Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  She turned and left with a backwards wave to us as she walked down the drive, pointedly swinging her gypsy hips.

  We went back toward the pool. The maid, a distant aunt of Dooley’s, was serving food in a gazebo to its rear.

  ‘You were saved by the doorbell, Milo. Either that or she had us under surveillance and hand picked her moment. Or else you paged her for help.’

  We joined Jonah at the table, looking at a huge plate of steamed stone crab claws, blackened tuna, grilled Atlantic salmon salad and a strawberry studded something that was explained to me as guava mousse. The maid reappeared with an ice bucket with a couple of bottles of chilled Anjou Rosé.

  Jonah was pouring the wine and looking at the food on the table. ‘We ever have to go home from here, Milo?’

  ‘Only to remind ourselves how we do it on the other side. To stop us getting soft.’

  Jay prodded me. ‘So getting shot’s getting soft?’

  Jonah grinned. ‘He likes to put himself out for target practice for all this attention. Only happens when there’s good looking women around to look after him. Only way he gets it. Pity, I mean.’

  Jay said, ‘What’s in the envelope. Isn’t it late for Valentine’s Day?’

  Jonah was enjoying this.

  ‘Show you later. Let’s eat.’

  Jay knew how to crack the claws expertly without making the crab meat look like the puke of a bilious cat. There’s probably a school in Knightsbridge that gives courses. I imagined what she could do with those crackers on me at this moment. She looked at me as if that’s what she was thinking as well, as she massacred the crab carcass.

  I decided my contribution to lunch was to keep pouring the wine. After we’d eaten, I opened Cza’s envelope.

  There were three mugshots of Johnny ‘Steaknife’ Vittorio. One was taken in relation to possession of a firearm while on parole and the other two related to busts for drug offences.

  Details of the outstanding Detroit PD warrants were enclosed. A couple of them were for offences when he’d been picked up in the same Detroit bar on separate occasions. I wondered what the attraction was there. The bar and Detroit.

  His aka’s were Sadie and Steaknife. Sadie because he was a sadist or as it was rumoured, he had ambidextrous sexual tendencies, in the FBI’s words. Or probably both. He was paranoid about the name. And dangerous. Steaknife didn’t require too much imagination.

  He was a made member of one of Castellano’s crews and had disappeared from view in late 1985, straight after the Don’s murder. He was considered a loose cannon, a loner and he had a lot of mob enemies. The Feds had believed he’d been murdered by John Gotti, as part of an anti-Castellano purge that went on around that time, made guys or not, when the old rules went out the window and when the squealers treated omerta as if it were some sort of Italian omelette. Disappeared that is, until his fingerprints had been found on the South Fed Bank documents.

  He was five nine, and weighed one thirty-five pounds. His photographs showed slicked jet-black hair and a fairly handsome face, looked at in profile, if you fancied that oil-slicked Mediterranean stud look. In only one of his portrait shots did he look directly at the camera with a studied fuck-you-cops malice. He was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t dredge him from the recesses of my memory.

  I passed the shots to Jonah and Jay.

  ‘He be one mean mother,’ said Jonah.

  Jay made her contribution. ‘Ex-boyfriend of Cza’s? That dumped her?’

  I told her briefly about the case, leaving out the bits about the gutted body and the fracas at the pool. Come to think of it, I left out almost all of the details.

  We were back on recliners drinking cold wine. Jay was telling me of plans involving me, herself and a bowl of guava mousse and the strawberries, when Dooley returned with Gloria.

  It was late afternoon. I was supposed to call Sayers at The Delano after six. I agreed with Jay to let him stew. Why spoil a lovely day?

  Dooley’s cell rang. He walked away to take the call.

  ‘Your friend Sayers has been a busy boy again,’ he said to Jay and me on his return. ‘He was in Little Havana for lunch today with some heavy Cubans. He then went back with his sidekick to Hialeah. Swapped cars once to avoid a tail. Obviously goes to the right sort of movies. He went to the same warehouse, with the same guys he’d been with yesterday.’

  I said, ‘Something’s going down.’

  Jay looked my way. ‘Unfortunately not me.’

