Florida Heatwave Read online

  Also by Michael Lister

  Thunder Beach

  Double Exposure

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  The Body and the Blood

  FLORIDA

  HEAT

  WAVE

  INTRODUCTION BY

  MICHAEL LISTER

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  1213 N. Sherman Ave. #306

  Madison, WI 53704

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Compilation copyright © 2010 by Michael Lister

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Michael Lister

  All stories copyright their respective authors except:

  “Lily and Men,” © 2002 by Max Allan Collins and Jeff Gelb,

  first published in Flesh and Blood: Dark Desires

  “The Cypress House,” an excerpt from the novel The Cypress House,

  forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2011

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any similarities to people or places,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data has been applied for.

  12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  978-1-935562-17-7 hardcover

  978-1-935562-16-0 paperback

  For

  Ben LeRoy, Alison Janssen, and Jim Pascoe

  Without whom this book—

  and so many wonderful things in the world—

  wouldn’t exist.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MANY, MANY THANKS TO

  BEN AND ALISON for all you do

  to bring beautiful books into the world.

  JIM PASCOE for life-changing advice, making this book possible—

  and designing a kickass cover.

  ALL THE WONDERFUL CONTRIBUTORS.

  MARK RAYMOND FALK, friend, brother, fellow committee member.

  Alter ipse amicus

  THE UNIVERSE for making me a Floridian.

  FLORIDA for being so incredibly whacky and so surreally sublime.

  ALL THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE.

  The entire TYRUS TEAM, especially Rebecca Crowley.

  PAM, AMY, ALISON, LYNN, AND BETTE

  for care over and investment in my wordplay.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, MICHAEL LISTER

  Low Budget Monster Flick, MARY ANNA EVANS

  Overexposure, JAMES W. HALL

  Revenge of the Emerging Market, JAMES O. BORN

  A Tampa Man, ALICE JACKSON

  Iffy, JOHN DUFRESNE

  Personal Experience, CAROLINA GARCIA-AGUILERA

  Trapped, JOHN BOND

  Paper, JIM PASCOE

  Escambia Counties, RAVEN MCMILLIAN

  A Breath of Hot Air, ALEX KAVA & PATRICIA A. BREMMER ….195

  The Cypress House, MICHAEL KORYTA

  The Apalachicola Night, MARK RAYMOND FALK

  Burn Off by Noon, TOM CORCORAN

  Lily & Men, JOHN LUTZ

  Wild Card, LISA UNGER

  Quiet, JONATHON KING

  Ultima Forsan, MICHAEL LISTER

  The Cypress Dream, CAROLYN HAINES

  INTRODUCTION

  BY MICHAEL LISTER

  Florida.

  A place like no other.

  In many ways a microcosm of the country in reverse (the north part of the state resembling the south part of the country; the south part of the state resembling the north part of the country), Florida is disorienting and deadly, dangling dubiously as if it might slide into the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Ocean.

  A place of water—surrounded by, dotted with, flowing through.

  A place of movement—like the ocean’s tides. Migration. Sway. Cyclical. Rhythmic.

  A place of crackers and snowbirds, shotgun houses and Art Deco—an environment of great risk and great reward.

  Some people say Florida has no sense of place. They are wrong—or, at least, inaccurate. Florida has a sense of places—a plurality of exoticas.

  It’s both my natural and spiritual home, and I love it like only a native can, but there’s a dark side to the sunshine state.

  It’s a place of intense heat—like hell, only hotter.

  Oppressive.

  Stifling.

  Crazy-making.

  The suffocating heat makes you do desperate things—it seeps in through your pores and sucks the life right out of you. Like the bloody smear of a swatted mosquito on sweat-soaked skin, violence erupts suddenly, but the damage it does lingers long after.

  According to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, evil happens everywhere under the sun. This is nowhere truer than the sunshine state. From the rural highways of the panhandle to the mean streets of Miami, evil deeds are done everywhere—and everything here takes place under the sun. But don’t let the sunshine fool you. There’s plenty of darkness lurking in the shade of our spreading oaks and swaying palms, down our dirt roads and on our interstates, inside our mobile homes and behind our fortressed mansions, beach condos, and retirement centers, and back in our mangroves and river swamps—a real bleakness beneath the natural beauty.

  Florida is a beautiful place where ugly things happen—both to its environment and inhabitants.

  Florida is a place where people come to die.

  It hangs beneath the continent like a handgun holstered for quick draw—more a state of mind than one drawn on maps.

  If Florida is a handgun pointed at Cuba, then the part I write about is its trigger, a reactionary place where just the right squeeze can be explosive. The peninsula proper is the barrel, a pawnshop special blued finished bearing traces of rust and corrosion beneath the oily polish of theme parks and retirement villages. The weapon ends where the state, the continent, and the world does, in Miami—a town perched precariously, like Florida itself, between worlds, between countries, between what was and what will be, old Florida all but vanished, new Florida emerging.

