Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 20: MONIQUE

'You don't trust my driving?'

'It's not that,' I said.

Buckle wouldn't work.

'You know something? I bet I dropped a dime down there in the slot. I'm always doing it.' She leaned towards me, scent of patchouli. 'Hit it. Hit it like this.' A ripple of laughter, 'See what I mean? You can keep it, buy yourself a yacht.'

I got the buckle fixed and sat back and pulled it tight and tried to think.

'Ride around a little?'

'That would be nice.'

She turned left again at the lights, driving cleanly, sitting there in her black leather skirt and tunic, gold belt, rings on her fingers and long gold nails, tiny feet half-naked in gold sandals poised over the pedals, the curve of her body cut like a black crescent moon.

'Monique, I believe it was.'

'That's right.'

'What happened,' I asked her, 'to the Honda?'

I wanted to know where we stood.

'He got him kinda shunting. George Proctor is a real mean man. He got him kinda shunting and then I think the guy in the Honda must have swung the wheel at the wrong time and he wasn't going too slow and bingo, he went rolling like a barrel. Who was he?'

'A friend of mine.'

'He in drugs too?'

'No.'

'He was trying to look after you, right? Didn't want Proctor to get you.'

'You could say that.'

'Proctor's real mad at you, right? You cut off his supplies or what?'

'I'm not a dealer,' I said.

'Nothing like that.' I watched the flash of her smile reflected in the windscreen. 'That's why Nicko was going to feed you to the sharks.'

'Thank you,' I said, 'for trying to stop him.'

'Usual way,' she said, 'I don't give a shit if a dealer gets his, providing of course he's not working for Toufexis. But the execution thing, I dunno, it kind of involves judgement, right? Kind of coldblooded, different from just some guy gets in the way of an AK-47 and kerboom. You British?'

'Yes.' She still hadn't answered the question. It hadn't had anything to do with judgement.

Is this the guy? Nicko, pushing his flashlight against my face.

No.

Don't give me that shit! Shaking the photograph in her face.

I haven't seen him before.

Well Jesus Christ this is the face of the guy in the photograph!

You'd better take care, Nicko, she said. Don't kill too many.

Her face hidden by the glare of the flashlight, but I'd caught the scent of patchouli.

'So why did you get in the car?' She was watching my face, too, in the windscreen.

'Which car?'

'This one.'

'I didn't have time,' I said, 'to find a taxi.'

'With Mr Proctor right up your ass!'

'That's right.'

'So what's a Britisher doing over here in God's country, muscling in on the game?'

'It's like calling you an Americaner, which sounds awful, don't you think? A British subject is actually a Briton.'

'You real cool cat,' tossing her head back, laughing, the big gold earrings flashing as they swung. 'So what's a Briton doing over here messing around on our home ground?'

She swung the wheel and gunned up through the intersection with an expertise that I found sexy. 'I work for the Foreign Office in London,' I said, 'and the reason why Nicko intended to kill me was because Proctor had asked your friend Toufexis to put out a contract on me, as you know.'

'Maybe I do, maybe I don't.' Not smiling now.

We were going very carefully, she and I. As far as I knew she worked for Toufexis and looked capable enough of making a hit if I said something wrong, despite her alleged aversion to making judgements. As far as she knew I was opposed to Proctor and Toufexis to the point where they'd put a price on my head.

'Foreign Office,' she said. 'What's that?'

'State Department.'

'See your ID?'

And the tone was unmistakable. I gave her my card.

'Looks authentic,' she said. 'Could even be.'

I took it back. 'You can flash your badge,' I said. 'I won't tell Toufexis.'

'What badge?'

Said it too fast.

Watching me in the windscreen, 'You know what I find so interesting about you? First time I see you, it's in George Proctor's place, visiting. Next thing, he vanishes like a bunny with a bee in his ass. Then you're down there on Quay 19 and Nicko's going to cream you, execution style, which is the only way he knows. Next thing, I see you tonight in that place talking with the highest-paid anchorwoman in the US of A like you knew each other all your lives, when you shoulda been out there in the ocean feeding the sharks. I don't get time to catch my breath before La Cambridge is lying dead on the ground just a hundred feet from where you're standing, just like you were the spotter for those guys, ain't actually saying anything. Then before I can blink you're tooling through the town in a limo with Proctor drilling holes in the bodywork, busy as a riveter. So I find you a very interesting man.'

She used the gear shift, the heavy gold bracelet shimmering in the glow from the facia panel, and we turned again, eastward towards the Bay.

I didn't say anything. I'd had to roll twice on the sidewalk back there and the stitches must have pulled because my shirt was sticking to the wound and the right shoulder was bruised because it had taken the impact but the worst of the shock was over by now and I was beginning to feel the heady lightness that suffuses the organism when it comes to know that life is sweet and that it has not been taken away.

Proctor had come very close to doing that, and it was nice to be driving through the late night streets of this fair city with a pretty little undercover agent of the Miami Police Department.

