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“Why were you trying to fake a suicide the other night?” asked Le
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Serge.
“It’s obvious. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant, too. Not like the guys who dive from short bridges and leave stupid notes or torch their boat in the Gulf at night and row ashore in rafts and they’re suspected right away and turn up two weeks later in Cancún. But nobody can survive a fall from the Skyway, so you have to be dead. Your prints are all over the car you left up there. And best of all, they got your fatal jump on videotape on the bridge surveillance cameras. Except the part about what was inside Santa’s belly. Where’d you get a black parachute, anyway?”
“Pez Easter egg coloring.”
Le
“Wonder why this light’s taking so long,” said Serge. He stretched his neck to look forward in traffic.
Their lane had the green arrow, but the Rolls-Royce ahead of them didn’t move. Then the arrow was red again.
“Goddammit!” said Serge. “Now the light has to cycle again. What’s going on in that car?”
Serge grabbed the top of the convertible’s windshield and stood up. He grumbled and sat back down and fidgeted. The driver of the Rolls was talking on a cell phone while simultaneously trimming nose hair with tiny scissors. Serge could see the driver stop to inspect his nostrils in the lighted mirror on the back of the sun visor, then resume trimming.
“Try to hang on,” Serge whispered to himself, twisting nervously in his seat. Then he noticed the Rolls’ two bumper stickers: “God is my copilot” and “Get a job!”
“You know, that’s pretty unsafe, putting a sharp object in your nose at a red light,” said Serge. “You never know when someone might rear-end you.”
Serge reached over with his left leg and tapped Le
“You might want to pull around him,” Serge told Le
They crossed the bridge at Johns Pass as a casino boat headed out to the edge of territorial waters.
“I love how we’re holed up in the room,” said Le
“Only when I have to.”
“I mean for fun,” said Le
“Turn here, David Janssen.”
“Where?”
“Here!”
Le
“Gotta get it down under a deuce,” said Serge.
They skidded into the parking lot of a thrift store, and Serge raced in. Two minutes later, he hurdled back into the car and threw a T-shirt in Le
“Put that on,” said Serge. “Whenever I’m fleeing and eluding, I hit the thrifts for local law enforcement T-shirts. Makes traffic stops go much smoother.”
Back in the motel room, Le
“Who’s that?” said Le
“Lloyd Bridges,” said Serge. “The immortal Mike Nelson from Sea Hunt. Originally, Nelson operated out of Marineland in California. But later he went freelance, and they shot several episodes in the Florida Keys, which made him technically eligible for inclusion in my shrine.”
Le
“It’s burned into my mind,” Serge continued. “The end credits of every episode, Bridges sailing off in his boat, the Argonaut, and then the trademark emblem of Ziv Productions.”
“You have a good memory.”
“That’s because I don’t smoke that shit you do. I wouldn’t want to be abnormal.”
Le
“This is all very interesting, but why put his picture up?”
“Inspiration. It’s important to build on the shoulders of the giants.”
Le
Serge duct-taped the edges of the curtains to the wall, taped over the message light on the phone and the battery indicator on the smoke detector.
“What are you doing?” asked Le
“Establishing theater conditions. I hate it when people watch a great movie at home with a bunch of lights on. Wrecks the whole medium. If there’s any other light source in the room except the film, it completely ruins it for me.”
Serge unplugged the pine-scented nightlight in the bathroom and taped over the blinking “12:00” on the VCR. Le
“What are you doing?” asked Serge.
“Putting hash oil on this doobie,” said Le
“What if you, like, didn’t do any of that stuff, then you wouldn’t have to worry about neutralizing all the bad effects?”
Le
Serge popped Goldfinger in the VCR, and Le
“Look! Look!” said Serge, pointing out the scene where Bond meets Goldfinger in the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Serge’s yelling startled Le
Serge hit pause on the remote, stood up without urgency and gave Le
“Now the movie’s ruined,” said Serge. He went over to the writing table and immersed himself in the tedium of taking apart and reassembling the homing signal receiver for the fifth time since they got to the motel.
“What are ya doin’?” Le
No answer. Serge wore safety goggles, and the soldering iron gave off a tentacle of smoke when he touched it to a capacitor.
Le
He suddenly had Serge’s attention by the short hairs. “What’s that?” Serge asked, unplugging the soldering iron and coming over to the bed.
“My special bag,” said Le
“Cool!” said Serge.
“I got something even better,” said Le