Powder Burn (12 page)

“Dumb son of a bitch!” he yelled. This was the last straw. He had been shot. He had nearly been electrocuted. He was being run out of town, and now some stupid bastard had nearly run him over. Limping, Meadows stormed toward the Trans Am. One punch, he thought, and then throw the car keys off the roof. If anybody deserved it, it was this schmuck.

The driver’s door of the Trans Am opened slowly as Meadows approached. Domingo Sosa, the man called Mono, got out.

Casually, with studied indifference, with the movements of a man who has all the time in the world, Mono stretched. He worked his shoulders. And then he turned to face Meadows.

“Buenas noches, caballero,”
Mono said.

Mono wore white shoes, white pants and a white belt. He wore a white silk shirt open nearly to the waist. From his neck hung a thick golden chain. His bushy black mustache was artfully trimmed. His shiny black hair was combed straight back. On his left wrist he wore a large gold watch. In his right hand he held a long knife. The knife shone dully in the fluorescent lights.

Meadows saw all this without seeing. Never had he experienced such twin currents of anger and shock. His knees trembled. His right eyelid began to tic. He almost vomited. Yet he was so angry he almost threw himself at Mono. He might have—but he didn’t. Christopher Meadows whirled and ran.

His leg ached from the first step, a searing, tearing pain that embodied his fear. He must stop. No, he must run. It was more of a limp than a run as Meadows approached the garage elevator. He could not stop. To stop was to die.

Gasping, Meadows reached the elevator. His hand clawed along the pastel wall for the down button. It lit at a touch. The indicator light atop the door showed the elevator on level three. Meadows could hear it begin to move. He looked back. Mono was about thirty yards away, running softly with effortless strides.

Meadows forced his hands against the elevator doors, as though to pry them open. Then he heard the elevator stop. The indicator read four.

Meadows shivered. His whole body felt chill, as chill as a corpse in the morgue. His breath came in great sobs as he pushed himself away from the betraying elevator and staggered toward a gray metal door marked Stairs.

The door was stiff. It would not move. Meadows pushed with all his strength. Finally it gave, opening into a barely lit, cavernous concrete stairwell that smelled of damp and urine.

Mono reached the door a moment later, before it could close. As Meadows started down the stairs, his leg felt as though it were on fire. Every step grated in the fillings of his teeth.

The garage stairs zigzagged down to the concourse level; two landings per level. Each set of stairs had ten steps. Meadows clutched the dirty handrail to help himself down the stairs. After six steps Mono was only a few inches out of range.

On the eighth step Meadows tripped. His weak leg collapsed, and he fell onto the landing. Rolling once, he crashed with his back against the unfinished cinder-block wall. He lay there, gasping like a landed fish, defenseless.

Mono was in no hurry. He looked down at his victim like some Aztec priest measuring his next sacrifice, gauging where to thrust the killer knife. Mono seemed to be enjoying himself. He had killed in more public places. In this little-used stairwell no one would even hear the screams. Supremely confident, he took a white linen handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his brow and then carefully laid the handkerchief on the third step as a buffer for his immaculate white pants. Mono sat down.

“Ahora te cago, gringo,” he
whispered. “You are feenesh.”

Meadows, as still and as tense as a trapped animal, shouted at him, “You can’t do this to me! What have I done?”

“For me you are unlucky. That is enough. Will you die like a man or crying like a woman?”

Mono tossed aside the cigarette and sprang lightly to his feet. He even remembered to pick up his handkerchief. Perhaps that is what triggered Meadows, the ultimate indignity of watching his executioner carefully replace his handkerchief in white pants.

Meadows didn’t move quickly, but in his arrogance Mono anticipated no movement at all. Meadows levered himself up along the wall until he was in a half crouch. When Mono came at him with the blade, Meadows did not rise but pushed off against the wall with strength he never knew he possessed.

Meadows aimed his right shoulder at Mono’s groin. He felt the knife rip his shirt as the shoulder went home. As Meadows drove forward, Mono jackknifed above him. They slammed against the concrete steps, Meadows on top. He heard Mono grunt as his spine absorbed the jolt. He heard the clatter of the knife as it fell.

