Naked Came the Florida Man Page 6

  “Cool.” Coleman grabbed a crayon in one hand and a bottle with the other. Chug, chug, chug.

  “Ahem!”

  Coleman looked up. “What?”

  “I don’t think Jack Daniel’s is on the lunch menu next to the beanie weenies.”

  “Oh, judge me for a little snort?” Coleman pointed with a yellow crayon. “I don’t remember that from childhood.”

  Serge looked over at a man tied to a motel room chair and gagged with duct tape. He slapped himself in the forehead. “I’d completely forgotten about Clyde.”

  Coleman scoffed sarcastically. “Did you tie people up in kindergarten?”

  Serge walked over to the hostage. “Actually, there was this one incident. It’s pretty funny now, but at the time: ‘Where the hell did Little Serge get all that rope?’”

  The hostage wiggled violently. “Mmmmm! Mmmmm!”

  Coleman grabbed the bottle of whiskey and resumed coloring. “Sounds like he wants to tell you something.” Chug, chug, chug.

  Serge rapped knuckles on Clyde’s forehead like it was a door. “Is that true?”

  Vigorous nodding.

  “Promise not to yell?”

  More nodding.

  Serge quickly ripped off the tape.

  “Owwwwwwwww!”

  “I thought you promised?”

  “Please don’t hurt me!”

  “Hurt you?” said Serge, innocently pointing to his own chest. “Oh, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  Serge gestured toward the arts-and-crafts table. “First I need to continue my kindergarten reversion therapy, and then we’ll have an after-school party. How about it? . . .” His gleeful expression became a frown. “What? You don’t like parties? You’re not in a festive mood? . . . Then you leave me no choice . . .”

  Serge turned his back to Clyde and bent over a bed.

  “No! Please! Whatever you’re thinking . . .”

  Serge spun back around. Two buttons were over his eyes. He shook his head back and forth, and the little objects in the buttons rattled around in circles. He removed the buttons. “Pretty wacky, eh?”

  Clyde just whimpered.

  “Jesus,” said Serge. “I give and I give.” He tore off another long strip of tape and forcefully wrapped it over Clyde’s mouth again. Terrified eyes looked up at him.

  “Hold that thought,” said Serge. “I’ll be back after I’m a superhero . . . But you can’t tell anyone my true identity.”

  There were a number of stray crayon marks on the table, but Coleman was able to get most on the pillowcase.

  Serge sat back down. “Wow, you’re really going at it!”

  “Yep, I dig kindergarten.” Scribble, scribble, chug, chug. “And I’m just about done . . . There!” Coleman beamed proudly as he held his case up to Serge.

  “It’s wonderful! It’s . . . It’s . . .” Serge didn’t want to discourage his buddy. “Absolutely fantastic! . . . Uh, what is it?”

  “Can’t you tell by the shield on the chest?”

  “All I can make out are the letters B and M,” said Serge. “I hope that’s not supposed to be bowel—”

  “Of course not.” Still smiling wide. “Don’t you get it? I’m Bong Man!”

  “I think it’s safe to say that this particular superhero name isn’t taken yet.” Serge scratched his head. “But you don’t have a superpower.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a superpower all right.” Coleman grabbed the safety scissors. “It’s a doozy!”

  “What is it?”

  “Just go back to your own pillowcase, and by the time you’re done, I’ll show you.”

  “If you say so.” Serge resumed scribbling, skeptically watching Coleman out of the corner of his eye. What’s that idiot doing?

  Coleman had become a rare blur of industriousness. Construction paper, glue, tape and most of their other supplies came into play.

  It was a race to the finish, and it was a tie.

  Serge slapped down a crayon. “I’m done.”

  Coleman tossed an extra clothespin on the table. “Me too.” Like poker players: “Show me what you got.”

  Serge held up a pillowcase with flamingos, rockets, sailfish, race cars, Cinderella’s castle, Bok Tower and the lighthouse on Key Biscayne. In the middle, Serge had his own chest shield.

  “What does the CF stand for?” asked Coleman.

  “Captain Florida.”

