SSC (2011) The Road to Hell (7 page)

“
It’s just a figure of speech.”

“
Think about it, Steve. He doesn’t own a house. He leases a car. No brokerage accounts, no bank accounts. Everything he has, he puts into his boat. If he ever has to leave town quickly…”

“
Like he left Cuba,” Steve said, picking up the beat. “With nothing but the clothes on his back.”

“
This time it would be different because…”

“
The money’s here! On the boat.”

In sync now, she thought.

A man and a woman running stride for stride.

“
Vic, why don’t you go back up to the bridge and make sure we don’t crash into any cruise ships?”

“
And what are you doing?”

“
I’m gonna fix the plumbing.”

* * *

Steve opened the hatch in the salon floor and climbed down a ladder to the engine compartment, wincing at the noise from the twin diesels. He found the black water tank first, tucked up under the bow. Sewage and waste water. Nothing unusual about it, and Cruz wouldn’t want to dirty his hands with that, anyway. Then Steve found the freshwater tank, a custom job built into one of the bulkheads. Made of fiberglass, it looked capable of holding 500 gallons or more. The boat had desalinization equipment, so why did Cruz need such a big tank?

A big tank that wasn’t working.

Steve grabbed a flashlight mounted on a pole and took a closer look. He peered into an inspection port and could see the tank was three quarters full. On top of the tank was a metal plate with a built-in handle. He turned the plate counter-clockwise and removed it. Then he aimed the flashlight into the opening.

Water. Well, what did you expect?

He grabbed a mop that was attached by velcro to a stringer and poked the handle into the tank. The end of the handle
clanked
off the walls.

Clank. Clank. Clank
.
Thud.

Thud?
What the hell?

Steve pushed the mop handle around the bottom of the tank as if he were stirring a giant vat of
paella.
It snagged on something soft. He worked the handle under the object and lifted.

Something as long as a man’s body but much thinner.

Thin enough to fit into the opening of the custom-built tank. The object was a transparent, plasticized pouch, and when the end peeked out of the opening, Steve saw Ben Franklin’s tight-lipped face. A hundred dollar bill. Stacked on others. Dozens of stacks. As he pulled the pouch out of the tank, he saw even more. Hundreds of stacks, thousands of bills.

* * *

Damn heavy, Steve thought, lugging the pouch up the ladder from the engine compartment. Then he dragged the load out the salon door and into the cockpit. “Now you’ve done it,” Cruz sounded almost mournful. He stood on the bridge, aiming a double-barrel shotgun at Steve. The rail where he had been cuffed hung loose. “I didn’t want this. But it’s your own damn fault.”

“
I’m sorry, Steve,” Victoria said. “When I came up here, he’d gotten out.”

“
Not your fault,” Steve said. He dragged the pouch to the starboard gunwale.

“
Stop right there!” Cruz ordered. “Step away from the money.”

“
Nope. Don’t think so.”

Cruz pumped the shotgun, an unmistakable
click-clack
that Steve felt in the pit of his stomach. “I’ll blow your head off.”

“
And leave blood and bone and tissue embedded in the planking? Nah. You may kill us, but you won’t do it on your boat.” Steve hoisted the pouch onto the rail.

“
If I can’t take this to Teresa, I’m sure as hell not gonna let you have it. Your treasure, pal, is strictly Sierra Madre.’”

The shotgun blast roared over Steve’s head, and he flinched. The pouch balanced on the rail, halfway between the deck and the deep blue sea.

“
Put the money down, asshole.”

“
Okay, okay.” Steve shoved the pouch over the rail and it splashed into the water. ”It’s down.”

“
Asshole!” Cruz grabbed both throttles, slowed the boat, and swung her around. He turned a spotlight on the water.

Nothing but a black sea and foamy whitecaps.

He swung the spotlight left and right. Still nothing, until…the beam picked up the pouch floating with the current. Cruz eased the boat close to the pouch at idle speed, slipped the engine out of gear, then dashed down the ladder. Grabbing a tarpon gaff, he moved quickly to the gunwale. Shotgun in one hand, gaff in the other, he motioned toward Steve. “Back up. All the way to the chair.”

“
Do what he says, Steve,” Victoria called from the bridge.

“
Only because you said so.” Steve moved toward one of the fighting chairs.

Cruz leaned over the side and snagged the pouch with the gaff. He struggled to lift it with one arm, still aiming the shotgun at Steve.

Suddenly, the boat shot forward, and Cruz tumbled into the water, the shotgun blasting into space as it fell onto the deck. On the bridge, Victoria had one hand on the throttles, the other on the wheel.

“
Cono!”
Cruz shouted from the darkness.

