The Stingray Shuffle Page 3

  “The Sun Also Rises?”

  “We should be in Paris.”

  The remaining semesters dragged out like a stretch for robbery, but they all somehow managed to stumble through to graduation, where they hugged and took a hundred snapshots and swore they’d always stay in touch and promptly lost contact for twenty-five years.

  3

  The Sunshine State has a mind-bending concentration of “cash-only” businesses. These aren’t your shade-tree auto detailers or flea market kiosks selling houseplants and nunchuks. These involve amounts of currency that require luggage.

  On a day near the end of 1997, there were two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three cash-crammed briefcases floating around the shallow-grave landscape of Florida. Some were under the seats of limousines, some were underwater in ditched airplanes, some were handcuffed to South American couriers flying up to buy Lotto tickets, some were clutched to the chests of perspiring men in street clothes sprinting down the beach, ducking bullets.

  One briefcase was different from the others. Really superstitious people said it was cursed, just because everyone who ever touched it wasn’t breathing anymore. Whatever you believed, it was still filled with five million dollars.

  The briefcase, a silver Halliburton, now sat between two patio loungers next to a motel pool in Cocoa Beach. A pair of men lay on their backs and sipped drinks from coconuts.

  Paul and Jethro had plenty of money in the briefcase but not a valid credit card between them. Which meant no reputable inn would give them a room, so they paid cash through a slot in inch-thick Plexiglas at the Orbit Motel.

  The old Honduran night manager had made change without ambition. The motel office contained an empty water cooler and the smell of burnt coffee but no coffeemaker; two molded plastic chairs, one with a puddle of something and the other holding a sleeping man in a plain T-shirt who cursed as he dreamed. On the wall a framed poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch. “Hang in there.”

  Paul fidgeted as he waited for his change. He straightened a stack of travel guides with space shuttles on the cover. He fiddled with a display of business cards for taxi companies, Chinese restaurants, bail bondsmen, someone who called himself “The King of Wings,” and a fishing guide named Skip.

  Paul took his change and leaned toward the slot. “Can we get a wake-up call for eight?”

  “I’ll get the concierge right on it,” said the manager, not looking up from his Daily Racing Form.

  Paul held one of the travel guides up to the Plexiglas. “Are these free?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  The Orbit was not rated in any of the travel guides. Not even listed. Just as well. The landscaping was long dead, replaced by broken glass, cigarette butts and dejection. The water in the pool had turned the color of iced tea and occasionally fizzed. The 1960s neon sign out front featured a mechanical space capsule that used to circle Earth, but it had shorted out and caught fire over Katmandu.

  Until the previous Thursday, Paul and Jethro had been just like any other law-abiding citizens wandering the state fat and happy. That’s when Hurricane Rolando-berto came ashore in Tampa Bay. One of the state’s two thousand seven hundred and sixty-three briefcases was in the path of the hurricane, which threw it up for grabs like a tipped basketball.

  At the time, Paul and Jethro had been staying at another quality lodge, the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. The night before the big blow, Jethro had seen someone creeping around in the dark behind the inn, constantly looking over his shoulder, hiding something. But so was everyone else, and Jethro didn’t give it much thought.

  It began to nag at him during the storm. The next morning Paul and Jethro went down to the shore and joined the mob that assembles after every hurricane to collect prehistoric shark teeth and washed-up guns. The pair scanned the ground as they climbed through seaweed-draped power lines and uprooted trees.

  “Whatever it was, he wanted to make sure nobody would find it,” said Jethro. “I swear it was right around here somewhere…. Wait! Look! There’s something shiny down there! Help me move these bales of dope.”

  Paul and Jethro popped the latches on the briefcase and raised the lid. They slammed it quickly. Their hearts raced, eyes glancing around to see if anyone had been watching.

  Decision time. This wasn’t Girl Scout cookie money. People would come looking for it. They should probably go to the police. Yes, that was the only right thing. How could they even think of doing anything else? They might even be allowed to keep it. Maybe get a reward, too. On the other hand, they’d have to report it to the IRS.

