Powder Burn (3 page)

Meadows had never understood why she had left him. He had finished his laps one day to find her hunched on the porch steps, head in her hands. He had had faint warnings that something was wrong, but never anything concrete. She had been distant, nervous, skittish, alternately voracious and chill in bed. He had put it down to women’s problems and forgotten it; at the time he had been working hard on a town house for a millionaire in London.

She had refused to say anything sensible that day. She’d called him obdurate, imperceptive and self-centered, but that was not news to either of them. That afternoon she had left. He’d thought she would come back. She never had—until now.

“What brings you to Miami?” he asked finally.

“Fresh air and sunshine, like always. And I wanted Jessica to see the town where I grew up.”

“Is”—Christ, he couldn’t say Mr. Tilden. What in hell did she say his name was?—“is your husband with you?”

She spoke quietly. “Harold was killed last fall, a hunting accident. They were after deer. A silly accident.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Second lie in three minutes.

She was looking straight at him. The challenge was there, frank and direct. Before Meadows could accept it—did he want to accept it, almost six years later? And what about Terry?—the little girl came skittering around the corner, carrying a stack of books almost as tall as she was.

“Mommy, I want these books.”

“Jessica, you are not a member of this library, and those books are for adults, not for children.”

“I want them. You promised me ice cream. If I can’t have ice cream, then I want these books.”

“I’ll buy you the ice cream, darling. The store is just at the corner”

Meadows had been thinking in high gear, only half hearing the mother-daughter exchange. He had to make a decision. Which? How? He needed some time to think.

“Look,” he said, “maybe Jessica would like to go for a ride on the bay. I mean, if there’s a nice day while you’re here.”

“I’m sure Jessica would love that,” Sandy said. “We’ll be at the Crestview until the end of the week. Give us a call—if there’s a nice day.”

Dammit, she had always been more put together than he. He couldn’t shake her hand again, could he? Should he kiss her on the cheek?

She didn’t wait for him to decide. Taking the girl by the hand, Sandy smiled, gave a half wave and left the library. Meadows walked slowly to his bike, unaware of much more than that his sweaty palms still clutched the plastic bag with his library books about the Incas.

The bank was two blocks from the library. It took Meadows three minutes and six years to get there. After Sandy there had been a cheerless procession of one-night stands for Meadows. Plastic women. Windup dolls. He couldn’t even remember most of the names.

Until Terry. He had met her a year ago, a volcanic
Latina
with strength enough to turn the tides and beauty enough to make a poet weep. He smiled. It was no exaggeration, though. He had fallen hard for Terry.

And now here was Sandy, ripping open a scar thought to be healed. Was it nostalgia that had brought Sandy back? Or was it Meadows? No, that wasn’t what was important. There was something else. The equation didn’t balance.

So Sandy had left him and gone to New York. That made sense. If you’re looking for a change of life, it is harder to get farther from Miami than New York. But to meet some guy and marry him in two weeks? That was crazy, not like her at all. If anything, Sandy had been strait-laced, almost proper, the kind who would go to bed with you only if she thought she loved you. To meet a guy one minute, marry him the next and have a baby the morning after—what the hell kind of way was that to rebound from a love affair? Sandy was too smart for that.

Meadows parked his bicycle on the red-brick sidewalk outside the bank, then swallowed hard against a lump of lead that suddenly enveloped his gut. Could she have married quickly not as a means of burying an old affair, but as a way of legitimizing its result? Perhaps she had come, not to see Meadows herself, but to have the little girl meet him, so that one day the girl would understand.…

Meadows covered the few steps to the sidewalk teller in a mental fog. His head reeled, and Bert was no help.

Bert was a trial, a once-weekly test of endurance, a whining, shuffling, sweaty, living definition of dyspepsia. No doubt Bert’s conception, too, had been a mistake, for thereafter everything else had gone wrong for him.

“If you have piles, you can’t sit, right? So you have to stand all day. And what happens when you stand? Your arches fall, right?”

