Cut and Run (13 page)

“One shot, huh?” said Wolfe. “Funny. They pulled three bullets out of you.”

Pace looked even more embarrassed. “Well, maybe. It was self-defense, anyway. I knew I was going to die if I didn't make it back to shore, and the radio got all shot up in the battle. So I just pointed the boat in the right direction and tried not to pass…” He yawned again. “…pass out.”

“Okay, Pace,” said Delko. “We'll let you get some rest. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“Sure. I guess…”

Out in the hospital corridor, Wolfe turned to Delko and said, “So we know there's at least one other survivor—Jorge.”

“Yeah. But we still
don't
know what kind of contraband the
Svetlana 2
was supposed to be carrying.”

“Well, according to your buddy Pace, Jorge took off without it, and he couldn't find it. Which means either Dragoslav's crew managed to dump it overboard in the middle of a firefight—”

“—or it's still on board.” Delko shook his head. “I guess we go back to the boat, really rip it apart. Maybe there's a false compartment or something we missed.”

“I'm going to see if I can track down this Jorge, first. Maybe he knows more than Pace.” Wolfe grinned. “Though that wouldn't take much. Hey, how did you know about him getting seasick?”

“Took a look through what was in his pockets when he was brought in. Found dimenhydrinate.”

“Motion sickness pills? That's thinking ahead.”

“Not far enough…”

H
ORATIO HAD DEALT
with all kinds of cops in the course of his career, from ambitious rookies eager to make the jump to the next pay grade to street-weary veterans just hanging on until they could make retirement. He had encountered a broad governmental spectrum as well, from the U.S. Treasury to the FBI; the higher up the Federal Ladder, the less polite they tended to be.

During the nineteen-eighties, the Drug Enforcement Agency was in a class by themselves—and they knew it. Tasked with winning an unwinnable war against druglords who had more money than some countries, their job was high profile and never-ending. It even spawned a TV show, though most cops winced when it was brought up.

But the glory days of large-scale busts and screaming headlines were over; these days, people were more interested in the latest Baghdad carbombing than a cigarette boat caught smuggling a few keys of cocaine. The press and the public had acknowledged long ago that the drug war was a losing proposition, and more than one cop had said the same thing publicly.

A cop who had done more than just talk was Garrett McCulver. He'd quit the DEA in disgust just three years shy of his pension, and according to Horatio's sources he hadn't gone quietly, either. Some stories had him breaking his superior's nose; others had him actually pulling a gun on the man. Whatever the details, he was obviously a man with deeply held convictions.

McCulver had retired to a small bungalow in Surfside, no more than a few steps from the beach. He was out on his small deck when Horatio walked up, lounging on a lawn chair in a pair of denim cutoffs, an old gray sweatshirt, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. McCulver looked to be in his fifties, tall and broad-shouldered, obviously still in good condition. He wore no shoes, and his skin had the leathery look of a man who spent a lot of time in the sun.

“Garrett McCulver?” asked Horatio.

“At your service. You Caine?”

Horatio smiled. “You still have good sources.”

“A few.” McCulver's voice was surprisingly soft. “They told me you'd been asking around about me.”

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Not at all.” McCulver reached out with one long arm and dragged another lawn chair over. Horatio sat, and nodded his thanks.

“It's not so much about you,” said Horatio, “as one of your old cases.”

“I don't know if you've heard, Lieutenant, but I'm not much of a team player.” McCulver's soft voice held just a trace of bitterness.

“That's not what I heard at all.”

“No?”

“No. What I heard is that you were a good cop with a lousy boss. Happens to all of us, sooner or later.”

“But most of us don't quit.” It was somewhere between a question and an accusation.

“Sometimes the only option is to walk away. I think it takes more guts to do that than ignore the facts.”

“In that case, I've got plenty.” McCulver paused, then shook his head. “I'm sorry, Lieutenant. You're still on the job, and I'm busting your balls for it. Go ahead, tell me what you need.”

“First of all, call me Horatio. And second—I need to know whatever you can tell me about a man named Rodriguo.”

McCulver took his own sunglasses off and squinted at Horatio with ice-blue eyes. “Rodriguo. You're talking about the smuggler?”

