Magic City

by James W. Hall

  “How can love be anything but good? The great vibrant fuel of life. Like a rocket lifting off, that rush, that excitement, an explosion of joy. But like that missile rising from the earth, one little nudge, one jostle, the slightest disturbance in the trajectory, and that great ship will simply sail off into oblivion. That was me. That was us, Lola and me. A rocket to oblivion.”

  “How so?” Alex said.

  He stared into Alexandra’s eyes with a frank and bottomless despair.

  “I purchased my wife. I didn’t win her love. I bought and paid for her.”

  Alexandra turned the heat off under the eggs, set the spatula aside.

  “Eight hundred thousand dollars. It virtually depleted the family fortune. I gave it as a bribe to Meyer Lansky so he would kill the man my wife truly loved.”

  “Morales,” Sugar said.

  “Yes, Jorge Morales.”

  “Morales was Lola’s lover?”

  “Oh, yes, he was one of many who shared her bed. But Morales was the love of her life. When he threw her away, she despised him for it. She loved him and she hated him. And begged me to make her pain go away.”

  Alexandra looked over at Sugarman. His expression was as neutral as if he heard things of this sort every day.

  “And what’s this Southwoods deal?” Sugar said.

  “They’re all connected. Lola, love, Southwoods. It’s all part of the same dreadful stew. I wouldn’t have known about Southwoods if it weren’t for Lola. She and Lansky were pals. He liked having her around, such a beautiful woman. Just after Morales jilted her, Lola heard Lansky discussing Southwoods, then she got an idea and came to me and asked if I could help. It was all her doing. Making Morales the target. But Lansky needed persuading. He wanted to go back to Cuba very much and thought Morales was a poor choice. That’s what the eight hundred thousand was for. So even if Southwoods failed, Lansky would have something in his pocket.”

  “Southwoods was a CIA operation?”

  Stanton nodded.

  “Why does the CIA give their target selection to a mobster?”

  “Oh, they were all kids,” Stanton said. “The ones running the show, they were in their twenties, fresh-faced, naive. It was their first mission. They were doing this with minimal oversight. It was a rogue operation, run by some general up the chain. Caufield and the others were virtually on their own. They didn’t know the lay of the land or who to trust. The Cuban exiles were telling them one thing, local Anglos another, blacks another. They knew Lansky better than anyone else. The CIA had worked with him in Havana. To Caufield, Lansky seemed larger-than-life. She trusted him. She was even a little in awe. He knew Miami better than she did, and he spoke her language. Finally, I suppose she believed he was patriotic and wouldn’t steer her wrong.”

  “Lansky and the CIA teamed up to kill Morales,” Alex said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  Stanton King nodded, then glanced out the French doors at the lagoon and the sea beyond. Going back there, that time, that place. He frowned and shook his head hard, as if to clear a sour taste.

  “Did you go along that night with Runyon and Humberto and the others?” Sugarman was buttering the toast, keeping his voice low and sincere. The concerned interrogator. Helpful, interested, but not pushing it.

  “God, no. I went home after the fight and waited. But morally I might as well have been there. I was there in spirit. I have blood on my hands just the same. I knew what was going to happen. I aided and abetted a mass murder. Sitting there at the boxing match, knowing the Morales family only had a few hours to live.”

  His voice was growing fainter as he spoke, as though with every sentence he were receding further into that time he described.

  “Lola begged me. She was in such agony, I couldn’t refuse. Almost a million dollars so Lansky would execute her lover. And Morales’s wife as well. It was the wife who put an end to the affair and Lola detested her, too. I thought I wanted Morales dead. I thought it would end her heartache and she’d turn to me. That her gratitude would eventually become love.”

  The room was silent for a moment. Stanton King looking off at nothing.

  Then he said, “My God, I’m crazy, aren’t I? Crazy as a goddamn loon.”

  Stanton made a weary smile, and he looked at Sugar, then Alex, an impossible plea in his eyes. The ruby color drained from the birthmark on his cheek, and for a moment it disappeared into the flesh around it.

