Tropic of Stupid

by Tim Dorsey

  “Good morning, sunshine!”

  A young girl raised her head off a pillow and yawned.

  Someday she would be famous.

  But for right now it was just roller skating and getting those darn training wheels off her bike.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  She nodded, strapping on a tiny helmet covered with daisies. Her knee and elbow pads were already in place. She checked out all the equipment like an astronaut. In a way, it was a space race. Three boys on the block her age were getting close to losing their own training wheels, and she couldn’t let them beat her to it.

  “Do you need help?”

  She shook her head. Then clicked a socket wrench to the counterclockwise setting and grunted as a nut became unstuck and began to turn.

  “How’d you learn to do that?”

  “Figured it out.” She cast one of the wheel struts aside with scorn like someone finally able to throw away crutches. She went to work on the other one.

  Her mother watched with concern. And curious pride. The socket wrench was no surprise. She remembered the time a couple years earlier, after her daughter’s fourth birthday, when the youngster received an artistic easel for crayon drawings. The mother wanted to nurture her creative side. That afternoon she had checked in on her daughter’s bedroom and found her coloring away at her desk. The drawing was a happy scene of a house with two equally happy people looking out the windows. The daughter had to imagine the chimney with smoke, because they didn’t have a fireplace in Florida. A dog they didn’t have ran across the front lawn. The mother smiled, and made a mental note to get a puppy, and closed the door.

  A half hour later, the mom heard a sound she couldn’t fathom. She opened the door. “Dear Lord, what are you doing?”

  The child looked up from the floor, where she had sawed the legs off the easel. “Building a go-cart.”

  “Where’d you get the wheels?”

  “Lawnmower.”

  “We don’t have a lawnmower.”

  “Mr. Holcomb next door does. He also has a saw.”

  The mother covered her eyes briefly, then collected the contraband and walked the child next door for a teachable moment.

  “We’re so sorry, Mr. Holcomb.” She looked down at her daughter. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry.”

  The mom looked back up. “It won’t happen again. Here are your wheels and saw.”

  The neighbor was more impressed than angry. “How on earth did she . . . ?”

  Of course, there were conceptual flaws with Operation Go-Cart, but the Wright Brothers also had their false starts. Today, however, with the training wheels properly removed, it was all systems go.

  The girl straddled her pink bike with feet on the sidewalk and assessed the task at hand. What an idyllic time and place to be a child with all of life lying ahead! The smell of the grass on a Saturday morning, laughter from nearby yards where kids played tag. A warm sun, and other parents loading up a car of gleeful children for a five-minute trip to the beach. More tots giggled and splashed in an inflatable pool.

  A different mood on the pink bicycle. A fierce glare of determination that bordered on predatory.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” her mom asked again.

  The child answered by placing her right foot on a pedal and pushing off. And promptly toppling over into the grass.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” The child righted the bike and started again and fell over again on the lawn. Another five attempts with the same results. She had traveled only twenty feet on the sidewalk. Then another ten failed tries with no sign of discouragement. The next attempt resulted in a particularly nasty spill on the pavement that pulled down a safety pad and scraped a knee bloody.

  “Oh, dear.” The mother bent down to provide aid.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  That surprised her mom. It was the first such firm utterance from her daughter. But it wasn’t disrespectful; it was independence. Her mother had worried about that for a while. She’d read all the magazine articles about the effects of single-parent households, especially on an only child—how some children stray into bad influences and a general life trajectory of that is the antithesis of purpose. Other children, however, compensated for the domestic void with an almost clinical obsession to reject failure.

  It began to grow dark. Her mother watched the streetlights come on. How many hours could she keep this up?

  On her next attempt, she actually made it ten yards before the spill. That was the watershed. She took stock of what she had done right, and she was off: fifty yards, a hundred, two hundred, turning into the street and making circle after circle like she’d been born on a bike.

  She raced back to their driveway and skidded to a stop.

  Her mother hugged her hard. “I’m so proud of you, Heather!”

  Heather removed her headgear and looked at the daisies. “You think I can get a new helmet?”

  Two decades later, Heather took another ugly spill.

  She had just been clubbed good with the end of a pugilistic stick.

  Heather got up from the ground with a shirt caked in mud and sweat. She took off again, grabbing a rope and vaulting a wooden barricade. The obstacle course subconsciously reminded her of training wheels. She reached the finish line and grabbed her knees and panted.

  A man with a crew cut clicked a stopwatch. “Not good enough! Can’t you cut it?!”

  Heather just took a deep breath and trotted back to the start, beyond the envelope of exhaustion. She again entered the gauntlet of padded clubs, then a ramp and a leap over a water hazard that came up short. More mud, this time on her face.

  A stopwatch clicked again at the finish line. “Still no good.” The man looked at the darkening sky. “We’ll pick it up again tomorrow.”

  “No!” said Heather. “One more time!”

  All the others in attendance just exchanged glances. They got ready with their padded sticks and clubbed her the hardest yet. She vaulted the barrier and hit the ramp. She didn’t clear the water hazard again, because it was designed so nobody could, but this time kept her footing, which was the edge she needed. She hit the finish line. The stopwatch clicked.

