AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (10 page)

Alicia

Miami, Florida

Saturday, April 7, 2012

7:10 PM

T
HE TEXT
FLOWED INTO ALICIA'S THROWAWAY
phone:
I'm in
Broward.
It was from the mule. Alicia texted back:
E Hialeah. U know the place.

She had never met this mule, and probably never
would. But she'd had these little text talks with guys just like him over the
last several years and she wondered now what this one looked like.

She knew he was probably somewhere around
twenty-one or two and a college student, but which college? What did he want to
do with his life when he graduated? And how about the girl traveling with him?
What was her name? Were they lovers? Did they do coke together? Or were they
just impersonal partners in this dry, repetitive task? Or maybe brother and
sister.

Knowing the mule had just crossed into Broward
County and was still about sixty minutes from his destination, Alicia was in no
particular hurry. She finished a little paperwork and a few minutes later, got
up from her desk and went into the living room. Nick had finished working an
hour or so ago and now pushed a big orange rubber ball back and forth across
the floor with Francesca. Lots of smiles and squeals.

"Honey," she said to Nick, "I have
to run to the store. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

He frowned before rolling the ball back to
Francesca. "At this hour?"

"A problem's come up. We've got this delivery
scheduled to go out tomorrow and it got messed up. I have to go in and take
care of it."

"Can't you stay home for a while? You've been
gone so much lately." His tone told her he was not pleased.

She went over to him and bent down, putting her
hand on the back of his neck. "I know, baby. But this can't wait. I'll be
back soon, I promise." She kissed him and went over to little Francesca,
who was still smiling.

"Mommy, are you going away?" she asked.

"No, sweetie. I'm just going out for a short
time. I'll be back very soon with a Dilly Bar. Would my baby like a Dilly
Bar?"

"Oooh, will you bring me one back?" she
asked, already savoring her favorite Dairy Queen treat. "Will you,
Mommy?"

"Yes, I will, Princess. Just for you. I'll be
back before you know it."

Francesca gave out with a light yelp and pushed
the ball excitedly back toward a disheartened Nick as Alicia headed out the
door, where Berto waited in an idling Lexus sedan.

≈ ≈ ≈

At about ten minutes to
eight, the Lexus arrived at the alley in Hialeah which led to the small
deserted parking area behind Computer Superstore of the Americas.

"Go past the alley," Alicia said to
Berto. "Park over there by that black car. Shut off the lights."

Berto parked on the other side of the black car,
which was stationed in a diagonal spot in front of a little food market in a
long strip center on East 25th Street. CSA was one of the bigger stores in this
center, located a little farther down the street, but the food market was the
only business open at this hour. Their position behind the black car afforded
them a full view of East 25th Street and the alley while appearing to be food
market customers.

Before long, the white Hyundai appeared with two
people in it, turned into the alley and vanished from sight. About two minutes
later, a black Ford Focus emerged from the alley, also with two people, and
pulled onto 25th Street, heading west for the short trip to the airport hotel.

Alicia signaled Berto to go into the alley. He did
and they made the turn behind the strip center. The only source of nearby light
back there was a single streetlamp by the edge of the alley some fifty yards
away, not illuminating much more than the pavement directly beneath it. Two CSA
vans stood behind the store, with one space between them which was filled by a
white 2005 basic-model Hyundai. The car had been stolen in Boston a week or so
earlier and its fake New York license plate had ensured it would never be
spotted during its final trip. Alicia opened the driver's side door and shined
a penlight inside. Keys on the floor.

Hidden from view by the two vans, she opened the
passenger side back door. Berto removed a knife from his pocket and flicked the
blade open. He sliced a rectangular pattern, opening up the passenger side of
the back seat. Underneath the stuffing lay a black carry-on suitcase, bulging
at the seams. After a quick look around, he jerked it out and handed it to
Alicia, who unzipped it, and saw the money.

That was how it went with all of her mules.
Clean-cut college kids from four cities — Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta,
New York — kids who had been vetted by cartel people and who were eager
to make some easy money. All they had to do was drive to Miami when they were
told. Usually, they traveled in pairs, male and female, to give off the
appearance of an attractive young couple on vacation.

