by Ted Bell
“There are ways,” the guy said, bending over to check the Town Car’s left front tire tread. “Believe me, Mr. Jones, there are ways upon ways upon ways.”
“I do believe you. But I’m telling you one more time I’m not going to trade it in. Okay? Man, I haven’t even seen the eight-second Pontiac yet. So what are we even talking about here, Johnny? Where the hell is that Pontiac?”
The Auto Toy store guy had moved so he was standing in Stoke’s shadow again. Stoke was about six-eight and built like a very large armoire. He tended to create a lot of shade wherever he went.
Johnny mopped his brow. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You’ll see the Pontiac, all right? Just as soon as my boy finishes the detail. Like I told you. Look. Tell you what. Let’s step into my office over there and talk about it. I got air in there. You can sit down. I can get your information. You got kids? I got a nine-year old. Johnny Jr. He’s a pisser. Lemme show you his picture.”
Johnny whipped out his wallet and flashed some pictures in a cloudy accordion plastic holder. Stoke glanced at the kid and said, “Cute as a button all right.”
“Yeah. Kid just can’t keep his mind on his schoolwork because he—”
“Johnny. Stop. What’s that thing over there?”
“Which? The black Ferrari 430 Spider? Gorgeous automobile.”
“No.”
“That turquoise convertible? You don’t want that. No resale. A color only Ray Charles could love.”
“How do you know I don’t want it?”
“It’s a replica.”
“It looks real.”
“That’s why it’s called a replica.”
“Holy maca-moley.”
“What?”
“Is that it? Is that the car? Over there?”
A gleaming dark car had rolled out of the detail shed behind the guy’s back. Johnny craned his head around to look at it and wolf-whistled like he’d never laid eyes on it before this very minute.
Stoke was wishing his jaw was wired shut so it wouldn’t be hanging down on his collarbone like this. Bad negotiating tactic, see a car your jaw drops involuntarily on you.
Johnny let out another long wolf whistle.
“Oh, yeah, there she is, my friend, in the flesh. The 1965 Pontiac G-T-O convertible. Piece of friggin’ work, I kid you not, Mr. Jones. You’re looking at one bad-assed muscle car. Pumping major steroids, I shit you not.”
Stoke managed to get his own smile muscles under control before he let the guy see his face. He even managed a frown in reaction to the car’s absolutely gorgeous color.
“Black?” Stoke said, holding a hand up to shade his eyes. “Is that black? The ad said black.”
“Black? Hell, no it ain’t black. Black Raspberry, my man. Metallic. Totally custom job by my guys in Lauderdale. You like, amigo?”
“Yeah. I like. How much?”
Stoke, trying unsuccessfully to be cool about it, nonchalant as his friend and employer Alex Hawke might say, walked over to the car. Johnny followed close behind, trying to stay in his shadow.
“How much you ask?” Johnny said. “Well, we gotta talk about that, don’t we? How the hell you put a number on a piece of automotive art like this?”
“No. I mean how much horsepower has it got.” Stoke ran his hand over the almost liquid finish of the bulging hood.
“Were you a Marine? You carry yourself like a Marine.”
“Navy. SEAL. Three tours in the delta.”
Johnny was busy, opening the driver’s door and popping the hood.
“Cool. Semper fi, right? I got a lot of respect for you guys. So, what do we have under the hood? Okay. Very cool. Look at this thing, huh? Chrome headers. Everything you see here is street legal. For starters, we got an Alston chassis with Strange struts, spool and rear housing that holds a—”
“Strange struts?”
“Bear with me, sir, please. Strange is the manufacturer of the after-market struts. Okay? So, the transmission is a 1.96 low Powerglide with brake and TCI4500 converter. The engine powering this eight-second ride is an Indian Adventures special displacing 541 cubic inches and has a Moldex billet crank, Ross pistons, Oliver rods, Edelbrock wide port heads with T&D shaft rockers, a custom sheet-metal intake with two methanol toilets, MSD with crank trigger—”
“Toilets?” Stoke asked, sliding behind the wheel and glancing over his shoulder at the rolled and pleated red leather rear seat.
