"Browder, the man behind you is not very familiar with firearms. The revolver is c.o.c.ked. There is a sh.e.l.l in the chamber. His finger is on the trigger. If you do anything quick and funny, it might twitch."
"Nothing quick. Nothing funny. Believe me." After I had tied him to a stanchion with a length of braided nylon line, Meyer was able to take a deep breath again. I emptied his pockets and put everything on the table. He had a silver money clip in the shape of a dollar sign, worn from long use, with four hundred and twenty dollars in it. He had some crumpled ones and some change in the same pocket as a Swiss Army knife with a cracked red handle. I patted him down and found an ankle holster with a little two-shot derringer in it, two rounds of.22 Magnum hollowpoints. He stood as patiently as a horse being groomed.
"Going to do it with the derringer?" I asked him.
"It wouldn"t look like an accident, would it?"
"Why does it have to be an accident anyway?"
"I"ll give you a number and you dial it and let me say something into it. They will get a voiceprint, okay? Then they"ll clear me."
I had to retie him where the phone would reach. He said the phone was manned twenty-four hours a day. I wasn"t familiar with the area code. It was answered on the second ring by a male voice repeating the last four digits of the number I"d dialed. I held the phone to Browder"s face and he said, "Okay Browder for clearance. Give them a description."
"Hold," the voice said.
We all waited for a long ninety seconds and then the voice said, "Browder, Scott Ellis. Five foot seven, one hundred and seventy-five pounds, age thirty-eight, brown eyes, ruddy complexion, S-shaped scar inside of left forearm, first joint of little finger of left hand missing, hairy mole right shoulder, faded blue tattoo right forearm of anchor and five stars in a circle around it. Browder is on detached duty with the Drug Enforcement Administration."
I said thank you to a dead line and untied him. "You don"t want to check the hairy mole?" he asked.
"No, thanks."
"It isn"t all that hairy anyway."
"Just for luck, I"ll hang on to the derringer, though."
"Don"t let me leave without it."
"Mr. Scott Browder, this is Meyer."
They nodded at each other. He ma.s.saged his wrists and said, "I could guess you"d be careful. What I hoped was no whop on the skull first. Hits on the head make me throw up. After the bomb thing they really wondered if they should go after somebody with all that amount of luck."
"Sit down. Drink."
"Thanks. Scotch, no ice, little bit of water. You can guess why I wouldn"t carry an official ID."
"Infiltration?" I asked.
"After Operation Southern Comfort a lot of our guys were made, so I"m one of the new batch."
"Operation what?"
He looked disappointed. "It was big, like five tons of c.o.ke by plane, with a relay strip in the Bahamas. Anyway I"m involved with the peopl who never see it or touch it or have a direct contact with anybody who does see it and touch it. I"m after the arrangers. Not like Jornalero. He just does money for them. Long ago he used to hire the mules for the Colombianos. He worked his way up and, because he"s smart, mostly out of it. They could get him for currency violations if they thought they could make it stick. But he covers his tracks good."
"Can you tell me who wants me killed?" I asked, giving him his drink.
He sipped it, nodded approval and said, "What would you do if I gave you names?"
"Pay visits."
He looked at me with disapproval. "McGee I am not going to tell you how much I know about you. You are big and you are lucky and you have some good moves. If I wanted to get you killed quick, I"d give you some names. How can I impress you? We are talking about very big money and very smart people. Listen and believe. It would be like sending a twelve-year-old girl on a naked reverse against the Raiders. It is a cla.s.s you will never be in."
"Who is Cappy?"
"Short for the Capataz. That isn"t his name. It means the Foreman. He"s way down the list. He"s enforcement. You scrambled three of his people. Rick Sullivan is having his knees rebuilt. Louis LaLieu will spend a year with his dental surgeon. Dean Matan has four broken bones and some ripped tendons in his left hand. And Cappy is annoyed."
"Who did it to Billy?"
"I don"t know and I don"t think Cappy knows, and I would guess that the man in Ma.r.s.eille Cappy contacted for a favor wouldn"t know either exactly who did it. Just like n.o.body really knows who put your bomb together or who mailed it. Incidentally, word went back to Ma.r.s.eille that the wire job was sloppy. They wanted it done so that it wouldn"t be picked up in an autopsy. They should have used a big injection of insulin."
