Florida Roadkill, page 21
part #1 of Serge Storms Mystery Series
He pushed Coleman into the car and hit the gas.
Mo Grenadine thought it was the first time he’d seen a brick fireplace next to a bright window view of tropical plants. A sailfish hung over the mantel and a cat rubbed his leg. He threw the cat a piece of jerky, but it was rejected.
The homing device sat on the table; a bright dot slowly approached from the east.
Grenadine fiddled with the remains of the steamed shrimp and ordered another beer. The restaurant sat back in the banana trees and he hadn’t noticed it on the side of US 1 until it was too late and he had to backtrack. The Jamaican paint scheme had caught his attention, vibrant green and yellow, and a funky sign on the roof: Mangrove Mama’s.
The dot on the homer was accelerating. Grenadine chugged the beer as the dot passed through the middle of the screenhis positionand kept going west. He left a twenty on the table and ran to his car.
The dot became stationary and Grenadine shook the homing device. But there it stayed. He slowed as he crossed Sugarloaf Key. He recognized the lodge, to his right. That old dolphin Sugar, who had lived in the pool out back for years, had died and it had made every paper south of Orlando. Grenadine was getting close to the dot, and he slowed and turned in the dirt road next to the lodge.
He approached an isolated airstripwhere they had filmed part of a movie when they needed a place with smuggler atmosphere. Over the tops of nuisance pine trees he saw the bat tower. It was a louvered gothic structure from the 1930s. Another developer’s folly, but a creative one, put up in a vain attempt to colonize bats that would dine on mosquitoes.
Grenadine pulled around a bend in the road. He parked the car and walked quietly on the gravel with his binoculars. First he saw the parked red LeMans, and then the full bat tower came into view. At its base, a slightly plump man had his arms and legs wrapped around one of the pylons, hanging on for life only a foot above the ground, and a taller, thinner man was trying to pry him off.
“Is it just a matter of time?” asked Sean. “Are we safe in this state, or have we just been beating the odds?”
“You’re paranoid,” said David, at the wheel, crossing Tavernier Creek. “I saw an article in the newspaper. It said Floridians are overly fearful of crime. There was this study that found residents fear violent attack about fifteen times greater than the rest of the country, when the actual threat is only ten times greater.”
“That’s comforting,” said Sean. “Last year Karen and I were coming out of a video store just after dark. She was eight months’ pregnant. Looked like she was about to pop, she walked like a freakin’ penguin. These two guys followed us out. I didn’t think anything of it ‘cause I can’t fathom the mind that would prey on someone that obviously pregnant.”
“What happened?”
“I put Karen in the mini-van and was about to walk around to my side when I realized the guys had disappeared. I looked around and I finally bent down and looked under the car. There were two pair of feet on the other side. They were crouched down waiting for me to walk around. I got Karen back out of the car and we went back in the store as fast as we could. I can’t tell you how frightened I was until we were back inside. But you know, once we were there, I started to get this feeling like I’ve never had before. I was so angry I wanted to kill those guys with my bare hands.”
“I woulda helped,” said David. “You found the traveler’s checks yet?”
“No!”
“Just asking.”
“I told you I hid them and I can’t remember where. It’ll come to me.”
“Okay, okay.”
The conversation stopped in a truce, and a minute later David asked Sean if he’d get the guidebooks back out. It was the division of labor; whoever wasn’t driving would read from history and travel books, looking up facts and legends about whatever place they were driving through. They were traversing the causeway between Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys.
“Okay, up ahead on the left,” Sean said, looking down at a map and then out the window. “That should be Indian Key. That used to be the seat of Dade County. Back in 1840, the guy who developed the place, Jacob Houseman, offered to kill Indians for the government for two hundred dollars each.
“For some reason the Indians got upset. They came out there and massacred a bunch of people.”
“And you’re worried about muggers at a video store,” said David.
