'Which sounds very thin to me,' Ortega had said.
'Very,' Hamilton said.
'Unless, of course, there are no thieves in your city.'
Both men chuckled.
'Do you want to know where all this is going to take place, Lewis?' Ortega asked.
'That might be nice to know,' Hamilton said.
'But no messing with the Miami people, please,' Ortega said. 'I live here.'
'I understand.'
'Whatever you decide to do is between you and the Chinese.'
'Yes, I understand.'
'And if a little happens to fall my way . . .'
Ortega's voice shrugged.
'How much do you think should fall your way, Carlos?' Hamilton asked, thinking You cheap bastard, I killed somebody for you. As a fucking gift.
'I thought ten percent,' Ortega said. 'For the address of where the big buy is going down.'
'You have a deal,' Hamilton said.
'Ten keys, correct?'
'No, that's more than ten percent.'
'No, it's ten percent of a hundred keys.'
'You told me five keys would be someplace else.'
'I know. But ten keys is the price, Lewis.'
'All right.'
'Do we have a deal?'
'I said all right.'
'You deliver.'
'No. You pick up.'
'Certainly,' Ortega said.
'The address,' Hamilton said.
Ortega gave it to him.
This was back in December.
Two weeks before Christmas. The tenth, the eleventh, somewhere in there.
Ortega had told him that the shipment would be arriving in Florida on the twenty-first of January. In Florida, there had to be at least eight zillion canals with private boats on them. A lot of those boats were Cigarette types - high-powered speedboats like an Excalibur or a Donzi or a Wellcraft Scarab that could outrun almost any Coast Guard vessel on the water. Zipped out to where the ship was waiting beyond the three-mile limit, zipped back in to their own little dock behind their own little house. Did it in broad daylight. Safer in the daytime than at night, when the Coast Guard might hail you and stop you. During the daytime, you were just some pleasure-seeking boaters out on the water to get some sun. Out there on the briny, you sometimes wouldn't see another vessel for miles and miles. Your ship'd be standing still out there, you lay to in her shadow, you could load seven tons of cocaine, there'd be nobody to see you or to challenge you. Coast Guard? Come suck my toe, man. What you needed to stop dope coming into Florida on either of its coasts was a fleet of ten thousand US Navy destroyers and even then they might not be able to do the job.
The shipment would be coming up north by automobile.
No borders to cross, no Coast Guard vessels to worry about.
You drove straight up on interstate highways with the shit in the trunk of your car. You obeyed the speed limit. You drove with a woman beside you on the front seat. A pair of married tourists on vacation. White people, both of them, pure Wonder Bread. No blacks, no Hispanics. Nothing to raise even the slightest eyebrow of suspicion. You later met these people at a prearranged place in the city, usually one of the apartments you rented on a yearly lease for the specific purpose of using it as a drop, you paid them the money, you walked off with the shit.
This big shipment coming up was the reason Hamilton had hired Herrera.
What Herrera hadn't known, of course-
Well, maybe he had known, considering it in retrospect.
'I still don't know why you trusted that fucking spic with fifty dollars,' Isaac said.
This was language the gangs had picked up from fiction.
It was funny the way life often imitated art.
None of the gangs in this city had ever read a book and they would never have heard of Richard Condon's Prizzi's Honor if there hadn't been a movie made from it. They liked that picture. It showed killers in a comical light. It also introduced real-life gangs to something Richard Condon had made up, the way his hoodlums talked about money in terms of singles instead of thousands. If Condon's crooks wanted to say five thousand dollars, they said five dollars. It was very comical. It was also an extension of real-life criminal parlance where, for example, a five-dollar bag of heroin became a nickel bag. That was when heroin was still the drug of choice, later conceding the title to cocaine and then crack, admittedly a cocaine derivative. A five-dollar vial was now a nickel vial. And when a thief said fifty dollars, he meant fifty thousand dollars. Which was the sum of money Lewis Randolph Hamilton had entrusted to José Domingo Herrera on the twenty-seventh day of December last year.
'Why?' Isaac asked now.
He knew he was risking trouble.
Hamilton was angry this morning.
Angry that Herrera had run off with fifty dollars belonging to him. Angry that Andrew Fields, who'd been sent out once again to dispatch the little spic, had been unable to find him anywhere in the city. Angry that he himself, Lewis Randolph Hamilton, had bungled the execution of the blond cop. Angry that the cop had taken a good look at him. All of these things were like a cluster of boils on Hamilton's ass. Isaac should have known better than to ask about Herrera at a time like this. But Isaac was still somewhat pissed himself over the way a week, ten days ago Hamilton had appropriated both of those German hookers for himself.
In many ways, Isaac and Hamilton were like man and wife. They each knew which buttons to push to get the proper response from the other. They each knew what the kill words were. Unlike most married couples, however, they did not fight fair. A marriage was doomed when either partner decided he or she would no longer fight fair. Hamilton had never fought fair in his life. Neither had Isaac. They weren't about to start now. But this was not threatening to their relationship. In fact, they each respected this about the other. They were killers. Killers did not fight fair.
'Not of the blood,' Isaac said, shaking his head in exaggerated incredulity. 'To have chosen someone not of the blood . . .'
'There's Spanish in you, too,' Hamilton said.
'East Indian maybe, but not Spanish.'
'A Spanish whore,' Hamilton said.
'Chinese maybe,' Isaac said, 'but not Spanish.'
'From the old days,' Hamilton said. 'From when Christopher Columbus was still there.'
'That far back, huh, man?' Isaac said.
'Before the British took over.'