Blood Dues (3 page)

Miami is as much a Cuban metropolis as it is American. For more than twenty years the city's heart has been Hispanic, throbbing to a Latin rhythm, crowded with the refugees of Castro's revolution. More than eight hundred thousand of them have arrived since New Year's Day of 1959 — the date of Castro's final triumph in Havana.

Their arrival has transformed Miami irrevocably, for good or ill. Suburban Hialeah and Coral Gables were converted almost overnight to Spanish-speaking enclaves, but the living core of Cuban life is centered in Miami proper, in the district known as Little Havana.

Sandwiched between downtown Miami on the east and Coral Gables on the west, with Flagler Street its northern boundary and a southern demarcation line at Southwest 22nd Street, the district is a piece of Cuba physically transplanted stateside.

Billboards there are generally in Spanish, but shops with English Spoken signs dot the boulevards. The district's central artery is Southwest 8th Street, flowing one way, eastbound, over thirty blocks of shops and sidewalk coffee counters, pushcarts and corner fruit stands. Locals call the main drag Street of Gold, but the gold is long since tarnished; there is grime amid the glitter.

Frigid winds of change had battered Cuban Florida since Bolan's visit early in his Mafia war and again some years later, and much of what was decent, warm, romantic, had been withered by the blast. Ironically, the blight had sprung from the same love of freedom that brought Cubans to Miami in the first place.

During April, 1980, half a dozen dissidents sought sanctuary at the Peruvian embassy in Havana. When the embassy officials would not give them up, Castro retaliated by withdrawing all his sentries from the compound. Within two days some seven thousand Cubans jammed the embassy, attempting to escape communism's iron-fisted rule.

Converting the embarrassment into a propaganda weapon, Castro publicly announced that anyone dissatisfied with Cuba was at liberty to leave. He opened up the port of Mariel to a rag-tag "freedom flotilla" based in South Florida. Miami exiles flocked to Mariel, attempting to collect their relatives and friends, but as they jammed the port, the Cuban leader was waiting to reveal his hole card.

Every vessel leaving Mariel with refugees aboard was forced to carry several passengers selected by the Cuban government for deportation to America. With new arrivals pouring into Florida at a rate of four thousand per day — more than one hundred twenty thousand of them by mid-June of that year — it soon became apparent that Castro was cleaning out his prisons and asylums, ridding Cuba of its undesirables by shipping them direct to the United States. If proof was needed, the statistics made it plain: within a few months of the boatlift, major crime inside Havana dropped by thirty-three percent, while metropolitan Miami showed a corresponding leap in violent felonies.

Narcotics was the booming modern industry in southern Florida, and with the cocaine cowboys came a radical increase in urban violence. A 1980 FBI report ranked six Florida cities among the nation's ten most lethal, with Miami rated first. At least a third of all the slayings in Miami's murder boom were drug related, and recent Cuban immigrants — the outcast
marielistas
— filled the local jails in mounting numbers. Soon, their names and faces were in law-enforcement record books as far away as New York, Chicago, Seattle and Las Vegas.

Backlash had been brewing in Miami, fueled by anger and frustration, seasoned with racial animosity. Gun sales were soaring, and old-line residents had started seeking safety in the suburbs, some abandoning the state entirely.

Dade County voters banned the use of public funds to encourage the use of any foreign language, burying a referendum that would make Miami an officially bilingual city.

An active fringe of anti-Castro terrorists had been adding to the violent toll in recent years with bombings, beatings and assassinations. Half a dozen groups were armed and organized at any given time, all plotting raids against the Cuban mainland, scheming toward the liberation of their homes.

Mack Bolan had enlisted in their cause at one time, welcomed the
soldados
into his own war as allies — but the times had changed for all concerned.

Today, embittered by American "abandonment" of Cuba since the missile crisis, some of the exiles saw their adopted country as the enemy. Attacks had been directed at the FBI and local law enforcement, airline offices and planes in flight, against the diplomats of nations that acknowledged Castro.

