Miami Noir
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple
Miami map by Sohrab Habibion
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-936-07038-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-13-2
ISBN-10: 1-933354-13-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006923116
All rights reserved
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
A
LSO IN THE
A
KASHIC
N
OIR
S
ERIES
:
Brooklyn Noir
, edited by Tim McLoughlin
D.C. Noir
, edited by George Pelecanos
Manhattan Noir
, edited by Lawrence Block
Baltimore Noir
, edited by Laura Lippman
Dublin Noir,
edited by Ken Bruen
Chicago Noir,
edited by Neal Pollack
London Noir,
edited by Cathi Unsworth
San Francisco Noir,
edited by Peter Maravelis
Twin Cities Noir
, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz
Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics,
edited by Tim McLoughlin
F
ORTHCOMING
:
Los Angeles Noir,
edited by Denise Hamilton
New Orleans Noir
, edited by Julie Smith
Havana Noir
, edited by Achy Obejas
Bronx Noir
, edited by S.J. Rozan
Queens Noir
, edited by Robert Knightly
Wall Street Noir
, edited by Peter Spiegelman
Detroit Noir,
edited by Eric Olsen & Chris Hocking
T
ABLE OF
C
ONTENTS
J
AMES
W. H
ALL
Coconut Grove
Ride Along
C
HRISTINE
K
LING
County Line
Dead Storage
G
EORGE
T
UCKER
North Miami
Silence of the Stone Age
PART II: WIND, WATER, AND GRIME
A
NTHONY
D
ALE
G
AGLIANO
Homestead
Blown Away
T
OM
C
ORCORAN
Card Sound
One Man’s Ceiling
P
AUL
L
EVINE
Florida Straits
Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor
D
AVID
B
EATY
South Miami
The Last of Lord Jitters
J
OHN
D
UFRESNE
Sunny Isles
The Timing of Unfelt Smiles
V
ICKI
H
ENDRICKS
Miami Beach
Boozanne, Lemme Be
C
AROLINA
G
ARCIA
-A
GUILERA
Downtown
The Recipe
P
RESTON
A
LLEN
Miami-Dade Correctional Center
Swap Out
L
YNNE
B
ARRETT
Upper Eastside
The Noir Boudoir
B
ARBARA
P
ARKER
Biscayne Bay
Machete
For the good that I would, I do not:
but the evil which I would not, that I do.
—Romans (Ch. VII, v. 19)
T
ROUBLE
& P
ARADISE
A
s both a teacher and a writer, I have often been asked to explain why Miami is such fertile territory for writers who write well and truly of crime and violence and of the dark side of the human condition. Sometimes the question is put out of honest curiosity. Other times, it seems as if there is a challenge there. As if the questioner might have continued, given half a chance:
Why aren’t you writing novels of manners down there? Drawing room comedies? Something literary, for God’s sake?
The former types are fine—honest curiosity is a good thing; as for the latter interrogators, they tend to become the models for the victims in our upcoming work. But let there be an attempt at an explanation:
The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and “edge” might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city.
We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island’s heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the twentieth century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami’s role as the harbinger for America’s future.
All the flux of a beautiful city where everyone is on the make and almost nothing has quite been settled creates an exceptional place for writers to live and work—and to put it simply, we write what we observe. Once this part of the world has settled down a bit—the tide of newcomers calmed, all the hustlers gentrified, the gators chased away—perhaps our literary output will morph into something a bit more “civilized.” But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world.
Nor is this exclusively a late—twentieth century development: In 1936, Francis Wallace published
Kid Galahad
, a novel of mob-influenced boxing set in Miami. In the 1940s, Leslie Charteris set an episode or two of
The Saint
series here. After Charteris came Davis Dresser, a.k.a., Brett Halliday, and his Mike Shayne series of the ’40s and ’50s, with such understated titles as
Die Like a Dog, The Homicidal Virgin,
and
Blood on Biscayne Bay.
In the 1960s, John D. MacDonald cranked the quality of the proceedings up several notches with the debut of his long-running Travis McGee series, set in the slightly less menacing environs of nearby Fort Lauderdale.
