SS 18: Shark Skin Suite: A Novel Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Steve Yeaw

  EPIGRAPH

  History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

  MARK TWAIN

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Part Four

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Dorsey

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  My name is Edith Grabowski, I live in Florida and I’m old as dirt.

  Eat me.

  Those last two words you just read? They’re now on like a million T-shirts, along with my picture. There are other T-shirts with more photos from the rest of my gang: Edna, Eunice and Ethel. About 392 years of hard life between us. Everyone says we have spunk. Some claim we give them hope. There used to be a reason we made headlines and became famous, but who can remember? I think now we’re in the news just because we’re in the news, like half the nobodies on reality shows. The networks want to know every detail, especially the sex. They follow us into restrooms. Enough already.

  We needed something to kill those high beams of publicity. So every time the TV people chased us down and turned the cameras on again, I’d say, “Eat me.” We thought there were laws against putting such language on the air. But all that did was sell more T-shirts. And coffee mugs, and big foam hats with our names, and rear-window decals of four old ladies peeing on just about everything.

  They never leave us alone, day and night. Then we remembered the big stink over Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. So this morning when they turned on the cameras outside my condo, the four of us had our own wardrobe malfunction. Everyone acted like their heads had caught fire, and one of the reporters threw up on his microphone. And me and the girls laughed like motherfuckers.

  So here we are again. Story time. Guess you want to know what happened, again. We landed in the middle of another huge Florida freak show that made the news all the way to Germany and Japan. How many times is that now? Four? Five? We’re like geriatric Forrest Gumps.

  Anyway, it all started back when everyone was hunting pythons in the Everglades, and some guy died at a cockroach-eating contest in Deerfield Beach, and this chick got arrested for riding a manatee like Seabiscuit, and a mysterious eyeball the size of a coconut washed ashore in Miami, and an entire trailer park crowded around the apparition of Christ in a power meter, and . . . Shhhh! Shut up, Ethel! I’m talking to these people here! . . . Sorry about that. Ethel says I’m senile and getting off track, but if she was telling the story, we’d now be tits deep in some long-winded nonsense about her great-grand-nephew who’s trying to “find himself” but instead just finds all the food in her refrigerator and plays video games all day before locking himself in the bathroom for three hours with an old briefcase he won’t let anyone touch and insists through the door that he’s dealing with a fungus. Now that’s off track. When I listed all those wacked-out news stories earlier, I just wanted to give you the latest lowdown on the Sunshine State to show what passes for normal around here, like residents strolling ho-hum along the shore, stepping over a big-ass eyeball and thinking: Sure, why not?

  After you can grasp that baseline of weirdness, you’ll understand how this story could actually happen. But only in the Sunshine State. It unfolded last year in the middle of the Florida Keys with the whole foreclosure crisis still gripping the nation. Except whenever something goes to hell everywhere else in the country, Florida puts it on roller skates with rocket thrusters. And whenever me and the girls get dragged in, there’s always one name that takes it to the next level:

  Serge.

  Hold on a second. We’re walking down the sidewalk right now. One of our fans is driving by in a convertible. He just honked at us and yelled “Eat me,” like you’d shout “You da man” when someone tees off in golf.

  Sure, why not?

  Mahoney’s the name. The chipped letters on my office window say I’m a private eye, private dick, gumshoe, hawkshaw, shamus, sherlock, sleuthhound, and the chair on the paying side of my desk is the last whistle-stop on the railroad of hard luck and soft dames.

  The chair doesn’t talk much but the people in it do: bankers, barbers, butchers, boozers, men-about-town, ladies-in-waiting, ex-husbands, futures traders, straight arrows, crooked cops, long-shot gamblers, nearsighted pimps, dark horses, alley cats, loan sharks, stool pigeons and Charlie Sheen.

  Their accents are different but the story’s the same, betting on the Chance Brothers, Fat and Slim. They hoof through my door from sunrise until the clock’s big hand is on boxcars. Then I have a standing appointment with Harvey Wallbanger.

  My bartender is a regular Joe named Louie who makes with the cocktails faster than the paint jigger at Sherwin-Williams. But my gut tells me you didn’t come to hear me mumble about the social life of bookies and bangtails.

