Big Trouble (27 page)

“No, he won't,” agreed Greer. “Anyway, based on our conversation with him, we think this is the suitcase we want, and that it is now going to MIA with these local scumbags.”

Baker sat back in the seat and looked out the window for a few moments. He leaned forward again and said, “Here's what I don't get.”

“Lemme guess,” said Greer. “You don't get how come, if we think there's a chance the suitcase is here, we don't tell the cops, make some kind of announcement, evacuate the public outta here. That it?”

“Basically, yeah,” said Baker.

“Several reasons,” said Greer. “Number one, these assholes don't know it, but we got 'em trapped at the airport.”

“What do you mean?” asked Baker.

“I mean,” said Greer, “just before we ran into you, I made a phone call.” He held up what looked to Baker like a cell phone, except it was on the thick side, and it had a short, fat antenna. “Until we say otherwise, no plane is takin' off from MIA. There won't be any announcements; the planes'll be boarded as usual, but they won't get clearance to push back from the gates.”

“You can do that?” asked Baker.

“You'd be surprised,” said Greer. “Point is, we got these assholes bottled up.”

“Then why don't you evacuate the area around the airport?” asked Baker.

“That's the second reason,” said Greer. “Think about it. If word gets out, which it would, there's a nuclear bomb practically in fucking downtown, what do you think would happen to this city? Do you think there would be an orderly evacuation? Women and children first? Cooler heads prevailing? You think that's how the citizenry of Miami would react?”

Baker thought about it.

“What would happen,” continued Greer, “is that every idiot in this town who owns a gun, which is basically every idiot in this town, would grab his gun, jump into his car, or somebody else's car, and lay rubber for I-95. Inside of ten minutes the city is gridlocked, and what happens next makes Iwo Jima look like a maypole dance. This whole town turns into the end of a Stephen King novel.”

“Good point,” said Baker.

“Number three,” said Greer, “if word gets around about what's in the suitcase, it eventually gets to the morons who
have
the suitcase. Long as they don't know what they got, which apparently they don't, they ain't gonna think about trying to use it, like as a bargaining chip.”

“
Could
they set it off?” asked Baker. “I mean, doesn't it have, like, whaddyacallem, fail-safe things?”

“This thing wasn't built by good guys,” Greer said. “It's not like in the movies, where the president has to give the Secret Code and two trusty soldiers have to turn their keys simultaneously. This thing was built by bad guys who wanna be able to set it down in a public place in a crowded city and arm it quickly. We don't know for sure about this suitcase, but the other one? The one they recovered? All you had to do there was open it up and flip three electrical switches, and that starts a forty-five-minute timer.”

“Forty-five minutes?” said Baker.

“Forty-five,” said Greer. “We think the True Believer was planning to hop a subway, be up in the Bronx, facing north, by the time it blew.”

“And now it's here,” said Baker, staring out the window.

“Looks like it,” said Greer.

“Jesus,” said Baker, shaking his head. “I mean, you see this shit in the movies, and you think it's fiction, but I guess it was bound to happen one day.”

Seitz snorted.

“What?” asked Baker.

“What makes you think this is the first time?” said Seitz.

“This
isn't
the first time?” said Baker.

Seitz snorted again.

“Never mind which time this is,” said Greer. “Here's the thing. What I told you here, it's because, like I said, you're a cop, and you got cops involved. But what I'm also telling you is, when we get these scumbags, we take them, and the suitcase, and we leave, and that's the end of this as far as you are concerned, understand?”

“What do you mean?” asked Baker.

“What I mean,” said Greer, “is that as far as the federal government is concerned—and I am talking about way, way,
way
the fuck high up in the federal government—none of this happened. There was no nuclear bomb in Miami. There never have been any nuclear bombs going around loose in suitcases anywhere in this great land of ours. Because if people start thinking there are, we are gonna have panic like you cannot imagine—people leaving for Montana, hoarding food, taking all their money outta the banks, lynching every guy with a beard, you get the picture. The economy goes into the toilet, civilization collapses, end of story. So this did not happen. Understand? Whatever happens,
it did not happen
.”

