by Don Donovan
"I know, I know. It stinks to high heaven. But Kilgore went straight to the State Attorney and had a little talk with him. About what, we can only imagine, but one thing you may be sure of, we'll never know what went down. I just now found out about it myself."
"S-so what happens now? Harvey skates on the whole fucking thing?"
"Looks that way."
Vargas said, "But he killed his own brother, Lieutenant. Or had him killed. We've got the evidence."
"Apparently the State Attorney doesn't think we do."
"So what do we do now?" Silvana said.
"We consider the case closed. The whore takes the full rap."
Silvana's jaw dropped open. "Sofía Ramos?"
Santos nodded. "Affirmative. Phil Harvey's going to testify she was angry with Bob over not paying the Díaz girl, made some kind of angry threat against him. The State Attorney'll build some kind of case out of that, I'm sure. Meanwhile, we'll pick up her triggerman brother somewhere down the line. He's probably in hiding right now, but he's got to show sooner or later."
Silvana's eyebrows shot up so fast they almost leaped off her forehead. "You're telling me Sofía Ramos is going down for the whole thing? And that she's the only one?" She was sure no one would ever find what, if anything, was left of Desi.
"That's right," Santos said, shrugging his shoulders. "Right now, she's the only one. Until we pick up her brother."
"This is un-fucking-believable, Lieutenant. We had a big case, it was all wrapped up, and now all we have is little Sofía Ramos? Who was so fucking naive she never even knew she was confessing to murder the other day at her apartment?"
"She's probably the most harmless of the three of them — her, Phil Harvey, and Desi," Vargas said.
"Probably so," said Santos. "But by representing Harvey and getting his charges dropped, and by hanging the whore out to dry, Kilgore has cut all potential ties in this case to Maxie Méndez. If the charges against Harvey had stuck, the Harvey-Méndez connection would have floated to the surface sooner or later, and the shopping center deal would go down in flames."
Silvana gaped at Santos. "Shopping center deal?"
"You know the one," Santos said. "The one in Hialeah. Phil Harvey's arranged for new financing for it. He didn't like the arrangement his brother had, with kickbacks and all the rest of it. Not being exactly sure about the source of the financing, he thought it smelled like a money laundering scheme. So he got a legitimate deal, from somewhere in England, I think."
Silvana sensed a lot of money being spread around here. "Lieutenant, are you saying … I mean … why do you give a shit about the shopping center?"
"As far as you're concerned, Machado, and you too, Vargas, I don't. Got that?"
They both looked down at the floor and mumbled "Yes sir" in unison.
"Listen, you two," he said in a far more chipper tone. "There's an upside in all this." The two detectives were still standing, still steaming from this travesty. Santos told them to sit down. They did with great reluctance. He put his elbows on his desk and brought his hands together. "I can tell you with near certainty," he said, "that, as a result of you two breaking this case, Machado, you're going to make lieutenant, and Vargas, you're making sergeant. I myself will make captain."
No smiles or celebratory noises came from the two cops. Only angry, blank stares.
"Come on," Santos said, spreading his arms wide. "This is great news! You see what one big case can do for your careers. You both did a terrific job. Machado! You're getting your own office. Come on!"
Silvana looked like she wanted to kill someone. "That girl is taking a fucking murder one rap for Phil Harvey because he'd rather have clean financing for his fucking shopping center deal!"
Santos leaned back in his chair. "I don't like it any more than you do. Fair? Hell, no. It's not fair. But then, what is?"
Silvana felt like spitting on the floor as she and Vargas left the office. Instead of going back to the squad room, she stopped at the elevator.
"Where you going, Silvi?" Vargas asked.
"What time is it?"
Vargas glimpsed his watch. "About four o'clock."
She said, "Early, right?" He nodded just as the elevator arrived. "Bobby, you ever know me to say I needed a drink?"
"Never."
"Well, I do," she said.
Vargas said, "So do I."
