The Riptide Ultra-Glide (16 page)

“That was only to hold the room in case of late arrival,” said the clerk. “But you were early. Here are your keys. Number seventeen.”

“Wait. So until a minute ago, my card was never charged,” said Pat. “I didn't actually need a refund.”

“That's right.”

“Since it was just a minute ago, can we get a refund?”

“You'll have to talk to the owner.”

Pat snatched the keys off the counter and looked at his wife. “Let's just go.”

“Hey, buddy, what are you trying to pull?”

“What?” said Pat.

The clerk pointed. “My pen.”

Pat handed it back, and the couple left with brass room keys.

The clerk waited until the door closed and shook his head. “What's with the customers in this place? . . .” Then he picked up the phone. “Zzmükhan, it's Mo. Yeah, just got another bunch. Drop on by.”

A trail of black smoke came up the highway, and a thirty-year-old purple Cadillac Fleetwood pulled into the motel. Its windows decoratively trimmed with mariachi sombrero balls. A gypsy cab.

The driver entered the office.

“Zzmükhan,” said the clerk, tossing him a thumb drive from his laptop.

The driver was lanky, with an untucked button-up shirt and long dreadlocks that fell down his back from under a floppy, knitted cap in the national colors of Jamaica. The whites of his eyes were a baleful yellow. Empty. He handed the motel manager three hundred dollars without speaking, and left the office with even less fanfare. Then he went back to his motel room six blocks away and plugged the thumb drive into his own computer, where data from the magnetic strips of fifty credit cards zipped through microprocessors to a special machine that cloned the information onto the magnetic strips of fifty stolen blank credit cards, which went back out to the gypsy cab and three blocks north on U.S. 1 to a boarded-up gas station, where a loose, roaming group of life's leftovers quickly formed a line of loyal customers, each forking over sixty dollars to respectively become Casey Windsor, Octavio Reyes, Danforth Hill, Molina Pomeroy, Hideki Yokomota and Patrick McDougall.

Chapter Sixteen

RIVIERA BEACH

T
he sun had gone down. Coleman stood at the edge of the surf, surrounded by a group of sunburned kids with salt-water-bleached hair.

“Shhhhh!” said one of the boys. “Coleman's about to speak.”

“Here's a foolproof way not to get arrested while blowing doobies.” Coleman turned his back against a sea breeze and cupped his hands to fire up a number. He exhaled the hit and began strolling as small waves rolled over his toes. The others followed. “You walk along the edge of the ocean after dark, making sure nobody else is within a comfort bubble of twenty yards, just in case there's an undercover narc on the beach. And here's the most critical part: Make sure your stash is
stashed
. Nothing on your person except the jay in your hand. Then just smoke it like a regular cigarette; no clutching or thumb-toking. The beach wind should take care of the smell, and if it doesn't, or if some narc makes a move for other reasons, the twenty-yard buffer gives you plenty of cushion so he can't snatch the evidence from your hand, and you just dive in the ocean and roll it apart in your fingers underwater.”

“Wow,” one of the kids said to another. “Coleman's, like, got his act completely together, man. His mind is working on so many levels at the same time . . .”

“He didn't just pull that shit out his ass,” said another. “It took some stone-serious planning, man . . .” His hands cut through the air like slow-motion karate. “ . . . Seeing all the angles before anyone else could even dream of them . . .”

“Thank you, Coleman . . .”

“Right on, Coleman. Don't ever give up the fight, man! . . .”

Fists of solidarity went into the air as the group walked away.

Serge approached from the opposite direction. “Who
are
all these people?”

“I have no idea,” said Coleman. “You think something odd is going on?”

“You mean the part about lots of strangers coming up out of the blue and acting like you hold an endowed chair at Oxford? Gee, I wonder.” Serge headed back up the beach, past his sand fort.

Coleman followed and pointed down. “Are you going to finish repairing that?”

Serge shook his head and continued plodding through cool night sand. “It's gotten way too dark. I'll resume reconstruction in the morning.” He shifted the strap of the canvas bag on his shoulder. “Meanwhile, back to the beach activities list . . .
Ding, ding, ding!
. . . That's the surprise beach-list Daily Double!”

“What's that?”

“Read cheesy magazines you'd otherwise never touch, and they're all in unusually heavy supply at beach convenience stores. I saw one over there on the strip.”