“
Do sharks feed at night?” Steve leaned over the side. “ Or should I just drop some wiggles on your head and find out?”

“
Get me out of here!” His voice more fearful than demanding.

“
Nah.”

“
No me jodas!”

“
I’m not fucking with you. Just don’t feel like giving you a lift.”

Victoria raced down the ladder and joined Steve in the cockpit. “Testing, testing,” she said, punching a button on her pocket Dictaphone.

“
What are you doing?” Steve said.

“
Mr. Cruz,” Victoria called out. “We’ll bring you on board once you answer a few questions.”

Cruz was splashing just off the starboard side. “What fucking questions!”

“
Do you admit stealing three million dollars from Teresa Toraño?” Victoria said.

* * *

Pink slivers of sky lit up the horizon and seabirds squawked overhead as Steve steered the boat into the channel at Matheson Hammock. He had one hand on the wheel and one draped on Victoria’s shoulder. A shivering Cruz, his arms and legs bound with quarter-inch line, was laced into a fighting chair in the cockpit. His taped confession would be in the hands of the State Attorney by noon. The pouch of money lay at his feet, taunting him.

“
What are you thinking about?” Victoria asked.

“
I was just imagining the look on Teresa’s face when we give her the money.”

“
She’ll be delighted. But it was never about the money, Steve.”

“
Whadaya mean?”

“
When you were a baby lawyer, Teresa believed in you and nobody else did. You needed to prove to her that she was right. And maybe you needed to prove it to yourself, too.”

Steve shrugged. “If you say so.”

She wrapped both arms around his neck. “But remember this, Steve. You never have to prove anything to me.” They kissed, at first softly, and then deeper and slower. The kiss lasted a long time, and when they each opened their eyes, the sun was peeking above the horizon in the eastern sky.

Their bodies pressed together, Victoria felt something digging into her hip. “Are you carrying another pair of handcuffs?”

“
Nope.”

“
Then what…?” She jammed a hand into one of his pocket. “Oh. That!”

Steve smiled. “Like I said, no cuffs.”

“
That’s okay, sailor.” She brushed her lips against his cheek. “You won’t

need them.”

Mortal Sin is available as a
Smashwords ebook
.

Chapter 1

Thy Client’s Wife

ON A STIFLING AUGUST DAY OF BECALMED WIND AND SWELTERING humidity, the Coast Guard plucked seven Haitians from a sinking raft in the Gulf Stream, the grand jury indicted three judges for extorting kickbacks from court-appointed lawyers, and the Miami City Commission renamed Twenty-second Avenue General Máximo Gómez Boulevard.

And Peter Tupton froze to death.

Tupton was wearing a European-style bikini swimsuit and a terry cloth beach jacket. Two empty bottles of Roederer Cristal champagne 1982 lay at his feet. His very blue feet. Two thousand six hundred forty-four other bottles—reds and whites, ports and sauternes, champagnes and Chardonnays, Cabernets and cordials—were stacked neatly in their little wooden bins.

A high-tech air-conditioning system kept the wine cellar at an even 56 degrees and 70 percent humidity. Hardly life-threatening, unless you wandered in from the pool deck sopping wet, guzzled two liters of bubbly, and passed out.

Cause of death: exposure due to hypothermia. Which didn’t keep the
Miami Journal
from seizing on a sexier headline:

ON YEAR’S HOTTEST DAY,
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST
FREEZES TO DEATH

The medical examiner reported that Tupton’s blood contained 0.32 percent alcohol. If he’d been driving, he could have been arrested three times. But he’d been swimming, then sipping mimosas on the pool deck. When he stumbled into the wine cellar, he must have kept drinking, this time leaving out the orange juice.

Cheers.

“
He was a most disagreeable man,” Gina Florio said, dismissing the notion of the late Peter Tupton with a wave of the hand. It was a practiced gesture, a movement so slight as to suggest the insignificance of the subject. When the hand returned, it settled on my bare chest. I lay on my back in a bed that had a bullet hole in the headboard. The bed had been Exhibit A in a case involving a jealous husband and a .357 Magnum, and I picked it up cheap at a police auction of old evidence.

I stared at the ceiling fan, listening to its
whompety-whomp
while Gina traced figure eights with a blood-red fingernail across my pectorals. A crumpled bed sheet covered me from the waist down. Her clothing was simpler; there wasn’t any. She reclined on her side, propped on an elbow, the smooth slope of a bare hip distracting me from the hypnotizing effect of the fan. Outside the jalousie windows, the wind was picking up, the palm fronds swatting the sides of my coral-rock house.