  Heather wiped dirt from her face and looked up. “Well?”

  No answer. The instructor shot her a derisive glare before walking away. Heather walked the other way with a smile.

  The police academy was particularly brutal on Heather. Whatever they dished out to the men, Heather got a second helping. No encouragement or camaraderie, just vicious, profane insults designed to crush her spirit.

  It was purely because she was a woman, and all the extra abuse wasn’t fair. But it was because everyone at the academy cared about her. Because the street wasn’t fair. Ask anyone in law enforcement, particularly correctional guards. Criminals are masters of exploiting perceived weakness, and they particularly zero in on women. Heather was being prepared.

  With brains and grit, Heather rose through the ranks. Not meteoric, but steady. Then came the landmark case. Some boys were playing in a stormwater ditch, trying to hit frogs with rocks, as they are known to do.

  An hour later, crime tape, sticks with little flags, detectives in gloves. The bones were photographed where they were found, then bagged and tagged, including a skull with two bullet holes. At first they thought it would be easy, because most of the teeth were intact. Then it wasn’t easy. If bones are relatively fresh, forensics is pretty good at pinpointing how long they’ve been in the ground. But the further back you go, the bigger the margin of error, and without a timeline to look up dental records, it’s close to hopeless.

  Despite help from the media and pleas to the public, the remains remained anonymous. After six months, Jane Doe went in a box in evidence storage.

  It wasn’t Heather’s case, and she stayed respectfully in her lane. But when it was finally appropriate, she knocked on a lieutenant’s door. She had an idea h
ow to solve the case and laid it out. The lieutenant had no idea what she was talking about, and he also had nothing to lose.

  The lieutenant was even more shocked when Heather came back with a rough date of birth, 1966, maybe ’67. From there it was a simple matter of collecting missing persons reports in that age range, then correlating the home addresses with the geographical location of the grave and moving outward in concentric circles. They got their ID, and arrested the victim’s former husband in a retirement park.

  “But where on earth did you get such an idea?” asked the lieutenant.

  “I like science,” said Heather. “I knew we had a crack at it. A long shot, but still a shot. And a bit of luck. We were just fortunate that the victim was alive between 1945 and 1980.”

  “I’m still confused.”

  “Mass spectrometry,” said Heather. “Before the superpowers knew any better, Cold War atomic testing took place above ground until the ban on atmospheric blasts. Tiny amounts of radioactive fallout circled the entire globe, and anyone alive in that era ended up with varying amounts of isotope in their teeth that, given recent advancements in instrumentation, are highly effective at determining a D.O.B.”

  Chapter 12

  The Present

  The budget motel room at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea was still dark. But exciting.

  “Mmmm! Mmmm!”

  Serge hopped up and down with a big smile. “Be right back . . .” He ran out to the car and returned in a jiff, placing two new items on the bed. He picked up his snorkel and hit the hostage in the head again. “In case you’re just tuning in, this is a contest. Some call it a reeducation camp. In either case, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Which brings us to the bonus round. Play it right, and you’re free to go. Ready?”

  “Mmmm! Mmmm!”

  “Great! Let’s get to it!” He reached for the bed and held up the two items he’d just brought inside. “This is the first half of the bonus round. Your choice. Which will it be?”

  “Mmmm! Mmmm!”

  “Good selection!” He cast the kite aside. “This one it is! I wasn’t sure which you were going to pick, so I just have a little more tinkering to do.”

  He reached into the backpack again and unfolded a leather travel tool kit. He grabbed a wrench and some pliers . . .

  An hour later, Serge folded the kit back up. “Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s the opening bell! Let the contest begin!”

  He helped the hostage out of the chair, and Serge put a gun to the back of his head. “I’m going to untie you and remove the tape from your mouth, but no screaming or unappreciated moves or it’s no bonus round for you. Do we have a deal?”

  A head urgently nodded.

  “Okay.” Serge ripped the tape and sliced the bindings. “Here’s your bonus round. I deduced from that little messiness at the store earlier today that you’re big on sprinting. So I’m going to open the back door of this motel, and you can sprint down the beach. If you get away, then you’re free.”

  “So you’re going to chase me?”

  Serge shrugged. “In my own way. Now git!”

  The man didn’t need to be told twice. He hightailed it away across the sand. Something flew out the door behind him.

  “And there goes your drone!” said Coleman.

  Serge stepped onto the back porch and worked a joystick on a fancy remote control. “I’ve been practicing.”

  “Like the kite?”

  “This takes more finesse . . .”

  The drone swooped and soared. The released captive finally heard the buzz and noticed it, repeatedly looking back over his shoulder as it chased him down the beach.

  “He’s not watching where he’s going,” said Coleman. “He’s trampling sandcastles and blankets and just knocked over that umbrella.”

  “Such inconsideration.” The joystick toggled.

  “Now people are yelling,” said Coleman. “Isn’t this kind of public for one of your contests? Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?”

