“This is where Kelly goes to the phone,” Flaherty said. “He raised the marine operator to try to warn Kerrivan.”
“Kevin, what are you doing?” Larochelle’s voice sounded anxious and confused.
“I got to get ahold of Pete. I told him Meyers was a narc.”
“We have removed all the marijuana but a little bit.” Escarlata’s voice. “Tell him to sink the ship, Kevin, and take the small boat in. It is the safe way. I do not want to see your friends arrested, my darling. I tell you this as a token of my love.”
“He’s got stardust in his eyes,” Flaherty said. “Poor sweet, beautiful guy.”
“This is the marine operator speaking.”
“We were hooked into the phones, too, of course,” said Flaherty.
“Kevin, I don’t think you should.” Larochelle’s voice.
“Now, would you like to hear a little music?” Flaherty said, pushing the stop button. “Let’s take a break. I can save the rest for later. The best part. Where Meyers comes waltzing in, right in the middle of Kelly’s phone call to Kerrivan.”
O’Doull’s head was pounding with confused rhythms. “You listened to Kevin and Escarlata die.” He spoke bitterly. “Were their deaths all part of the DEA master plan, too?”
“No, Theo, that’s the last thing we wanted. I called the police right away. It was me who phoned the hotel desk, by the way, not Larochelle. I’m sorry about Kelly, of course. But Augustin — that really was a bummer. If he hadn’t been killed, Meyers would be in the clink right now.”
“Augustin Escarlata,” O’Doull said slowly. A light began to flicker in his head. “He was your inside man. He was your . . . Alfredo, you called him?”
“Code name, Alfredo J. I still don’t know what his real name was. He was a find — God, he was a find.”
“How did you find him?”
“Actually, he kind of found us. He wouldn’t take any money. He was working with us, really, not for us.”
“Who was he working for?”
“Cuba. Castro. They sent spies on the boatlift. Tent City was crawling with them. But Augustin was class, he was their number one. Probably actually was a Cuban colonel. Jeez, he was so good. You know, I think I could have fallen in love with him. Those clandestine evenings on the park bench. But the subject was usually Meyers, though. Not love. Or we talked politics. He kept asking me if I was interested in politics. Ultimately, he took a chance on me, told me he trusted me, told me he was working for Fidel. He was a Red, Theo.”
She sighed. “He took a real chance on me. If I had snitched on him to the CIA, those boys would have bumped him. Poor Augustin. He might have survived this and gotten back to Cuba if he hadn’t fallen for that bitch Larochelle. What’s she got, anyway? As if I don’t know.”
O’Doull tried to censor thoughts of Larochelle, tried to clear his mind of her and concentrate on Colonel Escarlata. “So he was sent here to infiltrate the anti-Castro terrorists,” he said. “And he found his way into the April Seventeen Movement.” Things were coming together as he spoke. “He met Meyers. And after he met Meyers, he came to you. He found out Meyers was going to finance the movement with three hundred million dollars’ worth of dope money.” He smiled crookedly at Flaherty. “He used you the same way you used us — to get Meyers.”
“Yeah, I guess. Meyers was going to finance a goddamn invasion of Cuba — that’s what Augustin was worried about. The CIA — maybe they were getting the word from the State Department — didn’t want me to touch Meyers. But I got my job to do, and I don’t buy their crap.”
She sighed. “I guess Augustin figured it didn’t matter if he compromised the Canadian end of Operation Potship by then. He had just about completed his mission for the Cuban government. I was supposed to meet with him in the park that night, at two o’clock. He was going to tell me where Meyers had stashed the grass.”
“And where is the grass?”
“I don’t know. Augustin never made it to the park. And now we’ve lost Meyers.” She shook her head sadly. “We blew a great scenario, Theo. Augustin was going to give us the word, and we were going to scoop Meyers sitting on top of a mountain of marijuana. And we were going to watch his crafty grin disappear from off his face.”
O’Doull felt a little thrill of revenge over it all. He felt his police force had been badly used. “So you’re up shit creek without a witness,” he said. “Meyers has got away with it.”
