Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (43 page)

Serge smiled as he put the tape back on Veale’s mouth. “I know you have.”

In what should have been a lazy sunset, thousands of motorists headed up A1A, bumper to bumper, a necklace of headlights along the shore from Satellite Beach to the Cape. They came from all over, in sedans, vans, sports cars and station wagons, ready to tailgate.

Sean and David drove over the causeway bridge near Port Canaveral. Sean, behind the wheel, turned onto the Kennedy Parkway and headed north until the security checkpoint. David had gotten a visitor’s pass through work, and the guard noted the red placard in the windshield and waved them through.

Sean pointed out the Vehicle Assembly Building to David. As they approached the causeway at the Banana River, the space shuttle appeared over the water, in a crossfire of spotlights.

He followed the other cars onto the grass and parked. People unloaded lawn chairs from trunks, and kids ran around in pajamas. Parents broke out
pizzas and KFC boxes. A souvenir trailer did brisk business in NASA pennants, mugs, hats, shot glasses and freeze-dried astronaut ice cream.

Back at the guard station, an untuned Barracuda backfired and the radio played “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” through the open windows.

Serge, in the driver’s seat, sipped a steaming cup of Addiction World coffee and obnoxiously flapped a visitor’s pass at the guard. Back at the convenience store, Serge had traded a hundred-dollar bill for the pass with a stunned family from Ocala.

The guard bent down and saw Coleman in the passenger seat, wearing the Marlin hat and raising a Slurpee cup to him in toast; Sharon sat in back with arms crossed, almost biting through the cigarette in her mouth. The guard couldn’t wait to wave them through.

They parked on the causeway and spread motel towels. “What do we do now?” asked Coleman. “I mean about the money?”

“Nothing. We’ll have to wait until that guy checks in at the Purple Pelican. Until then we’re on vacation,” said Serge. “How’d you like to see the real Florida?”

Sharon sneaked back in the car and snorted crank off a floor mat. Coleman sat on the edge of the Banana River drinking seven beers. Serge said he should probably move back from the water. The river is normally full of alligators, he said. But before each launch, trappers come in and secretly remove them. They’re bound to miss a few.

“I think I see one!” said a drunk Coleman, pointing at a piece of cheeseburger floating by.

“I think you’re right,” said Serge, and Coleman scooted back to where Serge was sitting.

Communications between launch control and the shuttle were broadcast from loudspeakers attached to poles and echoed by hundreds of car radios tuned to local coverage. There were brief waves of celebration and relief at the countdown milestones. One hour, thirty minutes, ten minutes…

Sean and David sat in lawn chairs with binoculars and Chee-tos. They heard a commotion and turned up the riverbank. An intoxicated man with a foam fish on his head was beating a piece of litter on the edge of the water with a tire iron.

The loudspeakers broadcast that the weather was acceptable, and a NASA voice told the astronauts to “have a nice ride.” Following the loudspeakers’ cue, Sean and David and the rest of the crowd shouted in unison: “…ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five…”

In the distance were quiet pops and clicks. A flushing sound as tons of water hit the pad, a flicker of light, and the space shuttle disappeared as white smoke obscured everything. A David Copperfield trick. The crowd leaned forward, holding its breath. And after a theatrical delay, the space shuttle
Columbia
slowly poked its nose out of the top of the cloud, climbing sluggishly and twisting as the thrusters gimbaled.

A deep, tunneling sound began to build, that giant
worm from
Dune
coming straight at them, and the shock wave hit. It hammered up from the ground like they were standing on a big stereo speaker. A gray mass of birds filled the air in confusion over the distant marsh, and Serge thought of the Bible and locusts.

Veale watched the shuttle rising on TV but didn’t hear anything. One of Serge’s half-finished Perriers rested on the dresser, and Veale saw the surface of the mineral water start to vibrate. He heard a faraway rumble and looked down at the little shuttle hanging from the wire, starting to swing gently.

