Powder Burn (11 page)

“You mean, arrest him,” Meadows corrected.

“Shoot him, I said.”

“You can’t do that. You’re a cop.”

Nelson’s voice dropped to a feral whisper. “The law and justice are not synonymous,
amigo.
Not in this country, not in my country, not in any country. Never have been. Never will be.”

“That is absurd,” Meadows replied. “You can’t have one without the other.”

They argued for a time, a
pas de deux
in which naïveté and cynicism danced without embracing. Intellectually it was a draw. As a matter of reality it was Nelson who won.

“Will you testify against him,
amigo?”
Nelson asked suddenly. Meadows never saw the bait or the cruel hook it obscured.

“Against who?”

“Mono. He shot you and then tried to kill you here again tonight, although we’ll never prove that one. But he shot you, and you can identify him. That’s a crime, and justice demands he go to jail. But you’ll have to testify. Without that, no conviction, no jail, no justice.”

“Of course I will testify,” Meadows responded.

“Bueno.
Then I’ll arrest him. And I’ll get you all the police protection you want.”

Meadows nodded, and Nelson set the hook.

“And I’ll bet you anything that inside of six months you are as dead as that lizard out there. That is not conjecture.”

Meadows felt sick. He could taste the whiskey rising in his throat. He had trouble catching his breath. Sweat sprouted on his throat. His mind tried to reason, but what it saw was the tiny lizard, gaily jumping: jumping to eternity. It suddenly occurred to Meadows that Nelson’s horror stories had been more than boozy hyperbole. They carried a message to Meadows that he had not understood. With chilling clarity, Meadows saw that Nelson did not want to arrest Mono. And he accepted as conviction that to seek justice against Mono in a courtroom would be to sign his own death warrant. When Meadows spoke, it was a croak.

“Look, maybe is there some other way? I mean…”

Octavio Nelson peered at T. Christopher Meadows with the same kind of detached superiority he had shown the lizard. Then Nelson smiled wickedly, his eyes masked by the fire-red
O
of the cigar.

“Good thinking,
amigo.
Testifying is a good way to commit suicide.”

Meadows felt as though he had been reprieved: a coward allowed to leave the battlefront.

“What do I do?” he asked weakly. He sounded pathetic, even to himself.

“Leave. Get out of town.
Vete.”

“Just cut and run?”

“There is no other good choice. If you stay, you are a sitting duck. If you leave, time is on your side. You are not a major character in this show, and that puts time on your side. Sooner or later they’ll forget about you. Another loose end is bound to take your place. Big things are happening, and you won’t be worth killing long.”

It would be wrong to run. Meadows knew that. But every fiber screamed at him to go. Sandy and Jessica were dead, and nothing would bring them back. He himself had already suffered enough. It would be running away from a fight, true, so what? Fighting was senseless, and he hated it, avoided it except when there was no alternative—like that night in New York with the mugger. Here there was a clear choice. He could accomplish nothing by staying. And probably save his life by leaving.

“How long would I have to stay away?”

“A couple of weeks. It’s hard to say. Keep in touch.” Nelson ground his cigar into an ashtray and headed for the door.

Meadows felt awful.

“I still think I’m right. If you decide to arrest him, I’ll come back,” he ventured.

Nelson waved his hand airily.

“Don’t worry about it. Mono is one of those guys who ends up floating in the bay. He’ll never get his in a courtroom.”

A silence grew, became awkward.

“Do you want a ride to the airport?” Nelson asked.

“No, thanks. I’ll make a few calls to friends in New York, and I have the house to close up first. I’ll make the last flight.”

“Why don’t you go fishing? I love fishing,” Nelson said. He stared at the sleeping bay with black eyes that were a universe away. “We used to fish a lot in Cuba when I was a boy, me, my father and my brother. I’ll never forget the day my brother caught a big shark and was so scared he wouldn’t even cut the line. Just stood there, frozen, with the rod in his hand and the shark rapping the side of the boat.

