The Stingray Shuffle

TIM DORSEY

The fifth book in the Serge Storms series

Copyright © 2003 by Tim Dorsey

For Kerry, Chris and Dinah

The only reason for time is so

that everything doesn’t happen at once.

— ALBERT EINSTEIN

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

— GROUCHO MARX

PROLOGUE

Uh-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD.

That can be the only explanation.

It’s been nonstop hallucinations. Which normally I don’t mind, but you wouldn’t believe how it complicates trying to cross U.S. 1 against heavy traffic. I must have stepped off the curb and headed back about fifty times now. I think I’m in the Florida Keys.

I keep slapping the side of my head to make the visions stop, but it only changes the picture, like a slide projector.

Slap!

Carjackings, exploitation of the elderly, cigarette boats running from the Coast Guard, melanoma, tar balls, deed restrictions, beefy mosquitoes that crack windshields, Colombian shoot-outs, Cuban boycotts, Mexican standoffs, rampant-growth speculators, offshore-drilling lobbyists, cheap rum, cheaper motels, crack vials, condoms, mouse ears, William Kennedy Smith, Phillip Michael Thomas, chicken wing restaurants featuring women’s breasts…

Slap!

Shark attacks in two feet of water, barracuda jumping into boats and biting people, alligators roaming backyards and eating poodles named Muffins, college boys named Bo funneling beers on the beach and trampling sand castles and making children cry, broken-down cruise ships with decks full of irritable people from Michigan in puffy orange life preservers, the lottery won by a pool of 23 office workers who quit their jobs to become down-and-out junkies, trained seals playing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on bicycle horns…

Slap!

There. The hallucinations have stopped. I’m in the dark, now. I’m weightless, too. That’s much better.

Whoops. Spoke too soon. The weightlessness is giving way. I’m starting to drop. Faster and faster. Free-falling toward a pinpoint of light. The light grows bigger, spinning off bright curved red swirls as I hurtle down this spiral chute like some hokey special effect from The Twilight Zone, or Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo; I’m helpless, this little black silhouette of a man, arms and legs flailing in a blizzard of chads, plummeting toward a haunting psychedelic pinwheel with the floating head of Jeb Bush in the middle…

The spinning has stopped. I’m coming out of the tunnel now. The LSD feels like it’s wearing off, but the sky is still ten different colors and the clouds are whispering about me. Just ignore them or you’ll end up doing something odd that will attract attention. Are we hungry? My skin is unusually sheen and agreeable. I want to raise my voice and croon the opus of life!… I can’t think with all the people in my head talking at once! I need to call the room to order…. That’s better. Next item of business? Yes, you in the back with your hand raised…. Why are we wandering in the middle of busy traffic?… Good question. How did we get out here? I thought we were still on the sidewalk… Well, what’s done is done. Cars are whizzing by, so work with it… Try to get to the opposite curb. So what if that truck is coming? He’ll stop because I will it. I am the master of time, space and dimension. Here we go: to the curb… See? The truck stopped. He hit that car when he swerved around me, but I’ve made my point… Where’s that music coming from? It’s The Doors, “People Are Strange.” No kidding. The sound… it’s coming from the sun. God’s playing it on his personal hydrogen jukebox, the Big Puff Daddy-G layin’ down the master moral rap and spinnin’ the eternal hits, If there’s a rock ’n’ roll heaven, you know they got a hulluva band!… Oh, no, that horrible song is now stuck in my head. I must kill myself immediately. Damn that Lenny!… Wait. Who’s Lenny? For that matter, who am I? Why can’t I remember my name? And what the heck is this strange outfit I’m wearing? A royal blue jumpsuit with a NASA patch on the shoulder. Am I an astronaut?… Now I’m getting a shooting pain. It’s coming from my forehead. What’s this I feel up here? That’s some huge knot you got on your dome — better have a doctor look at it. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember who I am… When in doubt, check your license. Let’s see, is your wallet in this pocket? No, not there, but… what’s this? A prescription bottle? Empty. Wow, that’s some serious medication on the label; the guy who’s taking this is one real sick-o…. Hold a sec. Could this be yours? The first name on the label is “Serge,” but the last name has worn off. And the refill date was over a month ago…. Now it’s starting to add up. This isn’t LSD after all. It’s not even a drug experience. That’s the whole problem — you haven’t taken your drugs…. Uh-oh, hallucinations again; the ground is starting to move. The road is rumbling and rising up. This is no ordinary street. It’s a bridge. A drawbridge. Only one thing to do: hurry up and get to the lip of the span and hang on by hooking your arms through the grating. That way, when the span rises, you’ll be way up at the top, above the hubbub, alone with some space to think and a clear view of the situation…. Here we go, up, up, getting pretty high now, nice panorama. Wish I had my camera. Why are all those people down there pointing at me? And who called the cops? Here they come again, drawing their guns as usual. Now I’ll have to dive in the water for my getaway. All this stress can’t be good…

Two weeks later.

An unconscious man in a blue astronaut jumpsuit lies facedown on the shore of a breezy mangrove island in the Gulf Stream. He’s coming around, talking in his sleep. Jeannie! Come out of that bottle right now! His eyelids flutter in the sand, squinting at the bright sunlight. He raises his head and sees hundreds of eyes staring back at him.

They’re still here. What do they want from me?

Serge stands up.

“I told you. I’m having memory problems. I can only recall textbook history, plus some stuff about a briefcase and a recent trip I took, but I can’t piece it all together yet.”

The eyes silently stay on him. Some blink.

“Okay, okay. One more lesson.”

Serge steps forward in the sand and spreads his arms in an encompassing gesture:

“Railroads had a seismic impact on the development of Florida, beginning with the fabled East Coast line slashing its way through the swamps a hundred years ago, opening up the bottom half of the state, an unforgiving no-man’s-land of eccentric pioneers, cranky Indians and alcoholic hermits…”

Serge. Serge A. Storms. Wiry, intense, unhinged, standing on a beach in the lower Florida Keys, leaves rustling in the salt wind, surrounded by his students, hundreds of small attentive monkeys.

“…Then the railroads unveiled the fancy deco streamliners of the 1930s, introducing the northerners to frost-free vacations and society-page beach sex in Palm Beach…”

Serge stops speaking. One of the monkeys in back is chattering.

“Buttons, please, I’m trying to talk up here.”

The monkey stops chattering.

“Thank you…. As I was saying, the histories of the railroads and Florida are inextricably entwined. By the end of the twentieth century, Amtrak had unveiled its latest high-speed express train, The Silver Stingray, for its New York-to-Miami route. The train didn’t have the same seminal influence on the state as its predecessors, but it played a crucial role in one of the most infamous mysteries in the annals of Florida crime. The missing briefcase with five million dollars. Remember? The one with the curse I was telling you about?”

The monkeys stare.

“It was a Wednesday. The Silver Stingray clacked down the tracks on its regular afternoon run. The train entered a tunnel near a phosphate mine, and everything went dark. The train came out of the tunnel. Someone screamed! A body lay in the aisle of the dining car!”

Serge lies down in front of the monkeys for effect.

“The victim wore a blue velvet tuxedo and ruffled shirt, one of the lounge reptiles entertaining the tourists on the trip south. It was murder! All the passengers eyed each other suspiciously. Who was the killer? Was it one of the other performers in velvet tuxedos? The blues singer from New York? The Russian? The Jamaican? Or perhaps one of the women in that book club? And why? Did it have something to do with the five million dollars rumored to be on board?…”

Serge stops talking again, his hyperkeen senses twitching. He jumps up and runs to the edge of a mangrove outcropping, peering out at the ocean through the branches.

“A boat’s coming! Battle formations!…”

1

The race to invent the first mechanical orange harvester was on.

Dreams and designs for a mechanized citrus picker had been bandied about since the 1940s. But back then, it was science fiction stuff. Anyone who seriously thought it could be done was a laughingstock.

Near the turn of the millennium, Florida’s postcard orange groves had exploded into a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Meanwhile, technology had marched. Nobody was laughing anymore. A functional harvester seemed just around the corner. The state’s top citrus barons were now so rich that they had almost everything they wanted. They were unhappy. They wanted to be as rich as oil people. A mechanical picker would do that.

Research teams from various nations labored at a feverish pace. Work proceeded in secret, along several different lines. The Swedes were considered to have the lead, advancing the spike-and-drum technique. The Germans placed their bets on hundreds of mechanical arms with spring-action picking fingers. The French used a shake-and-catch design with hydraulic trunk-grabber and retractable manganese skirt. The Japanese were working on something called the Centipede, which nobody knew anything about.

All four teams soon had models up and running. That was the easy part. The last big hurdle was efficiency. Every prototype up to now had either left too many oranges on the tree or squashed too much in the process. They had long since mastered the proverbial low-hanging fruit. The real test now was clean canopy penetration. The barons set a tolerance standard of ninety-five percent. The teams redoubled their efforts, improving performance, everyone getting closer. These were exciting times.

In January, the Japanese were rumored to have caught the Swedes. Competition became brutal. Engineers went without sleep, safety steps eliminated. Hammering could be heard from the German lab late into the night. The French argued. It was anyone’s ball game.

Then, on a sunny spring day in 1997, word went out like a cannon shot. A prototype was ready. Dozens of limos quietly converged on a remote grove near the center of the state. Nothing but orange trees in all directions. There was a VIP tent, paddle fans, champagne on ice.

Just outside the tent, at the edge of the trees, a huge object sat under a white sheet. The German team approached the podium. Ludwig, head of design, leaned to the microphone.

“Behold! Der Shleimerhocken GroveMaster Z500.”

Someone yanked the sheet, which flew off the device and fluttered to the ground.

The audience gasped.

A large, intricate cylinder imbedded with innumerable jointed metal arms and razor claws fanning in all directions, the gene splice of a carnival ride and Edward Scissorhands. A German flag on the side. The anticipation was unbearable. Ludwig walked to the GroveMaster, dramatically throwing a switch on the side, and it fell over, crushing him.

The Germans had a drawing board, and they went back to it. Work continued tirelessly. Various models and upgrades rolled out. Limos driving into the groves every few months, the barons increasingly bitter, the parade of failures reminiscent of newsreel footage from the early days of aviation — the plane with the collapsing stack of eight wings, the bouncing helicopter-car, the man in bat wings jumping off a suspension bridge and flying like an anvil, the guy with ice skates and a rocket pack, who had to be extinguished with snowballs.

