The Consummata

“That,” I muttered, “is what you get when you pay a drunk in advance.”

Muddy blinked at me, freezing between bites of pie. “What, Morgan?”

“If the old porter polished off one of those quarts, that explains why he didn’t set the timer right.”

“Yeah, or maybe you just got lucky, is all.”

He finished the pie, swirled the coffee around in the cup, polished it off, and smacked his lips.

“So,” Muddy said, “the kid and me start nosing around at what’s left of the Amherst Hotel to see who the old man’s contact was. We went round and round until finally we get one of those cleaning maids to talk. Seems a few hours before the explosion, she remembers that the old boy asked her to cover for him for a while.”

“Did he tell her why?”

“Indeed he did—turns out grandpa had an errand to run. She agreed to help him out, and said he was gone for a couple of hours. When Pops come back, he was acting funny, the maid says, nervous-like, and had something with him that she figured was just another bottle in a brown bag. She nips from her own jug from time to time, so never thought anything much of it.”

“Tell me there’s more.”

“Oh, there’s more. After that, it took a whole lot of legwork, but the bellhop and me, we found a place where the old man went for some chili and beer. Seems he was eating when a guy come in, sits next to him and strikes up a confidential sort of conversation. The counterman didn’t hear what they were talking about, because the jukebox was blasting away, but when they left, the guy paid for the old boy’s eats.”

“Get a description?”

“Absolutely,” Muddy said, nodding. “The counterman came through. The dining companion was about thirty-five, pretty sharp looking and big for a Cuban type, tall, dark, and nearly handsome. Nearly ’cause of a squashed boxer’s nose and a scar kinda like a lightning bolt on his cheek. Not sure which cheek. Anyway, counter guy never saw the big Cuban before, and said he hoped he never did again, ’cause this character looked like the type you didn’t mess with.... Honey! Honey, do this again, would you?”

Muddy was holding his empty plate out to a passing waitress, and lifting his cup, as well. She stopped, took the plate, and filled the coffee with the pot she was hauling.

When she was gone, Muddy said, “Now here’s the kicker. When the big Cuban comes in, he’s carrying a package. Only when the two of ’em left? The old man had it.”

I nodded thoughtfully.

“Got him pegged?” Muddy asked me.

I nodded. The description fit Jaimie Halaquez, but I didn’t tell Muddy that.

“So don’t tell me,” Muddy said, shrugging. “Send me out for information, but keep the damn context to yourself. That’s a good way to get nowhere fast.”

I ignored him.

He had a slug of the coffee—it must have been hot because he said, “Ow,” before asking me, “Maybe you’d like to know something else?”

“Maybe.”

“You got that Walter Crowley guy really screwed up. They got a make on the spic who really belonged to those car-wash coveralls. Right now they’re figuring you’re long gone from the scene.”

But it hadn’t stopped Crowley from sending my photo around to the hotels.

“Where’d you hear that, Muddy?”

“Big ears, thin walls. It’s what makes my world go round.”

His new round of pie and ice cream arrived. He dug in.

“Anything on this Consummata dame?” I asked.

“Couple of things.” He kept eating.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

He swallowed a bite, which meant at least I wouldn’t have to watch him masticate while he talked. “Morg, are you aware that this is an older doll?”

“Who?”

“The Consummata!”

“How old?”

“Her activities go back to before the war, in Europe. That means, if she started out in her early twenties, you know, real precocious and such like, she’s got to be pushing fifty, anyway.”

“Last time we talked she was a rumor. A legend. Now she’s a broad of fifty? What gives, Muddy?”

He shrugged expansively. “Who the hell knows, for sure? But my guess is, she may be a political operative.”

“Attached to whom?”

“Who can say? Maybe freelance. Nazis, Allies, Commies, NATO, it’s up for grabs. But when you have some special somebody with key information, and that somebody has a kink in their make-up? That’s a sweet way to squeeze information out...and ideal blackmail material. Whether it’s for money, or military intelligence, it’s a great gambit.”

Like the Club Mandor, only more so.

I sipped iced tea, kept my tone casual. “You said a couple of things about the Consummata. What else?”

Now he leaned forward, as if suddenly there was something worth being confidential about. “There’s a big old house, built in the thirties, one of them stucco mansions, out on Palm Island—near the old Capone estate. Nobody’s lived there for years, but it gets rented out, for parties and so on. Word is somebody took it for the next couple months. Paid top dollar to do so.”

“Somebody.”

“Some woman. Some beautiful woman.”

“About fifty?”

“No age. No description. I can dig further and get more, maybe lots more. I can put private eyes on it, if you have the bread. We could stake the place out, see who shows up. Doesn’t have to be your Consummata babe. It’s a long shot. Longer than any they play at Hialeah. But it’s a shot.”

Maybe not so long a shot. A mansion on private grounds, out on Palm Island—what better place to install a whipsand- chains playroom or two? Where better to set up an elaborate if temporary dungeon? Elegant enough to suit her clients, secluded enough to let them scream for mercy, or more. What else could the Consummata ask?

“Keep digging,” I said.

“And it will be worth...?”

Discreetly, I passed him another three hundred bucks off the roll. “Enough?”

He slipped it away. “For now. If you pay for the pie.”

“I’ll pay for the pie. You just deliver. I’m in no position to go out on the snoop myself.”

“I gather that.” He glanced at me speculatively. “Anything else you want?”

“Yeah. Get what you can on anybody engaged in traffic with the Cuban mainland. Even suspected activity. Castro shut the casinos down, but I hear he doesn’t mind selling the decadent West illegal dope. You know, just to help along the decline of democracy.”

Muddy whistled, or anyway tried to. “Brother, you’re asking for a lot. That’s military ground you’re troddin’ on. And what isn’t military is Mob.”

“Information can be bought. That’s your business.”

He shrugged. “I guess you’re right—anything and anybody can be bought, can’t it?”