  “Why? We’re hidden back here on this patio.” Serge worked the joystick the other way. “The only thing that’s public is the drone, and anyone on the beach could be operating it. Plus, the general public itself is an essential ingredient of my project.”

  More screaming and shouting as the man ran in frantic circles beneath the unshakable drone.

  “Why’d you buy that thing anyway?”

  “Aerial reconnaissance of historic sites to look for alien instructions.”

  “And the speargun?”

  “An impulse purchase. I didn’t think it through.”

  “How’s that?” asked Coleman.

  “When you’re snorkeling six miles out, you see sharks all the time and it’s no bother. But after you spear your first fish, there’s blood in the water and competition for a meal. Some of the sharks get a little too belligerent for my taste.”

  “How do you deal with it?”

  “One solution is a bang stick.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A short stick with a spring-loaded chamber on the end containing a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. Sharks will start by nudging you to see what they’re up against, so you punch them on the snout. Some don’t want the hassle and take off, but others like to start shit. So after the second nudge, it’s game on, and during the third pass, you poke it with the end of the bang stick and no more shark. So I bought a bang stick.”

  “Cool!”

  “Not cool!” said Serge. “I was figuring out how to use it and then smacked myself in the forehead. ‘What am I doing? I’ve peacefully coexisted in the ocean with sharks for years, and they’ve provided me the awesome majesty of their presence in their own element. Now, if I have to go around killing them to pursue a hobby, forget it.”

  The screaming grew louder.

  “Something’s happening in the crowd,” said Coleman.

  “Hey! I know that guy! . . .”

  “It’s the one from TV! . . .”

  “He stole that old man’s wallet! . . .”

  “Get him! . . .”

  “I think he’s been recognized,” said Coleman. “Now there’s another chase besides the drone.”

  Serge worked his lever back and forth. A propeller toy tilted and banked. “Darn it. I thought I’d practiced enough, but the wind is taking it.”

  “The people are catching up.” Coleman was so engrossed he barely had time to chug. “They’ve got him surrounded.”

  “You son of a bitch! . . .”

  “You piece of shit! . . .”

  “Pick on someone your own age! . . .”

  “The general public has come into play. Good development, because this is harder to maneuver than a kite, and he was moving around too much.” Serge deftly worked the controls, hovering the drone over the vigilante mob. “There we go. You know the hardest part of flying a drone?”

  “Not really.”

  “The landing. Without a soft enough touch you can break the struts off.” Another wiggle of the joystick. The drone descended. “Here we go.”

  “The crowd’s closing in,” said Coleman. “Some people now have him by the arms. He’s crying and saying he’s sorry.”

  “Too little too late.” Serge pulled a lever back. “And he’s starting to bore me. Let’s wrap this up and go snorkeling.”

  “Me too?”

  “Sure,” said Serge. “I’ll share my stuff.”

  “Can I use the speargun?”

  “Now I have a mental image of one or both of us with a spear sticking out, so the answer’s no.”

  “What about the bang stick?”

  “I told you: That thing is cruel.”

  “Then I guess you wasted your money on it.”

  “Not exactly. Remember me getting out the hacksaw back in the motel room?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I cut the spring-loaded chamber off the end of the bang stick. Then I used a pair of L-shaped mending brackets from Home Depot to attach it to the landing gear.”

&nb
sp; “You mean the drone?”

  Serge nodded and worked the lever.

  “Cool.” Chug.

  The crowd had a good hold of the thief now, pulling him in opposite directions like a wishbone.

  “Ow! You’re hurting me! . . .”

  “Good! . . .”

  “Pull him harder! . . .”

  “Punch him in the dick! . . .”

  Serge had the drone on final approach. He switched the lever all the way back, and the flying contraption dropped quickly toward the top of the thief’s head.

  Bang.

  “Jesus!” Coleman jumped back. “All those people scattered and fell over like bowling pins. They’ve got blood everywhere on them.”

  “So much for the bonus round.” Serge turned back to the room. “I’m ready for some real excitement. Let’s go look at sponges.”

  Chapter 13

  Ten Years Ago

  Nathan Sparrow, attorney-at-law, wanted more.

  “But how?” asked Reinhold.

  “We’ve already maxed out on medical bills,” said Nash. “And pain and suffering.”

  “We’re still low on projected lost wages,” said Sparrow. “Most of our clients are the kind of people who take the bus to work.”

  “Maybe that’s because we advertise on bus benches?”

  “We need to expand our marketing budget,” said Nathan.

  “What does that mean?”

  “TV.”

  Everyone has to start somewhere, and the firm started at the bottom. They hired a local production company, the kind that specialized in making bad commercials. Intentionally bad. So bad that they were good. People saw the ads over and over. And after the viewers forgot the stupidness, all that was left etched into their memories was the name of a used car dealership or a place to buy engagement rings.

  On a Tuesday afternoon, a single camera sat on a stand in front of the courthouse. The producer was actually sitting in one of those tall director’s chairs. He had given the lawyers their scripts and props. He raised a big cardboard cone, making a fist with the other hand. “And . . . action!”

  They filmed the commercial in a single take.