by Jon Land
“Yes, but he is little more than a strang—”
McCracken shoved Ventanna’s upper body over the edge. “You’ve decided to get into guns, Ventanna, and Alvarez has agreed to become your connection. In fact, he’s half of South Florida’s connection. Big market in the schools now, I understand. I want him.”
Ventanna looked in Blaine’s eyes fearfully. “I don’t know who you are, amigo, but you cannot get close to Alvarez.”
“No, Vincente. But you can. In fact you’ve got a meeting set with him for tonight. You’re going to tell me where.” McCracken eased back on the pressure and straightened Ventanna’s lapels. “And you’re going to lend me a suit.”
Since Ventanna wore his clothes long and oversized, the fit was acceptable. So, too, was the drug lord’s confirmation of the fact that tonight would mark the first time he would ever actually be meeting the mysterious Alvarez. He was to enter the Baja Beach Club in Cocowalk through the nightclub’s second-floor entrance wearing a white suit with a rose pinned to the right lapel. Alvarez would have people waiting.
Stepping into the palm-lined courtyard center of Cocowalk, McCracken was instantly aware of how much he stood out. There were few adults, certainly none his age, and his manner of dress was all wrong. No one else in view was wearing a suit, which would make it all the easier for Alvarez’s people to spot the man they thought was Ventanna once he entered the Baja Beach Club. Overhead the helicopter’s spotlight poured through Cocowalk’s roofless structure and caught him briefly. The crowd was cheering and hooting. “Sympathy for the Devil” was finished and the bandleader announced a tune by Led Zeppelin was next.
The concert had been set up on a makeshift stage erected at the base of a second-floor mezzanine. The top of the Cocowalk complex was rimmed with gold inlay, but the dominant shades of the lower levels were chic pastels of mauve and cream. Salesmen who didn’t rate a glass-covered storefront like the Gap, The Limited, Victoria’s Secret, or B. Dalton hawked their T-shirts or costume jewelry from pushcarts and kiosks set up anywhere they could squeeze them.
McCracken climbed to the second-floor veranda level. He passed by a bar called Fat Tuesday’s and approached the entrance to the Baja Beach Club on the right next to a restaurant called Big City Fish. There was a line to get in, but Blaine flashed Ventanna’s gray private membership card and went right on through.
His ears were instantly assaulted by a screeching rasp of a voice singing lyrics to the accompaniment of a karaoke machine. The words slid down a screen on the wall of a large inner room as a balding patron fought to match the Bob Dylan classic “Tangled Up in Blue.” Few of the Baja Beach Club’s young patrons seemed to be familiar with what he was singing. Bikini-clad waitresses loped across the floor toting trays of multicolored drinks.
“Body shots!” one advertised above the din. “Body shots!”
“Mr. Ventanna?”
Blaine turned to his right and found a young man dressed in a baggy olive suit.
“Mr. Alvarez is waiting upstairs. If you’ll just follow me …”
They moved toward a doorway with an arrow pointing up over it. The door led back outside and onto a narrow set of brick steps. On the Baja Beach Club’s second floor, Cocowalk’s third, the clutter of people was the tightest yet. McCracken followed the young man through a crowd loud enough to all but drown out the Led Zeppelin song being pounded out down on the first level. Blaine saw a covered outdoor balcony just up ahead, strangely deserted considering the excellent view it offered of the festivities. A trio of figures leaned over the far railing. A pair standing vigil at the doorway halted McCracken’s progress after his escort had slid through. The escort moved to the railing and spoke briefly to the shortest figure peering over it. The figure turned and started McCracken’s way.
It was a kid; sixteen, seventeen maybe, wearing baggy cuffed jeans and a silk floral shirt. Dark curly hair wet with mousse or gel. Deep-tanned, with the sharpest blue eyes Blaine had ever seen.
“I’m Carlos Alvarez,” the kid said when he neared McCracken.
He didn’t stick out his hand. Neither did Blaine.
“I was supposed to meet with Manuel.”
