Tiger Shrimp Tango

Chapter Seven

MIAMI BEACH

Unlike Serge, and almost everyone else, there was one particular man in Florida who had the kind of looks that were the first thing women noticed upon entering a room.

All women. Every time. Every room.

Smoldering Latin sexuality and charisma. And a regular clotheshorse. He consistently had them lining up in the clubs and social events and produce departments. Just one last blank to fill in. What did he do for a living? The women crossed their fingers: doctor, lawyer, banker? . . . Why, none of the above. He had a trust fund. Ding, ding, ding—we have a winner!

But there was this hitch. And nobody would ever believe it without witnessing it in person. And even then, they’d blame it on a trick of lighting.

It was this: Despite all outward appearances to the contrary, he was, well, to look at it from the opposite end, the luckiest man in the world at cards.

When it came to women, he could effortlessly surround himself with a harem. Closing the deal was another matter entirely. It was always something. Something Florida: category-five hurricanes, red tide blooms, Cuban unrest, election unrest, alligators, mosquitoes, Burmese pythons, brush-fire evacuations, all-purpose outbreaks of criminal weirdness and peripheral aberrant behavior.

The bottom line, the guy had never, ever scored.

He was: Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.

Johnny himself didn’t understand it, but it came down to numbers. As any theoretical mathematician will tell you, it is the statistical anomaly that bears out the equation. Somehow, somewhere, in any quantified hierarchy, there is dead-last place. To put it more precisely—again in academically provable terms—if this was all mapped out on a blackboard, and in the exact center of the board was sigma designated by the hump of a bell curve, and halfway to the left side of the blackboard along the negative x axis was the beginning of the most un-laid one percent of men on earth, Johnny would approximately be across the street at Starbucks.

But to Johnny’s credit, his misfortune was in proportion to his persistence. The guy never gave up. And this particular night he put on his batting helmet again and got back in the game at an ultra-hot new Washington Avenue dance club called Liquid Plasma.

Deafening rhythms throbbed out the door to those behind the velvet rope who couldn’t get in because they weren’t attractive, yet not ugly or self-disfigured enough to be trendy. Inside, it was dark, steamy and crammed tight with perspiring bodies hopping to the music in perfect synchronization like a North Korean military parade. The ceiling rose a full four stories over the dance floor, where crisscrossing lasers sliced the vapor of dry ice. Swooping down on the crowd were holograms of dragons, unicorns and Kardashians. The club usually reached max capacity around four A.M., but tonight even earlier because it had booked the most popular DJ on the beach, Count Dreckula. Flexible fiber-optic tubes glowed through his translucent jumpsuit as he stood in a window washer’s scaffold just below the ceiling. The Count had richly earned his rabid following through years of rigorous music study, learning how to play a record on a record player.

Down in the middle of the pulsating mass was Johnny Vegas. Pressed against him was 360 degrees of willing breasts. But all that was Plan B. Because Johnny was awaiting the return of the vixen who had introduced him to the club.

Sasha.

Sasha was on the Permanent A-List with the security team at the front door because she was a consensus all-American femme fatale. First, there was her jaw-dislodging, exquisitely draped platinum-blond hair. Sure, it came out of a bottle at her hairdresser’s, and she lied about it every chance. And if men ever learned that secret, their universal reaction to her black roots: “So what?” Plus that killer mane was fringed with brown lowlights an inch along the ends like some mythical jungle creature. Then her features, starting at an absolute perfect ten, but after that each of them was a notch different, not negative or positive, just . . . off. Her eyes more oblate and drawn to a taper, lips disproportionately fuller in the middle, nostrils with larger intake. And the total package worked, adding to the exotic allure, because that’s how men work. They’ve all been to strip clubs. Beauty is beauty, and then there’s new, like the unsymmetrical cant of Ellen Barkin’s smile, or Lauren Hutton’s tooth gap. Only makes them stand out more. Sasha had all that going on. It was her predatory, catlike looks and moves, but it was more. Even the way Sasha said her name. It was a laboriously drawn-out process that drew no complaints, starting with an elongated hissing sound like a vandalized tire, rising to a throaty whisper accenting the first syllable, before finally concluding with a post-coital exhale.

