“All right,” Joe said, his nerves getting the better of him.
“All right?”
Joe nodded and resisted the urge to smile like a fool, show the guy how nice he was.
“I know it’s all right. I know.”
Joe waited.
“I know it’s all right,” the guy repeated. “Gave you the impression I needed your counsel on the matter?”
Joe said nothing.
“I did not,” the boy said.
Something thumped in the back of the truck and the boy looked back there for his partner and when he looked at Joe again Joe placed his Savage .32 against the boy’s nose.
The kid’s eyes crossed to stare at the gun barrel and his breathing came heavy and long through his mouth. Dion came out of the truck and around to the boy and relieved him of his sidearm.
“Man with teeth like yours,” Dion said, “should not be remarking on the flaws of others. Man with teeth like yours should just keep his mouth shut.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy whispered.
“What’s your name?”
“Perkin, sir.”
“Well, Perkinsir,” Dion said, “me and my partner will at some point discuss whether we let you live today. If we decide in your favor, you’ll know ’cause you ain’t dead. If we don’t, it’ll be to teach you you should have been nicer to people. Now put your fucking hands behind your back.”
Pescatore gangsters came out of the back of the truck first—four of them in summer suits and florid ties. They pushed the orange-haired boy ahead of them, Sal Urso pointing the kid’s own rifle at his back, the boy blubbering that he didn’t want to die today, not today. The Cubans, about thirty of them, came out after them, most of them dressed in the white drawstring pants and white shirts with the bell-hemlines that reminded Joe of pajamas. They all carried rifles or pistols. One carried a machete and another carried two large knives at the ready. Esteban led them. He wore a dark green tunic and matching trousers, the field outfit of choice, Joe assumed, for banana republic revolutionaries. He nodded at Joe as he and his men entered the grounds and then spread out around the back of the building.
“How many men inside?” Joe asked Perkin.
“Fourteen.”
“How come so few?”
“Middle of the week. You come here on a weekend?” A little bit of mean returned to his eyes. “You’d have met some men.”
“I’m sure I would have.” Joe climbed out of the truck. “Right now though, Perkin, I’ll have to settle for you.”
The only guy to put up a fight when he saw thirty armed Cubans flood the halls of the armory was a giant. Six and a half feet tall, Joe guessed. Maybe taller. A huge head and a long jaw and shoulders like crossbeams. He rushed three Cubans who were under orders not to shoot. They shot anyway. Didn’t hit the giant. Missed him clean from twenty feet away. Hit another Cuban instead. A guy who’d been rushing up behind the giant.
Joe and Dion were right behind the Cuban when he got shot. He spun and toppled in front of them like a bowling pin and Joe shouted, “Stop shooting!”
Dion screamed, “¡Dejar de disparar! ¡Dejar de disparar!”
They stopped, but Joe couldn’t be sure if they were just reloading their creaky bolt-action rifles or not. He grabbed the rifle from the one who’d been shot, grabbed it by the barrel and cocked his arm as the giant rose from the defensive crouch he’d adopted when they started shooting at him. Joe swung the rifle into the side of his head, and the giant bounced off the wall and came for him, arms flailing. Joe changed his grip and drove the butt of the rifle through the flurry of the guy’s arms and into his nose. He heard it break, heard his cheekbone break with it as the butt slid off his face. Joe dropped the rifle when the big man hit the ground. He pulled handcuffs from his pocket and Dion got one of the guy’s wrists and Joe got the other and they cuffed them behind his back as he took a lot of huffing breaths, his blood pooling on the floor.
“You gonna live?” Joe asked him.
“Gonna kill you.”
“Sounds like you’re gonna live.” Joe turned to the three trigger-happy Cubans. “Get another guy and take this one to the cells.”
He looked at the one they’d shot. He was curled on the floor, mouth open and gasping. He didn’t sound good and he didn’t look good—marble white, way too much blood flowing from his midsection. Joe knelt by him, but in the moment it took to do so, the boy died. His eyes were open and tilted up and to the right, as if he were trying to remember his wife’s birthday or where he’d left his wallet. He lay on his side, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath him, the other splayed up and behind his head. His shirt had bunched up at his ribs and left his abdomen exposed.
The three men who’d killed him blessed themselves as they dragged the giant past him and Joe.
When Joe closed the boy’s eyelids, he looked quite young. He might have been twenty, or he could have been as young as sixteen. Joe rolled him onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. Below his hands, just below the steeple where his lowest ribs met, dark blood climbed from a hole in him the size of a dime.
Dion and his men lined the National Guardsmen up against the wall and Dion told them to strip to their skivvies.
The dead boy had a wedding ring on his finger. Looked to be made of tin. Probably had a picture of her on him somewhere, but Joe wasn’t going to look for it.
He was also missing one of his shoes. It must have come off when he was shot, but damned if Joe could see it near the corpse. As they marched the Guardsmen past him in their underwear, he searched the corridor for the shoe.
No luck. It might have been under the boy. Joe thought of rolling the body again to check—it seemed important to find it—but he was due back at the gate and he needed to change into another uniform.