Baker said, “But I have to report . . .”

“You don't have to report shit,” said Greer. “You repeat any of this, Agent Seitz and I, backed by pretty much the entire federal government, will deny it. You push it, and we will push back on you, hard.
Very
hard. Nothing personal, because seems to me like you're a good cop, but we can and will fuck your career up so bad you won't be able to get a job policing Porta Potties.”

Baker sat back in his seat, staring out the window again. He said, “What you said before, about if you told me what was going on, you might have to kill me . . .”

Greer turned and looked back at him. “What about it?”

Baker said, “You weren't kidding, were you?”

Greer looked forward again. “Traffic's getting bad,” he said.

E
ven veteran air travelers find Miami International Airport disorienting. It's often crowded, and it seems to have been designed so that every passenger, no matter where he or she is coming from or going to, has to jostle past every other passenger. The main concourse looks like a combination international bazaar and refugee camp. There are big clots of people everywhere—tour groups, school trips, salsa bands, soccer teams, vast extended families—all waiting for planes that will not leave for hours, maybe days. There aren't enough places to sit, so the clots plop down and sprawl on the mungy carpet, surrounded by Appalachian-foothill-sized mounds of luggage, including gigantic suitcases stuffed to bursting, as well as a vast array of consumer goods purchased in South Florida for transport back to Latin America, including TVs, stereos, toys, major appliances, and complete sets of tires. Many of these items have been wrapped in thick cocoons of greenish stretch plastic to deter baggage theft, which is an important airport industry, another one being the constant “improvements” to the airport, which seem to consist mainly of the installation of permanent-looking signs asking the public to excuse the inconvenience while the airport is being improved.

The airport air smells of musty tropical rot, and it's filled with the sounds of various languages—Spanish, predominantly, but also English, Creole, German, French, Italian, and, perhaps most distinct of all, Cruise Ship Passenger. The cruisers just arriving are usually wearing brand-new cruisewear. They follow in groups close behind cruise-line employees holding signs displaying cruise-line names; they tell each other what other cruises they have been on, and they laugh loudly whenever anybody makes a joke—which somebody does every forty-five seconds—about how much they're going to drink, gamble, or buy. The cruisers heading home are more subdued—tired, sunburned, hungover, and bloated from eating eleven times per day, whether they were hungry or not, because . . . it's all included! Some of the women have had their hair braided and beaded, a style that looks fine on young Caribbean girls, but on most women over sixteen looks comical or outright hideous. Some passengers are clutching badly mass-produced “folk art”—large, unattractive, nonfunctional sticks are popular—and a great many of them are lugging boxes containing the ultimate cruise-ship passenger trophy: discount booze! Never mind that they spent thousands of dollars to take this vacation: They're thrilled to have saved as much as
ten dollars a bottle
on scotch and brandy and liqueurs that they will never actually drink, but which they lug through miles of airports, on and off various planes, so that when they get back home they can haul it out and display it proudly to visitors in the months and years to come (“We got this for twenty-three-fifty in the Virgin Islands! Guess what it costs here!”).

On the night that Snake and his party walked in with a nuclear bomb, the airport was even more chaotic than usual. There was bad weather in Chicago, which of course meant that virtually every flight in the western hemisphere, including space shuttle launches, had been delayed. And now some airlines were noticing a problem getting clearance for outgoing flights to push back, although the control tower was not saying why. Most airline ticket counters had sprouted long lines of pissed-off passengers shoving to get to the counter so they could argue fruitlessly with pissed-off airline employees. Police had already been summoned to arrest one returning cruise passenger who had threatened a ticket agent with his souvenir stick.

Eddie came through the airport door first, followed by Puggy, lugging the suitcase, and then Snake, who had one hand under the sweatshirt and the other holding Jenny's arm. Like Eddie and Puggy, Snake had never been inside MIA before, and for a moment, when he saw the roiling mob, he thought about turning and running. But then he squeezed his gun, his wand, and the moment passed. He was
not
going back to scamming dimes.

