“No, no, they’re not real cops. Look.” Their car was a dark Crown Victoria, but it was pure civilian except for a baseball-size blue light suction-cupped onto each side of the roof. Wires trailed from the lights down into the car. The big spotlight was not built into the driver’s side windshield pillar of the car, as on a real police car, but was a handheld model operated by the passenger.
A chrome-plated .45-caliber pistol lay by the driver’s left knee, the hammer back and the safety off. No cop pistol that. And he was wearing scuffed cowboy boots beneath his jeans. I’d drilled him above his left ear, the massive exit wound draining down his chin onto the street. I moved carefully to avoid stepping into the expanding lake of blood, reached over him into the Crown Vic, and pushed off the headlights with the backs of my knuckles. The dead driver could keep his pistol until the next passerby came along to steal it, contaminating the crime scene with false leads, hopefully including extraneous footprints and fingerprints.
I looked on the ground where I expected my empty shells to have landed. The spotlight’s reflected glow beneath the car revealed the shine of two brass cases about ten feet to the right of my firing position, and in a second they were in my pocket. The shots had been spaced so closely together that they could have been mistaken for multiple echoes of one report. If anybody bothered to call it in, a single shot or even two probably wouldn’t get an official reaction. Not in a county that couldn’t afford to power the public streetlights, not even on Interstate 95 or eight-lane Oakland Park Boulevard.
The gunshots could have come from any moron loosing off a few blasts from his back porch. Or the shots could have been part of a gangland turf war. Either way, who wants to call the police and get involved? In a city of a million, random gunshots happened many times every night. If no real police were within a several-block radius to hear the shots, there might be no official response at all. Even if the shots were located by one of the acoustic systems in common use, would a patrol car be dispatched?
The fact that these bandits felt comfortable pulling blue-light robberies meant they probably knew that no actual police units were in the area. If the local governments couldn’t afford to light their streets, how much nighttime law enforcement could they afford?
This is a predictable aspect of the downward spiral of a society in collapse. The more dangerous it becomes at night, the more afraid the police are to leave the safety of their most secure areas, except in massive force on raids executed like military operations. The absence of routine patrolling at night emboldens criminals to fill the power vacuum, and the process accelerates. It was no wonder Kelly hated driving at night.
Nick went around to the passenger door and shut off the spotlight, now lying on the sidewalk. It was still attached to the car’s twelve-volt accessory plug with a spiral electric cord. I had shot the spotlight man first, in the left side of his head, and I didn’t feel the need to inspect him; I knew what I’d find.
Too much was happening too fast. Time is a slippery substance to wrestle when operating in microsecond time. How much actual time had elapsed since the two shots? Twenty seconds? Two minutes? The scene was much too complex to clean up or stage-manage without leaving a dozen inadvertent clues, doing more harm than good. Genuine police cruisers could race up at any second. And I’d already retrieved my spent brass, an unexpected bonus. “Let’s go, Nick. Time to go.”
I grabbed my money, still leaning against the wall, and dropped it back in my pocket. I was glad Kelly had stayed in the driver’s seat. Glad that she hadn’t seen the bandits’ faces. There are some things you’re better off not seeing, ever.
****
Nick crawled headfirst beneath the GTI’s open rear hatch and into the backseat, then pulled it down from inside. Before I’d closed my door all the way, Kelly popped the clutch and we shot past the mini-storage and behind a used furniture store that connected to the back of a plumbing supply company.
“Did you just shoot a cop back there?” Kelly asked with raw fear in her voice.
“No. They were just bad guys pretending to be cops.” I readjusted my mirror, and Kelly readjusted hers.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Maybe they were undercover cops, or off duty?”
“No. They weren’t cops. They were just robbers.”
“But you killed them?”
“It was them or us. Better it was them.”
“So you had to kill them?”
