Powder Burn (2 page)

“¡Fuego!”
he cried.
“¡Fuego!”

In the Donzi, the small man ducked when he saw flashes from the freighter and came up with his semiautomatic, firing. His hand shook.

Ruis never understood.

“Slow down! Christ! Slow down!” he yelled.

The speedboat accelerated like a rocket, throwing Ruis against the gunwale. The pistol dropped from his hand and clattered overboard. He clutched wildly for something to hang onto, but the Donzi plowed through a wave and bucked him up over the stern into the wake. From the freighter the splash sounded like a sack of cement.

“Jesus,” the small man said.

Rigid at the wheel, the driver never looked back. His eyes teared from the sharp wind. The speedboat raced eastward, out of rifle range, toward the Cape Florida lighthouse and home.

“Shit,” the small man exhaled. “Can Ruis swim?”

“I hope not—for his sake,” the driver said, shaking his head.
“¡Mierda!
It was a mistake to bring him.…”

By now the small man had stopped trembling. “What was in the bag?” he asked.

“Tampons,” the driver said.

ON THE FREIGHTER
, the captain cursed and spit into the sea.

Ruis bobbed in the water while the Colombian crewmen watched silently. No one fired at him.

“¡Socorro!”
Ruis cried. “Help!” His voice bounced off the hull like a dull chime.

¡“Por favor! Tengo miedo!”
Ruis treaded water awkwardly. He was afraid to paddle toward the ladder, afraid to move a muscle in the sight of the rifles.

“Help!” he yelled plaintively.
“¡Tiburón!
Shark!”

One of the crewmen laughed harshly, but the captain silenced him with a grunted command: “Bring him aboard.”

By daybreak the
Night Owl
was gone.

Chapter 1

ALL OF HIS FRIENDS
in Coconut Grove had gone to ten-speed bicycles, but Meadows thought that was absurd. He didn’t race, and there wasn’t a hill for three hundred miles. Three gears were enough. As a matter of fact, the sturdy brown Raleigh he was pedaling along Main Highway had only one gear; the other two had rusted to perdition long since.

It was summer, one of those afternoons when the clouds build over the Everglades and march with thunder and drenching rain out to sea.

The temperature stood at eighty-eight; the humidity, even higher. Sweat poured from him as he pedaled a narrow strip of asphalt alongside the road, protected from the traffic by majestic banyan trees, their thick branches casting a dappled shade over roadway and bike path. Lizards darted across the path. He heard the cry of a family of wild parrots that lived in an old royal palm near the bay.

The hotter the better, as far as Chris Meadows was concerned. It was the time of the year when all the tourists went home and left Florida to the Floridians. At least that was how it used to be. Now more and more people were moving in, calling themselves Floridians, and with each one of them there was that much less of Florida.

Meadows glanced over at the long line of traffic moving in the opposite direction past an ivy-covered church. Three cars in five had their windows closed, air conditioners growling. He felt sorry for the drivers. They missed the lizards, the parrots, the tantalizing breeze being sucked off the bay into the building clouds. In another hour they would miss the cloudburst that in a furious few moments would wash the streets, drop the temperature twenty degrees and reward all those wise enough to enjoy it with new sights, sounds, sensations.

Meadows was of two minds about the coming storm. On the one hand, he could pedal home before it and watch from his porch with a shot of Jack Daniel’s as it beat on the bay, or he could take off his shirt and pedal home in the rain. Either would do.

Indeed, it would not have been hard to please T. Christopher Meadows that afternoon. The hospital in New Mexico had been a tremendous tonic. He had done it for the cab fare, liking the idea of science cloaked in white adobe on the sere shank of a mountain. The hospital was for children, and Meadows had suffered it: every block, every window, every angle. He had paced the hillsides around the growing structure, weighing, examining, analyzing. Then one day he had walked no more. The building belonged. Even the sallow consulting architects who made their living designing hospitals had found no flaws.

Usually Meadows made a point of being somewhere else when the time came to inaugurate buildings he had designed. It was curiosity that had led him to break his own rule in New Mexico two days before. He had left room in the vaulted hospital lobby for a cross on the wall facing the wood-framed doorway. Meadows understood that without the crucifix the hospital would never be complete in the eyes of the nuns for whom he had built it. To carve their cross, the nuns had improbably picked a wispy kid, self-taught, thin as a reed and spacy as hell. Meadows wouldn’t have hired him to chop firewood.

