Powder Burn
Carl Hiaasen
Bill Montalbano
For Dart and Connie
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Prologue
THE FREIGHTER was registered in Panama, a formality. The name crudely painted across her square stern was Night Owl. Two months before it had been Pacific Vixen; before that, Maria Q.
She was 108 feet long and nearly rusted out. Once she had hauled coffee from Santos and fish meal from Callao; now she wallowed in senility, crabbing against the current, her diesels coughing. She showed no running lights.
The freighter changed crews as often as she changed names. That night it was nineteen young Colombians, adventurers from the tropical Caribbean coast where Drake once sailed. They lounged on the flaking deck, gambling idly for cigarettes, drinking beer. A scratchy loudspeaker played old Argentine tangos from Radio Rebelde in Havana.
The captain was older, a taciturn man who drank white rum from a bottle with no label and prized his M-1 rifle, Colombian army issue. He had many friends in Colombia, but none on his ship and none at sea that night.
The rifle hung across a yellowed undershirt. Its barrel brushed the wooden coping as he leaned through a portside window of the bridge and peered westward into the night.
On the horizon, the Miami skyline glowed under an amber halo from sodium vapor streetlights. The captain had heard much about the city; he wondered about it. Would it be big and noisy like Bogotá? Or small and lively, more like Cartagena? And the women? How were the gringas?
The captain rang the bridge telegraph to “Stop,” and the freighter lost way. Instinctively her crew became silent. A few of them whispered, some of the new ones pointing toward the sleeping city.
The ship’s radio crackled, faded and crackled again. On the tarnished bridge only the radio shone, a compact package of Japanese electronics, sophisticated, gleaming.
The captain gave his coordinates in Spanish, flicked the bow lights twice and darkened the ship again.
“Ya vienen,” one of the crewmen called.
Even against a stiff easterly breeze the captain heard the humming, like a distant swarm of bees deserting the mangrove coves in South Biscayne Bay. He counted three, no, four different engines, each with its own pitch, growing louder in the night.
Three crewman moved below quickly. A fourth stationed himself on the bow.
The radio spoke.
“Owl, what’s your twenty? Come in, Owl, this is Pussycat. Could you give your twenty again?”
This time the captain spoke in labored English, repeating the coordinates. As he finished, a curt voice from another boat broke in.
“¡Basta!” it commanded. Then the radio was quiet.
“They are in a hurry,” the captain told the guards on deck. “Be sure your guns are ready.”
THE CRANDON MARINA docks were quiet; the sportsmen in their chalk white boat shoes and the playboys with their zinc-coated noses always left with the sun. The night belonged to the shrimpers, lobstermen and hand-liners, solitary men more at home with the lonely sea than with the painted city to the west.
A big Jeep International pulled into the lot and backed a sleek red speedboat down the ramp: a Donzi, twenty-six feet of screaming lightning. Three lithe young men in dark clothes hopped in. The roar of the big twin Mercruisers startled the drowsy resident pelicans and flushed two stringy cormorants from a buoy in the harbor.
The driver shoved the throttle forward. The bow of the boat stood up, then planed off under four hundred horses. The Donzi cleared the last harbor buoy and raced south, rooster-tailing a ten-foot spray. The Miami skyline glinted pink and ruby off the boat’s mica hull.
“Lights!” yelled the smallest man.
“What?” The driver cupped a hand to his ear.
“Get your lights on. You want the Coast Guard tailing us all the way out?”
Balaos, needlefish and a big stingray skittered out of the Donzi’s path. The third man sat in the jump seat, his back to the others, watching the spray fly from the huge inboard engines and trying painfully to set himself for the concussion of waves he could not see.
“How about a beer?” the driver yelled at him.
The third man shook his head. “No, thanks.” His eyes fixed on the wake, a mile-long seam in the black water. The small man, a gun in the waistband of his jeans, leaned close to the driver.
“What’s the matter with Ruis?”
“It’s his first time,” the driver said, grunting as the boat’s tapered hull pounded off a swell. “He’s just a little nervous.”
“That’s just great. Jesus! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hey, it’s no problem,” the driver said, smiling. “This will be easy.”
“Shit,” said the small man. He heaved a beer can, half-full, into Biscayne Bay.
Twenty minutes later the Donzi anchored near Elliott Key, a boot-shaped island nine miles off the mainland. The driver flipped a CB radio to Channel 15, turned down the squelch control, and the boat filled with harsh static and Spanish gibberish from cars in the city.
“Idiots,” he muttered.
The three men sat in silence for thirty minutes, the driver scanning the eastern horizon. The ungainly silhouette of a tanker moved south in the Gulf Stream. Occasionally the whine of a small boat broke the quiet.
Ruis, balancing like a rookie high-wire artist, stood to urinate off the side of the boat, and the driver and the small man coughed with laughter. “While you’re up there, get the anchor,” the driver said, then glanced at his wristwatch, a gold Rolex Oyster that had cost him twenty-three hundred dollars and one night’s work. “It’s time to move.”
“See anything?”
“Not yet.”
He aimed the Donzi out to sea and throttled up to thirty miles per hour. The hull pounded mercilessly in the offshore rollers, and all three men stood in the open cockpit to brace themselves. After fifteen minutes the driver cut back the engines and the bow dropped with a slap.