Word leaked out, bad press. Testing was moved to Clermont, for historic symbolism. The demonstration site was in the shadow of the world-famous Citrus Tower, built in 1955 in the rich-soiled, rolling grovelands where it had all started. At least they used to be grovelands. Most of it had been bulldozed for sprawling developments of identical homes and screened-in pools built on top of each other. It was enough to make a baron cry. They needed a harvester now!

The French were next. “Gentlemen — I give you zee Terminator.”

The sheet flew off.

A War of the Worlds contraption stood on spider legs. A man named Jacques picked up a radio control box and pressed a button. Yellow lights that looked like eyes came on. The device began chugging. Smoke puffed out a chimney. Jacques turned a dial. The machine chugged faster, springing on the spider legs. He turned the dial some more. The legs started clomping up and down, slowly at first, then at a brisk, running-in-place clip.

Jacques moved the joystick on his box. The device began running. The wrong way. It ripped up the spectator tent, flattening chairs and upending the punch bowl. Barons and politicians scattered through the groves, the Terminator running amok. It cornered one of the barons against a Cyclone fence and seized him around the waist with the hydraulic trunk-grabber, lifting him off the ground and squeezing until he squirted stuff. Then it shook the limp body a few times before dropping it in the self-cleaning metal skirt.

Talk about a setback. But there were others. A new and improved GroveMaster exploded in the German lab, unpleasant news photos of men fleeing in burning lab coats. A militant migrant group dynamited the Swedish lab. Then the French blew up their own lab with cooking sherry. But so close! Can’t stop now. Work continued through the winter with smudge pots, icicles on the trees. Toes had to be amputated. Finally, spring again.

The Japanese were ready.

The barons had decided to move to the top of the Citrus Tower and watch through binoculars.

“Gentlemen — the Centipede!”

The sheet came off.

The Centipede ripped down three rows of trees, then left the grove and took off in the direction of town. The barons’ binoculars swung around to the west side of the tower, toward the distant screams.

The resulting public outcry got the state into the act.

The foreign labs were closed down and a domestic contractor brought in. The contractor was well connected with state government. It had previously only stamped out interstate highway signs at twenty thousand dollars each but was able to convince officials that the technology was interchangeable. An appointed board quickly approved the no-bid contract. Work resumed.

The accidents stopped but not progress. It went backward. Picking efficiency dropped below sixty percent for the first time since 1980. Everything got behind schedule. Cost overruns, redundant parts, the device mutating into unworkable configurations without apparent design or goal. But political contributions were up, and the Florida Robotic Harvester program was considered a smashing success.

The barons were furious. They called in their own markers, and the state met behind closed doors to strike a compromise. It would offer the contractor an incentive. A harvester would be worth tens of millions of dollars a year to a private inventor. If it was made by a contractor working for the taxpayers, however, those rights reverted to the state. The deal: develop a functional prototype by the fall and keep all proceeds for the first three years. It was a fifty-million-dollar carrot. Everyone agreed.

Roscoe Weege was president and owner of Signs of the Times, the traffic sign company that was busy undeveloping the state’s robotic citrus picker.

Roscoe was convinced the project was impossible, and he told the state he had complete faith in his workers. Roscoe’s plan was to minimize costs, jack up expenses, and milk the thing as long as he could. What did he care? The quarter million a year in R&D seed money was chump change. Just keep up the appearance of work. He hired the remnants of the German team, ninety-year-old scientists who had come to the country in 1945 after the Americans beat the Russians to Peenemünde and scooped up all the best scientists. The Russians took the next bunch. Those that neither country wanted paid their own way to the States and now worked on the harvester. They gladly accepted Roscoe’s fifty percent pay cut because it was that or face war trials at The Hague.

The harvester research was the redheaded stepchild at Roscoe’s company. The real money was in his other contract with the Florida department of agriculture — an exclusive arrangement to provide the state with sterile Medflies in the event of another citrus infestation. Roscoe had studied the equation from ten different angles before offering the bribes.

The Medfly — now that was an organism Roscoe could respect. Short for Mediterranean fruit fly, the Medfly was a highly destructive, ambitiously reproducing little life bundle whose sole mission was to inject oranges and grapefruit with its eggs, which hatched and gorged themselves on the host fruit until they broke out and laid their own eggs. The buggers multiplied so fast that discovery of a single fly always set off statewide panic. That’s why the groves were saturated with Medfly monitors, essentially the old Shell No-Pest Strip, little boxes with openings and sticky pieces of cardboard inside. In the mid-nineties, three Medflies were found in one of the monitors in western Florida, and the state immediately blanketed ten counties with a cheap insecticide that headed off the outbreak and gave people diarrhea and short tempers.

Roscoe was a visionary. He knew people wouldn’t put up with that for long. There was another option to deal with Medflies, and even better, it was expensive. Sterile Medflies. The insects had ultrabrief life spans. Drop, say, a million sterile flies — outnumber the virile guys a hundred to one — and math would take care of the rest. Roscoe invited the key people to lunch, wrote the right checks, and soon he had his exclusive contract. All Roscoe had to do now was wait for the next outbreak and the tide of public opinion to come in.

That was two years ago. Roscoe had grown weary. His contract was set to expire, and others were now interested. Roscoe went to the scariest bar in rural Polk County, The Pit, the kind of place where people hire guys to kill their spouses. Roscoe began drinking with a man named Lucky. Lucky had killed two people, one of each, a husband and a wife. Different couples.

Roscoe said he had a proposition.

“It’ll cost ya.”

Roscoe said that wasn’t a problem — now here’s what he wanted done….

“There’s got to be a catch,” said Lucky. “Where’s the risk? The difficulty?”

“That’s just it. There is none.”

“Something’s not right,” said Lucky.

“Will a thousand-dollar retainer be enough?”

Lucky wrote his number on a napkin.

Roscoe got up one morning the following week and waited by the mailbox. The truck arrived. “Morning, Mr. Weege.”

“Morning, Rex.”

The mailman handed Roscoe a stack of letters. Roscoe ran inside and spread them out on his rolltop desk. There it was, an envelope postmarked Venezuela. He slit the flap with a Wallace in ’72 letter opener and removed a single piece of stationery. Three dead Medflies Scotch-taped to the front. He dialed Lucky’s number.

Midnight. Lucky sat in the dark cab of his four-by-four pickup, listening to the radio and drinking white lightning. Polk was strange radio country. The most enlightened station was static. Lucky turned the dial through various programs about them queers, them exterterrestials, fishin’, shootin’, huntin’, prayin’ in classrooms and can’t-miss investin’.

Lucky stubbed out a Winston. “Let’s get this over with.”

He climbed down from the pickup and headed into a dark orange grove.

Two days later, Roscoe heard what he’d been waiting for on the evening news.

“…State agriculture officials tonight announced the discovery of three Medflies in a Polk County citrus grove. Officials are meeting at this hour at the capitol in Tallahassee to decide on the appropriate response, but a well-placed source tells us aerial spraying is out, and as many as a million sterile flies may be released…”

Roscoe’s phone rang before the report was over. It was Tallahassee.

“Yes, sir, I just saw it on the news…. No problem…. I’ll have ’em ready.”

Roscoe hung up and poured a drink. “This is the easiest money I’ll ever make.”

It was more than easy. Breeding Medflies — well, try not to breed them. A sealed warehouse, two flies, a bunch of rotten fruit, and you’re in business. The expensive step was the sterilization, which was why Roscoe skipped it.

The C-130 transport plane flew over the heart of Florida citrus country at three thousand feet. Roscoe was in the back of the cargo bay, supervising workers with gloves, goggles and gas masks as they released the first flies from special bio tanks. Bright light and a whispering roar filled the plane as the aft cargo door slowly lowered, the insects momentarily swirling around in a dense swarm before taking to the sky.

Roscoe laughed. The state had started with only three flies, and those were already dead. But look out below! A million horny flies on the way!

The copilot came back in the bay and yelled over the engines that someone wanted to talk to Roscoe on the radio. The workers cracked open another tank of flies as Roscoe headed for the cockpit.

It was one of the state agriculture officials: “I just heard the good news.”

“Yes, we’re releasing the flies now,” Roscoe said into the microphone.

“No, I’m not talking about that,” said the official. “It’s the Germans. They’ve done it!”

“Done what?”

“The mechanical picker. It works! We tested it this morning. Mr. Weege, you’re on your way to becoming an extremely rich man!”

The microphone bounced on the cockpit floor. “Hello? Hello?”

The workers releasing flies looked up when they heard the shouting.

“Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Roscoe, running through the cargo hold, snatching at the air, trying to catch flies with his bare hands, hysterical, still running, right out the back of the plane and into the wild blue.

2

It was another perfect chamber of commerce morning in Miami Beach. The sewage slick had cleared up, and the last of the ninety-two Haitians who swam ashore after the daily capsizing were apprehended in the Clark Gable booth at Wolfie’s deli before most people knew what was happening.

The sun was high and strong, beach worshipers covered the sand in European swimsuits, and fashion photographers barked instructions at malnourished girls. “Turn!… Pout!… Look like you’re on heroin!”

An inbound 747 appeared over the Atlantic, its passengers getting their first glimpse of land after the six-hour flight from the Continent. The jumbo jet’s shadow crossed the beach and the futuristic lifeguard shacks and the art deco hotels on Collins Avenue.

All up and down Collins, people lounged on sidewalk patios. They shielded their eyes and looked up at the jet. The new café society, drinking espresso, speaking French and German, smoking Turkish cigarettes without guilt. There was a traffic dispute. Frat brothers in a Jeep that said No Fear! began shouting profanities at another car. Men in linen suits got out of a Mercedes, dragged one punk from the Jeep and flamenco-danced on his crotch until they heard sirens and fled. Nobody saw anything. Chicness resumed.

Five distinguished women in their late forties sat on the patio in front of the Hotel Nash. Tasteful single-piece bathing suits, sunglasses, wide-brimmed straw hats. A pitcher of mimosas and five cell phones on the table, next to five books. It was the quarterly literary field trip of their reading club, Books, Booze and Broads. The name was a whimsical joke on themselves; they were trying to break out of obsessively responsible lives now that all their children had left for college. Two cell phones rang.

The five books on the table were all the same paperback, The Stingray Shuffle, by Ralph Krunkleton. The women had been on a Krunkleton kick lately.

“I think this was his best book yet,” said the Latino businesswoman, getting off the phone.

“Me, too,” said the redheaded commercial artist. “All those crazy orange harvesting machines.”

“I loved how Roscoe ran right out the back of the plane with the Medflies,” added the attorney with cropped blond hair. “Never saw that coming.”

“Wait till you find out what happens to the five million dollars,” said the petite veterinarian.

“Shhh! Don’t tell me! I’m not there yet!” said the self-assured aerospace engineer, flagging down a waiter for another pitcher.

