U-Haul trucks filled several parking spaces beside the swimming pool wall at RayRay’s Paradise. Standing at the top of the state-of-the-art apartment complex stairs, Ruby Arenas waved with both hands at her new neighbors who prepared to unload and move into their new homes. Ruby got so excited at what she jokingly called “RayRay’s commune,” she clapped her hands.

Kim Phillips and Marty Durkin stepped out of a large 20-foot orange and white truck.

Randall Lark got out of his 26-foot extra-large truck in which he had loaded furniture and boxed belongings, most of which he bought at a discount just the day before from an estate sale that emptied out the mansion of a deceased former cocaine dealer.

Sam Bennett showed up looking like a wizard wearing a pointed paper New Year’s Eve hat, playing with a yoyo and wearing a backpack. A flock of seagulls circled his head serenading him with high-pitched squawks that to him sounded like a celestial choir.

In a good mood for the first time in a long while, RayRay had set up beside the stairway a banquet table he covered with a tablecloth decorated with skulls and crossbones. Piles of fresh bagels, fresh squeezed orange juice, lime marmalade, a variety of melon slices, tangerines, nectarines, mangos, coconut milk, soy milk, granola and other breakfast treats created a food mountain ready to climb.

 “I’m glad to see you took some of my advice about healthy eating, RayRay,” Ruby said. “But on such a happy day the tablecloth pattern leaves something to be desired.”

“I had the tablecloth left over from last year’s ‘Biker Pirate Night’ at the bar,” RayRay said.

 “How could I forget,” Ruby said. “Those bad boys brought a live alligator with them.”

“Without a leash,” RayRay said. “But that poor baby seemed under your spell. She even let you pet her.”

“We’re kindred spirits,” Ruby said. “I talked the Crushers Motorcycle Club president into setting her free in the swamp.”

“He was under your spell, too,” RayRay said.

“Witchy woman,” Ruby said.

Pointing to an empty U-Haul truck with the back door open RayRay radiated goodwill.

“I just rented two apartments to a couple of those wrestlers who stood up for Sam when the whole world except us was against him,” RayRay said. “They’re decent boys I might hire as doormen.”

Ruby frowned.

“Do we really need bouncers?”

“With that screwball billionaire gangster Borys Popov running all over with a checkbook and a chip on his shoulder, everybody in Clearwater Beach needs protection,” RayRay said.

“Even here in Paradise?” Ruby asked.

“The twins will work security here at the apartments as well,” RayRay said.

Rocco and Ricco, known in the raw professional wrestling world as “The Terrible Twins Tag Team from Hell,” stood at the edge of the storage shed roof where they had been sunbathing. Both men posed with their hands on their hips. Wearing matching fake leopard skin bikini bathing suits and black knee-high patent leather boots with purple laces, the men waved. Clean shaven and movie star handsome, their curly natural blond hair hung below their shoulders. Chests, arms and rippled stomach muscles glistened with sweat from an early morning workout. Carved as perfectly as a Michelangelo Renaissance masterpiece sculpture the lovable wild men stood as vigilant sentries guarding their newly established territory and extended family of beach misfits.

“Come on down, boys, and get something to eat,” RayRay said.

Rocco and Ricco raised their arms over their heads as if celebrating a victory. Then Rocco bent at the knees and leaped, his arms extended out at his sides, his lower back arched, his head lifted skyward with his arms raised above his head as he entered the brimming blue swimming pool with palms together as if in prayer, his powerful body cutting the water with almost no splash.

Ricco followed.

A champion Acapulco cliff diver could not have delivered more perfect plunges.

Despite the successful daredevil stunt, Sam Bennett began flapping his arms wildly, running in circles, laughing, shouting and repeating himself.

“No, no, no.,” he screamed.

The gulls looked at Sam like they wanted an explanation, apparently figuring he owed them something since they hadn’t dive-bombed the buffet.

“What, Sam? What?” Ruby asked.

“That’s not how you fly,” Sam said.

Relieved, everybody chuckled.

Rocco and Ricco climbed from the pool uninjured and headed for the granola. After eating, breaking bread together as the wrestlers put it, everybody moved into what they hoped to be meaningful new lives.

Trusting in the future, that afternoon Ruby kept her door wide open, her reggae music playing softly inside. Durkin set up the frame for the new water bed he wanted since he was a teenager. Randall hung framed Malcolm X and Huey Newton posters. Kim decorated with new purple drapes. Sam laid out his sleeping bag and constructed simple brick and board shelves where his drone gulls would roost. Rocco and Ricco decorated their place in a jungle motif complete with life-sized furry stuffed animals they won at carnival strongman competitions and lion roars on the stereo.

Paradise was living up to its name.

Sort of.

Nobody noticed Kim peering from the side of her new drapes. Nobody heard the two harsh hushed whispers crawl from her mind and from her mouth as she focused a laser beam stare on Rocco and Ricco when her dueling split personality took over.

“They don’t look so tough to me,” Shannon said.

“We can take ‘em,” Tara said.

“I want a cage match,” Shannon said.

“Bring it on,” Tara said.

At first nobody saw Borys Popov, either, as he watched the action from a parked and fully-loaded 2023 Chrysler Pacifica minivan. That morning, raising high-powered military grade binoculars to his eyes, he had peered and sneered at each face – Ruby Arenas, RayRay Gigliardi, Marty Durkin, Randall Lark, Kim Phillips, Sam Bennett and a couple of monsters he didn’t know, longhairs who reminded him of East German bodybuilders loaded with anabolic steroids.

A KGB-style assassination list fit the bill. With these American degenerates out of the way Borys could regain his power. Maybe he wouldn’t have to destroy Clearwater Beach after all. Nuking the beach still appealed to him, though. Maybe he’d just kill each nemesis first then nuke the beach with a ticking atomic time bomb. By the time a mushroom cloud appeared over RayRay’s Elbow Room he’d be safe in the arms of a couple of new Ukrainian brides in Ft. Lauderdale. Everybody else was moving. Maybe the time had come for him to move the base of his illegal operation, too.

