Powder Burn (30 page)

“Chris! It’s three o’clock in the morning. Where have you been? Why weren’t you here when I arrived?” Arms akimbo, hair tousled, legs planted like a boxer, she had surveyed him suspiciously from the doorway of the darkened bedroom, as though trying to decide whether to embrace him or slug him.

“What have you done to your hair? What happened to your face? What’s in the bag?”

“Is there anything else, or can I say, ‘Welcome home’? I wish you’d told me you were coming, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“I didn’t know myself until this afternoon. Tell me what is going on,
carajo.”

“It’s a long story.”

The cocaine bag in hand, Meadows walked quickly to the tiny kitchen. Terry stalked after him. He poked through the refrigerator freezer compartment. Ice trays, a chicken, something in tin foil that looked like a fish, about a half dozen packages of frozen vegetables. He pulled one out from the bottom of the stack. Brussels sprouts. Perfect. He dumped the sprouts into the sink, fitted the cocaine into the box and restored it to its frozen home. Terry watched wide-eyed, momentarily stunned into silence.

“Now,” said Meadows in satisfaction, “give me a big kiss and make a pot of coffee.”

“I do not want any coffee, thank you, and I am through kissing you until you start making sense. What’s in the box?”

“Cocaine.”

That stopped her.

“Cocaine?” She echoed weakly.

“Like I said, it’s a long story. Please make a pot of coffee.” As Meadows went to shower away the taste of theft and stewardess, a clatter of pots and a monologue of rude Spanish bobbed in his wake.

As dispassionately as possible Meadows recounted what he jokingly called the “survival surrealism” that had climaxed with his theft of the cocaine. He left out only Patti and the stewardess. If Terry suspected, she said nothing, interrupting only once to suggest they climb into bed to be more comfortable. She listened quietly for a long time.
“Querido,”
she said finally as dawn tinged the Atlantic, “this is not like you. None of it.”

“It’s a bit like getting caught out in a bad storm, isn’t it? You run and run, looking for a place to stay dry, but there isn’t any. And after a while it suddenly occurs to you that being wet isn’t so bad, that you might even come to enjoy it.”

“Brrr!” Terry shivered dramatically and pulled the mauve sheet close around her. “Now what will you do?”

“Well,” Meadows replied pensively, “I have nearly all the materials I need, so I think I will build a house for Señor Bermúdez and all his friends—a special kind of house.”

“It would be easier if you were
latino,”
Terry said.

“Why?”

“Then you would kill them, one by one, until they were all dead and you felt very good.”

Meadows laughed. “I’d rather do it the American way.”

“Bueno, mi amor.”
Terry snuggled closer. Her fingers traced lightly across his chest, then danced slow circles around his navel. “You do it your way, and I will help you,” she whispered. “But now you will help me, yes? Not too gently.”

MEADOWS RAISED HIS
arms above his head and rolled over onto his back on the crisp white towel. Adrenaline coursed through him. Things were moving now, moving well. But he would have to be careful. Meadows was juggling too many balls. No, not balls, grenades. If one of them slipped, they might all explode. Still, there was no other way. He had to take risks.

Manny and Moe and emptied-headed Patti were all risks. Chris Carson had dropped from their lives without a good-bye. What would they make of that? Would they conclude that the thin and nervous novice from Atlanta had stolen Rennie McRae’s coke? Had McRae caught a glimpse of him, or would they simply puzzle it out once their systems had flushed away the fogging dope and alcohol? Once they knew, would they come looking? Meadows thought they probably would. He could not judge how well they would look, or how hard. It didn’t matter. Ignore them. They were minnows, and he was fishing for shark. All Meadows needed was a little more time. If they came while he lay low in designing frenzy on Key Biscayne, too bad for them.

The cocaine itself also troubled Meadows. It was like a dead rat, lying there in Terry’s refrigerator. Sooner or later it would smell. He had not wanted to involve Terry. Now there seemed no other way, and that troubled Meadows. Ignore that, too. Deep down, Meadows knew, she was tougher and stronger than he could ever be.

And so was Octavio Nelson. There was no way he could be ignored. Meadows would have to take him head-on. That would be a trial and a danger. Nelson was the foundation on which Meadows’s structure of revenge had to rest. But could Meadows trust him? Probably not. Certainly not beyond the Cuban cop’s own self-interest.