She was still watching me, and I suppose it would have been rude not to answer.

'One has to keep busy,' I said.

'It's this Foreign Bureau thing I don't get. It doesn't gel with all that.'

'Office.'

'Huh?'

'Foreign Office.'

'Oh, sure, yeah. Maybe intelligence?'

'I was afraid you'd never catch on.'

Proctor knew; Toufexis and the mob knew; it was practically in the papers.

'Okay,' she said in a minute, 'that makes sense.' She turned her head to study me. 'Yeah, you got the look. Mean, hard as a nail, sell your own mother and not for much.' She slipped a slim dark hand into the gold bag on the seat. 'You mean this one?'

'Yes.' A lieutenant, yet.

'Just a bit of gold tin, but I like the life.'

'It suits you. Does he deal? Proctor?'

'No. He smokes crack, that's all. But he's in with Toufexis like you said. We go to your place or mine?'

'Yours.'

'Okay. Fix you some protein. You gotta be feeling hungry after a ride like that. I been there.' I suppose she meant the Corvette thing.

'I can imagine,' I said.

'See, I moved in on Proctor to find out what he was doing. I knew he was in with Toufexis.'

'And Toufexis is your assignment.'

'Absolutely. Pull him in, I pull in the most powerful branch of the mob in Florida, that don't get me captain, nothing can. Proctor, he doesn't deal, no, but tell you this, he's into something bigger than that. Political. And very sophisticated. Like when I move in on him I have to move La Cambridge out, and she's – she was really quite attractive. So what happened, you going to tell me Nicko got a sign from heaven to spare you out there in that boat, or what?'

She'd done a lot of interrogation in her time, been taught how to drop a subject for a while and then snap back to it, catch you by surprise.

'They weren't professionals,' I said.

'You bet your sweet ass they were professionals, man. They -'

'I mean they weren't trained in close combat.'

'Oh, come on. You mean you had a teeny weeny XM-177 assault rifle tucked in your sock and they never frisked you.'

'I never carry a gun.'

She stopped at the lights, hand on the gear shift, her head turned to look at me. 'You never carry a gun. But there were four of those guys out there with -'

'Look,' I said, 'this is very embarrassing. I had some luck, and that's it.'

Watching me, a shimmer of dark eyes between smoky lashes. 'You're really annoyed aren't you?'

'Yes.'

A soft explosion of laughter as the lights changed and she hit the gear shift and took the Mazda away. 'You real, real cool cat!'

Very annoyed cool cat. 'So why didn't you just flash your badge and call the police and get me put into protective custody?'

'Huh? Well see, it's this way. I thought you were a rival dealer horning in on his operation, or maybe you'd stashed away a little bit of Toufexis's merchandise when someone wasn't looking, and normally I don't give a shit if one of those mothers gets in the way of a spray gun, it lightens the load for us and it saves all that bullshit in the courts when we work our ass off for months on end and bring a bunch of those suckers into the court and see some bleeding-heart jury give them an acquittal on all counts and send them whistling on their way, happens all the time. But like I say, the execution thing gets under my skin a little, I mean I like to sleep nights, so I put in my bit for you and tried to cool Nicko off, but that was all I could do because you know what? I flash my badge and he'd have shipped me out there with you on that boat, you better believe me, and if he hadn't done that I'd have blown my cover, and I've been working more than six months getting closer and closer to Toufexis and I would've thrown the whole thing out the window for the sake of one little waterfront dealer, which like I say is what I thought you were, didn't know you were a real live dude in the British Foreign Bureau – sure, Office, right. But then, gee, big deal, you didn't need my help anyway.'

'All the same,' I said, 'it was civil of you.'

'Hey, any time.' White flash of her smile in the windscreen.

She turned again and headed south and started slowing along a street full of waterfront apartment houses.

'That was a Mafia hit?' she asked me. 'Cambridge?'

'I don't know.'

'Oh. That's a shame.'

We ran into an alley behind the houses and hit two speed bumps and she swung the Mazda alongside a broken-down fence and switched off the engine. 'I was kind of hoping you'd be able to tell me about that. You seemed to know her pretty well, the way you were talking to her at the party. See, narcotics are okay but she was a big time gal and that was a big time hit, and if I could get a handle on that operation I might take it straight to the FBI and who knows, they could offer me a job with them, change of pace, little more prestige, you know?'

She locked the car and we went across a concrete yard and into the rear of the nearest house and took the lift to the fourth floor, a broken strand of one of the cables twanging through the pulleys. At the third door along a dim-lit passage she got out her keys and opened up and went inside and I followed.

'You want some eggs?'

'That would be nice.'

'Make yourself at home. Bathroom's through there, you want to clean up. Boy, you got legs, you know that?'

'I'm sorry?'