“Come in, Owl,” a voice on the radio said. The reception was clear this time. The driver said nothing.
“Why don’t they answer?” Ruis whined.
“Shut up,” the small man said. “Just watch.”
“Owl, come in,” the voice repeated.
“There!” the driver exclaimed. He pointed northeast. Several miles away two lights flickered. One green. One white. On, off. On, off. Over the radio an answering voice recited numbers in Spanish. The driver of the Donzi didn’t bother to write them down. He could make out the freighter’s bulk even above the four-foot chop.
“Come in, Owl, this is Pussycat. Could you give your twenty again?”
“That guy’s crazy,” hissed the small man in the Donzi. “Tell him to shut the fuck up.”
The driver snatched the microphone and spoke sharply in Spanish. “¡Basta!”
“OK,” the small man said. “Let’s do it.”
Another boat beat them to the freighter. It was a Magnum, Gulf Stream blue and built to fly. Even in the dark the Donzi’s driver could see the crew was American: tall, sandy-haired, tennis-shirted, two of them with pistols.
The Night Owl’s Colombians, shirtless and sweating, passed the bales to the Magnum with the rhythm of a fire brigade. One of the Americans perched on the bow of his boat, relaying each burlap bundle to his partners. The bales, fifteen in all, disappeared into the fat hull.
“I wish they’d hurry,” Ruis said nervously.
The small man said nothing but glanced angrily at the driver. This was the pussy’s last trip, as far as he was concerned.
The Magnum roared away, the backwash rebounding in deep echo off the freighter’s old steel hull.
The Donzi motored up to the Night Owl, and the small man tied on with a clove hitch. His hands clinging to the speedboat’s plexiglass windshield, Ruis stared up at the freighter’s bulging flanks. Framed above him against the night sky stood a lean Colombian with a rifle.
“¿Cuantos?” the crewman asked.
“Veinte,” the driver replied in Caribbean Spanish that had come with him from Cuba as a child. “Y algo más.”
The Colombian nodded.
“You do the loading,” the driver ordered Ruis. “I’m going aboard.”
The Colombians began tossing the pungent bales to the small man, who relayed them to Ruis. Winded from the effort, Ruis awkwardly hauled each of the fifty-pound bundles below, cramming it as far up the Donzi’s hull as it would go. After a few minutes the speedboat was nearly full.
“It won’t hold any more,” Ruis gasped. “There’s not enough room up there.”
“¡Silencio!” the small man commanded.
The driver stood on the deck of the freighter, talking quietly with the captain. To the south he could hear the sounds of more engines; more customers.
“Three kilos,” he said to the captain. “We can pay cash now.”
“Those are the rules. We aren’t supposed to even carry this shit,” the captain replied, handing a brown bag to the driver. “Grass is one thing. Cocaine is something else.”
“But not too risky for you, eh? Or your brother?”
The captain’s face darkened.
“Oh, I saw him in Miami the other day,” the driver continued. “Big car, pretty señorita. Last time I saw him he was on this boat; now he’s a big shot salesman.”
“It’s a big business, compadre,” the captain replied in a flat voice. “There’s plenty of room for people who don’t ask questions. Get the money.”
Back on the Donzi, the driver extracted a small blue Pan Am flight bag from a locked stowage shelf under the cockpit. The sides bulged.
“Hurry,” the small man urged. “We’re running out of room.”
“Start the engines,” the driver said. “Here goes.”
Quickly he scrambled up the rope ladder to the freighter’s deck. The small man turned the ignition key and idled the Donzi’s engines back as far as they would go.
“Hey, where’s he going?” Ruis demanded, wrestling with bale number thirteen. The small man moved against him and pressed a pistol into one of Ruis’s hands.
“Let the other bales go. Turn your back on the ship, and put the gun in the front of your pants. Use it only if I tell you.”
On deck, the Donzi’s driver handed the flight bag to the Colombian captain.
“It’s all there, Félix.”
“Bueno. I will count it.” The captain never took his eyes off the smuggler. One hand held the M-1, the other the Pan Am bag.
The driver monkey-climbed down the ladder, cast off the freighter’s rope and went to the wheel of the Donzi. “Hang on,” he yelled, slamming the throttle forward. The speedboat spun in an arc, hurling spray on the Night Owl’s deck.
The captain unzipped the flight bag.
“Madre de Dios,” he screamed. “¡Come mierda sinvergüenza!”
He dropped the satchel onto the wet deck and brought up his rifle.
“¡Fuego!” he cried. “¡Fuego!”
In the Donzi, the small man ducked when he saw flashes from the freighter and came up with his semiautomatic, firing. His hand shook.
Ruis never understood.
“Slow down! Christ! Slow down!” he yelled.
The speedboat accelerated like a rocket, throwing Ruis against the gunwale. The pistol dropped from his hand and clattered overboard. He clutched wildly for something to hang onto, but the Donzi plowed through a wave and bucked him up over the stern into the wake. From the freighter the splash sounded like a sack of cement.
“Jesus,” the small man said.
Rigid at the wheel, the driver never looked back. His eyes teared from the sharp wind. The speedboat raced eastward, out of rifle range, toward the Cape Florida lighthouse and home.
“Shit,” the small man exhaled. “Can Ruis swim?”
“I hope not—for his sake,” the driver said, shaking his head. “¡Mierda! It was a mistake to bring him.…”
By now the small man had stopped trembling. “What was in the bag?” he asked.
