Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [55]
Still, it was not so bad, Meadows reasoned. An hour or two at the drawing board, and all three men would come to life. With the sketches Nelson would have all he needed. The killers would be in his pocket then, and el Jefe would follow.
The crowd in the central hallway had resolved itself into a babbling knot around what Meadows presumed was an old woman who had collapsed. He slipped through the door without trouble, curiously elated and pleased with himself. Caught in a terror not of his own making, a pawn—to use Nelson’s term—Meadows had acquitted himself well. He had what Nelson wanted; in fact, in one macabre interlude he had achieved more than Nelson and all his professional pawns.
He had found el Jefe. There could be no thought of any criminal charges against Meadows now. He had done his job. The rest was up to Nelson. Meadows would go away for a few days, and when he came back, it would be all over. He searched the street in both directions—above all, he didn’t want to bump into the killers now—and walked across the intersection to the darkened gas station where Nelson was waiting.
But Nelson did not wait there. There were only the broken pumps, a pregnant gray grimalkin and the smell of decay. In agitation Meadows walked to the corner. He found only a faceless line of traffic.
A squall sprang out of the night sky, and Meadows huddled in the doorway of a bakery. He waited there for what seemed a long time, but Nelson never came.
Chapter 14
T. CHRISTOPHER MEADOWS lay in a coffin of burnished wood. His flesh was as white as talcum, as rigid as steel. The mourners came in solemn procession. “So young, so sad, so tragic,” they said, and each laid an empty cup of Cuban coffee on the coffin lid. The lawman came late. A tarnished star glinted from his forehead. He leaned close, and when he thought no one was looking, he ground his cigar into the corpse’s folded hands, just to be sure.
T. Christopher Meadows could feel the pain, just as he could smell the yellow roses and hear the empty lamenting and see through lids sewn closed by a mortician’s apprentice. But he could not move. He could not even cry. The lawman watched expressionlessly as the cigar burned the white flesh with the smell of embalming fluid. He shrugged. “Adios, amigo,” he said, and tossed his cigar on the teetering mountain of empty cups.
The widow wept. She wore a black bikini and the white peaked cap of a pilot. “Ay, ay, ay,” she wept, and embraced the mourners in turn, tight, grinding embraces that climaxed when the widow directed each mourner’s hand to her firm cocaine breasts.
The man with the shark eyes came from the espresso machine to say the rosary. “Gringo, gringo, gringo, gringo, feenesh, unlucky gringo, feenesh.” Blood spewed from his coffee cup and gave birth to a whirlpool on the corpse’s chest.
The mourners never understood that the shark-eyed rosary man was the killer and the corpse his victim. They watched without comprehension while a gust of indifference toppled the mountain of coffee cups and they fell, one by one, into the whirlpool. Taxi! cried the corpse. I must get away. Why are there no taxis in this fucking city? Taxi! Taxi for a gringo. Please.
Meadows awoke with an erection, every pore open. The pale blue sheets clung to his body. His mouth felt like steel wool. Flares of pain chided his intemperance with every blink. A breeze had sprung up off the sea, rattling the Venetian blinds. That was what had awakened him. Rattling blinds, toppling coffee cups. Meadows shivered.
Meadows rolled out of Terry’s bed, heading for the shower. El Jefe, the Peasant and Cauliflower Ear hated him from the wall opposite the bed where he had pinioned them with thumbtacks. Again, Meadows shivered. No more pisco, he promised himself.
The empty bottle of the deceptively clear, seductively smooth Andean aguardiente lay at the foot of the kitchenette table where Meadows had worked through the night.