After everybody got settled into their new digs Durkin stretched out on a lounge chair at the far end of the pool. Randall stretched out at the other end. Durkin and Randall noticed the van at about the same time. Randall nodded, seeing a familiar unwelcome face grimacing through the open window.

Both men got to their feet and converged on the gate.

“Let’s go,” Durkin said.

“USA, USA,” Randall said.

On this new day, this new team working together on the same side, two very different men – one white, one Black – headed up the street to have a talk with the Florida boss of the Russian Mafia.

Escaped again from his cage, Dillon watched the high noon confrontation unfold from his perch on a nearby telephone wire.

“Oh, shit,” the parrot said.

In the flickering glow of a blue candle Ruby’s face resembled a ghost, a soul shadow from the netherworld. Bathed in purple light from the fluorescent art deco circle hanging on the outside balcony wall of her new efficiency apartment her caramel skin blended to glow as a lush ripe plum. Sitting in a white plastic chair at a circular metal table she covered with a Mexican linen tablecloth embroidered with red roses, Ruby silently watched her date’s eyes for a sign.

Moving to a new one-bedroom apartment on New Year’s Day thrilled her. Most of her possessions still filled cardboard boxes in the dingy cramped place where she lived since relocating to Clearwater Beach. When RayRay bought the 15-unit waterfront motel and refurbished the place into a retro 60s-style long-term rental oasis, he invited Ruby to be his first tenant. Painted creamsicle orange and lime vodka green, RayRay’s Paradise overlooked Clearwater Harbor. The two-story building boasted a swimming pool and a dock leading all the way to RayRay’s Elbow Room.

Ruby loved communing with the water.

Mysterious spirits of the deep frolicked in the harbor each morning, entertaining her as she drank fresh orange juice. When not in class she conjured spells in the afternoon and extended good vibes at night across small lapping waves that rippled below the spacious dark sky. For the first time in her life she honestly felt like a bruja, a sorceress with the power of life and death in her hands.

On the other side of the romantic flickering flame, Randall Lark looked glum. Of course he felt good, better than good, when Ruby asked him over for champagne and fish spread, an exotic meal as far as he was concerned that only added to her allure. Being from Philly, Randall liked cheesesteaks, roast pork sliders and scrapple. But his mind was elsewhere.

Randall felt the adrenaline surge with his desire to take the law into his own hands the way he did when he killed as a soldier. Somebody needed to shoot that Russian billionaire. Maybe throwing his gun into the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t such a good idea. He could easily buy another, a sniper rifle maybe. Any number of targets loomed on the pastel horizon of corporate and government corruption. Ruby had talked with him about peace of mind for hours on the beach, while railing against dirty politicians and the harm they do to people like them.

People like his dead baby brother Tyrone.

People like his beloved mother and father.

White business executives killed his mother and father by pushing menthol cigarettes at them for decades with the ease of high-flying heroin dealers. Selling smokes is much easier, of course, because tobacco is legal. Feeding America’s nicotine addiction and destroying addicts with lung cancer, strokes and heart attacks also helps the medical and insurance industrial complex that’s worse than the military industrial complex.

As for Ruby, a drunken state senator smashed head-on into her parents’ car and crushed them both. Police charged the longtime elected official with DUI but the attorney general from the same political party ruled her parents at fault in the accident. Witnesses who disagreed with the judgment suddenly clammed up. The DUI charge quickly disappeared. The senator sued her parents’ insurance company for damages.

Maybe Randall should track down members of the cigarette company board of directors.

Maybe he should stake out the senator.

Nobody would know he pulled the trigger until they finally figured out his identity and motive. Maybe he’d call a press conference and announce his mission. He wouldn’t tell Ruby, but she’d know anyway. She seemed able to read minds, especially his. Ruby was right about corruption, of course. That’s one reason he liked her. She survived as a thinker brave enough to act, a witch, too, she told him proudly, who took seriously her calling on both sides of her Mexican/Cuban families.

A witch? Man, Randall thought, a witch. He dug her though. He dug her a lot. She could see right through him when he thought he kept the darkness hidden deep inside his innermost identity as a Black man.

Blackness meant something to him white people would never understand. Ruby wasn’t African American, but he knew she knew what made him tick like a time bomb. Randall sensed her ticking as well. Rage was cool as long as you kept the frenzy under control. Rage could and should be channeled. That kind of control could save the world. Rage turned to Black power meant a change was coming, but at what cost? Some of the brothers and sisters sold out for big money, rapping and seducing white girls dancing hip hop like they grew up in North Philly instead of the Jewish suburbs of Northeast Philadelphia. Some people were too poor to sell out because they had nothing to sell.

White people never understood.

White people never would understand the heart and soul of soul.

Slavery said it all. Slavery created America. If half the country could bring back chains and the auction block they would. Even well-meaning white people take their white privilege for granted with many arguing such privilege doesn’t even exist.

Maybe Randall should go back to the gun.

“Thinking those heavy thoughts again?” Ruby asked.

“Sorry,” Randall said.

“How’s the fish spread and crackers?”

“Great with the hot sauce,” he said.

Randall tensed when he heard the knock at the door.

“Relax, dude,” Ruby said. “It’s just our main course. Follow me.”

RayRay stood on the other side of the door holding a tray piled high with extra-large stone crab claws.

“You know the best part about these claws?” Ruby asked Randall.

“Other than they taste like some of your sweet hoodoo dipped in melted butter?” he said with a small laugh, trying to lighten up.

“The claws grow back,” Ruby said. “They really do. You remove the claws, throw the crab back into the water and in a year the claws are back. Like renewable energy.”

