Powder Burn (8 page)

What Meadows could not seem to replicate were the eyes. He fiddled with them for what must have been a half hour, faltering and starting again, before he was satisfied.

When he was finished, Meadows knew what the eyes reminded him of, so dark and dispassionate and deadly. They were not the eyes of a man at all. They were the eyes of a shark.

Chapter 6

THE LINCOLN
sat in front of El Hogar, a cramped storefront restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street in Little Havana. A Sorry We’re Closed sign hung in the door window, but small candles still burned in the red table lanterns inside. There were but four customers.

Outside, in a dingy blue Dodge less than a block away, Detective Octavio Nelson closed his eyes. They had been sitting on the Lincoln for an hour with no sign of the owner. Nelson was sure the man was inside El Hogar, but he wasn’t sure it was worth the wait. Another headache was coming on like a noisy bus.

“I heard Shafer got off today,” Wilbur Pincus said.

Nelson nodded and sucked on a cigar.

“I told you it was a bad search,” Pincus said.

Nelson glared at his partner. “I knew he had at least a kilo in the trunk. I took the chance.”

“How’d you tell it in court?”

“Routine traffic stop.”

Pincus shook his head. “I bet they took you apart on probable cause, right?”

They sure had, Nelson thought to himself. He hated to lose a shithead like Shafer. Shafer could have been flipped. He was an Anglo. He’d been scared out of his mind. Nelson had known it the minute he’d put the handcuffs on. But the judge had said it was a bad search. “Totally illegal” were the words he’d used. So Shafer walked.

“At least I cost him a kilo of coke,” Nelson muttered.

Pincus snorted. “We took a whole course in probable cause up at Tallahassee. Lasted two weeks. Maybe you ought to sign up next time.”

“Right,” Nelson said. “You bet.”

The car was like a sauna. He flipped on the radio and tuned in a Miami
salsa
station.

“Don’t you think you ought to leave the squawk box on?” Pincus asked. “In case they try to reach us.”

“Naw. We’re on surveillance.”

The front door of El Hogar opened. Nelson sat up. Just one of the waitresses on her way home. The lights in the restaurant remained on.

“What did you find in that car?” Pincus asked suddenly.

“What car?”

“The Mercedes you hauled in a couple weeks ago.”

Nelson tightened. “How’d you know about that?”

“I saw the tow sheet on your desk.”

Fucking Mathers in the garage. He should have known better. “Nothing,” Nelson said. “The car was clean.”

“Who’d it come back to?”

“I don’t even remember. Some doctor, I think. He got bombed one night and forgot where he parked. It was nothing.”

Pincus seemed to buy it.

The car had
not
been clean.

Roberto Nelson’s Mercedes-Benz sedan had contained 5.7 grams of cocaine hidden in a metallic key box beneath the steering column. Octavio Nelson had found it after a ten-minute search, weighed it and field-tested it himself on a lab kit he had bought one day at a Coconut Grove head shop. Then he flushed the powder down the john.

He’d never made a report on the coke or even on the tow job, an oversight the boys in the police garage were not likely to forgive soon. He’d given Mathers the same bullshit story about the doctor.

Then Roberto, idiot Roberto, had waltzed into police headquarters and copped the keys off Octavio’s desk on the fourth floor and driven his goddamn Mercedes off without a word. They would see about that later, he and Roberto.

In the meantime, there was Wilbur Pincus, Iowa-born-and-bred, a babe in Miami. Pincus was a book man. He dressed by the book, talked by the book, made out all of his A forms by the book. The first time Nelson had caught Pincus shining his shoes, he’d immediately put in for a new partner. His complaints were ignored. Pincus, unfortunately, was a pretty good cop.

Nelson had tried another approach. He’d worked on Pincus until he planted the idea that the young cop should go to work for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Nelson had even gone so far as to provide three glowing letters of commendation, two of them signed by police captains who had been dead for years.

The DEA had been interested. Pincus had come out of his first interview with flying colors. Two days later, however, a DEA agent working in Hialeah had been shot down by one of his own men during a busted Quaalude deal. That afternoon Pincus had withdrawn his application. He’d told the feds he’d rather work with Octavio Nelson.