AN EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW OF
STAYING ALIVE
BOOK THREE OF
THE MIAMI CRIME TRILOGY
by
DON DONOVAN
1
Jimmy
Miami, Florida
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
1:45 AM
THE DOBBS HOTEL WASN'T MUCH TO LOOK AT, a cheap dump really, but if you were going to kill someone, it was the perfect spot.
Nestled down a dark side street in one of Miami's rougher areas, about a half-block off Northwest Seventh Street, it was little more than a flop — not even good enough for whores and their johns — surrounded by a neighborhood of closed eyes and silent tongues. Just what Jimmy Quintana needed for this job.
He and Raúl pulled up in front. No other cars in sight. A dim streetlamp down on the corner and the vertical neon sign in front of the hotel were the only sources of light, and they weren't much. The moon was blacked out by low clouds moving in from the Keys, assuring a late-night rain. They checked their weapons — semi-automatic pistols — jacking a round into the chamber and affixing silencers to their barrels. Their eyes met, only briefly, but long enough to cement the bond between them and validate the act they were about to commit. They got out of their car into the steamy night.
Inside, the night clerk dozed behind an ancient front desk. Cigarette smoke of sixty years lingered in the air, staining the off-white walls and choking what life was left out of the dusty armchair and threadbare rug in the small lobby.
Wilfredo was in room ten, according to the snitch. The men tiptoed up the sagging stairs to the second story, where room ten greeted them right away. Jimmy took up position by the wall nearest the doorknob and motioned Raúl to the opposite side of the door. They drew their guns. Jimmy turned the knob slowly and soundlessly.
Locked.
He knocked on the door, a couple of light, unthreatening taps. No answer. More taps, more silence. He wiped sweat from his eyelids.
He nodded to Raúl, who pulled two long, pointed instruments from the pocket of his shirt. Inserting them into the lock, Raúl skillfully twisted them and jiggled them until he heard a soft click. He withdrew the picks and shoved the door open.
They rushed in, guns flashing. In the semi-darkness, they quickly scanned the small room. No one, no opposition. A slim shaft of light slipped in through the room's only window from a warehouse building's security bulb in the adjacent lot off the alley behind the hotel. Jimmy eased the door almost all the way shut. The men adjusted their eyes and took stock.
Your basic shabby room. Twin bed in the corner on a metal frame, messed up sheets, no case on the sweat-stained pillow. Rickety chair against the wall next to a card table. Low-rise veneer dresser with two drawers, a small lamp and a fan sitting on top. Sink on the opposite wall with a metal prison-style mirror. A worn little suitcase lay flat under the bed. Jimmy pulled it out. Only old clothes and shaving stuff. Regalia of a guy on the move, laying low. Air conditioning: forget about it.
Jimmy took a seat in the chair.
"What do we do now?" Raúl asked. He was short, some even called him "Tiny", but not to his face. Jimmy knew Raúl was a lot tougher than he looked, fearless, and a good man to have along on jobs like this one. From Cuban heritage, he grew up on the hard streets of East Hialeah.
Jimmy grew up in another part of Hialeah, from the same Cuban heritage, learning the ways of crime at an early age. His grandfather had run brothels in Havana and his father had learned the business from boyhood. When they came to Miami, they did what they knew best, and Jimmy grew up in whorehouses. Eventually, he branched
out into drugs like everyone else, because that was where the real money was. Now, at thirty, he had entrenched himself in Hialeah as the number two man and top crew chief in Maxie Méndez's organization. He looked at Raúl.
"We wait," he said. The air hung heavy in the close, humid room. A trail of sweat started down Jimmy's forehead into his eye and onto his cheek. He wiped it with his shirtsleeve.
Raúl got up, saying, "I'll get the door." He went to close it.
Jimmy noted the half-open door. And remembered he'd closed it nearly shut.
"Raúl! No! No!"
Two shots rang out from the hallway. Raúl was blown backward across the room, red splotches on his chest squirting blood. Jimmy pulled his weapon into firing position and ran to the doorway.
