AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (7 page)

Then you become more and more aware. And one day,
you wake up and you know, I mean you absolutely
know
, there are people close to you who are scheming to move you
out. To kill you. The question then becomes who. Which of your most trusted,
closest associates wants to put a bullet in your ear? Or maybe in your back.
This one? That one? Both of them? And how about other big guys like you
throughout South Florida? Fort Lauderdale? West Palm? They're everywhere, and
they'd love nothing better than to add your territory, and everything that
comes with it, to their expanding map.

Any mishap, any perceived insult, no matter how
small, is taken as a direct frontal attack on your position. This absolutely
requires action, retaliation. If you overreact, you're going to get a heavy
response from the other side. And if you don't have your shit together and you
go around killing anything that moves, like those fucking Juárez
guajiros
, you soon find yourself in a
bloody war that will cartwheel out of control, a war in which tens of thousands
of bodies pile up, murdered in unspeakable ways.

That was the problem with being a drug dealer.

Luckily, Alicia was able to sidestep this entire
journey. As a money launderer, she only saw the dealers themselves on very rare
occasion, usually socially, and then only the bigger big dealers, guys who
never actually have drugs on their person. Her job is to launder their money,
period. They — actually, a network of their bagmen — arrange for
their cash to be delivered to her every week or so and it becomes her
responsibility to get it out of the country into one of any number of offshore
havens lined up for that purpose.

While the dealers — every one of them
—
 
are going up this stressful
ladder of success, trafficking in dangerous and deadly substances, surrounded
by mortal enemies, and endlessly hounded by armies of dedicated Feds, Alicia
López traffics only in their cash and never,
ever
sees any drugs, nor does she ever go
near
drugs. She doesn't know where they are processed, she doesn't
know how they are brought into the country.
 
She has no idea where the major weight
goes once it is in the country, and she definitely does not know the identities
of any street users.

She doesn't know and she doesn't care.

For this, she gets her four points out of every
laundering trip.

And when you're talking about the kind of money
she handles and the frequency with which she handles it, those four points add
up to big, big numbers, and fast.

Big numbers for her, but for the service she
provides — placing the cash in secure places beyond the grasp of the
governments of the US and Colombia — well worth it.

Yes, it was all about legacy now. Taking care of
her family. She was perfectly positioned to ensure their future.

Desi Junior

North Miami, Florida

Friday, April 6, 2012

2:50 PM

T
HE LUMBER
YARD
, along with the Burger King across the street, were the two
classiest establishments along that grieving stretch of State Road 7. Most of
the other businesses were decidedly lower-end: a dollar store, furniture
rental, a food stamp office, and that blaring distress signal of a neighborhood
in decline, a pawn shop. It was actually in the city of North Miami, where the
cops are far less capable of taking on major drug action. A small weed bust
here and there keeps them happy, and they pretend all the big deals go down
somewhere else — like Miami — so that was likely the reason it was
selected for the site of this deal.

He drove down Northwest 127th Street one block to
a dead end, with the lumber yard on his left, but right before the end, a dirt
road veered off to the left and went straight around the lumber yard to the
rear. A large, unpaved area lay behind the long, squat building. A wall about
five feet high ran along part of the length back there, separating the property
from a grassy area, about thirty feet in width, also running the length of the
building. Beyond that was a chain link fence that ran between the breadth of
the property and the southbound lanes of I-95.

It was a good place for a deal. Very private, no
lighting, not particularly visible from I-95. Any freeway traffic would buzz
right by the rear area of this long, plain building set way back from the road.
Things could happen back here and no one would ever know.

He motored back to State Road 7 and up a block to
128th Street. This street was also one block long. No street lights. It ran
alongside the lumber yard, now to his right, and dead-ended just before I-95.
In a small area adjacent to the building rested several piles of cinderblocks,
carelessly placed, each pile several feet high. The whole of the rear area was
entirely cut off by a chain link fence. No way in, no way out from this side.
All traffic goes in through 127th. All traffic, that is, except him.

Attached to the lumber yard was a very large
hardware store. Desi parked in front and went in. He picked up a pair of Klein
forty-two-inch bolt cutters, guaranteed to cut "almost anything". Two
hundred fifty bucks. The clerk bagged the item and Desi walked out chuckling to
himself.

