Powder Burn

by Carl Hiaasen

  MEADOWS’S REVERIE CARRIED him onto I-95, through the long elevated curve that skirted downtown Miami, past the blackened sentinels of despair that the riots of 1980 had posted in the Liberty City ghetto. The dog track was only two blocks off the 125th Street exit, and the matinee was in high gear by the time Meadows arrived. The clubhouse seemed to rattle like an airplane hangar as the crowd cheered another skinny hound to the finish. Meadows rehearsed what he would tell Terry about the shooting.

  She was hard to miss in the tawdry bar, tall and bronzed, hair like pitch and eyes to match. To Meadows’s surprise, Terry seemed to be studying a race program. As he moved toward her, though, first his gaze, then his path were blocked. Was the couple in front of him dancing? No, they were wrestling.

  “Gimme the ten!” snarled a tall black man in a Panama hat. “You tol’ me to bet that dog. It’s your fault I lost.”

  He clutched a belligerent woman by the elbows. In one hand she deftly balanced a plastic cup full of beer; in the other she kept a death grip on a crumpled ten-dollar bill.

  “Get your fuckin’ hands off me!” she shouted. “You touch me and I’ll run to your goddamn wife.”

  They twirled in a woozy minuet until a fat security guard waddled up and collared them both. Meadows slid onto the barstool next to Terry’s and sneaked an arm around her waist.

  “Nice place you have here,” he whispered, “but welcome home anyway.”

  “¡Por fin!” The embrace took Meadows’s breath away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Meadows said into the great black mane. “I have lots to tell you.”

  Terry surveyed him hungrily. “Ten minutes, one race. I have made a bet.”

  “I thought you hated dogs.”

  “I do when they shit all over my airplane. But not this one. Look.” She gestured to the program. “Here, number three, Fly Baby. It must be good luck for me.”

  They found a seat twenty rows up, far from the race track. Meadows noticed glumly that they were surrounded by garrulous retirees from a nearby condominium. Having spent their youth, but not their savings, in Queens and Charlestown, they fled to Florida, first for the winters and then forever. Great climate, but not a damn thing to do but to await death over the bingo table or to sign up for the bus trips to the dog track. Meadows tuned out their chatter.

  Two minutes before race time the grooms emerged from the kennel area. At the end of each leash was a lean greyhound capped tightly with a muzzle. The dogs were impossibly mean, he knew, sometimes even stopping in the middle of a race to fight each other. The inbreeding that had made them fast as a freight train had also made them monumentally stupid. Each dog in front of him now wore a cloth number and walked in a desultory gait two or three paces behind the groom.

  “You picked a name. How does everybody else know which dog to bet on?” Meadows asked.

  “That’s how,” said Terry, pointing. The number seven greyhound was hunched unabashedly in a squat, fertilizing an orchid bed near the home stretch. A cluster of drunks down on the rail gave a hearty ovation.

  “Jesus!” Meadows laughed. “Great sport.”

  “Ay Dios, everyone will bet that dog now.” Terry sighed. And sure enough, by post time the odds on the seven greyhound had dropped to five to three.

  The dogs bolted from the gate in hot pursuit of a bogus rabbit nailed to a moving boom. Meadows tracked Fly Baby as it grabbed an early lead, faltered, move up once more before getting bumped to the outside and finished fourth, out of the money. The whole thing took forty-nine seconds.

  “Mierda,” muttered Terry. The number seven dog won by three lengths. “Let me go to the bathroom, and then we will leave. I’ll meet you at the finish line.”

  Alone, Meadows scanned the payday crowd. Below, six rows down, was a pretty young woman. From the back she resembled Sandy Tilden. Meadows found himself straining to see if a small child sat at her side. Of course, there was none. When the woman turned sideways, she did not look like Sandy at all, and Christopher Meadows looked away.

  He limped down to the rail for a better glimpse of the greyhounds. From the grandstands they all looked alike; up close he noticed marked differences in size, musculature and gait. The grooms looked bored stiff. So did the dogs.

  “Stop it now. I was here before you.”

