Warlord: An Alex Hawke Novel

by Ted Bell

  “Fuck me,” Harry said disconsolately. The graveyard shift, 12:00 midnight to 6:00 a.m., was the most grueling of all.

  THIRTY-ONE

  HARRY PLOPPED DOWN IN THE CHAIR, settled in, and stared up at the monitor with a look of abject misery. He had not the faintest idea why he had ever thought this stakeout was going to be a wild and crazy few days in the lap of luxury on the beach. It sucked. Big time.

  Stoke padded off to his bedroom, one of four down a long hallway, hit the pillow on his fabulous king-size bed, and was instantly sound asleep. Two seconds later his bedside phone rang. He looked at the fuzzy green numbers on the digital clock. Somehow, it was almost six o’clock in the morning.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Stoke, it’s me. Sharkey.”

  “Shark, tell me how you got this number.”

  “I called Fancha. She gave it to me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I tole her, man, this is an emergency. She gave it to me.”

  “What kind of emergency?”

  “Life and death. I gotta come out of the joint, man. Right now. I’m dead serious.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know where to begin is the problem. See, there’s this crazy con on my cell block in the Glades. Seminole Indian guy. Calls himself Chief Johnny Two Guns. Former championship prizefighter who murdered his own mother with a fucking tourist-shop tomahawk he bought in Alligator Alley. Know what he tells me yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “He says ‘Got some good news and bad news for you, Nurse Shark-boy. Nurse shark, get it? Funny, huh? The good news is, he says, I’m getting married tomorrow. Bad news is you the squaw.”

  Stoke said, “That’s bad.”

  “Tell me about it. Anyway, he’s out in the yard every day sayin’ I’m his bitch. I got to wear Revlon Love Dew lipstick during lock-down. And a blond wig, Stoke; man calls me his little ‘Cuban Firecracker’ I’m telling you, man, it’s just a matter of time before I get my butt fucked. Flipping out in here, I’m saying, I mean what the hell, man? I didn’t put in for this shit.”

  Luis Gonzales-Gonzales sounding all wound up like he was about to come unsprung.

  “You juiced right now, Shark? You jacked up on shit?”

  “Ah, hell, no. Clean and mean. Ask me a question.”

  “Capital of Idaho?” said Stoke. Shark, for God knows what reason, had decided long ago it would be a good idea to memorize all the U.S. state capitals.

  “Boise.”

  “Alaska.”

  “Juneau. Okay? Satisfied? I ain’t wrecked. Now get my ass the fuck out, boss.”

  “Anybody else troubling you?”

  “Lemme see. Aryan Brotherhood? Yeah, they’re troublesome. Big white asshole skinhead with a swastika on his forehead. Calls himself ‘The Bonecrusher.’ And there’s this other guy see, in that Islam cell you want me to penetrate. He’s this Black Muslim cat, calls himself Ishtar, big sonofabitch, three hundred pounds at least. Eyes bulging out his head like hard-boiled eggs. He says he catches me doing the nasty with the Chief he’s going to cut my dick off with a razor, one inch at a time.”

  “That shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Don’t mess with me right now, Stoke. Serious. I can’t take this place a second longer. And when I get out, I’m taking early retirement. Spend more time with my remaining limbs.”

  “Sharkey, you know how to protect yourself against this kind of shit. You got your shank.”

  “Shit, that’s the thing. They did a shakedown of my cell and found my shiv inside my mattress. I got nothing, man, nothing. You know what it’s like to be a one-armed Cuban cat doesn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds in a bug-house full of homicidal maniacs like the Glades?”

  “Did you penetrate that radical Islam cell yet? Get me some names besides this Ishtar cat? Say yes and you can come out.”

  “Penetrate the cell? Fuck, that’s the problem. I penetrated the damn cell and now they trying to penetrate me! That’s what I’m talking about, Stoke. Penetrate my ass! And if I don’t pick up the soap, they whack me. I gotta come out, Stoke. Please get me out. I’m beggin’ you. I can’t do another day in stir.”

  “Look, Sharkey, I understand. But we need to get inside these bad boys’ heads and find out what the hell kind of bad shit they got in mind once they get out.”

