Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (41 page)

The memories served him and he skirted every submerged bar on the plane. He ran along a seawall behind a remote strip of old waterfront homes and
turned into the mouth of the Little Manatee River at Goat Island. Two miles upriver, he pulled the bilge plug and sank the skiff in a deep snook hole under a broken bridge. He waded along the shore of a bayou, pulling a small Styrofoam cooler in the water behind him with a rope. He climbed up the incline where the bridge on the Tamiami Trail crossed the river.

A thirty-six-year-old auto mechanic took seventeen kilos home from Cockroach Bay, pried up the floor-boards in his lawn mower shed, dug a hole five feet down and dropped them in. They sat untouched for three years. During that time the mechanic developed a constellation of facial ticks, stayed home more than the average house arrest, cultivated a malignant strain of dandruff, and became therapeutically dependent on quick-release anti-anxiety medication. In the middle of one night in 1987, the third in a row without sleep, the mechanic dug up the bricks and talked to them until dawn. That’s when he poured gasoline on the bricks and himself. His neighbors said the fire left nothing but a five-foot crater.

Twenty-four bricks went to a twenty-three-year-old bachelor, a rising advertising executive in a flats boat with power trim, jackplate and twice the horsepower he would ever use. Unlike the mechanic, the ad exec broke out his stash immediately, and the party lasted until early December. The stuff ended up on every level, nonporous surface in his apartment. At first it was only his close, trusted friends.
That lasted two days. Then it was open to secretaries, clerks at the mall, every neighbor in his complex and people off the street. The occupancy of his one-bedroom unit never dipped below fourteen. The incident was featured in an article in
Business World
magazine when it took down the entire ad agency, which experienced a rash of unplanned pregnancies, white-collar accidents requiring emergency-room treatment and absenteeism that eventually spiked at 92 percent. The executive moved back in with his parents in Ohio.

A refrigerator repairman from Wimauma named Zach had never even seen cocaine in his life. Now he was staring at two hundred grand of the stuff, piled on top of the VCR in his single-wide trailer on the edge of a cow pasture. After two days he thought, what the hell, a little dab’ll do ya. He tore a hole in the middle of one brick and sniffed at the little spot of white at the end of his index finger. Then snorted harder. He found a straw in the utensil drawer and stuck it in the torn hole in the brick. The sheriff’s department received predawn complaints of someone riding a cow down State Road 674.

Since the mid-seventies there have been numerous published studies all involving a box holding a bunch of mice, a wedge of cheese and a pile of cocaine. In all the studies, the mice eventually stayed up round the clock doing the coke until they were found starved to death next to the untouched cheese.

Zach was the human version. He left the trailer less and less, until he stopped leaving at all. He ordered
out for pizza and Chinese, then ceased that. His entire daily routine consisted of snorting coke and peeking out windows. Coke-thinking told him it was a good time to clean all his guns.

Deputies approaching the trailer at night saw shafts of TV lights flickering out dozens of bullet holes in the front of the residence. Zach’s wasted, perforated body lay on the couch. The deputies backed out as soon as they opened the front door and called in a haz mat team. Ripped-open bricks of coke were strewn through every room, and all the furniture was coated with a thick, white film as if someone had gone through the trailer shucking sacks of flour in the air.

Rumors swept across Florida’s Gulf Coast about a fortune in buried coke out in Cockroach Bay, and soon the whole mangrove flats—desolate bastions of the nature lover—were overrun by a motley crew of every asshole in the bay area who could lay his hands on a motorboat, canoe, Jet Ski, sailboard, or raft. They camped on the islands, threw trash everywhere, did nothing useful, played repetitive, bad music on tape decks and otherwise turned the bay into a Grateful Dead jamboree gone to sea.

The digging went on for months. The Florida Marine Patrol posted guards at the offshore Indian mound at the mouth of Cockroach Bay. That was after a pickup full of Gators fans drove to Tallahassee for the annual showdown with the Florida State Seminoles with a dug-up skull on the hood.

Nobody found a gram, and the flats resumed normalcy.

Eleven months later, however, the curse continued. A team of senior archaeologists from Gainesville, reconstructing apocryphal pirate stories, searched the islands on the southwest side of Cockroach Bay with metal detectors.

After six hours, they found a buried crab trap and a penny from 1971. Then one of their headphones beeped and the display lit up red. Digging revealed the detector had pinged on the metal zipper of a scuba bag and the two lead dive weights inside, along with thirty pounds of white brick.

Later that night, back on land, police reported foiling a brazen heist at the Museum of Natural History, twelve naked elderly men in white beards carrying the complete skeleton of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
out the front door on their backs.

The last twelve kilos ever recovered had gone to a twenty-two-year-old named Serge A. Storms. He was caught immediately.

