by Tim Dorsey
“ . . . Kill them! . . .”
“ . . . Get out of America! . . .”
“ . . . Go to Canada! . . .”
“I finally united them.”
A few drops of water hit them in the face. “And just in time,” said Coleman. “It starting to rain.”
“Rain? It’s going to be a deluge,” said Serge. “The feeder bands are cutting loose.”
A sudden gust of wind whipped Coleman’s hair as he looked back over his shoulder. “The mob’s gaining on us. There’s no way we can escape.”
“ . . . Traitors! . . .”
“ . . . Dead meat! . . .”
As Serge had predicted, a torrential downpour erupted. Lightning sliced the sky.
Coleman looked back again, and Serge looked at Coleman. “Why are you slowing down?”
“Because the mob is,” said Coleman. “In fact, they’ve come to a complete stop.”
The pair ceased running and turned around, watching curiously at the reason for their reprieve.
Shouting within the crowd, then fists flew. Someone got tackled; a protest sign was bashed over a head.
“What’s going on?” asked Coleman.
“The rain has smeared all their signs into inkblots.” Serge momentarily covered his eyes. “It’s even worse than before. Democrat on Democrat, Republican on Republican.”
“At least we got away,” said Coleman.
Serge sighed and threw his inkblot sign in a trash can as they disappeared into the darkness under an overpass. “Crap.”
Chapter Five
DANIA
The police expressed sympathy and thought Jim Townsend was an idiot.
Jim waved excitedly in several directions. “And then Cid took off chasing the thief.”
A detective wrote in a notebook. “Didn’t you wonder where he got the pickup truck?”
“He, uh, well . . .”
“It was planted ahead of time behind the restaurant, probably by the accomplice who stole the convertible.”
“Cid was in on it?”
“You say you found the Corvette in a classified ad?” asked the detective.
“Yes, you can trace the phone number, right?” said Jim. “You can track down Cid?”
“We’ll give it a try, but it was probably a disposable cell.”
“Then what should I do?” asked Jim.
“Count your blessings.”
“But I just got ripped off!”
The detective closed his notebook. “It’s a common scam, but this one was more elaborate than most. I’m guessing they picked a public location so it wouldn’t raise your suspicions with the amount of money involved. You’re lucky.”
“How is any of this lucky?”
“Usually it’s an older car they’re selling for three or four grand, and they give you an address that’s at the end of an empty road and simply stick a gun in your face.”
“This happens a lot?”
“That’s why we keep telling the public never to meet a private seller with cash.” The detective opened his wallet. “Here’s my business card. Give me a call if you can think of anything else.”
Jim now felt as stupid as the police already knew he was. He drove home in a slow funk, getting honked at when he didn’t realize the light had turned green.
The accountant listlessly walked up the path to his front door and went inside. He took out the business card and walked even more slowly to the phone and dialed.
“Detective Green here.”
“This is Jim Townsend. Remember? The stolen Corvette at the pancake house.”
“Oh, hey. Think of anything else?”
“No.”
“They why are you calling me?”
“Someone robbed my house.”
MEANWHILE . . .
She was the classic Latin bombshell.
Luscious red lips, full-bodied jet-black hair, and a beauty mark to die for. Her legs were crossed sensuously in the sidewalk café. The tangerine sundress was low-cut but tasteful.
Serge easily held his own in the dating jungle. He never had the kind of striking looks that made him the first guy women noticed in the room. But he possessed what they call intangibles. Charm, manners, intelligence and a robust enthusiasm for everything. Within minutes of conversation, members of the opposite sex gave him a revised appraisal and were usually smitten by a warm, plainly handsome face. And most of all, those piercing ice-blue eyes. No need for eHarmony; if he put his mind to it, he could easily form a line in most jurisdictions.
Serge was never a cad or a deliberate user of women. He always had the sincerest feelings for his companion du jour. Plus he was one of those rare males who never felt the slightest twinge of heartache if they left him, which happened with severe frequency. The charm and other stuff could last days, even weeks, before inevitably: “This guy has serious problems—I need to leave the state.” Then Serge would simply be thankful for the fun times they had shared and go whistling his separate way.
If there was any heartbreak, it fell on the women. As often as they left him, so he left them. Like a Siamese cat that inexplicably stops in the middle of a room and takes off in a totally different direction, Serge would routinely decide that he suddenly needed to be somewhere else.
Now, as he sat in a sidewalk café across from a tangerine sundress, emotions were all new and raw. He had been with her type countless times, but this one was different. She had gotten to know the real Serge and was cool with it, even amused. Serge was lost and helpless and utterly happy.
He stared like a schoolboy into her eyes as they discussed plans for a beach wedding.
Serge never heard anything as her face fell forward on the table, because the gun had a silencer. Confused, he gently put his hand on the back of her head and felt hair matted with tacky blood.
“Felicia! Felicia! Noooooooooooo! . . .”
Coleman waddled through the night with a crooked smile and a beer in each hand. It was a giant, wooded field. It would have been the middle of nowhere if it had been closer to other places.
