Hammerhead Ranch Motel

9

Zargoza waited ten minutes at the glass front door with the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign. He daydreamed and gazed at the drawbridge over the viridian sailboat channel. A gold Dodge Viper rolled into the gravel parking lot of B. F. Skinner Taxidermy.

“What are you doing here so early?” the driver asked Zargoza as he got out of the car.

“I need a repair job, B. F.” He pointed to the stuffed hammerhead shark sticking out the back of his pickup truck. The end of one of the shark’s eye pods was snapped and dangling.

“Damn college kids,” said Zargoza. “One shimmied up the thing last night and lost his balance and grabbed for something on the way down. Fucked up my shark. Kid landed on his neck, went to the emergency room. Guess who he’s gonna sue.”

“It just ain’t right,” said Skinner, unlocking the door. He hit switches near the entrance and fluorescent tubes flickered on in sequence and filled the large room with unnatural light. The taxidermy shop was an open studio with a high ceiling. The walls were white, and there was a row of generous transom windows just under the ceiling. Only a blond pine desk near the door and long, neat work shelves in the back. The minimalism set off the trophy fish. Finished jobs covered the walls. The fish still curing hung by their tails from a ceiling rack running down the center of the studio.

“Damn fine work,” said Zargoza, looking at a sailfish, king tarpon and hammerhead shark hanging in the middle of the room, almost completely dry. He admired the sail-the iridescent rainbowing in the ultramarine ridges-and the silver scaling of the tarpon. Zargoza walked up and touched the shark tentatively, but it was still tacky.

“That’s a great hammerhead,” said Zargoza. “I’ll double whatever you’re getting for it.”

Skinner rummaged through a mess of yellow papers and mail on his desk. He looked up. “I don’t know who that’s for. I’ll have to check with Jeff. He must have come in over the weekend and done them.”

“Jeff sure has improved since you took him on,” said Zargoza. “This is some of the best work I’ve ever seen… And these eyes-they’re so lifelike. It’s almost like the fish knew he was doomed.”

Zargoza walked around the tarpon. “I like what he did with bodies, too, full musculature. Lumpy, but in a menacing way, like a boa constrictor after it’s swallowed something.”

Zargoza squatted down and stuck his face under the hammerhead to admire further.

Skinner was opening a bank statement and almost impaled his hand with the letter opener when Zargoza screamed. He looked up and saw Zargoza on the ground, trembling and unable to speak, pointing up at the recessed mouth of the hammerhead. Inside the shark’s mouth was another mouth, a human mouth.

T he coconut telegraph running through the Gulf Coast ’s criminal subculture came alive.

Sidney Spittle was enjoying a morning beer at The Wharf Rat when word swept through the bar about the three regulars found taxidermied alive over at B. F. Skinner’s. His hands shook, and a sweat broke out at his temples. He got up and made it to the pay phone by the pool table, where he dropped his quarter and it rolled under a jukebox. He retrieved another from his pocket and used two shaking hands to get it into the slot, and he dialed.

“Baby, I’m at The Wharf Rat. Something bad’s happened. No, not now, not here. In an hour…” Sid stopped and looked around. He turned his back to the pool room and whispered.

“…I love you. Be careful,” and he hung up. He scanned the room again and left briskly through the screen door in the back of the bar.

A customer sitting at a table next to the screen door had his nose in a 1952 Life magazine. When Spittle went by, the customer stuck the magazine under his arm and followed Sid out the door.

As the screen slammed shut, Zargoza and his traveling goon squad skidded to a stop in the parking lot out front.

The bartender got his cocaine six steps below Zargoza and the Diaz Boys, and he wanted to score points. He also wanted to avoid the unspoken penalty of later being found to have withheld information. Upon hearing about the dead car thieves ten minutes earlier, he immediately phoned in a tip to Zargoza that the three had been bragging about five million dollars the night before and tipping everyone in sight like John Gotti. They had been hanging out with another regular, and the guy was back this morning, acting peculiar-he only knew his first name, Sid.

“Where is he?” Zargoza shouted as he crashed through the front door of The Wharf Rat.

The bartender pointed at the back door. “Just left.”

They ran out the back and saw Sidney Spittle and another driver pulling onto Gulf Boulevard. They sprinted around front to Zargoza’s German sedan.

It was a slow-motion O. J. chase down the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. Serge had retrieved the scorched Chrysler in Ybor City after dealing with the car thieves, and he drove under the speed limit in the right lane. Two cars back in the left lane was Team Zargoza. Neither was aware of the other and neither wanted to make a move on Spittle until they saw him with the briefcase.

