Who'll Stop The Rain: (Book One Of The Miami Crime Trilogy)

by Don Donovan

A PREVIEW OF

  RENEGADES

  by

  DON DONOVAN

  BOOK TWO OF

  THE MIAMI CRIME TRILOGY

  1

  Silvana

  Miami, Florida

  Friday, March 30, 2012

  3:25 PM

  SILVANA MACHADO'S CELL PHONE WENT OFF while she was pistol-whipping a street punk. He'd gotten up in her face when she and Vargas confronted him after they spotted two hookers slipping cash into his palm. She eyed the caller ID on the bleating phone. Headquarters.

  She holstered her weapon and opened the call. "Machado." Bobby Vargas held on to the punk.

  "Sergeant Machado, Lieutenant Santos here. What's your location?"

  Silvana stepped away from her partner and the punk, just out of earshot. "Brownsville, sir. Northwest 26th Avenue, just off 50th Street."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Questioning a suspect, sir."

  "Suspect?"

  "Yes, sir," she said. "Possible involvement in last week's drug murder in this neighborhood."

  "Forget it. Get over to 75th and Biscayne, the Sea & Sand Motel. On the double. The manager found a body in one of the rooms."

  "Yes, sir." She swiped the call off and turned back to the punk, now sniveling. His lip was slashed open. A dark bulge was forming over his swollen left eye. She pushed a heavy lock of mousy-brown hair back from her face and held out her palm. "Give." Two snaps of her thick fingers.

  "Gi-give what?" the punk said.

  Vargas landed a hard knee into his skinny back. He buckled.

  "The money, dipshit," Silvana said. He resisted no more, reaching into his pockets and pulling out a wad of cash, maybe twelve or thirteen hundred. She snatched it from his hand.

  She said, "Now, I understand they call you G-Man." His head went up and down fast a couple of times. "Okay, G-Man, get this straight." She held up the cash, close to his bleeding face. "This is your initiation fee, your payment of which goes no farther than this sidewalk on this shitty street in this God-forsaken neighborhood. Got it?"

  G-Man gave off a discouraged nod. He wasn't particularly well turned out, wearing an ordinary polo shirt and jeans, lacking the gaudy flash popular in pimpdom. She made him as a newbie, just getting his enterprise off the ground. He'd gotten out of a black Dodge Charger, not a bad car, but it sported a large dent in the passenger side door, and as such was a far cry from your typical pimp's tricked-out ride.

  She said, "From now on, it'll cost you one grand a week to run your whores in this neighborhood. You understand?"

  He said, "What? A grand? Man, that's a —"

  Another whack across his face, this time with a closed fist. Blood flew from his mouth, nearly hitting Vargas's sleeve. She was well-muscled and that one had to hurt.

  "One thousand. Every Friday. Four PM, right here at this corner. You miss a payment or if we don't find you on Friday, we'll find you on Saturday and you won't see Sunday. You hearing me?"

  He nodded.

  "Say it!" she said, thoroughly wiping blood residue from her gun on G-Man's polo shirt.

  "One th-thousand. Every Friday. Four — four o'clock. I-I hear you."

  She gave Vargas a head signal and he shoved the punk to the pavement where she heard something crack. They got back in the car.

  "Who was on the phone, Silvi?" Vargas said as he sparked the engine.

  "Santos. He wants us to check out a homicide call at a motel up Biscayne Boulevard." She counted the punk's money. Twelve hundred eighty. She peeled off six-forty and stuffed it in Vargas's shirt pocket while he drove. No point in kicking any of this up to Santos, she thought. He'll never find out. The grand a week, though, he'll have to get his cut. Word might well leak out about it and Santos has a wide network on the street.

  "Which motel?" Vargas asked.

  "Sea & Sand. 75th and Biscayne."

  "I know that place," Vargas said. "It's a fleabag. Hourly rates, strictly for the hooker trade in the area."

  "Probably some trick got rough and wasted a whore. Let's find out."

  Vargas drove. They wended their way out of Brownsville and down 54th Street where they picked up the I-95 feeder. They entered the freeway at 62nd. Vargas said, "So, Silvi, you been reading anything lately?"

  That wasn't an idle question. Vargas knew Silvana had never read much until one day last year when she came to pick him up at his apartment for an off-the-books job. While he was getting dressed, she browsed his modest bookshelf and found a Michael Connelly novel. The cover intrigued her, and she was surprised Vargas was a reader, so she later bought the book. On her way out of the bookstore, she held it very protectively, as if it were a bar of gold she found in a back alley. Because she was an immigrant, twenty years in the country from Cuba, her linguistic confidence was low. Sure, she'd picked up English very handily on the streets of Hialeah, but reading … that was a different deal altogether. That required a deeper, more profound feel for the language. Despite her anxieties, however, she tackled the Connelly book, and although it was rough going at first, she got through it and fell in love with the magic of reading. Several Connelly novels later, she decided to spread her wings.