  “What’s your superpower?”

  “I can name the state’s sixty-seven counties in under a minute, sometimes.” Serge pulled off his T-shirt and tried on the pillowcase. “Your turn. What are you hiding under the table?”

  “Close your eyes and promise not to peek.”

  Serge did. He heard the unmistakable telltale sound of a Bic lighter coming to life. Then a familiar smell of smoke.

  “Hey,” said Coleman. “I didn’t say you could open your eyes yet.”

  Serge’s jaw came unhinged. “Your superpower is that you can make a bong out of ordinary kindergarten craft supplies?”

  “Pretty super if you ask me.” Puff, puff, puff.

  Serge sat back and studied the contraption, held together solely with glue and tape, plus pipe cleaners and clothespins for extremities. Colorful construction paper was bent and rolled and folded like the work of an origami expert. “Coleman, your bong, is that a robot?”

  “Robots rule! What do you think?”

  “Danger, Will Robinson.”

  “And I used Play-Doh for the seals.” Puff, puff, puff. “Your turn to put up.”

  Serge took a deep breath before spitting out words rapid-fire like an auctioneer. “Alachua, Baker, Bay, Bradford, Brevard, Broward . . .”

  “Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm!”

  Serge grabbed a tape dispenser and flung, ricocheting it off Clyde’s soon-to-be-bloody nose. “We’re trying to be five-year-olds, motherfucker!”

  A pot cloud exhaled toward the captive. “Serge, could you hand me those two eye buttons? I want to glue them on my robot to make him wacky.”

  “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” Coleman squirted Elmer’s Glue. “By the way, what are you planning to do with him?”

  Serge reached into a shopping bag. “I’ve given this one a lot of careful thought.” He pulled out a small blue box.

  “Alka-Seltzer?” asked Coleman.

  “No, a generic brand called Fizzing Circles because I wouldn’t want to cast a pall on the good people at Alka-Seltzer.”

  “That’s a weird name.”

  “Apparently, someone’s tightening up trademark infringement laws, because generic names are getting pretty strange in order to keep their legal distance. You need look no further than the cereal aisle. I swear these are all real: Fruit Rings, Square Shaped Corn, Circus Balls, Crispy Hexagons, Pranks instead of Trix, and a knockoff of Life cereal called Live It Up. Children see right through those bowls of bullshit.”

  “So what’s the plan with the tablets?”

  “Stalled for now,” said Serge. “The first hurdle was how do I get enough tablets in him without them activating before the Big Fizz? I finally found a solution, but the technique was so tediously long that I grew weary of the wit involved. So I went hard the other way . . .”

  Serge grabbed a bottle of glue off the table and reached in his grocery sack again. Then he went over to the hostage with the safety scissors and began snipping off his clothes. “Sorry, I know this must be one of your favorite T-shirts because of the slogan on the front: ‘I’m Not a Gynecologist, but I’ll Take a Look.’ Damn, that’s funny.”

  Serge stopped snipping and began smearing glue across Clyde’s bare chest. He opened a product from the supermarket and placed the pieces in a careful arrangement. “Now we just wait for the drying process.”

  Chapter 6

  Four Years Earlier

  Tequesta, Florida.

  The northeastern tip of Palm Beach County on the ocean. Named after the Native American t
ribe who lived, loved and built shell mounds here for two thousand years until ancestors of the current residents put a stop to that, clearing the way for golf.

  It is a quiet, affluent bedroom community with many dockside homes and waterways, making it popular among sportsmen. Most prefer sailing out into the Atlantic under the bright sun for their recreation, but some are nocturnal. Night scuba diving is an exciting change of pace, with all the local reefs. So is night fishing.

  On a Tuesday evening, just after eleven o’clock, a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler with twin Mercury engines cleared the jetties at Jupiter Inlet and began bouncing across the waves out to sea. The continental shelf off this coast is among the narrowest on the whole U.S. seaboard, sometimes barely a mile wide before precipitously dropping off hundreds of feet, where they call it deep-sea fishing.

