Powder Burn (25 page)

On the summer night that Detective Ethan Bradley, Miami Homicide, was summoned to Room 713-714 of the Holiday Inn Bayside, Pepe Falcón celebrated for the last time. Then someone stuck the barrel of a small automatic handgun up his nose and blew a few brains and a lot of high-grade cocaine all over the walls. Detective Bradley noted in his report that the mess had “totally ruined a very nice seascape hanging on the west wall.”

A few hours later a truck driver heading north on Interstate 95 with three tons of assorted vegetables noticed a car in flames on the highway apron. He braked his rig, hopped out and doused the late-model Oldsmobile until his portable fire extinguisher was empty. The trucker got on his CB and called for help when he noticed something very funny on the upholstery. A Florida highway patrolman waited for ninety minutes to make sure the car had cooled off, then used a crowbar to pop the trunk.

Inside was the body of a man named Hilarión Escandar, a young Colombian national. Detective Sergeant Ray Lesnick, Miami Homicide, was given the task of searching the corpse. He found approximately fifty-five thousand dollars in U.S. currency, two dozen raw emeralds, three different driver’s licenses and an airline ticket that showed Escandar had arrived earlier that evening on a flight from Lima. The Dade County medical examiner would later determine that the twenty-four-year-old university student had been shot within thirty minutes after he had strolled out of the terminal at Miami International.

Two days later a twin-engine Beechcraft landed at 1:07
A.M
. at North Perry Airport. Several men waited by their cars as the cherry-striped aircraft taxied to a stop. The pilot got out, carrying an Ingram submachine gun and nothing else.

“Sorry, fellas,” he said to his welcoming committee. “Somebody fucked up. It’s all dried up.”

“That’s impossible!” shouted one of the men.

“I couldn’t buy a fucking gram!” the pilot shouted. “Your money is in the plane.” He waved the gun. “Get away from that car. Don’t call me again for a long time, OK?”

An airport security guard who witnessed the incident notified the Dade County Metropolitan police, but even the Beechcraft had vanished by the time a squad car arrived. Octavio Nelson heard about the landing from a friend in Narcotics at the county, and now he was beginning to believe that his punk informer was right: There was a plague on the marketplace.

He read over Ethan Bradley’s report and wondered why anyone would bother killing poor Botones, a proud, self-made man—but still a small-time freelancer who couldn’t move enough coke to keep a rock band on its feet for a week. And this kid Escandar,
¡Cristo!
Nelson had talked to a sister and learned Hilarión was muling to put himself through medical school. It was a lesson, all right, torching the car and leaving all the cash and jewels for the cops to find. But a lesson to whom? The kid was a nickel-and-dimer.

“It’s getting nasty out there,” Nelson said, tossing the files on Wilbur Pincus’s desk.

“One Cuban, one Colombian—”

“Don’t forget Redbirt.”

“Right, and one Anglo.”

“And coke is getting scarce,” Nelson said, rising from his desk. “What’s your mechanical mind tell you about all this?”

“That nobody big is getting hurt.”

“Bravo,” Nelson cheered.

“And that somebody big is sitting on a lot of cocaine—”

“A whole shitload,” Nelson agreed.

”—and they will sell it,” Pincus continued, “when the time and the market are just right.”

Nelson grabbed a handful of cigars from a drawer. “Come on, sport, we’ve got work to do.”

Chapter 21

ALL THREE
sat up front in the van. Manny drove. Moe sat on the passenger side, elbow out the window and a can of Budweiser on his lap. Chris Meadows sat directly behind them in a swiveling vinyl jump seat. The van was empty, except for a layer of cheap plastic taped to the floor and side panels. “Residue,” Manny had explained tersely. “I don’t want a single goddamn seed in this truck when we’re through.”

They headed west for nearly ninety minutes, Manny steering away from the interstate highway, the Palmetto Expressway and the Florida Turnpike. “You’re a paranoid sumbitch—” Moe laughed.

“Every time I been stopped has been on a four-lane,” Manny said. “Cops see me driving and something goes off in their heads.”

“But we’re clean now,” Meadows ventured.

Manny glanced over at his partner.

“So all those rules were meant just for me,” Meadows said dryly.

“You really think I’d come out here with no gun?” Manny sat forward, took one hand off the steering wheel and groped into the waistband of his pants. He withdrew a small, flat automatic and held it up for Meadows to see.

