Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) (2 page)

D
uring late July, in the southernmost city of the United States, taking a breath is an exhausting chore. More so if you aren’t used to the steamy tropical climate of South Florida. The very air seems to carry a massive weight, pressing down on this island town at the end of the road, flattening it. Here, the term “hot and humid” loses all meaning. The air is so saturated and heavy with moisture it feels as if you can cut it with a knife. The sun is like a blast furnace, searing into exposed flesh. Stifling and still, the air shows not even a hint of the slightest breeze. The sun bears down without mercy, heating the already hot air and evaporating any moisture lying on the surface of the land. Being surrounded by the ocean, there is plenty of moisture and little land.

Standing on the corner of Duval and Caroline Streets waiting for traffic to clear, a man stood restlessly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. A beat-up old Chevy pickup blocked the crosswalk, its exhaust adding to the heat and misery. Feeling like he was standing on a bed of charcoal, the man waited. Stepping out in traffic was ill-advised on the crowded and narrow streets of Key West.

The few seconds of respite the fidgeting afforded his feet didn’t really help much in his new flip-flops. The pavement only heated up the rubber soles. Late July and the man was sweating profusely, his new tropical-looking shirt already sticking to his skin after only five blocks of walking. Even in shorts, he could feel the sweat dripping down the backs of his knees. The temperature and humidity both hovered near the one-hundred mark, and any cooling breeze that might have come off the sea wasn’t quite making its way down to street level.

A native of Pittsburgh and on his first-ever trip out of the Alleghenies, it was like Michal Grabowski had crossed into a new dimension when he’d stepped off the Greyhound bus late the previous night and encountered the sights, smells, sounds, and the very feel of Key West.

Two days before, very early in the morning, he’d bought a one-way ticket at the main bus terminal near the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. When Grabowski boarded the southbound bus out of Pittsburgh, he never looked back. With good reason.

The pickup jerked and belched smoke, chugging its way across Duval as Grabowski stepped off the curb to cross Caroline Street. He was nearly hit by two lime-green scooters, jumping back just in time as the riders turned off Duval and onto Caroline, racing and yelling at one another, the scooters belching more smoke. The riders were obviously already drunk and it wasn’t even noon.
Or maybe their Friday night just hasn’t ended yet
, Grabowski thought.

At only five seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, Grabowski often thought himself to be invisible. It wasn’t the first time he’d nearly been run over. He didn’t have any distinguishing marks, scars, or tattoos, and wore his blond hair short, just over his ears. His unremarkable face now bristled with a two-day stubble. Back home, he looked like a thousand other guys. Here, he stuck out like a sore thumb among the cast of oddball characters that make up Key West. Crossing the street, he stopped to let his feet cool in the shade of an awning covering the entrance to a T-shirt shop.

Looking across the street at a travel agent’s storefront, Grabowski noticed a map of the state that they had taped to the inside of the front window. It was hanging loose from the top right corner, the employees either not noticing or not caring to fix the tape, which had lost its adhesiveness in the humid air.

Tilting his head slightly to the right, Grabowski looked at the map at a whole new angle. Ninety degrees from its usual angle, the long East Coast highway called US-1 now wound its way from left to right, ending right here.

Key West has got to be the reservoir tip of the Florida condom
, Grabowski thought. Glancing up and down Duval Street, he could actually see the dense air as the midday sun seemed to melt the asphalt, heat waves shimmering up from everything. Grabowski watched the other people on the sidewalks as they shuffled through the oppressive heat of the day.
All the little swimmers moving around in a daze, bumping into one another, then moving on,
he mused.

Michal Grabowski had an unusual way of looking at things. He’d learned to just take each moment in time and everything that was going on in it on its own merit. He didn’t have good or bad days, just moments that he accepted for what they were and used for what he could. A practical young man, who acknowledged what fate handed him and enjoyed what he could.

Continuing up Duval Street, weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic on the narrow sidewalk, he hurried through the areas exposed to the brutal sun and slowed under the awnings of the businesses and bars that afforded shade.

Like many, Grabowski had come to Key West on the run. Three days ago, he’d ripped off a coke dealer. He’d been planning it for weeks, building up his courage as he sold off his meager belongings. Finally, when he was down to just a few changes of clothes, with nothing else in his furnished apartment that he could sell, he decided it was time to get out of the Three Rivers area. Grabowski knew he could get away with it, because he knew the dealer and his habits. The two were occasional drinking buddies. Sometimes, they smoked weed together and Michal never turned down the offered line on a mirror. The dealer was small-time, moving grams at street level. An acquaintance, not really a friend.

The fact that the guy would get into serious trouble with the dealer who fronted him a kilo every other week never even occurred to Grabowski. Lenny snorted and partied away all his profits during a three-day binge party after scoring the coke. Grabowski figured there’d just be no way for Lenny to even consider trying to find him, unaware that the dealer who supplied Lenny did so on credit and moved thousands of pounds in the Pittsburgh area. That guy had a bit longer reach, another notion that had escaped Grabowski’s attention.

So, Michal planned the theft as carefully as he could. He knew Lenny’s routine as well as Lenny did. The guy didn’t seem concerned with taking any precautions. Michal knew that Lenny scored a kilo every other Wednesday, late at night, in preparation for the three-day party. Michal had attended a number of the nonstop affairs himself, where coke and weed were passed around freely. So he just happened to be there on delivery night, when Lenny was breaking the brick up into several hundred single-gram packets. He waited, even offered to help by making coffee for the guy.

When Lenny went to the john, Grabowski made his move. He quickly gathered up all the little packets, wrapped the rest of the unbroken brick tightly in its foil cover and stuffed everything in his oversized pants pockets. Driving quickly, he was three blocks away at the Greyhound station, boarding the first bus headed south, before Lenny even noticed that he and the party supplies were gone.

