Four of the men stopped next to the building as the one in the lead came to within a few feet of the Cherokee. Tasker looked at his passenger seat, where the Miami Herald sports page was covering his MP5. He looked through his tinted window, knowing the twenty-year-old white kid couldn’t tell who was inside. He heard the guy in jeans and a plain white T-shirt say, “Yo,” then, after no response, get louder and say “Yo” again. Two of his friends came up to join him. One moved to the passenger side of the car. Tasker smiled thinking of a Discovery Channel show he’d watched with his girls about the pack behavior of wild dogs hunting antelope in Africa. The big difference was that the antelope didn’t have automatic weapons.
The leader took a step forward and tapped on the window. “Yo, mister.”
Tasker knew that they had a problem with gangs out here. Some preyed on migrant workers, some sold crack. Tasker hoped these might be the bullies who bothered the poor migrants. Rolling down the window, he could’ve made these losers a mile away for redneck dropouts from some high school south of Kendall.
The leader said, “Man, why didn’t you answer me?”
Tasker kept his voice low and calm, “Didn’t know I had to.”
The kid looked at him sideways and said, “Yo, whatchu doing out here? You lost?”
“I’m fine, thanks.” He started to roll up the window.
“Wait, wait, wait.”
Tasker stopped the window. “What?”
“This here is private property.”
“Is it yours?”
“Naw.”
“Then don’t worry about it,” said Tasker, rolling the window the rest of the way up.
The kid stepped closer and rapped on the window with his knuckles.
Tasker appreciated these young men breaking his boredom, but he had to put an end to it. As the window came down again, he said, “What’d ya want, son?”
“Naw, man, what do you want?”
“I don’t want a thing from you.”
“Then you must got something. ’Cause out here you either keep driving, you need something or you got something. So what do you got?”
Tasker shrugged, sliding his hand under the unfolded Miami Herald. “I don’t know. All I got is this submachine gun.” He pulled the MP5 up from under the newspaper. “You want some of it?”
The young man stumbled back, saying, “No sir, I’m sorry to bother you.” By the time he was on his feet, his friends were in the car, throwing it into drive.
Tasker chuckled as they burned rubber out of the lot. His temporary good mood faded quickly as he felt the frustration rising in his mind again.
Derrick Sutter had never been obsessed with anything or anybody, except maybe himself. He acknowledged this character trait and attributed it to his mother, who used to tell him, “No one will ever love you like your mom or yourself.” He’d found it to be true. Both his mom and he tended to focus on one subject: his happiness.
Now he had to admit that he was very nearly obsessed with this crazy case, or at least with Alicia Wells. Not ’cause she was a knockout, which she definitely was, but because she was the only person who had ever successfully escaped from him in the city. It was bad enough he had trouble finding her, but to have his hands on her then have to cry like a little girl for the second time in two days. He had to find her. Luckily, hanging out at topless bars wasn’t the worst form of police work.
He didn’t mind working on a Saturday night late when he thought about poor, obsessed Bill Tasker. That boy was gonna work himself into an early grave. When Sutter had called him, about an hour ago, the FDLE agent was still on post, watching the damn KKK house. He was a better man than most. Even Sutter admitted to himself that if he was out there alone on a Saturday night, he’d risk missing Wells and head out to have some fun. Tasker took things too seriously to have much fun.
Sutter leaned back in his tall chair at the Harem Club and surveyed the line of stages as he took a swig of his Bombay and tonic. A blond on the last stage might be Alicia. He couldn’t tell, and he damn sure wasn’t going to get too close this time.
It was near dawn, and Alicia Wells had broken her rule of not drinking while working, but the young lawyer who had helped Daniel had showed up and was so nice. A public defender for the federal court. Whatever that was. He was nice, cute and had some cash. The next thing Alicia knew she was a little drunk, giving him a lap dance in the back room. One lap dance turned into another and another, until they were just making out in the small room with two couches. No one even checked on her. She lost interest when he ran out of money, and nice and cute just didn’t cut it. Besides, she was a married woman, though that seemed less and less real every day. In fact, the longer she was away from Daniel’s hellion boys, the better she liked it. She did miss little Lettye. She was just a sweet little Barbie doll. But the boys never stopped, and Daniel encouraged them all the time. He talked about how he liked to “disturb the natural flow of the universe.” Whatever that meant, she just wished the boys weren’t one of the ways to do it. Daniel would watch the news about the riots or some explosion like it was one of her soaps. Like General Hospital without a plot. She knew he had some weird ties to different people and believed he might have helped them do some crazy things from time to time but never let on. He thought she was a little stupid because he had three years of college, but she wasn’t. She had her GED, and a month and a half of beauty school besides. She may not have known the capital of Florida for sure, she figured it had to be Orlando ’cause of where it was built, but she was smart in other ways. Like he didn’t have ten dollars to his name. He’d work and work and charge people for only the hours he put in. She made four hundred, sometimes six hundred, a night after expenses, and untaxed. Unlike the other girls, she didn’t use drugs or drive fancy cars. She had almost nine thousand dollars stashed away. That made her smart as far as she was concerned.
All this ran through her head as she stumbled down the long path that led to the small apartment she rented from the nice Cuban family in North Miami. The bungalow-type building sat way off the road and no one ever bothered her.
As she stuck the key in the lock and started to turn it, she heard a man’s voice say, “Found you finally.”
Tasker was a little drowsy at the wheel of the Cherokee on the way home and then fell into a deep sleep on his couch ten minutes after turning on the TV to unwind. He caught a little of Saturday Night Live-the “Weekend Update” bit with the really hot babe in glasses-before he was off dreaming of water skiing with the girls in the Keys while Donna drove the boat. The phone snapped him awake at eight in the morning.
He reached for the portable handset, unable to focus on where it could be. Finally he grabbed it and mashed the talk button. “Hello.”
“Billy, it’s Jerry. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, I was on the damn Klan house until almost midnight.”
“Sorry, Billy, I thought you had it this morning and the only number I had handy was home. I was trying to get you before you left.”
“No problem, Jerry. Camy has some ATF guys covering the surveillance for us today. What’s up?”
“Hey, I didn’t want to say anything in front of the Feds, but there is something weird about one number in Wells’ phone book. I was in the office yesterday, cleaning up some stuff, and noticed a subpoena to Bell South had come back.”