Nightlife (21 page)

Nevertheless, as had been the case in Medellín, it was easy enough to tell the headman from the warriors. Luis Escobar’s identity was obvious. He moved differently from the other three, he ordered them about. He carried his authority like a crown.

From here, at least, Escobar looted substantially younger than Vasquez had been. He was a dark-skinned man, with very black hair. Most of the time he was visible, he wore blue slacks, no shirt. No shoes. For a time, he dragged out his own long chair and lay between the two women on the rear deck.

Like the tides, the day moved on, and afternoon became evening, and evening deepened toward night. Shortly after dusk, Kerebawa removed his palm-leaf disguise, strapped his belongings on again, and descended the tree. Safely within his fortress of bushes, he removed his clothes and shook out the bugs that had nestled within them, swept them from his body. He stretched cramped muscles, massaged out a day’s worth of kinks. Then lay in the cool grass and let it tickle his body, leaching out the heat he had absorbed through the day.

He urinated, having managed to do so only once since dawn, and that cautiously down the side of the palm.

And once again on the ground, he waited for the dead of night. Catnapping to feel refreshed.

Well past midnight, Kerebawa stole out from his hideaway. Eyes and ears alert. Close by, at least, the marina was quiet.

He readied for war. Restrung his palmwood bow. Lashed three war tips to arrow shafts. These he would have to make count. Given that he was about to turn amphibious, he couldn’t carry everything. Not only that, the water would wash away the coating of curare on the tips. While dried, curare could remain potent for twenty, even thirty, years. Take it swimming though, and that was that. So tonight, accuracy was more important than ever. Last, he slung his machete around his neck.

Again he stripped, peeling down to his waistcord.

And he was off.

Kerebawa ducked to lower his silhouette, padded north a bit, keeping to darkness and shadows as best he could. A silent predator such as Miami-teri had never seen. North, until he was nearly two hundred yards up from the
Estrella.
Didn’t want to enter too close to where it was moored. Even if they weren’t visible, Escobar would surely leave a guard or two on duty.

He placed a coiled length of twine in his mouth, then stole across the open distance and slipped over the retaining wall and into the sea. The water was bracing, refreshing. Holding his bow and arrows in one hand, he sidestroked a lazy path from shore, leaving only his head above water as often as he could. He had entered between two yachts, slipped back south along the first one, then onto a second, and so on. Letting the currents help pull him along. Entering to the north was far easier than impossibly fighting the current had he entered to the south.

Kerebawa took it slow, quiet. A murky shadow on the water as it rippled, dappled by splashing moonlight. In the approaching distance, the
Estrella
was a ghostly white galleon.

When he reached it, Kerebawa braced himself against the starboard side, opposite the dock. Palm on hull, he treaded water and slipped around aft. Beneath the rear deck, past the opening for the inboard engines. On around to port. Here, on the yacht’s left side, was where it was moored, drifting gently alongside the dock. Intermittent lines tying it secure.

He looked down its length, and from this water-level vantage point, the craft looked enormous. No gangway left in place to link it to the dock. As he had expected.

He kicked south a few feet to the pier, heavy pillars thrusting up from the sea, crisscrossed with support beams. Here he lingered, braced against a beam. Had to be careful with his bare feet. Beneath the water, the beams felt alternately slick and slimy, then hard and crusty enough to cut. Barnacles.

Kerebawa slung his bow down over his head, letting the string cross his chest from right shoulder to left hip. He spat the twine into his hand and uncoiled it. Looped it around his middle and used it to bind the arrows, now poisonless, to his back. There. He was as secure as he was apt to be.

And then he looked up. No palm tree had ever looked this tricky.

He inched himself up on one of the pier’s diagonal crossbeams. Moving slowly, letting the water slide gently from his body instead of splashing. His body was like a compressed spring with tension. He tried to keep most of his contact with the barnacles to his hands and feet, but even now, his calluses had been softened by the water. He felt tiny cuts in a few places, stinging salt water. Once he was above the barnacles, he removed the machete from around his neck and held it in both hands. Rocking the blade into the beam to give him a cross-strut to hold to and pull himself along. Progress was agonizingly slow, but silent.

