Tropic of Stupid Read online

  Dedication

  For John Rand

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Dorsey

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  One Month Ago

  The rain had just stopped when the convenience store clerk asked the customer not to heat up his urine in the microwave.

  The customer explained that the urine he was heating wasn’t his.

  Which meant it was Florida.

  At the other end of the store stood two Abbott-and-Costello-shaped customers.

  “Serge, what are you looking for?” asked the plump one.

  “Coleman, I told you at the last store,” said the thin one. “Baseball cards and kites.”

  “What are those guys up there arguing about?” asked Coleman.

  “Urine heating,” said Serge. “Sunshine State Tip Number 327: Never use convenience store microwaves because there’s now an epidemic of addicts borrowing someone else’s peepee for drug tests, but many were getting caught since the samples were too cold, so the drug culture had some kind of meeting to resolve it, and now I can’t melt the cheese on my Cuban sandwiches.”

  At the cash register, an argument broke out with another clerk over a cardboard box on the counter. “No, you can’t trade your pet snake for beer. Just money . . .”

  Coleman idly pulled a gift card for international cell minutes to El Salvador off a pegboard hook. “Why are you in such a bad mood?”

  “The golden age of convenience stores is officially dead.” Serge’s eyes scanned the shelves. “The priority of convenience stores used to be the children. They were magical places where your allowance money set you free. It was total empowerment, the first time you alone could make purchase decisions without your parents around, and the mini-marts had everything you could dream of: yo-yos, wax lips, slingshots, bags of green army men, plastic handcuffs, suction-cup dart guns where the suction cups were easily removed for further empowerment. But baseball cards and kites stood at the top of the mountain. The cards were obviously popular because they were the currency of the schoolyard, but kites took it to a whole ’nother level.”

  Coleman put the gift card for Central America back on the hook. “Kites?”

  Serge continued scrutinizing shelves in vain. “Even more empowerment. Kites allowed six-year-olds to send something up into FAA airspace. Most important, you had to assemble them from flimsy sticks and even flimsier paper, then the tail, and learn how to deal with the wind. You had to earn your empowerment. Today, kids just pull a drone out of a box.” Serge turned around in sadness to face a locked display case. “It’s all gone now. Instead of wax lips, we have glass hash pipes, roach clips and bongs.”

  Coleman reached into his pocket. “I think I have some allowance money.”

  “Don’t reward them for stealing childhoods.” Serge picked up a box and headed for the register. One person was ahead of them.

  “Fine! I’ll take my urine elsewhere!”

  It was Serge’s turn. He placed the box on the counter.

  The clerk rang it up and made change. “Will there be anything else today?”

  “Just the drone,” said Serge. “Please think of the children.”

  As they headed out of the store, there was a rumbling sound overhead. Then a muted scream. The ceiling tiles busted open and a naked woman fell into the potato chips.

  Coleman nodded. “Drugs.”

  Serge pushed the door open. “I don’t even notice anymore.”

  Miami

  An oversize brown corkboard hung from a wall in a bright office. It was an open floor plan with a grid of gray government-purchased desks. On another wall hung a law enforcement seal.

  The corkboard was covered with photographs and notecards, names and dates, witnesses and victims, locations of bodies. It was all tacked up with different-colored pushpins, and connected with crisscrossing strands of yarn. All arranged roughly in the shape of a pyramid. In the middle, a final notecard, blank except for a question mark.

  In another part of Florida hung another corkboard. Quite similar, in fact. Photos, cards, pins and yarn. But the room was not bright. Actually, it was quite dark. Some of the photos had been taken while the victims were still alive. There was no card in the middle with a question mark.

  Chapter 1

  A Week Before Christmas

  Down on the southernmost tip of England lies a quaint fishing village in the county of Cornwall.

  Simply called Looe.

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British constructed six ships named after the town, including the HMS Looe, a forty-four-gun frigate commissioned in 1740.

  The ship saw military action during something called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, because someone got his ear cut off and, naturally, war. The conflict was primarily fought in the Caribbean and off the coasts of Georgia and Florida. In 1744, the Looe captured a Spanish merchant ship and towed it along the coast about twenty-five miles from Key West. Just after midnight on the fifth of February, it ran aground on an unnamed sandbar in the Gulf Stream.

  In the centuries since, the sandbar has washed away, as well as much of the doomed vessel. But the ship left something else behind, her name, and today the place where she went down is called Looe Key.

  Looe isn’t an actual key, as it rests entirely underwater, consisting of a patch reef with parallel rows of coral fingers. What makes it so distinct is that it lies seven miles offshore south of Ramrod Key, rising up out of the deep surrounding ocean to unexpectedly shallow depths. It has become known for some of the finest diving, both scuba and snorkeling, in all the Keys. In 1981, it was named part of a national marine sanctuary.

  Sometime in the 1950s, a modest concrete-block motel went up on Ramrod, housing twenty rooms on its two floors. It was the opposite of fancy, just this plain rectangular box, providing a cheap roadside layover for weary motorists. Then someone had a brainstorm.