“Where we goin'?” asked Eddie, staring at the airport scene. He had never felt less like he belonged somewhere, and Eddie was the kind of person who never felt he belonged anywhere.

“That way,” said Snake, pointing, pretty much randomly, toward a line of ticket counters. He jabbed the barrel of the sweatshirt-swathed gun into Puggy's back and said, “You stay close, punk. You don't go one step farther away from me'n you are now.”

They moved slowly through the crowd—first Eddie, then Puggy lugging the suitcase, followed closely by Snake, who limped next to Jenny, who shuffled her feet and stared ahead, zombie-like. The first airline they came to had a name Snake did not understand and a sign listing departures for cities that Snake had never heard of; everyone at the counter was talking in Spanish. Snake jerked his head to indicate to Eddie that he should move ahead. They went past a half dozen more airlines that Snake found incomprehensible, then came to a small counter with a half dozen people waiting in line for a lone agent. Over the counter was an orange sign that read:

Snake felt a good-vibe jolt.
The Bahamas!
He motioned Eddie to get in line. They shuffled forward, Snake keeping his grip on Jenny and periodically letting Puggy feel the gun in his back. In ten minutes, they were standing in front of the agent.

The agent was a single mom named Sheila who had been on duty for fourteen hours without a break, because two of her three coworkers had quit that very day. Air Impact! had trouble keeping employees because its paychecks were behind schedule as often as its flights, which was quite often. Air Impact! was owned by two brothers from North Miami Beach who had done well in the pest-control business and had hatched the plan of starting an airline so that they would have a legitimate business excuse to fly to the Bahamas and gamble and have sex with women who were not technically their wives. The airline was in its second year, and the brothers were spending more and more time in the Bahamas and less and less time on business details such as payroll and schedules and hiring competent personnel.

The Federal Aviation Administration had begun to take a special interest in Air Impact! after receiving an unusually high number of passenger complaints about flight delays and cancellations. Eyebrows had also been raised two weeks earlier when an Air Impact! flight from Miami to Nassau, flown by pilots with questionable credentials, had in fact landed in Key West, which even non-aviators noted was several hundred miles in the diametrically opposite direction. Rumor had it that the FAA was about to shut Air Impact! down, and morale was very low among the employees who had not already quit. Nobody's morale was any lower than Sheila's; aside from having been on her feet for what seemed like forever dealing with unhappy customers, she had just received a call from the baby-sitter she could barely afford telling her that her two-year-old daughter was throwing up, this coming on top of the call from the mechanic telling her that her 1987 Taurus, which always needed something, needed major transmission work.

Had Sheila been in a state of higher morale, she probably would have cared enough to be suspicious of the quartet now standing at the counter—a zoned-out young woman with three scuzzy-looking men. But Sheila had long since passed the point of giving a shit.

“Yes?” she said to Snake.

“We need four tickets to the Bahamas, one-way, next flight you got,” said Snake.

“Nassau or Freeport?” she asked.

Snake frowned. “The Bahamas,” he said.

“Nassau and Freeport are
in
the Bahamas,” said Sheila, mentally adding
you moron
.

Snake thought about it.

“Freeport,” he said. He liked the sound of it.

“There's a ten-ten flight,” said Sheila, checking her watch, which said nine-fifteen. “Four one-way tickets is”—she tapped the computer keyboard—“three hundred sixty dollars.”

Snake let go of Jenny for a moment while he dug his free hand into his pocket. He pulled out the fat wad of bills he'd taken from Arthur Herk at the house. He set it on the counter, in front of Sheila, and, one-handed, started counting off twenties out loud . . . “twenty, forty, sixty. . . .” At 120, his brain fogged up—he'd always struggled with arithmetic—and he had to start again. He did this twice, said “fuck,” and pushed the wad off the counter, scattering bills across Sheila's keyboard.