The club went way back, started quite by accident in 1971. It was a Monday morning in July, an office waiting room filled with crying, screaming children who occasionally broke free and had to be chased. They were in Gainesville, the middle of Florida far from ocean breezes, and the room was muggy with the musk of spent diapers. The air conditioner didn’t work, and a single electric fan whirred unevenly atop a crumpled stack of Southern Bride.

A clerk slid open the reception window and looked at her clipboard. “Samantha Bridges?”

A tall, young blonde stood up, an infant strapped to her chest and a two-year-old girl by the hand. She capped a bottle of milk and stuck it in a pocket in her demin overalls.

There was a short discussion at the window. The clerk shook her head.

“Sorry? What do you mean you can only send him another letter?” Samantha’s voice was beyond loud, but the other women didn’t seem to notice, bouncing tots on knees. Another day in paradise at the office of child-support enforcement.

“I waited two hours for you to tell me you can only send another letter? He’s ignored all the others!”

The clerk told Sam that if she would have a seat, a supervisor would get to her when he was free.

“In another two hours?”

Samantha went back to her chair and sat down and got out the milk bottle.

“Mommy…” said the two-year-old at her side.

“What is it, dear?”

“Mommy…” Her mouth was still open, but she had stopped talking.

Samantha patted the infant on her chest, trying to get a burp. “What? What is it, dear? Are you okay?”

The girl threw up in Samantha’s lap. Samantha looked down, and the infant regurgitated on her shoulder. A dozen children wailed all around. Her checking account was empty.

Samantha raised her eyes to a blank spot on the concrete wall and tried to imagine an afternoon at the beach.

The other women in the waiting room had all been there. Each had that hardened, dazed, lack-of-sleep look usually only seen on men at the end of extended military campaigns. One of the women had once dated a Navy SEAL, who told her about going through some kind of grueling test called Hell Week. One week, she thought. Big deal. If you really want to toughen them up, have ’em trade places with single moms.

Samantha returned to her apartment on the campus of the University of Florida, where she lived in a wing of married student housing nicknamed “divorced student housing.” There were day classes and night waitress shifts and midnight feedings and more trips to the support office. Summer became fall. Samantha began recognizing some of the regulars from the support office at her apartment building. They became a group. Teresa Wellcraft, Rebecca Shoals, Maria Conchita, Paige Turner. And Samantha — everyone called her Sam. She was the tallest, a full six feet, blond hair in a semishort soccer-mom cut. She had also played soccer. And lacrosse. And basketball. And batted cleanup on her high school softball team. That’s where the self-reliance came from. Sam viewed the world in a resting state of unfairness and it was up to nobody but her to change it. She never let anything pass. Rudeness, bad service, Sam was all over you. She favored sweatpants and sports bras and majored in law enforcement.

Paige was the smallest, and she let everything pass, and Sam was always stepping in and defending her, which only embarrassed Paige all the more.

“Please, let’s just go,” said Paige. “It’s no big deal.”

“No! Not until this fucker honors his competitor’s coupons!”

Paige had grown up inland, and her Okeechobee twang was mistaken for southern. She was the classic girl next door, big brown eyes and no hint of guile. Her hair was always in a ponytail. She would have been more comfortable never saying a word and not joining the group, except Sam pressured her, and she felt more comfortable acquiescing. She wanted to be a veterinarian.

Maria filled the conversation voids left by Paige and then some. She cared about people and wanted to let every one of them know it. At length. Before the pregnancy, she had volunteered at hospices for the terminally ill, where lonely residents pretended they were asleep when they saw her coming. Her personal passion was clothes, and her fashion sense was that unfortunate combination of wrong and bold. She also had trouble with makeup, rooted in her philosophy that more is more. She was big and gangly, almost as tall as Sam. She had flunked out of fashion design and went on to probation in graphic design.

Rebecca had the artistic side that so tragically eluded Maria. She excelled at painting and could pick up a musical instrument for the first time and become competent in an hour. She was the reluctant beauty, the one in the group the men hit on the most. Medium height but curvy, with nice cheekbones, bedroom eyes and the kind of exquisite auburn hair with natural body that caused other women to make up things about her behind her back. It didn’t bother Rebecca. Nothing did. She was the flower child of the group, barefoot, daisies in the hair, undeclared major.

Teresa was the brain, Phi Beta Kappa, insanely organized with cross-indexed filing systems and a gravity-well memory. She used big words. Propinquity. Weltschmerz. But all that was overshadowed. There was no other way to say it. Teresa was a fatso. She also bit her nails to the skin, yo-yo dieted, checked constantly to see if the stove was off and quit smoking every week. She had a knack for tinkering, which led to her double major in chemical and electrical engineering. For Christmas she installed dimmer switches in everyone’s apartment.

The women quickly discovered they had several things in common. Number one, assholes in their pasts. Number two, a surplus of guts. Not man guts, where you charge a pillbox, dive in a raging river or punch a biker outside the Do Drop In. This was woman guts. Quietly enduring when there is no acceptable alternative but to endure.

Third thing in common: They loved to make chili, which they did every Friday, seven sharp. The weekly cook-off was the best thing they could have done. Being a single mom at a major football university was the formula for clinical depression, like being in prison with a view of Bourbon Street. Marking time until the next get-together made it all seem a little less hopeless.

The fourth thing in common, however, that was the primary reason these five particular women bonded so tightly. They agreed never to talk about it. Ever.

After a month of chili Fridays, the book club was born of necessity. They loved reading, but there was no time with the kids, not even for literature classes, which forced them to pool notes.

“Who knows what Moby-Dick’s about?”

“Man wants to kill fish. Fish kills man. Lots of details about boats.”

“The Jungle?”

“The rich are mean.”

“Invisible Man?”

“White people are mean.”

“Clockwork Orange?”

“The British are mean.”

“Brave New World?”

“The future is scary and weird.”

“Naked Lunch?”

“Junkies are scary and weird.”

“The Sun Also Rises?”

“We should be in Paris.”

The remaining semesters dragged out like a stretch for robbery, but they all somehow managed to stumble through to graduation, where they hugged and took a hundred snapshots and swore they’d always stay in touch and promptly lost contact for twenty-five years.

3

The Sunshine State has a mind-bending concentration of “cash-only” businesses. These aren’t your shade-tree auto detailers or flea market kiosks selling houseplants and nunchuks. These involve amounts of currency that require luggage.

On a day near the end of 1997, there were two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three cash-crammed briefcases floating around the shallow-grave landscape of Florida. Some were under the seats of limousines, some were underwater in ditched airplanes, some were handcuffed to South American couriers flying up to buy Lotto tickets, some were clutched to the chests of perspiring men in street clothes sprinting down the beach, ducking bullets.

One briefcase was different from the others. Really superstitious people said it was cursed, just because everyone who ever touched it wasn’t breathing anymore. Whatever you believed, it was still filled with five million dollars.

The briefcase, a silver Halliburton, now sat between two patio loungers next to a motel pool in Cocoa Beach. A pair of men lay on their backs and sipped drinks from coconuts.

Paul and Jethro had plenty of money in the briefcase but not a valid credit card between them. Which meant no reputable inn would give them a room, so they paid cash through a slot in inch-thick Plexiglas at the Orbit Motel.

The old Honduran night manager had made change without ambition. The motel office contained an empty water cooler and the smell of burnt coffee but no coffeemaker; two molded plastic chairs, one with a puddle of something and the other holding a sleeping man in a plain T-shirt who cursed as he dreamed. On the wall a framed poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch. “Hang in there.”

Paul fidgeted as he waited for his change. He straightened a stack of travel guides with space shuttles on the cover. He fiddled with a display of business cards for taxi companies, Chinese restaurants, bail bondsmen, someone who called himself “The King of Wings,” and a fishing guide named Skip.

Paul took his change and leaned toward the slot. “Can we get a wake-up call for eight?”

“I’ll get the concierge right on it,” said the manager, not looking up from his Daily Racing Form.

Paul held one of the travel guides up to the Plexiglas. “Are these free?”

“Knock yourself out.”

The Orbit was not rated in any of the travel guides. Not even listed. Just as well. The landscaping was long dead, replaced by broken glass, cigarette butts and dejection. The water in the pool had turned the color of iced tea and occasionally fizzed. The 1960s neon sign out front featured a mechanical space capsule that used to circle Earth, but it had shorted out and caught fire over Katmandu.

Until the previous Thursday, Paul and Jethro had been just like any other law-abiding citizens wandering the state fat and happy. That’s when Hurricane Rolando-berto came ashore in Tampa Bay. One of the state’s two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three briefcases was in the path of the hurricane, which threw it up for grabs like a tipped basketball.

At the time, Paul and Jethro had been staying at another quality lodge, the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. The night before the big blow, Jethro had seen someone creeping around in the dark behind the inn, constantly looking over his shoulder, hiding something. But so was everyone else, and Jethro didn’t give it much thought.

It began to nag at him during the storm. The next morning Paul and Jethro went down to the shore and joined the mob that assembles after every hurricane to collect prehistoric shark teeth and washed-up guns. The pair scanned the ground as they climbed through seaweed-draped power lines and uprooted trees.

“Whatever it was, he wanted to make sure nobody would find it,” said Jethro. “I swear it was right around here somewhere…. Wait! Look! There’s something shiny down there! Help me move these bales of dope.”

Paul and Jethro popped the latches on the briefcase and raised the lid. They slammed it quickly. Their hearts raced, eyes glancing around to see if anyone had been watching.

Decision time. This wasn’t Girl Scout cookie money. People would come looking for it. They should probably go to the police. Yes, that was the only right thing. How could they even think of doing anything else? They might even be allowed to keep it. Maybe get a reward, too. On the other hand, they’d have to report it to the IRS.

Paul started counting the money as they fled on Interstate 4. They were in a baby-blue ’74 Malibu, speeding across Florida to catch a cruise ship for the Bahamas. The law allows someone to take up to fifteen thousand in cash across the border. Paul passed that threshold thumbing through his second pack of hundreds, practically the whole briefcase to go. Inbound Customs was tough. But outbound on a cruise to Nassau was another matter. You didn’t even need a passport.

Paul and Jethro ran through the ship terminal at Port Canaveral and up to the ticket window. The next cruise left on Friday. It was Wednesday. Nothing to do but wait and freak out. They decided to keep the briefcase with them wherever they went — walking along the shore, around the pool, down the pier, jumping at every sound. They needed liquor.