  Paul started counting the money as they fled on Interstate 4. They were in a baby-blue ’74 Malibu, speeding across Florida to catch a cruise ship for the Bahamas. The law allows someone to take up to fifteen thousand in cash across the border. Paul passed that threshold thumbing through his second pack of hundreds, practically the whole briefcase to go. Inbound Customs was tough. But outbound on a cruise to Nassau was another matter. You didn’t even need a passport.

  Paul and Jethro ran through the ship terminal at Port Canaveral and up to the ticket window. The next cruise left on Friday. It was Wednesday. Nothing to do but wait and freak out. They decided to keep the briefcase with them wherever they went—walking along the shore, around the pool, down the pier, jumping at every sound. They needed liquor.

  The Orbit Motel did not have a bar or restaurant, only a bank of vending machines dispensing Ho-Hos and French ticklers. So Paul and Jethro made a series of trips up the beach to the many conveniently spaced tiki bars that now outnumber pay phones in Florida. They returned to the pool patio and used straws to suck pink froth out of coconuts with paper umbrellas. Six empty coconuts sat beside each lounger. The Orbit Motel was not the kind of place to beat back a panic attack. It had that tropical OK Corral glow, a washed-out dustiness of light and color, the air hot, still and silent, except for occasional gusts that pushed a brown palm frond across the concrete with an unpleasant scratching sound. The ice machine had been dusted for prints. Two men came out of a room carrying a large TV and an unbolted window air-conditioning unit, got in a Firebird with no tag and sped off.

  Paul and Jethro were an unusual alliance. Jethro was president of the Hemingway look-alike club in Pensacola. Paul was afraid of people and ran a detective agency. He was Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.

  “What was that?” said Paul.

  “Just a car door.”

  Paul wiped his forehead. “I’m not gonna make it.”

  “Courage is the ability to suspend the imagination.”

  “What?”

  “We need to keep our minds occupied. Hand me the travel guide.”

  Johnny Vegas was a golf pro.

  As of Thursday.

  Vegas’s tanned, six-foot frame rippled in all the right places beneath a tight mercerized-cotton shirt, stretched over broad, firm shoulders and tapered to a trim waist under an alligator belt. He had that squinty Latin thing going that drove women wild. His black hair was longish and currently organized for the Antonio Banderas effect.

  Johnny had decided to begin teaching golf when he met his first pupil. Her name was Bianca, a tall Mediterranean model in town shooting a swimsuit photo spread for truck tires. Bianca broke golf etiquette by wearing a bikini to her first lesson. That made them even. Johnny didn’t play golf.

  Johnny had met Bianca an hour earlier on the beach behind the Orbit Motel. He was standing near the shore wearing two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, holding a surfboard. Johnny was standing on the beach with the surfboard because he didn’t know how to surf. Bianca walked up.

  “You surf?” she asked coyly, cocking her hip.

  “Of course not,” Johnny said with playful sarcasm. “I just stand here with this board.”

  Johnny didn’t have a job. Didn’t have to. The scion of an insurance mogul, Johnny had a bulging trust fund and the kind of lifestyle not seen since Joe Namath wore mink on Broadway. He also had a secret. You wouldn’t
know it to look at him, but Johnny had never gone all the way. Oh, he wanted to. So did the women. It had just never worked out. It was always something, some kind of bizarre interruption. Johnny had learned the hard way that if getting a woman in the mood was an art, then keeping her there was a fucking science—the whole fleeting phenomenon more rare, delicate and unstable than suspending a weapons-grade uranium isotope at the implosion point. The least little vibration and everything tumbles. Or detonates.

  That was Johnny’s love life. Hotel fire, civil unrest, military jet crash, ammonia cloud evacuation, George Clooney sighting. In addition to being a trust-fund playboy, he was Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.

