She counted them out. “Twelve of them, that’s right. Thank God, we didn’t have to use these. They’d have taken us straight to the bottom.”
“Each was seven kilo, Señor James.” With his jackknife, Juares slashed one of the vests open, slitting through both the fabric and the plastic wrap inside. Several grams of uncut cocaine spilled onto the warehouse floor.
Juares scooped a thousand dollars’ worth of snow into his hands and smeared it on his face and grinned. He looked like a kid caught in his mother’s flour bin.
Each gram of this cocaine when cut twice with procaine would yield three hundred dollars, street price.
“You may not win all your cases, James,” said Larochelle, “but somehow you always end up on top.”
“Let’s get these into the car,” said Peddigrew. “It’s a long drive to Toronto.”
Johnny Nighthawk
It is a modern mansion near the ocean, secluded, surrounded by mangrove trees. There are maybe two or three acres inside a high spiked fence. From behind the fence, five Dobermans are snarling at us.
The gate can probably be unlocked only by electronic signal from inside the house. There is a buzzer outside it, but of course we do not try to announce ourselves.
The Cubans whom we arrested are still in Little Havana, still in the back of the real estate store. They are safe there, in the mop closet, their hands tied with good fisherman’s knots, their Colt AR-15 rifle in the trunk of our car. If they start screaming, their rescuers will find the hundred pounds of pot, so we do not expect them to scream.
Pete has Jorge’s loaded .22 in his pocket. “I am going over the fence,” he says.
I say I will go with him, but he says no. “I’ll get the gate open from inside the house. Then you guys can drive in.”
“Aw, Pete.”
“Just keep the dogs off my ass. Occupy them.”
He walks down the fence line while Billy Lee and I make friends with the dogs. Billy Lee has a good country way with dogs and after a few minutes they are licking his hands.
Pete has disappeared. . . .
***
The fence took a right-angle turn, and he turned with it, keeping close to it, away from the swamp. He stopped where he could get a good view of the house from between the trees. It was an overpowering mishmash: part Tudor manse and part Spanish hacienda, with wide arches, deep balconies, red-tile rooftops cascading down three levels. There were yard lights at back and front. Stained- and lead-glass windows on the ground floor glowed from a light inside. A young but sturdy banyan tree shaded the east wing.
Kerrivan went over the fence, sprinted across the lawn, climbed the banyan tree, and swung down from a branch, softly, onto a balcony.
A sudden rain shower muffled his sounds as he peeled the lead strip away from a pane of glass, reached inside, unlocked the door, and entered. He was in a bedroom. In the dim light he saw that the furniture was hidden by canvas dustcovers.
The air reeked of marijuana.
He stepped into the hall — an inner gallery with a balustrade which looked down into a Spanish-style court. The furniture there, too, wore dustcovers. There was light from a wall fixture near a covered bookcase.
Kerrivan was staring down at a hill of bultos — hundreds of them. Some were opened.
He crept down a great, curving staircase and went to one of the open bales. Scooping a handful of marijuana flower from one of them, he went to the light, and held the sinsemilla to his nose.
It took a minute or two for the full effect of Meyers’s enormous sting to sink in. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths.
It was a premonition, perhaps an extrasensory message, that caused him to whirl and duck suddenly as a hand flashed by with the speed and strength of an executioner’s axe and cleaved through the fabric covering the bookcase, splitting canvas and wood and bringing down a hailstorm of old first editions.
Meyers’s second blow was blocked by a collection of eighteenth-century poetry, and Kerrivan was quickly out of reach, pulling his gun as he scrambled away, pointing it at Meyers.
“I am not alone,” Meyers said. “There are armed men in the guest house in the back.” He was in a dressing gown, in bare feet.
“If you wake them up, I’ll shoot you.”
Meyers’s face took on an expression of relief.
“Oh, it’s you, Peter. God, I thought it was a thief. Or even worse, the cops.” He smiled his flat, unsmiling smile and took a few steps to the wall. Kerrivan kept the gun trained on him.
