Powder Burn

by Carl Hiaasen

  The tall cop, Pincus, unexpectedly proffered a thin white envelope.

  “This is your property. Would you sign the receipt, please?”

  Startled, Meadows scrawled his name on a form the police officer supported on his notebook. He peeled open the envelope and inverted it. Four soiled twenty-dollar bills drifted onto his chest. Meadows stared at them dully.

  “You had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank when you were shot,” Pincus said. “This is all we could find.”

  The dark cop laughed.

  “You’ll never see the other twenty. Somebody grabbed it off the street,” he said. “And if it was me, I’d take about half of what’s left and buy a bottle of whiskey for that big black dude.”

  “Arthur?” He knew someone had come running, had knelt over him, stayed with him, but through the haze of pain he had not been able to see who. So it had been Arthur.

  “He had the bleeding pretty well controlled by the time the ambulance got there. If he hadn’t been so quick, it could have been a lot worse,” Nelson said.

  Meadows winced.

  “Do you want me to call the nurse?”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  Smoke from the fat cigar wreathed the policeman’s face. It nibbled at his mustache, poked at deep-set eyes and fingered his long black hair. He was a Latino, Meadows concluded, almost certainly Cuban. You had to tell by looking. His English was perfect.

  “Sorry, not supposed to smoke in here,” Nelson said with an airy wave of the cigar that was less apology than explanation, “but I figured you wouldn’t mind—there’s nothing wrong with your lungs.”

  “Su casa,” Meadows replied.

  “Coño, chico, hablas español. Qué bueno.”

  “Sí, hablo,” Meadows responded, and switched back to English. “Just now I’d rather not bother.”

  “No problem, amigo, I only want to ask one question. English is fine.”

  “Answer one first: Have you caught them?”

  “No.”

  “Will you catch them?”

  “We’re trying,” said Pincus, “trying hard.”

  “That means ‘No, we won’t,’ doesn’t it?”

  “Probably,” Nelson said with a shrug. “Maybe you can help. Can you describe the man who shot you?”

  “Not very well. It’s still a blur,” Meadows said, looking away. “I remember he was a big guy, and he wore aviator glasses. And he had a very prominent brow…it was so fast. Mostly I was thinking about the girl and her mother.”

  “Rest on it then. If enough of it comes back that you want to try building a composite with a police artist, you call me.”

  “Probably Homicide will take care of that,” Pincus remarked.

  “I think he ought to call me,” Nelson said curtly. “The first name is Octavio.” He laid a business card on the table next to Meadows’s bed.

  Meadows glanced at it, then took a sip from a glass of water. “Do you understand what it’s all about?” he asked.

  “What’s there to understand? Two assholes broke somebody’s balls and they got killed. Bang-bang.”

  “Tell me about it. I’d like to know.”

  “Naw, you don’t want to get involved. It’s scum from top to bottom.”

  “But I already am involved.”

  “The hell you are. You’re not even an ‘innocent bystander’—like the two who were killed. You are just what the paper calls ‘a slightly injured passer-by.’ They didn’t even use your name.”

  “The innocent bystanders”—Meadows controlled himself—“the woman and the girl, they were special people to me. Very close.”

  Nelson seemed to admire the smoke spilling from the red edge of the cigar.

  “Shit, amigo, I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t know that.”

  Meadows knew anger then, ignited by loss and pain, exacerbated by the cavalier cop and his own feeling of helplessness on the hospital bed.

  “The guy who shot me is also responsible for killing Sandy and Jessica. He ought to be in jail already, for Christ’s sake. It was broad daylight!”

  “It is easier to identify the plague, amigo, than to kill all the rats.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Meadows snarled.

  Pincus, who had silently watched the byplay, stepped smoothly into the ripening tension.