He cruised the area a little more, thought back to
his own hardscrabble upbringing in Hialeah, and remembered how it wasn't much
better than this sad slice of North Miami.

They lived in three rooms over a mattress store,
he and his sister and his parents. The neighborhood was all tough kids and
broken windows and bottom-feeding businesses: liquor stores, check cashing
joints, used furniture stores, and the like. Desi and his sister slept on a
fold-out couch in the living room with all the street racket going on day and
night outside the window. During their preteen years, the two of them ran with
all the wrong crowds, little-kid gangs of their own wreaking havoc on
neighborhood residents and businesses. The cops? What did they care? To them it
was just out-of-control Cuban punks running wild in East Hialeah.

But that was all before his father got his feet
wet in the drug business.

Desi Senior

Miami, Florida

Tuesday, November 21, 1989

12:10 PM

T
HE DAY
TURNED OUT
TO BE MIAMI
GORGEOUS
. A predawn rain had cooled things down and the clouds were
gone by mid-morning. Desi Ramos Senior had kept to his schedule, parking his
city bus on Southwest First Avenue, the last stop on his route, a couple of
minutes before high noon. The passengers climbed down and Desi turned off the
big engine.

It was a major source of pride for him, keeping to
his schedule. The bosses who created it were reasonable men, allowing for heavy
traffic along certain routes during certain times of day. Desi's route ran from
downtown straight out
Calle Ocho
through Little Havana to Florida International University and back, and traffic
in the downtown segment of this route was always the worst. He'd never seen it
this bad in his eight years of driving. They would have to do something about
it. Miami traffic. How could it get any worse?

But he was always aware of where he was along the
route and what time it should be, and he was seldom more than a couple of
minutes off. Only a major accident or a weather event, such as flooding, could
throw him off any more. Granted, there were times when a passenger would give
him shit about one thing or another, and he would always be tempted to jump
right in his face, even more tempted to drag the guy's ass off the bus and
pound the piss out of him. He was broad-shouldered and had big fists, and
feared little in the way of street fighting. But getting bogged down in any of
that hotheaded shit would put him behind schedule.

He stepped off the bus and strolled across First
Avenue to Pepe's, a little open-window sandwich kiosk near the corner. This was
where he came every day for his Cuban mix sandwich. Nobody made them better,
tastier, than Pepe. The roast pork was always cooked to absolute perfection and
the Cuban bread was … well … anyone who's ever had Cuban bread knows of its
exquisite taste, but Pepe did something to it to lift it over and above all
others. He would never tell his secret, but Desi didn't mind. He just loved the
sandwich.

Three people stood in line ahead of him. As soon
as he took his spot, another man slipped in behind him. Desi glanced at him. He
looked to be a few years older than Desi, which would put him somewhere just
south of forty. He was undoubtedly Cuban, fairly well-dressed in a pale yellow
guayabera and gray slacks, trim, and with a stern face that looked like it
didn't smile too often. Styled dark hair brushed straight back on his head rose
in the front over steely eyes and a narrow mouth. He was no bus driver. Desi
caught himself looking at the man just a moment too long, so he had to speak.

"
¿Cómo
está?
Desi asked.

The man went for a light smile, but didn't quite
get there. "
Bién, gracias. ¿Y usted?
"
His voice had a slight sandpaper tinge to it, like he almost had to clear his
throat.

Brushing aside an unruly shock of dark hair that
continually fell onto his forehead, Desi said, "
Bién, bién
," and from this small courtesy sprang a mild
conversation. It started with the beautiful day, segued to the traffic nightmares
and how they're as bad as they can possibly get, then on to Pepe's sandwiches,
which the man agreed were the very best in all Miami. In fact, he said, few
places in Cuba itself could equal Pepe for the taste of his offerings. This of
course led to Desi asking him if he had come across and he said he had,
arriving as a child with his parents in the first wave in 1959 after the Beard
seized power. Then the man introduced himself as Julio Cesar Delgado.

They went on like this, and pretty soon, Desi was
at the kiosk window ordering his sandwich. They chatted a few minutes more and
it was clear Delgado had taken a liking to Desi, appreciated his easy charm and
smooth personality. Desi took a seat at one of the two small wooden picnic
tables under an awning outside the kiosk, while Delgado took his meal to go.
They waved goodbye.

