“Latin,” Gaita chimed in from the sidelines. “It has several meanings. One is...crowning touch. The other you might guess.”
“Sexual consummation,” I said.
“Got it in one,” Bunny said, cheerfully, slipping off her desk onto her feet.
I got up and faced her. “You’ve been a big help, kiddo.”
“Oh, you’ll be seeing more of me, Morgan.”
“You sure you really want that?”
She laughed. “Not sure at all. You might get ideas about raiding me. I wouldn’t put it past you...though why, with forty million bucks stashed away, you’d want to bother with small change like little ol’ me, I’d never know.”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Bunny.”
“About you, Morgan?” She slipped an arm in mine, walking me to the door. “I’d believe anything.”
Jaimie Halaquez had gone on the run with a purpose in mind.
He had tested the defenses and offensive capabilities of the opposition, and found them lacking in strength. His first kill had been made in a small motel outside of St. Louis, a young Cuban who’d been smart enough to find Halaquez but not skilled enough to survive. The next contact had been made north of Little Rock, and a third near Meridian, Mississippi, both resulting in dead emissaries from Miami’s Cuban community.
Traced on a map, Halaquez’s path took him away from the Miami area, then swung him back toward it again. These movements had nothing to do with reaching his final destination.
But wherever he was now, he was in position to make that final move.
The only thing that had me wondering was the relatively small amount of money involved. To some people—like those he’d taken it from—seventy-five thousand bucks was a lot of loot. If Halaquez made it to Cuba, and the dough had been converted properly, it could mean a lot more. Still, the Cuban exiles were, in their way, a national political group, and taking them on for this kind of cash was asking for trouble. Almost stupidly so.
And even if Halaquez did make it to Cuba, with the cash converted to a friendly-to-Cuba country’s currency, there would still be anti-Castro sympathizers ready to cut him down the first chance they got, and seventy-five grand wasn’t about to buy him perpetual protection.
A funny little hunch was scratching at me again. From one angle, this seemed all cut-and-dry, but from another it was sticky and wet. This was feeling like much more than just a small-time heist of $75,000 made worse by the betrayal it represented; to the Cubans of Little Havana, this seemed like a very big deal, but the reality was, the Halaquez score was small change.
So why did it feel like the big time?
Something seemed to be missing from the equation, and the longer I thought about it, the more that seemed to be the case. Offhand, it might look like a quick grab for seventy-five thousand bucks, and that could be enough of an incentive for anybody, even an amateur.
But then amateurs would hesitate at pulling off three kills, any one of which might get botched, risking Jaimie getting his ass slammed in some local jail. Halaquez could have disappeared into the vastness of America and somehow made it to Canada or Mexico, and become just another Latin louse with a grubstake. Instead, he’d hopscotched his way back to the Miami area....
Jaimie Halaquez had stolen money and left the state, and committed a trio of murders along the way, making this now an interstate affair, which meant the Feds were onboard. The FBI would have its ears to the ground and its own contacts within the Cuban freedom organization, so they’d know, at least basically, what was going on.
Whatever Halaquez was up to, it had all the earmarks of big professionalism, and the big pros don’t make a Federal case out of seventy-five thousand bucks.
I sat there in a Mandor suite decorated with an oriental motif, feeling ill at ease and even silly in a business suit padded out to make me look like a pudgy city councilman, hair powdered gray, and in pinched shoes that made my steps mince because I couldn’t help it.
The only thing that lent any comfort was the weight of the .45 in my belt and the three spare clips in my pocket.
Tami, a lush blonde who could have stepped out of the centerfold of the highest-end men’s magazine, kept looking at me through heavily made-up eyes that she kept half-lowered in deliberate fashion.
“Tell me, Morgan, if this were real life...would a girl like me really be attracted enough to a man like you to make her want to marry him?”
By “a man like you,” Tami meant the pudgy councilman I was pretending to be.
“If I were rich enough,” I said.
“Is that the only reason?”
I squirmed under the dark suit jacket. “Could be gratitude by way of blackmail. A guy like ‘me’ could have kept your sweet behind out of a jail cell.”
Long eyelashes, not real but pretty enough, fluttered. “What would it take for a man like the real you to be attracted to a girl like me?”
“Not much. You have it all going for you, sugar. But you need to know something...”
“You don’t pay.”
“Bingo.”
The living wet dream squirmed, looking at Gaita. “The man has confidence,” she remarked casually.
“Didn’t mean to hit a nerve,” I said.
“Oh, you didn’t.”
Gaita snapped her fingers abruptly at both of us. “Please! Now is not the time for such nonsense.” To the blonde, she asked, “You are sure about what you must do?”
Tami nodded. “Mr. Boyer is drunk again, and I’m little Tessie, come to drag him out of the house of ill repute.”
“Always liked that phrase,” I said with a half a smile.
The lovely whore, dressed to pass as a rich man’s wife, continued: “The chauffeur downstairs will see it all, discreetly turn away, and have something to talk about at the next card game among Mr. Boyer’s male staff.”
Gaita, doggedly serious, said to the girl, “And then?”
“And then delivery to the Amherst Hotel, where our friend gives Mr. Boyer’s clothes back to me, while I return to home base in time to get the real Boyer back into his clothes, and smuggle the old boy out...and hope nobody notices the time discrepancy.”
I said, “Suppose we get stopped along the way?”
“Our tough luck,” Tami told me. “You’ll have to deal with it.”
“I will,” I said.
Gaita checked her watch. “It is eleven o’clock. You leave now.”
Time had worked in my favor.
The local police had long since vanished back to their regular assignments, and Walter Crowley’s men had thinned down to a few spot checkers who were still working areas where they thought I might be hiding.
I grinned to myself when I thought of Crowley sitting someplace, fuming. He’d have that receipt for my body, dead or alive, tucked away in his wallet, and every minute I was on the loose increased my chances of being taken back dead. Much as he might relish delivering me without a pulse, he would surely much prefer to deliver me breathing, and with the possibility of finding that forty mil.
Hell, if I had any sense of humor at all, I would send Crowley a letter telling him just where that pile of dough was, or anyway where the guy who put it there said it was. According to the raider who had framed this Morgan, the forty mil was right where my namesake, Sir Henry Morgan the Pirate, put his treasure.
Well, buddy, I told Crowley in my head, lots of luck—just try and find it.
Everybody else had, and failed. Old Morgan operated out of Cuban waters with a preference for the island of Santa Catalina, and all the reference works were easily accessible in the public library, or in certain archives for more rarified researchers, with plenty of folklore and rumors to keep treasure hunters hopping every year.