  Meadows turned to his left in time to see a pudgy snowhaired old man move nose to nose against a tall young Latin. “Now this was my spot, son. Move down a little bit, please.”

  His adversary was built like a refrigerator.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” the young man demanded. He had the face of a ferret. Another husky Latin stood behind him, laughing. A third had his back to the fracas. He was studying the greyhounds. Meadows noticed he wore a cream-colored suit.

  “Now I don’t want to fight…” the older man was saying.

  Meadows searched the crowd for a sign of Terry. When he looked back, the old man was out of breath and off the ground; the punk had hoisted him by the shoulders.

  Meadows did not move. His heart raided against his ribs, and his legs felt like sand. He saw it quite clearly, tucked into the young man’s belt…the bluish butt of a pistol. Then the third man turned around. The face of the man took Meadows’s breath away.

  There it was. Oval and brooding. Those fierce, deep eyes, coals and ice.

  It was him.

  The eyes flicked past Meadows as the man in the cream-colored suit said something harsh to the other two and gestured sharply. The young Latino sullenly put the old man down and walked toward the ticket lobby with his two companions. The old man slapped wanly at his rumpled clothes, speaking to no one in particular. “Stupid goddamn hoods. Think they own this country…”

  Meadows could only stand transfixed.

  Terry appeared then. “Chris! You’re pale! Is something wrong?”

  Meadows grabbed her arm.

  “Let’s go. Let’s go,” he muttered. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Meadows and Terry moved upstream against the crowd, which was pouring back to the grandstand from the ticket windows. His eyes searched the seats as he shuffled impatiently toward the exit.

  There.

  In the last row up, they sat together. Meadows counted four now. The three biggest ones were laughing together. The fourth, the dapper one in the suit, held a pair of small binoculars to his eyes.

  He had been scanning the park, but now he stopped. He wasn’t looking at the greyhounds. He was looking directly at Christopher Meadows.

  “What is it?” Terry asked. “Chris, you’re pushing me.”

  “Hurry. Please.”

  That night, when he tried to draw that face from memory, the shape came easily in smooth, circular strokes. The sharp eyebrows and heavy Neanderthal ridge of the forehead were not exact, but acceptable.

  What Meadows could not seem to replicate were the eyes. He fiddled with them for what must have been a half hour, faltering and starting again, before he was satisfied.

  When he was finished, Meadows knew what the eyes reminded him of, so dark and dispassionate and deadly. They were not the eyes of a man at all. They were the eyes of a shark.

  Chapter 6

  THE LINCOLN sat in front of El Hogar, a cramped storefront restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street in Little Havana. A Sorry We’re Closed sign hung in the door window, but small candles still burned in the red table lanterns inside. There were but four customers.

  Outside, in a dingy blue Dodge less than a block away, Detective Octavio Nelson closed his eyes. They had been sitting on the Lincoln for an hour with no sign of the owner. Nelson was sure the man was inside El Hogar, but he wasn’t sure it was worth the wait. Another headache was coming on like a noisy bus.

  “I heard Shafer got off today,” Wilbur Pincus said.

  Nelson nodded and sucked on a cigar.

  “I told you it was a bad search,” Pincus said.

  Nelson glared at his partner. “I knew he had at least a kilo in the trunk. I took
the chance.”

  “How’d you tell it in court?”

  “Routine traffic stop.”

  Pincus shook his head. “I bet they took you apart on probable cause, right?”

  They sure had, Nelson thought to himself. He hated to lose a shithead like Shafer. Shafer could have been flipped. He was an Anglo. He’d been scared out of his mind. Nelson had known it the minute he’d put the handcuffs on. But the judge had said it was a bad search. “Totally illegal” were the words he’d used. So Shafer walked.

  “At least I cost him a kilo of coke,” Nelson muttered.

  Pincus snorted. “We took a whole course in probable cause up at Tallahassee. Lasted two weeks. Maybe you ought to sign up next time.”

  “Right,” Nelson said. “You bet.”

  The car was like a sauna. He flipped on the radio and tuned in a Miami salsa station.

  “Don’t you think you ought to leave the squawk box on?” Pincus asked. “In case they try to reach us.”

  “Naw. We’re on surveillance.”