“Not everybody,” I said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I took a circuitous route back through the night to the beginning of the maze Gaita had led me into, reaching into my memory for the right paths and the tunnels that had been part of an abandoned Prohibition brewery.

At intervals I stopped, listened for any feet that might be following my own, wondering whether Walter Crowley would still have kept any of his men posted in the area— Muddy had said the chase had been called off, yet I knew Crowley had only recently sent my photo around to the hotels.

When I was sure I wasn’t being followed, I felt my way through the last brick-lined corridor that curved over me like a vault to the nearly invisible door at the end, swung it open on its silent hinges and took a flight of considerably less silent stairs to the top. I laid my ear against the panel, heard nothing, then slipped my fingers in the recessed handle and slid it open.

She was sitting there at the dressing table, her eyes so intent on fixing her makeup, she didn’t notice me until I was all the way in. Then she stiffened, snatched a pair of scissors from the tabletop, and spun around in the chair.

“Hello, Gaita,” I said.

She took in a soft gasp, laid the scissors slowly down, and allowed a tremor of relief to take her body.

“Morgan,” she said, “you bastard. Don’t do that again—not ever! People, they can get killed that way.”

“People can get killed a lot of ways.”

That melted her glare, which became a self-conscious smile as she realized the negligee had partially opened, and the suddenly shy little courtesan, with a deft motion of her fingers, folded the lapels one under the other, covering the fullness of her dark-tipped breasts.

“You look like you’re dressed for a client,” I said.

Her eyebrows rose indignantly and her nostrils flared with pride. “Señor Morgan—do not mistake me for the others who work here. Gaita chooses her own company—I am the only one at the Mandor Club with this privilege.”

“Any guy you choose would be a lucky devil.”

She shook her head and dark curls bounced off her shoulders. “These days I choose to be alone.”

“Expensive choice in your trade.”

She ignored that, cocked her head and peered at me. “You surprise me, Morgan.”

I sat on the edge of a bed. Soft, springy, with a tropical floral spread.

“There aren’t many places left for me to go in this town,” I said. “The hotels aren’t safe. They either have a photo of me, or my room blows up before I get there.”

Gaita let seconds drag past before she replied, never taking her eyes from my face. “That’s why I have been waiting, Morgan. I knew you would come back.”

“I thought you said I surprised you.”

“I didn’t hear you enter. But I knew you would come. You have questions?”

I glanced at the door, then back to her.

“It is locked,” she said. “Even Bunny does not have a key. We have privacy.”

That meant a guy could slap her around till she talked, or toss her lovely behind on the lush carpet and ravish her, and with a hand over her mouth, who would know?

Instead I just there sat on the edge of the bed, realizing for the first time how damn tired I was. Somehow a few days had slipped by and there had just been odd fragments of sleep grabbed in even odder places.

With no menace at all, I asked, “Why’d you pick the Amherst, Gaita?”

“Because it was a hotel I could afford. It was not a special place, only out of the way, where I thought you would be safe.”

“Nobody suggested it to you?”

“No, Señor Morgan. It was my idea only.”

“Your friend Tami—you trust her?”

“Completely.”

I slipped out of my sport jacket and tossed it on a chair. The .45 in the shoulder sling was showing now. “How’d you make the arrangements?”

“By phone from here.”

“I don’t see a phone in this room.”

“I used Miss Bunny’s private line.”

And Bunny had assured me her phone wasn’t tapped.

“Could anyone have overheard you?”

“I do not think so. The door, it was closed. I spoke softly. With my hand cupped, like this? No, I’m sure there was no one listening.”

“Could Tami have passed the information on?”

Gaita gave a slow negative shake of her head, her hair swirling softly about her neck. “Already, I have asked her. Nada did she remember mentioning to anyone, not even accidentally. And she knew of the importance of your escape, if not the reasons.”

“Uh-huh.”

Her chin raised. There was no fear in her voice but I could make out a slight movement in her dark eyes. “Morgan, do you suspect me? Do you think that I....”

“No,” I said.

“You trust me? You believe me?”

“As far as it goes. I just don’t think it would’ve gone down that way.”

“What way, señor?”

“That simple. If I escaped from the trap at the Amherst—and that’s what I’m known for, doll, escaping—they’d know you’d be the first person I asked. They’d probably expect me to torture the truth out of you.”

“Then they have not paid attention to the legend.”

“What legend?”

“Your legend, Morgan. The legend of the Raider—a man of light who lives in the darkness.”

I gave that the snort it deserved. “Maybe Disney will make a TV show out of it.”

She smiled then, a lovely, full-lipped smile that was less in response to my little gag than to my belief in her honesty. It was a lovely thank you in an elegant manner, and the tension went out of her like the receding of a wave.

Yet her eyes still held that intense look, probing for answers. “I did not expect it would be like this, Morgan.”

“Like how?”

“Filled with such complication. At first, the mission was only for you to find for us Jaimie Halaquez, and recover our missing funds. Now Bunny has told me of what else has happened— the dead assassin at her apartment building. Even now, she waits for you to call her, sitting there in the office, drinking champagne.”

“What’s she celebrating?”

“Nothing, señor. Quite the reverse. She only does this when she is very much upset.”

“Get her up here.”

“At once.” She stood up, pulled the belt of the negligee tight and went to the door. “Keep it locked behind me, Morgan. I have the key. I’ll let myself back in.”

“Don’t worry about me, kid.”

“Con su permiso, I will worry about us all.”

Then she was gone like a lovely wraith and I lay back on the oversize bed, and folded my hands behind my head, staring at myself in the mirror on the ceiling. If that thing had been a television screen, it would have some wild reruns to play.

Right now I looked like a rerun of myself—on a distant channel that was coming in fuzzy as hell. I looked like ten miles of bad road.

Twenty.

My sport coat and sport shirt and slacks were of high quality, but I’d been in them so long, they were a wrinkled mess and needed a wash. Me, too. Plus a shave.

