“I believe someone has my ticket,” said Rogan.
“Your ticket?” Pelota laughed with derision. “I believe you are seriously mistaken.”
“You’re the one who’s making a mistake.” Rogan tilted his head slightly, and all his men raised their weapons. Instantly, Pelota’s crew raised theirs. Fingers twitched on triggers.
Standoff.
The O.K. Corral comes to Miami.
Nobody moved. Two parallel firing lines faced each other twenty yards apart, with Serge and his hapless friends caught in the middle.
All the women from the salons were at the windows. It was a simple equation of timing now. Whoever got the drop and shot first at the perfect moment. But no sooner or it would be an uncoordinated spray.
The innocent people glanced one way and the other at the death squads. The looks in the gunmen’s eyes told them exactly what they were considered to be: collateral damage.
Goons in each camp slowly began squeezing triggers.
Suddenly another squeal of tires. A black Lincoln convertible raced into the parking lot. “Marilyn, I love you!”
“Oh no,” said Serge.
An SUV sped in from another direction. Dundee jumped out with his camera, and Brisbane made a fist. “Action!”
“Oh no,” said Reevis.
“Who the fuck are all these people?” said Pelota.
“The ticket,” said Rogan.
The squeezing fingers were a hair from dropping the firing pins.
The door of the law office opened, and an oblivious man with a camo hat and a cardboard box wandered into the fire zone.
All guns swung toward him.
He looked up. “Ahhhhhhh!” And dropped the box. A reptile scampered.
“Alligator!”
Every trigger pulled.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang . . .
The crowd in the middle flattened themselves to the ground as chunks of parking lot exploded around the gator. But all the shots were wildly off target because the gunmen had learned how to shoot from TV. The reptile emerged unscathed.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang . . .
But bullets do have a habit of ricocheting. Lead flew up from the pavement.
A scream as one of Pelota’s men went down, then one of Rogan’s.
Bang, bang, bang . . .
More screams.
“Cease fire!” Pelota waved both arms in the air. “Everyone knock it off! It’s just a stupid little alligator! We don’t have the ticket yet!”
When the smoke cleared, bodies lay still, and each of the gangs was down to three.
A bicycle rolled by on the sidewalk with reptiles dangling from the handlebars.
“Iguanas!”
Bang, bang, bang.
“Stop shooting at everything!” yelled Pelota.
Sirens, police cars, dozens. The heavy artillery told them to hang back a block and form a perimeter until the tactical armored trucks arrived. Officers drew weapons and squatted behind open squad-car doors.
The warring factions grabbed clips to reload, and Serge used the opportunity to inch closer to the Corvette. He glanced toward the window of the nail salon and furtively formed his thumb and forefinger into a letter of the alphabet. One of the nail women nodded.
The guns were racked and raised. Squinting, quiet, itchy fingers.
Serge slowly reached for the dashboard and put on the Oswald mask.
“Ahhhhhhh!”
JFK took off running.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang . . .
The brown-haired man high-stepped it through the flying chunks of pavement and dove back into his convertible Lincoln.
More ricochets, more screams, more bodies fell.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang . . .
“Stop shooting! Stop shooting!” screamed Pelota.
But he was only talking to himself. The crowd in the middle looked around. Rogan’s crew had been entirely wiped out, and Pelota’s gang was down to, well, Pelota.
A woman ran out of the nail salon and hugged Serge. “Don’t shoot him! Don’t shoot him!”
“Are you out of your mind?” yelled Pelota. “Get back in the store.”
She ran off and took shelter.
Ocho Pelota rolled his eyes at the sky. “The fucking ticket? Please?”
“I can’t take this anymore,” said Ziggy. “I’m way too high . . . I have the ticket.”
“That’s more like it,” said Pelota. “Just pass it over and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Now that Pelota’s eyes had turned to Ziggy, Serge worked a hand behind his back, manipulating what the nail salon lady had been able to slip him.
Ziggy’s trembling fingers fished the ticket from his wallet, and he shook even more as he extended his arm toward the gunman. The stress was too much. The ticket fell from his grasp.
It seemed like it was happening in slow motion as the tiny piece of paper fluttered down. Everyone watched in shock as it slipped through the grating of a storm drain, where a raging subterranean river of runoff began taking it on its journey to the sea.
“Ahhhhh!” screamed Pelota, losing control with ungoverned anger. He quickly raised his weapon to kill every last one of them.
Just as he did, Serge hit him in the eyes with a laser from the nail salon. “Ahhhhhh!”
The natural reflex is for the hands to go to the face, kind of like a blink response.
When Pelota did, he shot himself in the head five times.
Everyone jumped back as Pelota momentarily stood lifeless before toppling over.
A parking lot full of silent, open mouths and big white eyes. Did that just happen?
Then the street came alive again with sirens and tires. All the police cars converged on the strip mall. Officers rushed toward the carnage.
“Serge,” said Brook. “What are you going to do? They’ve got the place surrounded!”
“Just like I planned it.”
“Planned?”
Cops kicked guns away from the hands of fallen bad guys. Others ran toward the survivors. Serge popped the Corvette’s trunk, grabbed something for himself and handed another to Coleman.
Just as the officers arrived, the pair finished slipping into their Windbreakers.
“You’re the hostage negotiators?” asked a sergeant.
“I’ll be doing the paperwork on this for a month,” said Serge.
“What’s with the cheetah and panda outfits.”
“Undercover. Sign-spinners.” Serge pointed vaguely up the road. “I’ve got to coordinate with headquarters and seal the airport. Others on the watch list might be trying to get away.”
“Homeland Security? FBI?”
“It’s a task force.” Serge put a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “But I respect your jurisdiction, so the person you need to talk to is that attorney over there. She’ll give you the whole story. And make sure you spell your name for the press release.”
“You got it.” The sergeant waved for a couple of officers guarding the edge of the parking lot to pull back and make space so the silver Corvette could get through.
Serge headed south on Biscayne Boulevard, wearing a cheetah costume and hostage-negotiator Windbreaker, sitting next to a panda as they passed a bicyclist with dangling iguanas, looking in the rearview mirror as officers interviewed Korean salon workers, an Australian film crew, Marilyn Monroe and JFK, while a man in a camo hat ran through a dozen bodies chasing a small alligator. Serge shook his head to himself. “Life goes by way too fast when it’s the same thing every day.”