Hurricane Punch

by Tim Dorsey

  “I agree.”

  “Sir,” said the host, “if you’re just going to get into the spirit of the proceedings—”

  “I’m completely serious,” said Serge. “We desperately need to come together for the greater good of the nation.”

  “But what about the slogan on your T-shirt?”

  Serge looked down. I’M AGAINST WHAT YOU’RE AGAINST. He looked up. “I was trying to be agreeable.”

  The host turned. “Artamus?”

  “We’re treading on dangerous ground. Agreeing is a secular Trojan horse for inclusion.”

  “I can respect that,” said Serge. “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

  “No they’re not.”

  The host tapped a pencil. “How can you be from Operation Holiness and espouse such anti-religious propaganda?”

  “But I’m very religious,” said Serge.

  “Which denomination?”

  “I agree with all of them.”

  “That’s even more anti-religious.”

  “How?”

  “You’re a moral relativist.”

  “What?”

  “You have to choose!”

  “But they’re all great. I glean the best from each. It’s just that every one I’ve tried leaves me with a couple of questions.”

  “You know who invented questions? Satan.”

  “That was just a question,” said Serge.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That’s another one.”

  “Why, you little—”

  “Okay, okay. I really do have a religion.” Serge pulled his T-shirt off over his head, turned it inside out and put it back on, displaying a new slogan: I’M PROBABLY WRONG.

  “That’s your religion?”

  Serge nodded. “Like those early snap judgments I made against organized faiths? Way off the mark. They’re all based on unconditional love, and I was an idiot not to see it. As for my own spiritual journey, aggressively doubting myself keeps me curious and yearning, which only brings me closer and closer to God. It’s just something I feel inside. I can’t explain it.”

  “Because you’re wrong!”

  “Exactly!”

  Panelists had to shout over the crowd’s growing hostility. “Impostor!” “Heathen!” “I’ll bet he’s against the feeding tube!”

  “Just the opposite,” said Serge. “I’m so in favor of it that I propose inserting a second tube. Then we’ll have an extra to remove for the federal court. Everybody’s happy.”

  On it went, jeers growing louder until they were deafening. The crowd charged. “Get him!” The rest of the TV people cleared off the flatbed and locked themselves in the semi. Serge suddenly found himself surrounded. The mob scrambled onto the platform. Shoving broke out. Coleman’s shirt got ripped. “Serge, you have to do something!”

  “Okay, I think I got it. It worked at Woodstock for Country Joe and the Fish. But this is a slightly different audience, so no guarantees….”

  Someone grabbed Coleman in a headlock. “Just do it!”

  “All right.” Serge cleared his throat and grabbed one of the microphones. “Give me an F!…”

  Up in the hospital room, a growing roar came through the walls. The protesters were even noisier than usual. One of the relatives from the bedside vigil peeked through the blinds.

  “Something’s going on out there.”

  “Look,” said another relative. “It’s on TV.”

  “That guy on the flatbed is leading the crowd in some kind of chant.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “I can’t make it out.”

  Down in the parking lot, Serge had reversed his fortunes one-eighty, whipping the crowd into a revivalist fury. Serge repeatedly pumped a fist skyward in rhythm with his new mantra: “Fuck the devil! Fuck the devil!…”

  A camera from Florida Cable News caught a chanting, eighty-year-old woman off guard. She covered her mouth and giggled. “Normally I’d never condone such language, but the devil just won’t listen to reason.”

  The wind snuck up. People lost hats and picket signs. The crowd parted for Serge and Coleman, but it was slow progress back to their vehicle with all the handshakes and autographs. Then the clouds let go, and everyone scattered for safety. Some were able to make it to their cars. Others took refuge in the emergency room.

  Serge crawled the last few yards to the H2.

  “We can’t drive in this,” said Coleman.

  “I know.” Serge threw the vehicle in gear. “We need to park against the leeward wall of the building. It’ll block most of the wind.”