“Ssssssssaaa-shhhhhh . . . ahhhh.”

She had hired a voice coach.

Women were the last thing on Johnny’s mind earlier that day around noon as he enjoyed a takeout lunch of lobster salad and sparkling water from a fjord. He was sitting by himself in the sun on the grassy slopes of Dumbfounding Bay. Except it’s not really a bay. Actually part of a string of lagoons just inside the barrier-island communities of Bal Harbour, North Miami Beach and Sunny Isles. It was Johnny’s special place, a quick midday nature escape a convenient fifty feet south of the William Lehman Causeway and the golf course on the other side.

Johnny wiped his mouth with a napkin and began to get up when, suddenly, she was just there.

Sasha.

In all her platinum halo glory. Gently weeping, casting upon the water a dozen of the reddest roses, which were promptly ripped apart by pelicans and seagulls accustomed to human handouts from the Frito-Lay company. But the roses were quickly spit back: What is this shit?

Sasha sniffled daintily and dabbed her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief.

J.R.

Of course Johnny was required to come to her rescue. After all, he had the same first initial as the hankie.

“Miss, are you okay?”

“What?” Sasha turned. “Oh, I didn’t notice you. I, uh . . . Yes, I’m fine.”

“You’re crying.”

She smiled and wiped mascara-smearing tears. “This is my special place. It’s where J.R. and I . . .” She stopped to blow her nose with unusual duration.

Johnny took half a step back to be safe.

She glanced at him with another embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that.”

“No, just take your time.”

Sasha nodded. “J.R. was a real gentleman, knew how to treat a woman.” She lowered her gaze toward the water. “He’s gone now . . .”

Johnny Vegas thought: He’s gone, good. Let’s hear more.

Sasha watched the remaining mangled flower petals drift south with the tide. “So you like to come out here and relax for lunch?”

“Time to time,” Johnny said with underplay. He knew women loved the sensitive type. “It’s so tranquil. Occasionally you need to break away from the crazy pace out there with all the calls from hedge-fund managers. The natural purity and solitude out here helps me meditate.”

“I love the sensitive type,” said Sasha. “J.R. was like that.”

Johnny Vegas didn’t know it, but he had inadvertently stumbled into one of Florida’s most vividly historic landmarks. There were no signs. With reason. Vegas grinned. “What about you? Come here often?”

“No.” A sigh. “Just once a year . . . On the day he—” The handkerchief came out again.

Uh-oh, Johnny thought, a woman in mourning. Grief was such a heartbreaking thing. Maybe he could use it to score. “You said this place is special?”

She nodded again. “Holds a lot of memories.”

And how. Every responding police officer clearly remembers the day they got the call. The neighbors remember the fifty-five-gallon drum that had bobbed to the surface and was dragged ashore. The medical examiner remembers the ghastly contents . . .

A screech of braking tires.

Johnny and Sasha turned to see a black Firebird skid off the causeway into the grass on the opposite side of the tiny bay. The driver got out and dashed enthusiastically down the bank. The passenger tripped and rolled like a log to the water’s edge.

“Coleman, stop fooling around! Stand up and get into the moment. I remember it all like it was just yesterday. They opened the steel drum and there was the legendary Johnny Roselli, who worked for Capone and Sam Giancana. Everything about his murder pointed to another legendary moment from Miami’s historic nexus of organized crime and the espionage community, which began when the CIA christened Operation Mongoose during the early sixties. In 1976, Roselli was called to testify before a Senate select committee investigating Mongoose’s alleged cooperation with the Mob to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. But he never got the chance. It’s long been rumored that my homey Tampa godfather, Santos Trafficante, made the call. They sawed off Roselli’s legs and jammed them in the drum beside him. That’s why I can’t resist coming here—it’s such a happy place! . . .”

