Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (40 page)

He climbed back in his car and waited at the end of the block. A Barracuda pulled up two houses in front of him and nobody got out. Minutes later, a
Camaro screeched up in front of the Barracuda, and a dangerous woman opened the door.

“Christ,” Serge muttered in the Barracuda.

A furious Sharon in chartreuse hot pants slammed the door of the Camaro and stomped up the street toward Serge’s driver-side window. A long mane fell over the shoulders of her tight football jersey that was cut off just below her breasts—no bra. The tattoo on her left ankle was a rose dripping blood from its thorns. Her eyes were covered with Terminator sunglasses, and a cigarette dangled from her lips hooker-style.

“If it isn’t Martha Stewart,” said Serge. “What’s today’s tip, Martha? How to turn that cozy guest room into a dingy garage?”

“Fuck a duck,” said Sharon.

“Wordsmith,” said Serge.

Serge saw a cab drop Veale off in his driveway. “Quick, get in before he sees you,” said Serge, and Sharon crawled in the backseat.

“You buttholes were gonna stiff me! George told me all about the insurance scam yesterday at the club!”

Serge ignored her and lifted a pair of stolen Bavarian binoculars. Veale was in the house less than fifteen minutes. When he hit the street again, he had shaved off his beard. He wore a curly blond wig, his wife’s, under a Devil Rays baseball cap. He had on a full-length trench coat. He threw two suitcases and a gym bag into the Aston Martin and took off.

Serge and company followed him down MacDill
Avenue to Kennedy Boulevard and east over the drawbridge to downtown Tampa. Veale parked in a loading zone at the Florida National Bank tower and walked inside with a suitcase.

“What’s he gonna do, rob the place?” asked Sharon.

“Dressed like Harpo Marx?” said Serge. “My guess is he’s about to make a withdrawal.”

Through the front window, they saw Veale approach a teller and throw the suitcase on the counter like he was checking luggage. The teller appeared to talk excitedly, shaking her head from side to side, and a bank vice president appeared. After a curt discussion, the vice president motioned for Veale to follow him around the corner and out of view.

Minutes later, Veale reappeared on the street with the suitcase, having come out a different door.

Serge had planned to jump Veale outside the bank, but Veale surprised him. He was in his car and gone thirty seconds after they spotted him, getting on Interstate 4 at Malfunction Junction.

Two blocks east of Tampa International Airport, the death metal band Crucifixion Junkies blew an electrical fuse. The bass player accidentally spilled a beaker of chicken blood into his amp during a song urging violence against pacifists.

Tampa was—maybe still is—death metal capital of the country, and the Junkies were working their way up the pile. An alternative newspaper,
The Gotham City News
, praised the band’s recent performance at
the Ritz Theatre in Ybor City for its “delightful banality.” Their guitars were crucifixes.

The five men had identical stringy, sweat-soaked hair. Because of low-paying gigs and unwise home economics, the quintet could only afford to practice in a U-Store-It shed in an industrial park next to Tampa International.

The Junkies’ shed was number 9 in a row of garage-type units with roll-down doors, and they had just locked themselves in for the third time.

With the door rolled down, the power outage left them in darkness, and the five bumped into each other and stubbed toes and cursed.

The lead singer flicked a Bic lighter.

“It’s hot as hell in here,” griped the bass player. “Why can’t we practice with the door open?”

“I told you, because of noise complaints from the airport!” said the singer.

The singer had an inverted cross burned into his forehead. He had done it himself by heating a stationery wax stamp from a religious store.

A cell phone rang and the lead singer picked it up with the hand that wasn’t holding the lighter. The conversation was short and one-sided. The voice on the other end, Charles Saffron’s, gave him two names passed along by Mo Grenadine. Told him to consider it an offering to the devil. And an easy five grand.

After he hung up, the bass player started bitching again. “This storage shed sucks! Why do we have to get so sweaty? Why can’t we have a decent place to practice?”

“Because we are the servants of Satan!” yelled the singer. “We are the embodiment of pure, merciless evil! We are the fucking lords of hellfire!”

The Bic lighter started burning the singer’s hand. “Ouch! Owww! Ouch!” He dropped it, and the fucking lords of hellfire were bumping around in the dark again.