The impact nearly knocked Meadows out. It stunned Mono. Meadows lay for a moment atop the killer in an obscene embrace. Then he rolled away, and something pricked his good leg. Meadows reached down and picked up the knife.

Mono lay unmoving. Meadows’s only thought was to escape.

He could not go up the stairs—Mono blocked the way—so he started down at a shambling pace, leg flaming, arm bleeding, head aching. His right hand grasped the banister; his left held the knife.

Meadows had nearly reached the third level when Mono was on him.

Savagely the killer tore at Meadows’s neck. Meadows turned, elbows bent, and Mono’s momentum carried him into the knife. Meadows felt the knife slash through something soft. Mono lurched back, away from the pain that suddenly enveloped him.

The knife came free, still in Meadows’s nerveless hand. A gush of warm blood sprouted from Mono’s chest and drenched his white silk shirt.

Meadows ran again. He jerked open the stairway door and burst into the garage. It was deserted, a graveyard of cars. Still clutching the knife, Meadows started down the ramp. He was drained, exhausted. He felt unclean, and he needed help.

He had gone only a few paces when a wave of nausea engulfed him. Meadows tottered between two parked cars and fell to the pavement.

It seemed as though he lay there for a long time. Finally he pulled himself to a sitting position, leaned against the ramp wall and breathed deeply. He tried to cry for help. All that emerged was a hoarse croak.

Gradually Meadows’s brain began functioning again. Mono was badly hurt or dead. There was no longer any urgency. He could pull himself together and seek help at his leisure. The nightmare was over. All he needed was to find a policeman and explain his story. Mono would haunt him no more. If he was not dead, he would go to jail.

Meadows had only to sit somewhere visible and to wait until a motorist or the cop on the Cushman drove past. It was over. Meadows laughed a bit hysterically at the prospect and prized himself forward to sprawl against the back of a car.

Five minutes passed. Another five. Then Meadows heard the sweet sound of the sewing machine engine that could only mean the cop who patrolled the garages. The machine was just entering the garage. It would come up slowly, a level at a time. Meadows willed the cop to hurry.

He would have to call Dana to say he wasn’t coming. Too bad, but it wouldn’t hurt her to sleep alone for once. There was no reason he couldn’t go right home to the Grove. A hot shower, a couple of drinks, and in the morning he would decide whether to see a doctor. He was hurt, but he was functional.

And that—by Jesus—was more than anybody could say for that motherfucker Cuban in the stairwell. The cocaine mob would have to find another killer.

Meadows heard the Cushman clearly now. It was on the second level and climbing. The cop made Meadows think of Nelson. Wouldn’t Nelson be pleased to know that Mono had gone out in the same violence by which he had lived. One less scumbag for the Orange Bowl, eh,
amigo?
Meadows felt lightheaded.

But there was something. Nelson…Meadows shook his head to clear it. Mental alarms sounded. A thought formed, dissolved, formed again. Pickpocket Luis…enough firepower to retake Havana…hanging beams…

Then Meadows had it, and he groaned aloud with despair.

Nothing had changed.

Meadows, wide-eyed, naïve, an innocent bystander, had come to the airport because he was literally running for his life. And now he had even more reason to run. He had killed the killer. In the cocaine jungle Nelson had sketched so powerfully there could be no greater insult, no greater crime, no more surpassing summons to vengeance.

If Meadows reported the body in the stairwell to the police, there was no way on earth he could avoid being publicly identified as the killer of Mono. That would be his death warrant. Always Get Even. Never Talk to the Cops.

He would have to remain silent. He would have to disappear. Then no one would ever know it was the shy architect who had, in terror, dispatched the fearful Mono. Only he would have that satisfaction.

As the police three-wheeler neared, he sank behind the car that had supported him, crouching in the shadow of its hood. The Cushman passed him going up. A couple of minutes later it whirled back down. The policeman driving it had seen nothing, suspected nothing. Who would check out a deserted stairway at this hour on a quiet night?

Meadows felt a great weight lift from his chest. Now he was truly free. So there was justice after all.
Adios,
Señor Mono. May your death have come hard. May the shades of hell rejoice in your company. There is nothing to link me to you.

