Naked Came the Florida Man Read online

  An ebullient moment took a slight, sullen hit. Darn, he would have to notify the police as required under the law for anything of this value.

  A beat cop arrived three hours later. Webber had sent the declaration fax of his purchase to police headquarters, and normally it would have stopped at that. But he knew the drill. Word of the coins was slowly getting out.

  Bells jingled. The officer entered and twirled his nightstick. “So how many does that make now?”

  “How many what?”

  “Rare gold coins these kids are finding just laying on the ground.”

  “I don’t know.” The pawn owner wiped the lenses of his reading glasses. “A few.”

  “Seventeen by our count.”

  “That many?”

  “Imagine the odds,” said the officer. “Seventeen different kids just walking along and looking down.”

  “I understand some were under the dirt.”

  “Whatever you say.” The officer walked along the glass display cases and resumed twirling his stick. He stopped and leaned over. “Is that the coin? May I see it?”

  The owner sighed and handed him the small plastic protective holder.

  “Real pretty,” said the officer, turning it over in his hand. “It’s just so unbelievable. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you might be fencing coins stolen from some collections.”

  “Really, they’re just kids,” said the owner. “You remember the million juke joints we had around here when the town was big? All those workers getting paid and drunk on a Friday night. I’m surprised they didn’t drop more of these things stumbling around.”

  “Okay, I’ll go along. And I’m sure you always pay these kids fairly.” The officer held up the coin. “How much did this baby set you back?”

  Webber stood mute.

  “Did I stutter?” asked the officer.

  “I-I don’t remember.”

  “Now you’re stuttering. Come on, it was only a few hours ago.”

  Webber was a very bad actor as he searched the top of a cluttered desk. “The paperwork’s around here somewhere . . .”

  “I’m sure it is,” said the officer. “By the way, you know my boss’s daughter?”

  Webber welcomed the change of topic. “Great girl!”

  “She’s starting high school next fall and wow, is she fantastic in the band. Especially the trombone, except she—”

  Webber sighed with renewed resignation as he turned to the shelf. “Just had one come in, real cheap. You probably heard the rumors . . .”

  The officer nodded sadly. “Slide McCall. Who would have thought?”

  “I just feel for his family,” said Webber, handing the instrument across the counter as the daisy chain completed another link.

  The officer whistled a merry tune as he headed toward the door with a long piece of brass over his shoulder. “Remember that fencing is a serious offense.”

  “They’re kids. Really.”

  “Whatever.”

  Bells jingled.

  Chapter 4

  The Florida Keys

  Serge slapped his pal on the shoulder. “Look alive. Next stop.”

  “Okay.” Coleman headed back to the car.

  “Where are you going?” asked Serge.

  Coleman grabbed a door handle. “Next stop, like you said.”

  “No, this way.”

  He led Coleman in the opposite direction, down local roads a couple hundred yards toward the ocean. They arrived in front of an ultra-luxury resort where the first President Bush often stayed during fly-fishing vacations.

  “I get it,” said Coleman. “We’re going to crash another rich place and find a business conference reception with free food and booze. I’m down with that. Let me straighten myself up so we can get through security because this shit is worth it.”

  “Not necessary,” said Serge. “Act however you want.”

  Coleman wiped his nose on his shirt. “What do you mean?”

  “Just be yourself,” said Serge. “It is indeed a world-class resort, but we’re allowed to cut through the side of the property because the public has the right to access my next stop.”

  “Be myself? Okay.” He pulled a pint of Southern Comfort from his pocket and lifted it to the sun as he guzzled.

  “Once again, my words were not chosen with adequate care,” said Serge. “Be like other people.”

  “That’s different.” Coleman stowed the bottle and stumbled after his friend.

  They ended up on a sandy beach behind the hotel as waves from the Florida Straits lapped the shore.

  “What the hell?” said Coleman.

  “Told you it would be cool.”