But the true founders of the so-called “Miami School” are Douglas Fairbairn, author of the quintessential Miami noir,
Street 8
(1977), the story of a hustling car dealer up against Cuban zealots, and his contemporary Charles Willeford, creator of the Hoke Moseley novels, which include
Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead
, and—perhaps my favorite title of them all—
Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.
What Nietzsche wondered about, Fairbairn and Willeford nailed flat out. These two pioneered a kind of writing that so many of us pay homage to: captivating stories rich in character and sense of place, carefully wrought, complex in theme. And what was the question about
literature
again, please?
Veterans of Miami mayhem will find many of their favorite authors in the lineup that follows. And they will also savor the appearance of several new perpetrators whose dark endeavors will fill the pages of many a novel to come. I was tempted to join in the fun myself, but given the plethora of talent, there seems no need to swell the rout. On the subject of Miami, I’ll give my last words to Vernon Driscoll, ex—Miami police detective and erstwhile sidekick of that endlessly put-upon South Florida building contractor Johnny Deal: “Do your worst,” Driscoll muses, while searching for his kidnapped pal in my novel
Presidential Deal
, “set off your explosions, spread your gases, litter the landscape with bodies, and when you tire of it all, in a few thousand years, the sawgrass will come creeping back, the roots will split the seams of the concrete, the heat and the moisture and the rot will do the necessary work, and all will be as it was before anybody got any big ideas. Big ideas. Miami. Yeah!”
Until
Miami Noir 2
, then.
Les Standiford
Miami, Florida
September 2006
J
umpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, “Nothing weird this time. Promise me.”
Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.
“Define weird.”
He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, 4 a.m., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams, and coconut palms. The have-nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.
Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Chevy with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn’t Guy’s idea of good business practice.
“The soul train must have a station around here,” Jumpy said.
“You’re jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it’s over, I walk.”
“I don’t like dreadlocks,” Jumpy said.
“It’s a hairstyle is all,” Guy told him. “A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you.”
“I never did like dreadlocks. It’s a gut reaction.”
“Okay, so you don’t like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn’t going to keep us from doing our business, right?”
“It looks dirty,” Jumpy said. “Unkempt.”
“Yeah, well, then let’s forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here.”
“You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?”
“Nothing weird, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”
Jumpy was 6’4″, skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam’s apple. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he’d shipped out as a Marine for two hitches, then a lone-wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he’d been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn’t ask, Jumpy didn’t say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.
Jumpy didn’t pump up his past. Very understated, even flip. Guy considered that a form of extreme cool, like those muscle-bound bodybuilders who only wore loose clothes. Tight shirts were for showboat assholes.
Jumpy didn’t have to flaunt. There was a halo around him nobody could miss, a haze of androgen and pheromones that could turn a barroom edgy in a blink. Guy had seen nights when the bad boys lined up for a chance at Jumpy, pool cue in one hand, switchblade in the other, one by one coming at him like twigs into a wood chipper. Going in solid, coming out a spew of sawdust.
Trouble was, in Jumpy’s line of work, nuance might be a better strategy than overwhelming force. But try to tell that to Jumpy. Dialing back that guy’s throttle, even for Guy, a silver-tongued specialist, a man Jumpy respected, it could present a challenge. Not that Guy was morally opposed to violence. In the abstract, inflicting pain and drawing blood was fine. He’d written about it for years, described it in excruciating detail. But putting it into flesh-and-blood action, no, that wasn’t his instinctive first choice like it was with Jumpy.
“So we cool on this?” Guy said. “Do your deal and walk. No crazy-ass banter, no stare-downs. Right?”
Jumpy kept his lasers fixed on the two dreadlocks.
“I need some signal of agreement, Jumpy. A grunt is enough.”
Jumpy turned his head and blinked. That was all Guy was getting.
They got out and Guy tried to match Jumpy’s casual saunter over to the Olds.
The two gangstas insisted on patting Guy down, then after a moment’s indecision, they did a hurry-up job frisking Jumpy and stepped away like they’d burned their hands. The tall one went around to the trunk of the Olds and popped the lid.
Guy stayed a couple of steps behind Jumpy while the tall dude, wearing a black T-top and baggy shorts, showed off the Squad. His dreadlock buddy stood by the driver’s door watching. His right hand fiddling around his shirttail, ready to quick-draw if things went bad.