He felt watched by bored or indifferent gods as he pulled the boy’s shirt back over his abdomen and left him lying there, one shoe on, one shoe off, in his own blood.
The guns arrived five minutes later when the truck pulled up to the gate. The driver was a seaman no older than the boy Joe had just watched die, but riding shotgun was a petty officer in his midthirties with a permanently windburned face. He had a ’17 Colt .45 riding his hip, the butt weathered from use. One look in his pale eyes and Joe knew that if those three Cubans had charged him in that corridor, they’d be the ones lying on the ground with sheets over them.
The IDs they handed over identified them as Seaman Apprentice Orwitt Pluff and Petty Officer Walter Craddick. Joe handed the IDs back with the signed orders Craddick had given him.
Craddick gave that a cock of his head, left Joe’s hand hanging in the space between them. “That’s for your CO’s files.”
“Right.” Joe withdrew his hand. He gave them an apologetic smile, not putting much into it. “A little too much fun last night in Ybor. You know how that is.”
“No, I don’t.” Craddick shook his head. “I don’t drink. It’s against the law.” He looked out the windshield. “We backing up to that ramp?”
“Yes,” Joe said. “You want, you can off-load it and we’ll take it all inside.”
Craddick took note of the chevrons on Joe’s shoulder. “Our orders are to deliver and secure the weapons, Corporal. We’ll be walking them all the way into the hold.”
“Outstanding,” Joe said. “Just back it up to the ramp.” He raised the gate, catching Dion’s eyes as he did so. Dion said something to Lefty Downer, the smartest of the four guys he’d brought along, and then walked off toward the armory.
Joe, Lefty, and the other three Pescatore men, all four dressed as corporals, followed the truck to the loading ramp. Lefty had been chosen because he was smart and didn’t lose his cool. The other three—Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone—had been picked because they spoke English without an accent. For the most part, they looked like weekend soldiers, although Joe note
d as they crossed the lot that Parone’s hair was too long, even for a Guardsman.
He hadn’t slept properly, if at all, in two days and he could feel it now in every step he took, every thought he tried to formulate.
As the truck backed up to the ramp, he saw Craddick watching him, and he wondered if the older man was just naturally suspicious or if Joe had given him a reason to be. And then Joe realized something that nauseated him.
He’d abandoned his post.
He’d left the gate unmanned. No soldier would do that, not even a hungover National Guardsman.
He glanced back, expecting to see it empty, expecting a shot in the back from Craddick’s .45 and the peal of alarms, but instead he saw Esteban Suarez standing erect in the guard shack, wearing a corporal’s uniform, looking to all but the most curious eyes every inch the soldier.
Esteban, Joe thought, I barely know you but I could kiss your head.
Joe glanced back at the truck, saw that Craddick wasn’t looking at him any longer. He was turned on the seat, saying something to the seaman apprentice as the boy applied the brake and then shut off the engine.
Craddick hopped from the cab and shouted orders to the back of the truck, and by the time Joe got there, the sailors were out on the ramp and the tailgate was down.
Craddick handed Joe a clipboard. “Initial the first and third pages, sign the second. Clearly states that we are leaving these weapons in your charge for no less than three and no more than thirty-six hours.”
Joe signed “Albert White, SSG, USANG,” initialed where appropriate, and handed it back.
Craddick looked at Lefty, Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone, then back at Joe. “Five men? That’s all you got?”
“We were told you were bringing the muscle.” Joe gestured at the dozen sailors on the ramp.
“Just like the army,” Craddick said, “putting its feet up when the work gets tough.”
Joe blinked in the sun. “That why you guys were late—you were working hard?”
“ ’Scuse me?”
Joe squared off, not just because his blood was up, but because not to do so would look suspicious. “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Craddick said, “and we were delayed.”
“By?”
“Fail to see how any of this is your business, Corporal.” Craddick stepped up close. “But, in truth, we were delayed by a woman.”
Joe looked back at Lefty and his men and laughed. “Women can be hard work.”
Lefty chuckled and the others followed suit.
“All right, all right.” Craddick held up a hand and smiled to show he was in on the joke. “Well, this one, boys, was a beauty. Ain’t that right, Seaman Pluff?”
“Aye, sir. She was a looker. Bet she’s a real biscuit too.”
“Little dark for my tastes,” Craddick said. “But she come out the middle of the road, been all roughed up by her spic boyfriend, lucky he didn’t cut her, fond as they are of their knives.”
“You leave her where you found her?”
“Left a sailor with her. Pick him up on the way back if you ever give us a chance to unload these weapons.”
“Fair enough,” Joe said and stepped back.
Craddick may have eased up a notch, but he was still a man on the alert. His eyes soaked up everything. Joe stuck with him, taking one end of a crate while Craddick took the other, lifting by the rope handles built into the ends. As they walked the loading bay corridor to the hold, they could see through the windows to the next corridor over and the offices beyond. Dion had placed all the fair-skinned Cubans in the offices with their backs to the windows, all of them typing gibberish on their Underwoods or crooking receivers to their ears with thumbs pressed down on the cradles. Even so, on their second trip down the corridor it occurred to Joe that every head they saw over there had black hair. Not a blond or a sandy dome in the bunch.