Meadows, Sandy-on-the-brain, had no compassion for Bert this afternoon. It seemed to take an eternity for the teller to open his drawer, count out four twenties and four fives. He put them in a neat stack, lined up the edges and counted them again. Meadows roiled with impatience. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The sidewalk reflected in Bert’s picture window cage was burning hot. He should have worn shoes, Meadows thought. And where was the rain? He looked up and saw the first gray scout cloud nearly overhead. It wouldn’t be more than a minute or two now. Somehow the thought of biking home alone in the rain didn’t seem as attractive as it had a few minutes before.

“And the doctors? What do they know? They charge you a lot of money and never fix anything.”

“There is no justice, Bert,” Meadows muttered as he retrieved his money from the stainless steel drawer that at last shot forward.

“Now that’s the truth. I was explaining to one of the vice-presidents here and he—look at that crazy bastard!”

Meadows had a disconcerting moment of dual imagery. He saw Bert’s eyes pop open, his mouth constrict in a shocked O. At the same instant, through the glass of the teller’s cage, Meadows saw a red blur whip past, a car, traveling at an impossible speed on a drowsy business street.

Meadows whirled to his right. He caught a rear-end view of the car, a Mustang, and what looked like two occupants. The car would never make the corner where the road turned toward the bay. It was going too fast.

The driver saw that, too. He swerved to the left, hunting for more room. He lost control. The car veered toward the opposite sidewalk.

Sandy Tilden stood there, hand in hand with Jessica. Jessica was eating an ice cream cone.

They had no chance. The Mustang hit them both simultaneously. But it was capricious. It tossed Jessica high into the air, a pathetic bundle of rags, the ice cream spinning away like a hailstone. The car dragged Sandy Tilden. She was under it when it glanced off a trash can. She was under it when it grazed the edge of a building. She was under it still when it came to rest against a light pole.

The bills, four twenties, four fives, dropped unnoticed from Meadows’s nerveless fingers.

“God. Oh, God,” he moaned. He did not move. He could not move. Nothing moved save a squat black sedan that slid quietly to a halt in the street opposite the Mustang, and then nothing more except the passenger in the sedan.

He walked with economy, deceptively, the way a good emergency room doctor will get where he is going quickly without wasting the resources he will need when he gets there. But the passenger from the black sedan was not a doctor. He carried a gun. To Meadows, forty yards away, it looked like an obscene black stick.

The passenger stopped about ten feet from the Mustang. He spread his legs, leveled the gun and fired a long, continuous volley into the Mustang. It was the only sound. Then the passenger turned and strode back toward his car in the same measured pace.

It was more than Meadows could comprehend. His mind, so intricate, so finely honed, could not function. He began running. He ran without thought, without purpose. He ran toward the Mustang and the black sedan.

He had covered perhaps half the distance to the carnage when the passenger noticed him.

A split-second subconscious image impressed itself, like a Polaroid, on Meadows as he ran. The passenger was tall and burly. He wore aviator’s sunglasses. The face was oval and cruel, with pronounced ridges above the eye and prominent black brows.

The passenger raised his gun with a casual flick. He fired once.

Meadows hadn’t the time to recognize the danger, nor did he recognize the searing, angry blow that snapped his right leg from under him and sent him, in an uncontrolled slow-motion pirouette, sprawling onto the hot asphalt.

He did not hear the screams when they came. He did not sense the fresh wind that announced the squall. And he did not feel the rain that consumed the orphaned ice cream and sent probing red rivulets coursing through the gutter.

Chapter 2

“
YOU ARE
a lucky man.” The voice came from the end of a long tunnel. Meadows, lying on white sheets in a white room, peered up through the voice at the swarthy man behind it.

“Why am I lucky?”

“The bullet just tore away some flesh. If it had hit the bone, you really would have been in deep shit. That was an Ingram he hit you with, a submachine, real nasty. You should have seen what it did to those two guys in the car.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Nelson.”

“Doctor?”

“Cop.”

With an effort, Meadows hiked himself higher on the pillows. The movement sent an arc of pain along his right side, but it also chased some of the cotton candy from his head.

Two men stood by the bed, one tall and blond and muscular, the other shorter, leaner and darker. “That’s Pincus,” the dark man said, pointing. “My partner.” The blond man wore the first crew cut Meadows had seen in years.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Meadows. We would like a few minutes if you feel up to it, sir,” said Pincus.