It wasn’t called
The Cockroach Bay Story
until it became a paperback and the subsequently forgettable TV movie of the week starring Jan-Michael Vincent as the misunderstood-cop-fighting-the-system and Suzanne Somers as the feisty-but-vulnerable love interest who didn’t exist in the real story.

It was 1984, early November.

The sky slipped from black to deep gray over the Florida Keys, but the sun was a good half hour under the horizon. A twin-engine Beechcraft flew north two hundred feet above Cudjoe Key and the radar blimp called
Fat Albert
that was reeled in and moored. The pilot looked down on a flock of ibis heading east and wisps of ground clouds moving over the shallows. All his transponders were turned off.

At that moment, an identical plane took off from Key West on a vector that would intersect with the first Beechcraft fifty miles off Chokoloskee. The air
force was already trying to contact the first pilot and had scrambled a chase plane.

When the Beechcrafts were on top of each other, the Key West pilot switched off his transmitters and the first pilot flipped his on, using the same electronic signature. The Key West plane continued on into the western Everglades and landed at a suspicious makeshift runway in the Corkscrew Swamp. No contraband, papers in order.

Except the chase plane didn’t follow the decoy. The switch was imperfect; there was the slightest shift in signal that couldn’t be explained by electronic anomaly. The radar operators stayed with the first plane.

The pilot was heading for a dawn drop among the countless islands off Homosassa halfway up Florida’s west coast, but now it was taking frantic evasive action trying to shake the air force prop-jet.

It flew recklessly under the center spans of the Sunshine Skyway bridge across Tampa Bay, causing rear-enders in the stunned rush-hour traffic. The chase plane radioed the Beechcraft without response. It dipped wings and pulled alongside. The Beechcraft went on autopilot.

Cockroach Bay drafts just a few feet deep and is generally accessible only to flats boats. Cool mornings on the changing tide are ideal. Great snook, maybe even tarpon in the passes in June.

Seven boats sat still in the water, damp with dew. A johnboat, skiffs, bass boats. Most had poling plat
forms. Everyone using electric motors or push poles and talking in whispers.

One angler spotted redfish near some mangrove roots. He baled the orange line three times into his right hand and shallowed his breath. His heart sped as he hesitated a last moment before presenting a black-and-red, one-eyed fly lure he had tied the night before.

He let out the line from his right hand as he increased the whipping action of the cast, back and forth over his head. He looked up and over his shoulder as he brought the line around for the last time.

The fisherman stopped and the line fell limp in the water, the lure bouncing off the roots and snagging. The fisherman continued staring back over his shoulder at the sky. Something was zooming down toward Cockroach Bay at the end of what appeared to be a large, colorful streamer. The fisherman grabbed his binoculars and could see that the object flapped two arms.

Before the pilot had jumped, he had tethered three duffel bags to his parachute harness with D-rings. He banked the plane in autopilot so the Beechcraft would be a hundred miles offshore when its fuel tanks went dry and it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The bags added five hundred pounds of cocaine to the job of the parachute, and when it popped open, half the shroud lines tore out of their stitching. The canopy sucked inside out like an umbrella.

The pilot hit the water with such force that the ma
rine patrol would later scoop much of him out with pool skimmers. Only one other fishing boat had noticed the pilot; everyone else too busy with their rods or reading the water. When the middle of Cockroach Bay exploded, they thought they were taking howitzer fire.

After a pause to gather bearings, they started outboard engines to investigate.

The duffel bags had ruptured, as well as most of the tightly wrapped wax bricks inside. It looked like a cocaine piñata. Eighty-six one-kilo blocks had stayed intact, and it was first-come-first-served.

All the fishermen knew each other, but nobody said a word or exchanged looks as they scooped in the white bricks with trout nets.

In less than five minutes, all the bricks had been retrieved, but the flats boats were a jumble of bumper cars in the center of Cockroach Bay, pointed every which way, anchor lines twisted up. A new boat appeared from Tampa Bay and raced into the narrow entrance channel to Cockroach Bay. Then another. Both blue, numerous radio and radar masts.

“Shit! DEA!” one fisherman yelled.

The fishing boats came to life in a cacophony of different rpm’s and levels of engine maintenance. They shot out in all directions, some without pulling anchor. Two boats opened up and went off at forty-five degrees from each other. Their anchor lines caught and jerked them around to face each other.