A most disagreeable man
. In earlier times, she would have called him a dickbrain.

Or if there were clergy on the premises, simply a birdturd.

But Gina was a sponge that absorbed the particulars of her surroundings, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. Lately, she’d been hanging out with the matrons of the Coral Gables Women’s Club. Finger sandwiches at the Biltmore, charity balls at the Fontainebleau, tennis at the club. Discussions of many disagreeable men. Mostly husbands, I’d bet.

“
A swine, really,” Gina said. “A short, bald, lumpy swine who mashed out his cigarettes in my long-stemmed Iittala glasses.”

“
Iittala, is it?”

“
Don’t mock me, Jake. Finnish, top of the line. Nicky likes the best of everything.”

“
That’s why he married you,” I said, without a trace of sarcasm.

“
You’re still mocking me, you prick.”

Prick
. Now, that was better. You can take the girl out of the chorus line, but …

“
Not at all, Gina. You Ye a name brand. Just like Nicky’s Rolex, his Bentley, and … his Iittala.”

“
What’s wrong with my name, anyway?”

Defensive now. She could play society wife with the white-shoe crowd at Riviera Country Club, but I’d known her too long.

“
Nothing,” I said. “I’ve liked all your names. Each suited the occasion.”

“
Even Maureen? Rhymes with latrine.”

“
I didn’t know you then. You were Star when I met you.”

She made the little hand-wave again, and her butterscotched hair spilled across my chest, tickling me. Her movements hadn’t always been so subtle. When her name was Star Hampton, she jumped and squealed with the rest of the Dolphin Dolls at the Orange Bowl. She had long legs and a wide smile, but so did the others. What distinguished her was a quick mind and overriding ambition. Which hardly explained why she chose me—a second-string linebacker with a bum knee and slow feet—over a host of suitors that included two first-round draft choices with no-cut contracts and a sports agent who flew his own Lear. Then again, maybe it explained why she
left
me.

We were together two years, or about half my less-than-illustrious football career, and then she drifted away, leaving her name—and me—behind. When the gods finally determined that my absence from the Dolphins’ roster would affect neither season ticket sales nor the trade deficit with Japan, I enrolled in night law school. By then, Star had sailed to Grand Cayman with a gold-bullion salesman, the first of three or four husbands, depending if you counted a marriage performed by a ship’s captain on the high seas.

I hadn’t heard from her for a few years when she called my secretary, asking to set up an appointment with Mr. Jacob Lassiter, Esq. She wanted her latest marriage annulled after discovering the groom wasn’t an Arab sheikh, just a glib commodities broker from Libya who needed a green card. We became reacquainted, and Gina—though that wasn’t her name vet—kept drifting in and out of my life with the tide.

Sometimes, it was platonic. She’d complain about one man or another. The doctor was selfish; the bodybuilder dull; the TV newsman uncommunicative. I’d listen and give advice. Yeah, me, a guy without a wife, a live-in lover, or a parakeet.

Sometimes, it was romantic. In between her multiple marriages and my semirelationships, there would be long walks on the beach and warm nights under the paddle fan. One Sunday morning, I was making omelets—onions, capers, and cheese—when she came up behind me and gave me a dandy hug. “If I didn’t like you so much, Jake,” she whispered, “I’d marry you.”

And sometimes, it was business. There were small-claims suits over a botched modeling portfolio, an apartment with a leaking roof, and a dispute with a roommate over who was the recipient of a diamond necklace bequeathed by a grateful thief who had enjoyed their joint company during a rainy Labor Day weekend. And, of course, the name changes. She had been born Maureen Corcoran on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. A mutt name and a mutt place, she said long ago. So she changed her name and place whenever she deemed either unsuitable. She called herself Holly Holiday during one Christmas season, Tanya Galaxy when she became infatuated with an astronaut at Cape Canaveral, and Star Hampton when she dreamed of a Hollywood career.

Finally, she asked me to make it official: Maureen would become Gina.

“
It goes well with Florio, don’t you think?” she had asked. “And Nicky likes it.”

Nicky.

What was he doing today? Making money, I supposed. Wondering whether he was going to get sued by the estate of one Peter Tupton. Maybe worrying about his wife, too. Had Gina said she was going to see her lawyer?

Their
lawyer, now. I could see Gina cocking her head, asking Nicky if it wouldn’t be sweet to hire Jake Lassiter.
You remember Jake, don’t you, darling?

Sure, he remembered.

* * *

Before he was filthy rich, Nicky Florio used to hang around the practice field. He was hawking someone else’s condos then, and he’d deliver an autographed football at each closing. If he couldn’t get Griese, Csonka, Kiick, Warfield, or Buoniconti, I’d sign my name. And theirs.

