He let the cab idle for another minute, rolling it around, then dug out his cell and called Nelson Mendoza back.
“Who’s working tonight?”
Nelson gave him three names.
“Send Ignacio to the Riviera Motel,” said Snake.
“Yeah? Why him?”
“Tell Ignacio his fare will be standing out in the parking lot. Honk if he doesn’t see him. Keep honking till he shows his face.”
“It’s after midnight, man. That’s the Gables, they throw people in jail for causing a disturbance.”
“I know what time it is.”
“What’s this about, Snake?”
“Just do it, Nelson.”
“I don’t know about this. This doesn’t feel right.”
“Hey, Nelson, let me ask you something.”
Nelson was silent.
“You ever meet my old man?”
“Your old man? You mean Mr. King?”
“The real one. Jorge Morales.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my old man. You ever meet him, see his picture, read about him in the paper, see him on TV, anything?”
“Jesus, Snake. All of a sudden you want to start with the heart-to-heart?”
Snake gave him a few seconds of silence, then asked again: “You grew up in Miami, Nelson. I’m asking you if you happened to hear about my old man, read about him, anything like that. Form an impression of him? Jorge Morales.”
Nelson sighed.
“An impression? I don’t know. I was like fifteen. It was a big fucking deal in the newspapers and the radio, I remember that much, your sister and mother and old man getting whacked by Fidel.”
“No impression?”
“Whatta you got in mind?”
“Like did he come across as a romantic hero? The kind of man who’d attract a certain sort of sappy woman?”
“Man, Snake, what’ve you been shooting up?”
“Call Ignacio,” Snake said. “Give him the Riviera. Make it a rush job.”
Pauline could’ve lived anywhere in town, trendy South Beach, the Gables, Grove, one of the towers on Bayshore, out on Key Biscayne, but she chose Belle Meade Island, off Biscayne at Seventy-sixth Street. A venerable fifties community, two-story Mediterranean homes. Staid, stuffy. She had a pool, a view of the bay. Five minutes from work. And what she liked best, her neighborhood rode the edge of Little Haiti. Which gave her a Third World buzz every day she drove to work through all that teeming hardship.
She was in her upstairs office, logged on to the Agency database, violating the hell out of Executive Order 12333, which expressly prohibited collecting intelligence information directed against U.S. citizens. Pauline was trying to pull up something on this Thorn character but was getting nowhere. A man with one name was proving to be impossible.
Scanning birth certificates, property ownership, brushes with law enforcement, credit rating, Social Security. Anyone with first or last or middle name of Thorn. Getting hits dozens of pages long, but having no way to narrow her search. Nothing to go on. Nothing to give her an idea how to approach this guy who was holding the photo for reasons known only to himself. What’d he want, for christsakes?
A Thorn in the lion’s paw.
The lion being Hadley S. Waters. She’d gotten four phone calls from the Big Cheese following up his first one. Hadley was ready to call in a commando team, invoke national security, the Worldwide Attack Matrix, and start sterilizing the situation. He sounded serious. But she persuaded him to hold off, she was managing fine. Less troops, better control. Then an hour later he’s back on the phone and she had to convince him again.
Fact was, things didn’t feel under control. The porn-shop fiasco. An ex-cop killed and his daughter, a crime-scene tech, shot up. Local Miami PD making a big deal. Turning their best homicide guys loose on it. The press was in full roar. Then just a while ago she learned of disaster number two at the hospital, Runyon bungling an attempt on the cop woman’s life. She escapes, and runs off with this same Thorn character.
Pauline was trying to step back, stay calm. Just wait for Runyon to get it right. He’d once been the Agency’s go-to man. Drop him anywhere in the world with just the name of his target and the job was as good as done. But this time she was starting to feel twitchy.
Looking out her window at the pool, the patio, the dark water beyond. Having another sip of the chardonnay that was warm now. Almost finished the bottle since supper. Not like her. Usually so cool. Covert operations on the verge of exposure, she’d seen it a hundred times. But this was something else. This was a goddamn tectonic plate buckling beneath her world.
She made a list, just a whim. Who she’d have to snuff to end this. Just to soothe her nerves. Names of the soon-to-be dead.
Stanton King, number one. He’d be easy, a man nobody would miss. His son Snake next. For sure, Lola. Unbalanced bitch. An entire family of loose cannons. Then there was Runyon. He’d have to go. This was too much inside information for even Runyon, a true-blue patriot. Too much gold for one person to have in his piggy bank. A year from now he could scoop it out, try to cash in. No, Runyon was on the list for sure. And she’d have to put Thorn’s lights out. Pull the switch on the Collins woman, the injured cop. There was another guy in the mix, a black PI named Sugarman. He’d have to go. What was that? Seven in all.
Still one shy of the Morales murders. Take them off the table, one by one. She could do it. She still had the cojones. She could manage it in a day, two at most. Provided they didn’t run, didn’t hide. That would draw it out but wouldn’t make it impossible.
Somebody might go squealing to the cops. Yeah, now that would be a complication. She had people inside Miami PD, people at Metro-Dade she trusted. She was working that angle already, putting word out in case the Collins woman checked in with her superiors at work. She even had a slime-ball she was tight with inside the local FBI field office if it got to that point.
