Raul Cuervas is so busy opening a new pack of Marlboros that he doesn’t notice the pink Toyota Camry until it’s almost alongside him. He follows it on foot, which is easy, since the car return area is crowded. He sees a uniformed attendant signal the driver to pull into a spot. Cuervas walks closer, but not too close. He wants to get a look at the driver, but he’d rather not be noticed. So he walks behind a minivan and melts into the family that’s just climbed out of it.
When Cuervas sees the driver step from the Camry, he can’t help smiling. The guy is short, maybe five six. He’s not fat, but soft-looking. Got this curly Jew hair with a little bald spot just starting to show. He’s maybe forty. Looks like he never did a real day’s work in his life. A pencil pusher. But the thing that really gets Cuervas is the way the guy’s dressed. Got on this girlie shirt and a pair of jeans that look like they just came off a rack, real dark and still perfectly creased. Best of all, they’re turned up about four inches at the cuffs. This guy is a bufón, Cuervas says to himself, a real clown.
Goodman unloads the two duffel bags from the trunk. He tries to act casual about it, telling himself to treat them as though they contain nothing but personal belongings. An Avis attendant wearing a WE TRY HARDER button checks him out, then directs him to a shuttle bus that will take him to the terminal. He pays no attention to a family returning a minivan nearby.
He boards the bus. When the driver goes to help him with his duffel bags, Goodman politely declines the offer. He rides the bus with the bags on his lap. He realizes he’s only drawing attention to himself, tells himself he’s going to have to try loosen up a little bit.
“Hey, that’s my baby,” Cuervas tells the Avis attendant who’s about to get into the pink Camry. When the attendant, a large black man, looks at him quizzically, Cuervas explains. “I got her next, special for my daughter’s birthday. She likes pink.”
“That’s nice,” the man says, as if he couldn’t care less.
“I ‘preciate it if you could turn her around real fass for me,” Cuervas says, and to show just how much he would appreciate it, he extends a $50 bill in the man’s direction. The man takes it, never taking his eyes off Cuervas’s.
“Real fass,” Cuervas repeats. “An’ let ‘em know at the counter as soon as it’s ready I’m in a big hurry.”
“No problem,” the man says.
At the main terminal, Goodman finds the Avis counter and gets on line. When he makes it to the front of the line, he asks the rate for a oneway rental to New York City. After punching up some numbers on the computer, the attendant, a young man with blond hair, gives him the news.
“For a midsize car, I can give you a rate of $46 a day, unlimited mileage-”
Goodman is pleasantly surprised, and is in the process of multiplying forty-six by two, then three, when he hears the bad news.
“And there’s a one-way drop-off charge of $250.”
Goodman knows his credit card can’t take a hit like that. “Thanks,” he says. “Let me think about it a bit.” He turns, lifts his bags, and walks away from the counter.
Goodman is gone less than a minute when a Hispanic man with a droopy mustache ignores the line and walks directly to the Avis attendant with the red hair and the big breasts.
Cuervas pays no attention to the complaints muttered by the people waiting on line. “My pink Camry,” he tells the woman. “She’s back.”
“Oh, Mr.-”
“Velez. Antonio Velez.”
“Mr. Velez,” she repeats. She checks her computer. The people on line mutter some more, but she ignores them, too. “I’m sorry,” she says, “they’re still servicing it.”
“I don’t need it serviced,” Cuervas tells her. “I need it now.”
“Let me see what I can do,” she says, and picks up the phone.
Goodman stops at the Delta counter, asks about a one-way ticket to New York.
“I can put you on our flight five-sixty-two to Kennedy,” he’s told. “It leaves at twelve-oh-one.”
Goodman has a theory about the number 562. He’s convinced it comes up more often than any other three-digit number. Were he a gambler, he’d play the number. But he doesn’t even know how you go about betting on a number. Nonetheless, he figures flight 562 is a good omen.
“How much would that be?” he asks. He’s down to $47.47, plus a $100 in traveler’s checks.
