Tourist Season (40 page)

“The late Victor Hugo,” Keyes mused. Wiley must have known how his friends would smile at that one; he was forever edifying his own legend.

“Les Miserables,”
Kara Lynn said. “Sounds like Mr. Fuego had a sense of humor.”

“Sick,” Keyes said. “Sick, sick, sick.” Wiley would be better off dead, he thought, before the incredible dismal truth were known. With Wiley dead, Kara Lynn would be safe. So would the newspaper; Cab Mulcahy could return to the world of honest journalism. It would be better for almost everybody if Wiley were lost at sea, everybody except Jenna—Jenna was another issue. She hadn’t been aboard that helicopter. Keyes knew it instinctively. Jenna’s talent was creating catastrophes, then avoiding them.

“I want this to be the end,” Kara Lynn said quietly.

“Well, maybe it is.”

“But you don’t believe they’re really dead,” she said.

“The way it happened, it’s too perfect.”

“The Prince of Cynics. You don’t believe life can ever be perfect?”

“Nope,” Keyes said. “Death, either.”

Later, when Kara Lynn was in the shower, Al Garcia phoned.

“It’s about damn time,” Keyes groused.

“Been kinda hectic around here,” the detective said. “I saw this stack of messages from you and Mulcahy. Figured your conscience finally woke up.”

“We had our reasons, Al. Now it’s time to talk.”

“Oh, I can’t wait. But it just so happens I already got a line on
El Fuego”

So Garcia knew.

Keyes felt lousy about not telling him in the first place, but Wiley’s threats had seemed serious and, in retrospect, believable. Garcia would have to understand.

“When we were doing routine checks on Wilson and Bernal, I had a pal search the morgue at the newspaper,” the detective said. “Easy, really. I guess it’s all on computer now. Funny thing, Brian. About four months ago your asshole buddy Wiley does this story on whatever happened to Daniel Viceroy Wilson, the famous football star. Very sympathetic. Hard-times-for-the-troubled-black-athlete number. Typical liberal shit. Anyway, three weeks later, guess what? Guy does a column about Jesus Bernal.
Our
precious Jesus.
Fire burns in the breast of a young Cuban freedom fighter—
that’s how the story starts off. Makes me sick, too, I gotta tell you. Nearly tossed my black beans. So I’m thinking, what a weird coincidence this is: two of the four Nights of December getting a big ride in the newspaper just before the ca-ca hits the fan. So, for the hell of it, what d’you suppose I do?”

“Pull all Wiley’s columns.”

“Right. Big stack of ‘em, and they’re full of geeks and cons and losers … shit, if you threw them all together you’d have the scariest nest of bizarros in the history of the planet Earth. Took me a week to wade through that crap, too—hey, the guy can write, I told you that. He can put the words together okay, but it’s his attitude that hacks me off. Such an arrogant hump. Anyway, out of all these columns, guess who pops up next? Your Indian, Brian, the guy with the airboat, Tommy Tigerpaws or whatever the hell it is. A fucking full-blooded gator-wrestling white-hating Seminole Indian. I got more stuff out of Wiley’s column than I’ve been able to squeeze out of the whole Seminole tribe. Turns out ole Tommy’s richer than your average Colombian snowbird. And he’s also very bitter about all the bad shit to come down on his ancestors—for that I can’t blame him, Brian. That was
your
people, too. The Cubans had nothing to do with screwing the Indians out of Florida.”

“Al, let’s—”

“I’m almost done,
amigo.
So after all this I look on my desk and what have I got? I got an angry black racist football player, a crazy bomb-happy Cuban revolutionary, and a filthy-rich Indian with a bingo chip on his shoulder. Three of the four. So the rest was easy, even for a dumb cop like me—the trick was to read everything Wiley wrote for the last two years.
Cristo!
What a strange guy.”

“Funny you didn’t mention all this at the press conference,” Keyes said.

“Gee, guess I forgot.”

Which meant Garcia wasn’t ready to buy the chopper crash.

“It bugs me,” he said. “I think to myself, why would
El Fuego
pick a stunt like this to show his face?”