Moe burped, and Meadows got a faceful of hot, beery breath. “How about grabbing me another beer?” Moe crushed the empty can in one hand and heaved it out of the van. Meadows saw it bounce off a parked Cadillac.

“Ten points,” Manny said.

The van turned west on the Tamiami Trail, a treacherous and ancient two-lane highway that bisected the steamy Florida Everglades. Only ten miles out of Miami, and nothing but darkness stretched ahead. Manny flicked on the brights and goosed the van up to seventy. Moe lit a joint.

Meadows fidgeted. He had agonized all day about making the trip, but as he had lain in bed with Patti, waiting for his midnight ride, he had acknowledged something to himself: He’d never been more excited. It was one sort of gratification to see a building born, story by story, until it filled a skyline with one man’s vision. That was a pleasure, but it was meticulous, faultless, too damn well planned.

For what Meadows was doing now, there were no blueprints, no textbooks, no exactitude. Running the blockade was a project that demanded guile, skill and blind luck.

The architect’s nerves were haywire.

“Tell me about Atlanta,” Manny said.

“Muggy in the summer, wet in the winter,” Meadows replied.

“He doesn’t want a goddamn weather report,” Moe said.

“Tell me about business. How was business?”

“Good, for a while. The cops up there are much different. They’re—”

“Meaner,” Moe interjected.

“Yeah.”

Manny took the joint from Moe and sucked noisily. “How do you know about the Atlanta cops?” he asked Meadows. “Did you get popped up there?”

“No,” Meadows said quickly. “Some friends did.”

“Ha! Atlanta’s nuthin. They got damn Nazi cops in Mississippi.” Moe was blasting off.

“Tell Chris about the jail in Hattiesburg. With the dog.”

“That was Meridian,” Moe corrected.

Meadows leaned forward. Moe was beginning to mumble, and he could barely hear him over the engine. “What happened?”

“Aw, I got busted—this was three, four years back—I got busted for possession at an Allman Brothers concert.”

“He was scared shitless,” Manny said, handing the soggy last shred of the joint to Meadows, who passed it along to Moe.

“That’s it for this one,” he said, flicking the roach out the window. “Anyway, I got this ace lawyer who got me off all the charges. I bet I didn’t even pull a week, but while I was in there, the cops raided a farm where this old geezer was growing grass as high as alfalfa.

“So the cops chop it down, except for a couple real small plants, which they bring into the station for a display.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Yeah,” Moe roared, “for the school kids. They gave a tour so that the kids could see what real marijuana looked like. It was terrific. They brought a whole line of ’em just past my cell and pointed me out as some kind of fuckin’ criminal—”

“Which he is,” Manny said.

“But that night,” Moe went on, “the police chief’s dog—he was a beagle—got up on the sill and ate the goddamn grass right off the planters. Chewed it right down to the stem.”

Manny tapped the brakes as a behemoth tractor-trailer rig heading eastbound weaved briefly across the center line in front of them. “Shit,” Manny said, punching the horn. “He’s falling asleep.”

Moe didn’t notice. “Anyway, the chief comes in the next day and finds the pot plants all chewed to hell, and he knows what done it. So what does he do? He locks up the dog in one of the empty cells.”

“What for?”

“He was afraid the thing was going to go crazy, berserk he said, from eating the grass. So he locked the dog up, pulled up a chair, got hisself some fried chicken…and waited.”

“And?”

“And…nuthin!” Moe said. “The dog puked his guts out for about two hours, and that was that. The chief finally let him out after a couple of days.”

Manny, still smiling at the story, turned right down an unmarked gravel road. “So what kind of action you looking for?” Moe asked.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Meadows chewed nervously at his lower lip. Now, without benefit of any passing headlights, he could see nothing but darkness on Moe’s face.

Manny gave an impatient sigh. The van bounced over washboard ruts, and Meadows shifted his legs to brace himself.

“Man, you
know
what I’m talking about,” Moe said. “What is it you’re looking for?”

“I want to buy some coke,” Meadows said, laboring for a matter-of-fact tone.

“Who doesn’t?”

“I need a couple of pounds.”

“What?” Manny hooted. “Your timing is fucking hilarious, man.” He guided the van around a manhole-sized pock in the road. Hundreds of insects swirled about the headlights, casting a rush of dot-sized shadows before them.

“I don’t get it,” Meadows said.