I closed my eyes for just a moment, and never even heard them come back. When Bunny shook me, I woke up swearing at myself, because nodding off like that could get me killed.

“Morgan,” Bunny said, almost a snarl, “will you please be quiet!”

“Sorry, baby.” I didn’t realize the .45 was in my hand until I saw them both gaping at it, then I stuck it back in its berth under my left arm.

Bunny shoved me back onto the bed. “Take it easy, cowboy.” She gave me an appraising look and let out a disgusted sigh. “You look like hell.”

“I feel like hell.” I wiped my hand across my face and the bristles damn near hurt my tender little palm. I looked at the hostess of the Mandor Club. “You don’t exactly look your best either, kiddo.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said. “Like they say, with friends like you who needs enemies.”

This little adventure was taking its toll on her. Worry lines creased her face, showing through the makeup, and her hair was straggling loose from its formerly artful styling. With those purple streaks, she had a Bride of Frankenstein look as she clutched a handful of note papers, fidgeting with the clips that bound them.

I sat up with a couple of plump pillows propped behind me. “What have you got there, Bunny?”

“First things first.” She sat on the edge of the bed. Lithe legs crossed, Gaita was seated at the makeup mirror, but had her back to it, facing us.

“I did what you told me, Morg,” Bunny said. “I made inquiries about that murdered client of mine, Dick Best. There was no next of kin and nobody to claim the body. The cops thought it was goddamn big-hearted of me to contribute toward a decent burial, and it didn’t seem funny to them at all, when I asked how he was killed.”

“How was he killed?”

“The usual unidentified blunt instrument that broke his neck. Or it could have a blow from a hand, if the killer was skilled enough.”

“A karate chop, you mean?”

She nodded. “They said it was a common mugging technique.”

I smirked in disgust. “It really isn’t. But that helps the Miami fuzz close the file and not have to look into the matter.”

She was nodding again. “Which they didn’t, and aren’t. They wrote it off as homicide during a burglary gone wrong. They figured Best surprised the robber and got himself killed in the struggle.”

“How did the thief get in and out?”

Bunny shrugged. “Either picked the lock or had a skeleton key. There was a fire escape in the hall. Morg, it really is pretty standard stuff.”

“Is it? I’d say we’re seeing a pattern.”

“How so?” Her forehead knitted.

“Somebody likes those single-handed blows. That’s how the old porter got it at the Amherst hotel, after he screwed up a certain simple assignment an old amigo of yours hired him to do.”

Gaita whispered, “Jaimie Halaquez....”

“At least he’s consistent,” I said. “Give him that much.”

Bunny, still on the edge of the bed near me, said, “But the Cuban boys that were tracking him—in Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi...they didn’t die that way.”

Gaita said, “Halaquez used a blade. They die slow and painful, those boys, with their insides in their hands.”

“Two different kinds of kills,” I said, clinically. “Those brave kids were made to suffer—to make them examples, and to send a message back to Little Havana. And they may not have been killed by Halaquez at all.”

“What?” Gaita snapped.

It was Gaita’s question, but I aimed the answer at Bunny. “They may have been killed for him by the Cuban assassin who died in your apartment house lobby. Fitting, he died by the blade.”

“You’re a cold-blooded bastard,” Bunny said with a shiver.

“A breathing one,” I said, then went on: “The old man and this Richard Best required efficient kills, not so messy, not so noisy.”

The Mandor’s madam had a glazed, dazed expression. “So he’s still around, our Jaimie....”

“Well,” I said, “more like he’s back. Bunny, you said first things first. First, was finding out from the cops how Dick Best bought it. What’s second?”

Now she smiled; now her eyes took on a twinkle. “Finding out who Dick Best really was.”

I leaned forward. “Who, Bunny?”

“A businessman I was introduced to years ago...but not as Richard Best—different last name...Parvain.”

Meant nothing to me.

She continued: “Now this goes back a good twenty years, Morg. I thought Dick Best looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him—and he looked more than twenty years older. Anyway, after seeing the poor S.O.B. stretched out on the morgue tray, well, I came back here and sat down for a good think. Best and I had talked lots of times, in the last year or so—had anything of it meant anything, I wondered?”

“Had it?”

“Maybe. It came back to me that one day, a couple years ago—Best and I were sitting in the bar downstairs, and he gets to telling me about a business of his called Possibilities, Inc. And how it was too bad my husband wasn’t around to get in on the ground floor with him again.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again, he said. Morg, at the time, I wondered what he meant by that. But I didn’t ask, because you don’t pry with clients, or maybe I just got distracted...but at any rate...I never asked him about it.”

“Understandable,” I granted.

“Then seeing him dead like that, suddenly something jarred loose. I remembered something. I remembered that when my husband kicked off, I went through some papers he left, and there was a notation about this Possibilities, Inc.”

She gestured with the yellowed packet that she had been holding onto like the railing at a sharp drop-off.

“So I dug them up again,” she said, “from my old box of souvenirs from back when we were rich and infamous.”

Bunny tossed the moldy sheaf my way, and I picked it up, wondering what answers it might hold.

“They may not make much sense to you,” Bunny said. “That old fox I was married to wasn’t much for making notes that the income tax people might follow. But you’ll see that he invested ten thousand in a gimmick Parvain invented that was supposed to detect uranium ore from an airplane, instead of working at ground level.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, back in those days of all the big strikes in Canada. Up north, everybody and his brother was inventing these gizmos that claimed to sniff out the stuff.”

“What are we talking about here,” I asked, “glorified Geiger counters?”

She nodded and tendrils blonde and purple bounced. “Exactly right—least as far as I understand it. Nothing ever came of Parvain’s deal, or I would have heard about it. My dear departed reprobate husband liked to brag about his scores, but if something didn’t pan out, it became a dead issue.”