“Tampons,” the driver said.
ON THE FREIGHTER, the captain cursed and spit into the sea.
Ruis bobbed in the water while the Colombian crewmen watched silently. No one fired at him.
“¡Socorro!” Ruis cried. “Help!” His voice bounced off the hull like a dull chime.
¡“Por favor! Tengo miedo!” Ruis treaded water awkwardly. He was afraid to paddle toward the ladder, afraid to move a muscle in the sight of the rifles.
“Help!” he yelled plaintively. “¡Tiburón! Shark!”
One of the crewmen laughed harshly, but the captain silenced him with a grunted command: “Bring him aboard.”
By daybreak the Night Owl was gone.
Chapter 1
ALL OF HIS FRIENDS in Coconut Grove had gone to ten-speed bicycles, but Meadows thought that was absurd. He didn’t race, and there wasn’t a hill for three hundred miles. Three gears were enough. As a matter of fact, the sturdy brown Raleigh he was pedaling along Main Highway had only one gear; the other two had rusted to perdition long since.
It was summer, one of those afternoons when the clouds build over the Everglades and march with thunder and drenching rain out to sea.
The temperature stood at eighty-eight; the humidity, even higher. Sweat poured from him as he pedaled a narrow strip of asphalt alongside the road, protected from the traffic by majestic banyan trees, their thick branches casting a dappled shade over roadway and bike path. Lizards darted across the path. He heard the cry of a family of wild parrots that lived in an old royal palm near the bay.
The hotter the better, as far as Chris Meadows was concerned. It was the time of the year when all the tourists went home and left Florida to the Floridians. At least that was how it used to be. Now more and more people were moving in, calling themselves Floridians, and with each one of them there was that much less of Florida.
Meadows glanced over at the long line of traffic moving in the opposite direction past an ivy-covered church. Three cars in five had their windows closed, air conditioners growling. He felt sorry for the drivers. They missed the lizards, the parrots, the tantalizing breeze being sucked off the bay into the building clouds. In another hour they would miss the cloudburst that in a furious few moments would wash the streets, drop the temperature twenty degrees and reward all those wise enough to enjoy it with new sights, sounds, sensations.
Meadows was of two minds about the coming storm. On the one hand, he could pedal home before it and watch from his porch with a shot of Jack Daniel’s as it beat on the bay, or he could take off his shirt and pedal home in the rain. Either would do.
Indeed, it would not have been hard to please T. Christopher Meadows that afternoon. The hospital in New Mexico had been a tremendous tonic. He had done it for the cab fare, liking the idea of science cloaked in white adobe on the sere shank of a mountain. The hospital was for children, and Meadows had suffered it: every block, every window, every angle. He had paced the hillsides around the growing structure, weighing, examining, analyzing. Then one day he had walked no more. The building belonged. Even the sallow consulting architects who made their living designing hospitals had found no flaws.
Usually Meadows made a point of being somewhere else when the time came to inaugurate buildings he had designed. It was curiosity that had led him to break his own rule in New Mexico two days before. He had left room in the vaulted hospital lobby for a cross on the wall facing the wood-framed doorway. Meadows understood that without the crucifix the hospital would never be complete in the eyes of the nuns for whom he had built it. To carve their cross, the nuns had improbably picked a wispy kid, self-taught, thin as a reed and spacy as hell. Meadows wouldn’t have hired him to chop firewood.
Meadows had been wrong. He realized that the instant he had walked into the completed lobby. The boy had carved a breathtaking Christ, bony as himself, stretched in agony on the mahogany cross. The cross had seemed to envelop the lobby and everything in it; the anguished Christ had spoken more of forgiveness than of pain. Meadows had been astonished. And now, back home in Miami, the delight still warmed him.
THE BUSINESS DISTRICT OF Coconut Grove slept in the afternoon sun. Few people walked the streets. Meadows passed a darkened theater, an empty park, an earnestly fashionable line of boutiques of the sort that had made Coconut Grove so chic Meadows was thinking about moving out.
Meadows won an inviting smile from a jogger with whom he briefly shared the bike path: he, pedaling north, hair tousled, shirt open, feet bare, canvas shorts straining at the thighs; she, running south in a seventy-five-dollar outfit of satin and tie-dyed cotton, hair combed back and tied with a red ribbon. Pretty, Meadows thought, but a bit too obviously on the make. He had paced a few joggers in his day, one athletic activity prelude to another, but that was in the past now.
Meadows waved at a teller named Bert who stared morosely at the street from a drive-in window at the local bank. It reminded him that he had to pick up some money on his way home, even if it did mean passing the time of day with poor Bert. Bert had piles.
From what had once been a good neighborhood bar a blond youth appeared, wiping tears with a piece of blue silk. The silk matched his light T-shirt, which matched his pocketless jeans, which almost matched the tearful eyes. A circular gold pendant bounced uncertainly against the hollow, heaving chest.
Meadows let the bike coast. There had to be a second act. There was. The youth took a deep breath, marched back to the bar and pulled open the door.
“Bitch!” the young man screamed. “Cheating bitch. I hope he bites it off.” There was a commotion inside the bar. The youth walked swiftly away, clutching the silk handkerchief to his face as though it were an ice pack. Ah, to be young and in love, Meadows thought.