  Before them stood a white picket fence surrounding a small cluster of graves and tombstones.

  Coleman took a furtive swig from his flask and grabbed the fence for balance. “I never expected a cemetery in the middle of a beach.”

  “It’s not just a cemetery but a pioneer cemetery.” Serge snapped photos. “You’ve got three main family plots in there. The Pinders, Russells and Parkers, who settled here back in the 1800s and kicked off what this island is today.”

  “But how is it allowed on a beach?”

  “Because of history lovers!” said Serge. “The die-hard locals knew this stuff here meant a lot, so despite the prevailing wisdom that tombstones are not your first choice for a tourist draw on the beach, they stood firm and dutifully tended the flame of heritage.”

  “Whooooaaaaaa.” Coleman hung on to the top of a picket with one hand, swinging off-balance and bouncing against the fence a few times like a screen door in the wind. “Getting a little funky here.”

  Serge was lost in the focus of the moment. “But I view the whole tourist-cemetery interface from an optimistic viewpoint that history is the future. A lovely family from Elk Rapids comes down here, and they’re like: ‘This is paradise. We’ve got a beautiful sun and sky, our blankets spread out, sodas and baloney sandwiches in the cooler, our kids laughing and splashing in the surf. How can it possibly get any better? . . . Wait, are people buried here?’”

  “Where else can they get that?” asked Coleman.

  “This is what I keep trying to tell people, but it’s always the same closed-mindedness: ‘Don’t hurt me.’”

  “I kind of dig that angel statue in the center.”

  “Remember the big hurricane monument by the highway? True story: When that storm blew through, it picked up that angel—I’m guessing by the wings—and sent it flying all the way back to the road. I mean, that’s a pretty heavy chunk of rock. And it barely got scratched. The local history heroes returned it to its rightful place.”

  “Must have been a big storm to blow it that far.”

  “One of the biggest.” Serge placed paper to headstone. “And Islamorada was particularly hard hit, with scores of victims. But of course all the people in this cemetery were already dead.”

  “So they survived?”

  Serge stared at Coleman a moment and returned to his rubbing.

  Soon they were strolling along the beach, Serge in a straight line, Coleman on a much looser course. His veering became more and more generous until he was offshore.

  Serge sternly folded his arms and yelled at the ocean. “Can you please not do that?”

  “Sorry.” Coleman splashed back toward land. “Having a little trouble coloring inside the lines.”

  They continued on. Then they stopped and stared down.

  “A dead seagull?” said Coleman.

  Serge raised his eyes up the shore. “There’s another one, and another . . .”

  After walking twenty more yards, Serge paused again. “That’s weird. Six dead birds, but no clues. No fishing lines or oil or trauma.”

  “Maybe it was the hurricane,” said Coleman.

  Serge shook his head. “The bodies are too fresh. Oh, well . . .”

  They resumed strolling again and heard a chorus of rambunctious yelling. Three young boys charging down the
beach to the water’s edge.

  “Now that’s what I like to see,” said Serge. “A footloose childhood like mine spent in the Florida outdoors instead of moving pieces of candy around on cell phones.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Looks like a bread sack. They’re throwing pieces.”

  “Here come the seagulls.” Coleman ducked as they swooped in. “How do they do that? Not a bird around, and then a million.”

  “Seagulls are the FBI surveillance teams of the animal world. You never know the FBI is there until the shit goes down, and then they’re everywhere,” said Serge. “Likewise, seagulls often don’t make their presence known until someone tosses aside the last bite of a hot dog, turning the beach into a Hitchcock movie.”

  “What are those kids throwing now?” asked Coleman. “It doesn’t look like bread anymore.”

  “What are they throwing?” asked Serge, heading off in a trot.

  The trio of young boys giggled as they tossed stuff to the frenzy of birds.

  “Excuse me,” said Serge. “May I see what you’re feeding them?”

  One of the boys quickly hid something behind his back, and they all stopped laughing.

