“Give me a break, man. This is worthless. You need detailed blueprints.”
“Look at the house, Sugar,” Thorn said. “We’re doing fine with these plans.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is?”
“Well, the point is somebody has a wild hair at Building and Zoning, and they’re going to make your life shitty till you go along with the rules for once. That’s all there is to it. And next time they send a cop out here it won’t be me, and it won’t be a warning. They’ll put you in the tank.”
Sugarman frowned, massaged his brow, his receding hairline.
“How’s the food in the jail these days?” Thorn said. “Still serving tacos on Fridays?”
“You never quit, do you?”
“What’s to quit?” Thorn said. “It’s still us against them, isn’t it, Sugar?”
“I’m afraid it’s us against you, Thorn, this time anyway,” he said. He let his eyes drop from Thorn’s, studied the ground between them. “There’s rules,” he said to the dirt. “You either play by them, or you get screwed. That’s just how it is.”
The load on Sugar’s shoulders was bearing down. He was shaking his head. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Saying oh, no, not this again. No, I don’t believe this.
Thorn said, “What is it, Sugar? You look terrible.”
Sugarman settled against the edge of the maple workbench. He shook his head again.
“I just helped slide two decomposed teenagers into body bags,” he said. They were out in the weather at least a week, at Dynamite Docks. The raccoons’d been at them.”
“A drug deal,” Thorn said.
“Looked that way,” he said. “Just a couple of Miami high school kids.”
“That’s tough,” Thorn said.
“Days like this, I think it may be time for another forty-day flood. Wash it all clean and just start over.”
“Yeah, well,” Thorn said, looking off at the darkening sky. “The problem with that is, nowadays it’s the bad guys who have all the arks.”
Gaeton Richards sat on the edge of the motel bed. He watched Myra Rostovitch standing in front of the window, sipping her coffee from a large Styrofoam cup. The light was leaking in around the venetian blinds now. It was still before eight on Saturday. He listened to the traffic on Calle Ocho, the blat of motorcycles, Cuban voices arguing in the parking lot.
She ran her fingers down the blinds, flattening them a bit more. There was a shine in her curly black hair.
A year ago Gaeton would’ve risen from the bed and kissed her, turned her around and unzipped that gray dress, rolled down her panty hose, and led her to the cool sheets. They would’ve stayed the weekend, their handguns on the bedside tables.
“Adamson sick or what?” Gaeton said.
Myra Rostovitch said, “Things have changed, Gaeton. Adamson’s out of it. I’m taking it over from here on.”
She blew on her coffee, paced in front of the TV, sipping it.
Yeah, things had changed all right. But she hadn’t. She was still inside herself. Still could work a stretch of silence as well as anybody he’d ever seen. Turn it into some kind of drama or make it sexy. He’d seen people talk for an hour and not say as much as Myra got out of a minute of dead air.
“You know I’ll have to call Adamson, check this out.”
Myra nodded, still pacing, staring into her coffee.
She sat down in the Danish modern chair across the room, crossed her legs, set her cup on the bureau.
“Gaeton,” she said, “there’s been a fuck-up. A major one.”
Now Gaeton tried it, the thing she did with the silence. But it didn’t have the same effect. It just lay there.
Finally he said, “A fuck-up.”
She studied him carefully.
“It was a simple case of the right hand not knowing what the hell the left was up to,” she said.
“Give it to me,” he said. “I can probably handle it.”
“Well, it all sounds perfectly reasonable when you list it out,” she said. “Adamson gave us the history of it, from his point of view. Last January one of his confidential informants gives him Benny Cousins’s name, suggests Benny may be consorting with known felons for unknown purposes. Adamson is intrigued. Former DEA official up to no good. It sounded like it was worth a look. So he put you down there. It made sense it should be you. You already had a network of contacts in the Keys. You were the obvious choice. It could be a RICO case, racketeering, whatever. Adamson OK’s it; you go undercover, move down there; the bureau drops some taxpayer money on it.