They took a bridge to the mainland and drove across the Pinellas Peninsula. They caught the Gandy Bridge over the bay to Tampa and followed the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway downtown. Took nearly an hour, everyone stressed going so slow hanging back from Spittle.

Sid parked in front of the bus station, looked around and went inside. Zargoza parked a block away, Serge at the corner.

Spittle took a chair with his back to the wall and pretended to read a travel brochure. He peeked over the top and scoped the place. So far so good. He got up and walked around for a more thorough recon, checking out the facilities. An old scale, your weight and lucky lottery number, twenty-five cents. A vending machine dispensing artificial stimulants, artificial depressants and temporary tattoos. A schedule board, arrivals, departures. Western Union, for the broke and the shameless, to renew old friendships with the endearing three-A.M. phone prostration for five hundred dollars. Out on the loading platform, thick with diesel fumes, a bus from Richmond idled and someone in uniform was flinging sawdust on a Night Train regurgitation. Sid took a seat again in the station and decided to wait and watch. The terminal reminded him of visiting day at the state prison. The chronic inability to master life hung in the air like a toxic mist. Something about the manner of travel. Good news comes to Tampa rarely and by divine intervention, but bad news arrives every day on the bus. The luggage definition was casually regarded: gunnysacks, laundry bins, pillowcases, Glad bags and liquor cartons. Woody Guthrie made them sound like romantic troubadours over the radio, but in person the image was a bit too jarring for Sid to burst into hobo songs.

Two Tampa cops came in the front door and walked slowly down the rows of molded plastic chairs, comparing waiting passengers with mug shots of Serge A. Storms. Various fugitives began to fidget and perspire in their seats. The stress got the best of a young work-farm escapee with bushy hair and an acoustic guitar. He jumped up and was grabbed immediately. He tried to put up a fight with the instrument, but the cops easily took it away and smashed it like balsa wood to a smattering of applause. They led him off in cuffs. The clock on the wall continued ticking.

A half hour later, Sid was confident the coast was clear. He got up and walked to the lockers. He scanned the station a last time before opening number seventeen and removing a metal briefcase.

When Sid turned back around, he saw a man in a chair on the other side of the station staring at him over the top of a newspaper. The man quickly looked back down. A hot flash of dread surged through Sid and he had to focus hard to walk as if each leg weighed two hundred pounds. He made it to a chair and sat down next to a girl reading a Sixteen magazine with Leonardo on the cover. He set the briefcase on the floor next to his feet. He was still on the other side of the terminal, but he had a clear view of the man with the newspaper. The man looked at Sid again over the top of his paper and back down quickly. Sid then noticed there was a whole damn row of men peeking over newspapers.

Sid’s heartbeat shook his whole body. He and the men furtively watched each other for five minutes. Sid suddenly grabbed the briefcase and raced for the bus station’s exit onto Polk Street. Zargoza and his goons threw their newspapers in the air, pulled guns and ran after him.

There was a yellow Checker cab at the curb, and Sid clutched the briefcase to his chest and literally dove through the open back window.

The cabbie turned around. “Never seen that before.”

“Get me out of here!” yelled Sid.

“Sure thing.”

The cab patched out from the curb, and Sid looked out the back window at Zargoza and the goons standing in the street, shaking their fists at the cab and shouting.

Sid turned back around, slumped in the seat and let out a deep breath of relief. “Take me to the airport.”

“You got it,” said Serge, and he turned on the meter.

B ack inside the bus station, everyone was in Florida mode-here we go again!-hitting the deck when the goons pulled their guns and started hurtling through the terminal.

As the cab peeled away and the men stood yelling in the street, the waif named Patty Bodine stopped reading her magazine article about Leonardo Di Caprio. She picked up a second, identical metal briefcase at her feet and calmly strolled out the exit doors on the other side of the bus station.

S erge had Sidney Spittle’s undivided attention.

Sid was chained up around the armpits and elbows. Another chain wrapped tightly around his hips and knees. Each chain was extended loosely and fastened in opposite directions so that Sid hung like a hammock. He almost looked comfortable.

There wasn’t any challenge to the interrogation. In the first minute, Spittle was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. He told Serge everything about the money, about making the switch at the bus station with his girlfriend, Patty, and about their planned rendezvous later that night.

Serge had one last question. Who were those guys chasing you?

“You don’t know?” Sid said incredulously. “That’s Zargoza’s crew!”

