Room two: Twenty-seven blue cardboard crates of legal-size files covered both beds. Lunch hour. Three unindicted co-conspirators in business suits anxiously fed documents into a ninety-nine-dollar shredder just out of the box from Office Depot.
Room three: A Balkan war criminal tried to unload three hundred loggerhead turtle eggs to an aphrodisiac salesman from Terra Ceia.
Room four: Twenty-one undocumented Haitians huddled silently as their cruise director, Captain Bradley Xeno, brushed his teeth in the mirror and hummed “Tequila.”
Room five: Six federal agents sat around the edges of the beds eating Chinese-to-go and guarding an underboss in the witness protection program.
Room six: A delicensed surgeon stacked twenty thousand in cash in his briefcase and prepared to saw off the right leg of a man afflicted with the rare condition apotemnophilia, the sexual desire to have limbs removed.
Room seven: A Japanese businessman filled a hollow surfboard with a five-year supply of shark cartilage extract in gel caps.
Room eight: An unemployed auto mechanic named Leo barricaded himself and refused to come out, although he had done nothing wrong and nobody was looking for him.
Room nine: Three Cubans swallowed condoms filled with large American currency folded into tiny squares and triangles.
Room ten: Two men tried unsuccessfully for the third day to sell a highjacked truckload of thirty thousand Motorola beepers.
Room eleven: Three Anglos in taste-proof floral shirts randomly tested seven kilos of cocaine packed in Sharps medical waste dispensers. Three Latinos in matching yellow guayaberas stood across from them, cramming bundles of hundred-dollar bills into the side of a Naugahyde golf bag.
Rooms twelve to fifteen: Zargoza went over the day’s wire fraud receipts as a dozen con artists worked the phones. There was a loud thud against the wall coming from room eleven, then a series of smaller thumps and some yelling. A door slammed.
“What the hell?” said Zargoza.
On the other side of the wall in room eleven, bricks of coke and hundred-dollar bills were strewn across the floor and both beds. A Mexican standoff. Two of the men in floral shirts stood in one corner of the room, MAC-10s drawn. The third crouched on the floor with a pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun. The three Latinos aimed back with Rugers.
The door of eleven crashed open and four men in black ninja outfits ran into the room pointing subcompact machine guns at both the Anglos and the Latinos. They wore night-vision goggles. It was the afternoon.
“I can’t see anything! Are the lights on?” said one ninja, slapping the top of his goggles. He reached in a Velcro compartment on his right thigh, pulled out an underwater flare, cracked it and threw it on the floor, setting the carpet on fire.
“I still can’t see anything. What’s happening?”
The head ninja glanced sideways at his colleague and back at the men he was covering with his machine gun. He whispered out the corner of his mouth: “Lens caps.”
“What?”
“Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” the leader said. He turned and ripped the night goggles off the ninja’s head and stomped out the carpet fire.
Then he aimed his weapon again at the floral shirts and guayaberas. “Okay, back to live action! Everybody drop your guns! You’re all under arrest! We’re U.S. special agents from the U.S. Special Agency.”
“No, you drop ’em-you’re under arrest!” said one of the floral shirts, showing a badge. “ Florida Bureau of Investigation! This is a double-reverse, flea-flicker sting operation!”
A guayabera said, “No, both of you drop ’em! You’re all subpoenaed! We’re from the special prosecutor’s office!”
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” said the ninja leader. “We’re all cops?!”
A fist pounded from the other side of the wall. It was Zargoza. “Hey, what’s all the racket in there! Knock it off!” he yelled, and he went back to weighing out cocaine on a triple-beam scale.
“You shut up!” a floral shirt yelled back through the wall and hit it with the butt of his shotgun. “I’ll kick your ass!”
“I’m the owner!” yelled Zargoza. “Settle down or I’ll call the police!”
The head ninja told them to cool it. This farce didn’t need a fourth jurisdiction of cops.
“Sorry. We apologize,” the leader yelled through the wall.
“That’s better,” shouted Zargoza, spooning cocaine. “We try to run a civilized place here.”
The three teams of cops filed out of the room and took up a row of stools at the bar by the motel pool. They ordered strawberry daiquiris and watched a TV weather report on a new hurricane moving steadily across the Atlantic after slamming the Cape Verde Islands.
“Doesn’t anyone sell cocaine these days?” asked an agent in a floral shirt. “I mean, besides undercover cops?”
“It’s out of style,” said a ninja with night-vision goggles propped on top of his head like sunglasses. He licked whipped cream off the end of a flamingo swizzle stick. “I don’t think you can buy it in Florida anymore.”
T he Hammerhead Ranch Motel was a sandspur between the toes of everyone who lived next door in the spanking-new high-rises of Beverly Shores.
Condominiums, someday, will be the stuff of Florida nostalgia, but not yet.
Before it incorporated, Beverly Shores was the classic beach town. A row of one-story mom-and-pop motels built in the early sixties. All nondescript and modest except for the few dollars that went into corny neon signs. Alligators in top hats and dancing swordfish. Several of the motels carved out niches with foreign visitors. There were signs with maple leafs and Union Jacks, and one had an insane Bavarian with crossed eyes, playing a glockenspiel.
Hammerhead Ranch was the only one left. The others were all gone, demolished one by one to clear the path for the advancing column of condos that would become the City of Beverly Shores.
One of the condominiums had a twin, curved design like a W; one was stair-stepped. There was traditional Mediterranean, a towering spaceship and another that looked like the Watergate. One was a rhombus.
Half had the word “Arms” in the name. Total, nine hundred fifty units, average cost, six hundred thousand. Population: spite.
The residents were exceedingly fortunate and comfortable, which brought them to the inescapable conclusion that they needed to be pissed at someone. They were mad at people who drove down the public street in front of their condos, and swimmers who swam in their public ocean and beachcombers who combed their public beach. The phenomenon was so pronounced across Florida that such residents had a nickname: “Condo Commandos.” The particular residents of Beverly Shores took it to a new level.
A nine-year-old overthrew a Frisbee behind one of the buildings, and it sailed a few yards across the city limits of Beverly Shores. A woman manicuring a shrub picked up the plastic disk, cut it in half with pruning shears and threw the two unaerodynamic pieces wobbling back at the boy.
The residents put aside a few hours each day to complain about being screwed by welfare mothers.
Every fall the storm season washed the beach at Beverly Shores out to sea, and every spring the Army Corps of Engineers sent in barges to dredge sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pump it back to shore. It cost millions of dollars and, coupled with their federally subsidized flood insurance, made the residents of Beverly Shores the biggest welfare recipients in the state. All the government required in return, to legitimize spending tax dollars on beach restoration, was public access to the already public beach.
It was an outrage.
The residents planted small trees to obscure the beach parking signs at the tiny access areas. When people continued showing up, they stole the signs at night and blamed outside agitators. They presented a united front of frosty stares at anyone who parked in the small public lot between their buildings; the mayor yelled at them if the parking job was out of alignment, and he yelled if it was not. The residents drove golf carts everywhere, with loud horns.