Across the bay, Johnny and Sasha watched the odd couple on the other side.

“The tall one’s jumping up and down.” Sasha cupped a hand to her ear. “What’s he saying?”

“I can’t quite make it out,” said Johnny. “But he sure is drinking a lot of coffee—” He cut himself off and strained for a closer look. “It couldn’t possibly be them . . . Oh, no, this isn’t happening.”

“What isn’t happening?” asked Sasha. Then she turned toward the opposite bank. “Dear Jesus, the fat one’s peeing in the water. J.R.’s water!” This time she cupped her hands around her mouth. “You son of a bitch! . . .”

On the other side of the bay: “Serge, I think that woman is yelling at us.”

“Probably one of your fans.”

“Now she’s throwing rocks,” said Coleman. “I think they’re meant for us, but her arm’s way too weak.”

“Do you know her?” Serge reached down and grabbed a handful of wildflowers.

“I don’t think so,” said Coleman. “But the guy looks familiar . . . What are you doing?”

“A historic place requires proper respect.” Serge cast the flowers upon the water. “For Johnny. Let’s bow our heads . . . That’s enough.” He sprinted up the bank to the car.

Back across the water, Sasha threw a final rock, then collapsed onto the grass in a sitting position, covered her eyes and began crying.

Johnny collapsed next to her and began crying, too.

His unlucky streak was intact.

Johnny was still covering his face when he felt something. A hand caressing his cheek.

“You’re crying,” said Sasha, snuggling into his shoulder. “That’s so sensitive.”

They sat still together. Eventually she raised her head. “I’m okay now.”

She stuck the J.R. handkerchief back in her purse. Sasha never knew Roselli, or any of the others. Way before her time. But she had this quirk. Sexual. One of those rare, unhealthy paraphilias where she needed to be in danger from the man she was with. At the top of her fantasy list was mobsters. She watched the movies and read the books and visited the sites. Just standing on the edge of Dumbfounding Bay set off a joy buzzer between her legs. In another era, she’d have been a gun mol, but she was born too late. Instead she was forced to run with today’s crop of low-level punks and wannabe gangsters. She was unsatisfied.

Sasha stood up and smiled.

Vegas followed suit and held out his hand. “My name’s Johnny, too.”

“Wow, this must be fate. Pleasure to meet you, Johnny.” She shook his hand. “My name’s Ssssssssaaa-shhhhhh . . . ahhhh.”

Sasha had been able to throw a bit of ventriloquism into the delivery, and Johnny glanced behind him like her name was being announced in Dolby Surround Sound.

“Johnny,” she said, putting his arm in hers. “Are you doing anything tonight?”

Inside his head: You have no idea how much I hope so. “Uh, let me check my planner.”

“Because if you’re free, I know the hottest new place on the beach . . .”

And that’s how Johnny Vegas came to find himself at three A.M. on the dance floor of the club called Liquid Plasma in the middle of a breast buffet.

Soon, a ripple through the crowd as it parted for Sasha. She presented herself in front of Johnny and launched into one of the sultriest grinds anyone had ever seen outside a gentlemen’s club. The performance climaxed with hands sliding down in her signature move that was almost illegal. No, it was illegal. Others took photos and videos with cell phones.

Sasha finished her routine and threw her arms around Johnny’s neck. And her tongue inside his shirt. The crowd congealed back around them and resumed hopping again as a single organism. It went on like this for hours, Johnny and Sasha tripping the light fantastic with the aid of the new ultra-strength energy drink, Tripping the Light Fantastic. They waved glow sticks and did cocaine bullet-snorts offered by fellow dancers, and Sasha sucked a glow-in-the-dark, amphetamine-laced baby pacifier.

