Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [56]
Meadows’s new-found assurance had dissolved in those first few minutes outside the funeral home. He was alone. What should he do? Was he still a fugitive from a murder charge? Where should he go? Not to the Buckingham, surely. He couldn’t go home. The Peasant and Cauliflower Ear had gone home. Should he try to leave Miami? He could, but if he was a fugitive, the police would be watching. That left Terry’s apartment on Key Biscayne. It was the only refuge he had.
In a city notorious for its poor public transportation, Meadows had walked the rain-fresh streets for twenty minutes in search of a cab. Taxis do not cruise in Miami. They lie in wait. Meadows had found one, finally, in front of a hospital. He pounded on the window to awaken the driver, who, faithful to the tradition of all Miami cabdrivers, switched on the meter before unlocking the door to let him in.
Why, Nelson, why? He had asked himself that a hundred times that long night. He found no answer now in the finely chiseled features of el Jefe on the paper before him or the finely numbing lash of the pisco in his gut.
After he had showered and jolted his quarreling nerves with black coffee, Meadows examined the three sketches again with a critic’s eye. He was pleased to see that neither confusion nor alcohol had cheated his skill. The broad-faced ferret looked exactly as Meadows had seen him: huge, stolid and dumb. The dominant pug characteristic had come through nicely in the second sketch, the head half turned to show the cauliflower ear.
The drawing of el Jefe was the best of the three, Meadows decided. Breeding, distinction, magnetism were all there. The deep-set eyes promised depth and intelligence. The mouth was a trifle too small, though, and not sensual enough. Meadows fixed it.
Then he tried to call Terry to say he was using her apartment. She lent it out sometimes, and the last thing Meadows needed right now was a gaggle of South Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the great PX in the north.
Predictably Terry was nowhere to be found, and the secretary at CAN’s main office in Asunción, Paraguay, seemed even thicker than usual.
“When will she be back?”
“Long time no back.”
“Tell her to call Chris at her house.”
“What her house?”
“Su casa está quemada,” said Meadows, summoning his best Spanish and hanging up in disgust.
Meadows washed the dishes, made the bed, threw out the dead bottle of pisco, found Terry’s keys and coaxed life from the old clunker Ford she kept in the building garage—just in case. Then he went back upstairs, drank a glass of ice water and realized suddenly he had nothing to do. He tinkered with the sketches. He turned on the television and turned it off again quickly. He tried to read. Terry had a good collection of Latin American literature, and Meadows picked up an English translation of Garcia Márquez’s short stories. The Colombian wizard’s sense of timelessness suited Meadows’s mood perfectly, but he tossed the book aside after a few minutes. He had enough mythical reality of his own to cope with just then.
Meadows kept coming back to Nelson. His disappearance was perplexing, outrageous. Several times he had picked up Terry’s beige bedside phone to dial police headquarters, only to stop himself.
Nelson had set a mouse loose in a nest of snakes and then had abandoned him. Why? Something was wrong. No matter how Meadows juggled the pieces they would not fit.
Nelson should have waited. If the sketches were so precious to the case, nothing would have driven him away.
The logic eluded Meadows. Was Nelson trying to set him up? Suppose Nelson were allied with the dopers. Suppose the whole mission at the funeral parlor had been a charade, Nelson’s way of feeding the killers their victim.…
Meadows recoiled at the thought. It was a possibility, but it did not square