Six

  The state of Florida was in a heat wave in early spring.

  Three stove-bellied men marched abreast down a sidewalk in Sarasota, forcing visitors and retirees into the gutter. Their leather jackets were festooned with nonfunctional chains. The back of each jacket had an unfaded zone in the shape of a large patch, bordered by broken stitching.

  “Who ever heard of bikers without bikes!” one said. “Now we just look like goddamn drunks.”

  “But we are drunks,” said a second.

  “Shut the fuck up!” said the third. “I need to think.”

  They waited. Nothing.

  The first biker sneered at an old lady, who hissed back and raised her walker at him like a lion tamer.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “No respect.”

  The men sat on a street bench next to a pair of fashionably depressed students from New College, who gave the bikers the creeps.

  The trio had been kicked out of every self-respecting criminal biking outfit on both coasts until they were forced to cling to the bottom rung of Florida’s biker community: The Riders of Eternal Doom, Sunshine Chapter.

  The Riders had wanted a flaming skull and lots of daggers for their emblem, but they could only afford factory seconds from the uniform company. So instead they settled for reembroidered patches originally rejected by a Siesta Key ice cream parlor. The riders’ logo became a cobra wrapped around a triple scoop of Rocky Road.

  The Riders had kicked out the three bikers that morning, tearing the patches off their jackets and confiscating their motorcycles.

  Maybe it was their names, they thought. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm. Maybe they should have gone with a more violent tone instead of the antihygiene theme Ringworm had suggested.

  Ringworm was the obvious leader of the crew, based purely on his hugeness. Stinky was excitable and easily panicked. Cheese-Dick got beat up a lot.

  Ringworm was nothing less than a giant. About six-six and three hundred and fifty pounds, he usually wore an open leather jacket with no shirt. His belly was so swollen it extended up to the nipple line, and it had a large tattoo of the Hindenburg going down. Stinky was the middle in size, same proportions as Ringworm, just more in scale with the general population; he got his nickname from his nonstop nervous perspiration. Cheese-Dick was short and wide and had scars everywhere from his cavalcade of ass-kickings.

  They walked down to the waterfront and signed on with a band of wildcat shrimpers who beat them up—Cheese-Dick first—and threw them overboard ten minutes later.

  They swam ashore on Lido Key and kicked in a sand castle.

  Sharon thought Serge and Coleman were insufferable boobs. To think that she allowed Coleman to finance her cocaine habit!

  She had intended to flop in the cigarmaker’s cottage only until her next grifter or smuggler boyfriend came along. If she hadn’t been in a world-record drought, she would never have allowed Serge to force her into stripping at The Red Snapper to help with room and board. Not that she had anything against stripping; she had a thing against ambition.

  Sharon’s vixen looks instantly made her the most talented lap dancer in The Red Snapper, even though she refused to pay attention and stop chewing gum or smoking during the daily grinds. Her sole motivation was determining whether the next customer might be a Carlos Lehder or Robert Vesco. If one looked promising, she planned to take him to the spare office in back that some of the girls used for the high-rollers. Except that all her customers seemed to be fat guys in bowling shirts.

  A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.

  Serge told Sharon to stand lookout. A couple of times a week, he’d come by for tips on robbery candidates, looking for married, drunk, wimpy out-of-towners, preferably from overseas.

  Serge, getting the report from Sharon one night, stopped and thought he heard something. “Is that a tuba?”

  “From the back room,” Sharon said. “Don’t ask.”

  Serge and Coleman followed the marks to their hotels, usually out on West Shore Boulevard. As the tourists chuckled and stumbled and began closing the hotel room door, Serge would kick it in and level revolvers in both hands.

  “Which one of you dirty fucking cowards beat up the dancer at The Red Snapper? One of the girls pointed out your car!”

  Usually they’d freeze or faint. One time four guys actually started pointing at each other. “It was him, I swear!”

  By the time it was over, they were thrilled to give Serge all their money and jewelry and anything else he wanted.

  “Okay, you guys look honest. I’ll just take this stuff as good faith. But if you’re lying…!”

  They never called the cops.

