Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [100]
Chapter 25
MEADOWS HAD CHOSEN the shopping center for its anonymity. It lay like a huge, gap-toothed cash register at the juncture of two featureless highways south of the city, a palace of plastic and plasterboard. Two squat department stores anchored the monster to its asphalt peneplain. A broad mall, glass-roofed, a quarter of a mile long and lined by lesser shops, throbbed like a phallus between them. The mall had become middle-class suburbia’s replacement for the neighborhood: Bored housewives rendezvoused breathlessly with sallow lovers on its benches; heart-attack victims sought rejuvenation on measured strolls along its floral carpet. Long-legged teenagers whose fathers had stolen hubcaps dueled silently with pimply store detectives for stereo tapes. Meadows hated the place, but he would use it, just as he would use Nelson, Terry and himself to destroy José Bermúdez. Chris Meadows had known the grip of compulsion before, but before, it had always been professional, a virus assuaged by an all-night stand at the designing board. The fever that enveloped him now was deeper-seated, more consuming. It left him cold with anger and cunning, and he wondered if he would ever purge it.
“I’m afraid I have a bit of stage fright,” Terry admitted. They had been walking arm in arm through the crowded mall, a scouting foray. Now Meadows stopped and looked at Terry. She wore a denim skirt, a crisp white blouse and fisherman’s sandals. She was ravishing.
“What is there to be nervous about? He looks just like the sketch I drew for you—a good-looking Latino. In this crowd he’ll stand out like a gorilla. Besides”—Meadows grinned—“looking the way you do, he’ll probably head right for you and figure if you’re not the mysterious Señora Lara, then the hell with her.”
“Don’t be stupid. Suppose he doesn’t want to talk to you?”
“He’ll want to, don’t worry.”
“Maybe,” Terry replied uncertainly, “but I feel just like I did before the curtain went up on the big play when I was in school.”
“And when it did, I bet you were fine. What role did you play?”
“Pizarro.”
“Pizarro the conquistador?”
“It was an all-girls school, boludo.”
Perhaps as a slave to his conscience for all the trash he sold up front, the owner of the Book Baron in the Southland Mall had built a quiet room at the back of his shop reserved for Floridiana. Meadows had browsed there before, always alone. And he was alone again when he heard Terry approaching.
“…and so, of course, everybody knows God must be Brazilian. Who else repairs at night all the mistakes we make by day?”
Octavio Nelson laughed. But when he stepped into the tiny room, his grin was only a formality.
“Hola, amigo,” Nelson said to Meadows, hand outstretched, “how’s the floor covering holding out?”
It was a bad moment for Meadows. Floor covering? What was he talking about? Meadows had summoned Nelson to talk about summary justice, not rugs. Then it came to him. A young Latina, lovely and importuning. A dead aunt and a rosary. Nelson was trying to throw him off-balance, the bastard.
“So that’s your idea of surveillance, a lady in black,” Meadows said. “She wasn’t even around when I needed her.”
“Neither was I, and I’m sorry,” Nelson said. “One of my men got shot, and I had to go. There was no time to get you.”
“Sure. Who got shot, Pincus?”
“No, unfortunately,” Nelson muttered. “Garcia. He works undercover. He was playing Wyatt Earp for some waitress at a doughnut shop, and he shot himself.” Nelson looked at Meadows. “I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
Meadows stared back at him for a long moment, then sighed. “Shit,” he said finally. “I think I do. It sounds too stupid to be a lie.”
He glared at Nelson. “You know I could have been killed in that place. How would that have looked in your file, getting a witness murdered?”
Nelson gave him a look. “I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry! You go chasing off to nursemaid some idiot while I’m waiting for a knife in my ribs?”
Nelson shook his head. “These