Hammerhead Ranch Motel

12

It was a hot, clammy afternoon in Biloxi. Keesler Air Force Base was dead. There were no missions for the Hurricane Hunters and no wind, and the air sat heavy on the town. The Prop Wash Bar only had ceiling fans.

Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes filled his mug from a pitcher of draft and looked across the bar at the group of airmen sitting around two tables near the dart boards. It was the crew of the Rebel Yell, the fierce rivals of Montana ’s plane. The crew stared back at Barnes and his colleagues, and a few began to chuckle derisively.

“I hate those fuckers,” said Barnes. “They think they’re hot shit.”

Marilyn Sebastian leaned up against the jukebox, wearing flight pants and a tight combat-green tank top with a large oval of perspiration between her shoulder blades. Her fiery red hair was out of its usual ponytail and fell over her shoulders. She punched up a Patsy Cline tune and swayed with faraway thoughts. She wrapped her lips around a longneck beer and took a hard pull.

One of the members of the Rebel Yell made a wisecrack and his table broke up. He smiled and stood and strolled over to Marilyn with the cockiness of the oxygen-deficient.

Both crews watched as the airman whispered something to Marilyn, who continued staring into the jukebox. He leaned a second time and whispered something else. Without warning, Marilyn had him by the forearm, with leverage behind his elbow, and smashed his face into the front of the jukebox.

“Bitch!” the airman shouted from the dusty floor.

Both crews sprang out of their chairs. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes grabbed a whiskey bottle by the neck and smashed it against the bar, cutting tendons in his favorite hand.

Suddenly, the air base’s claxons sounded, and Montana ’s crew was all business. They grabbed their gear and sprinted in formation across the tarmac. The wheels of the Hercules were off the runway in eight minutes.

Four time zones ahead, Hurricane Rolando-berto began to sputter. The cooler waters of the mid-Atlantic sapped its strength, but the National Hurricane Center wanted visual reconnaissance before they downgraded it. It did a loop-de-loop more than a thousand miles due east of Montserrat and languished in random, constantly changing directions, its tracking chart looking like someone with DTs got hold of an Etch A Sketch.

Weather officer “Tiny” Baxter bandaged the ex-lieutenant colonel’s damaged hand. Montana took a wide swing at twenty thousand feet around the storm system. Miami was right, he thought, no longer a defined eye. It was becoming completely unorganized. Milton “Bananas” Foster radioed the report back to Florida; then he began screaming “Mayday!” until Barnes wrestled the microphone from him.

Armed with the report, the books at the National Hurricane Center were officially closed on Rolando-berto.

B ack in Aristotle “Art” Tweed’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, lived a man named Paul.

Paul was passive.

He was built for it. At five foot four, he never weighed more than a buck-ten-a small, rumpled man in a similar suit. He had thin gray hair that he kept covered with a black fedora, and his voice was hesitant, barely above whisper. Paul’s was the soft face of the full-time victim. All his features were on the small side, and the fifty-eight years of aging did not etch harsh lines and cracks, but gentle folds. Pink webs of capillaries and other blood vessels were visible on his cheeks and chin. His complexion was extra pale, not quite sickly, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he fainted at any moment.

Paul was a nice guy, to a fault. He was a shy, considerate, deferential, rule-following worrier. He was worried about lawsuits and IRS audits and madmen. He drove slow in the right lane, never took a pen from work, ate extra fiber and overfed parking meters. He was obsequious to telephone solicitors.

When Paul walked by, people thought: The meek shall inherit the earth, but only if their parents were ruthless bastards.

Paul had worked the past twenty-three years as a claims adjuster at Fidelity Insurance, which was trying to cheat on Paul. Even with paltry two percent annual raises, Paul’s salary had grown to a decent level, and Fidelity wanted to replace him with a younger, cheaper worker.

They gave Paul a six-month buyout, which killed his pension in the fine print. Fidelity didn’t mention that the buyout put the company on dicey legal ground and he had every legal right to refuse, which most of his co-workers did. The gracious offer was designed to take advantage of people like Paul, who rolled over on command.

Paul soon found the six-month buyout was based not on his current salary, but on a mathematically suspect twenty-three-year index, and in today’s dollars Paul received the equivalent of two paychecks. He went to work selling shoes at the Mega Mall.

Paul’s wife was not passive. She was a thirty-six-year-old loud bottle blonde with qualified good looks, possibly sensual, but not elegant. Put it this way: She’d be the best-looking woman you could expect to find at ten A.M. in a bar, which was where she went every day after Paul left for work.

They were newlyweds, and they hadn’t had sex since the wedding night, which she only did for tax reasons.