Arthur stood at his usual corner, where the road turned east to dip toward the bay. Arthur was hard to miss. He was six-four in splay-toed feet that were indifferent to the burning concrete sidewalk. He wore his hair in braids. A wrap of beige and white batik circled his waist and breached at his ebony calves.
“Hey, Chris,” Arthur called.
“How you making it?” Meadows asked.
“Lean time, brother. The heat is after me every time I turn around. A man can’t even stand on the street anymore without trouble.”
To the very tense Miami police assigned to patrol the Grove, the theorem was simple: Anybody who stood on a street corner all day was peddling something—dex, ludes, weed, coke, even heroin. The cops rousted Arthur regularly, but they never busted him.
“What you need”—Meadows laughed from his bicycle—“is a defense fund.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll get some T-shirts printed up. We’ll stage a rally.”
“Fuck off, whitey,” Arthur said. “How about some chess later?”
“Not tonight. I’m working on a project.”
“Make it pretty, Frank Lloyd.”
Meadows encouraged the old Raleigh down the gentle slope toward the library. Arthur was a friend. Meadows had seen him first in a neighborhood greasy spoon, where the black man had been engrossed in a battered book of chess openings. Good chess companions do not come easy in Miami, but your average citizen does not casually approach strange ragged giants and ask them for a game. So Meadows had simply eaten and left.
A few days later, however, Meadows had been buying pencils and ink in an art supply shop when Arthur had approached him nonchalantly dragging a teenager in each ham-sized fist. It seems he had caught them popping the door locks on Meadows’s aged Karmann Ghia. That night the two of them had played chess by the pool, and Meadows had learned to his dismay that he was overmatched.
“The man looks like a Rastafarian and plays chess like Morphy,” Meadows said to his beleaguered king. “OK, I give up. Who the hell are you?”
“Just another refugee,” Arthur answered. He was, in fact, a computer technician of some talent who had saved his money, let his hair grow and dropped out. At night he worked effectively as a bouncer in a small downtown jazz club. By day he manned his street corner in the Grove. Meadows had never asked what he did there. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“GOING TO PERU, Mr. Meadows? You seem to have just about cleaned us out of Incas,” said the pleasant round-faced librarian. “Ecuador. Northern branch of the same family, I’m told.”
When the last Incas’ sons had feuded, one had had his capital in Cuzco, the other in Quito. Would it have made any difference to the Incas, Meadows wondered, if they had known that under their empire lay reservoirs of oil that would centuries later become the lifeblood of civilization? Probably not—but tapping those reservoirs certainly had made a difference to the inheritors of the empire.
Out in the Amazon vastness, Ecuador had oil and, with it, sudden national wealth, instant inflation, unprecedented international status and membership in OPEC. Would Señor Meadows consider designing a building to house the oil ministry in Quito? A skyscraper, por favor, something majestic and symbolic of the new Ecuador. Meadows hadn’t decided. He hadn’t liked the pretentious, nouveau riche army officers who had approached him, but he was intrigued with the challenge: how to design a skyscraper consistent with the colonial heritage of mountain Quito and yet strong enough to resist the earthquakes there were nearly as common as revolutions in the Ecuadorean Andes? Before he made up his mind, he would do some homework.…
He had just decided the rain would catch him on the way home, and turned to ask the librarian for a bag to protect the books, when he was intercepted by one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.
She stood squarely in his path, a half smile on her face, a twinkle in green eyes that seemed a mirror of Meadows’s own. Her blond hair was cut to the shoulder. She wore a plaid pinafore, white socks and white patent leather shoes.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi.”
“My name is Jessica Tilden and I am five years old.”
“Oh. My name is Chris Meadows and I am thirty-six years old. How do you do?”
“Are you famous?”
“No, of course not. Who says I’m famous?”
“My mommy.”
“Well, she probably means well, but she’s mistaken.”
Jessica Tilden thought that one over. Clearly she would have more to say. Meadows couldn’t take his eyes off the little girl. There was something there in that pixyish, semimocking, I’m-not-through-with-you-yet expression. Something familiar.
“Don’t you know it’s not polite to lie to little girls?”
The voice came from over Meadows’s shoulder. It sent a shiver down his spine, a pounding in his chest. He felt lightheaded, weak, vulnerable. Meadows turned.
“Hi, Sandy,” he said softly.
“Hello, Chris.”
Jessica was her mother’s daughter, no mistake about it. Except that her mother’s eyes were a bottomless blue and she wore a knee-length white cotton dress and sandals. The last time he had seen her she had worn a bikini and the blue eyes had sparkled with tears.
They shook hands, there in the library. The ultimate absurdity, to shake hands among strangers with someone you once loved. Meadows didn’t know what else to do.
“Your palms are all wet, Chris.”
“I’m sweating. I came on the bike.”
“Yes, I saw it outside; that’s why we came in.”
“Gee, Sandy, it’s been…”
“Almost six years.”
“If she is Jessica Tilden, then you are…”
“Mrs. Harold Tilden of Syracuse, New York.”
“Syracuse. Yes, well, I’ve been there. Nice town.” It was not a nice town. It was an awful town; no architecture, no life, no sun, and he didn’t give a damn about Syracuse anyway.
“How are things with you?” she asked with that gentle, private smile.
“I can’t complain.”