“That would come to $229.”
“Okay,” he says, and fishes out his Visa card. Again he holds his breath, but it seems that Delta isn’t checking credit cards too closely this day. A machine spits out his ticket and boarding pass.
“How many bags will you be checking?”
Goodman freezes for a moment. Do they search bags? Run them through an X-ray machine?
“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I’m going to buy a few things before I check them in. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
After a few minutes on the phone, the redhead tells Raul Cuervas that his car is ready. She gives him a big smile, like maybe she expects another fifty. But Cuervas is finished with her.
He takes the stupid little red bus to the pickup area and spots his Camry. He opens the trunk and lifts the lid covering the spare tire. It’s there, good as new, nicely bolted down. He gives it a push with his thumb; it feels nice and hard. He closes the lid, slams the trunk.
He gets in behind the wheel, starts the engine, and pulls out of the spot. He knows a little turnoff about ten minutes away, where he can make sure that everything’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Goodman looks at his watch, sees he’s got an hour to kill before his flight. He decides he’s going to have to take a chance and check his luggage, at least the larger duffel bag. They’d only take it away from him at the gate: It’s much too big to carry on.
While he knows they don’t make you open checked-in luggage on a domestic flight, he has no idea what they do to the bags before putting them on the plane. But he figures he has no choice.
He buys a newspaper, wanders into a souvenir shop. They’ve got all this Miami Dolphin and Florida Marlin stuff, picture frames covered with shells, and plastic dolphins and killer whales that can spout water. He buys Kelly a dolphin. Then, as an afterthought, he buys his mother-in-law a bottle of toilet water called Florida Breeze. He figures a little peace offering can’t hurt.
His purchases come to $19.85, leaving him $27.62.
He finds a quiet corner to unzip the big duffel bag. He rearranges the contents until they look like nothing but clothes and dirty laundry. He puts the dolphin and the toilet water on top, then zips the bag closed again. He finds a piece of string in a trash can and uses it to tie the zipper pull closed. Then he goes back to the Delta counter and checks the big duffel bag with them.
Cuervas pulls the Camry off the highway and into a little turnoff between the north and south lanes. It’s a heavily wooded portion of the divider, where he can back his car between the trees in such a way as to make it invisible to passing traffic. He knows the spot because a friend of his who used to be with the Highway Patrol pointed it out to him. The cops use to use it to “coop” - to catch some sleep on the job - or even to conduct a quick out-of-court settlement of a speeding infraction committed by some pretty young thing who’s afraid of losing her license.
He opens the trunk and lifts the lid, revealing the spare tire. He unscrews the dust cap from the valve. Using the blade of a silver pocketknife, he presses against the valve stem to let air out of the tire. He knows there’s supposed to be twenty kilos inside, so he figures there can’t be much air, maybe only five or ten seconds’ worth.
To his surprise, air keeps hissing out. Fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty. As the tire empties, Cuervas fills with panic. By the time the hissing noise stops, the sidewall of the tire is soft enough to push away from the rim.
Though he could easily pry the tire from its rim by hand to inspect the inside, Cuervas instead stabs at the rubber with the blade of his knife, cutting into it a
nd ripping it.
“Fuckin’ gringo!” he shouts. “Fuckin’ gringo maricón!” He continues to slash away at the empty tire until the knife blade closes across his fingers, drawing blood. He slams the lid and the trunk, gets back into the car, pulls out onto the highway in a violent spray of cinders and dirt, and heads back to the airport.
He covers the seven miles in just over six minutes, weaving in and out in the midday traffic. He remembers making the same drive, more or less, last night, only to arrive at the Avis counter after closing time. This time, it’s not the Avis counter he’s racing to; it’s the guy in the rolled-up jeans who’s stolen the twenty kilos from the spare tire.
Cuervas has no idea how the guy knew the stuff would be there. He figures somebody has to have tipped him off; he just doesn’t know who or why yet. The thought that the guy might have stumbled onto the drugs by pure accident never once occurs to him. In Raul Cuervas’s business, there is no such thing as coincidence; there are no pure accidents.
