“I was expecting an argument.”
“Why bother? You’ll be in jail soon enough anyhow.”
I checked the peephole before opening the door. The hallway was filled with light and emptiness and the quiet of sleeping people. I opened the door and stepped out.
“You’re a very stupid man,” Susan informed me.
“I realize that.”
“Is she worth it?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I can’t leave it half done.”
“I’m not sure I can be your attorney anymore, Jack, not after this.”
“I understand.” I showed her the key. “Thanks for the car and the clothes.”
“Don’t bother calling me when they catch you,” Susan said before shutting the door in my face.
I stood in the hallway, staring at the peephole for a moment. Then my stomach reminded me about the famous tuna fish sandwich again. I considered ringing Susan’s bell to ask for it, but something told me I had better let it ride. One more squeeze and I’d probably wind up with a black eye.
The old Beemer was where she said it would be, at the far end of the garage shrouded in form-fitting gray plastic as snug as a bodysuit. I peeled the skin off and stowed it in the small trunk, then climbed into the cockpit and prayed. I turned the key in the ignition and heard the sweet, happy purr of the engine.
Five minutes later I was on U.S. 1 heading north toward the beach. Only three courses of action now made any sense at all. The first was to keep driving until I hit Canada and then get a job training Eskimos. The second was to find Vivian and Williams, or maybe even Nick, with the hope that the truth, whatever it turned out to be, would be better than the chaos and uncertainty of not knowing. Of course, there was the third alternative of turning myself in and telling everything I knew to the cops, of playing the part of the pawn who’d gotten used like a condom on a one-night stand.
But the more I thought about it, the less I liked that last idea.
Maybe in the end they would give me my life back, but not right away, and that’s why I didn’t do it. I couldn’t see how I could avoid doing time—and not just because I’d illegally performed a burial at sea. By sinking Matson’s yacht, I had also sunk crucial evidence in an investigation, if not the entire investigation itself, and investigations take time to set up, especially when they involve more than one branch of law enforcement. A big case might take years to build. A dozen assorted careers might depend on its successful conclusion, and then I came along in a kayak and sent all that hard work down to the bottom of the sea—not deliberately perhaps, but permanently nonetheless.
I would have to pay for that. My ass would be grass, and the government would be the lawn mower. It might be that they would get me for obstruction of justice or even as an accessory to murder, though that charge wouldn’t stick. And then there was my famous breakout from Krome. That one was good for a couple of months. The point was that they would do whatever they could to make my life miserable for as long as they could, and that would mean keeping me in jail for as long as possible. Once I was inside, it might even be revealed that once upon a time Jack Vaughn had been a police officer up in New York City, and then the real fun would begin. If you think the police lack a flair for vengeance, then you need to hang out with them more often.
So I was in no rush to put myself in the hands of the police, the FBI, the DEA, or even the ASPCA for that matter. Sitting passively in the slammer waiting for fate to call my number made no more sense to me at that moment than being free. Jail is a lot like death in that respect: It makes sense to avoid it for as long as possible, and I felt more than a little vengeful myself. So since there’s nothing more pathetic than a vengeful man sitting in a jail cell, I intended to stay free.
Vivian and Williams were up to something, and I intended to find out what that something was. There was no sense in going down alone. I hit a button, and the sunroof slid open. Orion winked at me; the wind tore at my hair. I put the Space Man’s CD into the tiny slot and turned the music up full blast. They’re going to extradite my love. I threw my head back and laughed without reason. It was a catchy tune, though:
Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York City, too,
They caught my ass in Tennessee,
Now I’m comin’ right home to you.
They’re going to extradite my love, baby,
They’re going to extradite my love.
Now take your butt to the bondsman, baby.
’Cause I got shit to do….
It was a good song. Double platinum at least.
Vivian owned an apartment on Michigan Avenue out in South Beach, in a building called Tuxedo Park, just down the street from the firehouse and a block south of Flamingo Park, where the municipal swimming pool used to be. I drove by the building twice but saw nothing suspicious.
The block was dark. The tall trees muted the glow from the streetlamps, and it was as quiet as a lane in a small town. On my third sweep, I pulled into a space about sixty or seventy yards up the block and across the street from her place and shut off the engine.
The flood lamps behind the hedges threw up a barrage of light that lit the sea green facade of the building and the neon letters that spelled Tuxedo Park as bright as the marquee at a Hollywood premier. I checked my watch; it was five minutes to twelve. Knowing Vivian as I did, she would be just about ready to leave for the nightclub her brother had bought with money from his trust fund, a place called Embers over on Collins. Williams, if indeed he was looking for her, too, would probably be aware of this, so the only question was whether he would try to grab her as she came out of her apartment or try to waylay her at the club. The latter would be risky. There would be too many people and too many witnesses. No, I told myself, he’ll make his move here.
That meant my somehow getting into Tuxedo Park. Time was when I had a key to the place, but that time had long passed; however, there were a few other options, one of which was another felony. I was just about to exit the car when the glare from a pair of headlights bounced off my rearview mirror. I hit the recliner button on the side of my seat and slipped out of sight just as a white van slid by me, doing about ten miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. People in Miami don’t drive like that unless they’re looking for something or someone: Maybe a crackhead looking for a rock or a plumber on his way home from work looking for a hooker with a soft pair of immoral lips. But it was neither of these. It was Williams.
