AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (17 page)

Desi Senior

Hialeah, Florida

Thursday, December 28, 1989

11:35 PM

D
ELGADO
SWUNG BY DESI'S
, not in his grand Mercedes, but in an '87 Toyota
cargo van, a vehicle which could best be described as a rolling box on wheels.
Unlike Desi's six-cylinder Plymouth, however, this one had certain
modifications done to it, including a turbocharged engine, giving it a real pop
uncommon to the line that year. The exterior had a worn look, as most working
cargo vans should, and as such would attract no undue attention.

Today was his son Desi Junior's tenth birthday.
They gave him a little party in the evening with just the family, no other
kids. Desi gave his son a brand new bicycle, one of those fancy racing jobs.
Cost four hundred dollars. Desi Junior was thrilled and wanted to go riding it
right away, but it was dark and Marianela said no. Desi told his son he could
ride it all day tomorrow if he wanted to. Desi Junior's smile was as wide as a
football field, and Desi and Marianela knew they had a good boy, a fine boy.
Desi didn't want to go out tonight, but it was late and everyone was in bed, so
he went. Besides, it had to be done.

Desi climbed in the van. "Where's your
Mercedes?" he asked. "Why are we taking this van?"

"This blends in," Delgado said in his
scratchy voice. "If it ever comes to that, nobody will remember it.
They'll just remember a van. The Mercedes? Well … that's a different story. You
never take your everyday ride on a job. Because you never know what's going to
happen. And because you never want to be identified."

Desi nodded, soaking up this important advice. He
noticed the van was of an indeterminate color, maybe tan, maybe brown, maybe
gray, he couldn't tell. That meant nobody else could tell, either.

They drove across Hialeah to West Twelfth Avenue,
and as they closed in on the intersection of 41st Street, Delgado approached an
apartment complex. Several two-story, terra cotta buildings lined one side of
Twelfth Avenue. He pulled into the parking lot. More similar buildings
stretched in a perpendicular line away from the street. The dirty van slowly
rolled past these buildings until Delgado saw the one he wanted. He parked in a
spot across the lot, facing the building. The night was warm, but not humid. No
breeze, but thick overhead clouds hid the moon and hinted of rain.

After Delgado shut off the engine and the lights,
Desi said, "What now?"

"Now we wait. Check your weapon."

Desi pulled his piece from his canvas handbag. A
Ruger SR-22, very light, small, fits perfectly in the hand. He retrieved his
silencer from the bag and attached it to the threaded barrel. He and Delgado
had spent several hours each day practicing at various shooting ranges. Delgado
warned against spending too much time at any one range so as not to attract
undue attention of the range owner and employees. Turns out, Desi was a natural
with a handgun. He'd never owned one before, but his first practice round was a
kill shot from five yards. Not bad for a newbie. He routinely hit the chest area
of the targets from five, seven, and nine yards. Beyond that, he still hit the
body, but not all in the kill zone.

"Don't worry about that," Delgado told
him. "These .22s are designed for close-up work. Ten, twelve yards, you'll
probably never be in that situation. Not with that gun, anyway."

The hollow-point rounds, Delgado further
explained, were so that they would go straight into the body, making a clean
entrance wound, but because their tips were irregularly shaped, rather than
rounded and smooth, the round stayed in the body, turning and tumbling and
twisting and damaging as many organs as possible, all without coming out the
other side.

"It's like the opposite of a shotgun,"
Delgado said. "A shotgun promises a wide pattern of devastation on impact
because of its design. The .22 is far more precise, but just as deadly at close
range."

Over the last couple of days, Desi had come to
like shooting that gun. He realized he was good with it and he wanted to try
others, other calibers, other sizes, maybe even a shotgun, but Delgado touted
him off it. "You'll get your chance,
mi
amigo
. For now, just get used to that .22, okay?"

With silencers in place, they sat there in the
darkened van. Delgado said, "They're in that apartment right over there,
across the way. Number 1156." He motioned toward a first-floor unit with
barred door and windows. The windows were also draped, but Desi saw light
behind them. He rolled the window down and looked around the parking lot. A few
cars took spaces, but there were a lot of empty ones. Poor lighting. No people
walking around. No sounds. Only cars humming past the entrance back on the
street.

A couple of people came out of 1156, two youngish
men. Desi sat up sharply. Delgado patted him back. "Not them," he
said. The men laughed and jostled each other all the way to their car about
twenty yards away. They got in, fired it up, and sped out the exit.

 
Delgado had outlined a semblance of a
plan. They get the drop on the guys — there would be three of them
— and hustle them into the van, where Desi would bind them up and keep
them covered. Then they would drive to some appointed place and … well … take
care of them.

Desi's nerves jangled momentarily. This was for
real. They were going to kill these fuckers! Of course, they had it coming, but
still! He'd never done anything remotely close to this before. Oh, he'd had a
few scraps in his time — he was always a competent
mano-a-mano
brawler, even when he was outnumbered — but he'd
never actually set out to kill someone, someone who was otherwise living his
life and not expecting to be killed.

