. His nose white from zinc sunblock. The beach jams were bright cadmium orange, and Saffron noticed they were covered with smiling octopuses wearing sailor hats.

“Sixteen million bricks, that’s how many. They started building in 1846. I like to hang out on the roof. I pretend I’m the king,” Crash said, putting his hands on his hips like Yul Brynner. His voice was nasal because of the swim plugs in his nose that were connected by a thin strip of pink rubber looping from nostril to nostril.

“That other island with the lighthouse is Loggerhead Key,” he said, looking west four miles. “It’s the very end of the keys, of all Florida in fact.”

As Crash spoke, the three couldn’t take their eyes off the thin rubber strip under his nose, and Crash scrunched his neck and bent his knees to get lower and lower into their line of sight.

“You need to bring dishwashing liquid to take a bath. Did you know regular soap won’t lather in salt water? It’s like rubbing a smooth stone on your skin. Found that out camping here three days once.”

They stared at the pink rubber and Crash stood back up.

“Well, gotta go snorkeling.” He waved.

Saffron hated him. The stupid bastard obviously had no money but was content as all outdoors, and Saffron was furious at the lack of justice in the world.

“Where were we?” he said to Sean and David.

Another voice interrupted, from the beach: “Shrimpers!”

It was Jack Nicklaus, and he was running for the seaplane.

Others on the beach sprinted across the sand for a row of beached dinghies and pushed them off in what looked like an emergency escape.

Around the corner of the fort, across the water, came the mechanical sound of general calamity. It had the backbeat of Creedence Clearwater.

“What kind of a verb is
chooglin
’ anyway?” asked David.

A small, tattered diesel boat appeared. The crew of wildcat shrimpers laughed and hooted.

Jack Nicklaus pulled the case of Budweiser from under his pilot’s seat and ran for the dock. Most of the dinghies had turned around and were racing back to the shore from the yachts and sailboats in the harbor. Loaded down with bottles of Beefeater and Stolichnaya. They joined the pilot on the dock.

As the shrimp boat pulled to the pier, the yachtsmen ran alongside, handing bottles over the railing before the boat had stopped.

A large shrimper in blue waders came up on deck carrying two five-gallon buckets. The others filled
hefty plastic sacks from the buckets containing shrimp.

The yachters held up the giant bags of shrimp like the heads of their enemies; the shrimpers already had most of the bottles open. The one in waders announced, “All the best liquor and no mixers. I’ll give a whole bag of shrimp for a single Coke.” A man wearing Top-Siders and a Rolex ran for a cooler like the shrimper’s own butler.

Soon, the western breeze would carry the scent of shrimp grilling across the beach.

From the moat wall, Sean, David and Saffron saw Crash talking with some shrimpers, gesticulating at different parts of the fort in a one-man stage production of history. The shrimpers laughed hard, slapped Crash on the back and invited him onto the boat.

Fred McJagger’s yacht was anchored on the south side of Tortugas harbor, and Max Minimum had zipped ashore in a dinghy when he saw the shrimp trading.

Minimum brushed butter on the shrimp snapping and popping on a grill at the south end of the beach. He ate them with the Channellock pliers he’d found in a toolbox on the dinghy, which was aground between the pier and the coal docks. Those shrimpers made a stupid trade, Minimum thought.

The barbecued shrimp was succulent, and Minimum threw his trash on the beach. He went inside the fort to get tourist information and maybe take the tour of sights and mock the toil of history.

Sean and David climbed down a circular staircase from the top of the fort and ducked as they entered the low-ceilinged visitor center. They sorted through pamphlets.

“You guys like to snorkel?”

Sean and David turned to see Minimum.

“I came down here on my boss’s yacht,” Minimum said. “He sent me away from the office because I was making too many damn sales. They said they needed to let all the paperwork catch up.”

He stopped to chuckle. “But I’m all alone and I wanted to do some snorkeling. I need some dive buddies.”

David said there were always people diving near the moat wall.

Minimum shook his head negative. “I mean the real stuff. Out at Loggerhead.” He cocked his head west.

“There’s a great reef on the far side called Little Africa because that’s what it’s shaped like. I hear it’s amazing, probably the finest in the Keys ’cause it’s so isolated. Wanna go?”

Sean and David hesitated.

“Come on! You’ll love it. I can’t go alone,” he pleaded. “Safety rules.”

Sean and David looked at each other and shrugged. Why not?

“Good, good!” said Minimum. “Meet me at the dock in ten minutes.”

“Can I come too?” Charles Saffron asked from the doorway.

A week at sea, Minimum was finally appearing natural behind the helm as he piloted the yacht into the deep, narrow channel between the fort and Bush
Key. He took the small ship on a curling course first northwest and then west-southwest.

Minimum yelled against the wind: “I hear there’s killer lobster at the reef, but they’re off limits under federal law.”

The yacht was so sturdy, the deck barely moved in the mild, open-Gulf chop on the way to Loggerhead. Minimum’s sailing jacket was open and the tail fluttered behind him. He turned the wheel with facility, an illusion of ruggedness. Saffron sat on his hands, deceptively harmless.

Sean and Dave were running out of money. They wouldn’t be if Sean hadn’t outsmarted himself and hidden the five hundred dollars of traveler’s checks where he couldn’t remember.

“I told you I hid it!”

“Where?”

“If I knew…” And so on.

Saffron picked up on the friction, but the words sailed downwind and out of earshot. When the wind died for a moment, all he heard was the last line of the conversation.

“When we get the money from where you hid it, we’ll be set,” said David. “It’s our ticket out of here.”

Bingo. Saffron fast-tracked his plans.

Minimum anchored the yacht in soft sand and twelve feet of water and the reef was between them and Loggerhead. They were even with the lighthouse.