She married Paul because he owned his house outright, and her lawyer/lover estimated the shortest possible time she had to stay married to Paul to have a realistic legal shot at getting half. It was a modestly priced place when Paul purchased it in the sixties, but the area had become exclusive Cloverdale, and the house had appreciated wildly.

On the first day Paul’s wife was in the eligibility zone for a fifty-fifty split, she asked for a divorce, and for the first time in memory, Paul said no.

On the second day, Paul came home and found her naked on the dining-room table, her lawyer riding herd. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. I-won’t-give-my-wife-a-divorce. How was work today, honey?”

She got her divorce.

Paul was forced to sell the house and move into a cramped apartment on the Atlanta Highway, closer to the shoe store.

Since he was a teen, Paul found refuge during difficult times in the pages of hard-boiled mystery novels. He read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He watched Robert Mitchum on the big screen. A private detective-it was all he ever wanted to be. He fancied his life a dog-eared twenty-five-cent paperback, a dame, a shot of bourbon and no regrets. But he never followed his passion because he found out it might involve confrontation.

After the divorce, he began plowing through Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. He drove to the shoe store imagining he was cruising through the City of Angels in the fifties. At work, he pretended every woman customer was a floozy with a hard-luck story who only needed a good slapping.

During his third Monday on the job, Paul was lacing up oxfords with a gritty, hard-boiled savoir faire. Three truants ran through the shoe store, grabbed the left oxford and played keep-away from Paul. Paul repeatedly jumped in the air, trying to grab the shoe the youths held over their heads. “C’mon, guys!”

The youths grew bored and shoved Paul into a promotional pyramid, and he went sprawling on the floor in an avalanche of Hush Puppies. Even his customers laughed. He’d had it. If life was going to kick him in the teeth anyway, he might as well be doing what he loved.

Paul dipped into his proceeds from the sale of his house. He hung out a shingle and had his name painted in gold block letters on the window of his office door. His enthusiasm for the job started paying off in any case that had no possibility of human contact. Tracking lost assets, researching ancestry for probate, taking surveillance photographs of empty buildings. Because Paul was so terrible with people, his other senses began to compensate, and Paul learned he had an almost mystical clairvoyance when it came to inanimate objects. Word got around, and Paul was sought out by law enforcement and the private sector for a specific kind of case. He began making headlines. “Lost Gems Located After Eighty Years,” “Murder Weapon Recovered from Lake,” “Human Skull Found in Victory Garden.”

Paul was patted on the back for his results and then browbeaten over the size of his bill, and his net rates became the cheapest in town. But with each success, Paul became more confident and assertive. A metamorphosis was taking place. Of course in Paul’s case, it was all relative; there could only be so much change.

He became Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.

One afternoon in November, Paul was sitting in his office with his feet up on the desk, asking questions of one of those large novelty eight balls that tell fortunes. An answer floated up in the ball’s liquid window. “Fat chance.” The phone rang.

It flustered Paul and he threw the eight ball over his shoulder and out the third-floor window. He grabbed the receiver.

A t four-oh-five on a cool fall afternoon, the public information officer of the Montgomery, Alabama, Police Department called the assignment editors of the collected capital press corps. He announced a “walkout.” A walkout was a staged event where a police department assembles reporters and walks a suspect out in front of the cameras, at the optimum photographic angle and light, just in time to lead the six or eleven o’clock broadcasts. Reporters are supposed to yell, “Why’d ya do it?!”

At four-fifty, in front of a compressed line of still and video cameras, two husky officers escorted a handcuffed teenage girl out of the police station to a waiting jail van. The girl had ratty hair down in her face.

“Why’d ya do it?” a dozen reporters yelled in harmony.

The girl answered with the middle digit.

The snarling teenager seen on the six o’clock news across the great state of Alabama that night was the incorrigible daughter of the senior records keeper at Montgomery Memorial, a good, hardworking woman trying to straighten out her child. So she took her to work on a recent Friday afternoon and left her in an auxiliary records office to do her homework…where she logged on to the hospital’s confidential computer files and telephoned twenty patients, falsely informing them of positive HIV tests, malignant growths, late-stage leukemia and something she made up called “brain worms.”

Officials at Montgomery Memorial Hospital had been trying for three days to track down the twenty patients. They had reached eighteen. The nineteenth had shot himself in the head that morning. That left only one.

They tried the home phone but got no answer, so they sent someone out to his house. There was no car in the driveway and nobody answered the door. They couldn’t find Aristotle “Art” Tweed.