Meyers casually lifted a canvas-covered painting from its hook and set it on the floor. He began dialing the combination of the wall safe.
“This modest little casa was the safest place I could think of,” he said. “Our company has been guarding it for a rather rich fellow who has gone on a four-month sailing cruise. A very rich fellow. Not a bad little hideout, is it?”
He brought out four thick bundles of currency. “I can’t give you your full share right now. We’re trying to sell it in small lots to keep the price up.” He threw the four bundles at Kerrivan’s feet. “That’s four hundred thousand dollars.”
Kerrivan knelt down, keeping his eyes fixed on Meyers, and picked up one of the bundles and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “This will be for Merrie and the two kids,” he said. “The rest I think I’ll leave for the police. For when they come to bust you. Because I’m calling them, Meyers. Where’s the phone?”
“Oh, come off it. I knew they wouldn’t be able to keep you in jail when they found out it was only alfalfa. I’ve been waiting for you to show up so I could get some money into your hands. I thought you’d be congratulating me for having pulled this off so well. Take the money. It’s yours. Hell, you can even take my car. I’ll even see you to the door — and if you’re going to be nervous about it, keep the gun on me.”
“I suppose Senator Paez will be coming around soon, looking for his share.”
Meyers grinned. “Come on, you and I both know he can grow lots more where this came from. What he doesn’t know . . .” He shrugged.
“Won’t kill him” Kerrivan said. “But he’ll kill you, won’t he? You’ll be number-one target for some jail-house hit man when they put you in the joint.” Kerrivan half-smiled. “That suits me just fine.”
Meyers became animated. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Peter, let’s stop fooling around. It was a scam; of course it was a scam. We’re both in the business, and we both know what it’s all about. If you can get away with it, you’re a winner; if you don’t, you pay. So I didn’t get away with it. I pay. You know you can grind it out of me, and darn it, I’ll pay. I don’t wish to get arrested, and there’s absolutely nothing in it for you if I do get arrested.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“Half of it. Half of every dollar I make from it. You’ve talked to Paez, and you’ve heard his little speech about trust. So I know you’re going to squeeze me. Come on, Peter, you’ll be a multi-multimillionaire. Four hundred thousand now, and two hundred thousand week after week after week.”
Kerrivan looked through the sliding aluminum doors that led out back to the swimming pool. Under a canopy was a pool-side extension phone. He moved slowly to the sliding doors and rolled one of them open.
“Two hundred million dollars, Peter! No taxes to pay off that to the bandits in Washington. You love the sea — buy yourself a luxury sailing yacht. Heck, buy yourself a South Pacific island. Buy yourself a New York chorus line for the night.” He was a man desperately pushing buttons, looking for the right one.
“How much,” Kerrivan asked, “will it take to buy back Kevin Kelly?” He motioned with the gun for Meyers to follow him outside.
“Oh, no, you’re not going to blame me for that one. Not for that one. Now, Peter, I didn’t kill him. I promise you that. My word of honor. That’s all been cleared.” He was talking
rapidly.
Kerrivan picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. His eyes were off Meyers for less than a second, but Meyers was flying at him by the time he released his index finger from the dial. Again, instinctively, he pulled his head back.
Meyers’s foot was aimed not at his head but at the hand holding the gun. He seemed to put all his strength and leverage into the one lunging roundhouse snap kick, and it was on target. Kerrivan felt the bones of his fingers crack; his arm went numb. The gun whirled through the air and splashed into the water.
Kerrivan’s street instincts took over. Meyers’s lunge had been a desperate one, and he had saved nothing for a counterstrike. Out of control, he was unable to dodge Kerrivan’s blow. The crashing left hook hit him square on the ear, and he sprawled. But he somersaulted as he did, and was on his feet again, centering, calming himself, his hands forward in the zenkutsu-dachi front stance.
Kerrivan didn’t know any better than to come straight at him. Meyers caught his forward arm in an upper rising block, took him off balance with a leg sweep, and swung him lightly over his hip. As Kerrivan fell head-forward, Meyers kicked away the arms that he had extended to ward off the fall, and Kerrivan’s head hit the tile, landing with a crack. He grunted and lay limp, one arm dangling over the edge of the pool in the water.