The Orbit Motel did not have a bar or restaurant, only a bank of vending machines dispensing Ho-Hos and French ticklers. So Paul and Jethro made a series of trips up the beach to the many conveniently spaced tiki bars that now outnumber pay phones in Florida. They returned to the pool patio and used straws to suck pink froth out of coconuts with paper umbrellas. Six empty coconuts sat beside each lounger. The Orbit Motel was not the kind of place to beat back a panic attack. It had that tropical OK Corral glow, a washed-out dustiness of light and color, the air hot, still and silent, except for occasional gusts that pushed a brown palm frond across the concrete with an unpleasant scratching sound. The ice machine had been dusted for prints. Two men came out of a room carrying a large TV and an unbolted window air-conditioning unit, got in a Firebird with no tag and sped off.

Paul and Jethro were an unusual alliance. Jethro was president of the Hemingway look-alike club in Pensacola. Paul was afraid of people and ran a detective agency. He was Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.

“What was that?” said Paul.

“Just a car door.”

Paul wiped his forehead. “I’m not gonna make it.”

“Courage is the ability to suspend the imagination.”

“What?”

“We need to keep our minds occupied. Hand me the travel guide.”

Johnny Vegas was a golf pro.

As of Thursday.

Vegas’s tanned, six-foot frame rippled in all the right places beneath a tight mercerized-cotton shirt, stretched over broad, firm shoulders and tapered to a trim waist under an alligator belt. He had that squinty Latin thing going that drove women wild. His black hair was longish and currently organized for the Antonio Banderas effect.

Johnny had decided to begin teaching golf when he met his first pupil. Her name was Bianca, a tall Mediterranean model in town shooting a swimsuit photo spread for truck tires. Bianca broke golf etiquette by wearing a bikini to her first lesson. That made them even. Johnny didn’t play golf.

Johnny had met Bianca an hour earlier on the beach behind the Orbit Motel. He was standing near the shore wearing two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, holding a surfboard. Johnny was standing on the beach with the surfboard because he didn’t know how to surf. Bianca walked up.

“You surf?” she asked coyly, cocking her hip.

“Of course not,” Johnny said with playful sarcasm. “I just stand here with this board.”

Johnny didn’t have a job. Didn’t have to. The scion of an insurance mogul, Johnny had a bulging trust fund and the kind of lifestyle not seen since Joe Namath wore mink on Broadway. He also had a secret. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but Johnny had never gone all the way. Oh, he wanted to. So did the women. It had just never worked out. It was always something, some kind of bizarre interruption. Johnny had learned the hard way that if getting a woman in the mood was an art, then keeping her there was a fucking science — the whole fleeting phenomenon more rare, delicate and unstable than suspending a weapons-grade uranium isotope at the implosion point. The least little vibration and everything tumbles. Or detonates.

That was Johnny’s love life. Hotel fire, civil unrest, military jet crash, ammonia cloud evacuation, George Clooney sighting. In addition to being a trust-fund playboy, he was Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.

A few months earlier in Miami, Johnny had picked up a Cuban dreamboat with a perfectly positioned beauty mark that made him swallow his own tongue. They had met at a trendy salsa club in Little Havana and were back at her place within the hour. She grinned naughtily as she gave Johnny a private dance, peeling off her clothes piece by piece, tossing them aside with aplomb. Johnny sat at the foot of the bed, ripping open his trousers like a stubborn bag of potato chips.

She finally flung her panties over her shoulder and sauntered toward Johnny. “You’ve been a bad boy.”

That’s when they heard the sirens. Flashing blue and red lights filled the bedroom. The woman ran to the window.

“What is it?” asked Johnny.

“I can’t believe it!” she yelled. “It’s the feds! They’re taking Elián!”

“Who’s Elián?”

“This is so unfair!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go. I need to be alone tonight.”

Seven months later, Johnny was back at the plate. He had landed a drop-dead attorney in a serious pantsuit and glasses, her brunette hair in a no-nonsense bun. She strolled up to him at a political cocktail party, slipped off her glasses and shook down her hair. “What do you say we blow this Popsicle stand?”

A half hour later, Johnny was lying in bed on his back, the woman climbing aboard.

The TV was on. Tom Brokaw. The woman heard something and looked over.

“What?” she yelled. “They’re taking Florida away from Gore? They can’t do that!”

She jumped out of bed and turned up the volume with the remote.

“What is it?” asked Johnny.

“Shhhhh!”

So when Johnny met Bianca on the beach behind the Orbit Motel, he had just one question.

“Do you read newspapers?”

“Read what?”

They headed for the golf course across A1A from the motel, where Johnny said he was the club pro. That impressed her; she said she had always wanted to learn golf.

On the third hole, the ball was three feet from the cup. Johnny interlaced his fingers on the putter’s leather grip. Then he handed her the club. “Now you try.”

She pretended to be all thumbs. “I just can’t do it. Could you show me again?”

Johnny stepped up from behind and wrapped his taut arms around her, repositioning Bianca’s hands on the shaft. She turned toward his biceps. “Wow, you’re pretty strong. I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.”

“Just stroke through the ball,” said Johnny. “One fluid motion.”

Bianca tapped the ball with the putter.

“Darn! It hit the windmill again. I just can’t play this game.”

“Let’s try the dinosaur hole,” said Johnny. “That’s an easy one.”

“It’s not golf,” said Bianca, pooching out her bottom lip, then staring off.

“What is it?”

“I have this problem…. It’s medical.”

Just my luck, thought Johnny. Probably a week to live. On the other hand, a week’s a week.

“What kind of problem?”

“It’s embarrassing. My boyfriend dumped me because of it…. Autagonistophilia.”

“Is that like a bunion?”

“It means I can only become sexually aroused if I’m doing it in a public place near people.”

“You do it in public?”

“Not actually in public, but where I can see lots of people close by, and there’s a high risk of being discovered, possibly arrested…. You okay? You look pale.”

Johnny braced himself on the side of the windmill.

“Wait, there’s more,” she said. “I’ve also got chrematistophilia — that’s getting excited if you’re blackmailed into sex. And hybristophilia, sex with convicted criminals, and symphorphilia, sex during natural disasters, and formicophilia, wanting to have sex on cheap countertops.” She held out her left arm. “See? I have a medical alert bracelet.”

Two men walked by them on the cart path, sipping coconuts and reading their Cocoa Beach travel guide. They strolled past the waterfall, the pink elephant and the airplane crashed into the side of a plastic mountain on the thirteenth hole. They crossed the Japanese footbridge over the lagoon that separated “Goony Golf” from the driving range. The lagoon was actually a retention pond, and the pair looked over the bridge’s railing at the bubbles in the water and the submerged scuba diver with a sack of golf balls.

Sleigh bells jingled as Paul and Jethro opened the door to the driving range office. The man behind the counter scooped balls into wire baskets and plopped them on the counter.

Paul pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket.

“We don’t take hundreds.”

“I’m sorry,” said Paul. “What if I let you keep the change?”

“Then we have a new policy.” The man plucked the bill from Paul’s hand, stuck it in his back pocket and pushed two baskets of balls across the counter. Paul and Jethro went to select clubs from a large oak barrel of bent irons and woods.

“We close in a half hour,” said the man. “You can still play, but you’ll be in the dark.”

“Ah, such is the challenge of life itself,” said Jethro.

“No problem,” added Paul. “Anything you say.”

“And replace your divots,” said the man. “This ain’t a sod farm.”

Actually, it was a sod farm, at least on documents at the zoning office. The state was under drought restrictions, which meant only sod farms could water, and the driving range wanted to keep its sprinklers going.

“Right. Replace divots,” said Paul. “Sure thing.”

“I remember it well,” said Jethro. “Grand traditions of Scotland, the noble but curious land of plaid…”

“And stop talking like that. Both of you. It’s getting on my nerves.”

“You got it,” said Paul. “No problem-o.”

The pair left the office and headed to the last tee, number twenty-two.

Jethro spilled his bucket on the ground and used the head of a four iron to rake a few red-banded balls over to his feet. “DiMaggio would have been a formidable golfer. You could see it in his dark Italian eyes, etched with the scars of life.” Jethro swung hard and hit the ball with the toe of his club, slicing right, scampering through traffic on A1A and ricocheting off the manager’s door at the Orbit Motel. An old Honduran opened the door, looked around, closed it.

Paul lined up his own shot. He looked out at the range signs, marking distance in fifty-yard increments. In between were small greens with flagsticks.

“What’s the objective here?” asked Paul. “Hit it as far as you can or get it close to the flags?”

“Neither, my worthy companion. It is but to hit the range cart.”

“The what?”

“You do not understand now, but you will in time.”

Paul and Jethro swung through their ration of balls, which took off at random adventures in geometry. They were accompanied by a score of other golfers whose graceful swings resembled the chopping of firewood, and a spray of balls curved, sliced, bounced and whizzed across the range, some hooking high over the safety netting and into the retention pond, where a scuba diver trespassed with a mesh gunnysack full of balls in one hand and a twelve-gauge bang-stick for alligators in the other.

One of the golfers noticed something. Out near the left hundred-yard marker, a small tractor started moving across the range. The driver’s seat was enclosed in a protective wire cage, the tractor pulling a wide scooping device that sucked up balls and squirted them into the collection bin.

The golfer on tee number three sounded the alarm.

“Range cart!”

The customers began hitting balls as fast as they could, a rapid series of twenty-one-gun salutes. Most were wildly off target, but through sheer volume the range cart began taking heavy fire. The driver was used to it by now, a community college student reading Crime and Punishment and drinking a Foster’s as the fusillade of Titleists and Dunlops pinged off the vehicle. A lucky shot smashed one of the red plastic light covers. A small voice in the distance: “I got the taillight! I got the taillight!” A two-wood clanged off the outside of the cage protecting the driver, who was inside a depressing nineteenth-century Russian apartment. He turned the page. Balls flew by.

Paul topped another drive fifty yards. “How does anybody play this game?”

Jethro addressed his ball with a three wood. “Think of it as bullfighting and you will see the truth in it.” He knocked a TopFlite into the Checkers drive-through.

Bianca and Johnny held hands as they crossed the footbridge over the retention lagoon next to the driving range. She giggled and squeezed his arm. “I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”

Johnny choked on some saliva and grabbed the railing for balance.

“You all right?”

He nodded. They continued walking, coming to a fence and meeting a third party in the dark. Johnny paid the man in twenties. The couple began wiggling into position behind a control panel.

“Look! I can see people over there!” said Bianca. “Oh, my God!” She ripped off her bra and plunged her tongue down Johnny’s throat. Her hands went for his zipper.

“Are you ready?” she whispered.

