I felt almost naked driving to Miami with nothing but a pistol that I couldn’t even carry into the Fontainebleau. And of course I wore no body armor, and I didn’t even have a tinted window beside me to hide behind.
In every car and truck we passed were drivers and passengers who could glance over for a look at Dan Kilmer, American citizen and quasi-fugitive. Every casually held smart phone could be taking a photo or even a video, and forwarding it to other sets of eyes for study, analysis and computer cross-reference. I kept my elbow on the window ledge and used my open right hand to obscure my face from the side when passing other vehicles.
Faces, eyes, lenses and cameras of all sorts were aimed at me in passing as we hummed down the freeway. There were cameras on poles, cameras on signs, cameras on overpasses, cameras in cell phones, cameras on the dashboards of police cruisers. What was I thinking, heading to Miami on Interstate 95? Could more cameras possibly be found anywhere outside a maximum-security prison?
I looked up in awe as we passed beneath the massive flyover interchange of I-595. “Alligator Alley” was the straight shot across the Everglades from Lauderdale to Naples, on Florida’s west coast. I hadn’t seen anything like those soaring concrete-and-steel mega-structures in many months.
A humpbacked 747 jumbo jet glided low across the interstate a mile in front of us, just seconds from landing into the sea breeze at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International. When we passed the airport’s western perimeter fence, another big jet was lifting off, soon diminishing over the ocean and lost in coastal Florida’s yellow morning haze, equal parts sea mist and pollution, glowing in the sunlight.
When I-95 elevated a bit above the neighborhoods and industrial parks, I caught glimpses of hotel and condo towers three miles to the east along the shoreline of Broward County. They reminded me of my first view of Fort Lauderdale from seaward the day before. From land or sea, the distant concrete towers marked the edge of Florida’s east coast like a line of white dominoes thrust into the shoreline sand. Closer to the highway, down in vacant lots and drainage areas I caught glimpses of more tent cities and shantytowns like the one we had seen back in Wilton Manors.
****
Traffic thickened and Kelly downshifted, riding the back of the truck ahead of us for a moment before slingshotting out into the next hole with just yards to spare at our bow and stern. Then unexpectedly, she asked her own firearms-related question. “What do you think about thirty-eights?”
“Why, do you have one?”
“My Dad does; a Colt Detective Special. It was my grandfather’s, from back when he was a cop. He died before I was born. Is that a good gun?”
“It’s a great gun,” said Nick, leaning forward with one hand on each headrest to join the loud conversation. “It’s six shots, right? Blued steel, with a snub-nose barrel and a small wooden grip?”
“That’s it,” she said. “But I’ve never shot it. Well, I’ve unloaded it and shot it without bullets, just so I’d know how hard to pull the trigger. And I’ve practiced loading the bullets into it. Things like that.”
“Why haven’t you shot it?” I asked her.
“Where? It’s not registered, so we can’t take it to a public shooting range. They copy down the serial numbers and scan your registration card and driver’s license, and then the computers cross-check everything. And, of course, they have you on video.”
“Can’t you get it registered?”
“No way, not after the new federal law. And now it’s too late. We missed the grandfather period, and then the final amnesty. My dad doesn’t trust the government. And neither does my mom, for that matter.”
Nick said, “But they trust you to drive two guys you just met down to Miami?”
“What? Oh, I pretty much run my own life now. I’m driving two fellow students to the FIU library to do research all day. We might even stay with friends in Coral Gables tonight. That was my excuse for the overnight bag.”
She lied well. I’d probably have believed her if I was her father. Well, maybe not. Who does library research over the summer break, in Miami?
“And they bought that?” Nick asked skeptically.
“Stranger things have happened. I’ve gone on road trips to Key West and Atlanta in this car. Nobody has to approve my passenger list. And I drove it down from Norfolk, nonstop solo in twelve hours. Just gas and go. I usually sleep at home, but I live my own life when I’m outside it.”
Nick said, “Your parents have a lot of faith in you.”
