“Betsy?”
“One of the craziest hurricanes on record. Labor Day weekend 1965. It was first spotted by a Tiros weather satellite, and it curled up near the Bahamas. Then it continued tracking northeast, out to sea, and Florida breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone got out their barbecues and went swimming. But Betsy stalled out there. Everyone gulped hard and kept watching the TV reports in disbelief as it did a complete U-turn. Nobody had seen anything like it. Betsy headed right back at south Florida with hundred-and-forty-mile-per-hour winds…” Serge swirled his arms.
“What happened?”
“Raked the bottom of the state. My family huddled in the hallway of our house. Everything got real dark and quiet. I was a little kid so I thought it was fun, but I remember it was the first time I had seen the grown-ups afraid. A small palm tree came through our living-room window, and my mother screamed. We rode it out, but seventy-four others weren’t so lucky.”
“Wow,” Lenny said softly.
The drawbridge closed and they began moving again. Serge fished in the glove compartment and found a Phil Collins tape, and he stuck it in the stereo. They passed the Pelican Diner.
“…I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight-hold on…”
“This is too cool,” said Lenny. “It’s like we’re on the exact same page. I need another joint.”
Lenny grabbed a doobie paper-clipped behind the visor and tried to light it but couldn’t. “Same thing on the pier. I need a new lighter.” He pulled into a convenience store.
Back on the road, he lit the joint on the first try with a small, windproof acetylene torch on a keychain, $9.99.
“You shouldn’t waste your money on crap like that,” said Serge, playing with the laser pointer on his own keychain.
“In the long run, paraphernalia pays for itself,” said Lenny.
“I used to know someone like you,” said Serge.
“What’s he like?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh,” said Lenny. They stopped behind a Rolls-Royce at a red light, waiting to turn onto Gulf Boulevard.
“Why were you trying to fake a suicide the other night?” asked Lenny. “Need to ditch some business partners? Meet your wife in the Bahamas to split the life insurance? Jump bail?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Serge.
“It’s obvious. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant, too. Not like the guys who dive from short bridges and leave stupid notes or torch their boat in the Gulf at night and row ashore in rafts and they’re suspected right away and turn up two weeks later in Cancún. But nobody can survive a fall from the Skyway, so you have to be dead. Your prints are all over the car you left up there. And best of all, they got your fatal jump on videotape on the bridge surveillance cameras. Except the part about what was inside Santa’s belly. Where’d you get a black parachute, anyway?”
“Pez Easter egg coloring.”
Lenny nodded.
“Wonder why this light’s taking so long,” said Serge. He stretched his neck to look forward in traffic.
Their lane had the green arrow, but the Rolls-Royce ahead of them didn’t move. Then the arrow was red again.
“Goddammit!” said Serge. “Now the light has to cycle again. What’s going on in that car?”
Serge grabbed the top of the convertible’s windshield and stood up. He grumbled and sat back down and fidgeted. The driver of the Rolls was talking on a cell phone while simultaneously trimming nose hair with tiny scissors. Serge could see the driver stop to inspect his nostrils in the lighted mirror on the back of the sun visor, then resume trimming.
“Try to hang on,” Serge whispered to himself, twisting nervously in his seat. Then he noticed the Rolls’ two bumper stickers: “God is my copilot” and “Get a job!”
“You know, that’s pretty unsafe, putting a sharp object in your nose at a red light,” said Serge. “You never know when someone might rear-end you.”
Serge reached over with his left leg and tapped Lenny’s gas pedal, and the Cadillac lurched forward and popped the bumper of the Rolls. The windows of the Rolls were up, but everyone near the intersection could hear the terrible screaming anyway.
“You might want to pull around him,” Serge told Lenny. “I think there’s some kind of problem in that car.”
They crossed the bridge at Johns Pass as a casino boat headed out to the edge of territorial waters.
“I love how we’re holed up in the room,” said Lenny. “I do it as often as I can. What about you?”
“Only when I have to.”
“I mean for fun,” said Lenny. “You know, you want to break the routine, so you drive across town and check into a seedy motel and pretend you’re on the run. Act mysterious, arouse people’s suspicions, maybe rock star the room. There’s a lot of style you can put into being a fugitive. It’s a damn American art form!”
“Turn here, David Janssen.”
“Where?”
“Here!”
Lenny checked his watch as Serge sprinted in and out of the video store and vaulted back into the passenger seat without opening the door. “Two minutes, eight seconds,” said Lenny.
“Gotta get it down under a deuce,” said Serge.
They skidded into the parking lot of a thrift store, and Serge raced in. Two minutes later, he hurdled back into the car and threw a T-shirt in Lenny’s face. Lenny held the shirt out and read the front. “ Treasure Island Police Athletic League.” Serge had an identical one, and he had already stripped off his other shirt and was wiggling his arms through the holes of the new one.
“Put that on,” said Serge. “Whenever I’m fleeing and eluding, I hit the thrifts for local law enforcement T-shirts. Makes traffic stops go much smoother.”
Back in the motel room, Lenny shoved more bottles and cans down into the ice-filled tub. Coke, Sprite, orange and grapefruit juice, Bloody Mary mix, Budweiser, Heineken, Absolut, Finlandia. Serge arranged a row of Florida keepsakes along the back of the writing desk. Above them he taped an autographed black-and-white photo of a scuba diver to the wall.
“Who’s that?” said Lenny, shotgunning a beer on the way out of the bathroom.
“Lloyd Bridges,” said Serge. “The immortal Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt. Originally, Nelson operated out of Marineland in California. But later he went freelance, and they shot several episodes in the Florida Keys, which made him technically eligible for inclusion in my shrine.”
Lenny reached into the shrine and started to pick up a Flipper thermos, but Serge slapped his hand.
“It’s burned into my mind,” Serge continued. “The end credits of every episode, Bridges sailing off in his boat, the Argonaut, and then the trademark emblem of Ziv Productions.”
“You have a good memory.”
“That’s because I don’t smoke that shit you do. I wouldn’t want to be abnormal.”
Lenny looked again at Bridges’s smiling face in the yellowed photo and the inscription, “To my pal, Serge.”
“This is all very interesting, but why put his picture up?”
“Inspiration. It’s important to build on the shoulders of the giants.”
Lenny poured vodka, lit a joint and took some speed.
Serge duct-taped the edges of the curtains to the wall, taped over the message light on the phone and the battery indicator on the smoke detector.
“What are you doing?” asked Lenny.
“Establishing theater conditions. I hate it when people watch a great movie at home with a bunch of lights on. Wrecks the whole medium. If there’s any other light source in the room except the film, it completely ruins it for me.”
Serge unplugged the pine-scented nightlight in the bathroom and taped over the blinking “12:00” on the VCR. Lenny took a small brush out of a nail polish jar and painted his joint with a brownish liquid.
“What are you doing?” asked Serge.
“Putting hash oil on this doobie,” said Lenny. “I’ve been refining the technique. The speed counteracts the dovetail-drowsiness of the weed and the depressant effect of the alcohol. The booze files down the rough edges of paranoia from the pot and hyperagitation from the amphetamine. And the marijuana heightens self-awareness to prevent you from pulling something stupid that the liquor and pills are trying to talk you into.”