Why yes,
officer. We're just going to Florida for a few days to soak up some sun.

For that matter, once in a while they would even
be carrying tickets for a weekend cruise to the Bahamas, in case some nosy cop
needed real convincing.
It never came
to that, though, because these mules always stayed at five miles under the
speed limit and up till now, had never been stopped by the law. Furthermore,
they kept enough tourist regalia — suntan lotion, extra flip-flops,
People
Magazine, and so on — in
plain sight all over the back seat so as to dissuade any peering cops from
thinking they had probable cause to search the vehicle.

The cars were all selected for their ordinariness,
but in fact cartel people had outfitted each with a special GPS unit that could
not only reveal their location, but how fast they were going, when and where
they stopped, and for how long. All this data was recorded and stored on a
special app installed in very special cell phones held only by Alicia and a
couple of others in Colombia, cell phones that were used for that purpose only.

None of the mules knew what the cars contained,
nor were they stupid enough to ask. In fact, all of the cash collected from all
of the cartel's drug sales east of the Mississippi was gathered together in
hidden locations within the cities where the sales were made. In those small,
secure rooms — under close supervision by trusted associates —
worker bees colored up the cash from fives and tens and twenties to banded
packets of hundred-dollar bills. An army of other mules then drove other cars,
with this cash buried in them, to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
Once all the money was funneled into those four cities — and that was
virtually a round-the-clock operation in itself — the mules from those
towns brought it to Miami, into the waiting arms of Alicia López.

This procedure was repeated at irregular
intervals. Sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly, sometimes less frequently
than that, but always designed to avoid any pattern of discernible activity.
The Feds were out there, twenty-four hours a day, with watchful eyes in every
corner of the country, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything
suspicious, the slimmest thread on which they could begin building a case. And
many cases were made because people got sloppy and started doing the same thing
over and over in a predictable manner.

Berto waited outside and dialed up a
cartel-friendly wrecker service in Hialeah to send a tow truck for the Hyundai.
They would haul it to their scrapyard where it would meet its fate with a
crusher the following morning. While Berto made the call, Alicia unlocked the
rear door to CSA and took the suitcase inside where she brought it into her
vault, located in a hidden space behind a sliding panel in her office.

The vault was a cozy walk-in, six and a half feet
wide by eight feet deep, with a ceiling about eight feet high. Not even the
store employees knew it existed. A large safe stood against the far wall, and
overhead LED lighting was controlled by a switch inside the sliding panel. On
the floor were four other such suitcases piled one atop another, each bursting
with money. Other mules had delivered them in the last few days from Chicago,
Atlanta, and Philadelphia, as well as one bag from South Florida itself. She had
already counted the cash from those deliveries, so she had only to tally this
New York money.

On a small table sat a sophisticated counting
machine, and Alicia pulled up the swivel chair in front of it. She began the
tedious process of inserting the money into it, one packet at a time, until it
was totaled up.

≈ ≈ ≈

When the final packet
ruffled its way through the machine, Alicia now had her total for all five
suitcases: seven million, eight hundred seventy thousand dollars, not a
jaw-dropping figure, but a decent week's take, and an exact match with what she
was told to expect. A few fast clicks on her calculator told her the amount of
her commission, although she didn't really need to perform that little manual
task. Her brain instantly calculated her cut would come to three hundred
fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars. According to custom, she removed this
amount of cash from the final bag and placed it in the safe.

She pulled out her cell phone and texted a
ten-digit tracking number to the mule.

Josh

Miami, Florida

Saturday, April 7, 2012

9:30 PM

R
IGHT AFTER
CHECKING INTO THE HILTON
, Josh set his bag down and plopped onto the
bed, flicking on the TV. Toni had used the time to snuggle up against him on
the bed, murmuring honeyed words that he never heard because of the high TV
volume. He was watching
Iron Man 2
,
and he wanted to absorb all of its explosions and crashes as they were meant to
be absorbed.