Neighbors hadn’t seen Tweed around in at least a week, so the hospital asked the police to trace his long-distance phone calls, credit-card charges and ATM withdrawals. The credit-card company already had an eye on Tweed, who, although not over the limit, had begun to amass charges with a frequency and eclecticism that tripped the company’s security software designed to detect cards that had fallen into the hands of binge criminals.

At the behest of the hospital’s civil attorneys, a private detective was dispatched to bring in the nomadic Mr. Tweed before he could incur any liability.

When Montgomery Memorial Hospital was advised to retain a private eye to track down Art Tweed, they followed the same corporate philosophy that guided patient care: cut cost regardless of result. Any law firm worth its salt would have known that the particular private detective selected by Montgomery Memorial was not right for this type of job: It involved people, not inanimate objects. However, the hospital had also retained the cheapest law firm in town, and there were no objections. They dialed the phone.

“I’m on the case,” said Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye. He put on a fedora, got in his black Ford Fairlane, put “The Peter Gunn Theme” on the radio and headed for Florida.

I have attained a humility that involves no loss of pride,” said Jethro Maddox, just after passing gas in the blue Malibu heading down U.S. 19.

Art Tweed quietly stared out the passenger window, saddened by all the bullies in the world.

They were in the Big Bend, where Florida ’s panhandle makes the wide turn south into the peninsula. There were no more beaches, no postcard scenes. A small rusty bridge spanned a gorge. Art saw a brown highway sign at the river that had a bunch of music notes and the name Stephen Foster. As they crossed the Suwannee River, Art looked down and saw a handmade wooden canoe knifing the glass surface of the water.

The gas needle was on E, and Jethro aimed the Malibu for the turn lane and the old gas station with a tin awning.

On the gas station’s porch was a whiskered man with a large carving knife, whittling a table leg into a tree branch. “Ain’t no way that Hurricane Rolando-berto is gonna hit Florida! I can feel these things. I got the shine.”

“All the weather reports indicate otherwise,” said Jethro.

“They also said we landed on the moon, but that was TV tricks.” The old man leaned and spit. “You’ve been brainwashed by whitey!”

“But you’re white,” said Art.

“Bah!” the man said in a crotchety voice, dismissing Art with a careless flick of the knife. He got up and went inside.

Jethro and Art stepped over a lactating Labrador in front of a rusty Yoo-Hoo machine and followed the man into the station.

Jethro pulled out a Visa card and asked for fifteen bucks of regular unleaded.

“We don’t accept charge cards,” said the old man, displaying undependable teeth.

Jethro pointed out the window at the Visa sign on the gas pumps.

“The distributor put that up,” said the old man. “It’s only good at participating dealers. I’m not a participating dealer.”

“What determines whether you are a participating dealer?”

“Whether I feel like it.” He lit a filterless cigarette and pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue. With an insulting slowness, he picked up an open gold can of Miller High Life next to the register.

“Okay,” Jethro said in resignation. “Can I get the key to the restroom?”

“Are you buying any gas?”

“No, I am going to a participating dealer.”

“Then you’re not a customer. Can’t you read the sign? Restrooms for customers only.”

Jethro took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling. “A man must sometimes summon patience when there is no reward for doing so.”

“And no Hemingway in here either!” said the old man.

As the clerk talked, Art noticed he had clumps of hair sprouting like pods of lichen from unexpected anatomy, and he knew it would be an image he would have trouble shaking.

“You wanna take a crap? Buy something! Whatever you want-doesn’t matter to me-Ding Dongs, pickled eggs…” The old man patted the big green glass jar next to the lottery machine.

The sound of the old man’s voice became softer and softer inside Art’s head until there was no sound at all-just his lips moving. Art’s stare tightened to tunnel vision around the man’s head. Then he heard a deep, unfamiliar voice inside his skull: He should die! You should kill him!

“Hey! What’s wrong with your friend?” the clerk asked Jethro. “He’s actin’ kinda weird. I don’t think I like how he’s lookin’ at me… Both of you, outta here!”

They backed out of the store like gunslingers retreating from a hostile saloon.

Jethro turned to Art in the car. “There are many roads to dignity, and one is called character-”

“Just drive,” said Art.

Jethro pulled back onto U.S. 19 and Art turned on the radio.

“Hey, boys and girls, this is Boris the Hateful Piece of Sh-AHH-OOOO-GAH! reminding those of you who are old enough to hit the ballot box to make sure you vote yes on Proposition 213…”

“What’s this about?” asked Art.

“Foreign immigrants are taking away your jobs and sponging off your tax dollars! It’s time we stood up for America and put a stop to it!”

“Intolerant bastard!” said Jethro. “When I was in Spain for the civil war-”

“Shhhh!”

