AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy)

by Don Donovan

  While the dealers — every one of them — are going up this stressful ladder of success, trafficking in dangerous and deadly substances, surrounded by mortal enemies, and endlessly hounded by armies of dedicated Feds, Alicia López traffics only in their cash and never, ever sees any drugs, nor does she ever go near drugs. She doesn't know where they are processed, she doesn't know how they are brought into the country. She has no idea where the major weight goes once it is in the country, and she definitely does not know the identities of any street users.

  She doesn't know and she doesn't care.

  For this, she gets her four points out of every laundering trip.

  And when you're talking about the kind of money she handles and the frequency with which she handles it, those four points add up to big, big numbers, and fast.

  Big numbers for her, but for the service she provides — placing the cash in secure places beyond the grasp of the governments of the US and Colombia — well worth it.

  Yes, it was all about legacy now. Taking care of her family. She was perfectly positioned to ensure their future.

  12

  Desi Junior

  North Miami, Florida

  Friday, April 6, 2012

  2:50 PM

  THE LUMBER YARD, along with the Burger King across the street, were the two classiest establishments along that grieving stretch of State Road 7. Most of the other businesses were decidedly lower-end: a dollar store, furniture rental, a food stamp office, and that blaring distress signal of a neighborhood in decline, a pawn shop. It was actually in the city of North Miami, where the cops are far less capable of taking on major drug action. A small weed bust here and there keeps them happy, and they pretend all the big deals go down somewhere else — like Miami — so that was likely the reason it was selected for the site of this deal.

  He drove down Northwest 127th Street one block to a dead end, with the lumber yard on his left, but right before the end, a dirt road veered off to the left and went straight around the lumber yard to the rear. A large, unpaved area lay behind the long, squat building. A wall about five feet high ran along part of the length back there, separating the property from a grassy area, about thirty feet in width, also running the length of the building. Beyond that was a chain link fence that ran between the breadth of the property and the southbound lanes of I-95.

  It was a good place for a deal. Very private, no lighting, not particularly visible from I-95. Any freeway traffic would buzz right by the rear area of this long, plain building set way back from the road. Things could happen back here and no one would ever know.

  He motored back to State Road 7 and up a block to 128th Street. This street was also one block long. No street lights. It ran alongside the lumber yard, now to his right, and dead-ended just before I-95. In a small area adjacent to the building rested several piles of cinderblocks, carelessly placed, each pile several feet high. The whole of the rear area was entirely cut off by a chain link fence. No way in, no way out from this side. All traffic goes in through 127th. All traffic, that is, except him.

  Attached to the lumber yard was a very large hardware store. Desi parked in front and went in. He picked up a pair of Klein forty-two-inch bolt cutters, guaranteed to cut "almost anything". Two hundred fifty bucks. The clerk bagged the item and Desi walked out chuckling to himself.

  He cruised the area a little more, thought back to his own hardscrabble upbringing in Hialeah, and remembered how it wasn't much better than this sad slice of North Miami.

  They lived in three rooms over a mattress store, he and his sister and his parents. The neighborhood was all tough kids and broken windows and bottom-feeding businesses: liquor stores, check cashing joints, used furniture stores, and the like. Desi and his sister slept on a fold-out couch in the living room with all the street racket going on day and night outside the window. During their preteen years, the two of them ran with all the wrong crowds, little-kid gangs of their own wreaking havoc on neighborhood residents and businesses. The cops? What did they care? To them it was just out-of-control Cuban punks running wild in East Hialeah.

  But that was all before his father got his feet wet in the drug business.

  13

  Desi Senior

  Miami, Florida

  Tuesday, November 21, 1989

  12:10 PM

  THE DAY TURNED OUT TO BE MIAMI GORGEOUS. A predawn rain had cooled things down and the clouds were gone by mid-morning. Desi Ramos Senior had kept to his schedule, parking his city bus on Southwest First Avenue, the last stop on his route, a couple of minutes before high noon. The passengers climbed down and Desi turned off the big engine.

