Tim Dorsey: Hammerhead Ranch Motel

“No! Nobody’s here!” said Johnny. “We’re okay. Go away!”

“Mandatory evacuation! You have to come out!”

“We’re fine!” said Johnny. “I’ll sign a waiver. Slip it under the door.”

The officials opened the room with a pass key. They wrapped Gigi in a towel and administered oxygen as they led her to an evacuation van. Johnny straggled behind, clenching his fists. “I was this close. This close!”

Johnny followed the van in his convertible Porsche to the command post outside the burn zone, where Gigi was checked out by field medics, who gave her bottled water and fire safety pamphlets, and she turned and gave Johnny a stare that could freeze hydrogen.

T he black Mercedes 420S limousine was doing a hundred when it clipped the gopher tortoise, which spun on the heel of its shell and tumbled violently as it skipped down the road. It came to rest. The tortoise poked its head out of the shell and looked around the edge of the Tamiami Trail in the Everglades.

Serge had seen the tortoise and tried to avoid it. He lost control of the limo and bounced through the sawgrass a bit before coaxing it back on the pavement. The limo’s steering column was missing its plastic collar, and Serge’s ignition key was a slot screwdriver. A crumpled tag lay on the floor from the Key West Police impound lot. Serge thought he should probably ditch the limo, since it would draw attention, but he didn’t because, one, he was nuts, and two, it had gizmos.

The sun went down, a deep red beach ball over Naples, and Serge raced through the glades waiting for the back of a white Chrysler to show up in his headlights. In the Chrysler’s trunk was five million dollars in drug money. It was in a metal briefcase hidden behind a panel over the wheel well, unknown to the car’s innocent occupants. In fact, nobody knew it was there except Serge.

Serge speculated there was more missing drug money around Florida than buried pirate treasure. The illegal drug industry flows hundreds of millions of dollars in and out of Florida every year. It’s all in cash. It’s moving around constantly. It must be concealed every step of the way or ditched in an emergency. And most of the people hiding and retrieving it are on drugs. They do a few lines or bong hits and go back and say, “I could’ve sworn it was under this rock…or was it that one?”

This time around, someone had tried to make off with five million in cartel money being laundered through a Tampa insurance company. That someone was dead now. Serge had seen to it. But before Serge could move in, the man had tossed the money in the trunk of an acquaintance’s car…

The Miami Herald sent three reporters to Key West and two more up to Canaveral to cover the story. Eleven bodies so far. One sap shotgunned in a Cocoa Beach motel room, three tied to cement blocks in the ocean, another floating with a doll’s head in his windpipe, and four more machine-gunned in a Key West bed-and-breakfast, three of whom were members of the Russian mafia from Fort Lauderdale. A man was run over outside the stadium in Miramar by a car with a dead stripper in the trunk. Rumors said the killings were over five million in a missing briefcase. Nobody knew whether the briefcase or the money really existed, but that didn’t stop everyone in Key West from clearing out of the bars and tearing the island apart. As more and more bodies turned up, another rumor began to circulate about the money.

It was cursed.

S ean Breen and David Klein headed home fishless again, their record intact. The breadth and complexity of each fishing failure was increasingly impressive. This time they had gone all the way to the Keys and spent a couple thousand to not catch fish.

They had overlearned the sport. They studied drag and line and leaders. There were tides and feeding patterns and how to read the water. They boned up on “the presentation of the lure” like it was a plaque at a Rotary luncheon. Too much thinking and not enough fishing.

They didn’t care. Fishing wasn’t about catching fish. It was about trolling the flats with a silent electric motor, watching the barracudas and sharks and tarpon. And the colors: down in the Saddlebunch Keys, ten miles from Key West, the bright pastel green puddled up in the cracked cakes of clay…fluorescent aqua near the mouth of Newfound Harbor…raw umber shining off the coral through the shallows at Ramrod Key.

They had a heck of a fish story to tell when they got back, except that everybody had heard the whole thing already on the news. The big fiasco down in the Keys. They got special commendations from the mayor and a gold trophy from the city council for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time-and staying alive in the cross fire while the bad guys bumped each other off. It was a chance for local officials to put smiling faces on the tourism nightmare. All that was behind them now.

Sean and David were one hundred ninety miles from Tampa, crossing the Everglades at dusk. They had just passed Ochopee, home of the smallest post office in the United States, when they saw a commotion up ahead. There were men in the road and a bunch of cars parked askance on the shoulders. They noticed a glow on the horizon, and their headlights caught wisps of what they first thought was fog. There was a line of blinking amber lights ahead on wooden barricades. A sweaty man with a reflective yellow vest and a blackened face stepped into the middle of their lane and put his arms out toward the car, ordering them to stop. David and Sean pulled over and saw a firefighting team on the side of the road taking water; some were tended by paramedics.

A wildfire was raging across the Everglades, and a stout northeastern wind had whipped it toward the Tamiami Trail. Soon flames came into view and scrub burned to the edge of the pavement. A National Guard helicopter swooped overhead. A team of firefighters staggered out of the smoke in a sawgrass ditch and collapsed. The firefighters who had been resting got to their feet and disappeared into the smoke. Tourists who had been stopped by the roadblock took snapshots and video. A young man in Italian slacks cursed and pounded his fist on the hood of a Porsche.

David and Sean stood on the side of the road next to a panther-crossing sign. They watched the fire jump to the other side of the road, and the highway became a tunnel of flame filled with smoke. The wind gusted and shifted again to the east, and the fire leaned toward them. The resting firefighters got to their feet and motioned the motorists back to their cars. They yelled for everyone to evacuate east. The fire would be burning where they now stood within twenty minutes.

Sean and David turned and started back to the Chrysler. It was the first time they noticed the black Mercedes limousine parked behind it. They were a few yards away when the Chrysler’s headlights suddenly came on and the engine roared to life. They jumped back as the car lurched off the shoulder of the road and sped past them. Firefighters ran into the highway, waving for the driver to stop. They dove out of the way as the Chrysler splintered the wooden barricades and disappeared into the wall of flame.

Near the end of 1997, at longitude twenty degrees west and latitude ten degrees north, the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean reached a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and vapor filled the air. The trade winds blew robustly and the barometric pressure dipped. Convection began to convect. The earth rotated, as it has for billions of years, and the force of the spinning imparted the Coriolis effect on the atmosphere. Nobody was there to see it happen, but lots of air and water molecules started turning slowly like a child’s top the size of Iowa.

Three thousand miles east of Florida and four hundred miles west of Dakar on the coastal tip of Africa sit the Cape Verde Islands. There are fifteen islands in the chain, ten large and developed, five not. In Cape Verde they grow coffee beans, bananas and sugar cane, and they catch tuna and lobster. They won independence from Portugal in 1975, and many residents practice animism, the belief that everything in nature has a soul. The monetary unit is the escudo.