Lucien brought Boudreau another vodka. The big man had calmed down. He actually said, “thanks” and his face broke into a smile.
“You know, Toothpick, I like it. You’re right. Longstreet will be crapping in his pants the whole time I’m with him. I think I’ll bring a bunch of the boys with me for a little vacation at his place. Things are pretty quiet around here. You come, too. The scumbag can spend a little of my money on me for a change. He’ll bend over backwards making me happy.”
Vocce smiled. It had gone better than he’d expected.
“And then do you know what I’m gonna do?”
“No,” Vocce said.
Boudreau grabbed his own crotch.
“I’m gonna bend him over frontwards.”
CHAPTER 22 – GOOD ADVICE
It took almost two months for Sudden to get all his strength back. His bullet wound healed fairly quickly, but impact trauma to his neck and some subsequent minor surgery to repair a tear to his trapezius muscle reduced the motility of his left arm. For a while he feared that he’d suffered permanent nerve damage. But as the internal adhesions broke down he realized that the disability was only temporary. He actually welcomed the pain, which told him the nerves were in good working order.
He lost 12 pounds and was not able to resume his normal workout schedule. He augmented physical therapy at a local clinic with visits to the New London submarine base, where Nigel had arranged some additional work with specialists. Buss told him that the Philadelphia unit, with some additional agency help, was keeping tabs on Boudreau and Vocce. Sudden would have all the information he needed when he made his move.
With so much time on his hands, Sudden concentrated on his writing. Cristina Parker came out to visit. She brought cupcakes from Crumbs, the Manhattan standby, and the news that she had sold three of his future thrillers to a major publisher. Sudden’s elation was tempered by the thought that Sylvia would have loved to have known that.
He went into Manhattan to sign the contract and took Allison Beech to lunch. She had moved into her sister’s apartment and was trying to keep the bookstore going.
“I hadn’t realized what a local institution Shakespeare and Friends was,” she told Sudden, “or how much people loved Sylvia. There were dozens of sympathy cards slipped under the door of the shop and even some flowers in the doorway. I just hate the thought of it going under. Do you think I could make a go of it? There’s nothing keeping me in Michigan. Sylvia had been trying to get me to move to New York for years. But I don’t know anything about the book business, other than it is supposedly dying.”
Sudden told her that while there were few independent bookstores left, those that found a niche and a following, such as Shakespeare and Friends, had a fighting chance. Given the closing of so many other bookstores, hiring knowledgeable people to work in her store while she learned the business would be no problem. He said he would contact Cristina and others and they would be in touch to help her with both the recruiting and bookkeeping. He also told her not to worry about money. Allison again told him she didn’t hold him responsible for her sister’s death, and didn’t want charity anyway. Sudden replied that she could consider any funds he gave her as an investment.
“You can be the main distributor for my books in Greenwich Village,” he said. “I have to write three of them for my new publisher. Of course, that will come after I take care of the other project we discussed.”
That sealed the deal.
***
By the end of the second month of rehab, Sudden was winning most of his matches against the hand-to-hand combat instructors at West Point. Nigel Buss’s cornucopia of information had also proved helpful to Army Intelligence and strings had been pulled allowing Sudden to gain access to training facilities at the United States Military Academy. He knew Nigel wanted him in tip-top shape before going up against Boudreau and was just grateful Buss hadn’t set him up against Delta Force operatives. The West Point commando types were bad enough. They quickly picked up on the weakness in his left side and gave him no quarter, especially when they found out he was a “Swabbie.”
Sudden had particular trouble with a young woman instructor who was as deadly as she was beautiful. While he was determined not to take her sex into account, he found himself pulling some of his blows and avoiding contact with certain parts of her body. Inevitably, that resulted in him flying through the air and landing on his back. On one occasion she pinned him to the ground and he was embarrassed to realize that she had aroused him. When they stood up, she smiled at his discomfort, readily observable through his shorts, and promptly kicked him in the groin. While he was sitting on the mat trying to control the agony, she squatted next to him and pulled up her t-shirt and sports bra.