“Is that really true?” Randall asked.

“No illusion here,” Ruby said.

“Pity champagne doesn’t grow back when you finish the bottle,” RayRay said. “Let me know when you can make that magic happen, Ruby.”

“You never know, RayRay,” she said. “I hear that at RayRay’s Elbow Room anything is possible.”

Keeping secrets challenged most people.

Not Kim Phillips.

Even as a girl, Kim – who everyone knew then as Kate, Kate Leary – never gossiped, told tales out of school or spread rumors. She was no tattle tale. No snitch. As he father often said, “No rats allowed in this house.”

One morning about 4:00 when she was 10, Kate looked out the window to see the constellations because she couldn’t sleep and saw her father strangle bookie Tony Bilardi with his alligator belt in the front yard. Kate never said a word. When she was 12 Kate watched her mother invite the mailman in for a two-hour drink and kept her little yap shut. At 14 she fed rat poison to the neighbor’s cat and kept the caper to herself when the neighbor came out crying and calling, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

Each time she maintained her silence Kate heard the voices tell her she was a good girl.

Kate heard the voices talking in her head.

“Be the hush,” her Irish gangster father James Patrick Leary told her from the time she was four as they sat talking at the kitchen table in their South Boston house. Just because she hated her father didn’t mean she didn’t listen to him. Just because he created a hostile childhood environment didn’t mean he didn’t offer sound advice. Just because he shot himself didn’t mean she loved him or ever thought of telling him how she really felt.

Years later living under the radar in Clearwater Beach with a false identity, other than a rapid-fire sales pitch for her real estate sales career, she still kept her mouth shut. But with the two “lasses” that formed her split personality now completely out of control and running amok, Kim Phillips knew she had to heal – permanently – or risk jeopardizing and maybe even outing her brother Kevin and his bogus identity as RayRay.

Truth would ruin everything. Kim loved her brother. Kim would sacrifice anything to protect him.

Agreeing to meet Russian mobster money man Borys Popov when he phoned with a dinner invitation went against her better judgment. She had expected his call. She knew he knew she saw through his thin veneer. She knew he knew she was seriously mentally ill. She knew he knew she meant trouble.

Her worse half, Shannon, or was it Tara, peaked Borys’ interest by flirting with the billionaire and eventually telling him his late brother Ivan’s plot to poison him, throw him out a window or tie cinderblocks to his legs and dump him overboard from his multimillion-dollar yacht he named “Cream of the Kremlin.”

Now, sitting alone on the couch in her waterfront condo, feeling weak, nervous and anxiety-ridden, smoking a joint and meditating on the beautiful expanse of Gulf water that rose to meet a thin line of amber horizon, Kim formulated a plan to do away with Borys Popov.

After all, she had some experience in these matters.

Kate Leary never told anybody what happened to her friend Deirdre when Deirdre disappeared when they were seniors in high school. She just told police she saw a man who looked like the singer Dean Martin driving a red Mustang follow Deirdre after cheerleading practice. Kate said she waved goodbye when the man stopped and Deirdre got in the car and kissed the man. Poor Deirdre, who talked about Kate behind her back calling her dirty names, one day just never came home from school. At the memorial service Kate made everybody cry with the heartfelt words she spoke about her “best friend” Deirdre.

After the service her brother Kevin winked at her. She knew he knew. Kevin knew everything.

If Deirdre could disappear so could Borys. Homicide as common as the thick black hair that covered her and her cousins’ heads seemed to run in the Leary family.

Kim Phillips knew Borys had figured out her psychosis and sensed the “Irish” woman he dated was a figment of Kim’s imagination. With years of high-level KGB psychological warfare training behind him he knew Kim’s fragile mind had careened off the charts. Unstable meant dangerous. It was only a matter of time before Borys put the pieces together and realized she was not who she said she was. Kim knew her instability also meant weakness. And weakness could get people killed, maybe even Kevin. Kim had served her purpose. She knew she had to go – one way or the other. That’s why Borys called and asked her to dinner – and a goodbye kiss.

Maybe Kim could get the jump on him. End it all for them both. Life might be easier dead.

RayRay could go on with his full good life minus her demons.

Pondering the future back at the Elbow Room, RayRay knew he needed to act before the mounting disorder in his family grew worse. Until now he gave Kim unlimited freedom, allowing her to live life as she pleased with no interference. Until now RayRay could live and let live because nobody created problems for her or for him. But the Russian botched everything, ruining RayRay’s personal paradise with plans for a beach real estate takeover and now a romantic relationship with RayRay’s secret sister. Forget about it if word ever got out that Kim Phillips was RayRay’s sister and RayRay wasn’t really RayRay but an Irish hit man who hit hit men.

Maybe he should just whack that whack job Russian. Justifying the hit would be easy. Borys Popov ruled as a Russian Mafia boss, a corrupt land developer who was helping kill the planet, a KGB asset and even a government hit man. Maybe the CIA would give RayRay a medal.

One last hit wouldn’t hurt for old time’s sake, would it?

Deep in thought, RayRay didn’t hear Sam Bennett stroll into the bar wearing his gull beak-shaped N95 respirator mask and slowly flapping his arms.

Dillon did, though.

 “Buy that man a drink,” the parrot squawked.

“Don’t mind if you do,” Sam Bennett said.

Spotting the grim look on his friend’s face, Sam Bennett said, “You look like somebody just died.”

RayRay met Sam Bennett’s gaze.

“Or is about to,” RayRay said.

Killing isn’t supposed to be easy.

Neither is justifying the grisly act.

But ask anybody who commits such a ghastly deed and he or she will likely explain away the dire circumstances that led to that dark finality, explaining exactly why death happened as it did.