Finally. A few feet above the water, and now within reach of one of the mooring lines. For a craft this size, they were heavy, a nylon cable over an inch in diameter. He grasped it, gave an experimental tug, found it held fast. At both ends.

Holding tightly to the rope, he held his breath in anticipation and pushed free of the dock. Legs drawn up so as not to splash down into the water. He dangled for a moment, waiting until momentum died. Then pulled himself hand over hand up and across to the side of the
Estrella.
Once he was nearly adjacent to it, he planted his feet against the hull and pulled himself the rest of the way toward the deck like a mountaineer scaling a cliff face.

He pulled up and over, crouched just inside the railing of the rear deck. Watchful, listening. Nothing. Yet more tales of daring to tell his children and grandchildren.

Kerebawa untied his arrows, rubbing where the twine had creased the flesh. He unslung his bow. Decided to hold the machete in his teeth. Too much to carry at once, but no telling which he might need.

The fore end of this rear deck was bordered with a series of sliding glass doors, curtained from the inside. Disaster to try entering from here. On either side, a rubber-stripped stairway led to the upper deck, half open and half enclosed by the dark-glassed cabin. Again, risky, but he was betting that if guards were up and around, they would likely be watching the front to see if anyone should come from shore along the docks.

He crouched up the starboard stairway to the upper deck. Empty, save for the reclining chairs the women had used earlier, a cooler full of melted ice. The cabin sat like eyes behind dark sunglasses, not hinting if they were open, and if they were, where they gazed.

He could creep along no longer. Now the
real
risks would begin.

Kerebawa sprinted along the right side, crossed the upper deck. Launched himself to plant feet on the gunwale just behind the upper cabin. Pushed off to land on the roof, cushioning the landing with flexing knees to reduce the noise to a soft slap of his feet.

He froze. Waiting for any possible alarm to be raised. One minute, two. Still as a stalking panther. Nothing.

He crept around the perimeter of the cabin roof, perhaps twenty feet wide by twenty-five long, and curved at the front. It was like a giant platter. Unobstructed except for a sprouting of antennas and horns and such near the front, and a back-tilted flagpole with an American flag. There was a door to the cabin at the front port side. Now. How to draw a guard out.

The flag . . .

Kerebawa rested his bow and arrows. Duck walked over to the flagpole and used his machete to slice through the nylon rope. Freed the flag, carried it back to a position directly above the cabin door.

He let it dangle half over the window, draping it onto the black glass with a gentle slap. Blown by sporadic winds. Slapped it again. Slid it farther down. Slap. Let it go, to fall to the deck.

Held his machete aloft and waited.

Several moments later he heard the clicking of the door latch. A softly grumbling man opened it, stood just inside the doorway for a few seconds. Out of range. Then he saw the top of the man’s head pass beneath him. The man stooped to retrieve the flag, and when he straightened, Kerebawa hooked the machete out and down, then sharply in. It whacked dead-center into the guard’s face with the sound of a melon being halved. The blade held fast, anchored into bone, cartilage. He uttered a choked cry, dropped the flag as his hands flailed at the blade sunk into his face.

Kerebawa leaned and reached, pulling him back with the other hand. His right held fast to the back of the blade, directly over the man’s split nose, and he seized a fistful of hair with the left. Gave a savage twist that snapped the man’s neck; he went limp.

Kerebawa, still looming over the doorway like a gargoyle, pulled him up and onto the roof. Wriggled the blade back and forth to free it from the man’s face, now a wet sticky mess.

Kerebawa curled over the roof far enough to peek inside the cabin door, head upside-down. So far, so good. Nothing but the confusing controls that navigated this huge canoe, and beyond that, a large room, full of plush furniture and carpeted and decorated as fine as any building he had ever seen beyond the jungles of home. With a narrow doorway leading down below.

He gathered his belongings and dropped to the deck, slipped through the cabin door. No sound, above or below. He notched an arrow into his bow, held it ready to draw.

And then he went belowdecks.