Loggerhead faced them broadside, but the map told them it was a long sliver of island that came to
a point on the southwestern end where the Gulf Stream filed it down. Minimum was in the water first. Sean and David next, and Saffron, who kept his shirt on to swim. They drifted over purple sea fans and orbs of brain coral. Staghorn and elkhorn coral, tube sponges, grunts, damsels, yellowtail snapper, tangs, parrotfish and even a flying gurnard.

A tarpon big enough to win the tournament at Boca Grande drifted feet from Sean. The silver wall startled him, which drove off the fish. Two black rays with seven-foot wingspans swam in slow motion between them.

As the four paddled, the coral came closer to their stomachs. Sean raised his mask and saw the beach twenty yards ahead. They worked their way over to a fissure and swam to the beach.

Sean imagined he was a shipwrecked sailor from the 1800s finally reaching safety, and what he saw was exactly what such a mariner would have found. It was a few dozen yards across the narrow part of the island to the lighthouse. Inside was one ranger, high up and asleep.

Sean and David said they wanted to go to the southwest end; they wanted to be able to say they’d reached the
real
end of the state. Saffron wanted to tag along.

Minimum said he would rest on the beach near the lighthouse. He pointed out an approaching squall line in the distance, to the west, and told them they didn’t have a lot of time. Then he lay down for a nap.

Sean and David walked the few hundred yards to the bottom of the island, studying the low beach brush. The wind whipped up at once, and they looked out at a low-slung gray front coming in fast over a bright blue sky.

“We’re almost there,” Sean said. They reached the end of the island in another minute and took turns standing on the tip of the state, their feet dipping into the water at the sharp, sandy point.

“Forget ‘southernmost point’ in Key West,” Sean said as David took his picture with a disposable waterproof camera. “This is The Spot.”

“You’ve run out of Florida, assholes.”

Saffron was pointing a Glock 9mm.

“Where’s the five million?” he said.

“What?”

“The five million dollars that Veale gave you.”

“Who?” asked David.

Sean showed recognition. “You mean that crazy doctor?”

“Right.”

A faint yell came from up the island. Minimum ran toward them shouting they had to get off the island and back to safe harbor at Fort Jefferson. The storm was rolling in too fast.

Saffron concealed the gun against his side and faced Minimum, thirty yards up the beach. With his back to Sean and David he raised his shirttail and slipped the Glock back in the holster. “Be right there.”

He turned back to Sean and David. “No scene. Not
one word to him or I’ll fuckin’ shoot all three of you. What’s stopping me?”

It was a tense and bizarre swim back out to the boat. Minimum wondered what was up, the other three repeatedly stopping, looking at each other. The sky was black on the ride back toward Garden Key. No rain yet, but twenty degrees cooler.

Once Minimum was under way, he felt more confident about the weather and took time to change into long sweatpants. He threw extra pairs of sweats to the others. He handed out cups of coffee in mugs with the logo of Vista Lago Estates.

Sean awoke as he usually did when he slept in the middle of the day, not knowing when or where he was. He looked around in alarm at David and Saffron, who had regained consciousness earlier from the barbiturate-spiked coffees. Minimum stood on the fantail and stared down at them with a Barbie in his mouth.

The three were spread out sitting down on the swim platform, handcuffed behind their backs. Their ankles manacled and eight feet of chain connecting their necks to cement blocks. David in the middle; Saffron on the right.

The top of the fort was barely visible above the horizon, and David figured they were anchored about five miles off the far side of Loggerhead. It was still an hour until sunset, but the low-pressure front made it appear later. The sun peeked out under the cloud ceiling.

Minimum was on his knees behind the stern and breathing harder.

From the edge of David’s sight, he noticed Saffron focused on Minimum and slowly lifting up his shirttail with handcuffed hands, going for his gun.

Minimum gave a sickening grunt and without warning leaned over the transom with the gaff and toppled Saffron’s cement block into the water. The terror generated voltage inside Saffron and the veins in his neck and face popped to the surface; small blood vessels in the whites of his eyes broke. He was yanked off the platform and disappeared beneath the water.

Minimum, breathing even harder, leaned over again, reaching toward David’s cement block.

David’s eyes bulged and his system flooded with endocrine and steaming surges, and he saw Minimum liked it.

Minimum leaned forward with the gaff, and stopped halfway, to prolong. He reached farther until the tip of the gaff touched the block.

David had worked his feet up under him, and when Minimum was at the farthest point of his lean, David thrust upward. He intended to head-butt Minimum, but didn’t get his legs set right and missed.

David’s forehead would have hit Minimum in the mouth except Barbie was there, and he hit her square in the feet.

Minimum stumbled backward and clutched his throat like Kennedy in the Zapruder film. David was standing up straight now and could see into the boat.
Barbie had fallen out of Minimum’s mouth onto the deck.

Except she had no head. It was lodged in Minimum’s trachea like a Titleist golf ball. He reeled and staggered and finally tried to give himself a Heimlich. He charged at the railing and in his panic hit it far too hard and low, and he flipped over into the water.

David and Sean watched astonished as Minimum fought and splashed on his back in the Gulf, unable to drown because he was choking to death. He drifted west, gradually moving less until only an occasional twitch, and then completely still, a log of flotsam in the sunset.

David looked around for leverage to break the handcuff links. He steadied himself for balance when the front tossed up a series of chops that pitched the boat. He looked over at Sean and saw him trying to stand. As the yacht rolled, Sean’s cement block slid closer and closer to the edge of the swim platform until it fell in the water.

Sean was gone.

David was thinking in numbers now and it was simple math: Sean had two kids and a wife. He didn’t.

David kicked his own cement block into the water.