The second book in the Serge Storms series, 2000

Florida ’s beauty creates the illusion of civilization.

It is a thin but functional veneer, like fake-wood contact paper stuck to flimsy particle board. Glistening condos, palm trees down the median, corkscrew water slides and waiting lines of retirees spilling onto restaurant sidewalks at four P.M., hoping for a shot at an early-bird $3.95 Sterno tray of Swedish meatballs. Spring training, mermaids, trained whales. Brave New Disney World, where commercial microbiologists try to isolate the DNA responsible for bad thoughts and free will. Space shots and orange juice with more pulp and roadside hot dog vendors in T-backs causing traffic mishaps at the latest apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who chose to appear this time in squeegee residue on the plate glass of a financial tower on U.S. 19.

Late one Thursday toward the end of the twentieth century, a white Chrysler New Yorker drove up the Florida Keys on the way to Tampa. Behind a secret panel in the trunk was a spare tire, a jack and a metal briefcase containing five million dollars. Under the bumper was a homing device. The Chrysler’s innocent occupants didn’t have a clue.

A small concrete booth painted a graffiti-resistant government tan sat near the base of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Its green-tinted windows beveled outward like an air traffic control tower. The Skyway spanned the mouth of Tampa Bay with a massive arch that climbed so steeply into the thin, clear air that motorists said it was like taking off in a DC-10. Pleasure boats made small white trails through the wave caps far below.

Inside the booth, state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole stood at the stainless steel sink and rinsed his favorite coffee mug, which remained in his right hand at all times. It read: “Ask someone who gives a shit!” The window AC unit began to clatter, and Dole whapped it with precision.

On paper, Dole’s job was to monitor the bridge for hazard. In reality, Dole’s job was to preserve his job. A nineteen-year public servant, he was the equivalent of a fat, hundred-year-old alligator. No natural predators left. Just as long as the gator didn’t change his proven routine in a spasm of senility and chase executives around the thirteenth green at Innisbrook. Not to worry with Dole. He was master of the unvaried, safe pattern that didn’t deviate into unknown adventures of genuine work. His attitude toward his job station was that of a felon at the crime scene: Don’t touch anything and don’t stay a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Paperwork wasn’t filled out, reports weren’t read, ringing phones kept ringing. His bosses, a pyramid of progressively paranoid career preservationists, gave him high marks.

Dole stared out the windows, making sure the hand not holding the coffee mug stayed in his pocket. He became an expert on every detail of his solitary outpost that had nothing to do with his job. To the south, the Skyway bridge dominated everything. It was Tampa Bay ’s defining landmark, like the St. Louis Arch or the Seattle/Dallas/Calgary Space Needle. Dole studied the Skyway’s twin isosceles triangles of yellow suspension cable all day long-a big sundial, backlit in the morning, bleached bright with vertical shadows at high noon, glowing a burnished orange in late afternoon and then a soft scarlet at sunset. Finally the bridge was the negative image against the indigo sky, and the headlights came on and trickled across the span like illuminated water droplets sliding down monofilament fishing line.

Dole sipped from the mug. Tanker ships sailed in from the Gulf of Mexico, fly fishermen cast on the flats, sailboats tacked around Pinellas Point, and dolphins splashed in the channels. There was the monument to the crew of the USCG Blackthorn, lost in a foul-weather collision in ’80. And the stub of the old Skyway bridge, now a fishing pier. A sign: “Please do not clean fish in restroom.”

Inside Dole’s booth was a bank of nine-inch black-and-white video screens feeding live from remote cameras at various pressure points along the Skyway. They monitored for breakdowns, wrecks, fog conditions, suicide jumpers and terrorism. But Dole wasn’t monitoring the surveillance screens because he was monitoring his portable color TV set, laughing at Toto the Weather Dog doing a funny dance on the anchor desk of a local newscast. Toto was an eight-year-old half-blind Chihuahua who appeared in a variety of anthropomorphic costumes and predicted the weather. Tonight Toto was shaking in a hula skirt in a manner consistent with a sixty percent chance of rain and a UV index of seven, according to weatherman Guy Rockney.

Following a recent spate of fatal tornadoes and windstorms on Florida ’s west coast, both the U.S. Weather Service and local television stations faced pressure to upgrade their Doppler radar and other early-warning technology. Four of the region’s major stations spent heavily on new equipment. The fifth, Florida Cable News, picked up Toto at the pound for the cost of the shots.

Florida Cable News saw its audience share increase sixteen percent on segments with Toto. The loss was spread evenly among stations with the expensive new equipment. Those stations saturated the air with ads desperately trying to explain the importance of adequate wind-shear detection.

Toto kept dancing them right over to Florida Cable News.

Early one October evening, the technology investment paid off. The Weather Service and four stations picked up a quick-forming front moving east of Tampa with funnel clouds. The warnings went out. Hundreds took cover and were saved. Florida Cable News, instrumentally blind to the twisters bearing down on its viewers, sent the audience to bed with a happy little jig from Toto in a spandex aerobic outfit and a promise of a pleasant evening and a sunny tomorrow.

Florida Cable News wasn’t responsible for the entire death toll, just part. Just enough to spell Toto’s demise. The end was hastened when weatherman Guy Rockney joked on the air that some of his viewers had gone on a “Florida Double-Wide Sleigh Ride.”

That did it. Toto and Rockney were history before Rockney could remove his clip-on microphone. It lasted a week. Until the specific gravity of letters and phone calls and, most important, the ratings plunge was too much to withstand. Both were reinstated and the ratings at Florida Cable News rebounded stoutly. The other stations responded by hiring a cast of trained cats, ferrets, chimpanzees and marmosets.

Chester “Porkchop” Dole was a loyal television viewer. He couldn’t be lured away by cheap imitations; he was sticking with Toto, the cheap original. On this December evening, Dole was working the short-straw second shift. But he made the best of it, howling with laughter and pointing at Toto on the little TV. He slapped his knee with the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee mug. He wheezed and coughed and laughed some more as Toto pirouetted in a tutu atop the News-Flash Anchor Desk, and the entire News-Flash Anchor Team chuckled with manufactured sincerity.

As the anchor team waved good night and the camera pulled back, weatherman Guy Rockney secretly jabbed Toto with his weather pointer, and Toto resumed dancing for the fade-out. Dole broke up laughing again and waved back at the anchor team. He never once thought of glancing over at the bank of surveillance monitors, especially not monitor number five, trained on the peak of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.