Toni was getting comfortable, draping a leg over
Josh's lower regions, while Josh was getting annoyed. He struggled with how he
was going to break it to her, the fact they weren't going to have any kind of
romantic vacation. Just as he was honing in on the right approach, a
particularly loud explosion occurred in the movie. He almost didn't hear the
text alert, but his phone was on his chest, so he grabbed it and sat up,
jostling Toni out of her dreamy state.

The text was a ten-digit number, along with an
address. The address he knew to be a Western Union outpost close by.

"What is it?" Toni asked, not quite
shaken from her reverie.

"A text from the guy," he said.
"I've gotta go out for a few minutes."

"Out? Out? What for? Why can't you stay here?
We were having
such
a good
time." She wrapped an arm around his shoulder.

He turned to face her. "Look, Toni. I've got
some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, we're not going to be able
stay here in Florida. We'll have to take the first plane out in the morning
back to New York."

"We can't stay?" Her voice bordered on
whining, but not quite. "What's wrong? You
promised
."

"I know, I know," he said. "I
promised. But it can't happen. But don't you want to hear the good news?"

Her head rolled a little before dropping in
frustration. "All right," she said. "Tell me the … good
news."

He shifted his voice into upbeat levels. "The
good news is, you're going to make some money for your trouble. For coming down
here with me."

"Money? What are you … what do you mean,
money?"

"I mean, you're going to make money. Just for
taking this trip with me. You're getting paid a thousand dollars."

She gasped. "Wha — wha —"
Her jaw dropped and her mouth remained wide open.

"That's right," Josh said. "We're
getting a thousand dollars apiece, and I'm going to pick it up now."

She managed to close her mouth but then gulped.
"You're going now? To pick up two thousand dollars?"

"Right now. I'll be back in a half-hour.
Maybe less."

As it all sunk in and she realized she was a
thousand dollars richer, a smile spread out over her face. "Oh, my God! A
thousand dollars. Somebody actually paid us money to take that car down here?
Oh, Josh b'gosh, that's just
wonderful
!
I can't believe it!"

"Not only that," he said, "but he's
going to want us to do it again in the future. Sometime soon."

"You mean we get to do it again? Oh, it was
such fun
!"

"Maybe a bunch of times more," he said. He
turned on his big smile. "You in, darlin'?"

"Well! I guess I better be, hadn't I! We had
such a fun trip and now, to get paid a thousand dollars! Oh, I am so in."

He lightly pinched her little chin. "Don't
you go away, little girl. I'll be back before you know it. And we've … still
got tonight, hm? To celebrate?"

She swooned.

As he walked out the door, he decided he would
fuck her tonight to seal the deal.

Alicia

Hialeah, Florida

Sunday, April 8, 2012

6:10 AM

C
OMPUTER
SUPERSTORE OF THE AMERICAS
presented a darkened front to the cool
pre-dawn street. In the back room, however, where computers were packaged for
delivery, a group of overhead LED lights burned. No hint of any light made it
to the outside through the sole rear window covered with blackout tape.

The room was large, about thirty feet wide by
forty feet deep, two of its walls covered by rows of stacked, unwrapped boxes
of computers and other equipment recently delivered from various manufacturers.
They were the cheap kind, desktops all of them, the bigger and bulkier the
better, meant for third world countries, ghetto schools, and other such
markets. No Apple stuff here. No sleek laptops, no iPhones, no tablets.

The legitimate side of Alicia's business shipped
these down-market items to the Free Zone in Colón, Panamá, an enormous,
bustling arena of free trade and cheap goods. The ultimate destination for
these machines was Latin America, principally Colombia and Ecuador. The stores
in those countries had people in Colón greasing the right palms to allow them
to spirit the computers out of the Free Zone and onto waiting boats, which
would land on Colombian shores and be unloaded in the dark of night. This
allowed them to leapfrog local Customs duties and import tariffs, which were
invariably prohibitive.

Alicia made a point of making periodic donations
of equipment to worthy local recipients. Selected libraries, schools, and other
institutions received computers, monitors, printers, and other such items every
year or so. She also gave generously to socially-active civic and fraternal
organizations who would in turn redistribute the items to needy individuals and
groups.

