Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [44]
That morning, after wrestling with an improbable seascape, Manolo walked to the shower wondering for the thousandth time whether he had turned to pastels from natural predilection, or in rebellion against his environment because the Rock was a universe of gaudy, primary colors.
Among the calls Manolo extracted from the recordings over a sting cafecito that morning were two he expected: one tedious, one dangerous.
“Hey, big chief, give me a call chop-chop, urgente, like bang-bang, man.”
Winnebago Tom. Asshole. And if I called you, fool, what would you say? Probably you would tell me exactly what I heard myself this morning: big shoot-out in Key Largo, two dead men in the water and a bunch more in a burned-out van, a missing boat, a search. Well, Tom, for now only you and I know it was an alien run gone wrong. But we had nothing to do with it, did we? All we provided was the transportation and the captain to run it. The rest was somebody else’s problem. That is all I want to know. If you know more about it than that, loudmouth Tom, then keep it to yourself. Manolo did not call Winnebago Tom.
The second call had been short and to the point, a girl’s voice in rough Caribbean Spanish that was not Cuban.
“Matilde a las dos,” she said and hung up.
Manolo winced. The trouble with Jorge, sitting there in his sumptuous ranch in the emerald hills of Colombia, was that he had too little to do. Jorge loved spy stories. He devoured them.
“Tradecraft, Manolo,” he insisted, “that is important to learn. It distinguishes us from the amateurs. It is a sign of maturity and dedication.”
And of pretension, Manolo had added silently. Still, he had played Jorge’s game, as usual. Part of it was to memorize a list of telephone booths, each assigned the name of a girl. When Jorge had something important to say, a terse call would arrive—from Miami, Manolo supposed—naming the booth and the time. Dos meant two. This was an even month, so subtract two. Jorge would call a telephone booth on Little Torch Key, twenty miles north, precisely at noon. Which meant that Manolo would have to get there early to be sure of getting the booth. When a secret agent needed a booth, it was always empty in Jorge’s novels. A busy signal from Matilda would discomfit him thoroughly. Manolo tossed the Cadillac keys to the dumpy cubana.
She knew the drill. She would start the car and let the air conditioning run full blast. Manolo could not bear to touch hot metal, and he hated the feel of stuffy cars. That was what he told the cubana. He didn’t tell her that, in his business, sometimes cars blew up.
Manolo liked to watch the landscape as he drove. He saw with an artist’s eye, and sometimes he was later able to transmute swatches onto canvas—a pelican in awkward flight, a bridge stretching whitely away across blue waters. In truth, though, there was less of natural beauty to contemplate each time he drove north, from the Rock to Stock Island, to Boca Chica with its naval air station, across a procession of bridges that followed an old railroad line, into the Lower Keys.
Manolo’s grandfather, that turn-of-the-century refugee from some forgotten political battle in Cuba, would not have recognized anything beyond the aching glare and the inviting clear water. When Jorge made the ride on his infrequent visits to the Rock, what he saw in satisfaction was a string of satisfied customers, puffing away, snorting, popping, in a chain of baked cinder-block settlements clinging tenuously to the mangroves.
What Manolo saw was destruction. The Keys had become all the rage of late: a tropical asylum from crime, cold, and high taxes. That was how they were advertised. The developers loved that line. They loved to plow up the mangroves and bulldoze the gnarled, disorderly native vegetation and replace them with block houses closed to the breeze and decorative