Magic City (16 page)

But something wasn't right. He saw Alex's foot wiggle hard beneath the sheets. Saw the man's thick neck straining.

“Hey,” Thorn said. “Hey.”

He went forward, saw the man's hands gripping her throat, then threw himself at the man and shouldered him aside.

The doctor who was no doctor swiveled into Thorn, throwing a looping right hand out of the shadows. Thorn took it on the cheekbone, his head snapping back, and he saw the spin and whirl of galaxies and felt the floor tilt beneath him.

Thorn grabbed the man's lab coat for balance, got his eyes to focus, and set his feet and slung the big man to the right against the bedside table. Just buying time till his vision cleared.

Glass shattered on the floor, and the man growled and came back at Thorn with another punch, this one to Thorn's gut. Hardened by long hours of poling his skiff across the flats, his stomach took the blow and took the next, and he was still standing. The light was coming back; the air had more oxygen.

Thorn crushed an overhand right into the man's jaw. Then hooked a left hard into his kidney, then another left to the same tender spot, and a right digging into the man's gut. The man belched up a string of spit.

As Thorn stepped in to deliver the knockout, the man snarled and drove his knee into Thorn's crotch. Thorn gasped and staggered backward, and the man pushed past him around the bed.

He was old and slow, but stronger than any man Thorn had ever fought. The man staggered out of the room, and made it to the hallway, turned left, and hustled away.

Breathing hard, Thorn went back to the bed, touched Alexandra's shoulder. Spoke her name but got no response. Her face was the wrong shade of white. She was cooler than she should have been, quieter.

He tilted her head back at the proper angle, bent over her, pinched her nose shut and pressed his lips to her lips and emptied his lungs.

Fighting off the dread, he found the rhythm and did it all again. And again. He pressed down on her chest, fit his lips to hers, and repeated and repeated again. A prayer he'd known as a child came into his head, and the words fell into the rhythm of his movements. Breathe, pump, breathe, pump. Hail Mary, full of grace.

Except for Carmen's gold crucifix hanging on the west wall, Snake's room was bare. Sheets on his bed, a single pillow, but otherwise a cell. The walls scrubbed clean, the floor dust-free, windows polished. Snake's daily ritual of exorcism, cleansing his cubicle of impurities. It was the room of a monk, a convict, a man deep in training. Snake thought of himself as some of each.

Two shirts in the closet, two pairs of jeans, running shoes. A wallet, key chain, and sunglasses. Traveling as weightlessly as a spirit, leaving no footprint, no evidence of his passage.

He needed a weapon fast and thought he knew where to find one.

It had been years since he had been in his brother's room. Carlos had kept the door shut, used multiple locks. Never admitted anyone, not Snake, not Lola, no girls, nobody. Part of his vast paranoia. Carlos's bedroom was thirty feet from Snake's. Neither had summoned sufficient motivation to move out, get his own place. Still boys, still orphaned kids. Suspended animation.

With another kick, Snake splintered the wood around one lock, and with two more jolts, another and another gave way, and with a final side kick the last two locks clattered to the floor inside the room. Snake leaned his weight against the wood and shouldered the broken door aside.

He stood in the entryway, absorbing the scene.

Carmen was everywhere. Carmen. Her long black hair, her brown eyes, her soft, rounded cheeks, those innocent lips. That look of happy resolve and joyous faith in God's generous, guiding spirit.

Carlos had reproduced the photo of Carmen from her thirteenth birthday. He had duplicated the image hundreds of times and blown it up or shrunk it, then grafted her smiling face to another and another and another cut-out photograph. Wallpapering his room with Carmen as a nun, Carmen with white angel wings, Carmen as a housewife minding three steaming pots on a stove, Carmen on a sailboat waving across the blue sparkle, Carmen driving a station wagon, piloting a fighter jet. There was Carmen's perfect smile sitting atop the bodies of Olympic gymnasts and movie actresses. An entire wall that set their sister's innocent face on the grotesquely inflated bodies of porn queens.

Snake stepped into the room and began to search. On a closet shelf he found a shoe box too heavy for shoes. He hauled it down and opened the lid. A .38 Colt with a four-inch barrel and a box of shells.

On his way to the door, Snake took a last look at the walls. Among all the photos, one caught his eye. Carmen wearing a red blouse and a white skirt. The same outfit she wore to her last Christmas Mass.

Christmas Eve 1963. Carmen is sitting next to Snake on a pew in the chapel of St. Michael the Archangel only a few blocks from the Morales home. In two months Jorge Morales will be murdered. So will his wife, María, and his daughter, Carmen. Five of his militiamen.

Snake sits in the aisle seat. Carmen is radiant in the red blouse and white skirt. Her bare arm brushes Snake's. He looks at her, but her rapt attention is fixed on the rituals of the Feast of the Nativity. “Glory to God in the highest: and on earth peace to men of goodwill.”

