Tim Dorsey - Gator A-GO-GO

Coleman squinted. “Follow That Dream Parkway?”

“It’s a sign.”

“Yeah, metal. See them all over the roads.”

“No, I mean a religious one. God wanted that light to turn red, like a burning bush. From now on, I’ll never question the apparitions of the red lights.”

“What are you going to do?”

Serge hit the left blinker as the light turned green. “Follow that dream!”

The Challenger skidded around the corner. “There’s the chamber of commerce. They’ll have answers.” He pulled into the parking lot.

“Serge, it’s closed.”

“What the hell? The economy doesn’t stop on Sunday.”

Coleman burped. “Back there, I saw a-”

“Not now.” Serge grabbed his camera. “Maybe I can find answers through the office window with my zoom lens.”

“But, Serge-”

He was out of the car. He came back.

“Answers?”

“Only more questions.” He stuck a key in the ignition.

“Serge, what was that brown sign we passed racing around the corner?”

“Coleman, I’m trying to think!” He stopped and turned. “Did you say brown? ”

“Yep. Big one.”

“Brown means information, which means God left another message on my machine.”

Serge threw the Challenger in reverse and squealed backward a hundred yards. He stared at the sign, then at Coleman.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“He speaks through you.”

“Cool.” Coleman switched to his flask. “What’s this dream parkway jazz about anyway?”

“The sign reveals all.”

Serge got out and stood fervently before the sun-faded paint. At the top, a rust-streaked logo of an old-style movie camera. Below: Elvis spent July and August of 1961 in this area filming his ninth major motion picture Fo//ow That Dream … The main set was located 5.8 miles ahead at the bridge that crosses Bird Creek.

Serge dashed back to the car. Coleman dove in after it began moving.

They sped west through Crackertown.

The odometer ticked under Serge’s watchful eye. “… Based on the novel Pioneer, Go Home! by Richard Powell…”

Coleman pointed at the running camcorder on the dashboard. “I thought this documentary was about spring break.”

“It is,” said Serge. “In the movie, Elvis plays Toby Kwimper, whose family drives to Florida and homesteads on the side of the highway. Presley was such a force of nature, he created his own spring break. Plus another righteous Florida footnote: One of the film hands from Ocala brought his eleven-year-old nephew to the set, and he was bitten by the Elvis bug, dedicating his life to rock ‘n’ roll. That child? Tom Petty!”

The odometer reached 5.7.

“Is that the bridge?”

“Elvis lives!”

The Challenger skidded to a stop on the tiny span. Serge got out with his camcorder, filming the surrounding marsh. “Coleman, there’s much to do. We must get down on that bank and fashion a bivouac like the Kwimpers’ from available natural materials. Then I’ll buy a guitar and rehearse the theme song while you round up extras from the day-labor office. Nothing in the universe can make me waver until this mission is complete.”

“What about the guy in the trunk?”

“Or we can do that.”

MEANWHILE…

ABritish Airways jumbo jet cleared the Dolphin Expressway and touched down at Miami International. The control tower had to-the-horizon visibility for minimum landing separation. Minutes later, another transatlantic from Berlin. And Rome. And Madrid. Then the domestics, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Nashville.

The cadence of swooping turbines rattled the inside of a tiny bar on the back of an ill-stocked package store with Honduran cigars and a bulletproof Plexiglas cage for night sales that was so thick it was like looking at the cashier through an aquarium.

Only four customers in the late afternoon. Guillermo and his boys. The bar sat just north of the airport on the side of Okeecho-bee Boulevard. The interior was dark, choked with cigarette smoke from insufficient ventilation, which consisted of an open back door on a windless day. Out the door: roosters and roaming dogs pulling wet clothes from laundry lines. Beyond that, an unassuming drainage canal that began a hundred miles away near Clewiston, cutting south through a million sugarcane acres, then the Everglades, past western quarries and jumping the turnpike for a perfect, man-made straight diagonal shot through Hialeah, eventually assuming natural bends when it became the Miami River before dumping into Biscayne Bay.

The connectivity of that waterway could stand as a spiritual metaphor for the irreversible series of events Guillermo and his colleagues were about to set in motion, but that would just be shitty writing. Before coming to the lounge, they’d fished the bullet from Miguel’s shoulder with tweezers and tequila. Not a bad job of swabbing the wound. Now Miguel wanted more tequila, and Guillermo wanted quiet as the TV over the bar went Live at Five from the so-called Lottery Massacre in West Perrine. When the report finished, Guillermo asked the bartender to change the channel. There it was again. And the next channel. Guillermo exhaled with relief. He’d been worrying that they had jumped the gun and removed ski masks too soon in their rush out the door. Another channel, CNN taking the south Florida fire-fight to the nation. But still no surveillance footage of the assailants, because the low-grade convenience store couldn’t afford real security cameras and went instead with decoy boxes and blinking red lights.

“We lucked out,” said Guillermo.

“Tequila,” said Miguel.

BIRD CREEK

Serge stood in the middle of the bridge with coils of white rope. He threw one end over the west side and the other over the east.

“What are you doing?” asked Coleman.

“Making a guitar.”

Serge walked twenty yards and tied monofilament fishing line to the bridge’s railing. Then he went forty yards the other way and tied another.

“Guitar?” Coleman looked around. “Where?”

“The bridge is the guitar.“ Serge tested a hitch knot.”Elvis deserves only the biggest.”

“But how can a bridge be a guitar?”

“Just a matter of proportion. The tones of an instrument’s strings are determined by their thickness.” Serge pointed. “That braided, inch-thick nylon would be the E string”-he turned-“and the fishing line is-let me think. Treble scale. ‘Every good boy deserves fudge’- probably G.”

Serge ran to the end of the bridge and down the bank.

A horn-honker lay in the mud, gagged, hands behind his back.

Serge grabbed two discarded crab traps and splashed out into the shallow creek. He stacked them beneath the bridge.

Ten minutes later, the hostage stood on top of them.

“That rope gives you balance,” said Serge, clamping a D-ring. “Which is important because you definitely don’t want to fall off those crab traps.”

Coleman stood knee deep with a Pabst. “No noose?”

“Been there, done that.” Serge crouched and stretched fishing line. He looked up at his captive. “Remember: The traps are everything. If you can stay balanced on them long enough, someone’s bound to find you. If not, they’ll still find you, but you won’t like it.”

Coleman crumpled his empty can and pointed. “What are those for?”

Serge knotted lines through crab trap wires. “Refreshment.”

The hostage stared in front of his face at a pair of gerbil dispensers hanging from the underside of the bridge and inserted through his mouth gag.

“Well, time to run.” Serge stood and smiled. “Gotta follow that dream!”