Was Johnny ready? He had the kind of erection SWAT teams could use to knock down doors on crack houses. He fumbled to operate the control panel like he’d been shown.

The man waved goodbye as Johnny and Bianca departed. “Have a safe trip.”

Bianca gave Johnny a hickey as she slid off her panties. She looked over her shoulder at the little people in the distance and her stomach fluttered. She bit Johnny again. “You’re going to remember this the rest of your life….”

The couple had just gotten the rest of their clothes off when they heard a tiny voice in the distance.

“Range cart!”

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

Bianca jumped off Johnny in alarm. “What the fuck was that?”

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

A shower of dimpled balls pelted the range cart with the two naked people.

“They’re trying to kill us!” yelled Bianca.

“No, they’re not,” said Johnny. “It’ll just make it better. Come on, baby.”

Bianca lost it, clawing at the inside of the protective cage like a drowning cat. “I have to get out of here!”

“Don’t open that door!”

She opened it, took a Maxfli in the forehead and fell back unconscious in Johnny’s lap.

4

Rush-hour traffic lurched along The Palmetto Expressway through hardworking Hialeah, past the horse track and industrial park. In the third warehouse off Exit 7, men in back braces pushed handcarts of brown boxes marked THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE through beams of exhaust-filtered sun, loading trucks and vans, which pulled out of the shipping bay toward the highway ramp.

In a windowless room next to the dispatcher’s office, a young man scrolled down his computer screen. He stopped, hit print and waited for a sheet of paper to come off the inkjet.

The supervisor’s office had windows, but they overlooked the loading dock and the men hoisting cases of bestsellers at one of the biggest book wholesalers in the Miami–Fort Lauderdale statistical hub. The young man stood in the doorway.

“What is it?” asked the boss, staring at his own computer screen, squeezing a stress ball advertising a new stress-free-diet book.

“I’m getting some strange sales figures on this one title.”

“Down?”

“Way up.”

The young man handed his printout to the supervisor, who grabbed his reading glasses.

“That is strange. You sure these are right?”

“Triple-checked.”

“Must be an explanation. Maybe a publisher’s promotion. Contest or something.”

“Nope. Already called them.”

“What about the author? Is he touring? Speak at a local college?”

“Hasn’t been seen in years. Could be dead for all we know.”

“Anything on Oprah?”

The young man shook his head.

“Maybe it’s one of these local book clubs. Look — see how the sales are all just at this one bookstore in Miami Beach, The Palm Reader?” He took off his glasses and set the page down. “That has to be it. Must be someone’s selection-of-the-month, and they’re all buying at this store.”

“Three months in a row? The numbers are bigger than any ten book groups could account for. Besides, The Palm Reader is a dump. No self-respecting club would set foot inside with all the classier places nearby.”

The supervisor scratched his head. “Then there’s simply a strong word-of-mouth pocket. The book’s taking off on its own.”

“Sir, The Stingray Shuffle has been out eleven years.”

“This is a crazy business. I’ve seen stuff out twenty years with nothing to show, then someone makes a movie and bang!”

“There’s no movie.”

“The point I’m making is you can’t account for consumer behavior. These things sprout at their own pace, the gestation of the pyramid progression, a classic equation of the hundredth monkey. Revenues are cruising horizontally along the X axis, then suddenly demand reaches critical mass and sales make the all-important vertical swing up the Y axis.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making some money,” he said, picking up the phone. “Let’s call the other bookstores, see if we can’t help this thing along. And beat the other wholesalers while we’re at it.”

The supervisor got the entire staff in on the act, and they canvassed the bottom half of the state, pushing the title, then working their way north. The stores were receptive. They could always send the books back if they didn’t sell. “Sure, we’ll take a few cases.” The title started moving in several markets. Not like at the first store, but respectably, and multiplied by hundreds of outlets, it began adding up to real numbers.

An overcast summer morning in New York. A Friday. Midtown Manhattan, the nerve ganglion of the global publishing industry, and by noon everyone was consumed with the same crisis: how to beat weekend traffic heading out of town to the Hamptons after lunch.

On West Fifty-third Street, at a sidewalk restaurant of obscure nationality and no prices, a man and a woman sat across from each other in identical business suits. A waiter in a red turban set a plate in front of each of them. They had ordered the same, pan-seared sponge on a bed of pollen.

“Pepper?” asked the waiter.

They nodded. The waiter twisted a metal tube over their plates.

“Sir,” said the woman. “We have a sleeper on our hands. Just got the sales report yesterday. Red-hot — might even crack the Times bestseller list.”

“Whose book? Allister? Byron? Sir Dennis?”

She shook her head. “Ralph.”

“Ralph!”

The waiter held a pump bottle. “Moisture?”

They nodded.

“I didn’t know Ralph was even still alive.”

“We’re trying to confirm that.”

“When did we publish a new title?”

“We didn’t. This is his last one.”

The waiter put on safety goggles. “Blowtorch?”

They nodded.

“But his last book was ten years ago.”

“Eleven.”

The man shook his head. “This is a crazy business.”

“No crazier than any other.”

A troupe of midgets surrounded the table, Cossack dancing.

“I just can’t get over it. I mean, Ralph! How did this start?”

“A sales fluke out of Miami Beach. A bookstore called The Palm Reader, then it snowballed.”

“The Palm Reader?”

“One of those new crime and mystery specialty shops. A local wholesaler got wind of it and spread the word…”

The waiter clapped his hands twice, and the midgets dispersed. “Dessert?”

They nodded.

“Okay, throw some money at promotions,” said the man, jabbing his sponge with a fork. “And find Ralph. We need to get him back on tour. Talk to his agent.”

“He isn’t represented anymore, not that we know of.”

“Try the last one.”

The dessert hovercraft arrived.

5

The day Paul and Jethro found the five million dollars and took off across the state had started out pleasant enough. No rain in the forecast, the mercury hovering under eighty at the Lakeland airport, halfway between Tampa and Orlando. Two long lines of cars sat stationary in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 4, hundreds of traffic-jammed vehicles stretching endlessly over the gentle central Florida hills, all the way to the horizon.

In the middle of the right lane was a blue ’74 Malibu. Jethro was driving, Paul in the passenger seat with an open briefcase in his lap, counting wads.

“How much farther to the cruise ships?” asked Paul.

“Eighty miles,” said Jethro. “How much money?”

“Three million. A lot left. Hope there’s a ship leaving today.”

“We can always put up in a motel. Nobody’s going to find us that fast. It’ll be weeks before they even realize anyone has found the money, and longer, if ever, before they connect it to us.”

Five miles behind the Malibu, a pink Cadillac Eldorado was stuck in the same lane.

“What’s the global-positioning tracker say?” asked Lenny.

Serge looked down at the beeping box on the seat beside him. “The briefcase is stuck in traffic, too. About five miles ahead.”

The Cadillac held four people, two men in front, two women in back. Airbrushing down the side of the convertible: LENNY LIPPOWICZ — THE DON JOHNSON EXPERIENCE. One bumper sticker: REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS.

“What’s the delay?” said Serge, grabbing the top of the windshield and standing up on the driver’s seat to see as far as he could. He plopped back down and punched the steering wheel.

“Maybe a wreck?” said Lenny in the passenger seat, wearing a pastel T-shirt and white Versace jacket.

“Should have known better,” said Serge. “Never take I-4 when you have to get anywhere.”

A female voice from the backseat: “Can we have another joint?”

“No!” snapped Serge. “No more dope for you!”

Lenny passed a joint back.

Serge threw up his hands. “I just told them they couldn’t have any more.”

“Doper etiquette,” said Lenny. “Mellow out.”

“You know my personality type,” said Serge. “I can’t take boredom. And I especially can’t take some kind of huge holdup where you don’t know what’s going on!”

One of the women offered the lit joint over Serge’s shoulder. He pushed it away. “Just give me a ballpark of how long the wait is! I don’t care if it’s four hours — I need something I can mentally whittle on, compartmentalize, break down and digest. Or give the reason. Let me know what the hell’s going on! This out-of-the-loop, can’t-seethe-front-of-the-line shit is making me crazy!” He punched the steering wheel again.

“Look,” said Lenny. “I think they’re starting to move up there.”

They both leaned forward and watched closely. They sat back again.

“Sorry. Just an illusion,” said Lenny. “Heat waves from the road.”

The backseat: “Ahem…can we have, like, another joint? It’ll be the last one. Promise.”

“See what you started?” said Serge. “They’re hooked.”

“How was I to know?”

Serge turned around and put his arm over the back of the driver’s seat and stared at the women, City and Country, college-age babes from Alabama. “You say you never got high in your life until last week? Not a single time until Lenny turned you on back at Hammerhead Ranch?”

The women nodded, one hitting a roach clip, the other holding her smoke.

“At least try to be a little more discreet. We’re in a convertible.” Serge turned back around and hit the steering wheel again. “C’mon!”

“Must be a wreck,” said Lenny.

“It would have to be a ruptured tanker of liquid phosgene to take this long. Otherwise, they’d already be sweeping up glass.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s I-4. Take your pick,” said Serge. “I’ve seen sinkholes, armed assaults, forest fires that flushed wildlife into traffic. And then there was the cow.”

“The cow?”

“There was this one cow. She liked to stand alone all day up to her tits in the middle of this little lake off the side of the road.”

“That was a driving problem?”

“Everyone slowed down and watched. They thought she was in trouble. Hundreds called the highway patrol, wanting them to send a rescue helicopter with a canvas sling harness and a winch.”

“Did they?”

“No. There was nothing wrong. But the calls kept pouring in and tied up all the emergency lines. So the highway department put up a sign, one of those big mobile things on wheels, a bunch of flashing orange light bulbs that spell out stuff like RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD. Except this one said, THE COW IS OK. True story.”

“What happened?”

“Made everything worse. Everyone slowing down to watch.”

Lenny nodded, then pointed ahead at the stationary lines of cars. “Might as well turn the engine off and save gas.”

“And put The Club on.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Lenny. “How come you always put your Club on backward, with the lock facing the dash?”

“Fuckin’ kids — they stick machine screws in the lock and yank the mechanism out with dent-pullers. But they don’t have the necessary clearance if I reverse the bar. The things you have to do to survive in this state.”

A BMW blew by in the breakdown lane and kept going, passing the entire line of cars and disappearing over a hill.

“That’s the fourth guy who’s done that since we’ve been here,” said Lenny.

“It’s just not right,” said Serge.

“We could do that, too, but we don’t,” said Lenny.

“Because rules are important,” said Serge. “Otherwise, everything starts breaking down.”

The backseat: “Um, do you think we could have, you know, another…”

Lenny passed a doobie back.

