When serial-killing local Florida historian Serge A. Storms is off his meds, no one is safe — not Russian hoods, Jamaican mobsters, spoiled frat boys, women’s book clubs, drug dealers, bad Vegas-rejected local lounge acts — especially when $5 million in cash in a bugged suitcase is still racing up and down the Eastern Seaboard. But in the oddball circus known as the Sunshine State, little things like astronomical body counts tend to get lost in the shuffle.
THE STINGRAY SHUFFLE
TIM DORSEY
The fifth book in the Serge Storms series
Copyright © 2003 by Tim Dorsey
For Kerry, Chris and Dinah
The only reason for time is so
that everything doesn’t happen at once.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.
— GROUCHO MARX
PROLOGUE
Uh-oh. Lenny slipped me LSD.
That can be the only explanation.
It’s been nonstop hallucinations. Which normally I don’t mind, but you wouldn’t believe how it complicates trying to cross U.S. 1 against heavy traffic. I must have stepped off the curb and headed back about fifty times now. I think I’m in the Florida Keys.
I keep slapping the side of my head to make the visions stop, but it only changes the picture, like a slide projector.
Slap!
Carjackings, exploitation of the elderly, cigarette boats running from the Coast Guard, melanoma, tar balls, deed restrictions, beefy mosquitoes that crack windshields, Colombian shoot-outs, Cuban boycotts, Mexican standoffs, rampant-growth speculators, offshore-drilling lobbyists, cheap rum, cheaper motels, crack vials, condoms, mouse ears, William Kennedy Smith, Phillip Michael Thomas, chicken wing restaurants featuring women’s breasts…
Slap!
Shark attacks in two feet of water, barracuda jumping into boats and biting people, alligators roaming backyards and eating poodles named Muffins, college boys named Bo funneling beers on the beach and trampling sand castles and making children cry, broken-down cruise ships with decks full of irritable people from Michigan in puffy orange life preservers, the lottery won by a pool of 23 office workers who quit their jobs to become down-and-out junkies, trained seals playing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on bicycle horns…
Slap!
There. The hallucinations have stopped. I’m in the dark, now. I’m weightless, too. That’s much better.
Whoops. Spoke too soon. The weightlessness is giving way. I’m starting to drop. Faster and faster. Free-falling toward a pinpoint of light. The light grows bigger, spinning off bright curved red swirls as I hurtle down this spiral chute like some hokey special effect from The Twilight Zone, or Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo; I’m helpless, this little black silhouette of a man, arms and legs flailing in a blizzard of chads, plummeting toward a haunting psychedelic pinwheel with the floating head of Jeb Bush in the middle…
The spinning has stopped. I’m coming out of the tunnel now. The LSD feels like it’s wearing off, but the sky is still ten different colors and the clouds are whispering about me. Just ignore them or you’ll end up doing something odd that will attract attention. Are we hungry? My skin is unusually sheen and agreeable. I want to raise my voice and croon the opus of life!… I can’t think with all the people in my head talking at once! I need to call the room to order…. That’s better. Next item of business? Yes, you in the back with your hand raised…. Why are we wandering in the middle of busy traffic?… Good question. How did we get out here? I thought we were still on the sidewalk… Well, what’s done is done. Cars are whizzing by, so work with it… Try to get to the opposite curb. So what if that truck is coming? He’ll stop because I will it. I am the master of time, space and dimension. Here we go: to the curb… See? The truck stopped. He hit that car when he swerved around me, but I’ve made my point… Where’s that music coming from? It’s The Doors, “People Are Strange.” No kidding. The sound… it’s coming from the sun. God’s playing it on his personal hydrogen jukebox, the Big Puff Daddy-G layin’ down the master moral rap and spinnin’ the eternal hits, If there’s a rock ’n’ roll heaven, you know they got a hulluva band!… Oh, no, that horrible song is now stuck in my head. I must kill myself immediately. Damn that Lenny!… Wait. Who’s Lenny? For that matter, who am I? Why can’t I remember my name? And what the heck is this strange outfit I’m wearing? A royal blue jumpsuit with a NASA patch on the shoulder. Am I an astronaut?… Now I’m getting a shooting pain. It’s coming from my forehead. What’s this I feel up here? That’s some huge knot you got on your dome — better have a doctor look at it. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember who I am… When in doubt, check your license. Let’s see, is your wallet in this pocket? No, not there, but… what’s this? A prescription bottle? Empty. Wow, that’s some serious medication on the label; the guy who’s taking this is one real sick-o…. Hold a sec. Could this be yours? The first name on the label is “Serge,” but the last name has worn off. And the refill date was over a month ago…. Now it’s starting to add up. This isn’t LSD after all. It’s not even a drug experience. That’s the whole problem — you haven’t taken your drugs…. Uh-oh, hallucinations again; the ground is starting to move. The road is rumbling and rising up. This is no ordinary street. It’s a bridge. A drawbridge. Only one thing to do: hurry up and get to the lip of the span and hang on by hooking your arms through the grating. That way, when the span rises, you’ll be way up at the top, above the hubbub, alone with some space to think and a clear view of the situation…. Here we go, up, up, getting pretty high now, nice panorama. Wish I had my camera. Why are all those people down there pointing at me? And who called the cops? Here they come again, drawing their guns as usual. Now I’ll have to dive in the water for my getaway. All this stress can’t be good…
Two weeks later.
An unconscious man in a blue astronaut jumpsuit lies facedown on the shore of a breezy mangrove island in the Gulf Stream. He’s coming around, talking in his sleep. Jeannie! Come out of that bottle right now! His eyelids flutter in the sand, squinting at the bright sunlight. He raises his head and sees hundreds of eyes staring back at him.
They’re still here. What do they want from me?
Serge stands up.
“I told you. I’m having memory problems. I can only recall textbook history, plus some stuff about a briefcase and a recent trip I took, but I can’t piece it all together yet.”
The eyes silently stay on him. Some blink.
“Okay, okay. One more lesson.”
Serge steps forward in the sand and spreads his arms in an encompassing gesture:
“Railroads had a seismic impact on the development of Florida, beginning with the fabled East Coast line slashing its way through the swamps a hundred years ago, opening up the bottom half of the state, an unforgiving no-man’s-land of eccentric pioneers, cranky Indians and alcoholic hermits…”
Serge. Serge A. Storms. Wiry, intense, unhinged, standing on a beach in the lower Florida Keys, leaves rustling in the salt wind, surrounded by his students, hundreds of small attentive monkeys.
“…Then the railroads unveiled the fancy deco streamliners of the 1930s, introducing the northerners to frost-free vacations and society-page beach sex in Palm Beach…”
Serge stops speaking. One of the monkeys in back is chattering.