I turned my head just enough to catch sight of the driver’s profile as the van crept by. It was Williams, all right. He pulled up to Vivian’s apartment building, and his brake lights flared as he backed into a parking space. I reached under the seat and grabbed hold of the .45. I got quickly out of the car and went around to the curb and ran along the street half crouching, knowing that if Williams happened to glance in his sideview mirror, then he would surely see me. To avoid this I ducked behind the rear end of an old Chrysler. I tucked the gun under my shirt and waited. The way I saw it, I had two choices: take him now, before he went upstairs, where he might or might not manage to get hold of Vivian, or wait for him to come downstairs and then make my move.
Williams got out of the van and started across the street. He was wearing a waist-length black leather jacket and black leather pants. That’s when I decided on the second option. Still in a semi-crouch, I ran until I was just across the street from the entrance to Tuxedo Park and crouched again behind another car. Williams walked very deliberately up the flagstone steps and opened the glass door that led into the vestibule. He didn’t bother with the intercom but went through the second glass door that led to the elevators.
I waited for him to disappear and went around to the driver’s-side door of his van. I got the .45 out and looked around. The tree-lined street was empty, so I used the butt of the gun to break the window and opened the door and swung in behind the steering wheel. I popped the hood and a second later had ripped loose the distributor cap and the cables that led to the battery. I cl
osed the hood with as little noise as possible and stuffed the cap and cables behind some hedges. I’d felt a wild sense of glee as I ripped the cables free; I was getting to be quite the little ninja.
Now it was time to wait. The key was whether or not he had Vivian with him. The next question was the location of his gun, for I had no doubt that he was armed. Williams was big and strong and nasty enough to be able to coerce just about anyone into his van without a firearm, but if he came out with the end of the barrel at Vivian’s back, then it would be a very delicate situation indeed. If that were the case, I’d have to be close enough to surprise him. I thought through it in fast forward. He’d see the broken window. That would distract him for sure. He’d have to open the door for Vivian, then for himself. The van would not start. He would have to open the hood. He might be suspicious, but he would still have to open the hood, and that’s when I would take him. Knowing that, I also knew where I would wait.
I pranced up a few cars south of where Williams’s van was parked and squatted down by someone’s rear fender, hoping nobody would spot me. But I wouldn’t have to wait for long, because a moment later Williams came through the front door—I let out my breath. He was alone. The choice I had to make swelled up inside my chest like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. Kill him now and have one less enemy at my back or let it wait for another time. The first choice made sense. From this range I couldn’t miss. Could I get away with it? Maybe. Probably. People got dead in Miami all the time. Get rid of the gun. Would I be a suspect? Maybe. Probably. Motive? What motive? Nobody knew about our intimate interlude on the high seas. After all, he had tried to kill me. Even the score. Wipe that smirk off his face now and forever.
Still, it was no easy thing to kill a man.
Not by accident, at least. Then the old video started, and I couldn’t stop the tape. Going up the stairwell in the Fredrick Douglass projects. The heart’s steady beating, a reminder that you at least are still alive. It sets the pace of your slow, cautious ascent up the stairs. Then the glint of metal in the almost dark and both of you firing your guns simultaneously as though in a semiautomatic dream, and for the rest of your life the burning question of every day, of every stray waking moment: What if you had waited a second longer?
Then I heard the wail of sirens far in the distance, heading away from me. The video blurred before fading completely.
As I crouched there behind the car, waiting, it came to me that the time was not yet now. Williams and I were on a collision course. Of that much I was certain. But not now. It was too soon. Or maybe I was just scared. It didn’t matter. I felt the relief of knowing that the time had not yet come.
I heard Williams’s muffled curse when he spotted the broken window, heard him curse again—this time more loudly—when the engine wouldn’t start. Crouched in the darkness, I smiled like a fiend. I peeked up over the trunk of my perch when I heard the hood of his van open. After a second or two, he slammed it shut and cursed again. He looked around suspiciously for a moment, but there was nothing else he could do. I thought I heard him talking on a cell phone. Then he cursed yet again and started walking east toward Washington Avenue. He would be heading for Embers. I waited for him to turn the corner, then sprinted back to the car.
I made a U-turn and went north on Michigan. At the park I turned left and drove the few blocks east toward the neon playground over on Washington Avenue. I got lucky and found a parking spot right in front of an all-night grocery store, then walked the half block to the main drag, already bustling with the crowds from across the causeway, the traffic not moving and the humid air smelling like a Chinese restaurant. I had the gun under my shirt like a deadly invitation.
There are certain places on this earth that seem to rise up full-blown like Venus flytraps out of nowhere, cafés or nightclubs that flourish and prosper where other endeavors have failed and vanished almost as soon as they opened their doors. I had seen it happen in South Beach a dozen times in the years I’d been in Miami. Embers was in the first category. Nick, Matson, and a few silent partners had opened the place a few months before I met him, and from the moment the lights came on that first night, the crowds had been there at the double gold doors, buzzing with anticipation like mosquitoes after a long rain.