They finished trudging back through the sand and crossed the street. Someone over at the public beach showers threw a hand in the air.
“Coleman! Power party!”

Coleman waved back. “Thank you very much.”

The pair reached the doors of the convenience store. Some babes came out. They covered their mouths and whispered.
“It's Coleman!” “Are you sure?” “I'm getting an autograph . . . Coleman, can you sign my breast? . . .”

Serge watched dumbstruck as Coleman capped a pen and belatedly came through the doors. “We've definitely fallen through some kind of flux port in the universe.” They wandered into the magazine aisle and began riffling issues.

“Here's a motorcycle magazine with hot chicks on choppers,” said Coleman. “And a fishing magazine with a hot chick in one of those deep-sea rod holders right over her snatch, and a hunting magazine with a chick in a T-back straddling a moose head . . .”

“I love convenience-store periodical sections.” Serge picked up a magazine dedicated to bodybuilding and dirt bikes. “Completely different from the rest of the world.”

“Here's one that must be for women. Check out their main feature article: ‘Call Him or Text Him?' I say blow him.”

“Coleman, that's offensive.”

“But it's the right answer.”

“Of course it's the right answer, but you can't just put that on a magazine cover.”

“Because chicks will get upset?”

“I don't know about them, but I'll get upset.” Serge unfurled a centerfold of a swamp buggy. “Word like that getting out? Women apparently don't know it yet, but if they all coordinated on the Internet, they could rule the world in forty-eight hours.”

“Holy shit!” said Coleman.

“Relax. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.”

“No,” said Coleman. “They got the new issue of
High Tides
!”

“What's that?”

“It's like the Florida version of
High Times
.” Coleman waved the magazine at the clerk behind the register. “When did these come out?”

“Just delivered this morning.”

Serge grabbed a wrestling magazine with blood-streaked faces. “I don't see why you're getting so excited. I'm sure you already know everything in there.”

“It's not that,” said Coleman. “Look!”

“Holy shit!” said Serge.

“I'm on the cover,” said Coleman. “Lenny, too.”

They went silent and read the headline on its glossy front: “The Bong Brothers! Can their records ever be broken?”

Serge quickly flipped through pages. “But what—? . . . How—? . . . Why—? . . .”

“These magazines are always asking for reader photos,” said Coleman. “So Lenny and me sent in everything we had. Then someone called his mom's house in Pompano while we were there. Lenny thought the request for an interview was a hoax, but played along anyway as a goof.”

“So that's what all this nonsense with those kids on the beach has been about.”

Coleman carried ten copies to the register and plopped them on the counter. “It's the happiest day of my life . . .”

They came out of the store. From across the parking lot: “Coleman! Rock steady!”

Coleman returned the power salute.

A two-stroke engine gunned.

“Great,” said Serge. “It's my new friend again. The quarterback.”

“He's on a motorcycle,” said Coleman.

“No shirt, no shoes, swim trunks. If there was a photo of flunking an IQ test . . .”

“A bunch of bikini babes are gathering around him.”

“Christ,” said Serge. “They're just encouraging his ego . . . Now he's offering a ride and they're all raising their hands and hopping up and down.”

“He picked the blonde in the skimpiest suit,” said Coleman. “She's climbing on the back of his bike.”

“This is sickening,” said Serge. “The most perfect specimens of each gender from the whole beach. It's like the fucking master race on that bike. And absolutely everyone else is staring in envy . . . Come on, America. Don't buy into surface flash.”

“I'd do her,” said Coleman.

“Thank you for your support.”

“He's gunning the engine again. They're about to take off . . .”

A final fuel injection of the V-twin.

The stud patched out to impress everyone. When he did, it was like a magician pulling the tablecloth from under his passenger, and she fell to the ground in a sitting position, skidding a few feet down the road on her bottom.

“Oooooo!” Coleman covered his eyes. “Ass rash. I can't look . . . And she was so hot just a second ago.”

Serge looked. His eyes locked twenty yards up the road, where the stud had stopped his bike. “Unbelievable. He's too embarrassed to come back and be a man, so he's compensating by arrogantly making fun of the girl with his brain-dead buddy.”

Serge darted out into the road and offered a hand. “Let me help you up . . . are you okay?”

Tears. “It hurts.”

