The Pope of Palm Beach Read online

  The pharmacist punched a few buttons and bent closer to the computer screen. His name tag said Irv. “That can’t be right.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Says here this bottle of thirty pills costs twenty-one thousand dollars.”

  Sterling twitched as his hands burrowed deep in his pockets, pulling out crumpled currency that he tossed on the counter. “But I only have a couple hundred. And I really need that medicine. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Let me see what I can do.” Irv’s fingers pressed more buttons. “Probably just a glitch. I’ll run it through again.”

  Sterling began gyrating in a combination of the chicken dance and someone who’d been leg-whipped over a gambling debt.

  “Nope, still twenty-one thousand,” said the pharmacist. “Which I know is wrong because we’d never keep drugs that expensive in a little branch store like this. They send a courier down from Miami when needed . . . Let me look at something else . . . Yeah, that’s weird. Shows here we originally had them priced for twelve dollars, so it does make sense we’d stock them in this branch . . . But why would it say they’re now seven hundred each?”

  Sterling’s gaze followed a swarm of imaginary butterflies across the ceiling of the store. “Can I have them?”

  The pharmacist abruptly looked up. “I remember now. It was in the news. That greedy company jacked prices through the roof! I hate that kind of exploitation that gives us all a bad name! . . . Well, since we bought them cheap before the price hike and they were originally twelve bucks, I can override the computer.” Tap, tap, tap.

  Sterling swatted the air in front of him because the butterflies were attacking him with blowguns. “Sound business decision.”

  “What?” said the pharmacist. Tap, tap, tap.

  “The media had a vendetta.”

  The pharmacist stopped and squinted. “Do I know you?”

  Swat, swat. “Never been in here before.” Swat.

  “Yes, I’ve definitely seen your face before. Just can’t place it.”

  Sterling decided his hair was trying to escape. He grabbed the top of his head. “I’m really, really rich.”

  “That’s it!” Irv took a step back and stretched an arm out firmly. “You’re the obnoxious little pipsqueak who victimized all those parents.”

  Swat, swat. “You don’t know how hard my job is. Heavy lies the crown.” Swat.

  Irv angrily pressed buttons. “The price is back to twenty-one thousand.”

  “But I need them! How about one pill?”

  “Okay.” The pharmacist extracted a tablet and offered it in his palm. “That’ll be seven hundred dollars, please.”

  “But I already told you, I don’t have that much.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  Sterling’s eyes locked on the pill, and he lunged. The pharmacist closed his fist around the tablet and jerked his arm back.

  “Criminals took my wallet! Have mercy!”

  “Get out of my store, you bastard!”

  The air was now thick with gummy worms swirling around Sterling’s head. He plucked them and filled his mouth. “Can you at least print out the prescription my doctor called in so I can take it somewhere else?”

  Irv smiled in sweet irony at the near future. “I would be more than happy to do that.”

  A not-so-silent printer clattered to life and a document chugged onto the tray. “Here you go.”

  Sterling snatched it. “Ha! You’re not the only business in town!” A final gummy worm in his mouth, and he was out the door.

  The pharmacist picked up the phone . . .

  . . . Outside, Coleman pointed. “She’s over there.”

  Serge raised binoculars. “Where?”

  “By the news boxes. Cutoff shorts and an untucked plaid shirt.”

  “Heart be still.”

  Something large and blurry suddenly blocked Serge’s view. “What the—” He lowered binoculars. “Sterling, what are you doing lying on my windshield?”

  “You’ve got to help!” He plastered the prescription printout against the glass. “Take me to another pharmacy!”

  “Don’t you know anything about Florida?” said Serge. “There are only two major drugstore chains. And whenever you see one, the other is always on the next corner. It’s like a zoning law down here.” Serge aimed an index finger.

  Sterling turned. “I see it!” He jumped off the car.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Coleman.

  “Only the amoebas know.”