“They should have faith in me. Last summer, when I was still nineteen, I went to Europe with three girlfriends. I worked it out and got us almost free tickets over on a group charter. Then Ireland to Spain and back, driving a rental car about this size. Guess who drove most of the trip? And we didn’t drink roofies and we weren’t sold to Arabs. My folks know I can take care of myself. And I can’t believe I don’t have my i-phone with me today. God! I already feel like I’m missing a limb.”
Her parents and her upbringing sounded nothing at all like mine. “Does your dad know you’ve been messing with his revolver, or did you sneak it?”
“Sneak it? Hell yes, he knows—he’s the one who showed me how to shoot it. He showed me in case I was home alone and somebody was breaking in. I know all about shooting double action, and cocking the hammer so you can aim better.”
“Well, you’re smart to practice dry-firing. It’ll just make a loud bang and kick a little if you shoot real bullets. No big deal. But you can practice aiming it and pulling the trigger just fine without ammunition.”
Nick added, “One good thing about living on boats is we can practice shooting anytime we want. Out in the middle of the ocean the range is always open. And nobody else can hear it or see it.”
Kelly’s Wayfarers didn’t hide her eyes from the side. I noticed that they flicked up to the rearview mirror when Nick was speaking. I could tell when she was scanning the traffic behind us, and when she was looking at him.
“Maybe,” I told her, “you’ll get a chance to do some shooting sometime. Out on a boat, I mean.”
“That’d be nice. I wish I was good at it, like you guys.”
“When this is all over and things are back to normal,” Nick suggested, “maybe you can come over to the Bahamas for a visit. Do all the shooting you want.”
After a pause Kelly said, “We’ll see. When this is all over.”
I asked her, “Does your dad have extra ammunition for the Colt? Or just the six rounds in the cylinder?” They could have been her deceased grandfather’s leftover cop bullets from his leftover cop gun. Forty-year-old cartridges will probably fire, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on them. Especially not with the ineffective round-nose lead slugs that cops used in those days.
“Oh yeah, a lot more. Remington Golden Sabers is what it says on the box. Fifty bullets, I think, counting the ones in the gun. They’re hollow points.”
I gave her a thumbs-up. “Golden Sabers are good stuff. They’ll definitely do the job.” I smiled because she believed that fifty rounds were a lot, and maybe they were in her case. The thought rolled through my mind that if she did a perfect job of conserving ammo, they could do the job up to a maximum of fifty times. But even once would justify the entire exercise if it saved her life or the life of a loved one.
Nick was leaning forward almost between the headrests to stay in the raised-voice conversation. “The main thing is you gotta be sure you can shoot somebody. You don’t shoot to wound or to give somebody a warning. You stop them from hurting you by shooting them in the chest or in the guts, and that usually kills them, sooner or later. You shoot them until they’re on the ground and not moving. Forget about shooting to wound them. You have to shoot to kill. Can you do that? Shoot to kill? Otherwise, forget it. You’re better off without a gun. Especially since you’re such a good talker.”
Kelly answered in an icy tone, “If it’s that or getting raped or killed, you’re damn right I can shoot somebody.” She lifted her
right hand off the wheel, leveled her arm straight ahead, aimed her petite index finger and said, “Pow!” Her delicate hand bucked like a recoiling revolver. “You’re dead, motherfucker!”
I almost broke out laughing at the unexpected outburst of violent obscenity from this ponytailed pixie, but I let her have her moment. Kelly wasn’t joking. She was deadly serious, and I knew then that she was down for the mission.
An enormous blue traffic sign above the highway read:
Chief of Police Ray Romeiro
Welcomes You to Miami-Dade County,
Florida’s Safest Major Metropolitan Area.
8
Billboards showed Romeiro in a variety of tan-and-brown police uniforms and business suits. Captions in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole warned visitors that there was zero tolerance for crime in Dade County. Official blue highway signs had cheery messages such as Please cooperate at traffic safety checks and Report suspicious behavior to law enforcement. Phone numbers, websites and email addresses for a variety of snitch lines were prominently displayed.
