Key West Connection (8 page)

“No problem there.”

“And I want you to think about becoming a fighter. You'd be one of the greatest of this century—and I've seen 'em all. You're like a big cat on that trap—too fast and too strong to be believed. And what are you? Seventeen, eighteen?”

“Almost twenty,” I lied. I wasn't quite sixteen yet.

He chuckled. “Sure, old-timer, sure. And I want you to do one other thing, okay?”

“Name it.”

“If you can, come back to Key West. Take care of it. Too many jerks here now since they built that highway. This place is going to need some taking care of.”

I had looked out across the black water, beyond Kingfish Shoals, toward the Tortugas. “I will, Papa. I mean it. I really will.”

Two or three years later I read that Papa had finally escaped; left his disintegrating cage in his own private way.

So that's what I was thinking about when I heard the explosion. A sharp
crack
and rumble that made the island vibrate. The dopeheads loved it.

Almost eight-thirty p.m. by my Rolex. There was an odd roaring in my ears. And then I was running; running with a strange alien sob escaping from my lips. Because I knew. I knew without knowing. I ran for my life; the life they had just extinguished.

Sirens. Pulsing blue lights. I saw the remains of our old Chevy; blue splinters and twisted metal. And then Rigaberto was in front of me, trying to hold me back. He was crying; bawling like a child. And then everyone was trying to hold me back. But I had to save them. Had to help them. I was the invincible one, the unbeatable one, and only I could bring them back.

I broke through. And then wished I hadn't.

“They're gone, Dusky . . . Janet, the boys, gone . . . ” It was Rigaberto, crying, still trying to turn me away.

“I had a hunch . . . was going to watch myself tonight . . . too late, too goddam late . . . waved goodbye at me before she started the car. . . . ”

A flower-scented evening in the tropics, and I stared on as if from above; as if soaring among the cold, cold stars and the dark chaos of mindless universe: my loves lay scattered like broken toys. . . .

The cocaine boat lay anchored off Middle Sambo Reef, ghostly in the pale August moonlight. I waited for the pickup vessel to arrive, and watched, too, for any form of law-enforcement surveillance.

There was none.

I had left Key West at midnight in the stocky little Boston Whaler: just over thirteen feet of rugged, take-any-sea boat, powered with a fifty-horsepower Johnson. In a pinch, she'd do forty. I had powered five miles across the slow roll of frosted night sea, then broke out the oars and rowed the remaining mile to the lee side of the reef. The cocaine boat arrived about an hour later, noiselessly, showing no running lights. I breathed in the fresh night air; the sweet south wind blowing across from Cuba. Finally, something seemed real. After three blurry, hellish days of gauzy disbelief, nauseating guilt, and, finally, awful, awful realization, this, at least, seemed real.

I had gone through the funeral like a zombie. I spoke to no one, answered no one, refused to acknowledge condolences.

It brought the newspaper ghouls on the run.

One beefy reporter approached after the funeral. Very demanding, very pushy. He said he'd been one of Janet's best friends before she “left the business.” I owed him a statement. Some good quotes. Was I mixed up in drug running? How was she involved? Had she been hooked on something?

He watched me, a perplexed look on his face, when I started to smile. I reached into my pants pockets. It wasn't there. I finally located the little tin of snuff in my coat. There were a lot of people around. Curiosity seekers. The pretty actress and her two little boys had been blown to bits. My, my, what a shame. Any celebrities around that might give an autograph? What about that big blond guy—hadn't he starred with her in a film? No, that was the husband; the guy who had ruined her career and, finally, her life. The beefy newspaper reporter watched me slip the Copenhagen into my cheek.

“What the hell's the matter? Why're ya smiling like that? Listen, I realize this is a tough time for you, buddy, but I need a story. Came all the way down here from New York—”

I nailed him with an amber stinger—full in the right eye. He dropped his little notebook, howling.

“Goddam it, you can't treat the working press like that! You'll be hearing from our—”

He tried to sucker-punch me. Soft chubby roundhouse in slow motion. I brushed it away and stuck him good with a left. His nose collapsed, blood spattering the other reporters.

And then Rigaberto was there, guiding me away.

“Don't bother with them, Dusky—they aren't worth the trouble.”

“How about you, fat boy? UPI? I'll be glad to give you a story, too.”

The reporters scattered in the face of this madness. I called them names. Childish obscenities you might hear from teenage boys readying for a fight none of them wanted. Only, I wanted to fight. Fight them all. I was ready to kill, and someone was going to die—them, me, it didn't matter.

“This is Dr. Robinson, Dusky. He's going to give you something to calm you down.”

Muscular, good-looking man in a suit. There was a needle in his hand.

“How'd you like me to stick that hypo up your ass, sawbones?”

I never got a chance to hear his answer. Something stung my arm, and then, mercifully, there was nothing. . . .

Oh, the killers had done a professional job, all right. Rigaberto filled me in, sitting in a chair beside my hospital bed. Someone had sent flowers. Red roses. I didn't even bother to read the card. Outside, in the sterile hallways, nurses in white uniforms hurried back and forth while doctors so-and-so were paged softly over the telecom system.

“Before I tell you anything, Dusky, I want you to promise me something. This is a job for professional law enforcement, and I want you to promise you'll stay out of it. Okay?”

“Absolutely,
amigo
. Absolutely.”

He knew I was lying. “I mean it, Dusky. This has all been tragic enough. I don't want to end up having to arrest you.”

“Write out an oath and I'll sign it in blood.”