  A few months earlier in Miami, Johnny had picked up a Cuban dreamboat with a perfectly positioned beauty mark that made him swallow his own tongue. They had met at a trendy salsa club in Little Havana and were back at her place within the hour. She grinned naughtily as she gave Johnny a private dance, peeling off her clothes piece by piece, tossing them aside with aplomb. Johnny sat at the foot of the bed, ripping open his trousers like a stubborn bag of potato chips.

  She finally flung her panties over her shoulder and sauntered toward Johnny. “You’ve been a bad boy.”

  That’s when they heard the sirens. Flashing blue and red lights filled the bedroom. The woman ran to the window.

  “What is it?” asked Johnny.

  “I can’t believe it!” she yelled. “It’s the feds! They’re taking Elián!”

  “Who’s Elián?”

  “This is so unfair!” she sobbed. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go. I need to be alone tonight.”

  Seven months later, Johnny was back at the plate. He had landed a drop-dead attorney in a serious pantsuit and glasses, her brunette hair in a no-nonsense bun. She strolled up to him at a political cocktail party, slipped off her glasses and shook down her hair. “What do you say we blow this Popsicle stand?”

  A half hour later, Johnny was lying in bed on his back, the woman climbing aboard.

  The TV was on. Tom Brokaw. The woman heard something and looked over.

  “What?” she yelled. “They’re taking Florida away from Gore? They can’t do that!”

  She jumped out of bed and turned up the volume with the remote.

  “What is it?” asked Johnny.

  “Shhhhh!”

  So when Johnny met Bianca on the beach behind the Orbit Motel, he had just one question.

  “Do you read newspapers?”

  “Read what?”

  They headed for the golf course across A1A from the motel, where Johnny said he was the club pro. That impressed her; she said she had always wanted to learn golf.

  On the third hole, the ball was three feet from the cup. Johnny interlaced his fingers on the putter’s leather grip. Then he handed her the club. “Now you try.”

  She pretended to be all thumbs. “I just can’t do it. Could you show me again?”

  Johnny stepped up from behind and wrapped his taut arms around her, repositioning Bianca’s hands on the shaft. She turned toward his biceps. “Wow, you’re pretty strong. I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.”

  “Just stroke through the ball,” said Johnny. “One fluid motion.”

  Bianca tapped the ball with the putter.

  “Darn! It hit the windmill again. I just can’t play this game.”

  “Let’s try the dinosaur hole,” said Johnny. “That’s an easy one.”

  “It’s not golf,” said Bianca, pooching out her bottom lip, then staring off.

  “What is it?”

  “I have this problem…. It’s medical.”

  Just my luck, thought Johnny. Probably a week to live. On the other hand, a week’s a week.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “It’s embarrassing. My boyfriend dumped me because of it…. Autagonistophilia.”

  “Is that like a bunion?”

  “It means I can only become sexually aroused if I’m doing it in a public place near people.”

  “You do it in public?”

  “Not actually in public, but where I can see lots of people close by, and there’s a high risk of being discovered, possibly arrested…. You okay? You look pale.”

  Johnny braced himself on the side of the windmill.

  “Wait, there’s more,” she said. “I’ve also got chrematistophilia—that’s getting excited if you’re blackmailed into sex. And hybristophilia, sex with convicted criminals, and symphorphilia, sex during natural disasters, and formicophilia, wanting to have sex on cheap countertops.” She held out her left arm. “See? I have a medical alert bracelet.”

  Two men walked by them on the cart path, sipping coconuts and reading their Cocoa Beach travel guide. They strolled past the waterfall, the pink elephant and the airplane crashed into the side of a plastic mountain on the thirteenth hole. They crossed the Japanese footbridge over the lagoon that separated “Goony Golf” from the driving range. The lagoon was actually a retention pond, and the pair looked over the bridge’s railing at the bubbles in the water and the submerged scuba diver with a sack of golf balls.

  Sleigh bells jingled as Paul and Jethro opened the door to the driving range office. The man behind the counter scooped balls into wire baskets and plopped them on the counter.

  Paul pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket.

  “We don’t take hundreds.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Paul. “What if I let you keep the change?”