I leafed through the pages, which dated to the mid-1950s, and found the phrase “Possibilities, Inc.” twice, among a couple of rows of abstract figuring, and a half-paragraph in an almost illegible scrawl. A heavy check mark went through the whole page, like a memorandum to forget it. “Bunny, you said Best mentioned that it was too bad your husband wasn’t in with him again. Maybe those Possibilities panned out after all.”

She shrugged grandly. “If they did, why didn’t Best have a pot to piss in? Unless him living like an old fart on a fixed income was just a front.”

“Maybe he was hanging around your club because he eventually planned to hit you up for a touch—to refinance a business your husband had been part of.”

Bunny shook her head thoughtfully. “No, the conversation in question goes back a good couple of years, and Best never mentioned the subject again.”

Something wasn’t adding up.

I asked, “Where the hell did Best get the kind of money it takes to hang out at the Mandor Club? And how did a nebbish like that even gain entry?”

That stopped her. “Be damned if I know. Somebody on our approved list must have brought him in as an invited guest.”

“Is that something you can track?”

“Probably not. Why?”

“Because he was murdered. And anything to do with nuclear physics can be important enough to get somebody killed. It’s the only damn lead we have.”

Bunny gave me a funny look then, then shook her head.

I said, “What is it?”

“Oh, just something Best said to me, not too long ago. Couldn’t be anything important.”

“Damn it, who the hell knows what might be important, in this damn mess? Spill.”

“Well,” she said, and paused, thinking back, “I had a birthday party a few weeks ago. Best wasn’t here for it, but he called to wish me happy returns. He sounded half in the bag, and I was a little potted myself, so...”

“So?”

“So he said he was sorry he didn’t have a present for me, but he’d stop by with something when he got a chance. And then what he said after that was weird....”

“Weird how?”

“Weird and then some—Morg, he said that if anything happened to keep him from visiting the Mandor Club again, I should expect to receive a late birthday present.”

I frowned. “Has anything shown up? In the mail, or from a shipping firm?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Well, keep a goddamn sharp eye out. Do you think Best thought his life was in danger?”

Her shrug was almost comically exaggerated. “I don’t know. Like I said, he sounded drunk. And I was drunk. I’m really not sure I should be trusting my memory on this subject....”

“Perhaps,” Gaita said from her seat on the sidelines, where she’d been quietly taking it all in, “Tango might know something of this.”

“Tango, kitten? Who’s that?”

But it was Bunny who answered. “Just one of the girls, Morg. Real name’s Theresa Prosser. Gaita’s right—this Best character, or Parvain or whoever he was, was pretty smitten with Tango. Even took her out to supper a few times.”

“Is she here now?”

“No! Look, Morgan, the last thing we need to do is get anybody else involved in this mess...”

“Let me worry about that. Tell me about Tango. How special was she to Best?”

Bunny was rolling her eyes. “Christ, Morg, don’t make more out of it than what I’ve already told you! Best just seemed to prefer Tango’s company, if she was available.”

“Meaning, Best might have told her something that he didn’t tell you or any of the other girls.”

Bunny seemed openly annoyed now. “This is a business like any other—employees get days off, and this is hers. She’s probably at the Vincalla Motel. Goes there and sits around the pool all day, when she’s not working. At night she reads or watches TV. Quiet girl.”

“Is there a boyfriend in the picture?”

Now Bunny seemed strangely amused. “Gaita, why don’t you break it to him?”

Gaita made a resigned gesture with her shoulders. “Tango, she is a lovely woman. One of the loveliest and most in demand here at the Mandor. But she does not like the men.”

“Funny game to go into, then. So, she’s a lesbian?”

“No. She is...how you say...frigid.”

Bunny said, “Tango says the act of sex is no more exciting, or meaningful, to her than brushing her teeth or using the john.”

I frowned. “What, so she puts on an act for her clients?”

“No. She takes great pleasure in having them work hard to please her while she remains bored. It’s her way of feeding her hatred for men.”

“Why is she popular, then?”

Gaita took that one: “Because she is very beautiful, señor.”

Yeah, and what man doesn’t think he’s just the right guy to melt an ice queen?

I asked, “Yet she went out on...what, dates with this Best character?”

“Him she did not mind,” Gaita said. “He was more the father to her. My guess is, they never did the act of sex together.”

Bunny cut in: “To what degree she can put up with men, Tango prefers older ones, like Best. Younger men, closer to her own age, she has a supreme contempt, even hatred, for.”

“Why in hell?”

Again, it was Gaita who responded: “It is because of her older brother, Señor Morgan. He is dead now. Because he raped her. And she killed him.”

“Okay, I’m starting to get the picture.”

“This is why she left Cuba, señor. To flee the police for this crime, but it was really self-defense.”

I nodded. “How old is she now?”

“She is twenty.”

“Brother,” I whispered under my breath. “How long has she been at the Mandor?”

Bunny took that one: “Four years,” she said, too casually.

“That’s rape, too, you know,” I told the madam pointedly. “Statutory rape.”

“She had papers saying she was twenty-one when she came here,” Bunny said. “I take my girls at their word.”

“Even when you know they’re lying.”

“Excuse me if I don’t take morality lessons from Morgan the Raider.”

I raised a hand to quell any argument.

Then I crawled off the other side of the bed, got to my feet and tried to shake the tiredness out of my body.

“Okay,” I told them, “I’m going to speak to Tango, then I’m coming back here. In the meantime, Bunny, you rack that memory of yours for anybody else who might have been involved with Parvain and your hubby in that Possibilities company. Come up with somebody we can track down.”

Her eyes flared. “Morgan, damn it, that was years ago.”

“Phone operators are the best tracers of missing persons in the world. Let your fingers do the walking—just don’t bust a nail.”

Bunny came over and touched my arm. Suddenly the good-looking old broad had what seemed to be a genuine look of concern. “Going to that motel—aren’t you taking a big chance?”