A marine patrol officer was standing by the guardrail where the Tamiami Trail bridge crossed the Little Manatee River. He’d seen Serge coming ashore with the cooler and was expecting to find undersized snook or maybe illegal stone crabs. When he saw the cocaine in the cooler, he was so flustered his hand couldn’t find the snap on his holster on the first try.

Hillsborough Deputy Sheriff Samuel Tchoupitoulas testified for the defense during the young man’s
cocaine trial and again at sentencing. Based on his statements, Serge A. Storms only got a year and a day at Starke. The things they do to someone Serge’s age up there would last him the rest of his days.

The subtleties of mast and boom escaped Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm, and the sails stayed furled. The fifty-horsepower Johnson outboard was different; it was a small internal combustion engine, and they thought of it as a stripped motorcycle hanging off the back of McJagger’s sailboat.

Ringworm manned the helm, and the three motored down the coast of southwest Florida in tattooed cellulite majesty. The boat had everything. A generator, stocked freezer, full kitchen, air-conditioning.

First they went naked. Then they dined on filet mignon and racks of lamb with their hands, and kept their spill-proof nautical coffee mugs filled with Maker’s Mark. They lay on the deck until they got too hot, and they dove into the Gulf until they were cool. Then back spread across the deck. Munch a chunk of leftover pheasant lying around, some more booze, and when it got too hot again, back in the water.

These were pirate days. Laughter filled their lives. Lots of “Yo-ho-ho” and “Shiver me timbers.” Cheese-Dick made an eye patch from a piece of Naugahyde. Stinky sat on the bow with a brandy snifter filled to the brim like a bear with a hive of honey.

They hugged the coast, less than a mile offshore, and watched the New World go by. Stilt homes at Midnight Pass, the twenty-four-hour pier by Venice, the lighthouse outside Charlotte Harbor, and the shorebirds of Cayo Costa and Captiva.

At night, they sat under the stars and watched lights twinkle from Fort Myers Beach. There was a cool breeze and they were still naked, but sunburns kept them warm. And they were overcome by a strange, almost paranormal feeling they couldn’t quite put their fingers on. They were clean.

Three silhouettes sagged in deck chairs in the moonlight. The engine was off, and the sailboat left an opalescent wake of microscopic sea critters as it rode the Gulf Stream quietly toward the Florida Keys. The name on the stern was
Serendipity
.

The next day everything went south. Stinky was the first to awake, before dawn. There was no land anymore, no more food, and they had run out of gas. He was sure they were in the Bermuda Triangle, and he panicked. He grabbed the metal box of emergency gear and emptied it on the deck. He dumped green dye in the water, flashed a mirror at the sky and blew a referee’s whistle. He strapped on a bandolier of flares and threw a strobing distress beacon overboard. He set off smoke charges on the bow, stern
and midships. Ringworm and Cheese-Dick awoke choking and confused in a cloud of smoke to the air horn Stinky was blowing.

McJagger’s sailboat had every essential and useless piece of radar, sonar, laser, loran, radio, telephone, and satellite-tracking, course-charting, weather-forecasting, fish-finding doodad ever overpriced at a marine store. To the bikers, it was all ballast. And in a crisis, ballast went overboard. They ripped out the big floating black globe of a compass in front of the helm and over it went too.

Stinky was messing with a large flare gun, smacking the back of it with his palm when the breech refused to latch. Kept smacking it, and it kicked with a quiet whoosh, and a trail of smoke laced across the deck. Stinky followed the trail and saw Cheese-Dick, surprised, staring down at this thing the size of a soup can lodged in his chest. The white-hot phosphorus lit up the inside of his rib cage like a jack-o’-lantern. A small parachute popped out of him and he fell backward into the water.

“You killed Cheese-Dick!” shouted Ringworm.

“It wasn’t me! It’s the curse of The Triangle!” said Stinky. “We’re all gonna die!”

Ringworm slapped him around. “We’ve got work to do.”

By midday, Stinky was sure they were near Africa, but the rudder had them turning in an evertightening circle due west of Naples until they were spinning in exactly one spot like they were over a bathtub drain.

Stinky found a block of frozen squid at the bottom of the freezer and gnawed on it with his dog teeth.

Ringworm found a chart and tried to read it. Stinky, squid in his beard, passed the frozen bait.

Serge had visual contact with Veale’s Aston Martin as they passed the Lakeland exits on Interstate 4. On the radio, a guy was hawking beef jerky and calling homosexuals “fudgepackers.” As they pushed east, the signal faded a bit, and the stream of bigotry acquired the backbeat of an urban contemporary station out of Orlando. Serge thought it sounded like rap music of The Third Reich—Master Race MC Eichmann. He went to change stations, but the knob came off. He handed it to Coleman, who put it in his mouth.

