SS 18: Shark Skin Suite: A Novel by Tim Dorsey Page B

to sail down to the wealthy wreckers and cigar kings of land-starved Key West. After the town disappeared, the Everglades National Park put in a remote visitors’ outpost, with a few motel rooms, but that was canceled by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, and now only the most rugged tenters hammer their stakes in the sand. From an airplane, the virtually empty designated camping area looks like a big pineapple.”
    The Cobra parked outside the visitors’ center. “They even sell mosquito lapel pins and bumper stickers and can coozies with drops of blood. It’s reverse-psychology advertising: Embrace your biggest drawback and tourists think that if they aren’t eaten alive, they’ve been gypped.”
    Coleman slapped his neck. “Like all those funky bars that say ‘Warm beer, lousy service’?”
    “True fact about those bars. The owners started getting complaints from British customers because they drink warm beer anyway, and when cold beer arrives, they say, ‘What gives?’ I guess bartenders in Liverpool are also rude.”
    They went inside and approached the info desk.
    “May I help you?” asked a park ranger.
    Serge opened his wallet. “Yes, one souvenir mosquito pin. Nice marketing tactic. With a name like Smucker’s . . .”
    “What?”
    “Where’s the tombstone?” said Serge. “I must touch it.”
    “Oh, the tombstone,” said the ranger, ringing up the pin. “Right over there with the exhibits.”
    Serge snatched the souvenir off the counter and ran across the room. He placed his palms against a flat rock and closed his eyes.
    Coleman bent down to read the artifact. “ ‘Guy Bradley’?”
    “Shhhhh,” said Serge. “I’m channeling. For the entire time I’m here, I’m going to be Bradley and carry on his legacy.”
    “But, Serge—”
    “I don’t know anyone named Serge.”
    “Uh, but, Guy.”
    “Yes?”
    “Who was he?”
    “Just one of my all-time Florida heroes.” Serge opened his eyes. A small tour group had arrived. He faced them and spread his arms. “Thank you for coming! Besides being a ghost town, Flamingo was also the Wild West. And Bradley became the unofficial sheriff, hired by the Audubon Society.”
    “We’re from the Audubon Society,” said someone in the group with big binoculars.
    “And a fine group it is,” said Serge. “Especially overcoming a scandalous past that you’ve been trying to hush up all these years.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “James Audubon visited Key West in 1832 and stayed at the landmark home on Whitehead Street, which is now a museum and gallery. He spurred conservation awareness of our feathered friends through his fabulous paintings. Ironically, in order to capture their majesty on canvas, he first had to kill the birds and prop them up in aesthetic poses with whatever they used before pipe cleaners were invented. You have to let him slide a little on that one because otherwise there’d be birds flapping around the ceiling of his studio, and all the paintings would have been blurry.”
    Murmurs in the group. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Then in the early 1900s, rich dames in New York tried to outdo each other, strutting down Park Avenue with ridiculous Lady Gaga hats sprouting giant fans of bird plumes that soon became more valuable than gold, and poachers began shooting up entire rookeries in the Everglades. So Bradley single-handedly patrolled the entire bottom of the state from Ten Thousand Islands to Flamingo, valiantly battling the heartless hunters. Out west, gangs robbed trains; in Florida, they collected feathers, which is embarrassing on multiple levels, and in July of 1905, only a few steps up that beach outside, Bradley attempted to arrest the infamous Smith gang and was brutally gunned down. Then, in one of the most famous Florida legal cases that nobody remembers today except me because I’m putting myself through wildcat law school, the head of the Smith clan was found not guilty in a Key West trial. Bradley was