Randall Lark killed on behalf of his government. He also killed as an act of revenge. Grieving all the bodies he left on the Afghanistan battlefield, he believed the deaths were his fault. At least that’s how he saw his role in yet another lousy American war that chewed up young men and women that most Americans never think about. Worst of all, a little boy named Boss who Randall loved might still be alive if American profiteers hadn’t put them both in such a bloody no-win situation.

Marty Durkin killed by accident. Or did he? Deep down inside he wondered if he knew the small figure sitting alone on the sand was indeed an unarmed child as he pulled the trigger on Tyrone Lark in an impulsive repulsive act of fear, jumping the gun, so to speak, in a fatal panic. Could he ever admit to knowing a child sat alone in the sand clutching a band instrument but pulling the trigger anyway in a fit of sheer confusion because his paranoia as a white male cop finally got the best of him?

Ruby Arenas killed while in a tumultuous trance, casting a black magic spell against a macho college classmate who laughed when he killed a dolphin and deserved to pay the price for his brutality. Overkill, she later decided, yet writing off her own lethal cruelty as the mistake of a novice sorcerer. Next time she’d take her time to triage those who qualified to disappear on behalf of Santa Muerte, the Mexican death saint who needs fresh sacrifice to fertilize the earth for eventual goodness and peace. Ruby yearned to be more like that lovable old bird Sam Bennett who had the right idea not wanting to hurt anybody but still wanting to fight back against the unchecked predatory capitalism that would continue to kill species after species until one day we killed ourselves.

Kevin Leary aka RayRay Gigliardi killed because his scum Mafia hit men targets deserved to die. Feeling no contrition on these hits, he only quit whacking the whackers because he simply tired of erasing deserving mob targets and chose to retire – which he did with better federal benefits than most lifetime civil servants paid for by good old Uncle Sam.

Sam Bennett’s live gull allies killed for him and for their own survival, pecking out Ivan Popov’s eyes as an act of pure comeuppance as the gulls swooped and swarmed like avenging angels, bereft of pardon as they chased this human beast up a tree where he lost all sight of mercy and the benefit of reprieve.

Borys Popov killed for fun and profit, a deadly agent of totalitarian bliss sponsored and encouraged by the Russian government as part of a plot to take over the world and stamp out individual freedom.

Killers all, this gang that drank at RayRay’s Elbow Room fit perfectly into the frayed puzzle of fractured American society.

Poor Kim Philips didn’t kill anybody and didn’t want to kill anybody – at least not yet. Truth be told, she wouldn’t miss terrible twins Shannon and Tara if somebody else snuffed them from her mind. Lately, though, Kim sensed they’d been hiding out in her inner nature, biding time in her id preparing an ambush.

Just a few days before Christmas, Florida First Lady Jenna DeShifty and Mrs. X returned home to their husbands.

“I expect you to sign a Christmas Eve pardon for Sam Bennett,” Jenna DeShifty told her he-man governor hubby she still considered a “warrior sent from God.”

“Yes, dear,” Ronnie DeShifty said.

Mrs. X wanted something less philanthropic.

“Buy me desert island in Pacific,” she said.

“Yes, dear,” Mr. Big said.

What she didn’t tell him was her plan to pay rogue spy secret agent ex-boyfriends she knew from the old country in Slovenia to drop Mr. Big alone and marooned on that uninhabited tropical island before the indictment she heard about through the grapevine came their way. If the feds locked him up, locked him up, locked him up she’d lose money. If he disappeared, she could pay crooked Cuban-American judges to declare him dead and keep whatever cash the old man stockpiled under his retro water bed at Shangri-Lago.

Talk about making America great again!

Mrs. X even planned to donate money to Sam Bennett’s “Come Fly with Me Foundation” to save the gulls. Her whole life had been for the birds so she might as well sit back and enjoy the flight. Still, she had enemies. Sleazy Russian gangster Borys Popov had shown up at Shangri-Lago for lunch the other day and had blown her a kiss on his way out.

When the billionaire mobster left he carried an atomic suitcase bomb – or what he thought was an atomic suitcase bomb big enough to destroy everything within a half-mile radius of the center of Clearwater Beach. Mr. Big said mad scientists told him that within hours of detonation even a slight breeze would carry the nuclear fallout throughout the Clearwater area. Bomb makers set the nuclear explosive charge at one kiloton, the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT, Mr. Big said.

But Little Rocket Man in North Korea had actually given Mr. Big a nuclear device loaded with itching powder and Chinese fireworks the tiny dictator used to prank foreign dignitaries.

Either way, Mr. Big finally had his paws on the Pee Pee Tape.

Or so he thought.

Excited about the prospect of the new year, Sam Bennett found himself looking at a full gubernatorial pardon, money in the bank to help save the gulls and a chance to refocus on his main goal in life: flying. In training as the sun rose each morning, you could see Sam Bennett running up and down the beach flapping his arms. No longer worried about another early riser beachgoer identifying him from a wanted poster, his picture in the paper or on TV, he flapped and flapped and flapped until his chest hurt and he dropped to the sand out of breath. Even resting on the sand he slowly flapped like a baby gull trying out the first primal beatings of its little wings, feeling centuries of gull DNA surge through his body like electrical current in a power house, knowing the elemental forces of nature always meant for him to fly.

Sam knew he would fly.

Needed to fly.

Must fly.

Maybe Borys Popov would fly too – right out a 30-story window, perhaps, or maybe like a bird soaring higher and higher into the wild blue yonder. Maybe one day Borys Popov would fly off into the sunset and disappear for good.

Still hearing shrill voices in her head but not telling anyone, relief washed over Kim Phillips that the “girls,” as she now called them, were keeping to themselves. The exorcism must have scared split personalities Shannon and Tara into some kind of weird mental demilitarized zone as Kim tried to keep going about her business trying to sell luxury Clearwater Beach condominiums.