“We scoured their camp — the April Seventeen camp — the barracks, everywhere. We’ve had Meyers’s office staked out for the last ten days. We ran a few test calls through his office, so we know he picks up his messages by pager. He calls from pay phones — local calls, not long distance. In the meantime, he’s selling off the pot a few hundred pounds at a time. Just enough to keep the prices high without glutting the market. When it’s all gone, he’ll surface again — maybe in Cuba with three thousand mercenaries armed to the teeth and ready to start World War Three.”
“Jessica, you ended up suckering everybody — even yourselves.”
“The joke, hah-hah, is on us.”
“Funny as hell,” said O’Doull, “funny as hell. Well, I’ll tell you something even funnier. I can find Meyers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I can find that son of a bitch. I put together a little thing for Operation Crackpot, as you call it. I figured we’d slip it into Pete’s watch. But it turned out Pete doesn’t carry a watch. So I planted it on Meyers, instead. I had a hunch Rudy might try to disappear.”
“Are you kidding, Theo?”
“A little bird-dog transmitter, no bigger than a matchhead. While Meyers was taking a shower at the dsa camp, I slipped it inside his pager and wired it up to the antenna. Operates off the batteries.”
Flaherty’s mouth and eyes were wide open.
“I’ll need a large-scale chart of Miami,” O’Doull said, “and a high-gain preamp to tie into a transmitter-receiver. Then we just crystal it to the right frequency and drive around Miami. The receiver will tell us when we’re getting warmer or colder. It’s like pin the tail on the donkey.”
Flaherty leaned over and bussed O’Doull lightly on the cheek. “I think it’s time you heard the rest of the tape, Theo.” She pushed the play button.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Johnny Nighthawk
I have lost track now. I forget what I numbered the last few tapes. This is Nine or Ten. I have got to get out of here soon. I have a living to make.
Okay. Miami.
The fix-it man is out of the country on business — this is what we learn from the woman who answers his office phone. She does not know when he is due back, but if it is urgent, she will take a message. She is not at liberty to say where he is.
Pete has the whole story about Kelly’s murder, because Sergeant O’Doull spent some time filling him in and Marianne added some facts in a long note she sent to Pete in the St. John’s lockup. And now Meyers has vanished. We ask ourselves: Is he on the run from the police?
But, no. When Billy Lee phones the cop shop (he is a reporter from the Miami Herald catching up on old murders), he is told that the file has been closed. Murder–heart attack. What we expected. These cops have just written Kelly off.
Pete is not fazed. He is prepared to wait Meyers out. Our guess is that he is still calmly playing both ends and has gone off to Cartagena to report the disaster to Senator Paez.
“He’ll be back,” says Pete. “I will get him.” I wonder, what does “get” mean?
Billy Lee tries to lighten things by showing us a good time in Miami, which he knows well, since it has been a main staging area for many of his operations. We take a rented car to Lauderdale, to a smoke-easy he frequents there. He promises us European beer, girls, laughs, various varieties of hemp and other organic and chemical compounds, and not exactly under the table.
The front door operates on the Joe-sent-me principle. There is a peephole in it so the manager and bouncers can look you over.
“Private club,” a guy yells. “We don’t know you.”
“Just say Billy Lee Tinker.”
After a second the door swooshes open, and a big happy black guy, decked out in feathers and velvet, explodes out of there and wraps his arms around Billy Lee like a TV wrestler.
“Hey, White Trash, how you doin’, baby?”
“Hey, Jake, give me some of them nigger fingers.”
And so on. “Couple of my friends up north from the National Honkie League,” Billy Lee says, introducing us.
“Hey, man!” Skin is given, and we are ushered inside. Billy Lee is known in here. There is backslapping and yahooing, as if Terry Bradshaw or Ferguson Jenkins had just walked in. It is like a Miller Beer commercial: “Hey, ain’t you Pete Kerrivan? Hey, fellas, Pete Kerrivan! What a pleasure to meet you, man.”
A hundred people are crowded into this room, which is sweet and spicy with smoke. We have pushers, rounders, grifters, and wheelers with money to spend. Across the way a couple of guys are marking numbers with chalk on a board, taking down orders being called to them by customers.