They had been linked to the assassinations of a U.S. President and a Chilean ambassador. The list was long and bloody, and it kept on growing.

Bolan knew the Cuban exiles — or he had, before the sealift — and the bitterness had poisoned everything they touched. In other days, another war, he had relied on them for assistance in the final stages of his grim Miami massacre. They had saved his life — not once, but twice — when he was wounded, cornered, and the Mafia hounds were snapping at his heels.

And one of them, the lovely Margarita, had provided Bolan with a very different kind of aid and comfort, laying down her life as a result.

The warrior owed them something, right, but circumstances altered cases. He had come to southern Florida in answer to reports of mounting terrorism, rumors of a KGB involvement somewhere. And if the exile movement that he once respected and admired had been perverted, twisted into something else...

The warrior checked himself, refusing to assume the worst. Some of the exiles had undoubtedly reverted to terrorism. Some of them might be in league with
mafiosi,
Cuban agents or the Soviets.

Some of them, right.

But in Mack Bolan's war, you did not slaughter herds of sheep to find the lurking wolf. The soldier made distinctions in selection of his targets. There were allies, enemies and bystanders — each of them indexed and filed away for handling under individual criteria.

There was no room in Bolan's everlasting war for indiscriminate attack, unreasoning response. In every combat situation certain steps were necessary for elimination of the enemy.

Penetration.

Target identification and confirmation.

Destruction.

The warrior had not yet achieved phase one of his attack plan. He possessed a code name, but without some further leads he could chase his tail around forever in Miami. He would have to find a handle on the puzzle, something....

Someone in Miami knew the true identify of Jose 99. It was a simple matter of applying some strategic pressure, rattling some cages, waiting for the proper answers to fall out.

And Tommy Drake had been a starting point. His death was not the end of anything. It was the opening gun of Bolan's new Miami war, and Drake would have a lot of company in hell before the Executioner's Florida campaign was finished.

He was carrying the cleansing fire to
mafiosi,
terrorists and traitors in Miami. Someone sure as hell was going to get burned.

The nightmare was familiar, worn around the edges like an ancient snapshot that is taken out and handled frequently. It never varied.

There was water, dark and silky smooth, a flat obsidian plane beneath the cuticle of moon. The boat was sleek and fast despite its load of canvas-covered crates. The pilot handled her expertly, threading in and out among the Keys, running without lights for fear of Prohibition agents.

And the dreamer rode up front, as always, Thompson submachine gun tucked beneath his arm. He tasted the salty spray and smelled the marshy soil of the surrounding hummocks.

They were almost there. Another hundred yards would see them to the drop, then they could ditch the cargo. Rum and whiskey, loaded on the Cuban docks, would bring tremendous profits in the gin mills of Miami. Cut and bottled under phony labels, twenty dollars' worth of rum could easily return a grand to the investor. All you had to do was make the drop on time, avoiding any interference.

Hence the Thompson.

He had used it once, not far from here, when the reception crew had sprouted sidearms, moving in to commandeer the load. And nothing could erase the memory of strobe-light muzzle-flashes in the darkness, heavy bullets slicing through the hollow men and toppling them like stalks of grain.

It had been terrifying — and exhilarating.

He was waiting, hoping for another chance to try his hand.

A flashlight winking in the gloom, and now the pilot had his heading, throttling back and easing in against the battered pier. A Packard and the usual covered truck were parked at shoreside.

Handlers, taking in the line and scrambling awkwardly aboard, were already moving toward the cargo. One of them hung back, a trifle slower than the rest. There was something....

As he turned an errant ray of moonlight fell on his face. The cold, familiar features still damp from the submersion, with the ragged, bloodless bullet scar across one cheek. The handler opened his mouth to speak, and seawater dribbled from between rubbery, lifeless lips.

The dreamer tried to lift his Thompson, found it leaden in his lifeless arms. He squeezed the trigger, but the frozen firing mechanism mocked him and the creature had him now. Its clammy fingers locked around his biceps, lifting him and shaking, shaking...