  It was a major source of pride for him, keeping to his schedule. The bosses who created it were reasonable men, allowing for heavy traffic along certain routes during certain times of day. Desi's route ran from downtown straight out Calle Ocho through Little Havana to Florida International University and back, and traffic in the downtown segment of this route was always the worst. He'd never seen it this bad in his eight years of driving. They would have to do something about it. Miami traffic. How could it get any worse?

  But he was always aware of where he was along the route and what time it should be, and he was seldom more than a couple of minutes off. Only a major accident or a weather event, such as flooding, could throw him off any more. Granted, there were times when a passenger would give him shit about one thing or another, and he would always be tempted to jump right in his face, even more tempted to drag the guy's ass off the bus and pound the piss out of him. He was broad-shouldered and had big fists, and feared little in the way of street fighting. But getting bogged down in any of that hotheaded shit would put him behind schedule.

  He stepped off the bus and strolled across First Avenue to Pepe's, a little open-window sandwich kiosk near the corner. This was where he came every day for his Cuban mix sandwich. Nobody made them better, tastier, than Pepe. The roast pork was always cooked to absolute perfection and the Cuban bread was … well … anyone who's ever had Cuban bread knows of its exquisite taste, but Pepe did something to it to lift it over and above all others. He would never tell his secret, but Desi didn't mind. He just loved the sandwich.

  Three people stood in line ahead of him. As soon as he took his spot, another man slipped in behind him. Desi glanced at him. He looked to be a few years older than Desi, which would put him somewhere just south of forty. He was undoubtedly Cuban, fairly well-dressed in a pale yellow guayabera and gray slacks, trim, and with a stern face that looked like it didn't smile too often. Styled dark hair brushed straight back on his head rose in the front over steely eyes and a narrow mouth. He was no bus driver. Desi caught himself looking at the man just a moment too long, so he had to speak.

  "¿Cómo está? Desi asked.

  The man went for a light smile, but didn't quite get there. "Bién, gracias. ¿Y usted?" His voice had a slight sandpaper tinge to it, like he almost had to clear his throat.

  Brushing aside an unruly shock of dark hair that continually fell onto his forehead, Desi said, "Bién, bién," and from this small courtesy sprang a mild conversation. It started with the beautiful day, segued to the traffic nightmares and how they're as bad as they can possibly get, then on to Pepe's sandwiches, which the man agreed were the very best in all Miami. In fact, he said, few places in Cuba itself could equal Pepe for the taste of his offerings. This of course led to Desi asking him if he had come across and he said he had, arriving as a child with his parents in the first wave in 1959 after the Beard seized power. Then the man introduced himself as Julio Cesar Delgado.

  They went on like this, and pretty soon, Desi was at the kiosk window ordering his sandwich. They chatted a few minutes more and it was clear Delgado had taken a liking to Desi, appreciated his easy charm and smooth personality. Desi took a seat at one of the two small wooden picnic tables under an awning outside the kiosk, while Delgado took his meal to go. They waved goodbye.

  Two days later, Desi ran into him ag
ain, also at Pepe's. This time, Desi invited him to sit at his table and Delgado did so with pleasure. During their meal, their talk ran a little deeper. More serious topics. Baseball, their wives and families, politics. And then right before the end of their meal, the talk turned to the blistering crime wave that had engulfed Miami for years and the drugs that were at the root of it, and Desi said, "You know, I hear my passengers talk about that cocaina. I mean, they talk about it a lot."

  Delgado's eyebrows shot up. "What do they say? About the cocaine, I mean?"

  Desi began gesturing with his hands: clear, expressive motions. He almost didn't have to speak, but he did anyway. "Oh, they say everybody's trying it, everybody's doing it, you know? And they say it's everywhere. Ay, all these people being killed, it's all because of the cocaine!"

