“I got a creepy phone call from him,” I said.
“He got your number out of my cell phone. He went nuts when he found out you’d escaped,” Hooker said.
It was late afternoon. There were big puffy clouds in the sky and the wind was picking up. It would have been a nice day to be on the beach or drifting around in a boat. A couple blocks over, the almost naked sun worshippers were packing up, and the Ocean Drive waiters were arriving for work. And here I was wearing day-old underwear, sitting in a parking lot with a bomb and a goon in my trunk.
“All righty then,” Judey said. “Let’s get Bill upstairs and comfy. And you’re welcome to come up, too. I could put a pot of coffee on. And I have a cake.”
“Anybody have any ideas about the goon?” I asked.
“He can come, too,” Judey said. “I have plenty of room. We can lock him in my powder room. And before we put him in the powder room we can put on a salsa CD and beat the crap out of him.”
“That sounds like fun,” Bill said.
We opened the trunk and hauled the goon out. He was wild-eyed and soaked through with sweat.
“It’s Dave,” Hooker said. And then he punched Dave in the face.
“Stop that!” Judey said, clutching Brian to his chest. “I was kidding about the beating.” He put his hand over Brian’s eyes. “Don’t look.”
“I owed it to him,” Hooker said.
NASCAR Guy was back in the saddle.
We dragged Dave up to Judey’s condo, locked the door behind us and propped Dave up against a wall.
“We need to know where Maria’s hidden,” I said to Dave.
“Eat shit,” Dave said.
“Can I hit him again?” Hooker asked.
“No!” Judey said. “He’ll bleed on the carpet.”
“This is your last chance,” I said to Dave. “Or else.”
“Or else what?” he asked.
“Or else we’ll turn Brian loose on you,” Judey said.
Brian was running in circles, happy to be home. “Arf, arf, arf, arf.”
“Yeah, that’s gonna worry me,” Dave said.
Judey took a spice cookie out of his pocket and held it out, waist level. Brian rushed over, jumped into the air, and SNAP! The spice cookie was dust.
Hooker was smiling. “Allow me,” he said, unzipping Dave’s slacks. The slacks slid down and pooled at Dave’s feet, leaving Dave standing there in his tighty whities.
Judey scooped Brian up and tiptoed over with Brian under his arm. With his free hand, Judey dropped three spice cookies into the front of Dave’s briefs, crushing them up a little, releasing a lot of spice cookie fragrance, making sure the crumbs settled in the pouch.
“Rawffff!” Brian said, watching the spice cookies disappear from view.
Judey held Brian out so he could better smell the cookies. And Brian started to salivate. Brian’s ears were up and his legs were treading air. He was squirming and running in place, eyes bugged out of his head, and schnauzer spittle was flying everywhere. “Arf, arf, arf, arf!” Brian was in a spice-cookie frenzy.
“Okay, now I’m going to put Brian down,” Judey said.
“Jesus, no!” Dave said. “You people are freaky.”
“So, what about Maria?” I asked him. “Do you know where she is?”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “I know where she is. Get the dog away from me.”
“Where’s Maria?” I asked again.
“Salzar’s got a garage on the Trail. She’s in the garage,” Dave said.
“She’s alive?”
“Yeah. She’s alive.”
When we were done questioning Dave we pulled his pants up and shoved him into the powder room.
“Hey,” he said, “you can’t leave me in here like this with my hands cuffed behind my back and cookies in my drawers. And what if I have to use the facilities?”
Judey smiled at him. “Just give me a holler, big boy, and I’ll be glad to help you.”
We closed the door on Dave, and Judey rolled his eyes.
“Wouldn’t touch him with a long stick,” Judey said, “but I couldn’t resist scaring him one more time. Now if you’ll all get comfy, I’ll make some coffee, and we can sit down and plan out the rescue operation.”
“We need help,” I said when we were at the table. “We need someone in government that we can trust.”
“I know a guy,” Hooker said.
Hooker called his assistant and minutes later had a phone number. Hooker dialed the phone number, made some required small talk when the connection was made, and then got to the point.
