Tourist Season (33 page)

In a panic, Bloodworth dashed back up the steps. He couldn't go back to the newsroom empty-handed, too much was riding on this story—a raise, his very own column, maybe even a job with the New York
Times.
The stakes were too fantastic to let an oafish Cuban cop ruin everything.

Bloodworth hopped off the elevator at Homicide, but the TV crew was nowhere in sight. He scurried from office to office, unimpeded. At the end of a long hall, he finally spotted the bright TV lights.

It was too late. Through the window of a soundproof interview room, Bloodworth saw Al Garcia talking expansively to a pretty brunette television reporter. She was holding a microphone and he was smiling like it was cocktails at the Four Seasons. The camera rolled.

Bloodworth watched in wretched helplessness, struggling to read the detective's lips. García glanced at Bloodworth's face in the window and mouthed three words: “Up your ass.”

In a fury, Bloodworth retreated to García's empty office, where he fumed and cursed and looked at his wristwatch every thirty seconds. How long could it last? What could he be telling her? Bloodworth felt a damp stripe settle down the back of his shirt. He was getting beaten, beaten badly. By a TV bimbo.

A man with a plastic badge that said “Mail Room” came in and piled papers and packages on García's desk.

As soon as the messenger left, Bloodworth slid over and sifted through the goodies. A two-page memo on weapons training. A ten-page memo on pensions. An invoice for softball uniforms.

Crap!

Next he sampled the unopened mail, scanning the return addresses. He found something from the FBI fingerprint section in Washington and held it to the light, without success; the clever Feebs used opaque envelopes.

Underneath the stack of letters was a brown box the size of a toaster.

A bright red courier sticker was glued to the box: Same-day service, fourteen bucks. Oddly, whoever had sent the parcel had tied a luxurious bow in the twine, the kind of bow you'd see on a Fifth Avenue Christmas package.

The address label had been typed neatly:

Ricky Bloodworth excitedly opened his notebook and copied everything.

In the upper-left-hand corner, on the top of the box, the sender had written:

From a warrior and patriot.

Ricky Bloodworth went to the door and peered down the hallway. Amazingly, the TV lights were still blazing away. God Almighty, he thought, not even Joe Wambaugh yaps this much.

Bloodworth returned to the desk and picked up the brown box. It was much lighter than he expected. Bloodworth shook it cautiously at first, then briskly. Nothing. It was packed solid.

Bloodworth trembled at the thought of what he was about to do.

We're talking felony, he told himself. This is police evidence, no doubt about it.

But screw García—he busted my tape recorder.

Ricky Bloodworth put the box under one arm and hurried out of the Homicide office. He went down three flights of stairs and came out in the Traffic Division, which was deserted. He found an empty rest room and locked himself in a stall that reeked of ammonia and bad cologne.

The reporter sat on a toilet and set the box on his lap. He propped his notebook on the tissue rack. He stuck the red pen behind his left ear.

Bloodworth's heart was drumming. He actually felt himself getting hard—that's how much he loved this job. Ricky savored his coup: a treasure chest of clues from the Nights of December. An exclusive, too ... that was the part that gave him a hard-on.

He had already decided what he would do. As soon as he was done peeking, he'd send the package right back to García. He'd wrap it exactly the same and steam the labels—who would ever know?

Lovingly Ricky Bloodworth rubbed the smooth brown paper, fingered the frayed twine.

Then he pinched one end of the magnificent bow and pulled, pulled on it until the knot popped.

And a savage furnace swallowed him.

Tore the air from his lungs.

And the flesh from his cheeks.

Until the universe turned molten white.

It had always puzzled Cab Mulcahy that Mr. Cardoza took such an ardent personal interest in the Miami
Sun.
Traditionally publishers love to meddle with the news operation (because that's the most exciting part of a newspaper, the only part worth dicking around with), but Cardoza was not a typical publisher. He had little understanding of the tenets of journalism with no paternal affection for the newspaper, for his fortunes did not singularly rise or plummet with the Sun. Rather, Cardoza was a boundless entrepreneur, a man who loved the variety of making money; a man with dozens of incongruous irons in the fire. He owned a soccer team in St. Kitts, a stock car in Darlington, a chain of family cinemas, four butcher shops, a Liberian oil tanker, three thousand coin-operated condom machines, and a phosphate mine. Any single one of those enterprises, Cab Mulcahy thought, was infinitely more amusing as a money toy than the frequently struggling Miami
Sun
, of which Cardoza owned fifty-one percent. Which automatically made him publisher and meddler-for-life.

