Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [31]
Luis Garces, said Nelson, ah, yes, now there was an instructive example of getting even. Tough, cunning Luis. Poor Luis. He was an unlettered boy from the Colombian countryside with quick wits and quick hands. He came up to cocaine from picking pockets. Some of the best pickpockets in the world came from Colombia. There has been a university for pickpockets in Bogotá for more than three hundred years. Meadows didn’t know that, did he? And Luis, good pickpocket though he was, was smart enough to realize that there were more pesos in one kilo of coke than there were in a thousand pockets. He stole enough to buy some travel documents and made his way to Miami. Could have retired to a condominium on Miami Beach and lifted an occasional bangled pocketbook from blue-haired ladies. But not Luis. He was young, and he was ambitious. Not long after reaching Miami he found himself a partner. Luis and his partner went shopping for coke, and one day they found it. Luis got all dressed up and passed himself off as a buyer from New York. Came the night to make the buy, and they didn’t buy the stuff; they stole it. A sweet little sleight of hand, Luis being so good with his hands. They got away with the coke, OK, amigo, about a pound, but they made a big mistake: They didn’t kill the guys they stole it from. Luis and his friend, playing in the big league with little-league pickpocket rules. If you’re going to steal coke, Meadows, you have to make sure nobody chases you afterward. Because they will chase you. They chased Luis and what’s-his-name. Caught them one night on the street downtown, near one of those banks that’s always changing their name. Luis and his friend, they never even got a chance to pull their guns. Bam. Down they go. Hurt bad. But not dead, not by a long shot. So we bundle them off to Flagler Memorial, where it would cost you and me a couple of hundred bucks a day but dopers get fixed free. Luis and the other guy, they don’t know nothin’. Was I shot, Officer? Are you sure I didn’t walk in front of a truck? After a few days it looks like they’re both going to be OK. Anyway, one day Luis and this other scumbag are resting up in their nice soft taxpayer beds when what happens? The guys who shot them come back to finish the job. How about that, huh? Persistence. These scumbags burst in with automatic weapons and blaze away. Luis gets hit a couple of times. His partner gets made into Swiss cheese. There are doctors fainting and nurses screaming and patients having heart attacks and every cop in the city running around the hospital with enough firepower to retake Havana. One of the shitheads gets away; we never could figure out where he went. The other one gets as far as the roof. There is a big fight up there with SWAT and helicopters and the whole goddamn cavalry. Well, the guy gets blown away finally, but a cop gets hit, and so his buddies rush him back downstairs. If you got to get shot, a hospital is not a bad place to have it happen, right? Wrong. They get back down with the cop, and there’s nobody to take care of him. You know why? They are all working over pickpocket Luis. Hurt so bad he was. Poor Luis. Well, the lieutenant of the cop that’s shot goes bananas. He jams his pistol down the throat of the head doctor and says, “You treat my cop first, motherfucker, because if you don’t, I’m going to shoot you first and then the scumbag Colombian lying there on the table.” Boy, was there hell to pay after that. But in the end the cop survived, and even Luis survived, and all that happened was that the lieutenant was transferred someplace where he didn’t command troops anymore. The brass have shat on him ever since, but there’s not a cop in the county who wouldn’t lay himself down for that guy. Everybody’s dead, everybody’s even.
But that’s not the end of the story. It’s only the