  “I found out some stuff today, peeking at the Wizard’s laptop when nobody was looking.”

  “Wizard?”

  “Little old Pakistani guy who seems in charge. Looks like Yoda in Star Wars. Has this long pointed white beard. Wears a robe all the time, some kinda Arab writing all over it. Talks like Yoda too. I think he does it on purpose, you know, give himself a little personality.”

  “He’s got a computer? You can’t have a computer in the slam, man.”

  “He does, Stoke, all I can tell you. Smuggled in by a guard at Admin who’s on the little guy’s payroll, how do I know? Got one of those little plug-in aerials that gives you Internet access.”

  “Where’s he hide it?”

  “I dunno. I heard about it and paid some guard named Figg a grand to let me get a quick look at it when everybody was out in the Yard.”

  “Can you get back at that computer? Steal it? Then you can come out.”

  “I got to come out now, man, I’m serious. Ishtar catches me poking around trying to steal the Wizard’s shit, I’m dead on arrival.”

  “Calm down, Sharkey. I got an idea. I don’t like it, but I guess I got no choice but to do it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m coming inside with you.”

  “What?”

  “I can get myself incarcerated at the Glades with you. Have us put in a cell together so I can take care of your skinny ass. Keep you from getting married to somebody you’re not totally in love with. Steal the Wizard’s computer.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s really sounding good, man, but when?”

  “Tell me where the Wizard keeps his laptop and how the hell they let a con have one in the joint.”

  “Smuggled in. He’s got a battery charger and some kind of antenna he plugs into it that picks up cell-phone towers, I think. What do I know. No idea where he hides it but someplace good because the hacks toss his cell all the damn time and they can’t find it. So, when? Like, tomorrow?”

  “As soon as I put away the bitch tried to kill me and almost killed my good friend Fast Eddie Falco.”

  “How long will that take, you figure?”

  “Not long. I’m sitting on her twenty million bucks but she has to go through me to get it.”

  “Why can’t Harry do that? He’s goddamn CIA.”

  “Harry sucks at surveillance. No patience. He’s got severe attention deficit syndrome.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just hang in there, okay? Stop taking showers for a few days. Maybe the stink’ll keep ’em away from you too. I’ll come take care of you, Sharkey, I promise.”

  “Okay. But what do I do until you get here?”

  “Eat a lightbulb and get yourself sent to the prison hospital.”

  “Eat a lightbulb?”

  “Nobody said it would be easy, Shark.”

  Stoke hung up. He would have killed to go back to sleep but it was 6:00 a.m. and he had to go relieve his partner.

  He grabbed some coffee in the kitchen and went out into the living room. Harry was on the floor doing push-ups, which was okay as long as he kept one eye on the monitor.

  “Beddy-bye time, little buddy,” Stoke said to Brock, sitting down in the armchair and sipping his hot java. “The hell are you doing down there?”

  “I’m trying to wear myself out so I go to sleep instantly,” Harry said, the words coming out funny because of the push-ups. “Think I ate too many reds.”

  “Clock is ticking, partner.”

  “Twenty more.”

  “Anything interesting happen on TV?”

  “Yeah, I g
uess. Somebody checked in.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. The night manager called me from the front desk about three in the morning. Some sheik and his family. Just flew in from Dubai. You know what they charge for that suite across the hall? Ten grand a night.”

  “Harry. Tell me you checked this guy out.”

  “Of course. That’s why we’re in this fucking dump.”

  “And?”

  “And it was a sheik and his family, like the guy said. Wife, dog, five little rug rats all under the age of ten. And luggage. Two bellmen with carts stacked with those big steamer trunks, the luggage with the brown LVs all over, you know what I mean?”

  “Louis Vuitton.”

  “Yeah, those. Okay, that’s it. I’m hitting the sack, pards. Keep your eyes open.”

  “Harry. Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Come back here. Describe the wife. Tell me exactly what she looked like.”

  “The wife? Hell, Stoke, it was a whole family. Seven of them, like I told you. Oh, and a little white dog on a diamond-studded leash.”