***
Rudy Meyers breathed out slowly. His mind ordered his body to relax, and his body obeyed.
It was necessary now to be very calm.
None of his soldiers in the guest house had stirred from their sleep. Meyers was thankful for that. Witnesses would add complications. Simplicity — that was the key element of any good operation.
Where were the dogs? Had Kerrivan poisoned them?”
He could see that the man was still breathing. A concussion, that was all.
Meyers wondered why he had not killed him at the outset. Kerrivan had come at him clumsily, an incompetent brawler. Meyers could easily have cleaved his face in with a right-handed knife-edge. That he had not done so made him wonder at his will and resolution in future combat situations.
His weakness made him angry, and he reached down and slipped Kerrivan’s glasses off, crushing the metal frames in a balled fist.
No, he told himself. Be calm. Again, he stilled his body.
He picked Kerrivan’s head up by the hair and searched with his fingers for a nerve point at the base of the ear. One squeeze there; then convulsion, then death.
But he hesitated. He thought. And he realized now that his earlier instinct in avoiding a quick karate kill had been the correct one. The injury would have told a tale. As would, he now realized, a bruise behind the base of the ear — or upon any of the killing points on the body.
Think, he told himself. Don’t act quickly. But think quickly. Remember your training. The temptation is to be too clever, to indulge oneself in the brilliance of one’s skill and craft. . . .
Kerrivan groaned, and Meyers watched him, his mind racing. It would be easy to end his life — in so many ways. An eye-socket gouge. Or better, a quick two-handed slap on both ears. But that, too, would tell a story to a skilled investigator. Only a master could accomplish such a death. And Meyers would be the first suspect.
It must look like an accident. The body would have to be removed from the house — perhaps wrapped up in one of the empty marijuana bags. He smiled inwardly at the irony of a dope pusher’s body being carried away in old marijuana sacking. Yes, that was the plan. They would have to move all the bales out, anyway. If Kerrivan had found him, others might.
Well, it was obvious: a skull fracture. A fatal brain injury. After all, there was contusion to the scalp already. The body could be found at the bottom of a cliff far away from southern Florida. At the bottom of a rocky cliff.
The best strategies are the simplest strategies. He had always believed that. But time was wasting. Bending down, he grabbed Kerrivan by the hair, lifting his head, then smashing it on the pool-side tile. Meyers felt the cracking of the bone, but the skull didn’t cave in. The man had a head like a granite boulder.
There was a distant, tinny voice coming from somewhere. Was a radio on? Then he saw the telephone dangling off the hook. “Hello, sir, are you there?” An aggravation. Unsettling. Especially now. Meyers could not abide open telephone lines — a private detective’s paranoia. He went to it, rubbed the receiver with the velour fabric of his dressing gown, then settled the receiver in its cradle.
He returned to the pool side to attend to Kerrivan, who still, amazingly, was breathing. This time he took a firm grip with both hands, one on each of Kerrivan’s ears, and raised the body up three feet off the tile, took a deep breath, and concentrated on bringing Kerrivan’s head down onto the edge of the pool with all his force.
Chapter Fifty-One
Johnny Nighthawk
I saw a blurred picture as I ran by the front door of the house, a picture framed first by a pane of leaded glass, and second by the open doorway to the swimming pool. This was the picture: Rudy Meyers, with one hand holding Pete’s head by the hair, smashing it onto the edge of the pool. A stark still life that visits me yet, sometimes in my sleep, sometimes when I am awake.
It is worse in my sleep. I am running by the side of a house, a house as long as the Wall of China, and, oh, God, I am running so slowly. I am encased in sludge, in a molasses bath, my thigh muscles aching, straining, pulling, and I am moving a few feet, and Meyers is bringing Pete’s head down, and Pete’s eyes are open and he is staring into mine, and I will never get there because I am pulling a thousand-pound weight behind me, and my mouth is open but no sounds come out. . . .