  The front door of El Hogar opened. Nelson sat up. Just one of the waitresses on her way home. The lights in the restaurant remained on.

  “What did you find in that car?” Pincus asked suddenly.

  “What car?”

  “The Mercedes you hauled in a couple weeks ago.”

  Nelson tightened. “How’d you know about that?”

  “I saw the tow sheet on your desk.”

  Fucking Mathers in the garage. He should have known better. “Nothing,” Nelson said. “The car was clean.”

  “Who’d it come back to?”

  “I don’t even remember. Some doctor, I think. He got bombed one night and forgot where he parked. It was nothing.”

  Pincus seemed to buy it.

  The car had not been clean.

  Roberto Nelson’s Mercedes-Benz sedan had contained 5.7 grams of cocaine hidden in a metallic key box beneath the steering column. Octavio Nelson had found it after a ten-minute search, weighed it and field-tested it himself on a lab kit he had bought one day at a Coconut Grove head shop. Then he flushed the powder down the john.

  He’d never made a report on the coke or even on the tow job, an oversight the boys in the police garage were not likely to forgive soon. He’d given Mathers the same bullshit story about the doctor.

  Then Roberto, idiot Roberto, had waltzed into police headquarters and copped the keys off Octavio’s desk on the fourth floor and driven his goddamn Mercedes off without a word. They would see about that later, he and Roberto.

  In the meantime, there was Wilbur Pincus, Iowa-born-and-bred, a babe in Miami. Pincus was a book man. He dressed by the book, talked by the book, made out all of his A forms by the book. The first time Nelson had caught Pincus shining his shoes, he’d immediately put in for a new partner. His complaints were ignored. Pincus, unfortunately, was a pretty good cop.

  Nelson had tried another approach. He’d worked on Pincus until he planted the idea that the young cop should go to work for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Nelson had even gone so far as to provide three glowing letters of commendation, two of them signed by police captains who had been dead for years.

  The DEA had been interested. Pincus had come out of his first interview with flying colors. Two days later, however, a DEA agent working in Hialeah had been shot down by one of his own men during a busted Quaalude deal. That afternoon Pincus had withdrawn his application. He’d told the feds he’d rather work with Octavio Nelson.

  After all, all the other captains got fat behind desks, chewed out the sergeants, fucked the secretaries and worked up office pools on the Dolphin games. Not Nelson. Here was a big shot cop who really loved street work. Pincus had been impressed. Nelson was sloppy, to be sure, and a bit crude, but he was a cop Pincus could learn from.

  Pincus truly felt that way until he’d discovered Nelson had been trying to dump him. The humiliation had been devastating. For two days he’d trod from floor to floor in search of Captains Donnelly and Lopez, to thank them for their letters. A rookie motor-man had finally told him they were dead. That Nelson would actually counterfeit recommendations and mail them to the DEA—Pincus had been thunderstruck. He’d said nothing to Nelson, but the partnership had become a study in simmering friction. The other narcotics detectives watched closely to see which of them would surrender to the other’s style. The heavy money was on Pincus.

  Then came the Aristidio Cruz beating, and the whole bureau waited for the lid to blow. But Nelson and Pincus both acted as though it never happened. For Nelson, it was forgettable. For Pincus, it was a trauma, never far from his troubled thoughts.…

  “What if these goons go out the back door?” he asked now, motioning toward the restaurant.

  “They won’t,” said Nelson, turning up the car radio again.

  At a corner table inside El Hogar, Domingo Sosa, the man known as Mono, seemed lost in himself while his three companions joked.

  “How much did you lose today?”

  “Four hundred,” said one.

  “Three eighty,” said another.

  “Perros de mierda. I tell you, the whole thing is fixed. They put drugs in the Gainesburgers. Some of them could barely walk around the track, much less run.”

  “We go to jai alai next time.”

  “Ha, that’s worse. I had a friend who was a jai alai player. He said he never won if he made love to a woman the night before. For three weeks he went to bed alone. He won almost every night. Everybody in the fronton started betting on him. He was a big star. He said he was serving so hard the other players never saw the pelota until it was past them.”