Dreadlock One was extolling the merits of the Squad Automatic Weapon, otherwise known as SAW. Eight hundred—meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred—round magazine. Talking straight English with a little Bahamian singsong, none of the hip-hop, webadass bullshit.
When Dreadlock One paused, Guy said, “You want to hold it, Jumpy? Inspect it?”
Jumpy was silent.
“One of you should check that shit, man, we don’t want no pissing and moaning later on.”
“Let me know when the sales pitch is over,” Jumpy said. “I’ll get the cash.”
Dreadlock One shifted his angle, moving for a better view of Guy.
“What’re you looking at?”
“That’s what I’m asking myself,” he said.
“Do that again?” Guy said.
“Who’m I doing business with,” Dreadlock One asked, “man or woman? From across the way, you look like a dude; up close like this, you could be a bull-dyke bitch.”
Guy felt Jumpy shift closer to him.
“Happens all the time,” Guy said. “It’s the haircut.”
Guy had blond shoulder-length Jesus hair, slender hips, and sleek Scandinavian features. A man of long smooth planes. Not feminine so much as asexual. A floater. Hovering between the sexes. Some women found him sexy, and just about as many men.
“More than the freaking haircut. It’s your whole entire weird-ass self.”
Jumpy stepped between Guy and Dreadlock One and said, “Why don’t you reach down my partner’s pants and find out?”
The second dreadlock cackled, then grinned a big gold smile. “Yeah, Willie, do it, man, reach your hand in there and squeeze.”
“I was just curious,” Willie said. “It don’t matter. Forget it.”
“Don’t be shy,” said Jumpy. “Reach in, take a handful, make yourself happy. Guy’s cool with that, aren’t you, Guy?”
Willie stared at Guy’s face for a few ticks, then shook his dreads.
Jumpy took two quick steps and grabbed Willie’s hand, took a grip on Guy’s belt buckle, pulled it out, and jammed the dude’s spidery fingers down the front of Guy’s pants.
The other dread had his pistol out and was aiming at Jumpy, ordering him to step the fuck away from his partner, let him go, stop that shit.
Jumpy released Willie’s hand and the man yanked it out of Guy’s pants.
“So what am I?” Guy said.
Willie didn’t say anything. He turned and saw his partner with the pistol out.
“Put that shit away, man. Put it away.”
“So what I am?” Guy said. “Did your field trip enlighten you?”
“Two thousand for the SAW. Five hundred for the loaded magazine. Take it or leave it, no negotiating.”
“Two for the whole caboodle or I’m outta here. Starting now. Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
“Two’ll do,” Willie said.
“Hard bargainer,” Jumpy said. “Tough nut.”
Jumpy and Guy walked back over to the stolen Chevy, Jumpy getting into the passenger seat. Staying there for a minute, another minute with Guy standing back by the trunk waiting, watching, recording.
Jumpy’s door was swung wide open, the overhead light on.
The two dreadlocks were talking near their Olds Ciera, but after a while they started shooting looks over. Willie held the SAW in one hand.
Jumpy sat there and sat there and sat some more until finally the head dread came strolling. Dumbass carrying the SAW one-handed.
“You got the bread or you fucking with me?”
“It’s stuck,” Jumpy said. “Fucking glove box is stuck.”
“Stuck?”
Jumpy leaned back in the seat, gestured toward the glove compartment.
Willie leaned in the door, peered through the darkness.
“You got a screwdriver,” Jumpy said, “something that can pry it open?”
Willie craned another inch forward and Jumpy took a grip on the padded handle and slammed the door closed on the dreadlock’s neck. Opened it and slammed it again and then a third time. Then one more for good luck and pushed the dread out of the way and reached down to the gravel and took hold of the SAW and aimed it out the crook of the open door at Dreadlock Two, who was trotting over with a big-ass chrome .45 in his right hand.
Guy was frozen. It was a freaking movie streaming around him. Every outrageous, amazing second of it. Hand down the pants and all.
The SAW kicked against Jumpy’s shoulder. Jumpy fired again over Dreadlock Two’s head, yelling at him to drop his weapon. Which he did. Not giving it a second thought, just tossing it into the gravel.
The downed dread struggled to his feet. Jumpy aimed the SAW at his chest.
