Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

Lenny had his newest rap.

He bought a loose white Italian suit and Gucci loafers. He took the newsmobile in for an off-the-books pink paint job. He turned it into a convertible with a demolition saw and glued strips of packing foam over the jagged metal along the top of the windshield and where the side window posts had been. He stuck pink and blue neon tubes under the chassis.

The Miami Vice convention started well enough until Angie broke down onstage. Out in the car, Lenny managed to get her to stop crying and he got in and started driving to their next gig in Tampa. She gave him the silent treatment all the way across the Everglades and up I-75. When he got to Tampa Bay he pulled off at the fishing pier, hoping maybe if he could get her alone in a romantic setting and turn on the Johnson charm…

T he fresh salt air stung Lenny Lippowicz’s nostrils as he gazed off the end of the fishing pier and into Tampa Bay just after midnight. He looked up at the Sunshine Skyway and the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles bunched together at the top of the bridge.

He turned around and watched Angie’s angry hips in red-leather hot pants as she walked barefoot away from him under the row of crime lights running down the pier, toward shore. She had a pair of bright green spiked heels in her right hand, and he colored her gone.

Lenny sighed with a hard exhale through his nose and watched her, now tiny at the foot of the pier. He listened to the waves. He rolled the end of a filterless Lucky Strike in his mouth, gripped it with his lips and didn’t light it. The cold ocean wind blew through his hair.

Lenny leaned against the concrete retaining wall at the end of the pier and looked into the blackness. The pier used to be the old Skyway bridge until a ship hit its supports in a storm in ’80 and collapsed the middle span. When they built the new Skyway next to it, they ripped out most of the old bridge except the ends and converted them into fishing piers. Lenny looked up again at the emergency lights flashing on the bridge and wondered what had happened. A Coast Guard helicopter arrived and hovered with a search beam aimed down into the water.

Lenny was alone on the pier. Waves plopped against the cement supports in the darkness thirty feet below. He pulled a joint from his pocket but he couldn’t get it lit in the breeze from the bay, so he crouched down behind the concrete wall and fired it up.

When he stood again, another head popped up simultaneously from the outside of the retaining wall. Lenny screamed in surprise and the other man screamed too, and the man lost his grip and fell thirty feet, splashing back into the bay. Lenny leaned over the railing and saw the man climb back out of the water again and up one of the pylons like a telephone repair man. A Santa Claus cap floated in the water behind him.

The man pulled himself over the railing, turned around and reeled in a soaked black parachute trailing behind him. He wrung out the chute and bundled it in his arms.

“Don’t hurt me!” Lenny said, and covered up his face.

“I’m not gonna touch you,” said Serge, and he threw the wet chute in the backseat of Lenny’s Cadillac. Serge walked to an oil-drum garbage can in a corner of the pier and retrieved a small brown paper sack hidden down in the garbage. Serge unpacked the contents: khaki shorts, sandals and a short-sleeve yellow shirt with an M. C. Escher pattern of angelfish turning into juvenile delinquents. He changed into the dry clothes.

Lenny slowly lowered his arms. “Who are you?”

“I’m the messenger,” said Serge. “The one you’ve been waiting for.”

Lenny took another slow drag on his joint. “Far out.”

Serge climbed into the passenger side of the Cadillac and Lenny got in behind the wheel.

Serge pointed down the pier, back toward land. “Step on it, toke-meister.”

And Lenny hit the gas.

O n the edge of the Hillsborough River, in a large open room on the second floor of the Tampa Tribune Building, the skeleton night crew tapped away at computer keyboards.

A young copy editor just out of college named Kirk Curtly worked the rim. He opened a computer file from the directory containing stories that needed headlines written. Kirk had been gently prodded by his supervisors to be more specific in his headlines. On the other hand, he was roundly praised for never having incurred a dreaded correction, which he achieved through inspired vagueness. Kirk tapped his chin with the Montblanc pen he’d gotten for a graduation gift and never used, since everything was done on computers. He typed the headline “Panel Studies Plan.” He looked at its structure and rhythm on the screen. He smiled with satisfaction and sent the story along to the typesetters. He called up another story and tapped his chin again. He typed “Official Mulls Options.” Curtly had a mental Rolodex of short, bureaucratic terms that were perfect for narrow headlines over one-column-wide stories, and he searched for such thin articles in the headline directory to show off his arsenal. It went this way for much of his shift. “Board Picks Member,” “Senate Takes Flak,” “Gov Eyes New Trend,” and his proudest effort: “Pols Nix Proxy Prexy Tap.”

Shortly after midnight, a late news story wormed its way through the Tribune computer system until it came to the headline directory. Kirk looked around. All his colleagues were writing heads on other stories. Only one story left that wasn’t being worked. It wasn’t one column. It ran in big type all the way across the top of page one. Kirk’s hands were unsteady as he opened the file. He read the story. A man in a Santa Claus suit had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway bridge. He began typing. He finished, sent the story along, got up and walked into the men’s room, where he suffered a forty-minute failure of nerve.

The story and headline moved with the speed of light to the copysetter, who was overworked and had exactly eight seconds to proof everything before pressing a button in the upper right of his keyboard, which fired electrons through the building and made the story spit out on a roll of silver-nitrate paper from a machine in the blue-collar section of the building. The page composers, who had exactly six months before their jobs would be sucked out of them by microprocessors, ran it through the waxer and slapped it on the master page, which was photographed by a giant camera, burned into a metal plate and clamped on the huge rollers of the printing press, and hundreds of thousands of copies rolled down conveyor belts to trucks waiting at the loading dock to bring the news to you.

It was a hot, clammy afternoon in Biloxi. Keesler Air Force Base was dead. There were no missions for the Hurricane Hunters and no wind, and the air sat heavy on the town. The Prop Wash Bar only had ceiling fans.

Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes filled his mug from a pitcher of draft and looked across the bar at the group of airmen sitting around two tables near the dart boards. It was the crew of the Rebel Yell, the fierce rivals of Montana ’s plane. The crew stared back at Barnes and his colleagues, and a few began to chuckle derisively.

“I hate those fuckers,” said Barnes. “They think they’re hot shit.”

Marilyn Sebastian leaned up against the jukebox, wearing flight pants and a tight combat-green tank top with a large oval of perspiration between her shoulder blades. Her fiery red hair was out of its usual ponytail and fell over her shoulders. She punched up a Patsy Cline tune and swayed with faraway thoughts. She wrapped her lips around a longneck beer and took a hard pull.

One of the members of the Rebel Yell made a wisecrack and his table broke up. He smiled and stood and strolled over to Marilyn with the cockiness of the oxygen-deficient.