“Who isn’t?”

“Morgan...”

The tone of Bunny’s voice made me meet her eyes. “What, kiddo?”

She whispered, though surely Gaita could hear. “Tell me ...please...what did you do with that...that person who was killed at my building?”

“I left him in Domino Park behind some bushes.”

She had the expression of a startled deer. “There was nothing about it in the papers.”

“Yeah, I know. Kind of curious, isn’t it?”

Her mouth was a tight line now. “Morgan...sometimes you frighten me.”

“Just sometimes?”

Then I got a closer glimpse of myself in the dressing table mirror.

“No wonder,” I said. “You think maybe I could scare up a shower and a shave around here someplace?”

Bunny didn’t answer me—maybe this simple indignity was the last straw.

But Gaita came over, took my arm and gave me one of her funny, sexy grins. “Why, of course, señor—we attend to all of a man’s needs here at the Mandor Club.”

She was good as her word.

I was halfway through the shower, the spray like hot little friendly needles that were bringing me to life even as the steam soothed me and uncoiled muscles that were tight with stress and too little sleep. I was washing my hair with a bath bar, eyes tight shut as soapy water trailed down my face, when I heard the shower stall open.

Gaita slipped inside and she was naked, with her hair pony-tailed back, and her makeup already washed off, a fresh, youthful girl but no kid, not with breasts so full and high, their dark nipples taut, not with that supple belly where a little whisper of dark hair worked its way from her navel down to gradually expand into the lush dark tangle of the delta between her legs, the rest of her a coppery smoothness that the water seemed to love, to caress, to turn her into a gleaming goddess, pearled with moisture, her parted lips dripping water down like nectar flowing from a goblet.

She began to soap my front, lathering up my chest hair, then lathered lower and had she spent any more time down there, we’d have been finished before we started; but then her arms slipped behind me as she soaped my back while the front of her was pressed to me, the breasts splayed against me.

“Gaita...no...I’m....”

She covered my mouth with hers, lips with a full plumpness that seemed to consume mine, and over the hammering of the shower and the splash at our feet and the gurgle of the drain, she drew away from me and said, “You are not married. Did you not tell me so yourself? You have not consummated the act. You do not betray her. You do not.”

This time I kissed her.

We moved away from the spray of the showerhead, to the rear of the stall where she pushed me against the wall like a suspect, but she did not interrogate me, she went down on her knees, she went down on me, and for a moment I thought of Kim, but just a moment, because then the Cuban kitten was rising and turning and leaning against the wall with her hands flat against the tile, glancing back at me with sultry insistent invitation, offering the rounded cheeks of the most perfect posterior that fool Castro ever banished from his country.

And not doing something about it would have been goddamn insulting, so I entered her and she said, “Si!” with every stroke, grinding back at me in a rhythmic sexual samba that required no music but our heavy breathing and the percussive insistence of the shower.

We wound up on the floor of the bathroom on a fluffy little rug, first with her riding me, her eyes shut dreamily, her mouth beaming with bliss, rocking, grinding, rocking, then with me on top, stabbing her sweetly, and when she came, she cried out in a language neither Spanish nor American, but I understood it perfectly.

Finally I was sitting, out of breath, on the lid of the can, feeling like I was the one who’d been ravished. She had already disposed of the rubber she’d so stealthily slipped onto me, practiced doxy that she was.

Now she stood and toweled herself off, shamelessly at ease with her body, and then in the mirror carefully applied her lipstick, put on a touch of eye makeup, and undid the ponytail and shook all that hair like the lioness mane it was, looking at herself, pleased with what she saw.

“I told you,” she said into the mirror but speaking to me, “that I do the choosing.”

She turned to her exhausted conspirator and said, “You are not married. You will not be married until the marriage it is consummated. This is no sin, señor. You remain pure.”

That was a hell of a way to look at it.

On the other hand, she was the first woman I’d been with since I married Kim.

And maybe it didn’t hurt to stay in practice.

CHAPTER NINE

The taxi let me out on the corner and I walked the rest of the way to the Vincalla Motel. Traffic had dwindled and— while the lights of Miami Beach still lit the sky across the bay—this side was quiet and sleepy, the only activity around being restaurants and nightclubs catering to the singles scene.

I looked like just another Miami swinger, Bunny having come up with a black sport jacket, charcoal sport shirt and black slacks for me. I had requested black sneakers, wanting to keep the sound of my footsteps minimal, and the madam of the house had come through for me on that score as well.

Between Bunny and Gaita, I could hardly have any complaints about the service at the Mandor Club.

I skirted the motel office out front, crossed the lawn that circled the pool, and headed toward the room I’d been told was Tango’s, down on the right.

At the opposite end, a party was going on, split between two rooms, the blare of a hi-fi playing rock ’n’ roll and raucous drunken laughter covering the sound of my feet on the concrete walk. The motel’s parking spaces, outside the bottom tier of rooms, were filled, license plates about evenly divided between local and out-of-state. With the exception of three rooms up top and four below, all windows were darkened, Tango’s among them.

For a second I stopped, checked behind me, and slow-scanned the area toward the street to see if anyone was silhouetted against the street-lamp and traffic glow. Five feet away was Tango’s room, and I could see the windows curtained with no light bleeding through at all.

If Bunny was right, the man-hating hooker was probably just asleep—the motel was where she went to relax and cool it. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with the play.

You can’t call it instinct, because it’s learned; but it’s nothing mental, strictly physical, as the back of your neck prickles and your belly tightens and your eyes narrow and your mind becomes a resonating space where caution calls to you in vague yet not uncertain terms.

So I just stood there, looking around again and sorting out the details until my inner warning system found the flaw for me.

Tango didn’t have a car. She always traveled by cab, Bunny had said.

Yet all the car slots were filled.

Maybe some of the partygoers down at the other end weren’t guests at the Vincalla, and the overflow had filled up some extra slots.

