Patriot

CHAPTER 40

Stokely Jones Jr. had the top down on the GTO crossing MacArthur Causeway. Not so much for the blue sparks zinging off the wave tops to either side, or the salt air and the South Florida sunshine, as for the throaty exhaust note on his precious metallic black raspberry 1965 Pontiac GTO.

If this wasn’t music to beat the blues, he didn’t know what was. He downshifted to third, whipping back the shiny 8-ball atop the chromed Hurst shifter and double-clutching, just to hear the street-legal deep burble and pop of the heavily modified bored and stroked V-8.

“Sweet,” Sharkey said, dark eyes straight ahead. “And street legal!”

“Ain’t it just, brother?” Stoke said, looking over at him and smiling his trademark megawatt white smile at the little guy. Not that Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a.k.a., the Sharkman, was really all that little. Besides, he was a tough guy, wiry, but wires of woven steel. But, still, when you personally tip the scales at three-hundred-plus pounds and stand over six foot seven like Stoke did, everybody seems little.

Sharkey, a one-armed Cubano, formerly a fishing guide down in the Keys, was Stokely’s sole employee over at his small office across the water in Coral Gables. Tactics International, founded and funded by Stoke’s best friend in the world, the British espionage cat named Alex Hawke, was a cover operation. They pretended to be helpful to companies planning to shift operations overseas, mostly to Latin America. But what they really did was travel to the four corners looking for bad guys and playing whoop-ass m’lady all day.

Once located, Stoke’s mission was to blow their shit to hell and do it completely off the radar. His number one client, and the bane of his existence, was his partner. He was a CIA field officer, name of Harry Brock. Harry, who caught a lot of shit from Stoke for growing up in a gated golf community in Southern California, was one of those guys who was absolutely convinced he was the toughest and funniest white man alive. The fact that he was neither never seemed to occur to him. Still, if you’re a small operation, pretty much running on a shoestring, the U.S. government and the CIA are pretty good clients to have on your roster.

But, hell, save that stuff for Monday. Here it was Friday evening and they’d had a tough week at Logistics. Some enterprising young Colombians had set up a meth factory to hell and gone out in the Everglades. Los Hermanos, they called themselves, the brothers. They were hooked up with MS13, baddest of all the Latin drug gangs in the country. Pretty bad bunch of gators, Stoke had warned his man Sharkey while they were suiting up in their ass-kicking gear.

Miami Dade PD, another VIP client, had hired Tactics to go out there at night and do their dirty work for them. Go in there in the wee hours aboard two airboats with mounted .50-cals and shut those boys right down. What the local cops had failed to ascertain was that these hombres had built a damn fort out there, surrounded by barbed wire, and they had a thirty-foot-high lookout tower with a few of their own damn .50-cals mounted on top.

That he and Shark had survived that bloody and noisy rumble in the jungle was one thing. That they’d shut the operation down for good was another. To celebrate their newly extended life spans, Shark and Stoke decided to stop at their favorite watering hole, the Mark, for a couple of cold ones on the way home. He’d called his housekeeper on the cell, saying to tell his wife he’d be a little late getting home. Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy, rule one.

Stoke and his wife, Fancha, a former Miami Beach nightclub chanteuse and now a famous torch singer with a number-one hit single, lived in a palatial Key Biscayne estate right on Biscayne Bay. Most Friday nights Mr. and Mrs. Jones invited Sharkey and his wife, Maria, over for Stoke’s world-famous BBQ poolside cookout.

The Mark, short for Marker 9, was a notorious gin joint just off the causeway near the Fisher Island ferry. Once a mob spot and then a hangout for dirty cops, it was smoky and smelly maybe, but maybe that’s just the way they liked it. They parked the GTO in the last available spot and made their way through the muggy tropical heat that hung over Miami. Didn’t bother either of them. Stoke, born and raised on 196th Street up in Harlem, loved all of it. Heat and humidity, skeets and sunshine. Bring it.

“After you, amigo,” he said, stepping aside so Shark could enter first. The kid looked good. Rocking a lime green porkpie hat and matching loafers, he rolled in on a tide of smooth. Stoke smiled. He was in the man’s debt. One of the Colombian brothers in the ’Glades had gotten the drop on Stoke while he was busy shooting with a couple of the other brothers. Sharkey, who could use a fillet knife with lightning skill, had dropped the guy before he could pop a plug into Stoke’s brainpan.

Stokely was about to enter the joint when his cell vibrated. He pulled it from his pocket and checked the ID. It was Fancha. She never called this number, ever, unless it was something serious.

“Hey, honey,” Stoke said.

“Hey, baby,” Fancha said. “You going to be late?”

“Yeah. Just stopped at the Mark to buy my coworker a cold one. Won’t be long.”

“I hope not. I’ve got a surprise waiting here for you.”

“Aw, baby, don’t do that to me now. Hold that thought, okay?”

“Not that kind of surprise.”

“What then?” he asked, smiling, her making him wait for it.

“Alex Hawke just showed up at the door.”

Stunned silence and then Stoke said, “No way! Hawke? Here? Are you kidding me?”

“You think I could make that up? He’s here all right. Going to be staying a few days, too. He brought Alexei with him.”

