by Sam Jones
“You think he might have killed Sykes?”
Billy shook his head. “No, the guy who did is probably someone higher up in the food chain. Some hit man he’s got. Christ, the guy cut Sykes up into pieces. The stuff that got shipped to the Hoover building was done with surgical precision. The guy who did it is both brilliant and sick, no question, and Rodriguez and his friend who got away are neither of those things. They’re punks. Keep on Rodriguez, though. Maybe he’ll let something slip.”
“We will. What are you gonna do next?”
Billy said, “For a second I was thinking about the Russians…”
“The Russians? What makes you think the Russians were involved in all this?” Ferris said.
Billy realized that he was spacing out.
It was the lack of sleep.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not thinking that. My mind was just wandering. I saw Red Dawn a couple of weeks ago, and it’s still kind of messing with me. It was a freaky movie, man. Really freaky…”
Ferris sighed.
“Look,” Billy said, “I’m not a bureaucrat, I’m not a suit, and I’m not part of the administrative side of this business. I don’t do meetings, I don’t do policies, and I don’t do procedures. I’m out on the edge. I hang out with the seedy guys and move in close so you can bust them. You point; I shoot. Plain and simple.”
“What are you getting at?”
“My point is you need to pull me out or set me loose. I need to make my moves on the street, on my own accord. I need to find the people who kill our guy. Not the suits. My way.”
Another pause.
“If it were your call,” Ferris said, “what would your next move be?”
A thought popped into Billy’s head. “Dizzy Alvaro.”
“Who’s that?” Ferris asked, trying her best to recall the name from the list of scumbags she had on file in her brain.
Billy opened the sliding glass door at the back of the house, saltwater-laced air clearing his sinuses as the gentle rumble of the slow-moving and black in the moonlight tides rolled onto the shore two hundred feet from the back of the house.
Static began to come over the cordless the further Billy distanced himself from the house. He extended the antenna at the top the whole way in an attempt to get better reception.
“Dizzy Alvaro,” he said to Ferris, “is this slimly little cretin that moonlights as a middleman and ecstasy dealer. He set up the deal that went down today.”
“Did you disclose him in any of your reports?”
Billy quickly realized that he hadn’t.
The night he was supposed to, he had gotten drunk and fixated on thoughts of his ex-wife.
Shit.
Get your act together, Billy.
Start doing your damn paperwork.
“Let me go down to the docks and grill Dizzy,” he said. “Maybe he knows something. It’s a shit lead, but it’s a lead nonetheless.”
“Why not just bring him in for questioning?”
“Dizzy’ll jump ship the minute he hears the cops want to talk to him. He’s a shifty little creep. Even if he does come in, he won’t say anything. But maybe if I surprise him and take him off guard, he’ll talk.”
“You mean if you threaten him,” Ferris clarified.
Billy took a pause. “I might shove him around a bit, but it’s not like the little toilet bug doesn’t have it coming.”
“Sometimes,” Ferris said, “I think you’ve been undercover too long, Billy.”
Billy looked out at the water. “I get that a lot.”
He kicked off his shoes and moved closer to the incoming tides, the moon bouncing off the rippling waves like a schizophrenic strobe light, the static over the phone becoming nearly unbearable.
“Look,” he said, “the guy’s just a lousy middleman. But he may know something. There’s a chance that pressing him points us in the right direction. The only way I can get that to happen is if I give him a hard time. Also, chances are pretty high that Castillo’s people might come after Dizzy after this botched deal. I need to get to him first.”
More silence.
Ferris wasn’t convinced.
“Let me grill this idiot as soon as the sun comes,” Billy said. “I want to see if I can get anything good out of him. We can’t bring him in and asks him these questions. Trust me. It’s a last-ditch effort. I get that. But let me try. A good guy got caught in the crossfire today. Let’s see if we can get everyone who took part in it, no matter how long the shot is.”
Silence held sway for several seconds.
At the end of the day, Ferris still trusted Billy Reese, and chances were he’d sniff out a trail.