But down here on this very quiet end of things, a blue Mustang convertible was parked in the stall right outside Tango’s room, and its hood was still very warm. Hot.

I snaked the .45 out, cocked the hammer back and took a run at the door, smashing it open with a kick, then rolling inside just as the phut of a silenced gun poked two fingers of light directly over my head. I scrambled to my knees, brought the .45 up, and a foot kicked the gun out of my hand.

But I got that hand on my would-be assailant’s other leg, yanked hard, and a cursing, flailing heavyweight came down on top of me, the rod in his fist smashing against my back and shoulders trying to find my skull.

I gave him just enough leeway to think he had me nailed, then drove my head up against the point of his chin and, when he reeled back, grabbed him between the legs and squeezed so hard the scream that started in his throat never got anywhere, choking off into an anguished sob as he jackknifed forward with incredible pain.

That put me over onto my back, and I was under him, with no idea where my .45 had got to, and for all the pain he was in, he did still have that silenced rod in his mitt, he’d managed to hold onto it, so I glommed onto his gun hand before he could get his pain in check, and twisted my grip on his wrist, thumb slipping under the butt of the gun into the fleshy palm, digging my thumbnail in, hoping to make his grasp go away, but instead in the struggle I again heard that little phut and a bullet angled up and into him, his sob whistling off into a throaty rattle that had bubbles in it.

I pushed him off me, still wondering where the .45 had got to, and moved to where the door stood open, and peeked out to see if anybody had heard the noise of the struggle. But there was nothing out there, just the laughter and rock music of that party down the way.

Luck was still with me, it seemed.

Only it wasn’t—I never figured on a second man. Never figured the guy I’d tangled with, who was still giving off his death rattle on the floor, had a friend with him, a friend who would quietly wait in the darkness of the bathroom to see how the fight between his partner and the intruder turned out.

Those well-honed instincts had let down, and the only sign luck was still with me was when the karate chop missed the back of my neck, because I was just starting to turn, the blow hitting between my shoulder blade and spine, sending pain through me like a hot spear and maybe cracking or even breaking a rib, but not killing me, not hardly.

And when he shoved me into that open door, rattling my teeth and banging my head, damn near putting my lights out, he didn’t take time to try another karate chop—maybe he knew enough about me to want to avoid any direct confrontation— and just rushed past me.

In the second I needed to recover, I saw that almost handsome face fly by me, with its squashed nose and lightning bolt scar.

Jaimie Halaquez.

My .45 was M.I.A., but Halaquez had a gun in his hand, another silenced automatic that went phut phut, sending two chunks of doorframe exploding into splinters and flying into my face.

Then he was in the Mustang, squealing out, and flashing a white grin of adios at me—I wasn’t dead, but he’d beaten me. He had beaten me.

Me, with no gun. I didn’t even have a goddamn car, having returned Bunny’s station wagon.

Shit!

The only saving grace was nobody seemed to have heard or seen a thing. Only silenced shots had been fired, and the hand-to-hand had been brief if brutal.

But why hadn’t Halaquez waded in to help his partner?

Hadn’t wanted to risk exposing himself, I guessed. He’d figured his crony would take me out, no trouble, and if not, Jaimie boy would deal with me.

Heaving a disgusted sigh evenly divided between the unkindness of fate and my own stupidity, I went back into the still dark room, shoved the door shut, propped a chair against it, and flipped on the light.

Tango was sprawled on the bed.

What had originally been a pretty face was now a battered mass of welts and bruises; a strip of two-inch wide adhesive covered her mouth, another strip binding her hands behind her. The remnants of her pajama tops were tossed on the floor, and she was naked to her waist, pert perfectly-formed breasts exposed, but there was nothing remotely sexy or erotic about it.

Not unless you were a sick son of a bitch.

I felt my face tighten as I took in the ugly red pits that had been burned into the smooth tanned flesh of her stomach and breasts, the mark of lit cigarettes in the hands of her interrogators. I wished I could have taken longer with the bastard on the floor, given him a slower, more painful sendoff to hell.

And when I finally nailed Halaquez, I would remember this beautiful body made hideous.

But at least she wasn’t dead—not yet, anyway.

She was unconscious, probably a blessing at the moment, her pulse light and unsteady. When I yanked the tape from her mouth, she never even stirred. I cut her wrists free and released her arms, retrieved my .45 from under a chair, then went over for a better look at the dead man.

He wasn’t as big as Halaquez, but larger than the average Latin—Jaimie did not seem lacking in brutal henchmen from his native land. As the gurgling I’d heard had indicated, the bullet had caught the prick in the throat and exited at the back of his neck. The gun was still in his hand.

I went through his pockets, found nothing except his car keys, some loose cash, and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. His clothes were all well worn with labels common to stores in every big city, and the touch of the professional was there in every detail. Nothing but his basic appearance identified him as a Cuban, with or without a green card.

The drawers of the motel-room dresser were open, and had been tossed, but not much was there—no sexy working clothes, just casual stuff and underthings. She’d arrived, apparently, with a single suitcase, and what was left of it was shredded over by the wall, a blade having gutted its lining. Next to the dead suitcase was the woman’s emptied handbag, by a scattering of the usual female junk, the bag apparently tossed there in disgust.

Whatever Halaquez had been looking for, he hadn’t found it in this room. His next step had been to try to squeeze it out of the girl the hard way.

But now a peculiar little factor had popped up.

Tango wouldn’t have been the type to keep quiet under that kind of treatment. If she had anything to say, she would likely have talked, not been subjected to beating and burning.

That left just one answer. Whatever Halaquez wanted from her, she either didn’t have...

...or didn’t know she had.

Yet somebody thought she had it, or that she maybe knew something.

I picked up the bedside phone with my handkerchief, dialed the police, told them where to find the trouble, and to send an ambulance.

