Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [11]
“For every one we catch, another ten laugh all the way to the bank,” Nelson concluded.
“And this time?” Meadows asked lightly. “Who was it this time?”
“It’s hard to know,” Nelson replied. “The two stiffs carried no identification, but from the looks of them I’d say they were Colombians. Judging from the gun that killed them, the hit man was probably Cuban. You can’t be sure.”
“It’s completely mindless,” Meadows protested.
“Sure. And senseless and lawless. And hopeless. And the next time your very proper host at a dinner party passes around the spoons you be sure and tell him that.”
OCTAVIO NELSON’S HEAD ACHED, and his tongue protested the bitterness of too many cigars. He drove reflexively. The rush hour was peaking, but the traffic into the city wasn’t bad. The sun, poised for flight over the Everglades, promised another couple of hours of daylight. Angela was working, so there was no hurry to get home. He would go back to the station and slog through some papers. It had not been a profitable afternoon, Nelson decided.
“Can anybody really be that naïve?” Pincus asked suddenly. He meant Meadows.
Nelson grunted. Meadows had been about as useful as another corpse. Something strange was going down among the dopers. Only that would account for the daylight chase through the Grove. Dopers liked to settle their differences alone, in the dark; it was more effective, and it kept the pressure down. Nelson needed to know what was happening. But he certainly would get no lead from the morose, angry young man they had just left.
“If he had been able to finger the guy who shot him, it would have helped,” Nelson said. “And it would have been smoother, Wilbur, if we had known he was somehow connected to the woman and the little girl.”
Pincus bridled at the rebuke. “Jesus, I checked him out six ways from Sunday. Our records, the feds’ records, everywhere.”
“Did you ask around the Grove about him?”
It was not hard to interpret the silence that followed. Nelson stifled a sigh of disgust. His partner was the complete twenty-first-century cop. If information were reduced to a form and filed in a computer, Wilbur Pincus would find it. If Meadows had ever married the girl, Pincus would have known it. If they ever had had drivers’ licenses from the same address or applied together for credit, Pincus would have found out. But if they had been simply good friends, or neighbors, or lovers, Pincus was defenseless. Nobody had bothered—yet—to file that kind of information in a central archive.
“Forget it, Wilbur.” It probably didn’t make any difference anyway.
ROBERTO CALLED THAT NIGHT just as Nelson was getting ready to leave the station. There was no small talk; there hardly ever was anymore.
“I need a favor, hermano.”
“What now?”
“My car. It’s parked over on Brickell Avenue, near the toll gate. I need somebody to tow it in.”
“Call a garage.”
“It’s not that easy. Nothing illegal or anything like that, I swear. I just can’t go near it right now. I think the cops ought to do it.”
“What are you up to now, por Dios?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. It’s just some silly misunderstanding, but you really ought to get the car off the streets. I can pick it up down at the pound in a couple of days.”
“Is it your car?”
“Hell, yes, it’s my car, a brand-new four-fifty SEL, Sahara beige; it’s a beauty. Listen, the tag is PRW three-seventy-eight. OK? Thanks. I’ll call you later.”
Octavio Nelson cursed silently. He yanked open a bottom desk drawer, dragged out a fresh cigar, but off the tip and spit it out. Some men simply had brothers. Octavio Nelson instead endured an affliction named Roberto.
Some brothers drank together, remembered old times fondly, cosseted one another’s kids, helped each other when help was needed. Roberto Nelson was not that kind of brother. He was the kind who helped only himself until things went wrong. Then he came sniveling.
Fat, cherubic, good-for-nothing Roberto, the eldest of them all, and the most spoiled; the one who most resembled that shambling, wispy figure of disarming smile