"A bomb isn"t exactly accidental-looking."
"After that missed, they decided on accidents. Too many killings and you have a lot of official attention, and that is bad for business. The people in Peru would understand the accidents were arranged."
"What was my accident going to be?"
"I couldn"t say exactly, but I think you were supposed to walk out into heavy traffic. Those three were standby talent, strictly second-cla.s.s, McGee."
Meyer asked his first question. "Mr. Browder, if Mr. McGee stays here, what are his chances of staying alive?"
Browder looked at Meyer with more interest. "Slim to none."
"And why is that so important to somebody?"
"Friend Meyer, you ask the hard ones, don"t you? Something is stirring. What you"ve got in the Miami-Atlanta area is a loose amalgamation of two groups. They work very cozy together. It"s in their interest. Let"s call one the Old-timers. Some syndicate families, gambling interests, vice, narcotics. But not down on the nitty-gritty level. Making policy, suggesting arrangements, selecting the right people. Let"s call the other group the New Boys. Rednecks, Cubans, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Bolivians. Smuggling narcotics, peddling weapons, murder and arson for hire. And again you have a top layer of policy people, negotiators. For a while the Old-timers and the New Boys were killing each other off. Wiser heads prevailed. They have the same problems of product and cash flow. So they have been working together. Now there is trouble in paradise. It has something to do with you, McGee, and with Ingraham and his wife and Jornalero and that stolen boat and Gigi Reyes. I"ve discussed matters with my a.s.sociates and my superiors, and the general feeling is that if we can find the right b.u.t.tons and push them, there is going to be a full-scale war again. Crazy Marielenos running around in panel trucks full of automatic weapons and grenades. And some fruit may drop off the tree. We may get enough to build some tight cases.
"Lately, it"s getting a little better. When we can"t build a solid criminal prosecution, we can bring a civil action and tell the clown to either show up on the stand and explain his income taxes for the past fifteen years, and how come he could buy a two-million-dollar home on the beach, or we take the house off his hands. It stings them pretty good. But I like the tight cases better."
"Which side wants me dead?"
"The Old-timers, mostly."
"What can I do?"
"I don"t know yet, McGee. First I want to know every detail about the boat. How you looked, where you located it. What you did aboard. The whole thing."
He made me go over the part about the boat coming over from Yucatan twice. And he wanted every detail about the interior of the Sundowner, known then as the Lazidays. The exact position and condition of each body. The placement of the roll of fifties, and the spare fifties around the head of Howard Cannon. The shape and placement of the bruises on the thighs of the Peruvian girl. The clothing on the others. I closed my eyes and rebuilt the scene. It came back so vividly I could hear the lazy buzzing of the carrion flies, feel the sodden weight of my sweat-soaked clothes.
"I got to think," Browder said.
He was a pacer. He frowned and paced and, with fresh drink in hand, made little grunts, mumbles and hand gestures.
He stopped in front of me and pointed down at me. "You! Have you got any cowboy clothes? Hat, shirts, boots?"
"Nothing."
"Buy them tomorrow morning. Get high heels on the boots and a big high crown on the hat. I want you seven and a half feet tall. I want you looked at. I"ll bring the eye patch. He"s dead, but they won"t know that in the Yucatan, will they?"
"Is that a question?"
"h.e.l.l no. Shut up. Let me think." And he went back to pacing.
Finally he dropped into a chair and clapped his thick hands together. "It"s a chance, but maybe the only chance you got, McGee. Bring money. A good chunk of it. Can you bring fifty big ones?"
"To where, for what?"
"You and me, we"re going on a buying trip."
"I thought you were up there on the policy level, Browder."
"h.e.l.l no. I"m third or fourth string. If I want to go buying and have a source, why should they stop me? They let people turn a dime. They don"t want them to get greedy and foolish. I had been working on the idea they came over from Veracruz or Tampico. If it was from Chetumal, and they made a buy, I know the name. It had to be through him or somebody close to him. I know the name but I don"t know how to make the contact. We can"t roam around asking. I think I know who can tell me how to make the contact. What you do, McGee, you stay low. Buy the cowhand clothes. Wait for a call from me day after tomorrow. I think we"ll be taking the Monday or Tuesday afternoon flight on AeroMexico to Cancun."