No reaction time. The engines drove the boats into
each other head on, and the fiberglass hulls shattered in a thunderclap.

The other skiffs scattered, each boater having a second to run all the waterways through his mind and place his bet. The main part of Cockroach Bay is an open dogleg of water, but the shores and western section are labyrinthine with mangrove islands and oyster bars.

Two boats shot into the Hole in the Wall Pass, making a run for Tampa Bay at Buoy Pass. The one heading toward Dung Islet would try to pull his boat ashore in the mangroves and hide. The one that cut in below Big Cockroach Mound wagered on escaping through the pass at Snake Key.

The DEA boats were bigger, drafted deeper and had it all over the skiffs in horsepower. They could run them down in short order, but if the shallower, shorter skiffs made it to the mangroves, they’d maneuver around the DEA at will.

Two fishermen from Riverview raced toward a clearing wide enough to take boats of excessive beam. But stretching just under the water was a thin, granite-hard oyster bar. In this tide, the fishermen calculated, it was six inches below the surface. Enough for their hull, as long as it stayed up on a high-speed plane, but not enough for the propeller. The DEA boat was gaining. Too late to change course; they were meat.

Thirty yards apart. The DEA boat closing fast. One fisherman crouched in the back of the skiff, leaning over the engine. Two agents sat up on the bow, brac
ing themselves, less than five yards range and still closing, almost near enough to reach out and grab the fishermen.

The next step became obvious. The skiff was too close to the sanctuary of the mangroves for the DEA boat to head it off. The agents were going to ram it from behind and send it out of control into the mangroves. Or ride right over the top of them.

The fisherman up front worked the power-tilt and the engine began lifting up from the water at an angle. Then it stopped, something hung up. The fisherman in the back of the skiff reached all the way over the twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude with both arms and grabbed it under the head. He jerked it hard and the mechanism came free. It shot a rooster tail of spray and the propeller popped out of the water and spun at high frequency in the air just feet from the agents’ faces.

The pilot of the DEA boat knew the second he saw the gray-white through the water.

The fisherman up front held the propeller in the air, thinking in split seconds. He had yanked it out of the water at the last possible moment. Pulling it up too soon would have dropped the skiff off its elevated plane, and the hull would crash onto the oyster bar. Wait too long and the engine’s lower unit would have smashed into the bar.

The DEA pilot didn’t have time to curse before he was thrown over the windshield. The agents on the bow were tossed in the water as the oyster bar peeled open the underside of the hull. The two-hundred-
horsepower Mercury sputtered and sank thirty feet behind the boat, where it had snapped off, and water poured in the transom.

The fisherman dropped the engine on the mark, and, at the precise second the skiff threatened to sink down into the water and muck, it roared back to life atop the surface and disappeared into the mangroves.

A new player, a green airboat from the sheriff’s department, skimmed into the entrance channel of Cockroach and took south.

The two fishermen who’d set off for Dung Islet had landed on another island southwest. There was no shore, only a mangrove-root barricade around a half-acre circle of sand. The anglers fought and high-stepped their way through the roots with arms full of white bricks. A DEA helicopter buzzed the islands, but the fishermen had pulled their boat into a cove of red mangroves and the whole small island sat under a cover of sabal palms and sea grapes and black mangroves. The dense canopy darkened the middle of the island, with countless flecks of light dancing through the branches onto the sand. When the wind blew the trees, it made a disco-ball effect.

The fishermen dropped the bricks in a pile and went back for another load. They heard the airboat and crouched. The airboat slowed as it approached the cove with the hidden skiff. The older fisherman absolutely despised cops, having done time twice. One time for killing his wife, back when you could do it and still get out of jail young. Despite the short
sentence, and the fact he’d shot his wife four times in the head, he blamed all his life’s problems on the cops who arrested him. He raised a.38 with a six-inch barrel through the mangroves.

They couldn’t see the airboat yet, but the roar of the aircraft propeller told them where it was.

The deputy was sure he’d seen the boat come in here, and he scanned the mangroves as he idled across the water. His gun was drawn.

They saw each other at the same time. The deputy raised his pistol, but the fisherman already had his level.