  Florida’s geographical diversity is only matched by its diverse populace. And those who write about it—as this anthology will so convincingly demonstrate. This diversity lends itself to a rich, varied crime fiction tradition. From the pine-tree lined rural highways of North Florida through the tourist traps of Central Florida to the tropical, international environs of SOBE, Florida crime writers continually offer up stories of sun-faded noir, orange pulp served freshly squeezed.

  Those of us living in and writing about the hottest, wackiest, kitschiest state today follow in the footsteps of Charles Willeford and John D. MacDonald. We are their heirs, the recipients of a rich heritage of good writing, a responsibility to keep the sacred fire from going out, to honor them and the state we all find so endlessly interesting.

  I’m very proud of this collection, and it gives me great pleasure to present it to you. I’m extremely grateful to all the contributors for their fantastic Florida stories, and to everyone at Tyrus Books, especially Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen for their usual stellar work.

  So, here it is—Florida Heat Wave, a sun-drenched, sweat-soaked collection of crime stories set in the peninsula pistol state by Florida’s foremost crime writers. Pour yourself a big glass of 100% pure Florida orange juice (and a couple of ounces of vodka) and enjoy!

  LOW-BUDGET

  MONSTER FLICK

  BY MARY ANNA EVANS

  In my own defense, I’ll say that the job sounded good when I took it. Who would
n’t jump at the chance to get paid to spend a month in Florida doing wardrobe and makeup for the most voluptuous starlet on the silver screen, Carlotta Verona? Particularly when the wardrobe in question consists entirely of skimpy bathing suits and torn blouses … thin, wet, torn blouses.

  It was hardly a year after Hiroshima. In those days, my nightmares still inhabited the sweltering damp hellholes of the South Pacific, and those nightmares were heavily punctuated with gunfire and haunted by death. I was picturing a few healing weeks on a broad sandy beach, surrounded by bathing beauties. (Did I mention that I was to be paid for this?)

  Benny Schulz neglected to mention that I’d be working in a sweltering damp swamp that looked a helluva lot like the South Pacific, if I crossed my eyes and squinted. Benny Schulz was your typical lying, cheating, stealing Hollywood assistant producer, but he was my friend. How could he have known that he was sending me to yet another steamy jungle where the nights were haunted by death?

  Benny hired me for this gig because I could build a face for any monster a movie mogul could imagine. Warts, scars, scales, open oozing wounds—Benny called me whenever a director needed a glamorous movie star to be ugly. I enjoyed doing warts and scales. Scars and open oozing wounds? Not so much. They put me too much in mind of the things I saw on Guadalcanal.

  So imagine how I felt when I arrived in that godforsaken swamp and saw that this movie monster didn’t need my magic at all. I was so upset that I bullied the director into letting me make a long-distance call, just so I could yell at Benny.

  “Dammit, they’re making a movie about a rubber fish! Or lizard or turtle or … shit, Benny. I don’t know what it is. It’s just an ugly-looking monster with a zipper up its back. The director’s gonna put an actor in this rubber suit and throw him in the water, and that’s that. Instant monster.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Benny. It’s an allover suit … not a square inch of actor showing. Know what that means?”

  “It means we can put somebody cheap in there, ‘cause nobody ain’t gonna see who it is?”

  Cheap was good in Benny’s world.

  “Benny, it means there’s nothing for the makeup guy to do. Meaning there’s nothing for me to do here but spread pancake makeup on Carlotta Verona’s pretty face.”

  “‘Zat mean you get to touch her with your bare hands? ‘Cause maybe you can tell her she needs a beauty mark on her chest.” Benny’s constant lecherous leer had seeped into his voice and was oozing out of the receiver. I had a sudden urge to go wash my ear.

  “You’re wasting money, Benny. I don’t come cheap. You coulda hired anybody to smear lipstick around. It’s not hard to make Carlotta look good.”

  Benny’s snort communicated the pain of an assistant producer watching dollars fly out the door. “Too late now. I already paid to get you over there. I could bring you home and fly somebody cheap to Florida, but it’d cost more than I’d save.” This had to be true, because Benny didn’t make errors when dollar signs were involved. When Benny thought about money, you could hear the percussive thunk of an adding machine lever being pulled. “You’re just gonna have to stay there and find excuses to rub your hands on Carlotta. And her stunt double, who may actually have bigger tits, if such a thing is possible.”

  “Does the rest of her look like Carlotta?”

  “Yeah, only more so. And since Debbie ain’t famous, she ain’t got a rich old ugly boyfriend like Vince Carmichael chasing her around. A chump like you might have a chance with her. I think you’re gonna like this job. Feel free to thank me.”

  I mumbled, “Thanks,” and hung up, but I didn’t mean it.

  I looked out at an endless array of cypress trees dripping Spanish moss. They shaded an untamed river fed by Glitter Spring, a watery abyss that belched out about a trillion gallons of diamond-clear water every day. I’ve still never seen anything like that water. It was clear as air. You could shoot a movie through it, which is precisely why we were there.

  The landscape here hadn’t changed since the dinosaurs walked. I could have written a blockbuster script about those dinosaurs. People would’ve been tossing their popcorn sky-high in happy horror. I knew I could do it, just like all those other people in Hollywood who were damn sure they could be actors or directors or … yeah … screenwriters. It just about killed me that Benny would only hire me for making monster makeup and smearing lipstick.