“Do you see these, Mr. Sudden.” She had lovely, firm breasts with nipples hardened by their combat. “You keep ignoring them when we’re fighting. You’re missing obvious holds. It could get you killed. All’s fair in love and war. My husband’s not afraid of grabbing my tits. Why are you? They won’t break.”
Good advice, Sudden thought, and it might come in handy.
Fats Boudreau had bigger boobs than this gal.
CHAPTER 23 – BUTTERFLIES AND SPENSER
For such an innocuous (if often spectacularly beautiful) creature, the butterfly exerts an outsized influence on science and literature.
Aficionados of time-travel science fiction stories, for example, often point out that should people ever succeed in traveling to the past, they dare not do anything that might alter the future. A favorite cautionary tale, the short story The Sound of Thunder, written by Ray Bradbury in 1952, describes how a hunter on a “Time Safari” panics at the sight of a Tyrannosaurus Rex he was hoping to shoot and steps off a special trail designed to prevent interaction with prehistoric fauna and animals. (Shooting the T-Rex was allowed because it was about to be killed by a falling tree.) When the hunting party returns to the modern world they left, everything has changed, and not for the better. The reason: A squashed butterfly on the boot of the frightened man who stepped off the trail. Over millions of years the death of that small insect had reverberated through time to change the future.
Then, there’s the weather. While some people don’t believe that anything can influence the weather, or global warming, or the pennant hopes of the Chicago Cubs, there are those who are convinced that whatever happens someplace in the world, however insignificant, will have an effect someplace else. Eventually, and a lot sooner than a couple of million years. That’s where the butterfly comes in again. The cause-and-effect crowd posits that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, it starts a process that can eventually cause a hurricane to devastate the United States. It has to do with air flow, heat, revolution of the earth, Atlantic Ocean currents, phases of the moon, and, presumably, a lot of bad luck on the hurricane end of the scenario.
Hurricanes themselves are like politicians. They depend on hot air. In equatorial Africa, where that proverbial butterfly presumably flutters, there is a lot of hot air. When this air finds itself pushed out of Africa (it probably takes more than one butterfly) over the warm waters of the Atlantic, it rises, bringing water vapor with it. The vapor condenses at high altitude and falls as rain. The convection creates thunderstorms. The storms start out disorganized – and some stay that way – but the earth’s rotation can spin them into something more malevolent. A gaggle of storms can then become a tropical wave, then a tropical depression, which can evolve into a tropical storm and, if the conditions are right (or wrong, if you happen to be in the way), a full-fledged hurricane.
During hurricane season, roughly late June through November, a veritable train of potential hurricanes march across the Atlantic from Africa toward the Caribbean and the United States. They vary in size. All are potentially dangerous, because they all have high winds and can dump torrents of rain in a few hours. In addition to massive flooding caused by rainfall, the real killer storms push millions of tons of seawater into low-lying c
oastal areas. When these storm surges coincide with high tides, the result can be catastrophic.
Hurricanes are part of the natural order of things on Earth and serve a necessary purpose by bringing water from the Southern Hemisphere up into the North, where, on balance, it does more harm than good. Still, there really isn’t anything nice to say about the largest hurricanes, which can outgrow their usefulness rapidly. Category 5 monsters are capable of scouring the landscape like a razor with winds that can approach 200 miles an hour.
In their path, humans are like butterflies under a boot.
***
Prior to 1954, hurricanes were nameless.
No one knows what Native Americans called the storms that periodically flattened their villages and surely killed them by the thousands. In tribal lore passed down generationally mouth-to-mouth there are probably references to “The Great Wind” or “The Day of Too Much Water,” or, perhaps, “The Night of the Flying Tepees.”
But it took the arrival of Europeans to start the labeling of the most-devastating storms. Hence, “The Great Hurricane of 1790” or “The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1906.” The descriptions soon became more colorful. In 1938, “The Long Island Express” cut Long Island in two and almost drowned Katherine Hepburn.