“Shut up,” said Sean. “Here’s the wild part. There was a famous botanist, a Dr. Henry Perrine. He was hiding with his family. The Indians killing people all over the island. And the Indians are moving toward his house. So Perrine lowers his wife and three kids into the basement through a trapdoor. They expect him to come with them, but he figures the Indians are sure to discover the trapdoor and kill his family. So he closes them in and piles bags of seeds and junk over the door to conceal it. Then he waits up in the house and the Indians come in and butcher him. They never found the trapdoorhis family survived.”
“Man, read something lighter,” said David.
As soon as they arrived in Key West, Sean and David settled in at the Expatriate Café on Duval Street and watched the news. The Conch Train, an open-air sightseeing tram, clanged its bell as it went by, and a tourist took a picture of Sean and David.
On the side street, in the doorway shadows of a closed bric-a-brac shop, a man watched David and Sean.
Did they really want to go to Sloppy Joe’s, David asked. Sean was ambivalent too, but it was a week-night, he said, when Joe’s was a functional bar instead of a souvenir mall.
David and Sean had been looking out at the traffic on Duval as they talked, not looking at the man approaching the table from David’s blind side. In the last few yards the man lunged. David’s Canon camera with zoom lens was in the middle of the table, next to the lamp. While still looking at Duval, David’s left hand shot out and landed atop the camera, a split second before the man’s hand landed on top of David’s.
David looked up at him. He said calmly, “You have a decision to make.”
The man snarled, “I want the camera. Now!”
“Wrong decision.”
David curled his right arm just behind the man’s calves and slammed his shoulder into both his knees. The man went over backward like a tree. David was on him, and gave one quick rabbit punch below and behind his ear, knocking him out.
“How’d you know?” asked Sean as they walked down Duval. “I didn’t even see him coming, and he was almost behind you.”
“It’s Florida,” David shrugged. “It’s like you’re a small fish on the reef. You have to stay aware of your surroundings.”
Up ahead, at Sloppy Joe’s, Sean and David stuck their heads in the door from the sidewalk. They decided not to go in.
The bar was packed more than usual for that early, and especially a weekday. There was something odd about the crowd. They were all older men on the paunchy side. Gray or white hair with beards. Rosy, full faces, some sunburned, others with lots of capillaries near the surface. Most of them in white turtleneck sweaters.
“I think they’re all supposed to be Hemingway,” said Sean.
Since the early sixties, looking like Hemingway had been a growing cottage industry in Key West. So much so that by the time the annual Hemingway festival was unexpectedly canceled, it spelled a crisis of confidence for the swelling numbers of look-alikes who vacationed or had permanently relocated on the island.
The colony even had a name, The Look-Alikes. In 1997, Hemingway’s heirs decided to cancel the festival. They said they didn’t like the rowdy image of Key West’s yearly festival, which disgraced Ernest’s memory by not giving them a big enough cut of the profits.
They moved the festival to Sanibel and announced there would be no drunken revelry; Hemingway would be honored with more appropriate activities, like golf.
The look-alikes moped around Key West for weeks, some became surly, a few ended up on the public dole. They had started meeting lately, trying to figure something out. They hadn’t made any progress against the Hemingway heirs or the city of Sanibel, but interest and hope were building. Each Monday they held a meeting at Sloppy Joe’s, but before they could stratify a legal or economic approach, the gatherings inevitably unraveled into loud misadventure.
The forums grew each week. It started with the previous year’s eighty-three entrants in the look-alike contest, and grew to one-fifty the next week, and two hundred the week after that. Soon the weekly meetings generated so much sympathy that they were pulling in the cross-over look-alikesthose of Burl Ives, Orson Welles and Dom DeLuise, who, in a pinch, could do Hemingway in a crowd, if they were in the back rows.
This Monday, the meeting had ballooned to a record three hundred and forty. TV crews from Japan, England and Spain were on hand. But the meeting was well on the way to making no sense. One of the Hemingways tumbled onto the sidewalk and spilled a draft on Sean’s shoes.
Sean and David agreed that no good could come of going inside, and they proceeded to Captain Tony’s.
