Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (25 page)

The driveway was paved and sealed with tar, giving it a smooth, blue-black sheen. The front stoop was shallow, six feet wide by four feet deep, but evidently, somebody enjoyed watching the world from this perch: A lawn chair leaned against the stucco.

The screen door looked in on a sofa covered with a knitted blanket. A painting of a bullfight’s final stages hung behind it.

Lili pushed the doorbell and got startled by a buzzing twice as loud as it needed to be. The laughtrack of a sitcom was rising and falling somewhere in the house. She was going to hit the buzzer again when Alex Fernandez came into view, tall and lanky, his Soul Train afro intact.

She said, “Alex Fernandez?” She had her badge in her right hand.

The kid tilted his head like he was about to say Yeah, pivoted off his left foot, and disappeared. Lili ran toward the driveway side of the house. Another screen door banged shut. She rounded the corner to see the long-legged Fernandez scrambling over a chain link fence, his feet moving as he hit the sod in his neighbor’s back yard. Lili took off after him.

She hopped the same set of fences, her gun flapping against her hip in its holster. She yelled for him to stop, that she was the police. That was stupid. He knew exactly who she was.

He continued in a southerly direction, loping through a second set of yards. Lili felt confident on the hard pavement of the street, the asphalt and concrete, where the footing was certain and it was easier to run. Fernandez had veered east on 13th Street, and Lili caught a flash of one sneakered foot before it vanished around a corner. She followed it.

He cleared another fence and landed in a yard guarded by a snarling German Shepherd. Drool flew from its snapping jowls. Fernandez raced the animal to the back fence and won, the dog leaving all four of its feet in a last lunge the kid beat by some miracle.

Lili ran alongside the fence. She was closing the gap. Her breathing was deep and steady. If Fernandez wanted to run all day, that’s what she would do. She yelled, Stop, Police a couple more times in a couple more places, and as he hit 11th Street, he showed signs of weakening. His arms pumped crazily. His head lolled.

He came to another fence. Spooked by his confrontation with the dog, he dashed past the fronts of a few houses. Lili gained ground. “Your time’s up,” she yelled. “Where’re you running to?”

He headed down an alley. Lili was right behind him.

Coming to 9th Street, he pulled up short and shot a look back. He took two steps to his right, kicked it into gear, and broke east again, toward Palm Avenue. The light was against him. Two lanes, both directions, heavy traffic.

He dashed into the intersection, clearing the northbound vehicles. Lili got hung up on the curb. She yelled one last time for Alex Fernandez to stop. Looking over his shoulder, he sprinted off the safety island and directly into the path of a late-model Buick. They collided with a crunch of steel and bone. Fernandez got knocked ten feet into the air, and flipped a reverse somersault, his ankles bent back over his head, forming an inverted U. She was close enough to see the shock on his face. Thinking about it later, Lili would’ve sworn they made eye contact while he was still in the air.

He hit the street with a smack. The driver of the truck that ran over his legs and snagged him and dragged him had less than a second to hit the brakes, which he did, with an air-piercing screech. It sounded like a lullaby next to the scream he let go of when he jumped out of his truck and saw what he had done.

Sweet.

Oh yeah, this was sweet.

Just as sweet as sweet could be, live from Hialeah, Chopper Lens pointing straight down on the corner where Alex Fernandez had been hit by two cars and killed. Cut to a ground shot, and a picture of Alex’s mother, her wide mouth wailing one unbroken, dry-eyed sob. The frame went shaky after a few seconds, one of Fernandez’s uncles, Leo thought, taking a swing at the cameraman.

Leo felt sorry for Alex. He felt sorry for Alex’s mom, for his sister, and for the uncle. On the other hand, the hand that counted, he didn’t have to worry any more about Alex blabbing to the cops. He’d done the right thing, waiting him out. Fernandez was dead and Leo didn’t have a thing, not one thing, to do with it.

But here was the true genius: Fernandez got run over jetting from the same sexy cop who was here busting Leo’s balls just a day or two ago, Detective Lili Acevedo. Well, according to the television, Detective Lili Acevedo was in deep shit. The Fernandez family had hired a lawyer, and he was suing the City of Miami Beach for $163 million, due to the reckless and irresponsible behavior of Detective Lili Acevedo. A young man had been cut down in his prime, an act of criminally negligent homicide, if not outright murder.