“And let me tell you, you did a good job. Buddied right up to Benny. In six months you were his number one man. And you’ve got a case on him, no question. I’ve seen your reports, bribery, extortion, conspiracy. Some of it is maybe a little dirty, entrapmentwise, and a trifle rinky-dink, but still, it’s a case.”
“Rinky-dink?” Gaeton cocked his head at her. He tried to get her to smile one of those old smiles, one of the coded ones they had. But she wouldn’t snag on to his eyes. He said, “Last time I looked, bribery of a public official, racketeering, extortion, it totals up to fifteen to twenty years. He’d take some county politicians down with him and some code enforcement people.”
She shook her head, looking into her cup.
“Like I said, rinky-dink.”
Her gaze wandered over the budget motel room, the details of this place, the double bed, the antiseptic bathroom, the seascape painting. Once they had transformed Spartan rooms like this, made them into warm, glowing oases.
She said, “Look, Gaeton. The truth is, Benny’s one of the central players in a very big, and I stress it, very big situation we’ve been developing for quite some time.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “And believe me, this is out of Adamson’s league. This is out of Miami’s league, this comes from farther north, a good way up the road from here.”
Gaeton tried to recall who he’d been when they’d loved each other. Had she seen him as a hotshot on the rise, on his way up the road, north? No. More likely, she’d known the truth all along. By thirty-five Gaeton had peaked and was already heading south. Destined soon to sink back into that slum of lower-echelon agents, bogged down in the tedium of uninspired investigations. Had she timed it so she stepped away from him just at his apogee? Gaeton starting his spiral down, no more promotions, only minimum raises, and Myra, her boosters about to switch on.
Even her voice had moved to a higher plane. It was amplified now, as if she’d retrained it from sessions at long, expensive conference tables, speaking down those polished planks to men who monitored every word she uttered for any falter.
“We screwed up,” she said. “It was just a case of our going in too many directions. By the time your operation came to our attention, you were already burrowed in there with Benny.” She looked over at the bathroom. She saw something in there that held her attention for a moment. Some memory. Maybe a shower they’d taken together, giddy from champagne. Something that made her almost smile, almost brought back that face he remembered. She turned to him, her features hardening back into this new face, and said, “But fortunately you never seemed to catch on to our operation. So we let you stay in there.”
Gaeton smiled painfully. “If I’d been more alert, figured things out, what, you would’ve yanked me? That it?”
She nodded.
“Glad I could oblige,” he said.
She said, “And now, Gaeton, it’s time to start planning on how to bring you out. That’s what this meeting is about.”
“Bring me out? I’m just down the road. I’ll drive up.”
“No,” she said, and sighed. She tugged her dress down an inch. “You’re out on a limb, Gaeton. Way out. You don’t know it yet, but you are.”
He stared at her, remembering for a moment how that mouth had molded itself to his. How it had felt to hold that solid body. The sparkle she got in
her laugh.
He said, “What limb am I out on, Myra?”
She put her tinted glasses on. She stood up, cocked her head at him for a few moments, letting the silence build a nice drumroll for her.
“It was either compromise you or compromise the mission,” she said. “We chose you.”
Gaeton looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.
He said, “You’re telling me that Benny knows I’m still with the bureau, investigating him?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’d provided him with limited clearance to access FBI files as part of our operation. Apparently he used that clearance to run a routine check on everybody on his staff. Your name got flagged. He came to us and wanted an explanation.”
“And you gave me up?”
“Benny’d figured it out anyway,” Myra said.
“Why didn’t you just bring me out then, Myra? Huh?”
“Benny insisted on keeping you,” she said. “You were opening so many doors for him down there, introducing him to all your Conch cronies, Benny didn’t care if you were a spy, building a case on him, he was in heaven. He loves rubbing shoulders with all the Bubbas down there. He didn’t want to lose you.”
“Goddamn, Myra.”