  “What did the wife look like, Harry?”

  “Shit, Stoke, I didn’t get that good a look at her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for starters she was wearing one of those black burkas. A fancy one. The one all the rich Arab women wear.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t see her?”

  “Of course I saw her. I saw her fucking husband. I saw her fucking children. And I saw her luggage and her fucking dog. Gimme a break, man. I’ve been eating reds all night and I’m a little ragged here.”

  “Ragged? I’m not in a real good mood, Harry. Seriously. I just got off the phone with Sharkey. I’m going to prison soon, Harry, a very bad prison.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Later. Now, you tell me all those people are still inside that suite across the hall. That they did not come out. Not one of them. Not ever.”

  “Not one of them came out. I swear. I was watching that door, man. I been all over it.”

  “They order any room service? Maid service? Bellmen? Plumbers? Electricians?”

  “No. Not a soul. I swear.”

  “You think about maybe waking me up, Harry?”

  “It didn’t seem like that big a—”

  “Did you think about telling the manager to bring their passports up to our suite? So you could, you know, sorta check them out?”

  “No. I mean, yes, of course I thought about it. But—”

  “Did you think about what a good disguise a burka would make for a woman who didn’t want to be recognized?”

  “I—”

  “Get your weapon, Harry. We’re going across the hall to pay the sheik a visit. We’re hotel detectives checking on the sheik’s security arrangements in case they give us any trouble. Okay?”

  “Good idea.”

  “They better be in there, Harry.”

  “They’re in there, dude. Unless they can fly off balconies, they are most definitely fucking in there.”

  THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE WAS EMPTY. Stoke examined every square inch of it. You’d never know anyone had set foot in it. Only by going into the master bedroom walk-in closet, where there were chunks of plaster and plaster dust all over the goddamned floor where a fake wall had been taken down, and a big damn hole punched in the real wall behind it, would you know somebody had been there. There was a very substantial wall safe with the door hanging ajar. It was empty too. Imagine that.

  “Shit,” Harry Brock said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Yeah,” Stoke said, too angry with his partner to say more.

  “So how did they get out, Stoke? Jesus.”

  “It seems there is a small service elevator in the suite’s kitchen pantry. It’s behind a china cabinet that swings out from the wall. So room service can bring meals and hors d’oeuvres up directly and heat them for cocktail parties and shit.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Our guys didn’t know about the service elevator?”

  “No, Harry, they did not. I did not. I should have. My bad. You feel better now?”

  “How the hell you get twenty million in hundreds out of the damn suite? Out of the hotel?”

  “I dunno. Steamer trunks with little brown LVs all over them, maybe? Huh? You think?”

  “Right.”

  “But all those kids. The dog. The sheik.”

  “Relatives. Cousins, nephews, who the hell knows.”

  “Yeah, relatives. Except for the dog.”

  “Harry, I’m going to kill you.”

  “You know what? I don’t blame you. Give me five minutes alone in that bathroom and I’ll kill myself.”

  “I can’t wait five minutes. Besides, I’d really rather do it myself, Harry,” Stoke said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  PALM BEACH, FLORIDA

  DRIVE EXACTLY 39.7 MILES DUE WEST of Palm Beach, Florida, and you will soon find yourself on another planet. There you’ll find the miniburg strip called Belle Glade sweltering amid vast cane fields. BeeGee, as Stoke called it, was about as far removed from the money, tropical splendors, and glamour of Palm Beach as the earth is from the sun.

  In addition to a smattering of smoke-belching Big Sugar factories out in the fields, a gas station, and a grotty Burger King, BeeGee is also the home of an infamous hellhole penal colony called the Glades Correctional Institution.

  The Glades, for short. Think Cool Hand Luke meets Devil’s Island and you’ve got yourself a pretty good mental picture. Established in 1932 as Florida Prison Farm 2, inmates were originally sent there to grow vegetables for other state institutions. Now it’s just GCI, or as the medium-to-close custody population calls it, the Glades.

