Hammerhead Ranch Motel

1

Lone headlights appeared in the blackness five miles away.

They were high-beams, illuminating the sea mist through the slashed mangroves and crushed coral down the long, straight causeway toward Miami. The rumble of rubber on tar grew louder and the headlights became brighter until they blinded. The Buick blew by at ninety and kept going, red taillights fading down U.S. 1 toward Key West.

It was quiet and dark again. An island in the middle of the Florida Keys. No streetlights, no light at all. The low pink building on the south side of the street was unremarkable concrete except for the hastily stuccoed bullet holes and the eight-foot cement conch shell on the shoulder of the road, chipped and peeling, holding up a sign: “Rooms $29.95 and up.”

No cars in front of the motel; the night manager nodding in the office. The beach was sandy, some broken plastic kiddie toys, an unsafe pier and a scuttled dinghy. The air was still by the road, but around back a steady breeze came off the ocean. Coconut palms rustled and waves rolled in quietly from the Gulf Stream. Parked behind the motel, by the only room with a light on, was a black Mercedes limousine.

Voices and an electrical hum came from the room, number seven. Inside, personal effects covered one of the beds-toiletries, carefully rolled socks, newspaper clippings, sunscreen, postcards, snacks, ammunition-meticulously arranged in rows and columns. The hum was from the Magic Fingers bed jiggler that had been hot-wired to run continuously. The voices came from the TV that had been unbolted from its wall mount and now sat on a chair facing into the bathroom, tuned to Sportscenter.

In the flickering blue-gray TV light, a figure sat in the bathtub behind an open Miami Herald. Two sets of fingers held the sides of the paper-a front-page splash about a drug shoot-out in Key West and a missing five million in cash-and smoke rose from behind the paper. An old electric fan sat on the closed toilet lid, blowing into the tub. Something about the Miami Dolphins came on ESPN. The man in the tub folded the paper and put it on the toilet tank. He grabbed the remote control sitting in the soap dish on the shower wall. The slot in the top of the soap dish held a.38 revolver by the snub nose. “Nobody messes with Johnny Rocco,” said the man in the tub, and he pressed the volume button.

The bather was tan, tall and lean with violating ice-blue eyes, and his hair was military-short with flecks of gray. He was in his late thirties and wore a new Tampa Bay Buccaneers baseball cap. In his mouth was a huge cigar, and he took it out with one hand and picked up an Egg McMuffin with the other. He checked his watch. Top of the hour. He clicked the remote control with the McMuffin hand and surfed over to CNN for two minutes, to make sure nothing had broken out in the world that would demand his response, and then over to A &E and the biography of Burt Reynolds for background noise while he read the Herald editorials. He put the McMuffin down on the rim of the tub and picked up the cup of orange juice. On TV, Burt made a long football run for Florida State in a vintage film of a forgotten Auburn game. The tub’s edge also held jelly doughnuts, breakfast fajitas and a scrambled egg/sausage breakfast in a preformed plastic tray. On the toilet lid, next to the fan, was a hardcover book from 1939, the WPA guide to Florida. Inside the cover, the man had written his name. Serge A. Storms.

Like now, Serge was usually naked when he was in a motel, but it wasn’t sexual. Serge thought clothes were inefficient and uncomfortable; they restricted his movements, and his skin wanted to breathe. Nudity also cut down on changing time, since he was constantly in and out of the shower, subjecting himself to rapid temperature changes, alternating hot and cold water rushes that reminded him he was alive and cleaned out the pores to keep that skin breathing, feeling new.

Serge hesitated a second in the tub, mid-bite in the McMuffin. He couldn’t think of what to do next, not even something as simple as chewing. Too many ideas raged at once in his head, and his brain gridlocked. He was paralyzed. Then the congestion slowly unclogged and he resumed chewing. When he realized he could move his arms again, he reached on top of the toilet tank for a prescription bottle. He shook it, but it made no sound, and he tossed the empty in the waste can beside the sink, a bank shot off the ceramic seashell tiles. Hell with it, he thought, I’ll go natural. If it gets too strange, I’ll run to a drug hole and score some Elavil that crackheads use to come down after four days on the ledge. Serge had started feeling the effects of not keeping up with his psychiatric medication.

And he liked it.

He got out of the tub and opened the back door of the motel room and walked out under a coconut palm. The breeze dried the sweat cold on his skin. He looked up into the nexus of palm fronds and coconuts set against the Big Dipper and a sky of brilliant stars over the water, away from the light pollution of the mainland. Serge said: “There’s a big blow a-comin’.”

Serge went back inside and slept all day in the motel tub, and his skin shriveled. Two hours before sunset, there was a loud beeping sound in room seven. Serge awoke in alarm and splashed around as if he’d discovered a cottonmouth in the water. He jumped from the tub and into his pants without toweling off. The beeping sound came from a metal box on the dresser, an antitheft car-tracking device. Serge threw on a shirt and packed a travel bag in seconds. He didn’t close the door as he ran out with shirt open and shoes in his hands. He threw the bag and shoes in the front of the limo and sped away from the motel.