Selling a few grams here and there on the trip south, Michal quickly doubled his meager stash of running cash. He was careful, though. Being small made a person careful. Being invisible helped a lot, as well.

Michal had only bought a ticket to the next stop and kept only two or three grams in his pocket for a possible sale. The rest was stashed in his backpack. He made sure to conduct the actual sale when the bus stopped. And that seemed like it happened in every little town they came to.

If he didn’t make a sale, he bought another ticket to the next stop heading south and reboarded the same bus. If he did make a sale, he let the bus and buyer continue on and he caught the next one. Always headed south.

Wanting to avoid any kind of confrontation, he had to take what precautions he could. Having speed and agility on his side meant that being in the open, where he could move around, was safer. That way, he was certain that, if anything happened, he could outrun the cokeheads he targeted. If that didn’t work, he was capable of defending himself, but not in the confines of a rolling bus.

Michal had always been small. Growing up in a tough neighborhood, being small meant being picked on and beaten up on a weekly basis. Sometimes more often than that. His dad had spent a year in Japan and learned a few judo moves, which he’d taught to his son. At the age of nine, Michal had learned all that his dad could teach him and was enrolled in a judo school across town.

The small boy grew into a small man. He worked hard and learned fast, eventually becoming a part-time instructor at the school. Judo seemed to meld with the way he looked at life. Watch everything going on around you, step out of the way of things that can hurt you and take advantage of the things that can’t.

Standing in the bus’s lavatory halfway between Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and Morgantown, West Virginia, Michal caught a look at himself in the stainless steel mirror, as he held a tiny spoon to his nose and sniffed.
I still don’t see the attraction,
Michal thought, wiping his nose.

It’d been seven years since Michal had quit the Bushido dojo to work full-time at the foundry. He tooted when the opportunity presented itself, but had never actually bought coke before. Union strikes and layoffs were part of everyday life and he found himself drinking and partying more. He hadn’t worked out, or practiced judo, in several years now.
A new location and a new life
, he thought.
Maybe I’ll open my own dojo in Florida
.

Checking his nose again, he capped the small vial and put it in his pocket, always careful to leave a tiny grain or two of the fine white powder on his mustache to attract customers. It worked better than a sign hung around his neck.

The farther south he went and the more of the stolen drugs he sold, the farther south his ultimate destination became. Soon, that destination had a name. When someone asked where he was headed, he’d picked the destination at random because it was the furthest south you could go. As far from the steel mills as he could get. He was through with the gray slushy winters. Key West.

Sales of the little packets increased the further south he rode on the busses. Upon reaching the terminal in Miami, he had a dinner stop and a one-hour wait for the next bus that would take him all the way to Key West. Altogether, he’d sold twelve grams of the white powder and another half a gram went up his nose, one little spoonful at a time. He kept his personal stash in a tiny glass vial, the spoon on a chain attached to the cap. Cokeheads had sharp eyes and could spot the telltale white flakes under his nose from the other end of the bus. He kept the little jar half-full, to entice prospective buyers.

When he finally got to the end of the line in Key West, he had a little over five thousand dollars in his backpack, but at some point his wallet had been picked from his pocket. He figured it had to be while standing in the crowded departure area in Miami, remembering that he’d had it at the restaurant and found it missing after boarding the bus. It didn’t have any cash in it—he had that stashed in his backpack. But it did have his driver’s license and three credit cards, of which two were maxed out. Just another event that he accepted and moved on.

Figuring to start a new life, Michal considered the loss of the cards and license to be part of doing business. With more than a pound of the key unbroken and almost four hundred little packets ready to sell, he thought his prospects were pretty good. Those packets alone represented two years’ worth of wages to him. He’d need to find a place he could buy a lot more of those little Ziploc packets. He’d looked around the bus, wondering if the pickpocket was aboard, but hadn’t seen him.

Thinking back, Michal knew it had to have been in the crowded line, where people were pushing and shoving to get on the bus. Only one person stood out in his mind and that was because he stood out less than Michal himself. There’d been a guy near him in the line, shorter than Michal’s five seven. An ugly little guy with greasy hair, acne, and a crooked, hooked nose. Michal remembered him because he stunk. He’d also sold him an eight ball when they stopped in Belle Glade on the south side of Lake Okeechobee.

Michal had broken his own rule on reboarding a bus after a sale. The next one out of Belle Glade wasn’t until morning. He tried to avoid the nasty little cokehead on the trip to Miami. The guy tried offering him a hit from his crack pipe, but Michal didn’t want anything to do with that.

The crackhead wasn’t on the bus from Miami to Key Largo. He’d looked for him after realizing his wallet was missing. Arriving in Key West late last night, Michal rented a room at the cheapest place he could find, but it was still a hundred bucks a night. In his mind he calculated he could afford that for over a year if he was careful. Being optimistic, he only paid for a week in advance. It was four blocks off the main drag on Fleming Street. Michal envisioned moving up to better digs in the very near future.

Having decided to not drink very much and leaving the bulk of his cash hidden under the mattress in his room, Grabowski went from one bar to another, getting a feel for the bustling little tourist town. With enough cash, it was easy, tipping bartenders and waitresses and buying shots for the people they tended to talk with more than others. Locals hang with locals.

So Michal ingratiated himself with the locals, the big spender looking for some fun. He made a couple of quick contacts and before last call, he’d managed to buy four more little packets, adding them to his stockpile to resell. He planned to limit his own use, but wanted to quickly gain a reputation as a user so he could meet the sellers. To him, that seemed like the easiest way to map out the ground rules and territories and stay out of the dealers’ way.