Her gifts were made with some fanfare, noted in
the media —not with too big a splash, rather a modest local-section
article in the Miami
Herald
or an
end-of-newscast piece on the five o'clock news on one of the local stations.
These low-key good works went a long way toward diverting prying, suspicious
eyes from her operation. In fact, Alicia was somewhat well-known as a good-hearted
Cuban-American businesswoman who had succeeded due to her own hard work and now
made it a point to give back to the community which had supported her. Various
organizations — the Miami-Dade Public Library System, the Rotary, the
County School Board — had given her plaques and certificates of
appreciation which now hung on the wall of CSA's showroom for all to see.

Two very long, wooden tables stretched parallel to
each other across the center of the back room. Up against one wall was a large,
heavy-gauge, empty cardboard box, one of many such boxes custom-made for CSA by
the Hialeah Box Company. On one of the long tables sat a dozen desktop
computers, unboxed, lined up one next to the other, opened up with their covers
off and resting behind them. There was about three feet of space left on the
end of the table. On the floor beneath the table were the original shipping
boxes for each computer. On the other table sat the motherboards, hard drives,
CPUs, and most of the other components that made up the guts of these machines.
The power supplies remained inside in case a curious Customs official somewhere
wanted to turn the unit on to make sure it "really was a computer".

Yesterday afternoon, Alicia ordered an early
closing. The store employees went home at four o'clock and were happy to do so.
She immediately got to work on disassembling the computers and arranging
everything just so for her task this morning.

She wanted to get home at a decent hour yesterday.
Too many nights lately she'd been working late or in "Tampa" or
somewhere and she really wanted to spend some time with Nick and Francesca.
Plus, she knew the New York mule was due to arrive sometime last night, and
that required her absence from home yet again.

Now, after pouring herself a cup of coffee, she
pulled her hair back into a pony tail and hoisted the first of the suitcases
onto the empty space at the end of the table, the one that held the computer
shells. Right next to it was a powered screw driver attached to an extra long
extension cord running the length of the table underneath. The four mates to
the suitcase remained upright on the concrete floor.

The silence in the room was always overpowering
for Alicia at this precise point in the process. She stood still and took it
all in. This was where she was at her most vulnerable, where she would be
defenseless against any kind of law enforcement incursion. And where she would
be totally fucked. Without moving a muscle, she opened her ears and heard not a
single sound, not even from outside. At this hour, in this warehouse/retail
district, no real activity would begin for another hour or so. She listened
carefully for any kind of sound, something she habitually did on these early
morning tasks, listened for anything that would tell her she was not alone, any
light creak in the settling of the building, any rapid rodent footsteps across
the bare ceiling beams. Sometimes she heard these things, but this morning?
Nothing.

She flipped on the air conditioning. With the
familiar whirring in the background, she pulled a swivel chair up to the table
and got to work.

Setting her coffee cup toward the far edge of the
table, she unzipped the first suitcase.

The money very nearly overflowed to the floor, it
was so full. It was banded, all of it, in ten-thousand dollar packets,
amounting to over a million dollars in that one bag. She paused to look at it,
momentarily unable to stop gazing at it, listened again for any sounds, and
started unpacking.

She stuffed stacks of cash into the first
computer. When that one was full, she bolted the cover back on it and rolled
her chair down the line to the next one. She filled that one up, put it back
together, and so on all the way down the line until the computers were full.
When the last carry-on bag had been emptied and the last dollar had been stored
and the cover replaced on the final computer, she sat back and let out a loud
exhale.

She then set about the process of boxing up each
computer. A handheld tape dispenser sealed the boxes. Once sealed, she placed
each box in the large, empty cardboard container over against the wall. Three
layers of four computers each with just enough room for bubble wrap at the
bottom and all around the inside perimeter. Significant room remained at the
top. Room for four fully-functioning computers, placed there in the event an
overzealous Customs agent wanted to open up one of the boxes and thoroughly
inspect the item inside.

She checked her watch. The store would open in
less than an hour, and her people would seal the big box, now delivery-ready
and marked "For Export Only", then load it into an oversized van for
the trip to the airport, where it would be transferred aboard a big, yellow DHL
cargo plane bound for Panamá.