After seventy miles, Veale took the ramp to the Bee Line Expressway, skirting under Orlando.

“I spy with my little eye…” said Coleman.

“No road games,” said Serge.

“What about songs?”

“No songs.”

“I’m bored,” said Coleman.

“I gotta take a piss,” said Sharon.

Veale continued his neurotic escape flight until he was stopped by the Atlantic Ocean. He decided to spend the night, and in the morning head to Port Canaveral and take his chances on a cruise ship to anywhere else. He pulled into the motel parking lot, grabbed a suitcase and gym bag and walked toward the office. Serge was right behind. The Barracuda bot
tomed out as it sailed into the lot, and Serge sprang from the car.

Veale saw him and sprinted into the motel office. Serge thought better of it and got back in the car, watching Veale at the counter through the office’s front window. Sharon got out of the Barracuda and walked cross-legged to Launch Pad Food Mart, where they gave her a restroom key chained to a hockey stick.

“Sean?” said an unfamiliar voice.

Sean, signing a credit card receipt in the motel office, looked up. He tensed at first. But he remembered it was Halloween Week as he looked at Harpo Marx.

“It’s Sean, right?”

Sean studied him but nothing came. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I remember…”

“It’s me! George Veale! You were at my Gasparilla party in Tampa!”

Another pause. Sean said, “You’re the one who blew the parrot through the window with the cannon?”

“You remember!” said Veale. “You decide to join the krewe yet? We’re a fun bunch!”

Sean found it hard to ditch people, and he tended to give boring, cloying, overbearing cretins far more time than appropriate, which only encouraged them to sink their hooks deeper into his life like jumbo ticks. By the time Sean ultimately had to cut them loose, his delivery was abrupt and socially messy. “I want you to go away.”

Veale walked out of the motel office with Sean, continuing an excruciating conversation as if they were on speaking terms. Sean loaded luggage into his car as Veale went on and on.

Sean and David had arrived the day before, taking in the attractions at the Kennedy Space Center. Now they were checking out of the motel to drive to a viewing area for an evening launch of the space shuttle
Columbia
.

Veale offered to help load Sean’s car, which Sean thought was a little much, but a nice gesture all the same. The twelve-year-old Chrysler, a land yacht, was backed to the room. With the trunk lid up, Veale was blocked from the Barracuda and Serge’s field of vision.

“What’s he doing?” asked Coleman.

“Stalling,” said Serge.

Veale glanced around the edge of the trunk lid; Serge still there. Veale correctly figured all the money would be lost if Serge caught him with it. Veale studied the trunk while talking to Sean, looking for a place to stash the suitcase. At least that way, there was a chance he could catch up with Sean later and get it back.

When Sean returned to the room to get another load, Veale tried to fit his suitcase this way and that in the trunk, under the other bags. Nothing worked; too conspicuous. Veale stood up and scratched his stomach, and he noticed the false panel leading to the wheel well behind the backseat. It was attached with plastic snaps and came off easy. A few auto
motive tools back there, and the spare tire was smaller than he’d thought. Plenty of room.

When Sean got back to the car, Veale looked up from the trunk as innocently as someone hiding a body. Sean only thought: Please let this end.

“So, where are you going?” he asked Sean.

“To the launch.”

“The launch?” asked Veale.

Sean looked around them on the edge of Highway A1A. There were a dozen signs for sandwich shops, hardware stores and a lingerie place that all had “space shuttle” in the names. Logos of the space shuttle were everywhere. One shuttle had a smile and was waving hello.

“The space shuttle launch,” Sean said.

“Right, right,” said Veale. “Then where?”

“Just down the coast.”

“Where ya gonna stay?”

“Play it by ear.”

And this cat-and-mouse went on in agony, Veale desperately trying to cling to some scrap of itinerary so he could link up with Sean and retrieve the suitcase. And Sean deliberately nebulous so there’d be no conceivable way Veale could bump into them. Sean wished David wasn’t next door at the Moon Hut restaurant and could get him out of this.

Veale kept glancing across the parking lot.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” said a jumpy Veale. “So you’re going to Key West? You know any good hotels?”

“We’re staying at the Purple Pelican,” Sean said,
assuming Key West was way too far to have to worry about Veale—and hoping a direct answer might eclipse the interrogation.

“The Purple Pelican, eh?” said Veale. He repeated “Purple Pelican” in his head eight times and made himself picture one.

“I think I’ll go to Key West too,” said Veale. “Maybe stay at the Purple Pelican.”

Sean put a Post-it note in his brain to cancel reservations at the Purple Pelican.

“So, what’s there to do in Key West?” asked Veale.

“Please go away,” said Sean.