Cash Landing

by James Grippando

  He said good-bye and hung up before her reply. “Love you, too,” she said to no one.

  She immediately dialed her mother. Jeffrey answered.

  “Is Mom home?” she asked. “I want to come over for a while.”

  “Yeah, she’s here. What time are you coming?”

  “It could be an hour. I have to take the bus.”

  “No, I’ll pick you up.”

  “With what car?”

  “Yours. It’s in our garage.”

  “Ruban said the engine is shot.”

  “That’s bullshit. He told me the same thing so I wouldn’t drive it. There’s nothing wrong with the engine. I’ve been driving it all day.”

  Savannah hesitated, not sure what to say. “Why would he swap cars?”

  “I don’t know. Ask him.”

  Another lie. Best to keep Jeffrey out of this. “I will.”

  You want me to pick you up or not?”

  “Can you come get me now?”

  “Sure. Be there in ten minutes.”

  The call ended, and Savannah laid the phone on the counter, her mind awhirl. The lies and half-truths were starting to pile up, and the best spin she could put on it was that Ruban was trying to protect her and keep her from worrying. The spin was getting harder to swallow.

  She walked to the end of the kitchen counter, where her daycare satchel lay. Tomorrow’s lesson plan was inside: group time, story time, small-group activities. Tucked beside it was another folder, which contained copies of the court records that the DCF social worker had given her. Savannah glanced over the papers once more, then dialed Betty’s home number.

  “I’m so sorry to call you at home.”

  “Not at all,” said Betty. “I said you could call me whenever, and I meant it.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” said Savannah. “I was looking over the records you gave me. I notice that the victim’s name is blocked out.”

  “Yes. Her identity was sealed by court order. That’s not the typical situation in domestic-violence cases, but it’s not unheard of.”

  “Ruban told me her first name is Mindy. Is there any way to find out her last name?”

  “Why don’t you just ask your husband?”

  “I could do that,” she said, drawing a breath. “But I don’t want him to know that I’m looking into this.”

  “Ah, I see. Savannah, are you having some difficulties?”

  “No. Nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s like I told you earlier, I’m concerned about you.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “Okay. I won’t pry. But why do you want to know her name?”

  Savannah swallowed hard. Perhaps Ruban would have a perfectly good explanation for the little lie about the car engine, and she could probably forgive him for that. But if there were still more lies, bigger lies, she wasn’t so sure. “I want to talk to Mindy,” said Savannah. “I want to know the truth about her and Ruban.”

  There was silence on the line. Then Betty answered. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Savannah took one more look at the docket sheet in the case of State of Florida v. Karl Betancourt, her finger running over the printed black bars that obscured the victim’s name.

  “Thank you,” said Savannah. “Thank you very much.”

  Chapter 36

  The call from Savannah left Ruban’s brain throbbing. A stabbing pain behind his right eye forced him to dim the lights and sit quietly at his desk for a minute. It was his classic stress headache.

  He was alone in the cramped office at Café Ruban, which wasn’t much of an office at all. There was no window. The constant clatter of the kitchen came right through the walls. The only way to open the closet door was to pick up and move the printer and the fax machine. The filing cabinets were somewhere behind thirty-pound bags of rice, canned chicken stock, and the overflow of other dry goods from the stockroom.

  Ruban tucked his cell into his pocket, leaned back in his squeaky desk chair, and closed his eyes, willing the headache away. It was only getting worse.

  Lies. More lies. There were almost too many to keep track of.

  He’d come so close to telling Savannah the truth about the heist, even closer than on the night he’d climbed into their bed with the smell of money on his hands and lied for the first time. He wasn’t sure when he’d conjured up the story that Pinky was threatening to blackmail him if they went to the police—that Pinky had the power to put Ruban away for thirty years, and that Savannah just needed to stand by her man and all would work out. Such a great lie. It almost felt like the truth. If it was in fact Pinky who’d killed Marco and Octavio, it wouldn’t be long before Ruban was in his crosshairs. The lie he’d told Savannah wasn’t all that far from the truth.