He pulls the Camry right up to the terminal and leaves it there. They can tow it back to fuckin’ Japan, for all he cares. He strides into the terminal, starts with the United ticketing area, then heads to American. . . .
Goodman hears the first announcement for his flight at twenty minutes to twelve. From the fact that there are passengers waiting to get on as standbys, he figures he was lucky to get a ticket when he did.
He listens for the announcement that they’re boarding his row before getting on line. When he was married and traveling with Shirley, she always said it didn’t matter, and insisted that they line up as soon as the very first announcement was made, the one for travelers with small children, or those requiring special assistance. But, without his wife’s bravery, Goodman’s afraid they might catch him boarding before his row’s been called, so he waits his turn.
Finally, at quarter of twelve, they announce that everyone can board, and Goodman takes his place at the rear of the line, the smaller of his two duffel bags tucked under his arm like a football.
It’s ten minutes to twelve by the time Cuervas works his way to the Delta gates, just in time to see Mr. Rolled-Up Jeans handing his boarding pass to a ticket taker at gate 22 and disappearing from view. Immediately, Cuervas runs to the counter, pushes past several people waiting for standby seats, and gets the attention of a man behind the counter.
“I gotta get on that flight!” he shouts.
“Sorry, sir,” the man tells him. “That flight’s actually oversold.”
“You’re actually an asshole!” is all Cuervas can think to say.
People turn to stare at him. After a moment, he walks off, but not before taking a look at the sign above the door through which the guy disappeared: GATE 22 FLIGHT 562 NEW YORK-JFK.
Michael Goodman sits looking out the window of the plane, watching the Florida coastline recede beneath him into the distance, and wondering exactly what it is he’s doing.
He has lived on this planet for a shade over forty years, and his entire life has been conventional to the point of absolute boredom. Or so it seems to him. For as long as he can remember, he has gotten up in the morning, showered, shaved, and gone to school or to work. He has a wife and a daughter. Had a wife. He has a studio apartment he rents, debts he owes, and cards made out of plastic that somehow manage to get him to the next crisis.
Up until this moment, Goodman’s only link to the world of illicit drugs has been the two marijuana cigarettes he puffed unsatisfactorily years ago. He knows nobody who traffics in narcotics, and can’t even come up with anyone who he knows for sure even uses narcotics, though he has his suspicions about the McPherson’s teenage son, the one who wears the earring.
Yet now he suddenly finds himself sitting in a plane, resting his feet on top of a duffel bag containing thousands of dollars’ worth of narcotics, while stapled to his ticket is a claim check for another duffel bag containing twice as much. He has absolutely no clue as to what he can do with the white powder inside those duffel bags in order to convert it somehow into money. And yet he knows that that’s precisely what he’s going to try to do.
* * *
Unable to get onto the same plane as Mr. Softee, Raul Cuervas toys with the idea of getting a ticket on the next available flight, but there are no nonstops to JFK for another hour, which means he’ll miss the guy at the other end. He heads to a bank of pay phones, feeling as if he’s about to enter a confessional booth. Only difference is, he knows Mister Fuentes isn’t going to be satisfied with telling him to say five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers.
It takes him twelve minutes and three phone calls before he finally gets to speak with Johnnie Delgado and explain things. Then he holds on for Mister Fuentes. But when next he hears a voice, it’s still that of Johnnie Delgado.
“El viejo is so pissed off, he won’t talk to you,” Delgado tells him.
“Tell him I’m real sorry,” Cuervas says. “Tell him I make it up to him, however I can.”
“He wants to know if you got a good look at the guy,” Delgado says.
“Yeah, yeah,” Cuervas assures him. “I could spot this guy in the fuckin’ Orange Bowl, man.”
There’s a pause. Cuervas can hear Delgado relaying his answer to Mister Fuentes in the background.
“Okay,” Delgado says. “He says for you to come to the hotel. Right away.”