  “We’re going to have to take you in,” Alex said. “You know that.”

  “I know. Yes, I know. I’m ready whenever you are.”

  Sugarman said, “What exactly was the CIA trying to achieve? Why kill Morales? What’s this all about?”

  “It was a terrible plan, terrible. Sick and evil.”

  Stanton resettled on his stool. His eyes strayed out the French doors again, and seemed to come into focus on something nearby. Alex turned to follow his line of sight but saw nothing unusual.

  When she turned back around, the glass in one of the doors exploded and Stanton King’s head jerked hard to the side and he coughed. From his lips a pink vapor bloomed. He fell forward onto the countertop, and his pistol twirled across the white tile. As it was going over the edge, Alex snatched it.

  In the instant she ducked to make the grab, a second slug slammed into the side of the refrigerator exactly where she’d been standing. Electrical sparks spewed from the dented hole.

  A third round gouged a trail across the face of the cabinet and sent Sugarman sprawling to the floor. A fourth raked the stove, and the fifth blasted apart a mirror across the room.

  Then the shooter ceased. There was only the trickle of glass and the sizzle of sparks from the guts of the fridge and the pounding in Alexandra’s ears.

  Stanton King coughed another time and a moment later his dead weight shifted and his body tumbled from the stool onto the kitchen tile floor.

  By then she and Sugar were squatting side by side between the stove and the breakfast island. Near his collar blood seeped through the fabric.

  “A nick,” he said.

  “Let me see.”

  But he raised a hand to wave her off.

  “A nick.”

  It was clear from the sound of the blasts and the shattered glass in the French door that the shooter was in the woods near the lagoon.

  “Your weapon, where is it?”

  “Down the hall in my laptop bag.” His voice was raspy.

  “You take this. I’ll get it.”

  Alexandra held out King’s .45.

  “I’ll get mine. I know where it is. You stay here, Alex.”

  “You’re okay? You’re sure?”

  “One way to find out.”

  Sugarman held his left hand hard against his neck and rose.

  When he was gone, Alex duckwalked to the end of the counter. From there she had a view out the doors to the lagoon and the mangroves and scrub palmettos that formed the border of Thorn’s property. To make those five shots, the shooter had to be in one of two clumps of shrubbery.

  But a smart man would’ve repositioned himself already.

  If it were Alex, she’d slip around to the front of the house. That was the brazen approach. What a pro would do. Enter through the door that Stanton used. Just walk in. A slow prowl while the two civilians cowered in the kitchen. Reload, strike again before the targets could regroup.

  She cut back to the long hallway. Her arm ached and a ligament or tendon in her neck was badly strained from the weight of the cast—a sharp crick burned deep in the meat of her shoulder. Alex held the pistol in her good hand and advanced down the hall.

  Inside one of the bedrooms she heard Sugar moving around. She didn’t wait for him but got to the door to the foyer, flattened her back against the wall. A long breath, another, listening for the latch to click.

  She waited another half a minute. She checked the wall for shadows but saw nothing. Just the coatrack, an old wind-breaker hanging there. A brass pot on the floor with two umbrel
las in it.

  She lowered the .45 from the ready position.

  She must’ve had it wrong. The shooter wasn’t coming through the front. Maybe he was gone, or maybe he was circling the house to break into one of the bedrooms on the north side. Sugarman was taking too long.

  Alex turned and made a first step back down the hall toward the bedrooms when she heard the latch. She pressed her back to the wall and raised the pistol shoulder high. She heard nothing. Half a minute went by and still nothing.

  The shooter was a quiet bastard. Probably waiting just inside the door to absorb the floor plan. Choosing which way to head, just as Stanton had. Forward into the house or left to the doorway where Alex stood.

  Alexandra bent her knees into a half squat, inched the barrel to the edge of the door frame. She didn’t count to three, didn’t take a breath, just went.