Hadley Waters would okay anything she asked. He’d turn his eyes. Give support. That is, if she bothered to ask. But it would be far better to present it as a done deal. Keep Hadley’s hands clean. Plausible deniability. He’d appreciate the hell out of that. It was leverage she could use later on. If he won the nomination, his seat at the CIA would be vacant. Who else could do that job as well as she could? First female director, that had a nice ring.
So that was it. Take all seven out, be done with it. Along the way the photo was bound to pop up. Burn that, get the Southwoods papers from King, burn those. If Stanton didn’t hand them over, torture him, torture Lola in front of him. He’d cave.
Of course, she’d have to wait for Runyon or Stanton King to check in again to find out everyone’s location. Play along with them a little longer. But once she knew where everyone was hiding out, she could start.
She looked at her list of names. It was just a game she was playing, mental chess.
She looked out the window at the pool, a blue shimmer in the darkness.
But the more she imagined it, the more she liked. Get involved, bull by the horns. It got her blood kicking. The way she used to feel every minute of every day, before she got old and started dialing back.
Yeah, why not? Seven scalps. Step way outside protocol. Out beyond the ozone. When the thing was done, Hadley would be forever grateful. Damn, the more she thought about it, the more her blood cooked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thorn was at the motel vending machine, feeding in quarters for granola bars and a single bag of pork rinds for Sugarman. Two cans of Coke. A freshly delivered Miami Herald from the bin.
While he stood with his food and newspaper, a current of air flooded the breezeway, carrying scents of hot pavement and chlorine from the motel pool and the aroma of warm doughnuts and coffee. It was still a couple of hours till sunrise, but Thorn could see the night clerk setting out a small breakfast in the lobby. He was tempted to go inside and help himself, but he expected his photograph might
be on the TV by now, or somewhere in the morning paper, a suspect in the Porn Shop Massacre, or at least a drawing of his likeness, so for now the Coke and granola bars would have to do.
Back in the room Sugar was at the dinette table, studying the Xeroxed pages. He looked up when Thorn came in, and leaned back in the chair.
“Now we got three.”
“Three?”
Thorn set the food on the table, popped open a Coke, and took a hit.
“You didn’t look at these pages?”
“I scanned them,” Thorn said. “Printed out everything around those dates. I haven’t been over it in detail, no.”
Sugar slid the boxing photo across the table and tapped the slender man with the pencil mustache who sat beside the thin blond woman.
“So?”
He handed Thorn one of the Xeroxed newspaper pages.
The photograph had appeared on the second page of the lead article the morning after the massacre. The man Snake had hacked to death with his father’s machete was named Humberto Berasategui. He ran his own plumbing firm in Miami. The grainy newspaper shot seemed to be a passport photo in which the man was wearing a dark suit and black tie. Same narrow mustache, same wavy black hair and skinny face.
“These people at the fight are the raiding party,” Thorn said. “Having a relaxing evening’s entertainment before they go murder eight people.”
“Starting to look that way.”
“No wonder Snake and Carlos want this thing. It’s proof of who killed their parents.”
“Don’t know how much proof it is,” Sugarman said. “Far as I can see, it’s still just a photograph of a bunch of people. Mayor, mobster, plumber. There’s nothing here that actually proves anything. Nothing says these people were in league, conspiring to do anything illegal. The plumber, yeah, it turns out he was one of the killers, but just because he’s sitting next to these people, you know, it’s not evidence of anything more than he was at the fight, sitting in the same row with some other people. Couldn’t take it into court.”
Thorn sat down and picked up the photo and tilted it toward the lamp.
“Maybe I’m playing tricks on myself.”
“What?”
“The guy in Alexandra’s hospital room, the one trying to strangle her.”
Thorn pointed at the chunky man sitting between Stanton King and Meyer Lansky.
“You’re shitting me.”
“I didn’t get a great look at the guy. It was dark, and our scuffle was done in thirty seconds. He’s forty years older. But it’s the same build. Same blocky head. Meaty hands. I didn’t see any diamond, but it could’ve been there. He had on latex gloves.”
Thorn fingered the bruise on his cheekbone. Even his stomach muscles had begun to ache. The guy must be near seventy, but he had the punch of a heavyweight in his prime.
“Give Alex a look at the guy. See what she says.”
Thorn leaned over to the venetian blinds and slid one slat up to see outside. He’d found a perfect angle to view the base of the stairway, the only way up to the second floor. If Snake got the message from his dispatcher and showed up, he’d have to pass that way going to room 212. It wasn’t much of a ruse, but it would have to do.
“You watch for Snake, okay?”
“You think the guy’s that stupid?”
“I think he wants this photo real bad. Stupid or not, he’ll show.”
Thorn picked up the photograph, walked to the bedroom door, opened it, and stuck his head inside. Alexandra’s breathing was hoarse but regular. He stood for a moment in the doorway, then crossed the room and went to the edge of the bed and bent over and touched her lightly. Her forehead was damp and warm, and the scuffs on her neck were swollen and bruised. But she was alive. Very much alive.