  Dooley smiled briefly, being remarkably polite. Thank goodness Jonah was out of earshot.

  ‘At around four a van arrived at the back of the building and two cases were carried in. Everyone stayed for another hour and they all left, without the cases. Sayers is now back at The Delano. The cases are still there. We think.’

  I said, ‘Let’s go take a look at this mystery merchandise.’ ‘Done. I got someone to get you in there. I’ll just make a few calls to confirm.’

  He went inside and returned after a couple of minutes.

  ‘My man Rafe will pick you up at midnight at the hotel. My other man Dario will be waiting for you at the warehouse.’

  ‘You don’t have to do all of this just for me,’ said Jay.

  I said, ‘Jay, it’s not just for you now. Those guys might have been the ones who arranged the hit on me. Besides, we’ve nothing else this evening can’t be put off.’

  Jay kicked me on the leg. ‘I could think of something.’

  ‘I’ll keep tomorrow night for you, then,’ I said.

  ‘Promises, promises. But you promise to take care of yourself. You’re in charge of him, Jonah. I want him back with all of his pieces intact.’

  ‘I know where some of those pieces have been, bro,’ he said to me softly, as we left the house. ‘I think I should maybe tell her.’

  We drove back to the hotel for a few hours’ sleep.

  13

  Dooley’s man Rafe was on time. He’d brought us dark-camo woolen hats, track suits and black trainers and gloves. He drove a battered Dodge crew cab pick-up; nondescript wheels that wouldn’t look out of place near a Hialeah warehouse in the middle of the night.

  Hialeah is most famous outside Florida for its racetrack and its breeding colony of flamingos. It’s less a city than a patchwork of residential developments and commercial land, with street after street of fast food outlets and strip malls, where Spanish is the first and mostly the only language.

  The homes are anonymous uniform one-storey dwellings of mock stucco over wood and tar paper, and real bars over doors and windows. We pulled into an all-night diner for coffee where we were joined by a guy I recognised as the driver of the blue Chrysler Neon. He and Rafe spoke in Spanish. I guess they were satisfied we weren’t being tailed so we left. The Neon and the driver would follow to keep an eye on us.

  In twenty minutes or so we pulled into a dead-end road. Rafe cut the pick-up’s lights. Razor wire protected most of the properties along the short street’s perimeter. We turned into a driveway stopping at a tall gate. It was down a short slope where the truck would not be easily seen. We got out and Rafe lifted the rear seat, taking out a couple of Benelli M1s with their bet-your-life-on-it reliability.

  He handed them to us. ‘I don’t know what to expect tonight, so these won out over Swiss Army Knives.’ He clipped a pistol rig into his waistband.

  We loaded five rounds of solid shot into each magazine plus one chambered into the barrel. Our nines were primed and rigged and on our belts. The two main streetlights in the road were unlit, maybe shot out earlier by Dooley’s men as a precaution. Rafe motioned us to follow him. A little further down the road we turned left into a gateway onto wasteland. The heavy padlock on a chain holding the gate had been pre-opened for us. Rafe unravelled the chain and we followed him through. He wrapped the chain back around the gate.

  We silently followed the wasteland for about a hundred yards until we came to a low building. A faded sign advertising Champion spark plugs said it was
a stockist of foreign auto parts before the days of electronic ignitions. I could make out several loading bays along its wall. They looked as if they hadn’t been in use in awhile. We walked toward one at the end of the building. Rafe looked at his watch. He motioned to us to stop.

  ‘We’ll wait here. We have someone taking care of the alarm. When that’s done, he’ll let us in.’

  The moon stayed mainly behind clouds and there was overgrown scrub and skeletal packing cases to give us cover. Nevertheless I felt vulnerable out there without having reconnoitred the area first. But Rafe seemed to know what he was doing.

  Two o’clock came and went. So did 2.15. It was almost 2.45 and I was getting an uneasy feeling. We were sitting targets out here to anyone with a good eye, a night scope and a certain predisposition.

  There was a grating noise from the building. Jonah and I took up positions on either side of the door. Rafe stayed twenty feet in front of it, crouching behind a mound of timber. The door opened slowly and noisily in the still night, as long unused and unoiled steel wheels clattered against the concrete floor.