Jake shoves a little black fellow with a goatee at us. “This here is Brother Moses. He will get you what you want, when you want it, however you like it. Your credit’s good, Billy Lee.” Jake wanders off to tend to some other favorite customers.
Moses seems a little shy in front of The Presence. “How is it, Billy Lee?”
“Moses, how are y’all? Thought you was shovin’ weed up north.”
“Jus’ about to go. Now, Billy Lee, you and your friends should try a little of this here.” He pulls a pinch of weed from a beaded leather pouch and tamps it into a small-bowled pipe.
“Wal, I don’t mind,” says Billy Lee.
“Jus’ take a half a lung of this, man. It will knock you on your butt. Ain’t bin nothin’ like this around here, ever. Like, ever. Baddest dope you ever taste, man.”
When Billy Lee is in mid-toke, his eyes pop out. He takes the pipe from his mouth and pokes around in the bowl with his little finger, as if he is looking for some kind of strange bug he has seen in there.
“Where did this come from?” he says. He passes the pipe to Pete, who takes a taste. Pete looks at Billy Lee, frowning.
Billy Lee jabs a finger at Moses’s jacket pocket. “Gimme, gimme.” Moses hands the pouch over, and we rummage around inside it, rub the buds, smell our fingers. I take a little toke, a tester. It is definitely punta roja, all female flowers. It has a very pungent, familiar bite. With his perfect palate, Kevin would have known for sure.
“Where did you get this?” Billy Lee repeats.
“It’s yours, Billy Lee. There’s three-quarters of a lid in there.” Moses is proud of his generosity. “It go a hundred and eighty a ounce. Here. In Miami. Be two-fifty in New York.”
“Now, Moses,” Billy Lee says, “maybe you’re a little whacked or somethin’, ’cause you don’t hear me so good, and I want you to listen real careful, ’cause I’m askin’ you again to tell me where you got this flowertop from, man.”
“You talkin’ near twenty-five hunnert a pound for quantity.” Moses has a sly look. He is thinking: Maybe Moses the Goatee will make a score off Billy Lee Tinker himself.
“Who connected you, Moses?”
“Man, I cain’t make nothin’ if I give away my businessman.” His eyes dance from Billy Lee’s to mine to Pete’s. Finally Pete, who manages our shrinking supply of dollars, peels five hundred off the roll in his pocket, fans them out for Moses to see, then tucks them into his leather pouch and hands that back to Moses.
The little man peers around the room until his eyes settle on a skinny Latin type sitting at a table doing some business. Moses bobs his head in that direction.
“How much of this is there around?” Pete asks.
“Steady stream,” Moses says. “Twenty, thirty pounds a day around here. Lotta folks movin’ it north.”
We had never counted the bales when we unloaded at Captain Pike’s in Judas Bight. It could be that as many as fifteen, twenty bales had been lifted from us here in Miami. By the guys who were working on the ship when we got out of the slammer here, I am thinking. Meyers’s boys.
“That guy, he a Colombian?” Pete asks.
“No, Cuban.”
Pete says in a low voice, “Maybe we can recoup some of our losses, boys.” Louder. “Moses, go and tell him we are friends. Big buyers. Tell him to meet us outside.”
Moses does that. He lets the man know we are good people, and the Cuban looks around the room, spots us, flashes us a smile and a wink. We wait a while, have another beer, then go out.
We can tell he is carrying a heater. He extends his hand. “Jorge,” he says.
Billy Lee introduces us around. “I’m Chopper. This is Duke and Jack.” I am Jack. Billy Lee will later amend it to Mad Dog Jack.
“My friends and me, we’re big buyers from Texas,” Billy Lee says, putting his arm around Jorge’s shoulders. “I do Houston, Duke does Dallas–Fort Worth, and Jack does San Antone and west. You’re gonna be a rich man, Jorge. Now how much of this sinsemilla you got?”
Jorge takes us to an old red Cutlass convertible and opens the trunk. Three pounds, bagged up.