“I’m a guest here at the Vincalla Motel,” I told the dispatcher.

“Sir, what is your name?”

“John Smith. I’m sure you’ll find it on the register.”

I hung up.

There was nothing more that John Smith, Good Samaritan, could do for Tango now. I rubbed my handkerchief on anything else I might have touched, gave the corpse one last dirty look, then shut the light off, eased out of the room and got back out to the street.

From the south I could hear the wail of sirens over the rock ’n’ rolling partyers.

We were in Bunny’s office now. She looked damn fetching for an older broad in a gold lamé halter top and matching loose pants. She was behind her desk where a .38 was serving as a paperweight on those ancient papers of her husband’s that she’d shared with me earlier.

But her face was again showing her years, as the dismay over what had happened to Tango mingled with fear generated by the events of recent days.

She said, “But why torture her, Morgan? What did they want? What did she know?”

I was seated across from her. “No idea. She was out when I got there, and still out when I split. What did the hospital say?”

Bunny sighed. “Severe concussion and suspected skull fracture. She hasn’t regained consciousness.” The madam covered her face with her hands, her shoulders limp. When she looked up her eyes were misty and tired. “She’s on the critical list.”

“Think the cops can connect her to you?”

“Maybe not right away, but they will. She’s always used the address of her family, on the north end, and all that’s left there is her father, and they won’t get anything from that drunken bum. She paid his bills and went up there a couple times a month, but all he knows is that she worked someplace in Miami. She told him she was a waitress.”

“A waitress who could pay all his bills?”

“Reprobate parents getting their bills paid by their kids, Morg, don’t ask a lot of questions.”

“Good point. Otherwise she stayed here at the Mandor?”

Her shrug was grandiose. “Where else? She has her own room, like the others. My girls are welcome to live here fulltime, if they like. Most, like Tango, have an apartment or motel room somewhere, to get away on their days off, at least.”

“Let’s see her room.”

Bunny sat and watched me, her mouth tight. “Morgan...I think it’s time to let this thing end.”

“Look...”

Her expression beseeched me. “Look at all you’ve brought on, since you got here! Two men dead. And we have a girl who may die because of it.”

“Not my doing, Bunny. And I didn’t bring anything on. It was already here.”

“You can’t deny you’ve stirred things up.”

So I dropped the bomb on her.

“Bunny—one of the two men I tangled with in her motel room? Not the one who bought the farm, but...the other one?”

“Yes?”

“He was Jaimie Halaquez.”

Her expression fell and all the blood drained from her face.

Silently, I rose, slipped off the sport jacket, draped it over the back of my chair, then I slipped off the sport shirt and turned my back to her.

Showed her the nasty welt there, a welt about the size and shape of the side of a human hand, swung as a weapon.

With my back still to her, I said, “If I hadn’t moved a fraction of a second before he struck the blow, that would have hit my neck. And I’d be on a slab next to your old pal Dickie Best.”

She said nothing. She sat staring at the sheaf of papers and the revolver playing paperweight on top of them.

In the meantime, I got back into my shirt and jacket. “I figure you have a doc on call, right?”

She frowned in confusion, then nodded.

“Well, could you call him, and get him over here to check me out, in between passing out penicillin tablets? I think maybe Halaquez busted a rib for me. I could use taping up, and some decent damn drugs.”

She swallowed, nodded, and reached for her phone.

When she hung up, she said, “Half an hour.”

“Cool. While we’re waiting, let’s go see Tango’s room.”

Tango lived in relative simplicity. Her clothes were few, if expensive, the opposite of the casual things in the dresser at the motel—these were working clothes, or in some cases, evening wear. After all, she’d been known to date Richard Best.

“She didn’t meet johns in this room,” I said.

Bunny said, “No. Each of the girls has her own living quarters, modest but her own. You’ve been in Gaita’s. There are suites designed for entertaining guests—the girls share those. Those spaces are assigned when the client and a hostess are matched up.”

That explained the simplicity of a room bare of decorations except for two bowls of artificial flowers and a few abstract paintings of the starving artist variety. The only expensive item was a 21-inch color television set nestled in one corner with a battered comfy armchair before it. Tango’s small desk held a few cancelled bills, a dictionary, and a dozen historical romances with bodice-bursting damsels and swashbuckling bare-chested heroes on the front—everybody had their fantasies, even a woman who represented other people’s fantasies.

Her irritation with me ever more obvious, Bunny said, “Well? Does it send you any messages?”

I ignored her and went to the closet again. Tango’s shoes were neatly aligned in a rack with a matching handbag above each. Out of curiosity, I took the handbags down one by one and looked in them. Each one had some odd toiletry items along with a few coins. One had a letter from an old friend sent to her home address, four months ago, full of chatter about the other girl’s marriage and children in a more normal life than Tango had managed so far. I noted the street number of Tango’s house, and put the letter back.

But the blue bag held the kicker.

In the side pocket was a worn-edged picture that I held out for Bunny to see.

Softly, she said, “My God...it’s Jaimie Halaquez.”

“I thought Tango didn’t take to men. Especially younger men.”

Bunny frowned and handed the picture back. “That photo doesn’t mean she flipped over him or anything.”

“Hell, Bunny, it’s the only photo she has.”

“So?”

“You ever notice them together? Was Halaquez a client of hers?”

“Morgan, in this business, it’s a business to be together. You know already that he was a client here. Sure, he knew her, but he liked variety too much to single any girl out. Understand, this Halaquez was a real self-styled stud.”

“And an S & M freak. Don’t leave that out.”

“Yes, and not all of the girls were willing to go down that road. So that does narrow it for you. Within reason, if the money was right? Tango was willing.”

“In other words, two to tango.”

“Very funny.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking out loud, “she had the same kind of yen and you didn’t know about it. Some women who were abused as young girls develop their own weird kinks.”

The madam didn’t argue that point—she knew all too well how many weird sexual byways there were for human beings to go down.