“If only they’d found some bodies,” Keyes said. The words sounded stark and bloodless, but he meant them. He said to Garcia: “What do we do now?”

“The smart guys in the suits say it’s all over.”

“What do you say, Al?”

“I say we wait till after the parade before we open the fucking champagne.”

“Good idea. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the queen.”

“One more thing, Brian. Since I’m nice enough not to immediately throw your ass in jail for obstruction, the least you could do is stop by later and tell me about your crazy batshit friend.”

“Yeah,” Keyes said, “I guess I’d better.”

28

As Al Garcia hung up, he chided himself for not hollering more at Brian Keyes. He didn’t know why Keyes had held back about Skip Wiley all these weeks, but he certainly would find out. The gamesmanship of trading information always irritated Garcia, but he accepted it as essential to the job. Reporters, cops, politicians, private detectives—all gifted in the coy art of you-tell-me, I-tell-you. Afterward you felt like either an oracle or a whore.

Garcia assumed there was a compelling reason for what Keyes had done. There better have been. A trade-off of some sort, maybe even extortion. Wiley seemed capable of anything.

Besides, the question had diminished in urgency since the helicopter crash. No sooner had the Sunday press conference ended than the chief had slipped Garcia a terse note: “Consider disbanding Fuego One Task Force. We could have a press release ready by tomorrow A.M.”

Garcia had acknowledged the suggestion without committing to it. As all good detectives, he had learned to subsist on the bittersweet. Good guys, bad guys, you had to watch your step. He’d met crooks to whom he’d entrusted his life, and cops who’d steal crackers from the blind. Garcia was seldom moved by the wisdom of his superiors, and more often dazzled by the cleverness of the criminal mind. The
Fuego
case had been a peculiar challenge; all along he had felt as if he were battling two sides,
Las Noches
and the Miami establishment.

The detective was ambivalent about the mysterious helicopter crash. Part of him wanted to believe that the Nights of December was dead. It had nothing to do with the Orange Bowl or civic boosterism or preserving the tourist trade. Rather, it seemed a marvelous example of bad guys getting their due; justice in the biblical sense. And as a practical matter, there was no tidier way to solve a homicide than to have all your suspects suddenly croak. God knows the small fortune it would save the taxpayers.

On the other hand was the tug of professional pride: Garcia didn’t like the Chamber of Commerce opening and closing his murder cases. The self-congratulatory tone of the TV press conference had been farcical; the truth was, Garcia’s crack squad never had come close to finding, much less capturing,
Las Noches de Diciembre.
It had been a frustrating assignment for a cop unaccustomed to being outwitted, and Garcia didn’t like the taste of it. To see Skip Wiley and his weird crew vanquished by a sputtering old Army helicopter seemed mundane and anticlimactic. From Garcia’s view, it would have been immensely more satisfying to have tracked the bastards to their Everglades hideout and smoked them in a blazing firefight.

Which is why he wasn’t ready to call it quits.

Intuition told Garcia that the ending didn’t fit. A bunch of crazy Cubans or Nicaraguans?—sure, that’s the sort of fuck-up you’d expect, running a chopper clean out of fuel. But from the very first victim, the Nights of December had been different. They had approached each act of violence with a certain selectivity and elan. Choking Sparky Harper with a toy alligator was more than murder; it was terrorism with imagination. It was the stamp of a blade like Wiley.

Wiley—who, in Al Garcia’s opinion, was too damn smart to flame out over the deep blue sea. It’d be just like that cagey sonofabitch to fake his own death, lull everyone to sleep, then swoop down on the Orange Bowl parade and snatch the queen—just like he’d planned all along.