  There was a canal behind the motel, leading out to the sea. And that fabulous finger reef. The owners bought a boat and air compressors, and converted half of the motel office into a dive shop, and, in 1978, the Looe Key Reef Resort was born.

  “There it is!” Serge pointed through the windshield at a red sign with a diagonal white stripe. “My home away from home!”

  Coleman popped a magic mushroom in his mouth and chased it with a Jäger Bomb. “Doesn’t look like a resort.”

  “Can you not splash that stuff all over the car? The guy I borrowed the last one fr
om won’t talk to me because of an upholstery beef.”

  “Mostly on my shirt, but it’s worth it.” Coleman upended the cocktail to chase the toadstool. “Just drop a shot glass of ’meister into a bigger glass of Red Bull.”

  “And what can possibly go wrong?” Serge pulled into a gravel parking space just shy of mile marker 27. “The ‘resort’ part of the nomenclature is a misnomer, sort of.”

  Coleman did a line of coke off the back of his hand and unwrapped a Twinkie.

  “Man, you’re in overdrive,” said Serge. “But it’s the Keys, so there’s blame to go around.”

  “Resort?” Coleman wiped frosting and white dust from his upper lip. “Explain.”

  “People say ‘resort’ and you think of gilded luxury and wallet-busting prices, which are equally negative,” said Serge. “I don’t want amenities, I want authenticity, and this is as real as it comes down here, a bargain with bells!”

  “Groovy.”

  “But wait! There’s more! You walk out the back door of your room, and you’re on the dock, and a few more steps, you’re on the Kokomo Cat II, a spacious pontoon dive boat—mere seconds from bed to on-board! Plus there’s a convenience store next door, and not just next door but right up against the building. That’s my definition of resort. And the tiki bar!”

  Coleman bolted upright in battle-station mode. “Tiki bar?”

  “I know what you’re thinking: tiki bar, a little shack with bottom-shelf rum. But not here! It’s a huge open-sided lounge with live music most nights under a vaulted, thirty-foot-high thatched roof, with a full seafood menu including my required smoked-fish dip. After showering off brine, the divers congregate here in their endorphin glows to compare notes and tips and underwater video like an aquatic Algonquin Round Table. Once, I set up at the counter with my briefcase and busted out my latest Internet find, a January 1906 edition of National Geographic with an article on the Keys before there were any bridges, and everyone was all over me like yellowtails on puke.”

  “Wow, that really is a resort.”

  “But I’m not done!” Serge got out and walked around the back of the car. “A quick stroll up the road is the Five Brothers Grocery Two, spun off from the original in Key West on Southard Street, a delightfully crammed corner store with an espresso machine and pressed cheese toast. One of my favorite routines at this resort is to get up way before dawn and stroll up the road in total darkness for the grocery, then stand outside with all the construction workers and their pickups, waiting for the clock to strike six, and then we all rush inside for nirvana: a Cuban breakfast sandwich. When I first saw it on the menu board, I was like, ‘Heart be still! You mean someone has figured out how to genetically splice the ecstasy of an Egg McMuffin and a Cuban sandwich? I don’t think I can handle that much morning goodness.’ . . . And of course there’s a Dion’s just over the bridge on Summerland Key.” He popped the trunk.

  “Mmmmm! Mmmmm! . . .”

  Coleman’s head jerked. “They have a Dion’s near here?”

  “I know, I know. It’s just finger-licking rapture.” Serge grabbed a tire iron. “Now normally any food that’s deep-fried in a vat at a gas station should set off civil defense sirens to don biological warfare suits. But not Dion’s! Some of the best fried chicken you’ll ever taste!” He swung the tire iron until the trunk’s passenger became quiet. “And the mashed potatoes! The gravy! You won’t find a lot of tourists in Dion’s because, well, it’s a gas station. But all the locals know and love it, and at noon every day the residents form long lines for their Styrofoam boxes of to-go joy. Ask anyone. It’s a Keys thing.”

  He closed the trunk and led Coleman through the office door.

  “Serge!” “You’re back!” “We got your regular room!”

  Serge smiled at Coleman. “They kind of know me here.” He pointed along the front of the counter at a row of homemade Christmas stockings with names: “‘Will,’ ‘Wanda,’ ‘Christian,’ ‘Robert,’ ‘Tony,’ ‘Kim,’ ‘Phil,’ ‘Mark,’ ‘Tim (aka Boss Man!),’ ‘McMoosie,’ ‘Divemaster Diane’ to differentiate from the other ‘Diane,’ ‘Capt. James,’ and ‘Twins plus Kelly.’

  “For quick reference, that’s the staff,” said Serge. “You’ve just got to love a place that hangs Christmas stockings for the whole crew. It’s family around here, not like those big cattle-boat diving outfits that talk shit behind your back.” He bellied up to the counter with his wallet. “Since I’ve auditioned all your rental gear on my previous excursions, I’m ready to buy! Holiday presents for myself!”