“Talk to the guy,” she said. “See what he knows.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And get some sleep. Pick things up in the morning.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Billy went to hang up the phone.
“Agent Reese,” Ferris called out.
Billy waited.
“Make this count for something.”
Billy gave no verbal reply, but the pleading and guilty and angry cocktail of emotions he felt inside were perfectly relayed through his breathing. He would make damn sure it would all count for something.
After Billy hopped off the phone with Ferris, he gave a call to a man named Larry Yurek, a freelance pilot based in the Everglades.
Or smuggler, depending on how one looked at the man’s ill-gotten gains.
Yurek was solid guy, though, even if he did skirt the line between legitimate earning and illicit enterprising. He liked Billy. The two of them worked together on more than one occasion. He was dependable, forthright, and never told a lie.
Except on his tax returns.
After Billy bailed him out during a dicey little operation in El Paso, Yurek became an off-the-books informant for him, dishing out little tidbits of information here and there. In return, Yurek continued to fly dope for other people and sent most of the money he earned to a family that lived on a ranch somewhere down South.
Yurek also worked alongside Dizzy on more than one occasion. If anyone might have the scoop on where he was, Yurek was a good bet.
“How’s it going?” Billy greeted after Yurek picked up on the second ring.
“My, my,” a booming voice laced with a Southern twang replied. “Billy Reese. I hope you’re not calling on behalf of your superiors…”
“I am. But not for you.”
“Well, then, I’m all ears, my friend. How can I help you?”
“Dizzy Alvaro.”
Billy heard a snicker followed by the unmistakable sounds of a soda can being popped open.
Pepsi Free.
“You still drinking that crap?” Billy asked.
“Every damn day.”
He then heard Yurek taking a giant swig. The guy had an unquenchable thirst for Pepsi Frees after he quit doing blow and booze. Ever since he ditched the habits, he went from a thin and wired paranoid to a robust, two-hundred-and-seventy-pound bear who liked chain smoking and caffeine-free Pepsis.
“Is Dizzy in trouble?” Yurek asked as Billy heard him take another swig.
“Just need to ask him a few questions. I’m just not sure where that little bastard has been hanging out, though.”
“Try Miamarina. Last time I saw him, he said he got a part-time gig over there cleaning boats so he could sell X on the slips. Knowing Dizzy, he’s probably cleaning out more than just the trash bins, if you catch my drift.”
“I do. Thanks, Yurek.”
“My pleasure,” Yurek said before killing his Pepsi Free and hanging up the phone.
For the time being, Billy had several hours to kill. He spent a half hour of it with his feet in the water and the roar of the ocean hitting his eardrums, his thoughts centered on reflecting on the day’s events and wondering when the time would come that he would finally get too old for this shit or the odds would finally catch up to him.
Someone had it out for him.
Whoever it was, he could only speculate. Billy’s sixth sense was finely tuned at this point in his life.
He knew when something bad was about to go down.
No question of “if.”
Just “when.”
That night, for the first time in a long time, Billy Reese slept with his Colt under the pillows.
6
BILLY HAD BEEN yawning the entire drive over to Miamarina. After a quick power nap, he splashed some water on his face, snagged his FBI shield—a tactic to scare Dizzy into submission—and grabbed his cars keys and about twelve grand in cash he used while on the job. Some of it had been given to him by the higher-ups, some by Ferris; the rest he’d confiscated from dealers and shitheads to use for purposes of the job. All of it official. All if accounted for. Whatever cash he had left in his pocket at the end of a job, he always turned in, and he always gave the receipts for the stuff that he did spend dough on. Billy wasn’t corruptible. The way he saw it, he was using the confiscated gains to spread the wealth, taking it from the drug-peddling punks he busted and redistributing it to the masses while funding his work to bring down more.
The Robin Hood of the 1980s.
Billy honestly wasn’t a fan of the responsibility that tons of cash brought with it, though. When he wasn’t on the job, Billy was a simple guy with a hundred-buck-a-week budget and four items of clothing in his closet. The point was that it wasn’t hard for him to scratch up cash, even in a pinch.