The chubby, belly-landing amphibious plane dropped its wheels and rolled onto the short Key West runway. A young man and woman in Bermudas directed taxiing planes around with lazy gestures. The woman chewed gum.
The Key West International Airport doesn’t allow jets, because of noise rules, and the old prop planes lend romance. Much of the modest terminal is taken up by the Conch Flyer Lounge, which, in a display of priorities, sticks out onto the runway.
The door flopped down into a staircase from the green-and-white plane, and Charles Saffron trotted out, yelling into a cell phone. He marched to the terminal with the purpose of a man moving toward someone he wants to punch.
“You dumb sonuvabitch! Where’s my money!”
“I’m real close, Mr. Saffron. Got ‘em on the run,” said the phone. “Just a little more time.”
Grenadine, who had had a hundred miles of sea and sky to crunch the numbers, was no longer on the New England Life team, but it was no time to tell Saffron.
“Grenadine! Where are you! I want to see you right now!”
“Your signal’s breaking up, Mr. Saffron,” said Mo, holding the phone at arm’s length. “I’m losing you. I can’t hear…” and he hung up.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Saffron yelled next to a luggage cart. He bit the cell phone, breaking off the 6, 8 and 9 buttons.
Saffron entered the airport through the bar and punched a hole in a wicker butterfly chair. He ran out to the curb and hailed a cab the color of Pepto-Bismol.
The driver of the school bus had been crying off and on since they’d left Miami southbound on US 1. He turned around and looked at the men sitting behind him. “I love you guys.” And started blubbering again.
Sixty middle-aged, overly happy men hugged each other often and sang, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water…” They passed around pictures of their families and hugged and wept some more.
“Sorry you changed your mind,” the desk clerk at the Purple Pelican said in the phone, jotting down the cancellation.
Sean, at a pay phone outside Captain Tony’s, said he was sorry, too. Maybe next time.
The clerk was short, fiftyish, effeminate and well tanned. He had a white tank top, short blond hair, and an engaging personality. When he was finished writing, he looked up and saw two men approach.
“Welcome to the Purple Pelican,” he said.
Serge’s arms held a brown sack full of papaya, guavas, passion fruits, kumquats, pomegranates, limes, dates and coco plums. An hour earlier he had announced to Coleman that from now on his life was all about fruit. He decreed that he would drink only beverages that contained a tincture of banana.
“Any vacancy?” Serge asked.
“Usually we’re booked solid,” said the clerk, “but you’re in luck. We just had a cancellation.”
The clerk asked if they wanted to know where his favorite restaurant was and was told no.
“Blue Heaven,” he said anyway. “Used to be a brothel. Roosters run around your table while you eat.”
Serge looked down at a souvenir pelican trivet and took a bite of papaya while the clerk wrote down the make and model of their car. Serge went in the gift store and came back with a stack of postcards and a pair of souvenir Hemingway beards.
“The room I have for you is European bath facilities. That okay?” the clerk asked.
“European?” said Serge. “Wow, you make less service actually sound classier. We have to pay extra for that?”
The clerk dropped the smile. He handed over the key and said tersely, “Room three, upstairs.”
In the room, Coleman became erratic, his skin clammy. He jerked his head around, looking.
Coleman stuck his head under one of the beds, and Serge finally said, “What!”
“Where’s the TV?”
“There isn’t one. A lot of guesthouses in Key West don’t have ‘em.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“Where’s the TV?”
The hotel tucked itself between a used bookstore and a moped rental on Fleming Street, just around the corner from Duval Street and a block from La Cubaria. The lobby was flush against the sidewalk. A tiny spotlight illuminated a sign with a purple pelican in a Hawaiian shirt.
“I’ll be out in the lobby,” said Coleman, “by the TV.”
Serge looked down from the window into the courtyard with a pair of royal palms. Ceramic tiles at the bottom of the pool formed yet another pelican. Serge installed the tension rod in the bathroom doorway. He put on his antigravity boots and hung upside down, working his abs.