He caught sight of a T-shirted figure leaping down the last five or six steps and toward the door of the hotel. Jimmy flew down the stairs past the now-roused desk clerk and across the lobby. Out the front door into the empty night. He looked in both directions and saw no movement. Heard no sounds other than the distant hum of activity trying to be heard all the way from Northwest Seventh Street. He stayed absolutely still, even stopped breathing, to listen for something, anything, a tell as to where that fucking Wilfredo was hiding.
Across the street was a small parking lot in front of a boarded-up storefront. Jimmy ran over to the lot and behind the building. Only trash and neglect back here, and big doses of both. Crouching in the weeds, he cast quick glances all around him. Nothing but darkness. He could only identify the heavy stench of human shit from somewhere in the immediate vicinity.
The rain from the Keys made its appearance, big wet drops plopping on Jimmy's head and all around him. Within a minute, it would be pounding down from the sky. He dropped his gun to his side and thought about Raúl and his death on this silent night.
They'd known each other since third grade at Hialeah Elementary and they'd always had each other's back. Always. Jimmy recalled that big scrape he found himself in back in '03 when those punks from Coral Way ventured up into Hialeah. Four of them, all with shanks, and they had Jimmy cornered out behind a bar. He was armed, too, but he knew he couldn't take them all. He was mentally ready to go down when Raúl ventured out of the bar and appeared behind the punks. He dropped two of them right away with a .38. The third wheeled around and cut him on his gun hand and the two struggled. That gave Jimmy the opening to take out the remaining one himself. Raúl prevailed over his opponent, and he and Jimmy went back inside and got drunk.
But now, Jimmy couldn't even go back for him. The cruisers would be here any minute and he couldn't be seen carrying a corpse out of the hotel. Raúl's mother would have to claim him later on.
As for Wilfredo, that prick would turn up sooner or later. Tonight he got lucky. But just like in poker, luck only lasts for so long.
2
Jimmy
Hialeah, Florida
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
3:05 AM
JIMMY STEWED ABOUT RAUL ALL THE WAY HOME. As he pulled up to his house in the pouring rain, tears had found their way out onto his face. He dabbed at them with a handkerchief and went in through the garage into the kitchen. Nora was still up.
She saw his wet eyes, knew from the reddening it wasn't the rain. "What is it, honey? What's wrong? Are you okay?"
He dropped soaking wet into a chair at the dinette table, shoulders slumped, head straight into his hands. "Yeah, I-I'm all right. But … but Raúl …"
"Oh, no! Not … don't tell me …"
He nodded. "Took … took two shots in the chest. He's gone. I had to leave him there. Fuck me!"
"My God, Jimmy! What happened? Who did it?"
He wiped his eyes and ran it all down for her. There were no secrets between them. Nora had full knowledge of Jimmy's activities, or a lot of them, anyway. She had always insisted on it. She didn't want to be one of these wives who thought her husband was a real estate salesman when the FBI came busting in with their blue windbreakers and a warrant.
She came from a decent family, hard-working Cuban exiles who came to the United States with the clothes on their backs and never had much more than that, but managed to raise their family in a loving home in East Hialeah. She graduated from high school with decent grades and after a brief tenure working in a supermarket, she met and married Jimmy Quintana. He had told her right away what he did for a living and she didn't flinch.
"One night I may not come home," he had said after one of their early dates. "I mean permanently. My job is dangerous."
"I don't care," she said.
"You're willing to take that risk?"
She gave him a slow nod while looking him straight in the eye, and he knew he had found the love of his life.
Eventually, Nora insinuated her way into Jimmy's work. His front business was Café Q-Bano, a little Cuban restaurant just off West 49th Street. She organized his books into readable fashion, then developed a second set of books to cover the money that he laundered through the restaurant. Now, she was his full-time bookkeeper and trusted adviser, as well as sometimes-manager of Café Q-Bano.
He got up from the dinette table and went over and poured himself a stiff shot of rum. He took a healthy pull.
"That fucking Wilfredo is going to pay, I swear," he said. He ran a hand through his dark hair.
