Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

Joe sobbed and Sammy giggled as the men jockeyed with the loungers like Macy’s parade ground crews. They bumped into each other in the close quarters of the motel room and Sammy got wedged in the doorway. Rafael Diaz shoved from the rear and a few balloons popped as Sammy came free and shot up into the night air faster than they had expected. “Wheeeeeeeeee.”

Then it was Joe’s turn, but he went up screaming and crying.

Some people in the bar heard the commotion and looked out the window, but didn’t see anything. Two doors down, City and Country thought they heard something and stepped out of their rooms onto the sidewalk. City checked her watch and shook it. “Where can those guys be?”

Sammy drifted out over the Gulf, but Joe caught a thermal crosswind and blew back across the bay toward Tampa, over the big green glass dome of the Florida Aquarium.

Lenny had been staying with Serge the last two days in room one of Hammerhead Ranch. From the moment they jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac on the Sunshine Skyway fishing pier, there was instant hypergolic chemistry.

Serge upon arriving in the room: “First we establish a bivouac. I’ll deploy my gear over here by the TV and check the escape routes; you fill the tub with ice… If we do it right, the room should look exactly like we’re on a stakeout.”

“This is so great!” said Lenny.

Serge cleared the wicker writing table with the round glass top and laid out precision tools, electrical meter, soldering iron and snacks. He began taking apart the homing signal receiver, trying to figure out why it wasn’t picking up the briefcase. Soon he had the guts all over the table, frayed wiring sticking out everywhere, looking like it would never work again. Serge talked to himself. “It’s gotta be something simple, like a bad rheostat… Hmmm.” He stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth in concentration. He plucked a semiconductor off the chassis with needle-nose pliers like a kid playing the old Milton Bradley game Operation. In the background, Lenny was a one-man bucket brigade, making repeated trips from the ice machine to the tub with the motel’s tiny plastic ice pail.

“These things don’t hold shit,” said Lenny, dumping his twentieth bucket of cubes.

“That’s so inconsiderate guests don’t hog all the ice.”

“Some people spoil it for everyone.”

Lenny dumped another bucket, and the ice finally crested the top of the tub.

Serge finished reassembling the homing receiver, extended the telescopic antenna and turned it on. Nothing. “Piss.” Serge turned it off and tossed it on the near bed. “Supply run!”

“Check!” said Lenny, and they sprinted out the door.

They had been tooling around the barrier islands ever since in bursts of aimless but urgent activity.

On the third day, Serge slouched in the passenger seat at an open drawbridge on the Pinellas Bayway. His arm was over the side of the car, slapping the “Don” in “The Don Johnson Experience” in time with the music. He looked up to the sky and made a scrunched face.

“My spider senses are tingling… First time I felt like this I was three, just before Betsy hit.”

“Betsy?”

“One of the craziest hurricanes on record. Labor Day weekend 1965. It was first spotted by a Tiros weather satellite, and it curled up near the Bahamas. Then it continued tracking northeast, out to sea, and Florida breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone got out their barbecues and went swimming. But Betsy stalled out there. Everyone gulped hard and kept watching the TV reports in disbelief as it did a complete U-turn. Nobody had seen anything like it. Betsy headed right back at south Florida with hundred-and-forty-mile-per-hour winds…” Serge swirled his arms.

“What happened?”

“Raked the bottom of the state. My family huddled in the hallway of our house. Everything got real dark and quiet. I was a little kid so I thought it was fun, but I remember it was the first time I had seen the grown-ups afraid. A small palm tree came through our living-room window, and my mother screamed. We rode it out, but seventy-four others weren’t so lucky.”

“Wow,” Lenny said softly.

The drawbridge closed and they began moving again. Serge fished in the glove compartment and found a Phil Collins tape, and he stuck it in the stereo. They passed the Pelican Diner.

“…I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight-hold on…”

“This is too cool,” said Lenny. “It’s like we’re on the exact same page. I need another joint.”

Lenny grabbed a doobie paper-clipped behind the visor and tried to light it but couldn’t. “Same thing on the pier. I need a new lighter.” He pulled into a convenience store.

Back on the road, he lit the joint on the first try with a small, windproof acetylene torch on a keychain, $9.99.

“You shouldn’t waste your money on crap like that,” said Serge, playing with the laser pointer on his own keychain.

“In the long run, paraphernalia pays for itself,” said Lenny.

“I used to know someone like you,” said Serge.

“What’s he like?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh,” said Lenny. They stopped behind a Rolls-Royce at a red light, waiting to turn onto Gulf Boulevard.

“Why were you trying to fake a suicide the other night?” asked Lenny. “Need to ditch some business partners? Meet your wife in the Bahamas to split the life insurance? Jump bail?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Serge.

“It’s obvious. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant, too. Not like the guys who dive from short bridges and leave stupid notes or torch their boat in the Gulf at night and row ashore in rafts and they’re suspected right away and turn up two weeks later in Cancún. But nobody can survive a fall from the Skyway, so you have to be dead. Your prints are all over the car you left up there. And best of all, they got your fatal jump on videotape on the bridge surveillance cameras. Except the part about what was inside Santa’s belly. Where’d you get a black parachute, anyway?”

“Pez Easter egg coloring.”

Lenny nodded.

“Wonder why this light’s taking so long,” said Serge. He stretched his neck to look forward in traffic.

Their lane had the green arrow, but the Rolls-Royce ahead of them didn’t move. Then the arrow was red again.

“Goddammit!” said Serge. “Now the light has to cycle again. What’s going on in that car?”

Serge grabbed the top of the convertible’s windshield and stood up. He grumbled and sat back down and fidgeted. The driver of the Rolls was talking on a cell phone while simultaneously trimming nose hair with tiny scissors. Serge could see the driver stop to inspect his nostrils in the lighted mirror on the back of the sun visor, then resume trimming.

“Try to hang on,” Serge whispered to himself, twisting nervously in his seat. Then he noticed the Rolls’ two bumper stickers: “God is my copilot” and “Get a job!”

“You know, that’s pretty unsafe, putting a sharp object in your nose at a red light,” said Serge. “You never know when someone might rear-end you.”

Serge reached over with his left leg and tapped Lenny’s gas pedal, and the Cadillac lurched forward and popped the bumper of the Rolls. The windows of the Rolls were up, but everyone near the intersection could hear the terrible screaming anyway.

“You might want to pull around him,” Serge told Lenny. “I think there’s some kind of problem in that car.”

They crossed the bridge at Johns Pass as a casino boat headed out to the edge of territorial waters.

“I love how we’re holed up in the room,” said Lenny. “I do it as often as I can. What about you?”