“I found something that might be dangerous,” Hooker said to the person on the phone. “I want to turn it over to the authorities, but I’m not sure how to go about it. I think giving it to the local police isn’t the route we want to go.” There was some talking on the other end. “I don’t want to go into details on a cell phone,” Hooker said. “Let’s just assume the government would like to gain possession of this item that’s chemical in nature. I’ve been approached by two losers who claim to be feds.”
“Scala and Martin,” I said. “Working out of Miami.”
Hooker repeated the names to his connection. “And something else,” Hooker said. “I want to get someone out of prison in Cuba. Maybe buy him out.” There was some more small talk, and Hooker hung up.
“He’s going to get back to me,” Hooker said.
“He have a name?”
“Richard Gil.”
“Senator Richard Gil?”
“Yeah. He’s a real good guy.”
“And a NASCAR fan?”
“That too.”
“Let’s make a list of everything we have to accomplish,” Judey said. “We have to rescue Maria. We have to get the gold and use it to buy Maria’s father out of Cuba. We have to give the bomb over to the authorities.”
“It would be good if we could neutralize Salzar,” Hooker said.
“Neutralize?” Judey said. “You mean like whack him?”
“NASCAR Guy doesn’t whack people,” Hooker said. “NASCAR disapproves of whacking. Neutralizing is broader in scope.”
Brian was whining at the powder room and sniffing under the door. He wanted the cookies.
“Now let’s review what we know,” Judey said. “We know the location of the garage on the Tamiami Trail. We know what it looks like inside and that there are always four guys there. We know they have the gold crated for shipment to Cuba.”
“We know the helicopter can land in the parking lot out back of the garage,” Bill said.
“I think my man can help facilitate things like swapping out an old Cuban guy for a shitload of gold,” Hooker said. “And I think he can coordinate this with canister pickup. What he’s probably not going to be able to do is round up the goods. We’re going to have to round up the goods. And then we’re going to have to deliver them.”
“I don’t want to be left out,” Bill said.
“You look awful,” I told him.
“I can deal,” he said.
It was midafternoon, and by six we had a plan pretty much in place. It sounded ridiculous on paper. Straight out of a bad movie. But it was the best we could do. We couldn’t move on the plan until we heard from the senator.
The phone rang at seven-thirty and Hooker answered. It was Senator Gil. Hooker took notes while he talked. His face was flushed when he got off the phone.
“It’s a go,” he said. “Everything will be in place tomorrow at ten AM.” He turned to me. “NASCAR Guy’s a little flummoxed.”
We were all flummoxed.
“Gil says Slick and Gimpy are part of a combined agency task force that keeps tabs on international arms sales. He didn’t know much about them. They’ve been with the task force for three years. Before that they were ATF, pushing paper. Gil’s sending them over to help us. He thought we could use some extra firepower.”
This set off a mental alarm. “They’re coming here?”
“Yeah. Is ther
e a problem?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about those guys that doesn’t feel right. Maybe we should do something with the bomb.”
“Damn,” Hooker said. “We left the bomb in the trunk. I forgot all about the bomb.”
We all trooped out and got in the elevator and rode to the garage. Judey had a blanket so we could wrap the bomb and bring it upstairs unnoticed.
Hooker opened the trunk. “It’s gone!” he said.
We all gasped.
He winked at me. “Only funnin’.”
NASCAR Guy humor.
Hooker wrestled the bomb out of the trunk, we wrapped the blanket around it, and Hooker headed for the elevator.
“This is like carrying a giant eighty-pound watermelon,” he said. “Somebody hit the button. Barney’ll be all disappointed if I get a hernia from this. She’s got plans for me.”
Bill grinned at Hooker. “A hernia’s the least of your problems if Barney has plans for you, you poor dumb sonovabitch.”
We got to the condo and Judey ran ahead clearing the way. “Put it in my closet. It’ll be safe there. No wait, not on the Gucci loafers. Right there, next to the Armani dress shoes.”
