The Stingray Shuffle Read online

  TIM DORSEY

  The

  STINGRAY SHUFFLE

  For Kerry, Chris and Dinah

  The only reason for time is so

  that everything doesn’t happen at once.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

  —GROUCHO MARX

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  Uh-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD.

  ONE

  The race to invent the first mechanical orange harvester was…

  TWO

  It was another perfect chamber of commerce morning in Miami…

  THREE

  The Sunshine State has a mind-bending concentration of “cash-only” businesses.

  FOUR

  Rush-hour traffic lurched along The Palmetto Express-way through hardworking Hialeah,…

  FIVE

  The day Paul and Jethro found the five million dollars…

  SIX

  A weather-beaten seventeen-foot flats skiff motored slowly through the first…

  SEVEN

  Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in…

  EIGHT

  The sun hung just below the Atlantic horizon on another…

  NINE

  At the end of the twentieth century, major drug cartels…

  TEN

  A pink Cadillac sat quietly at the end of an…

  ELEVEN

  In the fall of 1960, five very special little girls…

  TWELVE

  A de Havilland twin-engine turboprop banked at four thousand feet…

  THIRTEEN

  The pink Cadillac raced east out of Orlando on the…

  FOURTEEN

  Another month, another book club meeting. Miami Beach this time.

  FIFTEEN

  Collins Avenue.

  SIXTEEN

  An astronaut in a pressure suit heard his own amplified,…

  SEVENTEEN

  There was trouble brewing elsewhere in the United States. Which…

  EIGHTEEN

  It was a dark and starry night down the long,…

  NINETEEN

  “We’re in Cocoa Beach,” Ivan said in his cell phone.

  TWENTY

  Spider came back to the Sapphire Room after storming out…

  TWENTY-ONE

  “They’re in a pink Cadillac, for Chrissake!” Ivan yelled into…

  TWENTY-TWO

  Well after midnight on the island of Palm Beach. The…

  TWENTY-THREE

  A white Mercedes Z310 cruised down US 1. Ivan was…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Shit. That Mercedes is still behind us,” said Serge.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ivan pointed across the spectator deck at the Pompano Beach…

  TWENTY-SIX

  Serge sat with Lenny at the bar in the B&H…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It may have been December 30, but nobody told Palm…

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  New York City. Manhattan. East Side.

  TWENTY-NINE

  December thirtieth in New York is no time for shorts…

  THIRTY

  A sheet-covered body lay on the sidewalk outside a pizza…

  THIRTY-ONE

  Eugene Tibbs knew he was past the fail-safe, his life…

  THIRTY-TWO

  A small newsstand stood on the corner of Madison and…

  THIRTY-THREE

  The first day of the new year in Manhattan.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Serge had his new digital camera ready, aimed out the…

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Ivan and Zigzag listened to Jimmy Cliff on the stereo…

  THIRTY-SIX

  The dining car began filling up again shortly after noon.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Two crooked lines of cocaine wound across the instrument panel,…

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  A half hour after sundown, flashlights split the darkness, wisps…

  EPILOGUE

  A Greyhound bus cruised down the Florida Keys on a…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  BOOKS BY TIM DORSEY

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  U h-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD.

  That can be the only explanation.

  It’s been nonstop hallucinations. Which normally I don’t mind, but you wouldn’t believe how it complicates trying to cross U.S. 1 against heavy traffic. I must have stepped off the curb and headed back about fifty times now. I think I’m in the Florida Keys.

  I keep slapping the side of my head to make the visions stop, but it only changes the picture, like a slide projector.

  Slap!

  Carjackings, exploitation of the elderly, cigarette boats running from the Coast Guard, melanoma, tar balls, deed restrictions, beefy mosquitoes that crack windshields, Colombian shoot-outs, Cuban boycotts, Mexican standoffs, rampant-growth speculators, offshore-drilling lobbyists, cheap rum, cheaper motels, crack vials, condoms, mouse ears, William Kennedy Smith, Phillip Michael Thomas, chicken wing restaurants featuring women’s breasts…

  Slap!

  Shark attacks in two feet of water, barracuda jumping into boats and biting people, alligators roaming backyards and eating poodles named Muffins, college boys named Bo funneling beers on the beach and trampling sand castles and making children cry, broken-down cruise ships with decks full of irritable people from Michigan in puffy orange life preservers, the lottery won by a pool of 23 office workers who quit their jobs to become down-and-out junkies, trained seals playing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on bicycle horns…

  Slap!

  There. The hallucinations have stopped. I’m in the dark, now. I’m weightless, too. That’s much better.