After all, all the other captains got fat behind desks, chewed out the sergeants, fucked the secretaries and worked up office pools on the Dolphin games. Not Nelson. Here was a big shot cop who really loved street work. Pincus had been impressed. Nelson was sloppy, to be sure, and a bit crude, but he was a cop Pincus could learn from.

Pincus truly felt that way until he’d discovered Nelson had been trying to dump him. The humiliation had been devastating. For two days he’d trod from floor to floor in search of Captains Donnelly and Lopez, to thank them for their letters. A rookie motor-man had finally told him they were dead. That Nelson would actually counterfeit recommendations and mail them to the
DEA
—Pincus had been thunderstruck. He’d said nothing to Nelson, but the partnership had become a study in simmering friction. The other narcotics detectives watched closely to see which of them would surrender to the other’s style. The heavy money was on Pincus.

Then came the Aristidio Cruz beating, and the whole bureau waited for the lid to blow. But Nelson and Pincus both acted as though it never happened. For Nelson, it was forgettable. For Pincus, it was a trauma, never far from his troubled thoughts.…

“What if these goons go out the back door?” he asked now, motioning toward the restaurant.

“They won’t,” said Nelson, turning up the car radio again.

At a corner table inside El Hogar, Domingo Sosa, the man known as Mono, seemed lost in himself while his three companions joked.

“How much did you lose today?”

“Four hundred,” said one.

“Three eighty,” said another.

“Perros de mierda.
I tell you, the whole thing is fixed. They put drugs in the Gainesburgers. Some of them could barely walk around the track, much less run.”

“We go to jai alai next time.”

“Ha, that’s worse. I had a friend who was a jai alai player. He said he never won if he made love to a woman the night before. For three weeks he went to bed alone. He won almost every night. Everybody in the fronton started betting on him. He was a big star. He said he was serving so hard the other players never saw the
pelota
until it was past them.”

“Did you go and bet on him?”

“No,
chico.
I never trust a man who can’t get laid for three weeks.”

“What happened to your friend?”

“He damn near went crazy. Now he screws every night before the match. He’s a shitty jai alai player, but I bet on him every time I go.”

Ignoring the laughter, Mono motioned to the waitress. “Another pitcher,
señorita.”
He looked sternly at the other men. “No more of this. We must get back to business.”

“The
gringo
at the dog track?”

“Yes.”

“You are sure it is the same man?”

Mono nodded. “Did you see the way he stared?”

“So what?” One of his men, who looked like a peasant, shrugged. “Many people were staring.”

“I recognized him,” Mono said flatly. “He was the man down in the Grove that day when the woman was hit by the car.”

“But you shot him.”

Mono glared. “In the leg.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

He had learned his ballistics from the best of the CIA. He had trained on a beach in the Florida Keys—a mock invasion during a stinging rainstorm; nighttime target practice with the tracer rifles; blasting coconuts out of the palm trees with a .45 pistol at lunch-time. Six months’ worth of training.

Mono had made many friends among his fellow soldiers-in-training. Two of them had died at the Bay of Pigs. Another, who had gone to jail for seventeen years on the Isle of Pines, had wished he had. He’d been freed, blind and half-crippled, and Mono had been at the airport when the chartered Eastern jetliner had brought him into Miami from Havana. The two men had wept together like children. Mono’s henchmen had never seen him cry, but they understood.

Over the years Mono forgot nothing of what the CIA had taught him, least of all how to shoot. Now he was cursing himself: You should have killed that
gringo
when you had the chance. You should have aimed for the chest and squeezed the trigger. Instead you aimed low, not out of compassion but out of common sense—the important difference between aggravated assault and first-degree murder.

Mono had never dreamed he would see the
gringo
again or that the
gringo
would see him.

“Suppose you are right,” said the peasant. “So what? Do you think he even saw your face? And if he did, do you suppose he would come looking for you?” The man chuckled and lifted his beer.

“I think you’re full of shit,” said one of the other men, whose ear was deformed, a grotesque knob. “I saw no one staring at you. Forget about it.”

“No,” Mono said. “Find out who the man is. Ramón, you have a girlfriend who works in the admissions office at Flagler Memorial. Call her. Tell her to check all the gunshot wounds that came in that day. Tell her you are looking for an Anglo in his thirties, thin, brown hair. He was hit in the knee or thigh.” Mono patted his calf.