“If we’re going to be here much longer, I’ll have to occupy my mind,” said Serge. He turned off the Cadillac and walked to the rear of the car.

“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.

“Getting my toys.” He opened the trunk, removed a gym bag and got back in the driver’s seat. “I bought you a present.” Serge pulled something out of the bag. He could have easily handed it across the seat to Lenny, but he threw it, the way guys have to.

Lenny dropped it on the floorboard.

“Nice catch.”

Lenny picked up the red-and-white canister. “Cruex? What are you trying to tell me?”

“No, you dingleberry, unscrew the bottom.”

Lenny struggled to figure out the can, twisting with everything he had. “You know what a dingleberry actually is?”

“I’ve heard the rumors,” said Serge. He reached over. “Here, let me.”

Serge grabbed the can and twisted off the bottom, revealing a secret compartment.

“Cool,” said Lenny. “A stash safe.”

“I bought it at Spy vs. Spy.”

“What’s that?”

“A new chain that sells a bunch of espionage and counterespionage stuff, but it’s really a toy store for guys — useless gadgets men can’t resist. Night-vision scopes, walkie-talkie pens, voice-activated bomb-disposal robot/beer caddy…”

Lenny stuffed a baggie of pot up the bottom of the can. “Why’d you have to pick Cruex?”

“Had a friend who went to college in Boston. His roommate was from Colombia, and during spring break, the roommate says, ‘Hey, why don’t you come visit back home with me?’ My friend says sure. It’s a legitimate visit — no drugs or anything — and he’s coming back through Miami, and Customs goes ape. What’s an Anglo kid doing on vacation in Bogotá? They rip his luggage apart, make him take a laxative and shit on a clear toilet in front of all these people…”

“They actually have clear toilets?”

“The government does. But they seem to be the only ones who want them. I think that speaks volumes. Anyway, get this — they grabbed my friend’s can of shaving cream and sprayed some out and tested it.”

“That’s spooky,” said Lenny.

“Drugs are spooky,” said Serge. “But jail is spookier. That’s why I got you that can. Use it and stay free, my friend. Shaving cream is one thing, but nobody wants to mess with a guy’s Cruex. DEA, Customs — they don’t get paid enough.”

Serge removed another canister from his bag and began shaking it. A metal ball rattled inside.

“Spray paint?” asked Lenny.

“Spy spray paint.” Serge got out of the car and walked back to the rear bumper. He bent down and sprayed the license plate.

“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.

“The paint’s clear, reflective,” said Serge, rattling the can again. “Standard technique for operatives attending state dinners in case any spies try to photograph license plates in the parking lot of the embassy while you’re upstairs stealing files. The clear coating reflects any flash photography, and all the spy will see when he gets his pictures back from the drugstore will be a bright, all-white license plate, completely blank.”

Lenny rubbed his chin. “Is this a problem you anticipate us having?”

Serge climbed back in the car and pointed up the road toward Orlando. “It also works on those new cameras the state installed to catch people running tollbooths. I’m tired of paying these motherfuckers every time I want to go see a shuttle launch.”

Serge pulled something else from the gym bag. A few little poles covered with spikes.

“What are those?”

“Stop sticks,” said Serge. “Police use them at roadblocks to puncture the tires of fleeing suspects.”

“Why do you need them?”

“To throw out the window in case the police are chasing me,” said Serge. “Two can play this game.”

Serge casually tossed the sticks over Lenny’s head, out the right side of the car, and began rooting around again in his bag. “Let’s see — what else do I have in here?…”

Pow, pow, pow, pow.

A new set of Michelins blew out on a Corvette racing by in the breakdown lane, and it cascaded down the embankment.

“…Here we are.” Serge removed a heavy egg-shaped object wrapped in orange silk. “My ace in the hole.” He carefully folded back the silk to reveal a scored olive-green metal hulk — an antique hand grenade.

“Is it live?”

Serge nodded.

“Also get that at Spy versus Spy?”

Serge shook his head. “eBay.”

A chorus from the backseat: “We’re hungry.”

“Again?” said Serge.

“Why don’t you drive to a restaurant or something?” asked Country.

“Good idea,” said City. “Drive us to a restaurant.”

Serge turned around and pointed at the empty boxes in their laps. “You just ate. You both got the jumbo taco salad.”

They looked down at their shirts and hands covered with grease, shredded cheese and strands of lettuce. Country looked up. “We’re still hungry.”

“I’m feeling like barbecue,” said City.

Serge gestured around them at the sea of parked cars boxing them in, then searched for any hint of understanding in their bloodshot eyes. “Fuck it! Never mind!” He turned back around and sat silent a minute. He smacked the inside of the door. “What can be taking so long?”

“It’s funny how when you’re high, time seems to slow down,” City told Country.

“Absolutely,” said Country. “It just creeps. Everything takes forever. The least little thing becomes an eternity…Tick, tock, tick, tock…”

Serge slowly turned his head toward the passenger seat and glared.

“Don’t look at me,” said Lenny. “It was your idea to bring them.”

“…Tick, tock, tick, tock…”

“I thought it would be fun,” said Serge. “Get the women’s perspective for a change instead of the same old barbarian stuff I’m used to. But it’s gone horribly awry, and now I’m being held prisoner in a Cheech and Chong marathon.”

“I’m soooo hungry,” said City.

“Does this car have music?” asked Country. “Let’s play some music.”

“Yeah, crank up the tunes,” said City.

Lenny reached for the radio.

“Only classic album rock,” said Serge. “It’s all I can handle right now.”

The car began to throb with bass.

“What about contemporary urban?” asked Lenny.

Serge shook his head. “I respect the rapper, but I need to be in the proper mood to appreciate social and economic polemics about who can play a turntable better.”

Lenny twisted the dial to another station. The Beatles came on, “All You Need Is Love.”

Serge nodded his approval. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to relax with the soothing music.

“You know, they’re absolutely right,” said Country. “All you do need is love. It’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard in my life…”

“They get straight to the heart of the matter,” said City. “You’ve got love, what else do you need?…”

“Think about it, one small word, just four little letters, yet they make all the difference…”

Serge turned around and faced them again.

“What?” said City.

6

A weather-beaten seventeen-foot flats skiff motored slowly through the first light of day in the upper Florida Keys. It was a falling tide, and orange and pink and green Styrofoam balls dotted the water. Flocks of spoonbills glided low over the shallows, timing the tide to the minute, heading for feeding grounds as they had for thousands of years. Tiny, low mangrove islands punctuated the horizon, which disappeared toward Cape Sable and the Everglades.

An old man stood in the back of the skiff, his hand on the outboard throttle, a “Sanibel Biological Supply” fishing cap on his head. Yellow rubber waders with suspenders. The man had risen at precisely four-thirty, as he did every morning, and stepped onto the porch of his stilt house, eye level with the coconuts in the trees, barely visible in the blackness. Unseen water lapped the rock revetment; palms rustled. He grabbed the balcony railing and concentrated on being thankful. Then he went downstairs and turned on the Weather Channel. There was a rim of light on the horizon when he headed down the dock with a mug of Sanka and an insulated sack of tuna sandwiches. He mixed gasoline and oil in the two-stroke fifty-to-one ratio and jerked a bucket of frozen mullet from a dockside freezer. He pulled the cover off the outboard, wiping spots with a rag, spraying points with silicone, replacing the cover. The davits clicked as he cranked the skiff down into the water. Soon he was planing up across the bay, snaking between the islands, until he was in the thick of the floating Styrofoam. The man throttled down.

He idled the boat and reached for one of the balls with a long-handled gaff, grabbing it and pulling up the crab trap tied underneath with rope. He pushed the outboard throttle stick to the side, turning the propeller starboard and putting the skiff in a perpetual clockwise circle as he shook blue crabs out of the trap and into a seventy-gallon cooler. Then he reached in a gray bucket for a dead fish and rammed it into the empty trap’s wire-mesh bait hole and threw it all back over the side, the Styrofoam ball bobbing in the wake a few times as the trap settled back to the bottom. The man motored up for the next float and repeated the process, again and again, float after float — the whole time drinking coffee, eating sandwiches, juggling gaff, bait, traps, throttle. Back-country ballet. But he only stopped at the green floats; the orange and pink belonged to the other guys, and you didn’t mess with them unless you wanted to get shot. Back-country justice. The man tossed his last trap in the water and headed home. He knew he was getting close when he saw the toilet seats.

On the north side on Plantation Key, the approach from the bay was extra shallow and rocky, and a channel had been cut long ago. The pass was known as Toilet Seat Cut or Little Stinker. It was originally designated with regular nautical markers, but the locals had since hung toilet seats on all of them. They were painted in vibrant colors, with names and dates and little drawings of people and pets. The old man looked off to the side. Spoonbills chiseled at tide-exposed oysters; tarpon fins slit the surface. An ibis stood frozen in an inch of water among the mangrove roots, then snapped its neck forward, spearing a fish with its beak. A pink toilet seat went by.

The sun finally rose as the old man cranked the skiff back up the davits and flushed fresh water through the lower unit with rabbit ears. He hoisted the cooler of crabs into the back of a pickup and headed for market.

The man had come into a modest amount of money in the sixties and bought a house and several commercially zoned parcels in the Florida Keys. Now their worth was in ransom range. The rental checks from the gas stations and seashell shops were steady, and the man no longer had need for the crab money. That wasn’t work; it was religion.

He loved the stilt house. Two stories, tin roof, screened-in wraparound balcony. Inside, you couldn’t see the walls for all the built-in bookshelves. You knew he was a book guy by the way the shelves were filled, not just packed rows of vertical spines, but more books crammed in on top. It might have been a space problem except the man only collected one other thing: beer signs. The shark Bud Lite sign, the palm tree Corona, the flamingo drinking Miller. At night, the neon came on, and so did the strands of white Christmas lights tracing the porch’s eaves. People driving by on US 1 often mistook it for a tavern and pulled over. “Hello? Anyone here?” — climbing the stairs and knocking on the screen door — “Is the bar open?”

The old man would trudge across the porch and reach for the handle. “It is now.”

That’s how he started his third collection. He collected friends, many of whom he met when they were on vacation and initially thought his place was a pub. They returned year after year. He kept a refrigerator on the porch, stocked with beer. There was a basket of colored markers on top, and he told his visitors to “sign the guest book,” and the refrigerator was now covered with names and hometowns from across the USA and parts of Europe.