Ruby Arenas dutifully went to class, studied, swam long distances in the Gulf of Mexico in the morning, worked at RayRay’s at night and pondered becoming a full-time witch, casting black and white spells on elected political officials. She also wondered why she didn’t want a boyfriend. Honestly, Randall Lark was nice but came with too much baggage. Nobody else of any gender or no gender at all impressed her at the college, the restaurant or anywhere else. Mexican death saint Santa Muerte served as Ruby’s best friend, partner and role model. Marty Durkin also needed help with his past and not her type – better suited to Kim, who, like her, expressed no interest in relationships with anybody.

RayRay?

Unbeknownst to anyone, RayRay now faced a severe dilemma, continually second-guessing himself about making the wrong choice by accepting the U.S. Justice Department’s offer of plastic surgery, a new name, his own beach bar and a secure spot in the federal witness protection program.

His government handlers in Washington, D.C. loved him. After refusing to rat out Mafia bosses he knew all his life, he accepted a “contract” job that did appeal to him – hitting the hit men.

RayRay, born as Kevin Leary – that’s right, Irish – hated the mob. Growing up in Boston’s North End Italian neighborhood, he knew all the wise guys and the worst of the worst, psychotics who grew up to be hit men, killers, cold-blooded La Cosa Nostra button men.

More Molly Maguire than made man, Kevin Leary loved his Celtic blood lines. Revenge, justice and old-fashioned taking the law into his own hands appealed to him. Watching evil assassins he knew who was who and what was what. When he finally had enough of the wanton violence that intimidated and ruined the lives of good people he decided to do something about it.

A crooked Irish FBI agent who grew up with Kevin loved Kevin’s idea and introduced him to corrupt law enforcement contacts. The next week Kevin Leary hit his first hit man. The FBI agent picked up the tab for expenses – gun, bullets, hotel, car, new suit, dinner.

“May the road rise up to meet you,” Kevin Leary said before pulling the trigger.

Then he hit another hit man.

And another.

Within a year all over America the Mafia ran low on killers because Kevin Leary whacked the whackers. When he sensed he made his point and the mob was on the ropes losing power and influence in America, he decided to quit and call a press conference.

The feds went nuts and cut a deal: Keep killing what they called “bad guys” for one year, they said, and we’ll take care of you for life. The government loved Kevin Leary because he did what they wanted to do but couldn’t do in a nation of law.

OK said Kevin Leary.

“For one year I’ll hit all the hit men I can hit,” he said. “Then I’m out.”

“OK,” said the feds, including CIA bosses who also loved his work.

Twelve men fell dead in 12 months.

More than a decade later, RayRay lost his Boston accent and doubled down on a trace of a Buffalo dialect with the help of an FBI linguist and lived in peace. Masterful at changing the subject about his professional hockey career because it never existed, he loved cooking at the restaurant, wiping down the bar, playing drums in the house band, watching hockey on TV and looking after Dillon.

What RayRay hated was worrying about his sister. Nobody knew he shared blood with Kim Phillips except her and the feds who broke all their own rules by giving her a new identity and backstory because Kevin refused to cooperate and move to Florida without her. With their drunken abusive Irish parents having long ago killed themselves Kevin looked out for Kim better than a pedigree army of guard Dobermans. Kim suffered severe psychological trauma growing up, but Kevin always respected her wish to get better on her own without the doctors who disagreed about her diagnosis and mostly without her powerful medication. Now she had God knows how many voices singing sympathy for the devil in her head and was worse than ever.

Kevin Leary, aka RayRay Gagliardi, had no idea how to help.

RayRay wasn’t the only guy feeling confused by chaotic life events out of his control. With just a week to go before Christmas, Dillon finished his last rum and Coke of the night as he helped RayRay string colored lights around the bar. When RayRay locked up for the night and left, the poor bird couldn’t sleep. Depressed and anxious, the crusty parrot knew he needed to straighten up and fly right.

After all, he had a gull friend.

Partial to gulls over his own kind, for weeks he had his eye on one beach blanket bird he spotted sunbathing near Pier 60 as he cruised sunny skies when he could get out looking for a snack. Watching her daintily eating clam strips, she ignored him when he landed nearby. She ignored him when he strutted and flexed his muscles like a preening parrot Popeye the sailor man. She even ignored him when he sang a snippet from “Free Bird,” the Lynyrd Skynyrd song he learned from the jukebox at RayRay’s. The gull’s name was Margot and she had more important things on her mind than a parrot with a hangover, a dirty bird that reminded her more of a feral chicken than a newfound fine-feathered friend.

One day last week when Dillon spotted an unattended open foam take-out container loaded with a variety of Italian pasta delicacies displayed on an unoccupied beach towel, Dillon swooped. With a half dozen marinara-coated strands of pasta in his beak, he hovered over Margot’s head, dropping first one single tortellini. A cheap date, Margot devoured the morsel as Dillon now dropped a plump lobster ravioli which she swallowed in one gulp. Nervous in the service of love, Dillon girded his loins for a tender finale.

Holding one end of a slimy strand of white clam sauce encrusted linguine in his beak, he hovered, dangling the macaroni strand above Margot’s head as she looked up with warm dark eyes. Taking the other end of the noodle she gobbled until together they reached the middle.

Their beaks touched.

Love at first bite.

Despite inbred differences, him a parrot, she a gull, they shared the same fluttering instincts at a tumultuous time when the world needed all the friendship it could muster – or mustard if you count the potato salad Dillon and Margot found and shared for dessert on their first date.

If only for a moment, all was well in the world. If only for a moment, as a perfect cantaloupe sun sank into the shimmering horizon off a white sandy shore, that’s amore.

Dillon might not stop drinking but he was sick of people picking on poor Sam Bennett who only tried his best to save the world, the environment and the gulls.

Endangered Margot mattered.

The time had come to move to the top of the pecking order.

The time had come for Dillon to start pecking.