He hopped inside the Pontiac he kept at the safe house, peeled away, snagged a quick bite and a coffee from a drive-through, and headed over to Miamarina.
The drive would take a couple of hours. Layton was a cozy town nestled down south of Miami on a chain of islands known as the Florida Keys—far and hidden, just as a safe house should be.
Billy couldn’t recall how long it had been since he’d slept more than a few hours. Judging from the stubble on his face that he began rubbing as he pulled into the parking lot of the marina, he figured about three days. But it didn’t matter. Billy’s internal clock had become accustomed to the lack of z’s.
Caffeine jolted his senses awake just fine.
It was 9:32 a.m. when he pulled into the lot outside the marina, the place practically dead save for a few people patrolling the docks—a dock boy, a security guard, and a couple of women in bikinis.
Good morning…
Billy checked the rounds in his Colt and stepped out of the car. He moved through the gate that spilled onto the docks and made a beeline for the two-hundred-footer at the far end, the sun bouncing off the Miami skyline ahead of him and accompanied by the never-ceasing heat that was just beginning to rev up.
He passed the security guard, an older and slower gentleman clearly inching his way toward retirement.
Billy flashed his badge. Discreetly.
“You know a Dizzy Alvaro?”
The guard pointed to the stern of the yacht with the moniker Greed Equals Good done up in an overelaborate style along the back, a Latin-based beat bumping through the speakers inside the vessel and the silhouette of a shorter-looking individual passing/dancing by the galley windows.
Billy thanked the guard, moved toward the boat, and mounted the ramp that led inside. He then pulled out his Colt, disengaged the safety, and put on his bad cop vibe.
Angelo “Dizzy” Benavidez was a five-foot-four, coke-bottle-glasses-wearing schmuck who lied about 50 percent of the time. He lied about everything: where he lived, where he was from, the people he knew, what he ate for breakfast. According to his records, a court-appointed shrink at one point designated this “knack” as a kind of “defense mechanism.” Dr. Olga Luria, through several sessions with Dizzy, had (inaccurately) deduced that Dizzy’s need to lie was his way of coping with a rough upbringing, a kind of “side effect” of his thirty-six years in existence being rife with torment, self-inflicted and otherwise: his brother and sister being gunned down by drug dealers, a cyclical life of poverty and petty crime, and a nasty crack habit he had developed in the late ’70s.
According to his rap sheet, Dizzy was the product of Cuban immigrants and had taken to the streets of Miami at the tender age of five like a duck to water, stealing bikes, forging signatures on baseball cards, selling bogus, high-end rip-off purses—you name it. The pettier it got, the more likely Dizzy was behind the action. However, Dr. Olga Luria’s theory that Dizzy’s life of crime was a byproduct of a bad environment was total and utter horseshit.
Dizzy was smart—he just preferred to act like a shithead.
Those who knew him best knew the reasons why.
What was even worse than his means to an end was the way he dressed, which looked something shy of the pop singer DeBarge: vibrant colors and ill-fitting and Prince-like ruffled shirts. Everything looked like it was purchased—most likely stolen—from several different secondhand clothing stores.
Dizzy was currently wiping down the kitchen counters inside the Greed Equals Good not so much out of necessity of the job but because he had accidently spilled a piña colada concoction he was trying to perfect while the owners of the yacht were out of town. He had Miami Sound Machine’s “I Need A Man” playing way too loudly in the background as he shuffled his hips and danced like an asshole to the beat, his rear out way too far in a cartoonish fashion as he boogied all through the galley.
If he had been paying any attention to his surroundings, he would have noticed Special Agent Billy Reese approaching him from behind with a Colt aimed at his back.
Right as Dizzy belted out the chorus of “I Need A Man,” Billy kicked the back of his knees out. Dizzy fell onto his back and immediately began a kind of backward spider-crawl to avoid the oncoming assault. “God damn! Whoa! What the hell?!” he hollered out in his unique and nasally, Cuban-tinted tone.