  Whoops. Spoke too soon. The weightlessness is giving way. I’m starting to drop. Faster and faster. Free-falling toward a pinpoint of light. The light grows bigger, spinning off bright curved red swirls as I hurtle down this spiral chute like some hokey special effect from The Twilight Zone, or Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo; I’m helpless, this little black silhouette of a man, arms and legs flailing in a blizzard of chads, plummeting toward a haunting psychedelic pinwheel with the floating head of Jeb Bush in the middle…

  The spinning has stopped. I’m coming out of the tunnel now. The LSD feels like it’s wearing off, but the sky is still ten different colors and the clouds are whispering about me. Just ignore them or you’ll end up doing something odd that will attract attention. Are we hungry? My skin is unusually sheen and agreeable. I want to raise my voice and croon the opus of life!…I can’t think with all the people in my head talking at once! I need to call the room to order…. That’s better. Next item of business? Yes, you in the back with your hand raised…. Why are we wandering in the middle of busy traffic?…Good question. How did we get out here? I thought we were still on the sidewalk…Well, what’s done is done. Cars are whizzing by, so work with it…Try to get to the opposite curb. So what if that truck is coming? He’ll stop because I will it. I am the master of time, space and dimension. Here we go: to the curb…See? The truck stopped. He hit that car when he swerved around me, but I’ve made my point…Where’s that music coming from? It’s The Doors, “People Are Strange.” No kidding. The sound…it’s coming from the sun. God’s playing it on his personal hydrogen jukebox, the Big Puff Daddy-G layin’ down the master moral rap and spinnin’ the eternal hits, If there’s a rock ’n’ roll heaven, you know they got a hulluva band!…Oh, no, that horrible song is now stuck in my head. I must kill myself immediately. Damn that Lenny!…Wait. Who’s Lenny? For that matter, who am I? Why can’t I remember m
y name? And what the heck is this strange outfit I’m wearing? A royal blue jumpsuit with a NASA patch on the shoulder. Am I an astronaut?…Now I’m getting a shooting pain. It’s coming from my forehead. What’s this I feel up here? That’s some huge knot you got on your dome—better have a doctor look at it. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember who I am…When in doubt, check your license. Let’s see, is your wallet in this pocket? No, not there, but…what’s this? A prescription bottle? Empty. Wow, that’s some serious medication on the label; the guy who’s taking this is one real sick-o…. Hold a sec. Could this be yours? The first name on the label is “Serge,” but the last name has worn off. And the refill date was over a month ago…. Now it’s starting to add up. This isn’t LSD after all. It’s not even a drug experience. That’s the whole problem—you haven’t taken your drugs…. Uh-oh, hallucinations again; the ground is starting to move. The road is rumbling and rising up. This is no ordinary street. It’s a bridge. A drawbridge. Only one thing to do: hurry up and get to the lip of the span and hang on by hooking your arms through the grating. That way, when the span rises, you’ll be way up at the top, above the hubbub, alone with some space to think and a clear view of the situation…. Here we go, up, up, getting pretty high now, nice panorama. Wish I had my camera. Why are all those people down there pointing at me? And who called the cops? Here they come again, drawing their guns as usual. Now I’ll have to dive in the water for my getaway. All this stress can’t be good…

  Two weeks later.

  An unconscious man in a blue astronaut jumpsuit lies facedown on the shore of a breezy mangrove island in the Gulf Stream. He’s coming around, talking in his sleep. Jeannie! Come out of that bottle right now! His eyelids flutter in the sand, squinting at the bright sunlight. He raises his head and sees hundreds of eyes staring back at him.

  They’re still here. What do they want from me?

  Serge stands up.

  “I told you. I’m having memory problems. I can only recall textbook history, plus some stuff about a briefcase and a recent trip I took, but I can’t piece it all together yet.”

  The eyes silently stay on him. Some blink.

  “Okay, okay. One more lesson.”

  Serge steps forward in the sand and spreads his arms in an encompassing gesture:

  “Railroads had a seismic impact on the development of Florida, beginning with the fabled East Coast line slashing its way through the swamps a hundred years ago, opening up the bottom half of the state, an unforgiving no-man’s-land of eccentric pioneers, cranky Indians and alcoholic hermits…”

  Serge. Serge A. Storms. Wiry, intense, unhinged, standing on a beach in the lower Florida Keys, leaves rustling in the salt wind, surrounded by his students, hundreds of small attentive monkeys.

  “…Then the railroads unveiled the fancy deco streamliners of the 1930s, introducing the northerners to frost-free vacations and society-page beach sex in Palm Beach…”

  Serge stops speaking. One of the monkeys in back is chattering.

  “Buttons, please, I’m trying to talk up here.”

  The monkey stops chattering.

  “Thank you…. As I was saying, the histories of the railroads and Florida are inextricably entwined. By the end of the twentieth century, Amtrak had unveiled its latest high-speed express train, The Silver Stingray, for its New York-to-Miami route. The train didn’t have the same seminal influence on the state as its predecessors, but it played a crucial role in one of the most infamous mysteries in the annals of Florida crime. The missing briefcase with five million dollars. Remember? The one with the curse I was telling you about?”

  The monkeys stare.

  “It was a Wednesday. The Silver Stingray clacked down the tracks on its regular afternoon run. The train entered a tunnel near a phosphate mine, and everything went dark. The train came out of the tunnel. Someone screamed! A body lay in the aisle of the dining car!”

  Serge lies down in front of the monkeys for effect.