There was footage of Acevedo wearing her cheap-ass sunglasses, surrounded by cops and lawyers of her own. The head of her union, his mustached cop’s face hogging the screen, was convinced a subsequent inquiry would reveal Detective Acevedo acted in full compliance with Department guidelines regarding the pursuit of a suspect. She had not fired a single shot. At no time did she draw her weapon. He was one hundred percent confident she would be cleared of any wrongdoing.

In the old days, the days before sexy Cuban detectives, before Beaumond and Fernandez or even Manfred, when he had fresh leases on a six-room house and a fine British automobile, Leo might’ve taken a margarita into the back yard and gotten into the Jacuzzi to feel the warm sun on his face, dreaming his dreams of endless possibility. What happened? It wasn’t that long ago.

He didn’t feel so much possibility now. For one thing, somehow or other he had managed to spend nineteen thousand dollars in three months. All he was doing was spending money, so he couldn’t claim it as a total shock, but where could almost twenty grand have gone? This was after the house and the Jag, twenty thousand of his grandfather’s hard-earned dollars roaring up and down the Beach.

And then he thought of something else: Vicki, who must have been the one who’d ratted him out.

There was a moment back there, when Leo was on his roll, that he was looking for Vicki, and he was going to take care of her, too. He was sitting at that Ocean Drive café. His eyes mine-swept the crowd for her, because he knew if he just sat there long enough, Vicki would pass by. But then he forgot her. Didn’t give her another thought after that evil afternoon until a minute ago, when it was too late to do anything about her. This was why you had to watch. The one kink out there against you, if you didn’t eliminate it, was the one that would take you down.

His path was so hard and bright, and he let Whitney get in his way. Whitney, a pain in the ass who caught his eye and cost him money and made him forget Vicki, who by all rights should be alligator shit right now. Okay, the alligator part didn’t work out, but still.

Another thing pissed him off. What had the cops done with Harry Healy besides crash Leo’s door one sunshiny morning and throw the guy back in his face? Leo figured he’d found the perfect patsy once he worked out that Vicki knew Harry’s girlfriend. And though the girlfriend told Vicki she was done with Harry forever, she knew pretty much to the second when he was getting out. When it turned out Manfred knew Harry, too, come on, who could blame Leo for setting this up?

But then instead of calling when Harry got back to the hotel, Vicki got scared and ran, leaving it to Leo, and that meant to Beaumond and Fernandez, to take care of business.

That’s where it had gone wrong. Leo’d just meant for Healy to absorb the heat from the robbery. He fully expected to see Manfred, if not the next day, then the day after. He didn’t think that pig-ignorant, white trash piece of shit Beaumond was going to shoot him.

Leo was so glad Beaumond was dead. He was so happy he’d killed him. But where did that leave Leo now?

More bad news: Between Whitney and Jo Ann, Leo was down to an eightball. Not counting the quarter ounce he had stashed in the freezer, tucked between two slices of a loaf of Wonder Bread, where nobody would ever think to look for it.

The sun burned yellow outside, but every curtain and blind was shut tight against the day. Leo spilled some coke onto his plate, carved up a juicy fat line, and mowed it down. The sounds coming from the carport turned out to be the central air kicking on, but the upstairs part of the house was making noises, too. He checked the closets and looked under the beds. He searched the carport again, then took a quick peek into the back yard, before he was satisfied that everything was chill.

The phone rang and he picked it up without thinking. What a mistake.

“Hey, baby,” Whitney said, “What’s going on over there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not feeling too good today.” He downed a shot of Cuervo and tried to get his lie over with a few fake coughs.

“You don’t sound too good.”

“No,” Leo said. “Matter of fact, I just took a bunch of stuff and I’m gonna go lay down. Try and sleep this thing off, whatever it is.”

“Have you got a fever?”

Leo touched the back of his wrist to his forehead. “A fever,” he said, “yeah, I think I do.”

“You better be careful it doesn’t turn into something else,” she said. She wanted to know if he’d talked to Homes-Leighton.

Homes-Leighton had left a bunch of messages, when was it, the day before yesterday, but Leo hadn’t called him back. “I haven’t heard from the guy,” he said.

She started to thank him for hooking her up with Lawrence. He had gotten her some unpaid extra work on this movie he was shooting. Whitney was hurting his ears.

