PANAMA CITY BEACH — Cock-A-Doodle-Do, a team in the Monday night billiards league at Foghorn’s, started shooting before two of its members arrived.
“They were on their way here,” bartender Amy Calloway said Tuesday.
The rumors got to the bar quickly: Missy DeBerry and Scotty Davis had been killed in a wreck.
Johnny Adams left the bar and went to the home where they lived. He found a woman he didn’t know and a state trooper. Adams told the trooper he’d heard a rumor. The rumor was true, the trooper told him.
Back at Foghorn’s, Cock-A-Doodle-Do forfeited its match. Friends at the bar drank shots of Fireball, the cinnamon whiskey Davis drank, in tribute to their lost friends.
“They’re going to be missed,” Calloway said.
DeBerry was on the back of Davis’ black Harley Davidson Road King when 71-year-old Joyce Mickschl of La Crosse, Wis. crossed their path at the intersection on Moylan Road and they crashed into the front of her Chevrolet Equinox. DeBerry, 48, and Davis, 54 were killed. Neither was wearing a helmet. FHP is investigating.
DeBerry and Davis are going to be missed by the people they knew from their rides and the haunts they frequented when they killed their engines and bellied up to the various biker bars of Panama City Beach.
“He was always happy, always nice and friendly. So was she,” said Kathy Haley, who works at Ms. Newby’s, another bar Davis and DeBerry liked to frequent. Davis organized the bar’s Old School Bike Show twice a year during Thunder Beach, Haley said.
Friends said if it wasn’t dumping rain, Davis was on his motorcycle. He was passionate about motorcycles, Haley said.
Beth Sherman rode over to Mardi Gras in St. Andrews with Davis and DeBerry. She said the loss of her friends had her considering whether she would still ride.
“They keep going down around this town, seems like more and more,” Sherman said Tuesday.
He was craftsman by trade, and he’d recently started a passion project, a motorcycle and auto shop called Hawgbodys that he ran out of the shop behind his home on Joan Avenue. Parked out back Tuesday was a van with a bumper sticker warning motorists to look twice for motorcycles and a bright orange canoe.
If he wasn’t on his motorcycle, he had that distinctive canoe with him, and he was always ready to drop it in the water.
“You knew where he was because of that damn canoe,” Calloway said.
“He used to say, ‘you never know when you’re going to go canoeing,’ ” said Foghorn’s owner Bill York. “All you had to do was mention it and he was ready to go.”
Davis and DeBerry were at the Salty Goat Saloon Sunday evening, owner Gary Gault said. The tavern is a popular spot with bikers, particularly on Sunday evenings when that last ride of the weekend winds down.
“They were good people,” Gault said. “It’s a sad loss for us all.”
Calloway woke up Tuesday morning and started looking back through Davis’ pictures on Facebook. She laughed when she described seeing her long-haired, tattooed friend in leather chaps and a g-string. She was at a loss to explain the picture, so York chimed in.
“Because that was Scotty,” York laughed. “That’s why.”