by Carl Hiaasen
“What do you mean?”
“Fatso Barnett, Fatso Barnett. That’s all you can think of. He’s only part of the problem. A fat little leech, a nobody. The real problem is bigger scum, like that lawyer Boone. They really run this town. Barnett is only their puppet. They laugh at us.”
“Drake Boone?”
“Scumbag.”
Freed was surprised. He had always thought of Beeker as the ethereal sort. Neal always signed the petitions and dressed well for the rallies, of course, but you could tell his heart wasn’t in it.
“What do you know about Drake Boone, Neal?”
“Lots.”
“Tell me.”
“No, I just want to go away.”
“Please tell me. It could be important.”
“What’s the use?”
“It all fits together. Believe me, I know more than you think.” Freed stroked Beeker’s hand. “Please tell me.”
Beeker sighed.
“Bring some ice for the wine, and I’ll tell you,” he surrendered.
Later that morning, with Beeker asleep, Bobby Freed walked alone to Singleton Docks to watch the shrimp boats come in. His mind was in turmoil, sickened. He would have to control his fury before the council meeting that night. Beeker had told him a story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Julie Clayton; it was the kind of thing you read about in the tabloids. But it had happened in Key West. And no one knew. Let me find some proof of what I have heard, Freed prayed silently. And the whole world will know.
Julie Clayton lay in Room 177 of Duval Hospital. She had been there for weeks, with a snake’s nest of tubes to feed her and drain her, and machines to preserve the pretense that she was still alive. Julie Clayton was a vegetable.
Once, the way Beeker told it, she had been a student at Key West High, a fun-loving girl who took her kicks wherever she could find them.
She had found one too many, and his name was Drake Boone.
She must have been a cinch, huh, counselor? What a change from slap-and-tickle with panting adolescents in seedy drive-ins: a blow-dried, big-shot lawyer with three-piece suits, a fancy car, and an office with its very own private entrance. What a wonderful secret for a fifteen-year-old girl, right, Drake? No band practice for Julie. No empty afternoons before soap operas in dingy trailers. For Julie, rather, after-school excitement, adventure, sex, perhaps even the illusion of love. Did you pretend it was love, Drake? Did you lovingly roll her joints? Was it you who introduced her to the wonderful high that comes from a couple of tiny pills? Was she wild, Drake, at those wonderful impromptu office parties? How many more like her were there? And where were you, Drake, you hideous bastard, the afternoon that Julie Clayton popped so many pills that they shut down her nervous system and left her a cabbage? Were you there, Drake, or could any fifteen-year-old wander in and help herself to joy juice at the private entrance of Drake Boone, Jr., attorney-at-law?
Neal Beeker had told the story in the strained tones of a sinner at confession. His hospital room had been across the hall from where Julie Clayton lay. And late one night, restless and unable to sleep, he had padded to a first-floor lounge for a cigarette and there encountered the girl’s mother: a haggard, work-worn woman, Key West blue collar.
“I think she must have had a few drinks, Bobby, because she was real uptight at first, but then she opened up. She must have talked for half an hour, a monologue, almost like she was in a trance, talking to herself. Then suddenly she looks up and sees me and goes all white. That was the worst of all, Bobby, what she said then.”
“What did she say, Neal?”
“She said, ‘Mister, please forget what I told you. Mr. Boone, he made me promise not to tell anybody. He says he’ll pay the hospital bills as long as I keep my mouth shut. But if anybody finds out what Julie done, Mr. Boone says he’ll have them turn off the machines, and my baby will die.”
IN THE SUMMER, Manolo always rose with the dawn. The skylight in his studio had an eastern exposure, and in the mornings the light was perfect. He would paint in total absorption for several hours, until it became too hot. Manolo disliked the heat, and to have air-conditioned a studio with a high vaulted ceiling would have been wasteful. Besides, even air conditioning could not have helped with the glare. And to have fought the glare would have meant sacrificing the light. It was a closed circle: Manolo only painted by morning. It was his conceit that he could have made it as an artist if he had not become a doper, although he knew his subtle abstracts with occasional flashes of a dark vision were not truly of international standard. Still, he sold one every now and then, and he even had a show once, in Miami. For Manolo, art was at once a smuggler’s cover and a private passion.
