Hammerhead Ranch Motel Read online

  Johnny turned and gazed into the emerald-green eyes of If, who tossed an empty plastic champagne flute into the otter tank. Responding to ancient genetic memory, Johnny sheep-dogged her over to the bar. The TV was tuned to Florida Cable News.

  FCN was in Daytona Beach reporting the phenomenon of college student balcony falls. And it wasn’t just hotels anymore-anything of altitude would do: overpasses, parking decks, scoreboards at sporting arenas. While the FCN reporter spoke, a computer illustration showed the side of a beachfront hotel and a dotted line arcing from the top floor down to a large X on the pavement painfully shy of the swimming pool.

  Johnny turned to If. “Did you know that because of Florida, architects have had to recalculate the setback distance of swimming pools from hotels?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s true,” he said. “They used to go by standard Mexican cliff-diving clearances and then add a percentage as a deterrent. But spring break queered the whole equation. All the drinking. Everyone’s depth perception is fucked.”

  “What kind of yutz would dive from the fourteenth floor?” asked If.

  “I’d rather hit something with my speedboat,” said Johnny.

  “You have a speedboat?” If asked, her face lighting up.

  “Used to,” Johnny said with dejection. “It’s now being raced around Biscayne Bay by Rastafarians smoking marijuana cigars.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her smile dropped along with her eyes.

  Johnny stared at the floor, too, and idly scraped at a piece of gum with the point of his Italian shoe. Then a thought. He looked back at her and offered tentatively, “I have a Porsche.”

  “Not a nine-twenty-four, I hope,” she said with reserve.

  “No way! Nine-eleven. Convertible.”

  “Airfoil on the trunk?”

  “And Luther Vandross on the CD.”

  If began to purr, and Johnny tried to picture her in the cheerleading outfit he had in the back of his closet. If said she had to hit a party across the bay-meet a few guys from her office and string them along, purely as an investment in her career. But she’d love to meet him, say, in two hours? She gave him directions, a late-night piano bar in St. Pete, a little walk-down joint below street level on the bay-front.

  Johnny glanced back at the TV. The newscast had moved into the weather segment, and he laughed and pointed at the screen. “I love that dog. He cracks me up.”

  If looked up and saw Toto the Weather Dog spinning in a ballerina outfit and began laughing, too. “That’s too much! How do they think of this stuff?”

  Johnny smiled and bade If farewell, but in his heart he knew she wouldn’t be at the piano bar. It was the classic brush-off.

  He’d forgotten about her as he trolled the party without result. Two hours later, with no further success in hand, Johnny hopped in his Porsche and drove for the piano bar, a slave of groundless hope, calling on God in the night air: “Please, please, please, please, please…”

  Seconds after Johnny left, Boris cued up “Train” by Quad City DJs. Patrons filled the dance floor, which shook with the nondancelike, orthopedically inadvisable twitching and stomping of rich white people. The aquarium staff lined the sides of the crowd, clapping in rhythm and blowing traffic-cop whistles.

  Amid the swirling lights and dry-ice fog, there was a tremendous crash-then a huge cannonball splash in one of the tanks. People looked around, but the loud music and light show aggravated the confusion. Someone glanced up and saw a jagged opening in the middle of the aquarium’s glass dome. It was simple deduction from there. The imaginary path of gravity led down from the dome to the alligator tank, where a large object floated. The staff turned up the house lights, and the crowd pressed against the glass walls of the tank for an underwater view. What was it? Where did it come from? There were no tall buildings nearby and no air traffic patterns overhead.

  The waves from the splash lapped against the tempered glass and churned up bottom gunk, hazing the view. Two docents climbed down to the tank from a maintenance ladder. Guests began to make out bits of brightly colored cloth with a floral pattern, a tan Birkenstock, purple fanny pack and Roger McGuinn/Byrds sunglasses.

  “It’s…” someone said, then filled with dread, “…a college student!”

