Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (54 page)

A respectful nod to my agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Paul Bresnick, two of the most dangerous men in the New York literary establishment.

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PRAISE

COPYRIGHT

F
lorida’s beauty creates the illusion of civilization.

It is a thin but functional veneer, like fake-wood contact paper stuck to flimsy particle board. Glistening condos, palm trees down the median, corkscrew water slides and waiting lines of retirees spilling onto restaurant sidewalks at four
P.M
., hoping for a shot at an early-bird $3.95 Sterno tray of Swedish meatballs. Spring training, mermaids, trained whales.
Brave New Disney World
, where commercial microbiologists try to isolate the DNA responsible for bad thoughts and free will. Space shots and orange juice with more pulp and roadside hot dog vendors in T-backs causing traffic mishaps at the latest apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who chose to appear this time in squeegee residue on the plate glass of a financial tower on U.S. 19.

Late one Thursday toward the end of the twentieth century, a white Chrysler New Yorker drove up the Florida Keys on the way to Tampa. Behind a secret panel in the trunk was a spare tire, a jack and a metal briefcase containing five million dollars. Under the
bumper was a homing device. The Chrysler’s innocent occupants didn’t have a clue.

A
small concrete booth painted a graffiti-resistant government tan sat near the base of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Its green-tinted windows beveled outward like an air traffic control tower. The Skyway spanned the mouth of Tampa Bay with a massive arch that climbed so steeply into the thin, clear air that motorists said it was like taking off in a DC-10. Pleasure boats made small white trails through the wave caps far below.

Inside the booth, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole stood at the stainless steel sink and rinsed his favorite coffee mug, which remained in his right hand at all times. It read: “Ask someone who gives a shit!” The window AC unit began to clatter, and Dole whapped it with precision.

On paper, Dole’s job was to monitor the bridge for hazard. In reality, Dole’s job was to
preserve
his job. A nineteen-year public servant, he was the equivalent of a fat, hundred-year-old alligator. No natural predators left. Just as long as the gator didn’t change his proven routine in a spasm of senility and chase executives around the thirteenth green at Innisbrook. Not to worry with Dole. He was master of the unvaried, safe pattern that didn’t deviate into unknown adventures of genuine work. His attitude toward his job station was that of a felon at the crime scene: Don’t touch anything and don’t stay a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Paperwork wasn’t filled out,
reports weren’t read, ringing phones kept ringing. His bosses, a pyramid of progressively paranoid career preservationists, gave him high marks.

Dole stared out the windows, making sure the hand not holding the coffee mug stayed in his pocket. He became an expert on every detail of his solitary outpost that had nothing to do with his job. To the south, the Skyway bridge dominated everything. It was Tampa Bay’s defining landmark, like the St. Louis Arch or the Seattle/Dallas/Calgary Space Needle. Dole studied the Skyway’s twin isosceles triangles of yellow suspension cable all day long—a big sundial, backlit in the morning, bleached bright with vertical shadows at high noon, glowing a burnished orange in late afternoon and then a soft scarlet at sunset. Finally the bridge was the negative image against the indigo sky, and the headlights came on and trickled across the span like illuminated water droplets sliding down monofilament fishing line.

Dole sipped from the mug. Tanker ships sailed in from the Gulf of Mexico, fly fishermen cast on the flats, sailboats tacked around Pinellas Point, and dolphins splashed in the channels. There was the monument to the crew of the USCG
Blackthorn
, lost in a foul-weather collision in ’80. And the stub of the old Skyway bridge, now a fishing pier. A sign: “Please do not clean fish in restroom.”

Inside Dole’s booth was a bank of nine-inch black-and-white video screens feeding live from remote cameras at various pressure points along the Skyway. They monitored for breakdowns, wrecks, fog conditions, suicide jumpers and terrorism. But
Dole wasn’t monitoring the surveillance screens because he was monitoring his portable color TV set, laughing at Toto the Weather Dog doing a funny dance on the anchor desk of a local newscast. Toto was an eight-year-old half-blind Chihuahua who appeared in a variety of anthropomorphic costumes and predicted the weather. Tonight Toto was shaking in a hula skirt in a manner consistent with a sixty percent chance of rain and a UV index of seven, according to weatherman Guy Rockney.