While he painted, Manolo tolerated no interruptions. At first, he had had the Cuban maid answer the phone while he worked. But she always got the messages wrong, and even the ringing, dimly perceived though it might be from another part of the house, was sometimes enough to break his concentration.
That morning, after wrestling with an improbable seascape, Manolo walked to the shower wondering for the thousandth time whether he had turned to pastels from natural predilection, or in rebellion against his environment because the Rock was a universe of gaudy, primary colors.
Among the calls Manolo extracted from the recordings over a sting cafecito that morning were two he expected: one tedious, one dangerous.
“Hey, big chief, give me a call chop-chop, urgente, like bang-bang, man.”
Winnebago Tom. Asshole. And if I called you, fool, what would you say? Probably you would tell me exactly what I heard myself this morning: big shoot-out in Key Largo, two dead men in the water and a bunch more in a burned-out van, a missing boat, a search. Well, Tom, for now only you and I know it was an alien run gone wrong. But we had nothing to do with it, did we? All we provided was the transportation and the captain to run it. The rest was somebody else’s problem. That is all I want to know. If you know more about it than that, loudmouth Tom, then keep it to yourself. Manolo did not call Winnebago Tom.
The second call had been short and to the point, a girl’s voice in rough Caribbean Spanish that was not Cuban.
“Matilde a las dos,” she said and hung up.
Manolo winced. The trouble with Jorge, sitting there in his sumptuous ranch in the emerald hills of Colombia, was that he had too little to do. Jorge loved spy stories. He devoured them.
“Tradecraft, Manolo,” he insisted, “that is important to learn. It distinguishes us from the amateurs. It is a sign of maturity and dedication.”
And of pretension, Manolo had added silently. Still, he had played Jorge’s game, as usual. Part of it was to memorize a list of telephone booths, each assigned the name of a girl. When Jorge had something important to say, a terse call would arrive—from Miami, Manolo supposed—naming the booth and the time. Dos meant two. This was an even month, so subtract two. Jorge would call a telephone booth on Little Torch Key, twenty miles north, precisely at noon. Which meant that Manolo would have to get there early to be sure of getting the booth. When a secret agent needed a booth, it was always empty in Jorge’s novels. A busy signal from Matilda would discomfit him thoroughly. Manolo tossed the Cadillac keys to the dumpy cubana.
She knew the drill. She would start the car and let the air conditioning run full blast. Manolo could not bear to touch hot metal, and he hated the feel of stuffy cars. That was what he told the cubana. He didn’t tell her that, in his business, sometimes cars blew up.
Manolo liked to watch the landscape as he drove. He saw with an artist’s eye, and sometimes he was later able to transmute swatches onto canvas—a pelican in awkward flight, a bridge stretching whitely away across blue waters. In truth, though, there was less of natural beauty to contemplate each time he drove north, from the Rock to Stock Island, to Boca Chica with its naval air station, across a procession of bridges that followed an old railroad line, into the Lower Keys.
Manolo’s grandfather, that turn-of-the-century refugee from some
forgotten political battle in Cuba, would not have recognized anything beyond the aching glare and the inviting clear water. When Jorge made the ride on his infrequent visits to the Rock, what he saw in satisfaction was a string of satisfied customers, puffing away, snorting, popping, in a chain of baked cinder-block settlements clinging tenuously to the mangroves.
What Manolo saw was destruction. The Keys had become all the rage of late: a tropical asylum from crime, cold, and high taxes. That was how they were advertised. The developers loved that line. They loved to plow up the mangroves and bulldoze the gnarled, disorderly native vegetation and replace them with block houses closed to the breeze and decorative shrubs that belonged somewhere else.