“Yeah, well, my father don’t meet with just anybody.” The kid paused. “You carrying?”
“Your instructions were not to, amigo,” McCracken followed, trying hard not to register his shock at the fact that South Florida’s biggest gunrunning operation was being run by a father-and-son team.
“I’m not your amigo,” the kid told him in perfect English. “You want to do business, let’s do it.”
A canopied table was set out on the balcony, and two of the kid’s goons led Blaine toward it. The view from this vantage point took in all of Cocowalk. For the first time McCracken had clear sight of the cineplex occupying the fourth floor and the Oriental gazebo-like structures sitting atop the open U-shaped roof that sloped around the courtyard.
“You sure you’re not carrying?” Alvarez said, taking the seat across from him. The kid had both a beer and some foamy pink concoction within easy reach. But he seemed more interested in working a wad of gum noisily about his mouth. “I mean, I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot or anything.”
“What’s this about?” Blaine snapped, pulling open his jacket to invite a frisk.
“Just want to give you a chance to own up to a fuck-up if you made it.”
“Vincente Ventanna gave his word,” Blaine said with just enough toughness while one of the kid’s henchmen patted him down.
The kid leaned forward slightly. A smile full of white teeth spread across his face.
“Trouble is, amigo, you’re not Ventanna.”
CHAPTER 3
Down on Florida Avenue, Cassas checked his watch. Around him the street continued to swell with additional throngs of people. He figured South Beach must be dead, so its patrons had hit the Grove for what remained of the night. Red lights meant little to drivers in search of a parking space or familiar face. No one was going anywhere, or if they were, they weren’t going fast.
Perfect.
Cassas drew the cellular phone from his pocket. The sight was not unfamiliar in the Grove, giving him no reason to disguise it. He pressed out the numbers and waited.
“Here,” a voice greeted.
“It’s time,” Cassas signaled.
Five guns had been thrust McCracken’s way before he could move. Slivers of the chopper’s spotlight caught the Alvarez kid’s face as he continued. “You think I’m stupid, man? You think I don’t check out who wants to meet with me?” His white teeth twisted into a half snarl. “This is Miami. I own this city.”
“Then you should be taking better care of it. Stay home and finish your homework instead of moving guns.”
“Funny, man.”
“Maybe study for midterms.”
“You’re a regular fucking riot.”
“I hope you’re not a dropout.”
“A average, shit for brains,” the kid boasted. “At Ransom.”
“Must be the local juvenile detention center.”
“Keep it up, asshole, and maybe I’ll have you killed slow.”
“You’re out of your league, kid.”
Alvarez leaned back, cupped his hands behind his head, and shifted his eyes among the five gunmen spread over the balcony. “This is fun. I’m glad I let you up here.”
“This your operation or your father’s?”
“Both.”
“Keeping it all in the family.”
“Hey, man, the American Dream!” Alvarez shook his head disparagingly. “And you come here hoping to spoil it.”
“Kids are killing each other with your guns.”
“I got national distribution now. Branching out.”
“That’s why I came.”
The kid chuckled. “You gonna stop me, that it?”
Blaine shook his head. “People like you always end up stopping themselves. I just might help the process along.”
The kid’s eyes bulged incredulously. “Look around you, man. I got the guns. I snap my fingers and you’re dead right here.”
“Your father wouldn’t like that.”
“Somewhere else, then. Don’t matter to me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Blaine corrected. “I told you, you should be studying.”
The kid snarled again. “You gonna be sorry you tried this, man You gonna be soooooooo sorry.”
A second helicopter dropped down from overhead, descending right above them. Two of the Alvarez kid’s guards stole glances at it from their posts near the balcony railing.
“Hey,” Alvarez shot Blaine’s way when he noticed McCracken’s eyes drifting toward it as well, “I’m talking to you.”
Blaine watched the second chopper lower in a direct line with the Baja Beach Club’s balcony and dropped to the floor.