  “Mr. Meadows, there is a drug war going on in this city, and the incident in which you were involved is one aspect of it. Eventually we will dominate the violence, but our resources are limited, and we can’t do it overnight.…”

  It was a pat speech, Nelson thought. He had made it himself, less stilted, a dozen times. Now he listened in brooding silence. Dammit, he had walked into a minefield. He should have bothered to find out that there had been something between Meadows and the dead woman. No, Pincus should have found out. Pincus was the one who went by the book, wrote perfect reports and could conjure up a dozen conspiracies between home plate and first base.

  Now, Nelson reflected, instead of a wounded victim who could possibly give him a glimpse of the killer, he had on his hands an outraged guy who looked mad enough to eat raw meat.

  Meadows didn’t seem the vigilante or the I-am-going-to-the-newspapers-and-the-mayor type, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to cool him off just the same. Then maybe, once he had pulled his wits together, he would look through the mugs of dopers for the triggerman. If he was an architect, he should have a good eye.…

  “Look, amigo, I don’t know how much you know about the drug business—” Nelson began.

  “I don’t know anything about it. Why should I?”

  “If you yell like that, you’ll probably start bleeding again. But if you listen for a few minutes, we’ll tell you enough about it so that you’ll understand why a mother and her little girl got killed in the street and you got shot.”

  Meadows lapsed into glowering silence, but it was only later that he would begin to digest what they told him now. It was as if they were talking about some other universe. Meadows had no term of reference by which to judge what he heard.…

  South Florida, as Nelson and Pincus described it, was the victim of its own geography. Its thousands of miles of beaches, hundreds of airstrips, the inviting emptiness of the Everglades—all beckoned the drug merchants.

  “When it comes to law and order and justice and all those other beautiful things the Constitution promises, the United States of America ends just north of the Miami line. Miami is a free-fire zone, a no man’s land—call it what you will,” Nelson said.

  “This is drug central, amigo. From spaced-out kids to pillars of the establishment—everybody’s into it; everybody’s getting rich, and some people are getting dead.”

  From the Caribbean came huge quantities of marijuana, particularly from Jamaica, where ganja was the biggest cash crop. From Colombia in South America came mountains more of marijuana and perhaps the most prized drug of all, cocaine, the rich man’s high.

  The Colombian smugglers had established networks to move small quantities of cocaine. It came in purses, in high heels, in bellies and rectums. Customs once found two kilos sewn into the corpse of a three-month-old baby. A young Colombian once fell over dead, getting off a flight from Bogotá. When the pathologists got to her, they discovered she had stuffed nearly a pound of pure cocaine into her vagina. The plastic bags had leaked.

  “She never would have to work another day in her life. Instead, she went out on an eternal high.” Pincus snickered.

  However, as the market grew, Nelson related, the smugglers had grown bolder. Small quantities became tedious, more trouble than they were worth. The smugglers began sending freighter loads of grass and big bundles of coke through the Windward and Mona passages into the Florida Straits. Fast boats came from shore to offload. Airborne smugglers landed tons of grass on headlight-lit runways in the Everglades. One load was enough to pay for an aged DC-3 or a rusty tramp freighter a dozen times over.

  In the past f
ew years the drug trickle had become an avalanche of unprecedented proportions. It was enormous, unstoppable. If the risks were huge, so were the profits. Drugs made hundreds of blue-jean millionaires every year.

  And new widows as well, for as the volume grew, so did the violence. For a long time the Colombians distilled the coke and ran it as far as Florida. There the Cubans took over.

  Among the half million Cuban exiles in Miami there were some who remembered fondly the old Batista days when tough hombres ran the women and the slots and their own private armies. The Cuban multitude also held legions of lean young men who had learned to kill, to infiltrate, to run small boats at high speed on moonless nights. The CIA had taught them, in a secret, losing war against Fidel Castro. They had learned well—and they had taught their young, acquisitive, upwardly mobile American-bred cousins, nephews and children.

  Drug money was easy money. But more and more it tended to be bloody money.

  “Now the pros are in tight. They have no room for wise-ass amateurs. There are still some around, but soon the big boys will be calling all the shots.”