  “Come onnnnnn,” said Serge. “I just want in on the fun.”

  “Then okay,” said one of kids. He produced a box of generic Alka-Seltzer.

  Serge gasped and grabbed his heart.

  From behind: “What the hell are you doing? Get away from those kids!”

  It was a voice from someone Serge hadn’t noticed on the beach before. He turned and saw a man running down from the palm trees around a resort swimming pool.

  He arrived and got between Serge and the boys. “What are you, some kind of pervert?”

  “No, but why do you have a video camera in your hand?”

  “None of your business! And you’re wrecking my shot!”

  “I know what you were doing,” said Serge. “You told these kids to feed Alka-Seltzer to the birds. And because birds can’t burp, they would explode.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You’re lying,” said Serge. “And then you were going to film the whole shameful episode with your camera. That level of cruelty is a sickness.”

  “So what if I was?” He shoved Serge hard in the chest. “What are you going to do about it?” Another shove.

  Serge stumbled backward a couple of steps. “Don’t you know the whole tale about birds exploding is an urban myth?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They don’t explode,” said Serge. “They can burp, or whatever the avian equivalent is of dealing with the social awkwardness of unpleasant gas that gets looks from the rest of the flock.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  Serge pointed back up the beach at the half-dozen fallen seagulls that they’d just passed. “While the birds may not explode, you’ve given them an overdose of aspirin and anhydrous citric acid, the active ingredient in those tablets. A gull that weighs a pound or two can’t handle what’s meant for an adult human.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe this: The overdose symptoms include high fever, double vision, respiratory distress, cardiac distress, abdominal agony, brain-swelling, seizures. It’s such a horrible way to go that those birds probably wished they had exploded.”

  “You—!” The man with the video camera noticed something out in the water and paused. “What’s he doing?”

  Coleman was up to his belly button in the surf with a strained look on his face.

  Serge cupped hands around his mouth. “Coleman! No taking dumps in the ocean! We’ve talked about this.” He turned back around to the man. “Sorry, where were we?”

  “You were just about to leave!” Another shove.

  “Jesus, there are kids here,” said Serge. “What kind of example are you setting as a parent?”

  “Ha! I’m not their father. I’m their uncle.”

  “Well then, by all means, ruin them, Uncle Jack Wagon.”

  “I’ve had enough of you!” A final shove, sending Serge down to the sand. “Fuck off!”

  “Okay, now you’re really being a bad example,” said Serge. “Using profanity and ending a sentence with a preposition.”

  Coleman trudged his way back to shore. “What did I miss?” He received his own shove to the chest and toppled over. “Hey, what was that for?”

  Serge got up and dusted himself off. “I’ve really tried to be nice, but now you’re being mean to Coleman, which is a broad form of animal cruelty.”

  The man gritted his teeth in rage and lunged for another shove. This time, Serge quickly slipped aside, grabbed him by the wrist and locked up the man’s arm under his armpit.

  Now, in fights it’s often the bigger combatant who prevails. But sometimes it’s the little things. Like the little finger. Bend it back to the breaking point, and people bend to your will.

  “Ow! My finger!”

  “Tell the kids to go home.”

  “You mean to the motel room.”

  Serge rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” He bent the finger harder. “Now.”

  “Boys! Go back to the room!”

  “What about the birds?” asked a child.

  “Get going!”

  The young trio skedaddled.

  “Alone at last,” said Serge.

  “Now will you let go of my finger?”

  “Yes.” Serge pulled a pistol from under his shirt and stuck it in the man’s ribs. “I never got your name.”

  “Clyde.”

  “Clyde, start walking.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, this is going to be a real blast, a regular humdinger,” said Serge. “Have you seen the Pioneer Cemetery? . . .”

  A little while later, Serge stared down into a car trunk. “Comfy?”

  “W-w-what are you going to do—”

  The lid slammed shut.

  Eight Years Earlier

  Chris was a weird little kid.