“The house?”
“Fine.”
“The boat?”
“New engine, same boat.”
“The coffee grinder?”
Oh, stay away from that, Sandy; that is too close to home. In the mornings, when the sun ricocheted off the bay into the bedroom, it had been his custom to get up and make coffee, beginning with shade-grown Costa Rican beans a friend shipped him from San José. He was a fetishist, she teased. Anyone who abandoned her alone and languorous on a big bed in the morning sunshine to make coffee had to be. And a fool to boot, she liked to say.
“The grinder broke. I threw it away,” Meadows lied.
“Oh? Somehow, Chris, I can’t imagine you without your trusty grinder. Or is it that there is someone to make your coffee?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I make it myself still.”
Meadows struggled unsuccessfully to regain his poise.
“You…you haven’t changed much, I mean not a bit at all. How have you been? All that time.”
“It went so fast.” She blurted it out, a set piece. “After we, uh, after I left Florida, I went up to New York and thought about finding a job. But I never got a chance. Almost as soon as I got there I met Harold and he…swept me off my feet.” She smiled in apology for the phrase. “We were married in two weeks—can you believe it? Then, bang, along came Jessica right away, and well, Syracuse, when Harold’s company transferred him there. Apart from that I haven’t changed a bit. Big, old-fashioned country girl who likes the sun in her face and sand between her toes.” The smile again.
Meadows had never understood why she had left him. He had finished his laps one day to find her hunched on the porch steps, head in her hands. He had had faint warnings that something was wrong, but never anything concrete. She had been distant, nervous, skittish, alternately voracious and chill in bed. He had put it down to women’s problems and forgotten it; at the time he had been working hard on a town house for a millionaire in London.
She had refused to say anything sensible that day. She’d called him obdurate, imperceptive and self-centered, but that was not news to either of them. That afternoon she had left. He’d thought she would come back. She never had—until now.
“What brings you to Miami?” he asked finally.
“Fresh air and sunshine, like always. And I wanted Jessica to see the town where I grew up.”
“Is”—Christ, he couldn’t say Mr. Tilden. What in hell did she say his name was?—“is your husband with you?”
She spoke quietly. “Harold was killed last fall, a hunting accident. They were after deer. A silly accident.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Second lie in three minutes.
She was looking straight at him. The challenge was there, frank and direct. Before Meadows could accept it—did he want to accept it, almost six years later? And what about Terry?—the little girl came skittering around the corner, carrying a stack of books almost as tall as she was.
“Mommy, I want these books.”
“Jessica, you are not a member of this library, and those books are for adults, not for children.”
“I want them. You promised me ice cream. If I can’t have ice cream, then I want these books.”
“I’ll buy you the ice cream, darling. The store is just at the corner”
Meadows had been thinking in high gear, only half hearing the mother-daughter exchange. He had to make a decision. Which? How? He needed some time to think.
“Look,” he said, “maybe Jessica would like to go for a ride on the bay. I mean, if there’s a nice day while you’re here.”
“I’m sure Jessica would love that,” Sandy said. “We’ll be at the Crestview until the end of the week. Give us a call—if there’s a nice day.”
Dammit, she had always been more put together than he. He couldn’t shake her hand again, could he? Should he kiss her on the cheek?
She didn’t wait for him to decide. Taking the girl by the hand, Sandy smiled, gave a half wave and left the library. Meadows walked slowly to his bike, unaware of much more than that his sweaty palms still clutched the plastic bag with his library books about the Incas.
The bank was two blocks from the library. It took Meadows three minutes and six years to get there. After Sandy there had been a cheerless procession of one-night stands for Meadows. Plastic women. Windup dolls. He couldn’t even remember most of the names.
Until Terry. He had met her a year ago, a volcanic Latina with strength enough to turn the tides and beauty enough to make a poet weep. He smiled. It was no exaggeration, though. He had fallen hard for Terry.
And now here was Sandy, ripping open a scar thought to be healed. Was it nostalgia that had brought Sandy back? Or was it Meadows? No, that wasn’t what was important. There was something else. The equation didn’t balance.
So Sandy had left him and gone to New York. That made sense. If you’re looking for a change of life, it is harder to get farther from Miami than New York. But to meet some guy and marry him in two weeks? That was crazy, not like her at all. If anything, Sandy had been strait-laced, almost proper, the kind who would go to bed with you only if she thought she loved you. To meet a guy one minute, marry him the next and have a baby the morning after—what the hell kind of way was that to rebound from a love affair? Sandy was too smart for that.
Meadows parked his bicycle on the red-brick sidewalk outside the bank, then swallowed hard against a lump of lead that suddenly enveloped his gut. Could she have married quickly not as a means of burying an old affair, but as a way of legitimizing its result? Perhaps she had come, not to see Meadows herself, but to have the little girl meet him, so that one day the girl would understand.…
Meadows covered the few steps to the sidewalk teller in a mental fog. His head reeled, and Bert was no help.
Bert was a trial, a once-weekly test of endurance, a whining, shuffling, sweaty, living definition of dyspepsia. No doubt Bert’s conception, too, had been a mistake, for thereafter everything else had gone wrong for him.
“If you have piles, you can’t sit, right? So you have to stand all day. And what happens when you stand? Your arches fall, right?”
