Powder Burn

by Carl Hiaasen

  Patti walked back into the room. “You two getting along?”

  “Sure,” Manny said. “Was that Susie?”

  “Yeah, and I told her you were on your way home.”

  Manny raised his hands and looked despairingly at Meadows. “You can’t trust ’em, Christopher. They stick together like nuns. See you tonight.” Manny swaggered out of the house, and Meadows heard the Magnum growl to life. When he looked out the window, all he saw was a frothy crease in the tea-colored water. The speedboat was already around the bend.

  Meadows felt Patti’s arm around his waist. “He left out one,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “Rule number four. Named after my husband. The Larry Atchison Rule.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t get greedy.”

  Chapter 20

  THE HOUSE IN Coconut Grove disturbed Octavio Nelson the most.

  The deliberate savagery with which Meadows’s pursuers had destroyed the place was sobering. Nelson felt himself sicken as he and Pincus walked through the wreckage, touching nothing, marveling in breathless expletives at the thorough job.

  “They must have got him, Captain,” Pincus said. “I’ll bet he’s dead.”

  Nelson sat down in a slashed patio chair by the now-rancid pool, thinking back to the night of the lizard. “No,” he said to Pincus. “Meadows wasn’t here when they paid their visit. That is why they did all this.”

  “For sport?” Pincus prodded a mangled stereo speaker with one of his shoes.

  “A message, Wilbur. The sort you don’t forget. I think our friend Meadows knows what happened here. He won’t be back.”

  “You sound awfully certain.”

  Nelson’s eyes narrowed. Again the challenge, the edge of righteous doubt in the voice. It had been like this with Pincus for months, now, ever since the Cruz thing. Nelson was annoyed with it.

  “What are we looking for?” Pincus asked.

  “Drawings. Rough sketches.”

  “Of buildings? Let’s check his studio—”

  “No, not buildings,” Nelson said. “Men. Meadows once told me he was going to draw sketches of Mono’s bodyguards.”

  “Yeah? When did he tell you that?”

  “One day when you weren’t around,” Nelson said, peeling a stack of soggy papers off the carpet.

  “Before the airport murder?”

  “I guess so, yeah. Shit, look at this. These are letters from his girlfriend. Those dirtbags probably went through the whole stack before they trashed the place.”

  Pincus peered over Nelson’s shoulder. “The ink’s all smeared now,” he remarked. “Can’t make out hardly anything.”

  The detectives had been on their ghastly tour of the house for ten minutes when Arthur Prim stalked through the front door.

  “Finally putting in an appearance, I see,” the black man growled.

  “Hello, Prim,” Nelson said. “Where’s Meadows?”

  “Don’t know.” Arthur kicked off his thongs. “I got a couple extra mops if you guys want to help clean up this shit. I been at it three days.”

  Pincus said, “When was the last time you talked to Mr. Meadows?”

  Arthur chuckled, trading glances with Octavio Nelson. “Hey, I’m just the maid. I don’t know jackshit.” He bent over and began tossing chunks of rotting food and fragments of glass into a plastic garbage sack.

  “It’s OK,” Nelson said. “We’re not looking to bust your friend. We couldn’t.”

  Pincus stared at his partner.

  “If you see him, tell him it’s OK to come up now. Tell him I’ve closed the investigation into Sosa’s death.”

  “That’s the airport thing, right?” Arthur asked warily.

  “Yep.”

  “Why’d you quit on it?” Arthur said.

  “Yeah, why?” Pincus echoed.

  Nelson stifled him with a scorching glare and faced Arthur. “Look, all we got is a body in a car, some blood at the airport and no goddamn eyewitnesses. Nobody mourns Mono, nobody that I care about. I need Meadows’s help.”

  “Shit!” Arthur Prim said.

  “If you see him or talk to him, tell him I got his ass off the chopping block. Tell him he’s got my word,” Nelson said.

  “I’m sure he’ll be overwhelmed with gratitude, Captain. Could you move your foot? You’re standing on a Neiman print, I believe.”

  Once they were alone again, in Nelson’s car, Pincus practically exploded.