  Inside a month, Serge and Coleman had collected two thousand dollars, eleven watches, three cameras, a laptop computer, two camcorders, six cell phones, a derringer, a night vision scope, a leather jacket and another complete airline pilot’s uniform. When Sharon received her first one-third cut, she got with the program and more aggressively sought victims.

  Between dances, Sharon worked on her two-pack-a-day cigarette hobby and wondered whether to get another tattoo. While straddling a customer, she noticed the two Canadians across the room.

  Later, she made small talk with the tourists. She was bored, wanted to get something to drink and unwind after work. Hey—they were cute! Where were they staying? The Porpoise Inn on Waters Boulevard? Sure, she might hook up with them.

  At four A.M. a delightfully surprised but groggy Canadian opened the door of room 14 at the single-story Porpoise Inn, circa 1953.

  “I’m tipsy,” Sharon giggled, and stumbled into the room. The other Canadian turned on the light and squinted. She put her arms around the neck of the first and tongue-kissed him silly. Coleman and Serge ran into the room, and Sharon pulled back and punched the one she was kissing in the balls. She pointed at the tourist still in bed. “Shoot that fucker if he moves!”

  Serge ripped apart luggage and dumped drawers, and Sharon and Coleman snorted lines of meth on top of the dresser. Between lines and ransacking, the trio realized the tourists were gone.

  They ran to the door and saw a rented Taurus speeding out of the parking lot, west, toward Interstate 275, and they hopped in Sharon’s red Camaro. Northbound on the interstate, past the Bearss Avenue exit, there was nothing for twenty miles—no traffic lights, no exits and generally no cops as the road headed into Pasco County.

  The Taurus was in the left lane and the Camaro caught it ten miles from the county line, pulling up on the right side. Serge drove with his right hand and shot a .380 automatic at the Taurus’s tires with his left. Sharon was in the front passenger seat, trying to hold her left hand still, snorting meth off the back of it.

  The right front tire blew out and the Taurus careened into the median. The Camaro pulled over and Coleman and Serge sprinted down the embankment. The tourists were neutralized with a single punch in the head each. Wallets and watches were removed.

  Sharon came running down the embankment, sizzling on meth, screaming, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” She pushed her head and arm into the front seat of the Taurus and shot both tourists in the face with the .380 that Serge had left on the Camaro’s front seat.

  Serge and Coleman leaped back from the car.

  “Oooo, that had to hurt,” said Coleman.

  “That’ll teach ‘em not to tip,” said Serge.

  Coleman and Serge never mentioned the killing of the Canadians to Sharon after that night. It had taken them five high-wire minutes to get her to take her cranked-out finger off the trigger and hand them the gun. A half hour later, as they drove over Tampa Bay, they had brought up the topic—maybe she was a smidgen out of line, putting them at risk—and Sharon went apeshit. She bounded up from the backseat and grabbed Serge from behind, around the neck, as he drove. Serge fought with the steering wheel, smacking the guardrail on the Howard Frankland Bridge. He bent her fingers back, turned and scrambled over the top of the driver’s seat into the backseat, abandoning the driving duties. Coleman casually reached over with his left hand and grabbed the wheel, driving from the passenger side.

  Serge pinned Sharon in the backseat and punched her in the face and stomach, again and again. Coleman straightened the car out and slowly climbed over the center console into the driver’s seat. Sharon was cursing, clawing and beating on Serge, who bashed her in the left cheek, trying to shut her up. But Coleman noticed a certain rhythm develop in the Camaro’s suspension. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the moonlight off Serge’s bare rear, popping in and out of view. Sharon spit in Serge’s face, grabbed his hair and pulled his face down for a hard kiss that busted both their lips. Coleman thought it was too violent to qualify for rough sex. More like an alley fight with a quickie worked into the choreography.

  Sharon’s profanity grew louder, meaner and more poetic. They were westbound, Tampa to St. Petersburg, and when they hit the hump on the Howard Frankland, Sharon went off like an Apache warrior charging over a hill.

  “Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi!!!!!!”

  It startled Coleman so badly he swerved into the lane on his left, overcorrected, and almost went in the water. He got a handle on the problem and accelerated.