Rat-tat-tat … rat-tat-tat …
The machine-gun fire tore through the men at the railing first. Blaine was going for Alvarez to take him down when the kid swung the chopper’s way and was greeted with a volley of bullets. Impact threw him over the table, blood jetting from his silk shirt. Bullets dropped another of his guards to the floor. Two more were cut down in the back as they tried to flee.
McCracken crawled to the nearest one and yanked the nine-millimeter Beretta pistol out of his holster, then a trio of clips from his jacket pocket. He lunged to his feet and slammed his shoulders against the lone outdoor wall. At the same time, the chopper’s pilot did his best version of a quick drop in a hot landing zone and deposited a half-dozen black-clad gunmen atop the second-story roof of Big City Fish. The helicopter banked immediately back into a rise as the gunmen broke into a spread formation and leveled their M16s toward the crowd on the first floor.
McCracken opened fire. A pair of his bullets punched one of their number backwards. The way he went down could only mean body armor, ruling out body shots to effect a kill.
The other five gunmen swung the balcony’s way and Blaine managed to direct a bullet dead center into one of their foreheads. He dove back to the floor just ahead of the barrage of 7.62mm fire and crawled for the doorway leading back into the Baja Beach Club.
Throughout Cocowalk, meanwhile, confusion had given way to chaos. The band giving the concert had stopped in the middle of another Stones number and its members were scurrying for cover. The initial hail of bullets that in the original plan would have been fired into the crowd had alerted it instead. The complex’s front provided the most convenient means of exit by far, and the thousands gathered rushed that way in a stampede-like charge until the attacking helicopter dropped low to cut off their escape. Automatic fire rained down from within it, effectively pinning the occupants of Cocowalk in their tracks. Bullets thumped into bodies and dropped them where they stood.
McCracken emerged through the chaos of the Baja Beach Club onto Cocowalk’s second floor just as the enemy chopper started into another rise. The carnage it had left sickened him. Screams rose over the last of the gunfire pouring from within it.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ!”
McCracken held his Beretta overhead and fought to angle through the crowd for a shot at another of the gunmen. All five had dropped off the roof and would be moving through Cocowalk, no doubt distracted by the presence of a man who had drastically altered their plans.
Meanwhile, the dozen police officers who were on duty in Cocowalk struggled to maintain a semblance of order, at the very least to track the movements of the gunmen spreading through the mall. The walkie-talkies the officers carried meant backup would already be en route in the form of every bit of firepower the Miami police could muster. But Blaine had to assume that it was too far away to do much good at all and would be hard-pressed to penetrate the crowds in any case.
The throng McCracken was caught in suddenly stopped its surge for the stairs. One of the gunmen had appeared on the opposite side of the mall. The policeman who had been posted near the second floor entrance to the Baja Beach Club frantically shoved patrons aside to clear a path for his bullets. The gunman didn’t wait. He simply fired into the crowd. The policeman went down. The survivors around him hit the floor, exposing the gunman who had begun to move on.
“Down!” Blaine screamed to those nearest him and got off a trio of bullets.
The first thumped into the gunman’s bulletproof vest and drove him backwards. The second caught him just under the collarbone, while the third found his skull. The man keeled over.
McCracken pulled himself on, briefly alone now as he neared the mezzanine that overlooked the makeshift stage and panic-seized Cocowalk entrance. Gunfire traced him from the third floor and he had no choice but to thrust himself over the railing down to the first.
He hit the concert stage with knees tucked to his chest, landed in a sea of wires and cables. One of the big amplifiers tipped over at the same time the spotlight from the civilian chopper inadvertently found him in its spill.
“Shit!” McCracken rasped and threw himself into a roll that saved him from a barrage originating on the second floor in front of B. Dalton.
Blaine came up firing the Beretta in that direction. No way to hope for a killshot this time. Four hits into the gunman’s legs, though, pulled his feet out from under him. His machine gun was still erupting when he went down, and the bullets shattered the plate-glass window fronts of B. Dalton and the stores on either side of it.
