Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

“Baby, I’m at The Wharf Rat. Something bad’s happened. No, not now, not here. In an hour…” Sid stopped and looked around. He turned his back to the pool room and whispered.

“…I love you. Be careful,” and he hung up. He scanned the room again and left briskly through the screen door in the back of the bar.

A customer sitting at a table next to the screen door had his nose in a 1952 Life magazine. When Spittle went by, the customer stuck the magazine under his arm and followed Sid out the door.

As the screen slammed shut, Zargoza and his traveling goon squad skidded to a stop in the parking lot out front.

The bartender got his cocaine six steps below Zargoza and the Diaz Boys, and he wanted to score points. He also wanted to avoid the unspoken penalty of later being found to have withheld information. Upon hearing about the dead car thieves ten minutes earlier, he immediately phoned in a tip to Zargoza that the three had been bragging about five million dollars the night before and tipping everyone in sight like John Gotti. They had been hanging out with another regular, and the guy was back this morning, acting peculiar-he only knew his first name, Sid.

“Where is he?” Zargoza shouted as he crashed through the front door of The Wharf Rat.

The bartender pointed at the back door. “Just left.”

They ran out the back and saw Sidney Spittle and another driver pulling onto Gulf Boulevard. They sprinted around front to Zargoza’s German sedan.

It was a slow-motion O. J. chase down the barrier islands of the Gulf Coast. Serge had retrieved the scorched Chrysler in Ybor City after dealing with the car thieves, and he drove under the speed limit in the right lane. Two cars back in the left lane was Team Zargoza. Neither was aware of the other and neither wanted to make a move on Spittle until they saw him with the briefcase.

They took a bridge to the mainland and drove across the Pinellas Peninsula. They caught the Gandy Bridge over the bay to Tampa and followed the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway downtown. Took nearly an hour, everyone stressed going so slow hanging back from Spittle.

Sid parked in front of the bus station, looked around and went inside. Zargoza parked a block away, Serge at the corner.

Spittle took a chair with his back to the wall and pretended to read a travel brochure. He peeked over the top and scoped the place. So far so good. He got up and walked around for a more thorough recon, checking out the facilities. An old scale, your weight and lucky lottery number, twenty-five cents. A vending machine dispensing artificial stimulants, artificial depressants and temporary tattoos. A schedule board, arrivals, departures. Western Union, for the broke and the shameless, to renew old friendships with the endearing three-A.M. phone prostration for five hundred dollars. Out on the loading platform, thick with diesel fumes, a bus from Richmond idled and someone in uniform was flinging sawdust on a Night Train regurgitation. Sid took a seat again in the station and decided to wait and watch. The terminal reminded him of visiting day at the state prison. The chronic inability to master life hung in the air like a toxic mist. Something about the manner of travel. Good news comes to Tampa rarely and by divine intervention, but bad news arrives every day on the bus. The luggage definition was casually regarded: gunnysacks, laundry bins, pillowcases, Glad bags and liquor cartons. Woody Guthrie made them sound like romantic troubadours over the radio, but in person the image was a bit too jarring for Sid to burst into hobo songs.

Two Tampa cops came in the front door and walked slowly down the rows of molded plastic chairs, comparing waiting passengers with mug shots of Serge A. Storms. Various fugitives began to fidget and perspire in their seats. The stress got the best of a young work-farm escapee with bushy hair and an acoustic guitar. He jumped up and was grabbed immediately. He tried to put up a fight with the instrument, but the cops easily took it away and smashed it like balsa wood to a smattering of applause. They led him off in cuffs. The clock on the wall continued ticking.

A half hour later, Sid was confident the coast was clear. He got up and walked to the lockers. He scanned the station a last time before opening number seventeen and removing a metal briefcase.

When Sid turned back around, he saw a man in a chair on the other side of the station staring at him over the top of a newspaper. The man quickly looked back down. A hot flash of dread surged through Sid and he had to focus hard to walk as if each leg weighed two hundred pounds. He made it to a chair and sat down next to a girl reading a Sixteen magazine with Leonardo on the cover. He set the briefcase on the floor next to his feet. He was still on the other side of the terminal, but he had a clear view of the man with the newspaper. The man looked at Sid again over the top of his paper and back down quickly. Sid then noticed there was a whole damn row of men peeking over newspapers.

Sid’s heartbeat shook his whole body. He and the men furtively watched each other for five minutes. Sid suddenly grabbed the briefcase and raced for the bus station’s exit onto Polk Street. Zargoza and his goons threw their newspapers in the air, pulled guns and ran after him.

There was a yellow Checker cab at the curb, and Sid clutched the briefcase to his chest and literally dove through the open back window.

The cabbie turned around. “Never seen that before.”

“Get me out of here!” yelled Sid.

“Sure thing.”

The cab patched out from the curb, and Sid looked out the back window at Zargoza and the goons standing in the street, shaking their fists at the cab and shouting.

Sid turned back around, slumped in the seat and let out a deep breath of relief. “Take me to the airport.”

“You got it,” said Serge, and he turned on the meter.

B ack inside the bus station, everyone was in Florida mode-here we go again!-hitting the deck when the goons pulled their guns and started hurtling through the terminal.

As the cab peeled away and the men stood yelling in the street, the waif named Patty Bodine stopped reading her magazine article about Leonardo Di Caprio. She picked up a second, identical metal briefcase at her feet and calmly strolled out the exit doors on the other side of the bus station.

S erge had Sidney Spittle’s undivided attention.

Sid was chained up around the armpits and elbows. Another chain wrapped tightly around his hips and knees. Each chain was extended loosely and fastened in opposite directions so that Sid hung like a hammock. He almost looked comfortable.

There wasn’t any challenge to the interrogation. In the first minute, Spittle was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. He told Serge everything about the money, about making the switch at the bus station with his girlfriend, Patty, and about their planned rendezvous later that night.

Serge had one last question. Who were those guys chasing you?

“You don’t know?” Sid said incredulously. “That’s Zargoza’s crew!”

Serge said thank you and taped Sid’s mouth shut. Then he sat back on the catwalk and ate a Snickers bar and waited. He fiddled with his electronic tracking device and shook it, but the sensor stayed in the middle. Why wasn’t it picking up the briefcase? Something must be jamming it. Must be the weather-all the electricity in the air.

Serge’s blinking increased and he sat paralyzed for a moment.

When movement came back into Serge’s body, he asked Sid, “Did you know the first barbecue was held in Tampa?”

Sid just stared bigger.

“It’s true,” said Serge. “In 1528 a stranded Spanish explorer named Juan Ortiz was marked for death by Harriga, the Timucuan Indian chief in Tampa Bay -mainly because another Spaniard had earlier cut off the chief’s nose. And we called them savages… Anyway, they decided to roast Ortiz alive over a fire pit that the Indians called barbacoa-and that’s how we got barbecue!”