Veale prayed the shuttle would hurry up, get itself high enough in the air so the sound would peak before it was strong enough to trigger the booby trap. The little shuttle swung a bit farther, but still a good margin to go. And the big shuttle on TV now a healthy way up in the sky. Looking good for Veale. The distance and the speed of sound were deceptive, however, and a violent, tearing roar blew through the room. When the little shuttle swung into the collar and sparked, Veale had a massive heart attack.

It felt like a wrecking ball was pressing down on his chest. He saw the electric motor click on and wind string. The shuttle was so loud that nobody back in Cocoa Beach heard anything when Veale’s eyes slammed wide open for good.

Serge insisted they have a late dinner at Bernard’s Surf, but Sharon complained that she couldn’t see what the big deal was.

“The big deal, you communist, is that the heroes who risked their lives for your freedom ate dinner there!”

“Whatever,” said Sharon, rubbing a fingertip of crystal meth around her gums.

On the way to their table, Serge pointed out photos on the walls of Deke Slayton eating dinner and astronauts in convertibles waving to crowds during a parade that had passed the restaurant in 1962.

Coleman went to the restroom. Two guys talking sports at the hand-blowing machines.

He came running back to the table. “We forgot about the World Series!”

“Damn!” said Serge. He threw down a hundred. “Let’s roll!”

“Fuck the World Series,” Sharon said a little too loudly, turning heads. “You’re not going anywhere. I’m not moving.”

Serge blew. “Then you’ll be a fucking pedestrian, ’cause I’m taking the car. No woman is gonna tell me I can’t watch the World Series! Come on, Coleman.”

The dining room was mortified, but two retired guys at a nearby table gave Serge a thumbs-up. Sharon cursed under her breath and chased them out.

Serge pushed the Barracuda two miles up A1A to the Cocoa Beach Pier. They walked eight hundred feet to the end and grabbed stools under a thatched hut.

It was getting late, windy and cold. Around the bar was a wide walkway, where men in rain slickers threw cast nets and landed pompano and jack with
heavy rods. Under the hut’s rafters, the bar had plywood shutters that swung down to jam the wind. The north and east sides of the bar were shuttered.

It was the third inning, and the three sat at the southwest corner of the bar, watching a snowy TV set whose guts crackled in the salt air like bacon. Serge considered it a plus.

“Rumrunners?” asked the bartender.

“Go for it,” said Coleman. Serge got a Dr Pepper.

The bartender—“Call me Gary”—brought back hurricane glasses filled red. Serge had already stuck a hundred under an ashtray and Gary brightened. With an awkward attempt at style, Gary took a bottle of Bacardi 151 and filled Coleman’s and Sharon’s straws with a funnel.

“Hit it all at once so the rumrunner chases it,” he said. Coleman and Sharon complied.

The Indians led four-two and the bar was a dirge. Sharon was still in a snit, and it needled Serge more as Florida continued losing.

In the sixth inning, with one swing of the bat, Moises Alou’s three-run homer put the Marlins in the lead. The bar erupted.

Mid-celebration, the TV exploded, shooting Roman candles of electronic gizzards into the sea. Everyone ducked. A fuse blew, cutting power to the pier. The bar was in darkness except for a fire burning inside the TV that cast a flickering glow through its vent slits.

“Somebody do something!” said one customer. A second responded by grabbing a fire extinguisher.
“No!” said the first customer. “Someone get another TV!”

Serge jogged to the car, retrieved a stolen five-inch battery-powered set, and ran back up the boardwalk. The bar huddled intimately around the unit. When the Marlins held on to win, the bar celebrated again. Serge left the hundred.

Early the next afternoon, a private twin-engine jet from the Lesser Antilles touched down at Tampa International Airport. A three-step staircase hydraulically unfolded from the fuselage. Four men in linen suits jumped to the tarmac without touching any of the steps and ran to a waiting Mercedes limousine.

A chauffeur held the back door open, and they climbed in. The tallest got in the driver’s seat and took off, leaving the chauffeur on the runway.

Serge dumped the rest of his medicine down the toilet and announced he would show Coleman and Sharon the sights.

“Our lucky day,” said Sharon.

