16 Tiger Shrimp Tango (27 page)

Coleman stared into the glass. “Huh?”

“Where’d you get those ice cubes—”

Blooooooooossssshhhhhhh!

Foam sprayed everywhere. On the windshield, in their eyes . . .

“Coleman, get that shit out of here!”

“I can’t see!”

The Trans Am slalomed wildly back and forth across the road, threatening to go up on two wheels. Serge steered into the skid. “Coleman! It’s still spraying!”

Coleman covered his face. “It stings!”

The Firebird whipped across the road a last time before jumping the curb, taking out a hedge and crashing head-on into a coconut palm.

Steam spraying from the radiator, but the foam had stopped.

Coleman looked over at the driver’s seat. “Serge, didn’t you see that tree?”

“You idiot.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

MIAMI

A
n hour after dark, an oil-dripping Ford Focus cruised down a residential street a mile east of the turnpike.

Brook Campanella glanced in her rearview mirror again. She had grown suspicious of a Firebird that she could have sworn was following her, but now there was nothing back there. She’d heard the sound of a wreck and checked a side mirror to see the car a half block back, crashed into a tree.

Tough luck. Bigger things on her mind.

She headed south on I-95 and took an exit ramp six miles later. There was a hitchhiker heading to Key West, a homeless guy waving a cardboard sign and a broken-down Beemer with the hood up and someone bent over the engine.

Brook drove by. The man slammed the hood, jumped in the Beemer and hit the gas.

She found her way through a modest middle-class neighborhood outside Miramar. Brook cut the headlights and drove the last hundred yards in the dark before easing up to the curb. She unzipped a leather tactical bag in her lap and removed the sawed-off, pistol-grip shotgun. Then she grabbed the door handle. Headlights hit her car from behind. She took her hand off the handle and watched in the mirror.

At the end of the block, a Beemer rolled to a stop five homes back and cut its lights. The driver didn’t get out of the car. Maybe he was waiting for someone to emerge from the house. Maybe he was getting a hummer. Who cared? The important thing was his lights were off her. She grabbed the door handle again.

Lights hit her again. This time a Camaro. Then a Datsun. “How busy is this street?”

Brook suddenly jumped as she heard gunfire. But it was just a loud TV across the street where the windows were open to save on A/C. The street may have been dark, but it was a noise fest on a Friday night. Multiple stereos, people laughing and yelling at a backyard pool party; other televisions were tuned to more networks that decided they needed even more weapon fire.

Every sound made Brook flinch. She reached in the glove compartment for an airline miniature of banana-flavored rum, her first drink of the day. She made a wicked face and began coughing as it went down like any non–call brand of well liquor.

She waited for the effect. Headlights appeared again at the end of the block, this time facing Brook and making her lie flat across the front seat. The lights passed, and she straightened up to reach for the door handle. And withdrew her hand again. She grabbed another miniature from the glove compartment and made another face.

Brook lowered her head with self-anger. “I just can’t do it.”

The car remained still while she flipped through photos in her wallet. Mostly of her parents. Emotion spiked in two directions, sorrow and rage. She nodded at a new idea. “But I can at least scare the shit out of him, just like he did to my father.” She ejected the twelve-gauge’s shells and opened the driver’s door. “If he has a heart attack, it’s fucking karma.”

She reached the front steps with the shotgun slung under a light jacket. But now what? Did she ring the doorbell? Or find a darkened side door and bust out some jalousie glass. This clearly wasn’t thought through.

For reasons known only to the rum company, something told Brook to try the knob. Unlocked. She gave the door a gentle push and poked her head inside. Lights blazed throughout the residence. Somewhere inside, a TV’s volume was way up. That’s where he must be. Brook silently slipped the door closed behind her, raised the shotgun from under her coat and followed the sound of a cop show where someone was being interrogated. She found herself in a hallway and concluded that the TV and fake Rick Maddox must be in the den.

Brook crept forward, chest pounding, sweat starting to trickle into her eyes, every inch forward an undertaking. She reached the edge of the den’s door, and her legs began to buckle. She got mad at herself again, thought of her father and forced her muscles to steel themselves.