The Sheik had partied there, and so had the Space Man. The models that roamed there swayed like palm trees on the dance floor, and upstairs, in the VIP section, I had seen things usually reserved for motel rooms with mirrored ceilings, bedbugs, and hourly rates. I’d never expected to go back there again, just as I had assumed that I would never see Vivian again. Now it seemed I was wrong on both counts.
It was still early by South Beach standards, just twenty past midnight, but there was already a long, pulsating line of people stretching around the corner. Rain showers had swept in off the ocean, and the crowd pressed its back against the sides of the building and under the narrow ledge that girded the curtained windows of the second floor. I stood across the street beneath the awning of a tattoo parlor and watched them get wet. The rain fell with the kind of slanted fury that gives birth to jungles and howling monkeys, to floods that cover the earth. It overran the gutters and jumped the sidewalks, rolled back, then rose up and tried again.
The line moved slowly toward the door where long, tall Sidney, the gatekeeper to paradise, waited under the awning behind a lectern, checking names against the guest list like St. Peter making sure the wrong people didn’t get into heaven. He wore a white sequined gown and looked like the giant bride of a man few other men would envy. The yellow wig on his head, contrasted with his black skin, failed to add to his attractiveness. It was hard to believe he had once been a karate instructor up in Detroit—that is, until you saw him drop-kick a troublemaker.
I waited for a break in the rain, then sprinted across the street and up to the lectern. The two bouncers flanking Sidney straightened up and prepared to whip my ass. Sidney glared down at me as though I were a water beetle who had swum across the surface of a lake. Even without the heels, he would have still had me by three inches; with them he had me by six or seven. I could smell his perfume from four feet away, and it filled me with the opposite of romance. As usual, he had overdone his makeup. His lipstick was the color of purple orchids, and his mascara had started to run down his face, which was dark and handsome in a Denzel Washington kind of way.
“Hey, Sidney,” I said. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”
He slammed the guest book shut like a preacher closing his Bible at a revival meeting.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned! Look who it is! Where the hell you been, you dried-up burden of a white man? I thought the Good Lord had called you home. Him or the devil, either one! Last time I saw you, we were playing pool at that after-hours place up behind the library. Remember that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was the night they stole your wig.”
“That’s the problem with this godforsaken town, Jackie,” he said. “Take off your hair for one minute and they go and steal it on you.”
“The neighborhood has changed,” I admitted. “By the way, is Vivian here?”
“I believe she is.”
“Can I get in?”
“I believe you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You ain’t got on the right clothes. I let you in, I got to let in the homeless people, too.”
“It’s an emergency,” I said. “Come on, just this one time. I’ll be in and out in ten minutes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Somebody’s after her. Somebody bad.”
He looked me over for a moment. I guess he sensed my desperation, because he told his assistant to let me in.
“You must have snuck in,” Sidney said. “’Cause I sure as shit didn’t see you.”
“That’s right. I came in through the back way.”
“Dressed like that, you should have.”
The bouncer unclipped the rope from the brass post and lifted it past me.
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“He ain’t dressed right,” the bouncer said.
“Shut up,” Sidney said.
“Say, Sidney. Did you ever finish law school?” I asked.
“Sure did,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Passed the bar exam, too—on the first try. Got some interviews coming up next month.”
“They’re not ready for you in the courtroom,” I told him.
“They weren’t ready for me here either, homeboy. Don’t you worry—I dress different during the day.”
I eased closer to Sidney so that no one could overhear me. He had to lean down to hear what I was saying.
“I have another favor to ask,” I said.
“What you need?”
“There’s a big guy trailing me. Almost as tall as you, bald head, red mustache, heavy into ’roids. Black leather. Looks crazy. If you can’t keep him out, at least stall him.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”
“I hear you. Go on in.”
I went through double glass doors with the heavy brass trim, and the music and the lights hit me all at once, like the beginning of a bad trip. The bar in the anteroom was packed three deep, and the bartenders in their white tuxedo shirts and pink bow ties were gliding back and forth like a trio of ice-skaters. The cigarette smoke was so thick it made the ceiling seem much lower than it was. A mixture of perfume and sweat filled the air like the prelude to an orgy, and the women were wearing just enough to keep from getting arrested.
I went through a second set of wide-open glass doors to my left and found myself looking out over a dance floor already packed with people. I fought back a surging wave of claustrophobia and squeezed through the crowd sideways, twisting and turning my body like an eel trying to ease through muck. If I was going to find Vivian in a place like Embers, I would need an aerial view, so I pressed my way toward the stairs that led to the balcony, knowing that Williams would not be far behind.
You would have thought that with all the advances in technology they would have found a replacement for the disco ball, the cyclopean, multifaceted silver ball spinning like a miniature sun over the dance floor, but you would be mistaken. The lights were low; the speakers were throbbing; the dance floor was a quivering fresco of arms and legs, and above it all, the ball turning slowly, strafing the crowd with bars of blue and gold light. The air was so cold it was hard to smell the marijuana, but it was there, hovering, cloying, and sweet, like a red-eyed genie waiting for a wish.
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