Minimum was valuable to McJagger, first, because he’d sold 42 percent of all the trailers in Vista Isles, getting an average of sixty thousand for the “$39,000” model through fine print and outright fraud.

  Second, he’d shown McJagger how to see beyond development. These weren’t just home buyers. Minimum said he had to view them as frail old people that he had by the throats.

  First came the maintenance fee for lawn mowing and upkeep of the shuffleboard courts and such. Start ‘em at ninety-nine dollars a month and jack it up a hundred every six months until they die. What are they gonna do? We put in a clause that says they can’t move the trailer. And who will buy into a mobile home with such high fees?

  The bottom line, Minimum said: They were really easy to scare.

  More than once, Minimum had had his arm around the shoulder of a shrunken old man when closing the sale, saying they’d take good care of him.

  Two years later he was yelling at the same man, telling him he better damn well pay the maintenance fee or his keester would be out on the street digging through Dumpsters. They’d take away his trailer and sue his bank account dry for breach of contract. And the old man, a widower—a good man, a veteran, who’d worked too hard in his day and sacrificed everything for his children—was left near the end of his life crying and shaking all alone in what was essentially a large toolshed.

  The retiree was being cannibalized by the New American, an untested, ungrateful, wet-behind-the-ears, fast-buck shit-ass like Minimum, who didn’t know what had gone into the country under his feet and wouldn’t care if he found out. To Minimum, no sacrifice was too small to pass on to someone else.

  McJagger particularly liked Minimum’s air-conditioner scam. Free AC inspections for the entire development that would lead to a thousand bucks of repairs that had to be done or the mobile home would be red-tagged for code violations and they’d be out on the street.

  If the residents didn’t believe the imaginary problems, the repairmen were coached to go out to the unit and break something. If they still resisted, the staff became physically menacing.

  The purpose of the guard shack wasn’t to protect the residents but to keep out reputable repair companies. When the service vans arrived, the guards at first offered fifty bucks to take over the service call. Sometimes the repairmen flipped them off and drove through, and the guards activated road spikes.

  McJagger was singularly impressed that Minimum turned the name, phone number and address of each resident into at least two hundred dollars on the phone-scam circuit. Each retiree could expect no less than fifteen boiler-room phone calls a day. Sweepstakes, world cruises, blind children, hospital wings, ballroom romance, missionaries held captive by pagans.

  Minimum had a reputation among the residents of Vista Isles like that of an evil prison guard. The old people on their three-wheel bikes, electric wheelchairs, and Cushman carts booed and spat at Minimum when he showed new prospects around the Isles. Sometimes, to amuse himself, he’d glare back and jerk his thumb toward the entrance of Vista Isles, which meant “out on the street.”

  “Screw the bank,” said the porcine man leaning forward on the edge of his couch, upholstered in brown corduroy. His madras Bermuda shorts were unbuckled, and his tank-top T-shirt was too small and stained in earth tones.

  Max Minimum found himself staring down at the man’s bald spot, which had been spray-painted with gloss black Krylon exterior enamel. Lester Frangipani had spent the early hours of the morning watching infomercials and drinking Tropical Depression Malt Liquor, whose cans depicted a fifty-foot sailboat being bashed to popsicle sticks on a jetty. Market researchers said the logo had the double benefit of appealing to both alcoholism and class warfare.

  About three A.M., Frangipani had seen an infomercial about a new baldness camouflage in which three men sat on a stage atop stools, like The Dating Game. A studio audience “oooo”ed and “awww”ed as a Manhattan hair stylist sprayed “Liquid Appeal” on their heads. Lester was about to jot down the 800 number when the price appeared on the screen.

  “Twenty-nine ninety-five my ass!” Lester changed the channel with the remote control. Former Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench came on the screen, shaking a metal ball inside a can of Krylon no-drip exterior.