Someone was shaking him awake and into hazy semi-consciousness. He twisted, recoiling violently from the hand upon his shoulder, biting off a startled scream as he recognized the houseman, Solly Cusamano.

Philip Sacco sat up in the king-size bed and brushed the hand away.

"I'm sorry boss. I hate to wake you." Solly's voice was tight, anxious.

"What the hell time is it?"

"Quarter to four."

"In the morning? This better be good, Solly."

The housecock shuffled back a pace as Sacco scrambled out of bed and found his robe.

"I didn't want to wake you," Solly said again, "but I couldn't take the chance. You never know about these guys."

"What guys?" The mobster felt his irritation mounting, and he let it show.

"You got a visitor downstairs. He's waiting in the library. Says his name's Omega."

Sacco felt a prickling of the scalp, as if his hairs were slowly standing up on end.

"What kind of name is that, for chrissakes?"

"Well, he gave me this."

A card materialized in Solly's hand and he was offering it to Sacco, holding it between his thumb and index finger as if fearing further contact might contaminate him.

Sacco stared at it, recognizing it for what it was, reluctantly accepting it from Cusamano. It was fashioned like a playing card, but smaller, and the symbol printed on its face was staring back at Sacco like a solitary, disembodied eye.

It was an ace of spades.

The death card.

Symbol of the Mafia's own elite gestapo.

In the old days when the Talifero brothers, Pat and Mike, were alive and operating from the New York headshed, the black aces were a law unto themselves within the closed fraternity of Mafia. They answered only to the brothers, and the brothers answered only to
La Commissione.

It had been said that Pat and Mike, or any of their lethal emissaries, had the power to ice a
capo
on their own initiative, providing they could justify it later to the mob's commissioners. And they had used that sweeping power once, to Sacco's knowledge, right there in the open city of Miami.

That had been while Mack The Bastard Bolan was in town and kicking holy shit out of the brotherhood. A lot had changed since then, and little of it for the better, but the aces had been hardest hit of all. They were in flux, their status vague and ill-defined. Almost certainly, their sweeping powers had been radically curtailed. And yet....

You never know about these guys.

Damn right.

"He give you any idea what he wants?''

The houseman shook his head.

"Just said he needs to see you. Right away."

"Let's go see him, then. I wouldn't want to keep him waiting."

Solly trailed him out along the landing, down the curving staircase to the first-floor library and den. A sentry was on station at the door. He nodded curtly at a sign from Cusamano, stood aside to let them enter.

Sacco's uninvited visitor was standing with his back toward the door, examining a shelf of first editions. He did not turn immediately, although he must have heard them enter, and the
capo
took the opportunity to look him over.

He was tall, broad shouldered, with dark hair and an athlete's body. He was wearing an expensive suit, the tailored jacket cut to give him room for undercover hardware.

"What's this all about?"

The stranger turned to face them. Despite the hour, he was wearing sunglasses, his eyes invisible behind the lenses. The face was ageless, etched in stone.

A gravestone, right.

"It's all about your life, Phil. Want to save it?"

Phil?
The bastard had an overdose of nerve.

"We know each other?"

"I know you," the stranger said. "I know you've got a major problem on your hands."

"That so? I musta missed it."

"Heard from Tommy Drake tonight?"

The
capo
frowned. That goddammed prickling of the scalp again.

"I haven't heard from anyone tonight," he answered. "Everyone I know's asleep right now."

"I'll give you odds that Tommy won't be waking up."

The
mafioso
stiffened as an icy finger traced his spine. His fists were tightly clenched inside the pockets of his robe. He turned to Solly Cusamano.

"Get Tommy on the phone."

The houseman hesitated, glancing back and forth from Sacco to the ace.

"Hey, boss..."

"Go on," he snapped. "I'm covered here."

"Okay."

When they were alone, the
mafioso
moved to pour himself a drink, sipping it and deliberately ignoring the intruder, waiting for the liquid warmth to drive away his inner chill.

"You're wasting time," Omega told him. "And you haven't got a lot to spare."

"I'll take the chance."