"I can hardly wait," I said.
"Save the funny routines. This can get us both shot."
"If you take more than five thousand out of the country, they..."
"Fifty big ones makes a pack of hundreds this thick." He held up a hand, thumb and finger about two and a half inches apart "Got a pa.s.sport?... Good. I"ll take the money in. Pack a carryon with what you"ll need for three or four days. I don"t know this minute if it"s on or off. Maybe they think so much of me they don"t want me to go out on a buy because I could get picked up coming back. On the other hand, if I"m coming up with the money and they"re getting their percentage when they buy back from me for the wholesale market, what is there to lose? I"ll let you know."
"If it happens," I asked, "who am I supposed to be?"
"I never heard his real name. They called him Bucky. Didn"t look much like you. He had a round pink face. But tall. Real tall. He lost an eye in a bar. He walked into a dart game. Drunk. He didn"t say much. He smiled a lot. He could do a pretty good John Wayne imitation. He did a lot of field work, so all the sources knew what he looked like. Word gets around. They called him the Estanciero. It means the Rancher. Bucky was never on a ranch in his life except the night he got killed. It was a routine landing on a ranch strip in Pasco County and Bucky was there with a van to off-load the product and take it up north somewhere. Birmingham, I think. Some locals tried to hijack the load but they got cut down. Two of them got it. One of the others fired from long range, in the dark, probably just aiming in the general direction of the airplane, and took Bucky right in the throat. So one of the two people off the plane took the truck north, after the two of them had loaded Bucky and the two dead hotshots into the cabin. The pilot took it fifty miles out over the Gulf, put it on automatic pilot and heaved them out. What happened hasn"t exactly been advertised. I know because it is part of my job to find out things like that, and the pilot likes brandy."
He looked at his watch and stood up. "Got to go. Look, I don"t want to make you nervous. There"s very little rough stuff going on these days. I"ll be in touch."
After he had been gone ten minutes I said to Meyer, "If he is after my fifty thousand, that"s the most elaborate con I ever ran into."
"I think he"s real," Meyer said. "Is that the right word?"
"Probably not. The man is basically unreal. But he"s what he says he is."
"You"re saying I should do it? I should go with him?"
"Do you think that"s the kind of decision I should make for you?"
"Why do you keep answering a question with a question?"
"Doesn"t everyone?"
"Okay, Meyer. Seriously. Life is full of signs and portents. Something hides in the shadows and keeps trying to tell you things you should know. But the language is never clear. You aimed a finger at me a while back and said, "Bang, you"re dead." It is so unlike you to do a kid thing like that, I get the feeling something was trying to talk to me through you."
"It was just a dumb impulse."
"I guess the whole situation is making me too jumpy."
"And if you stay right here and make no moves at all, you"re going to get jumpier."
"Probably."
"But be very, very careful, Travis."
Eleven.
BROWDER AND I bought tickets, open return, at the AeroMexico counter at Miami International on Monday afternoon. If was still the busy season for Cancun, but there were a lot more coming back than going by this seventh day of the new year. We were put on standby, but after we were bused over to a newer building, Browder quietly bought us the top slots on the standby list.
The old fat jet was jam-packed. There was a holiday flavor, an antic.i.p.ation of vacation aboard. There were a couple of tour groups, shouting back and forth to each other. It reminded me of the time Meyer and I had flown down to the Yucatan, the time when we found the man we had looked for over a long time. At that time we were hunting, and this time I was the hunted. That time I was with Meyer, and this time with a man I did not know. Reason said he could be trusted. But the phone identification could have been rigged. This time I would not return with a prize as rare as the one I had brought back to Lauderdale the last time. I told myself to. relax and roll with it. But I could not shuck the moody, twitchy feeling. Besides, I felt like a clown, even after I had stowed the tall pale nineteen-gallon hat in the overhead compartment. Browder had brought the eye patch, one of those small black shiny ones with a black elastic band that was a little too tight, so that the edge of the patch pressed against the bones around the socket of my right eye. My shirt had pale shiny b.u.t.tons, my pants were too tight in the crotch and the high boots of imitation lizard hurt my feet.