  The Whaler continued cresting small swells. Four heavy-duty spin-casting rods swayed in their holders like radio antennae. The boat’s only occupant, a loner named Remy Skillet, also had two rifles and a shotgun. He was going shark fishing. He felt a slight pain in his mouth and thought of missed dental appointments.

  A mile out, on the edge of the continental shelf, Remy cut the engine and drifted with the current. All lines went in the water, along with a dumped bucket of bloody chum that spread a grease apron off the stern. Seasoned anglers understand that the sport requires mental stamina, and Remy had the kind of patience of someone who brings guns with him to fish. He began blasting the water with an assault rifle before he realized he was shooting at his own chum slick, now glistening under the moon. He opened another beer. He was so far offshore that the lights of the oceanfront homes formed a single, horizontal thread of light, which was his only indication of where black sky left off and black water began. The ocean wind was more loud than stout, and carried a salty mist from the bow slapping the waves. The salt made Remy reach for another beer. That’s when the shark hit the bait.

  It was a seven-foot mako, gauging from dorsal to tail, and it began swimming back and forth under the boat, bending one of Remy’s thickest rods to the breaking point. This required the shotgun. The water exploded off the port side, then the starboard, then port again. The next blast was decidedly louder than the others, and Remy took a step back and stilled his weapon. “That couldn’t have been my gun. What was it?” Then he turned around and recoiled even more. “Holy shit!”

  Remy’s face glowed in the orange light as a fireball mushroomed into the sky a few hundred yards away. What remained after that was some kind of vessel, at least forty feet long, but it was difficult to determine much else because it had burned practically to the waterline. Remy started up his engine and headed in the direction of the explosion.

  Minutes later, Remy idled his boat as it circled the smoldering wreckage. He felt his vessel bump something, and it wasn’t the other boat. He looked over the side and couldn’t see anything at first, because it was black. Not the water, but the scuba suit that the floating dead guy was wearing. Then he saw a second body in a wet suit, and a third, all bobbing in the waves. The toll ended at four, the last guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt with scorch marks.

  Remy scratched his head. “What on God’s green earth happened here?”

  Then more confusion as one of the previously motionless bodies began to thrash. Remy fell into his captain’s chair. “Jumpin’ Jesus!”

  In all the excitement and beer, Remy had completely forgotten about the shark on his fishing line that he’d dragged over to the scene and that was now devouring the bodies.

  “Stop that! Stop that right now!” He racked his twelve-gauge.

  Blam! . . . Blam! Blam! Blam! . . . Blam! Blam! . . .

  A steadier hand could have accomplished the objective with less ammunition, but Remy was still able to get the situation under control. The last shot sent the shark away from the bodies and diving under the boat . . .

  In the days to follow, Remy would be arrested as the prime suspect, mainly because all the victims were presumed to have died from multiple shotgun blasts.

  “No, really,” Remy told them. “I was trying to preserve the evidence.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A shark was eating them.”

  “You do realize it’s now impossible to determine how they died? And we wouldn’t even have been able to identify two of them if it weren’t for tattoos.”

  “Am I in trouble? . . .”

  But right now, as the bodies were still bobbing around Remy’s vessel, he had another question. “Where’s that last Schlitz?”

  A half mile away, night-vision binoculars watched a sinewy man crouching near the bait wells of a Boston Whaler, then standing up and appearing to drink from a can.

  A whisper: “What’s going on?”

  “I think we just caught a big break.”

  “But what the hell was all that shooting?”

  “That was the big break.” The binoculars followed Remy as he headed toward the front of the boat, tripped over something and disappeared from view, then popped back up. “This clown just shot up the evidence.”

  “Why?”

  “He was night-fishing. They use beer.”

  The three men continued hashing out their predicament in muted tones as they lay on their stomachs across the bow of a six-hundred-horsepower go-fast boat. The boat was as black as their jumpsuits, and all the running lights were off.

  They waited silently. The reason was obvious. They were about to slip away from the crime scene, as they say, scot-free. All they had to do was remain dark and quiet until Remy departed without detecting their presence, and pray he didn’t lose his navigational bearings and head toward them.