“It’s a racing terminology thing, Mr. Jones. Okay? Stop looking. There’s no toilet in the vehicle.”
“She’ll do a quarter mile in eight seconds?”
“She will. NHRA certified.”
“And she’s street legal?”
“Absofuckinlutely.”
“Mercy.”
“You want this car, Mr. Jones? I feel that you do.”
“I do.”
“Let’s do it.”
“I need a number.”
“Ballpark?”
“Yeah.”
“Step into my office.”
5
A n hour later, Stokely Jones was cruising south on I-95. He rumbled over the bridge connecting downtown Miami to where he lived on Brickell Key. He was at the wheel of his brand-new 1965 GTO, top down, wearing a super-sized shit-eating grin on his face. He simply couldn’t believe the chick-magnetizing power of a black raspberry GTO convertible. He’d gotten so many admiring glances driving back to Coconut Grove, his left arm and jaw muscles were tired out just from all the waving and smiling back he’d done in acknowledgment.
There’d been a high school car wash going on at the Dixie Crème and a mess of cheerleaders had swarmed over the car when he’d stopped for a light at the intersection. You girls behave, he’d said to them, blipping the throttle and watching them jump back at the throaty roar. Hey, it’s just an old GTO, what are all you ladies so excited about? And it hadn’t stopped there.
Now, as he came over the rise on the Brickell Island bridge, two blonde babes in a red Mustang convertible were pulling out of the Mandarin Hotel entrance. As he cruised by, surprise, surprise, Mustang Sally and her cute friend too were totally magnetized.
He checked the rear view, almost surprised they hadn’t hooked a damn U-ey and followed him home.
He pulled into the underground parking at One Tequesta Point, the tower that was home to his new Miami palazzo in the sky, blipping the GTO’s throttle again as he rumbled past the old security guy, Fast Eddie Falco.
Fast Eddie, cold cigar stub firmly clenched in his teeth, was reading the Miami Herald in his customized golf cart. Reading in the cart seemed to take up a lot of Eddie’s time. When he finished the sports section around noon, Stoke knew, he’d whip out an old paperback and dive into his afternoon reading program.
Because the two of them shared a liking for mysteries, Stoke and Eddie had recently started a small book club, just the two of them. They called it the “John D. MacDonald Men’s Reading Society.” Right now they were reading the Dress Her In Indigo, and it was one of Stoke’s personal favorites. Next Sunday, Eddie’s day off, the two of them were planning to drive up to Bahia Mar in Lauderdale and see if they couldn’t locate slip 14-A where Travis McGee moored his houseboat, the Busted Flush.
Hey, Stoke suddenly realized, they could take the GTO.
“Eight seconds, Eddie,” Stoke said to the security man as he pulled into his reserved parking spot right next to Fast Eddie’s reserved parking place. Reluctantly, he turned the key and shut her down. Fast Eddie still had his nose buried in the paper.
“You hear what I said, Ed? Eight seconds! You believe that?”
“Take your time,” Eddie said, not bothering to look up and flipping to the Living section. “I got all day.”
You had to laugh.
Stoke hit the switch that raised the ragtop, locked it up, gave it one long last look, and headed for the elevator. He punched 35, his floor, and leaned back against the wood-grained elevator wall, trying to imagine the look on Fancha’s face tonig
ht when she saw his new baby pull up outside her place over on Key Biscayne.
It was Saturday and he was taking her to dinner tonight, Sly Stallone’s new fusion place over on South Beach’s main drag. It would be Rollerbladers on parade tonight on Ocean, and all the muscle boys skating outside Sly’s would be ogling the heavy iron parked along the strip. He’d slip the valet guy a twenty to leave the GTO out front where he could keep an eye on it.
Sweet.
He’d been whistling an old tune all the way home, couldn’t get it out of his head. Ronnie and the Daytonas, if he remembered correctly. What were the words?
A wa-waaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaa—
He stepped off the elevator into the bright sunshine of the open-air thirty-fifth-floor lobby, strolled down the corridor, keyed in his number on the pad, and walked through his front door. Had to stop right there and admire the view, the sun lighting up half of Biscayne Bay beyond his living room windows. It was beautiful and it was all his.
