“What if they don’t?”
“These are professionals. It’s why we pay taxes.”
Serge stopped and got out of the car, locking the gate behind the Buick. He jumped back in and gunned the engine, sending up a thick cloud of dust as they whipped back onto the Tamiami.
A half minute later, another car appeared out of the cloud. A brown Plymouth Duster.
The Buick neared the end of the Everglades. It flew through the flashing red light at Dade Corners and kept on going for the turnpike. Serge and Coleman began seeing evidence of western Miami. Heavy industry, quarries, refining plants, paint-sample test institute.
“Hold everything,” said Coleman, watching something go by his window. “Turn around!”
“What is it?”
“Just turn around. We’re getting farther away.”
Serge veered off the right shoulder, making a liberal U-turn in the grass on the opposite side. “What’s the flavor of this wild-goose chase?”
“We passed a medical supply depot,” said Coleman. “The warehouse with the barbed wire around all those industrial tanks in the back lot. I think I saw nitrous.”
“Laughing gas?” Serge slammed the brakes and the Buick squiggled to a stop down the middle of the empty road.
“What are you doing?” said Coleman.
“I’m not going on some drug safari!”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you read where those two guys in that van passed out and died from nitrous.”
“Because they were abusing it.”
Serge yanked the stick on the steering column. “I’m turning around.”
“No fair!” said Coleman. “We already got to do what you wanted to.”
“What are you, in second grade?”
“I didn’t kick the guy to death. I didn’t have to come out here and help you.”
Serge stewed a moment. “Okay. Since you appeal to my sense of fairness. But I’m not waiting forever.”
The Buick drove another hundred yards and pulled over next to chain-link with a red-diamond warning sign: VICIOUS DOGS.
They got out and walked to the fence. “You’re right,” said Serge. “These are medical tanks. Oxygen and nitrogen. And there’s the nitrous….”
Two Dobermans galloped across the storage yard. They jumped up on the fence and snapped teeth at the level of Serge’s face. “Hello, puppies.”
Coleman walked up next to Serge, pulled the dog whistle from his shirt and blew. The Dobermans yelped and scampered off to hide behind a stack of empty pallets.
Four hundred yards back, a brown Plymouth Duster sat quietly on the shoulder of the road with a clear view of the tiny Buick parked in the distance. Hands rested on the steering wheel. They were inside tan leather gloves, the kind with holes cut out for the knuckles. The hands came off the wheel. The driver’s door opened, then the trunk. Out came wading boots and a bolt-action Remington deer rifle. The boots started down the shoulder into the swamp.
“Where are your bolt-cutters?” asked Coleman.
“Trunk.”
Serge climbed up on the Buick’s roof and sat with his legs crossed, leaning forward with rapt curiosity. Coleman snipped away at the chain-link fence, the dogs repeatedly charging, Coleman dispatching them each time with another blast from the ultrasonic whistle.
A half-mile north of the highway, an eye pressed against the scope of a deer rifle. The 10X-magnification compressed the view, eight hundred yards of sawgrass and cattails, then two Dobermans, a fence and, finally, Serge, sitting yoga-style on the roof of the Buick. A finger curled around the trigger.
Serge was amazed. He had never seen Coleman put together such linear purpose. After a few minutes, Coleman had snipped a Coleman-shaped hole in the fence.
There was a faint pop in the distance. The car window shattered beneath Serge.
“What did you do to my car?” said Coleman.
Serge leaned forward and looked down at the empty window with jagged pieces of glass around the frame. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did. All your weight.”
“Hope you’re not expecting me to pay for that.”
“Forget it. I was tired of rolling it down anyway….”
“Coleman!”
“What?” He turned around. The Dobermans were almost on him. He blew the whistle. The dogs ran under a forklift.
In the unseen distance, wading boots sprinted away through the reeds, back toward a brown Plymouth Duster.
Coleman stuck the whistle in his mouth, climbed through the hole in the fence and wrapped his arms around a four-foot-tall chemical tank. He returned through the fence, tooting the whistle all the way, and slid the cylinder into the Buick’s backseat.
“We can go now,” said Coleman. He turned as the Dobermans were almost to the car. The whistle blew. They ran back through the hole in the fence.
Serge threw the car into gear and nodded. “So that’s why you carry the whistle.”
“Dogs just don’t like me.”
THE BUICK FLEW south on U.S. 1. Serge accelerated across the drawbridge from the mainland to Key Largo. He looked at Coleman. “What’s the matter?”
Coleman scratched his arms. He glanced in the backseat. Then scratched again.
Serge grinned. “You can’t get in the tank, can you?”
“There were always other guys before. They had equipment.”
“What were you planning?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tap a little hole with a pick and a hammer.”
“Are you insane? Those things are highly pressurized. It’ll blow the pick right back through your forehead!”
“What about a really tiny hole?”
“You don’t know anything about physics, do you?”
“Will you help?”
The Buick pulled into a strip mall and parked at the first of fifty scuba shops on the island. The store was empty except for a single employee behind the cash register. The nineteen-year-old salesman had sun-bleached hair, a surfer’s tan and half-mast marijuana eyelids. He was totally stoked.
“Uh, listen,” said Serge, lounging against the counter. “We need some valve work on a tank.”
“No problem-o.”
“Except it’s not really a scuba tank. It’s for medical purposes.”
The salesman shook his head. “No oxygen tanks. I can’t work on anything flammable.”
“It’s not oxygen. It’s something else, but it’s inert.”
“What?”
“Why don’t I just show you?”
Serge and Coleman wrestled the tank into the store.
The salesman started giggling and pointing at them. “You dudes are gonna do nitrous!”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhh!” Serge set the tank in front of the counter.
“Don’t worry, dudes. I do this all the time. One of my specialties.”
“How long?”
“Half hour. But it has to be cash. The owner’s kind of weird about this.”
Serge and Coleman killed time wandering the store. They gazed into a glass case of hulky metal wristwatches with five-hundred-foot crush depths. Coleman picked up a Speedo box. “So you’re really going to marry Molly?”
“Isn’t she special?”
Coleman opened the box and stretched the trunks in front of his face. “I just don’t see you two together.”
“There’s a soul-mate connection,” said Serge. “I can’t explain it, but she’s definitely the one.”
The Speedo ripped. Coleman stuck it back in the box. “What if she isn’t the one?”
“Then we shake hands, say no hard feelings, and I drop her some place with no phones for five miles. Word on the street is you need a big head start….”
“Nitrous tank’s ready!”
They went in the back room. The salesman beamed proudly at his art. “Okay, you’re gonna love this. Easy connections, that’s my trademark. Here’s where your regulator goes” — he attached a rubber hose that ran to the mouthpiece in his other hand — “and this is your auxiliary port with universal mount.”