Meadows watched the coconut fronds rustle in a light breeze off the sea. The night before, he had paced the beaches of Key Biscayne with Terry and Arthur. Terry thought Nelson could be trusted in his promise to forget about the Mono killing. Arthur believed otherwise.

“Nelson is shrewd and mean, and he will use anything he’s got on anybody he knows to get what he wants,” Arthur had pronounced.

“But he is
latino,”
Terry had objected. “If he gives his word, Arthur, then somehow he will keep it.”

“Only if it’s convenient.”

Meadows had cocked half an ear to the debate around him on the deserted beach. He thought Arthur was right, but he had taken no side. Mono would be academic to the plan Meadows was devising. Nelson would see that. Even if he had lied to Arthur, events would persuade Nelson that the Mono killing was not worth pursuing.

With the right enticement, Meadows could snare Nelson and use him as calculatingly as Nelson had used Meadows at the funeral parlor. Locked away in Terry’s apartment, Meadows had what Nelson wanted most: the lifelike sketches of a peasant, a man with a cauliflower ear and a double-faced bastard with a dazzling smile and a rose at his lapel. Or perhaps triple-faced. That flamboyant José L. Bermúdez and the faceless
Jefe
were the same man, Meadows knew without question. Was Bermúdez also “Ignacio” to some of his doper minions? Meadows thought back to McRae’s avuncular lecture. McRae had said the name Ignacio with the same reverence some reserved for God or the president.
El Jefe-
Bermúdez-Ignacio. The name was as irrelevant as Mono. Whatever he was called, Meadows would destroy him.

The sketches were vital for that. He would scatter them like chum and watch Nelson rise in pursuit like a hungry swordfish. Meadows could afford to give away the identities that Nelson craved because he had more than that. Meadows knew that Bermúdez and the Colombian chieftains would meet in Miami to formalize their alliance. He had learned that from McRae. And from what Meadows had heard from Alonzo, he suspected the cocaine summit would be soon.

Meadows couldn’t know for sure how soon until he found the missing arch. He would dedicate tomorrow to it. A two-hour search by telephone that morning had been fruitless. Meadows was sure Alonzo had said “Cumparsi’s.” He had said it was a restaurant, but Meadows had been unable to find it in the phone book or through Information.

“Cumparsi.” Meadows rolled the name over his tongue. He must have heard it wrong. But it was close, surely. Still, there had been no listing under
Cu, Ca,
or
Co.
He had even checked the
G
’s and the
Q
’s.

Tomorrow he would look in earnest. A bell captain at one of the big hotels might know. Or one of Clara Jackson’s colleagues at the
Journal.
If necessary, Meadows would drive block by block through Little Havana until he found it. After that it would only be a question of hammering the roof in place.

Meadows pushed himself to his feet on the sunny beach and walked toward where Terry swam, a pouting white speck in the warm blue sea.

Chapter 25

MEADOWS HAD CHOSEN
the shopping center for its anonymity. It lay like a huge, gap-toothed cash register at the juncture of two featureless highways south of the city, a palace of plastic and plasterboard. Two squat department stores anchored the monster to its asphalt peneplain. A broad mall, glass-roofed, a quarter of a mile long and lined by lesser shops, throbbed like a phallus between them. The mall had become middle-class suburbia’s replacement for the neighborhood: Bored housewives rendezvoused breathlessly with sallow lovers on its benches; heart-attack victims sought rejuvenation on measured strolls along its floral carpet. Long-legged teenagers whose fathers had stolen hubcaps dueled silently with pimply store detectives for stereo tapes. Meadows hated the place, but he would use it, just as he would use Nelson, Terry and himself to destroy José Bermúdez. Chris Meadows had known the grip of compulsion before, but before, it had always been professional, a virus assuaged by an all-night stand at the designing board. The fever that enveloped him now was deeper-seated, more consuming. It left him cold with anger and cunning, and he wondered if he would ever purge it.

“I’m afraid I have a bit of stage fright,” Terry admitted. They had been walking arm in arm through the crowded mall, a scouting foray. Now Meadows stopped and looked at Terry. She wore a denim skirt, a crisp white blouse and fisherman’s sandals. She was ravishing.

