Hammerhead Ranch Motel

6

Five miles away from the car thieves’ warehouse, an unrestored white Rambler sat in a small south Tampa parking lot.

It was just another day in paradise for Sidney Spittle.

Sid sat behind the wheel with his arm resting in the open window. The upholstery was red and split. It was a Wednesday.

The parking lot was half empty and there was light traffic on the minor artery through Tampa ’s Palma Ceia neighborhood. Two teenage girls cutting school walked by on the sidewalk. Sid smiled at them; they called him a schmuck. Sid laughed. Nothing could ruin his day. He had a cold beer in a Styrofoam koozie between his legs and a newspaper propped on the steering wheel. The late-morning Florida sunshine warmed his arm in the window. The AM radio was tuned to Jamaican music, “ Electric Avenue.” Tropical flowers bloomed on the landscaped islands in the parking lot, and egrets perched on trash cans. What an existence. He turned the paper over to the weather page to check the temperatures in Sheboygan, Bangor and Duluth (14, 1, -8). There was a tracking chart and a small article about a new hurricane with a fifteen percent chance of striking Florida. Sid stuck his face out the window into the sunlight and smiled. “Ain’t gonna be no hurricane.” He folded the paper over to the races at Tampa Downs and creased it sharply. He took another swig of cold beer, clicked open a ballpoint pen and went to work picking losers.

Sidney Spittle was the Twenty-First-Century American. He completed the nation’s transition from a culture molded by sacrifice and hard work to a bunch of cranky, unobliged brats. The Roosevelt Americans of the Depression and World War II were gone. So was rugged individualism, self-determination, Ellis Island, manifest destiny and the American Dream.

Now there was Sid the Fuckhead.

Sid was living off the national inheritance, of which he was unaware and ungrateful.

Sid was a twenty-eight-year-old doughboy. Not fat, just soft in the gut, face and work ethic. He grew a dark mustache so he wouldn’t look like a complete dick, and it made him look like an insecure complete dick. Exercise never crossed the man’s mind. Sid had gotten up that morning at a leisurely nine o’clock, a little earlier than usual because he was working today, which he did three days a month tops, and then only for a couple of hours. At other times, Sid dressed like a slob, but this morning he wore a natty charcoal suit, and his hair was organized.

Sid looked over the top of the newspaper. The glass front door of the local branch of Florida National Bank opened, and Mrs. Deloris Hastings, a venerable and bent-over ninety year old, walked out in slow motion without the aid of a cane. Sid put down the paper and started the Rambler. He waited patiently for Deloris to get to her car, but her pace was so excruciatingly slow that Sid began to give her body English.

Once in traffic, Mrs. Hastings drove a precise and unvarying sixteen miles per hour for twenty blocks, having signaled for her eventual left turn immediately after leaving the bank parking lot. A steady stream of traffic flowed around Mrs. Hastings to pass. Except Sidney Spittle.

When Mrs. Hastings pulled into the driveway of her 1923 bungalow, a Rambler pulled in behind her.

“Who are you?” Deloris asked as she got out of her car.

Sid flashed a gold badge as he walked up the driveway. His tie was thin and pinned to the bright-white button-down shirt with a bald eagle tack.

“Norman Kauffman, Federal Investigation Department Agency.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to protect you,” said Sid. “Let me give you a hand.” He took her by the arm and helped her into the house.

“You’re such a nice young man,” she said. “Could I get you some tea?”

“Maybe some other time, ma’am, but right now I’m on business. My department is investigating a suspect who preys on the elderly. We could use your help.”

“My help? What can I do? I’m ninety years old.”

“There’s a teller at the bank who is stealing from seniors. We want you to go to the bank and make a withdrawal. He’s the last one on the right. We’ll have people watching.”

“You want me to be a decoy?” she asked. “Like on Hunter?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think I can. What if there’s shooting?”

“There won’t be any shooting. This guy is strictly nonviolent. Besides, we’ll have people all around for your safety. The person in front and behind you in the bank line will be our undercover agents. But of course they’re such pros that they’ll look ordinary. They’ll never acknowledge you, and you can’t talk to them. How much can you withdraw?”

