Walked right past them on the same side of the street.
Brothers for sure.
Twins, in fact.
Didn't even seem to glance at them. But got enough on them in his quick fly-by to be able to spot them later, anytime, anywhere.
He continued on up the street. Walked two blocks to the west, crossed over, came back on the other side, this time wearing a blue woolen watch cap that covered his blond hair. The one thing you could count on in any slum neighborhood was a dark doorway. He found one three buildings up from the one Herrera had entered. Across the street, the Chinese twins were flanking the front stoop like statues outside a public library. Ten minutes later, a man with a mustache walked past the Chinese and into the building. Like Herrera, he, too, was carrying a dispatch case.
* * * *
The man from Miami was a hulking brute with a Pancho Villa mustache. He said 'Hello,' in Spanish, and then 'You got the money?'
'You got the shit?' Herrera asked.
No passwords, no code words, no number sequences. The time and the place had been prearranged. Neither of them would have known when and where without first having gone through all the security bullshit. So now they both wanted to get on with it and get it done fast. The sooner they got through with the routine of it, the safer the exchange would be.
There were people who said they could tell by a little sniff up the nose or a little speck on the tongue whether you were buying good coke or crap. Herrera preferred two simple tests. The first one was the old standby cobalt thiocyanate Brighter-the-Blue. Mix the chemical in with the dope, watch it dissolve. If the mix turned a very deep blue, you had yourself high-grade coke. The brighter the blue, the better the girl. Meaning if you got this intense blue reaction, you were buying cocaine that was purer than what you'd get with, say, a pastel blue reaction. What you had to watch out for was coke that'd been stepped on maybe two, three times before it got to you.
For the second test, Herrera used plain water from the tap.
The man from Miami watched in utter boredom as he scooped a spoonful of the white dust out of its plastic bag, and dropped a little bit of it into a few ounces of water. It dissolved at once. Pure cocaine hydrochloride. Herrera nodded. If the powder hadn't dissolved, he'd have known the coke had been cut with sugar.
'Okay?' the man from Miami said, in English.
'Bueno,' Herrera said, and nodded again.
'How much of this are you going to go through?' the man asked, in Spanish.
'Every bag,' Herrera said.
* * * *
From where he stood in the doorway across the street, Kling saw the man with the mustache coming out of the building, still carrying the dispatch case. He did not look at the two Chinese, and they did not look at him. He walked between them where they were still flanking the stoop, made a left turn and headed up the street. Kling watched him. He unlocked the door to a blue Ford station wagon, got in behind the wheel, started the car, and then drove past where Kling was standing in the doorway. Florida license plate. The numerals 866 - that was all Kling caught. The street illumination was too dim and the car went by too fast.
He waited.
Five minutes later, Herrera came out of the building.
* * * *
'No trubber?' Zing asked.
'None,' Herrera said.
'You have it?' Zang asked.
'I've got it.'
'Where?' Zing asked.
'Here in the bag,' Herrera said. 'Where the fuck you think?'
His eyes were sparkling. Just holding the dispatch case with all that good dope in it made him feel higher than he'd ever felt in his life. Five kilos of very very good stuff. All his. Take the Chinks back to the place on Vandermeer, kiss them off, leave them there for the cops to find when somebody complained about the stink in apartment 3A. Take his time disposing of the coke, so long as he got rid of it by the fifteenth of February. Catch the TWA plane to Spain on the fifteenth. The plane to Spain is mainly in the rain, he sang inside his head. Christ he was happy!
The twins were on either side of him now.
Like bodyguards.
Zing smiled at him.
'Henny Shoe say tell you hello,' he said.
* * * *
From where Kling stood across the street, he heard the shots first and only then saw the gun. In the hand of the Chinese guy standing on Herrera's right. There were three shots in rapid succession. Herrera was falling. The guy who'd shot him backed away a little, giving him room to drop. The other Chinese guy picked up the dispatch case from the sidewalk where it had fallen. They both began running. So did Kling.
'Police!' he shouted.
His gun was in his hand.
'Police!' he shouted again and watched them turn the corner.
He pounded hard along the sidewalk. Reached the corner. Went around it following his gun hand.
The street was empty.
His eyes flicked doorways. Hit doorways. Snapped away from them. Nothing. Where the hell had they . . . ?
There.
Partially open door up ahead.
He ran to it, kicked it fully open, fanned the dark entrance alcove with his gun. Open door beyond. Went to that. Through the doorway. Syeps ahead. Not a sound anywhere in the hallway. An abandoned building. If he went up those steps he'd be walking into sudden death. Water dripped from somewhere overhead. A shot came down the stairwell. He fired back blindly. The sound of footfalls pounding up above. He came up the steps, gun out ahead of him. Another shot. Wood splinters erupted like shrapnel on the floor ahead of him. He kept climbing. The door to the roof was open. He came out into sudden cold and darkness. Flattened himself against the brick wall. Waited. Nothing. They were gone. Otherwise they'd still be firing. Waited, anyway, until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then covered the roof, paced it out, checking behind every turret and vent, his gun leading him. They were gone for sure. He holstered his gun and went down to the street again.
As he approached Herrera lying on his back on the sidewalk, he saw blood bubbling up out of his mouth. He knelt beside him.
'José?' he said, 'Joey?'
Herrera looked up at him.
'Who were they?'
They won't let you live in this city, Herrera thought, but they won't let you out of it, either.
His eyes rolled back into his head.
* * * *
Sitting in the automobile, Hamilton and Isaac watched the two Chinese men from the Tsu gang entering the building.
Hamilton smiled.
The thing about the Chinese, he thought, is that they know business but they have no passion. They are cool lemon yellow. And tonight, they were going to get squeezed.
The two men from Miami were waiting upstairs in apartment 5C.
This according to what Carlos Ortega had told him.
For ten percent, the ungrateful bastard.