  "Yeah," she said. "I've branched out from Michael Connelly."

  "What're you on now?"

  "I wanted to get something closer to home, you know? "Cause all those Michael Connelly books take place in LA. I still wanted cop fiction, but closer to home. I got this book, from like way back in the eighties, Miami Blues by Charles, uh — I forget his last name, but it's about this Miami cop, a detective, just like us. He's got false teeth and he's kind of strange, you know? Not like any cop we've ever known, but the book is pretty good so far. I'm about fifty pages into it."

  "Miami Blues? Wasn't there a movie called Miami Blues? Years ago?"

  "I don't know," she said. "I don't go to many movies."

  "The book, is it good?"

  "So far, yeah. It starts off, he's investigating the murder of this Krishna something, whatever the fuck they are, and there's this credit card grifter fresh out of the joint who's charging all kinds of shit on stolen plastic."

  "Sounds like another day at the office," Vargas said with a grin. Silvana tossed one back at him and spiced it with a laugh.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  "Fleabag" was way too nice a word for the Sea & Sand, which, by the way, was near neither ocean nor beach. Peeling paint and fading pastels told the whole story. The sign, which looked like it dated from the 1950s, was missing a couple of letters, and weedy growth showed itself around the property in all the wrong places. The potholed parking lot held a couple of crappy cars from the nineties, and those baked under a scorching sun. The whole place looked like it had terminal asthma, like it couldn't catch a full breath.

  In front of a room toward the rear stood a much newer white Lexus sedan, conspicuous amid the despair of the motel. A black and white blocked it in. Silvana and Vargas drove to it.

  The door to room 112 yawned and two uniforms stood in the doorway. Silvana and Vargas got out of the car, showing tin flapping from their breast pockets. The taller of the two uniforms, who looked Cuban, spoke.

  "Sergeant Machado," he said. "Patrolman Acevedo."

  Silvana's eyebrows went up at the familiarity. "Have we met, Patrolman?"

  "Sort of, ma'am. You gave a talk on evidence gathering when I was at the academy."

  "We-ell," she said through a chuckle, "I hope I didn't teach you any bad habits."

  "Ha! No, ma'am. None at all."

  "Okay, what've we got here?"

  "My partner and I took the call. We got here about twenty minutes ago. One victim, WMA, identified as Robert Harvey, address listed in Coconut Grove. DOB 3/10/59, two bullet holes in the head, execution-style. No witnesses."

  "Naturally," Silvana said. She looked around, down the row of worn, grimy rooms. What a dump. "How about any of the other guests? Or the manager? They hear any shots?"

  "The manager says he heard what might have be
en gunfire about thirty minutes ago. He came down to investigate and saw the door was ajar. He pushed it open and saw the body. Then he called 911."

  "Anything else?" she asked.

  Acevedo said, "Not much. One guest, though, in room 104, said he thought he might've heard shots, but he also says he saw a car leave right afterwards. We had him stay till you got here."

  Silvana nodded approval. "Any description on the car?"

  "Dark late model sedan. Black, maybe dark blue. No make. He says all cars today look alike. Can't tell 'em apart."

  "Can he describe the driver?" Vargas asked.

  "Negative."

  Silvana said, "Let's have a look inside."

  They walked in. The body was naked, face down on the bed, a wide red stain surrounding the head. He was a large man, Silvana noticed, probably forty or so pounds overweight and his hair was — wait a minute — wait a minute!

  She slapped on her latex gloves and bent down for a closer look. Turning his head to one side so she could see his face, she gasped. "Holy shit!"

  "What?" said Vargas. "What is it, Silvi?"

  She gently placed the head back on the pillow and turned to Vargas. "This is Harvey the County Commissioner, for Chrissakes."

  "The guy who gave us all that shit that day in Santos's office?"

  Silvana nodded. She remembered it too well. Bob Harvey, Miami-Dade County Commissioner, swung a lot of weight around town, including high up in the department. His wife's teenage niece was killed in a bloody triple homicide in Little Havana last summer and Harvey was all over the Chief to find the killer. The Chief leaned on Santos and one day Harvey himself showed up in Santos's office to rattle a few cages. Gave her and Vargas all kinds of shit, threatening them with this and that.

  Her attention turned back to the corpse. Visible bullet holes, one above the left eye, the other a couple of inches to the left, toward the temple. Acevedo had it right. Execution.

  "Stay here," she told Acevedo and his partner. "Forensics will be here before long. Nobody gets in till then."

  Room 104 sat a little way down the row. Silvana and Vargas went straight to it. A man stood in the doorway, observing the proceedings. Unruly hair and rumpled clothes suggested a hurried attempt at making himself presentable. Age: crowding sixty.

  Silvana spoke. "Police officers, sir. I understand you heard shots?"

  "Not sure, officer. Not sure they were shots, that is. Could've been someone banging on a door or a wall a couple of times. You know, with some kind of hard instrument. Or maybe a car backfiring."