Serge ran the Barracuda up to eighty heading north into Titusville on US 1. At the edge of the Indian River, he turned the wheel, hit the brakes and did a power slide into a public park. He jumped out with his camera. Sharon and Coleman straggled.

“There it is, the monument to the original
Mercury
7 astronauts. There’s another one out on the air station.” They looked up at a giant aluminum 7 in a circle with a cross and a squiggly line.

“It looks like the symbol for the artist formerly known as Prince,” said Sharon.

Serge glared at her.

“Did I see a place back there where we can get some beer?” said Coleman.

“Forget the beer,” said Serge. “Look! Their handprints are in bronze all around the base.”

Coleman put his hands in the prints for comparison, and asked about beer again.

They went to the Kennedy Space Center and Serge showed them space capsules that looked safe as barrels that had gone over Niagara Falls. Coleman wanted to buy a space helmet. Sharon tried to score dope in the rocket garden.

The Barracuda raced south from the center. They poked their heads in the Shuttle Grill and Bagel World and Alma’s Italian restaurant, for the space memorabilia on the walls.

Alma’s had a large photo of an astronaut walking on the Sea of Storms during
Apollo 12
. Inscribed: “I was the first man in history to eat spaghetti on the moon, but believe me it didn’t equal yours. Alan Bean.”

A waitress walked up with menus cradled. “Will that be three for lunch?”

“No,” said Serge. “Just looking at the artifacts. But I’ll take one of those menus, for my archives.” He
took a picture of the picture and herded Coleman and Sharon out the door.

The front wheels of the Barracuda left the ground as he crested the drawbridge onto the Canaveral Peninsula. He passed the turning basin and the cruise ships and slowed so he wouldn’t draw suspicion at the air force guard station. “Going to the museum,” he said, and the guard stepped back and motioned them on.

Serge told them the rocket gantries over the trees to their right were used for
Delta
and
Titan
launches. “The
Titans
are really top-secret spy shit.”

Sharon blew an irritated breath, but Coleman was into the six-pack he’d picked up at Blast Off! Mart.

They parked in an empty lot by an anonymous beige building. Serge got out and danced around with his arms in the air like Rocky. “The Air Force Space and Missile Museum!” He stopped abruptly and ran inside.

When Sharon and Coleman walked in, Serge and two old guys were sitting on a couch in the museum’s office, talking fast in a language they didn’t understand. MA-6, Agena, geosynchronous, apogee kick, perigee burn, fly-by-wire, ha-ha-ha-ha.

Serge finally came to the office door, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. He gestured back to the men, in their seventies. “These guys used to run the show. They manned the launches. Now they volunteer at this museum. The tour buses stop for a few minutes, but other than that, nobody comes out. I don’t get it.”

He pointed to a tiny window with green glass that looked a foot thick. “This was the blockhouse. Right out there they launched
Explorer
, our nation’s first satellite.”

Sharon twirled a finger. Big woop.

“You’re killing the moment for me!” Serge snapped. “Here, for heaven’s sake!” He reached in his pocket and tossed her the twisted-up corner of a sandwich baggie with cocaine packed down in the tip. He’d found it along the baseboard while sanitizing the motel room and had squirreled it away for just such an emergency.

“We have a hike ahead of us.” Serge led them out of the blockhouse and they walked down a row of old launch pads, hundreds of yards through weeds and stickers and broken concrete. At the other end of the field was another beige building, but this one boarded up and locked, no employees. The first blockhouse was quiet, this was dead. Not a soul or sound in any direction.

Sharon finished the coke, stuck her tongue down into the corner of the baggie, then tossed it over her shoulder.

Serge told them that one May morning in 1961, every television set in the country had been tuned to this exact spot. Alan Shepard walking out in his silver pressure suit and climbing into the Mercury-Redstone to become the first American in space.

“Now look at the place!” said Serge. “It’s like an abandoned gas station!”

There was a replica of the rocket standing on the
pad. Sharon walked up to it, pulled a key chain out of her pocket, and gouged a line through the paint.

Serge screamed and grabbed her arm. “Our heritage!”

