Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [23]
Meadows and Terry moved upstream against the crowd, which was pouring back to the grandstand from the ticket windows. His eyes searched the seats as he shuffled impatiently toward the exit.
There.
In the last row up, they sat together. Meadows counted four now. The three biggest ones were laughing together. The fourth, the dapper one in the suit, held a pair of small binoculars to his eyes.
He had been scanning the park, but now he stopped. He wasn’t looking at the greyhounds. He was looking directly at Christopher Meadows.
“What is it?” Terry asked. “Chris, you’re pushing me.”
“Hurry. Please.”
That night, when he tried to draw that face from memory, the shape came easily in smooth, circular strokes. The sharp eyebrows and heavy Neanderthal ridge of the forehead were not exact, but acceptable.
What Meadows could not seem to replicate were the eyes. He fiddled with them for what must have been a half hour, faltering and starting again, before he was satisfied.
When he was finished, Meadows knew what the eyes reminded him of, so dark and dispassionate and deadly. They were not the eyes of a man at all. They were the eyes of a shark.
Chapter 6
THE LINCOLN sat in front of El Hogar, a cramped storefront restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street in Little Havana. A Sorry We’re Closed sign hung in the door window, but small candles still burned in the red table lanterns inside. There were but four customers.
Outside, in a dingy blue Dodge less than a block away, Detective Octavio Nelson closed his eyes. They had been sitting on the Lincoln for an hour with no sign of the owner. Nelson was sure the man was inside El Hogar, but he wasn’t sure it was worth the wait. Another headache was coming on like a noisy bus.
“I heard Shafer got off today,” Wilbur Pincus said.
Nelson nodded and sucked on a cigar.
“I told you it was a bad search,” Pincus said.
Nelson glared at his partner. “I knew he had at least a kilo in the trunk. I took the chance.”
“How’d you tell it in court?”
“Routine traffic stop.”
Pincus shook his head. “I bet they took you apart on probable cause, right?”
They sure had, Nelson thought to himself. He hated to lose a shithead like Shafer. Shafer could have been flipped. He was an Anglo. He’d been scared out of his mind. Nelson had known it the minute he’d put the handcuffs on. But the judge had said it was a bad search. “Totally illegal” were the words he’d used. So Shafer walked.
“At least I cost him a kilo of coke,” Nelson muttered.
Pincus snorted. “We took a whole course in probable cause up at Tallahassee. Lasted two weeks. Maybe you ought to sign up next time.”
“Right,” Nelson said. “You bet.”
The car was like a sauna. He flipped on the radio and tuned in a Miami salsa station.
“Don’t you think you ought to leave the squawk box on?” Pincus asked. “In case they try to reach us.”
“Naw. We’re on surveillance.”
The front door of El Hogar opened. Nelson sat up. Just one of the waitresses on her way home. The lights in the restaurant remained on.
“What did you find in that car?” Pincus asked suddenly.
“What car?”
“The Mercedes you hauled in a couple weeks ago.”
Nelson tightened. “How’d you know about that?”
“I saw the tow sheet on your desk.”
Fucking Mathers in the garage. He should have known better. “Nothing,” Nelson said. “The car was clean.”
“Who’d it come back to?”
“I don’t even remember. Some doctor, I think. He got bombed one night and forgot where he parked. It was nothing.”
Pincus seemed to buy it.
The car had not been clean.
Roberto Nelson’s Mercedes-Benz sedan had contained 5.7 grams of cocaine hidden in a metallic key box beneath the steering column. Octavio Nelson had found it after a ten-minute search, weighed it and field-tested it himself on a lab kit he had bought one day at a Coconut Grove head shop. Then he flushed the powder down the john.
He’d never made a report on the coke or even on the tow job, an oversight the boys in the police garage were not likely to forgive soon. He’d given Mathers the same bullshit story about the doctor.