“I only have three thousand left in savings until my next Social Security check…”

“You better get all of it because this guy won’t make a move unless the stakes are right. He rarely goes for less than five grand. You have any CDs?”

“Two, but I was saving them for an emergency.”

“This is the emergency,” said Spittle. “Mrs. Hastings, your people need you.”

D eloris Hastings was two feet shorter than everyone else in the bank line. She turned and smiled at the construction worker behind her. She leaned and whispered, “You people do such fine work.”

The carpenter leaned down to her and whispered back: “Thank you.”

When Deloris got to the last teller, she handed over her paperwork, and the teller smiled warmly. Then he stopped and looked puzzled at Mrs. Hastings’s face. It appeared an angry sneer was curling up at the corner of her mouth. Either that or she’d gotten some bad cottage cheese.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Hastings?” he asked.

“I’m fine!” she groused. “I’ll bet you sleep just fine at night!”

Sidney Spittle waited around the corner in his Rambler and followed Deloris back home once he had determined everything was jake.

“I got it! I got it!” Mrs. Hastings said in her living room. She dumped the money from her purse onto an old desk. “I hope you put him in jail and throw away the key!”

“With the help of citizens like you, we just might,” said Sid. He took a midsize office envelope from his jacket pocket and stuffed the money inside.

“What I’m doing is putting this money in a special envelope and I’m going to mark it, and then I want you to take it back to the bank.”

Sid bent over the desk and wrote “Mrs. Hastings” on the envelope with a thick black Magic Marker. As he straightened up, he had his back to Hastings. During the brief moment, Sid switched the envelope of money with an identical envelope stuffed with blank pieces of paper that was premarked “Mrs. Hastings” with the same felt pen. God, this was too easy, he thought. It was one of the oldest scams, but it never stopped working. There was an endless supply of old people who were trusting, eager to follow rules and ready to assist authority. When would they wise up?

He held the packet out to her. “Okay, now go back to the bank.”

As Deloris took the packet, someone honked a horn outside. Spittle walked to the front window and peeked out the curtain, and he saw a green Geo parked in the driveway behind his Rambler, half hanging out in the street.

“Shit!”

The honking resumed-beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep.

“Something’s come up,” said Spittle. “I gotta run.”

“What about catching the bad guys?” asked Deloris.

“That’ll have to wait.”

The horn outside went silent.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Deloris asked.

Sid kept glancing at the front door, starting to show the first tremors of panic. “Look, I really gotta go.”

Deloris asked, “But what-”

The front door opened without a knock, and Sid cringed.

There she stood. Patty Bodine. The seventeen-year-old runaway that Spittle started diddling last week on Indian Rocks Beach. She was a thin waif of a thing with long, straight dirty-blond hair and lots of freckles that made her look even younger. She was sorta cute, but her lower face had a nagging ursine quality that Sid couldn’t quite get around. Her loose jeans rode low on her hips and the tight tangerine junior miss top exposed her midriff and pierced belly button. She tapped one of her dirty bare feet impatiently and smoked a Marlboro red. “What’s taking so long? Come on!”

Sid’s facial muscles tightened as he clung to composure. Underage girls were such great lays, he thought, but the immature crap he had to put up with-it just didn’t seem right.

“You’re messin’ up my gig!” said Sid. “Go wait outside!”

“You’ve got the money, right?” said Patty. “What’s the big deal? Just take it and let’s go!”

“What’s going on?” said Deloris. She looked inside her envelope and saw the stack of plain pieces of paper. She looked up. “You’re not a cop! Gimme my money back!”

“Let’s go!” yelled Patty, tugging on his right arm.

“I want my money!” yelled Deloris, grabbing his left arm.

Sid was dumbstruck by the turn of events.

Before he knew it, Sid had turned and decked Deloris with a right cross to the nose delivered as hard as he could. She dropped at his feet like a fifty-pound sack of russet potatoes. Her delicate vascular network had ruptured and begun to fill out the area under her eyes and across both cheeks with a deep purple just under the skin.

“Ooooo, gross!” said Sid. He leaned over and studied Deloris as she moaned.