  The violence had begun in earnest when the offshore-onshore arrangement between the Colombians and the Cubans had begun breaking down. Cocaine greed had been the divisor.

  The Colombians had decided to become farmer-to-market dopers, cutting out the Cuban middlemen. They had moved onshore, setting up their own networks in Miami to distribute Colombia’s down-home produce. The Cubans had writhed at the intervention, defended their home turf with lead and moved offshore, buying wholesale in Colombia and transporting the coke northward themselves.

  It would be messy, but simple, if the Colombians shot the Cubans and vice versa, but it was more confusing than that. Colombians also shot Colombians and Cubans shot Cubans, and if sometimes a beautiful woman and her little girl got caught in the middle, too bad.

  “For every one we catch, another ten laugh all the way to the bank,” Nelson concluded.

  “And this time?” Meadows asked lightly. “Who was it this time?”

  “It’s hard to know,” Nelson replied. “The two stiffs carried no identification, but from the looks of them I’d say they were Colombians. Judging from the gun that killed them, the hit man was probably Cuban. You can’t be sure.”

  “It’s completely mindless,” Meadows protested.

  “Sure. And senseless and lawless. And hopeless. And the next time your very proper host at a dinner party passes around the spoons you be sure and tell him that.”

  OCTAVIO NELSON’S HEAD ACHED, and his tongue protested the bitterness of too many cigars. He drove reflexively. The rush hour was peaking, but the traffic into the city wasn’t bad. The sun, poised for flight over the Everglades, promised another couple of hours of daylight. Angela was working, so there was no hurry to get home. He would go back to the station and slog through some papers. It had not been a profitable afternoon, Nelson decided.

  “Can anybody really be that naïve?” Pincus asked suddenly. He meant Meadows.

  Nelson grunted. Meadows had been about as useful as another corpse. Something strange was going down among the dopers. Only that would account for the daylight chase through the Grove. Dopers liked to settle their differences alone, in the dark; it was more effective, and it kept the pressure down. Nelson needed to know what was happening. But he certainly would get no lead from the morose, angry young man they had just left.

  “If he had been able to finger the guy who shot him, it would have helped,” Nelson said. “And it would have been smoother, Wilbur, if we had known he was somehow connected to the woman and the little girl.”

  Pincus bridled at the rebuke. “Jesus, I checked him out six ways from Sunday. Our records, the feds’ records, everywhere.”

  “Did you ask around the Grove about him?”

  It was not hard to interpret the silence that followed. Nelson stifled a sigh of disgust. His partner was the complete twenty-first-century cop. If information were reduced to a form and filed in a computer, Wilbur Pincus would find it. If Meadows had ever married the girl, Pincus would have known it. If they ever had had drivers’ licenses from the same address or applied together for credit, Pincus would have found out. But if they had been simply good friends, or neighbors, or lovers, Pincus was defenseless. Nobody had bothered—yet—to file that kind of information in a central archive.

  “Forget it, Wilbur.” It probably didn’t make any difference anyway.

  ROBERTO CALLED THAT NIGHT just as Nelson was getting ready to leave the station. There was no small talk; there hardly ever was anymore.

  “I need a favor, hermano.”

  “What now?”

  “My car. It’s parked over on Brickell Avenue, near the toll gate. I need somebody to tow it in.”

  “Call a garage.”

  “It’s not that easy. Nothing illegal or anything like that, I swear. I just can’t go near it right now. I think the cops ought to do it.”

  “What are you up to now, por Dios?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later. It’s just some silly misunderstanding, but you really ought to get the car off the streets. I can pick it up down at the pound in a couple of days.”

  “Is it your car?”

  “Hell, yes, it’s my car, a brand-new four-fifty SEL, Sahara beige; it’s a beauty. Listen, the tag is PRW three-seventy-eight. OK? Thanks. I’ll call you later.”

  Octavio Nelson cursed silently. He yanked open a bottom desk drawer, dragged out a fresh cigar, but off the tip and spit it out. Some men simply had brothers. Octavio Nelson instead endured an affliction named Roberto.