  “What was all that nonsense about Sosa?”

  “Just the truth.”

  “You aren’t trying to trick Meadows into turning himself in?”

  “No, Wilbur. I give him a little more credit than you do.” Nelson relighted his cigar.

  “You can’t just give up on the case,” Pincus protested. “We had good leads, good evidence. Meadows did it.”

  “Can you take it to court?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Wilbur, I can’t find the top of my fucking desk for the homicide files that are stacked up there. This one’s about number one hundred and eighty-three on my list. Sosa was a slug. And if Meadows killed him, like you say, the guy deserves an oak cluster, not an indictment.”

  “But what—”

  “And don’t ever tell me I can’t just give up on a case,” Nelson snapped. “I think Meadows can be useful. He is a most uncommon witness, in case you hadn’t noticed. He may even teach us something before it’s over, so if I choose to misplace the Sosa file for a few days or a few years, that’s too fucking bad.”

  “I didn’t mean to start an argument. I’m just confused,” Pincus said. “I don’t think Meadows can help us one bit. But that’s only my opinion.”

  “Opinions are like assholes,” Nelson said. “Everybody’s got one, and they all stink.”

  Back at the office, while Pincus carefully typed out a vandalism report about the Meadows residence, Nelson tried Stella one more time.

  “Mr. Meadows will be out of the office for several weeks,” she repeated loyally.

  “This is a police emergency, ma’am. Where can I reach him? It’s very urgent,” Nelson said ominously.

  “God, I don’t know, really.” Stella cartwheeled like a gull in a hurricane. “Maybe his parents…no, his girlfriend. Try the girlfriend, Officer.”

  “What is her name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It’s vital, miss!”

  There was a pause. “It starts with a T or M. She’s a pilot of some kind.”

  Nelson adopted the tone of a patient kindergarten teacher. “Do you have a phone number for the lady?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Sometimes Mr. Meadows stays at her place. Here it is.” She read off a number.

  Nelson hung up and dialed, hung up again when a man in a Seventy-ninth Street massage parlor answered the phone. Stella had screwed up.

  The detective scribbled variations of the original number, until he could think of no more. Using the cross-indexed city directory, Nelson matched numbers with names: G. Stein, Abraham Jones, Mark M. Flanigan, M. C. Betancourt…

  Nelson studied the last name. Latin. The use of initials usually indicated a single woman, alone. The phone company was very diligent about discouraging obscene calls; genderless initials instead of a name was one sure way.

  What grabbed Nelson’s eye was the parenthetical business identification: (Pres., CAN Airways). The number was almost the same, 724 instead of 742. Stella’s error was one of simple transposition, if this was the right woman.

  The phone number belonged to a condominium on Key Biscayne. Nelson slipped away without a word to Pincus, who was still perched studiously over one of the secretary’s typewriters.

  The building superintendent at Terry’s condo told Nelson he had not seen the busy pilot or her thin, quiet boyfriend for some time. When Nelson asked to inspect the apartment, the manager reluctantly accompanied him up the elevator and as far as Terry’s front door.

  �
��Listen, I don’t want no trouble. A lady died here last year.…”

  “In this apartment?”

  “No, no. In the building. We didn’t find her body for a week.”

  “Terrific. Sorta hangs in the drapes, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, well, I just don’t want any commotion, OK?” said the super. “I mean, if there’s something in there, can you just call the ambulance and take care of it without a commotion?”

  “Gimme the key,” Nelson said.

  Inside, there was no trace of Christopher Meadows, no evidence that the architect had lived there recently or ever. Meadows had been meticulous in his flight, Nelson thought as he rummaged fruitlessly through the trash cans. The dishes were all in place in Terry’s linoleum kitchen; the beds were made; the counters were absent of crumbs, stains and other loose clues. Nelson even searched through the laundry hamper only to uncover a bra, three small T-shirts and two pairs of bikini panties. There was no sign a man had been in the apartment.

  The super, a pale, bald little fellow with shoulders like a turkey vulture, was hanging nervously in the hallway while Nelson searched.