  There were monsters out there in Glitter Spring, but they weren’t movie monsters in rubber suits. They were cold-blooded, muscle-bound killing machines covered in scaly black skin and armed with fearsome teeth. Once, after we’d finished shooting, I asked the boat captain to take me close to those natural monsters, thinking I might get makeup ideas for my next horror movie. I learned that thirty seconds spent staring into the passionless eyes of an alligator felt like thirty seconds too long.

  This California boy didn’t feel safe in that primeval wasteland where pterodactyls would have felt right at home. I didn’t feel like thanking Benny for sending me there. Not one little bit.

  “Can I get in the water, Johnny? Please? It’s awful hot.”

  Nobody but Carlotta called John Plonsky “Johnny.” He’d been making low-budget monster flicks since Dracula was a boy, and he’d earned the respect of everyone in Hollywood except a few brainless starlets like this one.

  Carlotta reached down into the water. Gathering a few drops in her cupped hand, she tried to dribble them across her front. I was too quick for her. I grabbed her wrist just in time to keep her from spoiling the pristine white bathing suit sheathing her perfect form. Every one of those drops would show on camera. In the time it took them to dry, Carlotta would start to sweat, and sweat stains are obvious on film.

  The whole crew would be drawing their salaries while I escorted Carlotta to the hotel for a new suit and while I stood outside her dressing room, urging her to hurry. If Benny had foreseen this problem, there’d have been a clause in her contract requiring her to let me into the dressing room. I’m sure I could have poured her ample form into yet another tiny suit in a time-efficient manner.

  Fortunately, I had brought way more bathing suits than I should have needed for this gig. (I’d worked with Carlotta before.) Otherwise, I’d have spent my days handwashing little scraps of white fabric, then waving them frantically in the muggy air till they dried.

  She’d pulled this stunt once that day, already. John needed to shoot the sequence before she messed herself up again, and everybody knew it. I could see it on their faces as I hovered within arm’s reach, ready to stop her before she splashed river water on herself yet again.

  We were all as hot as Carlotta. Hotter, actually, because we were wearing more clothes. If I let her mess up another bathing suit … well, one of these people just might shoot her.

  “She can’t work under these conditions, John,” Carlotta’s manager Bradley barked, adjusting his Panama hat to shade his face better. Her boyfriend Vince, who was bankrolling the film, adjusted his own Panama hat, which was bigger, more finely woven, and obviously more expensive.

  John gestured at his uncooperative star, but spoke to the men in her life. “I just need her to sit still long enough for Louise to snatch her off the boat. Then she can go fan herself in her dressing room. Debbie can do the rest of the scene.”

  Louise and Debbie sat on the dock, chatting pleasantly about whatever it is that interests twenty-year-old girls. They were as blonde as Carlotta (whose real name was probably as plain as “Louise” or “Debbie”) and they were as shapely. Debbie, in particular, looked just like her. This was her job.

  When Debbie was struggling underwater in the monster’s clutches, wet and half-dressed, moviegoers needed to believe they were watching Carlotta in mortal distress. Fortunately, Debbie was a very good actress. She could make you believe just about anything. In fact, she’d spent the last three weeks making me believe she was in love with me.

  Louise, on the other hand, didn’t look like Carlotta, no
r any other woman of my acquaintance. She was heavily muscled and six feet tall, but perfectly proportioned for her size. The other two girls made men want to hug them and squeeze them and stroke them and romance them. Louise made you want to worship her for the goddess that she was.

  And what was Louise’s job on this movie set?

  She was the monster.

  When I told Benny that the monster needed no makeup artist, because the actor inside its rubber suit was completely invisible, I wasn’t lying. Louise was a local girl who’d learned to swim in this fast-moving river. She could plunge to the bottom of the mammoth spring, swimming against the rushing water with powerful kicks and strokes. And she looked like a river nymph all the while, with her golden hair streaming behind her and her golden-skinned body slipping through the water like a shimmering fish.

  Louise was a hundred percent suited to be the monster star of this movie, and she worked cheap. The crew for this movie was a hundred percent male, except for Carlotta and Debbie, and we approved John’s decision to hire Louise a hundred percent. Actually, we thought he was a goddamn genius.

  Lester Bond, owner of Glitter Spring and of the lodge perched on its rim, was a frustrated man. He’d bought the property with visions of a tourist attraction like Silver Springs. Hordes of paying customers, a fleet of glass-bottomed boats, hamburger stands, gator wrestling shows—if there was a Florida-tested method of separating Northerners from their money, Lester had hoped to build it on the shores of Glitter Spring.

  Unfortunately, Lester wasn’t a genius. He’d neglected to check the highway system funneling tourists into Florida’s peninsula. Glitter Spring was just too far from a major tourist route, too far from an airport, too far from a decent-sized town. It was just too far from everything. When God made this jaw-dropping miracle of nature, He wasn’t thinking like a grasping, avaricious human being, so He’d failed to put His miracle in a convenient spot. Lester Bond had stopped going to church, because he was really angry at the Almighty about this oversight.