After escaping the lynch mob at the Tampa convention, Serge had plotted a long, dark drive, hopping from state highways to county roads to nameless dirt trails. They were up north of the Ocala National Forest, in a quilt of lakes where land was sparse and in anti-demand. The last stretch formed an isthmus. Just before parking, Coleman saw an owl on top of a faded sign.
HAWTHORNE.
Then they got separated and couldn’t find each other for hours. There were two contributing factors: Serge’s passion to explore, and Coleman’s tendency to get separated.
Coleman had been wandering the woods wide-eyed all night like Hansel and Gretel. But he was properly roasted to dig the trees and crickets, and still had two beers left. He smiled and looked up at the moon through an old-growth canopy. Then a lot more trees. The first sign of anything but plants was a discarded farm contraption half buried in peat. He felt the coarse, rusted surface of a protruding wheel. It had been mule-powered. It called for a beer.
A short time later, he saw a shape in the distance with right angles. He came upon the small tilting barn and picked up a piece of brown glass from a bottle that had been drunk during Prohibition. An abrupt sound startled Coleman and turned him around. Just like the unseen frogs and birds at the beginning of his journey. But he’d gotten used to that. This noise was human.
He ventured forth and saw an even larger barn through the trees. When he drew near, a clearing opened up to reveal a farmhouse that hadn’t been occupied for decades. A voice erupted again.
Coleman gulped, but he pressed on.
The voice grew louder. He reached the house and stuck his face against the porch’s screen door. Empty. Except for the voice. Too weird. He was right on top of the sound, but nobody was there. He backed up. “A ghost.
”
The voice became even louder. Coleman got a funny look on his face, then crouched on his hands and knees and stuck his head under the farmhouse’s crawl space.
The voice cried out.
“ . . . Felicia! . . . Noooo! . . .”
“Serge?” said Coleman. “Is that you?”
“ . . . Felicia! . . .”
Coleman quickly slithered on his belly until he was under the middle of the residence. Serge thrashed in the dirt.
“ . . . Why, oh why! . . .”
Coleman shook his buddy vigorously. “Wake up! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare!”
Serge flopped a last few times, then blinked his eyes. “Coleman?”
“It’s cool, man. Just a bad dream.”
Serge looked around. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” said Coleman. “I crawled under this old house.”
“Are you still crawling under houses?”
“No, this time it was because I heard your voice and you were in trouble.” Coleman rolled over to rest on his back. “All those other houses . . . I don’t really know what that was about.”
Serge rolled over on his own back next to Coleman, then snapped his fingers. “I remember now. That horrible national family spat back at the convention began giving me the shakes, and I needed to retreat to a holy place.” He pointed up at the underside of the floorboards a few inches from his nose. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings bought this joint in 1928 and wrote The Yearling. But mainly she was one of those rare pioneers who preached the joy of undisturbed Florida. Today, undisturbed Florida means a place has only one titty bar.”
“And the chicks try less because where are you gonna go?”
“It’s a tragedy on so many levels.” Serge ran a finger along one of the floor beams. “At least I’m at Marjorie’s place. A Pulitzer was won right above our faces. Always feel better coming here.”
“Why didn’t you go inside?” asked Coleman. “The screen door was open.”
“I decided to sleep under the house instead because I didn’t want to trespass.”
“I wouldn’t really call that sleeping,” said Coleman. “You were yelling loud.”
“What was I saying?”
“Felicia.”
Serge closed his eyes hard.
“Sorry,” said Coleman. “Thought you’d gotten over her.”
“You never get over something like that. You just try to keep it in a box on an out-of-the-way shelf in your brain. But then you open the closet to look for an old sousaphone—”
“I’m getting hungry.”
“Thanks for listening.”
Coleman poked his stomach. “But it’s making the noises.”
Serge turned his head sideways. “The sun’s starting to come up, which is the signal to get out from under houses.” He began crawling. “We’ll grab breakfast at the Yearling.”
“The book?”
“Just come on . . .”
The Firebird took the western bend on Alachua County Road 325, past a dark body of water, and approached a brief bridge. The sun’s rise was known but not felt: A dewy fog hovered over the marsh grass, keeping the morning gray.
“That bridge sure is tiny,” said Coleman.
“It’s the bridge of my life.” Serge pulled over on a dirt road and threw his arms out in opposite directions. “We’re on a thin strip of land between two lakes, Lochloosa and Orange, and that bridge crossed the creek that connects them, Cross Creek, namesake of Rawlings’s classic memoir and the Oscar-nominated movie starring Mary Steenburgen as the author.”
Serge got out of the Firebird and walked toward a small wooden structure. “This is my favorite place on earth, for now. You can actually rent these little shotgun shacks right on the edge of the creek and hear the water going by. Isn’t it great? Can you feel the Rawlings magic?”
Coleman rubbed his tummy. “Can we get some food now?”
“No! We must go sit in the shack and dig it!” He produced a key from his pocket.