“Your heritage, space boy, not mine!”

He slapped her across the face. She slapped him back. He knocked her down. She tried to get away by scrambling under the rocket, but Serge crawled in after her.

Coleman looked around the horizon, but they were still alone. He walked over to the blockhouse and read a plaque, giving Serge and Sharon their privacy.

Surf shacks and honky-tonks dotted the seaside south of Cape Canaveral. RVs squatted roadside at untended lots until they were told to move on.

“We need to buy more guns,” said Serge.

“We’re convicted felons,” said Coleman. “And what about background checks and the waiting period?”

“That’s what gun shows are for,” said Serge.

The Barracuda didn’t slow as it hit the swale at the Melbourne Armory. The marquee read, “Treasure Coast Gun Show,” and below, “Limited-edition David Duke action figures, $25.”

A large sign greeted visitors at an expansive table inside the hall: “Private dealer. We don’t ask, you don’t tell!”

Gun advocates had preserved the “private dealer” clause, exempting a bevy of regulations. Ostensibly, it was meant to allow neighborly sales over the back
yard fence. Shockingly, it was used by arms dealers to place untraceable guns in the hands of untraceable criminals. Police chiefs across Florida cried foul. The gun lobby simultaneously labeled them jackboot fascists and ACLU bung-fodder.

The smiling salesman looked like no private dealer Serge had ever seen. His table was ninety feet long and staffed by eight salespeople in uniforms. He had two computerized cash registers and three VISA machines. A stack of background registration forms sat on a bottom shelf, holding up dust. The dealer wore a camouflage vest with mesh pockets, straps, clips, rings and secret compartments. He had a button pinned to the right breast pocket that read “Holy Moly is Right!”

Serge and Coleman squinted down the sights of assault pistols, which they accidentally pointed around the convention floor at other shoppers, who absentmindedly pointed guns back. Five salesmen clustered around Sharon, fitting her with a new line of sexy feminine body armor that made her look like Barbarella. She strolled and spun, modeling.

“It’s you,” said Serge.

Serge slapped a fifty-pack of hundred-dollar bills on the glass display case. Without even showing his false driver’s license, Serge walked out the door with TEC-9 and MAC-10 burp guns, two Peacemakers, three hunting rifles, scopes and Sharon’s Kevlar ensemble. He picked up a muzzle suppressor and the dealer showed him how to make it an operational silencer—“It’s your Constitutional right.”

In the high-rise offices of New England Life and Casualty, financial miscreation had reduced the company to a skeleton staff of agents, secretaries, mistresses and owners’ nephews. None had left the forty-second-floor office yet, even though it was eight at night. None dared move an inch.

The only activity in the office was four Costa Gordan men in linen suits pacing. They had machine guns, small Israeli models with straps over the shoulder like purses. The leader had a Colt Python.357 with a laser sight, and kept dialing a phone number without success and cursing. The yuppie staff were surprised they could see no chest hairs or gold chains.

Costa Gorda was a small island nation in the Lesser Antilles. It was so small, in fact, that it existed only on paper, and it rented a post office box and a conference room on the island of Grenada. The sole purpose of Costa Gorda was to create jurisdictional confusion for shell corporations, offshore bankers, dummy partnerships, shadow firms, tax shelters and eighty-year-old Nazis. During the holidays it sold cheese wheels by catalog.

One of Costa Gorda’s biggest clients was the Mierda Cartel, the sixty-eighth-largest cocaine producer in the world. Which was last place.

The law-abiding residents of Grenada acted intimidated, out of pity for their local cartel, which received unrelenting derision from the rest of the established cocaine world. At ribbon-cuttings, never
an introduction; at banquets, never a trophy. In the yearbook they were named “most likely to be extradited.”

The rare modicum of respect came when they flew into Tampa International, where they were mistaken for the thirty-fourth-largest cartel in the world.

Now, forty-two floors up, they had the complete attention of the New England Life staff.