“What are you waiting for?!” asked Patty.

“Think we should call an ambulance?”

“Don’t tell me you care what happens to her!”

“No, I care what happens to me!” said Sid. “If she dies, this is a murder rap.”

“Fuck her!” said Patty. She reached on top of the TV and grabbed a brass statue of the gentle Saint Francis holding a songbird on his finger, and she bashed Deloris in the head. That stopped all but the slightest movement in the old woman, so Patty did it again. This time Deloris fell completely still.

“There! She’s dead,” said Patty. “Now there’s no decision to make. Can we finally go!”

“Jesus Christ!” Sid yelled, stumbling backward in shock. “You’re one cold cunt!”

“You hit her first.”

“But that was self-defense!”

M rs. Hastings never felt a thing. She didn’t die right away like Patty thought. First she went into a coma. Six hours later, about the time that brain swelling put a coda on Mrs. Hastings’s ninety years, Sid was on his fourth Corona at a table in the back of a beach dive called The Wharf Rat. Patty had made a whining pain in the ass of herself wanting to go to the beach, but Sid said he needed some beer first to settle his nerves from what he had just witnessed. He placated her with two of Deloris’s hundred-dollar bills, and Patty smiled for the first time all day.

“This calls for a suck!”

Sid looked around the dim bar. “Okay,” he said and pulled out the chair next to him, and she crawled under the table.

The Wharf Rat was the kind of place where the waitresses worked in wet T-shirts and sold five-dollar joints on the side, which was overlooked by the bartender, who sold forty-five-dollar half-grams in the men’s room. The music was too loud, the room too dark, and the only pool table was warped.

An hour later, Sid’s nerves were sanded down smooth and he was feeling pretty good about himself. He had even gotten over his anger at Mrs. Hastings. The five thousand meant he wouldn’t have to work again for weeks.

A drink arrived, and the waitress in the wet T-shirt told him it was compliments of the men at the next table. Sid looked over. He saw three sloppy-drunk losers in T-shirts. He reluctantly raised the drink in a gesture of thanks, but they were too far gone. They had an entire bottle of scotch on their table, half pouring, half spilling their own drinks. He recognized them. They were regulars, just like him. But he had never liked their looks, and they didn’t socialize.

Sid soon noticed he was having trouble getting served. At first, the waitresses merely hovered around the three drunks. Then they dropped all pretenses; service to the rest of the bar ground to a halt as every waitress stopped and joined the circle around the three men, waiting to jump at their command. Sid saw they were tipping with hundreds. The bartender came over and led the trio to the bathroom, and they all came back out smiling.

“Arriba! Arriba!” they yelled.

Sid slid his chair over to their table. “What’s the celebration, fellas?”

“We’re richer than King Tut,” said the closest one, his pupils dilated different sizes and his mouth and tongue out of synch. “We just found five million big ones!”

“Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the second, his head rolling around in its neck socket. “That’s a seeeeecret! We can’t let anybody know it’s out in the car!…Ooops!” And he covered his mouth with his hands as if they were faster than the speed of sound.

“But I’m your friend,” said Sid.

“Yesh, he’sh our friend!” slurred the third one.

L ate the next morning, the first of the car thieves awoke in bright sunlight on the wooden floor of their Ybor City warehouse apartment, where they’d passed out just before daybreak.

He looked around, groggy. What happened? Snatches of memory filtered back. He remembered some guy back at The Wharf Rat helping them into a cab and paying the driver, then the ride back to the warehouse and the inebriated struggle up the steps, the three of them leaning against each other, an unstable tripod holding itself up. They must have made it into the apartment and lost consciousness on the floor because that’s all he could remember. He couldn’t remember anything at all about…the money! Where was the money? That bastard in the bar must have stolen it!

The car thief tried to spring up from the floor but couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his entire body spooled tightly head to toe with hundred-pound-test fishing line, his arms pinned by his sides and his legs bound together. He looked over at his two comrades on the floor next to him wrapped in the nylon line.

“Hey, you guys! Wake up! There’s trouble!”

The other two came around slowly at first, but then awoke all at once when they realized their situation. They thrashed around in panic.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said an unfamiliar voice. “That line will slice you to ribbons.”

