White Shadow (40 page)

FIVE HOURS EARLIER, Johnny Rivera was hurting like a son of a bitch and bleeding all inside the car he’d borrowed from his buddy who ran the Italian ice stand on Eighth. But he was smiling. He had the ledger, had thumbed through it, and knew it was everything he could hope for. It probably didn’t make a lick of sense to that Cuban girl, but he knew how the Old Man’s mind worked and it was all there. All that money. All the keys and names.

He was weak from loss of blood and had nearly nodded off twice when he found the little house in Ybor where the doctor lived. He slowed the car with a hard brake and he fell forward against the wheel when it thudded against the curb. He held on to the doorframe and tried to get out of the car but couldn’t move.

He kept honking until the doctor’s wife showed up outside in curlers and yelled in Spanish for her husband. The man came out shirtless in his boxer shorts and squinted into the dark before finally seeing it was Johnny.

He made quick apologies and had his wife help him take Johnny inside their house. Even with his wife starting to bicker and complain, the old Cuban laid him on a brand-new kitchen table. He disappeared for a moment and the old woman scowled at him before her husband came back and handed Johnny a bottle of peach schnapps. He drank down a hard, hot gulp and lay back down against the kitchen table.

The woman cackled and complained, and in Spanish, the doctor told her to go to hell.

“I’ll take care of you for this,” Rivera said.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked. “You are badly hurt.”

“I’m happy, Doc.”

The doctor used a kitchen knife to cut off his bloody pant leg and see the damage. He shrugged as if he were a mechanic seeing some minor wear that he could straighten out for a price and went for his black bag.

He returned with his bag and took out a bottle of pills. He handed Johnny two and Johnny swallowed them down with some more peach schnapps.

The doctor doused the wound with some alcohol and began boiling water on the stove. The old woman had disappeared.

There were pictures on their walls of the couple living in Cuba.

In a haze, Johnny said: “You miss Cuba?”

“Sure, Johnny. Why?”

Rivera saw the man’s kind face scatter before him. He felt his prying fingers on his leg, but they felt thick and numb and the hurt had gone far away.

“Why, Johnny? You want me to tell you about Cuba?”

“Yes, Doc. Tell me about Cuba. I’m going there. I’m leaving for Cuba.
Cha. Cha. Cha
.”

The doctor laughed and set his steel instruments in the boiling water. His wife made coffee.

The first light came over the bay and Ybor started to shine with a soft blue color.

DODGE DROVE with Clifton a half mile down the road, where they found the car with Pasco County plates. It was a white ’54 Ford four-door, with tan seats and a police radio under the dash. Like the ID they found on the body, the car was registered to a man named Carl Walker. The rest of the cab was clean except for more registration papers and gas receipts from a 76 station. In the trunk, they found two Remington 12-gauges, a .38 Chief’s Special, and a chrome-plated .22 with a bone handle.

Clifton handled the weapons and Dodge watched.

“Can you have that .22 processed?”

“Sure.”

“That killing last week over at the Gandy Bridge,” he said. “Story dug out .22 slugs from the men.”

“Lots of .22s,” Clifton said. “But I’ll check.”

“Can we check his house?”

“Of course,” Clifton said. “Looking for anything special?”

“A blackjack, or what’s left of one.”

“Charlie Wall?” Clifton asked. “Come on.”

They drove back to the crime scene at the Fish Camp, and Dodge followed Clifton into the cabin, where a deputy lifted the blanket from the body of Carl Walker. His mouth hung open and his eyes stared straight ahead with milky indifference. A big black pucker in the center of his skull.

DODGE FOUND Al Tomaini in the back booth of the restaurant giving his statement to the sheriff’s office’s chief criminal deputy, a man named Ross Anderson. He waited until Anderson finished up to join them at the booth. Tomaini had pulled the booth’s bench several feet from the table so he could sit with his knees raised above the lip. The Giant drank coffee and talked, his huge cowboy hat taking up the rest of the booth next to him.

Anderson introduced Dodge to Al, and the man’s hand swallowed his in a handshake.

“Tell me about the girl,” Dodge said.

“Her name is Lucrezia,” Al said, his voice deep and throaty like a man speaking into a deep well. “My wife knew her more than I did. Good girl.”

“Has she been here long?”

“About a week,” he said. “She was a good worker. Cleaned the rooms and worked the kitchen with Jeanie.”

“That your wife in back?”

He looked behind him and saw Jeanie behind a counter sitting on the stool, the lower part of her body shielded. She looked to anyone passing as if she had legs.

“This girl give you any reason why these men would want to hurt her?”

Al shook his head.

“You know where she may have gone?”

“No,” Al said. “What did you hear from Pasco?”

Dodge looked to Anderson and Anderson shrugged. “The sheriff said he had no idea why his men would’ve been over here.”

“You know where she was from?”