Throwing her gold bag on to a chair, checking her hair in a mirror, 'I saw you get out of that limo so fast I thought you were going to mash your head all over the sidewalk. Then you were up and running and I figured you were going to keep on flat out right to the end of that alleyway, and I had to burn rubber through a red light and get the whole of that block behind me and make another turn and get my ass all the way down to where you were in time to catch you, is what I mean, I only just made it, you got legs.' Turning away from the mirror and facing me with her hands on her hips in her black leather skirt with her moist skin glowing in the light and her eyes half-hidden in her long dark lashes, 'I'm real glad I made it, you know? I don't have a man now Proctor's taken off, you go for black gals?'

'Oh for Christ's sake, Lieutenant,' I said, 'we've got business to do.'

A flash of laughter – 'And just dig that accent – leff-tenant, wow! You want them boiled, fried, Benedict, sunny side up, over easy, two, three, four?'

'Whatever you're having,' I said and went into the bathroom, and when I came back she'd started frying them, the top half of her body visible above the counter dividing the big cathedral-ceilinged room from the kitchen.

'Like a drink?'

'I'm fine as I am.'

'Take a look around. That's my own art work on the walls.'

She meant the photographs, rows of them, black and white and most of them taken by flash, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 3546, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 1170, the positions mostly the same, a man stooping or leaning face to the wall or prone on the floor, a cop frisking him or putting the handcuffs on or keeping a locked arm-hold or pushing him into a squad car, Lt. Lacroix looking on, got up in short pants and a tank top or jeans and a tee shirt or a torn leather jacket, the same expression on her face in every shot, very alert, her eyes wide and missing nothing, giving me the impression that if the cop fumbled with the handcuffs or lost the arm hold or let the man slip away from the car she'd be there with a force of her own, because she hadn't spent the amount of time she had in nailing these people just to see them evade arrest.

'Kinda toast?' she asked me, 'rye, whole wheat, French?'

'Whatever you're having. So what would you do if one of these people tried to get away, Monique?'

'I do what it takes. I've been up three times this year on a police brutality rap, you beat that? Thing is, they're all in the slammer and I guess that's the name of the game.'

'How tall are you?'

'Five two, hundred and ten pounds, call me a fucking midget, but listen, the bottom line is just how hard you kick them in the nuts, because it really gets their attention.'

We sat at a black lacquered table under one of those hanging mirrored globes, with its reflections floating across the walls and the black net curtains as she flashed me a smile and passed me the ketchup and said in her light, husky voice, 'See, I don't personally give a shit if people decide to go to hell in their own handcart by smoking crack or shooting snow, they don't wanna live and they know how to die, it's their business. I just find it's a good game to play, it's fast and it's risky and I go into these houses and make a purchase and flash my badge and bring the rest of the guys in from the cars, scare the shit out of everybody and maybe sometimes shake a guy down for a couple of grand, I like nice things, look at this room, I like a nice watch and nice shoes, you know? And who do I steal from, the public? Shit, I steal from the dealers, see, I'm not like those fancy congressmen, charge the public for their plane trips and women and cruises and all that stuff, they're the real crooks but of course for them it's legal. They okay?'

The eggs. Said yes.

'Thing is, it triggers so much crime, and there's not much we can do to keep it down, the numbers are just too big. In this town there's maybe a thousand armed robberies and auto thefts and break-ins every day, and a big percentage of those are drug-related, those poor slobs sucking on the devil's dick and having to net a hundred grand or two hundred grand to support the habit – that's where the public pays. So I do my thing and like I say it's fast and risky but there's no way, there is no way we can stop the biggest growth industry in Miami – the stuff just comes dropping out of the sky in bales and canvas bags from the low-flying planes while the power boats are out there picking them up, same time as, the body-packers in from Columbia are dying in the hotel rooms, found one of them today with a pound of cocaine in his stomach stashed away in eighty-two condoms, had to give him emergency surgery because, see, those things can burst and the coke paralyses the colon and this poor son of a bitch had been out and bought himself an enema and two packets of prunes and a box of Exlax, didn't do him any good, see, near dying when we got to him, went to Jesus two hours later in the post-operative room, things going on like that all over this town, the stuff comes in every way there is, planes and boats and pickup trucks and people's stomachs, you like some more?'

Coffee. Said yes.

'Anyway, Toufexis is my assignment, I mean my personal assignment, they wouldn't put just one little lieutenant to work on the head of the Miami Mafia, we've got a whole special unit on his ass, but that's why I moved in on George Proctor, see.'

'What caught your interest?'

'I saw him with Toufexis himself, talking in the lobby of the Gold Hibiscus, shaking hands and everything like real good friends, I took it from there. Had to get Cambridge off the stage but he liked the cut of my whoops or something and it only took a few days. Then I began working on him, you know? I mean once I'd copied the key of the apartment and he wasn't there. Diaries, phone-numbers, the regular routine, and one time I followed him to a place he often went to, and the next day I got myself invited inside, flashed my badge, nice and polite.'

'Where was that?'

'House on West Riverside Way, 1330, you know the place?'

'No,' I said, and put my coffee down, 'but tell me about it.'