  In a good way. Other children take to education like they’re being force-fed. But Chris was so naturally curious that she practically became another piece of furniture in the library, spending hours on the computer to look up more data than her course material had to offer.

  Then the next day in science class, where they were discussing the basics of our sun, its age, distance. A hand shot up. “I found out that our sun bends time and space. The planets, too. It makes wormholes possible.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Einstein. Others proved his theory with a telescope during an eclipse when a star appeared from behind the corona when it shouldn’t have.”

  Then math class and a triangle with equal sides. A hand flew up again.

  “The Romans killed Archimedes while he was working on a problem. ‘Don’t disturb my circles,’ he said.”

  “What?”

  Soon, other teachers were showing up out in the hall, pointing through the window of the classroom’s door at the odd little kid in the front row with a hand enthusiastically in the air. Still more educators began joining Chris in the library to look up her tidbits, their own curiosity piqued. They glanced over at the young girl sitting a few desks away, leaning farther and farther forward, as if knowledge would pull her right through the computer screen.

  Saturday meant no school, but Chris had her own curriculum. She grabbed a notebook, pens, an old compass, some tape and a lunch bag. Chris had grown up alone with her grandmother due to the broken-home epidemic that was going around. The old woman looked up as Chris wheeled her bicycle through the living room of their apartment.

  “Where are you going, honey?”

  “Treasure hunting.”

  “Have fun.”

  The ride was at least a mile, possibly closer to two, but when Chris put her mind to something, get out of the way or prepare to be run over.

  Other kids probably didn’t remember, but Chris could recall every word of the old s
choolyard folklore stories about the evil sugar baron named Fakakta who was found shot to death after the 1928 hurricane. And of course the lost treasure. Kids are allowed to dream.

  She was a cute little sight, tiny legs churning as she pedaled her pink bicycle up the side of Hooker Highway. She finally arrived at a cane field from one of her recent rabbit hunts, and turned down a dirt road. Chris had a good memory as she walked her bike through the rows of sugar stalks. She came to a marking stake with an orange ribbon. Then she got out her compass and triangulated her position with a pair of distant power lines. Numbers were jotted in her notebook. Then she commenced digging. It was a scientific sampling grid that only she would have thought of, moving out from the stake. The afternoon wore on under the unfiltered sun, her face filthy from wiping away sweat with dirty hands. She was quickly reaching the logical conclusion: probably just a one-time find. And she didn’t have any proof that the bogeyman of the sugar field ever existed. That’s when her fingers hit it.

  The second coin.

  Now Chris had two geometric points to work with. She stood up and aimed her compass, dutifully recording new figures in the notebook. She turned the page and drew a second diagram. The search field had become an elongated oval. Digging continued till she could barely see in the growing darkness, but no more finds. She stuck the coin, compass and notebook in the lunch bag she had brought along, and taped it flat to her stomach under her shirt. No way anyone was going to steal this stuff.

  Two boys stopped her a block from the apartment building. “Hey, Milk Crate! What have you got there?”

  She hated that nickname. “None of your business!”

  “Empty your pockets.”

  “No!”

  “I said empty!”

  She turned them inside out. Empty.

  “Okay, you can go.”

  As she put her feet back on the pedals, one of them punched her in the shoulder with an extended knuckle.

  “Ow!”

  She left laughter behind as she pedaled away . . .

  Good thing the next day was a Sunday. Her power of will was locked in, and there was little chance she would have been able to focus in school. She rode her bike back to the cane field again. This time it only took her three hours to find the next coin. The compass and notebook came back out. Coordinates plotted, a new shape diagramed. She stopped and aimed her compass in the direction of Lake Okeechobee, squinting with one eye closed, the tip of her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth in concentration. Math and science were just intuitive to Chris. Her mind’s eye instinctively drew a line from the lake to where she stood, envisioning the shape of the debris field if some treasure chest burst open around here in a storm surge. She decided to load her search southeast of the last coin.