“So what’re we going to have here? Two dead assholes?”
“No, man. Don’t be doing that. Ain’t no need. We just get the fuck up and be gone.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jumpy said. He fired the SAW into the air and the two men sprinted off toward the neighborhood where lights were coming on in bedrooms.
Jumpy got out of the Chevy and walked over to the Oldsmobile. “We got about ten seconds. You coming? Or you want to stay here and get the police point of view on things?”
Guy trotted over to the Oldsmobile and got in.
Jumpy pitched the SAW onto the backseat. Guy could smell its oily warmth. Jumpy must’ve used nearly forty rounds. Which left one-sixty still in the magazine.
Guy started the car. Put the shifter into drive and made a U-turn.
“Can you use any of that?” Jumpy said when they were five blocks away, cruising down Douglas Road into the ritzy jungle shadows of Coconut Grove.
“Think I can,” Guy said. “Yes sir. I think I most certainly can.”
Guy dug the little Sony from his front pocket and found the record button and he started to speak into the miniature device. Jumpy smiled and took them south toward the condo parking lot where he’d left his old Civic.
Sirens filled the night like the wails of predatory beasts circling their night’s meal.
“What’s this mean?” Jumpy held up a sheaf of papers.
He was standing in the doorway of Dr. Guy Carmichael’s tiny windowless cubicle. Guy’s office hours were from 4 till 6. At 6:15 his evening graduate fiction workshop started and ran till 9:40. At the moment it was 5:30, so at worst he’d have to deal with Jumpy for fifteen minutes before he could claim he had to rush off to class.
“Could you be more precise? What does
what
mean?”
“Okay,” Jumpy said. “What the fuck is this? A fucking C minus on my story.”
“Did you read my comments? Is there something you’re confused about?”
Jumpy looked down the hall, then checked the other direction. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and blue jeans and loafers without socks. Trying to fit in with some preppie image of a college student still surviving from his first fling at higher education back in the early ’70s.
“I wrote what happened. You were there. You saw it. This is what happened. And that’s all it’s worth? Not even a fucking C? What’ve I got to do, kill somebody to get an A?”
“It’s the writing,” Guy said. “Not the events you describe.”
“On my paper you said—shit, where is it?” Jumpy started fumbling through the typed pages, looking for Guy’s tiny scrawl.
Jumpy used a battered Royal typewriter and he whited out his mistakes with big glops smeared across paragraphsized portions of his paper. Guy admired his stamina, hunched over the tiny machine, those enormous fingers drilling letter after letter onto the white page. Stamina was one thing. Talent was another. Guy had tried hard with Jumpy, made him a special project, devoted hours and hours to one-on-one’s in his office and in a bar on Biscayne. But after a minute or two of anything short of unadulterated praise, Jumpy glazed over and slid back into the murky grotto inside his bulletproof skull.
Jumpy found the comment he’d been searching for and put a finger on Guy’s words as he read.
It’s not credible that two such dissimilar men would pair up for such an effort.
That’s what I mean.
Not credible
But we did. We paired up. So why in fuck’s name is that a C minus?”
“You have to convince the reader it’s credible.”
“You’re the reader, Guy. You were fucking there. You were fucking standing right there pissing your fucking Dockers. And you don’t believe what happened right in front of your fucking eyes? I’m missing something here.”
One of Guy’s grad students, Mindy Johnston, stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Ooops. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Mindy was a poet, aggressively ethereal. Wispy red hair, enormous breasts that defeated her every attempt to conceal them.
“I just came by to drop off my assignment. I can’t be in class tonight. Migraine’s acting up.”
Guy accepted the paper and told Mindy he hoped she felt better soon.
“Try a pop of heroin,” Jumpy said. “Blow that migraine right away.”
Jumpy’s gaze was fixed on Mindy’s bosom. A smile slathered on his lips.
“Heroin?” Mindy said.
“Say the word, and I’ll drop a couple of hits off at your apartment. Special delivery. First two are free.”
She squinched up her face into something between a smile and a scream.
“That’s a joke, right?” Mindy backed out of the office and floated quickly down the hallway.
“Inappropriate,” Guy muttered.
Jumpy said, “You got anything going Saturday night?”