Salty Sky (23 page)

CALE WASN’T PLEASED
with himself. He’d lost enough contact with Joe to allow Joe’s hand to find his pocket. Who puts their right hand in a rain slicker pocket for comfort?
Nobody
was the answer. You did that if you were reaching for something. Cale kept himself positioned to look through the front door to see if anybody else was pulling into the driveway. He wanted to make sure what his visitor was doing in his pocket wasn’t signaling somebody else to come over.

Joe tightened up when Cale made his demonstration. Showing how easily he could hurt somebody wasn’t exactly lighting a peace pipe. The conversation had taken a turn for the worse, so Cale slowed down and tried to correct.

“Joe,” he said, taking a deep slow breath before continuing, “I was looking at a trimaran based out of Bermuda when I looked up and saw your nephew walking toward me. He took his shirt off, poured his PBR out but kept the bottle in his hand. He made some comment about beating me into barnacles.”

Cale paused, looking at Joe to make sure he was listening to the
story before he continued. “So I waited for him. I wanted to give him the chance to back out, like an elephant doing a false charge. But he didn’t, so I whooped his ass—plain and simple. Then I called the ambulance for him and went back to my friends. Thinking about it now, I should have just pushed him into the water. But at the time, the thought didn’t occur to me.”

GINO WITH HIS
shirt off. The PBR bottle in his hand. Even the barnacle comment. It all sounded like Gino. Somewhere between proud, a cowardly bully, and a blowhard. Analytically, the story made sense to Joe. Emotionally, he wasn’t cooling down. He did feel his fear slipping and pulled his finger off the trigger, but his temper was pulsing in a way it hadn’t in years.

“So you beat him senseless and left him there? Aren’t you pushing the age envelope for this kind of hooliganism?” Joe looked at Cale’s left hand and then, before Cale could respond to the first set of inquiries, asked another set, “What did you tell your wife about this? Wait, more to the point, what did you tell her about having three young women spend the night with you?”

Cale’s eyes looked dazed, like he had been brained with a two-by-four. He quietly repeated the last question, “What did I tell my wife?”

The sad tone in Cale’s response began to take the edge off Joe’s temper. He felt a twinge of embarrassment at the tack he’d taken with the conversation but, with less heart in it, kept pushing forward. “Yeah, that question, it seems to speak to me. Bringing a beautiful woman and her friends back to your home while your wife is away. I think that behavior says a lot about a man’s honor, his trustworthiness.” Belatedly, without conviction, he added, “The kind of man who’d do that might be the kind of man who’d sneak up on somebody and whack them from behind.” Joe knew the connection between being a
philanderer and a batterer was tenuous at best before the words even left his mouth.

Despite Joe’s last throwaway comment, both he and Cale realized the shift the conversation had taken. It no longer focused on Gino. It wasn’t even the girls as a group. It was Ashley.

WHAT WOULD I
tell Maggie?
Cale rolled the question around in his brain. He decided he was good with the truth, which was a cleansing confirmation. He confessed to himself first, then Maggie, that he was truly interested in Ashley but wasn’t going to track her down. Basically, his plan of non-attack was driven by the fact that he wouldn’t want a middle-aged guy chasing his daughters.

Cale returned his attention to the man standing in front of him. “Joe, I understand you’ve only known Ashley for a couple days, so is the concern for her or my soul?”

“Ashley was put in this situation because of my decision.”

It was good they weren’t talking about souls. Cale no longer worried this would be a violent situation. Without the adrenaline, fatigue crept back in. It was time for his visitor to be shown out.

“Joe, I don’t think Ashley felt too put out by the situation. Her friend, unfortunately, was romantically inclined toward one of the guys. Ashley helped me prepare the house for the storm, which I appreciated. We spent a couple of enjoyable hours talking while the others squeezed the rest of the life out of the party. When I came out of my room this morning, she was asleep on the couch.”

Joe nodded his head. The extra blood in his cheeks was draining back to a normal state. He said, “OK.”

In unison, the two men nodded their heads slightly toward each other. Joe turned and started to leave. As he reached the door, Cale remembered the original purpose of the visit. “Did you have any
other questions about what happened with your nephew? I really wish I’d just pushed him in the water.”

Joe turned back around. “He had his two friends back at the bar. If you pushed him in the water, it could have taken a turn for the worse.”

“Thanks. Still, I wish I hadn’t hurt him so badly.”

They uneasily shook hands. Without parting words, Joe returned to the rain and the four-speed.

17

THE GULFSTREAM DEPOSITED
the three men at the North Carolina coast, then flew inland to avoid the approaching hurricane. Francisco and his men checked into a hotel built inside an upscale outdoor mall. Issued by a Swiss bank, his credit card’s digital information did not reveal his name. It would be very difficult for the United States government to get the bank to release the identity of the cardholder.

The men rested during the worst part of the storm in the living room of Francisco’s suite.