On the evening of December 28, a Friday, Cab Mulcahy was summoned from an opulent pre-Orange Bowl cocktail party to explain to Mr. Cardoza why Skip Wiley's column had not appeared in the paper since Christmas Eve.

The publisher did not particularly wish to see Mulcahy in person, and he certainly had no intention of visiting the newsroom. Cardoza preferred to do business office-to-office, by telephone—distance yields perspective, he liked to say. Also, he got- a kick out of hanging up on people.

At the appointed hour, Cardoza dialed Mulcahy's desk. “I didn't think much of that Christmas Eve column,” he began.

“Me neither,” Mulcahy said.

“Who gives a shit about some native fisherman who can't swim? It seems to me Mr. Wiley can do better.”

“He's still not himself,” Mulcahy said.

“He gets paid to be himself,” Cardoza said. “A small fortune, he gets paid. And here it's Christmas week, tourist season, when our circulation's supposed to shoot sky-high, and where's our star clean-up hitter? Every day I pick up the newspaper, and nothing. No Skip Wiley. The Sun's dead without him. Lies there like a dog turd on my front lawn.”

Mulcahy said, “Really, Mr. Cardoza, I wouldn't go that far.”

“Oh you wouldn't? You'd like to hear the cancellation figures, maybe. Or take a few hours to read some of the mail we've been getting.”

“That's not necessary.”

For years Cab Mulcahy had tried to tell Cardoza that he overestimated Wiley's popularity, that no single writer could pull enough support to significantly boost or bust the circulation numbers. Whether that was true or not, it was what Mulcahy chose to believe. However, as a pure businessman Cardoza felt that he appreciated the concept of a Good Product far better than some ivory-tower editor. And in Cardoza's predominant and immutable view, what made the Miami
Sun
a Good Product were Skip Wiley, Ann Landers, and Dagwood Bumstead. On some days Wiley alone was worth the twenty-five cents.

“Where the hell is he?” Cardoza demanded.

“I don't know,” Mulcahy said. “I expected him back in town on Christmas Day.”

“Send someone to Nassau,” Cardoza barked through the speaker box. “Do whatever you have to do.”

Mulcahy rubbed the back of his neck and closed his eyes. It was fortunate that Cardoza couldn't see him. “Skip's not in the Bahamas anymore,” he said. “Apparently he was deported from the islands on the twenty-fourth.”

“Deported!” Cardoza huffed. “For what?”

“It's quite a long list, sir.”

“Give me the high points.”

“Attempted bribery, possession of a controlled substance, and behaving as an undesirable, whatever that means. For what it's worth, the embassy says Wiley was set up. Apparently that column about the fisherman didn't go over too well with the Bahamian government.”

“Now everybody's a goddamn critic,” Cardoza said.

“All I know is that they put him on a plane,” Mulcahy said. “At gunpoint.”

“Why didn't we think of that?”

Though miserly with compliments, Cardoza privately held great admiration for Cab Mulcahy; he couldn't imagine anyone trying to manage so many deeply disturbed individuals as there were in the newsroom. It was a disorderly place where eccentricity, torpor, petulance, even insubordination were tolerated, so Cardoza stayed far away, where it was safe. He stayed near the money.

“God knows I'd never tell you how to run that operation, Cab, but I do want to see Skip Wiley in my newspaper again. That means you'd better find him. I want a New Year's column from that crazy sonofabitch, you understand? Don't tell me he's sick and don't tell me he's exhausted, and don't fucking tell me that he's not himself. Just tell me that he's writing again, understand?”

“Yes, sir, but apparently—”

And Cardoza hung up.

All week long Cab Mulcahy had been waiting for the phone call or telegram, waiting for that familiar profane foghorn greeting. Waiting in vain. He couldn't believe that Skip Wiley had docilely accepted the butchery of the Christmas column; he couldn't believe that Wiley had suppressed what must have been a colossal homicidal rage.

Was Skip that far gone?