  “Is everything OK?” he called finally.

  “Yeah. You can go back downstairs. I’ll be down with the key in a few minutes.”

  “I think I ought to stay just—”

  “Get lost!” Nelson commanded. “I’m not gonna rip off the TV, for Chrissakes.”

  By the time he worked his way to Terry’s sweet-smelling bedroom Nelson was sure the place was dry. He opened the top drawer of the bedstand and, without touching, took a brief visual inventory: a round, unopened packet of birth control pills, a bottle of Bayer aspirin, some Vaseline, the instruction manual and warranty card for a clock radio and a dark green cloth that looked like brushed felt. The drawer smelled familiar. Gun oil.

  Octavio Nelson picked up the green cloth and laid it on the bedspread. He leaned back and put his head down to get a side-angle view. The grease marks were promising, but the imprint was even better. With a forefinger Nelson traced the shape of a gun, from grip to barrel, on the soft thick cloth. He folded it and slipped it into the inside pocket of his sport coat.

  Meadows’s girlfriend obviously kept a pistol by the bed, but it was missing now. As Nelson rode the elevator down to the parking garage, he wondered somberly if T. Christopher Meadows was teaching himself how to shoot.

  WINNIE LAINE, a travel agent at Tropic Suncoast Tours on Biscayne Boulevard, met the stranger for the first time on a Monday. He mentioned South America, and she gave him some brochures. Winnie was curious. The man was tall and blond, very polite, and she would have bet a week’s pay he didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

  He came back on Wednesday and asked about Barranquilla, and she could hardly suppress herself. Well, Bogotá is very nice this time of year, she said; what she meant was: Barranquilla is a snake pit, and you must be out of your mind to go there. And the man took some more brochures, asked about airline fares and said he couldn’t really make up his mind. As he left, Winnie wondered to herself what the young man would look like dressed in brown instead of gray.

  She was surprised, pleasantly, when he returned on Friday. He apologized shyly for his indecision and then not-so-shyly asked her out for a drink after work. Winnie said no, but the man didn’t seem to hear it. He smiled and was about to walk out when she changed her mind.

  They went to a dockside bar at the city marina. Winnie spent the better part of two hours answering the man’s quiet questions and not minding at all. When she finally asked a few of her own, the man told her he was an office supply salesman trying to unload a hundred used IBM typewriters in Colombia. The demand down there, he said brightly, was inexhaustible. He anticipated numerous trips, and he was merely shopping for the most economical way to get in and out from Miami. A good friend of his, Bobby Nelson, was a frequent traveler to South and Central America.

  “Yes, he’s one of our clients,” Winnie exclaimed.

  “No kidding?”

  “Twice a month, like clockwork,” said Winnie. “Miami to Bogotá to Medellín to Miami.” She laughed. “I even got it memorized.”

  “I’ll be darned,” the man said. “I know he’s on the road a lot.”

  “The seventeenth and twenty-eighth of every month,” Winnie said. “He’s one of our best customers.”

  “How long does he stay? Must be tough on his wife.”

  “Naw, three days at a time. That’s all.”

  “What airline?” asked the man.

  “Avianca.”

  “Bobby likes the service?”

  “I guess so,” Winnie said. “Of course, you don’t have a big selection to choose from.”

  The man finished off his rum-and-Coke. “That’s OK. It sounds like a good bet, right there. Tomorrow I’ll call my boss to get the OK, and then I’ll come downtown and buy the tickets. Maybe we can have lunch.”

  “That would be nice,” Winnie said. Then the blond man drove her back to her town house and kissed her goodnight at the door. She never saw him again.

  PEPE FALCÓN did all his deals in Holiday Inns, so his customers started calling him Botones, or bellboy. Pepe liked the name. As he prospered, his style changed accordingly. Where once he was content to get a single room for twenty-eight bucks, he now always made sure to get a suite, near the top, with a view. Any view would do. And after he collected his money, Botones would escort the customer out the door, pick up the phone and call a hooker, sometimes two. Then they would all celebrate.

