Mile Zero (42 page)

Lately heaven seemed to be raining displeasure on Justo. He blamed himself for Voltaire’s fate. True, no good deed goes unpunished. He knew he shouldn’t have tried such a crazy stunt to keep Voltaire bottled up in the judicial system so he wouldn’t be grabbed by the Feds and sent back into the jaws of the shark. But anything was worth a try, and with St. Cloud working in the same direction he thought, well, now it saddened him what he thought that long-ago day when the Coasties towed the refugee boat into Mallory Dock. He had thought wrong.
Se la dejaron en la mano
. He was left holding the bag. Still, he had one card to play before the game was over. He was
determined to take the last gamble to get Voltaire back. To make the gamble work he needed St. Cloud again. Somewhere in the gang of celebrants crowding the streets on this Halloween night of fantasy festivities he was bound to run across St. Cloud. St. Cloud was not one to miss a party, especially where the promise of free rum was loose in the air.

The question chalked on the blackboard behind the Wreck Room bar counter did not pose much of a challenge to the customers shouting for another drink. The answer was the Grand Costume Parade, making its noisy way down the one-mile length of Duval Street past the Wreck Room windows. Justo attempted to catch Angelica’s eye as she pacified fruit-hatted Carmen Mirandas, hoop-skirted Dolly Madisons, and intergalactic travelers sporting tinfoil antennae. Even the boisterous Bubba-Bob had exchanged his captain’s cap for a broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Things were definitely not as they should be. In the slot behind the bar where Angelica normally worked alone, five bartenders scurried with trays of foaming drinks. Justo couldn’t shout his question to Angelica, if she had seen St. Cloud. The noise inside the room was louder than the loudspeakers booming Japanese rock and roll from a truck rolling by outside. A thirty-foot glitter-scaled Godzilla reared from the truck’s flatbed, a vomit of foil-wrapped chocolate kisses erupting from the beast’s mouth onto grateful revelers lining the street.

“You want to go to Hollywood?”

Justo turned to find the voice directed at him in the crowded room.

It was a raspy voice. Its owner wore red tights and purple high-heeled shoes, a pink rabbit stole was slung over skinny cocoa-colored shoulders, a blond wig with a dazzling rhinestone tiara topped the whole affair. Green lipstick around the voice’s mouth puckered in a large, “O, oh, ohh! You come with me, honey, and you come to Hollywood.”

Justo stared into the voice’s smooth face, its eyes covered by a black Lone Ranger mask. He didn’t know if he was being hustled by man
or woman, though he had a strong suspicion. The creature raised a bony hand, its painted fingernails digging into Justo’s elbow.

“C’mon sugar, let’s fly to where I can make you a star.” The voice darted from a tongue close to Justo’s ear.

Justo was in the trap a good cop should never be in, caught off guard. A queer embarrassment flushed his face ruddy purple. He couldn’t decide whether to book the creature pawing him, or laugh off the proposition.

“Don’t be shy, honey. I’ll be gentle as Lassie. Maybe you don’t trust me to make you a star? Maybe you don’t trust women? Let me tell you something about women.”

The green lips were heating to their subject. Justo felt the hot air from them on his cheek as he turned to catch Angelica’s attention again. Maybe if he ignored the clutching creature it would slither back under its barstool. No such luck.

The green lips loosened with philosophical fervor. “Women know nothing of truth. Lies lies lies. Quack quack quack. Say whatever they want to suit themselves. Know what people say? A lie is a man’s last resort and a woman’s first aid. Have you ever noticed how a bad woman always gets a good man? Which are you, honey, a bad woman or a good man?”

“A
bad
cop.”

“I knew you weren’t a cop right off. Watched you come in. Stiff and stuffy in your butch blue suit, trying not to be noticed. Says to myself, this black boy is so uncomfortable. He should be masquerading as the Tin Man, or maybe delicious Dorothy herself.”

It was worse than Justo first imagined. Green lips figured him for an impostor, a shoe clerk or a lawyer decked out as one of Key West’s finest. That was the trouble with Fantasy Fest, nobody was who they were supposed to be. Green lips had a point. Justo probably could command more respect dressed as the Tin Man on a night like this. “Look,” he growled even more menacingly. “I am a real cop. Don’t push it.”

“No such thing as a real cop,” green lips snickered. “Only traffic cops and crooked cops.”

