Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

“Cuz I’ll kick your ass if you do! You know what you got there? That is the coolest! If I had one, I’d never sell it. I’d keep it in a special container with the rest of my special stuff.”

“Why?”

“To look at. You know, when you get the mood some nights to get your special stuff out and put it on the table, and you sit there and look at it and play with it, move it around…”

Lenny had a puzzled look.

“What?” said Serge. “Didn’t you have any hobbies when you were a kid?”

“So what am I supposed to do with it?” Lenny asked.

“If it’ll bring ten grand, so will a fully authenticated counterfeit moon rock. I can get this certificate touched up at Kinko’s and we’ll run off a bunch. Then we’ll get a few Lucite display boxes with little pedestals inside, like they use to show off autographed baseballs. We’ll sell the rock over and over again.”

“Where we gonna find more rocks?”

A red Audi driven by Tommy Diaz slowed on Gulf Boulevard and turned into the driveway of Hammerhead Ranch.

“Aaaaaauuuuuuuu!” Tommy yelled, and cut the wheel, barely missing two men crouched low to the ground in the parking lot.

Lenny looked up from the pavement as the Audi swerved by, barely missing him. “I think we’re too far out,” Lenny told Serge. “We’re gonna get run over.”

The pair duck-walked to the side of the motel parking lot, picking up rocks as they went.

“How about this one?” Lenny asked, holding up a smooth white river rock used in decorative landscaping.

“Are you still high? At least make some attempt to select one that looks real. That certificate is only gonna fool ’em so much.”

Serge sorted through some rocks next to a garbage can, and he picked one up and held it in front of his face. “Okay, here we go. We’re cookin’ now!”

“How’s that rock better than mine?”

“Look at it! Think basaltic, igneous-use your imagination. This could be from an ejecta blanket on the Sea of Storms. See the perforated texture? Intense heat, geological trauma! A few more of these and we’re in business!”

Serge leaned back down and sorted meticulously through the rubble among the butts and bottle caps.

“You gotta be careful selling space stuff on the black market,” said Serge. “Local cops and even the FBI shouldn’t be a problem, but you don’t want to mess with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Just ask the shrimper who’s talking to rats in his jail cell.”

“What happened?”

“They were on a trawler dragging the North Atlantic for shrimp when they snagged a tiny metal box. The shrimper cracked it open and found some personal effects and a few crew patches that said ‘Challenger.’ Their nets had hit a small skid of debris that hadn’t been found after the space shuttle blew an O-ring in ’86. The guy goes back to Cocoa Beach of all places and tries peddling the box around the pawnshops. He’s asking twenty grand, and he ends up settling for something like thirty bucks.”

“Not too shrewd,” said Lenny.

“That’s why they’re the underclass,” said Serge. “So the pawnshop owner calls NASA, and the next thing the guy knows, he’s walking down the sidewalk on A1A when ten agents come out of thin air and gang-swarm him… All that scientific nerd stuff you hear? Total garbage-these boys don’t play.”

They stopped talking and went back to collecting rocks.

A half hour later, Serge was still at it, subjecting every pebble to the same intricate degree of scrutiny. Lenny was totally bored and cranky.

“I think this is a lot more work than we have to go through,” he whined. “At a certain point it’s just not worth it anymore.”

Serge turned around with a handful of rocks. “It’s not a question of whether crime pays. It’s whether you enjoy your job. That’s the key to life.”

A n hour later, Serge and Lenny lay on their backs on their motel beds. Serge held the moon rock above his face, moving it around in the air, making rocket-thruster sounds with his mouth.

Lenny was on the bed next to the window, head toward the door. Serge had given him his keychain laser pointer to play with, and Lenny held it up above him, shooting the beam around the room and out the window.

“This is the coolest,” said Lenny, waving the red light around. “Since we’re gonna sell counterfeit moon rocks, I really don’t need the original. Wanna trade for the laser?”

“Deal!” said Serge.

They each reached out an arm into the little aisle between the beds and did a pinky shake to make it official.

It was ninety-two degrees by noon.

Zargoza reclined on a chaise lounge next to the pool at Hammerhead Ranch. He wiped sweat off his forehead and thought, I know this is Florida, but we’re heading into the holiday season for heaven’s sake. His swimsuit was a golden tan and a short length last in vogue in 1973. He had a sheen of sunscreen butter on his rugged, hairy chest and read the St. Petersburg Times through postmodern sunglasses that looked like welder’s goggles. It was early afternoon, no clouds or haze, and the sun was full strength. A group of children splashed and shrieked in the pool.

Four swimsuit models lay on their stomachs on Budweiser beach towels. Their bikini tops were untied as they read paperbacks with vibrant covers, Done Deal, Bones of Coral, Skin Tight and The Mango Opera. Just behind Zargoza’s chair, a constant flow of Japanese, French and German tourists stopped and posed for pictures in front of the row of stuffed hammerhead sharks and then drove away. Zargoza had a tall, sweating glass of grapefruit juice on the boomerang cocktail table next to his lounger. A cheap transistor radio played “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Zargoza took two Valium, the blue ones, and chased with the grapefruit. He was becoming a nerve case, thinking too much about the five million in the briefcase. Obviously drug money. Someone doesn’t lose that and not come looking for it. And, apparently, someone already had. Taxidermied alive? Ripped apart under a drawbridge? Zargoza shivered at the images. Those weren’t murders; they were messages. Definitely cartel work. It was only a matter of time.

Zargoza hadn’t been sleeping well. He kept waking up in the night obsessing about the briefcase, worrying it wasn’t hidden well enough. He couldn’t go back to sleep until he moved it again, and late each night he ran around the grounds of Hammerhead Ranch in his Devil Rays pajamas, the briefcase in one hand and a pistol in the other, making everything worse. “What was that?” Zargoza would spin around, aiming the pistol at imaginary shadows, dramatic music playing in his head. The curse was getting to be too much. Not to mention the Diaz Boys, the sweepstakes subpoenas and the simmering scandal at the nursing home. Zargoza decided right then to set C. C. Flag up as the fall guy; prosecutors can’t resist the headlines of bagging a celebrity.

Zargoza took another sip of grapefruit juice. He finished the Times and picked up a Weekly Mail of the News World left on the next lounger by a British tourist. Zargoza lifted the grapefruit juice again, gulped and put it back without taking his eyes off the tabloid. He couldn’t believe the stories.

First, a coke brick explodes in a car driven by a college student. Then the same student crashes through the glass dome of the Florida Aquarium. Finally, an unidentified Latin male with a shotgun is killed in the doorway of a condominium by an eighty-year-old woman with a hundred-year-old gun. The stories had the Diaz Boys’ fat fingerprints all over them. Shit, Zargoza thought, the British are covering this better than we are. He looked over the articles again. They all had the same byline, correspondent Lenny Lippowicz.