Coleman ran back into the room. “We’re on TV!”
They ran to the lobby but only caught the last seconds, the “armed and dangerous” part. Serge wondered how long the two giant pictures of them had been on the screen, Serge looking dangerous in his mug shot, Coleman smiling like a loon in his.
Serge looked over at the desk, but the clerk wasn’t paying attention, working with a pencil and calculator.
They returned to the room and bolted the door. They waited an hour, until Florida Cable News looped back to the segment on Serge and Coleman. They went back downstairs to the lobby.
When they got there, however, the lobby was full of Belgian students on a youth hostel tour. They had switched the TV to the Home Usher Movie Channel, watching Wayne’s World. Serge couldn’t believe what he saw, the entire room swaying back and forth and singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“No, no, no!” yelled Serge, standing in front of the TV set and waving both arms at them. “That song is illegal in this country. You must now go to your rooms and await instruction.”
“Weirdo,” said one of the Belgians as they walked out onto the sidewalk. “Dork,” said another, but Serge had already changed channels.
He and Coleman were right up to the set, blocking the view from anyone else, and the volume was low.
They saw crime scene tape outside the Orbit Motel. They saw the Lotus outside the World Series and a sheet in the road on No Name Key.
“What do they mean, ‘serial killers’!” said Serge. “Veale, okay. But Sharon was self-defense and the scalperI mean, that was the World Series! You can call me a murderer, fair is fair, but as soon as you put ‘serial’ in front of it, everyone automatically thinks you’re crazy.”
“I only killed a deer,” said Coleman, “and a turtle.”
“We have to lay low and try to figure something out,” said Serge.
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“I wanted to go out and party.”
The men in the school bus sang, “I am woman, hear me roar,” as they crossed the Seven Mile Bridge, but the driver didn’t know the words and asked that they switch back to “Put your hand in the hand.”
He blew his nose and dabbed his eyes with Kleenex and broke down again. They crested the Niles Channel Bridge and headed onto Summerland Key.
Dar-Dar hunched over the wheel, radio blaring. The sun had been down for two hours when the Yugo sputtered across the Saddlebunch Keys. He couldn’t believe his luck. To his right: a red LeMans parked at the shoulder of the road, two shadows on the bridge with fishing poles.
He made a U-turn and parked on the opposite side of US 1. Waiting for a break in the traffic.
“Way too late in the year for tarpon,” Serge told Coleman. Both were in their Hemingway beards. “Bonefish are out of the question too with this bait. Maybe get lucky with a trout.”
Coleman reeled in his line and found something had chewed the shrimp off the hook. He hoisted the bait bucket out of the water and with clumsy effort retrieved another shrimp. He held it and the hook out to Serge.
“Okay,” said Serge, “one more time. You can hook him through the face or under the tail or sideways through the carapace, but make sure you don’t hit that black round thing inside. That’s an important organ. He’ll die right away; you’ll get no action out of that bait. You can also twist that little fan thing off the end of the tail. It’ll improve the cast and put more scent in the water, but you’ll be doing way too many big things wrong for those little advantages to count.”
With a rebaited hook, Coleman thought hard and flipped the bail on his spinning rod. Serge nodded so-far-so-good. Coleman stiffly whipped the rod and the line back over his shoulder, ready to cast.
A voice behind them yelled, “Watch it! You could put someone’s eye out!”
Serge and Coleman turned. Dar-Dar held a sharp-looking scimitar. Without the baseball T-shirt and cap, and the scar on his forehead now showing, Dar-Dar didn’t look like the fan from the World Series. He wore an all-black outfit and ankle-length black trench coat. Cloven hooves were painted on his sneakers.
Serge studied the get-up and the inverted cross. “Who the hell are you supposed to be, Beelzeboob?”
“I am Dar-Dar!” he said.
“Tartar?” asked Coleman. “Like fish sauce?”
“No! Dar-Dar! Lord of ultimate evil, pain and hopelessness!”
“Oh,” said Serge. “That Dar-Dar.”