“Listen—!” Justo grabbed the rabbit stole draped around skinny shoulders and twisted it into a knot beneath green lips’ chin. At times like this his Cuban Spanish came instinctively faster than his English.
“Agila! Vete a la puneta!”

“Does that mean we are engaged?”

“Beat it! Go to the devil!”

“Don’t want to go to the devil.” The pucker of green lips dissolved into a pout, painted fingernails digging deeper into Justo’s elbow. “Just want to go to Hollywood with you. Want to make you a matinee idol.”

Justo didn’t have time for this. From the corner of his eye he saw the white cowboy hat of Bubba-Bob bobbing above crowded heads, moving toward the door. He stiffened an index finger and brought it up in a swift poke into the hollow beneath green lips’ Adam’s apple. A surprised gasp whooshed from green lips, the skinny body teetering backwards on spiked heels.

The cowboy hat of Bubba-Bob disappeared out the door. Justo bulled after it through the menagerie of bizarre beasts and femmes fatales of both sexes, pushing his way into the even greater crush of Duval Street. He had a hunch by following Bubba-Bob he might find St. Cloud. There were few men not island-born Bubba-Bob deemed worthy of sharing drink with. St. Cloud was definitely at the top of that list. Bubba-Bob owed St. Cloud a large and life-saving favor. It was St. Cloud’s glib tongue that saved Bubba-Bob from a cruel end worse than Karl Dean’s. Even though St. Cloud’s saving of Bubba-Bob’s skin happened several years back, it was still talked about from bar to bar as if it happened yesterday, making St. Cloud a local hero in some quarters. Justo knew the truth of the matter. St. Cloud had walked into the wrong bar at the right time. It was more than St. Cloud’s rum-loosened tongue that rescued Bubba-Bob from what was menacingly aimed at him. What was aimed at him were three
Marimberos
fresh from Bogotá. These weren’t just any three Colombian cocaine cowboys, they were on the trickle-down payroll of MK. They had been with MK since the early days of flying small planeloads of marijuana, up to the present time of running cargo ships of cocaine into Florida more frequently than ferries across the English Channel. Over the years the
Marimberos
enforced MK’s standard rule of trade: delivery plus two weeks to pay for the shipment. It was delivery plus two which brought the
Marimberos
to Key West in a rented Cadillac with blacked-out windows. They came to teach a lesson to a commercial lobster boat captain who had the bad manners not to pay for his load of cocaine passed from an MK mother ship. The Captain swore the Coast Guard busted his boat twenty miles out from Cuba, but the uniformed men who made the bust were put-up guys hired by the Captain, it was a straight rip-off. MK knew things were loosening
around the edges, screws had to be tightened. He was forced to run a school of show and tell, his
Marimberos
constantly called upon to hold classes. Last Christmas they had been in Tampa, delivering a textbook lesson on the ABC’s of inter-American commercial ethics to a drug lawyer working both sides of the line. The lawyer’s name was Woof-Woof, a handle applied because he could woof down a half kilo of coke faster than an anteater hoses up a jar of honey, and because his bayside estate was guarded by two vicious pit bullterriers. Woof-Woof entertained guests by commanding the pit bulls to attack the smooth trunk of a royal palm soaring from the divingboard end of his swimming pool. Released from chained leashes, the ax-shaped heads of the pit bulls would strike the trunk with razor teeth, their bodies rising higher with each ferocious bite, like mutant monkeys from hell ascending Eden’s last tree. The bowwows were no problem for the
Marimberos
when they arrived at the locked gates of Woof-Woof’s estate Christmas Eve, because MK knew everything about Woof-Woof. Woof-Woof was not unlike many lawyers MK put through law school with money laundered cleaner than a convent girl’s underwear. When the
Marimberos
tied Woof-Woof up in his living room they told him he had been naughty, but they were going to feed him well. They sat him on the shiny red tricycle he planned to give his nephew for Christmas, from there he could watch as they unwrapped his presents beneath the decorated pine tree. They chained the carnivorous canines to the chrome metal legs of a suede sofa, and helped themselves to Woof-Woof’s buckets of champagne, cocaine and Quaaludes. So many presents to open, so little time until the hour of the virgin birth. The presents did not bring out the Christmas spirit in the
Marimberos