  “Did you go and bet on him?”

  “No, chico. I never trust a man who can’t get laid for three weeks.”

  “What happened to your friend?”

  “He damn near went crazy. Now he screws every night before the match. He’s a shitty jai alai player, but I bet on him every time I go.”

  Ignoring the laughter, Mono motioned to the waitress. “Another pitcher, señorita.” He looked sternly at the other men. “No more of this. We must get back to business.”

  “The gringo at the dog track?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are sure it is the same man?”

  Mono nodded. “Did you see the way he stared?”

  “So what?” One of his men, who looked like a peasant, shrugged. “Many people were staring.”

  “I recognized him,” Mono said flatly. “He was the man down in the Grove that day when the woman was hit by the car.”

  “But you shot him.”

  Mono glared. “In the leg.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He had learned his ballistics from the best of the CIA. He had trained on a beach in the Florida Keys—a mock invasion during a stinging rainstorm; nighttime target practice with the tracer rifles; blasting coconuts out of the palm trees with a .45 pistol at lunch-time. Six months’ worth of training.

  Mono had made many friends among his fellow soldiers-in-training. Two of them had died at the Bay of Pigs. Another, who had gone to jail for seventeen years on the Isle of Pines, had wished he had. He’d been freed, blind and half-crippled, and Mono had been at the airport when the chartered Eastern jetliner had brought him into Miami from Havana. The two men had wept together like children. Mono’s henchmen had never seen him cry, but they understood.

  Over the years Mono forgot nothing of what the CIA had taught him, least of all how to shoot. Now he was cursing himself: You should have killed that gringo when you had the chance. You should have aimed for the chest and squeezed the trigger. Instead you aimed low, not out of compassion but out of common sense—the important difference between aggravated assault and first-degree murder.

  Mono had never dreamed he would see the gringo again or that the gringo would see him.

  “Suppose you are right,” said the peasant. “So what? Do you think he even saw your face? And if he did
, do you suppose he would come looking for you?” The man chuckled and lifted his beer.

  “I think you’re full of shit,” said one of the other men, whose ear was deformed, a grotesque knob. “I saw no one staring at you. Forget about it.”

  “No,” Mono said. “Find out who the man is. Ramón, you have a girlfriend who works in the admissions office at Flagler Memorial. Call her. Tell her to check all the gunshot wounds that came in that day. Tell her you are looking for an Anglo in his thirties, thin, brown hair. He was hit in the knee or thigh.” Mono patted his calf.

  “I will get the name,” Ramón answered.

  “Get everything you can,” Mono said.

  “Then what?” the peasant asked.

  Mono went on, “This is a private matter. You will do this as a favor to me.”

  One of the others snorted a laugh. He was drunk. Mono’s face darkened, and the muscles in his neck tightened like a rope. Under any other circumstances he would have smashed the foolish punk with his fists, leaving him bloody but wiser. But now he needed him, and he said nothing.

  “El Jefe said no more shootings,” Ramón reminded. “He was furious about what happened in the Grove.”

  “He will not know about this,” Mono replied sternly. “Find out what you can.”

  “Then what?” asked the man with the cauliflowered ear.

  “Nothing,” Mono said softly. “Then nada. I just want information.”

  He opened a thumb-sized plastic vial and tapped a small pile of white powder onto the flat side of his American Express card. He used a table knife to cut the powder into four perfect lines. The others watched silently as Mono rolled a crisp new hundred-dollar bill into a makeshift straw. He sniffed three of the lines in quick succession, then offered the fourth to Ramón.

  On his way out of the restaurant Mono stopped to hug Oscar, the owner. “Thank you for your hospitality. You are a good friend.”

  “You are welcome, Señor Sosa. Anytime.”

  Of course, it was always Señor Sosa. Oscar wouldn’t dare address him by Mono, a street name. The monkey.

  Señor Sosa had once done him a great favor. Just a small debt, but how foolish. A drunken night when Oscar had agreed to join some friends for the cockfights in Key Largo. Money had flown like the rooster feathers, and when it was over, the restaurant owner had been dismayed to find himself three thousand dollars down. Of course, he could not pay.