“Alberto, do we know Mr. Coleman’s home address?”

“
Sí
. I beg your pardon. Yes. Let me get it for you. Do you want the little computer too, Mr. Escobar?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Francisco flicked on his new tablet. He typed in the address. He clicked through various screens and looked at an aerial photo of the house. He noticed the distance between Coleman’s address and the neighboring homes. He saw the water and registered the massive size difference of the houses across the water from Coleman’s own home. He changed the view to look at the house from the street level. He drove up and down the street using his finger on the screen and then went back to the aerial view. He looked at routes for quick getaways. He also looked for hiding spots within a mile of the house. He found a long driveway cut-in where no home was ever built.

“Alberto?”

“Yes, Mr. Escobar?”

“Please review the plan with me.”

“We are told Mr. Coleman’s wife is dead and his children have moved out of the house. We should drive up to his home. He has no reason to think we are anything but someone he knows or someone who is lost. When he comes to the door, we will grab him. Then the Cuban and I will take him inside and tie him with wire until you are done.”

“How will we dispose of his body, Alberto?”

“However you wish.”

“What would you suggest?”

“We weight his body and drop it in the water behind his house.”

Francisco didn’t respond. The half-thought-out answer showed why Alberto never rose above loyal and brutal guard. There would be blood and other evidence to indicate a crime had occurred even if there was no visible body. Francisco and Alberto had spent their lives in villas filled with servants who cleaned where they stepped; neither of them knew how or had any desire to clean. Why spend such effort on something for which they could not succeed? Francisco, just as Pablo would have done, was going to leave the mutilated body wired to the chair. It might be a day or a month before it was found. Either way, Francisco would be gone.

Sadly for Francisco, Alberto never fully blossomed. Too many of his men were that way. They were powerful canopy trees casting long shadows, but they were not a forest. They had never nurtured the beauty and produce of the understory trees that flowered with fruit. They lacked the bushes near the ground, where coffee and chocolate flourished. Could they have become a forest yielding much more value to its owner? Francisco assumed so but did not take responsibility for their half-fulfilled potential because they were El Capo’s men, more than twenty years his senior. But he did take responsibility for the many undeveloped young men in his own employ. No one in
Francisco’s orbit had dared tell him he had failed these men so far, but he understood that he had. And he understood that this failing limited his family’s operation at this moment of its greatest opportunity. He looked to the Cuban, “What do you think we should do to the body?”

“I would leave it. Nobody knows we are here. We will be gone by the time it is found. If you want, when we are gone, I can have the house robbed.”

The Cuban’s suggestions resonated with Francisco, who nodded silently.

He suddenly needed to understand what had stopped him from further developing his men. Had it been the setbacks from energy invested in so many men who were killed by the
norteamericanos
or the civil war? Was it because he purposely avoided the world’s largest market for his products and could thereby survive with men who were only half-realized? He had not even begun to groom a successor. Surely, one of his many nephews or cousins could be groomed to be the next boss. But each had grown up so wealthy and felt entitled to their wealth. Would they accept a leader rising among them, or would an outsider be easier? He would keep the Cuban close to him to see what role he could play.

Just as each Argentinean opera star competed to play the lead role in an opera’s first production, so they could define how that role would be played for the opera’s life, be it one season or five hundred, Francisco thought he might be playing his role as Pablo defined it. Yes, he had his men’s love and fear more than El Capo ever did. But what had he done with that love and that fear? He had let too much time go by without building the skill sets that the present opportunity demanded they have. He had neglected something as simple as cultivating the ability to speak good English in his circle of bodyguards.

To realize the change he needed to see in his men, Francisco needed to change how he ran his business. He needed to identify rising stars. Why did he keep coming back to the Cuban? He needed to stop
spending his time on those who wilted in the heat and replace them with those who thrived in the sunlight. He would spend his time, as Pablo had done for him, teaching both the broad game and the small skills to let them succeed and grow the family’s operations.

He would have to indulge himself less. Fewer starlets and car races. The new jet and Estella seemed suitable replacements that would fit into the flow of his new work life. He wished she’d stayed behind when the jet flew inland. Now would be a good time to send Alberto and the Cuban to their rooms and use the enjoyment of her treasures to stop the barrage of ideas bouncing around his brain.

But Estella was not here, the wind and rain pounded outside, and his brain had no diversions to escape to. So he tried to target his thoughts on the big conquests to achieve.

First, to grow the powder trade to exceed the global dominance it once held, he needed to identify and proceed with the new alliances he so feared. Past this fear was growth, where the pain and pleasure trade-offs lay. This was where the men in his family could reach out and begin to rely on each other as brothers-in-arms instead of looking at each other as adversaries competing for the rare promotion or infrequent new project. Without the distraction of the Colombian civil war, Francisco could sense that their destiny would be adversarial if they remained stagnant.