“That's the worst part,” said Serge. “I think you're fine, but it's definitely going to tickle for a while.” He peeked behind her to gauge the injury and winced. “Here, put your weight on me. Let's get you some first aid.”

“Look,” said Coleman.

“Oh,
now
he's coming,” said Serge.

“What's the deal?” said the stud. “You trying to make me look bad?”

“You already have your arms all the way around that job.”

“Let her go.”

“So you can help her?”

“No, you're showing me up. If the bitch is too stupid to hang on, she deserves what she gets.”

“Coleman,” said Serge. “Take her arm.” Then back to the crew cut: “I was pussyfooting around before with the sand castle, but seriously, what is your malfunction?”

“
You're
going to have a malfunction!”

“Listen, king of the comebacks, the girl's too young for you to begin with, then you injure her and offer insults instead of assistance. So you need to step off of me right now or we're going round and round.”

The stud instead took a step forward. “You're telling me to step off?”

Serge took his own step forward, putting them chest to chest. “Not really. That was just another IQ test. And there's the buzzer. Sorry, but we have some lovely consolation prizes backstage, like a new set of knuckle guards for when you drag them.”

“That's it!”

A lifeguard, who was in pretty good shape himself, ran over with a medic bag and wedged himself between the two. “Break it up, guys, or I'm calling the beach patrol.”

The pair continued steaming and glaring like boxers being introduced by the ring announcer. Serge finally turned to more important matters. “Got a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in that bag?” he asked the lifeguard. “And some triple-antibiotic cream? . . .”

BROWARD COUNTY

A
n early evening on U.S. Highway 1. Modest traffic.

But along one block just below the county line, an untypical amount of honking horns, even for South Florida. All directed at one vehicle.

A gold Oldsmobile with curb feelers drove through the intersection at eleven miles an hour before finally turning into a parking lot, its undercarriage grinding the curb in excruciating slow motion. It was a '91 Cutlass Supreme, and it had ten thousand miles on the odometer. The front seat was all the way forward so the driver could see out from under the steering wheel.

The parking lot ran in front of a strip mall anchored by a pain clinic. All the storefronts appeared more or less the same, except one. It had a row of reinforced cement pylons at the curb to prevent drivers from plowing into the place. Which usually meant a liquor store.

But not this time. On the glass behind the pylons, in an arc of elegant silver lettering: W
OLFGANG'S
D
ANCE
S
TUDIO
. And underneath:
Classic ballroom instruction.

The Oldsmobile continued across the parking lot. Other cars that had started backing out quickly pulled back in. The Cutlass approached the studio, slowing to three miles an hour, then two. When the front bumper hit a pylon, it was the signal for the driver to turn off the engine.

The car door opened. Five minutes later, the front door of the studio opened. Bells jingled.

A dashing man in a tuxedo turned around at the sound. Sixty-three years old, conspicuously dyed hair and a gleaming smile of the whitest, most obvious dentures, like a game-show host on a cruise ship. He spread his arms. “Coco! Coco Farina!”

“Wolfgang!” said the shuffling old woman, eyeing the other women in the room. “Don't be buttering up those tramps.”

Wolfgang rushed to her. “Always the character! Full of moxie!” He bent down to kiss her hand.

“Moxie, schmoxie. I'm completely serious,” said Coco. “They're sluts. Especially Mabel over there, with her new permanent, thinking sunshine beams from her twat—”

Wolfgang intentionally interrupted with a hearty, nervous laugh—“Ha! Ha! Ha!”—then looked back at a cadaverous woman snoring in a chair. He reached deep for his best Clark Gable and gazed into Coco's eyes. “Mabel's a lovely woman, but not half as exquisite as you!”

Coco gazed back. “How come nobody's ever snagged you? Hubba hubba!”

“Who wants to get married?” Another kiss on the hand. “When I can instead spend so much time with all you great gals at the studio.”

And it was a nice enough studio. Fake parquet floor, full mirrors on all the walls, waist-high wooden handrails. The sound system was a boom box from Walmart that sat in the corner on a bar stool. But the main attraction was Wolfgang.

Wolfgang Finch.

Suave as they come for the silver set. He clapped his hands loudly for attention, then placed a hand over his heart. “What a stunning vision of beauty. You're even more radiant than last time . . . Now, if you will all take your places, we can begin today's lesson.”