Pouty lips went to Johnny’s ear. “It’s getting late,” she said just before noon. “Let’s go back to your place.”

Johnny practically knocked people over dragging her by the hand for the nearest emergency exit.

After running six red lights, Johnny parked his gull-wing Porsche GT1 behind a beach house. The couple stumbled and giggled together as they struggled up the front porch steps facing the dunes and bright sun over the Atlantic. Liquor, anticipation. She embraced him hard, and they crashed against the gingerbread trim next to the front door. Her mouth went to his ear again. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but my secret fantasy is to . . .”

The rest was inaudible except to Johnny’s eardrum. Bubbles hit his brain. Johnny fell one way, and Sasha the other, both landing on their asses. They stared at each other a second, then giggled even louder. Johnny dug in a pocket for house keys with renewed urgency. Yes! The streak is over!

Sasha got up and looked around. “Where’s my shoe? I lost a shoe . . .”

Johnny’s trembling hands fumbled with the keys, dropped them, and fumbled again. Sasha wandered in unsteady circles on the porch. “Where are you, shoe? . . . Come here, shoe . . .”

Keys hit the ground again. Anxious fingers snagged them but had trouble aligning the end of the key with the lock. “Let’s goooooo, focus!”

“Here shoey-shoey . . . Where are you, shoey? . . .” Sasha staggered around the corner of the house. “Motherfuckin’ shoe, where are you!”

The lock finally popped. Hooray. The door creaked ajar, but Johnny wasn’t looking inside. He stared off the side of the porch. “Sasha, the house is open . . . Sasha? . . .”

Then he finally looked though the front door.

“What on God’s earth? . . .”

In the background, squealing tires.

The cops arrived fifteen minutes later.

Johnny sat on the top porch step, face in his hands again. Shoulders shaking with sobs.

A detective approached the officer in charge of the crime scene. “Magruder, what have we got here?”

“Seems pretty open-and-shut.” The sergeant closed his notebook. “Our pal Mr. Vegas here spent all night in one of the local clubs with some young thing he had a chance meeting with yesterday afternoon, and he came home this morning to find his place stripped to the walls.”

“Another dating bandit?”

“Except a new wrinkle.”

“How’s that?”

“This one was female.”

They became distracted by a louder bout of weeping from the porch steps. The detective jerked a thumb sideways. “What’s his problem?”

The sergeant shrugged. “He’s been crying off and on ever since we got here.”

“Doesn’t he know insurance covers this?”

The sergeant raised his voice in Johnny’s direction. “Mr. Vegas, just call your insurance company . . . The important thing is you’re safe. She didn’t even touch you.”

The crying became deafening wails.

“Wow.” The detective turned toward the sergeant. “He must have really loved that furniture.”

FORT LAUDERDALE

Fingers impatiently tapped a counter in a strip mall. Hanging from a pegboard: chew toys, catnip, fish pellets, and electronic dog collars that create an invisible fence around your yard.

An employee rushed back to the register through a vortex of animal-waste aromas that combined to smell exactly like all pet stores everywhere.

“Sorry for the delay.” He wiped something green on his shirt. “How may I help you?”

“This is a rescue intervention,” said Serge. “You’ve seen those news stories about heroin-addict mothers forgetting baby strollers on escalators while they shoplift?”

The employee scratched his head. “I’m not following.”

“I need you to take in a hamster.”

“We don’t buy hamsters,” said the clerk. “They’re multiplying fast enough as it is back there. Unless you bought it here and it’s sick or something, then I’ll need a receipt.”

“No, I didn’t buy it here and I don’t want to sell it.” Serge reached in his hip pocket. “I want you to adopt it. His current owner needs parenting classes. He’s passed out in the Firebird right now . . . Oh, and he may have a drug problem.”

“Your friend in the car?”

“The hamster, too. He’s being raised in a toxic environment. And when Coleman lost consciousness a few minutes ago, that was my big chance to save him, so it’s not really a kidnapping, right?”