  J ohnny drove slowly through the empty downtown streets of St. Petersburg, the Porsche jostling on the brick road as he scanned boarded-up buildings for a street address. Johnny wondered how he had been reduced to this: junior nooky cadet, sniffing around a ghost town on poontang patrol. I deserve better, he told himself. I have a trust fund! And he thought about the family business of scamming the elderly into life insurance for which “you can’t be turned down! Your rates will never go up! And there’s no physical! Don’t make the mistake of waiting until it’s too late!”-and then an old woman in the TV ad cries over a checkbook and a photo of her dead husband. Johnny swelled with pride.

  As the numbers on the abandoned buildings approached the appointed street address, Johnny heard piano tinklings and eggnog laughter echoing from around the corner. He turned right at the light and pulled to the curb beside an iron staircase railing leading below the street. Standing at the top of the stairs, next to a small red “Piano Bar” sign, was If. She leaned against the wall quite sultry, sipping a jumbo martini. Her eyelids were at half-mast. She slugged back the last of the martini with a whipping action of her neck, took two steps toward the Porsche and threw the martini glass back over her shoulder. It was supposed to smash against the brick wall, but it missed and broke a window too. Things happened simultaneously. If stumbled toward the car. People came running up the stairs. Johnny tried to start the already running Porsche, and it made an expensively bad sound.

  Johnny was at his indecisive, fumbling best as If climbed in. “Let’s get out of here,” she told Johnny. “I need to be fucked hard.”

  A bouncer ran up and grabbed If’s door handle. Johnny pressed the gas pedal, and the bouncer was left spinning on his back in the street like a break dancer.

  If peeled her dress over her head as they cleared the southbound tollbooth for the Sunshine Skyway. The bridge began to ascend, and If unzipped Johnny’s pants with her teeth. He knew he had to hurry. He reached over the top of her head and pressed buttons to call up the exact song he wanted on the stereo. It had to happen perfectly, the right spot of the ideal tune playing at the precise moment they crested the bridge for the maximum view. He punched the controls quickly for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” But the part of the song he wanted was the fantastic guitar solos toward the end, and they were almost to the bridge’s apex. Shoot, he thought, it’s all happening out of synch! It’s falling apart! Maybe if I slow below a hundred. He digitally fast-forwarded through the song until finally, almost at the last second, everything was aligned. He wanted to tweak the volume up a little, but If’s increasingly bobbing head made it hard to reach. To make it louder, Johnny would have to mash her face down really hard leaning over her. Screw it, he thought, I’ll live. The song’s guitar triplets screamed from the Alpine speakers, and Johnny scanned the panorama of distant lights from ships and beach towns, and his pre-orgasmic ego said, “My sphere of influence.” Then it was back to shaking and moaning and trying to keep track of the steering wheel.

  Johnny didn’t see the parked car until it was almost too late. A white Chrysler New Yorker without emergency flashers sat half in the breakdown lane, half in Johnny’s lane. Johnny screamed and swerved left into the retaining wall. The Porsche scraped the cement barrier for three hundred yards, spraying a dramatic shower of sparks, but it helped slow the car without wrecking. There was no harm except extensive body damage and a socially awkward moment after they stopped when Johnny found If’s head turned a little too far in an undesigned direction and inextricably wedged between the seat and the bottom of the steering wheel.

  “Hold on, let me get some tools from the trunk,” Johnny said and hopped from the car.

  If tried to wiggle loos
e. “Hurry! It hurts!”

  Johnny lathered the sides of her head with grease used to pack bearings, and her head snapped free with the sound of a finger popping a cheek. They stood for a silent moment of relief, catching their breaths, then realized they had forgotten about the parked Chrysler that had started it all. They turned and looked back up the bridge.

  C hester “Porkchop” Dole was flipping channels on his TV and complaining about the lack of quality programming when he accidentally glanced up at the safety monitors.

  He screamed.

  Chester dove for the radio and knocked over the microphone. He’d never used the radio in six years at the bridge. He pressed buttons and switches until he got deafening feedback, and pressed more until it stopped. He keyed the mike and begged for help without protocol. He forgot to release the microphone button to hear a reply. When he heard no reply, he panicked and gripped the button harder. Everyone in the greater Tampa Bay area who owned an emergency scanner turned up the volume.

  “Help! Help! I’m at the bridge! Oh, please! Why won’t anyone answer me! Why are all of you doing this! For the love of Jesus! Fuck me!” Followed by long, loud crying.