  Any uncongenials would certainly have heard the din by now. Jonah and I crouched at the ready with our Benellis.

  ‘Rafe. Rafe,’ called a voice softly from the doorway.

  ‘Dario.’ Rafe’s voice in reply. ‘I’m here.’

  Rafe emerged from behind the packing case and walked to the door talking softly in Spanish. He waved us in behind him.

  Dario, the voice, was a slight man dressed in faded combat fatigues. On his head was a plastic helmet with an adjustable hi-power light on the front. Around his waist, a heavy belt held the tools of his trade. He looked like the lineman from the county.

  ‘Dario… Jonah, Milo.’ Rafe introduced us in a whisper.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. The alarm was a little more difficult than I’d expected.’

  We helped Dario close the door, lifting it as we pushed it to minimise the sound.

  ‘There’s no alarm system Dario can’t handle,’ said Rafe, like a father boasting of his seven-year-old’s prowess with a Lego set.

  We were in a deserted warehouse. Empty steel shelving ran along the centre of the floor while a crane dangled heavy steel hooks from a series of gantries above. An uneven line of forty gallon drums were along one wall and a rancid smell of stale oil hung in the heavy air.

  In the corner at the far end I could make out a glassed-in office. We inched our way towards it, me on point and Jonah, as agile as a waltzing ferret, trailing as Tailend Charlie.

  Dario shone a high intensity flashlight in front of us to look for any wires across the floor, as we made careful progress. He picked the lock on the office door. We went in.

  Inside were two wooden packing cases with dark coloured canvas sheeting lying on top, keeping their contents from view. The lids of the boxes were leaning against the wall.

  Dario shone his helmet light on the first of the boxes. I removed the cover and industrial strength bubble wrap.

  ‘Holy fucking Cuban hell,’ said Rafe. ‘Jesus, Castro and Mary the Mag.’

  Lying side by side like Rafe’s blasphemies were an RPG-7 rocket launcher and an anti-tank missile.

  I said, ‘Now we’re getting warmer.’

  We lifted the launcher and another layer of wrap.

  Underneath was a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun with a mini-scope and tactical light, special grips and a custom made sling, all the trimmings, soup to nuts. It had that factory fresh aroma.

  I was surprised to find anything incriminating here but obviously Sayers had counted on the alarm system for protection. He was a dilettante. The alarm was probably wired into somewhere nearby, with some bozo on remote guard duty, fast asleep.

  Rafe opened the other box. ‘Someone wants to start a little war somewhere. RPG-22s.’

  Stacked inside were the rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a sophisticated update of the RPG-7s. Underneath were their rockets, capable of piercing heavy armour and reinforced concrete.

  I took out my digital camera and took a couple of shots of each of the weapons. There were no outside windows for the flash to be seen. We carefully replaced them under the sheeting.

  Dario softly called out, ‘More over here.’

  He pulled up another piece of sheeting from the floor against a wall. ‘Mierda. They want to take out some aircraft as well.’

  It was a FIM-92A Stinger hand-held surface-to-air launcher. Its missile with an infra red heat-seeking nose and tapered tail containing a six pound high-explosive fragmentation warhead, lay nearby.

  We’d used an earlier version in ‘82 in the Falklands, downing an Argentinean Pucura ground attack aircraft before it strafed us. We had identified the Pucura from a photo supplied to MI6 by British planespotters who had holidayed in Argentina. Our copy was a photocopy. Thank God the nerds were on our side.

  I said to Dario, ‘We need to find out where this stuff’s going and when.’

  ‘Of course. I’m leaving something for your friends.’

  Dario showed me a three inch bolt with a nut screwed on at the end. It was slightly rusted.

  ‘It’s an omni-directional high gain voice-activated mike with a mini-transmitter.’ He had the jargon. ‘Dependable for at least a mile. And it’s got a back-up digital recorder, which I can call on my cell, just in case.’

  He placed it behind one of the wooden lids on a window ledge. He put another one on a shelf above the window. They wouldn’t be noticed amongst the other detritus in the office. We rearranged everything as we’d found it.

