Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [25]
“But you shot him.”
Mono glared. “In the leg.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He had learned his ballistics from the best of the CIA. He had trained on a beach in the Florida Keys—a mock invasion during a stinging rainstorm; nighttime target practice with the tracer rifles; blasting coconuts out of the palm trees with a .45 pistol at lunch-time. Six months’ worth of training.
Mono had made many friends among his fellow soldiers-in-training. Two of them had died at the Bay of Pigs. Another, who had gone to jail for seventeen years on the Isle of Pines, had wished he had. He’d been freed, blind and half-crippled, and Mono had been at the airport when the chartered Eastern jetliner had brought him into Miami from Havana. The two men had wept together like children. Mono’s henchmen had never seen him cry, but they understood.
Over the years Mono forgot nothing of what the CIA had taught him, least of all how to shoot. Now he was cursing himself: You should have killed that gringo when you had the chance. You should have aimed for the chest and squeezed the trigger. Instead you aimed low, not out of compassion but out of common sense—the important difference between aggravated assault and first-degree murder.
Mono had never dreamed he would see the gringo again or that the gringo would see him.
“Suppose you are right,” said the peasant. “So what? Do you think he even saw your face? And if he did, do you suppose he would come looking for you?” The man chuckled and lifted his beer.
“I think you’re full of shit,” said one of the other men, whose ear was deformed, a grotesque knob. “I saw no one staring at you. Forget about it.”
“No,” Mono said. “Find out who the man is. Ramón, you have a girlfriend who works in the admissions office at Flagler Memorial. Call her. Tell her to check all the gunshot wounds that came in that day. Tell her you are looking for an Anglo in his thirties, thin, brown hair. He was hit in the knee or thigh.” Mono patted his calf.
“I will get the name,” Ramón answered.
“Get everything you can,” Mono said.
“Then what?” the peasant asked.
Mono went on, “This is a private matter. You will do this as a favor to me.”
One of the others snorted a laugh. He was drunk. Mono’s face darkened, and the muscles in his neck tightened like a rope. Under any other circumstances he would have smashed the foolish punk with his fists, leaving him bloody but wiser. But now he needed him, and he said nothing.
“El Jefe said no more shootings,” Ramón reminded. “He was furious about what happened in the Grove.”
“He will not know about this,” Mono replied sternly. “Find out what you can.”
“Then what?” asked the man with the cauliflowered ear.
“Nothing,” Mono said softly. “Then nada. I just want information.”
He opened a thumb-sized plastic vial and tapped a small pile of white powder onto the flat side of his American Express card. He used a table knife to cut the powder into four perfect lines. The others watched silently as Mono rolled a crisp new hundred-dollar bill into a makeshift straw. He sniffed three of the lines in quick succession, then offered the fourth to Ramón.
On his way out of the restaurant Mono stopped to hug Oscar, the owner. “Thank you for your hospitality. You are a good friend.”
“You are welcome, Señor Sosa. Anytime.”
Of course, it was always Señor Sosa. Oscar wouldn’t dare address him by Mono, a street name. The monkey.
Señor Sosa had once done him a great favor. Just a small debt, but how foolish. A drunken night when Oscar had agreed to join some friends for the cockfights in Key Largo. Money had flown like the rooster feathers, and when it was over, the restaurant owner had been dismayed to find himself three thousand dollars down. Of course, he could not pay.
Señor Sosa could, on the spot, from a roll of bills so large it filled his hand like an egg. He’d never mentioned the money again. All he’d ever asked of Oscar was to keep El Hogar open late whenever Señor Sosa and his friends wished to talk business. He was asking