  All these people being killed. The staggering body count of the Cocaine Cowboys Era was slacking off, but only a little. Bodies still littered the streets, although in somewhat smaller numbers. Miami Vice had run out the clock, limping across the finish line of its last season a few months back, and the city itself was emerging from a decade of unimaginable violence. The curtain was falling on the final stages of the enormous transformation of Miami itself, first from a sleepy Southern town into a snowbird mecca for New York Jews, then into a Cubanized city in the decades following the 1959 revolution. Following that, it became a tourist magnet and shopping emporium for all of Latin America, until finally it made the leap to becoming a freewheeling drug center, the center of the targets of cocaine overlords in Colombia, Perú, and other centers of manufacturing and marketing.

  Since the day in 1979 when two Colombian drug dealers were killed in what has become expansively known as "the Dadeland Mall Massacre" — despite the fact only two people had died and they were both drug dealers — blood flowed freely through the streets of Miami. One killing begat another in revenge, and so on, as the struggle for control of the lucrative drug business swirled like a vicious hurricane around an intensifying center. Before too long, Miami had become the most dangerous city in the United States.

  The cocaine wars were fought over the tons of white powder that slipped through the porous Port of Miami, up the labyrinthine waterways of the Everglades, and into nearby remote airstrips, then taken to local laboratories where it was cut a few times with goodies like sugar, laundry detergent, laxatives, and usually something like benzocaine to replicate the anesthetic feeling.

  Then began the tedious process of repackaging it into small bags, thousands and thousands of small bags. All of it destined to flow up the noses of people looking for the high that only cocaine could deliver, one slender line at a time. Nothing to worry about, thought the public. Besides, everyone was doing it, right?

  Delgado looked at Desi. "Yes, it's pretty bad," he said. "All this killing."

  "The government has to do something," Desi said. "Something to protect us. How long can it go on?"

  "Let me tell you, Desi, the government can do nothing. How do you tell someone who wants to get high to kill that desire? It can't be done. Man has wanted to get high ever since he stood up straight millions of years ago."

  Desi thought about that one. "So you're saying this is all coming from —"

  "From the demand, hermano. As long as you have people who want to get high, you will have people who will give them what they want. And believe me, you will always have people who want to get high."

  Desi watched the traffic flow by on First Avenue. He said, "You sound like you know something about this, Julio."

  "I know a little bit about it. And I know these pendejos are killing each other for no fucking reason. If they would only think about it for a minute, they would stop. They would stop and there would be peace. Peace where people could still get their cocaine to get them high."

  "They better not try to sell any to my kids," Desi said. "I will give them so much pain, pain they never even dreamed of, they will beg me to send them to hell."

  "¡Ha! Bién dicho, Desi. Well said." Delgado finally managed a smile, a real one, as he rolled up his sandwich bag and napkins and tossed them into a nearby trash container. "Listen, Desi, do you like football?"

  "Of course. The Dolphins. I watch them every week on television."

  "I have season tickets. You want to come to the game with me this Sunday?"

  "To a Dolphins game?" Desi's voice rose an octave and his eyebrows zoomed upward.

  "Yes. This Sunday. They're playing Pittsburgh."

  "Well … sure! I would love to go! I've never seen them in person. You know, it's so expensive. And you say you have season tickets?"

  Delgado said, "Two of them. On the forty-yard line. You can see everything. What do you say?"

  Desi's grin threatened to cover his entire face. "I say yes! ¿Cómo no?"

  14

  Desi Senior

  Miami Gardens, Florida

  Sunday, November 26, 1989

  12.20 PM

  PARKING AROUND JOE ROBBIE STADIUM was not the nightmare it could have easily been. Well-placed signs and animated attendants guided the cars into the spaces in an unusually orderly fashion. Delgado glided down a row of tailgaters near the south entrance and parked in a spot near the far end.

