Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (3 page)

“The same guy owns them all. It’s like he has a thing for this street. And he has a knack for picking the worst tenants.”

“Which ones are rentals?” asked Martha.

“That one over there, where they think chain-link fence is landscaping. And the one next to it is rented by a Latin family who built that religious Madonna grotto with rocks and bathroom caulk. And that one over there, where a couple from Knoxville liked the grotto idea so much they made their own for Tammy Wynette.”

Jim stared at the students’ trash pile. “I’ve never seen so many pizza boxes.”

“It’s like clockwork,” said Gladys. “Every night, right after Jack comes out to water the lawn in his Delta Force outfit, the students order pizza. My guess is marijuana. That’s how it works, you know. The pizza companies are in brutal competition. Backgammon Pizza guarantees delivery in thirty minutes, and Pizza Shack sends its drivers out to follow the Backgammon drivers and lure away their customers by giving out free pies, which they claim taste better. Needless to say, they tear around the neighborhood hell-bent for leather trying to make the thirty-minute deadline and catch each other.”

Martha pointed at the house between the college students and Old Man Ortega. “Who lives there?”

“Mr. Grønewaldenglitz. He’s an artist…and a renter. Half the times I’ve seen him, he’s been wearing a welding helmet. He converted his den into an acetylene shop, where he stockpiles scrap metal from the landfill and solders it together into those whimsical creations of modern art that you’re pointing at in his front yard.”

“So that’s what those are,” said Martha.

“What’s the big one supposed to be?” asked Jim.

“The cow made of fenders and umbrella skeletons?”

“No, the radar range, monkey wrenches and water faucets.”

“Lady Bird Johnson.”

“I think it’s ugly,” said Martha.

“So does everyone else,” said Gladys. “We went to the zoning board, but they say it’s First Amendment.”

A pickup truck full of real estate signs parked in front of 867 Triggerfish. A man in jeans got out and began pounding a
FOR RENT
sign into the front yard between Lady Bird and a chickenwire diorama of Gettysburg.

“Wow, Mr. Grønewaldenglitz moved out,” said Gladys. “So that’s what he was doing in the middle of the night.”

“What else should we know about this neighborhood?” asked Martha.

“Well, do you have any pets?” asked Gladys.

“No.”

“You do now. A family of opossums lives under your house. They come out at night and make the rounds of the neighborhood’s pet-food bowls.”

Something large and fast-moving caught the corner of Jim’s eye. He turned quickly, but it was gone.

“Was that one of them?” he asked.

“Where?” said Gladys.

“Over there. I saw something big.”

They looked and waited.

“There!” Jim yelled. He pointed at what seemed to be a small armored personnel carrier. “There it is again! What the hell is it?”

Gladys laughed. “That’s one of our roaches.”

“
That’s
a roach?” said Jim.

Gladys nodded. “If you belong to the chamber of commerce, you’re supposed to call ’em palmetto bugs.”

“Kill it!” Martha told Jim.

“Maybe we should observe it for a while,” he said. “Learn its defensive systems.”

“What’s are you waiting for?” said Martha. “Kill it, already!”

Jim grabbed a rake and walked across the porch.

There was sudden movement and Jim swung the rake, taking down a hanging planter.

“I forgot,” said Gladys. “And they can fly.”

A commercial van drove up the street. It passed the Davenport home and stopped three doors down. The van had a large magnetic sign on the side:
INSULT
-
TO
-
INJURY PROCESS SERVERS
. A man in white makeup and a black-and-white-striped shirt got out.

“What’s that about?” asked Jim.

“A malignant version of the singing telegram,” said Gladys. “For wealthy grudge-bearers: subpoenas, summonses and suits delivered with attitude…We usually get them on this street about once a month.”

“What do they do?” asked Martha.

“Mrs. Van Fleet was served a defamation lawsuit by a barbershop quartet. Mr. Buckingham got a restraining order from a tap-dancing Shirley Temple look-alike. And Mr.
Fishbine was subpoenaed by a clown who squirted him in the eye with a trick lapel flower.”

The three turned to the left and watched. The mime stood at the front door, but nobody was answering because he mimed knocking on the door instead of actually knocking. Finally, someone inside noticed him through a window and opened up. The mime handed him legal papers, then did a pantomime of someone crying silently and holding on to the bars of a jail cell.