When I had asked Browder in the airport what was going on, he told me we"d talk later. He approved of the way I looked. He was not impressed with how much the boots hurt. I towered over him in the terminal. He leaned back and looked up at me like a pedestrian checking the stop light. In past years I had exaggerated my height as a method of disguise. But this time it bothered me more. I was a figure of fun. My clothes were too new. And I wondered if anybody wanted to do harm to the Estanciero.
One of the overworked flight attendants, charged with serving a hot meal on the short flight, smiled at me and said, "h.e.l.lo there! We haven"t seen you in a long time, Bucky."
"Nice to be aboard, ma"am," I said. The recognition made me more uncomfortable. She paused and looked back at me, with a small frown. And that didn"t help either.
Also I felt uneasy when I thought of the fifty thousand. I had handed it in a rubber-banded block in a brown paper bag to Browder. He had taken it into a stall in the men"s room. When he came out he led me into a quiet corner of the terminal and showed me his hard-cover Spanish/ English dictionary. He had divided the cash into three packets and placed them inside the hollowed-out book. He kept the book closed with a red rubber band.
"Won"t they look in that?"
"They don"t ha.s.sle the tourist business. And if they do check us and if they look, and if they find it, the going mordida is five hundred bucks. You and I are going through the clearance separate. Don"t sweat it. It"ll be fine."
Several other big pa.s.senger aircraft had landed at Cancun ahead of us, and a couple more came in right after we did. The modern airport is, for practical purposes, divided in half: The departure area with ticket counters, departure tax counters and security inspection is three times as large as the arrival lounge. Not a lounge. Long, long slow lines piled up at high counters where bored and indifferent little bureaucrats, male and female, glanced at pa.s.sports and stamped tourist permits which had been filled out on the flights. I was able to stroll right on out of the customs area into the outer area of the arrival section without interception. The customs counters were unmanned. But several attentive men stood back by a wall, and every now and then one of them would step out and flag down a pa.s.senger and check his luggage.
Beyond the gla.s.s wall was total chaos. Pa.s.sengers were finding their tour group, and the place to stand for their hotel buses. Avis, Hertz and Budget were doing big business. I looked back through the gla.s.s wall and saw Browder in there, working his way through the crowd toward the doorway. People charged into me, then backed off and stared up at me in obvious astonishment. I saw a whole pack of chubby people of indeterminate age, all wearing name tags with tridents on them, and I realized they were all destined for Club Med. They had that look, a batch of lonesome loners who had decided to try to take a big chance in the sunshine.
"Let"s go," Browder said, pushing at me. I do not like being pushed at. He went ahead in a half trot and I followed along, walking carefully on sore feet. He stood in the Budget line and, after he spent five minutes at the counter, we went out to the far curb, walking between a couple of the tour buses parked in a long line at the first curb. It was bright and hot in Cancian. The buses stood there snoring and stinking, big beasts drowsing in the heat. The drivers sat high behind the wheels, wiry little brown men with that same look of apathy and cynicism you see on the faces of big-city cabdrivers.
It was ten minutes before our rental car arrived, a dark blue Renault 12 with eighteen thousand kilometers on the meter, a mini-station wagon with four doors. Browder got behind the wheel. If I could have fitted there, I couldn"t have worked the pedals with those boots on. I tossed the big hat in back and took off the eye patch.
"You gotta wear that at all times!" Browder said.
"And off come the boots too, friend. You just drive the ear."
"You getting smart-a.s.s on me?"
I knelt on the seat and reached back and slipped the dictionary out of his carryon and put it in mine as he turned and watched me.
"If two of us are going to run this," he said, "we are going to run it into a tree."
"Get out of the crush here and park a minute." He drove out of the airport proper and turned onto the long wide road that led out to the main highway that runs from Puerto Juarez all the way down to Chetumal, the capital city of Quintana Roo (p.r.o.nounced "row" as in "row your boat"). He pulled way over to the side and turned the engine off. No air conditioning, and the dark car was like a convection oven when the windows were open and it was moving, and like a barbecue pit when it was standing still.
"Now what?" he asked.
"We are a long way from anything," I told him. "Up ahead turn left and we"re fifteen or twenty minutes from Cancun. Turn right and you"ve got a batch of sixty miles of nothing. So who are we seeing, where is he and how do you get in touch?"