“You rented one of these?”
“Of course.” Serge stuck the key in the knob. “I first thought of lodging under Rawlings’s house, but you can’t open a suitcase.”
“What about this Yearling place you said we could eat at?”
Serge turned around in the doorway. “See that old rustic building over there?”
“Yeah. Looks closed.”
“One of the finest restaurants in Florida way out in the sticks with handed-down family-recipe cracker cuisine. There’s something on the menu called cooter. Any place that serves cooter rocks my world.”
“Great! Let’s eat!”
“Doesn’t open till lunch.”
“Serge!”
Serge went inside the shotgun shack. “Gives us time to groove on the cottage. Now get in here and groove!”
It was a cozy little place with everything in one room: two classic beds with wooden posts, old table and chairs, antique cabinets that would now command top dollar as “shabby chic.”
Serge sat on one of the beds and swayed with enthusiasm. “This is so perfect. Can you hear that famous water?”
Coleman moped on the other bed. “My belly.”
“Maybe if you tried swaying. Just follow my example. I’m in such a happy place that I don’t think I can possibly ever leave.” Serge swayed some more. Then suddenly bolted upright. “I got to get out of here.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Coleman.
Serge ran out the door and began pacing on the dirt road. “Dammit! I came out to experience harmony and raise my empathy quotient, but then I had to go and have that nightmare. Now I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Serge, it hasn’t been that long yet since it happened. You need more time.”
“It will always be an open wound until I find out who killed her. I didn’t mention this before, but my quest to become a political version of a private detective and reunite our people isn’t entirely altruistic.”
“It’s not?”
“I’ll tell you more over lunch.”
“But that’s still a few hours. What will we do until then? . . .”
Time passed.
“Serge, what are you doing up in that tree?”
“Seeking the birds’ perspective. Birds get stunning overhead views of both lakes, but obviously don’t appreciate it like me because they’re easily distracted by a mouse. Oooo, a mouse.” He shimmied down . . .
More time passed.
“Serge, what are you doing in the creek wearing only your underwear?”
“Baptizing myself.” Serge dunked his head in the water, then threw a fist in the air. “Shula!”
Coleman turned around. “I think the restaurant just opened.”
“Excellent.” Serge climbed out of the creek and headed for the Yearling. “I could go for some vittles.”
“What about clothes?”
“Oh, right. That was almost another episode of having to talk fast on my feet.”
Moments later . . .
“Whoa,” said Coleman. “Look at this old place.”
“Couldn’t you tell that from the outside?”
“But that was like funky, broken-down old. This is . . .”
“People drive right by and never have any idea all this is inside.” Serge ran a hand along a railing. “Dark varnished wood like a hunting lodge, giant library of antiquarian books, stretched-out alligator hide on the wall above the vintage Coca-Cola machine, old hotel mail slots, more country antiques in the dining room, the bare-bones stage where legendary Willie Green served up Delta blues on slide guitar and harmonica . . .”
Coleman grabbed Serge’s arm. “The sign over that door: ‘The Cooter Shell Lounge.’ Can we go in?”
“Absolutely,” said Serge. “Then I
can show you all the ancient southern college football pennants, probably from 1952 when this place opened.”
They grabbed stools. Double whiskey and a bottle of water arrived.
“We’d like some food,” Serge told the bartender.
“I’ll get you some menus.”
“No need.” Serge waved a hand over his head. “Already know what we want. Cooter. For both of us.”
“How would you like that cooked?”
“I don’t even know what it is,” said Serge. “Just tell the cook that I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cooter. You may go.”
Coleman looked around in the dim light at more rows of books and a movie poster. “Man, they’ve got stuff by that Rawlings chick all over the place.”
“Because they know their history.” Serge drained his water. “And few realize how Marjorie was wired into so many Florida icons like the Kevin Bacon game. They just think she was this bucolic scribe. But you know how the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in St. Augustine is in an old castle?”
“I liked the shrunken heads and the grandfather clock made from three thousand clothespins.”
“Before it was Ripley’s, it used to be a hotel run by Rawlings and her husband.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Coleman.
Serge shrugged. “Believe it or not. They also bought a cottage on Crescent Beach, and her husband ran the nearby Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, one of the state’s earliest roadside attractions. They also managed my favorite feature of the park, a since-bulldozed-and-forgotten classic Florida watering hole called the Moby-Dick Lounge, where Hemingway once pulled a stool up to a bar shaped like a whaling ship.”
Coleman chugged his bourbon. “Rawlings made Florida her bitch.”
“You’ve broken new ground in literary criticism.”
Coleman slammed his glass down hard. “So what’s the deal with that nightmare about Felicia getting whacked?”
“Could you maybe ramp into the subject a little more gently?”
“But you said you’d tell me when we got in this restaurant about how the new Master Plan involves your revenge.”
“That I did.” Serge raised a finger to order another water. “Remember when we were back in Miami last year, and I met Felicia, who was working for the consulate of Costa Gorda?”