Although once, at night, a sound did come out. My señorita told me that I lurched from bed in the darkness and screamed, “I’ll kill him!” She was terrified.
In reality, I suppose I was going like a cannonball, churning through flower beds, past the garage, across a patch of lawn, and out into the open behind the swimming pool. I remember that it did not seem to make sense that Meyers, with his back to me, had just hung up the phone. Then I saw him going back to Pete, grabbing him by the ears, pulling his head up, bringing it down. . . .
I explode into Meyers like a runaway locomotive.
All I know next is that he and I are in the deep end of the pool, and he is thrashing crazily, like a speared crocodile. I lose my grip and his head comes up, and he screams: “I can’t swim!”
And I get him under the surface again. He is a powerful man.
And I keep his head down. He is a wild windmill of arms and legs.
I remember hitting him with the cast on my hand.
And I keep him under. I keep him under. I cannot remember what I was feeling. Loss. Pain. Hatred.
He is biting, twisting, fighting with the strength of the gods. But slower, and slower. Then he stops moving. And I keep him down, pushing him deeper, deeper. . . .
I can hear voices trickling through the great dam of anger and hate that has cut me off from the world.
“Johnny! Johnny, let him up!”
Whose voice is that? A voice I know. Yes, it is the voice of Billy Lee Tinker. A man who is a friend.
And other voices:
“Nighthawk, stop! Stop! Lord, I’m going in there.”
A woman’s voice. “It’s too late. He’s crazy.”
Billy Lee again: “Johnny, Pete’s alive!”
I bring Meyers up and watch his blue moon-face bob to the surface, its eyes closed. I stare dully at this face, studying it with awe and puzzlement. A man begins to hoist him by the armpits up over the edge of the pool.
I recognize the man. He is the cop from Newfoundland. O’Doull, Kelly’s friend. The woman is the DEA lady from Miami. I make out Billy Lee. He is squatting, with the Dobermans beside him, and he is stroking them, cooling them out, and with his free hand he is holding the AR-15 rifle. He has it pointed at a group of men
standing nervously near a guest house.
I take all this in as I scramble from the pool. I get to Pete. A trickle of blood is seeping from his mouth. I hold my ear to his mouth, and I can feel and hear his sweet breath upon it.
O’Doull is kneading Meyers, pumping water from him. He turns him over and gives him mouth-to-mouth. Meyers starts sputtering and coughing and the woman is putting handcuffs on him.
But I am still in a blind, hysterical rage. “If Pete dies, I’ll kill the son of a bitch! Get an ambulance. Get a doctor! If he dies, I will kill him. I will kill him!”
***
O’Doull walked slowly from the emergency door of the hospital to Flaherty’s car. She was behind the wheel, butting a half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray.
When O’Doull sat beside her, he hunched his head down and pressed his hands to his face, beating back the waves of tension.
“Did they let you speak to him?” Flaherty asked. She lit another cigarette.
“A few minutes, that was all. He gave me the missing link.” His voice sounded raw.
Flaherty wanted to reach out to him, to soothe him. She made a tentative half-start, then reached a hand to him, touched the back of his neck, and began gently to massage the muscles there.
“When are you going back?” she said.
“Right away.”
“Oh.”
That was all she said. A nice man was Theophile O’Doull. Another good man leaving her life. She felt suddenly lonely, vulnerable. But she was a cop, she told herself. Tough.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Peddigrew stumbled up to the door of his town house, swung five life jackets in front of him, and, panting, found his key and unlocked the door. That surge of power one feels with a few lines of pure cocaine did not speak falsely to him about the real condition his body was in. He had been neglecting the racquetball court. Juares, in no better shape, wheezed up the steps to join him.
But Larochelle looked as if she were carrying bags of feathers. She had stubbornly continued to do her exercises during every one of those mind-scrambling days since Miami. This morning, in her motel room — they had stopped overnight, then continued their long drive from Halifax — Larochelle had danced around for two hours, high on cocaine. She liked the shape she was in.
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