by Ridge King
“Has Emilia noticed anything?”
Gargrave rolled his eyes. Emilia Acevedo, Jack’s housekeeper, was not the smartest thing in the world and Gargrave couldn’t understand why Jack kept her on.
“Nothing, sir. She’s noticed nothing.”
Gargrave looked over Jack’s shoulder.
“It’s Carlos Rodriguez, sir.”
Jack turned to see Carlos, a recently appointed Secret Service agent and Jack’s childhood friend, walking across the green from Jack’s house.
“Right on time, Carlos,” Jack said as they hugged each other. “Still up for the poker game tonight?”
“Sure am, Jack.”
“How many days have you got off?”
“Just three.”
“Stay up here with me and Babe at my house if you like.”
“Maybe one night with you, but I gotta stay at my mom’s in Little Havana or she’ll bitch for a month,” Carlos smiled.
“I’ve got to run in to see my dad, so why don’t you meet me back at my house in twenty minutes. Babe’s coming over for a swim in a little while.”
“Sounds great. See you there.”
Carlos turned and headed back across the green.
“We’ll have to watch ourselves around Carlos, sir.”
“I know. Ever since he joined, I’ve kept my mouth shut around him. Don’t want to compromise his position.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was delicate being around one of his best friends who just happened to be a Secret Service agent. Rodriguez was assigned to the detail protecting Lydia Pearson, an ex-First Lady who lived in Tampa. Just as well he was almost always on the other side of the state.
Chapter 5
ALLIGATOR ALLEY
Aricela Oyebanjo pulled into a Shell station off Alligator Alley on her way back to Miami from Naples. She was thoroughly pissed off. She hadn’t had her Ford Escape for three months and it was already overheating. She was on the outskirts of Weston and had finished crossing through the Everglades, a trip she hated, but since Fernando Pozo insisted she expand their operations on Florida’s West Coast, she was making the trip over every week.
She’d passed two other gas stations that didn’t look like they had a mechanic until she came to the Shell station, which had two bays with cars waiting to be worked on.
She got out of the Escape but left it running and went to a grease-smeared gringo in a dirty set of overalls who wiped his hands on an equally greasy rag as he moved out of a bay and walked toward her.
“Help ya, ma’am?” he said, squinting in the bright December sunlight. She saw his expression change when he got a clearer look at the scar that ran across her face. She was used to the shocked looks of people repulsed by her ugly scar. It always caught them by surprise.
“Yes, thank you. My car—it’s brand new—and it’s overheating. What could it be?”
“Lemme have a lookee-see,” he said lazily.
He popped the hood and turned to her in less than ten seconds.
“Broken hose is all. Take me ten minutes to fix it.”
“Oh, thank you. That’s a big relief.”
“I think the clamp was too tight, ’cause this car is new and the hose oughta be just fine.”
Aricela didn’t give a damn about the details.
“I appreciate it. Please hurry. I’m late for a meeting in Miami Lakes.”
Gringo loser, she thought.
“I’ll get it done fast, ma’am.”
She went into the station and bought a can of Diet Coke with the single dollar she had in her pants pocket and watched the gringo from the inside where even though it was December, the a/c cranked.
While the gringo worked, Aricela went over in her mind how well things were going on the West Coast. They were rapidly expanding not only her chain of Cambio Xtra check-cashing outlets, using different names and various corporate covers, but Severo’s MediClínica outlets as well. They were well established in Naples, Estero, Fort Myers and Cape Coral. Aricela had very good feelings about the expansion north to Port Charlotte and Sarasota. They’d make a fortune for Cuba when they moved into the Tampa Bay area, working the cities of Clearwater and St. Petersburg with their large populations of aging seniors and crooked doctors and predatory nursing home operators, who, whether they knew it or not, were going to help Aricela and Severo fleece the U.S. government out of billions.
She smiled as she finished her can of Diet Coke. She reached up and touched the puffy ridges that ran along the length of her disfiguring blemish.
She remembered the horrific day she was attacked. She’d been taping the snout of a bait dog they were sacrificing to train a pit bull terrier she and Severo were preparing for an upcoming fight, but the bait dog, a Doberman with a bad leg, knew when she approached him with duct tape, what she was going to do. Once his snout was closed with the duct tape, the Doberman wouldn’t be able to defend itself against their prize pit bull, and the dog they were training would maul the Doberman to death.
But this is the way they trained their dogs. Many dogs had to die for a good dog to win a tough fight.
The sound of the tape as she pulled off a two-foot length as she leaned down toward him startled the Doberman and he lunged at her face. In one hand she held the roll of duct tape and in the other she held the two-foot length, so she wasn’t even able to raise her arms to push him back. The Doberman clamped onto her face and she fell backward onto the floor. If Severo hadn’t been there and grabbed a nearby tire iron and hit the Doberman on his back, the dog would certainly have killed her. As soon as the Doberman let go of her face to turn towards Severo, he smashed it in the head with the tire iron, killing it and sending a shower of blood all over Aricela, who was writhing in pain in a pool of her own blood, her hands clasped to her face as she screamed out in agony.