Kim Phillips slept soundly with no trace of demons in her head while Marty Durkin and Randall Lark sat staring at each other across her condo kitchen table.

“This might be a good time to talk,” Durkin said.

“Whatever,” Randall said.

“What kind of answer is that? You know that’s your problem,” Durkin said.

“You shoot and kill my baby brother, another white cracker cop executing another unarmed Black child, and I’m the problem?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, officer?”

“You don’t want reconciliation.”

“I want you to pay,” Randall said.

 “I hear you’re a combat veteran,” Durkin said. “You ever kill anybody?”

The question stopped Randall dead.

“Killing in war and killing a little boy holding his precious piccolo is not the same.”

“It is if you think the piccolo was a gun,” Durkin said.

“You know that’s what I called him,” Randall said. “I called him Piccolo.”

Durkin saw a soft opening.

“Why did you call him that?”

“He was small and high-pitched like his piccolo,” Randall said.

Durkin felt tears come to his eyes.

Randall wanted to fly across the table and hit the ex-cop who would always be a cop, a white cop, never an ex-cop, a white cop who opened fire on his own uncertainty and fear and killed Tyrone in the process. Randall wanted to punish him. Randall wanted to kill him.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said.

“Look, it’s hard for me, too,” Durkin said.

Randall went to his feet in a second.

“No, you look. It isn’t as hard for you as it is for me. You won. I lost. Tyrone lost. My parents lost. My city lost. Black people lost. The whole country lost. You won because you always win. Even when you lose you win.”

Now Durkin stood.

“You’re right,” he said.

Randall looked at him real hard.

“This isn’t going to work,” Durkin said.

Randall’s voice dropped to almost a whisper, more like a growl.

“You ever even personally know a Black person?”

“From work,” Durkin said.

“No Black friends?”

“No.”

“I knew your kind in the Army, man,” Randall said. “In Iraq. In Afghanistan.  We looked out for each other, depended on each other, saved each other’s lives. But we weren’t friends.”

Now Durkin glared.

“If I’m a racist what are you?”

“All Black all the time.”

Both men heard Kim’s labored breathing before she walked slowly into the kitchen.

“I’m starving,” she said. “Who wants Chinese?”

Now Randall tried to smile. So did Durkin. Both men tried to help put Kim at ease the way they tried to help people when they carried guns in the line of duty.

“How do you feel?” Durkin asked.

“I feel like shit,” Kim said.

“No way around the shit nowadays,” Randall said.

Nervous laughter at least bent the tension. Both men felt sorry for Kim but she seemed better, back to normal whatever that was. The demons seemed to have departed. Or were they just lying low, hiding out in the deepest reaches of Kim’s mind? Durkin and Randall each put on as much of a happy face as he could muster, controlling potentially explosive behavior that could result in some serious damage if tempers flared and sent them over the edge.

Speaking of explosives, across town the meltdown had begun.

After a lifetime of victory on behalf of the motherland, Borys finally gave up. Now, like the average American, he just wanted to get even, to strike out and hit somebody, call in an air strike and kill something in order to feel good about himself.

That realtor Kim was nuts. The Irish girl she pretended to be was nuts. All her friends were nuts. He might be nuts. Borys had enough of American society and was heading back to Russia where he belonged in a nice totalitarian society that let him buy and build whatever he pleased. Nobody in this land of the free and home of the knave cared about him. Nobody cared about his wealth, his power or his political connections. Nobody cared he had often risked his life to kill for the KGB, terminating enemies of the state across the former USSR. A master assassin, he poisoned them, threw them out windows, off bridges and from speeding bread trucks. He served his cruel nation well.

And where did that get him? Alone and lonely in Clearwater Beach, billionaire oligarch or no billionaire oligarch, nobody loved Borys Popov. Had angry birds not pecked out his brother’s eyes, he would have taken an ice pick to Ivan’s beady little peepers. Master of the secret and dark martial art Sicklejutsu, he could kill just by looking at you crooked, radiating sizzling violence from deep inside his mind worse than any James Bond villain, sending his victims into mouth-foaming frenzy and spasms of Red death.

Borys loved living a life of danger. But now he tired of the game. Now he needed help. Now he needed the ultimate weapon to teach capitalism a lesson the world would never forget. Borys needed a nuclear bomb – just a little one, a baby megaton fusion-laden device that would demolish not only every condo on Clearwater Beach but devastate Clearwater Beach itself.

The good life should not have come to this, but nobody appreciated Borys’ talent, his commitment, his twisted loyalty to the glory of self-interest, not even that rotten egomaniac Gov. Ronnie DeShifty to whom Borys had secretly contributed cash and election advice and illegal interference, going so far as to pledge huge infusions of cash for a 2024 presidential run, secretly working against the impeached former madman president who wanted to again become an even more dangerous madman president.

With DeShifty as leader of the so-called free world Borys could finally retire, buy a dozen mail order brides from the old neighborhood and live his remaining years as comfortable as a Saudi prince with a hair-raising harem loaded with prancing dancing girls.

Woo woo!

With DeShifty as president, Borys could rule from behind the scenes, discover America on his own terms and control the world. Screw Vladimir Putin, too. Borys couldn’t wait to expose Putin’s plan to undergo breast implant surgery to make his sagging aging pectorals look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pecs in his prime.

Borys would tell the world!

Fake boobs! Fake boobs!

Then he’d release the pee pee tapes of which he made 100 copies in living color. And show the dirty pictures on Hunter Biden’s XXX laptop. And, and, and who knows what other damage he could wreak on America? Always up for a fight, the idea of destroying the world made Borys feel good again. Maybe he’d quit skullduggery altogether. Leave the whole sordid mess of international espionage behind. Maybe he’d just call it a day after leveling Clearwater Beach.

Lights out.

Time for apocalypse now.

Mr. Big answered the resort phone on the first ring.