Meadows, Sandy-on-the-brain, had no compassion for Bert this afternoon. It seemed to take an eternity for the teller to open his drawer, count out four twenties and four fives. He put them in a neat stack, lined up the edges and counted them again. Meadows roiled with impatience. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The sidewalk reflected in Bert’s picture window cage was burning hot. He should have worn shoes, Meadows thought. And where was the rain? He looked up and saw the first gray scout cloud nearly overhead. It wouldn’t be more than a minute or two now. Somehow the thought of biking home alone in the rain didn’t seem as attractive as it had a few minutes before.
“And the doctors? What do they know? They charge you a lot of money and never fix anything.”
“There is no justice, Bert,” Meadows muttered as he retrieved his money from the stainless steel drawer that at last shot forward.
“Now that’s the truth. I was explaining to one of the vice-presidents here and he—look at that crazy bastard!”
Meadows had a disconcerting moment of dual imagery. He saw Bert’s eyes pop open, his mouth constrict in a shocked O. At the same instant, through the glass of the teller’s cage, Meadows saw a red blur whip past, a car, traveling at an impossible speed on a drowsy business street.
Meadows whirled to his right. He caught a rear-end view of the car, a Mustang, and what looked like two occupants. The car would never make the corner where the road turned toward the bay. It was going too fast.
The driver saw that, too. He swerved to the left, hunting for more room. He lost control. The car veered toward the opposite sidewalk.
Sandy Tilden stood there, hand in hand with Jessica. Jessica was eating an ice cream cone.
They had no chance. The Mustang hit them both simultaneously. But it was capricious. It tossed Jessica high into the air, a pathetic bundle of rags, the ice cream spinning away like a hailstone. The car dragged Sandy Tilden. She was under it when it glanced off a trash can. She was under it when it grazed the edge of a building. She was under it still when it came to rest against a light pole.
The bills, four twenties, four fives, dropped unnoticed from Meadows’s nerveless fingers.
“God. Oh, God,” he moaned. He did not move. He could not move. Nothing moved save a squat black sedan that slid quietly to a halt in the street opposite the Mustang, and then nothing more except the passenger in the sedan.
He walked with economy, deceptively, the way a good emergency room doctor will get where he is going quickly without wasting the resources he will need when he gets there. But the passenger from the black sedan was not a doctor. He carried a gun. To Meadows, forty yards away, it looked like an obscene black stick.
The passenger stopped about ten feet from the Mustang. He spread his legs, leveled the gun and fired a long, continuous volley into the Mustang. It was the only sound. Then the passenger turned and strode back toward his car in the same measured pace.
It was more than Meadows could comprehend. His mind, so intricate, so finely honed, could not function. He began running. He ran without thought, without purpose. He ran toward the Mustang and the black sedan.
He had covered perhaps half the distance to the carnage when the passenger noticed him.
A split-second subconscious image impressed itself, like a Polaroid, on Meadows as he ran. The passenger was tall and burly. He wore aviator’s sunglasses. The face was oval and cruel, with pronounced ridges above the eye and prominent black brows.
The passenger raised his gun with a casual flick. He fired once.
Meadows hadn’t the time to recognize the danger, nor did he recognize the searing, angry blow that snapped his right leg from under him and sent him, in an uncontrolled slow-motion pirouette, sprawling onto the hot asphalt.
He did not hear the screams when they came. He did not sense the fresh wind that announced the squall. And he did not feel the rain that consumed the orphaned ice cream and sent probing red rivulets coursing through the gutter.
Chapter 2
“YOU ARE a lucky man.” The voice came from the end of a long tunnel. Meadows, lying on white sheets in a white room, peered up through the voice at the swarthy man behind it.
“Why am I lucky?”
“The bullet just tore away some flesh. If it had hit the bone, you really would have been in deep shit. That was an Ingram he hit you with, a submachine, real nasty. You should have seen what it did to those two guys in the car.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Nelson.”
“Doctor?”
“Cop.”
With an effort, Meadows hiked himself higher on the pillows. The movement sent an arc of pain along his right side, but it also chased some of the cotton candy from his head.
Two men stood by the bed, one tall and blond and muscular, the other shorter, leaner and darker. “That’s Pincus,” the dark man said, pointing. “My partner.” The blond man wore the first crew cut Meadows had seen in years.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Meadows. We would like a few minutes if you feel up to it, sir,” said Pincus.
Meadows didn’t feel like much of anything. He knew where he was. He knew his wound was more painful than serious. The big-busted nurse had told him that, had urged him to eat a lunch he didn’t want and then had left him. He had lain there a long time, drowsing in the sunshine like an old man, seeking without much success to rearrange jumbled swatches of memory into a coherent beginning, middle and end. He had been shot, and now he was in the hospital. That seemed plain enough. He did not ask about Sandy and little Jessica; he didn’t have to. That much he remembered with a terrible clarity that would ache for the rest of his life.
The tall cop, Pincus, unexpectedly proffered a thin white envelope.
“This is your property. Would you sign the receipt, please?”
Startled, Meadows scrawled his name on a form the police officer supported on his notebook. He peeled open the envelope and inverted it. Four soiled twenty-dollar bills drifted onto his chest. Meadows stared at them dully.
“You had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank when you were shot,” Pincus said. “This is all we could find.”
The dark cop laughed.
