“What do I write?”
“Just look like you’re writing.” Serge snuggled into a comfortable position on the hot plastic straps and raised his voice. “The Jets will win! I guarantee it! …”
A heavily perspiring man in a tweed jacket emerged from the back of the condo. Mahoney quickly acquired the target and walked around the pool. The agent pretended not to know Serge as he reclined on the adjacent lounger and placed a rumpled fedora on his stomach.
Serge turned his head sideways. “Hope your money’s not on the Colts.”
“This is too conspicuous,” said Mahoney. “I can’t be seen with you.”
“That’s why I picked it. I knew you couldn’t resist coming here.”
“Poolside press conference,” said Mahoney. “Friday, January 10, 1969.”
“New York quarterback Joe Namath repeats his historic guarantee of victory in Super Bowl Three that he’d boldly made the night before …”
“… At the Miami Touchdown Club banquet,” said Mahoney. “Bad news: The hit’s still on.”
“You’re losing it. There is no hit.”
Mahoney shook his head. “Someone’s still asking around.”
“Must be my Internet travel service. It’s outrageously popular.”
“You’re being shadowed straight down the coast, stop for stop. At first they were a couple days behind, now just hours. It’s almost as if they have someone on the inside.” Mahoney gazed across the pool as Story applied lotion. “Nice gams.”
Someone in a blazer walked up to the end of Serge’s lounger. “Excuse me, sir. Do you live here?”
“No.” A big smile.
“Then what’s going on?”
“A press conference.”
Serge checked his watch: 4:45.
“Why can’t I sit at the bar?” asked Coleman.
“I already went over this. I need you for my backup.” He handed Coleman his piece.
“But I don’t know how to shoot a gun.”
“You won’t have to. Just sit in this booth while I’m at the bar. In the absolute worst-case, I’ll give a nod, and all you have to do is stand, look mean and briefly raise the edge of your shirt to expose the pistol butt.”
“But don’t you need the gun?”
Serge patted a bulge under his tropical shirt. “Have something better.”
Coleman plopped down in the booth beneath brass portholes and hanging maritime lanterns. “Why do I feel like I’m on a ship?”
“Because you’re supposed to. It’s the incredible Wreck Lounge in Fort Lauderdale’s Yankee Clipper hotel.” Serge swept an arm across the ultra-dark interior and up at thick, aged timbers. “I love the Wreck. Designed to look like the cargo hold of a nineteenth-century schooner.” He pointed another direction, toward the source of a dim turquoise glow that seeped through the lounge as its primary light source. “Best feature of all! Remember my number one rule for grading bars?”
“The view behind the bottles?”
Serge nodded. “Those thick windows framed with nautical rope provide a magnificent underwater vantage of the hotel’s pool.”
Someone came off the diving board and knifed through the water behind the Bacardi.
Coleman waved for a waitress.
Serge grabbed his arm and lowered it. “Stop drinking.” “But it’s a bar.”
“Coleman, you’re already halfway in the bag. You need to stay on your toes.”
“I’ll be fine.” He raised his arm again.
Serge lowered it again. “I’m just asking for a half hour. Until the meeting’s over, whatever you do, don’t drink. Then you can do whatever you want.”
Coleman folded his arms. “This sucks.”
Serge glanced at his watch again. “Better take our positions. And I’ll need to ask that guy to get up.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Robert DeNiro sat in Analyze This.”
Serge left Coleman in the booth. He reached the bar and tapped a designer shoulder. A low-grade golf pro turned around and looked Serge over. “What’s your problem, loser?”
“DeNiro sat there.”
“So?”
“I have to sit there.”
“Fuck off.”
Moments later, hotel staff rushed in to aid a customer twitching on the floor.
“He was just fine a minute ago,” said Serge, buoyant atop the DeNiro stool, making sure his tropical shirt covered the stun gun.
A ship’s clock ticked. A stretcher rolled out of the lounge. Serge sat with his back to the bar, facing the entrance. Coleman ordered two drinks. Bikini babes dove into the pool. Tension grew.
5:01. Four men entered the lounge: a scrawny accountant type flanked by three bodybuilders. They looked around.
Serge held up a chauffeur-type sign: Hotel Robbery Gang.
The quartet rushed over. “Put that damn thing down!”
Serge folded the cardboard. “I’m on the DeNiro chair.”
“You wanted to meet, so meet.”
“You the one I talked to on the phone?”
He nodded.
“We probably should use names.”
“Dick.”
“Dick, what’s with the goon squad?”
“In case of a double-cross. Then you’ll be taking a little ride.”
“Sorry fellas, not today.” Serge leaned smugly against the bar. “I’ve got a crack backup man. Best in the business. He’s sitting anonymously somewhere in this bar, but you’d never guess who until it’s too late. Won’t ever hear the bullet. Yes sir, the consummate pro.”
The goons looked around the lounge, including the rear booth. No Coleman.
Suddenly, a splash and small explosion of bubbles. They all turned and looked through the underwater pool windows. A fully clothed man dog-paddled toward the surface. A pistol drifted down to the drain.
Serge closed his eyes and placed his forehead on the bar. He raised his head. “Would you believe I have two backups?”
“You’re wasting my time.”
“Okay, here’s the deal.” Serge slipped Dick a matchbook. “Hotel, room, time.”
“What’s the take?”
“Opals, small but decent quantity. The big catch is a twenty-carat flawless ruby.”
“How do you know?”
“If I told you, I’d be out of a job.”
“Better not be a trick or you won’t hear the bullet.”
Javelin flew out of Miami on South Dixie Highway. Blistering afternoon. Mercury flirted with a hundred. Even hotter in the car since Serge had the heater up all the way. Sweat sheeted down their heads.
Coleman wiped his face. “My eyes are stinging.”
Serge grabbed a handle. “Roll down your window.”
Coleman cranked the knob on his own door. “Why’d you turn the heater on full blast?”
“Because the car’s overheating at this temperature.”
Coleman stuck his head out the window like a cocker spaniel. “I don’t understand.”
“Most people don’t. Serge’s travel tip number 739: When a radiator gets too hot, some drivers know to turn off the air conditioner, because the law of thermodynamics adds heat to the engine inversely proportional to the cooling of the passenger compartment. But the real trick in averting a boil-over is to turn on the beater. There is no real heater in most cars. It just sucks hot air off the engine and blows it in here. See?” He tapped the dash’s temperature gauge.
Coleman came back inside and looked at the instrument dial. “It’s working. The needle’s dropping out of the red zone.”
“The radiator was about to blow, but we successfully improvised to continue the mission. I should have been on Apollo 13.”
“So what’s the mission?”
“Perimeter sweep.”
They reached Homestead at the bottom of the state and took a small county road to the western outskirts. Low, flat agricultural fields with tomato pickers in wide-brimmed straw hats. “I’m driving
out to the address I got off that phone call. We need daylight to assess the layout for our counter-offensive against the gang tonight.”
“I thought we were going to double-cross them at that hotel room on the matchbook.”
“Correct. Two sets of targets today, so timing will be tight. My Master Plan to take out most of the gang requires an intricate sequence of perfectly ordered strikes or we risk picking off only a few. After the ambush tonight, we’ll need to get back here toot-sweet before word of the betrayal leaks out.”