  Some brothers drank together, remembered old times fondly, cosseted one another’s kids, helped each other when help was needed. Roberto Nelson was not that kind of brother. He was the kind who helped only himself until things went wrong. Then he came sniveling.

  Fat, cherubic, good-for-nothing Roberto, the eldest of them all, and the most spoiled; the one who most resembled that shambling, wispy figure of disarming smile and indolent air, his father. Dead how long? Twenty-five years as a storefront photographer in the sleazy streets behind the Capitolio. Twenty-five years of bad pictures; a sodden monologue on abandoned Ireland interspersed with Señora Sánchez-what-beautiful-children-you-have-surely-you’ll-want-some-extra-eight-by-tens. Twenty-five years, and when the mojitos had finally drowned the brogue, it was Nelson who’d arranged for the funeral and Roberto who’d cried.

  Nelson peered cynically at the steaming summer night. For a man who believed in justice he sure as hell hadn’t seen much—in his family, his job or anywhere else for that matter. And it was not as though he hadn’t looked. Cristo, how he had looked.

  He thought he had found it before he was twenty; wet, shivering, hungry and supremely content in the Sierra Maestra. He’d carried a rifle, mined bridges and lived with men who’d spoken of freedom and a new order. ¡Muera Batista; ¡Viva Fidel! Nelson spit at his wastebasket. Roberto had never come to fight.

  “You go, chico, I’ll take care of the family,” he had said the night that a teenage revolutionary marched to adulthood with tears in his eyes. Take care of the family, coño! One more dance at the yacht club, one more weekend in the country, another quick roll in the hay. But, boy, had Roberto been there that January morning when the guerrillas marched into Havana. Nobody had had a nicer red and black flag, and nobody had clapped harder. That day it had been Roberto who had cried and the hardened young section leader who had watched in a mixture of affection, disgust and unspoken political disquiet.

  Roberto had not been there either at a beach called Girón where Nelson, deceived by a revolution gone wrong and commanding exile troops this time, had begged from the shelter of a dead friend for air cover that never came.

  But wild horses would not have kept Roberto from the Orange Bowl to cheer the young president who promised to return a bloody battle flag one day in a free Havana. Octavio Nelson had not stayed for the speeches.

  At first Roberto had proclaimed
himself a businessman in their adopted land. Now he announced to all who wished to listen and many who didn’t that he was an executive. An executive of what? Will-o-the-wisp International, maybe. But something evidently. Roberto always had “a big deal cooking,” as he liked to tell his brother in his flawless English. Roberto wouldn’t even speak Spanish to his family. It didn’t suit his image.

  Good old Bobby Nelson. Big house on the bay, big boat, graphite tennis rackets, decorator wife, vacation cottage in North Carolina. Thank God he didn’t have any kids; they would have sneaked into the Ivy League on minority programs and claimed to their classmates to have been born on Beacon Hill.

  His brother was a crook. Octavio Nelson knew that. Big crimes, little crimes, any kind of crimes at all that didn’t require dirty hands. Roberto was always on hand with a charming smile, a brisk handshake and empty promises.

  And now he was running dope. Leave it to Roberto, forever at the height of fashion—a dope runner like every two-bit blow-dried dilettante in Miami. Probably even had his-and-hers matching gold spoons.

  How tricky for Roberto to have a cop brother who was always arresting dopers. Tricky but bearable. Octavio would always be a brother first and a cop second. Roberto knew that. He counted on it.

  Octavio Nelson sat for a long time. Around him the business of the police ebbed and flowed. He sensed it, but he didn’t see it, and he didn’t hear it. Should he, this one more time, do his brother’s bidding? If he did, it probably would be abetting a crime. If he didn’t, somebody might get hurt, and it certainly wouldn’t be cagey Roberto.

  Finally, painfully, Nelson picked up the black phone on his desk. He called a friend in the police garage.