Past Carmen's face Snake sees his father in a white shirt and dark tie. At this moment Jorge Morales turns his head and sneaks a look several rows behind them. Snake's mother notices and turns also, and her eyes settle on the object of her husband's attention. Carlos is babbling to himself and clicking together rubber soldiers in the battlefield of his lap.

In the middle of a prayer, María Morales comes to her feet. She snatches Carlos by the shirt and hauls him upright and motions for Snake to rise and lead the way out of the aisle. The rubber soldiers fall from Carlos's hands and he squirms to retrieve them. María Morales jerks him straight and herds her children toward the aisle.

They are causing a stir. People around them mumbling, others at the front of the church craning to see. Carmen is flushed with humiliation. Moving into the aisle, Snake snatches a look to see who is sitting behind them, the cause of this exodus, but it is all a blur, a clutter of faces, as he is jostled toward the exit.

Outside on the street, Carmen is aghast. Such a scene, such sacrilege.

María and Jorge Morales march ahead down the sidewalk. María speaks in harsh whispers near Jorge's ear. His face is forward. The children tag along. Carlos bawls about his abandoned soldiers. Snake turns to Carmen.

“Who was that?” he asks his sister.

“It was her.”

“The other woman?” Snake says.

Carmen doesn't answer, but the affirmation is in her face.

Snake is two places at once. A child fumbling to understand, a man stretching back into the stillness of the past. Snake searches his mind for her face, this woman. This dark force haunting his family. He scans the rows of people sitting behind the Moraleses' pew, the faces caught in the flashbulb of memory. Going slowly, one by one down the benches. Row by row, holding them up to the harsh light of recollection, freezing them. Seeing the bald man in a tight suit, the pimpled teenage boy, the blond-haired baby in the arms of a young mother, then one woman sitting apart, a space on either side of her.

The revelation must have been coming for years, working upward like a wisp of superheated steam sifting through the hard strata of the past, finding fissures in the layers of rock, finally massing just below the surface, massing and massing until it was ready to erupt in a volcanic flash. On some unspoken, pent-up level, Snake must have always known who she was. The other woman. The woman whose face is hardening into focus.

Snake sees her exactly as she was that night at Christmas Mass, the third person from the aisle, two rows back. She wears a black hat cocked to the side and a burgundy dress. Her hair is a thick and lustrous red, falling over her shoulders, and eyes are dark blue and clear and have an eerie distance in them, as if she has stared too long at the horizon. A woman ablaze with desperate longing.

It is Lola.

Snake rocked back against the wall across from his brother's bedroom. He was breathing fast, the scent of church incense still lingering. The echoes of “Silent Night,” the crèche, Baby Jesus in his crib.

Lola.

Outside on the lawn male voices approached, bickering and cursing. Cops coming to take his statement, trying to trick the truth from him.

Snake shoved away from the wall, scrambled down the stairs, cut through the garage, and exited out the door opening onto the bordering woods. He jogged along the property line to the neighbor's stone wall, mounted it, sprinted out their drive to the street, then stayed in the shadows to Main Highway, where he had left his taxi.

He was just unlocking the door, sweat trickling down his chest, when his cell phone jingled.

Snake dug it out, checked the caller ID: Friendly Service Yellow Cabs.

“You coming to work, or you quit?” Nelson Mendoza, the graveyard dispatcher, was as close to a boss as Snake had.

“I won't be there tonight. I'm into other things.”

“Yeah, I heard about Carlos,” Nelson said. “But people been calling for you. Thought you should know.”

“What people?”

“Couple of reporters. Homicide cops. Some other asshole.”

“What asshole?”

“Guy wanted you to pick him up. Very pushy.”

“A regular?”

“No, some guy,
muy anglo
. He gives me your cab number, asks if you was the driver. ‘Does Snake drive cab 4497?' That's what he says. ‘Does Snake drive that cab?' ‘Keep this to yourself,' he tells me, like you and him are long-lost buddies or some shit and he's going to surprise you.”

“Didn't give his name?”

“No name, just the wiseass bullshit.”

“Sounds like my buddy Thorn.”

“Thorn?”

“He wanted me to pick him up?”

“That's what he said.”

“He give an address?”

“Riviera Motel on Dixie, across from Suntan U. Room two-twelve.”

“If this gentleman calls back,” Snake said, “you didn't reach me.”

“This about Carlos getting shot?”

“None of your damn business what it's about. Go back to sleep.”

“Too bad about the kid. He was all right in a fucked-up kind of way.”

Snake clicked off.

The Riviera Motel was about ten minutes away.

He got into the cab, dug out the .38, broke the cylinder open. He loaded it from the box of ammo, filled his pockets with the extras.

Snake started the engine, then sat for a minute, hands on the wheel.

A smart guy like Thorn had to know the dispatcher would check in with Snake, give him the address. Which meant it was a trap. On the other hand, Thorn would have to be an idiot not to know that dispatch would also tell Snake how he'd recited the cab number. Making the ambush obvious.