As Art listened to Boris, his eyes locked on the radio, and his gaze went to tunnel vision. Boris’s voice slowly faded out and was replaced by a new, deeper voice inside Art’s head. Art was listening.

C ity and Country could feel they were getting close.

They were eastbound, driving through the backroads of Florida without streetlights. The night wind was too cold and they had the convertible top up. They hadn’t seen another car in miles; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska tape was in the stereo on low. State Road 16 was narrow and empty, and they rode high beams as they crossed girders over the St. Johns River at five A.M. Twelve miles later, they saw something bright and green in the distance that said they were out of the woods. The on-ramp sign for Interstate 95. They caught the highway below Jacksonville and headed south.

They soon passed the last St. Augustine exit. The stars were gone and the black sky was replaced with dark blue. By Palm Coast, daybreak was definitely on the way, and they crossed over to the seaside A1A highway. At a stoplight, the pair threw the latches; Country turned around and stood in her seat as she pushed the convertible top back. They were in twilight, and they couldn’t distinguish where ocean left off and sky began. They kept glancing left, and a thin red line soon defined the horizon.

When they hit Daytona, they drove right out on the sand. The early-bird beer-funnelers whistled and catcalled, and City and Country waved back. After the novelty of driving on sand wore off, City drove up Main Street. They parked across from the cemetery at Boot Hill Saloon. A hard-core biker hangout. They walked in and all heads turned. But the girls knew the score-places like this were harmless as long as nobody smelled fear, and the two strolled with reckless attitude to a pair of barstools. They ordered whiskey. It was seven A.M.

“Shit,” muttered an impressed biker three stools down, and turned back to a conversation with a hit man. City studied a photograph over the bar. Three smiling bikers with their arms over each other’s shoulders. Underneath was a plaque: “In memoriam. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm. Killed by yuppies.”

The door opened and a flabby insurance type with an untucked polo shirt stood frozen in the doorway with a Tipper Gore wife. Both looked like deer in headlights-one of the moments where someone knows they’re in the wrong place, but they don’t know which is worse, running or sticking it out. They took hesitant steps forward, their feet crunching the peanut shells covering the floor, the only sound in the room. They stopped under the unlaundered bras and panties hanging from the ceiling. Fear stunk up the joint. Several bikers got off their stools. The couple changed their minds and ran.

But there was a difference between fearless and dumb…take the Georgia Tech theology student in a Hog’s Breath T-shirt and the English major from the University of Tennessee, who finished off an all-night drink fest by falling from their hotel balcony. However, their room was on the first floor, and they simply rolled on the lawn, got up, and walked to Boot Hill Saloon. The Georgia sophomore was Sammy Pedantic. The English major in the Volunteers letterman jacket was Joe Varsity, and he was telling Sammy about his thesis comparing the Styron-Mailer literary schism to the East-West rap feud.

“Mailer might do a drive-by?”

“He’s got the temperament.”

“But he can’t do this,” said Sammy, and he stuck a full longneck beer in his mouth and raised it in the air without hands and drained it. Then he opened his mouth, and the empty bottle fell and bounced off the bar.

Three Latin men in sharp suits came in the door, and the bikers picked up their beers and cleared out of the way. The three sat down next to Joe and Sammy, who were trying to balance small stacks of quarters on their noses.

City and Country were getting a little blitzed. They ordered more whiskey and smoked cigarettes like amateurs.

Soon the Latin men left the bar, and Joe and Sammy looked around the place and spotted the two women.

“Oh, no!” said City. “They’re coming over here!”

“Hi, girls! Mind if we join you?”

“Yes.”

Joe and Sammy sat down.

The guys talked nonstop for twenty minutes while the girls faked yawns and tapped their watches. “So that’s the deal,” said Joe. “These three Latin guys are paying us to drive their Lexus across the state, and they’re even throwing in a couple of motel rooms on the beach. We just need someone to drive our car. What d’ya say?”

City talked real slow and annoyed, like she was dealing with the simple. “Why don’t one of you drive the Lexus and the other drive your car?”

“Cuz then we can’t drink beer and party on the way over,” Sammy said like it was obvious. “It wouldn’t be a roadtrip.”

“Who were these guys with the Lexus?”

“Great guys!…” said Sammy. “What were their names?”

City looked out the side window at their Alfa Romeo. A police cruiser drove by slowly, then stopped and backed up.

“Please, you gotta come with us,” said Sammy.

The officer got out and started walking around the Alfa.

“On second thought, it’s not such a bad idea,” said City. “Where’s your car?”

“Right across the street.” Sammy pointed. “When can you leave?”

“How ’bout right now?”