Long Way Down

by Paul Carr

  A wave of hot air and stench hit Sam in the face. His heart raced, the odor unmistakable.

  J.T. shook his head and said, “We should get out of here.”

  “Yeah, we should, but I want to take a quick look inside.”

  They stepped into a foyer, and Sam shone the light into a large living room to the left. Threadbare furniture sat on a worn and dusty wood floor. It looked as if no one had been there in a long time. Sam peered down the hallway and saw an open door mid-way down and another closed at the end. They eased toward the open door. Boards squeaked underneath a stained carpet runner. They stopped at the door and Sam shone the light inside a bedroom, the bed unmade. A large roach, the kind locals called a palmetto bug, ran across a dingy pillow.

  They went on to the closed door, listened for any sounds inside, and heard nothing. Sam twisted the doorknob. It snapped and the door sprang open an inch or so. J.T. gagged at the odor that escaped and turned away. Sam pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and put it over his nose and mouth. Light flashed from somewhere inside and Sam nudged the door all the way open with his foot. The light came from a muted large-screen television against the opposite wall, an old rerun of the Andy Griffith show playing. A reclining chair sat in front of the TV, and in it slumped a large man. Sam put the light on him. He had a grin on his face, as if having a good chuckle about the TV. The right side of his head had a dark spot on it. A mass of clotted blood covered the other side, and a spatter the size of a suitcase decorated the wall to the man's left.

  “Must be our man,” J.T. said in a muffled voice. He had pulled the neck of his shirt up over his mouth and nose.

  “Yeah, I’d say.”

  Empty boxes and old shoes lay spilled on the floor from a closet to the right of the chair.

  “Someone searched the place,” Sam said.

  “I can’t stand it; I’ve got to get some air.” J.T. turned and hurried out of the room.

  Sam shone the light inside the closet. A hat lay on the top shelf. Tangled wire hangers clung to the clothes rod like old bat skeletons. He went back to the bedroom they had passed. A similar closet contained the man’s clothes on hangers, most of which were new. The shelf above the hangers had been cleared. A string hung from a ceiling light fixture, so he pulled it and heard the snap of a switch, but nothing happened. Bad bulb.

  He glanced at the things on the floor: only shoes, men’s jewelry, and old photographs. Squatting on the floor, he shone the light on one of the snapshots, a family pose that looked at least forty years old. A boy in it might have been a teen-aged Ricardo Miro, though he bore no resemblance to the corpse watching TV in the next room.

  Sam searched the top and bottom of the closet and found nothing out of the ordinary, except a light scattering of plaster dust on the edge of the closet shelf directly under the light fixture. He dragged a chair from the corner of the room, stood on it, and loosened thumbscrews on the four corners of the fixture. It came loose in his hands and he laid it on the shelf. The bulb and sockets had been removed, and only a square hole in the ceiling remained. He reached inside, touched what felt like a small metal box, and pulled it out. The top snapped open with the press of a button, and inside he found a stack of papers that looked like Miro’s financial records. He replaced the fixture, wiped down everything he remembered touching, and went out the front door with the metal box.

  J.T. stood next to the car, looking toward the street, Prince Alfred next to him, growling from deep in his throat.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam said.

  “We’ve got company.”

  Chapter 14

  GRIMES SAT in the passenger seat with the rifle tip extended out the window, the night scope trained on Mackenzie, cross hairs centered on his chest in fluorescent blue. This would be easy. He would hit him and then the other guy for good measure. Grimes remembered the other guy from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place him.

  “What are you doing?”

  Grimes glanced at Amy behind the wheel, her eyes large, her voice urgent.

  “Don’t worry. I’m just going to nick him a little so he’s easy to deal with. I need all the help I can get; I only have one leg, you know.” He tried to sound pitiful, and thought it worked because Amy nodded and looked away.

  Grimes went back to the scope and zeroed in on Mackenzie again. Amy reached for the bottle of rum Grimes had sent her into the liquor store to buy. She’s just getting a drink to settle her nerves. He applied pressure to the trigger. In a half-second, Mackenzie would take the round and it would be over for him. Grimes felt the trigger snap under his finger, and at the same time he heard a loud thump and the shatter of glass. The back of his head felt numb and on fire at the same time, and his nostrils filled with the bite of alcohol. His head went into a spin, he thought he might throw up, and before he could comprehend exactly what had happened, the lights went out.

  ****

  SAM HEARD a familiar high-pitched whistle as the round went under his left arm. It jerked him sideways and he dropped to the ground.

  J.T. fired the 9mm in the direction of the van parked down the street. It sounded like dynamite exploding in the night and the van sped away, screeching its tires. “Are you hit?”

  “I think so,” Sam said, “it feels like a red-hot knife stuck under my arm.” He pushed up to a sitting position, wincing, leaned against the side of the car, and put his hand under his arm. Blood seeped through his shirt and wet his fingers. He stripped off the shirt and held his arm up, away from his body. J.T. shone the light on him and surveyed the damage. Prince Alfred nudged the back of Sam’s hand with his nose and whimpered.