Following a recent spate of fatal tornadoes and windstorms on Florida’s west coast, both the U.S. Weather Service and local television stations faced pressure to upgrade their Doppler radar and other early-warning technology. Four of the region’s major stations spent heavily on new equipment. The fifth, Florida Cable News, picked up Toto at the pound for the cost of the shots.

Florida Cable News saw its audience share increase sixteen percent on segments with Toto. The loss was spread evenly among stations with the expensive new equipment. Those stations saturated the air with ads desperately trying to explain the importance of adequate wind-shear detection.

Toto kept dancing them right over to Florida Cable News.

Early one October evening, the technology investment paid off. The Weather Service and four stations picked up a quick-forming front moving east of Tampa with funnel clouds. The warnings went out. Hundreds took cover and were saved. Florida Cable News, instrumentally blind to the twisters bearing
down on its viewers, sent the audience to bed with a happy little jig from Toto in a spandex aerobic outfit and a promise of a pleasant evening and a sunny tomorrow.

Florida Cable News wasn’t responsible for the entire death toll, just part. Just enough to spell Toto’s demise. The end was hastened when weatherman Guy Rockney joked on the air that some of his viewers had gone on a “Florida Double-Wide Sleigh Ride.”

That did it. Toto and Rockney were history before Rockney could remove his clip-on microphone. It lasted a week. Until the specific gravity of letters and phone calls and, most important, the ratings plunge was too much to withstand. Both were reinstated and the ratings at Florida Cable News rebounded stoutly. The other stations responded by hiring a cast of trained cats, ferrets, chimpanzees and marmosets.

Chester “Porkchop” Dole was a loyal television viewer. He couldn’t be lured away by cheap imitations; he was sticking with Toto, the cheap original. On this December evening, Dole was working the short-straw second shift. But he made the best of it, howling with laughter and pointing at Toto on the little TV. He slapped his knee with the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee mug. He wheezed and coughed and laughed some more as Toto pirouetted in a tutu atop the News-Flash Anchor Desk, and the entire News-Flash Anchor Team chuckled with manufactured sincerity.

As the anchor team waved good night and the camera pulled back, weatherman Guy Rockney se
cretly jabbed Toto with his weather pointer, and Toto resumed dancing for the fade-out. Dole broke up laughing again and waved back at the anchor team. He never once thought of glancing over at the bank of surveillance monitors, especially not monitor number five, trained on the peak of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

J
ohnny Vegas was chasing a blue moon across Tampa Bay.

The Porsche’s top was down, it was almost midnight and he was doing ninety on the Gandy Bridge, but it was still too hot. It was another typical heat wave that sweeps Florida every December, baffling the tourists and mocking the natives. What’s wrong with this state, Johnny wondered, wiping beads of sweat from a line under his pompadour.

Johnny passed a bait shop on the west side of the Gandy. The stuffed snook on the sign wore a Santa hat; in the parking lot were eight plastic flamingos with reindeer antlers pulling a bass boat. Johnny adjusted the bow tie on his tux. He passed a billboard urging him to have eye surgery in a strip mall. More decorations. Inflatable snowmen in bikinis and wise men with sunglasses and elves on water skis. Johnny turned down Fourth Street toward the St. Petersburg bayfront, hoping
she
would be there.

They had met three hours earlier, on the other side of the bay in Tampa’s Channel District. It was an after-hours black-tie fund-raiser at the new Florida Aquarium. The lights were low, the stars flickered
through the aquarium’s landmark glass dome, and the free liquor flowed as only free liquor can. A promenade of snob cars pulled up for valets at the aquarium entrance. Saabs.

The facility herniated debt, and the fund-raising party was another backhanded effort to get in the black. The aquarium was conceived by politicians and backed with tax revenue, which meant the operation was dumber than dirt when it came to surviving in the real economic world. A marketing corporation hired by the City of Tampa—the same one that advised the city to tear down a perfectly good football stadium and build a new one right next door with tax dollars—concluded that the same strategy was the only way to rescue the aquarium.

“Gentlemen!” the report’s author addressed the city council. “We must destroy the aquarium in order to save the aquarium!”

The proposal was tabled in a close vote.