A wa-waaaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaaa—
Man. Life was good.
Two bedrooms, two baths, and a wraparound terrace overlooking paradise spread out below. To buy the condo, he’d sold the small house and large apartment building in Bayside, Queens, that his sainted mother had left him. There was still some money left over to decorate the new crib. And now there was a brand-new piece of automotive art in the parking garage downstairs waiting for him.
He walked over to the tall windows to inspect his universe. A huge freighter was being towed out to sea, moving slowly through Government Cut. A new wide-load cruise ship had just arrived at the Port of Miami, probably quarantined because of some weird bacteria. A little farther east, he saw Blackhawke.
The two-hundred-forty-foot black-hulled yacht belonged to his longtime friend Alex Hawke, and she’d been in Miami for the last couple of months and was just out of the yard. Some kind of a weapons and engine refit while Hawke was down in Brazil or Argentina on his quasi-scientific expedition. In reality Alex was doing some unspecified government work. This time it was the British government. Usually, the work was unspecified and so was the government. That was the way Hawke operated.
There was work going on over at the big yacht. Day and night. Tom Quick, Hawke’s chief of security, had ordered bulletproof windows installed on all three decks after the near-miss incident in the harbor down in Santo Domingo. And they were upgrading the weapons and propulsion systems. The boat was Hawke’s floating operations center and he used it all over the world.
Stoke grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge and walked back out into the living room. The light was blinking on his machine and he plunked down into the deep suede chaise and punched the message play button. Probably Sharkey, he guessed.
“Hey. It’s me,” the disembodied voice said, not disappointing him.
It was Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a Cuban guy he’d recently put on his Tactics International payroll. He was the new company’s very first employee, he told Luis, so he’d better be good. Luis’s nickname, Sharkey, was because as a boy fishing with his father, he’d lost some of his left arm to a big bull shark down in the Keys. All he had now was a stump. He looked like, yeah, a Sharkey, Stoke had decided. Shark was a fairly laidback individual, maybe just a little nervous for Stoke’s taste, but he’d been a mate on a charter out of Key West for a couple of decades and he knew his way around that vicinity.
Not long after he was hired, Shark had told Stoke he liked this espionage gig a whole lot more than fishing. Stoke paid him five hundred a week plus expenses. Sharkey thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Went out and bought himself a sharkskin blazer to wear to work. Pair of secret agent sunglasses pushed back on his forehead, answering the phone in the rented office space in Coconut Grove. Stoke had to laugh.
Gonzales-Gonzales was Stoke’s only employee. Hell, it was only a month now since Tactics even had a payroll. But Stoke’s newly formed company had recently landed its first client and it was a good one. His clients had their home office in a big five-sided building up in D.C. called the Pentagon.
Hawke had given Stoke the seed money to get his company started. He’d even helped steer a guy they’d both worked with before, a CIA spook named Harry Brock, to him. Brock, who was now a military intelligence advisor to the Joint Chiefs, had met with him and had put Tactics on a retainer. They wanted him to poke around a little bit down in the Caribbean. Five grand a week plus expenses was a good start. It covered the rent and payroll and even kept the lights on.
From what Stoke was allowed to know, it seemed Harry Brock was planning on making some big presentation at an upcoming seminar on Latin American terrorist activities. Harry had hired Stoke to gather information to fill in the holes in a presentation he was planning to make. Harry told Stoke to look into one specific area, namely Cuba and the Florida Straits.
Harry’s boss in Washington, JCS chairman General Charley Moore, was getting very worried about a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Latin America. He was especially juned up about the new Cuba-Venezuela connection. It was that connection that had Washington’s pantyhose all twisted up at the moment. Harry Brock was calling in a lot of his sources. Every one of them was tasked to gather intel on the Chávez-Castro love-fest for the State Department’s Key West pow-wow.
The State Department was convinced Fidel was buying arms from the Russians with money from Chávez in Venezuela. Then he was shipping out weapons to all his new Latin American buddies. That was the theory anyway. But they needed confirmation and Stoke was one of the guys assigned to do that.