Nicky was a great salesman. He pretended to love football, always looking for the inside dope on the team. Injuries, mostly. How had practice gone? What was Shula’s mood? I’d give him a tip now and then, knowing what he was up to, but I never bet on games. Well, seldom. And I never bet against us.

* * *

Nicky probably balked when she mentioned me.
I need another lawyer like I need another asshole. Besides, your old boyfriend’s just an ex-jock with a briefcase.

He was right. I don’t look like a lawyer, and I don’t act like a lawyer. I have a bent nose, and I tip the scales at a solid 223. My hair is too long and my tie either too wide or too narrow, too loud or too plain, depending on the fashion of the times. I’ve hit more blocking sleds than law books, and I live by my own rules, which is why I’ll never be president of the Bar Association or Rotary’s Man of the Year. I eat lunch in shirtsleeves at a fish joint on the Miami River, not in a tony club in a skyscraper. I laugh at feeble lawyer jokes:

How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?

His lips are moving.

And I do the best I can to inflict the least harm as I bob and weave through life. Which made me wonder just what the hell I was doing with Gina yet again.

If Nicky had said no, Gina would have waited, then tried again. When the neighbor sued over the property line,
Give Jake a chance
. I picture Nicky Florio running a hand through his black hair, slicked straight back with polisher. He’d squint, as if in deep thought, his dark eyes hooded. He’d shrug his thick shoulders:
Sure, why not, he can’t screw it up too bad.
Putting me down, building himself up. Hire the wife’s old boyfriend, something to gloat about at the club, tell the boys how he tacks a bonus onto the bill, like tossing crumbs to a pigeon. To Nicky, I was a worker bee he could lease by the hour. He could buy anything, he was telling me, including Gina.

Well, who’s got her today, Nicky?

Was that it, I wondered, my infantile way of striking back? Hey, Lassiter, old buddy, what
are
you doing in bed with Maureen, Holly, Star, Gina? Don’t you have enough problems, what with the Florida Bar on your back? What would the ethics committee say about bedding down a client’s wife?

With all the single women available, what are you doing with a married one? South Beach is chock-f of unattached women, leggy models from New York, Paris, and Rome. Downtown is wall-to-wall professionals in their business-lady pumps, charcoal suits, and silk blouses. The gym has an aerobics instructor plus a divorcee or two who brighten up when you do your curls. So what’s with this destructive, nowhere relationship mired in the past?

“
Jake, what are you thinking about?” Gina asked.

“
Star Hampton,” I answered, truthfully. I rearranged myself on the bed to look straight into her eyes. “Do you remember the time you hit me?”

“
Was it only once?”

“
Yeah. You were leaving me for some cowboy. A rodeo star named Tex or Slim.”

“
It was Jim. Just Jim.”

“
No, Jim was the Indy driver.”

“
That was James,” she corrected me. “Or was he the tennis pro?”

“
You hit me because I didn’t beg you to stay.”

“
I don’t remember,” she said.

But I did.

* * *

We’d been living together in my apartment on Miami Beach. She stepped out of the shower, her hair smelling like a freshly mowed field. She kissed me, soft and slow, then said she was leaving. I told her I’d miss the wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. She let fly a roundhouse right, bouncing it off my forehead, cursing as she broke a lacquered nail.

Good kiss, no hit.

She dressed quickly and tossed her belongings into a couple of gym bags. Then she said it to me, a parting line I was to hear time and again. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, heading out the door. “And maybe I won’t.”

* * *

“
Slugged anybody lately?” I asked.

She laughed. It was the old laugh. Hearty instead of refined. “Gawd, I was so young then. Did you know I turned thirty last April? You think I need a boob job? Am I starting to sag?”

She sat up, stretched her long legs across the bed, and hefted her bare breasts, one at a time, her chin pressed into her chest. The streaked blond hair hung straight over her eyes. Outside, the wind was crackling the palm fronds. Only three o’clock, but it had gotten dark inside the bedroom. I peered out the porthole-sized window. Gray clouds obscured the sun as a summer squall approached from the west.

“
Jake! You’re ignoring me.”

So was Nicky, I thought. Maybe that was why she was here. Or was it just for old times’ sake?

“
Can we be friends again?” she had asked when she showed up at my office for a lunch appointment.

“
Friends?”

“
Friends who screw,” she explained.

Which, come to think of it, is what we had been from the beginning. After all these years, I was still dazzled by her beauty, the granite cheekbones, the wide-set deep blue eyes rimmed with black, the body sculpted by daily workouts with a personal trainer. Attention must be paid to such a woman, I thought.