It will be another fifteen minutes, while he’s driving back to Miami, before it dawns on Raul Cuervas that his ability to recognize the man may turn out to be the only thing that’s going to keep him alive. At least until they get the stuff back, that is.
In his business, that’s called reassurance.
Goodman drinks a Bloody Mary, emptying only half of the vodka in the tiny Smirnoff bottle they give him. He figures half will calm him down a bit, without depriving him of his ability to function. But then he uses a little more of the vodka to mix with what’s left in the can of Bloody Mary mix. Never much of a drinker, he feels a definite buzz even before draining the last of the mixture.
The person to his right, a young man with a ponytail, listens to music through headphones. The music is so loud that even Goodman can hear it. It sounds like rock ‘n’ roll, though Goodman actually isn’t too sure what rock ‘n’ roll really is. The music and the ponytail cause Goodman to wonder if the young man knows anything about narcotics. But he figures it would be a mistake to bring up the subject with a total stranger.
They bring him lunch, a turkey and cheese sandwich on a hero-type roll. Goodman knows that most people hate airplane food, and he understands it’s fashionable to complain about it. But the truth is, he secretly likes the meals you get on planes. He spreads mustard onto the sandwich from a little plastic packet, shakes on just the right amount of salt and pepper from individual containers, and eats slowly. Even the fig bar that’s supposed to be dessert is moist and good.
Tommy McAuliffe is working steady days at Kennedy all week. McAuliffe is a member of the New York Port Authority Police. He’s been given a computer-generated printout of a dozen incoming flights he and his partner are to meet that afternoon. “Meeting” a flight means checking the bags as they come off the baggage trains, right before they’re put on the conveyer belts that take them into the claim areas.
The seventh flight McAuliffe and his partner are to meet is due in at Gate D-17 at 3:37 p.m. It is Delta 562 from Fort Lauderdale. As always, McAuliffe and his partner will be looking for drugs. Almost all of the flights on their list are from South Florida. Statistical studies have consistently demonstrated that, along with Houston and New Orleans, those are the ones it pays to meet.
Because all of the flights are domestic, McAuliffe knows that only an external examination of the bags is permitted under law. Except in the case of customs agents dealing with international flights, the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits opening bags in the absence of a search warrant or probable cause to believe that they contain controlled substances.
Unde
r different circumstances, the prohibition might constitute an insurmountable obstacle to McAuliffe, given the fact that luggage tends to be opaque rather than transparent, and the further fact that controlled substances have a way of not showing up as much of anything on the X-ray machines.
This is where McAuliffe’s partner comes in handy. He has an uncanny ability that makes him ideally suited for his work. He is a four-year veteran of the K-9 division, a ninety-five-pound German shepherd named Rommel, trained to lie down whenever his nostrils detect an airborne con-centration greater than three parts per 100,000 of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or methamphetamine.
Goodman is one of those travelers who follows the suggestion to keep his seat belt fastened throughout the flight. (He even pays close attention to the demonstration on how to inflate the life jacket he’s assured is under his seat, and studies the laminated card that locates the emergency exit nearest him.) So he’s ready to descend long before the first announcement comes over the intercom.
He dries his palms on his pant legs. He tends to perspire at normal times, and this is no normal time. He’s worried about his daughter and her headaches, and how he’s going to pay for the tests she needs. He’s worried about the landing: Planes make him nervous, especially right before they touch down. He worries they may go into a skid, may blow a tire. The brakes may fail. The pilot may overshoot the runway. A little plane may be crossing in front of them as they roar down the tarmac. The possibilities are endless.
He’s worried about how to get home from the airport. He doesn’t think he’s got enough cash for a cab, which could run $30 into Manhattan. He’s heard about the “train to the plane,” but he doesn’t really know what it is. Certainly there’s no subway stop at Kennedy. But if there’s a “train to the plane,” doesn’t that mean there’s got to be a “train from the plane,” too?
Shoot the Moon Page 5