Billy had the Colt trained right on Dizzy’s chest. “Stop squirming,” he commanded. “Get up. Now.”
Dizzy relaxed, immediately recognizing the man he had come to know as “Price.”
Somewhat composed, he stood up, hands up in submission. “Damn, Price!” he said with an over-the-top exhale. “What’s wrong with a phone call, man?”
Billy grabbed Dizzy by his collar and slammed him against one of the cabinets.
“Easy!” Dizzy pleaded. “God damn, is this your way of saying ‘what’s up’? Whatever happened to handshakes, man?”
“Shut up,” Billy said as he patted Dizzy down.
“I don’t got a gun, Price.”
Just as he said it, Billy produced a compact and older-model Beretta that Dizzy had stashed in the back of his pants.
“Oh, yeah?” Billy said. “Then what the hell is this? A fuckin’ squirt gun?”
Dizzy swallowed. “That’s my cousin’s.”
“Your cousin’s…”
“Dumb-ass pendejo. He owns too many guns. He’s stupid, man, I’m telling you. Always has been. He’s that kid who used to lick batteries ’n’ shit back when we were little kids. I tell him all the time: ‘You’ve got too many guns, pendejo! You’re going to get yourself killed!’ I’m just being a good member of the family, man. If that idiot shot himself, his mom would hold my ass accountable.”
Billy then found a little blue envelope filled with powder in Dizzy’s pocket.
He didn’t even bother to ask the guy what it was.
He said, “Is this your cousin’s too?”
Dizzy froze.
He knew he had nothing good to bullshit Billy with, but he tried anyway.
“Eddie,” he said, accustomed to addressing Billy by his alias. “I swear on my life, the Virgin Mary, and all the starving children of Africa—this is the first time I’ve ever seen whatever the hell that is.”
Billy spun Dizzy back around and pressed him into the cabinet. “Dizzy,” he said, shaking his head, “you are by far the world’s shittiest liar, you know that?”
“What do you care, dealer?”
Billy reached into his pocket, produced a wallet-sized object made of le
ather, and displayed the contents to Dizzy: a gold FBI shield, Billy’s picture and credentials and real name alongside it.
Dizzy practically passed out. “Shiiiiiit,” he hissed.
Billy waited for an explanation.
Dizzy said pleadingly, “Okay, look, the gun is mine. I’m sorry. There’s been a lot of break-ins lately, and I’m carrying it for protection. That’s all.”
“Guy like you doesn’t have a permit, I’m betting.”
“It’s protection! I weigh like one-ten. Some big fat fool could kill me with one punch. I’m fragile, man.”
Billy shoved Dizzy toward a chair near a dining room set. “Sit down.”
“Okay! Okay!”
Billy took a glance around and started clearing the rooms, one eye consistently checking in on Dizzy every few seconds. “Anyone else here?”
“No,” Dizzy replied. “Just me.”
As Billy took one last walk around and shut off the radio, he noticed the mess that Dizzy had left on the counters from his piña colada experiment and a significant amount of binge eating.
God only knows where he’s dumping the calories. Guy’s thinner than a broom handle.
Billy took a moment before he holstered his Colt, grabbed a chair, placed it front of Dizzy and sat. “That deal you helped me and my boy set up went bad,” he said.
“Look,” Dizzy said, trying to muster up as much sincerity as he could. “I heard about what happened, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, so you’re in the know. If you know it went bad, then you definitely know about the part where my partner got shot.”
Dizzy swallowed. “Price—”
“It’s Reese. And you’re responsible for a federal agent getting shot, Dizzy. You’re going to answer some questions first, and then I’ll decide whether to bust you or let you walk. Got it?”
Dizzy nodded.
“After we met you to set up the deal,” Billy said, “what did you do?”
“I called Victor.”
“Who’s Victor?”
“My cousin. He works for this guy named Velasco. He works directly for Hector Fuentes. Runs a restaurant for him or something. It’s a front they use to distribute product.”
