Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

“Why Chinese?”

“Can’t use Spanish. Half the burglars in Miami are bilingual.”

“How do you say sit in Chinese?”

“I’m not gonna tell you!”

Back on the road, City and Country talked bad romance.

“Remember that one guy you thought was Mr. Right because he drove up for your date in an expensive Lincoln?” asked Country. “Then he took you cruising back and forth across campus for three hours and activated those low-rider shock absorbers that bounced the front wheels two feet off the pavement until it nearly detached your retinas.”

“Very funny,” said City. “Okay, remember that guy who came to pick you up with an entirely new haircut?”

Country stopped laughing and cringed. Shaved into the side of her date’s head: “Ingrid,” with a heart and a dagger through it. He’d seemed normal enough when he asked her out-then he arrived with that crazy shit carved in his skull. “How do ya like it?” he asked. Country plotzed in the doorway.

And their date still lay ahead. A dinner so painfully uncomfortable for Country that everything tasted like packing peanuts. Then an evening at the 4-H fair. Country returned home at midnight, quickly locked the door and threw a giant stuffed animal across the apartment.

“Nice panda,” said City.

“Shut up,” said Country.

The red Alfa Romeo sailed through a yellow light in Perry and kept going east.

T he traffic light in Perry turned red, stopping a blue Malibu.

Jethro Maddox checked his roadmap, then stuck it back in the visor. “When you took vacations as a small child, did you ever play the license-plate game?”

Art didn’t respond. The light turned green and Jethro made a right onto U.S. 19.

“I now enjoy a similar game when I am on the road-Pick the Fugitive,” Jethro continued. “It works very well in Florida. Anyplace you are on the highway, there must be a hundred fugitives come through a day… You study the people in the other vehicles and try to determine who is on the lam.”

Art couldn’t help but look around at the traffic, and Jethro joined him.

Cars full of suitcases and colorful rafts, with “Heart of Dixie” license plates, Florida Gators wheel covers and Fob James for Governor bumper stickers. There was a truckload of fruit pickers riding in back with a load of cantaloupe and marijuana; a retired couple from Newark muling stolen gems; a cold-call bauxite salesman with Michigan fraud warrants, driving a station wagon eaten up by harsh winters in Saginaw. Three runaway teens from Texarkana in a hot Taurus; the deposed president of Paraguay in a Chevy with bad transmission; and an ex-KGB agent stranded in Florida during the Soviet collapse who was now a freelance troubleshooter for the Broward County Democratic Committee.

“I pick that one,” said Jethro. He pointed at a van with a faded Molly Hatchet mural.

Inside the van were two sour-smelling men-a couple of open beers and loaded pistols on the greasy upholstery between them.

“I’ll bet the discussion in that van has just drifted into speculation about how much cash liquor stores keep on hand,” said Jethro.

“…About five hundred dollars just before the night drop,” the van’s passenger told the driver.

“I have seen it with alarming frequency,” Jethro told Art. “It is a well-worn path: The Downward Spiral into Paradise. They all follow the same internal riffraff gyroscope and drag their traveling cavalcade of dumbness across the Florida state line for a final stand that only ends in crime tape and headlines…”

“…Maybe six hundred bucks on the weekend,” said the van’s driver.

Jethro grabbed a day-old newspaper off the floorboard and handed it to Art. Strong-arm robbery. Exploitation of the elderly. Church funds missing. Handicapped woman raped. Four-year-old bludgeoned to death by boyfriend while mother went to buy crack.

Art became troubled. He looked up from the paper and resumed examining the nature of the traffic around him. He realized he had spent far too much time in the small pond; he never knew the outside world was so upsetting. His small-town values and obligations to the community kicked in. The knowledge that he would soon die gave Art a chance to be selfless and do something positive for the world before he left.

“Have you considered my advice?” asked Jethro. “Have you thought about something that moves you? Something to focus your energies?”

Art had. He became obsessed with the number of bullies he saw.

He decided to kill one of them.

Zargoza waited ten minutes at the glass front door with the “Sorry, we’re closed” sign. He daydreamed and gazed at the drawbridge over the viridian sailboat channel. A gold Dodge Viper rolled into the gravel parking lot of B. F. Skinner Taxidermy.

“What are you doing here so early?” the driver asked Zargoza as he got out of the car.

“I need a repair job, B. F.” He pointed to the stuffed hammerhead shark sticking out the back of his pickup truck. The end of one of the shark’s eye pods was snapped and dangling.

“Damn college kids,” said Zargoza. “One shimmied up the thing last night and lost his balance and grabbed for something on the way down. Fucked up my shark. Kid landed on his neck, went to the emergency room. Guess who he’s gonna sue.”

“It just ain’t right,” said Skinner, unlocking the door. He hit switches near the entrance and fluorescent tubes flickered on in sequence and filled the large room with unnatural light. The taxidermy shop was an open studio with a high ceiling. The walls were white, and there was a row of generous transom windows just under the ceiling. Only a blond pine desk near the door and long, neat work shelves in the back. The minimalism set off the trophy fish. Finished jobs covered the walls. The fish still curing hung by their tails from a ceiling rack running down the center of the studio.

“Damn fine work,” said Zargoza, looking at a sailfish, king tarpon and hammerhead shark hanging in the middle of the room, almost completely dry. He admired the sail-the iridescent rainbowing in the ultramarine ridges-and the silver scaling of the tarpon. Zargoza walked up and touched the shark tentatively, but it was still tacky.

“That’s a great hammerhead,” said Zargoza. “I’ll double whatever you’re getting for it.”

Skinner rummaged through a mess of yellow papers and mail on his desk. He looked up. “I don’t know who that’s for. I’ll have to check with Jeff. He must have come in over the weekend and done them.”

“Jeff sure has improved since you took him on,” said Zargoza. “This is some of the best work I’ve ever seen… And these eyes-they’re so lifelike. It’s almost like the fish knew he was doomed.”

Zargoza walked around the tarpon. “I like what he did with bodies, too, full musculature. Lumpy, but in a menacing way, like a boa constrictor after it’s swallowed something.”

Zargoza squatted down and stuck his face under the hammerhead to admire further.

Skinner was opening a bank statement and almost impaled his hand with the letter opener when Zargoza screamed. He looked up and saw Zargoza on the ground, trembling and unable to speak, pointing up at the recessed mouth of the hammerhead. Inside the shark’s mouth was another mouth, a human mouth.

T he coconut telegraph running through the Gulf Coast ’s criminal subculture came alive.

Sidney Spittle was enjoying a morning beer at The Wharf Rat when word swept through the bar about the three regulars found taxidermied alive over at B. F. Skinner’s. His hands shook, and a sweat broke out at his temples. He got up and made it to the pay phone by the pool table, where he dropped his quarter and it rolled under a jukebox. He retrieved another from his pocket and used two shaking hands to get it into the slot, and he dialed.