This had happened some time ago, but she had lately been to see a couple of plastic surgeons and they were working up plans to do remedial surgery on her. Pozo had told her to spend whatever it took to repair the damage. “Money’s not an object here,” were his exact words.
Aricela watched as the gringo closed the hood on her Ford Escape. She went outside to pay him.
“That was very nice of you to fix the hose so fast,” she said.
“That’s what we’re here for, ma’am,” said the gringo with a goofy grin.
“How much is that?”
“Oh, just $10 for the hose and $10 for labor.”
Aricela went to the car and pulled her purse, a black Chanel rip-off, off the floorboard, cursing herself for leaving it there to begin with and not taking it with her when she went inside. She didn’t have any cash in her purse, but realized she had $8,000 in a bag on the back seat floor, but didn’t want to pull it out in front of the gringo.
“I don’t seem to have any cash on me. I’ll have to use a credit card, OK?”
“Sure.”
He took the card, went inside and came out in a minute.
“Here ya go, Miss—” he squinted as he looked at the credit card. “Uh, Miss, uh, Oh-yay-ban-jo. Is that right?”
“It’s Oyebanjo, OYE-BAN-HO. The ‘j’ is pronounced like an ‘h’ in Spanish.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
She signed the credit card slip and handed him his copy.
“I added a $20 tip for you for fixing the hose so fast.”
“Thank you, ma’am. You drive safe, now, hear?”
“I will.”
“And Merry Christmas.”
Looking around the desolate Everglades landscape, Aricela thought that Christmas seemed a million years away, though it was only two weeks from now.
“Merry Christmas,” she said to him.
This gringo was a redneck idiot.
She got into the car and pulled back onto Alligator Alley, glad to get way from these uneducated white boys in the ’Glades. She couldn’t wait till she was back among her own kind in Hialeah.
But before she got back to the familiar surroun
dings in Hialeah, she had one important stop to make.
* * *
As Aricela drove into Weston and veered onto the ramp taking her into the southbound lanes of I-75, Severo Oyebanjo was in the back office of his MediClínica storefront in Hialeah Gardens, a little town northwest of Hialeah. He held open a valise as his accountant, Liana Gomez, stuffed a couple of hundred checks inside.
“I can’t figure out how they don’t catch us,” said Liana.
“They aren’t trying hard enough,” said Severo. “They get one in a hundred of us. What we do that the others don’t is close down before they even start looking for us and reopen two doors away under a different name. They can’t track us.”
“I sit at the computer all day making up these checks and printing them out. I have to keep making up different numbers.”
“That’s good. We don’t want too many checks made out in the same amount.”
Liana finished stuffing the checks into the valise.
“There. That’s the last of them. Off you go.”
“You’ll have the next batch ready when?”
Liana sighed and rolled her eyes wearily.
“The end of the week. Noon on Friday.”
Severo nodded, satisfied.
As he pulled the zipper to close the valise, he feigned surprise.
“Oh, what’s this?” He pulled out a gaily-wrapped present from inside and looked at it curiously. “What could this be? Oh, yes, I remember. I got it for you!”
He handed it across the table to her and she ripped away the gift-wrap to reveal a bottle of perfume.
“Deseo!” she squealed.
“Yes. ‘Desire.’ If Jennifer Lopez makes it, it’s perfect for you,” said Severo with a mild leer.
He moved around the table and put his arms around her, giving her a deep and lingering kiss.
“You think I’m like J.Lo?”
Severo slapped Liana’s shapely buttocks, leaving his hand there to rub her.
“You got something in common with J.Lo, all right—a beautiful culo!”
They kissed again.
“You better go, Severo. You don’t know when Aricela’s going to get back.”
“Ah,” Severo said dismissively. “She’s got things to do. She won’t be coming over here.”
“And you’ve got things to do, too,” she said, her manner turning coy. “Maybe you can come by a little before noon on Friday.”
Severo beamed at the prospect.
“Maybe I will,” he teased, slipping his arm around Liana’s waist.
They both heard footsteps in the hallway outside and split apart. The door opened and one of the clinicians poked a head in.
“Señor Oyebanjo, we have a question about the Medicare Form 56-H. Can you help us out front?”
“Be right there,” he turned and winked to Liana. “See you Friday—at eleven o’clock.”
“I’ll be ready,” said Liana, holding the bottle of Deseo behind her back.
* * *
Aricela pulled into the Miller’s Ale House in Miami Lakes facing Northwest 67th Avenue and found a parking space. She looked all around the car to make sure no one was near and reached behind her for the bag with the cash. She counted out $6,000, split it into two $3,000 stacks and placed them in separate parts of her Chanel bag.
She closed it and went inside Miller’s, where it was blissfully cool and noisy with a busy lunch crowd of local businessmen and blue collar workers drinking beer and watching one of the three dozen flat screen TVs mounted all over the place.
She quickly spotted Miguel Jado in his light blue U.S. Postal Service uniform sitting at the far end of the long horseshoe-shaped bar that easily accommodated 50 customers. Booths lined both walls peppered with sports memorabilia, with two dozen tables in the center of the main dining room beyond the large bar.