  On the wall was monitor number five, and on the screen a man in a tux and a young woman in a strapless evening dress with a large, dark stain on the side of her head walked apprehensively up the bridge. Ahead was a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the side, parked southbound. The Chrysler’s passenger stood between the vehicle and the bridge railing. He flicked a Bic lighter and held it to a strip of rag hanging out of a wine bottle and tossed it in the open passenger window.

  A fireball. The car crackled and was engulfed, sending swirls of sparks up into the bridge’s suspension.

  As Johnny Vegas watched a lunatic Molotov his own car, he thought the man might as well take a flamethrower to Johnny’s romantic life. He hadn’t lost his virginity yet. Some decent oral foreplay, but that wasn’t official under Queensberry rules. When the Chrysler’s driver climbed onto the bridge railing, Johnny’s heart skipped. Pleeeeeeeease don’t jump. It’s almost impossible to get a woman amorous after something like that. Men, sure. They’re in the mood after mass executions. Literally, there is no wrong time. But Johnny knew women were different. He had been on the business end of enough aborted trysts to know that far less than this can throw a woman’s emotions tottering out of that carefully nurtured trajectory needed to get her through the window of opportunity and into the sack.

  A highway patrol car skidded to a stop behind the Chrysler and the trooper jumped out. “Why don’t we talk about this?” he said calmly. Back on the patrol car’s radio, Johnny heard a frantic, sobbing voice: “Oh, sweet God in heaven! Please, somebody answer me! Mother! Mother, where are you! Why did you leave me, Mother?”

  Back in the safety booth, horror swept up the spine of Chester “Porkchop” Dole, and a cold, sallow flush hit his face. Dole could handle the drama on the bridge. What unraveled him was the knowledge that the smooth boulder of fate was about to roll over his nineteen years of public service. The safe routine of his job had been varied, the universe altered.

  A journeyman state employee, Dole had the bureaucratic survival instincts that told him how to lateral most responsibility, dodge most blame, cover most ass. But there was one error so costly it was to be avoided above all else. It was known as Death-by-Headline. No matter what you do in public life, no matter how gravely you blow it, make sure it’s in a nebulous way that takes a lot of obscure argot to explain. Even if you get a bunch of people killed, as long as they die in eight-syllable words with no convenient puns, alliterations, rhymes or homonyms. There’s nothing worse than screwing up in a way that makes a snappy, pants-around-the-ankles newspaper headline that wins some poor copy editor the hundred-dollar prize for the month.

  Dole saw just such a headline coming together on the screen. The Chrysler’s driver, dressed in a complete Santa Claus outfit, leaned forward, spread his arms wide and dove off the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

  “Shit!” Johnny Vegas said under his breath as Santa disappeared over the side. Then a light went on in his head. He would turn this to his advantage. Yes, he thought, I’ll console her. I still have a chance to hump her till she craps the bed by being incredibly sensitive and caring.

  Johnny took off his coat and draped it around If’s shoulders. He patted her head and leaned it against his chest. “Now, now,” he said, “everything will be all right.”

  They turned around and started walking back to the Porsche. They heard a deep air horn from behind. A semi tractor-trailer had come upon the scene too fast and couldn’t stop. Johnny and If pressed themselves against the guardrail as the truck blew by. The truck ran over the Porsche, flattening it out like a beer can, and dragged it a quarter mile.

  First there was silence, then the sniffling started, and Johnny closed his eyes for what he knew was coming. If’s crying erupted, building in hysteria until she emitted a shrill, warbling sound previously only heard in rutting minks.

  T he ends of The Little Mermaid slippers poked across the front-door threshold and into the moderately humid eighty-two-degree December morning. Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, a little older than the temperature, bent down on the step of her Beverly Shores condominium to get the paper. She read the top headline, “Sad-Sack Santa Swan-Dives in Seasonal Sunshine Skyway Suicide.” She turned back into the house, closed the door and shuffled across the living room to the kitchen. The television set was on the local morning show Get the Hell Out of Bed, Tampa Bay! As she passed the set, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole was on the screen being interviewed live about his vain but heroic efforts radioing for help after keenly observing the Skyway jumper. It was such an impressive TV performance that Dole probably would have salvaged his career. Except he was absentmindedly holding his “Ask someone who gives a shit!” coffee mug prominently for the cameras.