The resident grabbed a bowling trophy and began chasing the mime around the front yard. The mime ran with silly, exaggerated strides and a goofy look of alarm on his face until he was knocked cold.

T
WO A.M.
The pedestrian traffic was down to a trickle at the south end of Tampa’s Howard Avenue, the part of town overrun by bistros, martini bars and California cuisine. It made the young professionals feel cosmo, and they called the strip “SoHo”—South Howard—but it only increased the reek of small pond.

One of the last genuine places was a modest yellow building on a side street. Stark concrete and small windows with beer signs. The Tiny Tap tavern stood alone next to the railroad tracks and the vine-covered concrete supports of the Crosstown Expressway. There were two pool tables, some stock-car junk on the walls, lots of smoke and the loud, reassuring drone of malarkey. Tonight there was an added attraction. A leggy blonde poised with her back arched against the L-shaped bar and produced a cigarette with no intention of lighting it herself.

A young man with two beepers on his belt materialized with a flicked butane. The juke played “Indian Reservation” by Paul Revere and the Raiders. The blonde turned to the flame and lightly brushed the man’s crotch with the back of her hand. His stomach fluttered. Did she do that on purpose?

Ten minutes later he was getting a hummer in the front
seat of his Hummer, parked under the expressway. She came up for air. “You like to screw on coke?”

In an impressive display of prestidigitation, a wallet suddenly appeared in the man’s hand. He was fishing out a hundred when she grabbed the billfold and dumped the contents in her lap. “If we get an eight-ball, we can really have some fun.”

“But—” the man said, reaching for his money. She began playing the silent flute again, and his objections evaporated. “Start the car and head south on Howard,” she said, then back to work. His gas-pedal leg trembled, and the Hummer lurched herky-jerky up the street. She peeked over the dashboard. “Turn here!” He ran over the curb.

“Pull into those apartments. Cut the lights but keep the engine running. I’ll be right back.” She jumped from the vehicle with three hundred dollars and ran for the breezeway.

“An eight-ball is only two-fifty,” the man shouted after her. “Two-seventy-five tops.”

“I’ll get change,” she yelled, and disappeared into the blackness of the apartment hallway.

The man stuck his head out the driver’s window, trying to adjust his eyes. Where’d she go?

She kept running down the breezeway, right out the back of the apartments and into the next street. She spun around in the middle of the road, frantic. Headlights swung around the corner at the end of the street, and a dented Impala convertible raced up to her.

Sharon jumped in and punched Coleman in the shoulder. “You blockhead! You were supposed to be waiting!”

“Ow,” said Coleman, rubbing his shoulder as he drove off. “How much we get?”

“I shouldn’t give you any for being late! What if he followed
me!” She bent down from the wind to light a cigarette, took a deep drag and violently exhaled out her nostrils. “I should fuckin’ kill you!”

“Where’d you get that lighter?”

Sharon looked at the lighter. “What do you mean?”

“I think I recognize that lighter,” said Coleman. It was an old banged-up Zippo. The paint had started to chip on some words.
Miami
and
Orange Bowl
and 1969.

“A lighter’s a lighter,” said Sharon, jamming it down the tight hip pocket of her jeans.

“If that’s what I think it is, we’re in big trouble,” said Coleman. “That looks like Serge’s Super Bowl Three lighter. You haven’t been getting into his
secret box
, have you?”

“Secret box? What are you guys, playing fuckin’ army in the woods? I was out of goddamn matches. He’s always got a ton of matches in there. This time I found the lighter.”

“You’ve been taking his matches, too! Oh my God, we’re dead for sure!”

“Give me a break!”

“Oh, man!” said Coleman. “If you don’t understand the secret box, you don’t understand
anything
about Serge.”

“It’s a box. So what!”

“A 1905 Ybor City master cigar-maker’s box,” said Coleman. “Those matches are from his favorite places in Florida. Half of them have been torn down. And you’ve just been going through them to light cigarettes? He’s going to shoot us both!”

“He’s not gonna know,” said Sharon. “He’s got so much shit in that box I couldn’t believe it. I mean just crap! Swizzle sticks, lapel pins, ticket stubs, bar coasters, ashtrays, old hotel-room keys. He’s never gonna miss it.”

“Oh, he’ll miss it all right,” said Coleman. “I’ve seen his ritual, packing everything away in its special place and locking the box each night in the fireproof safe under his bed…We are
so
dead.”