Omega smiled and settled on the edge of Sacco's spacious hand-carved desk. Another silent moment passed before the houseman made his reappearance. Sacco raised an eyebrow.

"Well?"

"No answer. Want me to keep trying?"

Sacco thought about it, shook his head.

"I want somebody over there. Take care of it."

As he left, Cusamano spared another parting glance at the intruder. Phil Sacco waited for the door to close before he spoke.

"You sure?"

Omega nodded. "So are you."

"All right. So what's the story? Who's behind it?"

"You should know."

He stiffened, biting off the first obscene retort that came to mind.

"I give my people room to breathe. They handle any trouble on their own."

The ace responded with a crooked smile.

"I wouldn't say that Tommy Drake was handling it. He isn't even breathing."

The
capo
did not have an answer and Omega was not waiting for one.

"We've been hearing you've got problems with the Cubans."

Sacco snorted, downed another swallow of his whiskey.

"Everyone's got problems with the Cubans. I can handle it."

"We hope so."

We?
A look of puzzlement appeared on Sacco's face.

Omega did not leave him guessing.

"You've got friends on the commission, Phil. They're concerned about your welfare. Most of them would like to see you pull it out.''

Most of them, right. The
mafioso
knew a few old bastards in New York who would love to see him take a fall. Uh-huh. A few of them would dance around his casket when he bought the farm.

But Philip Sacco was not buying anything just yet.

"You tell my friends up north that everything is fine."

"They want a sign," the ace informed him.

"They'll have one," Sacco answered flatly.

"Good." Omega slithered off the corner of his desk and moved in the direction of the door. He reached it, hesitated with his hand upon the doorknob. "You ever deal with termites, Phil?"

Sacco frowned.

"Can't say I have."

Omega shook his head reflectively.

"They get inside a house like this, you never see them till it's too damn late. There's only one way to get rid of them for sure."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You torch the house, smash the ones that try to make a break. Kill everything that moves and start all over, fresh." He paused, regarding Sacco from behind the shades. "I hope you don't have termites, Phil."

"I can handle things at this end," Sacco said again, and he despised the sudden tremor in his voice.

"Okay." The door was open now; the ace was halfway through it. "You might start off with Jose 99."

The
capo
arched an eyebrow.

"What the hell is that? Some kind of Cuban beer?"

Omega laughed, and Sacco felt the color rising in his cheeks.

"I like a sense of humor," the stranger told him, growing serious again within an instant. "Check it out, Phil. Find out what your boy was doing with his breathing room. Don't let the termites bring your house down."

Philip Sacco clenched his teeth.

"I'm good at pest control," he told the closing door. If the intruder heard him, he gave no sign.

And in Omega's absence, Sacco willed his muscles to relax, returning to the wet bar for another whiskey. Too damned early to be drinking, but hell, it wasn't every day an ace dropped by to threaten you and everything you had.

And it
was
a threat. All that talk about his friends up north, the Cubans, termites in the walls — he read it loud and clear.

Sacco had a budding revolution on his hands, and Tommy Drake was probably the first in line to fall. New York knew all about it — or enough, at any rate, to send their bloodhound sniffing — and the fact of Sacco's obvious ignorance marked him as a careless
capo,
one who might be easily unseated.

Well, the bastards had a fat surprise in store for them if they believed Miami would be easy pickings. Tommy Drake had bitten off a wad he could not chew, but Sacco had the muscle to avenge his first lieutenant.

He would find out what the hell was going on — among the Cubans or the Haitians, in his own damn family if it came to that — and he would put his foot down. Right on someone's throat.

As for this Jose 99 — he might be anybody. That was fine with Philip Sacco. He was smart enough and strong enough to root out anyone in southern Florida. It was a relatively simple job of pulling strings and pushing proper buttons.

Right.

And you could can that crap about an open city in Miami. All it meant for Sacco was an open grave.

His "friends" up north were looking for a sign? Okay. Sacco had one ready for them.

It would read No Trespassing.

And anyone who crossed the boundary uninvited would be leaving in a body bag.