  “The victim wore a blue velvet tuxedo and ruffled shirt, one of the lounge reptiles entertaining the tourists on the trip south. It was murder! All the passengers eyed each other suspiciously. Who was the killer? Was it one of the other performers in velvet tuxedos? The blues singer from New York? The Russian? The Jamaican? Or perhaps one of the women in that book club? And why? Did it have something to do with the five million dollars rumored to be on board?…”

  Serge stops talking again, his hyperkeen senses twitching. He jumps up and runs to the edge of a mangrove outcropping, peering out at the ocean through the branches.

  “A boat’s coming! Battle formations!…”

  1

  The race to invent the first mechanical orange harvester was on.

  Dreams and designs for a mechanized citrus picker had been bandied about since the 1940s. But back then, it was science fiction stuff. Anyone who seriously thought it could be done was a laughingstock.

  Near the turn of the millennium, Florida’s postcard orange groves had exploded into a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Meanwhile, technology had marched. Nobody was laughing anymore. A functional harvester seemed just around the corner. The state’s top citrus barons were now so rich that they had almost everything they wanted. They were unhappy. They wanted to be as rich as oil people. A mechanical picker would do that.

  Research teams from various nations labored at a feverish pace. Work proceeded in secret, along several different lines. The Swedes were considered to have the lead, advancing the spike-and-drum technique. The Germans placed their bets on hundreds of mechanical arms with spring-action picking fingers. The French used a shake-and-catch design with hydraulic trunk-grabber and retractable manganese skirt. The Japanese were working on something called the Centipede, which nobody knew anything about.

  All four teams soon had models up and running. That was the easy part. The last big hurdle was efficiency. Every prototype up to now had either left too many oranges on the tree or squashed too much in the process. They had long since mastered the proverbial low-hanging fruit. The real test now was clean canopy penetration. The barons set a tolerance standard of ninety-five percent. The teams redoubled their efforts, improving performance, everyone getting closer. These were exciting times.

  In January, the Japanese were rumored to have caught the Swedes. Competition became brutal. Engineers went without sleep, safety steps eliminated. Hammering could be heard from the German lab late into the night. The French argued. It was anyone’s ball game.

  Then, on a sunny spring day in 1997, word went out like a cannon shot. A prototype was ready. Dozens of limos quietly converged on a remote grove near the center of the state. Nothing but orange trees in all directions. There was a VIP tent, paddle fans, champagne on ice.

  Just outside the tent, at the edge of the trees, a huge object sat under a white sheet. The German team approached the podium. Ludwig, head of design, leaned to the microphone.

  “Behold! Der Shleimerhocken GroveMaster Z500.”

  Someone yanked the sheet, which flew off the device and fluttered to the ground.

  The audience gasped.

  A large, intricate cylinder imbedded with innumerable jointed metal arms and razor claws fanning in all directions, the gene splice of a carnival ride and Edward Scissorhands. A German flag on the side. The anticipation was unbearable. Ludwig walked to the GroveMaster, dramatically throwing a switch on the side, and it fell over, crushing him.

  The Germans had a drawing board, and they went back to it. Work continued tirelessly. Various models and upgrades rolled out. Limos driving into the groves every few months, the barons increasingly bitter, the parade of failures reminiscent of newsreel footage from the early days of aviation—the plane with the collapsing stack of eight wings, the bouncing helicopter-car, the man in bat wings jumping off a suspension bridge and flying like an anvil, the guy with ice skates and a rocket pack, who had to be extinguished with snowballs.

  Word leaked out, bad press. Testing was moved to Clermont,
for historic symbolism. The demonstration site was in the shadow of the world-famous Citrus Tower, built in 1955 in the rich-soiled, rolling grovelands where it had all started. At least they used to be grovelands. Most of it had been bulldozed for sprawling developments of identical homes and screened-in pools built on top of each other. It was enough to make a baron cry. They needed a harvester now!

  The French were next. “Gentlemen—I give you zee Terminator.”

  The sheet flew off.

  A War of the Worlds contraption stood on spider legs. A man named Jacques picked up a radio control box and pressed a button. Yellow lights that looked like eyes came on. The device began chugging. Smoke puffed out a chimney. Jacques turned a dial. The machine chugged faster, springing on the spider legs. He turned the dial some more. The legs started clomping up and down, slowly at first, then at a brisk, running-in-place clip.

  Jacques moved the joystick on his box. The device began running. The wrong way. It ripped up the spectator tent, flattening chairs and upending the punch bowl. Barons and politicians scattered through the groves, the Terminator running amok. It cornered one of the barons against a Cyclone fence and seized him around the waist with the hydraulic trunk-grabber, lifting him off the ground and squeezing until he squirted stuff. Then it shook the limp body a few times before dropping it in the self-cleaning metal skirt.

  Talk about a setback. But there were others. A new and improved GroveMaster exploded in the German lab, unpleasant news photos of men fleeing in burning lab coats. A militant migrant group dynamited the Swedish lab. Then the French blew up their own lab with cooking sherry. But so close! Can’t stop now. Work continued through the winter with smudge pots, icicles on the trees. Toes had to be amputated. Finally, spring again.