He shot the deputy off the airboat. The deputy fell in a foot of water, losing his gun, and the airboat kept on going.

“I hate fucking cops,” said the ex-con, climbing out of the groves. He stopped six feet in front of the deputy, pointing the gun.

The bullet had torn into the deputy’s side, just below the ribs. It had missed everything vital and there wasn’t excessive bleeding. The fisherman standing over him fired again. The deputy turned reflexively and the bullet clipped his spinal cord. He lost touch with his legs. He lay bleeding in the water and groaned and with great effort pushed himself up into a sitting position.

The fisherman was tall and narrow with a Marine recruit haircut, his scalp nicked in places. His was the skin of the unintelligent, ravaged by sun, alcohol, nicotine and infection. An oversized wallet stuck out of encrusted jeans with a long chain looping to his belt.
His T-shirt advertised intolerance. His corneas had a turbid fogginess and his teeth showed abject neglect. The tattoos had faded to the color of veins.

The other fisherman looked young, Hispanic and scared.

With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, the fisherman fit a filterless Camel in his lips and lit it with a Zippo, exhaling through his nose. He took another drag.

“Cops fucked up my life. And now looky what I got here. A helpless cop.”

Another drag. “Got a wife?”

“Widower.”

“That’s too bad. Any kids?”

“A daughter,” said the deputy.

“How old?”

“Ten.”

“What’s her name?”

“Susan.”

“Little Suzie. My, my. Ten-year-olds are lip-smacking good. Think I’m gonna go look her up after I kill you. Get me some of that! Hoo-weee.”

Another drag on the Camel, exhaling as he talked.

“I’m sure you got a wallet on you, should be an address in there. Head over to your house, meet little Miss Suzie. Does it bother you you’ll never see her again? I’ll bet you’re thinking about that right now.

“Shoot, she won’t have a momma or a poppa anymore. Well, orphans taste that much sweeter. And you won’t be anywhere to protect your precious little daughter anymore.”

His voice became serious. “Don’t worry, ’cause I’m gonna kill the bitch right after! God, you’d love to have your gun right now, wouldn’t you? Stupid fucking cop.”

He aimed and cocked the revolver.

“No!”

The fisherman, caught by surprise, turned to the kid. The kid said, “You’re a piece of shit!”

The fisherman laughed, then mocked him. “I’m no good. My fishing buddy doesn’t love me!” He pointed the gun back at the deputy and cocked it again.

A handful of mud hit the side of the fisherman’s head.

He yelled at the kid, “Goddamn you little fuckin’ bastard!”

In a rage, he swung the gun at the kid and marched three deliberate steps, sloshing through the water. The kid backstepped and fell. The fisherman raised the gun fast, and a shot echoed through the mangroves. Then another. And another. Evenly spaced a second apart, the deputy firing like a machine. Long after the fisherman was dead, still firing the gun he had pulled from his ankle holster, emptying all fifteen shots from the automatic. Then pulling the trigger of the empty gun another dozen times.

The deputy dragged himself over to the body and started punching. “Motherfucker!” He found a rock and bashed the fisherman’s face to pudding before the kid pulled him off.

The deputy dropped his head and shook. The kid
came out of the cove pulling the skiff with about half the cocaine still in it.

The deputy told him to stop and pointed the automatic.

“Gun’s empty,” the kid said as he cleared branches away from the engine.

“Stop!” the deputy yelled again.

The kid turned and saw the deputy had found his service revolver.

“You won’t shoot me,” the kid said. The kid used a radio in the skiff to report the injured deputy. Then he cranked the engine, took off and never looked back. The deputy had already lowered his gun.

The youth steered his coke boat on the most difficult escape route, up by Camp Key toward Little Cockroach Bay. He pulled the engine up and got in the water to walk the boat through the shallowest parts.

He knew the water because this was where he took his canoe when he wanted to be by himself. He’d bring heavy work gloves, a hammer and chisel, a jar of cocktail sauce and a box of Saltines. He’d lean over the side of the boat and chip his dinner off an oyster bar. This was when you could eat shellfish out of Tampa Bay and not wonder if it would kill you. He’d lie there, watching the sun go down over St. Pete, kept company by the roseates at the other end of the bar popping oysters loose with spoonbills.