“I never go fishing anymore; there’s never time. Now to get away, I dream instead. You know what I dream,
amigo?
I dream that one day I’m going to round up all the cocaine cowboys in this town and I’m going to take them to the Orange Bowl. It would be quite a crowd. Then I’d line them up, and I’d walk down the line like a platoon sergeant. To the guy at the front of the line I’d say,
‘Oye, José,
do you remember how your
compadre
Luis got shot so many times they couldn’t count the holes? Well, this
hijo de puta
who did that is named Carlos, and he’s here in this line with a big grin on his face.’

“Then I’d walk down along the line to Carlos, and I’d say, ‘
Hermano,
I never could understand why they made your buddy Paco suffer so bad. If they had to kill him, that’s one thing; we all understand that. But could you ever figure out why they cut him and made him scream toward the end? Did they have to jam the coke up his ass, and why did they laugh when he started to scream? It was terrible, let me tell you. And did you know that the
cabrón
José who did that to your friend is right here, right now?’

“I’d make six or seven stops like that, walking down the line.

“Then,
amigo,
I would toss a couple of loaded submachine guns out there on the fifty-yard line in the Orange Bowl, and I would walk out and lock all the gates.

“And an hour later I would go back inside and finish off the wounded. Then I would go fishing.

“You like fishing, Meadows? Do me a favor. Go fishing.”

Chapter 9

ONCE MIAMI INTERNATIONAL
Airport dwelt in lonely splendor in the moist flatlands between the city and the Everglades. Now it is surrounded entirely by the tropical metropolis it serves, one of the busiest terminals in the world, a north-south funnel where every minute is rush hour. Flights to Santiago and flights to Seattle. Refrigerators for Grand Bahama and millionaires for Aspen. Christopher Meadows had never known the airport in its youth, in the days before cheap air-conditioning made Miami a magnet for northerners who learned that final escape from bitter winter was worth the long summers.

It amused him, nevertheless, to know that Miami International remained an official refuge for the burrowing owl and that rabbits, raccoons, squirrels and tropical birds of a hundred varieties lived in the grassy fringes alongside the giant runways. Meadows prized the airport. It was fifteen minutes from everywhere; eleven minutes by back road, to be exact, from his Coconut Grove haven.

He drove slowly that night, deep in thought. He had plenty of time for the last New York flight, and for once there had been room. He was tired, washed-out. Too much too quick, and too much Jack Daniel’s to boot. It would take a good night’s sleep and a long walk in the morning to restore mental order from the jumble of fear, curiosity and Tennessee whiskey.

Afraid? Jesus! There by the pool, with the lizard, he had come within an ace of wetting his pants. Meadows had never known fear like that. In the street, with Jessica and Sandy, there had been no time for it. Was Meadows a freak, to have lived nearly four decades without ever knowing that sudden bowel-wrenching emotion? Or was he simply the product of a society so well ordered that fear had become as anachronistic as smallpox?

That was it, of course. And that was the argument he should have used on the cop. Without law, without justice, no man is safe from fear, and fear has no place among civilized men. Put that in your smelly cigar and smoke it,
amigo
Nelson.

Meadows’s world held no one like Nelson. Tough, cynical, ruthless and probably very effective. Meadows pitied the criminal flotsam that fell into Nelson’s hands. Like going to bed with a bobcat. A psychiatrist would have a field day with Nelson, would peel him layer by solid layer, like an artichoke. And in the process would no doubt destroy him as a good cop. To allow people like me to live without fear, Meadows concluded, society produces people like Nelson.…

But Meadows had coped, hadn’t he? He hadn’t wet his pants. He hadn’t fainted or run in circles. He had called for help, and he had dealt rationally with the strange man who had come to help him. With Nelson’s macabre prodding he had taken the only logical decision open to him. It was not a hero’s decision, but it was a sensible one, an architect’s decision made after measured analysis of form and stress. Meadows was running away, and he could live with his flight.

Terry was something else again. Could he live with Terry? Was that what she wanted? She had left a lot unsaid at the airport, and that in itself was saying a lot. Meadows savored Terry as a rarity among women: She never engaged the tongue without first putting the mind in gear. So he was meant to think about Chris & Terry, twin hearts on a tree. Well, he would think about it. And while he thought, he would go see Dana. He already felt terrible about that. Damn Terry. Like Nelson, she, too, had set him up.