Brook told herself she was thinking too much:
Just do it.
She closed her eyes and counted to three, then jumped from around the corner into the den’s open doorway with shotgun aimed high.

Sure enough, there he was, stretched out in a La-Z-Boy, watching TV with his back toward her. Just the top of his head showing. For some reason, she had pictured him with hair.

She took a forceful step forward. “Get up, motherfucker!”

The plan was for him to spring up from the chair in a freak-out. But he just continued lounging there smugly watching his cop show. What an asshole.

Brook began circling him in a wide arc, the aim of the twelve-gauge never leaving its target. She got halfway around to his profile and realized he wasn’t ignoring her; he was asleep.

She picked up an ashtray—“Wake up!”—and hit him in the chest.

That’s when . . .

Gasp
.

Blood trickled out of the far side of his mouth. More blood in a circle on his shirt, just above the lung.

“He’s . . . dead? . . . Oh God! Oh, Jesus!”

Thoughts pinwheeled, eyes shooting everywhere. She noticed something on the floor. Whoever killed him had been going through his stuff, scattering manila folders, computer disks and a disgorged wallet.

Brook slowly retreated in terror. “No! No! No! No! No! . . .”

Back down on the floor, the wallet had fallen open to display a silver badge.

“Dammit, they got the addresses mixed up!” Brook gulped air. “It’s the real DEA agent! I couldn’t be any more fucked!”

Not yet.

Then more perspiration, a slippery finger, and ignorance on how to properly clear a chamber.

Boom
.

The shotgun exploded with a direct hit on the late Rick Maddox.

Brook had never fired a weapon in her life, and true to the gun dealer’s word, it kicked like a stallion, flying backward right out of her hands before crashing through a window and landing somewhere out in the yard.

Now the pounding chest and unsteady legs were becoming a serious barrier to getting out of the house. Brook was going into shock. She hyperventilated and stumbled down the hall to the front of the house.

The doorbell rang.

Brook screamed.

The person at the door thought it was just another TV show. He rang the bell again.

Brook somehow managed to get to the peephole and look outside. What the hell? Just a bunch of feathers. It looked like some guy . . . in a chicken suit?

The bell rang again.

From the other side of the door:
“Cluck, cluck, cluck. Chicken-gram . . .”

Brook severely fainted.

Outside on the porch, the man in the chicken suit grabbed a rubber mallet and turned to his assistant. “Coleman, apply force on the knob while I use the bump key.”

“Serge, it’s already open.”

“Crap, still haven’t gotten to use the bump key.”

“And there’s a babe on the floor,” said Coleman. “Is she dead?”

Serge bent down for a pulse. “No, just passed out.”

Brook woozily came around. She looked up. “The chicken!” And passed out again.

Serge removed the chicken head from his costume and scratched under his left wing. “She’s acting really weird.”

Coleman leaned in for a closer look. “Is she the one we were following?”

Serge nodded. “Pretty sure. Brook Campanella. Mahoney showed me a client photo he’d enlarged from her driver’s license, but you know how those things look.” Serge lightly tapped her on the cheek. “Where’s the dude who lives here?”

No answer.

Serge pulled out the pistol tucked under his suit. “Stay here with her while I check the rest of the house.”

“Roger.”

A beer cracked open.

Serge crept down the hall toward the sound of a television . . .

O
ut on the street, five houses away, a driver sat in a quiet Beemer and slipped on leather shooting gloves. A dead, straight line of a mouth as he stared ahead at a Firebird that had somehow limped across the city with a steaming radiator and was now parked behind Brook’s Ford. On the Beemer’s passenger seat sat the black-and-white photo of Serge that Enzo had positively matched to the driver who had exited the damaged vehicle moments earlier. As he unzipped a cushioned leather satchel and removed a silencer, memories drifted back to the last time he visited Miami. Enzo was a steady one, but it still stung that he had been assigned backup behind that ass who couldn’t carry his water. What did he do to deserve cleanup duty? And it wasn’t a small mess. First the clown with the rifle who couldn’t get out of the way of his own dick. Then:

Felicia.

