Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [35]
It amused him, nevertheless, to know that Miami International remained an official refuge for the burrowing owl and that rabbits, raccoons, squirrels and tropical birds of a hundred varieties lived in the grassy fringes alongside the giant runways. Meadows prized the airport. It was fifteen minutes from everywhere; eleven minutes by back road, to be exact, from his Coconut Grove haven.
He drove slowly that night, deep in thought. He had plenty of time for the last New York flight, and for once there had been room. He was tired, washed-out. Too much too quick, and too much Jack Daniel’s to boot. It would take a good night’s sleep and a long walk in the morning to restore mental order from the jumble of fear, curiosity and Tennessee whiskey.
Afraid? Jesus! There by the pool, with the lizard, he had come within an ace of wetting his pants. Meadows had never known fear like that. In the street, with Jessica and Sandy, there had been no time for it. Was Meadows a freak, to have lived nearly four decades without ever knowing that sudden bowel-wrenching emotion? Or was he simply the product of a society so well ordered that fear had become as anachronistic as smallpox?
That was it, of course. And that was the argument he should have used on the cop. Without law, without justice, no man is safe from fear, and fear has no place among civilized men. Put that in your smelly cigar and smoke it, amigo Nelson.
Meadows’s world held no one like Nelson. Tough, cynical, ruthless and probably very effective. Meadows pitied the criminal flotsam that fell into Nelson’s hands. Like going to bed with a bobcat. A psychiatrist would have a field day with Nelson, would peel him layer by solid layer, like an artichoke. And in the process would no doubt destroy him as a good cop. To allow people like me to live without fear, Meadows concluded, society produces people like Nelson.…
But Meadows had coped, hadn’t he? He hadn’t wet his pants. He hadn’t fainted or run in circles. He had called for help, and he had dealt rationally with the strange man who had come to help him. With Nelson’s macabre prodding he had taken the only logical decision open to him. It was not a hero’s decision, but it was a sensible one, an architect’s decision made after measured analysis of form and stress. Meadows was running away, and he could live with his flight.
Terry was something else again. Could he live with Terry? Was that what she wanted? She had left a lot unsaid at the airport, and that in itself was saying a lot. Meadows savored Terry as a rarity among women: She never engaged the tongue without first putting the mind in gear. So he was meant to think about Chris & Terry, twin hearts on a tree. Well, he would think about it. And while he thought, he would go see Dana. He already felt terrible about that. Damn Terry. Like Nelson, she, too, had set him up.
Dana had offered to meet him at La Guardia, but he had refused. Airports made him nervous. All he ever wanted from them was to be allowed to get in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible. He hated airport greetings only slightly less than he hated airport farewells. He would take a cab to Dana’s brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.
Calling Dana had been almost a reflex action for Meadows. New York without long-legged Dana was like New York without Chinatown. Once he and Terry had gone to New York for a weekend, and Meadows had worried absurdly the whole time that they would bump into her. She would not have fared well. Terry was a fighter.
Meadows drove up Twenty-seventh Avenue, his attention only partly on what he was doing. Paint stores, drugstores, a muffler shop flashed by in the night, all shrouded and locked tight. The only life in the streets came, as it always did, in the barrio. Traffic picked up there, and many cars brandished red, white and blue Cuban flag decals on a bumper or back window. Swarthy men in guayabera shirts clustered in gesticulating knots before shops that dispensed cigars, cafecitos and memories. A black and gold Trans Am cut