  On the hospital’s seventh floor, an attorney appeared in the doorway. He didn’t have to say anything. The Eleventh Circuit had spoken. The family stepped aside for the doctors. It didn’t take long. The presiding physician spoke quietly. “It’s in God’s hands now.” In scientific terms, that meant seven to fourteen days.

  Twenty minutes later a hospital administrator entered the room. “Storm’s here. It’s time to go down to the shelter.”

  Orderlies transferred the patient to a stretcher and wheeled him down the hall to a special oversized elevator. Police escorted the family down a regular one. The power went out, and the emergency batteries kicked in.

  The head nurse joined the family hunkering down in the shelter. She looked around. “What’s taking those orderlies so long?”

  STATE ROAD 72

  A black H2 sped away from the entrance to Myakka River State Park. White orderly uniforms on the floorboards.

  Coleman cracked a beer. “I can’t believe we kidnapped the feeding-tube guy.”

  “Know what you mean,” said Serge, carefully monitoring the cloud wall to stay within the eye. “This is worse taste than Weekend at Bernie’s.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “Because it’s even worse taste to exploit him for political careers. I couldn’t stand to see him in the middle of that travesty. Plus, the federal court just ruled he can’t be fed anymore.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Brings up an interesting legal question,” said Serge. “If we’re caught, will we be in more trouble if he’s alive or dead?”

  Coleman turned around in his seat and snapped fingers in front of a vacant face. “His family must be worried sick.”

  “Been thinking that, too,” said Serge. “I screwed up. We have to return him.” He slowed and executed a wide U.

  “We’re heading back into the hurricane?”

  “Land weakened it to a category one, but you should still belt yourself.”

  Coleman clicked a buckle shut. “At least your heart was in the right place.”

  “Who knows about the human brain?” Serge gave it the gas. “Maybe he’s picking this up on a subcortex level. I know if I was in his condition and ready to check out, I’d definitely appreciate it if someone drove me around on a cool road trip.”

  The advancing black eye wall was straight ahead. Under a mile, closing fast.

  Horrible screaming.

  Serge looked up at the ceiling. “I wish he’d stop that. He’s going to make me have an accident.”

  “Think I should check on him again?” said Coleman.

  “Good idea. Make sure he’s safe.”

  Coleman climbed out and sat on the lip of his rolled-down window. Eye wall a half mile, still closing. He reached and tested the rope that secured the unbolted rear car seat to the roof rack, a larger version of the child seat on the Cougar’s roof. He checked a second line holding the TV host in place. “You okay?”

  “Aaaaauuuuuuuhhhhhhhh!”

  Coleman came back inside the passenger compartment and rolled up his window.

  “How is he?” asked Serge.

  “I don’t think he likes it.”

  “Too late. Hundred yards.” Serge accelerated to seventy. Collision course. “Hang on. She’s really going to whip.”

  They punched through the violent wall. Serge fought the steering whee
l. There was a loud kerchunk. Serge and Coleman looked up. Something banged down the length of the roof, and then it was gone.

  Coleman turned around and looked out the back window. “Ooooooooh. He skidded on his face.”

  Serge grinned. “Gotcha!”

  Nursing staff and relatives scrambled through the hospital in panicked search parties. One of the groups turned the corner on a hallway that had already been checked. They froze.

  In the middle of the corridor, a young man was sitting up on a stretcher. “Am I hungry!”

  They ran him down to the lab for a battery of tests. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one of the doctors, reading a printout. “The only possible explanation is this brain scan indicating a recent overload of sensory stimulation.”

  The young man wolfed down a submarine sandwich. “I just had the weirdest dream.”

  A doctor came over and took the sandwich away.

  “Hey! I was eating that!”

  “Federal court order. We’re not allowed to feed you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MIDNIGHT

  A hand in a surgical glove wrote under the blue glow of a silent TV. No danger being discovered by handwriting experts this time, because the latest letter was being written in a made-up alphabet. Shapes and hieroglyphics and other symbols borrowed from Russians and Navajos. The sheet was folded, slipped into an envelope and addressed in the usual manner.

