Hammerhead Ranch Motel

A bouncer ran up and grabbed If’s door handle. Joh

If peeled her dress over her head as they cleared the southbound tollbooth for the Sunshine Skyway. The bridge began to ascend, and If unzipped Joh

Joh

“Hold on, let me get some tools from the trunk,” Joh

If tried to wiggle loose. “Hurry! It hurts!”

Joh

C hester “Porkchop” Dole was flipping cha

He screamed.

Chester dove for the radio and knocked over the microphone. He’d never used the radio in six years at the bridge. He pressed buttons and switches until he got deafening feedback, and pressed more until it stopped. He keyed the mike and begged for help without protocol. He forgot to release the microphone button to hear a reply. When he heard no reply, he panicked and gripped the button harder. Everyone in the greater Tampa Bay area who owned an emergency sca

“Help! Help! I’m at the bridge! Oh, please! Why won’t anyone answer me! Why are all of you doing this! For the love of Jesus! Fuck me!” Followed by long, loud crying.

On the wall was monitor number five, and on the screen a man in a tux and a young woman in a strapless evening dress with a large, dark stain on the side of her head walked apprehensively up the bridge. Ahead was a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the side, parked southbound. The Chrysler’s passenger stood between the vehicle and the bridge railing. He flicked a Bic lighter and held it to a strip of rag hanging out of a wine bottle and tossed it in the open passenger window.

A fireball. The car crackled and was engulfed, sending swirls of sparks up into the bridge’s suspension.

As Joh

A highway patrol car skidded to a stop behind the Chrysler and the trooper jumped out. “Why don’t we talk about this?” he said calmly. Back on the patrol car’s radio, Joh

Back in the safety booth, horror swept up the spine of Chester “Porkchop” Dole, and a cold, sallow flush hit his face. Dole could handle the drama on the bridge. What unraveled him was the knowledge that the smooth boulder of fate was about to roll over his nineteen years of public service. The safe routine of his job had been varied, the universe altered.

A journeyman state employee, Dole had the bureaucratic survival instincts that told him how to lateral most responsibility, dodge most blame, cover most ass. But there was one error so costly it was to be avoided above all else. It was known as Death-by-Headline. No matter what you do in public life, no matter how gravely you blow it, make sure it’s in a nebulous way that takes a lot of obscure argot to explain. Even if you get a bunch of people killed, as long as they die in eight-syllable words with no convenient puns, alliterations, rhymes or homonyms. There’s nothing worse than screwing up in a way that makes a snappy, pants-around-the-ankles newspaper headline that wins some poor copy editor the hundred-dollar prize for the month.

Dole saw just such a headline coming together on the screen. The Chrysler’s driver, dressed in a complete Santa Claus outfit, leaned forward, spread his arms wide and dove off the Sunshine Skyway bridge.

“Shit!” Joh

Joh

They turned around and started walking back to the Porsche. They heard a deep air horn from behind. A semi tractor-trailer had come upon the scene too fast and couldn’t stop. Joh

First there was silence, then the sniffling started, and Joh

T he ends of The Little Mermaid slippers poked across the front-door threshold and into the moderately humid eighty-two-degree December morning. Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, a little older than the temperature, bent down on the step of her Beverly Shores condominium to get the paper. She read the top headline, “Sad-Sack Santa Swan-Dives in Seasonal Sunshine Skyway Suicide.” She turned back into the house, closed the door and shuffled across the living room to the kitchen. The television set was on the local morning show Get the Hell Out of Bed, Tampa Bay! As she passed the set, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole was on the screen being interviewed live about his vain but heroic efforts radioing for help after keenly observing the Skyway jumper. It was such an impressive TV performance that Dole probably would have salvaged his career. Except he was absentmindedly holding his “Ask someone who gives a shit!” coffee mug prominently for the cameras.