“I am.”

“You're sure the guys at the Agency didn't send you down here to yank my chain?”

“No sir, they did not.”

“Huh. Well, all right then, Horatio—let me tell you about Rodriguo. He was my big fish, the one that got away. Until he vanished, Rodriguo was one of the biggest players in the cocaine trade, both on the East Coast of the U.S. and in Colombia. He was something of a legend in the eighties, and at one point I headed a task force put together for the sole purpose of stopping him. We failed. At the time of his disappearance, Rodriguo was at the top of his game—maybe that's why people still talk about him today. There are even occasional reports that he's still alive, living the rich life on the French Riviera or on some tropical island.”

“You think it might be true?”

“Nah. Just the drugrunners' version of Elvis sightings. I may have never met the man—or even seen his face—but over the years I got to know him. And if there's one thing I can tell you about Rodriguo, it's that he was fearless. There's no way he would go into hiding. Go out in a blaze of glory, sure, but stay out of the limelight for the last two decades? No way. He's dead.”

Horatio nodded. “Tell me about what he did while he was alive.”

“He moved coke. No heroin, no marijuana, no speed. He took it from Colombia to the U.S., and he used some of the ballsiest methods I've ever seen.”

“Such as?”

“There was one time—we heard about this after the fact, you understand—he swapped a cargo container full of furniture for one full of nose candy; the container was being used to ship the belongings of an Air Force colonel from a base in Panama to one stateside. Another time, he used an old Army bomber to airlift a hundred keys into Florida—or should I say carpet-bomb Florida. He dropped fifty crates, all of 'em with parachutes, forty-nine filled with baking powder. Left us running around half the state trying to find the right one.”

“Sounds like a gambling man.”

“He was what we called a cocaine cowboy. Live fast and hard, always go for the big score, never back down from a challenge.” McCulver shook his head and chuckled. “I even heard rumors he was negotiating with the Soviets for a decommissioned submarine before the Wall fell. Hell, for all I know he actually managed to buy one. Maybe that's where he is—he went from being a cowboy to Captain Nemo.”

Horatio smiled. “I sincerely hope not.”

McCulver glanced at him. “So what's this all about, Horatio? Has Rodriguo resurfaced after all this time?”

“Not exactly…” Horatio told him about Fredo and Consuela Bolivar.

McCulver looked thoughtful. “Yeah, I can vouch for the accuracy of the kidnap story; we knew about it and so did the FBI, but nobody ever got charged. That was the thing about Rodriguo—he had this ability to be famous and invisible at the same time. Everybody heard the stories, but only after he was already gone. The guy lived in the wind.”

“Well, he must have come down to earth now and then—or he wouldn't have a son.”

“If
it's his son, you mean. In certain circles, saying you're related to Rodriguo is like claiming to be descended from Julius Caesar—easy to say, hard to disprove.”

“You don't think there's any credence to it?”

McCulver shrugged. “Hard to say. If he is Rodriguo's son, you'd think he would have come forward before now.”

“To claim his father's empire?”

“Not so much an empire anymore. What Rodriguo had was a network, and that was pretty much carved up right away. Rodriguo didn't seem to believe in the kind of opulent mansions the other druglords lived in—or if he did, he kept their location so secret we could never locate them. He only trusted a very small circle of associates with his secrets, and they all knew better than to talk. Sometimes I think there must be a gigantic mansion in the middle of the Colombian jungle, overrun with vines and creepers, spider monkeys swinging from the chandeliers, one lone skeleton sitting in a rotting armchair with a snake crawling through its eye sockets…”

“You have quite the imagination.”

“I have a whole lot of time on my hands.”

Horatio hunched forward, clasped his hands together. “So what happened to all the money?”

“Ah. Now
there's
the question. Nobody knows exactly how big that mountain of cash was, but it had to have been in the hundreds of millions. Most people assume he stashed it in some secret offshore account we've never been able to locate; a few think it's still in hard currency, boxed up in some old warehouse like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. And then there's the old cranks, like me.”

“And what,” said Horatio, “do the old cranks think?”

