“Yes. Yes.”
“Your excuse is that you were checking on a package that was supposed to be delivered here. You faked him out with that story tonight, right?”
“Right....”
“So he’ll probably buy it, and let it go like that. Particularly if there’s a nice tip involved. Besides, attempted break-ins around here aren’t all that unusual. Now, let’s have your car keys. I need to borrow your wheels.”
This was all moving a little fast for her. “Well, okay....”
“Tomorrow I’ll tell you where to pick your buggy up. Cool?”
But she didn’t say, “Cool.” She just handed over the keys silently, watched me a moment, then said, “It’s more than just Jaimie Halaquez, isn’t it, Morgan?”
She was right, but she didn’t need to know that.
So I just shrugged and said, “I don’t know what the hell else it could be.”
“It could be that forty million bucks they say you hijacked.”
“Is that all you girls think about?” I asked. “Money?”
I reached out, gave a half-turn to the bulb in the wall bracket that had been unscrewed and let light flood the area.
The dead guy seemed to look up at me, eyes half open. The knife was in so hard, there was no blood showing around the wound at all. He looked a little silly like that. Death can be so goddamned undignified. The saving grace is, when you’re dead, you don’t really give much of a shit.
I heard Bunny suck her breath in, then she turned toward the stairway.
I called out to her: “Two things!”
She looked back at me like she was risking getting turned into a pillar of salt. “Yes?”
“I want you to call our mutual friend Pedro over in Little Havana for me, and give him a message.”
She listened, then nodded and said, “What’s the other thing?”
“Bring me down an old sheet, would you? I have to wrap this boy up. Might not be necessary if you didn’t drive a station wagon, but I don’t have a trunk to stuff him in, so....”
She shivered as she nodded, then ran up the stairs, came back quickly with a sheet, and without a word ran back up again.
Leaving me to do what I had to do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They say criminals return to the scene of the crime, if for no other reason than to check for evidence left in the sloppy heat of the moment.
But there’s another reason, too—sometimes the scene of the crime is the one place nobody thinks to look for you.
Little Havana wasn’t the scene of any crime of mine, not exactly; but nobody figures you’ll go back to somewhere you fled. The sprawling neighborhood just west of downtown stretched west from the Miami River for a mile or more. Near midnight, bustling Calle Ocho—Eighth Street, the area between Seventeenth and Twenty-seventh Avenues—lacked some of its robust flavor, though enough coffee shops and cigar stores remained open after midnight for their pungent aromas to add even more spice to the rhythmic sounds of Latin music pulsing behind barroom windows.
The block where I wound up wasn’t lively, not right now, no packs of muchachos on the loose, to help or hinder, the restaurants and other mom-and-pop shops closed. Still, I only had to knock once at the doorway next to the bodega before I got service—Pedro Navarro was right there, waiting.
If he’d been sleeping when Bunny called to tell him I was coming, he was wide awake and alert now, still just a funny little guy with a bandito mustache. He looked stiff and proper in his pale yellow pleated button-down shirt and loose tan trousers and leather sandals, his smile forced as it fought back worry.
Soon we were all at the kitchen table in the Navarro living quarters above the grocery store, sharing small cups of hot black Cuban coffee—Pedro, his wife Maria, and Luis Saladar—the latter summoned by the man of the house, at my request.
They sat across the table from me, their faces drawn in concentration, the nervous movement of their hands the only evidence of their fear.
I’d already filled them in about the now-deceased visitor who’d come looking for me at Bunny’s apartment house.
Pedro said, “Señor Morgan, what of the...the remains of this asesino? Do you require help in his...its...disposal?”
I waved that off. “Naw, buddy, but thanks. I dumped him in Domino Park on my way here.”
All of their eyes widened, even those of Saladar, who had been around such things.
“Don’t worry, amigos,” I said, and sipped at the little cup. Strong as it was hot. “That stretch of street was deserted, and the park wasn’t exactly busy—no old men playing checkers this time of night.”
They didn’t seem to know what to say.
Finally Saladar managed, “But why would such a person search you out, Señor Morgan?”
“Well, it’s not the militia. They’d just as soon catch me breathing.” I sipped more coffee. “Bunny thinks the dead guy worked for Halaquez.”
Maria, alarm in both her voice and eyes, said, “How could Halaquez know where you would be?”
“Good question.”
Pedro said, “If somehow he did know, he is very capable of sending a man to remove you, señor. Halaquez might be afraid that you would find him, and—”
“Maybe,” I said, cutting off my host. I watched his face closely. “But why send somebody before I’ve even begun the hunt? After all, you people didn’t hire me to kill this clown. It’s a straight retrieval job.”
Pedro squinted in thought. “I do not follow, señor....”
“Seventy-five thousand bucks,” I said, “is real money, I’ll grant you. But it doesn’t justify sending an assassin to take me out.”
“Perhaps not, señor,” Saladar said. “But if one considers the reputation of Morgan the Raider, it might well seem prudent.”
“Doubtful.” I let a few seconds of silence sink in, then added, “Could it be something else? Could it be more than the money?”
In turn, they looked at each other, their puzzlement palpable.
Pedro said, “I am sorry, Señor Morgan, but I do not understand.”
“Never mind.” I grunted. “Tell me about Gaita.”
Mildly defensive, Pedro said, “We trust her with our lives, señor.”
“That’s your choice. But trusting her with mine is my call. I want chapter and verse.”
“Señor?”
“I want the whole damn dossier.”
This also confused Pedro, but Luis Saladar knew exactly what I meant.
The trimly bearded man leaned back in his chair—again he wore a dignified white suit with a bolo tie—and his eyes focused on me steadily, rarely blinking as he spoke.
“My friend, this young woman’s parents were killed by Castro’s men before her eyes. With the bodies of her mother and papa nearby, several of these soldiers...they had their way with her.”
“They raped her.”
“They raped her, señor, yes. She was but a child of twelve or perhaps thirteen, you understand...yet what they did to her, she understood, and she learned at this age how to hate—how to hate very well.”
“Makes sense.”
“She came to this country aboard a small boat with six others. Two died of malnourishment before finally the Coast Guard towed them ashore. She was an independent child...true, she made her living by becoming a...”
He couldn’t make himself say it, and found other words.