There was the knife, of course, but that was easy, wasn’t it? There had to be a dozen places in the garage where he could safely discard the knife. No one would look for it very hard. Where could he hide it? Not under a car; cars move away. Not in the stairwell. He could throw it out the side, but it might fall somewhere easy to see. It might even hit somebody. He could hide it in the ashtray by the elevator, but even if it fitted, ashtrays must be cleaned occasionally.

Damn, but the garage was an austere, functional place. Meadows wondered fleetingly who had designed it. If he ever—God forbid!—had to design a garage, he would see to it there were places where a law-abiding man could hide a knife.

Meadows thought of crawling under a car and jamming the knife into the muffler or between the springs. But he had been on the ground too much that night already. Besides, the knife would probably fall out just when the car stopped at the booth to pay the parking fee.

In the end Meadows decided to lose the knife in a flowerpot by the elevator that held a scraggly ponytail palm. Once he had to hide from a passing car, but he made a good job of it. He dug a deep hole at the back of the pot with the point of the knife and stuck it in the earth, handle down. Carefully he packed dirt over the tip and arranged the palm fronds so that they obscured the burial ground.

It was a long way up the ramp to the top level, and every step pounded. But there was a spring in Meadows’s limp. He would look back on the nightmare as a maturing aberration. He would be better for it. He would never speak of how the terror had ended with the ripping of cloth, the awful sensation of the knife going home. In time, perhaps, he would even convince himself he had thrust with the knife, rather than witlessly, accidentally, allowing the killer to impale himself. Or perhaps he would one day feel remorse at having taken a human life, at having allowed his intellect to fail him.

Meadows felt no remorse as he passed the stairway door at level five. The door was closed. Meadows stopped to retrieve his overnight bag from where he had flung it.

Now, once he moved the car, there would be nothing whatsoever to link him to the garage or the grisly corpse in the stairwell. Meadows headed for the Ghia. Then he froze in his tracks.

Mono’s big black and gold Trans Am was gone.

Chapter 10

THE OLD MAN
from Bogotá walked among his flowers. They were beautiful, and he was proud. In the high Andean valley the flowers stretched for nearly half a mile in all directions. Mostly they were carnations, red, pink, white. There were also mums, daisies, pompons and delicate roses of many hues. They grew in string-encircled beds under a giant polyethylene roof to protect them from rain and hail. Dusky, flat-faced girls in blue smocks tended the beds, tended the flowers, one at a time, trimming unwanted growth, catching the delicate buds with rubber bands to keep them from opening too fully too soon.

“The altitude, climate, temperature, sunlight—everything here is ideal for raising flowers,” the old man boasted. “What you see are more than six million flowers. When they are ready, they will be cut and flown overnight to the United States. It is a big business. Each girl is assigned a specific bed to work. When her flowers are of the highest quality, she is rewarded.”

“The flowers are very beautiful,” the old man’s visitor said.

They had driven out to the flower farm, an hour from Bogotá, on the morning after. It had been a sumptuous wedding, elegant, tasteful. The poise and charm of the old man’s granddaughter had more than compensated for the awkward groom. A lucky man, said the guests. She is not the most beautiful woman in Bogotá, but of course, money has a beauty of its own. The bride’s brother, the one with the haunting black eyes, had performed the ceremony from the main altar of the cathedral. He had even trimmed his beard; wasn’t that the least he could have done with the metropolitan bishop there on the altar with him? Three hundred waiters in white coats had dispensed a hundred cases of French champagne, fifty pounds of Iranian caviar and five hundred pounds of Caribbean lobsters to 1,200 guests guarded by 300 policemen, 423 private bodyguards and a company of infantry commanded by one of the guests but deployed out of sight of the colonial
finca
Bolivar once owned. A catty social page reporter from
The New York Times
had assembled the box score. Bogotá’s
El Tiempo
called it “the wedding of the century” but left out the part about the policemen, the bodyguards and the soldiers. The bride’s mother wore a beige Givenchy of Chinese silk. The bride’s father wore a Savile Row morning suit with a perfect white carnation at his lapel. Everyone deferred to the old man from Bogotá. He was the patriarch, and it was his money that had paid for the champagne, the caviar, the soldiers and the bishop.