by Paul Levine
Just as the yellow turned to red, I hit the gas and burned rubber turning left. The guy in the Mini stayed put. The pimpmobile pursuer was trapped behind him.
I could have continued into the Grove and lost the Escalade, but that would have just kept me wondering all night. So I swerved into the alley behind Don Pan International Bakery, where I sometimes stop for ham bread and guava pastries. Tonight, I just wanted to hide out a moment.
Once the traffic light went through its cycle, the Mini Cooper turned, followed by the Escalade. I pulled out of the alley and onto Douglas. The prey was now the hunter. I crept up behind the Escalade, saw its Florida vanity plate.
U R NXT
The traffic light at Grand Avenue turned red. I stopped behind the Escalade, hopped out, and sprinted to the driver’s door. The windows were tinted black, and at the dark intersection, I couldn’t even make out a silhouette behind the wheel. Whoever it was hit the gas, yanked the wheel hard left, and peeled out. I jumped back, the rear left tire barely missing my big feet. The car screeched left onto Grand, and I was left standing there, adrenaline pumping.
“Next time, asshole!” I shouted. “Next time, I’ll drag your ass through the window and wipe up the street with you.”
The adrenaline ebbed. Other drivers were pulling around my Eldo, giving me wide berth.
“What are you looking at?” I yelled at everybody and nobody. A moment later, with no one to hit and no one to shout at, I got back into my car and drove home.
U R NXT
Next for what?
15 Adjudged Delinquent
I live in a two-story coral rock pillbox that could withstand an attack by tanks and mortar fire. It did withstand the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, a storm that pretty much blew the city straight into the Everglades.
I parked under a chinaberry tree and pulled up the canvas top to save what was left of the upholstery. Red velour does not appreciate juicy yellow berries. I got out of the car and called Cindy, my loyal assistant, on the cell, catching her at an unlicensed beauty salon in a friend’s house just off Calle Ocho. I gave her the Escalade’s vanity plate and asked her to get me the name of the owner. She used to date a Miami cop who still did favors for her, either because he had a kind heart, or because she had dirt on him.
The front door to the house wasn’t locked. Seldom is. The humidity has swollen the door shut, but a solid thwack from my shoulder opens it.
My dog, Csonka, greeted me inside with a slobbery hello. A couple years ago, he showed up, crapped on my front step, and challenged me to do something about it. He’s a mix of bulldog and something else, maybe donkey, and has the personality of a New York cabdriver. If you don’t get out of the way, he’ll barge into you. And yeah, I named him after Larry Csonka, the Dolphins’ fullback who used his forearm the way Paul Bunyan used an axe.
The tang of cinnamon floated from the kitchen. Granny’s sweet potato pie.
“You in the mood for catfish, Jakey?” Granny said, as I joined her at the stove.
“As long as it’s not deep fried.”
“No other decent way to make it.”
I watched her drag a fillet through a bowl of cornmeal. Having grown up on Granny’s cooking, I thought everyone made chocolate chip cookies with bacon and considered giblet cream gravy a beverage.
Granny’s skin was still smooth and her hair was still black, except for a white stripe down the middle. “Give that pot a stir.” She gestured toward her simmering swamp cabbage.
I did as I was told, all the while eyeing the sweet potato pie, cooling on the counter.
“Keep your mitts off,” Granny ordered.
Dorothea Jane Lassiter was not my grandmother. A great-aunt, maybe. We never straightened that out. She just took over raising me after my mom took off. When I was a kid, Granny filled a bushel basket with her do’s and don’ts. She taught me never to start a fight but to know how to end one. To be wary of the rich and powerful. And to go through life doing the least damage possible. Thanks to her, I favor the underdog. I root against the Yankees, the Lakers, and the Patriots. If Germany invaded Poland—again—I’d take the points and go with the Poles.
Now Granny was helping me raise my nephew, and I try to pass on her lessons, though without the clops on the head she dealt out for random acts of disobedience.
My mom left town two weeks after my father was knifed to death at Poacher’s, a shitkicker saloon outside Key Largo. Dad was a shrimper. Mom was a bottle blonde who hung out by the jukebox and wiggled her butt to Elvis and Johnny Cash. That’s right. We’re Florida Crackers.