  Stoke, who would be incarcerated inside the razor-barbed wire boundaries of the Glades in a few short hours, at three o’clock that very afternoon, had told Harry Brock he wanted to have his “last meal” in Palm Beach. Palm Beach? Brock had said. Wasn’t that where Bernie Madoff had lived? That’s how much Harry knew about Palm Beach.

  Stoke was starving. He knew exactly what he wanted, too. Cup of black bean soup followed by a rare bacon cheeseburger, mushrooms, fried onions, lettuce, extra mayo, at a restaurant called Taboo on Worth Avenue. Maybe even two bacon cheeseburgers. What the hell. God only knew how long he’d be inside the joint.

  They were blasting up I-95 from Miami in Stoke’s GTO, top down, Barry White CD pulsing, pushing the bass envelope on the Bose system. It was Stoke’s particular fave, Staying Power, the one Barry White album that had the six-minute duet with Lisa Stansfield, the one called “The Longer We Make Love,” on it. Stoke, behind the wheel, was singing along with Barry.

  The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,

  The longer we do it, the more we get down to it…

  When they reached the I-95 exits for Southern Boulevard, Stoke took the one going east toward the Atlantic Ocean. Moments later, they were rumbling over what the Palm Beach locals called the South Bridge, brothers standing on both sides of the bridge, fishing in the hot sunshine, little Styrofoam coolers with ice and beer at their feet, not a care in the whole damn world. And that lucky old sun, he just rolls around heaven all day.

  “You really look depressed,” Harry said, looking over at him.

  “Me? Nah. Hell, I got it all, baby. See that big pinkish house over on the left? Big green lawn rolling down to the water. Know what that is?”

  “Yeah. A big pink house.”

  “That just happens to be Mar-a-Lago, Harry. Home of none other than the Donald himself. Donald and me, hell, we practically neighbors now. Glades is only about forty miles from here, y’know. Turn this car around, it’s a straight shot west out Southern Boulevard. Way I see it, me and the Donald live on the same damn street. ’Course, I don’t have a pool and a nine-hole golf course, but still.”

  “You are depressed.”

  Stoke, still pissed at Harry over the Fontainebleau debacle, rea
ched over and turned Barry up, now on another CD backed by a full orchestra and Love Unlimited doing “Love’s Theme,” and concentrated on the music and just cruising Ocean Boulevard, breathing the salt air, the wide blue Atlantic sparkling on his right, gorgeous flowery mansions flashing by on his left. Beautiful. He had a lot of sins, but envy had never been one of them. He appreciated every damn thing he had.

  When they got to Worth Avenue, he hung a left, crossed County Road, and pulled up right in front of Taboo.

  The unpretentious restaurant was smack-dab in the middle of some of the most expensive shopping real estate this side of Fifth Avenue or Rodeo. The only thing Stoke ever shopped for here was the very expensive bacon cheeseburgers at Taboo. He had bought a couple of pairs of white boxers when Brooks Brothers, a couple of doors down the avenue, was having a sale. But he didn’t think that really counted as legitimate Palm Beach shopping.

  The valet parking guy came over to the GTO, his mouth hanging open. The rumble of the straight pipes was pretty strong here on the narrow street. Stoke could feel eyes on him as he climbed out of the car. Good. Let ’em burn their eyes on me moving, as the old song said. He climbed out, handed the kid the keys.

  “What color is this?” the kid said, caressing the mirrorlike fender.

  “Black raspberry. Metallic.”

  “Custom?”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “How many horses?”

  “You can’t count that high, son. Now you take care of it and I’ll take care of you.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll just put it right here in front where I can keep an eye on it.”

  “There you go. Class up the avenue a little bit, right? All these tacky-ass Rolls-Royce Phantoms and Ferraris and Lambos and shit. Now you got some serious Dee-troit iron parked right here, you watch business pick up. Guaranteed.”

  They went inside, immediately confronting a wall of ice-cold air. A shortish, sophisticated-looking man in a suit and tie, half-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, rushed up and shook Stoke’s hand. “Mr. Jones, long time no see. What brings you back to Palm Beach?”

  “Doing a little shopping. Actually I’m meeting Detective Garcia here for lunch. Oh. Franklin, please say hello to my driver, Harry Brock.”