It was, to Manolo’s eyes, a disaster; fragile beauty gone forever. Still, he supposed, one could not have it both ways. The venal officials charged with protecting what little of beauty remained in the Keys were the same ones who were supposed to suppress the commerce in which he himself traded. If they were effective at one, they might also be good at the other.
Manolo directed his full attention to rehearsing the lines he would say to Jorge. The conversation with Colombia that awaited him would be an ordeal. The time and location made that plain. Matilde was a punishment.
The booth sat in the middle of a desert, the survivor of a get-rich-quick scheme gone bust. “Trade Winds, a Community for Tomorrow,” read the slick aqua-and-tan billboard along US 1. For perhaps ten acres the land was totally flat and absolutely barren, limestone broiling in the sun. Nothing grew and nothing moved. The fifty-foot lots, each with its carefully carved finger canal, were a study in desolation. The square stucco sales office, single-story with a cypress fronting, was marked by broken windows and the smell of urine. A few come-on flags still hung limply from the roof, colors faded to gray by the merciless sun.
It must have been 120 inside the blue-and-white phone booth. But at least the phone worked: in Jorge’s books the phones always worked. Manolo jammed the door open with a chunk of coral in the forlorn hope some fresh air might seep in. Then he sat in his Cadillac with the engine running, waiting.
The phone rang precisely at noon.
“Con Carlos Ibañez, por favor,” the voice said.
“El no está,” Manolo gave the prescribed response.
“Cuando vuelve?”
“Para la pascua.”
“Momentito,” the girl’s voice said, and Manolo heard some clicks. Electronic games, probably.
“Manolo. What the fuck is going on up there?”
Manolo sighed. For Jorge, no pleasantries.
“Business is fine. Is there a problem?”
“Not the business. The transportation. What happened? What went wrong?”
“You asked for a boat and I provided it. You asked for a first-class captain and I found one, although I told you it wasn’t easy. That nobody here would touch that kind of job. What else should I know?”
“What I know is that I have had about a half-dozen hysterical phone calls from Miami already this morning. Fewer than half the people I sent have arrived. And they were screaming about shooting and explosions. One van apparently got caught by the highway patrol in the fallout. I need twenty people in Miami, and right now I got nine. How come?”
“I can’t answer that. But if there were big problems, I would have heard it already. The pickup was by your people from Miami, remember? I don’t know what went wrong. I only did what you told me.”
“Don’t feed me that Pontius Pilate bullshit, my friend. You are paid to take care of things for me up there. If things got screwed up, it was because something went wrong with the boat, or the captain got smart. I had a good man on that boat to run things for me, and he’s one of those missing.”
“Was it a clean pickup, Jorge? Like I suggested? Cash and no hassle?”
From Colombia came only static and silence. Instantly, Manolo understood.
“Because if it wasn’t,” he continued, “maybe the Conchs didn’t like the way you wrote the ending. Maybe that’s what happened, huh?” The booth was an oven. His soggy shirt stuck to his ribs like a rag; his tongue seemed bloated.
“I believe that is what happened,” said the voice from Colombia. “And now you must repair the damage for me—permanently. My prestige has suffered. I will not tolerate it.”
“Look, for God’s sake, Jorge, like I told you, people don’t like that kind of thing around here. This is not Colombia.”
“That is no concern of mine. Without a reputation I have no business. My reputation has been damaged by someone you provided. I don’t have to spell out what must come next.”
“This is a lousy connection. Let me get some facts and I’ll call you in a couple of days, OK? After the next shipment.”
“The shipment will arrive on schedule. Your other instructions are not subject to change,” the Colombian said, and the line went dead.
Manolo Sprawled across the front seat and gratefully let the air conditioning wash over him. Unbelievable. The Colombians were not simply from another country but also from another century. Why couldn’t they just hire a man and pay for his labor? No, that would be too civilized. Now, because some hapless fisherman had apparently had the temerity to balk at his own execution, Jorge’s machismo was all out of joint.