  “You have a little groove on your side right under your armpit. Not bad, I don’t think. Must have been small caliber with a suppressor. I never heard it.”

  “Yeah, neither did I,” Sam said. “I think he’s gone now, so let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be in the yard of a dead man when the cops arrive.”

  “Got that right, buddy. You need help?”

  “No, I’m okay.” He stood up and put on his shirt, then walked back to the driver’s side to look for the metal box he had dropped. It lay on its side but remained closed. He picked it up and got into the car.

  “Who do you think it was?”

  Sam started the car and pressed the accelerator, speeding out the U-shaped driveway and onto the street. “Probably Grimes. The only thing is, I wouldn’t think he could miss at this range, especially if he had a night scope.”

  “Why’s he trying to kill you?”

  “You know Grimes; he’s nuts. Besides, he might hold me responsible for him losing his leg.” Sam told the story about leaving Grimes in the Everglades.

  J.T. chuckled. “Man, I’m impressed. That sounds like something I would do. You still bleeding?”

  “I don’t think so, but it hurts like crazy.”

  “What’s that you brought out of the house with you?”

  Sam picked up the box from the floor and handed it to him.

  “Looks like Miro’s financial records.” Sam told him where he had found the box. “I think the killer might have been searching for them.”

  J.T. opened it and shone the light inside. He pulled out the document on top and looked it over.

  “This is a statement on a numbered account in the Caymans. Miro had almost three hundred thousand dollars stashed away down there.”

  Sam turned into a small motel with a liquor store next door and parked the car in a spot where it couldn’t be seen from the street.

  “How about deposits?”

  “There’s just one for the full amount of the balance, deposited a few months ago.”

  “What else is in there?”

  “That seems to be all there is. Hold on, here’s something else in the bottom of the box.”

  He pulled out a laminated card and turned it over.

  “It’s an identification card of some kind, with Miro’s picture on it.” He handed the card to Sam.

  “My S
panish isn’t very good,” J.T. said, “but it looks like he worked for a museum in Cuba, and had something to do with antiquities.”

  Sam looked at the card, dated several years before. He handed it back to J.T.

  “Put it back in the box.”

  Sam put on his jacket and zipped it up to cover the blood stains before going in to register. They got connecting rooms, and Sam went into the bathroom to look at his injury: just a flesh wound. He cleaned it up with warm water and applied some antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids from his shaving kit. After changing into his last pullover shirt, he went to the liquor store for bottles of gin and tonic. Back in the room, he got a bucket of ice and made two drinks. J.T. opened the connecting door and came in. Sam glanced up and saw Prince Alfred lying on the floor in the next room.

  J.T. dropped several sheets of paper on the table. “I checked out the Internet site.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Not much. And it’s like I said before, it doesn’t look like anything to do with banking.” He picked up the piece of paper on top and scanned it. “It looks like they’re monitoring things at different locations. There’s a coordinate associated with each process shown there.” He handed the printout to Sam.

  Sam looked at the piece of paper.

  “Did you check these coordinates?”

  J.T. sighed. “Yeah, I did. All of them are in the sea between Grand Cayman and Cuba.”

  “Wonder what that has to do with the missiles you saw?”

  “I don’t know, unless the coordinates are potential targets.”

  Sam thought about that for a minute and felt a tingle run down his back. He mentioned the news report he had heard in Jack’s car the day of the storm, about the pieces of a missing fishing boat washing up on the shore of Grand Cayman.

  “Yeah, it might have wandered too close to the place these guys are watching and they zapped it with one of those missiles.”

  Sam dropped the printout on the table, sat down in one of the chairs and took a drink of his gin and tonic.

  “Why don’t you keep an eye on the Internet site and see if it changes.”

  J.T. shrugged. “Sure. What I’d like to do, though, is get another look at Miro’s records.”

  Sam nodded at the box on the edge of the table. “Help yourself.”

  J.T. opened it and pulled out the papers. His eyes grew wide.

  “What is it?” Sam said.

  “I didn’t see this handwriting before. It might be a personal identification number; you know, a PIN.” He showed the number to Sam. “There’s a chunk of cash here that nobody’s going to use. Might not be too difficult to get it transferred into another account, especially if that really is a PIN.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “What if he had a family?”

  “He lived alone. And if he had a family, they would have found his body by now, even if they didn’t live with him.”

  Sam thought about Ricardo Miro lying in the chair with that comic look in his eyes. Hard to tell how long the man had been dead, but from the looks of the body, it had been at least a couple of weeks. He ran his fingers through his hair and took another drink. The pain in his side had diminished to a warm glow. Couple more drinks and it might be gone altogether.

  “He might still have someone in Cuba.”

  J.T. sighed. “You going to look them up so we can give them this money?”

  “I might,” Sam said.

  “Wonder what Miro could have done to accumulate that kind of cash.”

  “Danilov probably had something to do with it.”