I miss my old man. He used to lift me in one hand and swing me over his head. It was like flying. When he held me close, I inhaled the aroma of sea-crusted salt and diesel fuel and fish guts. Nothing ever smelled sweeter.
“Where’s Kippers?” I asked Granny, as she dropped a breaded catfish fillet into the fryer.
“In his room, and he needs a talking to.”
“Yo, Uncle Jake.”
Kip shuffled barefoot into the kitchen from his bedroom, where he’d likely been playing a video game in which a gang of criminals obliterates a major city. He wore my old Dolphins’ jersey, number 58, which hung to his knees. The boy was towheaded and fair-skinned with a faint blue vein showing on his forehead. He’s gangly and shy with a quirky intelligence and a smile so sweet, it clutched at my heart.
I hugged him, which under the rules, I can only do in the house, so his buddies can’t see us. He smelled of potato chips and bubble gum.
Then I saw it, a purple welt under his left eye. “What’s with the shiner, kiddo?”
He shrugged—no big deal—and headed toward the sweet potato pie.
“No dessert till after supper!” Granny wagged a finger at him. “Now tell your uncle what happened.”
“I got in a fight with Kountz.”
“Carl Kountz? He’s two years older than you.”
Carl was big for his age. Hell, he was big for my age. He was already starting at fullback on the Tuttle-Biscayne J.V. team. A frame like a set of box springs. By his junior year, the ’Canes, ’Noles, and Gators would come calling.
“So, why’d Carl pick on you?” I asked.
“I hit him first.”
“No way.”
“Carl said my mom’s a whore and I’m a bastard.”
Oh.
Genealogy-wise, Carl was spot-on. My half sister, Janet, was the unintended byproduct of a match made in hell, my alcoholic mother and Chester Conklin, a roughneck from Oklahoma. Just as Conklin and the Widow Lassiter never married, neither did Janet and her beau, whoever he was. Janet could only guess which unemployed, shiftless loser had fathered Kip.
Every six months or so, Janet drifted into town to see her son, dropping off presents and apologies. Then it was back on the road with some petty thief or drug-dealing boyfriend. Then a spell of rehab paid by me. The Lassiter family tree is not exactly the House of Windsor. Closer to the House of Pancakes.
“I told the boy you’d teach him to fight,” Granny said. “He’s gotta defend the family name.”
What name? I wondered. “Trailer Trash”? But what I said was, “Granny, you don’t understand these fancy private schools.”
“You’d fight back, Jake. Hell, you did.”
“When?” Kip asked.
“Never mind, kiddo.”
I’m not proud of the story, and Kip wasn’t yet ready to hear even a sanitized version. I was sixteen, working part-time mopping up puke at a roadside bar in the Keys. A couple biker punks got drunk and razzed me. Time and again.
“Ain’t you the Lassiter kid? I fucked your momma in the parking lot.”
“Shit, Billy,” the other one said. “Who didn’t?”
Wiry and mean, filthy jeans, dusty boots, and greasy hair. Born stupid, reared stupid, and they’d doubtless die stupid.
“Your mom takes it up the ass, kid.”
“Only when she’s drunk, Billy.”
I barreled into the f
irst one, bounced him off the wall, shattering the neon Budweiser sign. Clinched him and broke his nose with a head butt. Same move I’d use years later the night I wore a wire for Alex Castiel.
The punk’s friend snapped a pool cue across his knee and whipped it across my temple. I staggered sideways and when he swung again, I stepped inside the arc and splintered his jaw with a straight right. I could have left it there, but I didn’t. When he fell to the floor, I stomped him. Kicked him in the head, the gut, the balls.
Stomped him, not because I loved my mother, but because I hated her. Stomped him for all the pain of my childhood, for losing my father to a blade, not ten feet from where I stood, kicking the piss out of the biker.
The two punks landed in the hospital, and I did three months in juvie detention. Granny framed a copy of the judge’s order, as if it were an Ivy League diploma.