  The woman wasn’t expecting her. She’d taken a step forward, apparently deciding to proceed into the main house.

  “Lower your weapon,” Alex said.

  The woman was blond, slender. Wearing black chinos and a blue shirt and a dark jacket. She stared forward, her pistol still directed into the house.

  “I’m not telling you again.” Alex came up from her squat.

  “You’re Alexandra Collins, crime-scene tech with Miami PD. You’re training for search and rescue, a mid-career course correction.”

  “And you’re Pauline Caufield. Now lower the weapon. Last chance.”

  The woman was at least sixty, but in the right light she might’ve passed for ten years younger. With the bright sun flooding from the transoms, however, Alex could see the grooves around her mouth and eyes, not deep but lots of them. Frown lines, growl lines, pissed-off lines.

  Pauline was still weighing her chances, the Glock’s muzzle tipping down an inch. She was watching Alex in her peripheral vision the way cornered animals study their attacker just before they choose fight or flight.

  Alexandra stepped to her right, exposing her cast, her full body.

  “Just lower it. Stop thinking. Do it.”

  “Okay,” Caufield said. “You win. I’m lowering.”

  She dipped her weapon a few inches, then fell backward, dropped hard on her butt and rocked her legs upward, sighting between her uplifted feet at Alex. Somewhere in the first half second of her evasive move, Alexandra squeezed the trigger of the .45 and got the metal click of an empty chamber. And a second click.

  Stanton had held them hostage with an empty weapon.

  As Caufield was settling her aim, Alex slung the pistol at her. The woman bobbed her pistol down, then brought it back. Alex was in the air by then, leaping at the federal agent who had just killed Stanton King and wounded Sugar and meant to murder her.

  Alex swung her heavy cast, accelerating as she swiveled into a roundhouse blow. Then spiking the woman full in the face.

  The Glock blasted. A skewer of shock waves knifed down Alexandra’s shoulder and the round tore open a seam in the plaster cast and ripped apart the sleeve of her sweater.

  Alex fell back on the floor. Her ears were ringing, but she was not dead. No wound she could feel. Not yet anyway.

  Pauline Caufield, on the other hand, was out. A three-inch gash etched across her hairline, and blood drooling from the cut like milk from a leaky carton. Alex pried the Glock from her hand and stood up. She patted her down and found only a tiny telescope in her jacket pocket. No ID, no keys.

  Alex stood up straight, and the foyer started to spin like a sluggish carnival ride. She settled her back against the wall and ordered the whirling to cease. After a few seconds it slowed enough for her to walk.

  Alex made it back into the hallway without falling. She made it five more feet, then another five, the walls breathing in and breathing out. She pushed open the door to the first bedroom, but Sugarman wasn’t there. She made it to the second and shouldered that door aside.

  Sugar sat on the floor, his back propped against the bed. Blood saturated the front of his shirt and was puddled around his butt.

  He opened his eyes and watched her kneel down beside him.

  An embarrassed smile washed across his lips.

  She found a phone in a hallway, called Emergency, gave her location.

  The dispatcher got the medics rolling, then said, “This is Thorn’s house?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hell, what’s he into now?”

  Alex had forgotten that part of Key Largo. Everybody into everybody’s business. Some folks thrived on it.

  “Five minutes or less,” the dispatcher said. “Apply pressure.”

  “I know about that,” Alex said, and hung up.

  She opened Sugarman’s collar and examined the wound.

  He’d been right, it was just a nick, but it was a bad nick. Very bad. The slug had whisked across the flesh just below his jawline. The artery was perforated, and a strong current of blood was pulsing out. She pulled a pillowcase loose and pressed a corner to the gash. When the fabric could absorb no more, she kept it in place to speed the clotting and folded another piece over it to soak the rest.

  As they rolled Sugar out to the ambulance, Alex noted without surprise that there was no sign of Pauline Caufield.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Pauline had double vision. Speeding up the turnpike toward Miami, seeing two eighteen-wheelers where there was one, two motorcycles, two bread trucks. Two exit signs flashing past.