These
cocksuckers think they're going to get in their car and go home or wherever and
just go on living their miserable fucking lives. They have no idea we're
waiting for them, that
I'm
waiting
for them.

The night dragged on. Twelve-thirty came, one
o'clock … Desi, feeling his blood pumping, said, "Are you sure they're in
there?" Rain began a soft dance on the roof of the van.

"I'm sure," Delgado said.

"How do you know?"

"I know the guy who lives in that apartment.
He knows if he lies to me about something like this, he's a dead man."

As soon as Delgado said "dead man",
three men and a woman exited the apartment. They all wore T-shirts, and two of
them wore black vests over the T-shirts.

Delgado jacked a round into his chamber.
"Showtime," he said.

They got out of the van and walked at a normal
pace toward the group, with their guns slightly behind them, not easily spotted
in the dimly-lit parking lot. The quartet was halfway across the lot when Desi
and Delgado came up on them. They raised their guns in unison and Delgado said,
"Hands in the air, all of you."

The men were startled, but their instincts told
them to put their hands up. The woman moved to one side and shrieked. Desi
reflexively put two in her chest from about six feet away, the muffled pops
from the .22 barely audible. She crumpled to the pavement, blood spilling out
of her small entry wounds. The other three gazed at her corpse with wide eyes
and slackening jaws. Their hands shot higher into the air. The rain fell harder
now.

Delgado and Desi herded them toward the van.
Delgado opened the rear door out of the men's line of vision. He jerked a
baseball bat from inside the van and said, "All right, everybody
inside." They moved around to the back of the van and began to enter, but
Delgado, with astonishing speed, whipped the bat around three times and caught
all three squarely in the head. They collapsed, and he said, "Come on,
help me get them into the van. Take their guns when they're inside."

Desi did as he was told. He loaded them into the
rear of the van, which had a large painter's dropcloth spread over it to absorb
the blood. All three were strapped and their guns went into the glove box. Two
of them had knives as well. Delgado threw these into the narrow landscaped
strip behind the van. Desi tied them up with ropes Delgado had brought.

Once they were secure, Delgado slid into the front
seat and started the engine. Off toward the exit and out into the street. Still
no other activity in the lot. The whole thing took less than ninety seconds.

Desi Senior

Hialeah, Florida

Friday, December 29, 1989

1:05 AM

T
HE THREE
MEN LAY ON THEIR STOMACHS,
bound and bleeding from head wounds. A
couple of them had regained some semblance of consciousness, alternately
groaning and howling in pain. Desi sat with his back to the locked rear door,
.22 trained on them. Delgado had returned the bat to the rear of the van, and
Desi saw for the first time what looked like a rectangular hard shell guitar case
propped up along the wall.

Up close, he could see they were all young, maybe eighteen,
nineteen. One of them, the one without the vest, looked to be about twenty-two.
Two Latinos
¾
probably Cuban
¾
and one, the youngest, was black. The two Cubans were well-built, wide at the
shoulders and hips, the black kid wiry and hard. Desi fished through their
pockets.

None of them had wallets, but they all had cash in
the front pockets of their jeans. Desi took it and flipped through it. Looked
to be close to four grand. "
Tenemos
cuatro mil en caja
," he said to Delgado.

"
Muy
bién, hermano
," came the reply from the driver's seat.

Desi couldn't see where they were going, since
there were no windows in the van, not even in the rear doors, but they were
going at normal speed, so they weren't on the Palmetto Expressway. Not many
turns. One right turn out of the parking lot, then a left a little ways down.
Delgado got up to about thirty or thirty-five on that street with no red lights
to slow him down. From where he sat, Desi saw no commercial-activity lighting
through the top of the windshield. That means residential. Probably West 37th
Street. By now, the rain was exploding out of the sky, pounding the roof and
defeating the namby-pamby windshield wipers. Frequent thunder bursts told Desi
the rain wasn't quitting anytime soon.

Some minutes later, they turned right and Delgado
picked up speed, up to maybe forty-five miles an hour. Desi saw brief flashes
of commercial lighting. This had to be Red Road. Not too long after that, he
felt the van go over railroad tracks and turn left immediately. East 21st
Street. Deep in East Hialeah. After that, one more turn which could've been
anywhere. A few minutes later, Delgado turned into a paved lot and stopped. He
killed the engine and doused the lights.

Desi unlocked and opened the back door. He stepped
out into the heavy rain and saw they were in a small, empty parking lot at the
end of a row of long, squat one-story industrial-type buildings, which looked
like they housed a trucking company. He saw several uncoupled trailers backed
up to loading docks about fifty yards down.
 
Railroad tracks ran behind the worn
buildings, and on the opposite side of the tracks, the flat, windowless backs of
more such buildings. A bawling wind swept hard rain across the lot.