  Coleman took the exit at Twenty-second Avenue North and found an Addiction World convenience store on Fourth Street. It was five A.M. For breakfast, Coleman bought three sausage biscuits and a forty-four-ounce Thirst Mutilator, Serge a quart of OJ, Sharon cigarettes. She and Coleman each dropped a Roofie in front of the clerk, to cut into the crank, and washed it down with the soda. Coleman set the Thirst Mutilator down next to the cash register and poured in half a flask of Jim Beam. The clerk watched and yawned.

  Serge took over the driving again, motoring aimlessly in the empty, predawn streets of St. Petersburg as Sharon and Coleman passed the spiked soda in the backseat, adding a joint to the mix. Nobody talking, relaxing, the twilight at the top of the ballistic trajectory when the day’s drug battle finally turns in favor of the downers. The radio was on medium volume, Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” as the car rolled under a series of synchronized stoplights. “I am a traveler of both time and space…” The sky toward Tampa started to glow, and Sharon and Coleman drifted toward crash. Serge drove out on the pier, sending gulls and pelicans into the air, and parked in the valet section. Coleman and Sharon were out. Serge got a stolen Pentax from the trunk and took a dozen shots as the sun rose across the bay.

  Sharon and Coleman awoke in a broken-down hotel on Fourth Avenue that had a palm-green canopy out to the sidewalk. It reminded Serge of St. Pete in its prime. He had checked them in, dragged each into the room. Told the clerk they had eaten bad seafood.

  When they awoke, Serge was wired from skipping his medication. He said he was going to teach them to appreciate Florida.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” said Sharon, and they slapped each other.

  He took them to the Salvador Dalí Museum, but Coleman’s and Sharon’s brains only registered static.

  “This is the epitome of the surrealist movement,” Serge tried to explain.

  “Why does that guy’s head have a crater filled with seashells?” asked Coleman.

  “Can’t you read?” said Serge. “It’s because he’s a bureaucrat!”

  He drove them over to Treasure Island, where Serge said the motel strip reminded him of early Las Vegas: the Sands, the Thunderbird, the Bilmar, the Surf. He took them by Haslam’s bookstore, the art deco in decline on Fourth Street and the International Museum.

  Sharon had her standard pissed-off expression, but she surprised herself by starting to enjoy the day. They went to a spring training game at Al Lang Stadium on the waterfront. She bought a baseball jersey that came down so low you couldn’t see her hot pants. She stood against the bullpen fence, attracting New York Yankees.

  When a pop foul left the stadium, Sharon went after it.

  “I got it! I got it!” The ball bounced thirty feet when it hit Bay Shore Drive, and Sharon chased it into the yacht basin. She came up with the ball, but the seawall was too high for her to climb out. Half the bullpen came to the rescue.

  Sharon was sopping wet, looking hot, and two Yankees made crude remarks. She winked and gave them teasing looks over her shoulder as she walked toward the parking lot. One Yankee followed her to her car, and Serge followed the Yankee.

  The murders of the Canadians made ripples in the press, but not as much as the robbery of the Yankees player. Serge had always wanted a World Series ring. For her part, Sharon hadn’t exhibited the first hint of violence since that weekend. But under her vibe Serge and Coleman had become increasingly brutal in subsequent robberies.

  There were the two Brits, who said something ill-advised like “Now look here. This just isn’t civilized,” and carried their teeth home in their pockets.

  There was the Japanese businessman, who reacted by blinking four hundred times a minute and making high-pitched peeping sounds like a baby chick. So Serge and Coleman beat him into an express coma.

  And after each robbery, Serge and Sharon resumed combat and copulation in the backseat while Coleman chauffeured them around, wondering, Is this what they meant when they said I’d regret dropping out of school?

  Coleman was deliriously content, but Serge had bigger dreams.

  “Tell me ‘bout the office in back of the club again,” Serge asked Sharon.

  “I told you already! Bunch of rich freaks. If they got enough money, they get whatever they want. One girl told me she made three hundred dollars sneezing on a guy’s cock.”