He eased down onto the bed and took her free hand in his.
It lay there for a moment, then came to life.
She blinked, took a few seconds to examine her surroundings. The cast on her left shoulder and upper arm seemed as heavy as a slab of concrete. She looked at him and withdrew her hand from his grip.
“Where am I?”
“A motel on Dixie Highway.”
“Why?”
“Somebody tried to kill you. I got there in time, carried you out. You were pretty groggy, so I guess you don’t remember.”
“His name is Runyon,” Alex said in a raspy voice. “I remember that.”
“The man who attacked you? You know his name?”
“He murdered a nurse right in front of me.”
“I saw her body,” Thorn said. “Nothing I could do for her.”
“That was Patty. She recognized the guy, called him Runyon. He used to have a TV show.”
“Don’t talk,” Thorn said. “You’re weak.”
“He’s one of the guys who took the fall for the illegal war in Central America,” she said. “One of those fanatics.”
“Okay.” Thorn wasn’t sure which illegal war she meant.
“Where’s Buck?”
“At an animal clinic. They’re taking good care of him. He’ll be fine.”
Her eyes held his for a moment, then slid away.
“I need you to look at this.”
He held out the photo and she turned her attention to it. With her good hand she rubbed the focus back into her eyes and took the photo from him.
“This is why Dad died?”
Thorn said nothing. She held it for a long while, shaking her head.
“Man with the diamond ring. Third row. Chunky. Recognize him?”
Alex handed the photo back.
“Runyon,” she said. “Edward Runyon.”
“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t a hundred percent.”
“What is this, Thorn? What the hell is this?”
“Has something to do with a mass murder that took place forty years ago in Miami. A Cuban family was killed: husband, wife, their fourteen-year-old daughter. Five other guys, too. Anti-Castro militia types.”
“What does this have to do with us?”
“Lawton had this copy of the photo. The surviving sons of the murdered family came looking for it. More than that, I’d just be guessing.”
“A goddamn photograph.”
“I know, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“After I left for Tampa, was there a point when you could have just handed over the photograph to these creeps and walked away?”
“Yes, there was.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“If I had it over…”
“Yeah, if we all had it over.”
He stood up, watched her blink the mist from her eyes, then turned and went to the outer room and shut the door.
“She doing okay?”
“She’ll make it.”
Sugarman looked up.
“She’s beating up on you pretty bad, huh?”
“Nothing I don’t deserve.”
At the hospital after five minutes of CPR, he’d brought her back. Maybe she’d been on the brink of death and his quick reaction saved her life. Maybe she was just unconscious and would have revived on her own. He wasn’t in a credit-taking mood. He still felt a nasty clang in his hands from the aluminum baseball bat hammering Carlos Morales’s skull. Probably be feeling that clang for a long time.
After he’d roused her from unconsciousness, Alex was too fragile to walk. Thorn phoned Sugar in the parking garage, filled him in, and Sugar came sprinting. Thorn helped her into her gray slacks and pink sweater, and with Sugarman running interference, the two of them smuggled her down an inner stairwell without a brush with security or staff.
“So we got names for four of the five?” Sugarman said.
“The man sitting next to Lansky is Edward Runyon. Some kind of soldier of fortune or something.”
“Edward Runyon? You’re kidding.”
<
br /> “Not a night for kidding.”
“Christ, Edward Runyon is a world-class scumbag.”
“I heard,” Thorn said. “Some illegal war thing.”
“Way more than that. Bay of Pigs, that arms-for-hostages thing, Watergate, you name it. All kinds of down-and-dirty bullshit our boys in Washington tried to pull off, Runyon’s hovering around. One of those self-styled patriots, gun for hire, super-hawk. Few years back he had a dumb-ass TV show. Big talker. Bullying his guests. He’s the guy who’s missing his first two fingers. That’s his trademark.”
“What’s that mean?”
“End of his show every night, he used to say the same thing. ‘Don’t forget, peace comes with a price tag, and that price isn’t always pretty.’ Then he’d flash the two stumps, and say, ‘Peace.’ Real sweetheart.”
Thorn nodded, looking at the closed door of the bedroom.
“Guy’s certifiable,” Sugar said. “But there’s people who worship him.”
Thorn reached out, slid the Xeroxes over, and paged through them for a few minutes. He found the passage he recalled, reread it quickly.
“What if we can put Runyon at Morales’s house?”
“How?”
“Snake whacked off two fingers of one of the attackers. Fingers were left behind on the floor in one of the kids’ bedroom. Appeared to be first two digits of the right hand of a man who weighed somewhere around two hundred pounds.”
“That’s good. But it doesn’t exactly nail it down.”
“It does for me,” Thorn said.
“Jesus, your boy Snake is a charmer. Hacks one guy to death, chops two fingers off some hulk.”
“And he was only twelve years old at the time.”
“This is the guy you’re luring over to have a powwow with?”
“Snake and I have a strong common interest. I can give him four of the five people in this photograph. Two of the four were at his house that night. And he just might be able to give me an overview of what we got going on.”
“You killed his brother, for christsakes. He’s going to sit down with you and make nice?”
“I intend to give him that opportunity.”
Magic City Page 18