In 1954, the National Weather Service started giving tropical storms female names, such as Camille, which eventually annoyed feminists, who thought it bad form to name these tropical killers after only women. So, in 1979, the powers that be started alternating male and female monikers. The list of names extends years into the future, and has become politically correct, to account for the nation’s immigrant diversity. Now, one is just as likely to be killed by a Hispanic hurricane and by a WASP tempest.
Names are retired, like those of famous ballplayers. Only instead of base hits, the deciding factor is dead bodies. The name of a storm that kills a lot of people is never used again.
***
It was a busy season for storms in the Western Hemisphere. By late August, the Weather Service was up to “S” on its alphabetical list and was keeping an eye on a tropical wave that emerged from equatorial Africa. Within days, a cluster of thunderstorms developed into a tropical depression and started across the Atlantic. When wind speeds reached 45 miles an hour it was classified as Tropical Storm “Spenser.” Statistics concerning Spenser – forward motion, wind speed, barometric pressure, width – were fed into computers. These were collated with parameters from other weather conditions and variables that might influence its development and direction – high pressure domes, jet stream wind shear, water temperature in the storm’s path, phases of the moon (for tides).
It was all very scientific and a great improvement on the days when people went to sleep on a warm cloudless night and woke up in a tree. Modern weather forecasters have become very good at predicting where a hurricane will go, when it will make landfall and how strong it will be.
Of course, no one is perfect. Occasionally they are wrong and people still wake up in trees.
CHAPTER 24 – BROTHERS IN ARMS
Sudden was feeling pretty good. His rehab program had returned him to peak physical shape and Nigel Buss had signed off on his mission of revenge. His JetBlue flight to Fort Myers had been pleasant and on time.
Then he walked out of the terminal. The heat and humidity reminded him of a particularly unpleasant assignment in Sumatra. By the time he got to the car the agency had rented for him, his shirt was plastered to his skin. Well, southwest Florida in early September wouldn’t have been his first choice, Sudden thought, but that’s where Vocce and Boudreau were. And he wouldn’t be there long.
He popped the trunk of the Ford Fusion – Nigel had been enamored of the car ever since seeing James Bond drive one in Casino Royale – and saw the large suitcase. He knew it contained everything he needed for the job, and then some. Nigel liked his operatives to be prepared. Sudden knew that there was so much high-tech weaponry in the case he could probably hop a puddle-jumper to Cuba and take out half of Castro’s army. But he doubted he’d need more than the silenced Bersa Thunder .380 automatic – the Argentine version of the Walther pistol – or, perhaps, the collapsible British Rangemaster sniper rifle with the .338 Lapuua Magnum bullets.
Sudden smiled grimly, thinking of Sylvia Beech and how much fun the expandable, hollow-point dum-dum bullets would have inside Boudreau’s corpulent body. Nigel had thoughtfully included two different magazines for the Bersa, the standard seven-round variety and the extended one that could hold 15 bullets.
He threw his own bag in the trunk and then drove to his hotel in Bonita Springs, a Holiday Inn about a mile inland from the Shalimar II. As he walked up to the reception desk to check in, he spotted a slim black man sitting in the lobby reading a tourist brochure. After getting his room key, Sudden walked into a small coffee shop and sat down facing the door. The man entered a moment later and sat down next to him.
“The manatees can’t tap dance,” Sudden said.
The man looked confused.
“What?”
“It’s the code for the day. You’re supposed to answer, ‘That’s because no one has taught them.’ Now, who are you working for?”
“What?”
“OK. I guess that will do.” Sudden smiled. “Sorry, I’m just funnin’ with you. There is no code phrase.”
The man sighed.
“They told me you were a pain in the ass, Sudden. It’s too fucking hot to screw around. Code phrase. Jesus!”
The Caribbean-based agent, whose name Sudden knew was Calvin Brothers, had flown to Florida to keep an eye on Vocce and Boudreau after they landed in Florida. It had originally been assumed that they’d only made the trip to kill Longstreet. Sudden planned to take them out when they got back to New Orleans. But they had actually moved into Longstreet’s building and were seen sitting with him around the pool, often in animated conversation. Boudreau had brought a retinue with him and it didn’t appear that he would be going anywhere soon. There were even women, presumed to be hookers.