  So why is my head pounding?

  There was a knock at the door, and his assistant manager stuck her head into the room. “Our sous-chef is threatening to walk out again. I’ve had it with him. You need to deal with this.”

  Ruban’s head chef had the night off, leaving the sous-chef in charge. “I’ll be there in two minutes,” he said.

  “Okay, but it’s getting pretty intense. And there are lots of knives in that kitchen.”

  She was only half kidding, but Ruban seemed to recall that an argument at a fine restaurant in Coral Gables had been settled in that very fashion. The thought triggered a moment of panic. Ruban unlocked the desk drawer and opened it. To his relief, the gun was still there—no armed lunatic in the kitchen.

  Ruban had always kept a gun at the restaurant, just in case, but Savannah’s instincts had been correct. After the hit-and-run, he’d gone to his cabinet at home and swapped out the revolver for a pistol with more firepower. Ruban wasn’t eager to use it. In fact, he was determined to avoid a confrontation with Pinky, at least until the immediate shock and anger over the hit-and-run subsided. He couldn’t say what he would do if he met up with Pinky in his current frame of mind. Would he feel the impulse to avenge his friend’s death? Did he even have the capacity to act on it? He didn’t want to find out. If he didn’t hunt Pinky down, he couldn’t self-destruct. But if Pinky came looking for him . . .

  Can’t let it come to that.

  No one—not Pinky or Jeffrey, and definitely not Savannah—knew of the friendship. He and Octavio had lost touch years earlier. In early summer, Octavio had reached out to him, a blast from the past. He’d heard on the street that Ruban had a criminal record and thought he might be up for something big. They’d met at a bar after work to talk it over. “It’s why we got on that shitty raft and came here,” he’d told Ruban with that wry smile. “To be millionaires, right, bro?” The plan was finalized by the Fourth of July weekend, which was the last time Ruban and Octavio had spoken or met in person. Their strategy to prevent law enforcement from connecting the dots between two boyhood friends from Cuba was ironclad: No contact the four months before the heist, and none for six months after it. There were only two exceptions. The phone call on the disposable cell from the MIA warehouse, after which Octavio would crush the phone to bits and flush it down the toilet. And the face-to-homeless-face exchange at Bird Road.

  There was no contingency plan for the death of one of them.

  It killed Ruban that he couldn’t even go to the memorial service. A message from Octavio’s new girlfriend had come to him through the restaurant’s Facebook page that afternoon. Ruban didn’t know Jasmine. She and Octavio had met during the pre-heist blackout. Ruban couldn’t even drop a note to express his condolences. He couldn’t do anything that linked him to Octavio, especially with Eyewitness News pegging him as the possible insider in the airport heist.

  The door opened. It was his assistant manager again. Ruban shut the desk drawer before she could catch a glimpse of the gun.

  “Ruban, I’m serious. I need you.”

  He locked the drawer. Only he had the key. “Coming.”

  They went straight to the kitchen, where one angry sous-chef was shouting obsce
nities at his “incompetent and disrespectful” line cooks. Ruban pulled him aside, but the rant continued. They stepped out into the alley for some fresh air. A cigarette seemed to calm him. Ruban pretended to listen as the sous-chef got everything off his chest. As in most kitchens, the problem was egos. At Café Ruban, things seemed to come to a head whenever Chef Claudia took a night off and the sous-chef took over.

  “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” Ruban said a dozen times.

  The chef crushed out his cigarette and, after a little more stroking from Ruban, returned to the kitchen. Ruban went back inside to check on the dining room. It was packed, which made him smile. So was the bar, which made his smile even wider. Profits surged when customers tipped back cocktails while waiting for a table. Ruban went down the line and thanked each customer for waiting. It was the time of year for more tourists than locals. Tonight, there were no familiar faces, save one: the woman sitting alone at the end of the bar, who managed to wipe the smile from Ruban’s face.