Craddick’s eyes were on the windows as they walked, so far unaware that the corridor between theirs and those offices had just played host to an armed assault and the death of one man.
“Where’d you serve overseas?” Joe asked.
Craddick kept his eyes on the window. “How’d you know I was overseas?”
Bullet holes, Joe thought. Those fucking itchy-fingered Cubans would have left bullet holes behind in the walls. “You have the look of a man seen some action.”
Craddick looked over at Joe. “You recognize men who’ve been in battle?”
“I do today,” Joe said. “With you, anyway.”
“Almost shot that spic woman by the side of the road,” Craddick said mildly.
“Really?”
He nodded. “It was spics tried to blow us up last night. And these boys with me don’t know it yet, but spics called in a threat against the whole crew, said we were all going to die today.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“That’s ’cause it ain’t for hearing yet,” Craddick said. “So I see a spic girl waving us down in the middle of Highway 41? I think, Walter? Shoot that bitch between the tits.”
They reached the hold and stacked the crate on top of the first stack to the left. They stepped aside and Craddick took a handkerchief to his forehead in the hot hallway and they watched the last of the crates come to them as the sailors filed down the corridor.
“Woulda done it too but that she had my daughter’s eyes.”
“Who?”
“The spic girl. Got me a daughter from my time in the DR. Don’t see her or nothing, but her mama sends me pictures every now and then. She got them big dark eyes most Carib’ women have? I see those eyes in this gal today, I holstered my weapon.”
“It was already out?”
“Halfway.” He nodded. “I already had it in my head, you know? Why take chances? Put the bitch down. White men don’t get much more’n a tongue-lashing for that around here. But . . .” He shrugged. “My daughter’s eyes.”
Joe said nothing, his blood loud in his ears.
“Sent a boy to do it.”
“What?”
He nodded. “One of the boys we got, Cyrus, I believe. Looking for a war but he can’t find one right now. Spic woman saw the look in his eyes, she took off running. Cyrus is part coon hound though, grew up in swampland near the Alabama border. Should find her without breaking him a sweat.”
“Where will you take her?”
“There’s no taking her anywhere. She attacked us, boy. Her people did anyway. Cyrus will do what he will with her, leave the rest for the reptiles.” He put the stub of a cigar in his mouth and struck a match off his boot. He squinted over the flame at Joe. “Confirm your assumption—I seen battle, son, yeah. Killed me one Dominican, killed me Haitians by the bushel, point of fact. Few years later, I took out three Panamanians with one Thompson burst on account they were all bunched together, praying I wouldn’t. The truth of it all and don’t let no one ever tell you different?” He got the cigar going and flicked the match over his shoulder. “It was some fun.”
Chapter Sixteen
Gangster
As soon as the sailors left, Esteban ran to the motor pool to grab a vehicle. Joe changed out of his uniform as Dion backed the truck over to the ramp and the Cubans began pulling the crates right back out of the hold.
“You got this?” Joe asked Dion.
Dion beamed. “Got it? We own it. You go get her. We’ll see you at the spot in an hour.”
Esteban pulled up in a scout car and Joe hopped in and they took off down Highway 41. Within five minutes they saw the transport truck about a half mile ahead rumbling down a road so straight and flat you could practically see Alabama at the other end.
“If we can see them,” Joe said, “they can see us.”
“Not for long,” Esteban said.
The road appeared to t
heir left. It cut through the palmettos and across the crushed-shell highway and back into the scrub and palmettos on the other side. Esteban turned left, and they bounced onto it. It was gravel and dirt and half the dirt was mud. Esteban drove like Joe felt—harried and reckless.
“What was his name?” Joe said. “The boy who died?”
“Guillermo.”
Joe could see the boy’s eyes as they’d closed, and he didn’t want to find Graciela’s looking the same.
“We shouldn’t have left her out there,” Esteban said.
“I know.”
“We should have assumed they’d have left someone behind with her.”
“I know.”
“We should have had somebody waiting with her, hiding.”
“I fucking know,” Joe said. “How is this helping us now?”
Esteban goosed the gas and they soared over a dip in the road and hit the ground on the other side so hard Joe feared the scout would rise onto its front wheels, flip them onto their fucking heads.
But he didn’t tell Esteban to slow down.
“I’ve known her since we were no taller than the dogs on my family farm.”
Joe didn’t say anything. A swamp lay off to their left through the pines. Cypress and sweet gum trees and plants Joe couldn’t begin to identify raced by on either side of them, blurring until the greens and yellows were the greens and yellows of a painting.
“Her family were migrant farmers. You should see the village she called ‘home’ a few months every year. America has not seen poverty until it’s seen that village. My father realized how bright she was and asked her family if he could hire her as a maid-in-training, yes? What he was really doing was hiring me a friend. I had none, just the horses and the cattle.”
Another bump in the road.
“Strange time to be telling me this,” Joe said.
“I loved her,” Esteban said, speaking loudly over the engine. “Now, I love somebody else, but for many years, I thought I was in love with Graciela.”
He turned to look at Joe and Joe shook his head and pointed. “Eyes on the road, Esteban.”