“You’ll never see the other twenty. Somebody grabbed it off the street,” he said. “And if it was me, I’d take about half of what’s left and buy a bottle of whiskey for that big black dude.”
“Arthur?” He knew someone had come running, had knelt over him, stayed with him, but through the haze of pain he had not been able to see who. So it had been Arthur.
“He had the bleeding pretty well controlled by the time the ambulance got there. If he hadn’t been so quick, it could have been a lot worse,” Nelson said.
Meadows winced.
“Do you want me to call the nurse?”
“No, I’m all right.”
Smoke from the fat cigar wreathed the policeman’s face. It nibbled at his mustache, poked at deep-set eyes and fingered his long black hair. He was a Latino, Meadows concluded, almost certainly Cuban. You had to tell by looking. His English was perfect.
“Sorry, not supposed to smoke in here,” Nelson said with an airy wave of the cigar that was less apology than explanation, “but I figured you wouldn’t mind—there’s nothing wrong with your lungs.”
“Su casa,” Meadows replied.
“Coño, chico, hablas español. Qué bueno.”
“Sí, hablo,” Meadows responded, and switched back to English. “Just now I’d rather not bother.”
“No problem, amigo, I only want to ask one question. English is fine.”
“Answer one first: Have you caught them?”
“No.”
“Will you catch them?”
“We’re trying,” said Pincus, “trying hard.”
“That means ‘No, we won’t,’ doesn’t it?”
“Probably,” Nelson said with a shrug. “Maybe you can help. Can you describe the man who shot you?”
“Not very well. It’s still a blur,” Meadows said, looking away. “I remember he was a big guy, and he wore aviator glasses. And he had a very prominent brow…it was so fast. Mostly I was thinking about the girl and her mother.”
“Rest on it then. If enough of it comes back that you want to try building a composite with a police artist, you call me.”
“Probably Homicide will take care of that,” Pincus remarked.
“I think he ought to call me,” Nelson said curtly. “The first name is Octavio.” He laid a business card on the table next to Meadows’s bed.
Meadows glanced at it, then took a sip from a glass of water. “Do you understand what it’s all about?” he asked.
“What’s there to understand? Two assholes broke somebody’s balls and they got killed. Bang-bang.”
“Tell me about it. I’d like to know.”
“Naw, you don’t want to get involved. It’s scum from top to bottom.”
“But I already am involved.”
“The hell you are. You’re not even an ‘innocent bystander’—like the two who were killed. You are just what the paper calls ‘a slightly injured passer-by.’ They didn’t even use your name.”
“The innocent bystanders”—Meadows controlled himself—“the woman and the girl, they were special people to me. Very close.”
Nelson seemed to admire the smoke spilling from the red edge of the cigar.
“Shit, amigo, I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t know that.”
Meadows knew anger then, ignited by loss and pain, exacerbated by the cavalier cop and his own feeling of helplessness on the hospital bed.
“The guy who shot me is also responsible for killing Sandy and Jessica. He ought to be in jail already, for Christ’s sake. It was broad daylight!”
“It is easier to identify the plague, amigo, than to kill all the rats.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Meadows snarled.
Pincus, who had silently watched the byplay, stepped smoothly into the ripening tension.
“Mr. Meadows, there is a drug war going on in this city, and the incident in which you were involved is one aspect of it. Eventually we will dominate the violence, but our resources are limited, and we can’t do it overnight.…”
It was a pat speech, Nelson thought. He had made it himself, less stilted, a dozen times. Now he listened in brooding silence. Dammit, he had walked into a minefield. He should have bothered to find out that there had been something between Meadows and the dead woman. No, Pincus should have found out. Pincus was the one who went by the book, wrote perfect reports and could conjure up a dozen conspiracies between home plate and first base.
Now, Nelson reflected, instead of a wounded victim who could possibly give him a glimpse of the killer, he had on his hands an outraged guy who looked mad enough to eat raw meat.
Meadows didn’t seem the vigilante or the I-am-going-to-the-newspapers-and-the-mayor type, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to cool him off just the same. Then maybe, once he had pulled his wits together, he would look through the mugs of dopers for the triggerman. If he was an architect, he should have a good eye.…
“Look, amigo, I don’t know how much you know about the drug business—” Nelson began.
“I don’t know anything about it. Why should I?”
“If you yell like that, you’ll probably start bleeding again. But if you listen for a few minutes, we’ll tell you enough about it so that you’ll understand why a mother and her little girl got killed in the street and you got shot.”
Meadows lapsed into glowering silence, but it was only later that he would begin to digest what they told him now. It was as if they were talking about some other universe. Meadows had no term of reference by which to judge what he heard.…
South Florida, as Nelson and Pincus described it, was the victim of its own geography. Its thousands of miles of beaches, hundreds of airstrips, the inviting emptiness of the Everglades—all beckoned the drug merchants.
“When it comes to law and order and justice and all those other beautiful things the Constitution promises, the United States of America ends just north of the Miami line. Miami is a free-fire zone, a no man’s land—call it what you will,” Nelson said.
“This is drug central, amigo. From spaced-out kids to pillars of the establishment—everybody’s into it; everybody’s getting rich, and some people are getting dead.”
From the Caribbean came huge quantities of marijuana, particularly from Jamaica, where ganja was the biggest cash crop. From Colombia in South America came mountains more of marijuana and perhaps the most prized drug of all, cocaine, the rich man’s high.