I told her, “Yeah, I had to,” with more conviction than I felt. Maybe I had to kill them was closer to the truth. Or maybe they would have taken the mugger’s money and let us go. We’d never know. But they were in a dirty business, impersonating police to pull stickups. The blue suction-cup flashing strobe lights and the spotlight trick had probably worked well for them many times before, against unprepared civilians.
I felt zero remorse or regret for taking their lives. And if they had families waiting for them to come home with stolen money to put food on the table, well, screw them too. Starve, with my compliments. The only thing I felt was the added stress and worry over leaving more dead bodies in our wake. The mission wasn’t over, and we didn’t need any more complications. I did some silent deep-breathing exercises to calm myself down while this latest surge of adrenaline flushed out of my system.
Another block down a narrow alley between a wall and the back of a restaurant, a quick turn and we emerged on a residential street of modest single-family homes on tiny plots. Most of them showed some lights on inside, but only dimly. The houses were all surrounded by chain-link fences or walls. Most of the higher walls were topped with glass shards set upright in mortar. I was glad that Tony Marcello considered the property wall around Number 37 North Sunset Isle too classy for such treatment.
We were still a few miles from the Delaneys’ house and the Pantera, but Kelly didn’t use the GPS to navigate as she turned down one residential side street after another. After wiping the little nine-millimeter shell casings for prints with my shirttail, I tossed them into a row of hedges.
We jumped across the four lanes of Andrews Avenue, the main north-south artery in the western part of Wilton Manors. Kelly drove through another maze of neighborhoods, emerged for a few blocks on 26th, and then turned right on her own 18th Terrace. A motion-activated security light flicked on above us as we pulled up to the little guardhouse. Kelly gave a casual wave to the unseen guard behind his bulletproof window. The overhead light made a mirror of the glass.
An old man’s raspy voice emanating from a tinny speaker asked, “Are you staying out of trouble, Miss Kelly?”
Her voice almost cracked when she replied, “I’m trying to, Burt,” and the gate rumbled open. What the old man must have thought, with young Kelly Urbanzik bringing two strange men home at this hour.
Just a few minutes after I’d shot the two bogus cops we were rolling up to the Delaneys’ house. We hadn’t heard any sirens behind us. It was as if the traffic stop and the shootings had never happened, but I knew that I’d kicked open a couple of major hornet’s nests behind us. Kelly pulled to a stop just beyond the Delaneys’ driveway. Their minivan was parked in the same place as when we had left that morning. Life went on here as if our fatal Miami excursion and the more recent double bandit shooting had never happened.
I asked Kelly, “Do you have a garage at your house where you can hide your car?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Then put it in there and don’t take it out for a while. Not until you get a chance to see how this all plays out. Watch the news. Somebody could have seen us. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. Or there might be a security camera that caught it. So just lie low and watch the news.” Nick had already popped his rear hatch and exited through it with our bags. I grabbed my daypack from the foot well, leaned across the interior of the GTI, and gave Kelly a quick kiss on the cheek while firmly grasping her forearm, her hand still on the shifter.
I said, “You were ama
zing, incredible. We couldn’t have done any of this without you. But now you need to go home and be invisible for a while. You don’t want to get mixed up in what happened tonight.”
For once she was speechless, her mind full of turmoil and clearly working on too many thoughts at once.
I stepped out and closed the door. Her GTI didn’t move. She looked through the open window at Nick standing behind me. “So, go already!” I demanded. “Get this car out of sight.”
She worked the gearshift and rolled down the street. Mike Delaney held the inner and outer doors of his home open for us. The outer door combined painted ornamental burglar bars and insect screening, a popular tropical arrangement meant to keep out home invaders both large and small. I checked my watch just before climbing the steps onto his small porch; it was a minute until eleven.
Mike asked, “How did it go in Miami?” Obviously, we were not accompanied by Cori Vargas, which had been the entire goal of our operation.
“Overall, bad enough,” I said. “But we managed to get a tracker beacon aboard Topaz.”
