Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [30]
Nelson dawdled over the rum bottle, back turned to Meadows. He made a great production of adding ice cubes to his glass, one at a time, slowly, allowing Meadows to collect himself.
“Who is he?” Meadows asked. The voice was cold and ugly now. Nelson did not turn around.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll show you who he is.” Meadows seemed full of nervous energy. He bounded up the porch steps and rushed to a table near the bar. Nelson heard a drawer protest as Meadows yanked it open. Then Meadows was beside him waving a single sheet of paper.
“This is him—the man responsible for Sandy and the girl, the one who shot me. I drew it last night. Now you can arrest him, can’t you?”
Nelson laid down his rum and took the paper carefully, holding it at the edges. From the corner of his eye he watched Meadows pour a stiff shot of bourbon.
“God, that is well drawn,” Nelson said. “You do have talent, don’t you?”
“Do you know him?”
“Too well. Everybody calls him Mono. The nickname suits both his intelligence and temperament. He’s a torpedo, an enforcer.”
“In other words, your friend the monkey is a killer.”
Nelson nodded.
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“He has been, and maybe will be again someday.”
“Why not now?”
“We have lots of suspicions, but until this instant we have had nothing solid. Mono usually works on contract—so much a hit when it looks as though things are getting out of hand. Mono es muy macho. He killed his first man as a teenager in Havana. Everybody in the barrio is afraid of Mono. It’s impossible to get a Latin to testify against him.”
“But that’s wrong,” Meadows insisted.
Nelson exploded. “Wrong? Of course it’s wrong. But you know something? It is also right. The people in the barrio, most of them don’t have fancy educations like you have. But they are smart people, just the same. And they know the two laws of the dope business as well as they know the Ave Maria. They don’t teach that kind of thing at college, do they?”
Nelson drained his glass and filled it again. The once-robust Mount Gay bottle was dying. He must have drunk eight ounces already.
“Two simple rules, amigo, the new commandments. Rule number one: Always get even. Rule number two: Never talk to the cops. People like Mono are better at enforcing those rules than most judges are at enforcing the law. What do you think about that?”
Nelson drank again, more slowly, wincing as the sharp, bittersweet rum ignited in his gullet.
“Do you have any cigars?”
Meadows motioned toward a humidor.
“H. Upmann! Well, I’ll be damned. Are you sure you’re not a doper, amigo? I thought only dopers had enough money to smoke Upmanns.”
Intuition told Meadows it was not the time to say he bought the cigars on a trip to Cuba. In Miami it never paid to say that one had visited Cuba. A lot of people thought that was treason. No, he could not tell a Cuban exile cop that he had gone to Fidel Castro’s Havana to lecture on architecture, not when the cop was getting progressively drunker in his living room. Not when he himself was wobbly and disoriented by a second encounter with a barbaric subculture he’d never known existed. It would not do at all to argue that architecture, like art, was universal and ought to be unfettered by ideology. That was a topic to explore subtly around a fire, with friends who had been trained to think and to debate. And what would such friends say of the new commandments? Always Get Even. “Really, Chris, how atavistic.” Meadows could almost hear Geoffrey Brown’s professorial voice. “A ridiculous throwback to Old Testament morality: an eye for an eye.” And Scott Hansen, the painter whose bright canvases masked a morbid conservatism. Did he know that the second commandment was Never Talk to the Cops? “One more evidence of the decline of the society, the unraveling of the social fabric. A straw in the hurricane of dissolution. Military rule will come to this country. Wait and see.” That is what Scott Hansen would say.
Meadows himself said nothing as the lean and angry policeman lit the Cuban cigar. He listened in silence as Nelson, like