  Desi had become entranced by Delgado, what with his impossible-to-get Dolphins tickets and now riding in his Mercedes sedan. With real leather seats and a stereo compact disc player and everything! When his wife Marianela and his two kids stared out the window down at the street and saw the big blue automobile pull up in front of the mattress store, they gasped.

  "Daddy, is that car for you? Is that our car?" his little daughter asked.

  "No, Sofía, honey. It is not our car, but it is here to pick me up. The man driving it is a friend and he is taking me to a Dolphins football game."

  "It's such a pretty car," she said. "It's so big!"

  "What a beautiful car!" said Marianela, with a longing look in her big brown eyes. "What does this man do to afford such a car?"

  Desi thought for a moment and realized he had never gotten around to asking Delgado what he did for a living, so he answered with a shrug.

  "He must do very well," his wife said.

  Desi said yes, he must, as he kissed her goodbye and strolled down to the car. He was going to the game!

  The two men made their way into the stadium. True to his word, Delgado escorted Desi to primo seats on the forty-yard line, Dolphins' side of the field. Desi could only dream of how much these seats cost. The Dolphins were easily the toughest ticket in town, year in and year out.

  The game was exciting, at first, anyway. The Dolphins jumped out to a 14-0 lead and looked like they were in control. But Pittsburgh answered with 17 points in the second quarter and led as the first half ended.

  During the halftime hoopla, Desi turned to Delgado and said, "I don't like this. The Dolphins don't seem to be able to move the ball."

  Delgado waved it off. "Ahh, don't worry, Desi. These Steelers, they are a clumsy bunch. They can't win."

  Something about this guy Desi liked. His hard presence maybe, or maybe it was the contrast between his rough-sounding voice and his easygoing speaking style, he didn't know. But he did know he enjoyed talking to someone like him. He always enjoyed that kind of thing, even in his childhood when his own father would have long talks with him, talks about life, about the world, his job, baseball, Castro, everything.

  Delgado ordered a couple of beers from a passing concessionaire. He paid for them and handed one to Desi. They took the enjoyable first sip from their large, full cups and wiped foam off their mouths.

  After another sip, Delgado said, "Do you enjoy your work, Desi?"

  "Yes, I do," Desi replied. "But you know, I never asked you what you do for a living. Tell me, Julio, what line of work are you in?"

  Delgado raised his cup to his lips again. He drank slowly, as if stalling for time to formulate an answer. Eventually, he said, "I work for some very important people."

  "Very importan
t people?" A marching band came onto the field and played the opening notes of a stirring song. The crowd responded with loud cheers. The band began to execute a complicated choreography while playing. Within moments, the stadium volume had doubled.

  "Yes," Delgado said, raising his voice over the racket. "Big business people. Involved in very big business. They move a lot of money around."

  "Oh? Is it like real estate? Or maybe you work in a bank?"

  Delgado set his beer on the concrete at his feet and leaned toward Desi. After a quick glance around, he drilled Desi with his gray eyes and moved up close to him. "Tell me, mi amigo, how long have you been driving a bus?"

  "About eight years," Desi said.

  "And how old are you, Desi?"

  "I'm thirty-three. Why do you —"

  Delgado said, "Tell me, my friend, how much do you enjoy your work?"

  "Well, how much? I don't know, I guess I enjoy it a lot."

  "Would you like to do a job for me?"

  "A job? For you?"

  "Yes," Delgado said. "But don't worry. It won't take time away from your driving. You can do this after work."

  "After work? A job after work? I don't know if I want to take on another job right now, Julio."

  He waved that aside. "No, no, no. This is not a full-time job. It's just a one-time thing. I just need you to pick up a package and take it down to Kendall for me. Counting rush hour traffic, it should take you about an hour and a half to two hours altogether, round trip. What time do you get off tomorrow?"

  Desi said, "Five-thirty."

  "Well, that's just perfect," Delgado said, breaking a smile. "You drive over to Little Havana and pick up the package, bring it to Kendall, you can be home by seven, seven-thirty at the latest. Nothing to it."