She said, “So we informed Adamson, and since our operation had priority, Adamson agreed that even though your cover was exposed, you weren’t in any real danger. As long as you didn’t try to move on Benny, you were safe.”
“How long has Benny known?”
“A few months,” she said.
“Jesus shit, Myra. You mean, I’m there busting my ass, trying to make a case on this guy and Benny’s just toying with me? I don’t believe you fucking people. The things you think you can get away with.”
“It’s a war, Gaeton. Wars get complicated.”
“God Almighty. I fucking can’t believe it.”
“It gets worse,” she said. She took a deep breath and said, “Benny’s flipped on us. We set him up in one kind of business and he branched out into another kind. A kind that could do us all a great deal of harm. Not just careers or reputations. But lives. Other missions.” She took her purse off the dresser and snapped it open and drew out a small automatic. “He could do us a great deal of harm. Especially in an election year.”
Gaeton rose.
She stepped over to him and held the pistol out by the barrel. He hesitated for a moment, then took it.
“What’s this?”
“A very clean ten millimeters,” she said.
“What the fuck, Myra?”
She said nothing but turned and went back to her coffee. She drank the last of it and watched him standing there.
“The bureau wants me to use this,” he said. “To take out Benny? Is that what you’re saying?”
“The bureau wants you to continue to use your training and imagination.”
“Kill a guy for conspiracy to bribe public officials? Huh? We doing that now? I didn’t know.”
“Don’t be that way, Gaeton.”
“I don’t believe you, Myra. Handing me a gun, telling me to go shoot some guy. Somebody owes me a very big explanation.”
She dropped the coffee cup in a trash can. The light hit her hair again. Her skin backlit, creamy, the mole at her upper lip. Even in the midst of this, Gaeton noticed it, felt the warm growl rising from his stomach.
He tried to calm his voice.
“You think I’m going to shoot a guy and not know why?”
“The more people who know the specifics of this operation, the more jeopardy for everyone.”
“OK, well, let me guess then. Just nod if I get it,” he said. “It’s about Claude and these other guys, right? They’re not looking for burglar alarms. Anybody can see that. They’re getting out of the business. Giving you people a little testimony and getting paid off in Porsches, nice houses. They might give you names, drug routes, bad cops. Benny’s the go-between. Huh? Is that it? Am I close?”
She said nothing, gave no indication.
“Myra,” he said, “I got to know. You owe me that.”
She said, “I’ve told you what I can, Gaeton. Probably too much. Benny’s a loose cannon. He’s using his training as a federal agent, his contacts inside the government, and the computer access we gave him to accomplish some very bad things. The problem is, because we assisted him in setting up part of his shop, we’re complicitous. Politically, it’d be devastating, impossible to bring this to court.”
She let a few moments of silence work for her again. Then said: “The man knows things, he’s threatened to say things that could topple people. Lots of people, and from very high perches.”
“I don’t give a shit about toppling people,” Gaeton said. “Let him topple away. Maybe they should get toppled.”
She stepped up close to him, gave him a workover with those new conference-table eyes. The ones she’d won from staring down androgen junkies.
“We’re going to give you two weeks,” she said. “To convince yourself I’m right and to take care of him. You accomplish it, you’ve got complete immunity, witness protection, whatever you want. We’ll send in helicopters to pull you out if we have to, whatever it takes. The full deal.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You will,” she said. “You’ll call Adamson. You’ll check with whoever you want to at the bureau. You’ll see what I’m telling you is true. This is extremely volatile. It’s a boil that has to be lanced. And you, because you’re inside his security already, and because he thinks he has the upper hand with you, everyone agrees, you’re the logical person.”
“Logical,” Gaeton said.
She thought about it a moment more and said, “And because it’ll mean the bureau will owe you one, Gaeton, a very big one. It could turn things around for you, put you right back on the fast track. You should think about it.”
“I’m not taking this fucking thing.” Gaeton flipped the pistol onto the bed.
