'You're not brought up by Jesuits, I hope,' said Dave. 'Only those guys were so tricky they could swear one thing, think another, kiss a bible and get away with it thanks to the doctrine of equivocation.'
'No man, no--'
'OK, I believe you.' Dave stood up again and took another sip of his drink. 'All right. I'm gonna untie you now. Just remember though. I've got that little Phoenix Arms twenty-two in my pocket. You try anything ungrateful Moose and I'll take some of the pressure off that brain of yours. Give you an extra fuckin' blowhole. You clear on that?'
'Yeah, clear.'
Dave untied Willy and stood back as slowly, painfully, the big man sat up on the floor. Willy checked his balls and then pressed the heel of his hand gingerly against his injured eye. Through his one good eye Willy looked across the suite at the man now sitting down on a large cream-colored sofa. Laid out on the floor in front of Delano, like the Jerry Seinfeld American Express ad, were the results of what looked to have been a fairly major shopping expedition: several pairs of shoes, piles of shirts, sports shirts, sweaters and pants, and a brand new Apple laptop. There was nothing cheap on view. Even the suite, with a wrap-around balcony and a sea view looked like three or four hundred a night.
'How's your eye?' Dave asked.
'Hurts.'
'Sorry 'bout that, Moose. Take a hand towel from the bathroom if you like and some ice from the refrigerator. Make yourself a cold compress. Should keep some of the swelling down.'
'Thanks, man.' Moose fetched the ice. He was regretting the passing of his ice business with cousin Tommy. But for that he wouldn't be sitting there with the risk of losing an eye. And maybe he wasn't quite cut out for the tough stuff after all. There had to be something easier.
Watching Willy fix his cold compress Dave felt sorry for the big lunk, even though he was sure that Willy would have broken his fingers like he'd said, and without any remorse.
'You can tell Tony how disappointed I am about this,' said Dave. Cruelly, he added: 'When you see him.'
'If I see him,' Willy said bitterly. 'My fuckin' eye. I think you blinded me.'
'Disappointed but not resentful. Tell him that despite this little misunderstanding, we're still friends. Tell him that. Maybe even future business associates. Yeah, tell Tony I've got a business proposition for him. Chance to make a big score. That ought to help reassure him... Tell him, I'll be in touch through Jimmy Figaro.'
Willy picked up the Magnum and slid it into the clip inside his pants. He glanced around for the .22 then remembered that Delano had it in his pocket. Dave guessed what he was looking for, took it out and hefted it in his hand.
'I'll just hang onto this a while,' he said. 'First rule of self-defense. Have a gun.'
'Can I leave now?' Willy sounded contrite. Contrite and concerned. 'I'd like to get to a hospital.'
'Sure, but aren't you forgetting something?' Dave nodded at Willy's bare feet and the matchbooks between his toes. 'Your dogs, guy.'
Willy started to pick them out.
'I never figured you for no Dennis Hopper, man,' said Willy, shaking his head. 'In those clothes, you don't look so tough. More like a fuckin' college boy.'
'The apparel does oft proclaim the man,' said Dave. 'But you should have seen me at eight o'clock this morning.'
Willy pocketed one of the matchbooks.
'Souvenir,' he said. 'I collect them.'
'That should be one to remember,' suggested Dave.
'Would you really have done that? Set my toes on fire?'
Dave shrugged.
'Moose? I've been asking myself that same question.'
Chapter SIX
Special Agent Kate Furey stared out of the window of a third-floor conference room in FBI headquarters and stifled a deep yawn as her boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kent Bowen, began to tell the story. It was one of those unpleasant, cruel stories that her male colleagues seemed to relish. Most of them were already grinning since everyone knew that the subject of the story was how Bolivar Suarez, a cousin of the Colombian Ambassador, and one of Miami's major cocaine traffickers, had met his untimely death the night before last.
'So you wanna see where this asshole lives, on Delray Beach. Jesus. Two acres of ocean-front estate. And the house is like something out of James Bond. Battleship gray, 10,000 square feet, looks like the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But inside it's a goddamn palace. Marble floors, mahogany doors and windows, art deco fixtures and lights from Paris. You get the idea. Florida living in the lap to the tune of $10 million.
'Anyway, here's the set-up. Asshole liked art, in a big fucking way. Pictures all over. He must have kept some of those New York salerooms going single-handed. Modern, but not shit, y'know? I mean I know nuthin' about art but even I could see that some of these artists had real talent. Lot of Scottish stuff, from Glasgow, which I liked of course. Asshole probably thought Glasgow was a double-glazing company. Lot of South American stuff too. I guess that he did know. Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera. You name it. Asshole had it in a frame with a little light on. I mean, very particular. Like he couldn't just hammer a fucking nail in the wall. These pictures were positioned like he was a fucking surveyor. Story goes he once beat up his kid's nanny when she accidentally brushed against one of these canvases. And when I say beat up, I mean beat up. Apparently, he used one of those Romitron cosh things -- you know, kind of a plastic ball and chain? -- on her fucking hands. Damn near crippled her. No one touches those paintings except asshole himself.'
From headquarters on North-west Second Avenue it was only a couple of minutes' drive east to Kate's Williams Island apartment home. At least it was her home until the divorce came through. Howard, her husband, and a partner with one of Miami's smartest law firms, had paid almost $900,000 for the place. Her own lawyers had told her there was a chance she might get to keep the apartment as part of the settlement. But she was thinking that it hardly seemed fair he shouldn't get half. Besides, it wasn't as if she actually wanted to stay there in view of all the secretaries in his office that Howard had been balling there when, as on this occasion, Kate found herself working late.
'This information must have got out to someone in one of the other cartels,' Bowen continued, with one eye on Kate. 'Someone who wanted asshole dead. Take your pick. Hell, there's enough of them. Anyhow, whoever it was, they were real clever. Set it up while asshole was back in Bogota. The Delray place was well guarded on the highway side. Cameras, sensors, the whole protection package. But light on the ocean side. Like the stupid schmuck had never heard of boats. Anyway, CCGD Seven reports seeing some kind of high performance sports boat anchored a couple of miles up the coast, off the municipal beach, the night before asshole got hit. Sam Brockman figures they must have put a diver into the water who crawled ashore at the Suarez place under cover of darkness. There was only the one guard on the beach front. The guard says he saw nothing. Kate?'
Kent Bowen wanted her attention and approval most of all. She was one of the Miami Bureau's brightest agents, not to mention one of its great beauties and he had a thing about her. She snapped her attention back to Bowen and his interminable story.
'Here's the clever part,' he said. 'Guy gets in the house. A real pro. He selects his picture -- no idea what it was -- takes it off the wall and flattens out about 250 grams of C5 plastic onto the back of the canvas. Then he tapes a simple tilt detonator onto the inside of the stretcher. Just a ball bearing inside a test tube, two needles, a little battery and a blasting cap. And that's his bomb. Beautiful. A really neat job. He leaves the picture hanging slightly crooked and then skedaddles out of there. He's long gone by the time asshole returns from Colombia.' Bowen shook his head as if still amazed at the assassin's ingenuity. 'As usual the sniffer dogs go in first, but they can't get the scent of any explosives because the picture's about five feet up the wall. The asshole walks into the room and sees the picture hanging squint as Quasimodo's dick. And being the obsessive he is, right away he's over there to straighten it.'