Powder Burn (27 page)

“Shit,” Meadows groaned standing. “I’m getting a refill.”

Meadows got up and started toward the bar. The people crammed into McRae’s condominium were mostly young, tan and very loaded. The women were stunning and abundant. One look around the place told Meadows it cost at least $300,000. The carpeting was to thick it seemed to cover the tops of his shoes. On his way to the bar he passed a knot of chattering people; they hovered around a small table in the living room, chopping away at a small rock of coke presented elaborately on a silver tray. Moe was in line for his share.

“Fuckin’ Manny has to show up two hours late,” he was grumbling. “I coulda been into this stuff all night long if only we got here on time.”

But Manny had been insistent. The party had started at ten, but he had not wanted to go until midnight. “I want to give Alonzo enough time to mellow out,” he had explained. “He’s much more agreeable after a couple of hides.”

It was a wonderful logic, Meadows reflected. He admired Manny in many ways, not the least of which was his finely tuned instinct for survival.

Meadows returned to the couch and waited for the summit with Alonzo. A slender woman with long dark legs and frizzy auburn hair sat next to him.

“Hi. My name is Jill.”

“Hello, Chris Carson.” Meadows shifted the drink to his left hand and held out his right, awkwardly.

“I fly for Southeastern.”

Meadows smiled politely. Sweet Jesus, a stewardess. For a moment he wished he was back in the Everglades.

“I’m in real estate. I just moved down here.…”

“That’s funny,” Jill said. “I swear we’ve met before, here in Miami. Has your hair always been that long?”

“For a couple of years now.” He turned away abruptly; his mind scrambled for an excuse to get up and leave.

“It was at a party out on Key Biscayne—”

“I don’t think so,” Meadows said curtly.

“You know the Clarks?”

“No,” he lied. “Excuse me, please. I’m going to get another drink.”

Meadows fled the room. His neck was damp with sweat. He racked his brain for any recollection of Jill Somebody but came up empty. He would have remembered her. She was mistaken, certainly, but it made Meadows edgy. It was just more bad luck.

Carrying a fresh Jack Daniel’s he launched a search for a bathroom. He found a door, knocked twice and went in.

“Buenas noches.”

Meadows started to back out. “Sorry.”

“Don’t go.” The man was dark with a thick Pancho Villa mustache, porky, gregarious. He sat on the toilet with his pants up, a girl on each side.

“My name is Bobby,” he offered. “This is Candy, and this is Maria. We were just having a quick hit. Want some?”

Meadows lifted his drink. “Better not,” he said politely. “Thanks anyway.”

“Come on, baby,” said the girl name Maria. Meadows guessed her age at fifteen, tops. She wore designer jeans and a diaphanous halter top. Her nipples, Meadows mused through a fog of bourbon, looked like walnuts. She lifted a small mirror toward his face.

“Careful, careful,” said Roberto Nelson.

Meadows set his glass down near the sink.

“One little toot,” teased Maria.

Meadows nodded. “OK,” he said, and instinctively turned to lock the door behind him. Instantly Roberto and the two girls whooped with laughter.

Meadows caught himself laughing along with them. “Well, you never know where you might find DEA,” he joked.

A dumb move, he scolded himself. Thank God these clowns are too high to care.

Meadows took a rolled twenty-dollar bill from Roberto and snorted two short lines, tossing his head back. Roberto smiled a broad, perfect grin.
“Bueno,
eh?”

“Sí,”
Meadows replied.

Then the coke kicked in, and the jolt was stunning. Suddenly Meadows could
hear
his heartbeat. He felt like swimming a thousand laps, jogging until he dropped, fucking himself unconscious. He felt, in a word, sensational.

Maria was trying to disco in the shower. Roberto joined her. Meadows feared that the two of them would become stuck in the stall or, worse, that Roberto would try to hump Maria standing up and the two of them would come crashing through the glass doors and kill everyone.

“Do you live in Miami?” Meadows asked the girl named Candy.

“Forget it,” Roberto shouted from the shower. “She doesn’t speak English,
amigo.
She’s Colombian.”

Candy smiled and nodded. Then she scooted over and stationed herself on Meadows’s lap. There were three lines left on the mirror; Candy snorted all of them, one after the other. Then she started to sing, a high, off-key rendition of some long-lost
salsa
hit. Meadows’s ears stung with each note. He felt hot. Although she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, Candy sitting on his lap reminded Meadows that he’d best find an unoccupied bathroom as soon as possible. He squirmed from her featherweight embrace and made for the door.