Two days later, Desi ran into him again, also at
Pepe's. This time, Desi invited him to sit at his table and Delgado did so with
pleasure. During their meal, their talk ran a little deeper. More serious
topics. Baseball, their wives and families, politics. And then right before the
end of their meal, the talk turned to the blistering crime wave that had
engulfed Miami for years and the drugs that were at the root of it, and Desi said,
"You know, I hear my passengers talk about that
cocaina
. I mean, they talk about it
a lot
."

Delgado's eyebrows shot up. "What do they
say? About the cocaine, I mean?"

Desi began gesturing with his hands: clear,
expressive motions. He almost didn't have to speak, but he did anyway.
"Oh, they say everybody's trying it, everybody's doing it, you know? And
they say it's everywhere. Ay, all these people being killed, it's all because
of the cocaine!"

All these
people being killed
. The staggering body count of the Cocaine Cowboys Era
was slacking off, but only a little. Bodies still littered the streets, although
in somewhat smaller numbers.
Miami Vice
had run out the clock, limping across the finish line of its last season a few
months back, and the city itself was emerging from a decade of unimaginable
violence. The curtain was falling on the final stages of the enormous
transformation of Miami itself, first from a sleepy Southern town into a
snowbird mecca for New York Jews, then into a Cubanized city in the decades
following the 1959 revolution. Following that, it became a tourist magnet and
shopping emporium for all of Latin America, until finally it made the leap to
becoming a freewheeling drug center, the center of the targets of cocaine
overlords in Colombia, Perú, and other centers of manufacturing and marketing.

Since the day in 1979 when two Colombian drug
dealers were killed in what has become expansively known as "the Dadeland
Mall Massacre" — despite the fact only two people had died and they
were both drug dealers — blood flowed freely through the streets of
Miami. One killing begat another in revenge, and so on, as the struggle for
control of the lucrative drug business swirled like a vicious hurricane around
an intensifying center. Before too long, Miami had become the most dangerous
city in the United States.

The cocaine wars were fought over the tons of
white powder that slipped through the porous Port of Miami, up the labyrinthine
waterways of the Everglades, and into nearby remote airstrips, then taken to
local laboratories where it was cut a few times with goodies like sugar,
laundry detergent, laxatives, and usually something like benzocaine to
replicate the anesthetic feeling.

Then began the tedious process of repackaging it
into small bags, thousands and thousands of small bags. All of it destined to
flow up the noses of people looking for the high that only cocaine could
deliver, one slender line at a time.
Nothing
to worry about
, thought the public.
Besides,
everyone was doing it, right?

Delgado looked at Desi. "Yes, it's pretty
bad," he said. "All this killing."

"The government has to do something,"
Desi said. "Something to protect us. How long can it go on?"

"Let me tell you, Desi, the government can do
nothing. How do you tell someone who wants to get high to kill that desire? It
can't be done. Man has wanted to get high ever since he stood up straight
millions of years ago."

Desi thought about that one. "So you're
saying this is all coming from —"

"From the demand,
hermano
. As long as you have people who want to get high, you will
have people who will give them what they want. And believe me, you will
always
have people who want to get
high."

Desi watched the traffic flow by on First Avenue.
He said, "You sound like you know something about this, Julio."

"I know a little bit about it. And I know
these
pendejos
are killing each other
for no fucking reason. If they would only think about it for a minute, they
would stop. They would stop and there would be peace. Peace where people could
still
get their cocaine to get them
high."

"They better not try to sell any to my
kids," Desi said. "I will give them so much pain, pain they never
even dreamed of, they will beg me to send them to hell."

"¡Ha!
Bién dicho,
Desi
. Well
said." Delgado finally managed a smile, a real one, as he rolled up his
sandwich bag and napkins and tossed them into a nearby trash container.
"Listen, Desi, do you like football?"

"Of course. The Dolphins. I watch them every
week on television."

"I have season tickets. You want to come to
the game with me this Sunday?"

"To a Dolphins game?" Desi's voice rose
an octave and his eyebrows zoomed upward.

"Yes. This Sunday. They're playing
Pittsburgh."

"Well … sure! I would love to go! I've never
seen them in person. You know, it's so expensive. And you say you have season
tickets?"

Delgado said, "Two of them. On the forty-yard
line. You can see everything. What do you say?"

Desi's grin threatened to cover his entire face.
"I say yes!
¿Cómo no?
"