  On the summer night that Detective Ethan Bradley, Miami Homicide, was summoned to Room 713-714 of the Holiday Inn Bayside, Pepe Falcón celebrated for the last time. Then someone stuck the barrel of a small automatic handgun up his nose and blew a few brains and a lot of high-grade cocaine all over the walls. Detective Bradley noted in his report that the mess had “totally ruined a very nice seascape hanging on the west wall.”

  A few hours later a truck driver heading north on Interstate 95 with three tons of assorted vegetables noticed a car in flames on the highway apron. He braked his rig, hopped out and doused the late-model Oldsmobile until his portable fire extinguisher was empty. The trucker got on his CB and called for help when he noticed something very funny on the upholstery. A Florida highway patrolman waited for ninety minutes to make sure the car had cooled off, then used a crowbar to pop the trunk.

  Inside was the body of a man named Hilarión Escandar, a young Colombian national. Detective Sergeant Ray Lesnick, Miami Homicide, was given the task of searching the corpse. He found approximately fifty-five thousand dollars in U.S. currency, two dozen raw emeralds, three different driver’s licenses and an airline ticket that showed Escandar had arrived earlier that evening on a flight from Lima. The Dade County medical examiner would later determine that the twenty-four-year-old university student had been shot within thirty minutes after he had strolled out of the terminal at Miami International.

  Two days later a twin-engine Beechcraft landed at 1:07 A.M. at North Perry Airport. Several men waited by their cars as the cherry-striped aircraft taxied to a stop. The pilot got out, carrying an Ingram submachine gun and nothing else.

  “Sorry, fellas,” he said to his welcoming committee. “Somebody fucked up. It’s all dried up.”

  “That’s impossible!” shouted one of the men.

  “I couldn’t buy a fucking gram!” the pilot shouted. “Your money is in the plane.” He waved the gun. “Get away from that car. Don’t call me again for a long time, OK?”

  An airport security guard who witnessed the incident notified the Dade County Metropolitan police, but even the Beechcraft had vanished by the time a squad car arrived. Octavio Nelson heard about the landing from a friend in Narcotics at the county, and now he was beginning to believe that his punk informer was right: There was a plague on the marketplace.

  He read over Ethan Bradley’s report and wondered why anyone would bother killing poor Botones, a proud, self-made man—but still a small-time freel
ancer who couldn’t move enough coke to keep a rock band on its feet for a week. And this kid Escandar, ¡Cristo! Nelson had talked to a sister and learned Hilarión was muling to put himself through medical school. It was a lesson, all right, torching the car and leaving all the cash and jewels for the cops to find. But a lesson to whom? The kid was a nickel-and-dimer.

  “It’s getting nasty out there,” Nelson said, tossing the files on Wilbur Pincus’s desk.

  “One Cuban, one Colombian—”

  “Don’t forget Redbirt.”

  “Right, and one Anglo.”

  “And coke is getting scarce,” Nelson said, rising from his desk. “What’s your mechanical mind tell you about all this?”

  “That nobody big is getting hurt.”

  “Bravo,” Nelson cheered.

  “And that somebody big is sitting on a lot of cocaine—”

  “A whole shitload,” Nelson agreed.

  ”—and they will sell it,” Pincus continued, “when the time and the market are just right.”

  Nelson grabbed a handful of cigars from a drawer. “Come on, sport, we’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 21

  ALL THREE sat up front in the van. Manny drove. Moe sat on the passenger side, elbow out the window and a can of Budweiser on his lap. Chris Meadows sat directly behind them in a swiveling vinyl jump seat. The van was empty, except for a layer of cheap plastic taped to the floor and side panels. “Residue,” Manny had explained tersely. “I don’t want a single goddamn seed in this truck when we’re through.”

  They headed west for nearly ninety minutes, Manny steering away from the interstate highway, the Palmetto Expressway and the Florida Turnpike. “You’re a paranoid sumbitch—” Moe laughed.

  “Every time I been stopped has been on a four-lane,” Manny said. “Cops see me driving and something goes off in their heads.”

  “But we’re clean now,” Meadows ventured.

  Manny glanced over at his partner.