“I feel like I’m gonna pass out,” he said. “I’ll call you when I’m feeling better.” He was never going to feel well enough to call Whitney, but whatever.

He hung up and unplugged the phone. He wasn’t taking any calls today, he wasn’t making any calls, and nobody better show up at his door, that’s all he had to say.

He had divided another pile into four bumps when it hit him: The dining room was a very dangerous location. The edges of the curtains were framed with light, and if somebody had been looking in, they would’ve seen him with his plate and his straw and his finely chopped powder. The only place that was safe was the upstairs bathroom. Leo climbed the stairs, went in, and locked the door. Stepping into the tub, he pulled the shower door closed. He sucked up two quick lines, then two more. He took his toothbrush and scrubbed that tequila taste out of his mouth until the foam he spit into the sink was speckled with blood. Soon as he could find his car keys, he’d drive to the liquor store, stock up, and get himself set so there’d be no reason, no reason at all, for him to leave the house.

His mission succeeded, yielding a half-gallon of Cuervo and a carton of Marlboros. But the ride home just about made his heart stop. A white-haired police lady followed him for a two-mile stretch. She was driving an ’89 Grand Marquis, robin’s egg blue, the seat pushed forward as far as it would go, her head just peering over the dashboard and her wrinkled fingers gripping the wheel at the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions, just like they taught in Driver’s Ed, a deep-cover cop they were using to trick him.

Instead, Leo tricked her. He deliberately drove past his house, making a series of quick turns that got her confused. Losing the old bitch speeding through the back streets, he made a sharp turn into the driveway, and pulled the Jag all the way into the carport.

He supposed the coast was clear enough to prepare a cocktail, but what Leo could really go for right now was a nice hit off the pipe.

If he could figure out what he did with his pipe. He remembered hiding it from Whitney. It was under something. The kitchen sink. Behind the Ajax and the Drano and the Formula 409, wrapped in a remnant of a blanket he used to polish the Jag.

The house was getting dark, but Leo left the lights off. He secured himself in the closet of the spare bedroom. He had all the light he needed, right here in his palm.

He sparked a dime-sized boulder that almost didn’t fit in the bowl, sucking till the chunk glowed orange and the chamber was trapping a fearsome grey cloud. Smoke boomed into his lungs, right to the top of his throat. His ears crackled with a buzzing, like crickets on a crazy-hot afternoon. He held the hit, and when the buzzing died down, he let it go. Lights blinked. Lights winked and lights flashed at the edge of his peripheral vision.

The racket that echoed from every corner of the house forced him to investigate. Flashes followed him down the hall — that’s how he knew the lights were strobing inside his head, and not outside of it. Reconnoitering the living room, his back flush with a wall, he raked his shin against an end table. When he got to the kitchen, it went quiet, waiting till he got back upstairs before it started up again.

He sifted the bag for a tasty rock, but it was getting powdery in there. Selecting three pebbles, he cooked them and held the smoke, listening for that cricket buzz, but this blast was weak, just a hum, and it faded after a few seconds.

Now there was trouble outside. Big trouble in the form of a cop parked at the curb. The car was the same model as a police cruiser, without the gumballs and the splashy paint job. No tricks this time. The guy looked a lot more like a cop than any white-haired granny or sexy Cuban chick, that was for sure.

Leo could make out the cop’s profile in the streetlamp glow. High forehead, short cop’s haircut, squared-off jaw a few years from going jowly. He was holding a spray inhaler to his nose, took a blast in one nostril, then the other, just sitting there. Probably waiting for Leo to do something stupid, like flip on the lights, give the cop some kind of sign he was home. He retreated to the spare bedroom and slipped into his closet. He’d wait right here. He dared the cop to try to come in and find him. He dared him.

He was sure an hour had passed, but it might’ve been more, when he combat-crawled back to the master bedroom. He peeked over the windowsill. Leo had won. The cop was gone. The cop was gone and it was safe to go downstairs.

A good thing, too, because as Leo headed down the stairs to go switch this powdery bag for the chunky fat one in the freezer, he heard glass breaking. He traced it right away to the sliding door. A tiny crash, then the clink-clink of shards raining down on the linoleum. The definite click of the latch being turned. The heavy door slid a few feet on its track.