Crease put on reading glasses, held up the letter and began reading:

“‘Dear Mr. Crease, You report too many depressing stories. More happy news, please. Warmly, Serge A. Storms.’”

Crease dramatically whipped off his reading glasses. “Obviously the rantings of a seriously deranged mind!…”

Tommy Diaz and the others started filling balloons with helium, tying them off and letting them float up to the low ceiling.

The men took turns inhaling helium and talking funny.

“I didn’t know drug smugglers were so much fun,” said Sammy, hair disheveled and head bobbing from the injection. “I thought you’d be mad at us.”

“No, we’re not mad,” Tommy said and took a hit of helium.

“So, you’re not going to kill us?”

“Oh no,” Tommy said like Donald Duck, “we’re still going to kill you.”

One of the men went outside and got two beach loungers from the patio next to the pool. They tied and taped Joe and Sammy into the loungers and attached a hundred balloons to each.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?” asked Joe Varsity.

Nobody answered. They kept tying on more balloons and taping Joe and Sammy more securely to the beach loungers.

“Okay, this is starting to not be funny anymore,” said Joe.

More balloons.

“Are you trying to make us blimps?” asked Joe. “It’ll never work. You can’t lift a person up with regular party balloons.”

Just then, Sammy floated away from his handlers. His hands were tied to the sides of the lounger, and his nose mashed up against a hanging lamp.

“Stop clowning around,” snapped Tommy. “Get him down from there.”

Sammy wasn’t coming out of the drug as quickly as Joe, and he giggled as they retrieved him.

“I heard about this before,” Sammy told Joe. “Some guy up in Georgia was laid off at a factory. So he got loaded at his daughter’s wedding and tied a bunch of balloons to a cot and grabbed a leftover bottle of champagne and took off. He brought a frog gigger with him to pop balloons one at a time when he wanted to come down.” Sammy turned to the Diaz Boys. “You’re gonna give us giggers, right?”

“No giggers,” said Tommy, not looking up, tying off another balloon.

“What’ll happen to us?” Joe asked from the outskirts of panic.

Sammy answered. “We’ll go up real high and black out from lack of oxygen and then die. Or the balloons will explode from the low atmospheric pressure and we’ll crash and die. Even odds which will happen first.”

Joe started crying.

“I hear Tampa Bay is beautiful from the air at night,” said Sammy.

Tommy Diaz cracked the front door to the room, stuck his head out and looked both ways. “Coast is clear.”

Joe sobbed and Sammy giggled as the men jockeyed with the loungers like Macy’s parade ground crews. They bumped into each other in the close quarters of the motel room and Sammy got wedged in the doorway. Rafael Diaz shoved from the rear and a few balloons popped as Sammy came free and shot up into the night air faster than they had expected. “Wheeeeeeeeee.”

Then it was Joe’s turn, but he went up screaming and crying.

Some people in the bar heard the commotion and looked out the window, but didn’t see anything. Two doors down, City and Country thought they heard something and stepped out of their rooms onto the sidewalk. City checked her watch and shook it. “Where can those guys be?”

Sammy drifted out over the Gulf, but Joe caught a thermal crosswind and blew back across the bay toward Tampa, over the big green glass dome of the Florida Aquarium.

15

Lenny had been staying with Serge the last two days in room one of Hammerhead Ranch. From the moment they jumped in Lenny’s Cadillac on the Sunshine Skyway fishing pier, there was instant hypergolic chemistry.

Serge upon arriving in the room: “First we establish a bivouac. I’ll deploy my gear over here by the TV and check the escape routes; you fill the tub with ice… If we do it right, the room should look exactly like we’re on a stakeout.”

“This is so great!” said Lenny.

Serge cleared the wicker writing table with the round glass top and laid out precision tools, electrical meter, soldering iron and snacks. He began taking apart the homing signal receiver, trying to figure out why it wasn’t picking up the briefcase. Soon he had the guts all over the table, frayed wiring sticking out everywhere, looking like it would never work again. Serge talked to himself. “It’s gotta be something simple, like a bad rheostat… Hmmm.” He stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth in concentration. He plucked a semiconductor off the chassis with needle-nose pliers like a kid playing the old Milton Bradley game Operation. In the background, Lenny was a one-man bucket brigade, making repeated trips from the ice machine to the tub with the motel’s tiny plastic ice pail.

“These things don’t hold shit,” said Lenny, dumping his twentieth bucket of cubes.

“That’s so inconsiderate guests don’t hog all the ice.”

“Some people spoil it for everyone.”

Lenny dumped another bucket, and the ice finally crested the top of the tub.

Serge finished reassembling the homing receiver, extended the telescopic antenna and turned it on. Nothing. “Piss.” Serge turned it off and tossed it on the near bed. “Supply run!”

“Check!” said Lenny, and they sprinted out the door.

They had been tooling around the barrier islands ever since in bursts of aimless but urgent activity.

On the third day, Serge slouched in the passenger seat at an open drawbridge on the Pinellas Bayway. His arm was over the side of the car, slapping the “Don” in “The Don Johnson Experience” in time with the music. He looked up to the sky and made a scrunched face.

“My spider senses are tingling… First time I felt like this I was three, just before Betsy hit.”

“Betsy?”

“One of the craziest hurricanes on record. Labor Day weekend 1965. It was first spotted by a Tiros weather satellite, and it curled up near the Bahamas. Then it continued tracking northeast, out to sea, and Florida breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone got out their barbecues and went swimming. But Betsy stalled out there. Everyone gulped hard and kept watching the TV reports in disbelief as it did a complete U-turn. Nobody had seen anything like it. Betsy headed right back at south Florida with hundred-and-forty-mile-per-hour winds…” Serge swirled his arms.

“What happened?”

“Raked the bottom of the state. My family huddled in the hallway of our house. Everything got real dark and quiet. I was a little kid so I thought it was fun, but I remember it was the first time I had seen the grown-ups afraid. A small palm tree came through our living-room window, and my mother screamed. We rode it out, but seventy-four others weren’t so lucky.”

“Wow,” Lenny said softly.

The drawbridge closed and they began moving again. Serge fished in the glove compartment and found a Phil Collins tape, and he stuck it in the stereo. They passed the Pelican Diner.

“…I can feel it comin’ in the air tonight-hold on…”

“This is too cool,” said Lenny. “It’s like we’re on the exact same page. I need another joint.”

Lenny grabbed a doobie paper-clipped behind the visor and tried to light it but couldn’t. “Same thing on the pier. I need a new lighter.” He pulled into a convenience store.

Back on the road, he lit the joint on the first try with a small, windproof acetylene torch on a keychain, $9.99.

“You shouldn’t waste your money on crap like that,” said Serge, playing with the laser pointer on his own keychain.

“In the long run, paraphernalia pays for itself,” said Lenny.

“I used to know someone like you,” said Serge.

“What’s he like?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh,” said Lenny. They stopped behind a Rolls-Royce at a red light, waiting to turn onto Gulf Boulevard.