We closed the closet door on the bomb and the doorbell sounded. Slick and Gimpy.
Judey looked out at them through the peephole.
“They don’t look happy,” Judey whispered to me. “And they look like they’ve been run over by a truck…several times.”
“Guess it’s tough being a federal agent,” I said.
Judey opened the door and I introduced Slick and Gimpy to Judey and Bill.
“So, you gentlemen are agents,” Judey said, making quotation signs with his fingers when he said agents. “That must be pretty exciting.”
“Whatever,” Gimpy said. “I’m hanging on for my pension. I don’t know why…it’s a freakin’ pittance.”
“Yes, but the job must be rewarding.”
“Real rewarding. We sit on our ass for a year watching Salzar, trying to set him up, and then some politician calls our boss and we’re told to take orders from a NASCAR driver.”
“Gotta go with the flow,” Slick said, sliding a cautionary look to Gimpy.
“I haven’t got a lot of orders,” Hooker said. “I figure we’ll all meet downstairs in the garage tomorrow at nine AM and we’ll take it from there.”
“Cake anyone?” Judey said. “I have a coffee cake.”
“Things to do,” Slick said. And Slick and Gimpy left.
“I’m going out for stone crabs,” Hooker said. “I didn’t get to eat them last time.” He draped an arm around me. “C’mon, Barney. I’ll take you for a ride.”
I followed him into the hallway and into the elevator. “Since we had decided to move out at five AM and you told Slick and Gimpy to show up at nine, I’m assuming you don’t trust them either, do you?”
“They’re not on my list of favorite people.” He tossed me the keys when we got to the car. “You drive, and I’ll run.”
As usual, there weren’t any parking places by Joe’s. I double-parked and watched Hooker jog off. Eye candy, I thought. Hooker always looked relaxed…as if motion was effortless, and all the body parts were working perfectly in sync. He had a nice gait when he ran and when he walked. I was betting his stroke was good, too. Holy cow! Did I just think that? Okay, truth is I’ve been having a lot of erotic thoughts lately. I’m sexually deprived. My love life is a barren wasteland. And I’m locked in an adventure with a sexy guy. Yes, he’s sort of a womanizer, but he’s a nice womanizer. I think his heart might be in the right place. And the rest of him seems to line up pretty good too. Damn. There I go again.
I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what was going on around me. I was watching Hooker through the big windows in the take-out section. He was standing in line with his hands in his pockets and his shorts were pulled tight across his butt.
So by the time I saw Puke Face, it was already too late. He had the door to the rental open. He reached across, released my seat belt, and yanked me out of the car like I was a ground squirrel and he was a grizzly.
I was tumbled into the back of a Town Car, Puke Face got in next to me, and before I could scream or kick or even haul myself off the floor, the Town Car was in motion.
No one said anything. No music from the radio. A driver. And a man on either side of me. Everyone stared straight ahead. Although, the truth is I could see only one of Pukey’s eyes, the fake one. I wasn’t sure where his other eye was going. We crossed the bridge into Miami and took Route 1 south. When we got to Coral Gables the driver turned off Route 1 and took a road that ran along Biscayne Bay. It was a service road, leading to a small marina. There were no other cars on the road. We stopped before we got to the marina entrance, and I realized there were lights shining in the rearview mirror. A car had come up behind us.
Pukey opened his door and yanked me out. Headlights blinked off on both cars, and I could see that the second car was a black stretch limo. Six seater.
I thought I was going to die. My chest felt constricted, and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. Beyond that there wasn’t much. No tears, no diarrhea, no fainting. Maybe girls who grow up in a garage in Baltimore aren’t real fragile. You learn early on that parts are recycled. Even scrap metal has some worth. Maybe that was my religion. Junkyard reincarnation. The soul as a rebuilt carburetor.
I was walked back to the stretch, Pukey opened the back door, and I was shoved in. There were two bench seats facing each other. Luis Salzar sat on one. A man Salzar’s age sat next to him. There was enough ambient light that I could see the men clearly. Both were dressed in expensive summer-weight suits, white shirts, and conservative ties. Their trousers were pressed. Their shoes were polished.
