Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [81]
“I’ll be darned,” the man said. “I know he’s on the road a lot.”
“The seventeenth and twenty-eighth of every month,” Winnie said. “He’s one of our best customers.”
“How long does he stay? Must be tough on his wife.”
“Naw, three days at a time. That’s all.”
“What airline?” asked the man.
“Avianca.”
“Bobby likes the service?”
“I guess so,” Winnie said. “Of course, you don’t have a big selection to choose from.”
The man finished off his rum-and-Coke. “That’s OK. It sounds like a good bet, right there. Tomorrow I’ll call my boss to get the OK, and then I’ll come downtown and buy the tickets. Maybe we can have lunch.”
“That would be nice,” Winnie said. Then the blond man drove her back to her town house and kissed her goodnight at the door. She never saw him again.
PEPE FALCÓN did all his deals in Holiday Inns, so his customers started calling him Botones, or bellboy. Pepe liked the name. As he prospered, his style changed accordingly. Where once he was content to get a single room for twenty-eight bucks, he now always made sure to get a suite, near the top, with a view. Any view would do. And after he collected his money, Botones would escort the customer out the door, pick up the phone and call a hooker, sometimes two. Then they would all celebrate.
On the summer night that Detective Ethan Bradley, Miami Homicide, was summoned to Room 713-714 of the Holiday Inn Bayside, Pepe Falcón celebrated for the last time. Then someone stuck the barrel of a small automatic handgun up his nose and blew a few brains and a lot of high-grade cocaine all over the walls. Detective Bradley noted in his report that the mess had “totally ruined a very nice seascape hanging on the west wall.”
A few hours later a truck driver heading north on Interstate 95 with three tons of assorted vegetables noticed a car in flames on the highway apron. He braked his rig, hopped out and doused the late-model Oldsmobile until his portable fire extinguisher was empty. The trucker got on his CB and called for help when he noticed something very funny on the upholstery. A Florida highway patrolman waited for ninety minutes to make sure the car had cooled off, then used a crowbar to pop the trunk.
Inside was the body of a man named Hilarión Escandar, a young Colombian national. Detective Sergeant Ray Lesnick, Miami Homicide, was given the task of searching the corpse. He found approximately fifty-five thousand dollars in U.S. currency, two dozen raw emeralds, three different driver’s licenses and an airline ticket that showed Escandar had arrived earlier that evening on a flight from Lima. The Dade County medical examiner would later determine that the twenty-four-year-old university student had been shot within thirty minutes after he had strolled out of the terminal at Miami International.
Two days later a twin-engine Beechcraft landed at 1:07 A.M. at North Perry Airport. Several men waited by their cars as the cherry-striped aircraft taxied to a stop. The pilot got out, carrying an Ingram submachine gun and nothing else.
“Sorry, fellas,” he said to his welcoming committee. “Somebody fucked up. It’s all dried up.”
“That’s impossible!” shouted one of the men.
“I couldn’t buy a fucking gram!” the pilot shouted. “Your money is in the plane.” He waved the gun. “Get away from that car. Don’t call me again for a long time, OK?”
An airport security guard who witnessed the incident notified the Dade County Metropolitan police, but even the Beechcraft had vanished by the time a squad car arrived. Octavio Nelson heard about the landing from a friend in Narcotics at the county, and now he was beginning to believe that his punk informer was right: There was a plague on the marketplace.
He read over Ethan Bradley’s report and wondered why anyone would bother killing poor Botones, a proud, self-made man—but still a small-time freelancer who couldn’t move enough coke to keep a rock band on its feet for a week. And this kid Escandar, ¡Cristo! Nelson had talked to a sister