“Thanks, man,” he called to Roberto.

“For sure,” Roberto answered. Through the dimpled glass of the shower door, Meadows could see Roberto’s fat pink buttocks. The cheery Cuban’s pants were at his ankles. Maria’s giggles and sighs echoed off the tile as Meadows slipped out into the hallway.

The next door was locked. The one after that was ajar. Meadows gave a light rap with two knuckles.

“Come on in,” boomed Rennie McRae. “Ah, Mr. Carson, sit down. Please.”

McRae reclined behind a broad mahogany desk. A narrow shaft of white light from a typing lamp cast a bright sphere on the wood surface, where McRae’s hands were at work. Meadows sat down across from him and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

McRae turned back to his task, barely glancing up at his nervous visitor. “I do this privately, Mr. Carson, because many of my friends are scared by the sight of needles.” The lawyer used a small silver spoon to scrape flakes from a huge lump of cocaine. “I don’t do this because I’m ashamed of it or because I’m afraid of the cops. This is my house.”

McRae’s voice was rising excitedly. Meadows watched uneasily as he flicked a small pocket lighter and steadied the spoonful of powder in the bluest tongue of the flame. McRae’s hands began to shake feverishly, and Meadows thought he was about to drop the whole kit.

“I’ll go through the motions of offering you some.”

Meadows lifted a hand. “Thanks anyway.”

McRae grinned. “This is excellent coke.”

“Yes,” Christopher Meadows said.

“Seventy-five percent pure. Of course, by the time it reaches our friends in Little Havana, the precious little disco swingers…well, the customers don’t get quite the same quality. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“You’re a dealer?”

“No, my friend. I’m the dealer’s attorney. That’s even better. I know faces I shouldn’t know, names I should forget, dates I could never possibly recall under oath but could recite to you right now with absolute certainty. So I get a very good price on cocaine.”

Meadows flinched at the sight of the syringe.

“I’m new down here,” he said. “I guess Manny told you.”

“He didn’t have to,” McRae said. Gingerly he slipped the needle into the melted coke and drew its syrup into the syringe. “I know
everybody
in Miami.”

“Then you must speak Spanish.”

“Sure. Who do you know? Just Manny, right?” McRae’s laughter burst out like the low bark of a big Doberman. He knotted a burgundy necktie around his left arm, above the elbow. He gave Meadows a hard stare.

“Don’t worry now. The needle is as clean as a whistle. I got it directly from my doctor.” He chuckled again and smoothly inserted the needle into a fat vein. Meadows looked away squeamishly.

“My, my,” the lawyer sighed. The needle lay on the desk. He swabbed at his arm with a cotton ball and rolled down his sleeve. “Jesus, that’s good!”

Meadows started to stand, but McRae motioned him down. “I didn’t invite you in here for a lesson in pharmacology.” His voice was dry, and there was no laughter. “I heard about your camping trip last night. Real bad luck, huh?”

Meadows’s jaw tightened. McRae lit a joint. He didn’t offer it across the desk. “Manny’s in some deep shit,” he said evenly. “It’s not your fault.”

“With Alonzo?” Meadows’s nerve jangled.

“Oh, yes, and worse than that.” McRae’s eyes moistened as the coke propelled him. He sucked deeply on the joint.

“Who else?”

“The names would mean nothing to you. They would mean nothing even in Atlanta. Alonzo, a shit, a lackey…the Diego brothers, even Ignacio.”

Meadows’s eyes flickered. “Why?”

“This is Manny’s third fuck-up in as many months. Three strikes and you’re out. Half a million in coke down the commode. You’ve got to understand what’s been going down in Miami the last few weeks…everybody relies on such careful planning. Everything must be very precise.”

“We know where it is,” Meadows blurted. “I’m sure we can find it again.”

“Settle down.” McRae raised his hands amiably. “It’s not your fault. I tell you this because you
are
new in town, and I’d hate to see you get in trouble so soon.” The lawyer rolled his head back and forth. “Jesus H. Christ, this is wonderful.”

“I don’t know enough to get in trouble.”

“Of course you don’t. Didn’t your friends give you any tips before they let you come down here?”

“They told me that a banker ran the show,” Meadows said boldly. “A Cuban banker. That’s all.”

“You got smart friends. What else?”

