The Dogs of Mexico (3 page)

“Of course,” Duane said, trying to recall the particulars of Eduardo’s domestic situation. “That can be arranged.”

“Listen, I have contacts in the diamond district in New York. You do this and we will split the take. The two of us, right down the middle.”

“Where are you now?”
 

Duane heard an audible sigh in the receiver. Then: “Are you in, or shall I look elsewhere?”

“And you have the diamonds?”

“Even as we speak.”
 

“Mm–hmm. So not only is De Beers after you, but every terrorist in North Africa as well.”

“Are you in or not?”

“Give me your number. I’ll make arrangements and call you back.”

“No, no. I will call you. We meet on neutral ground. I’m thinking Acapulco. I will send information for birth certificates, legitimate citizenships. So, please, you will have everything in order when you arrive.”

Duane couldn’t help but smile at Eduardo’s attempts at caution. “Sure,” he said. “That’s doable.”

“This one is going to set us free. Free at last, free at last!” Eduardo sing-songed in a Martin Luther King parody.
 

“Call me. Two days.”

Duane broke the connection, moved to another station, dialed again. He checked with two stringers, one in Cape Town, the other in Gibraltar. From Cape Town: Yes, a well-armed gang thought to be a splinter of some North African terrorist group knocked over a De Beers Consolidated Mines courier and got away with millions in diamonds. De Beers was keeping it out of the news. Bad press.
 

The Gibraltar call was less successful, but the stringer promised a callback. In the meantime, Duane checked out the Hotel Santa Clara Centro for any info not in the database: The hotel was once a convent—
Don’t miss seeing the downstairs bar with its tombs
, the copy read. Duane sighed. The world was full of irony.
 

He felt bad for what he was about to do. On the other hand, he visualized Susan’s cheerful smile, credit cards reinstated, heading off to New York for a day of shopping. He hated this in himself. This weakness.
 

In less than ten minutes the phone rang. Gibraltar: Yes, Abda Mufi’s mother, wife, and two children were living in Morocco in the old French Colonial district.
 

Duane took down the address and hung up. He sat for a long moment, mentally resorting conversations and information. He looked again at the Abda Mufi Moroccan address; finally he entered it in his private database and backed it up on a second drive under
Active—North Africa.
 

He would do right by Eduardo’s family. See that they got his company pension.

3

Wayfarer

N
ORMAN
SOFFIT PAID
the taxi driver. He and the girl got out and carried the bags of clean laundry down the pier to where the
Texas Moon
was docked. He let his bag down and handed the old man standing watch fifty pesos. The old man nodded once and left and Soffit picked up the laundry again.

The girl climbing aboard said something and laughed. He started to ask what she was talking about, but he didn’t understand half the stuff she said anyway and he let it go.

He had picked her up down in Colombia where she was stranded on the beach there, calling herself Mickey Sierra. No money and no way home. He guessed she was fifteen or sixteen, though she claimed to be nineteen. Lying like a dog. She was a crazy kid anyhow in her lowrider cutoffs and junk jewelry, her pins and buttons, black nails dusted with some silver glitter stuff, spiked green and orange hair looking like it been run over by a dull lawnmower. A bunch of rings and studs circled the rim of one ear, an old-timey brass key hanging from the lobe like a question mark.
 

She had a good body but still carried some baby fat. Except for that and a tattoo he hadn’t seen but the top half of—this angel floating up behind her low riders to just below her belly button—she might not be bad looking. A gold ring in her navel stood in for a halo over the angel’s head. Crazy kid all right, but he liked her. He couldn’t say why. It sure wasn’t sex. He wasn’t gonna do neither one of them no good in that department. It gave him a headache just thinking about it.

“I’m for sucking up a monthly,” the girl said.
 

Again he started to ask what language she was talking, but then he figured it out. Delicate little flower, this one. He followed her through the hatch and down into the galley. They dumped the laundry, and she set about making bloody marys when his cell phone rang.
 

“Ye’llo?”
 

“Flax,” said the voice on the other end.

“Damn,” Soffit said after a moment. “Been a while. I thought y’all might’a done throwed me to the dogs.”
 