“But I don’t think—”

Serge set the furry critter on the counter. “His name’s Skippy.”

The clerk looked down, then quickly up again with an odd expression.

“What’s the matter?” asked Serge.

“That’s not a hamster.”

“What is it, then?”

“A mouse.”

“Does that affect the adoption?”

“Well, we can always use mice.”

“Good. Great!” Serge bent down to talk to the rodent. “Hear that? You’ve found a loving new home, where you can get clean and sober.”

“Yeah,” added the clerk. “We feed them to the snakes.”

Serge’s eyes flew wide. He snatched the small animal off the counter and clutched it to his chest. “Not Skippy!”

“But it’s just a mouse.”

Serge crashed backward into a sales display. Tiny aquarium castles plunged to the floor. “What kind of monster are you!”

“Look, they pay me shit.”

Serge ran out the door to a jingle of bells.

Coleman sat up in the backseat when Serge peeled out. “What’s going on?” He looked around the car. “Where’s Skippy?”

“Taken into protective foster care.” Serge skidded around a corner. “And we should probably change his name to Mickey.”

“Why?”

They took off in the Firebird. It was noon along the countless finger canals that characterized the city.

A landscaping crew was putting in yeoman duty. Three trucks with trailers and the heavy rigs. Constant buzzing and sawing and people riding other noisy things around. A tiny one-man tractor grunted to a stop.

A ’78 Firebird pulled up to the curb.

Serge approached the man climbing out of the safety cage. “What are you going to do with that?”

“Probably make mulch.” The man wiped sweat and dirt off his forehead. “Why?”

“How much?” asked Serge.

“You want to buy it?”

Serge nodded.

“Okay, fifty bucks. No, a hundred.”

Serge opened his wallet. “Split the difference at seventy-five, and you help me load it in the car.”

“Cool.”

The yardman deftly maneuvered the tractor into position behind the Firebird. He threw a black-knobbed lever, flipping down the front-loader claw and dropping the item into the trunk. The car’s back end bounced on the suspension. Not a remote chance of closing the hood, so it was tied with twine.

Serge dusted dirt off the top of the fenders. “Got a business card?”

“Sure, it’s somewhere in here”—going through one of those thick hoarding wallets on a chain. “There we go.” He handed it to Serge. “What kind of work are you thinking of having done?”

“Stump removal.”

“Huh?” The landscaper narrowed his eyes, staring at the trunk of the Trans Am and the protruding, recently purchased stump.

Serge grabbed his door handle. “Pleasure doing business.” They drove away from the competing whines of small gas-powered engines.

The phone rang. Serge recognized the number in the caller ID.

“Hey, Mahoney, what’s going on?”

“Mahoney mulled the lowdown he was about to lay on Serge like a dirty ward boss with a case of the crabs and a day-old racing form.”

“Mahoney,” said Serge. “You’re doing third person again.”

“Serge was a sharp cookie, like a broad in a gin joint who sees all the angles, from acute to obtuse—”

“Mahoney, look, if it’s about the cases, we’ve been working round the clock. I just picked up a stump.”

“Serge made as much sense as wearing a belt with suspenders.”

“What I could use is a little help on your end,” said Serge. “Call some of your old contacts and get all the police reports with similar dating-bandit MOs. As for the newest victim who hired you, I already told you I only need—”

“Mahoney was sly to Serge’s jones and ready to roll Romans like loaded crap dice that always come up boxcars.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Serge grabbed a pen. “I’m ready for that phone number.”

Mahoney gave it.

“Thanks, I’ll let you know how it works out.”

“. . . Like a one-legged unicycle jockey . . .”

Serge began closing the phone—“ . . . Scootily-bop . . .”—and hung up. He immediately dialed again.

“Hello?”

“Yes, I’m calling about the yellow Corvette for sale in the paper.”

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