Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [12]
Nelson peered cynically at the steaming summer night. For a man who believed in justice he sure as hell hadn’t seen much—in his family, his job or anywhere else for that matter. And it was not as though he hadn’t looked. Cristo, how he had looked.
He thought he had found it before he was twenty; wet, shivering, hungry and supremely content in the Sierra Maestra. He’d carried a rifle, mined bridges and lived with men who’d spoken of freedom and a new order. ¡Muera Batista; ¡Viva Fidel! Nelson spit at his wastebasket. Roberto had never come to fight.
“You go, chico, I’ll take care of the family,” he had said the night that a teenage revolutionary marched to adulthood with tears in his eyes. Take care of the family, coño! One more dance at the yacht club, one more weekend in the country, another quick roll in the hay. But, boy, had Roberto been there that January morning when the guerrillas marched into Havana. Nobody had had a nicer red and black flag, and nobody had clapped harder. That day it had been Roberto who had cried and the hardened young section leader who had watched in a mixture of affection, disgust and unspoken political disquiet.
Roberto had not been there either at a beach called Girón where Nelson, deceived by a revolution gone wrong and commanding exile troops this time, had begged from the shelter of a dead friend for air cover that never came.
But wild horses would not have kept Roberto from the Orange Bowl to cheer the young president who promised to return a bloody battle flag one day in a free Havana. Octavio Nelson had not stayed for the speeches.
At first Roberto had proclaimed himself a businessman in their adopted land. Now he announced to all who wished to listen and many who didn’t that he was an executive. An executive of what? Will-o-the-wisp International, maybe. But something evidently. Roberto always had “a big deal cooking,” as he liked to tell his brother in his flawless English. Roberto wouldn’t even speak Spanish to his family. It didn’t suit his image.
Good old Bobby Nelson. Big house on the bay, big boat, graphite tennis rackets, decorator wife, vacation cottage in North Carolina. Thank God he didn’t have any kids; they would have sneaked into the Ivy League on minority programs and claimed to their classmates to have been born on Beacon Hill.
His brother was a crook. Octavio Nelson knew that. Big crimes, little crimes, any kind of crimes at all that didn’t require dirty hands. Roberto was always on hand with a charming smile, a brisk handshake and empty promises.
And now he was running dope. Leave it to Roberto, forever at the height of fashion—a dope runner like every two-bit blow-dried dilettante in Miami. Probably even had his-and-hers matching gold spoons.
How tricky for Roberto to have a cop brother who was always arresting dopers. Tricky but bearable. Octavio would always be a brother first and a cop second. Roberto knew that. He counted on it.
Octavio Nelson sat for a long time. Around him the business of the police ebbed and flowed. He sensed it, but he didn’t see it, and he didn’t hear it. Should he, this one more time, do his brother’s bidding? If he did, it probably would be abetting a crime. If he didn’t, somebody might get hurt, and it certainly wouldn’t be cagey Roberto.
Finally, painfully, Nelson picked up the black phone on his desk. He called a friend in the police garage.
“Tommy, this is Nelson. Could you do me a favor? I need a car towed in tonight—a brown Mercedes on Brickell near the causeway.” He recited the license number. “I’ll take care of the paper work on it tomorrow.”
“Sure, we’ll get to