  To Minimum, the freshly painted, rust-resistant bald spot represented easy money. Minimum had found Frangipani’s name and address in the foreclosure rolls at the Hillsborough County Courthouse, and Lester was now reading Minimum’s sales brochure. “Foreclosure? Screw the bank!” began the pamphlet. There was a drawing of a big screw going through an even bigger bank. It explained how Minimum would take over the property, set Lester up in a modest but clean one-bedroom apartment, paying first and last months’ rent and security deposit, and give him a thousand dollars of mad money. At the bottom was a cartoon of a wheelbarrow full of cash. It was pushed by a smiling bald man with a bushy mustache who looked like the guy on the Community Chest cards in Monopoly. Minimum had already researched the Seminole Heights house and determined that he would receive twenty-five thousand dollars of Lester’s equity for less than four thousand dollars out of pocket.

  “A month from now the bank’ll have your house anyway,” said Minimum. He made a hitchhiking gesture with his thumb over his shoulder. “You’ll be out on the streets.”

  Frangipani glowered up at Minimum and popped another can of Tropical Depression Malt.

  “The bank’ll just sell your house again,” Minimum continued. “They’re the ones making you homeless—you gonna take that? You gonna let them get away with it?”

  Lester gulped the malt liquor, tripping his gag reflex.

  “I say, screw the bank!” said Minimum.

  “Screw the bank!” echoed Lester. Minimum chalked it up as a positive sign.

  “The bank is licking its chops, thinking about all that money they’re about to steal from you!” Minimum said. “And we’ll march in there together. I’ll tell the bank, ‘Go suck on your mortgage, fellas.’ I’ll hand them my certified check for back payments and there will be nothing they can do.”

  “Fuck the bank!” said Lester.

  Jesus, this is too easy, thought Minimum. “Okay, you stay right here. I’ll go cut the check and get the forms.”

  But Frangipani didn’t stay there. As soon as Minimum was gone, he put on a beer helmet, stuck two cold malt liquors in the holders and the tubes in his mouth.

  Lester drew attention at every stoplight, but he stared straight ahead, sucking on the beer tubes. Both hands were at the top of the steering wheel, one holding a shiny gun.

  At Florida National Bank, six tellers called security when Frangipani strolled through the lobby to the elevators, slurping on the beer tubes and acting as though there was no gun in the hand swinging by his side.

  The security team would arrive thirty seconds too late. Next to the elevators, Lester scanned the menu of names and floors but none matched the autograph on his foreclosure letter. Because no such person existed, precisely to counter this eventuality. Lester rode the elevator to the top and got off on the forty-second floor. He walked past the receptionist and into the corner suite of Charles Saffron, president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, who had nothing to do with the bank.

  Saffron faced out the window in his high-back burgundy office chair. A medevac helicopter flew below his floor on its way to Tampa General. Two red-and-gray tanker ships headed out the channel at the Port of Tampa. A light haze hung over the bay, but traffic was moving well on the bridges.

  Saffron yelled in the phone, “No excuses! Officially, there was no malathion in the house!… No, listen to me! It’s not a good idea to say she drank just a little malathion! What drugs are you on!… What do you mean there’s gonna be a toxicology! Get her cremated!… I don’t care. Steal the body, go in at night, do whatever it is you do! I got enough to worry about—I’m up to my tits in medflies!”

  Frangipani, standing in the doorway, emptied all six shots from the .22 pistol into the back of Saffron’s chair.

  Saffron heard six gunshots and felt six bullets punch the back of his chair before the slugs flattened out against its interior steel frame.

  Saffron, still looking out the window, said calmly into the phone, “I gotta go.”

  The security team filed off the elevator and tackled Frangipani, whose pockets were full of literature from Max Minimum. The resulting threats of prosecution as an accessory prompted Minimum to gladly agree to leave the foreclosure market for life. In seeking a new field, Minimum considered his strengths and locale. He percolated Florida’s opportunities down to their stairstep elements: fear, intimidation and exploitation.

  In an epiphany, Minimum saw the future in two words. Old people.

  The next morning Minimum shaved, put on a dry-cleaned suit and walked into the office of Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles.

  Surveys found the number one feature sought by the senior citizens selecting a retirement home was safety from crime. Due to the Machiavellian wages Vista Isles paid its landscaping crew, this became their number one problem.