“Well, that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty good,” I agreed halfheartedly. “And now we have to chase her to God knows where. Hey, did you find any gas for the boat?”
Mike looked at his feet. “I couldn’t,” he stammered. “I tried, but… I siphoned about seven gallons from my own van and put it in your tank. Your fuel gauge shows almost a half full, whatever that means. And I got your spare fuel bag all tied down. Oh, and we put some drinks in your cooler.”
“I made you dinner,” said Sharon. “Can you take a few minutes to eat, or do you want me to pack it?”
“Can I eat while we watch the news? Switch between the Miami and Fort Lauderdale channels. Let’s see if we’re famous.” Sharon handed me a plate holding two chicken drumsticks; I tore at them while still standing. We stood between the kitchen and living room and watched the big screen while Mike hopped between news programs. A Miami-Dade police officer’s funeral after a notorious bank robbery and shootout earlier in the week, with bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.” An apartment fire up in Pompano Beach that left a fifty people homeless. More on the twelve bodies dug up behind an old folks’ home in Coconut Creek. Nothing from North Sunset Isle on Miami Beach. Nothing from Oakland Park Boulevard near I-95 in Broward County. We waited until the first round of commercials on each channel, and I said that’s enough.
I quickly repacked my big kit bag and my daypack. Out the back door the four of us went, crossed their patio and little yard in a few strides, Nick and I almost falling as we clambered over Doctor Zinn’s cockpit. Tossed my bags onto the Pantera’s rear bench seat and jumped aboard, followed closely by Nick, who threw our bags into the forward cuddy. Grabbed the hidden key; it seemed impossible that I had bought the Pantera only the day before. Turned the key and in a moment the engine was growling, its roar muffled as its exhaust gases were expelled underwater. Mike untied us and tossed our lines aboard. The Pantera was already pointing down the canal; I simply nudged the throttle forward into gear. No time for hugs, especially not across the gunwales of two boats. Just a sincere “Thank you!” shouted astern, big arm waves, and down the canal we went.
****
Nick coiled and put away our dock lines and fenders, then mounted my handheld marine GPS atop the instrument panel in front of me. I switched on the running lights, and the tip of the boat’s nose glowed red and green. Most of the backlit gauges on the instrument panel were circular analog dials with actual physical needles, from the last century and retro as hell but they worked. The glowing GPS with its tiny chart screen was the only digital device from the new millennium.
I thought about all the gasoline in the boats we passed going down the Delaneys’ canal. Much of the gas was probably too old and stale to even be worth stealing. Yance Mabry had said we could expect two miles per gallon at fifty miles an hour. The fuel remaining in the tank would get us how many miles? We needed gas, but I sure wasn’t going to drive the Pantera up to the fuel docks at Bahia Mar or Pier 66 and start flashing cash. That meant we would have to refuel in Bimini, sixty miles southeast across the Gulf Stream.
We slid down the Middle River at 1,100 rpm, trying to attract as little attention as possible in a dark and low-slung speedboat pushed along by a rumbling 500-cubic-inch Chevy big-block. Any stray manatees would just have to stay out of our path, because I couldn’t make the Pantera go any slower without taking her in and out of gear. We ducked our heads again while slipping under the Sunrise Boulevard Bridge, our water-muffled engine echoing and reverbing off the concrete and steel. Black-dark in the night shadow beneath the wide slab of steel, concrete and asphalt.
Then the big hairpin turn behind the back of the Winn-Dixie, where I’d first stepped back onto American soil only thirty hours before. I had spent one very long day back in the good old US of A. I noticed it was 11:19 on the glowing GPS. The eleven o’clock tracker fix had come and gone. “Nick, grab the Orbcom and find Topaz.”