“How goes it?”

“Not bad for a old fart. How bout yourself?”

“I might negotiate a little business your way. Interested?”

“Here, hold on a minute. Let me take this up to the wheelhouse.”

“Company?”

“Just this gal. She’s making up drinks.” He turned to her. “You go ahead there. I’ll be back in a jif.”
 

“Ace,” she said over her shoulder, flashing her big openmouthed gum–chewing smile at him, a little shimmy-shake of her ass for added effect.

He climbed the steps to the deck and went in the wheelhouse and sat in the swivel chair and turned away from the harbor so as not to be distracted. “Okay. I’m good to go here.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Aw, crazy kid. Picked her up down in Colombia.”

“Um. That might complicate matters.”

“Naw, hell. She’s just a kid, dumb as a stump. She crews pretty good, but I’ll put her ashore if it comes to that. So, what’re we talking here?”

“There’s a guy holed up in Cartagena. The Hotel Santa Clara Centro. He’s a terrorist, a ranking member of an al Qaeda cell operating out of North Africa.”

“Damn,” Soffit breathed. “A terrorist.”

“He has a canister on him. We need that canister in the worst way. You interested?”

“Depends. What do you want me to do?”

“We want this man stitched, and we want that canister delivered to us in Acapulco.”

“Whoa. A wet one, huh?” Soffit knew the terms. It gave him a sense of belonging. “Sounds big,” he said.

“This one’s off the books.”

Off the books? O–kay
. “Uh, what’re we talking here, moneywise?”

“How about fifty grand? I’ll wire you ten now. The rest when you deliver to my man in Acapulco.”

Fifty grand. Shit, this
was
big
. “Mm–hmm,” he mumbled, “and this terrorist guy, he, uh, gets decommissioned. Kinda like, for good?”

“His name is Abda Mufi. He’s registered in the hotel under the name of Eduardo Agustino. I’ll give you the address.”

“I’m in some pepper hole here on the bottom side of Costa Rica. Not all that far back to Colombia.”
 

“Good. Why don’t I wire the money to you in Cartagena?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Get in touch with me afterward. Let me know how it went and where to send the rest of the money. You still have my direct line, right?”

“Might be a few days. I gotta go back through that damn canal.”

“No, take a flight. This needs immediate attention.”

“Hot damn, Flax. This is good. Getting paid for doing something for the good old US of A. Shit fire, if I was still a young feller I’d sign on with you old boys myself.”

When he got back down to the galley, Mickey had the bloody marys made. She had her ear buds plugged in, snapping her fingers, shimmy shaking her flowering delights to the silent music of her iPod. By god, if it wasn’t for his difficulty, he’d give her a turn.
 

As it was, he took his drink back up to the wheelhouse.
 

The
Texas Moon
was sixty feet stem to stern and twenty-two abeam. A fully rigged Texas shrimper. She smelled it, too. A 3406 Cat engine with a four-to-one gear ratio, a 30-kilowatt Kubota generator, radar, depth finder and two Lorans. He had won her a couple of years back against sixty thousand dollars in a game of Texas hold ’em at Sabine Pass, just below Port Arthur on the Texas Gulf Coast. He wouldn’t a done such a thing but he had been partying for days and didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Sometimes there wasn’t no rhyme or reason for what Lady Luck was up to—that wanton witch with her unpredictable double-dealing two-timing sometime-mistress smile.
 

The
Moon
was registered out of Sarasota Florida, licensed to fish the territorial waters of the United States, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and Costa Rica. But he didn’t know how to operate the son of a bitch. The shrimper that is. And the two niggers he hired on from a pogey boat quit, objecting to his use of the word nigger. He hired a couple of dinks. At first they seemed easier to get on with and he gave it a try. Shrimping. Since they looked to know what they was doing.
 

One thing following another, he and the slopes found theirselves off the coast above La Ciba, Honduras where they run into some old boys and first thing you know he had false bottoms in the holds and was hauling arms and ammunition under a few pounds of iced down shrimp. But then the dinks started giving him a hard time, wanting a bigger piece of the pie, so he shot both of them while they slept and sent them overboard to the sharks.