Dana had offered to meet him at La Guardia, but he had refused. Airports made him nervous. All he ever wanted from them was to be allowed to get in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible. He hated airport greetings only slightly less than he hated airport farewells. He would take a cab to Dana’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

Calling Dana had been almost a reflex action for Meadows. New York without long-legged Dana was like New York without Chinatown. Once he and Terry had gone to New York for a weekend, and Meadows had worried absurdly the whole time that they would bump into her. She would not have fared well. Terry was a fighter.

Meadows drove up Twenty-seventh Avenue, his attention only partly on what he was doing. Paint stores, drugstores, a muffler shop flashed by in the night, all shrouded and locked tight. The only life in the streets came, as it always did, in the
barrio.
Traffic picked up there, and many cars brandished red, white and blue Cuban flag decals on a bumper or back window. Swarthy men in guayabera shirts clustered in gesticulating knots before shops that dispensed cigars,
cafecitos
and memories. A black and gold Trans Am cut Meadows off near the Flagler Street intersection. He took no affront.
El barrio
had its own unwritten traffic rules, and no prudent man drove there without anticipating some spontaneous display of
brio.
A red light that stopped traffic dead in staid Coral Gables was only a
gringo
challenge to
machismo
here. Meadows shifted down mechanically and swung around the Trans Am. The Ghia coughed in protest. The car was twelve years old, and it had been a long time since all four cylinders had fired properly.

Meadows disliked automobiles. They were dangerous, expensive and unreliable, and he drove one only because there was no alternative in a city where public transportation was as lackluster as its architecture. Besides, for table-flat Miami four cylinders was too much power. On the other hand, the damned thing would probably stop running altogether before long. As he approached the airport, Meadows made a mental appointment to have the car fixed. It was a promise he made religiously about once a month.

Growth had driven the airport to reckless extremes. Once a spacious ground-level parking lot had beckoned before the terminal building. Now there were five monster garages that were an affront to architecture: windowless, soulless, concrete mazes the only virtue of which was efficiency. Meadows hated them, but he had mastered them.

That had come after the time he had returned from a two-hour flight from Washington only to spend ninety-three minutes by his watch searching for the wretched car. Never again, he had vowed, and concocted a formula for parking survival that he shared with no one. It was simple: He always left his car in the last slot on the top level of the garage closest to the airline on which he was leaving. Sometimes, if he came back on a different carrier, it meant an extra walk—but at least he always knew where the car was without having to think about it. Like the owls and the rabbits, Meadows had learned to adjust to changing times.

The flight to New York was on Eastern. That meant parking garage number three, a hard left as soon as the Ghia conquered the ramp to concourse level. Traffic was light that night, even inside the airport. The Ghia followed a Dade County policeman on a Cushman three-wheeler up the approach ramp. The cop went straight. Meadows turned left into the garage and began the laborious climb to the top. He never saw the sleek Trans Am that slid in behind him.

The top level was empty, a few cars parked in gap-toothed clusters, but not a sign of life. Meadows had his choice of parking spaces. He left the Ghia against the far wall, pulled an overnight bag from the back seat, decided against locking the car and began walking toward the elevator.

He was thinking of Terry and Dana when the Trans Am crested the ramp to the top level. The daydreaming almost cost him his life.

It came hurtling at him like a torpedo, a rushing, roaring black hulk. What saved Meadows was the squeal of its radials as the big engine accelerated.

He had one flashing glimpse of the machine rushing toward him. Instinctively he hurled himself aside. His leather bag landed under the rear end of a dusty Chevrolet. Meadows landed with his nose to the retaining wall, his chest in a slick of oil. His wounded leg screamed in agony. He saw stars.

It was over in a second. With protesting brakes, the Trans Am howled to a stop a few spaces away from Meadows’s Ghia.

Meadows pulled himself painfully to his feet from the hot concrete floor. He felt like an old man. Nothing seemed broken, but his leg hurt like hell, and there was a six-inch scrape on his left arm. The oil had ruined his shirt. His pants were ripped. His head ached. Most of all, he was angry.