S erge caught up to the white Chrysler on the Long Key Viaduct and closed quickly as they passed Duck Key. They hit the next island. At mile post 66, they passed the historic marker for the Long Key Fishing Club, whose president was Zane Grey.

Serge became jittery and started to sweat. He looked over his shoulder and wiped his brow.

“Damn!” He smacked the steering wheel with both palms. He did a fishtailing U-turn on U.S. 1 and raced back to the roadside marker. He jumped out of the limo with his camera and took three quick snapshots, then hopped back in the driver’s seat.

He caught sight of the Chrysler again coming off the Channel Five Bridge into the Matecumbes. At mile 73, he saw the resort hotel coming up on the right. Serge stepped on the gas and summoned the will to resist, locking his eyes on the Chrysler. He began to vibrate. His face reddened from backbuild of blood pressure. He finally shrieked and took a hard turn, skidding into the parking lot at the gas pumps. He wound his way through the resort grounds to the waterfront and the Safari Lounge. He burst inside the bar with the camera. The bartender and patrons stopped and looked. Serge took quick pictures of the walls displaying old photos and mounted heads of exotic game the bar’s owner had gotten on hunting trips to Africa with Ernest Hemingway. Then he ran out.

Back on the road, he was about to leave Islamorada and still hadn’t reacquired the Chrysler. At mile 83, Serge saw the stone Whale Harbor Tower. He banged his forehead on the steering wheel three times, then grabbed the camera.

F lorida was on fire and Johnny Vegas didn’t care.

He was in room four of the Rod and Gun Lodge in Everglades City, trying to score with a lithe spokesmodel for fattening beer products he’d picked up at an MTV promotional show-your-ass-athon in Miami Beach. The Florida Marlins had just won the World Series, whose rich celebratory tradition often peaks with fans mistaking police cruisers for piñatas. When the spokesmodel began nibbling Johnny’s ear on Ocean Drive, he didn’t want to take any chances. The specter of mob misbehavior inspired Johnny to shove her in his Porsche and immediately put a hundred miles between them and Miami. They headed west into the glades on the Tamiami Trail. Johnny stopped at a megaplectic convenience store frequented by airboat operators and survivalists with inscrutable politics. He purchased cheese, bread, crackers, a four-dollar bottle of champagne, plastic cups, Vaseline, duct tape and ribbed Day-Glo rubbers, and he winked with conspiracy at the cashier. Back on the road, Johnny cranked up Sheryl Crow.

“…I think a change…would do you good…”

He sped past Miccosukee Indian chickee huts on the two-lane shoulderless highway, flawlessly filling the plastic cups with champagne to demonstrate the sports car’s fine European suspension; the model squeezed Johnny’s crotch, stress-testing his sleek Italian slacks. They pulled in at the rustic mosquito lodge on the western edge of the Everglades, surrounded by miles of nothing but peace. The buzz of crickets relaxed Johnny as he stuck the key in the knob of their room.

It had been a dry, brittle autumn, and a rash of lightning strikes sparked forest fires in sixty-six of sixty-seven counties. The winds drove the blazes across highway breaks. Civic events were canceled and motels evacuated from Tallahassee to Homestead. A fire line advanced on the mosquito lodge.

Gigi the spokesmodel returned from the hotel bathroom naked, but her eyes watered hard.

“What’s that smoke?” she asked between coughs.

“Nothing,” said Johnny. “Just a pig roast or a citronella tiki torch, to keep bugs away.” He leaned her back on the bed and tried to stroke her breast with a gentle, feathery touch, but she kept bouncing around from full-body hacking. More smoke came through the window seals and under the door. Johnny started coughing, too, and he grabbed a handkerchief and put it over his mouth and nose as he prepared to penetrate.

Gigi stopped him. “I can’t breathe!”

Johnny pulled her off the bed and pinned her on the varnished wood floor that had historic character.

“I saw a public safety message once where Dick Van Dyke said to get down below the smoke line,” said Johnny.

“To survive,” said Gigi, “not to make love!”

The was a sharp knock on the door. “Emergency management! Anyone in there?”

“Yes! Help!” said Gigi.

“No! Nobody’s here!” said Johnny. “We’re okay. Go away!”

“Mandatory evacuation! You have to come out!”

“We’re fine!” said Johnny. “I’ll sign a waiver. Slip it under the door.”

The officials opened the room with a pass key. They wrapped Gigi in a towel and administered oxygen as they led her to an evacuation van. Johnny straggled behind, clenching his fists. “I was this close. This close!”

Johnny followed the van in his convertible Porsche to the command post outside the burn zone, where Gigi was checked out by field medics, who gave her bottled water and fire safety pamphlets, and she turned and gave Johnny a stare that could freeze hydrogen.

T he black Mercedes 420S limousine was doing a hundred when it clipped the gopher tortoise, which spun on the heel of its shell and tumbled violently as it skipped down the road. It came to rest. The tortoise poked its head out of the shell and looked around the edge of the Tamiami Trail in the Everglades.