  It took her three tries before she punched the correct numbers.

  “Need to speak to Hadley.”

  Two red Corvettes blew by her on the left.

  “He’s in a meeting,” his secretary said. Someone new Pauline didn’t know. They were always rotating in and out.

  “Get him out of the meeting. This is urgent.”

  “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

  “Caufield, Pauline Caufield.”

  “One moment please.”

  Pauline watched two big white birds sail across the highway. Two suns burning in the sky, two roads running parallel before her. The blood had stopped seeping. But a bell was ringing in her throat, and something tasted rotten at the back of her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Caufield. He can’t come to the phone. It’s an important meeting.”

  “It’s Pauline Caufield. Did you tell him that?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  “Well, go tell him again. This is the highest priority.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, Director Waters said he doesn’t know a Pauline Caufield.”

  At thirteen she learned to pleasure herself. In her dreary, motherless house she lay beneath the sheet and comforter, hand stroking thighs. A sweet relief from the pressure knotted inside. Something new, something exciting. Something all her own.

  Twice that year her daddy swung open her bedroom door and caught her in the act. Shamed her, gave her prayers to say, made her read the Testament, pointing to the terrible punishments parents were sometimes required to make. Abraham and his boy Isaac. Onan, who so displeased the Lord for spilling his seed, he was slain.

  Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,

  Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

  The third and final time he caught her she was fourteen. As she was rising to the crucial moment, her guilt-loving father pushed open her door as if he’d been standing in the hall waiting for her moans, the squeak of mattress springs; her father waiting outside, ready with his punishment.

  He strode across the room, yanked back her sheets. He looked down at her hand tucked between her white thighs.

  I warned you about this.

  I warned you, yet you continue to defy me. This lewd conduct. It will spoil you for marriage. No man will have you. I will not allow this in my house. I have warned you. Over and over I have warned.

  There was a glass specimen jar in his hand. He held it out, unscrewed the lid, tipped it. Inside was a papery nest crawling with wasps, frantic to d
efend their broken hive.

  No, she said. I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll stop. I will.

  You promised before. I no longer trust your word.

  He dropped the hive onto her loins. The stinging hive.

  The wasps, the wasps, the stinging hive.

  Years passed and she grew wanton. More bold and daddy-hating. Eighteen, nineteen, moving quickly from boys to men and more men. Bringing his worst fears to life. Dangerous men, powerful men, some more powerful than he. Inviting them in, taking all they had. Draining them dry, casting them aside.

  Until that one man, that thrilling man. A man of valor. She fell for him, fell and fell so hard. His slinky body, his insolent smile, long lashes. Sensual macho lips. A genuine man, nothing like the others. A man of action and daring.

  She made her way into his bed, oh God, his bed, his body. Those hours in his arms, his breath in her ear. His ferocity, his yearning.

  But no. She can’t have him. Beautiful man. Can’t have, can’t have. The wife and children called him home. And that’s final. Go away, leave me alone. Forget I exist.

  With her eyes shut, she placed on her tongue the dry wafer of the past, sipped from the goblet of memory. Reliving once more that murderous night, the man who died, and that sweet girl child. The wasps, the stinging wasps seeking her out, circling her head like a venomous halo, they buzzed round her brain, swarming and swarming to return to their hive, crazy to return to their broken hive. Their broken, broken hive.

  Hadley Waters couldn’t do that. Could he?

  Pauline Caufield was a government employee with health insurance, a pension plan, nearly forty years of service. Waters couldn’t erase all that, couldn’t delete her Social Security number, expunge her from the system. No way in hell. People knew her, lots of people. She had a history. She had a penthouse office in one of Miami’s finest office buildings, a network of agents under her command. She had bank accounts, a Florida driver’s license, a passport, a deed to her house in Belle Meade, credit cards, a leased vehicle. There was no way she could simply poof and be gone. No way in hell.