T he heavy rain from Rolando-berto filled the Myakka River to flood stage as it wound through Sarasota County. Johnny Vegas had taken his four-by-four into the state park. He was on an idyllic bird-watching hike deep into the hardwood hammocks and palmettos with a pretty twenty-two-year-old nature mama. For once, it was a constructive activity for Johnny, an educational experience, a communion with the environment in the company of a wholesome, healthy woman. Johnny had met her on-line, in the Horny Hot Singles Chat Room.
They were eight miles down the trail when the woman and Johnny began exchanging silly double-entendre small talk. Hot damn, thought Johnny, I’m gonna be in those tight beige L.L. Bean hiking pants before you can say-he checked his Audubon field guide-man-o’-war frigate bird.
Johnny started buttering her up. “There’s just such a fresh, open-meadow feeling about you.”
She giggled and threw him a coy glance.
“You’re like a field of lilacs.”
She gave him another look. Was she touching her breast like that on purpose?
“You’re like little kittens and all-natural ice cream.”
She stopped on the trail and started taking off her backpack. At last he had arrived at Score City.
“You’re such a refreshing change from all those loser girls these days with tattoos…”
She froze in the trail. Oh no, thought Johnny. He gave her a fast up and down and saw just a tiny bit of green ink peeking out from under the right side of her shorts. “Did I say tattoo?”
“Yes, you did! And you’ll never see this one,” she said, slapping the right side of her ass. She reversed direction on the trail, angrily marching past Johnny in high gear back toward the four-by-four.
“Poop!” Johnny said to himself. Not only am I not scoring, but now I have to walk eight miles back to civilization in stinging silence.
A phone rang.
Johnny pulled the cell phone off his hiking belt. “Talk to me.”
It was If. “Oh, hi there!” said Johnny. He never thought he’d hear from her again after the night they got stranded on top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
They had a nice convivial confab. Turns out, If was just her nickname. Her real name was Inez Fawn Rawlings-I. F. Rawlings in her Tampa Tribune byline-a Vassar grad, Northeastern intelligentsia, rising reporter. She thought that Johnny, though not too mature or bright, looked dreamy in his tux that night at the aquarium. She would make the other women sick with jealousy when she showed up on his arm at the annual Tampa Bay media awards banquet. She told Johnny she had been nominated for the area’s highest journalistic honor, the Hubert Higgins Memorial Award, named after one of the area’s finest local writers, who was killed protecting a teenager from a mob attack on a lunch counter sit-in during the sixties. Actually, it was the former Hubert Higgins award. It was supposed to be named after Higgins in perpetuity, but in response to a tremendous outpouring of grief over a recent tragedy, it was changed this year.
I ’m up for the Toto!” If told Johnny as they entered the banquet hall at the Performing Arts Center in downtown Tampa. She wore a sheer black dress, backless, almost down to her divide, with the thinnest of straps. She held Johnny’s arm tight and waved and smiled at her friends, trying to get their attention, make them mad. She leaned up to Johnny’s ear and whispered: “Winning journalism awards gives me better orgasms.” She gave the center of his ear a quick poke with her slender tongue. Johnny’s legs went to rubber, and he almost went tumbling, but If caught him and they made it to the table with their place cards.
The lights went down and the four-ounce portions of boneless glazed chicken were served. After dinner, the sea of faces turned to the podium, where master of ceremonies Blaine Crease worked his way through a prodigious list of honors.
In the late twentieth century, a new corporate philosophy to all but blow the shareholders had ravaged newspapers and TV stations, bleeding off staffing, experience and standards until what was left of the profession was a karaoke rendition of itself. The Old Guard of journalism came to the rescue by increasing the number of awards and self-congratulatory fetes until journalism officially passed bowling for most trophies per calorie burned.
Crease was deep into the “best lighting on a weekend anchor desk” stretch of the honor roll. An elegant woman came up to If and whispered, “You got the Toto! I was backstage. I saw the engraving in the trophy.”
Johnny thrust a fist into the air in front of him. “Yessssss!”
Crease built his pace. Only one more category before the climax of the night, the Toto. If and Johnny leaned forward in anticipation. Crease moved into the copyediting awards, announcing the best headline on a breaking weekend news feature.
Rookie copy editor Kirk Curtly heard his name called out and arose with his Montblanc graduation gift clipped securely in his jacket pocket. He walked up to shake Crease’s hand and accept the solid-gold-plated trophy.
Up in the closed-off balcony was recently terminated state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole, a Remington.30-06 scoped rifle, and one of those bottles of Jack Daniel’s with a handle. He drank the bourbon out of a filthy coffee cup that read, “Ask someone who gives a shit!”
Everyone in the banquet hall heard a clear-as-day but enigmatic phrase yelled from the direction of the balcony. “Write this headline, motherfucker!”
Shots rang out and the podium was strafed. People screamed and scattered. Others dove under tables. Dole leaned over the railing to get a better angle on the fleeing Kirk Curtly, who was now three Kirks in Dole’s rifle scope, thanks to the miracle of modern alcohol. Dole leaned too far and went over the railing, doing a half-gainer onto Johnny’s and If’s table, collapsing it. If began crying and threw down her napkin. “My special night is ruined!” And she ran away.
Johnny snapped under the strain of involuntary virginity. He began beating the hell out of the half-conscious Dole, which was the image the cameras caught when the TV lights went on. Johnny didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become an instant media hero.
An hour later he was in a bar on Zack Street drowning his sorrows. At 11:07 P.M.-seven minutes after the eleven-o’clock newscast began-a statuesque blonde came over to Johnny. “That was you I just saw on the news, wasn’t it? You were great! So big and brave!” She leaned closer and suggested they call it a night and go back to her place. She didn’t have to ask Johnny twice.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked. “The movies?”
She smiled. “No, I’m not in movies, but I love to watch movies.”
Hubba-hubba, Johnny thought. He got up and put an arm around her waist and they strolled out the door and into the streets of downtown Tampa.
“So, what kind of movies do you like?” asked Johnny.
“You ever see The Crying Game?”
C C. Flag was never found. Neither was the mayor of Beverly Shores, and the crime scene tape remained across the door of his condominium at Calusa Pointe from when Mrs. Edna Ploomfield was blown up through his floor.
Neighbors began hearing movements and a voice from the unit-someone having one-sided conversations in the middle of the night. One of the bolder residents, a retiree named Cecil, knocked on the door.
A tall, lean man with dark sunglasses answered. He flipped open a billfold to display a gold police badge. Cecil leaned forward to read it, but the man flipped it closed. The man had a clipboard in his other hand, and he began writing on it without making an introduction.
“What is your name and address?” he asked Cecil, who stood nervously outside the door, trying to peek around the man into the condominium.
“Would you have any information we can use about the mayor or Mrs. Edna Ploomfield?”