  Mrs. Ploomfield’s condo sat on a thin ribbon of barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico. It towered thirty stories and, with the other condos, formed a wall along the shore. The only road running up the island was Gulf Boulevard, and across the street was an old Florida neighborhood of single-story concrete houses with white tile roofs. The landscape was flat, bright and hot. The yards were mostly white stones, with palm, hibiscus, bougainvillea, croton and schefflera. Some homes had sets of windows wrapped deco-style around the corners. Front doors were jalousie, and everything was whitewashed. Address numbers over the doors were flanked by pink sea horses or blue sailfish or yellow scallops. Herons wandered through yards, pecking on windows for handouts.

  The condominium residents thought they lived in paradise. The only problem was everyone else. All those cheesy houses across the street and that awful Hammerhead Ranch Motel next door that they couldn’t manage to close down.

  Mrs. Ploomfield lived at 1193 Gulf Harbor Drive in a first-floor unit of Calusa Pointe Tower Arms. There was little traffic this morning, only a brown delivery truck at the curb. A man stood outside the passenger door and checked the address against his clipboard. He leaned in the van and grabbed a floral arrangement in a ceramic manatee and a two-foot-long box of chocolates, red and green, with thick gold ribbon. He headed for unit 1193; a second man stayed behind the wheel and idled the engine.

  Mrs. Ploomfield had just gotten back to the kitchen table with the newspaper. She was scooping out canned niblets for an aged Chihuahua when the doorbell rang.

  “Coming,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, and she began cross-country skiing in her slippers across the terrazzo. A few minutes later, she arrived. She cranked the jalousie. “Who is it?”

  “ Florida Flowers ’n’ Fudge.” The man crouched down to see Ploomfield eye to eye through the slowly opening slats of translucent glass. “I have a delivery.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Is this eleven ninety-three?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a growling.

  The man bent down even lower to look through the jalo
usie, and he saw a small dog.

  “That looks exactly like Toto, the mutt on TV.”

  “It is Toto, and he’s not a mutt. I take care of him for my friend, weatherman Guy Rockney. Now, I want my candy and flowers. And I don’t like your attitude one bit.”

  “I hate that fucking dog.”

  Mrs. Ploomfield’s hemoglobin seized up like a piston, and it took several moments before she reconstituted. “What? What did you just say? I want your name right this second, young man. I’m going to ruin your life!”

  “I go first,” said the man. He ripped open the candy box and pulled out a sawed-off Remington shotgun with a twelve-shell drum clip.

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. She slowly cranked on the jalousie window. It was a quarter closed when the man racked the shotgun and the clip fell out. Shells rolled across the concrete porch.

  “Hee, hee, hee! You dropped your bullets,” said Mrs. Ploomfield, still cranking arthritically. Half closed. The man leaned down and began reloading, a little faster than Ploomfield had expected.

  “My goodness,” she said, cranking faster. Three-quarters closed.

  The man racked the shotgun again, but in his hurry the top shell of the magazine was not aligned to the feed lever, and it jammed. Mrs. Ploomfield finished closing the window and began shuffling back across the room.

  The man unjammed the gun and fired with beerad gusto. Splinters of glass sprayed the room. “Oh, my heavens,” said Mrs. Ploomfield. He fired again and again. A large swan-shaped vase exploded in front of Mrs. Ploomfield and a statue of a Persian cat behind her.

  He kept firing and kept missing, all kinds of ugly ceramic shit blowing up. The smoke clouded his view, and the man used the barrel of his shotgun to knock out the triangles of broken glass around the inside edge of the jalousie door. He ducked his head and stepped through the opening. When he looked up, he saw Mrs. Ploomfield reaching into a bric-a-brac shadow box on the wall. Old-fart antique country junk, the man thought. He swept specks of glass off his shirt with the back of his hand and checked his magazine, making sure there would be no jam this time. When he looked up, he saw what Mrs. Ploomfield had been reaching for: In the largest compartment in the middle of the shadow box was her late husband’s antique.45-caliber Peacemaker revolver. She wheeled and shot the man square in the chest, and he fell back through the hole in the door.