He reached over and patted me on the forearm. “Dusky, there are just some things one man can't fight alone. Some things are just too big. This is one of those things. We're after them, Dusky; after them this very moment. And we'll get them—I promise you that.”

“The way you got Ellsworth?”

“Goddammit, that's not fair, Dusky.”

I knew it wasn't fair. But I didn't care. So I promised everything Rigaberto wanted me to promise. I didn't plan on honoring any of the promises, but Herrera was a good friend. Why put him on the spot by telling the truth?

“We figure they got hold of someone who knew your personal habits. Not hard to do on an island as small as this. But they don't figure on Billy Mack's funeral screwing up your routine. Normally, every evening, about eight-thirty or nine p.m., you hop in the car and drive down to the docks to check on your boat. So they planted a little ignition bomb. Nothing fancy—but just the right amount of explosives and in just the right spot. Professional. Very professional.”

“So I try to avenge the murder of my best friend, and end up getting my wife and kids killed. God. . . . ”

“Dusky! It wasn't your fault, dammit! Mourn for Janet, mourn for Ernie and Honor, but don't mourn for yourself. Don't let yourself go to ruin, Dusky. You owe them better than that.”

That was true. I owed them better. Right then and there I decided to preserve myself, my strength, my sanity, and give them better. How many other Janets and Ernies and Honors had been left in the ruthless wake of those drug-running bastards? How many more would there be? The ones they didn't blow up would just end up among the walking dead: glazed eyes, vague smiles, hated pasts, and hopeless futures.

I would give them better. I would give them all better.

So I checked myself out on Friday morning. A hot Key West morning; the kind where the odor of asphalt shimmers up off the streets and the white clapboard houses and blue sea catch the sunlight and glow with oppressive, sleepy heat. Not a breeze, not a bird stirring. There was only the desperate whine of overworked air conditioners, vacationing cars on the molten streets, trapped smells of rotting fruit; mangos and limes and bananas.

Come to the happy tropics, historic Key West. Drink at Sloppy Joe's, walk past the Audubon house. And watch your life dissolve while your brain cures like a Virginia ham.

Upon my request, Rigaberto had moved my clothes and a few other personal effects onto my boat. I would never go into that pretty little house on Elizabeth Street again. It was just another corpse, and I had had a stomach full of corpses. I climbed onto the
Sniper
feeling, as I did, a soft rush of nostalgia. I felt as if I hadn't been aboard in a year. I opened the cabin door, pushed open the forward windows, and stripped off my sodden clothes. I loved that boat. And love for a boat does not come with looking at blueprints in a boatyard, or with delivery day. It comes gradually, slowly, after years of working heavy seas, rainy nights underway, of fighting big fish and bigger blue northers, and always coming out on top, together. The
Sniper
was Janet's wedding present to me. She had her built up in Port Canaveral, with design help from Billy Mack and a naval-architect friend of ours from Sanibel Island. She was all the boat I could ever want. LOA: thirty-four feet, six inches. Thirteen-foot beam. Plenty of headroom in the salon, and 140 square feet of cockpit. She had an enormous fuel capacity that gave me a range of four hundred miles, with a safety factor of about fifty miles. She felt good, she smelled good. I got a cold beer from the little refrigerator, and turned the VHF to the AM band, and Radio Havana came blasting in. Bright conga music: steel drums and guitar. I washed the sweat away with a quick shower, and was already sweating again before I slipped into soft cotton shorts, knit shirt, and leather sandals.

This was my home now.

The
Sniper
.

Appropriate.

She had been equipped for hunting down and taking the big ones; the blue-water rogues that stalk the Gulf Stream. Si-Tex/Koden 707 digital readout loran C. Benmar autopilot. Furuno FE-502 white-line commercial fish finder. The best outriggers, the best rods and reels and line; the best of everything because that's what I, as a professional, demanded. Now I needed to outfit her for a different quarry. A bigger, smarter, and far less noble kind of game.

I sat at the little table in the salon and made a list.

 

D. Harold Westervelt was a friend of mine. One of my stranger friends. We had both survived military life and war, commando raids and espionage missions, but where I had married and found a new life, D. Harold could never leave the conflict behind. He loved it all too well. He lived in an ironically peaceful setting: suburban house near the naval base on Boca Chica Key. When he got too old for midnight assaults, the state department kept him on as sort of a freelance inventor. When it came to killing, Westervelt was indeed ingenious. They financed his sometimes strange notions and, in return, he produced for them highly sophisticated—albeit unusual—weaponry.

Those of us who held D. Harold's friendship—and there weren't many—and those of us who knew how he made his living—even fewer still—often referred to him as the Edison of Death.

It not only fit. It was accurate.

He was eating lunch when I arrived. Tossed salad and unsweetened tea. A man of severe discipline, he looked much younger than his fifty-odd years. Shaved head, icy blue eyes, the lean steely look of an Olympic 170-pound-class wrestler. He was dressed in a white golfing shirt, blue serge pants with razor creases, and well-oiled topsider shoes. He looked like a retired German executive who had come to the Keys to enjoy bridge and lawn sports.

“I was expecting you, captain.” He got up from the table, poured me a glass of iced tea, added the teaspoon of honey. I had been to his home maybe twice in eight years, and still he remembered how I took it. We sat across from each other.

“It goes without saying that I was very sorry to hear about your wife and children.”

“How did you know I was coming? I didn't call.”

He shrugged. “I know you, captain. Why belabor the obvious?”

“Then maybe you know
why
I came?”