  “Hello, Ruban.” It was Edith Baird. She’d put on lipstick and brushed her hair, but Ruban recognized the same sundress from their talk in her trailer.

  He moved closer so none of the guests at the bar would overhear. “What are you doing here?” he asked through clenched teeth.

  “That peek inside your backpack led me to believe you must be doing well. I wanted to stop by and see how well.”

  “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  “I haven’t paid for my martini.”

  “I got it,” he said.

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  She followed him out of the bar, and he led her to the rear exit. He was in the alley again, and they were standing exactly where the sous-chef had crushed out his cigarette a few minutes earlier.

  “Don’t ever come here again,” said Ruban.

  “Not very hospitable of you. This was a long drive for me.”

  “I don’t want you contacting me. I’ll get in touch with you. That’s the rule.”

  “All these things are negotiable.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not negotiable. Got it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I got it.”

  “Good. Did you test out the hundred-dollar bill I gave you?”

  “Yup. Went to Macy’s this afternoon. No problems. It’s the real deal.”

  “There’s more where that came from.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “Because it’s going to take a lot more.”

  Ruban hesitated. He recognized that sly expression on her face, the old Edith. “You mean more than a hundred thou?”

  She sighed heavily, then turned on the phony southern accent that she liked to use. It had always annoyed Ruban. “You know, I’m very, very fond of Kyla. Now, I could see my way clear to let her stay with her daddy. But it’s just going to break my heart to say good-bye to her.”

  “How much do you want?”

  Another sigh. “Oh, my. How does a person put a price on such things? Not seeing her sweet face every morning. No more kisses good night.”

  “Edith,” he said flatly. “How much do you fucking want?”

  “Not a penny less than two-fifty,” she said, the accent suddenly gone. The old Edith was in her negotiating mode.

  “I’ll give you one twenty-five.”

  “That’s an insult.”

  “I’m off at midnight,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  “I’m in bed by then, sweetheart. Come by the trailer on Thursday. Bring your wallet.”

  He wanted to tell her exactly how he felt, but he held his tongue. His trail of lies to Savannah was like bile in his throat, and he had a sickening sense that she was beginning to see through it. No explanations could remove all of Savannah’s doubts. But Kyla might just make them go away.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

  Chapter 37

  Andie was hunting for a parking space, which was a form of extreme sport on Miami Beach, something that could quickly turn as violent as your average African safari. The trick was to target an unsuspecting gazelle walking along the sidewalk with her car keys in hand, stalk her at a steady and patient three m.p.h. all the way to her parked car, and then pounce on the opening as she pulls away. Andie found her mark and staked her claim in front of Dylan’s Candy Bar.

  Dylan’s is at the geographic heart of Lincoln Road Mall, a pedestrian-only, eight-block stretch of open-air shopping and dining. The mall was loaded with places like Dylan’s, celebrity-owned shops that sightseeing guides on double-decker buses liked to point out to tourists. “The store on your left with the giant lollipops in the window is owned by Ralph Lauren’s daughter . . .” Andie crossed Meridian Avenue and found an open café table beneath the palm trees outside the coffee shop.

  The report from the FBI’s body-mapping expert had actually been good, although the phone conference had taken much longer than necessary. Scientists loved to explain their methodologies, and Dr. Vincent was no exception. “Contrary to that old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words,” he’d told them, “images do not speak for themselves: they require interpretation. I applied several accepted methods of photo-anthropometry, morphological analysis to your images, including the overlaying of two similar-size images, known as photographic superimposition; the rapid transition between two images, or the ‘blink technique’; and the gradual transformation of one image into another, known as ‘swipes.’” Five minutes later, they were at the bottom line: “I can say to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that the man in Agent Henning’s photographs is the same man in the CCTV video from the warehouse.”