Sirens were wailing in the distance. But from the traffic Blaine had witnessed in the Grove streets, certain to be worsened tenfold by now, their arrival was hardly imminent. In addition to cars, the streets had filled with those people lucky enough not to have been within Cocowalk and others even more lucky to have escaped it. The asphalt seemed to buckle under the weight of so many charging onto it at once, the panic spreading fast.
McCracken realized the enemy chopper had temporarily abandoned its murderous vigil over the main entrance to swoop toward him. He threw himself behind the cover of a marble planter and felt bullets tear chips of it away on impact. When he heard additional gunfire but felt no more pounding, he knew the chopper had returned its attention to the young people, who, suddenly unimpeded, had launched a massive rush for Cocowalk’s front once more.
Blaine rose from his cover and opened fire on the helicopter. He emptied the rest of the clip into its frame and succeeded in drawing the chopper toward him again. The remaining three gunmen he could let go for now. The chopper was his main concern. It had to be neutralized. But not with a simple nine-millimeter, or even a machine gun. Movie scenes of bullets downing helicopters were hardly realistic. There were other ways, though.
Blaine’s eyes drifted up from the mass of rock music equipment on the small stage, following the thick lines of coaxial cable all the way to what must have been a fourth-floor power source. He had his answer.
McCracken snapped a fresh clip home into the Beretta and bolted for the stairs. Bullets from two of the remaining gunmen who had been laying in wait for him burned his way and he returned the fire, forcing them to take cover. One reemerged as soon as Blaine reached the second floor, but McCracken’s lightning reflexes served him well. He fired three bullets dead on, while the best the gunman could manage was a harmless spray. The first shots took the man in the right shoulder and arm. The third obliterated his throat and showered the panicked bystanders nearest him with blood.
Blaine then slid across the linoleum to avoid a burst fired down from the third-floor perch of one of the two remaining gunmen. Still in motion, McCracken drained the rest of his second clip, and the gunman dropped over the railing, dead.
The helicopter swooped for another attack. Blaine dove for cover beneath a collection of empty pushcarts stored near a wall on the second floor. He covered his head against the exploding splinters of wood and waited once more until the chopper whirled for a return to the Cocowalk entrance before reemerging.
Only one of the gunmen remained between him and the point on
the fourth floor where the other ends of the concert cables were plugged. McCracken took the stairs quickly to the third floor and was halfway to the fourth when a bullet grazed his side. As hot pain seared through him, he spun to see not the last gunman, but the one he had shot in the legs lying forty feet away. A trail of blood lay in his wake where he had dragged himself. The gunman tried for the trigger again, but McCracken had already measured off a head shot with the first bullet in the last clip salvaged from Alvarez’s dead guard.
Having neutralized all but one of his adversaries, McCracken sprinted to the fourth floor to follow the tangle of the coaxial cables to their source. This vantage point afforded him a clear view into the street. A quartet of police cars had managed to work their way through the snarl and were moving forward.
The helicopter, which had started back for him, again turned its attention on them. It pummeled the closest squad car with a fusillade that sent it careening down Mayfair Boulevard. Spinning wildly out of control, the car smashed through the front of Johnny Rocket’s, an old-fashioned fifties soda fountain that until tonight had boasted the best burgers in Miami. A grenade fired from a launcher inside the chopper turned a second police car into a spinning hulk of burning metal, while a third cruiser crashed into a row of parked cars trying to avoid it.
McCracken felt it all like kicks to his stomach. He reached a large junction box the coaxial cables had been plugged into and yanked one out. He took up what remained of the slack and then, with all his strength, jerked the other end of the cable up from the first floor. On the makeshift stage, an amp tipped over and in true domino effect took a row of equipment with it. Out of the jumble the cable began to rise.
Directly across from him, on the other side of Cocowalk, the enemy helicopter was cutting a horizontal path through the air, strafing the many buildings. Glass shattered and showered over those patrons still stuck within the complex. More sirens wailed. McCracken could see a police helicopter speeding through the air in the Grove’s direction.