So either Thorn grossly underestimated Snake or the asshole was in such a hurry to do some head-butting that he didn't care. Then again, maybe there was some other angle Snake was missing.

He let the cab idle for another minute, rolling it around, then dug out his cell and called Nelson Mendoza back.

“Who's working tonight?”

Nelson gave him three names.

“Send Ignacio to the Riviera Motel,” said Snake.

“Yeah? Why him?”

“Tell Ignacio his fare will be standing out in the parking lot. Honk if he doesn't see him. Keep honking till he shows his face.”

“It's after midnight, man. That's the Gables, they throw people in jail for causing a disturbance.”

“I know what time it is.”

“What's this about, Snake?”

“Just do it, Nelson.”

“I don't know about this. This doesn't feel right.”

“Hey, Nelson, let me ask you something.”

Nelson was silent.

“You ever meet my old man?”

“Your old man? You mean Mr. King?”

“The real one. Jorge Morales.”

“What're you talking about?”

“I'm talking about my old man. You ever meet him, see his picture, read about him in the paper, see him on TV, anything?”

“Jesus, Snake. All of a sudden you want to start with the heart-to-heart?”

Snake gave him a few seconds of silence, then asked again: “You grew up in Miami, Nelson. I'm asking you if you happened to hear about my old man, read about him, anything like that. Form an impression of him? Jorge Morales.”

Nelson sighed.

“An impression? I don't know. I was like fifteen. It was a big fucking deal in the newspapers and the radio, I remember that much, your sister and mother and old man getting whacked by Fidel.”

“No impression?”

“Whatta you got in mind?”

“Like did he come across as a romantic hero? The kind of man who'd attract a certain sort of sappy woman?”

“Man, Snake, what've you been shooting up?”

“Call Ignacio,” Snake said. “Give him the Riviera. Make it a rush job.”

 

Pauline could've lived anywhere in town, trendy South Beach, the Gables, Grove, one of the towers on Bayshore, out on Key Biscayne, but she chose Belle Meade Island, off Biscayne at Seventy-sixth Street. A venerable fifties community, two-story Mediterranean homes. Staid, stuffy. She had a pool, a view of the bay. Five minutes from work. And what she liked best, her neighborhood rode the edge of Little Haiti. Which gave her a Third World buzz every day she drove to work through all that teeming hardship.

She was in her upstairs office, logged on to the Agency database, violating the hell out of Executive Order 12333, which expressly prohibited collecting intelligence information directed against U.S. citizens. Pauline was trying to pull up something on this Thorn character but was getting nowhere. A man with one name was proving to be impossible.

Scanning birth certificates, property ownership, brushes with law enforcement, credit rating, Social Security. Anyone with first or last or middle name of Thorn. Getting hits dozens of pages long, but having no way to narrow her search. Nothing to go on. Nothing to give her an idea how to approach this guy who was holding the photo for reasons known only to himself. What'd he want, for christsakes?

A Thorn in the lion's paw.

The lion being Hadley S. Waters. She'd gotten four phone calls from the Big Cheese following up his first one. Hadley was ready to call in a commando team, invoke national security, the Worldwide Attack Matrix, and start sterilizing the situation. He sounded serious. But she persuaded him to hold off, she was managing fine. Less troops, better control. Then an hour later he's back on the phone and she had to convince him again.

Fact was, things didn't feel under control. The porn-shop fiasco. An ex-cop killed and his daughter, a crime-scene tech, shot up. Local Miami PD making a big deal. Turning their best homicide guys loose on it. The press was in full roar. Then just a while ago she learned of disaster number two at the hospital, Runyon bungling an attempt on the cop woman's life. She escapes, and runs off with this same Thorn character.

Pauline was trying to step back, stay calm. Just wait for Runyon to get it right. He'd once been the Agency's go-to man. Drop him anywhere in the world with just the name of his target and the job was as good as done. But this time she was starting to feel twitchy.

Looking out her window at the pool, the patio, the dark water beyond. Having another sip of the chardonnay that was warm now. Almost finished the bottle since supper. Not like her. Usually so cool. Covert operations on the verge of exposure, she'd seen it a hundred times. But this was something else. This was a goddamn tectonic plate buckling beneath her world.

She made a list, just a whim. Who she'd have to snuff to end this. Just to soothe her nerves. Names of the soon-to-be dead.

Stanton King, number one. He'd be easy, a man nobody would miss. His son Snake next. For sure, Lola. Unbalanced bitch. An entire family of loose cannons. Then there was Runyon. He'd have to go. This was too much inside information for even Runyon, a true-blue patriot. Too much gold for one person to have in his piggy bank. A year from now he could scoop it out, try to cash in. No, Runyon was on the list for sure. And she'd have to put Thorn's lights out. Pull the switch on the Collins woman, the injured cop. There was another guy in the mix, a black PI named Sugarman. He'd have to go. What was that? Seven in all.