Kelly said, “He looks like Nicolas Cage, doesn’t he?”
I could see it. “Yeah, he does. But with better hair.”
“Everybody calls him Chief Ray, or Chief Romeiro. And it works even better in Spanish. Jefe Romeiro, or just El Jefe. It means The Boss.”
I said, “You know the Spanish word for king? It’s rey. So Ray Romeiro sounds like King Romeiro to most of the people down here.” Maybe it was a Latino characteristic to be drawn toward the strong man in troubled times. Most of the countries I’d visited in Latin America were ruled by presidentes-por-vida, even if they sometimes went through the formalities of sham re-elections or swapped the presidential sash among their wives and cronies.
The public safety announcements and Ray Romeiro billboards on both sides of I-95 competed for space with dozens of other bilingual billboards advertising private surgical clinics and hospitals. Sign after sign showed twenty-foot-tall doctors and nurses who looked suspiciously like models wearing white coats and surgical scrubs. They all promised top-notch medical treatment by board-certified physicians, at competitive rates and with a minimum of official aggravation.
“What’s going on with all the hospitals?” I asked.
Kelly explained, “Miami is huge for medical tourism. Any kind of procedure you need, you can get it here.”
“What about the national health care plan?”
She shook her head. “Not in Dade County. Not under King Ray. He runs Dade County the way he wants to run it.”
“How does he get away with that?”
“By getting re-elected every damn time,” she said.
“But he’s just the police chief.”
“No, he’s King Ray,” Nick corrected. “The King of Dadeland. The mayors are just his bitches. Sorry, Kelly.”
Her right arm swung back at the elbow, the middle finger extended rearward.
“And the feds don’t stop it?” I asked.
“How can they?” Kelly said. “What are they going to do, send the Marines?”
Nick said, “There was nothing like this in North Carolina, I can tell you that for sure. You had no choice—government doctors or no doctors.”
“But it’s so blatant here,” I said. “How do they get away with it?”
“Here’s the deal,” said Kelly. “Everybody pretends it’s just for foreigners. The patients are probably half Americans and half from everywhere else. The Caribbean trade deal lets Washington pretend nothing’s wrong. Miami has a special free-trade status in the treaty, depending on how you read it.”
I said, “Hey, I noticed something else about the signs down here. No graffiti.”
“There’s not too much of it in Dade County,” said Kelly. “Well, at least not on the highway signs. El Jefe figured that one out too.”
“How’s that?”
“Graffiti taggers started turning up shot. All unsolved cases. It just doesn’t pay to be a graffiti artist anymore. Not in Miami-Dade. The highways are like sacred ground, because of the tourists. Tourists want to feel safe and drive on nice highways. They don’t want to see gang graffiti. So they don’t.”
The red triangle representing our car on the GPS screen reminded me of a similar icon inside the Trijicon sights we used on our M-16s. We often used them for urban sniping alongside our heavier and slower M-40A3 bolt-actions rifles. Quite a few insurgents had ridden that triangle to paradise at my hands. I wondered what Romeiro’s cops were using to target the graffiti vandals. Some high-velocity hollow points don’t leave anything but lead and copper chips after impact.
This time the red triangle was on a GPS screen, not a rifle scope, and it showed us penetrating another spaghetti tangle of concrete ramps and flyovers. After months on the ocean and anchored along tropical islands, my senses were assaulted by the surrounding columns and overhead roadways. Then three lanes split off to the left and we merged onto the 395 connector heading east to the MacArthur Causeway, which would take us over to Miami Beach. We drove between high-rise office buildings where the highway ramps crossed above Biscayne Avenue. Traffic slowed and backed up on 395. Kelly downshifted to second gear behind a sleek black limousine, the first I could recall seeing that day.
I had a road map of Miami partly unfolded on my lap to supplement the GPS. “You know, we’re only three miles from the very end of Interstate 95.”
Kelly glanced over. “Yeah, I-95 comes all the way down from Maine and then it just merges into U.S. 1 and disappears. Drive another two hundred miles south and you’re in Key West, throwing back rumrunners at Sloppy Joe’s.”