  He struck Silvana as distinctly middle management. Make no waves. Used to taking orders and not giving them, merely passing them along to what underlings he had. Definitely not an alpha male. Maybe taking off work a little early for a quick shot of pussy on his way home to the little woman and dinner. Silvana looked past his shoulder into the room. A strikingly-beautiful girl in her twenties lay on the bed with the TV remote in her hand and a bored look on her face, smoking a cigarette. Her black hair was splayed all over the pillow, as though it were carefully arranged. She wore only panties. The TV was almost as loud as the window air conditioner.

  "Patrolman Acevedo says you saw a car leaving. That right?"

  "Yes, ma'am. That's right."

  Vargas said, "According to the patrolman, you don't know the make or model of the car?"

  "Naw, these cars today, can't tell the difference one from another. Used to be, you know, you could tell a Chevy Impala from a Chevy BelAir. Nowadays, you can't even tell a Ford from a damn Tie-ota."

  Vargas nodded. "And you didn't see the driver?"

  "Nope. Didn't see him at all. Say, Detective, I won't have to testify or anything, will I? You know, I'd hate for my wife to find out about my being here, or —"

  "Right now, I wouldn't worry about it, sir," Silvana said. "But give Detective Vargas here your name and phone number in case we need to ask you a few more questions. We'll be discreet, I promise."

  He exhaled and gave Vargas the information off his driver's license.

  They found the office. The manager snapped to attention at the aging desk when he saw Silvana and Vargas come in. Silvana wasn't sure which was older, the manager or the motel.

  "Glad to see you two," he said. "This is just awful, I'm tellin' you." Silvana spotted an accent in his voice, maybe Southern, but she wasn't sure. Although she left Cuba for Miami twenty years ago, and although her English was impeccable, she still had a hard time placing accents.

  They showed him their IDs. "I'm Detective Sergeant Machado, sir. And this is Detective Vargas. We understand you heard the shots."

  He ran a hand across his stubbled face. "Thass right. I's watching Judge Judy on TV here in the back when all of a sudden I heard two loud pops. Sounded like they came from down the end of the row, you know? I turned the volume down on the TV, but I didn't hear any more."

  "Then what did you do, sir?" Silvana asked.

  He looked at her through red eyes. "Well, I got up, of course. An' I went to the window an' saw this dark sedan driving past the office at a pretty good clip. Comin' from that end of the row, you know, where I heard the pops."

  "Can you describe the car?"

  "Looked like it mighta been a Nissan. Black, or maybe gray. Hard to tell. It went by pretty fast, you know?"

  Vargas said, "What about the driver? Can you give us a description?"

  "Mmm, I don't think — " He paused, then he quickly said, "But wait, now, I did see there were two of 'em in the car. Thass all, though. Couldn't tell you any more about 'em."

  "Were they both males? Or was one of them a female?" Vargas asked.

  "Mmm, like I said, can't tell you any more'n I already have. Sorry."

  "Okay, then what happened?" Silvana said.

  "I went down to the room. The door was cracked just a little, so I pushed it all the way open and saw the guy on the bed, saw all the blood. Thass when I called the police."

  "How about the registration?" Silvana said. "What name did he use?"

  "Well, lessee," he said. He pulled out a book with lined pages, which check-ins had to actually sign. Running a gnarled finger down the list of signatures, he stopped at the last one. "Here it is."

  Silvana looked at it. "Eric Clapton", it read.

  "How much did you charge him?" she asked.

  "The normal rate. Forty dollars. For two hours."

  "Did he have anyone with him? A girl, maybe?"

  "Shoot, I s'pose he did. You know, a lot of 'em do come here with young ladies for one thing or another. But I didn't see any girl this time. She musta been in the car."

  "Car? You mean the Lexus?" Vargas asked.

  "I don't know. I didn't see what car they drove up in. Just assumed they drove up in something. That big white car down there. Looked like a Lexus, so I guess it musta been that one. I c'n tell you, though, I seen that fella before."

  "You have?" Silvana said, eyebrows shooting skyward.

  "Oh, yeah. He's been here at least ten, twelve times."

  "In what period of time, sir? I mean, how long has he been coming here?"

  "Wa-a-al, I'd say prob'ly in the last year or so. Yeah. The last year."

  Silvana handed him a card. "Here's my number, sir. If you can think of anything else, and I mean anything, please give me a call. Thank you for your cooperation."

  "Oh, you bet! Always glad to help the police. You know, my brother was a cop back in Tennessee. Always glad to help."

  Silvana cracked a smile. I was right, she thought. He's from the South.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I have loved noir fiction all my life. Among my favorite authors are Jim Thompson, Mickey Spillane, Don Winslow and David Goodis. I've called South Florida home for twenty-five years, and I've devoted myself to completing the Miami Crime Trilogy. Who'll Stop The Rain is my first novel.

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  — Don

  http://www.dondonovan.miami