“Stormy? Is that you?”

“No, you inflatable blimp,” Borys said. “Weather is perfect. But I do have whirlwind blast in mind.”

Mr. Big grew excited and when he got excited he got hungry.

“Want me to order pizza?”

“With extra mushroom,” Borys said. “As in cloud.”

Mr. Big’s business instincts kicked right in.

“You mean like Independence Day fireworks?”

Borys jumped on the opening like red beets on cabbage.

“You don’t have atomic missile rocket torpedo among White House gifts you moved from White House, do you?”

“I just so happen to have a teeny tiny baby nuke the Little Rocket Man in North Korea gave me as a gift,” he said. “I was saving the sparkler for my Fourth of July celebration here at Shangri-Lago. If I shoot it high enough into the sky, it won’t hurt anybody.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch by your swimming pool,” Borys Popov said.

“You get the bomb, I get the pee pee tapes,” Mr. Big said.

As soon as he hung up he got hungry. The gift-wrapped box of extra-large holiday Hershey kisses the size of silver covered apples caught Mr. Big’s eye. A young female assistant with a Ph.D. in fragrance counseling from Trump University, dyed blond hair, a red dress and pomegranate-colored pumps told him that morning that Mrs. Big had sent the candy as a peace offering. Despite his pleasure that Mrs. Big high-tailed it to Clearwater Beach with Jenna DeShifty, he needed Mrs. Big to return for public relations purposes until after the 2024 election. Then he’d trade her in for a couple of Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

What Mr. Big didn’t know was that one of the out-of-work wrestlers who now guarded Sam Bennett as part of his new crack security detail worked part-time in a gourmet candy factory and had prepared a specialty item Sam Bennett requested to be served at the many white glove society functions catered throughout Florida. The rich remained the enemy of the environment and of the people. And if you thought shit-filled golf balls were something, wait until you bit into a supersized shit-filled Hershey kiss.

Because of the mini confetti popper the professional wrestler inserted into the silver-wrapped kiss with the white paper strip plume as well as the volume of gull shit he jam-packed into the sweet confection, the fattest shittiest candy kiss ruptured as soon as Mr. Big’s thick greasy fingers pulled the parchment pin and the chocolate blew like a grenade in a war movie.

Mr. Big didn’t drink – not even a sip from one of the dusty bottles from one of the thousands of leftover cases he kept in the basement at Shangri-Lago from a failed vineyard investment. But he now gave new meaning to the word shitfaced. Gull guano dripped from his droopy eyelids, his fleshy nose, tiny mouth, thin lips, rippled chin and every strand of his stained hair. Bird feces dangled in coagulated strips from the crystal chandelier. Stunned, he stood by gold drapes covered in fetid waste. Transfixed by the power of the dung discharge he spit out a mouthful of putrid poo.

Still, on instinct, he answered his phone as soon as the slot machine jackpot ringtone went off. At the other end of the line the familiar syrupy voice of his runaway wife cooed bittersweet nothings into his crap-filled ear.

“Is that you, Poopsy?” she said.

Some short, some tall, including a Mexican little people tag team wearing rubber masks that covered their heads and a trans woman who billed herself as the “Amazon Zombie,” a dozen hungover professional wrestlers, some clothed in mismatched torn tights, multicolored capes, scuffed black combat boots, fedoras with feathers and worse, jumped from four Dodge muscle cars that pulled slowly into the Clearwater Beach parking lot beside the rubble of Borys Popov’s imploded beachfront condominium tower.

Mrs. X, Mr. Big’s absconder wife, smiled a mouth full of capped teeth pearly as a white power rally in a Buffalo, New York, snow squall as she perched in a silk semi-see-through muumuu on the back seat of a jet black custom built Charger convertible. Slinky Florida First Lady Jenna DeShifty modeled herself in a leopard print thong bikini perched in a blood red Challenger ragtop, her Medusa-like locks blowing above two inflated body parts she advertised on full display. The well-known duo posed like pretty poisonous vipers about to sink sharpened fangs into soft human flesh.

“I’m so happy Hulk Hogan wasn’t home,” Mrs. X said.

“Even happier we found his hangout bar downtown to flirt and hook up with these hunky chunky rasslers,” Jenna DeShifty said.

“Our new security team,” said Mrs. X. “I buy them with fat checks. Mr. Big won’t get us back without a riot bigger than January 6. I called loser president on phone last night to tell him I buy new house here and high-powered divorce lawyer, too.”

Jenna’s squealy high-pitched laugh sounded like a chipmunk mating ritual.

“I called the governor, too,” Jenna said, “and ordered him to keep his goon cops away from Sam Bennett until he pardons him of all crimes. If it weren’t for our husbands we wouldn’t be getting shit on all the time.”

“Especially you,” Mrs. X said. “With real shit.”

“It took three days to get the gull poop out of my hair,” Jenna said. “Exploding golf ball shit was the worst.”

“Newspapers say Florida country clubs are taking big hit,” Mrs. X said. “White male executives and rich retirees afraid of getting shit on. Stock market says terrorist shit-storm bad for corporate business brand.”

A customized muscle van equipped with hellfire flames painted on the sides and chrome pipes belching red and purple smoke loaded with more wrestlers screamed into the lot, dislodging enough muscle heads to body slam the entire governor’s staff as well as any overweight State Police security detail.

When the van doors opened Sam Bennett appeared raising his hands over his head like the Hulkster after winning another championship bout. When the eccentric nature lover stepped onto the macadam scores of gulls flying around his head went crazy when he flapped his arms in his trademark takeoff imitation.

“Free Sam Bennett!” Mrs. X yelled in the throaty Slovenian accent that swam in her mouth thick as veal and buckwheat gravy at a dirty dictator’s formal dinner party.

“Free Sam Bennett!” Jenna DeShifty yelled in tones tempting as key lime pie.