The narrow twisting stairway led him to a central corridor. Plushly carpeted, paneled, ornate brass light fixtures barely glowing low and warm upon the walls. Several doors branched off from either side.

Including a set of double doors, intricately carved, facing him from the opposite end. Little doubt as to who slept behind them.

Kerebawa eased forward. Some of the stateroom doors were open, and each of these was empty. Behind a closed door he found a sleeping guard, snoring gently into his pillow. He slashed the man’s throat in his sleep, clamping a hand over the struggling mouth while his life bled out to be soaked up by the sheets.

In another he found a guard who awakened as soon as the door was opened and the wedge of light fell within the stateroom. Good reflexes. The man groped for a pistol on his nightstand, and Kerebawa loosed an arrow. At less than ten feet, he could not miss. He skewered the guard’s skull through an eye socket.

Satisfied that he was now alone with Escobar and his women, Kerebawa set his sights on the carved wooden doors. Three people behind them. Stealth was fine when the enemy were handled one at a time. But this? This was riskier, even if two of the three were his women. Three against one meant confusion, diversion of attention that might be costly. Keep his eye on one, another might find a gun.

There had to be another way. He lingered in the hall. Considered various options, ways to increase the treachery. Discarded most. Then he remembered the sliding glass doors opening onto the lower deck, how they would no doubt lead into this room. A back route escape. He remembered the flag rope he had cut on the roof.

And knew that among the three dead men, he was bound to turn up what Angus had called a cigarette lighter somewhere.

Luis Escobar floated in the arms of Morpheus and the lap of luxury.

Within his darkened stateroom, triple the size of the next largest on the
Estrella
, he slumbered on a king-size waterbed between two of the finest knockout women he’d ever had the pleasure of encountering. Vanessa, the brunette, lay at his right. Redheaded Tracy at his left. They had seventy-four inches of bustline between them, and a pair of mouths that grazed on each other as happily as they did on him. A nice arrangement. Once he drained his scrotum into one or the other and needed a little rest, they could always put on enough of a show that he didn’t get bored.

As players went, in the upper echelons, Escobar was one of the more rugged-looking. His heritage reflected more peasant Indian stock than refined Spanish. A wider face, broader nose and cheekbones, thicker hair, though immaculately styled. Just a bit coarser overall, and this was the way he liked it. It instilled more respect and fear than pretty boys—like, say, Antonio Mendoza—were ever likely to command.

It gave him an additional edge too. More people than would care to admit sometimes thought brains the exclusive province of the classy-looking. As if superior intelligence couldn’t reside behind more rugged faces. Underestimating was their mistake. And sometimes, their loss.

You had to have brains to move the kind of weight Escobar did. In coke alone he pulled into Miami better than eight hundred keys a month. He did his business on the high seas. Brought on his well-paid captain of the
Estrella
and crew— heavily armed, of course—and out they went to nautical coordinates arranged the day before. Just them and the other ship, or seaplane, or pontooned chopper. Nice and private. The DEA would need a submarine to sneak up on them, and even then, the blow could quickly get turned into fishchow before anyone could board.

Here it was cut and repackaged, and off they sailed for other coordinates, other meets. Move it in, move it out. Or divided up into parcels of varying size so smaller boats could run them to any of several beachfront safe houses. At any rate, its actual time in Escobar’s immediate vicinity was minimal. While the rewards went on and on and on.

Rarely was he called upon to make a decision like he had a couple of weeks ago.

Some new product, up from Vasquez in Colombia. Something the old man had brought out of the jungles, theorizing that everybody was up for the idea of a new high now and then. Widen that product line. Tribal rain-forest stuff, visionary. Refined, of course, to winnow out the impurities.

Escobar had been cautious. Vasquez had only managed an initial shipment of six keys, so investment was negligible. He was, however, reluctant to turn it loose within his own area. Should it turn out to be poison, it was best not to foul one’s own nest. Exporting it at a distance seemed best. Move it up to Tampa. If soft American somatic systems couldn’t handle the stuff, he’d hear about it. And be insulated from the fallout. If it went over as big as crack, fine, he could handle that and pump a lot more into the pipeline.