In the meantime, the Nights of December had fallen quiet and dropped off the front page, much to the relief of the men in the orange blazers. Scores of suspects had been rounded up, including a few men who might have vaguely resembled Jesus Bernal or Daniel “Viceroy” Wilson; all were released or charged with unrelated crimes. There was also talk of a summit with Seminole tribal elders to seek assistance in locating Tommy Tigertail, but the Seminoles refused to go near the police station and the cops refused to enter the reservation, so the meeting never materialized.

The morning edition of the Sun had carried four stories about the upcoming Orange Bowl festivities (including a color photograph of twenty newly arrived Shriners, jovially polishing their Harleys), but in the whole newspaper there was only one item about
Las Noches de Diciembre.
It was a short feature story and a cartoon, beneath a headline that said:
Tennis Buff Boffs Bomb Suspect.

It was only now, rereading it in print, that Cab Mulcahy realized how trenchantly the presentation of Ricky Bloodworth's article—me tone, the headline, the slapstick cartoon—struck at the very manhood of the Nights of December. It worried Mulcahy. Coupled with Wiley's ominous silence, it worried him profoundly.

He looked out at the newsroom just in time to see a lean figure running toward the office, weaving through the desks and video-display terminals. It was Brian Keyes.

“He called!” Keyes said breathlessly. “Twenty minutes ago. The bastard left a message on my beeper.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he's gonna phone here, your office. Wants to talk to both of us.”

“It's about damn time,” Mulcahy said, feeling a little better about the prospects. He took off his black dinner jacket and hung it over a chair.

As they waited for the phone to ring, Mulcahy busied himself by brewing a fresh pot of coffee. His hands shook slightly as he poured it. Keyes scooped a handful of peppermint candies from a jar on the secretary's desk and ate them mechanically, one by one.

“What are we going to say?” Mulcahy asked. “When he calls, what the hell are we supposed to say?”

“We've got to convince him it's all over,” Keyes said. “Tell him we know the whole plan. Tell him if he tries anything at the parade,
Las Noches
are as good as dead. Tell him it'll make Bonnie and Clyde look like Sunday at the beach.”

Mulcahy nodded neutrally. Might work, might not. With Skip, who the hell could ever tell?

“I think we ought to concede some minor points,” Mulcahy suggested. “He'll never give up if he thinks it's been a total loss.”

“You're right,” Keyes said. “Congratulate him on all the ink they got. The newsmagazines, the
Post, USA Today
. Tell him the Nights of December made their point. They got everybody's attention.”

“Which is true.”

“Of course it's true.”

“But is it enough for Skip?”

Keyes and Mulcahy looked at each other with the same answer.

“What are we going to do,” Keyes asked, “when he tells us to go beat our meat?”

Mulcahy stroked his chin. “We could talk to Jenna.”

“Forget it,” Keyes said sharply. “Lost cause.”

“Then it's over. Bloodbath or not, we go to the cops.”

“Yup.” Keyes glanced at the telephone.

“Imagine the headlines, Cab.”

“God help us.”

The phone rang. Once. Twice. Mulcahy swallowed hard and answered on the third ring.

“I see,” he said after a few seconds.

Keyes excitedly pointed to the speaker box. Mulcahy shook his head unhappily. Then he hung up. His face was like gray crepe.

“That wasn't him,” Mulcahy said. “It wasn't Wiley.”

“Then who was it?”

“Sergeant García,” he said gravely. “Apparently the Nights of December just blew up the one and only Richard L. Bloodworth.”

 

The bomb that exploded in Ricky Bloodworth's lap was powerful by Little Havana standards, but not utterly devastating. To build it, Jesús Bernal had hollowed a round Styrofoam lobster float and packed the core with generous but unmeasured amounts of Semtex-H, C-4, and old gunpowder. Then he ran a fuse through the middle and plugged the ends with gasoline-soaked Jockey shorts and two Army blasting caps. Next Bemal had meticulously embedded into the Styrofoam ball hundreds of two-penny nails (the sharp ends facing out), as well as assorted slivers of rusty cola cans and soup tins. It was not a bomb designed to wipe out embassies or armored limousines; this was, in the terrorist vernacular, an antipersonnel device. Bemal had packed the bristling lobster buoy into an empty one-gallon paint drum and threaded the fuse through a hole in the lid. The fuse became part of the magnificent bow that adorned the deadly brown box—an inspired touch of which the Cuban was especially proud.