Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

Serge smiled broadly with satisfaction and his eyebrows raised in an expression that said, “Impressed, eh?”

Then Serge’s face got serious again. “Oh, I almost forgot. Cool footnote alert: Ortiz didn’t die. He was saved by one of the chief’s daughters, who had the hots for him and begged her father to let him go. The episode was later stolen for part of the story of Captain John Smith. And it became the legend of Pocahontas.”

Sid was a mask of silent terror.

“What? Don’t believe me?”

Sid began screaming mute under the tape, but the noise was soon drowned out by the air horn of an approaching sailboat. Serge got all excited like a kid at the circus. Water splashed below and cars droned above on the metal grating. A gap of moonlit sky opened over Sid’s stomach and he was lifted up into the air, the two spans of the drawbridge rising and separating, each chained to a different end of Sidney Spittle.

I t was the last flight out.

Patty Bodine, the underage girlfriend of the very late Sidney Spittle, was like ice water. Not a flutter, totally calm, sitting in a blue styrene seat in Airside D at Tampa International Airport with five million dollars on her lap.

It was shortly after midnight, and the airside was empty. Vacuum cleaners going. One last guy schnockered in the lounge.

The flight was the second leg of a Fort Lauderdale red-eye to Chicago, and the Whisperjet had just taxied to the accordion boarding arm. A ticket agent walked to the gate and unhooked the velvet cord. Patty and five other weary people stood up.

Patty pulled her boarding pass from a hip pocket. She was at the end of the short line, and she felt something poke her in the back.

“Where are you going?” asked Zargoza.

He turned her around and marched her back up the airside, and they caught the monorail to the main terminal. When the doors opened, Patty fell to the floor of the car and screamed and flopped around. “They’re gonna kill me!” The other passengers stared. Zargoza and his goons stuck their hands in their pockets, looked around innocently at the others and smiled, like they didn’t know her.

As the doors were closing again, Patty sprang out of the car. Zargoza lunged and grabbed the back end of the briefcase, and it wedged in the closing doors of the monorail.

“Let go!” they both shouted on opposite sides of the doors. They struggled fiercely and Patty lost her grip. Zargoza fell over backward with the briefcase, and the monorail doors snapped shut.

“Get her!” Zargoza yelled at his goons.

“Dammit!” Patty said under her breath as she saw the briefcase disappear into the monorail car. Then she saw the goons banging on the doors, trying to pry them open. She began backpedaling slowly, then faster and faster. One of the goons found the emergency button and the hydraulic doors hissed open. Patty turned and dashed full speed through the main terminal with the goons twenty yards behind. She bolted out the front of the airport to curbside and jumped in a cab.

“Get me out of here!”

“Ten-four,” said Serge.

Z argoza stood and stretched in the morning air, sipping hot coffee just outside the office of Hammerhead Ranch. He thought: A good night’s sleep, that’s all I needed to calm my nerves. That’s when he heard the first siren.

An out-of-breath goon ran across the parking lot. “Boss, I think you better come see this.”

Zargoza walked around the motel to the drawbridge over the inlet, where authorities had just discovered what was left of Sidney Spittle.

“Jesus!” Zargoza yelled.

Sharks pooled under the bridge and rubberneckers pulled over to be sick en masse.

Zargoza walked back to the motel and another goon came running from the other direction.

“Boss, come quick. You better see this.”

Zargoza walked around behind Hammerhead Ranch toward the swimming pool.

He suddenly screamed and fell to his knees. Then he held a hand over his mouth reverently and whispered: “The Curse.”

He faced the row of ten hammerheads. In the hole where Zargoza had removed the broken shark, there was now a replacement, a gleaming new hammerhead with the primordial eye pods seamlessly epoxied to the sides of Patty Bodine’s head.

Serge A. Storms was the native.

Born and raised.

Serge thought Florida in the sixties was a great place and time to grow up. He mythologized his childhood. All the objects in his memory had bright, shimmering outlines and they bloomed against backdrops of perfect cerulean sky or aquamarine sea. In his memories, there was no sound except a hot, melancholy wind. As a young boy, he wandered footloose around beaches and causeways, stomping through mangrove bogs, pretending they were the La Brea Tar Pits. He climbed the Jupiter Lighthouse on a field trip. He broke into JFK’s boarded-up bomb shelter on Peanut Island in the middle of Lake Worth Inlet. He dangled mullet heads off the Singer Island drawbridge with a cane pole, making sharks jump for dinner. Sometimes he fished from atop pier pilings on the Loxahatchee River. He always looked upriver, to the bend where it disappeared. All the kids knew better than to go up the Loxahatchee. That was Trapper Nelson territory. Nelson came to the area in the 1930s and built a primitive cabin on a remote bank of the river, where no road could reach. He made a living skinning furs and made a reputation as the Wildman of the Loxahatchee. To the adults, he was a crazy old hermit, but to Florida schoolchildren who repeated his story over and over, he was the Maximum Boogeyman.

One day when Serge was eight, he stole a rental canoe and paddled up the river. He entered a tree canopy, and the eyes of alligators bulged from the water like knots on cypress knees. He lifted his paddle and glided silently, listening. He came around another bend and the cabin appeared. Serge was still and quiet. No Trapper. He paddled with stealth, hugging the far bank, craning his neck for any sign of the wildman.

Serge heard movement behind him, and he turned to the near bank. There was Trapper, silent, with a slaughtered boar.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Serge yelled, and paddled like a mad bastard back to the boat launch.

The undetected canoe theft was Serge’s first taste of the criminal life. Twelve years later he began a series of short jail terms for petty larceny and simple assault, and a year at Starke on a coke charge. He avoided anything longer by reason of insanity. It was an easy call. Even expert state witnesses hired to rebut defense psychiatrists would spend five minutes interviewing Serge, then go back to the prosecutor and say, “Are you kidding? I can’t testify this guy’s normal.”

Serge’s face was inviting and intense. It betrayed his surplus of energy and told you he was completely alive every waking moment, fully engaged in life, gripping it with white-knuckled fists. He would invariably end up back at Chattahoochee, the high-security state mental hospital for the criminally insane.

There was nothing mean about Serge. In fact, there was an abundance of compassion. He had empathy for any living thing, felt its pain and joy as his own. It was just a problem of wiring. His overload of energy caused him to get a little too excited at times and he would fritz out. It short-circuited his conscience and he would perform horrific acts in a detached manner, as if he were watching it all on a TV set at the other end of the room. In the same five minutes, he could be exceedingly tender and frighteningly brutal.

The better psychiatrists in the Florida correctional system loved Serge. They recognized the pathology, just hadn’t seen it to this degree. A mixture of schizophrenia and attention-deficit, with a dash of dissociative. It was simply a matter of fine-tuning the chemicals in his brain, like the tracking on a VCR. It generally took a cocktail of four antidepressants and psychotropic drugs to even him out. When he was leveled, he was like an enthusiastic, sweet little kid.