  First, Minimum recruited the surliest of the crew to torch a few service vans of uncooperative repair companies. Then he used them to launch a war of nerves with troublesome trailer owners. Bushy-haired teenagers in Metallica shirts ran lawn mowers over beds of marigolds and chrysanthemums.

  Minimum trained them for the park’s air-conditioning and water-heater inspections, because of their aptitude for vandalizing large appliances.

  The riding lawn mower was the plumb assignment, and Minimum doled it out based on loyalty and repair revenue; next was the chain saw. The others were relegated to a gas-powered, over-the-shoulder line of edgers, trimmers, mulchers, leaf blowers and hedge clippers. Minimum became concerned that maybe the crew was getting beyond his control. As their reign of terror escalated, the landscaping staff began and ended the day by marching down the main street of Vista Isles in a flying-V formation, the riding mower in the middle, all the others trailing off to the sides, gunning two-stroke engines.

  Flanked by the edger and leaf blower men, Minimum circled the pool, enforcing the rules: no food, drink or loud talking. Any spark of fun prompted Minimum to run everyone out of the pool for a surprise chlorine analysis. Other times, Minimum would shock the pool before dawn with too much chemical, and laugh in the clubhouse as a dozen seventy-year-olds in the “Early Bird Aqua-Aerobics Club” ran from the pool yelling and clawing at their eyes.

  By the end of each pool visit by Minimum, the crowd was silent and cheerless. “That’s better,” Minimum said. “You need to be more serious, set a better example for the youth.” He gestured toward the landscapers with him.

  “Shoot, you’ve got very serious things to think about, like how little time you have left.”

  Eight

  In August and September, George Veale III improved teeth in two hundred mouths, crashed three cars, made eleven phone sex calls from his home, made one phone sex call from a crashed car, and went to the Red Snapper twenty-two times.

  Veale was always exceedingly loud at the club and never sober. But he tipped in proportion to his obnoxiousness and was considered harmless, except to himself.

  One time he stood on a chair, demonstrating to one dancer how he skied in Aspen, but the chair went out and he came down like a sack of cement, clipping his chin on the edge of a table and biting his tongue. Bouncers with rubber gloves paper-toweled the blood. Veale tipped twenties all around.

  It was now October, World Series month, and on this night Veale was up to a hundred dollars with Sharon, who thrust to “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails. Red and yellow lights strobed and swirled over the room, catching a dozen naked lap dancers in freeze-frame. The music was deafening and sexually narcotic and the dancers’ humping fell in synch with the metronomic beat.

  Serge and Coleman walked into the room unescorted. “Hey, you guys aren’t allowed back here!” Sharon said. “Take Charlie Brown here and get the fuck out!”

  Coleman’s head was too big for his body, and he hated it when Sharon called him Charlie Brown or blockhead or “that funny round-headed kid.”

  Serge pulled up a chair. He straddled it backward and stared at Veale. He had a videocassette in his hand. “It’s okay,” he said, “you can finish your dance.”

  When the song ended, Serge told Sharon to get lost—he had business to discuss with Veale—and she left in a huff. Veale slurred his words all over the road and bragged to Serge what a successful and important orthodontist he was. Serge revised upward the amount of blackmail he’d demand.

  “I have the biggest freakin’ dental clinic in the richest part of town, goddammit!”

  “Is that so?” said Serge, his mental tote board flipping over more numbers. Serge couldn’t stop picturing Veale with a fishbowl on his head.

  Veale held his hands up in front of him like a surgeon who had just scrubbed. “These hands are insured for five million dollars.”

  Serge’s tote board cleared back to zero, and he slid the video back into his leather jacket, thinking in a new direction.

  “Is that so?”

  Mortimer and Stella Hoffsner were lifelong Cleveland Browns ticket-holders, end-zone seats. They had been at Vista Isles less than a year but already the joy had evaporated from life. Mortimer suggested they treat themselves with a day away from the park.

  On a Tuesday, the Hoffsners drove down to Sarasota and crossed the north bridge to Siesta Key, as they had done every year since they had begun vacationing in Florida in 1963. They turned onto Garden Lane, parked across from a harbor of distressed fishing boats, and ate smoked salmon and crab cakes outdoors at the Siesta Fish Market. Cats begged. The menu said Eleanor Roosevelt and Ted Williams had eaten there.