Serge had seen the tortoise and tried to avoid it. He lost control of the limo and bounced through the sawgrass a bit before coaxing it back on the pavement. The limo’s steering column was missing its plastic collar, and Serge’s ignition key was a slot screwdriver. A crumpled tag lay on the floor from the Key West Police impound lot. Serge thought he should probably ditch the limo, since it would draw attention, but he didn’t because, one, he was nuts, and two, it had gizmos.

The sun went down, a deep red beach ball over Naples, and Serge raced through the glades waiting for the back of a white Chrysler to show up in his headlights. In the Chrysler’s trunk was five million dollars in drug money. It was in a metal briefcase hidden behind a panel over the wheel well, unknown to the car’s innocent occupants. In fact, nobody knew it was there except Serge.

Serge speculated there was more missing drug money around Florida than buried pirate treasure. The illegal drug industry flows hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of Florida every year. It’s all in cash. It’s moving around constantly. It must be concealed every step of the way or ditched in an emergency. And most of the people hiding and retrieving it are on drugs. They do a few lines or bong hits and go back and say, “I could’ve sworn it was under this rock…or was it that one?”

This time around, someone had tried to make off with five million in cartel money being laundered through a Tampa insurance company. That someone was dead now. Serge had seen to it. But before Serge could move in, the man had tossed the money in the trunk of an acquaintance’s car…

The Miami Herald sent three reporters to Key West and two more up to Canaveral to cover the story. Eleven bodies so far. One sap shotgunned in a Cocoa Beach motel room, three tied to cement blocks in the ocean, another floating with a doll’s head in his windpipe, and four more machine-gunned in a Key West bed-and-breakfast, three of whom were members of the Russian mafia from Fort Lauderdale. A man was run over outside the stadium in Miramar by a car with a dead stripper in the trunk. Rumors said the killings were over five million in a missing briefcase. Nobody knew whether the briefcase or the money really existed, but that didn’t stop everyone in Key West from clearing out of the bars and tearing the island apart. As more and more bodies turned up, another rumor began to circulate about the money.

It was cursed.

S ean Breen and David Klein headed home fishless again, their record intact. The breadth and complexity of each fishing failure was increasingly impressive. This time they had gone all the way to the Keys and spent a couple thousand to not catch fish.

They had overlearned the sport. They studied drag and line and leaders. There were tides and feeding patterns and how to read the water. They boned up on “the presentation of the lure” like it was a plaque at a Rotary luncheon. Too much thinking and not enough fishing.

They didn’t care. Fishing wasn’t about catching fish. It was about trolling the flats with a silent electric motor, watching the barracudas and sharks and tarpon. And the colors: down in the Saddlebunch Keys, ten miles from Key West, the bright pastel green puddled up in the cracked cakes of clay…fluorescent aqua near the mouth of Newfound Harbor…raw umber shining off the coral through the shallows at Ramrod Key.

They had a heck of a fish story to tell when they got back, except that everybody had heard the whole thing already on the news. The big fiasco down in the Keys. They got special commendations from the mayor and a gold trophy from the city council for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time-and staying alive in the cross fire while the bad guys bumped each other off. It was a chance for local officials to put smiling faces on the tourism nightmare. All that was behind them now.

Sean and David were one hundred ninety miles from Tampa, crossing the Everglades at dusk. They had just passed Ochopee, home of the smallest post office in the United States, when they saw a commotion up ahead. There were men in the road and a bunch of cars parked askance on the shoulders. They noticed a glow on the horizon, and their headlights caught wisps of what they first thought was fog. There was a line of blinking amber lights ahead on wooden barricades. A sweaty man with a reflective yellow vest and a blackened face stepped into the middle of their lane and put his arms out toward the car, ordering them to stop. David and Sean pulled over and saw a firefighting team on the side of the road taking water; some were tended by paramedics.

A wildfire was raging across the Everglades, and a stout northeastern wind had whipped it toward the Tamiami Trail. Soon flames came into view and scrub burned to the edge of the pavement. A National Guard helicopter swooped overhead. A team of firefighters staggered out of the smoke in a sawgrass ditch and collapsed. The firefighters who had been resting got to their feet and disappeared into the smoke. Tourists who had been stopped by the roadblock took snapshots and video. A young man in Italian slacks cursed and pounded his fist on the hood of a Porsche.

David and Sean stood on the side of the road next to a panther-crossing sign. They watched the fire jump to the other side of the road, and the highway became a tunnel of flame filled with smoke. The wind gusted and shifted again to the east, and the fire leaned toward them. The resting firefighters got to their feet and motioned the motorists back to their cars. They yelled for everyone to evacuate east. The fire would be burning where they now stood within twenty minutes.

Sean and David turned and started back to the Chrysler. It was the first time they noticed the black Mercedes limousine parked behind it. They were a few yards away when the Chrysler’s headlights suddenly came on and the engine roared to life. They jumped back as the car lurched off the shoulder of the road and sped past them. Firefighters ran into the highway, waving for the driver to stop. They dove out of the way as the Chrysler splintered the wooden barricades and disappeared into the wall of flame.