. They fought over a diamond pinky ring, silk neckties which could be worn to a marriage or a funeral, and a gold bracelet engraved with
WOOFIE MY SAVIOR, LOVE KIT KAT
. The boxes of Swiss chocolates and Florida fruitcakes the
Marimberos’
shared with their bound host, shoveling bonbons and glazed figs into his mouth until his cheeks bulged and saliva dripped from his lips onto a fattened belly. The famished pit bulls snarled, but received not so much as a sugared plum. What revived the
Marimberos
festive spirit was playing back recorded messages on Woof-Woof’s telephone answering machine. Aside from business and family ring-ups many young women were attempting to solicit the favor of a return call. One solicitor purred in a velvet voice which drove the
Marimberos
to manic distraction as they dipped their beaks into finger-thick lines of
cocaine.
“Woofie honey, you there? This is Meow-Meow. Five in the morning and just got in from Coconut Grove. Famished for your you know what. My tongue is furry and white. Meow-me-yow. Where is Woofie when Kit Kat needs her special thing
?” The
Marimberos
howled, the starving pit bulls growled. Everyone knew where Kit Kat’s special thing was, stuffed full of Christmas goodies and bound naked to a kid’s bike. The
Marimberos
were rocking with the yuletide spirit, they gobbled handfuls of Quaaludes and set about decorating Woof-Woof. They wound electrical tape around his head and over his mouth, then draped the attached links of kosher hot dogs over his shoulders and across his fattened belly. The two drooling brutes chained to the sofa eyed the fleshy decoration just beyond their straining reach with proprietary interest. Woof-Woof had yet to say a word, assuming the
Marimberos
were sent simply to scare him, but with ten pounds of hot dogs clothing him he decided it was time to cut a deal, he knew where all the bodies were buried, he was indispensable to MK. He tried to shout his terms. The sounds coming from his taped mouth were like hollow gasps from a rabbit clubbed back of its head. At sunup the phone started ringing again. The
Marimberos
played back the voice of a small boy wanting to know if Santa was bringing him a red bike, another voice whispered in a whiskey-throated purr that it was fresh from the shower and desperate for Woofie’s special thing. The
Marimberos
shouted at Woof-Woof. They were confused. They couldn’t comprehend why a man with a license to steal, a prosperous American drug attorney, would chisel a lousy hundred grand by skimming money he was supposed to move through safe banks in Mexico so MK’s imprisoned black shrimpers could return to business. Why would such an educated man with a mansion on Tampa Bay, a yacht tied out front and Kitty Kat girlfriends, go up against the accommodation? Was it true the Feds were about to nail him with twenty-two conspiracy counts and he had already flipped to them? The
Marimberos
were full of questions as they continued to deck Woof-Woof out like a butcher’s Christmas tree. They demanded answers, but all they got were muffled blubs from Woof-Woof’s taped mouth and ever more urgent calls from meowing Kit Kat. The pit bulls were lunging at the scent of a meal in the air. Did Woof-Woof know pit bulls ate all of their prey after they killed it, bones and all? “I want my special thing,” Kit Kat pleaded. “God bless ye merry gentlemen,” the
Marimberos
toasted each other with champagne and released the voracious animals. As the pit bulls tore into the flesh of their overdue present the
Marimberos
slipped
off to the airport, were back in Bogotá by late Christmas day. Not unlike the Three Kings of the Orient nearly two thousand years earlier, theirs was simply to bear witness to a fait accompli. It was for others to puzzle the truth of mysteries, divine or mundane.

When the
Marimberos
stepped from the Cadillac in Key West they had in mind for the lobster boat Captain a lesson similar to the one taught in Tampa, but no two lessons are alike, especially since the
Marimberos
fingered the wrong man. They found the Captain’s trailer among hundreds rowed in a dusty field behind the dog track, its humped living quarters surrounded by stacks of dilapidated wooden lobster traps. Over the locked front door was a
KILL CASTRO
bumper-sticker. The
Marimberos
kicked down the door. Nothing inside moved except a circling goldfish in a glass bowl atop a groaning refrigerator. The
Marimberos
figured the Captain was at sea, pulling up a day’s worth of traps. They decided to wait out the sun’s slow descent over Key West in the darkest bar they could find. That night, when the greyhounds chased the metal rabbit around the track, they would return to the trailer and teach their lesson.