Joe and Sammy sat down.
The guys talked nonstop for twenty minutes while the girls faked yawns and tapped their watches. “So that’s the deal,” said Joe. “These three Latin guys are paying us to drive their Lexus across the state, and they’re even throwing in a couple of motel rooms on the beach. We just need someone to drive our car. What d’ya say?”
City talked real slow and annoyed, like she was dealing with the simple. “Why don’t one of you drive the Lexus and the other drive your car?”
“Cuz then we can’t drink beer and party on the way over,” Sammy said like it was obvious. “It wouldn’t be a roadtrip.”
“Who were these guys with the Lexus?”
“Great guys!…” said Sammy. “What were their names?”
City looked out the side window at their Alfa Romeo. A police cruiser drove by slowly, then stopped and backed up.
“Please, you gotta come with us,” said Sammy.
The officer got out and started walking around the Alfa.
“On second thought, it’s not such a bad idea,” said City. “Where’s your car?”
“Right across the street.” Sammy pointed. “When can you leave?”
“How ’bout right now?”
13
The Diaz Boys had a big shipment of cocaine headed for Tampa Bay, and they decided to try one last time to make a drop at a rented home.
They sat down their newest mole couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez, and told them about all the other couples they had placed in rented homes, only to screw up. The Diaz Boys let them know in no uncertain terms exactly what the score was.
“What’s the score?” said Mr. Ramirez.
“We just told you!”
Ramirez wasn’t really their name and they weren’t really married. They were Miguel Cruz and Maria Vasquez from Colombia, both in their late fifties, who had recently immigrated to the United States with green cards arranged by the Diaz Boys with hefty bribes. They posed as a married couple. To make the arrangement more credible and unassuming, they were accompanied by a sweet great-grandmother, who was actually Margarita de Cortez, the vicious Mata Hari of Venezuelan politics from the 1940s, who was rumored to have been making love to the finance minister when she stabbed him in the heart with the spike of a German kaiser helmet that he had begged her to wear to bed. But now she was just another harmless old lady in her eighties on Florida ’s Gulf Coast -Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, the live-in mother-in-law.
The Diaz Boys repeated what the penalty would be if there were any more mistakes-just in case there was any confusion. The Ramirezes nodded eagerly that they understood and that everything would be fine. Thank you for the opportunity-you won’t regret it. They shook hands and made pleasantries until they noticed Margarita de Cortez sitting silently off to the side. Everyone stopped talking and looked over at her.
“I need a smoke,” she said. “And a drink. And a man.”
M r. and Mrs. Ramirez moved into Calusa Pointe Tower Arms, unit 1193. They couldn’t have been more thrilled about living in the United States. They wanted to be part of the American Dream. They signed up for citizenship classes.
But above all else, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez remembered what the Diaz Boys had said, and they kept to themselves and were gracious in all social situations. It came naturally. Their enthusiasm for being in the land of the free bubbled over, and they were exceedingly pleasant to all their neighbors, who reacted with surliness and sweeping expostulations. The Ramirezes couldn’t understand how people who had so much could be so bitter. But they figured it was just another facet of American culture they did not yet understand but would soon come to appreciate.
After a few months, the Ramirezes got the odd feeling that things had changed. Their neighbors’ normally crappy outlook had become one of suspicion and standoffishness. One day the Ramirezes were walking back to the unit with grocery sacks when they saw Mrs. Ploomfield standing in her nightgown just outside the door of unit 1193, pointing down the hall at one of their neighbors. “Yeah, you! I’m talking to you, motherfucker!…”
Mrs. Ramirez screamed and dropped her brown bag of vegetables. She leaped over the zucchini squash and ran up the walkway.
Edna Ploomfield was still yelling down the hall at the neighbor as Mrs. Ramirez hustled her inside: “You’re dead! You hear me? Dead!”
Mr. Ramirez brought up the rear and bolted the door. The couple quivered and stared at Edna in disbelief.
“What are you doing?” yelled Mr. Ramirez. “Do you want to die?”
Mrs. Ploomfield spit on the floor with disdain and shuffled toward the kitchenette.
Everyone in Calusa Pointe knew Mrs. Ploomfield and they avoided her. Just the opposite in the bar next door at Hammerhead Ranch, where she made lots of friends. One of her drinking buddies was Guy Rockney, the weatherman for FCN, who owned a penthouse at Calusa Pointe.
Rockney told Ploomfield he had a problem. He had come up with this great idea at the station for Toto the Weather Dog. The station gave him a raise but also made him take care of the pooch, which was running and peeing all over the penthouse and chewing up his shoes. He tried everything. Books, videos, obedience school. No matter what he did, he just couldn’t get the dog to behave. Could Toto live with her? He’d pay.
“Of course,” she said. “I love animals.”
Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez returned to Calusa Pointe from the drugstore and found a small Chihuahua wearing a Florida Gators cheerleading outfit, pompoms tied to its paws, sitting quietly in the corner.
“Stay!” Mrs. Ploomfield commanded, and the dog stayed.
T he mayor of Beverly Shores was shrinking.
This much was confirmed when he was fingerprinted and photographed for attempted murder with a lawn dart, which was dropped to simple assault. The news vans converged on Calusa Pointe again. Malcolm Kefauver had lost at least an inch since the last news story. He was now only five foot two, and his clothes had become so baggy they were in style.
The judge told Malcolm he expected more from a mayor, even if it was just the smallest incorporation in three counties. In addition to the lecture, Malcolm got probation and a hundred hours of picking up litter on the beach, which he accomplished by attaching a lawn dart to the end of his cane.
Malcolm Kefauver was up for reelection. The city’s vote total each year averaged one eighty-eight. Elections at Beverly Shores were wonderful occasions. Rows of folding plastic chairs filled the community rooms of the condominiums, and red-white-and-blue banners covered the walls and the podiums like the cabooses of whistle-stop trains. There was always a strapping turnout at candidate forums because of the likelihood they would degrade into talk-show donnybrooks.
Kefauver approached the podium. He was running for mayor as a Republican. The mayor and the city council did little more than argue over trash pickup, pool hours and the weight limit of pets. This didn’t stop Kefauver from issuing a tirade against the intangibles tax, foreign aid and the cultural elite in Hollywood that was conducting a systematic campaign to undermine the God-fearing values that built the condominiums of Beverly Shores. The crowd applauded politely.
As the clapping died down, someone in back yelled, “What about your arrest, Manson!”
Someone else: “Yeah, Dillinger, will your criminal enterprise be part of your administration?”
Laughter and hooting.
“Lies!” retorted Kefauver. “The distortions of commies and fags!”
“What are you talking about? You hit Mr. Goldfarb in the butt with a lawn dart. He’s a retired Army major with ten grandkids!”
“That’s right!” another woman yelled. “And why did you try to evict my dog, Muffins?”
“Oh shut up!” replied another heckler. “Your dog’s a mangy bitch!”
“She is not!” the woman responded. “But your wife has four martinis with lunch, not including the flask in her purse.”