The Colombian smugglers had established networks to move small quantities of cocaine. It came in purses, in high heels, in bellies and rectums. Customs once found two kilos sewn into the corpse of a three-month-old baby. A young Colombian once fell over dead, getting off a flight from Bogotá. When the pathologists got to her, they discovered she had stuffed nearly a pound of pure cocaine into her vagina. The plastic bags had leaked.
“She never would have to work another day in her life. Instead, she went out on an eternal high.” Pincus snickered.
However, as the market grew, Nelson related, the smugglers had grown bolder. Small quantities became tedious, more trouble than they were worth. The smugglers began sending freighter loads of grass and big bundles of coke through the Windward and Mona passages into the Florida Straits. Fast boats came from shore to offload. Airborne smugglers landed tons of grass on headlight-lit runways in the Everglades. One load was enough to pay for an aged DC-3 or a rusty tramp freighter a dozen times over.
In the past few years the drug trickle had become an avalanche of unprecedented proportions. It was enormous, unstoppable. If the risks were huge, so were the profits. Drugs made hundreds of blue-jean millionaires every year.
And new widows as well, for as the volume grew, so did the violence. For a long time the Colombians distilled the coke and ran it as far as Florida. There the Cubans took over.
Among the half million Cuban exiles in Miami there were some who remembered fondly the old Batista days when tough hombres ran the women and the slots and their own private armies. The Cuban multitude also held legions of lean young men who had learned to kill, to infiltrate, to run small boats at high speed on moonless nights. The CIA had taught them, in a secret, losing war against Fidel Castro. They had learned well—and they had taught their young, acquisitive, upwardly mobile American-bred cousins, nephews and children.
Drug money was easy money. But more and more it tended to be bloody money.
“Now the pros are in tight. They have no room for wise-ass amateurs. There are still some around, but soon the big boys will be calling all the shots.”
The violence had begun in earnest when the offshore-onshore arrangement between the Colombians and the Cubans had begun breaking down. Cocaine greed had been the divisor.
The Colombians had decided to become farmer-to-market dopers, cutting out the Cuban middlemen. They had moved onshore, setting up their own networks in Miami to distribute Colombia’s down-home produce. The Cubans had writhed at the intervention, defended their home turf with lead and moved offshore, buying wholesale in Colombia and transporting the coke northward themselves.
It would be messy, but simple, if the Colombians shot the Cubans and vice versa, but it was more confusing than that. Colombians also shot Colombians and Cubans shot Cubans, and if sometimes a beautiful woman and her little girl got caught in the middle, too bad.
“For every one we catch, another ten laugh all the way to the bank,” Nelson concluded.
“And this time?” Meadows asked lightly. “Who was it this time?”
“It’s hard to know,” Nelson replied. “The two stiffs carried no identification, but from the looks of them I’d say they were Colombians. Judging from the gun that killed them, the hit man was probably Cuban. You can’t be sure.”
“It’s completely mindless,” Meadows protested.
“Sure. And senseless and lawless. And hopeless. And the next time your very proper host at a dinner party passes around the spoons you be sure and tell him that.”
OCTAVIO NELSON’S HEAD ACHED, and his tongue protested the bitterness of too many cigars. He drove reflexively. The rush hour was peaking, but the traffic into the city wasn’t bad. The sun, poised for flight over the Everglades, promised another couple of hours of daylight. Angela was working, so there was no hurry to get home. He would go back to the station and slog through some papers. It had not been a profitable afternoon, Nelson decided.
“Can anybody really be that naïve?” Pincus asked suddenly. He meant Meadows.
Nelson grunted. Meadows had been about as useful as another corpse. Something strange was going down among the dopers. Only that would account for the daylight chase through the Grove. Dopers liked to settle their differences alone, in the dark; it was more effective, and it kept the pressure down. Nelson needed to know what was happening. But he certainly would get no lead from the morose, angry young man they had just left.
“If he had been able to finger the guy who shot him, it would have helped,” Nelson said. “And it would have been smoother, Wilbur, if we had known he was somehow connected to the woman and the little girl.”
Pincus bridled at the rebuke. “Jesus, I checked him out six ways from Sunday. Our records, the feds’ records, everywhere.”
“Did you ask around the Grove about him?”
It was not hard to interpret the silence that followed. Nelson stifled a sigh of disgust. His partner was the complete twenty-first-century cop. If information were reduced to a form and filed in a computer, Wilbur Pincus would find it. If Meadows had ever married the girl, Pincus would have known it. If they ever had had drivers’ licenses from the same address or applied together for credit, Pincus would have found out. But if they had been simply good friends, or neighbors, or lovers, Pincus was defenseless. Nobody had bothered—yet—to file that kind of information in a central archive.
“Forget it, Wilbur.” It probably didn’t make any difference anyway.
ROBERTO CALLED THAT NIGHT just as Nelson was getting ready to leave the station. There was no small talk; there hardly ever was anymore.
“I need a favor, hermano.”
“What now?”
“My car. It’s parked over on Brickell Avenue, near the toll gate. I need somebody to tow it in.”
“Call a garage.”
“It’s not that easy. Nothing illegal or anything like that, I swear. I just can’t go near it right now. I think the cops ought to do it.”
“What are you up to now, por Dios?”