Meadows had been wrong. He realized that the instant he had walked into the completed lobby. The boy had carved a breathtaking Christ, bony as himself, stretched in agony on the mahogany cross. The cross had seemed to envelop the lobby and everything in it; the anguished Christ had spoken more of forgiveness than of pain. Meadows had been astonished. And now, back home in Miami, the delight still warmed him.

THE BUSINESS DISTRICT OF
Coconut Grove slept in the afternoon sun. Few people walked the streets. Meadows passed a darkened theater, an empty park, an earnestly fashionable line of boutiques of the sort that had made Coconut Grove so chic Meadows was thinking about moving out.

Meadows won an inviting smile from a jogger with whom he briefly shared the bike path: he, pedaling north, hair tousled, shirt open, feet bare, canvas shorts straining at the thighs; she, running south in a seventy-five-dollar outfit of satin and tie-dyed cotton, hair combed back and tied with a red ribbon. Pretty, Meadows thought, but a bit too obviously on the make. He had paced a few joggers in his day, one athletic activity prelude to another, but that was in the past now.

Meadows waved at a teller named Bert who stared morosely at the street from a drive-in window at the local bank. It reminded him that he had to pick up some money on his way home, even if it did mean passing the time of day with poor Bert. Bert had piles.

From what had once been a good neighborhood bar a blond youth appeared, wiping tears with a piece of blue silk. The silk matched his light T-shirt, which matched his pocketless jeans, which almost matched the tearful eyes. A circular gold pendant bounced uncertainly against the hollow, heaving chest.

Meadows let the bike coast. There had to be a second act. There was. The youth took a deep breath, marched back to the bar and pulled open the door.

“Bitch!” the young man screamed. “Cheating bitch. I hope he bites it off.” There was a commotion inside the bar. The youth walked swiftly away, clutching the silk handkerchief to his face as though it were an ice pack. Ah, to be young and in love, Meadows thought.

Arthur stood at his usual corner, where the road turned east to dip toward the bay. Arthur was hard to miss. He was six-four in splay-toed feet that were indifferent to the burning concrete sidewalk. He wore his hair in braids. A wrap of beige and white batik circled his waist and breached at his ebony calves.

“Hey, Chris,” Arthur called.

“How you making it?” Meadows asked.

“Lean time, brother. The heat is after me every time I turn around. A man can’t even stand on the street anymore without trouble.”

To the very tense Miami police assigned to patrol the Grove, the theorem was simple: Anybody who stood on a street corner all day was peddling something—dex, ludes, weed, coke, even heroin. The cops rousted Arthur regularly, but they never busted him.

“What you need”—Meadows laughed from his bicycle—“is a defense fund.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll get some T-shirts printed up. We’ll stage a rally.”

“Fuck off, whitey,” Arthur said. “How about some chess later?”

“Not tonight. I’m working on a project.”

“Make it pretty, Frank Lloyd.”

Meadows encouraged the old Raleigh down the gentle slope toward the library. Arthur was a friend. Meadows had seen him first in a neighborhood greasy spoon, where the black man had been engrossed in a battered book of chess openings. Good chess companions do not come easy in Miami, but your average citizen does not casually approach strange ragged giants and ask them for a game. So Meadows had simply eaten and left.

A few days later, however, Meadows had been buying pencils and ink in an art supply shop when Arthur had approached him nonchalantly dragging a teenager in each ham-sized fist. It seems he had caught them popping the door locks on Meadows’s aged Karmann Ghia. That night the two of them had played chess by the pool, and Meadows had learned to his dismay that he was overmatched.

“The man looks like a Rastafarian and plays chess like Morphy,” Meadows said to his beleaguered king. “OK, I give up. Who the hell are you?”

“Just another refugee,” Arthur answered. He was, in fact, a computer technician of some talent who had saved his money, let his hair grow and dropped out. At night he worked effectively as a bouncer in a small downtown jazz club. By day he manned his street corner in the Grove. Meadows had never asked what he did there. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“
GOING TO PERU
, Mr. Meadows? You seem to have just about cleaned us out of Incas,” said the pleasant round-faced librarian. “Ecuador. Northern branch of the same family, I’m told.”