“Jacob Lassiter is hereby adjudged delinquent.…”
I didn’t want Kip to follow in my footsteps. But déjà-fucking-vu, those dang Lassiter genes.
“We’ll work the heavy bag tomorrow,” I told Kip. “Teach you to jab, a couple combinations, maybe some kick-boxing, too.”
“I can’t fight Carl. He’s too big.”
“No one’s too big.”
“Maybe not for you, Uncle Jake.”
“For all of us. No one’s too big and no one’s too strong.”
“Carl will kill me!”
“Listen up, Kip. I’m gonna teach you to hit Carl in the gut so hard, his eyes will pop out of his head, he’ll shit his pants, and he’ll vomit all over his shoes.”
“That’s my boy,” Granny said.
16 Naked Came the Night
Kip was asleep in his bedroom and Granny was snoring in the rocking chair on the back porch when the phone rang. Cindy. The red Escalade, license plate U R NXT, was registered to a Miguel Sanchez of Homestead.
“Never heard of him, Cindy.”
“Doubt he was driving, anyway.”
“Why?”
“He’s at FCI, awaiting trial on cocaine charges.”
That solved nothing. Who the hell was driving the con’s car, and what did they want with me? I was thinking a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks might help answer the question when there was a knock at the door. A knock so dainty I barely heard it over the whompeta of the ceiling fan.
It took three tugs to yank the door open. Standing on the front step was a six-foot-tall caramel-skinned young woman in a stretchy mini-skirt and high heeled, strappy sandals sloped like a ski jump. Her breasts, round as cantaloupes, threatened to tumble out of her fluorescent orange tube top. A bare tummy, tanned and taut. Hair bleached white-hot platinum. She gave me a small, knowing smile, as sinful as the devil’s laugh.
“Jake Lassiter?” she asked.
I said “Yes” on the assumption that she was neither a process server nor a Jehovah’s Witness.
“I’m Angel Roxx. Rhymes with ‘cocks’ but spelled with two ‘x’s.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you like a blow job?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“I work for Charlie Ziegler.”
“Let me guess. Spiritual adviser?”
“P.R. consultant. And I act.” She cocked a hip. You could have put a saddle on it. “Did you ever see A Tale of Two Titties. Or Lawrence of a Labia?”
“Not unless they were on ESPN. Why don’t you come inside? Fewer mosquitoes.”
She sashayed inside, dropping her bag on the wine barrel filled with umbrellas, fly rods, and a tarpon gaff. Csonka waddled over, jammed his nose under her mini-skirt and sniffed. She didn’t flinch.
Angel’s eyes danced around the living room, which looked like a garage sale at a fraternity house. My coffee table, a sailboard propped on empty milk cartons, seemed to amuse her. Or maybe it was my tree stump end table topped by a lamp in the shape of a vintage Miami Dolphins helmet.
She made an exaggerated motion of fanning herself. “What’s with this heat? A/C broken?”
“I’m saving the earth, all by my lonesome.”
“So what’s Charlie want with someone like you?”
“You tell me.”
“All he told me was to make sure you were in his office at nine A.M.”
“After blowing me tonight?”
“He didn’t get specific. Just said to prep you.”
“Great idea. Lately, I’ve been prepping myself.”
“You’re kinda cute in a beat-up sort of way. You look a little like Studley Do-Right.”
“Studley …?”
“Duh. Major porn star, like a thousand years ago.” She settled herself onto my old, lumpy sofa. Made of Haitian cotton, it had looked fine until one of my teammates dropped a lit joint between the cushions, starting a small but sweet-smelling fire.
“I hope you’re not on steroids. I hate when guys have shriveled balls.”
I put the pieces together. Earlier today, Alex Castiel had refused to investigate Ziegler and warned me to back off. Ziegler could be bad for my career, though Castiel failed to mention the guy could be good for my sex life. Either way, the State Attorney had called Ziegler and told him about me.
“Help me out here, Angel. If Ziegler wants to see me …”
“Why not just call you?”
“Yeah.”
“Charlie’s gotta be different. Gotta do things big. The grand gesture, he calls it.”
“I still don’t get it.”