“She’s a Cuban,” he said. “Said she came over to work in the cigar factories in Ybor City.”

“You know which one?” Anderson asked.

The Giant shrugged. It was a hell of a shrug.

“So you heard the shot?” Anderson said.

“And I walked outside, drew my .44, and came upon the two deputies. Both of the men drew on me.”

“Did you identify yourself as law enforcement?”

“Loud and clear,” Al said. “I was wearing my star, and I yelled to them I was police.”

“When did they fire?” Dodge asked. Anderson took more notes.

“The first drew just after I said police.” Al widened his eyes.

Ellis Clifton and another detective, tall guy named Henning, joined them at the table. Clifton and Henning said they were going to finish getting statements from guests at the motel and from a fisherman who’d been out late after the storm and saw the men creeping around back. They left.

“What about the man who got away?” Anderson asked.

The Giant shook his head. “Didn’t know him. I never saw any of them before.”

“This whole thing sounds like bolita to me,” Anderson said.

“What else is there?” Dodge asked.

“I’ll get Clifton to ask around Ybor,” he said. “If the girl worked bolita, he’ll find out.”

“What kind of car did the man use to get away?” Dodge asked.

“Two-seater Chrysler,” Al said. “Dark blue or black.”

“You get a plate?” Anderson asked.

“I got part of it,” he said. “It was all really fast.”

“What about the man?” Dodge asked, leaning in. “What did he look like?”

“He was Italian or Cuban. Real swarthy. Had long hair. It fell almost to his chin. Kind of pudgy and short. Black eyes.”

“Anything else.”

“Sure is,” Al said. “He had a long scar down his right cheek. It was kind of faint but looked like he’d been cut at one time.”

Dodge nodded, with dead eyes on the Giant. Anderson leaned back in his seat and took a deep breath.

“Can we put the wraps on this for the next twenty-four hours?” Dodge asked.

“Whatever you need,” Anderson asked.

“You know him?” Al asked.

“That I do,” Dodge said.

IT HAD STILL been dark in Ybor City when the doctor drove Johnny back to the Boston Bar. Rivera had told the doctor not to take him home, that he had business, and when the doctor tried anyway he pulled a switchblade from his sock and held it groggily to the man’s throat. The doctor gave him a bottle of pills and told Rivera to stay off the leg, but Rivera hobbled out of the car anyway, feeling loose and disjointed but without pain. The car drove off, and Rivera pocketed the pills. He hobbled two paces, his bloody pants cut into strips along one leg. He stopped and vomited on the ground. The back of the Boston Bar smelled of stale beer and booze and decaying crabs. It was a place for stray cats and bums to eat rotting things, and it was all making him sick as hell.

He patted his stomach and heard the hard
thwap
of the book in his waistband and pressed on. He thought about being in Havana with all that money and he walked another few paces. He’d buy a suit. He’d buy a young, clean girl. He’d stay at a top hotel for a week and sell this claptrap bar for losers and niggers.

He smiled.

And then he heard cars. The morning light had just started to break around Ybor City and it had this bluish black tint in the light. He hobbled another few paces and the sounds of big engines grew and he looked out to Twenty-second Street and saw nothing and suddenly there was everything. Brilliant bright light from dozens of headlights shining into the back of his broken skull and he shielded the light with his forearm and backed up and vomited again and tripped and fell to the ground.

More cars. Cadillacs, all of them. Maybe six. Maybe a hundred. He saw nothing but that hard white light in his eyes. He tried to look away, but it was all around him.

Car doors opened and black shadowed figures stood before him, out of the glow of the light. They just stood there and Johnny squinted.

“Who is it?” he yelled. “What do you want? Who’s there?”

One of the figures, a heavy dark shadow, moved into the headlights and offered his hand to Rivera. Rivera took it and looked up into the unsmiling dark-circled eyes of Joe Bedami.

Another figure joined him. He knew that man, too. And another man walked to his side.

The old Sicilians.

He understood.

“Come with us, Johnny,” said the Jukebox Salesman. A man he knew as the Hammer held him up straight by grabbing the back of his belt. He hobbled to a brand-new long black Caddy and was helped inside.

In that early, blue-black light, the car door slammed with a hard thud and he was held in that space of dead air in a fresh new car that smelled of leather and wood. He only saw the back of the driver’s head and heard the man knock the big black car into gear. They rolled out of the Boston Bar parking lot and headed south, back into the core of Ybor City, and it was early and he was sick but now Rivera understood where they were taking him.

Rivera laughed, still a little doped up.

“What is it?” the driver asked.

“This sure ain’t Cuba,” he said. And that tickled Johnny Rivera a great deal and he laughed for a while until the car stopped and he passed out. He felt rough hands grab him and carry him like a sack of potatoes deep into a marble vault, where everything was cool to the touch and men spoke in soft, lilting Sicilian.