He was a big hit with the neighbors, too, something of a local celebrity. But that had taken a little more time. The man may have been old, but he wasn’t weak or withered. In fact, he was scary. A burly, tight fist of a man, he kept fit swimming in the bay and pulling crab traps. His face was hard and leathery, and the shaved skull made him look like Mr. Clean. The neighbors were afraid of him at first; they aggressively avoided his property and gave him wide berth in town. There was talk he used to be a professional wrestler or a Green Beret or a bagman for the mob. But then they saw all the people dropping in from the highway, laughing on the porch late into the starry night. The bravest neighbor tiptoed up to the porch during one of the happy hours and knocked timidly.

“Frank! Come on in!” said the old man. Expansive smile and expansive, muscular arm that went around the neighbor’s shoulders and jerked him off the steps into the party.

“You know my name?”

“Sure, Frank. You’re my neighbor. I was wondering when you were going to drop by. Beginning to think you were afraid of me or something…. Hey, everybody! This is Frank!”

“Hi, Frank!”

“Frank, you want a beer? There’s the fridge. Help yourself. And write something if you want…”

Another knock at the door.

“Gotta get that. Make yourself at home…”

The old man became an institution. So did his parties, which sometimes lasted days, people sleeping or passing out all over the house, prompting the man to install a bunch of hammocks. Half the time strangers were cooking breakfast in his kitchen when he got back from crabbing.

“I grabbed some of your eggs. Hope you don’t mind,” said a young woman in a long University of Miami T-shirt and nothing else, stirring a frying pan. “Want some?”

“Sorry, can’t stay. But have at it.”

During his gatherings, the man was content to sit on a stool in the corner of the porch, smiling, not saying anything, letting others have the spotlight. It only grew the legend. When a shrimpy guy is humble and quiet, well, that’s just pitiful, but when it’s a genuine tough guy, people can’t resist building the story. The neighbors took to him like a lovable circus bear. That he was. Except when someone was being bullied; then he became a grizzly.

The old man liked the Caribbean Club at Mile Marker 104, where signs still made a big deal about a snippet of Key Largo putatively being filmed there. The usual crowd had gathered around the man’s stool one Friday night when they heard a woman’s protests from the pool tables.

“Ow! You’re hurting me!”

A tall young man in a workout jersey had her by the arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Let me go!”

Nobody intervened as he dragged her out the door.

“Excuse me,” said the old man, setting down his draft and getting off his stool. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Sixty seconds later, the woman ran back into the bar, followed by the old man, who casually returned to his stool and picked up his beer. “Where were we?…” Then they heard the ambulance siren.

The rumors spread, and the man got credit for ten times what he ever did, once driving off an entire motorcycle gang armed only with a bullwhip.

After dropping his crabs at the market each morning, the man always drove up to Mile 82 and the Green Turtle Inn. He stuck quarters in the news boxes out front and carried the stack of papers inside.

“Hey, it’s Ralph!” “Hi, Ralph!” “How the crab business treatin’ ya, Ralph?”

It didn’t seem the man’s reputation could get any bigger until one of the breakfast regulars came across an old paperback at the Islamorada Library. “What’s this?”

She thumbed down the row of books. There was another, and another, finally a whole bunch, all with Ralph’s name on the cover.

The next morning at the restaurant, everyone had books, wanting autographs. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?”

“What’s to tell? That was another lifetime ago.”

They talked about him after he left. “Wow, a tough guy who’s sensitive and writes books.”

“Just like him not to mention it.”

“That’s so cool!”

Ralph Krunkleton had seen life the way other people only dream. He had an uncanny knack for being at the right place at the right moment, an almost perfect sense of literary timing. Almost. He always seemed to be one human skin removed from huge success. The problem: Ralph wrote mysteries, which got no respect.

In 1958, he was twenty-seven years old and fifty pounds lighter. Goatee and turtleneck. It was San Francisco, drinking coffee at the City Lights Bookstore and listening to bad poetry. The beatnik movement was exploding, and he knew them all. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti. Ralph wrote his first novel, a quixotic tale of wanderlust on America’s highways and living in The Now, a stream-of-conscious bohemian murder mystery called B Is for Bongo. Another book came out that same year, and Jack Kerouac’s career took off.

Ralph was still in San Francisco nine years later when the Summer of Love broke out at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He began taking notes at the Fillmore, where he hung out with Jefferson Airplane and giant pulsing amoebas. He wrote a zeitgeist tome about hippies traveling the country in a brightly painted school bus, dropping LSD and getting murdered one by one. It was called Bad Trip. Tom Wolfe’s career took off.

New York two years later, Ralph was thrown in the back of a paddy wagon with Norman Mailer during an antiwar demonstration.

“I suppose you’re going to write a murder mystery about this!” said Mailer.

“Maybe I will!” Ralph shot back.

The Naked and the Murdered was published the following year and faded quickly after a single printing. Mailer became an asshole.

Ralph was last represented by the renowned agent Tanner Lebos. Ralph met Tanner in 1969 at a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park. Tanner was wearing a Simon T-shirt; Ralph a Garfunkel. It was meant to be. They started talking. Tanner was struggling to get his literary firm up and running. He took Ralph on, and they were together almost twenty years. By the mid-seventies, however, their careers were on clearly diverging trajectories.

Ralph began spending more and more time in Florida until he was there year-round. He split his days between his homes in the Keys and Sarasota, where he played liar’s poker with John D. MacDonald, McKinley Kantor and the rest of the gang at Florida’s version of the Algonquin Round Table.

“Stick to mysteries, kid,” said MacDonald. “Trust me. You’ll see.”

In the late seventies, Tanner paid Ralph a visit. They did lunch poolside at the Polo Lounge in Palm Beach. Ralph came in a corduroy leisure suit; Tanner wore tangerine sunglasses and an ascot. The conversation didn’t go well.

“One favor,” said Tanner.

“What’s that?”

“One book that’s not a mystery. Just one.”

“I don’t feel it.”

“You louse up more good books by throwing bodies around. Look at Fitzgerald — where would The Great Gatsby be if it was a mystery?”

“Technically, it is a mystery.”

Tanner began to simmer. “Let’s enjoy our food.”

While Ralph stayed down in the bargain bins, Tanner went on to become one of the hottest literary agents in Manhattan, eventually branching into theatrical representation. As they say, he was going places. Ralph was not. It continued another ten years until the big split-up in 1987. There had been a loud argument in the parking lot of a Longboat Key seafood restaurant, complete with police cars and women screaming and Tanner and John MacDonald wrestling at the base of a grinning lobster in a chef’s hat.

The phone was ringing in the stilt house when Ralph got back from morning coffee at the Green Turtle. He picked it up.

“Ralph, it’s me, Tanner. New York.”

Silence.

“Ralph? You there?”

“Tan?”

“Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”

“It’s been a while. What? Ten years?”

“Eleven.”

“Good to hear your voice.”

“I love you, too. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from your publisher. Your book’s taking off. They’re going back to press.”

“Which book?”

“The Stingray Shuffle. But the others are starting to catch the draft, too. It could be big.”

“Is this a joke?”

“They want you back on tour.”

“But that book’s been out for years. You said yourself it was dead.”

“It’s a crazy business.”

“I don’t want to tour. I like it here.”

“Don’t be a shmuck. Why did you write in the first place? So people would read your books. Well, now they’re reading them. And they want to talk to you. You owe it to your fans.”

Ralph was a stand-up guy. When Tanner put it that way, he couldn’t refuse.

“What are they talking about?”

“Twenty cities, plus a few book festivals, a little TV and a celebrity mystery train.”

“Could you repeat that last part?”

“It’s the new thing. Mysteries are big now — who would have thought? They have all these fancy dinners and cruises and train rides where people pay a fortune to act all this shit out. Don’t worry about the details — you’ll be getting faxes.”

“I don’t have a fax machine.”

“Doesn’t matter. I have one of the new faxless fax machines. And you’ll need some clothes.”

“When is this supposed to start?”

“They were planning next Thursday. But that was before Publishers Weekly hit the stands. Have you seen it?”

“I’m in the Keys.”

“There’s an article on you, page sixty-seven. They’ve made you out like some kind of tropical Salinger. Nobody can get in touch with you. They can’t find anyone who’s seen you in years or even has a recent photo. There’s talk you’re keeping some dark secret, but they’re not even sure you’re still alive.”

“That’s crazy. I’m in town all the time. Have coffee at the same place every day. There are no secrets—”

“I’ve told the publisher I want to push back the tour a month so we can grow the ambient buzz about your bizarre need for privacy and seclusion, and when the public appetite is too much to stand, then we put you on the road.”

“The publisher isn’t going to go along with this foolishness.”

“They already have a team working on your mystique. They want everyone wondering who or what it is you’re hiding from.”

“I’m not hiding from anything—”

“Start.”

“What?”

“Don’t leave the house, and don’t answer the phone. Unless it’s me.”

“How will I know it’s you?”

“Caller ID.”

“I don’t have caller ID.”

“Even better. Adds to the myth. The recluse completely out of touch, shunning the new technology. We’ll build you up like those Japanese living in island caves who think the war’s still on. Maybe you’ve even gone insane…”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Let me worry about that. You stick to the books. Later.”

Ralph put down the phone. “Unbelievable.”

It rang again.

“Hello?”

“I thought I told you not to answer the phone.”

“I didn’t know we had started yet.”

“We have.”

“Sorry.”

“While I’ve got you on the line, I want you to grow a beard. And start getting drunk in public.”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out…”

“You can for that. It’s pretty important.”

“Anything else?”

“Do you think you can get arrested? I mean, do you know any local cops, some minor thing where you can arrange beforehand to get out immediately on bail? Do you have any drug connections?”

“Tanner—”

“I’m just thinking out loud now. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. Later.”

Click.

7

Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in peninsular Florida. It is an unforgettable sight, a stone monument rising alone on a pristine ridge called Iron Mountain, near the center of the state.

“The Singing Tower,” as it is known, features a fifty-seven-bell carillon, the centerpiece of the tranquil Bok Tower Gardens, a meditative retreat of unmatched serenity.

A car engine roared. People screamed. Tires squealed. A beat-up pink Cadillac convertible patched out of the parking lot. Serge and Lenny turned around in the front seat and looked back at the two young women called City and Country as they ran and yelled through a dust cloud, trying to catch the Cadillac as it pulled back on the highway and sped off.

“Hated to ditch them like that,” said Lenny.

“They left us no choice,” said Serge.

“Our sanity had to come first,” said Lenny, pushing the gas all the way to the floor, watching the women grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

“They never stopped talking,” said Serge. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”

“They were smoking up all my weed.” Lenny held a can of Cruex to his eye to gauge the damage. “And they were starting to get fat.”