“Oh, there's all kinds of crazy theories. I think my second favorite is the one that he secretly bought Disneyland and lives in the basement of the Haunted Mansion.”

“And your favorite?”

McCulver didn't answer right away. He stared out at the ocean instead, watched two gulls fighting over the remains of a discarded hamburger. “That would be mine,” he said at last. “See, I probably know more about Rodriguo than anybody in law enforcement, and I think I finally figured out what Rodriguo wanted out of all this.”

Horatio waited.

“He wanted his own country,” said McCulver. “One where he wouldn't be hunted, where he'd have respect and power and wealth. He couldn't get that in the U.S., he couldn't get it in Colombia. But I think he found a place where he could.”

“Where?”

“Cuba.”

“A communist dictatorship?”

“I told you it was crazy. But hear me out. You're a CSI—if my theory is flawed, you should be able to spot the holes.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. The only way he could pull this off is with Castro's approval and help. It's the one country the U.S. is guaranteed not to be able to extradite him from. As long as he's under Castro's wing, he can live the high life, in a climate and a culture he's used to. Hell, Rodriguo might even have been Cuban in the first place; from what I hear,
Scarface
was his favorite movie. There's an apocryphal story that after it came out, Rodriguo liked it so much he had a kilo of his best Peruvian flake delivered to Pacino's front door.

“Anyway, none of this makes sense unless Castro's on board. And what can an obscenely wealthy druglord offer to a head of state?”

“An extremely large check?”

“No. A flat-out bribe would make for disastrous publicity. Castro would have required something to give the whole thing a veneer of respectability—at least, that's what Rodriguo would have figured. The answer he came up with was
art
.

“Specifically, Cuban art. When Castro's revolutionary party took power in nineteen-fifty-nine, hundreds of thousands of people fled. They took what they could with them, but a lot of things got left behind. In some cases, relatives were asked to look after such things—the assumption being that the revolution wouldn't last and the family could come back to reclaim their property. That didn't work out so well—almost five decades later, they're still waiting.”

“But not everyone was so patient?” asked Horatio.

“No. Between Castro's socialist policies and the U.S. trade embargo, life in Cuba became a lot harder. And if you're sitting on a pile of paintings you know are worth thousands, maybe millions, while your second cousin is living in a condo in Miami Beach…well, the temptation to maybe smuggle them out of the country and to an auction house gets stronger every year. Cuban art has been hemorrhaging off the island ever since.”

McCulver took a long swallow of iced tea. “Even a lot of the stuff the original exiles took with them has wound up on the market—starting a new life in a new country isn't cheap, and the quickest way to get some ready cash is to hock a few heirlooms. I figure Rodriguo had no problem building an extensive collection.”

“So you think he was buying Cuban art? To what end?”

“Eventual repatriation. See, he figured Castro wouldn't be able to resist the public relations opportunity—wealthy South American philanthropist donates a hundred million dollars in lost national treasures to the Havana National Museum, and
el presidente
welcomes him with open arms. Rodriguo retires with three or four hundred million to spare, never to be heard from again.”

Horatio nodded. “An intriguing theory. Do you have anything to back it up?”

“A little. Back in eighty-five, I was tracking an anonymous collector who was paying top dollar for Cuban and Spanish-American art—I was sure it was Rodriguo, but I could never prove it. Spent around a hundred million, give or take. I still have the documentation, if you'd like to take a look at it.”

“I would.”

“Give me a minute to dig it out, okay?” McCulver got to his feet.

“Sure.”

McCulver stepped into the house through the open patio door. While he was gone, Horatio took in the view; a few lazy sailboats on the water, a single jet skier buzzing along in the distance like an angry mosquito too waterlogged to get airborne. It was a peaceful, sedate environment, the kind that many cops dreamed of retiring to; no pressures, no worries, no responsibility except keeping the cooler stocked and maybe walking the dog.

He was pretty sure McCulver hated it.

The ex-agent returned, a beige file folder in one hand. Horatio guessed McCulver hadn't had to do much digging to find it; he suspected that, in fact, it was never too far from reach. McCulver may not have been drawing a salary, but he was still a cop.