The detective crumpled the chiefs directive and dropped it into a trashcan. He flipped through a stack of clippings until he came to the infamous hurricane column:

What South Florida needs most is a killer hurricane, sudden and furious, an implacable tempest that would raze the concrete shorelines and rake away the scum and corruption …

As he read it for the second time, Garcia felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

The tidal surge, a swollen gargoyle of a wave, is born beyond the Gulf Stream. Gaining size and thunder by the minute, it races under a deafening wind toward Florida’s sleeping coastline. In purple darkness it pulverizes Miami Beach with a twenty-foot wall of water, flooding Carl Fisher’s billion-dollar island of muck. Picture it: corpses upon corpses, clogging the flooded lobbies of once-majestic condominiums; dead dreamers, swollen, blue-veined, carplike.

They will die in bewilderment, in the fierce arms of the beloved ocean that brought them here in the first place. Fools! the wind will scream, fools all.

Garcia thought: These are the words of a pathologically bitter man, if not a certified fruitcake. He was dying to hear what Keyes could tell him about the guy.

Somebody rapped lightly on the door.

“Come on in, Brian,” Garcia said.

The door flew open with a crash.

Garcia’s left hand found the butt of his revolver but he changed his mind. Nothing like a sawed-off shotgun to argue for prudence.

“Buenas noches,”
the detective said to the man in the soiled undershirt.

“Hello, maggot,” said Jesus Bernal. “Let’s go for a ride, just you and me.”

Since spurning the Nights of December, Jesus Bernal had slipped into a desperate and harried state. He had pinned his grandiose hope of redemption on his last homemade bomb, only to see it claim the wrong victim, some goofball news reporter. Once again serendipity had taunted Bernal, reducing his most passionate and calculated crimes to slapstick. His long career as a terrorist had been marred by such misfortune, and he had come to fear that he might be forever cheated of his place in radical history, that he had blown his last big chance. That morning’s press conference had pitched the little Cuban into an orgy of self-pity—he had screeched at the television screen, pummeled the walls, kicked holes in the doors of his motel room. He
knew
that the helicopter stunt was a frivolous idea, that the first plan had been the best. He had
tried
to teach the others about discipline and efficiency, about the fatal dangers of impetuosity. But that fuckhead Wiley was beyond reason, and the dope-wasted nigger and the creepy Seminole Indian had trailed along like zombies. They were babies playing a man’s game.

Now they were dead, and so for all practical purposes was Las
Noches de Diciembre,
leaving Jesus Bernal an orphan of the cause. Wretchedly he wondered what his ex-comrades in the First Weekend in July Movement were saying about him; he could hear the
comandante’s
sneering laughter. Who could blame the old fart? For all the fanfare about
Las Noches,
nothing historic had been proven, nothing of permanence achieved. So there was no point calling the old man to beg again for readmission.

Bernal knew his options were limited. Strategically, it would be futile to revive the name of the organization—as far as the world was concerned, the Nights of December no longer existed. Even the fucking stationery was useless.

One possibility was to start his own underground terrorist movement. To hell with the crazy Wileys and the feeble old Bay of Piggers; it was time for daring new blood. Yet there was still the problem of credibility, and shedding the stigma of recent failures.

Which was why Jesus Bernal sneaked into Metro-Dade police headquarters on Sunday evening, December 30.

If all went as planned, Jesus figured he’d never again have to worry about his future; he would be the Reggie Jackson of South Florida terrorism, a free-agent superstar-assassin. The First Weekend in July, Omega Seven, Alpha 66—they’d all be knocking down his door. Then maybe he would form his own gang, recruiting only the best from the others and leaving the faggots and doddering old men to their Eighth Street parades.

Even before the helicopter accident, Jesus Bernal had unilaterally decided to select a new victim. To impress the
comandante,
the target would have to be a person of prominence and formidable authority. And most important, the chosen prey must represent an abhorrence to The Cause—either compromise, complicity, or total apathy.

Bernal’s brightest hope was Sergeant Al Garcia.

The chubby turncoat had invited trouble during the press conference by noting there was no evidence of Jesus being aboard the ill-fated Huey. In his emotionally bruised and paranoid state, Bernal perceived this remark as a slur, something meant to portray him as a sniveling coward who cringed in the background while his brethren risked their lives. In fact, Garcia had mentioned Jesus Bernal only to annoy the guys in the orange blazers; he never thought it would precipitate this kind of visit.