  You want the lowdown on Serge? He’s my factotum when things start to roll hinkey, and that’s as often as “close cover before striking.” It began like any other day, except this one was about to throw me more curves than a double-jointed hooker with a spitball. The case stunk worse than a Sterno bum with a pet skunk named Shooter, and by the time the fat lady warbled, the mouthpieces in shark skin suits were all over us like a zoo chimp on the flesh banana . . . and Serge A. Storms continued gathering force, about to make landfall . . .

  Coleman!” Serge waved urgently. “Come here!”

  “I’m busy.” Coleman stood at the motel sink, pouring a palmful of suds into his other hand and back again.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asked Serge.

  “Handcrafted beer,” said Coleman. “I still don’t get it.”

  “You idiot, just come over here.”

  Coleman rinsed sticky hands and strolled across the room. “What’s up?”

  “I finally got published!” Serge clapped his hands like a windup toy with cymbals. “Dreams can come true!”

  “But weren’t you already published by that newspaper?”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” Serge leaned toward his
laptop screen. “I mailed in my manifesto, Fixing the Entire World, to their letters to the editor, and I thought they were amazed by my expository style and global management skill set.”

  “They weren’t?”

  “Turns out they were printing it in cooperation with the police, asking the public’s help to track a serial killer. So that slightly taints its acceptance on literary merits . . . but not this time!” He turned the screen toward his pal. “Take a gander.”

  “You wrote a review on Amazon?”

  “That’s right,” said Serge. “E-publishing is the future of the written word.”

  “But I thought you hated stuff people put up on the Web.”

  “That’s how I used to feel. Until I got published.” Serge pushed Coleman’s head toward the laptop. “When the Internet first caught fire, they all said, ‘Now everyone can express their opinion.’ Then we saw the results and went, ewwwww, maybe not so great. And such a waste, too. We finally had this revolutionary new medium of communication to attain universal harmony, and people are posting videos of children hitting their dads in the nuts with Wiffle bats and writing one-star reviews shitting all over Lawrence of Arabia: ‘Too long,’ ‘Too British,’ ‘What’s the deal with all the Arabs?’ . . . I decided to jump in and demonstrate the Web’s true potential. Everyone else just reviews books and movies, so I went for my own niche.”

  Coleman looked up from the screen. “You reviewed duct tape?”

  “They always say to write what you know.” He grinned proudly. “I already have six hundred ‘likes.’ ”

  Coleman squinted as he plodded through the text:

  I’m here to say that duct tape isn’t just for ducts anymore. I could not survive without it. I can’t say enough about duct tape. One of the earliest versions was developed in 1942 by the good people at Revolite (according to Wikipedia, so who freakin’ knows?) and later used extensively by the military and NASA. It even helped save the Apollo 13 crew (wow!). I like duct tape for its soundproofing qualities when concentration and stealth are a priority. But don’t go cheap, as the shoddier brands can easily be loosened with the tongue. In the home improvement universe, duct tape is Sgt. Pepper’s, Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby all wrapped into one. If I could, I’d give this review a hundred stars, but The Man has boxed me in at five. So in conclusion, even if you don’t need duct tape, buy a roll today, “invite” some people over to your motel room, let your imagination run amok and surprise yourself!

  SERGE A. STORMS

  Part ONE

  Chapter ONE

  THE MIDDLE OF THE FLORIDA KEYS

  The invasion was under way. They hit the beach in overwhelming strength.

  Thousands of giant iguanas, Burmese pythons and African land snails.

  The iguanas basked along the grassy banks of the roads, for some reason all parallel, facing traffic like they knew something. The snakes wiggled through boat canals and curled up in the engine blocks of surprised car owners. The snails inspired the greatest disbelief, eating anything, including cement, and their baseball-sized shells punctured tires.

  It was the attack of irresponsible pet owners who’d become mollified by exotic species that knew no local predators, found an abundant food source and grew to unnatural scale. The pets had either gotten loose or were deliberately released when the owners’ motivation was required for more pressing matters of buying lottery tickets and fireworks.

  One of the snails completed a two-day slime odyssey across a parking lot and began nibbling at the corner of a low-slung concrete building that sat quietly beside the Overseas Highway.

  Above the automatic front doors was a colorful mosaic of tropical fish that fit together to form one large fish. To the right of the design: FISHERMEN’S HOSPITAL.

  It was the main community hospital for long stretches of the Keys in both directions. No fishermen were inside.