  Sterling high-stepped across the parking lot to avoid the radioactive porcupines. He dashed through honking traffic and into the drugstore on the opposite corner. The entire staff was already waiting, thanks to the phone call from Irv.

  They formed a riot line. “Boooooooooo!”

  “But I need my pills!”

  “Seven hundred dollars,” said the chief pharmacist.

  “I don’t have it! I’m pleading with you!”

  “Booooooooo!”

  Sterling stood and whined with pursed lips. “I’ll drop the price! I’m in charge! They’re back to twelve dollars!”

  “Okay,” said the pharmacist.

  “Okay.” Sterling fished his money out again. “Give them to me.”

  “When we get word from the national office,” said the store manager. “Sorry, it’s just good business.”

  Sterling whimpered the whimper of terminal desperation. He ran back onto the street, glancing east and west. His world began spinning to the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A meteor shower fell in the middle of the day. The road sparkled like it was encrusted with diamonds. He plucked polka-dot hexagons off his arms.

  “Somebody! Please help me!”

  Sterling fell to the ground and began slithering across U.S. 1. Cars screeched to a halt. Someone called 911. Bystanders assembled curiously along the shoulders of the road.

  An ambulance arrived, and the paramedics flipped him over to test vitals and check his pockets. One of the EMTs noticed the pharmacy staff emerging from the store. “He doesn’t have any ID on him. Anyone know who he is?”

  “That’s Sterling Hanover.”

  News of his identity ran through the increasingly incensed crowd of onlookers.

  Sterling fought as the paramedics struggled with the oxygen mask. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Apparently he needs these pills,” said the pharmacist, holding up a small plastic bottle.

  “Give them to me,” said the EMT, reattaching the oxygen.

  “They’re seven hundred a pill.”

  The other paramedic looked up. “Seven hundred! . . . Wait, Sterling Hanover? That’s the prick from the pharmaceutical company?” He looked at the other EMT. “On second thought, the guy just looks drunk to me.”

  “This is a job for the police,” said the first paramedic, packing up his gear. “Lunch break.”

  The ambulance drove off as the roadside crowd clapped and cheered.

  Sterling ran up to them and grabbed someone by the shirt. “Compassion! I’m begging!”

  “Get the fuck off me, you spoiled brat!” A hard shove.

  Someone else: “You better start running!”

  “Why?” asked Sterling.

  Punch.

  “Ow, you hit me.”

  “Run!”

  He ran.

  The crowd began following, slowly at first, because the dense formation of the mob needed time to space out and find the groove, but then quickly picking up rhythm and speed as a single unit: residents, tourists, pharmacists, sunburned bums who wove hats out of palm fronds.

  Sterling glanced over his shoulder. “Stop chasing me!”

  “Keep chasing him!”

  “And let’s hit him with rocks!”

  “Good idea!”

  Fling, fling, fling.

  “Ow, rocks.”

  A green Nova rolled slowly down U.S. 1, keeping pace with the jogging vigilantes.

  “There she
is,” said Coleman.

  Serge leaned out his window. “You! In the plaid shirt! Dinner and a movie?”

  She jogged and threw a rock. “I’m busy.”

  “How often do you do laundry?”

  Sterling was certifiably delirious and low on steam, but escape was soon at hand. He saw the waterway ahead cutting between the islands.

  “Look!” yelled someone in the crowd. “He’s going for the drawbridge!”

  “Don’t let him get away!”

  Sterling approached the paved apron to the bridge. Red lights flashed, and the orange-and-white crossing arm was down. He ran around it.

  Drawbridges are particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and each year in Florida several are seriously hurt or killed because people on sidewalks pay less attention to traffic signals. Then a few find themselves dangling high in the air with a great view but a tenuous grip on the railing. If they’re lucky, it’s a splash in the water. If not, a bruising tumble down the steep metal grating.

  But virtually all those mishaps occurred when the spans were rising, and now that these were more than halfway down, the bridge tender had turned his back on the action and opened a magazine on hot-air ballooning.