  The next night Tiffany was on back-room watch, making sure nobody walked in on the action. Sharon handed Tiff a twenty, pointed a thumb at the man standing next to her. “Foot weirdo.”

  Serge smiled, holding a shoe bag. Tiffany blew a stream of clove smoke in his face.

  Once inside the office, Serge pulled a camcorder out of the shoe bag and scanned the room.

  “What are you looking—”

  “Shut up!” Serge stood on a couch and stuck the camcorder on a shelf between a fern and a row of books. He bunched a small towel around it, concealing everything but the lens, and turned it on.

  “I don’t get it,” said Coleman, watching a video in the shotgun cottage with Serge and Sharon. On TV, musical instrument cases lay open on the floor of the back office at The Red Snapper. A beautiful naked woman was playing the tuba badly for twin brothers. The brothers started arguing; one wanted her to switch to the slide trombone.

  Serge hit the fast-forward. A man stuck a child’s doll, headfirst, halfway down his throat, and clapped like a seal. Serge hit fast-forward again. “Okay, this is the money part. I think he’s someone important. Sharon, see if you recognize him.”

  On TV, a flabby, middle-aged man in a three-piece suit walked into the office carrying a bowling-ball bag. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a large goldfish bowl. He lay down on the floor on his back and put the goldfish bowl over his head. A naked woman stood over him with a foot on each side of the bowl. She squatted down and her face strained.

  A squeal of glee echoed out of the goldfish bowl.

  “I may be sick,” said Sharon.

  “Can you get me his name?” said Serge.

  Seven

  The billboards started in Tampa and ran along Interstate 75 to Naples. The rough-and-tumble Jack Savage, has-been star of stage and screen, smiled down from the signs and pointed at passing motorists. He wore an unstrapped Army helmet that was his trademark from his biggest movie, the marginal hit Guts and Glory. There was a talk bubble next to his head: “Let’s hit the beach at Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles!” Underneath, a row of mobile homes and more writing. “Luxury prefab retirement living, from $39,900.” Near Exit 46, between Tampa and Bradenton, a man stood in saw palmettos beneath one of the billboards. It was a hot June day, four months before the World Series, but the man was wearing a long-sleeve blue-plaid shirt, jeans and a cowboy hat. He looked an athletic sixty years old. He waved an arm up at the sign and yelled at a man in a business suit, “Paint over those goddamn trailers. Shit, they look like goddamn tool sheds.”

  “But that’s a photograph of your mobile homes,” said the man in the suit.

  “That’s exactly why I want ‘em gone. I’m selling an impression here. A false impression. And I don’t need any photographic evidence to mess it up,” the cowboy said. He climbed into a black Ford pickup with Yosemite Sam mudflaps that said, “Back off!”

  “They’ll find out soon enough,” he yelled out the window and took off.

  Florida developer Fred McJagger drove his pickup south on I-75 to the next exit, site of Vista Isles, Phases I-IV, twelve hundred trailers around five perfectly rectangular lakes. A giant clubhouse for bingo and thirty lighted shuffleboard courts. Everyone drove a golf cart.

  On the other side of the interstate, Phase V was ready to roll. The sewer lines were run and the square lakes dug. McJagger met his ace salesman and fixer, Max Minimum, out where they were pouring the foundation for the new auditorium. A road grader roared and burped behind them.

  “There’s never been anything like this,” McJagger said with the slight drawl of a Florida cattleman. “It’s gonna get me on the cover of Forbes.”

  Minimum remembered his boss said the same thing before every new phase of Vista Isles. The “Isles” were eight miles inland, the lakes were retention ponds, and the beaches were light-gray fill dirt they’d poured instead of sodding up to the ponds because it was cheaper.

  McJagger had filled the first lakes with ducks and swans, but they flew away because the water was unacceptable. So Minimum was directed in the middle of the night to a warehouse in Ellenton, where McJagger had stored a new shipment of ducks and swans. Minimum’s job: break their wings.

  As the phases progressed, McJagger found if you broke just one wing, the birds would try to take off and go round and round in the water. He refined the technique, breaking the right wings of half the birds and the left wings of the other half, resulting in an elaborate water ballet of alternating concentric circles that the retirees thought was pretty.