And now:

Serge.

At least he was the primary on this sanction. But what a pesky gnat that Serge was. Enzo could easily have taken him out with Felicia at that totally exposed sidewalk café on Ocean Drive. Except the only actionable target is the one you’ve got clearance for. That’s the cardinal rule in a need-to-know business, or someone will be given clearance to take you out. Everything is compartmentalized, so for all Enzo knew, Felicia’s lunch companion might have been someone on his own side who was helping set her up by drawing her into the open. You never knew.

And now here he was, sent back to Miami for more mop-up. One thing for sure, he wanted a raise . . .

. . . Back inside the house, Coleman sat on the floor drinking a Schlitz and cradling Brook’s head in his arm. “Time to wake up, sleepyhead.”

Serge came running back into the room. “Coleman, we’ve got serious problems. There’s a dead guy in the den with his head blown completely off. I’m thinking Rick Maddox.”

“Can I see?”

“Yes,” said Serge. “I’m not doing this for your pleasure, but we need to sanitize the room for our client’s sake.”

“Cool!”

Brook had started coming around again, but Coleman got up and let her head hit the floor.

They went into the den and Serge turned down the volume on
Matlock,
which had resumed in its entirety following the game.

“So that’s Rick Maddox, the fake DEA agent?” asked Coleman.

“Yes and no.” Serge wiped down surfaces. “The scammer is using the name Maddox, which he lifted from a real agent in Miami.”

“That’s quite a coincidence.”

“Not really.” Serge picked a shotgun shell off the floor. “The grifter began his scheme somewhere else, but when victims and law enforcement started closing in, he migrated to Miami for cover.”

“How’s that cover?”

“Since the real Maddox had a legitimate address, the schemer was hoping his adversaries might be thrown off course by a false flame.” Serge held up a wallet he’d found on the floor.

“Is that a real badge?”

“The cover worked: Mahoney got the two addresses scrambled.”

“You’re blaming Mahoney for the dead guy?”

“Not his fault,” said Serge. “He doesn’t know what his clients will do with the info—and he took extra precautions with this gal, even though the last thing she appears to be is a killer. But right now time’s the new enemy.”

He ran back into the foyer, tossed the badge on a table and shook Brook hard by the shoulders. “You have to wake up right now!”

“W-what?” Her eyes weakly opened.

“We work for Mahoney, so don’t faint on us again.” Serge propped her into a sitting position. “We’re here to help you.”

She looked around. “Dear God, I’m still here. It’s not a dream.”

“Or a novel,” said Serge. “But right now you have to tell me as quickly as you can what happened here.”

“Just scare him! I, he, TV on. Rum, badge, Dad, La-Z-Boy, shotgun, karma . . .”

“Okay, not that fast,” said Serge. “Take deep breaths.”

Outside, a Beemer started up, but the headlights remained dark. It rolled so slowly you could hear bits of broken beer-bottle glass from teenagers who had moved on to a vacant lot. The sedan stopped directly across the street from the Maddox place. The driver checked his ammo clip one last time and racked a hollow-point bullet into the chamber. He looked up and down the street a final time and opened the door of his car . . .

Inside the house, Brook caught her breath. “I swear he was already dead when I got here! You have to believe me!”

“We do,” said Serge. “Someone blew his head off with a shotgun.”

“I did that,” said Brook.

“But I thought you told me—”

“He already had a gunshot wound in his chest. Then I got the shakes and my finger slipped.”

“That’s not good.” Serge stood up. “But there’s still time to get my arms around this. I’ve sanitized many a crime scene . . . Tell me, where’s the gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“It flew out the window. I think it went over the fence and landed in the neighbor’s yard because I heard their dogs barking.”

“That’s also not good,” said Serge. “But you didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“Yeah, the whole wall down that hallway. I was having trouble standing up.”

“So we’ve lost control of the weapon and left prints everywhere,” said Serge. “But that’s it, right? I mean you didn’t leave any other evidence that might be helpful to police, like a DNA sample?”

Brook promptly jackknifed over and threw up.