  “Then we have a new policy.” The man plucked the bill from Paul’s hand, stuck it in his back pocket and pushed two baskets of balls across the counter. Paul and Jethro went to select clubs from a large oak barrel of bent irons and woods.

  “We close in a half hour,” said the man. “You can still play, but you’ll be in the dark.”

  “Ah, such is the challenge of life itself,” said Jethro.

  “No problem,” added Paul. “Anything you say.”

  “And replace your divots,” said the man. “This ain’t a sod farm.”

  Actually, it was a sod farm, at least on documents at the zoning office. The state was under drought restrictions, which meant only sod farms could water, and the driving range wanted to keep its sprinklers going.

  “Right. Replace divots,” said Paul. “Sure thing.”

  “I remember it well,” said Jethro. “Grand traditions of Scotland, the noble but curious land of plaid…”

  “And stop talking like that. Both of you. It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “You got it,” said Paul. “No problem-o.”

  The pair left the office and headed to the last tee, number twenty-two.

  Jethro spilled his bucket on the ground and used the head of a four iron to rake a few red-banded balls over to his feet. “DiMaggio would have been a formidable golfer. You could see it in his dark Italian eyes, etched with the scars of life.” Jethro swung hard and hit the ball with the toe of his club, slicing right, scampering through traffic on A1A and ricocheting off the manager’s door at the Orbit Motel. An old Honduran opened the door, looked around, closed it.

  Paul lined up his own shot. He looked out at the range signs, marking distance in fifty-yard increments. In between were small greens with flagsticks.

  “What’s the objective here?” asked Paul. “Hit it as far as you can or get it close to the flags?”

  “Neither, my worthy companion. It is but to hit the range cart.”

  “The what?”

  “You do not understand now, but you will in time.”

  Paul and Jethro swung through their ration of balls, which took off at random adventures in geometry. They were accompanied by a score of other golfers whose graceful swings resembled the chopping of firewood, and a spray of balls curved, sliced, bounced and whizzed across the range, some hooking high over the safety netting and into the retention pond, where a scuba diver trespassed with a mesh gunnysack full of balls in one hand and a twelve-gauge bang-stick for alligators in the other.

 
; One of the golfers noticed something. Out near the left hundred-yard marker, a small tractor started moving across the range. The driver’s seat was enclosed in a protective wire cage, the tractor pulling a wide scooping device that sucked up balls and squirted them into the collection bin.

  The golfer on tee number three sounded the alarm.

  “Range cart!”

  The customers began hitting balls as fast as they could, a rapid series of twenty-one-gun salutes. Most were wildly off target, but through sheer volume the range cart began taking heavy fire. The driver was used to it by now, a community college student reading Crime and Punishment and drinking a Foster’s as the fusillade of Titleists and Dunlops pinged off the vehicle. A lucky shot smashed one of the red plastic light covers. A small voice in the distance: “I got the taillight! I got the taillight!” A two-wood clanged off the outside of the cage protecting the driver, who was inside a depressing nineteenth-century Russian apartment. He turned the page. Balls flew by.

  Paul topped another drive fifty yards. “How does anybody play this game?”

  Jethro addressed his ball with a three wood. “Think of it as bullfighting and you will see the truth in it.” He knocked a TopFlite into the Checkers drive-through.

  Bianca and Johnny held hands as they crossed the footbridge over the retention lagoon next to the driving range. She giggled and squeezed his arm. “I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”

  Johnny choked on some saliva and grabbed the railing for balance.

  “You all right?”

  He nodded. They continued walking, coming to a fence and meeting a third party in the dark. Johnny paid the man in twenties. The couple began wiggling into position behind a control panel.

  “Look! I can see people over there!” said Bianca. “Oh, my God!” She ripped off her bra and plunged her tongue down Johnny’s throat. Her hands went for his zipper.

  “Are you ready?” she whispered.

  Was Johnny ready? He had the kind of erection SWAT teams could use to knock down doors on crack houses. He fumbled to operate the control panel like he’d been shown.