“Just drive, blockhead!”

Coleman drove. He wore a T-shirt with a rum ad, cutoff shorts and dirty sneakers with no laces. He was on the pudgy side with a circular head that was a little too big for his body, and he didn’t like it when Sharon called him blockhead or That Funny Round-Headed Kid. His driver’s license was suspended for multiple DUIs. He opened another Schlitz.

“You’re driving too slow! Step on it, you blockhead!”

“Sharon, please don’t call me that.”

“Fuck off, Charlie Brown!”

Sharon Rhodes, exotic, tall, high cheekbones and a full, moist mouth that caused men to let go of the controls and fly their lives into the sides of mountains. Easily the hottest stripper on Dale Mabry Highway when she got the incidental ambition to actually show up at work. She was on probation for Jet Skiing topless next to the Courtney Campbell causeway.

They pulled into a dark apartment complex behind Busch Gardens. A crescent moon peeked through the top of the Montu roller coaster. Sharon got out.

“Don’t spend it all on crack this time,” said Coleman. “Get some powder, too. Crack is bad for you.”

“I’ll get what I fuckin’ want!” She put out her cigarette on the Impala’s upholstery.

“Hey!”

As soon as she was out of sight, Coleman slammed the gear shift in reverse and lunged backward, spinning ninety degrees. He threw the car in drive and floored it, leaving rubber.
He raced around the block and came up on the back side of the apartments just as Sharon ran into the street. She winced when she saw the Impala. “Damn.”

Coleman parked at the curb and jumped out. “Nice try. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

They went back in the apartments and knocked lightly on a peeling second-floor door.

There were shuffling sounds inside, then a quiet “Who is it?”

“Sharon and Blockhead.”

Coleman elbowed her.

“Don’t
ever
elbow me!” She grabbed him by the hair and went to smash his head into the door, but it opened.

Their host wore an orange-and-black silk Kabuki robe, and he turned without speaking and walked back into the dark room lit only by a dozen Bic lighters. People sitting and lying on the floor, gaunt, palsied. Trash everywhere. Glass and metal pipes and spent wooden matches lying in burn marks on the carpet. A rat scampered across tufts of shredded Brillo pads. There was a TV stand, but no TV. On an empty bookcase, one of those novelty static-electric lightning globes from Spencer’s Gifts. A naked, emaciated woman with deflated tits walked through the room in a trance and disappeared into the kitchen. Nobody paid attention. A stereo was going somewhere,
The Very Best of Tom Jones.

Sharon handed money to the man in the robe, who went in another room and came back with a baggie of little butterscotch cubes.

“…
It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone
…”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Coleman. “Everyone’s weird.”

Sharon ignored him. She dropped to the floor and began
breaking up the cubes and cramming them in a glass pipe. The naked woman walked back through the room and disappeared again. Coleman put his hands on the static-lightning globe. “Cool.”

The naked woman drifted back through the room, stopped in the middle and burst into sobs. Nobody cared. Sharon flicked the Zippo, pulled hard and held the smoke. The naked woman cried louder.

Sharon exhaled a cloud. “Will someone shut that bitch up! She’s pissing in my buzz!”

“That’s my sister,” said the man in the silk robe. He leaned down and lit his own pipe.

“Then
you
shut the cunt up!”

He wanted to slap Sharon, but he was holding his smoke. The naked woman sobbed louder.

“…
What’s new pussycat? Whoa-ooo, whoa-ooo whoaooo
…”

Sharon stood up, and screamed in the woman’s face. “Shut the fuck up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!…”

The sobbing got even louder.

Sharon grabbed the static globe out of Coleman’s hands and bashed it over the woman’s head. Glass, blood and sparks flew in the darkness; the crying stopped. The woman hit the floor.

The crack hit the robed man’s bloodstream, and his dilated eyes shifted conspicuously to the pistol-grip shotgun under the couch next to Sharon’s feet, telegraphing his intentions. Sharon intercepted the pass. The man jumped up and ran for the couch, but Sharon dropped and got there first. She came out with the twelve-gauge and rolled on her back just as the man was about to pounce.

“…
She’s a lady. Whoa, whoa, whoa
…”

The man left his feet and dove for Sharon, the silk robe
opening in the air like a monarch butterfly. The buckshot caught him in the stomach in midair and yanked him back the other way.