Which left brother Manolo between a rock and a hard place, didn’t it? If he didn’t have Breeze Albury killed, then he himself might become a victim. If he did have Albury killed—Winnebago Tom and his gay band of Marielitos would relish that job, no doubt—that would scare off half the decent boat captains left on the Rock and leave the rest of the Conchs thirsting for blood. Manolo’s blood.
Manolo killed the engine and tumbled into the heat, keys in hand. It was a moment’s work to uncover the concealed compartment he had had built into the trunk. His escape kit. It was all there: a virgin Canadian passport that had cost him ten thousand dollars and two bank passbooks, one for the Bahamas, one for Luxembourg.
He studied the comforting columns of figures. The next shipment hence would swell them nicely. Then he would decide. If there was no graceful way out of his dilemma, then Paris would simply have to find room for one more aspiring artist.
“… TWO DAYS OF surveillance by detectives resulted in apprehension of two pushers and the seizure of two hundred and seventy grams—that is, nearly eight ounces—of high-grade marijuana.” Huge Barnett looked up. “Those college kids from up north think they can come down here and flout the law.”
He resumed reading.
“As a consequence of ‘Crusade ‘82’ your police department has broken the back of the underworld drug business. I am proud to report that the situation in Key West is now under control. Sincerely yours …” Barnett constructed a tired man’s sigh to follow a carefully timed pause. “That’s it, gentlemen. As you can see, we have been busy.” Too busy, he thought. He wished to hell he knew what had happened up at Dynamite Docks that morning.
“Thank you, chief, a nice report,” said the mayor.
“Move-we-accept-the-report-and-thank-the-chief,” intoned Councilman Biggs.
“Second,” muttered Councilman Dawson.
“All in favor …”
“Wait a minute!” Bobby Freed objected. “I want to ask some questions. This is just nickel-and-dime stuff. He hasn’t told us about the real drug business at all.”
“Possession of ounces or pounds of marijuana is real business to me, councilman,” Barnett said levelly. “Anybody with that much drugs is in real bad trouble with the law here.”
“Let’s talk about the law down here. The federal drug-enforcement agencies pinpoint Key West as a major entry port for marijuana—not ounces or pounds, but tons of it.”
“Look, the feds don’t live here. I do. I know what’s going on here, and as I have just told you, everything is under control,” Barnett replied.
“Is that so? I am not talking just about the DEA, but also Customs and the Coast Guard. They both say that drug smuggling is a major
industry here. Let me quote one Customs report: ‘Its tentacles reach in all directions.’ Is that news to you, Chief Barnett?”
“News? It’s not news. It’s wrong. Those guys see a grunt and think it’s a shark. I know. I talk to them all the time.”
“Do you also talk to the Governor’s task force? Don’t you find it interesting that it should be here at all? Or that law enforcement—or the lack of it—is one of its concerns?”
“The Governor’s folks have been here for almost a year, councilman. They have made no accusations.”
“Let us hope some will be forthcoming.”
“Bobby, Bobby…” the mayor implored, not unkindly. Huge Barnett liked Mayor Gibbs. His wife was a skilled and determined shoplifter, but she would never have a record while the mayor was mayor and Barnett was chief.
“You gentlemen asked for a report on what we are doing to combat the evil of narcotics in this city, and I have given it,” Barnett said softly. “If there is nothing else, I would like to get back to work.”
“At least make him answer for the Ramrod Key fiasco. There were tons there, all right. And then what do we get? Headlines one day, and the next day everybody goes home and it’s all forgotten. Isn’t that real bad trouble, Barnett?”
Barnett reined his temper.
“You’re out of order, Bobby,” the mayor shouted. He pounded his gavel with one hand and with the other wrenched Freed back into his chair.
“With your permission, mayor, I would like to talk about the Ramrod Key incident,” Barnett said. “I didn’t put it in the report because I did not consider it one of our successes. But it’s important, and it’s the sick kind of thing that is happening all over the country today. It’s the kind of thing that happens when the police are handcuffed and criminals coddled.”
Barnett spoke slowly: Margie, the middle-aged divorcée who covered council meetings for the local paper, God bless her patient soul, took lousy notes.