She pursed her lips, which seemed to gorge cute little lines in her forehead. Deep thinking mode. “Charlie needs to impress people. And to be liked. So, when you see me at your door, you’re supposed to think, A present for me? What a guy!”
Actually, I was thinking, Charlie Ziegler, what a jerk, but I followed the logic.
“Anyway, that’s the sweet Charlie,” she continued. “The good Charlie.”
“But there’s another one?”
“You kidding? Lots more. Mean Charlie. Potty-mouth Charlie. Smack-you-around Charlie. You ought to see him when his face turns all red. Jeez!”
“I’m gonna go see Ziegler,” I told her, “but not tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Other plans.”
Actually, I had other people to see first. Sonia Majeski had called an hour ago. She’d talked to a couple of stripper friends from the old days. They’d put together a list of five men who used to drift in and out of Ziegler’s party circuit. No way to tell if any had been there the night Krista disappeared, but I would sure as hell ask. I also had a ton of questions for them about Ziegler.
Sure, I wanted to talk to him personally, but I might only have one shot at him, and I wanted to be ready. Young lawyers make the mistake of rushing to depose the main witness on the opponent’s side of a case. They should be talking to everyone else first. Build your dossier before you put your antagonist under oath. By the time you say, “State your name for the record,” you’d better know more about the son-of-a-bitch than his own saintly mother.
“We could still have some fun tonight,” Angel offered.
“Yeah?”
“I can do you while you watch one of my flicks. It’s a parallel universe thing.”
I was tempted. How could I not be? I was single and unattached, and here was Angel, hot and willing, and with no demands that I be attuned to her needs or go shopping at Pottery Barn during the NFL playoffs. In another time, I would have been incapable of saying no. These days, I require some semblance of an emotional connection.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I gave up one-night stands a long time ago.”
“I could come back tomorrow night, too.”
“Sorry. Doesn’t work for me.”
She crunched up her forehead again, as if presented with an especially tough algebra question. “No one’s ever turned down my b.j. before.”
“If it’s any consolation, it’s my first time, too.”
There was the sound of bare feet padding across the Mexican tile. Kip, all sle
epy-eyed, appeared from the corridor wearing his Miami Marlins pajama bottoms.
“I thought I heard voices,” he said, eyeing my guest, or rather the twin globes rising from her tube top.
“Kip, this is Angel Roxx,” I said.
“I know! A Tale of Two Titties.”
17 The Road Goes on Forever
The air was soggy as a steam bath as I started my morning run. The violet morning glories in my neighbor’s yard were yawning open for the day, just like me. The grass wet with morning dew, the sweet tang of jasmine in the air. No breeze, the palm fronds hanging as limp as laundry on the line.
It’s not a fancy neighborhood of mini-manses and well-tended lawns. More like a tropical jungle, small houses on crowded lots overgrown with ragged ficus hedges and creeping bougainvillea.
I wore an old pair of Penn State shorts and a T-shirt with the slogan “A Friend Will Help You Move, but a Real Friend Will Help You Move a Body.” I’d only recently started carrying an iPod and wearing headphones. Off-season training would have been a lot easier if we’d had them in the old days. Still, there was a tradeoff. I missed the slap of shoes on asphalt and the call of the wild parrots in the neighborhood.
I slogged along, sweat streaming down my chest. Loquat to Solana to Poinciana, then south on LeJeune toward the Gables Waterway. A black-and-white wood stork strutted across the street, apparently lost. I wanted to point it toward Biscayne Bay. In my earphones, I heard Joe Nichols worrying that his lady was going out for the evening, and “tequila makes her clothes fall off.”
Traffic was already building, and car fumes had overwhelmed the jasmine. I hung a right on Barbarossa, planning to cut over to Riviera and then north toward Dixie Highway. A pair of land crabs the size of catchers’ mitts scuttled across the pavement, headed toward the waterway.
A black Lincoln followed me through the turn, then slowed to keep pace. I tried to see through the tinted windows but could not, the morning sun shooting daggers into my eyes. I picked up my speed, and so did the Lincoln. I slowed, and the car edged closer, until it was directly alongside me.