Nobody cared.

Sharon and Coleman ran out the door to the sound of air rushing through glass.

They cut across town on Twenty-second Street for the sanctuary of their crib, an Ybor City shotgun shack, one of the quaint little
casitas
built for the Cuban cigar rollers at the turn of the century that Serge had purchased for almost nothing and restored to original historic condition. Sharon was out of the car and running for the house before Coleman had the ignition off. When he came in the front door, she was already at it again on the floor with a pipe.

“Save some for me!”

Coleman plopped down on the throw rug and grabbed the pipe and was halfway through a hit when Sharon grabbed it back. She fired it up and had just started toking when he grabbed it again, and they fought back and forth for ten hectic minutes. Then it was all gone.

“We have to get some more!” Sharon yelled.

“I’m not going anywhere. That’s the rock talking.”

“I want more!”

“I’m too wired,” said Coleman. He grabbed his face. “I’ve forgotten how to blink…I need a beer to take the edge off.” He went to the fridge. Empty.

When he came back, Sharon was crawling on the floor, pawing through the rug. “I think we dropped some! Help me look!”

“We didn’t drop anything. You’re just really fucked up. I’m going out for beer.”

It was 3:10
A.M.
—ten minutes after local cutoff for alcohol
sales—so Coleman picked up a sixer for seven bucks through the burglar bars of a speakeasy in a war zone off Nebraska Avenue.

He killed the first bottle on the way back to the car and stuffed the empty under the driver’s seat. He placed the rest on the passenger seat, started the car and began taking in the Tampa night. He killed the second passing the football stadium and stuck that bottle under the seat as well. He drained the third circling the airport.

The beer finally counterbalanced the cocaine, and Coleman’s head was full of happy pop rocks. He cruised along the waterfront on Bayshore Boulevard, the wind in his hair and the last beer in his hand. He untwisted the top.

The Rolling Stones came on the radio. Coleman loved the Stones. He cranked it up.

“I know…it’s only rock ’n’ roll…but I like it!…”

Coleman began singing along. He was having a
moment.
Everything was perfect. All the drugs were jelling, and he was in a convertible with excellent tunes. The twinkling Tampa skyline across the water seemed to be personally winking at him. Coleman decided the smartest thing to do at this point would be to drive standing up. He hit cruise control.

Coleman cranked the Stones as loud as it would go. The steering wheel was at his waist and he piloted the Impala like he was on the bridge of a ship. He had the beer in his right fist and he punched it into the night air. “Wooooooo! Stones rule! Woooooooooo!”

He turned onto Gandy Boulevard. “Woooooooo!” He made another turn, and another.

“Woooooo!”

When he turned onto Triggerfish Lane, an empty beer
bottle rolled out from under his seat and lodged beneath the brake pedal. Coleman looked down. “Uh-oh.”

He tried to kick the bottle free with his foot, which made him go off the road and jump a curb. He tried to steer as he plowed across a lawn, crashing through a picket fence and into the next yard. He hit an inflatable kiddie pool full of water in front of 897 Triggerfish Lane and spun out. Coleman tumbled into the backseat. The Impala kept going. It ripped across the front yard at 887 and tore up a rosebed at 877 before hitting a metal sculpture at hip level, the top half of Lady Bird shattering the windshield and bouncing over the car. The Impala came out of the spin and stalled out in a hedge under a bedroom window, a
FOR RENT
sign wedged in its grille.

Coleman stuck his head up from the backseat and looked around like a groundhog. He climbed into the front and turned the key. The car started on the first try.

COLEMAN MADE IT
back to Ybor City. He was a hundred yards from his home when the
FOR RENT
sign in the grille wiggled out of its rupture hole, and the radiator spewed antifreeze and wheezed to death. He walked the rest of the way.

When he opened the front door, Sharon was still on her hands and knees.

“Have you been at it the whole time I was gone?”

She just kept clawing at the rug.

“There’s nothing there!” said Coleman. “You’re stoned out of your mind!”

“Look! I found something!” Sharon held it in her palm.

“That’s not crack!”

“Then what is it?”

“Some unidentifiable shit in the rug.”

“I’m gonna smoke it anyway!”

Sharon stuck it in her pipe and flicked the Zippo a few times but couldn’t get the substance to ignite.