“How’s it hanging, Señor?” Sharkey’s recorded voice said. “Que pasa, hombre? Listen, man, I think I got something for you. This is still very private but we got to move fast or it won’t be. Like, we got to fly down first thing in the morning. Does that work? It does if you want to see this thing before the Federales find out about it. So, lemme know, okay, because—”
Stoke hit the save button and speed-dialed Sharkey’s cell.
“Fly down where?” he said the second the real-live Sharkey answered his phone.
“Dry Tortugas. Just south of Key West.”
“Tell me why, Luis.”
“Fortune offers us an opportunity, boss.”
“Good answer.”
“Oh, yeah. Look, I got us a seaplane out of Dinner Key. She’s called the ‘Blue Goose.’ Seven o’clock a.m. Mañana. Don’t be late.”
“What about the pilot?”
“Name is Mick. Mick Hocking. No worries, mate, like the man says. Dude ain’t saying nothing about nothing to nobody, man. I checked him out through a friend of mine at Miami-Dade PD. He’s okay. From Australia or New Zealand or some place. I’ll give you his number, you want to call him on his ‘mi-ble’ like I do all the time.”
“What’s a ‘mi-ble’?”
“What this Mick Hocking calls his cell phone.”
“Oh. Mobile. Got it. Hey. You know what the shark said to the clown?”
“No.”
“You taste funny.”
“That is so lame. Man, I can’t believe you even tell a handicapped person a joke like that.”
“I’m politically incorrect. Hey, listen. What are we looking at down there? It better be good, compadre, I’m telling you, ’cause I got a lot of paperwork and shit to deal with right here on the homefront.”
“It’s good. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, I’ll see. I’ll swing by and pick you up at six-thirty.”
“You get the car?”
“You’ll see.
6
THE AMAZON BASIN
W ould you kill for a cigarette? Commit murder for a single puff of burning weed? Could the sweet scent of Turkish tobacco drive a man insane? These were the questions the wild creature squatting inside the bamboo cage asked himself. The guard, who smoked in a very civilized manner, affected an air of boredom. He was leaning casually against a wooden bollard, gazing at the river.
Inside the small dock office, an argument wa
s raging. Wajari’s basso profundo rose and fell.
Hawke, desperate for a smoke, decided to try to communicate with his guard.
The tall, coppery fellow’s uniform was torn and faintly recognizable as British. On his head, a filthy white turban splotched with brown patches that appeared to be dried blood. An Arab, certainly, though perhaps of mixed descent. He carried himself with authority and his dark, heavily lidded eyes betrayed an intelligence beyond his station.
“Speak any English?” he asked, with little hope of a response.
“What’s that?” the man said, looking over at him with annoyance.
He spoke in a clipped English accent, with the unmistakable air of a chap unaccustomed to being addressed by caged animals.
Surprised, Hawke answered, “Actually, I asked if you spoke a bit of English.”
“More than a bit.” Afghani, on one side of the coin.
“What’s in the crates?” Hawke asked.
“Who wants to know?” the man said, as if the prisoner were a piece of rotted meat even the tigers wouldn’t touch.
“The Great Satan, of course,” Hawke said.
The man bent over and peered intently through the bars for a few seconds.
“Satan, I’ll grant you. But, great? I think not.” He rapped the muzzle of his gun on Hawke’s cage. “Tell me who you are.”
“The fifth richest man in England, at your service. Now give me a cigarette for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re not Hawke?”
“Not me.”
“Lord Alexander Hawke? You must be”
“Never heard of him.”
“It’s you, all right. I was expecting an Englishman, not the wild man of Borneo. Damn it, man! I’ve been half expecting you to show up around here. You were supposed to surface a week ago.”
“Sorry I’m late. I was detained. Cigarette?”
“Why not? I have to wait until they finish your paperwork anyway.”
“My paperwork?”
The man didn’t answer. Leaning his carbine against the bollard, he lowered himself to the dock, letting his legs dangle over the edge.