Meadows didn’t feel like much of anything. He knew where he was. He knew his wound was more painful than serious. The big-busted nurse had told him that, had urged him to eat a lunch he didn’t want and then had left him. He had lain there a long time, drowsing in the sunshine like an old man, seeking without much success to rearrange jumbled swatches of memory into a coherent beginning, middle and end. He had been shot, and now he was in the hospital. That seemed plain enough. He did not ask about Sandy and little Jessica; he didn’t have to. That much he remembered with a terrible clarity that would ache for the rest of his life.

The tall cop, Pincus, unexpectedly proffered a thin white envelope.

“This is your property. Would you sign the receipt, please?”

Startled, Meadows scrawled his name on a form the police officer supported on his notebook. He peeled open the envelope and inverted it. Four soiled twenty-dollar bills drifted onto his chest. Meadows stared at them dully.

“You had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank when you were shot,” Pincus said. “This is all we could find.”

The dark cop laughed.

“You’ll never see the other twenty. Somebody grabbed it off the street,” he said. “And if it was me, I’d take about half of what’s left and buy a bottle of whiskey for that big black dude.”

“Arthur?” He knew someone had come running, had knelt over him, stayed with him, but through the haze of pain he had not been able to see who. So it had been Arthur.

“He had the bleeding pretty well controlled by the time the ambulance got there. If he hadn’t been so quick, it could have been a lot worse,” Nelson said.

Meadows winced.

“Do you want me to call the nurse?”

“No, I’m all right.”

Smoke from the fat cigar wreathed the policeman’s face. It nibbled at his mustache, poked at deep-set eyes and fingered his long black hair. He was a
Latino,
Meadows concluded, almost certainly Cuban. You had to tell by looking. His English was perfect.

“Sorry, not supposed to smoke in here,” Nelson said with an airy wave of the cigar that was less apology than explanation, “but I figured you wouldn’t mind—there’s nothing wrong with your lungs.”

“Su casa,”
Meadows replied.

“Coño, chico, hablas español. Qué bueno.”

“Sí, hablo,”
Meadows responded, and switched back to English. “Just now I’d rather not bother.”

“No problem,
amigo,
I only want to ask one question. English is fine.”

“Answer one first: Have you caught them?”

“No.”

“Will you catch them?”

“We’re trying,” said Pincus, “trying hard.”

“That means ‘No, we won’t,’ doesn’t it?”

“Probably,” Nelson said with a shrug. “Maybe you can help. Can you describe the man who shot you?”

“Not very well. It’s still a blur,” Meadows said, looking away. “I remember he was a big guy, and he wore aviator glasses. And he had a very prominent brow…it was so fast. Mostly I was thinking about the girl and her mother.”

“Rest on it then. If enough of it comes back that you want to try building a composite with a police artist, you call me.”

“Probably Homicide will take care of that,” Pincus remarked.

“I think he ought to call me,” Nelson said curtly. “The first name is Octavio.” He laid a business card on the table next to Meadows’s bed.

Meadows glanced at it, then took a sip from a glass of water. “Do you understand what it’s all about?” he asked.

“What’s there to understand? Two assholes broke somebody’s balls and they got killed. Bang-bang.”

“Tell me about it. I’d like to know.”

“Naw, you don’t want to get involved. It’s scum from top to bottom.”

“But I already
am
involved.”

“The hell you are. You’re not even an ‘innocent bystander’—like the two who were killed. You are just what the paper calls ‘a slightly injured passer-by.’ They didn’t even use your name.”

“The
innocent bystanders”
—Meadows controlled himself—“the woman and the girl, they were special people to me. Very close.”

Nelson seemed to admire the smoke spilling from the red edge of the cigar.

“Shit,
amigo,
I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t know that.”

Meadows knew anger then, ignited by loss and pain, exacerbated by the cavalier cop and his own feeling of helplessness on the hospital bed.

“The guy who shot me is also responsible for killing Sandy and Jessica. He ought to be in jail already, for Christ’s sake. It was broad daylight!”