  It was a small victory for Andie, and her unit chief was true to his word: surveillance on Craig Perez, a/k/a Pinky, was an approved line item in the operational budget. There was just one problem: Pinky had vanished. He’d checked out of the motel where Andie had found him over the weekend. According to the postman, he hadn’t picked up the mail at his apartment in almost three weeks. He had no cell-phone account and was presumably using a disposable. Andie had one lead to follow. It didn’t involve another trip to Night Moves, but it did require a meeting between “Celia,” Andie’s undercover persona, and Priscilla.

  “Good to see you again, sweetie,” Priscilla said as she pulled up a chair at Andie’s table.

  She looked surprisingly suburban-like to Andie, nothing particularly sexy about her cotton blouse and khaki shorts, her makeup not overdone. Apparently she saved her “gotta have it right now” message for the club. Andie was second-guessing her own choice of red lipstick and a tight skirt for Celia. They ordered a couple of decafs from the waitress, and Priscilla lit a cigarette.

  “I was hoping you’d follow up,” she said with a puff of smoke.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No,” she said, then smiled. “Maybe a little. The club really is in a state of flux.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Jorge’s trying to sell it.”

  Jorge Calderón, the owner of the chop shop. He was on Andie’s list, but Celia had to be very discreet if she was going to make this about him as well as Pinky. “Why would he want to sell it?”

  “I don’t know. Why? You want to buy it?”

  Andie could have joked about the toxic site and EPA issues, the things that must have spilled on those floors. She let it go. “I don’t think I could afford it.”

  The waitress brought their decafs and left. Priscilla tasted hers and said, “You’ll never guess who wants to buy it.”

  “Who?”

  “Pinky.”

  Andie almost dropped her cup. She’d worked out a strategy in advance to turn the conversation in this direction, but she was more than happy to run with a gimme. “Is Pinky rich?”

  “I didn’t think so. Apparently I was wrong.”

  Two men took the table next to them. Their dogs immediately drew interest from passersby, and Andie couldn’t help overhearing that the two-hundred-pound ma
stiff was “Laurel,” and the skinny Thai Ridgeback was “Hardy.” She didn’t spoil the magic by telling them that they had it backward.

  “So, you want to join Night Moves?” asked Priscilla.

  “Uhm . . .”

  It was the classic undercover challenge: how to appear interested in sex without ever actually having it. “Here’s the problem,” said Andie. “My boyfriend is a definite no-go on the club.”

  “Really? I heard he was totally into the place.”

  Sounds like Sosa. “He was all for him having sex with other women. He’s not at all into me having sex with other men.”

  “Yeah, very common problem,” said Priscilla. “You think you could change his mind?”

  “Never.”

  “Too bad. Maybe you should find a new boyfriend.”

  Andie suddenly imagined herself walking into Night Moves with Barbara Littleford’s poor cousin, the attorney. It was a bizarre thought, and she shook it off. “I had another plan in mind.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I was hoping we could work out something a little less formal than a club membership.”

  “You looking for something specific, sweetie?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Something in an extra large.”

  “You naughty girl,” Priscilla said, smiling. “You mean Pinky?”

  “I do,” said Andie. “I really want to meet this Pinky.”

  Chapter 38

  Ten a.m. Ruban awoke alone in their bed.

  It felt good to sleep late, no need to get up and take Savannah to work, but the way it had come about bothered him. Savannah had called the restaurant around eleven p.m. to ask how late he was planning to work.

  “Definitely after midnight,” he’d told her.

  “I’m tired, and I have to be at the daycare center at seven. I’ll just sleep here at Mom’s house tonight.”

  “Okay. I’ll pick you up around six-thirty and take you to work.”

  “Don’t worry. Jeffrey will drive me. He can use our car. Which is sitting in my mother’s garage and running fine, no engine trouble.”

  A lie. A trap. A quick and light explanation, no need to panic. “Ah, busted.”