Delgado came around to the back. He said,
"I'm going to haul them one at a time to the back of the building. You
stay here and watch them and watch for cops."

Desi had to chuckle. He knew this neighborhood. No
cops ever came around here. If they did, people would think they actually gave
a shit.

Together, they pulled the first one out of the
van. This was the one who had never regained consciousness the whole trip.
Delgado dragged him through the rain, sloshing around to the rear of the
building and returned quickly for the black kid, the Groaner. The Howler, who
remained, was now silent, maybe unconscious, probably worn out from all that
howling. When Delgado came back, he and Desi took the Howler to join his
friends. Desi saw Delgado had arranged the first two in sitting position, backs
against the rear of the building. The third one was placed next to them. The
Groaner, who sat in the middle, continued groaning.

Rain pelted their heads, washing the blood away
almost as soon as it flowed out of them. The thunder was nearly continuous.
Desi saw no security lighting behind the building. None from the buildings
across the tracks, either. Only a street light a block away on 21st Street. No
traffic anywhere in sight.

Delgado kicked the Groaner hard in the stomach.
"Shut the fuck up!" A glance at Desi. "I'll be right back."
He ran back to the van and returned with the guitar case. Carefully setting it
on the ground in front of the three men, he said to the Groaner, "Can you
hear me?"

More groans.

Raising his voice to rise above the sharp rain, he
said, "
Can you hear me
?"

Delgado's hair hung in wet strands across his
forehead. His eyes brimmed with fury. He raised his fist into punching position
when the Groaner said, "Y-y-yeah. I-I hear you."

"Who sent you to the Ace Pawn Shop on East
Fourth Avenue two weeks ago?" No answer. The fist hit the face, cracking
the back of the head against the building. A yelp from the kid. Even back here
behind these buildings, in the darkness, Desi could see blood squirt from behind
his head. Or he thought he could, anyway.

Delgado repeated the question. The Groaner opened
his big, dark eyes and tried to say something. A stutter or two, a gasp, and a
couple of groans … Delgado leaned in and said, "Yes, yes. Who was
it?"

Blood flowing from his mouth, the Groaner put his quivering
front teeth over his lower lip and finally managed to say, "Fuck
you."

Another punch from Delgado, this one harder than
before, making a louder crack and a scream from the Groaner. Delgado opened the
guitar case to reveal a long, sheathed machete. He carefully removed the sheath
and slipped the machete out. It was almost as long as a sword, but whose blade was
much wider and showed a gentle, fluid curve. He turned the Groaner's head to
the left, facing the one who had never regained consciousness. He held that
man's head by the hair and with one deadly swipe of the machete, the head came
off, sliced off as clean as the end of a carrot on a cutting board. Blood
spurted upward from inside the headless corpse like an oil well in a
wildcatter's wet dream. Desi realized Delgado had done this before.

Delgado tossed the head on the ground. The
Groaner's eyes widened in horror. Delgado asked him again, "Who sent you
to the Ace Pawn Shop?"

With what had to be all the energy he could
muster, the Groaner replied in a voice barely audible above the pounding rain,
"Fuck you, motherfucker!"

Moving over to the Howler, Delgado repeated the
bloody scenario with the machete. This time, Desi heard the clang of the blade
as it took the man's head off and collided with the concrete building. He couldn't
remember if he'd heard it with the first man, but figured it had to be there,
he was just too stunned to realize it.

"Once more,
pinche puto
, who sent you?"

The Groaner just smiled, forcing a laugh over
bloody teeth. Desi wasn't sure if the man could even see his attackers through
the blood and the rain. Delgado handed the machete to Desi.

"Here. Take this nigger's head off."

Desi stepped up and took the long weapon. He saw
the heavy rain had washed the blood from it, the wet blade softly gleaming in
the dim light cast by the faraway streetlamp. A knot formed quickly in his
stomach, causing him to flinch. But then he realized,
These fucking pricks were going to take my life, leave my wife a widow
and my children without a father.

He pulled the Groaner's head up by his 'fro and
chopped his head off. One furious stroke. When the blade went through the neck,
it hit the building with such a force, the vibration backed up through the
weapon and into Desi's body. He felt it all the way down to his balls, causing
him to very nearly drop the machete. He held the head for a moment, gazing at
it. The Groaner's big eyes remained open, staring in blank death back at Desi.
He was surprised at how calm he felt. The rain still fell hard and loud, but it
soothed him as though it were a gentle spring shower, cleansing him of this sin
which he so perfectly justified to himself.

With a sense of ritual, Delgado took the head from
Desi with both hands. He carefully arranged a three heads in front of the
corpses. He then reached into his shirt pocket and retrieved three playing
cards. They were all the queen of spades. He left one in the mouth of each
victim.

"Do you play hearts, Desi? The card
game?"

Desi shook his head.

"The queen of spades," Delgado said.
"The head bitch. Griselda Blanco."