“Put his passport on the watch list,” said Dodson. “Get some men to the airport. Send a team of agents to his hotel. And get me his cell number. Guy like that’s got to have at least one phone on him at all times.”
Excusing himself, he made his way outside and hurried round the corner of the building. There on a neat patch of grass, Howell Dodson fell to his knees and vomited.
Never again, he swore to himself. Never again.
Gavallan drove the Mustang slowly, keeping his speed under the limit as he listened to news of the shooting on the radio. The announcer put the final tally at ten dead—eight males, two women. The Latino kid had been right: There were no survivors. The poor joe on the gurney hadn’t made it. Police speculated the killer was a disgruntled trader working out of Cornerstone, but had not yet identified him. The announcer spoke of another grim American tragedy. A lonely man. A failed career. A last desperate act.
Gavallan knew better. Ray Luca was the target, even if he’d been made to look like the killer. If Konstantin Kirov hadn’t pulled the trigger himself, he was responsible. By now the pattern was clear. Ask a question, risk Kirov’s wrath.
He reached the end of Biscayne Boulevard and stopped the car at a red light. Staring out over the placid blue water, he felt a sea change come over him. He was done being the victim. Done feeling guilty. He’d never been well-suited to playing the patsy anyway. A new emotion took hold of him—maybe a whole cocktail of them. Anger. Vengeance. The will to act, not react. He’d come a fair distance in his life, but not so far as to forget his roots, or the struggle he’d waged to get where he was today. He wasn’t about to let a smooth-talking Russian take it all away.
The light turned green. A left would take him to his hotel, where he could pick up his belongings. If he hurried, he could make his three o’clock flight home. He gazed up the road, at the seaside hotels and neat bike path. An elderly couple walked hand in hand along the sidewalk.
Gavallan looked to the right. The road offered the same amusements, but led in another direction altogether, to the uncharted places on ancient maps decorated with serpents and dragons.
Gavallan turned right.
30
Damn it!” muttered Gavallan as he turned the doorknob and found it locked.
He was standing at the back door of Ray Luca’s house, a run-down clapboard cottage with dormer windows, a weather vane, and paint peeling by the bucketload. Bougainvillea, ferns, and frangipani grew untended on three sides of the small home, enough vines and vegetation to qualify the place as a jungle. Frustrated, he took a step back, looking for spots where Luca might have hidden a key. He ran a hand along the door frame; his only rewards a splinter and a dead beetle. A few potted plants dangled from exposed rafters. His fingers probed the moist dirt, again without success. Behind him, a redbrick patio stretched twenty feet in either direction. A hot tub occupied one corner, a rusted hibachi and a flimsy set of lawn chairs the other. He walked to the hibachi and removed the lid. Fired charcoal briquettes dusted the interior. He replaced the lid carefully, his grasp that much tighter because of the sweat rolling down his forearms. The heat and humidity, coupled with his anxiety, made him feel plugged in, electric. He held out his hand and it trembled slightly, not so much with fear as with adrenaline.
He had parked two blocks up the road and walked boldly to Luca’s front door, calling out his name to show the world he was a friend. He’d decided that noise was less suspicious than silence, and that an innocent visitor wouldn’t think to camouflage his arrival. The neighborhood was sleepy bordering on comatose, with quaint cracker box houses spaced twenty to thirty yards apart and a scarred macadam road shaded by a palm canopy. Though he hadn’t seen a soul, he could be sure someone had laid eyes on him. He figured he had fifteen minutes before his window of safety closed. After that he had no idea who might come—police, the FBI, a nosy neighbor.
His anxiety growing as the seconds ticked by, Gavallan returned his gaze to the rear of the house. A watering jar, a can of insecticide, and a terra-cotta pot holding a spade and a trowel sat a few feet from the door. Taking out his handkerchief, he wiped his forehead and dried his palms. Eeny-meeny-miney-mo. He chose the watering jar. Wrong again.
The key was under the insecticide.
Inside the kitchen, Gavallan stood with his back pressed to the door, listening. He heard the tick of the oven clock, the whir of the ice machine, the deafening static of abandonment. Mostly, though, he heard the draw of his own shallow breathing and the boom-boom-boom of blood thumping in his ears.
Satisfied the home was deserted, he made his way through the dining room, past the front door, and into the den, or what his daddy would have called “the parlor.” A sky blue La-Z-Boy recliner occupied pride of place, four feet from a big-screen television. Luca hadn’t watched TV; he’d bathed in it.
Blinking, Gavallan remembered his father’s recliner, an olive velour “EZ-cliner” from Sears, armrests threadbare but spotless after fifteen years. The Captain’s Chair, his daddy had called it, though it was strictly for enlisted men. He saw, too, the fifteen-inch black-and-white television, the creatively mangled wire hanger that served as its antenna, and the TV’s cinder-block perch, prettied up with a pink pillowcase and a shiny glass jar filled with freshly picked daisies. Cleanliness alone had rescued the Gavallans from poverty.
A curtain fluttered and a faint breath cooled the room, but instead of catching a hint of jasmine and wisteria, he tasted the day-old scent of red beans and rice and the wet, ambition-robbing heat of a Texas summer.
Keep moving, he told himself.
Luca’s bedroom lay at the end of a narrow corridor. The queen-size bed was neatly made, colorful stitched pillows strewn over a white bedspread. Poster prints of Monet’s water lilies tacked to the wall supplied the culture. Gavallan spotted a few photos of three young girls he presumed to be Luca’s daughters—skinny little things with pigtails and overalls, around four, six, and ten. A personal computer sat on a long desk that took up one wall. A screensaver flashed a field of racehorses with the header “254 days until the Flamingo Stakes.”
Ray liked the ponies, mused Gavallan. And his “victory burger” with jalapeños.
Six piles of neatly stacked paper were laid out to the left of the computer. Technical charts. Analysts’ reports from bulge bracket firms. Typewritten notes. His eye stuck on a page with strangely familiar script. Craning his neck, he looked closer. The header was written in Cyrillic and the body of the text in English. The fax was dated two days earlier, and addressed to Assistant Deputy Director Agent Howell Dodson, Chairman, Joint Russo-American Task Force on Organized Crime.
As he dropped a hand to pick it up, something creaked in another part of the house. It was a distinct sound, high-pitched and whiny, lasting a second or more. It was the kind of noise that made you shiver. A door closing? A footstep?
Ten seconds passed. Fifteen. Gavallan held his breath, his ear tuned to any vibration that might indicate the presence of another. He wasn’t feeling so electric anymore. Not so plugged in. Jittery was more like it, the adrenaline long gone. He was breaking and entering into the home of a man shot and killed barely two hours earlier. If the police found him, he could count on a one-way trip to jail with bail an impossibility for days.