She looked at it. Picked up her purse, moved slowly to the door, and turned.
“Then leave it here. Maybe the maid can use it.”
After she’d gone, he sat on the side of the bed for a few more minutes. He could hear the morning news coming from the TV next door. Something about mines and harbors. He listened to that till he got back the strength to stand.
8
“Whatta you mean, Thorn’s not interested?” Benny said.
“Forget Thorn,” said Gaeton. “I’ve got somebody else.”
It was near midnight on Saturday. They were sitting in a booth in the back room of the Green Turtle Inn on Islamorada. Benny in a sherbet concoction. A rumpled raspberry jacket, lime pants, a white T-shirt advertising a Jamaican beer. He was experimenting with an earring tonight. A gold conch shell dangled from his left ear. It’s what could happen when you spent twenty years in standard-issue Sears suits.
“You must not’ve put it the right way to this asshole,” Benny said. “Give me his address. I’ll take a shot at him.”
“I’m telling you, I got you a much better guy,” Gaeton said. “The guy I got in mind, he’s a great fisherman, and plus, he’s got the goods on every politician in the county. He’ll break you up.”
“What’s his name?”
“Let me talk to him first, see if he’s interested.”
The late-night diners were clinking and clanking out front. The waitresses had lost all their hustle-bustle, now just smoking in a booth by the kitchen, watching the dawdlers. Benny was smiling from the four White Russians he’d had. He kept touching the fringe of black hair that circled his slick bald dome. He was getting all the hairs lined up to meet the constituents, the ones Gaeton had worked so hard setting up for him.
The barmaid came back again.
“Do us all again, sweet pea,” Benny said. “The boys in the booth, too.” He nodded at the three guys across the room, Benny’s tabernacle choir. All three still with their cop haircuts, square jaws. Their thick forearms resting on the table. All of them
in guayaberas, one yellow and two whites.
Benny swept his eyes across the darkened parking lot. A couple of retirees going home with their Styrofoam doggy box, fighting their way through the heavy wind.
Benny said, “You sell me on Thorn, then you take it all back. What’s the deal?”
“He’s busy, building his house,” Gaeton said. “Don’t worry, Benny. The guy I got in mind for you, he knows the water down here as well as anybody. You’ll love him.”
Benny was still looking out the window. Or no, was he adoring his own reflection? Gaeton took a sip of his Budweiser.
Benny fingered the gold conch shell at his ear. He brought his eyes away from the window, and said, “You give up too easy, Richards.” He smiled. “I haven’t met the man I couldn’t hire.”
They traded looks. Gaeton felt a trickle of sweat sprout in his armpit.
When the red-headed man in a plaid shirt and navy pants moved cautiously to the edge of their conversation, Gaeton broke connection with Benny’s eyes, waved the man over.
“Benny,” Gaeton said, “this is Charlie Boilini. Charlie, Benny Cousins of Florida Secure Systems. Charlie owns Boilini’s Liquors up in Tavernier.” No one offered to shake hands.
“Oh, yes,” said Benny. “The man who wants the stoplight.”
Mr. Boilini stood awkwardly at the edge of the table.
“Well, the thing is, Mr. Cousins, it’s a real bad intersection, accidents, near misses. I’ve petitioned the county commission, Department of Transportation. And they tell me they’ve got to do a study of the area first, and they—”
Benny said, “Hey, hey, hey, listen, Boilini, I’m no fucking politician. You don’t have to bullshit me with your humanitarian concerns. We clear on that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“OK. So you want to put a stoplight out front, slow the tourists down. They’re stuck in traffic, they get thirsty, they pull off, you get rich. Is this the story you want to make happen?”
Mr. Boilini shrugged like yeah, well, maybe.
Benny said, “So you got a problem with red tape. Every day of the week you’re choking to death already on regulations, paper work. And then a simple thing like a stoplight, it’s like taking a case to the Supreme Court. Am I right, Charlie?”
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