“There ain’t no coke to be had, at least not in those kinds of packages. The last couple of weeks has been as bad as I ever seen it. Wouldn’t you say so?”

Manny nodded. “Some guys been in the business four years can’t get any more than a couple ounces. It is fucking amazing.”

“But why?” Meadows asked.

“I don’t know for sure, but I got a theory,” Manny said authoritatively. “It’s the heat and the publicity. Too much goddamn violence down here. The governor and the DEA have been screaming about it at press conferences, all these crazy killings…I just think the wholesalers are laying low.”

Moe groaned. “There’s got to be a hundred warehouses full of paste down Colombia way.”

Meadows’s mind raced. “Then how do I get some?”

“You don’t,” Manny said coldly. “When things loosen up—and they will—the regulars will get first crack at the merchandise. The demand will be so great that the price will go up—”

“Naturally,” Moe said laconically.

”—and there won’t be much left for anyone else.”

“I can pay for it. With cash,” Meadows declared.

Manny tossed his head back and laughed without a trace of a smile. “Christ man, I can show you eighteen-year-old kids in Gucci Cadillacs who can pay for it in cash. That’s nothing down here.”

He pulled the van to the side of the dirt road and cut the engine abruptly. Meadows waited for the men to get out, but they did not move. From a few miles away drifted the diesel whine of a big semi on the Tamiami Trail. Around the van the night hummed with insects; ravenous clouds of Everglades mosquitoes bounced off the tinted windshield. Hundreds more poured through Moe’s open window. He slapped frantically at his pale, thin arms, and Manny cackled.

“I don’t suppose anybody brought bug spray?” Meadows asked feebly.

“Let’s get out now,” Manny said. He climbed down from the van and stretched his arms. Then he jogged in place for a few moments. “Much better,” he announced.

“Manny, I can’t take these goddamn mosquitoes,” Moe cried.

“They like white meat, huh?”

“Don’t we have anything to keep ’em away?”

“Just gasoline,” Manny answered. “Works nicely,
chico,
if you don’t mind rubbing off a couple layers of skin.”

Meadows paced the road, waving his arms about his head. Better to be a moving target, he thought miserably. The buzz of hungry bugs filled his ears, and he could feel the little bastards snare in his hair. His shirt, a short-sleeved cotton tennis number, was soaked with sweat; the humidity must have been eighty-five percent.

“What now?” he asked Manny.

“Be patient.” Manny squinted at his wristwatch, then up at the sky. The trace of a gray cloud line lay low over the western horizon, but overhead it was clear, the sky sprayed with brilliant stars. Meadows marveled at the unbroken flatness of the swamp, a burr of sawgrass for miles and miles. Far to the north was a small clump of trees, probably a cypress hammock. All around the men was a cacophony of frogs, insects and God only knew what else; to Meadows, the noise was getting louder and more menacing every minute.

“I think I heard something,” Moe said. He hurried to the van and retrieved a small flashlight. Cautiously Meadows followed him about fifteen yards down the dirt road. Neither braved a step into the spongy sawgrass. Moe aimed the light, and the beam fixed on an opossum, lumbering awkwardly through the tangled grass. Its eyes shone a wine-bottle green in the light. It carried its prehensile tail in a curl off the ground. The fur was sparse, a mixture of snow and gray. It reminded Meadows of his grandfather’s hair, the way it looked in the hospital when the old man was dying.

“You ever eat possum?” Moe asked.

Meadows shook his head.

“Niggers do all the time. When I was a kid, we used to shoot ’em with a twenty-two and sell ’em in blacktown for a dollar apiece. They use possums in stew.”

“Never tried it.”

“Me neither,” Moe said.

The opossum seemed stuck in the bushes. It turned its head, mouth slack, and glared at the intruders. Meadows started back toward the van. “Hey, Carson!” Meadows turned to see Moe aiming a pistol at the animal.

“Are you nuts?”

“I bet I can knock its tail off.”

Meadows didn’t move. “Come on, Moe.”

“I don’t aim to kill it.”

Meadows glanced down the road, searching for Manny.

“That tail looks like an eighteen-inch finger, don’t it? I know some ladies who’d favor that, don’t you?”

Meadows could only assume Moe was drunk or stoned, or both. Maybe even crazy. He spotted Manny’s fireplug shadow near the van and whistled. Manny didn’t hear him over the tree frogs.