“What is there to be nervous about? He looks just like the sketch I drew for you—a good-looking
Latino.
In this crowd he’ll stand out like a gorilla. Besides”—Meadows grinned—“looking the way you do, he’ll probably head right for you and figure if you’re not the mysterious Señora Lara, then the hell with her.”

“Don’t be stupid. Suppose he doesn’t want to talk to you?”

“He’ll want to, don’t worry.”

“Maybe,” Terry replied uncertainly, “but I feel just like I did before the curtain went up on the big play when I was in school.”

“And when it did, I bet you were fine. What role did you play?”

“Pizarro.”

“Pizarro the
conquistador?”

“It was an all-girls school,
boludo.”

Perhaps as a slave to his conscience for all the trash he sold up front, the owner of the Book Baron in the Southland Mall had built a quiet room at the back of his shop reserved for Floridiana. Meadows had browsed there before, always alone. And he was alone again when he heard Terry approaching.

“…and so, of course, everybody knows God must be Brazilian. Who else repairs at night all the mistakes we make by day?”

Octavio Nelson laughed. But when he stepped into the tiny room, his grin was only a formality.

“Hola, amigo,”
Nelson said to Meadows, hand outstretched, “how’s the floor covering holding out?”

It was a bad moment for Meadows. Floor covering? What was he talking about? Meadows had summoned Nelson to talk about summary justice, not rugs. Then it came to him. A young
Latina,
lovely and importuning. A dead aunt and a rosary. Nelson was trying to throw him off-balance, the bastard.

“So that’s your idea of surveillance, a lady in black,” Meadows said. “She wasn’t even around when I needed her.”

“Neither was I, and I’m sorry,” Nelson said. “One of my men got shot, and I had to go. There was no time to get you.”

“Sure. Who got shot, Pincus?”

“No, unfortunately,” Nelson muttered. “Garcia. He works undercover. He was playing Wyatt Earp for some waitress at a doughnut shop, and he shot himself.” Nelson looked at Meadows. “I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

Meadows stared back at him for a long moment, then sighed. “Shit,” he said finally. “I think I do. It sounds too stupid to be a lie.”

He glared at Nelson. “You know I could have been killed in that place. How would that have looked in your file, getting a witness murdered?”

Nelson gave him a look. “I said I was sorry.”

“Sorry! You go chasing off to nursemaid some idiot while I’m waiting for a knife in my ribs?”

Nelson shook his head. “These things happen.” He pretended to scan the titles on the shelves. “So how does it feel to swim with the sharks, Meadows?”

Meadows calmed down. “So far so good. I swim fast.”

“You damn well better. Now what it is you have to tell me?”

“First,” Meadows said, “tell me the status of the Mono case.”

Nelson laughed, his cigar tilting.
“Coño.
Mono’s ancient history. Nobody cares who killed that asshole. Didn’t your friend Prim pass along the message?”

“What about Pincus? Pincus cares.”

“Forget Pincus.”

“You guys have been busy, I bet. Lots of killings, rip-offs. The cocaine is dried up,” Meadows said casually. “Hardly a snort left in town.”

Nelson said, “So you’ve done your homework.”

Terry pawed distractingly at a book about orchids. She must have been biting her tongue to avoid asking about the floor covering remark and the unexplained “she.” Meadows vowed to brain her if she interrupted now.

“Are Mono’s two pals still hunting for me?”

“No way. I mean, if they bumped into you on the street and recognized you, they’d kill you on general principles. But they aren’t looking for you.” Nelson snorted. “They’re busy as hell, raking in the overtime. And do you know something else? They’re better than Mono ever was. Gun, knife, garrote, you name it. Slick as
sandía.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Not yet.”

“And the big man. What was it you called him?
El Jefe?”

Nelson shook his head.

“Jesus, it’s not your year, is it?” Meadows scoffed.

“Chris,” Terry blurted, “that’s not fair.”

It was Nelson who responded. “
No
se preocupe, señorita.
He’s right; there have been better times.” Nelson turned to Meadows. “You finished gloating yet?”

“Tell me about Ignacio,” the architect said.

Nelson whistled. “Now I
am
impressed. That’s the street name for
el Jefe.
Where it comes from, I don’t know.”

“Does anybody know who he is?”

“Nobody I’ve busted. Believe me, I’ve tried everything to get the name. I’ve had some very serious discussions about it with some of these little pukes.”

“I almost believe it,” Meadows said grimly.