  “What do you want?” asked Christian.

  Serge pointed to the right side of the office, which displayed every manner of diving equipment. “The works! Snorkeling is my life! One of everything! Especially those super-long, steel-reinforced open-ocean fins! I really zip in those things. And booties and a wrist strap for my new GoPro camera!” After loading all the top-of-the-line snorkel gear in a giant custom mesh backpack, Serge hoisted the padded straps over his shoulders. “And book two for the afternoon trip.”

  The manager looked at the office clock. “It leaves in a half hour.”

  “More than enough time.” He headed for the door. “To the reef!”

  They walked around the corner, past rows of palms and natural limestone boulders, arriving at the last unit on the west end.

  “Room number one! My favorite!” Serge kissed the door and opened it.

  Then he was back in the car.

  “Don’t we have a boat to catch?” asked Coleman.

  “Yes, but this is mandatory.” Serge navigated isolated roads up through scrub on the north side of the island. “You have to see Ramrod Beach to properly focus your third eye for a dive trip.”

  “I like beaches,” said Coleman. “You get to drink beer, even if you have to sneak.”

  “And they do drink at this one, but it’s not like the others.” Serge looked out the window at a swath of hurricane-downed palms. “Only the locals know about it.”

  A blue-and-white Cobra approached the end of the island, far from all the homes and everything else, including decent pavement. Palmettos and buttonwoods. Then the tires were on dirt where scrub plants dropped to knee-high. Serge parked in marl amid the quiet of a cool breeze off the back country. “Here we are.”

  Coleman got out, confused. “Where’s the beach?”

  “This is it. We have it all to ourselves right now because it’s a weekday.”

  “I’m still not seeing it.”

  “That’s because beaches are different here due to geology.” Serge took a panoramic video of the pine-green shrubs, pale-orange dirt, gray plateaus of rock, and bright mint-green water. “The upper Keys run parallel to the highway and are composed of ancient marine life that created beds of what’s called Key Largo Limestone. But down here after the Seven Mile Bridge, the islands lie perpendicular to the road, and the bedrock becomes a less porous type of limestone called Miami Oolite.”

  “Where’s the sand?”

  “There isn’t any,” said Serge. “The beach is these large slabs of limestone with tidal fissures. Isn’t it great?”

  “No beer or big bikini boobs?”

  “Walk this way.” Serge led him over to a remote spot where, in the middle of nothing, stood what was barely a twig of a bleached, leafless tree about four feet high. Someone had draped the pitiful thing with Christmas ornaments, solar-powered lights, and a frosty star on top.

  “That’s freaking weird,” said Coleman. Then a giggle. “Know what it reminds me of? Charlie Brown’s poor tree in those TV specials.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” said Serge. “More importantly, this tells you everything you need to know about the species of people around here.” He looked at his dive watch.

  Then a breakneck race back to the motel room. Serge immediately unbuckled and dropped his cargo shorts. “Coleman, I know this violates the theory of relativity, but you’re going to have to be fast. Get your swim trunks on.” He pointed out th
e back window at a perfect view down the main canal bisecting the southern half of Ramrod Key. Other motel guests were almost finished boarding the forty-eight-foot pontoon boat. “Our ride’s here!”

  Moments later, they exited the back door of room 1, took a few steps and climbed aboard.

  “Man, that was convenient,” said Coleman. “Less chance for problems with the ground.”

  A voice from behind the center-console steering wheel. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. First-In-Last-Out.”

  Serge stood at attention and saluted. “Aye-aye, Captain Katie.”

  “Serge,” said Coleman, “why did she call you that?”

  “Because I’m always the first in and last out at the dive sites. I like to milk my snorkeling dollar.”

  The captain set out the tip jar. “I’m surprised you almost missed the boat. You’re usually jumping up and down by the cleats before the crew even arrives.”

  “Had to show my friend Ramrod Beach.”

  “Why am I not stunned?” said Katie. “You’re the only non-local who knows more local spots than the locals.”

  “Due diligence,” said Serge. “I showed him the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.”

  “It’s a Keys thing.”

  The last divers boarded and they secured the gate chains. The captain got the attention of the dozen passengers for safety instructions and locations of life preservers. “. . . And the weather service is calling for three-foot swells, so it might get a little rough out there today. If you feel like you’re going to get sick, lean over the side. Not in the boat, please.”

  Coleman bent over the starboard railing and began heaving.

  “We haven’t even left the dock,” said Katie. “That’s a first.”

  “Not for Coleman.”

  Serge reached for a pump bottle and smeared his face. Then he took a seat directly in front of the console as Coleman came back wiping his mouth. “You look weird. Your face is all white, like one of those Japanese dancers.”

  “Because I care,” said Serge, smearing his arms. “This is coral-friendly sunscreen. I’m trying to get the word out. Most stuff for sale in stores contains chemicals that wreak havoc on reef ecosystems.”