Serge said thank you and taped Sid’s mouth shut. Then he sat back on the catwalk and ate a Snickers bar and waited. He fiddled with his electronic tracking device and shook it, but the sensor stayed in the middle. Why wasn’t it picking up the briefcase? Something must be jamming it. Must be the weather-all the electricity in the air.

Serge’s blinking increased and he sat paralyzed for a moment.

When movement came back into Serge’s body, he asked Sid, “Did you know the first barbecue was held in Tampa?”

Sid just stared bigger.

“It’s true,” said Serge. “In 1528 a stranded Spanish explorer named Juan Ortiz was marked for death by Harriga, the Timucuan Indian chief in Tampa Bay -mainly because another Spaniard had earlier cut off the chief’s nose. And we called them savages… Anyway, they decided to roast Ortiz alive over a fire pit that the Indians called barbacoa-and that’s how we got barbecue!”

Serge smiled broadly with satisfaction and his eyebrows raised in an expression that said, “Impressed, eh?”

Then Serge’s face got serious again. “Oh, I almost forgot. Cool footnote alert: Ortiz didn’t die. He was saved by one of the chief’s daughters, who had the hots for him and begged her father to let him go. The episode was later stolen for part of the story of Captain John Smith. And it became the legend of Pocahontas.”

Sid was a mask of silent terror.

“What? Don’t believe me?”

Sid began screaming mute under the tape, but the noise was soon drowned out by the air horn of an approaching sailboat. Serge got all excited like a kid at the circus. Water splashed below and cars droned above on the metal grating. A gap of moonlit sky opened over Sid’s stomach and he was lifted up into the air, the two spans of the drawbridge rising and separating, each chained to a different end of Sidney Spittle.

I t was the last flight out.

Patty Bodine, the underage girlfriend of the very late Sidney Spittle, was like ice water. Not a flutter, totally calm, sitting in a blue styrene seat in Airside D at Tampa International Airport with five million dollars on her lap.

It was shortly after midnight, and the airside was empty. Vacuum cleaners going. One last guy schnockered in the lounge.

The flight was the second leg of a Fort Lauderdale red-eye to Chicago, and the Whisperjet had just taxied to the accordion boarding arm. A ticket agent walked to the gate and unhooked the velvet cord. Patty and five other weary people stood up.

Patty pulled her boarding pass from a hip pocket. She was at the end of the short line, and she felt something poke her in the back.

“Where are you going?” asked Zargoza.

He turned her around and marched her back up the airside, and they caught the monorail to the main terminal. When the doors opened, Patty fell to the floor of the car and screamed and flopped around. “They’re gonna kill me!” The other passengers stared. Zargoza and his goons stuck their hands in their pockets, looked around innocently at the others and smiled, like they didn’t know her.

As the doors were closing again, Patty sprang out of the car. Zargoza lunged and grabbed the back end of the briefcase, and it wedged in the closing doors of the monorail.

“Let go!” they both shouted on opposite sides of the doors. They struggled fiercely and Patty lost her grip. Zargoza fell over backward with the briefcase, and the monorail doors snapped shut.

“Get her!” Zargoza yelled at his goons.

“Dammit!” Patty said under her breath as she saw the briefcase disappear into the monorail car. Then she saw the goons banging on the doors, trying to pry them open. She began backpedaling slowly, then faster and faster. One of the goons found the emergency button and the hydraulic doors hissed open. Patty turned and dashed full speed through the main terminal with the goons twenty yards behind. She bolted out the front of the airport to curbside and jumped in a cab.

“Get me out of here!”

“Ten-four,” said Serge.

Z argoza stood and stretched in the morning air, sipping hot coffee just outside the office of Hammerhead Ranch. He thought: A good night’s sleep, that’s all I needed to calm my nerves. That’s when he heard the first siren.

An out-of-breath goon ran across the parking lot. “Boss, I think you better come see this.”

Zargoza walked around the motel to the drawbridge over the inlet, where authorities had just discovered what was left of Sidney Spittle.

“Jesus!” Zargoza yelled.

Sharks pooled under the bridge and rubberneckers pulled over to be sick en masse.

Zargoza walked back to the motel and another goon came running from the other direction.

“Boss, come quick. You better see this.”

Zargoza walked around behind Hammerhead Ranch toward the swimming pool.

He suddenly screamed and fell to his knees. Then he held a hand over his mouth reverently and whispered: “The Curse.”

He faced the row of ten hammerheads. In the hole where Zargoza had removed the broken shark, there was now a replacement, a gleaming new hammerhead with the primordial eye pods seamlessly epoxied to the sides of Patty Bodine’s head.