On this sticky December evening, casino tables crowded the horseshoe crab tank, and a makeshift dance floor squeezed through the mangroves next to the otter pool. The turtle ponds began to fill with crumpled napkins and cigarette butts. The in-house joke: We draw the line at having sex with our animals.
Except during bonus pledge hour!

Johnny Vegas’s Porsche screeched up in front of the aquarium. Ahead of him in the valet line was a mega-stretch limousine; on its doors were five multicolored interlocking rings. A dozen members of the International Olympic Committee—scouting Tampa Bay for the 2012 games—got out of the backseat. A
smiling reception team of exotic dancers immediately stuffed unidentified envelopes in the suit pockets of the Olympic Committee and led them off to special guarded VIP rooms.

A valet jumped in the limo and sped off. It was Johnny’s turn. He pulled the Porsche up to the curb, jumped out and flung the keys hard, sidearm like Phil Rizzuto turning the double play. The keys deflected off the fingertips of the celebrity volunteer valet and hit him in the teeth.

“And don’t fuck with the stereo! It’s set how I like it!” Johnny barked as the mayor of Tampa dabbed blood off his gums with a handkerchief.

Johnny adjusted his tux, stretched his neck side to side, and strode into the aquarium with the air of a horny adolescent.

Johnny was the man other men hate. A young, bon vivant party hound, impeccably dressed and visibly rich with no visible means of support. His tan was a little too good and his haircut a little too long and sexy to get respect in any business setting. It drove chicks wild. Not those who mattered, of course. None of the educated, accomplished women would take such a man seriously. These were the real prize ladies—mature, focused, substantial in conversation and content. In short, the prizes the other men already had—their wives. Johnny only held attraction for the others, the giddy young bubbleheads with the short skirts and boob jobs who drooled over him. The married men thought: Damn him all to hell!

But Johnny had a dark secret. Even in the realm of gigolos and trust-fund playboys, where everyone
scored so frequently it blew the bell curve, someone had to bring up the rear. It was Johnny. He had no problem getting runners on base; he just couldn’t bring ’em home. Nothing, nada, zip, doughnuts, goose eggs. It was part Johnny’s immaturity, but it was more. Events seemed to naturally conspire against him. Whenever he was close, had a willing babe in his crosshairs, there was always a massive disruption. It was uncanny. Johnny was charting new horizons, entire lost continents, in involuntary
coitus interruptus
. Forest fires near Daytona, prison escape manhunt in Orlando, circus elephant rampage in Clearwater, and the red-tide marine kill off Sarasota: “Hey, where are you going? It just smells a little fishy!”

Playboy Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin, currently was trying to woo women with his Porsche. Until recently, he tracked his quarry with an orange-and-aqua cigarette boat customized with Miami Dolphins insignia. Then he ran aground and had to get it floated off a shoal in the Marquesas and later crashed it into a floating reggae bar near Dinner Key. The Dolphins sued him when women complained he was impersonating the quarterback. There were insurance problems and storage fees and barnacles, and the reggae bar filed a lien, and it went on and on until Johnny finally threw up his hands and thought, I’d almost rather
not
get laid.

But tonight at the aquarium everything was clicking with an unblemished ingenue in a strapless evening dress who had the supermodel prerequisites of being tall and sticklike. She said her name was If.

They flirted on the edge of the dance floor, near the marsh. A disco ball and revolving colored footlights disoriented the egrets, who flew out of their ponds and into the bar and restrooms. At the front of the dance floor was a mobile broadcast booth of local radio station Blitz-99, which was DJing the fund-raiser in a publicity swap. Blitz-99 had the hottest disc jockey in Tampa Bay, Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit.

That really was his name, at least according to files in Hillsborough Circuit Court, where Boris legally changed it in a ploy to get around persistent fines from the Federal Communications Commission. When regulators brushed aside the legal maneuver, the radio station compromised, and each time Boris said his name on the air, the last part of the word “shit” was bleeped out by a horn from a Model T automobile.

Boris objected that the compromise was a sellout of values.

Market research, however, showed the distinct Model T sound increased his name recognition, and the horn became the logo for a line of freebie T-shirts, bumper stickers and beer-can insulators.

In the late 1990s, the biggest things going in radio were shows that featured either mean-spirited, intolerant rants or sophomoric sexual innuendo. In a revolutionary breakthrough, Boris combined the two. He became all things to all sexually frustrated malcontents.