Nora came to him and standing behind him, put her arms around his broad chest. She was a big woman, about five-eight, only a couple of inches shorter than Jimmy, and there was meat on her bones, but all of it in perfect proportion. Her medium-brown hair, stylishly cut, framed a face of pale skin, paler than most Cuban women.
"You'll make him pay, honey," she whispered.
Another sip of the rum. "I know. We'll find him." The rum seemed to relax him. "What's happening at the restaurant tomorrow?"
She led him back to the dinette table and moved her chair next to his. They both sat and put an arm around his shoulders. "Nothing special," she said. "But there is something we need to talk about."
He gave her a wary look. "What is it?"
"It can wait till tomorrow. You've had a rough night."
"Come on, querida. What is it?"
Her iPad lay on the table and she clicked it on, navigating to a particular page with a lot of numbers on it.
"We're making a lot of money at the restaurant," she said, gesturing at the numbers. "Without even factoring in all your other income."
"So? That's good news, right?"
"Well, yes. Good news, up to a point. Your other income is way up, too."
Jimmy nodded. By "other income", he knew she meant drugs. Like every self-respecting drug dealer in Miami, he had carved out a piece of the lucrative cocaine trade for himself — distribution, mostly. Maxie still had the lion's share of the business, but Jimmy's crumbs added up to pretty big money.
Very recently, however, heroin had made inroads into the local drug scene. Mexican brown along with black tar. Especially the black tar. Mexico was just a few hundred miles away, as opposed to ten thousand miles to Asia, and small planes and boats traversed the Gulf every day carrying their deadly cargo. The Feds, meanwhile, were still wrapped up in trying to stop coke coming in from Colombia.
She said, "Take your heroin, for example. That black tar. You can get it cheaper and faster than the China white, right?"
"Right."
"And it delivers the same kick, right?"
"Right."
"Retails for about $15-$20 for one of those little balloon bags that hold, like, one-tenth of a gram? Same punch as Oxycontin, but one Oxy pill costs $40. Now which one do you think those users are gonna want?"
"Yeah," Jimmy said. "Heroin is on the rise down here, no doubt about it. Some of the old-timers tell me it's gonna be even better than it was back in the seventies when heroin ruled the world."
Nora said, "And you're in position to cash in on it. Get Maxie into it in a big way and there'll be plenty of dough to go around. It'll be like having a license to print
money with those presses running twenty-four seven."
He kissed her. "You're just full of good news tonight, aren't you." He was almost forgetting about Raúl. Almost.
She said, "Again, up to a point." She turned the iPad around to face him directly, showing him graphs shooting upward. "Your income is getting to the stage where you can't run it all through the restaurant."
"Why not?"
"Because," she said, "you can't take a hundred thousand dollars a day to the bank, claiming it was restaurant income. No Cuban restaurant does that kind of business."
"A hundred grand a day! Jesus! Is that what we're doing?"
"No, not yet. But we're headed in that direction. We'll be there before too long."
"Well … I'll open another restaurant," he said.
She shook her head. "That's not going to get it. You can't even do it with a chain of restaurants. Or a chain of strip clubs. Listen, when you're running that much cash through brick and mortar laundries, places people can see and point to, pretty soon the Feds are going to take notice. Before you know it, you'll be up to your ass in IRS audits and RICO investigations."
"So what do we do?"
Her body turned to face his. "There's this girl I know. I grew up with her in Hialeah. She launders cash for all the big cartel people in Colombia and all the major dealers here in the Miami area. Let me give her a call. Maybe she'll take us on."
"You think so?"
Nora said, "I don't know for sure. I know she washes millions and millions for the big boys. We may be too small time for her, but I can ask her. She might do it. You know, for old times' sake."
"The money," he said. "Will it be safe?"
"A lot safer than it is around here with you stashing it under floorboards and inside walls. Let me call her, honey."
"What does she do with it?" This was an area Jimmy never gave any thought to.
"She launders it, honey. You know. She turns it from dirty drug cash to clean money in the bank. Clean money just like everyone else has."
"How does she do it?" He was having trouble getting a grasp of the concept.