“No, Jorge,” Billy Lee says, “don’t fuck us around.” He switches to Spanish. “We are interested in hundred-pound lots.”
Jorge shakes his head. “I can get fifty pounds at one time. I sell fifty pounds, I get another fifty pounds.” His eyes look beady with concern. We are close enough for him to feel our hot breath. “I can see you tomorrow,” he says.
Pete nods to me, and I twist him over the car with his arm bent behind his back. Pete pulls a loaded Saturday-night special from the Cuban’s inside jacket pocket and pushes it against the man’s ribs. “We are going for a ride,” Billy Lee says. “We’ll use our car.”
We cruise a while, little cloudbursts hitting us from time to time. Finally, we park near a golf course, where it is dark. Billy Lee does the talking.
“The big guy on your left. They call him Mad Dog Jack in San Antone. Duke, on the other side, he got his brains scrambled when he od’d on acid. All he can think of is killing. He likes to kill. We got to watch him close, Jorge.” Billy Lee smiles. “What happened, man, is we got ripped off. And we think at your front end are the guys that ripped us off. We lost millions and we’re really mad about it. And Duke back there, he’s so mad he’s gonna cut your nuts out with a shiv if you don’t tell us where this comes from.” Billy Lee looks mean as hell with his dark glasses and five days’ growth of beard. The cast on my hand helps me look pretty heavy, too.
Jorge caves in and guides us to Little Havana, down an alley off Flagler Street, to the back entrance of a little real estate business — a screen, probably, a pantalla. Billy Lee gets out and peeks into a window. There is a light coming from behind a curtain.
“Can’t see it, but you can smell it,” he tells us. We leave Jorge and follow Billy Lee to the door. Jorge will run away, but he will be just one less person for us to handle.
I am able to take the door off with two hits from the heel of my boot.
“Miami police!” Billy Lee yells as he strides in. “Freeze!”
Who can tell these days who is a cop? We make a pretty good job of it, school of Starsky and Hutch.
There are two guys in here, weighing and bagging up about a hundred pounds of our sinsemilla. They are not carrying, which is a good thing, but there is an automatic rifle sitting on a chair.
“There’s enough here to send you to Raiford for twenty years,” Billy Lee yells. “You fuckin’ chiciteros! Scum! Poisoning people’s minds!” He is shouting at them hysterically in two languages and has one of them against the wall, holding his shoulders w
ith his big basketball hands.
“Calm down, calm down,” Pete is saying.
Billy Lee continues to rant, says we should “let the cocksuckers have it here and now.”
“Easy, Sergeant, easy,” Pete says. “It’s not these guys we want. We want the pushers who’re supplying them.”
This looks like the back end of the operation. There is more where the hundred pounds has come from.
We pretend to have a little conference, and they can hear us arguing.
“Come on, let’s just take them in, Lootenant,” Billy Lee says. “And maybe put a couple of rounds in them on the way.”
“No, I think we can make a deal,” Pete says. He talks to the Cubans in Spanish. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. You show us where the stuff is, we’ll let you go, we won’t lay charges. But if you don’t, my friends, we are going to beat the shit out of you, we are going to charge you with assaulting a police officer, possession of an illegal firearm, possession of narcotics with intent, and you guys are going to be stamping out license plates for the rest of your lives.”
Chapter Fifty
The warehouse was on the Halifax waterfront and it was full of damp.
Peddigrew switched on the lights and locked the door behind him. There were evil smells from the stuff that had been on the Alta Mar: a mix of mildew and marijuana and salt and the disinfectant spray that health authorities had covered everything with.
But it was all here, the radios, Omega, depth sounder, radar — all the gear that Meyers had paid for.
“Well?” Peddigrew said.
“Well what, James?” said Larochelle, suppressing a smile.
There was no suppressing the smile of Señor Felix Juares, the proprietor of Maritimas Manejos del Atlantico, S.A., of Barranquilla, Colombia. Juares smiled until his gums showed. Finally he said, “Hokay, Señor James, we show you.”
Juares and Larochelle waded into the jungle of gear and began hauling out all of the orange plastic-covered life jackets they could find, throwing them into a pile.
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