Neanderthal has-been, would-be and wannabe pro wrestlers, some still on parole for a variety of violent felonies, picked up on the cheer while Borys Popov stood in the shade of a palm tree looking at the autopsy report on his late brother Ivan. Cause of death? Blood loss. Manner of death? Birds pecked out his eyes – likely frenzied seagulls judging from feather fragments impacted deep in the eye sockets of the deceased.

Birds?

Birds.

Just like the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock thriller that struck more fear into the hearts of bird watchers than the day Borys walked into the KGB locker room showers and saw Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s shriveled private part dangling like a dead goose neck at a Red Square market.

Ivan Popov was for the birds all right.

As ominous gulls now swarmed above Borys’ head, Mrs. X got snide. Looking Jenna DeShifty in the eye she asked, “I watched your husband’s campaign ad on TV. Do you really believe God sent dorky governor to save world?”

Jenna got teary-eyed.

“I am so embarrassed,” she said of the political re-election ad that ran throughout Florida.

The ad said, “God looked down on His planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

Jenna wept.

“My husband believes he’s Jesus’ brother,” she said.

“Not fighter, though,” Mrs. X said. “Despite super riches, both husbands lack a pair of family jewels.”

Pointing to Sam Bennett, she said, “That guy is fighter.”

Jenna nodded.

”Sam Bennett will save us and Florida’s environment before Mr. Big and governor put together,” she said.

“Are we crazy?” Mrs. X asked.

“Crazy as loons,” Jenna said. “Look who we married.”

Both women began chanting.

“Free Sam Bennett,” they bawled. “Free Sam Bennett.”

Two wrestlers with biceps as big as their heads hoisted Sam Bennett onto their shoulders. Wearing his gull mask, he raised a bony clenched fist like he had just won a WrestleMania match or the karaoke contest at Hulk Hogan’s beach bar. Adoring gulls circled his head like a halo. Sunshine beamed down on his bald pate. Two beautiful VIPs egged him on. Life was looking up for Clearwater Beach’s unlikeliest hero.

If only the optimistic crowd gathered on the pristine sand knew what Borys Popov planned for the future.

Nuke kooks make the world go boom.

“I saw your wife dancing Watusi on a table at RayRay’s Elbow Room in Clearwater Beach,” billionaire Russian oligarch gangster Borys Popov said.

The booming voice on the other end of the telephone call gasped.

“Why should I believe you? Russians are pathological liars,” said the man Borys Popov called “Meester Beeg.”

“I was peeping through bar window and shot steamy video,” said the Russian Mafia boss.

“Everybody says they have video,” said Mr. Big.

“I have other smoking video, too,” said Borys Popov.

Mr. Big sounded like he was choking on what Borys would call a “Beeg Mac.”

“What other video?”

“Remember when we party hearty with fake Moscow beauty contestants who were real Moscow prostitutes? Remember hot tub full of bubbling champagne? Remember nude caviar wrestling?”

“That was Hunter Biden, not me.”

“Hookers took DNA sample when you snore in sleep. Body fluid now deposited with heavy interest in vault at secret Karl Marx Sperm Bank I own.”

“You have video of me singing in the rain?”

“In living color with big yellow raindrops falling on your head.”

Mr. Big’s voice dropped to a gravelly whisper.

“Not the pee pee tape.”

Borys’ voice overflowed with glee.

“Yes, I have pee pee tape!”

 “Fake news, fake news,” Mr. Big said.

“Tinkle time to rain on your parade,” Borys said.

“Where is my traitor wife now?”

“She and slinky governor’s wife went looking for Hulk Hogan’s house. Hulkster lives here, too, you know.”

“Is that why those two bimbos went to Clearwater Beach?”

“Governor’s wife just tired of getting shit on. Like your wife. Now they defect to other side like Patty Hearst. Now they help terrorist bird man Sam Bennett shit on you and Gov. DeShifty.”

“I hate Gov. DeShifty,” said Mr. Big. “I call him Gov. DeShafty.”

 Borys Popov threw his best psychological sucker punch.

“Big protest rally to support bird man scheduled tomorrow on beach,” Borys said. “All bird man’s friends nuts like him. They all were at condo party last night where weirdo hippie chick drugged me. Woke up this morning in parking lot Dumpster.”

“You need better security,” Mr. Big said. “I’ll send over a couple of Secret Service agents you can pay in cocaine.”

Borys Popov tightened the screws.

“I hear Mrs. Beeg and First Lady DeShifty are VIPs at tomorrow’s protest. They promise to help free bird man.”

Now Mr. Big flailed like a hooked swordfish, reverting back to sound bites from a recent speech where he resembled a rusting robot in a red necktie speaking programmed gibberish.

“I didn’t need this,” he said. “I had a nice easy life.”

Borys stifled a laugh.

“I’m a victim, I will tell you, I’m a victim,” Mr. Big said.

“I have idea,” Borys Popov said. “We sell two backstabbing tramps to Sheik of Araby for his harem. If they complain, he sells jezebels to nomad desert bandits.”

“Keep talking, Commie,” said Mr. Big.

“I give you pee pee tape in exchange for plush Palm Beach resort.”

Mr. Big knew Borys just handed him the raw end of the deal, but what choice did he have? Maybe the time had come to leave the sunshine state and go back to New York, start dating Kim Kardashian. Blathering Mr. Big sniveled.

“I go home and she says, ‘You look angry and upset.’ I say, ‘Just leave me alone.’”

Borys snickered.

“We’ll leave her alone,” he said. “Alone with the Shiek of Araby.”

Both men roared with laughter.

“In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for President of the United States,” Mr. Big said.

“Give it rest, already,” Borys said. “You sound like an old Wayne Newton record.”

Mr. Big gave the art of the deal one last shot.

“You want to buy some classified documents?” he asked.