“We meet again,” Salzar said. “Please sit down.” And he gestured to the seat across from him, where Maria was sitting. But then maybe sitting is the wrong word. Maria was so rigid she seemed to be levitating, hovering a fraction of an inch above the cushy black leather.
“You’ve caused me some inconvenience,” Salzar said to me. “Perhaps I can rectify that now.”
Some inconvenience. I supposed he was talking about his boat going down in a blaze of nonglory. Plus there was the canister.
“I believe you’ve already met Miss Raffles.”
I looked over at Maria. Her hair was unwashed, pulled back from her face, and held at the nape of her neck with a rubber band. Her face was pale. Her eyes were rimmed in dark circles, slightly sunken. Her expression was pure unadulterated rage. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, probably to keep her from ripping Salzar’s eyes out of his head. She barely acknowledged me. She was concentrating every scrap of hatred she could muster on Salzar.
“Pig,” she said to Salzar.
“She’s unhappy with me,” Salzar said. “She’s just received some unpleasant news about her grandfather and her father.”
“You killed my grandfather,” she said. “And you had my father imprisoned.”
Salzar showed a brief, slightly loopy smile. “True. But it wasn’t much of a loss. Your grandfather’s passing was a nonevent. Unfortunately, my gold and my SovarK2 were lost with your worthless grandfather. And your dim-witted father preferred beatings to divulging the location of the wreck.”
Maria spit at Salzar, but it fell short.
“Allow me to finish my introductions,” Salzar said, returning his attention to me. “This is Marcos Torres, my very good friend and the next President of the Council of State and Ministers of Cuba. You have something that belongs to me…and to Marcos. Would you like to tell me where our property is located?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I was hoping Miss Raffles would encourage you to cooperate.”
Neither Miss Raffles nor I responded.
“Very well,” Salzar said. “It’s only a matter of time. And it’s always much more rewarding when you have to beat information out of a woman. Plus, I have some men who would enjoy you.
” He turned his attention to Maria. “What do you think of my men?”
Maria continued to give him the death look.
“You killed Maria’s grandfather?” I asked Salzar.
“I was his partner many years ago in Cuba. I changed my name when I came to this country. I erased my past. Now I am going to reclaim it. In Cuba, I was a government officer, attached to the Council of Ministers. It was a good position, but not especially well paying, so sometimes when the occasion presented itself, I would supplement my income with an entrepreneurial enterprise. Maria’s grandfather and I had a very profitable, but short-lived entrepreneurial enterprise.”
“Smuggling?”
Another of the crazy half smiles. “Yes, but it was women we were smuggling. The Russian sailors wanted women, and we would supply them. We would run them out in the fishing boat. Maria’s grandfather and I were common pimps.” He gave a bark of laughter at that.
Maria continued to glare at him. No laughter from Maria.
“When the blockade went up, and Castro wanted to hide some things away for a rainy day, our fishing boat was the perfect choice,” Salzar said. “I was a trusted aide, and the boat wouldn’t raise suspicions. Unfortunately, Maria’s grandfather and I had a difference of opinion. He thought we should follow orders. And I thought we should take the gold and the SovarK2 and never look back. Marcos was the silent partner, the partner Enrique knew nothing about, really the mastermind of the plan. Even then, Marcos had a taste for power, eh Marcos?”
There wasn’t a lot of light in Marcos’s eyes. They were focused on me and they weren’t smiling. And it occurred to me that Marcos was probably crazier than Salzar.
“Enrique and I were arguing on the little fishing boat and not paying close attention to navigating and somehow we hit a reef,” Salzar said. “The boat began taking on water, so I shot Maria’s grandfather in the head and left him for dead. Then I set out in the dinghy we carried and watched for the boat to go down. I knew exactly where we were. Salvage would be easy. But the boat didn’t go down. Maria’s grandfather didn’t die fast enough. He managed to get the boat moving away from the reef, leaving me behind. I don’t know how he did that with a head wound. A hard head, I guess.