  ‘OK. All done,’ said Dario.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘You cats go out the way you came in. I’ll turn the alarm back on when I go.’

  We went to the side door and opened it far enough for us to squeeze through.

  ‘Adios, amigos,’ said Dario.

  We slowly made our way across the wasteland and back to the pick-up. We padlocked the gate behind us and drove past the other side of the building. A car flashed its lights at us as it sped by, as an all-clear.

  14

  We sat in Dooley’s office looking at the photographs on his MacBook screen. ‘These Cubans want to invade Guantanamo Bay?’

  I said, ‘Could all these weapons be supplied from Cuba?’ ‘Sure,’ said Dooley. ‘Anything can come from Cuba. At a price.’

  ‘Are our British friends buying or selling?’ said Jonah.

  I said, ‘My guess, acting as a middleman to source the gear. Sayers’ll be laundering Republican money. It’ll end up in some untraceable Sinn Fein account. Far across the Irish Sea. Less his cut.’

  Jonah said, ‘This shit hard to get hold of?’

  ‘The MP5s and RP-7s are available at a price. The RPG-22s a bit more difficult. Plus I haven’t seen too many Stingers at gun fairs recently.’

  ‘The RPG-22s,’ said Jonah. ‘What they do?’

  I said, ‘Designed to be light, portable, easy to conceal and quick to operate. A well-trained terrorist could ready and fire one in about ten seconds. They have a pop-up sight plus a manual calibration of the target range. Nice and simple. Designed for anti-tank work, but they ain’t too fussy about what they hit.’

  ‘A lot of them floating around Eastern Europe. Around three hundred bucks a throw to an unpaid Russian general,’ said Dooley. ‘Maybe higher delivered in bulk somewhere.’

  ‘Who do you take for the buyers?’ said Jonah.

  ‘A lot of terrorist groups could use this shit. Hamas. FARC. Al Qaeda. The Taleban. Hezbollah. Iraqi Hells Angels. Take your pick.’

  ‘Well, we might know later today. Dario is sitting out in Hialeah with his earphones on and recorder running.’

  I said, ‘He’s an operator.’

  Dooley chuckled. ‘He was a defector from the Cuban Special Forces – Soviet trained with a Russian doctorate in electronic engineering from the University of Leningrad. He was getting in the crap in Havana for not showing enough ideological fervour – rather
than be fired and work as a janitor or be imprisoned for vagrancy, he fled and ended up in Miami. The CIA became interested in him but were nervous he was some Castro plant from the Cuban DSE – the Department of State Security. Thought he was too good to be true. So he does a lot of work for people like me. Man’s a genius. Uncle Sam’s loss, our gain.’ Dooley grinned with self-satisfaction. ‘And get this. As a kid the man taught himself English reading Raymond Chandler novels. So this shit just comes naturally.’

  Tonique came into the office with notes written on a yellow legal pad.

  ‘Mr Sayers called again. He said he has business to attend to for the next few days and may be unavailable to talk to you. He said to make sure to tell you his offer to Jay expires as soon as he returns to London next week. He expects you to leave him a message. And he wants to meet with Jay. He said it’s very important for her.’

  ‘Thanks Tonique. He calls again, tell him you gave me his message and we’re far too busy to talk to him. Have more important things to do.’

  Sayers certainly did have business to attend to. I wanted him to think we had no interest in him until we delivered him on a platter to whomever.

  I changed the subject. ‘How’s Tomas?’ I said, turning to Dooley.

  ‘Very edgy. He’s had another call from The Roach in New York who wants his confirmation he’ll be placing that stock.’

  I nodded. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Detective Pino in Coral Gables got something else for us. You like to go and see him? It’ll cost you lunch.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  Dooley made the call.

  ‘Same place at noon,’ he said.

  Jimmy Pino was in the restaurant when we arrived. A reuben sandwich, slaw, large Coke and steak fries were adjacent. He was still in plainclothes but an ephemeral neon sign flashed ‘cop’, in NYPD blue. Maybe it was just the way he ate, the way your mother told you not to eat in public.

  He motioned with his knife for us to sit down. ‘Dooley tells me you’ve been in the wars,’ he said in between mouthfuls.

  We sat down opposite him.