Tim Dorsey: Hammerhead Ranch Motel

Mrs. Ploomfield’s condo sat on a thin ribbon of barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico. It towered thirty stories and, with the other condos, formed a wall along the shore. The only road running up the island was Gulf Boulevard, and across the street was an old Florida neighborhood of single-story concrete houses with white tile roofs. The landscape was flat, bright and hot. The yards were mostly white stones, with palm, hibiscus, bougainvillea, croton and schefflera. Some homes had sets of windows wrapped deco-style around the corners. Front doors were jalousie, and everything was whitewashed. Address numbers over the doors were flanked by pink sea horses or blue sailfish or yellow scallops. Herons wandered through yards, pecking on windows for handouts.

The condominium residents thought they lived in paradise. The only problem was everyone else. All those cheesy houses across the street and that awful Hammerhead Ranch Motel next door that they couldn’t manage to close down.

Mrs. Ploomfield lived at 1193 Gulf Harbor Drive in a first-floor unit of Calusa Pointe Tower Arms. There was little traffic this morning, only a brown delivery truck at the curb. A man stood outside the passenger door and checked the address against his clipboard. He leaned in the van and grabbed a floral arrangement in a ceramic manatee and a two-foot-long box of chocolates, red and green, with thick gold ribbon. He headed for unit 1193; a second man stayed behind the wheel and idled the engine.

Mrs. Ploomfield had just gotten back to the kitchen table with the newspaper. She was scooping out canned niblets for an aged Chihuahua when the doorbell rang.

“Coming,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, and she began cross-country skiing in her slippers across the terrazzo. A few minutes later, she arrived. She cranked the jalousie. “Who is it?”

“ Florida Flowers ’n’ Fudge.” The man crouched down to see Ploomfield eye to eye through the slowly opening slats of translucent glass. “I have a delivery.”

“Who’s it from?”

“Is this eleven ninety-three?”

“Yes.”

There was a growling.

The man bent down even lower to look through the jalousie, and he saw a small dog.

“That looks exactly like Toto, the mutt on TV.”

“It is Toto, and he’s not a mutt. I take care of him for my friend, weatherman Guy Rockney. Now, I want my candy and flowers. And I don’t like your attitude one bit.”

“I hate that fucking dog.”

Mrs. Ploomfield’s hemoglobin seized up like a piston, and it took several moments before she reconstituted. “What? What did you just say? I want your name right this second, young man. I’m going to ruin your life!”

“I go first,” said the man. He ripped open the candy box and pulled out a sawed-off Remington shotgun with a twelve-shell drum clip.

“Oh, my,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. She slowly cranked on the jalousie window. It was a quarter closed when the man racked the shotgun and the clip fell out. Shells rolled across the concrete porch.

“Hee, hee, hee! You dropped your bullets,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, still cranking arthritically. Half closed. The man leaned down and began reloading, a little faster than Ploomfield had expected.

“My goodness,” she said, cranking faster. Three-quarters closed.

The man racked the shotgun again, but in his hurry the top shell of the magazine was not aligned to the feed lever, and it jammed. Mrs. Ploomfield finished closing the window and began shuffling back across the room.

The man unjammed the gun and fired with beerad gusto. Splinters of glass sprayed the room. “Oh, my heavens,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. He fired again and again. A large swan-shaped vase exploded in front of Mrs. Ploomfield and a statue of a Persian cat behind her.

He kept firing and kept missing, all kinds of ugly ceramic shit blowing up. The smoke clouded his view, and the man used the barrel of his shotgun to knock out the triangles of broken glass around the inside edge of the jalousie door. He ducked his head and stepped through the opening. When he looked up, he saw Mrs. Ploomfield reaching into a bric-a-brac shadow box on the wall. Old-fart antique country junk, the man thought. He swept specks of glass off his shirt with the back of his hand and checked his magazine, making sure there would be no jam this time. When he looked up, he saw what Mrs. Ploomfield had been reaching for: In the largest compartment in the middle of the shadow box was her late husband’s antique.45-caliber Peacemaker revolver. She wheeled and shot the man square in the chest, and he fell back through the hole in the door.

The gunfire drew neighbors from the condo units and the houses across the street. When they saw the van’s driver dragging his dead partner and the shotgun back to the truck, they hit the ground and ducked behind square bushes.

The driver heaved the body through the passenger door and threw in the shotgun. He walked casually around the front of the van and climbed in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward and turned up the radio. “New Sensation” by INXS pounded out of the truck and off the houses. The driver bobbed his head to the beat as he put the truck in gear and chugged down the street, running over a garbage can as he turned the corner. The neighbors watched the van until it disappeared, then slowly emerged and tiptoed toward unit 1193.

“I got one! I got one!” Mrs. Ploomfield shouted from her doorway. “I got one of the cocaine men!”

Lone headlights appeared in the blackness five miles away.

They were high-beams, illuminating the sea mist through the slashed mangroves and crushed coral down the long, straight causeway toward Miami. The rumble of rubber on tar grew louder and the headlights became brighter until they blinded. The Buick blew by at ninety and kept going, red taillights fading down U.S. 1 toward Key West.

It was quiet and dark again. An island in the middle of the Florida Keys. No streetlights, no light at all. The low pink building on the south side of the street was unremarkable concrete except for the hastily stuccoed bullet holes and the eight-foot cement conch shell on the shoulder of the road, chipped and peeling, holding up a sign: “Rooms $29.95 and up.”

No cars in front of the motel; the night manager nodding in the office. The beach was sandy, some broken plastic kiddie toys, an unsafe pier and a scuttled dinghy. The air was still by the road, but around back a steady breeze came off the ocean. Coconut palms rustled and waves rolled in quietly from the Gulf Stream. Parked behind the motel, by the only room with a light on, was a black Mercedes limousine.

Voices and an electrical hum came from the room, number seven. Inside, personal effects covered one of the beds-toiletries, carefully rolled socks, newspaper clippings, sunscreen, postcards, snacks, ammunition-meticulously arranged in rows and columns. The hum was from the Magic Fingers bed jiggler that had been hot-wired to run continuously. The voices came from the TV that had been unbolted from its wall mount and now sat on a chair facing into the bathroom, tuned to Sportscenter.

In the flickering blue-gray TV light, a figure sat in the bathtub behind an open Miami Herald. Two sets of fingers held the sides of the paper-a front-page splash about a drug shoot-out in Key West and a missing five million in cash-and smoke rose from behind the paper. An old electric fan sat on the closed toilet lid, blowing into the tub. Something about the Miami Dolphins came on ESPN. The man in the tub folded the paper and put it on the toilet tank. He grabbed the remote control sitting in the soap dish on the shower wall. The slot in the top of the soap dish held a.38 revolver by the snub nose. “Nobody messes with Johnny Rocco,” said the man in the tub, and he pressed the volume button.