I smiled, picturing Kelly as a two-fisted drinker. “They’ll serve you liquor? You’re only twenty, right?”
“In Key West? Shoot, in Key West the only ID you need these days is the kind with the dead presidents. Oh, and if you ever wondered, from Key West to Canada is almost exactly two thousand miles.”
“Interesting,” Nick noted.
“Yes, I am,” she replied, turning her face back toward him and grinning flirtatiously.
After five minutes of stop-and-go we were climbing the 395 highway bridge over to Watson Island and the beginning of the MacArthur Causeway. In South Florida the only hills are bridges, and with traffic at a crawl we had time to appreciate the view. Three miles ahead of us were the hotels of Miami Beach, another row of gleaming white towers marking the edge of the Atlantic. Atop the bridge we were seventy or eighty feet above the boat channel along the mainland side of Biscayne Bay.
Straight ahead of us and halfway between Miami and Miami Beach I could see Palm and Hibiscus Isles, each mile-long man-made island set parallel to the MacArthur Causeway. A low white bridge connected the causeway to the middle of Palm, and a second low bridge connected Palm to Hibiscus. A hundred yards of water lay between the causeway and Palm, and again between the two isles.
I was glad for the traffic delay because it gave me an opportunity to check the water between Palm and Hibiscus. I took out my compact eight-power binos and scanned the water between the isles. Prechter’s mansion was on the south side of the far end of Hibiscus Isle. We had all studied the maps and satellite photos the night before, so I knew where to look. Even from nearly two miles away I hit pay dirt immediately. Between some distant trees and over the top of a smaller yacht I could make out her aqua superstructure, and I recognized the unique satellite domes atop her radar arch. “It’s there,” I announced. “Topaz is there.”
Traffic curved downward to the right as 395 dropped onto Watson Island, the security screening area for Miami Beach. The island was a half mile long and roughly diamond-shaped, correlating with what I could see on the GPS and the map on my lap. The causeway entered one sharp point of the diamond and departed from the other. Most of the landmass of Watson Island was to the right, south of the highway. The north side was taken up by marinas, launching ramps and parking areas.
It was time to recalibrate my camouflage for a higher social level. The
Marlins ball cap went back into my daypack. I asked Nick to pass me my already prepared necktie. I slipped it on and adjusted the knot, then rolled my sleeves down and buttoned them at the wrists. And I made sure my Glock was well hidden under the maps in the door pocket.
****
Watson Island was created decades before the creation of environmental impact statements by uprooting mangrove swamps and dredging black muck from the shallow and swampy Biscayne Bay. It was part of the same process that created the causeway and the other man-made islands inhabited by Miami’s mega-millionaires. Turning stinking bay sludge into millions of dollars’ worth of brand-new waterfront real estate must have set a profitability record for the insiders who put the deals together. From muck to millions should have been the state’s motto.
I alternately studied the GPS, the road map, and Watson Island through my binoculars. The three lanes ahead divided and multiplied in sequence like the entrance to a major airport. We dropped onto Watson Island and entered the sequential exits, guided by flashing overhead traffic signs. Trucks, buses, rental cars, taxi cabs and other vehicle categories were directed to the right toward their own areas for whatever level of inspection might be demanded. The SunPass lane went straight ahead, widened and split into two.
The left of these new lanes was marked for cars with the SunPassUltra. The only lane further over was marked for “Emergency Vehicles, Law Enforcement and Official Government Use Only.” Our lane had green arrows on the overhead signs in front of us. To our right I could see another twenty lanes of subdivided traffic, some of them moving at a crawl and some of them stopped. High roofs the size of tennis courts shielded the security officials from the elements. Cars were parked with open trunks and doors as uniformed police with working dogs moved among them. It reminded me of the highway border crossing from Tijuana into San Diego. Cars could be waved through, or they could be directed to other areas for increasingly higher levels of examination. But we sailed through the security zone without stopping. With two illegal handguns in the car, that was an enormous relief.
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