He saw her, too, she knew from the fidgety way he acted when she walked over to him and took the seat next to him. He’d purposefully sat at the end of the bar farthest away from the crowds so they would have a little privacy.
“Miguel,” she said with a big smile. “You’re looking good. How are you?”
He might have been better than he looked. Jado was about 55, but looked 65, with drooping shoulders and a threadbare mustache that needed trimming badly. He sat there glumly drinking an iced tea.
“Hola, Aricela,” he said.
“You look sad, Miguel. What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got to get another advance from you, Aricela,” Jado said in a low voice. “It’s my bookie. He won’t wait any longer.”
Aricela shook her head and clicked her tongue.
“If you’d buy Powerball tickets instead of playing the horses, you’d do better, Miguel,” she said with a sigh.
Jado leaned closer.
“Aricela, I need $8,000.”
“I can give you $3,000, Miguel.”
“I need it, Aricela!” he said in an urgent whisper.
“I have $3,000, Miguel. That’s all.”
“When can I get more?”
“You’re already into me. What have you got for me today?”
Miguel was about to reach for his backpack when the barmaid came over.
A gringa, thought Aricela. All blonde and pert and chirpy.
“Hi, my name’s—”
But Aricela wasn’t having any of it.
“Diet Coke. In a can. That’s what I want.”
Aricela saw the girl draw back when she got a look at Aricela’s face, but her training was good and she recovered quickly.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we only have fountain Coke. Will that do?”
“No, but I’ll take it. You used to have Diet Coke in a can.”
“But we don’t anymore.”
“I know.”
“Would you like to order something?”
Aricela hated this girl. She just beamed cheerfulness. Aricela saw that Miguel hadn’t ordered anything.
“Miguel, you should eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I like the Fiesta Nachos. We’ll have that. Miguel, you can share.”
Jado shrugged. He didn’t care one way or the other.
“Fine,” he mumbled.
Aricela liked the Fiesta Nachos at Miller’s—a huge mound of crispy tortilla chips layered with fresh ground beef simmered in ancho chili seasoning, pico de gallo, and Jalapeños smothered in Jack and cheddar cheeses, then melted until bubbling hot. All this was topped with sour cream and guacamole. $8.99, not to mention the zillion calories. She reminded herself to order a salad tonight when she went to dinner with Severo at La Casa Del Churrasco in Hialeah, his favorite place.
There was a Victoria’s Secret about half a mile from Miller’s Ale House and Aricela wanted to make a stop there for some sexy lingerie after she finished with Miguel Jado. It was an early Christmas present for Severo. Severo wasn’t the handsomest man in the world, but she was so thankful that he’d stood by her after the incident with the Doberman.
“And bring extra Jalapeños on the side, OK?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After Blondie went away, Jado reached into his backpack and brought out a brown envelope about two inches thick.
“How many?”
“About 70 or 75 Social Security checks.”
“That’s pretty good,” said Aricela.
At an average of $1,500 to $2,000 each, you were looking at $120,000 to $135,000. A good haul.
Miguel averaged 60 checks a month on an annualized basis, which netted the Oyebanjo operation some $1,250,000. Aricela had seven other postal workers in her little network. All together, they did about $10,000,000 a year.
Easy.
She had several postal workers she’d been cultivating on the West Coast, but they were not operational yet.
“You’re getting a lot from me, Aricela. I’m not getting much from you.”
Blondie came back with the tall glass of Diet Coke and quickly went away to the busie
r end of the bar.
“I’m doing the best I can, Miguel. I don’t get to keep but a little bit of this money. You know it goes through five or six guys. Everybody gets a little bit of the action.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out $3,000, which she slipped to him under the counter after scanning the area. No one paid them the least attention.
“It’s better than last month. But I can’t take them every month.”
“I don’t want you to, Miguel. The last thing we want is for you to get caught.”
“My wife would kill me.”
“Hold back on the gambling, Miguel. Save the money I’m giving you. You’ll need it someday.”
“I’ve got a government pension when I retire in two years. It’s good for life.”
“You won’t have much of a life if your wife finds out you’re spending three half-days a week up at Calder Race Track.”
“I need to get more money.”
“I’ll go out on a limb and get you another $3,000 tomorrow. I’ll meet you at 1:30 at the Ruby Tuesday next door.”
It was better with Miguel to dole the money out slowly.
“But you hate Ruby Tuesday.”
A food runner brought the oversized plate—more like a platter—of Fiesta Nachos, a cloud of steam billowing up from the pile of gooey mess. It looked like a cow had just shit something yellow and brown. The food runner put the side of Jalapeños down next to the platter.
“I can’t have Fiesta Nachos two days in a row, Miguel. My face might be fucked up, OK?—but I’m keeping my ass in shape.”
* * *
Severo made his way to the main office of the Cambio Xtra operation at the corner of Red Road and Okeechobee Road in Hialeah and parked in one of the four reserved spaces around back. He took his valise and went in through the back door.
They had a two-floor operation headquartered here and the place fairly buzzed with activity.
No sleepy Cubans drinking daiquiris here, thought Severo with a smile as his ears took in the noises of an operation running at full tilt. If Cambio Xtra had been a ship, they’d be churning ahead at full speed.