A stranger walked into the room from the kitchen and sat on the couch. He was wiry and casual, sitting there with a leg crossed, reading a Tampa Tribune. On the front of the newspaper the thieves saw a big headline, “Keys Killer Sought,” and a large photo that matched the man holding the paper.

“Who are you?” said the first thief. Then he stopped and studied the stranger. Something familiar. “Hey-you’re that guy we jumped last night coming out of the warehouse.”

Serge set the paper down. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa cushion and spoke softly. “Where’s my money?”

“What money?”

Serge reached around the side of the couch and slid a toolbox into view. He opened it and removed a pneumatic staple gun.

“Oh, that money. We don’t have it anymore. Some guy took it.”

Serge’s voice was understated: “Where’s my money?”

“I told you, we don’t know where it is.”

Serge didn’t say a word. He got down on the floor and sat cross-legged next to the men.

“What are you going to do to us?”

Serge raised a single finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Slowly and with deliberate theatrics, he removed items from the toolbox and set them on the floor. The men lifted their heads the best they could to get a better look. A roll of metal wire, tubes of commercial solvents and epoxies, arsenical soap, gauze, highly elastic putty, steel wool and quick-dissolve surgical suture. The three faces went white. One of the thieves fainted, and his head hit the wooden floor with the clack of a billiard break.

Serge went into the kitchen and came back with two buckets and a large plastic mat, which he unrolled on the floor. He turned on a small electric air compressor.

Serge went to work with diligence, industry and master craftsmanship. Before the hour had passed, Serge had been told every single detail the thieves could remember about the money, and a few more they made up. Serge knew they weren’t holding back. But it was too late; nothing could stop him once he was into one of his hobbies.

“Ever been to Ocklawaha?” Serge asked as he turned off the compressor.

Wide stares in response.

“You haven’t? You don’t know what you’re missing-gotta go sometime. It’s just up the road a ways between Orlando and Ocala. Famous four-hour shootout. That’s where Hoover ’s G-men finally tracked down the notorious Ma Barker Gang. They raided their empty hideout in Chicago and found a map of Florida with Lake Weir circled. On January sixteenth, 1935, they surrounded the house. A two-story antique wooden place with a traditional cracker porch. It was a crime in itself that they put three thousand bullets in it. Afterward, they found Fred Barker and Machine Gun Kate dead, and the locals later sold postcards showing their bodies at the morgue.”

The car thieves continued staring in blank terror as Serge put down a tube of epoxy and picked up the staple gun. “What?” said Serge. “None of this registers? And you call yourselves criminals?”

Serge sighed in disappointment as he made a deft cross-stitch with the suture. “What about Giuseppe Zangara? Ring any bells?”

Still nothing.

Serge threw up his arms. “If we can’t remember our own history, what kind of state will we have to live in?”

He began rubbing with the arsenical soap. “Okay, but I’m only going to go through this once, so listen up. It was 1933, the place: Miami. Zangara was an unemployed bricklayer who had a chronic stomachache that he blamed on capitalism. To me, it sounds like he had some other problems, if you get my drift. Anyway, on Monday, February thirteenth, Giuseppe buys a pistol in a pawnshop. He’s just about to leave for Washington to shoot Hoover when he hears FDR is planning to visit Florida, so he decides to save gas money. President-elect Roosevelt is giving a speech in Miami ’s Bayfront Park. Giuseppe is only five feet tall, and he gets a chair to stand on. Suddenly he yells, ‘Too many people are starving to death,’ and opens fire. But he picked a crappy chair to stand on, and it wobbled. He missed Roosevelt and hit five other people, mortally wounding Chicago mayor Anton Cermak…”

Serge made a final suture stitch and sat back to admire. “There!” he said, and smiled proudly at the three men, seeking approval.

Four hours later, the trio lay on the floor, quiet, still alive for a little while longer. Three disbelieving mouths frozen open.

One of the thieves had a late resurgence of survival instinct, and he began to twitch on the floor.

“See, now you’re wiggling around! Ruining all my work!” Serge let out a frustrated sigh and picked up the staple gun again.