“Of course they were getting fat — they never stopped eating. I thought I was watching some kind of unnerving nature special on the Discovery Channel, constrictor snakes dislocating their jaws to ingest small mammals headfirst.”

“That’s what the munchies do to you.”

“I’m glad I was never part of the drug culture,” said Serge, loading an automatic pistol in his lap.

“This isn’t about the drug culture — it’s about women,” said Lenny. “Oh sure, it always starts with a lot of Technicolor orgasms, and the next thing you know you got matching dishes in your apartment…”

“If we let them stay, pretty soon they’d be telling us what to do…”

“Making us wipe our feet…”

“Getting mad at us all the time for things we do not understand…”

Serge and Lenny looked at each other and shook with the heebie-jeebies.

“Still, I’m disappointed we had to leave the tower so fast,” said Serge. “I haven’t been to Bok since I was a kid.”

“You’re really into this history stuff, aren’t you?” asked Lenny, lighting a joint.

“Fuckin’-A. Built by Dutch immigrant Edward W. Bok, who dedicated it in 1929 to all Americans.”

“Nice gesture,” Lenny said through pursed lips.

“Guess what publication he was editor of.”

Lenny shook his head.

“Ladies’ Home Journal.”

“Get outta here.”

“I shit you not. And guess who he had write for him?”

Lenny shook his head again.

“Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.”

“Not too shabby,” said Lenny. “But how do you find out all this stuff? How do you remember it?”

“I assign each fact a geometric shape and then string them together in a crystalline lattice in the image center of my brain.”

Lenny exhaled a hit and nodded. “Works for me.”

“You see the funky colors in the masonry?”

Lenny nodded, although he didn’t know what masonry was.

“Pink and gray marble from Georgia and native coquina rock from St. Augustine,” said Serge, shaking the geopositioning tracker.

“What’s it say?” asked Lenny.

“The signal’s fading in and out, but it’s consistently pointing east, so the transmitter in the briefcase must still be working.” He put the tracker down on the seat beside him. “I’m pretty hacked I didn’t get to the gift shop. You know I’m always required to buy an enamel pin for my archives.”

Lenny reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a Bok Tower lapel pin. He turned it back and forth to glint in the sunlight before passing it across the front seat.

“You’re humble and lovable,” said Serge. He removed a small plastic box from the gym bag at his feet and tucked the Bok pin inside with dozens of other pins.

“What are those?” asked Lenny, glancing over.

“Recent acquisitions. Sea World, Silver Springs, plus lots of train stuff, like the Flagler Museum.”

“Trains?”

“Yeah, I kind of got into them a little bit last year, because of the direct linkage to Florida’s evolution.”

“You? Getting into something a little bit?” said Lenny. “More like you completely obsessed, right?”

“I like to call it disciplined study habits.”

“I don’t buy it,” said Lenny.

“Neither did the cops.”

“You were arrested again?”

“It’s so unfair,” said Serge. “All these misunderstandings happening to the same person. What are the odds?”

“How did it happen?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Serge, reaching in the glove compartment and taking out novelty glasses with 3-D spirals on the lenses and little pinholes in the middle.

Lenny looked over at him. “You going to do a flashback?”

Serge nodded. “I’m all about flashbacks.”

He slid the glasses on his face and raised his chin in concentration. “I can see it like it was just yesterday — a warm summer morning, the overnight dew burning off fast, mixing with the smell of just-mowed grass. A dark blue Buick LeSabre drove slowly down Cocoanut Row on the island of Palm Beach…”

Inside the Buick, two retired women sipped coffee from travel mugs. The passenger read the Palm Beach Post to the driver: an update on the “Spiderman” burglary trial out of Miami, then the arrest of a man who was looking up women’s dresses in Burdines with a videocamera concealed in the toe of his shoe.

“Must have been a small camera,” said the driver.

“Technology,” said the passenger, turning the page.

They took a left on Whitehall Way, toward a sprawling lawn and twin palms flanking a tall iron arch. The two museum volunteers parked and unlocked the gate, then the front door of a century-old mansion. They flipped on lights, adjusted the thermostat, opened the gift shop. One headed outside through the south door. There was an old banyan tree near the seawall, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway and the mainland, where the servants lived in West Palm Beach. In the middle of the lawn was a brief stretch of railroad track that led nowhere. On the rails sat a forest green Pullman passenger car custom-built in 1886. There were historical plaques and gold letters down the side. Florida East Coast. And a number, 91. The woman climbed the steps at the end of the car and unlocked the door on the observation platform. She walked through the dining room, then down a narrow hallway past the copper-lined shower. She got to the sleeping compartment and froze in the doorway.

One of the pull-down sleeping berths was open, holding a pile of blankets covering a human-sized lump.

The woman took a meek step backward.

The lump moved.

The woman seized up. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t respond.

The lump moved some more, and a head of mussed hair popped out of the blankets.

“Are we there yet?”

The woman stood paralyzed.

“Are we there yet? Key West?”

The woman finally managed a light, trembling voice. “Key…West?…”

“Key West,” repeated the man. “This is my big day. The biggest day of my life.”

There was a pause. The woman’s voice quivered again. “Uh…what day is that?”

“January twenty-second!”

The woman looked through the windows at the beautiful summer day outside. “January?”

“Of course,” said the man, “1912.”

No reply.

“If we’re not there yet, I could use some more sleep.”

“We’re…uh, not there yet.”

“Good,” said the man, rolling over and covering his head with the blanket.

Two officers in a squad car were en route to a report of golf rage at a local country club when they received the intruder call from the Flagler Museum and made a squealing U-turn. The officers reached the museum’s south lawn and found a garden hose stretching across the grass to the side of the train car. They drew service pistols and quietly climbed up the observation platform. As they filed down the car’s tight hallway, they heard water running. Then singing. The first officer reached the door of the shower and peeked in. The curtain came up to the shoulders of the intruder. His eyes were closed as he rubbed shampoo into his scalp.

“Everybody’s doooo-in’ a brand new dance, now!…”

The officers looked at each other.

The intruder opened his eyes. “Oh, my VIP escorts. Be with you in a minute.”

“Henry Morrison Flagler was born of humble roots in 1830 and, with John D. Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil Company. By the time he retired at the relatively young age of fifty-three, profits and interest were building up in his bank accounts faster than any human could spend. Some say what Flagler did next was out of guilt from the brutal business practices and obscene profits of his oil company. Others say the man was like one of those ants that spend all day lifting ten times their own weight, and Henry had no choice but to build, build, build!—”

“Objection!” said the prosecutor, jumping to his feet in courtroom 3C, Palm Beach Judicial Circuit.

“What grounds?” asked the judge.

“Your Honor, this is a simple trespassing case. A bum sleeping in a train car at a museum. The court has already been overly generous letting this man represent himself, but now he’s abusing the privilege and turning the proceedings into an utter travesty.”

The judge turned to Serge at the defense table. “What do you have to say?”

“The historical underpinnings of this case go directly to my motivation. I must be given wide latitude to establish my state of mind in order to defend myself against these unfair but highly imaginative charges.”

“Your Honor,” interrupted the prosecutor. “It’s clear the defendant needs psychiatric attention. He’s already wasted enough of the people’s time and resources.”

The judge looked at the defendant. “Tell me, are you Henry Flagler?”

“Of course not,” said the defendant. “That would be crazy.”

“What’s your name?”

“Serge. Serge Storms.”

“I’m going to allow it,” the judge told the prosecutor. “After hearing your legal arguments for the last few years, I find the change of pace rather refreshing.”

The prosecutor sat down and fumed. The judge faced the defendant again and got comfortable in his big chair. “You may continue.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Now where was I? Oh, yeah. Henry looked south and saw Florida, an empty canvas. The Spanish, French and English had been at work on the place for three centuries with nothing to show. The massive St. Johns River, just below Jacksonville, was the natural barrier preventing serious progress. The first crucial thing Flagler did was bridge that gorge. It changed the whole ball game. He began laying train tracks like nobody’s business and built a string of luxury hotels down the coast. Northerners came in droves. By 1904, Flagler’s railroad ran all the way to Homestead, south of Miami, the very bottom of Florida. Most people would have stopped. But did Flagler?”

Serge turned toward the prosecutor’s table. “Did he?”

The judge was grinning now. He looked at the prosecutor. “Well, did he?”

The prosecutor rolled his eyes. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

“That’s right!” said Serge, slapping the defense table. “With the Spanish-American War just over, that freed up the sugar and pineapple crops in Cuba. Flagler could load it all on ships and sail to Key West. If only he had a train station there. But surely a railroad couldn’t be built a hundred miles out to sea, facing the open ocean and hurricanes, right?” Serge slapped the table again. “Wrong! Flagler heard of a man named J. C. Meredith, who was doing new things with reinforced concrete down in Mexico, and brought him in on the project. Ten thousand workers came south. The cost blew the mind. This was something on the level of the pyramids, the Manhattan Project and the moon program. But no government was behind it — just one man. They said it couldn’t be done. Flagler’s Folly, they called it. And it looked like they were right.” Serge began pacing and gesturing. “All types of setbacks and geological barriers — they had to invent new kinds of engineering on the spot. Flagler himself was falling apart, almost blind, a year to live, tops. Didn’t look good. But on January twenty-second, 1912, The Extension Special, pulling Flagler’s private train car, rolled into Key West as bands played and schoolchildren cheered and threw roses on the tracks.”

Serge looked around the courtroom and dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief. “As he pulled into the station, Flagler said, ‘I can hear the children, but I cannot see them.’” Serge sat down at the defense table, buried his face in his arms and began sobbing.

The judge cleared his throat. “What does the court psychiatrist have to say?”

“Your Honor, the defendant obviously needs treatment. He’s on a variety of medications, and when he takes them, he’s fine. But when he stops, he has episodes, like the other day at the museum.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Only to himself. There’s nothing violent in his record…”

“Nothing yet,” interrupted the prosecutor.

“…Only a string of night burglaries,” continued the psychiatrist. “Cypress Gardens, Trapper Nelson’s Pioneer Home, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Estate.”

“What does he do? Take stuff?”

“He leaves stuff.”

“Come again?”

“He leaves stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Little historic artifacts and souvenirs he’s collected over the years. He finds them at swap meets or on the Internet or even with a metal detector,” said the psychiatrist. “He told me he wants to make sure they’re preserved by the appropriate authorities.”

Serge raised his head and nodded urgently in agreement.

Over the prosecution’s vociferous objections, the judge suspended sentence and ordered the defendant to perform fifty hours of community service polishing the brass on Henry Flagler’s private railroad car. Then he headed for his chambers, chuckling to himself, “Wide latitude.”