When the last Incas’ sons had feuded, one had had his capital in Cuzco, the other in Quito. Would it have made any difference to the Incas, Meadows wondered, if they had known that under their empire lay reservoirs of oil that would centuries later become the lifeblood of civilization? Probably not—but tapping those reservoirs certainly had made a difference to the inheritors of the empire.

Out in the Amazon vastness, Ecuador had oil and, with it, sudden national wealth, instant inflation, unprecedented international status and membership in OPEC. Would Señor Meadows consider designing a building to house the oil ministry in Quito? A skyscraper,
por favor,
something majestic and symbolic of the new Ecuador. Meadows hadn’t decided. He hadn’t liked the pretentious,
nouveau riche
army officers who had approached him, but he was intrigued with the challenge: how to design a skyscraper consistent with the colonial heritage of mountain Quito and yet strong enough to resist the earthquakes there were nearly as common as revolutions in the Ecuadorean Andes? Before he made up his mind, he would do some homework.…

He had just decided the rain would catch him on the way home, and turned to ask the librarian for a bag to protect the books, when he was intercepted by one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.

She stood squarely in his path, a half smile on her face, a twinkle in green eyes that seemed a mirror of Meadows’s own. Her blond hair was cut to the shoulder. She wore a plaid pinafore, white socks and white patent leather shoes.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi.”

“My name is Jessica Tilden and I am five years old.”

“Oh. My name is Chris Meadows and I am thirty-six years old. How do you do?”

“Are you famous?”

“No, of course not. Who says I’m famous?”

“My mommy.”

“Well, she probably means well, but she’s mistaken.”

Jessica Tilden thought that one over. Clearly she would have more to say. Meadows couldn’t take his eyes off the little girl. There was something there in that pixyish, semimocking, I’m-not-through-with-you-yet expression. Something familiar.

“Don’t you know it’s not polite to lie to little girls?”

The voice came from over Meadows’s shoulder. It sent a shiver down his spine, a pounding in his chest. He felt lightheaded, weak, vulnerable. Meadows turned.

“Hi, Sandy,” he said softly.

“Hello, Chris.”

Jessica was her mother’s daughter, no mistake about it. Except that her mother’s eyes were a bottomless blue and she wore a knee-length white cotton dress and sandals. The last time he had seen her she had worn a bikini and the blue eyes had sparkled with tears.

They shook hands, there in the library. The ultimate absurdity, to shake hands among strangers with someone you once loved. Meadows didn’t know what else to do.

“Your palms are all wet, Chris.”

“I’m sweating. I came on the bike.”

“Yes, I saw it outside; that’s why we came in.”

“Gee, Sandy, it’s been…”

“Almost six years.”

“If she is Jessica Tilden, then you are…”

“Mrs. Harold Tilden of Syracuse, New York.”

“Syracuse. Yes, well, I’ve been there. Nice town.” It was not a nice town. It was an awful town; no architecture, no life, no sun, and he didn’t give a damn about Syracuse anyway.

“How are things with you?” she asked with that gentle, private smile.

“I can’t complain.”

“The house?”

“Fine.”

“The boat?”

“New engine, same boat.”

“The coffee grinder?”

Oh, stay away from that, Sandy; that is too close to home. In the mornings, when the sun ricocheted off the bay into the bedroom, it had been his custom to get up and make coffee, beginning with shade-grown Costa Rican beans a friend shipped him from San José. He was a fetishist, she teased. Anyone who abandoned her alone and languorous on a big bed in the morning sunshine to make coffee had to be. And a fool to boot, she liked to say.

“The grinder broke. I threw it away,” Meadows lied.

“Oh? Somehow, Chris, I can’t imagine you without your trusty grinder. Or is it that there is someone to make your coffee?”

“No,” he said quickly. “I make it myself still.”

Meadows struggled unsuccessfully to regain his poise.

“You…you haven’t changed much, I mean not a bit at all. How have you been? All that time.”

“It went so fast.” She blurted it out, a set piece. “After we, uh, after I left Florida, I went up to New York and thought about finding a job. But I never got a chance. Almost as soon as I got there I met Harold and he…swept me off my feet.” She smiled in apology for the phrase. “We were married in two weeks—can you believe it? Then, bang, along came Jessica right away, and well, Syracuse, when Harold’s company transferred him there. Apart from that I haven’t changed a bit. Big, old-fashioned country girl who likes the sun in her face and sand between her toes.” The smile again.