By then he could handle the boat but, truth be told, it wasn’t no business for an old West Texas goat roper anyhow. He was sick to death of Dramamine and fish, sick of the islands and the voodoo jigs jelly–shaking tit to toe, lopping off chicken heads, telling you they was putting the
baaad
on you, working their selves into such a state that their eyeballs rolled back in their heads till they passed plumb out.
 

Then he made the acquaintance of some other old boys. He about shit his britches when he learned who they was. But they wasn’t after him. They had bigger fish to fry. They put him on retainer and even bailed him out of trouble once when he tangled with the Coast Guard. He didn’t know none of them by name except for this one, Flax. And of course that wasn’t his real name nohow.
 

Soffit looked across the bay, abstracted, his mind on the job.

Abda Mufti, huh? I’ll kill that terrorist sumbitch deader’n hell
, he reflected bitterly, still visualizing the girl’s compact ass snapping at the air like a dog grabbing biscuits. His chest felt swelled to busting. His head too. He wasn’t sure whether it was the terrorist, or aggravation over the girl, his inabilities. He hoped she didn’t come up from below and see him—a full-growed, gun-running, terrorist-killing assassin son of a bitch—choking back tears.
 

DUANE HUNG UP
the phone and exited the scrambler. Ah, he mused with guilty satisfaction, they each have their own peculiarities; like musical instruments, each must be played differently.
 

Money. A little seed money. He would put in a call to Eli, take out an equity loan against the house. He couldn’t help but smile, relief bolstered with pride
.
You’re a diabolical son of a bitch, he told himself. Diabolical, but effective.
 

At first he had thought to have Soffit bring the diamonds up to San Diego, or even back through the canal and up to Philly. But Soffit was something of a loose cannon and that would be bringing the game a little too close to home. Besides, Soffit’s disappearance could be more easily orchestrated in Mexico. As always, safety lay in degrees of separation.

All he needed now was a field man to make the pickup. He would do it himself but he was too well known, visibility too high. That, plus it was a chancy operation at best. Were it to fall through he would be busted out. No pension. No anything. Or worse. Already he suspected they were looking on him with suspicion. He hadn’t had a promotion in two years and he was being kept out of the loop. Others were getting the gravy. It was essential now that he keep his own nose clean.
 

Besides, he had just the man for the job. Duane congratulated himself again; a man you had something on was money in the bank.

Now he could enjoy his breakfast.
 

On second thought, he would go home, shower, and take Susan out for a nice upscale brunch.

4

Unannounced

R
OBERT BOHNERT GOT
out of the pickup, empty thermos in hand. “Tomorrow,” he said to Diaz behind the wheel.

“To-MOE-rah,” Diaz replied, coloring the word with a Cuban accent
.

Robert grinned. “Tomorrow,” he repeated. Then, enunciating: “To-mar-row.”

“Sí. Tu-MOE-rah.” Diaz waved cheerfully then drove off into the evening heat, pulling the trailer with its lawnmowers, gas cans, string cutters, pruners, leaf blowers.
 

Robert walked up the shell driveway and around behind the sagging old Victorian in Miami’s less desirable Opa-Locka neighborhood where he took room and board by the week. He was dirty and bone-tired and once again he told himself that at forty-one he was getting too old for this kind of work. But then, he had been saying that for, what, three years now? He still wasn’t used to the climate either. The tropical heat and humidity, the swamp-smell of decaying vegetation.
 

He entered by the back door, smiled and helloed Carmella, the cook, washing vegetables in the kitchen sink. She smiled in turn. Robert went on past the pantry, the utility room and the downstairs bathroom to his own quarters, a single room with a twin bed, desk, dresser, one chair and a wall-mounted sink. He kept an illegal hotplate in the closet.
 

He touched his key to the lock, then saw the door was ajar. He paused, alert.

“Welcome all ye who goeth there,” said a man’s voice.
 

Robert pushed the door open with his foot and stood back.
 

He stared for a second as recognition flooded him:
Duane Fowler!
At the same time, thinking:
Duane Fowler—who three years ago refused to okay my emergency hardship leave!
Thinking further:
So, they finally nailed me…