At unequal intervals, the four stuck tiny crystal injectors in their noses and hit small amounts of blow, filling the office with an irregular nasal syncopation. They had broken into the liquor cabinet an hour ago and each carried a personal fifth at his side. They cranked up the stereo in the cabinet, “Hot Stuff” by the Rolling Stones.

One of the men half-stood, half-sat on the edge of a secretary’s desk, trying to make time. Two looked west out the floor-to-ceiling window, mesmerized by the lights on Bayshore Boulevard and at MacDill Air Force Base. The tallest sat behind the office’s largest desk in a high-back leather chair, still trying to work the phone, still swearing. The epoxy used to patch the six bulled holes in the back of the chair didn’t quite match the burgundy.

One Costa Gordan found an ottoman on casters. He put one foot on it and pushed himself around the office skateboard style. Then he got up on it with both feet and hung ten, sailing across the marble floor. “Look at me, everyone. I’m surfing!”

A secretary with big red hair and a Brooklyn
twang finally told the leader, “You have to dial nine to get out.”

“Fuck!” said the leader, then smiled at the secretary.

This time the call connected and he spun the chair around, disappeared behind its back facing out the window. It was a quick conversation with an unmistakable tone. He slammed the receiver. “Damn!”

The leader walked to a spot in the middle of the office and turned slowly around the room with the Magnum so the laser sight scanned everyone’s face.

“We’re going to have a little party,” he said.

He dumped two ounces of coke out on an onyx credenza. In the background, from left to right, a Costa Gordan skated fast across the office floor on an ottoman, arms straight out, flapping for balance.

A Lamborghini Countach sped past the Desert Inn in Yeehaw Junction, heading east. Charles Saffron punched furiously at the cell phone’s button, still unable to reach Mo Grenadine.

He threw the phone down and it rang instantly. He picked it back up. “Hello!”

“We want our fucking five million.” The accent was Costa Gordan. Saffron backpedaled with excuses.

“What are you doing heading for the east coast?” said the Costa Gordan. “Trying to run like a dog?”

“No, I’m tracking the thieves—to get your money back,” said Saffron. “I’m getting close. Any day now.…What’s all that music? Is that my Stones CD?”

“Saffron, you goat-fucker. We’re gonna cut your
cojones
off and stuff ’em…”

“Your signal’s breaking up,” said Saffron, holding the phone at arm’s length and making static sounds with his mouth. “I’m losing you. I can’t hear…” And he hung up.

Back in Tampa, Saffron’s employees were lined up single-file and made to snort coke at gunpoint. They were then forced into a second line, where a smiling Costa Gordan was pouring shots.

The cartel cycled everyone through both lines three times and sent them to their desks. Some of the staff swayed and forgot the no-talking rule. The leader had to keep threatening with the gun for them to shut up, and they’d look surprised, put hands over their mouths and giggle.

One of the employees raised his hand.

“This isn’t school!” the tallest Latin said incredulously. “We don’t take questions!”

“Yeah, but I’m real curious,” said the accountant, his head lolling from the shots. “How do you smuggle cocaine?”

“Yeah, what do you hide it in?” asked the secretary.

“That’s a secret!” said the Costa Gordan.

“I saw in the newspapers where they call you the Keystone Cartel,” said someone else.

“The lies of Yankee pigs!” said the Costa Gordan.

“Do you hide it in your underwear?”

“Do you swallow balloons on tiny strings that come up your throat and are tied to your back teeth?”

“Shut up! Everyone! Right now!” said the Costa Gordan, waving the pistol fast around the room.

“I think you should pipe it in a slurry in long tubes.”

“You should get a running start and run right up to the border and throw it really hard.”

“You should sew it inside chickens.”

“EVERYBODY SHUT UP!”

There was a tremendous crash. They all ran to the west window, now a jagged opening. Wind gusted through the hole high above downtown Tampa, knocking loose sharp triangles of safety glass, and they followed the rest of the window to the pavement.

Forty-two floors below on Ashley Street, a Costa Gordan in a suit lay on the sidewalk in a bed of glass ground to diamonds. The roof of a parked Jaguar was caved in from an ottoman.