  They drank about half the bottle of gin and, about 1:00 AM, finally called it a night. Sometime in the early morning Sam heard the dog whimpering and J.T. let him out. He awoke again when the maid knocked on the door. The clock next to the bed displayed 9:00 AM, and he went to the door and told her to come back later.

  Sam went into the bathroom, took a shower and changed the dressing on his wound. When he came out, J.T. sat at the table with breakfast sandwiches and coffee from a nearby fast-food restaurant.

  As Sam joined him, J.T. asked, “So, what do we do now?”

  Sam took a bite of the sandwich and sipped the coffee. He added sugar to the coffee and took another sip before answering. “I thought I might try Jack again, and Marcus, the guy who worked for La Salle.”

  “You think you can trust him?”

  “Probably not. But I might not have much choice.”

  “You think Grimes killed Miro?”

  “Maybe, but I’d guess another of La Salle’s men did it. I’m sure he has several in Miami who would make a close-up hit like that.”

  Sam called Jack Craft on his cell phone, but he didn’t answer. Probably avoiding me. He cut the connection and punched in the number Marcus had given him the day he stole the Jaguar. A woman answered, her voice dreamy and slurred, as if she might have been asleep. Sam asked for Marcus and she told him to hold on.

  “Yeah, who is this?”

  “Mackenzie.”

  Marcus paused for a couple of seconds, as if he might not remember.

  “Oh, yeah. What’s up?”

  “Have you been in touch with La Salle since we talked?”

  “Uh, no. I told you, man, I ain’t going near that guy. I’m on his list for sure.”

  “How about Candi? Have you heard from her?”

  “Candi? Yeah, she called me a coupla’ nights ago. Wanted to know how to get in touch with La Salle. Said he didn’t answer his phone at the house.”

  “Why did she want to talk with him?”

  “Well, now, she didn’t say why. I just gave her a number I knew and she hung up. Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “She’s gone.”

  “Well, she was pretty thick with the big guy, if you know what I mean.”

  Sam knew.

  “Did La Salle leave town?”

  Another pause.

  “Yeah, uh, I heard yesterday from a buddy that he flew out on the private plane.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. He never told any of us.”

  “Who’s this buddy you mentioned?”

  “He could get in a lot of trouble if it got back to La Salle.”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t.”

  “Okay, Frankie’s the one called.”

  “Frankie?” Sam said. “The guy who worked for Tommy Shoes?”

  Sam remembered the short fat man who’d been in a fight because one of La Salle’s men said something about Tommy Shoes that he didn’t like.

  “Yeah, that’s him. La Salle took over Tommy’s clients and asked Frankie to look after them.”

  “Okay. I need to know where they went. Can you find that out?”

  “Yeah, I might be able to do that. Will we be square after that? ‘Cause I been thinking, it ain’t exactly smart of me to be talking to you.”

  “That’s not much for the stack of cash I gave you,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, but it didn’t belong to you anyway.”

  Sighing, Sam said, “Okay, get me La Salle’s location and I’ll let you off the hook.”

  Sam told him he would call again in an hour and hung up. They put their bags in the car and Prince Alfred skipped over from the shade of a palm and got in with them. After checking out of the motel a few minutes later, they rode toward Coral Gables and the house where Tommy Shoes had lived. Sam turned into the ornate driveway, stopped at the electronic gate, and pressed the button on the speaker box.

  “Yeah?” It sounded like the same voice as when he had visited with Jack, the one word punctuated with an electronic screech from the box.

  “This is Mackenzie. I need to talk to Frankie.”

  “Frankie ain’t here right now.”

  “I’ll wait for him.”

  “He won’t be back for awhile.”

  “Where is he?”

  The voice paused for a couple of heartbeats.

  “Hey, that ain’t none of your business. Get o
utta here.”

  Sam glanced up and saw J.T. grinning.

  “They were a lot friendlier when Jack did the talking,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  Sam drove away and tried Jack Craft again. Still no answer. They went across the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach and headed toward La Salle’s place. Sam slowed the car, cruised by the house and saw the garage door open, no cars inside, as if La Salle might have left in a hurry. The maid’s Ford sat out front. Sam circled the block and came back, stopping before he reached the entrance, and parked where he could watch the Ford.

  He called Marcus again and got an answer on the first ring. “What did you find out?”

  “I didn’t find out where he is, but you could talk to one of his pilots at the air strip where he keeps the planes. He might tell you. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Why would the pilot tell me anything?”

  “Randy and the boss ain’t the best of friends. La Salle smacked him against the head once when he made a wise crack about Candi. The boss kept him on, but he gets the other pilot to do all his plane driving now.”

  “How about a phone number?”

  “Sorry, I don’t have one. You’ll have to go see him.”

  Sam took down directions to the private air strip and hung up the phone.

  “Could be a set-up,” J.T. said.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I think I should go alone.”

  “No way. I don’t have anything better to do. Might as well go with you.”

  “Okay, but if it’s an ambush we’d both be better off if you’d stay outside watching.”

  J.T. considered that and nodded. “We can work it that way. I’m not afraid of these dudes.”