  After lunch they followed Ocean Drive south, past the Stickney Point drawbridge, and stopped at the Crescent Club. It was named after the island’s sugar-sand Crescent Beach.

  The Hoffsners had first come to the club in their early thirties. Now in their mid-sixties, they didn’t sit down, but walked around the room, looking for memories on the walls. There was a 1967 calendar from a Mishawaka, Indiana, machine supply store.

  It was early on a summer afternoon. The front door of the Crescent was propped open to the street. A blinding rectangle of light and heat. Inside was dim with excess air-conditioning tonnage.

  The Hoffsners picked a table near the door and talked about the park. “I can’t take this,” said Stella. “I didn’t work this hard all my life to be miserable every day. Let’s just move back to Dayton.”

  A voice from the bar said, “Dayton? You guys from Ohio?”

  Six months ago, the Hoffsners would have recoiled at what they saw, but after dealing with Minimum’s army of grunge, they didn’t blink.

  “Yep, Dayton,” Stella answered.

  “I’m from Dayton too!” said Stinky. Ringworm and Cheese-Dick turned on their stools to face the Hoffsners.

  “Home of the Ohio Players,” Stella said.

  “I love the Ohio Players,” said Ringworm. “Remember that rumor about ‘Love Roller Coaster’?”

  “Yeah,” said Stella. “You’re supposed to be able to hear the scream of a girl getting stabbed to death.”

  For three hours, the five got along famously and kept the pitchers coming.

  Stella Hoffsner answered the early-morning knock at her door wearing Day-Glo hair curlers and a Charlie’s Angels nightshirt.

  “AC inspection,” a punk said in an annoyed tone of voice, not looking her in the eyes, staring down the street.

  “The air-conditioning is working fine,” she said.

  “Sorry, it’s mandatory. Park rules,” said the punk, still not looking at her. His black T-shirt listed Marilyn Manson’s concert schedule.

  “But you’re just going to break it!” said Stella. “We don’t have the money!”

  The punk took a step into the trailer without being invited. He stood against Mrs. Hoffsner so that he stared down two feet into her eyes. He was amphetamine-skinny, at least six feet tall with shoulder-length unshampooed hair and halitosis. “Look, we can do this one of two ways,” he said firmly.

  “Your mother must be awfully proud!” Stella said and turned in retreat. The punk followed her through the trailer until they got to the kitchen. In the center of the table was a pile of steaming flapjacks being lowered by three men the size of barrels.

  “Sons,” said Stella, “I’d like you to meet this fine young gentleman from the park who is here to inspect our air-conditioning.”

  In the emergency room, doctors tied restraints on the young patient in the Marilyn Manson shirt to keep him from tearing at his skin. The hedge clipper guy had seen him first, but didn’t know what he was looking at. Four crippled ducks perched on a silver tube floating in the middle of Vista Isles’s main lake.

  The man was in shock, and Minimum identified him to police as one of the landscaping crew last seen making inspections. Paramedics had waded into the lake and retrieved him, covered in duck droppings and wrapped tightly up to his nose in thick fiberglass insulation commonly used in air-conditioning work.

  News spread and soon the residents and staff knew what had happened. The only people who didn’t were the police. Both sides decided to keep it that way.

  Minimum went on the offensive. He stepped up appliance inspections, sent out free resident lists to rabid phone solicitors, and closed the pool for “health reasons.” He secretly installed a microwave oven in the auditorium for the amusement of pacemaker users.

  Members of the lawn crew began turning up across the park looking like the victims of vicious fraternity hazing. Minimum called off the offensive when the leaf blower guy walked into the office with his thumb Super Glued up his butt.

  The coming months were halcyon days for the residents of Vista Isles. The park came alive with festivity. The bingo nights were rowdy, and the pool parties looked like MTV beach specials. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm kicked back by the pool on chaise longues. The residents never let the bikers’ beer mugs or nacho plates get empty.