“They said to thank God I wasn’t a Colombian.”

McRae roared. “That is priceless! Really.”

“Rennie?”

Meadows turned lethargically in his chair. A beautiful blond woman with drowsy eyes stood at the door. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“No, baby, come here,” McRae said gently. He pulled her to his lap. “Mr. Carson, this is Donna. One of my secretaries.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Donna said. She began to tickle Rennie McRae. He giggled like a four-year-old.

A pajama party, Meadows thought, just what I need.

“You been naughty, haven’t you?” Donna teased. “You been cooking up the white powder in here.”

“Please, please,” McRae spluttered.

“Gimme some.”

“It’s all gone.”

“Naughty boy. Stop pinching my tits.”

They acted as if Meadows were invisible.

“Give me some powder,” Donna said, leaning across McRae’s vast lap. With authority she yanked one of the desk drawers, and it slid open.

Meadows froze. His eyes fixed on a sack of cocaine, a lump so big that it glistened in the dim light of the den. It was at least a pound.

McRae slammed the drawer. “Not now, baby, we have company. Don’t worry, he says he is definitely
not
Colombian.”

“That’s good,” Donna said, finally looking up at the architect. “You don’t look Colombian.”

“Damn right. He’s breathing, isn’t he?” McRae laughed until he wheezed. “Most of my clients are not fond of Colombians. Get off me, luv. I can’t breathe.”

The lawyer had surrendered all prudence to the cocaine. Meadows felt it was a good time to push even harder.

“Explain this Colombian thing.”

“Greedy fucking peasants. Farmers! Moving in on the business. Surely you had trouble like that in Atlanta.”

Meadows nodded. “Blacks and whites. Friendly southern competition.”

“It isn’t friendly down here. It’s the Cubes and the Colombians,” McRae said. “He tried to warn them. A little rip-off on one of their freighters a few months back. But it went bad, and they wound up killing one of the local boys. That led to an ugly thing in Coconut Grove—”

“I read about it.”

“Damn shame,” McRae said remorsefully. “Brought all kinds of heat.”

Donna flung her brown arms around McRae’s neck and gave him a long kiss. It was not long before they forgot about Christopher Meadows once more.

The architect stood quietly and edged toward the door. “Rennie, thanks for the warning,” he said.

The chubby lawyer pried Donna loose momentarily. “Anytime, buddy. I hope you know what to do: Cut yourself loose, fast.”

“I intend to,” Meadows replied.

“No more camping trips.”

He found a bathroom, then a fresh drink, and wandered out on the patio. A twenty-four-story shoe box over Brickell Avenue, Meadows thought sourly, designed by some fathead Swede. A $300,000 view. Across the water, the peach light of the sodium streetlamps glinted off the Seaquarium’s geodesic dome, home of Flipper, the porpoise. To the north was the skyline, shining over the boulevard. It did not look grand and wonderful, Meadows admitted. He searched the towers for the Coral Key Bank. Soon his thoughts returned to the cocaine.

“Hey, Chris.”

It was Jill.

“Are you pissed off at me or what?”

“No, of course not.”

“You went for a drink and never came back.”

Meadows smiled weakly. “Sorry. I got sidetracked with our host.”

“Oh. Well, there’s some guys looking for you.”

Meadows quickly strode back inside. He found Manny and Moe in a corner and between them a gangly, coarse man pointing a smelly cigar. Meadows sat down next to Moe, and Manny introduced Alonzo.

The two Cubans jabbered at each other in Spanish. Meadows picked up only pieces of the exchange but was reassured by what he heard. “He’s a good man,” Manny was saying. “He was with us last night, and he didn’t blow up.”

Alonzo answered in English: “You men had some problems, eh?”

“We got spooked, is all,” Moe said thickly.

“We got interrupted,” said Manny.

“It was my fault,” Moe continued. “I hit the horn ’cause I thought there was cops coming.”

Alonzo said nothing.

“He did the right thing,” Manny cut in. “There was another car. We couldn’t see anything.”

Alonzo tapped the cigar until a chunk of ash dropped into Rennie McRae’s extravagant carpet.

“Chris, you were along for the first time?” Alonzo asked.

Meadows’s tongue felt like sandpaper. “That’s right.”

“Ever done anything like that?”

“Not quite like that, no.” They all laughed, but the tension did not dissipate.

“I can find all the stuff, Al,” Manny volunteered after a brief silence. “Just give me a night or two.”