  The medical center resided in the city of Marathon. The city got its name because it was the midpoint in the marathon effort to build the overseas railroad just after the turn of the twentieth century. It was often erroneously called Marathon Key, when the city actually sat on the island of Vaca Key. Civic leaders constantly attempted to clarify the name to news organizations that continued dispatching stories datelined “Marathon Key” anytime weirdness happened, like when those barracuda fired themselves out of the water like harpoons, biting people in fishing boats. The injured fishermen were taken to a different hospital.

  On the hospital’s first floor, inside a sterile patient room, a thin line of blue light crossed the screen of a heart monitor, beeping each time the line spiked. Normal range. Of more concern on another machine were red blood-pressure numbers that loitered on the downside.

  The patient’s massive bandages concealed gender, but it was a woman. One arm in a cast, gauze on both legs, ribs taped and a head so completely wrapped in white that only the hole over the left eye hinted anyone was inside.

  The hospital had that universal hospital smell, a bouquet of disinfectant and the funk in an old person’s house. The Florida Keys added a briny tinge, like vinegar potato chips. The wrist of the arm not in a cast was handcuffed to the bed’s railing.

  A chart hung from the foot of the bed: Campanella, Brook.

  A uniformed police officer stood outside the door. Three others in suits hovered around the patient.

  Another man in a better-fitting suit pointed at the cuffs. “Is that really necessary?” Her lawyer.

  Brook had been a well-liked paralegal at a large South Florida firm until disappearing several weeks back under murky details. When word first broke of her arrival at the hospital, the firm immediately flew in one of their best defense attorneys.

  On the other side of the bed, detectives glanced at one another. Procedure required handcuffs, but discretion disagreed. And the cops needed cooperation that hadn’t been forthcoming. A tiny key clicked in the lock, and a cuff snapped off her wrist. The detective looked up at the lawyer. “Good faith?”

  “Even if we were inclined to talk, it’s far too soon,” said the attorney. “She just regained consciousness after surgery. Can’t this wait?”

  “Actually it can’t,” said the detective stowing cuffs. “Every second is critical right now.”

  His partner opened a notepad. “Serge is probably still somewhere in the Keys. We’ve rarely gotten this close to him.”

  “Your client’s in deep trouble,” said the first. “Participated in a three-hundred-mile crime spree, not to mention obstruction of justice for helping a person of interest in more than twenty homicides evade capture.”

  “For God’s sake,” said the attorney. “She was kidnapped.”

  “Maybe in the beginning,” said the second detective. “But we’ve got a roomful of witnesses who saw her in public with Serge, free to leave but never trying to escape.”

  “He always had a gun on her,” said the lawyer, “which he wasn’t going to wave around for your witnesses. Plus she did try to escape, several times before she finally made it, and you’re looking at the results. I mean, who jumps from a moving vehicle on the Seven Mile Bridge?”

  “What about her fingerprints at the various locations?”

  “But no gun-toting Patty Hearst photos or anything else connecting her to even one of Serge’s crimes.” The lawyer gestured toward his client. “Trust your own eyes. Does this look like a willing participant?”

  The first detective sighed. “If we can just ask her a few preliminary questions, then we’ll go.”

  “Questions?” said the lawyer. “She’s got a tube down her throat and the rest of her mouth is bandaged shut.”

  “But she can blink,” said the second. “One for yes, two for no.”

  “We’ll be as brief as possible,” said the first. “And you approve each question.”

  The lawyer exhaled hard. “If it will get you out of h
ere. She needs her rest.”

  “Fair enough.” The detective turned toward Brook. “Did Serge do this to you?”

  The attorney squeezed her right hand. “You can answer that.”

  One blink.

  “Did Serge kill those people?”

  One blink.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Two blinks.

  “Where he might be heading?”

  Two blinks.

  “Did he mention any known associates besides Coleman?”

  Two blinks.

  “Can you remember—”

  The attorney stepped around the bed. “That’s it for today. I have to insist.”

  “Okay,” said the first detective. “We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  The investigators left Brook’s room and stopped to congregate at a water cooler across the hall.

  “What do you think?”

  “Back when she was still missing, I would have bet my paycheck she was in on the whole thing.”

  “Me, too,” said his partner. “I’ve seen this scenario before. No matter how many restaurant and convenience-store sightings of so-called victims smiling with their captors, they always later swear they were too scared to leave.”

  The other detective looked back toward the closed hospital room door. “But after seeing her in there, I have no doubt she was utterly terrified the whole time.”