  He headed toward them.

  “Don’t panic,” said one of the jumpsuits. “He’s still too far off to be on dead reckoning.”

  They waited.

  “He’s not veering.”

  “He’ll veer.”

  Remy’s bow light grew brighter.

  “He’s not veering.”

  “He’ll— . . . Shit!”

  The trio vaulted back behind the controls and gave it full throttle. At the last second, the black void of a large powerboat with its lights off shot out from in front of Remy.

  “Whoa!” Remy cut the steering wheel in a classic over-correction, careening for a slalom to port. And because all fishing boats are required to have way more engine than they’ll ever need, the centrifugal force flung Remy over the side into the water.

  Fortunately, the boat had a “kill switch” in the event the captain went overboard, and the fishing vessel quieted to a stop and settled into the water just a short swim away.

  Remy sighed with relief as he floated. “What a night . . .”

  Oh, and when the authorities would eventually question Remy, it would be in a hospital room. Because as Remy dog-paddled back to his boat, the shark still on his fishing line came over and bit him.

  Chapter 7

  Fort Lauderdale

  Chug, chug, chug. “What are we waiting for?” asked Coleman. “It looks like that stuff on your prisoner is dry now.”

  Serge glanced out the window. “The weather’s still really crappy.”

  “Is it going to rain?”

  “You’d think it would cut loose any second,” said Serge. “But it’s holding up. Just a full canopy of black clouds. To this day, whenever the weather is crappy like this, I get a joyous sense of childhood déjà vu. Instead of becoming glum, we’d use our imaginations and play endless games indoors.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “To the shopping bags! . . .”

  A few minutes later, Serge chased Coleman around the room, running over the tops of beds. “I got you! I got you!”

  “You did not!”

  “Yes, I did!” Serge blasted his friend in the face.

  “Hold on,” said Coleman. “I need to refill my squirt gun . . .”

  “Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm! . . .”

  Minutes later. “Coleman, look! I’m w
alking the dog! Now I’m doing the cat’s cradle. You try.”

  “Okay.” Zing, clack. “Ow! My forehead!”

  “It’s bleeding,” said Serge. “Apply pressure.”

  “I just remembered I hate yo-yos.”

  “Mmmmmm! Mmmmmm! . . .”

  Moments after that: “Coleman, here comes the paper airplane.”

  “I’ve never played with paper airplanes like this before.”

  “It’s no fun unless they’re on fire . . . Oooh, shit, get it away from the curtains.”

  “Mmmmmm! Mmmmm! . . .”

  More stuff came out of shopping bags. More games ensued. Until finally Serge had his eyes closed tightly as he walked around the room with outstretched arms. “Marco!”

  “Polo!”

  “Marco!”

  “Polo!”

  Serge grabbed a face and squeezed a nose. “Is that you, Coleman?”

  “No,” Coleman yelled from the bathroom doorway. “It’s Clyde.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Mmmmmm! Mmmmm!”

  Serge opened his eyes. “Fun’s over.”

  Coleman took a slow sip of whiskey as he surveyed their room: Hopscotch chalk on the carpet, jump rope wrapped around a broken lamp, a burned smell from a cap-gun battle, a horseshoe sticking out of a wall, pencils stuck in ceiling tiles, scattered marbles, baseball cards, jacks, a pogo stick, a robot bong and a hostage. “This was the best party ever!”

  Serge checked the window again. “Looks like the weather’s not going to clear. We’ll just have to take our chances and pray there’s no cloudburst.”

  “Cool,” said Coleman. “I finally get to see what you have planned for him.”

  Serge ripped the tape off Clyde’s mouth and grinned. “Bet you just can’t wait to find out what’s in store.”

  “Y-y-you, you’re completely insane!”

  “Me?” said Serge, tapping himself in the middle of his pillowcase costume. He reapplied mouth tape. “Coleman, look alive. It’s time to get ready and head out.”

  “Are we going in our pillowcases?”

  Serge shook his head and grabbed another shopping bag off the floor. “I’ve got a better idea.” He dumped the sack on a bed. “Let’s put these on.”