“I will get the name,” Ramón answered.

“Get everything you can,” Mono said.

“Then what?” the peasant asked.

Mono went on, “This is a private matter. You will do this as a favor to me.”

One of the others snorted a laugh. He was drunk. Mono’s face darkened, and the muscles in his neck tightened like a rope. Under any other circumstances he would have smashed the foolish punk with his fists, leaving him bloody but wiser. But now he needed him, and he said nothing.

“El Jefe
said no more shootings,” Ramón reminded. “He was furious about what happened in the Grove.”

“He will not know about this,” Mono replied sternly. “Find out what you can.”

“Then what?” asked the man with the cauliflowered ear.

“Nothing,” Mono said softly. “Then
nada.
I just want information.”

He opened a thumb-sized plastic vial and tapped a small pile of white powder onto the flat side of his American Express card. He used a table knife to cut the powder into four perfect lines. The others watched silently as Mono rolled a crisp new hundred-dollar bill into a makeshift straw. He sniffed three of the lines in quick succession, then offered the fourth to Ramón.

On his way out of the restaurant Mono stopped to hug Oscar, the owner. “Thank you for your hospitality. You are a good friend.”

“You are welcome, Señor Sosa. Anytime.”

Of course, it was always
Señor
Sosa. Oscar wouldn’t dare address him by Mono, a street name. The monkey.

Señor Sosa had once done him a great favor. Just a small debt, but how foolish. A drunken night when Oscar had agreed to join some friends for the cockfights in Key Largo. Money had flown like the rooster feathers, and when it was over, the restaurant owner had been dismayed to find himself three thousand dollars down. Of course, he could not pay.

Señor Sosa could, on the spot, from a roll of bills so large it filled his hand like an egg. He’d never mentioned the money again. All he’d ever asked of Oscar was to keep El Hogar open late whenever Señor Sosa and his friends wished to talk business. He was asking more and more these days.

“Oscar, you are having no more gambling problems, I hope?”

“Oh, no. I have given up. I don’t even play
la bolita
anymore. Not even for one peso.”

“That is good,” Mono said avuncularly. “If only you could talk some sense to these baboons. They dropped a fortune at the dog track today.”

Southwest Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, glowed a hazy orange beneath the sodium crime lights. The streets were deserted, save for an occasional speeding taxi on its way back to the boulevard. Mono stood for a moment outside El Hogar. His heart raced slightly. He did not feel like driving home; he felt wide awake.

His three companions slid into the gold Continental. Domingo Sosa did not follow. Instead, he walked briskly across Eighth Street and climbed into a gun-blue BMW parked in a space marked Handicapped Only.

“Adios,
Mono,” shouted one of the men in the Lincoln as it raced away. Drunken idiots, fumed Sosa, mashing the accelerator three times to warm the engine. Then he slipped the BMW into first and drove off in the opposite direction.

Octavio Nelson and Wilbur Pincus scrunched low in the front seat of the old blue Dodge. They stayed that way until the Continental passed them. Cramped together almost flush under the dashboard, Nelson could smell some kind of mint on his partner’s breath.

“Let’s go,” Pincus whispered eagerly.

“Be still.”

Nelson waited until the Lincoln’s engine was but a hum in the distance. When he sat up, he noticed bleakly that the BMW had vanished, too.

“Shit,” said Nelson, gunning the engine. The Dodge protested with a stall. “Oh, shit.” He turned the key again and drove off as fast as he dared, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mono’s taillights and afraid to look over at his partner.

Chapter 7

THEY MIGHT
have gone to Rio. Meadows later wished with all his heart that they had. It would have changed almost everything.

From the dog track, Meadows and Terry had driven to a small condominium Terry owned on Key Biscayne, an island twenty minutes south of the city. Along the way Meadows had recounted, as rationally as he could, what had happened in Coconut Grove and what he had seen at the track.

“I should have called the cops right then. They’d have caught the killer.”

“Probably not,
querido,”
soothed Terry. “If he recognized you, then he and his friends probably left as quickly as we did. Besides, it is better not to take chances with people like that.”