  THE MORNING AFTER

  Fifteen miles south of Sarasota. The shore was overcast. Tourists combed the beach for shells. Some fished from the giant twenty-four-hour pier. Others cracked oysters in an oceanfront restaurant named Sharky’s.

  People filled the water, but nobody was swimming. They stood up to their waists, working diligently with long metal poles. A lanky man raised his pole and shook the mesh basket at the end. He pulled something from the bottom, turned toward shore and waved it in the air. “Coleman! I got one! I got one!…Coleman…?” Serge splashed his way toward the beach.

  Coleman felt light taps on his cheeks. “Coleman?”

  “Mmmmmm.” Coleman slowly pushed himself up in the sand. “What happened?”

  “You passed out again. Look what I got!” Serge stuck a giant gray fossil an inch from Coleman’s face. It was pointy and serrated. Serge pulled it back. “Been hunting this baby for years. Now my collection’s complete!”

  Coleman peeled matted seaweed off his arms. “An old tooth?”

  “Not just any old tooth!” Serge rubbed it like a genie bottle. “Carcharodon megalodon! The Holy Grail!”

  Coleman brushed sand off his tongue. “Car-what?”

  “Prehistoric ancestor of Carcharodon carcarius, the great white shark, but up to five times as long. Some say eighty feet.”

  Coleman noticed all the people in the water. “What are they doing?”

  “Another Florida hurricane tradition. We’re in Venice…” Serge swept an arm over the beach like Caesar. “…Fossil capital of the state. I’ve filled coffee cans with all kinds of tiny teeth: mako, tiger, bull, blue. Once I stepped on a mastodon vertebra. But until a few minutes ago, no megalodon.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the fossil capital, which means it’s pretty much fossiled out. Everyone rents these metal tooth-hunting baskets from a concession on the side of the restaurant and picks the place clean. But hurricanes are your big chance. They churn up the sea bottom, bringing a new shipment of teeth to the surface. And now I got mine! Let’s celebrate!”

  Coleman lay back down on the sand and closed his eyes. “I celebrated in advance, in case something good happened.”

  Serge grabbed him by the arm. “Let’s go to Sharky’s. I’m buying.”

  They reached the side of the restaurant. Serge returned the rental basket and thrust his tooth in the face of the kiosk man. “I rule!”

  “That’s nice.” The man refunded Serge’s deposit.

  “Can I get quarters? I’d like to buy a newspaper. A lot is going on in our times. Miss a day and you could go years thinking Buddy Hackett’s still alive. What if you ran into his family and said something inappropriate?”

  Serge received his change and grabbed a paper from the row of boxes next to the rental fishing poles. They entered the restaurant from the beach side, and a waitress led them to a patio table in the wet-bathing-suit section. “I got my tooth!”

  The waitress smiled politely and handed out menus. “I’ll be right back to take your order.”

  “I’d like to order now. What do people usually have when they’re celebrating The Tooth? You probably get this all the time. Anything on the menu, like the Congratulations-on-Your-Tooth Platter?”

  “I’m kind of new here….”

  “Sorry, I’m being a bother. You’re busy with a full room of customers. I promise not to monopolize your time. Let’s just say I’ll try, because sometimes I can’t help it, especially if I’ve had coffee.” He closed the menu and handed it back to the waitress. “Just bring me coffee.”

  Coleman returned his own menu. “Beer.”

  The waitress left, and Serge carefully propped the tooth atop the napkin dispenser for maximum display. “There. I can sit in awe.” He spread out his newspaper and…A fist pounded the table. The tooth fell. “Motherfu—!” Heads turned.

  Coleman unwrapped a not-for-individual-sale packet of saltines. “What is it?”

  “Article on my most recent masterpiece. Mahoney’s taking advantage of the tragedy to plant more ugly rumors about me.” Serge kept reading. The fist came down again. “Impotent! That’s it! I can’t let this go unanswered!”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Write a letter to the editor.”