  Sterling stumbled up the lowering span and prepared to jump to the other side, but his depth perception was shot. He leaped and hit the edge of the other span with his chest, slipping until his fingers clung to the grate.

  A motorist on the far side of the bridge—who didn’t know what was going on—jumped from his car in alarm and ran up to the crossing gate, yelling to Sterling: “Just fall in the water! Just let go!”

  The gang on the other side: “Don’t let go!” “Hang on!”

  The bridge tender continued reading about “Five Must-Have Cheeses” for ballooning over the turning-of-the-leaves in New Hampshire.

  The green Nova stopped behind the flashing lights, next to the crowd of onlookers.

  “There she is again,” said Coleman. “What are you going to do?”

  “The key is not to act creepy,” said Serge. “It’s all about finding the perfect romantic moment.”

  Coleman gestured ahead with a Pabst. “If he doesn’t let go, his hands will be hurt bad.”

  “Actually, the ends of the bridge that mesh together are a bit thicker.” Serge patted his abdomen. “He’s roughly looking all the way down to belt level.”

  “Let go of the bridge!”

  “Don’t let go!”

  The two spans enmeshed.

  Silence and a collective wince. A blood slick poured from the bridge, and an epidemic of vomiting chain-reacted through the crowd.

  Serge stuck his head out the window. “You free now?”

  Chapter 7

  1976

  The water at the public beach was inviting and empty. No surfboards, no swimmers. The wooden lifeguard stands were long gone.

  Families didn’t come to Singer Island anymore. Just some teenagers. And they didn’t come to the beach. They loitered. None of them had even heard of the Amaryllis.

  “Hey, man.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Half O-Z, a dime.”

  Money and pot changed hands. Police increased patrols.

  All the quaint old beach shops had met the wrecking ball, and the little spinning wind gauge was in a landfill. Instead there was now the Ocean Mall. A strip mall. It was supposed to modernize the beach and bring the people back, but it just made off with the soul. Businesses conducted an industry of going out of business. The dress-up restaurant next to the Sands Hotel was now the Island Room titty bar.

  The stores on life support tried to lure customers with stereos blaring out the doors.

  “. . . Dream weaver . . .”

  “. . . Turn the beat around . . .”

  “. . . Philadelphia freedom . . .”

  It was an orphaned time. Mom-and-pop motels came down and condos went up. The only people still tending the flame had moved back down the beach to surf at the Pump House, but it never felt the same. The only constant was the Colonnades Hotel. It was old-school. Heyday gone; dignity intact. Which meant it would have to be demolished.

  Darby Pope and Kenny strolled through the hotel with their surfboards. They passed the coffee shop, where an old man read a newspaper and made notes on a legal pad.

  “Hi, Mr. MacArthur.”

  “What? Oh, hi, Darby.” A sip of coffee. “Still surfing, I see.”

  “Yes, but everything’s . . . different.”

  The billionaire nodded in resignation. “It’s all new.”

  The pair headed out the back of the hotel toward the beach and a short hike to the Pump House. It was ugly weather for tourists, which meant a great day for surfing. Kenny had reached the age of twenty-three, and all the younger board riders now looked up to him. He was generally considered the second best surfer on the coast. A distant second. The Pope was still out there on the waves, defying age, which was early fifties.

  The cloud ceiling became lower and grayer. The waves aggressively sucked back out at the shore. It was an incoming low tide, the best time to hit the Pump House, at least according to the surfing press (surfing press?). The peaks formed over a triangular sandbar, right side producing mild tubes, the left a nightmare. On a strong day like this, the spot was well known for snapped boards, sprained wrists and bloody scrapes on the bottom. Lose a board altogether on the wrong series of the breaks, and sport became survival, like trying to swim in a cross fire of riptides.

  That’s why they loved it.

  The younger surfers had been tearing it up for hours, some of the best action in months. Then came the wipeouts. That always happened at the Pump House, but today they were becoming viciously frequent.