He crawled below and came back with the transceiver. He also brought out rain slickers and life vests and laid them on the rear seat next to the cooler. Once he had the last known latitude and longitude for Topaz, he punched the numbers into my handheld GPS. That done, he held the device up so that I could see the three-inch-square electronic chart on the screen. He had zoomed it out to show everything from the east coast of South Florida as far over as Bimini in the Bahamas. Nick said, “The little circle is Topaz. At least, that’s where she was at eleven p.m. Thirty-five miles east of Miami.” He studied the tiny screen and said, “That’s on a line for Bimini, or maybe south of Bimini.”
I said, “She won’t stop there, she doesn’t need gas. So she’s crossing the Great Bahama Bank.” This bank was a vast area of shallow water over sand between Bimini and Andros Island, but it was navigable at night with GPS. The depths were mostly over ten feet, the few dangerous coral reefs well known. No problem for Topaz or the Pantera.
“Does that mean she’s heading for Castigo Cay?”
“Or Chub Cay, or Nassau, or a thousand other places.”
“But she could be heading for Castigo Cay.”
“She could. Sure. That’s the way she’d go.”
Nick stretched his arms out, twisted his torso and said, “This is going to be a long night.” Then he turned completely around in his bolster to look behind us, still checking six.
I said, “If it was easy, anybody could do it. Hey, while you have the GPS out, punch South Bimini in as our destination. It’s already on the waypoint list. We’ll refuel there.”
“So we’re going to Bimini after all, huh?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “we’re going to Bimini after all.”
“Even though your pilot buddy said it was all cutthroats.”
“Even though.”
“Okay, Dan, I’m cool with it if you’re cool with it. Hey, are you going to steer with your bare eyeballs or the NOD? Once we’re offshore, I mean.”
“Bare eyes, as long as the moon is up. After that, I don’t know. But in the meantime, you can set it up. It’s in my—”
“I know where it is.” He returned with the bowling ball bag, and in a minute he had the NOD on the hockey helmet and the helmet on his head.
“How does it fit you?” I asked him.
“Little loose. Not bad.” He took it off and set it on the deck at his feet. I was glad I didn’t need to mention that we couldn’t be seen leaving Port Everglades while wearing night vision. Being just harmless innocent civilians and all.
“Once we’re offshore, you can watch the horizon with the NOD while I drive.”
“No problem.” A moment later Nick tapped my shoulder and said, “Helicopter.”
“Where?”
“Five o’clock.”
When I turned to the right and behind, I could see its spotlight like a white light saber coming down from heaven. It was impossible to miss when we had a direct line of sight, w
hich we did some of the time. Directions and distances were hard to guess while on narrow, twisting creeks surrounded by houses, buildings and trees, but it seemed as if the helo was orbiting over to the west a couple of miles away, perhaps by Oakland Park and 95.
I asked Nick, “You think they found the fake cops?” We had to speak loudly to be heard even over the muffled engine.
“You mean, the dead fake cops,” he replied. “Hell if I know. Maybe they found them. I just hope they were fake cops, and not undercover or something.”
“They were fake cops. And they’ll have no reason to connect them to us.”
Nick said, “I’ll begin to believe that when we’re out on the ocean, with nothing behind us but the horizon.”
My biggest worry, a gnawing one, was that the entire scene with the fake cops had been captured on some security camera. I pushed the worry away. What I cannot control I should not waste time or energy fretting over.
Easier said than done.
The killing moon was low but still occasionally visible to our right, hidden at times by trees or condos as we turned and hooked our way south. Middle River joined the Intracoastal Waterway and we slipped under the Las Olas Boulevard drawbridge. No need for the tender up in his cubicle to leave his television program to raise the twin spans for tiny us.
By degrees we had reentered Fort Lauderdale’s golden zone. The owners of waterfront mansions and luxury condos clearly had no problem paying their electric bills. While passing the famous Bahia Mar marina, we observed an impressive party on a megayacht tied up on the longest outside pier. The yacht went two hundred feet, easily, and had at least that number of dinner-attired guests frolicking on the multiple decks from bow to transom.
Castigo Cay Page 40