  “But you already wrote one.”

  “I can write as many letters as I want. You’re thinking of manifestos. There’s a one-manifesto-per-serial-killer limit.”

  “Manifesto?”

  “Everybody has a manifesto,” said Serge. “You, me. Yours is probably short. The point is that everyone else doesn’t have an insecure need to call attention to themselves: Look at me, I killed a bunch of people, please publish my manifesto. On the other hand, all communities have a hard-core base of unstable, rambling letter writers who are actually encouraged so newspapers can fill pages for free. I’ll need to stay clear of coherence.” Serge waved for the waitress. “Can I borrow a pen?”

  TAMPA BAY TODAY

  The first budget meeting of the morning. Editors dribbled in. An identical Xerox lay on the table in front of each chair.

  The maximum editor arrived. “Another letter?” He picked up his copy. “What are all these weird symbols?”

  “An alphabet Serge made up,” said Mahoney. “We’ve already sent it to the FBI. Their top cryptographers are working round the clock.”

  “And?”

  “No luck. We’d like you to publish it in case one of your readers can crack the code.”

  “But if the best experts can’t—”

  “That’s how they untangled messages from the Zodiac Killer,” said Mahoney. “These two teachers figured it out at their breakfast table.”

  The metro editor pointed at a spot near the bottom of the page. A straight line intersected a squiggly one. “This symbol’s bigger than the others.”

  “Probably his logo. The Zodiac did that, too.”

  A news clerk approached the table with an envelope. “Sir, this just came.”

  “Another letter?”

  “Drop it on the table!” said Mahoney. “Nobody touch it!” He reached into his jacket for tweezers and a clear evidence bag. The letter was gently unfolded and slid into the plastic.

  McSwirley leaned for a better look.

  “That same Eye of the Storm guy?” asked Metro Tom.

  “Don’t know,” said Jeff. “It’s a completely different style.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s written on the back of a seafood place mat.”

  “It’s the same guy, al
l right,” said Agent Mahoney. “Serge. His personality’s splitting.”

  “Let me see that thing.” The maximum editor pulled the bag toward him and pushed reading glasses up his nose.

  Dear Letters to the Editor,

  Impotent! Why, I’ll have you know this cock still gets hard enough to bash your fucking skull in! By the way, nice redesign job with the sports section. Much easier on the eyes.

  Look, I know the confidential source is Mahoney, and I understand you have to play ball to keep the leaks coming, but is name-calling really necessary?

  Speaking of names, a word to parents: Stop using alternate spellings for your kids. Aimee, Eryn, Bil, Derik. You’re only costing jobs. The whole customized-coffee-mug and key-chain industry. An entire generation is being robbed of their roadside-Florida-souvenir heritage. “Daddy, why don’t they ever have my name? I see something close, but it’s spelled different.” “Sorry, honey, we decided to be pricks.”

  Next: state government. You know that official Hurricane Preparedness Program last year when all storm supplies were exempt from sales tax? The first two weeks of June. Preparedness. The first two weeks of hurricane season. The answers are all right in front of you, but Americans tend to overanalyze. Like during the space race, NASA spent fifty thousand dollars developing a zero-gravity pen that didn’t skip. Know what the Russians did? Pencil. Think about it.

  —S

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SARASOTA

  A few miles above Venice, the Tamiami Trail takes a pair of jogs as it swings past Marina Jack’s and the bridge to Bird Key, home of lifestyle pace-car and AC/DC front man Brian Johnson. The road continues north toward the international airport as part of something designated ‘Florida Scenic Highway,’ a route singularly characterized by a dense concentration of endangered mom-and-pop motels clinging from the fifties. Many had already been demolished, while others were converted to a variety of mixed-density operations selling live bait and sex toys. The most tenacious kept the neon buzzing: the Seabreeze, the Sundial, the Cadillac, the Galaxy, the Siesta, the Flamingo Colony….”

  “Serge,” said Coleman, “you’re doing it again.”