  And spectacular.

  Boards and their thrown riders experienced serious airtime in opposite directions. Half the kids were soon watching from the beach; the more daring still hanging tough. Then the biggest wave yet crested and broke early, tossing them like bathtub toys. They decided to cut their losses, but still took a beating as they paddled in.

  Now all the kids were staring out from the shore at empty water.

  “It’s just too hairy.”

  Two men walked past them and into the water.

  “The Pope and Kenny are going out? In this!”

  “Wow.”

  They paddled in a wide circle to the north, where the edge of the receding breaks didn’t pull back as much. The boards reached a perfect spot off the end of the jetty, waves doming in front of them toward the beach. They instinctively stood up at the same time, and their tandem ride began as it had a thousand times before.

  Onshore. “I knew they could do it!”

  “This is like history.”

  On the break, everything smooth. Kenny smiled to himself. He had been waiting for just the right moment for months. Time to dispel this second best surfer label. It wasn’t envy or bitterness, just the constructive competitive spirit that his mentor had instilled in him. Ready to challenge the master.

  He suddenly dipped and cut across the nose of the Darby’s board.

  “Kenny, what the hell are you doing?”

  Kenny was doing something he’d been instructed not to do ever since the day they met back 1965. He was riding inside the Pope along the jetty. The rule probably had a purpose back when he was a skinny kid, but now Kenny was an adult and could arguably surf as well as anyone.

  What he’d never be able to match was how the Pope could read the water. It was a simple equation of years, and the Pope intuitively saw everything in a three-dimensional geometric model, from the topography of the sand on the bottom, all the way up to the tips of the peaks. And right now what the Pope saw was a swell on the lean side of the sandbar, pushing water into a trough and about to form an A-frame peak with a wicked backwash just in front of Kenny, pushing him to the south.

  To the jetty.

  “Noooooo!”

  The Pope shifted his weight forward, nosing the board down the wave in nothi
ng that remotely resembled traditional technique. From here, he was making it up as he went.

  Kenny remained confident as he executed his flawless run. He never saw it coming. Competing waves met, and the water changed all at once. Instead of sweeping triumphantly into the beach, he was now fighting for balance, heading the other way toward where the waves were now pounding the eight-foot boulders so hard that they sprayed clear over the jetty and into Lake Worth Inlet on the other side.

  The Pope swooped his board down fast next to the rocks and began a northern curl up the trough. If he were surfing alone, it would have been a thing of beauty. But Kenny was coming in at a stronger angle, and the physics of two opposing objects in motion had already made its decision.

  The Pope jumped off his board and tackled Kenny around the waist, and they both went into the water.

  The kids onshore couldn’t see anything except a wooden Yater Spoon longboard splintering on the rocks and ending up on both sides of the jetty.

  Chapter 8

  The Present

  Serge dashed from a house in the Florida Keys and jumped in a car at the curb.

  A woman wearing only a plaid shirt stood back in the doorway. “When will I see you again?”

  “Maybe next laundry.”

  A seafoam-green Chevy Nova barreled north up the coast of Florida. The stereo blared road-trip music courtesy of Queen, Deep Purple and War.

  “. . . I’m in love with my car . . .”

  The windows were down, and a salty sea breeze whipped the occupants’ hair into bedlam as they cruised Highway A1A.

  Serge glanced over. “Coleman, what in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Hmm, mumhh, mooshum . . .”

  “Take the sweat sock out of your mouth.”

  Coleman did. “What’s the question?”

  “I know I will regret asking, but why are you chewing on your own sock?”

  “Because it’s not a sock right now.” Coleman opened the end to show Serge the leafy green contents.

  “You’re chewing pot now?”

  Coleman shook his head. “I made my own catnip toy. See? I drew a smiley face with whiskers on the side.”

  “I guess this is a two-part question. Why are you chewing a catnip toy?”