“Well, damn. Tell him I’ll be there in five. Lemme go get the Sharkman before he orders for us, okay?”

“Something bad happened, Stoke. He didn’t say what. But I can tell. See it in those baby blues of his. Man’s in trouble, honey.”

“I’ll be right there.”

The GTO pulled up at the big wrought-iron gates of Casa Que Canta seven minutes later despite rush hour. Stoke hit the call button, identified himself, and the heavy gates swung wide. He drove up the narrow drive through a lush jungle of every kind of tropical vegetation, dense, green, and almost dripping with humidity. There were tropical birds twittering away in an old aviary near the house, many of them purchased by Fancha on her recent Latin American tour.

“You got it made, amigo,” the Sharkman said. He was never able to quite register Stoke’s rich and famous lifestyle as that of someone he actually knew.

“Nobody’s ever got it made,” Stoke said quietly. “Ever. This all goes up in smoke in a heartbeat. Everybody’s hanging by a thread, you understand that?”

“Yeah. You right, brother. Sorry.”

“Didn’t mean to bust your balls, rocket man. I’m just worried about my friend, Alex, that’s all. Hop out, we’ll leave the car here at the front.”

Fancha kissed him at the door and led them down a long tiled corridor to the sunny bay side of the sprawling house. Stoke paused in the doorway and saw Hawke down at the pool, swimming in the shallow end with Alexei.

“He say anything yet?”

“No. He’s waiting for you, I think. You guys go put on your bathing suits. I’ll go down there and tell him you’re here.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“BBQ. It’s Friday night, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot,” Stoke said, and headed up the wide curving marble staircase that led to the second and third floors of the mansion. “Come on, Sharkbait, get your suit on, son! Last one in is a dead Latino.”

Sharkey and Fancha stayed in the pool, teaching Alexei how to play Marco Polo. Stoke and Alex Hawke took a stroll across the wide green apron of manicured grass that ran down to the white-ruffled bay. A long white dock there extended about fifty feet out into the blue water. Bobbing on her lines at the end was Stoke’s speedboat, a vintage Cigarette painted a fiery red. Her name, Lipstick, was painted on the stern.

“Tell me,” Stoke said, not looking up, but wanting to get the bad news over with.

“They’re getting close,” Hawke said.

“Who is?”

“The Russians. They smuggled a bomb into Alexei’s White House birthday party, for God’s sake! C-4 packed inside a toy helicopter. If it hadn’t have been for Nell… Alexei would…”

“Nell,” Stoke said. “Is she all right?”

“She’s dead, Stoke. The thing exploded in her hands and blew her… blew her…”

“Don’t say it. Shake it off, boss, shake it off.”

“What the hell am I to do, Stoke? They killed Nell! If the two of them are not safe at the bloody White House? I mean — where the hell do we go?”

“Listen, boss. We’re not going to let them get close ever again. No matter what it takes.”

“How? How on earth do we do that? He’s not safe, I’m telling you… he’s never been safe since the day he was born. They stole his mother and now they’ve killed my darling Nell!”

“I know how much you loved her. And I’m working on it, Cap’n. The old Stoke ain’t ever let you down yet, has he?”

“No.”

“And he ain’t about to start now.”

Hawke turned and looked back up the sweep of close-cropped green to the pool. He could hear Alexei’s distinctive laughter.

“Hear that, Stoke? That’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh since I got back to Washington. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t eat. He’s lost without her. And frankly, so am I.”

“You want to go for a boat ride?”

“I don’t really know what I want to do.”

“Listen. Did you fly down here in your plane?”

“Yeah.”

“From where?”

“A little strip out in Bucks County. Lumberville. Alexei and I drove there after the memorial service for Nell at St. John’s this morning. He cried for most of the trip.”

“Drove straight from D.C.?”

“Right.”

“Who knew where you were headed?”

“No one. Not even the pilots. Not even the president or the Secret Service. I didn’t tell anyone because I intended to decide on a location on the drive north. I had the pilots circle over Princeton, New Jersey, until I chose a remote field that could accommodate the Gulfstream.”

“Who drove you to Princeton?”

“Me. Hired car from Hertz. Low profile. A grey Kia sedan. Random taxi here.”

“So no one has a clue where you are at this exact moment. I mean, including Pelham and Ambrose Congreve. Nobody?”

“No one.”

“That’s a good start.”

“Stoke, Nell died for my son.”

“I know, I know. I am very, very sorry for your loss. She was a hero and a fine woman. And she gave her life, not only for your son, but for all those other children at the White House that day.”

Hawke looked away, his eyes shining. “There was love between us. We talked about getting married. She knew that being married to me was dangerous. But how many people close to me have to die, Stoke? How many?”

They were at the end of the dock now.

“Hop in. I’ll drive,” Stoke said.

“Let me get the lines.”

“Just get in the damn boat, boss.”

Hawke climbed over the gunwale and settled into the bucket seat on the starboard side, strapped himself in. A minute later, Stoke was in the boat and cranking up the twin 400-horsepower engines.

“Hold on,” Stoke said, his hand on the throttle.

“Believe me, I am holding on.”

And Stoke could see, the Hawke man really was holding on. But just barely. And for his life.