So, Sudden decided to make his move in Bonita Springs. That actually had some advantages. It was off season and the town was fairly deserted. The Shalimar II itself was basically empty, except for the New Orleans thugs. Collateral damage could be kept to a minimum.
“Where are you based in Jamaica, Brothers?”
“Ochos Rios. Listen, I don’t have much time for chitchat. There’s a hurricane heading this way and I have to catch a flight back before I get stuck here.”
“I know about the tropical storm. When did it become a hurricane? What’s the latest?”
“It’s a Category 2, now. It’s a biggie, but it looks like it will head into the Gulf. I wouldn’t worry. It’s tracking over Haiti – those poor bastards can’t catch a goddamn break – and then it will probably hit Cuba and Jamaica. This part of Florida rarely gets hit hard because all that land saps their strength before they get into the Gulf. Of course, they pick up strength then but they usually head up to Texas and Louisiana. Like Katrina. That’s where they think this one will go. Hurricane Spenser. What a dipshit name for a storm.”
Sudden smiled at the thought that fats Boudreau was probably thinking that he had dodged a bullet by leaving New Orleans. But there were all sorts of bullets.
“You know your hurricanes.”
“I told you, I live in Jamaica.”
Brothers took some sheets of paper and several photos out of the manila envelope.
“I got as many shots as I could without being obvious. People are always taking pictures around here. And I made a schedule of their comings and goings. Almost exclusively food runs, as far as I could tell. These guys can eat. They brought some hookers in, but the men spend most of the time at the pool or on the beach, where they lay out like stranded pilot whales. They did have some visitors. I got the plates and ran them. Turned out to be some local lawyers and real estate people. There’s obviously something going on.”
Sudden looked at the photos. He
already knew what Boudreau, Vocce and Longstreet looked like, either from personal experience or from photos provided by Nigel Buss during their planning sessions. But it didn’t hurt to see who else he might run up against. Of course, in addition to Vocce, if he shot everybody over 300 pounds in Longstreet’s building he couldn’t go wrong. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He wanted just Boudreau and Vocce. He wasn’t even planning to kill Longstreet, much as he probably deserved killing.
“You did a hell of a job, Calvin. I appreciate it. Now get home. I hope everything works out for you, hurricane-wise.”
“Thanks. You be careful, too. And I don’t mean the storm. These guys look like clowns, but they’re not. And the skinny guy is probably as dangerous as he looks.”
***
Sudden spent two days tracking the comings and goings of people at Longstreet’s building. The traffic consisted mostly of workers of one sort or another. There didn’t seem to be any extensive security, which was logical since the Shalimar II was still being renovated and neither Longstreet nor Boudreau would be expecting trouble. In fact, Sudden knew, the only person Longstreet might reasonably have feared was now sipping Planters Punches and mojitos with him at the pool.
That made absolutely no sense to Sudden. Fats Boudreau had a reputation for always getting even with those who crossed him, in the most brutal manner imaginable. And in the case of Longstreet, the New Orleans mobster actually had a legitimate grievance against his former banker. Longstreet not only stole millions from the family, but sent Lorillard Boudreau to jail, where he died. Maybe Fats didn’t know that Longstreet had sold the Boudreaus out. There was no reason to suppose he did. In any event, Sudden wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. If Fats and Vocce stayed put soaking up the sun a few days, it was fine with him.
He went to a nearby Home Depot, which was packed with frantic people buying up plywood and other materials in preparation for the coming storm, which forecasters were now predicting might actually brush southwest Florida. But there was no run on hard hats, work clothes and boots, and he felt sure his generic construction attire would pass muster at any work site. A tool belt and tool box completed the makeover. He planned on waltzing in the front door of Longstreet’s building. The Bersa Thunder fit nicely in the tool box. On his way to the checkout counter he spotted a clipboard. He added it to his basket. Clipboards never hurt.
TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers Page 10