“Maybe,” Bunny said, “Tango had a thing for Halaquez, at least enough to hang onto his picture.”

“Do you know if she ever saw Halaquez outside of the club?”

“I don’t,” she admitted.

“But we do know she sometimes dated her clients outside the Mandor’s doors. Dick Best a case in point.”

Bunny nodded, but then contradicted it with a head shake. “If Tango did date Halaquez, she never mentioned it. Nobody asks too many questions around here. And Dick Best is the only one I know of that she dated away from the club.”

I stuck the photo in my pocket and put the handbag back on the shelf. “Think I can beat Gaita out of her room tonight? She can stay here in Tango’s room instead.”

“I’m not crazy about you staying around, Morgan. You’re trouble.”

“You’re telling me? That’s why I want that handy back exit out of her room. Look, I can’t risk a hotel and the cops might spot me on a park bench.”

She sighed, a world-weary one, but then she gave me a little smile that said all was forgiven. Or most, anyway. “All right, Morg, I’ll arrange it.”

“Thanks.”

“Although Gaita may prefer sharing her room with you, to giving it up.”

“She and I can negotiate that. Just make sure she knows I’m coming.”

“Somehow,” Bunny said archly, “I think she’ll know when you’re coming. Morgan...what about Tango? How much heat is this liable to raise here at the Mandor?”

“And here I thought you were concerned about Tango as a friend.”

She whapped me on the arm—sort of a friendly whap, but a whap. “Bastard,” she said.

I grinned at her, shrugged. “My bet is that the cops will call it an attack by a sadist that was interrupted by someone who heard her yell. What happened is obvious enough—somebody tortured her. Whether to get information out of her, or just for the jollies, that’s in the eye of the beholder. It’ll be easy enough to understand why her rescuer would call the cops but get the hell out.”

But I was wrong. The cops didn’t call it anything at all. The next morning there would be no mention of it in the papers, nor any of the guy who had fallen on his knife in the lobby of Bunny’s apartment house.

Right now, of course, I didn’t know that. We went to Bunny’s office to wait for the doctor. We sat on her handsome leather couch, plumped up with big plush pillows, over which loomed that paisley wall hanging.

Her half-lidded eyes regarded me. “You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, don’t you?”

“Not really,” I said. “I think you’re a decent enough dame. I understand why you don’t want to risk what you’ve got going here. I know you care about your girls.”

Her expression softened. There was real warmth in those dark blue eyes.

When she kissed me, it came as a surprise. Not a bad one, either, but a surprise.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t mind that you’re married. Not at all. A lot of married men do business here.”

“Yeah, you do know I make a policy of not paying?”

“I didn’t say anything about charging you, Morg. Anyway, I kind of owe you one...I did try to have you killed, once or twice.”

I kissed her and it was starting to get somewhere when a knock came at her door, and a muffled voice said, “It’s Doc Wilson, Bunny! You in there?”

I took my tongue out of her mouth and my hand off her right breast and said, “Maybe I should get my busted rib taped up before we take this any farther....”

A thundering rain had driven everybody indoors and was beginning to turn the streets into sluiceways. The cabbie who had picked me up reluctantly let me out a block from where I asked to be dropped, clearly wondering what kind of nut would want to wade through a night like this one in a ramshackle neighborhood slated for rebuilding when the city got tired of looking at it.

Tango may have possessed an exotic queenly beauty, perfect for her to play Cleopatra in the movies, but she sure hadn’t been raised in pretentious surroundings. The house she grew up in was a relic of those days when the boom hit Miami, then collapsed to leave the memory of inflated money behind by way of unpainted siding and sagging verandas. The wind had blown two aged wicker rockers onto their backs on the porch, and kept the torn screen door slamming on its hinges, like the face of the house kept getting slapped. The noise didn’t seem bother anybody, though.

I stepped across the litter of soggy newspaper and leaves plastered to the porch floor, rapped on the door, and waited. I did it again without getting an answer, said the hell with it, and tried the knob. The door swung in limply, half-loose from the frame, and—when I closed it again—sighed with creaking release.

The smell was like a foul fog in the air. Rotted garbage was the base, somewhere a dirty toilet added its bouquet while whiskey and beer fumes gave it that certain tang. The only occupant downstairs was an unshaven, dead-to-the-world guy in his middle fifties who was sprawled out on the couch, like Lizzie Borden’s papa waiting to get the axe.

The sleeper reeked of booze, two empty bottles on the floor beside him, his half-naked belly poking through a split shirt and his pants held together by an old army belt with the zipper wide open. A half-dozen pension check stubs were on the table at one end of the couch—the name typed on them: George L. Prosser.

Tango’s old man.

No great surprise there. Scratch a whore, find a no-good father.

I tried shaking him awake, but it was no good. He didn’t even make sounds of protest or even of reflexive awareness. The bum would be out a pretty long time yet.

I went through the downstairs rooms, kicking my way through the mess, then upstairs to what used to be the bedroom level.

Two rooms were totally empty.

One was as much of a mess as those downstairs. The fourth had been locked, but somebody had broken it open. This one had been neat and clean until somebody had ripped it into little pieces.

So this was Tango’s room—the one she returned home to, once or twice a month.

There hadn’t been much to strip out of the single dresser or the closet. Her clothes were out-of-style teenage things from school days long ago, along with some paint-spattered (though otherwise clean) dungarees and a few sweaters. The stuffing had been pulled out of the antique mohair chair, the mattress torn to shreds, and the flimsy little desk knocked to splinters with the old letters and notepaper it held scattered all over the floor.

Two pictures had been yanked from the wall and their backs removed, one ornamental top knocked off a bedpost to make sure they were solid, and the linoleum rug ripped into hunks to see if anything had been hidden under it.

But at least it gave me an idea of what somebody was looking for. It had to be small and it had to be flat. And it had to be important enough to kill for.

They had looked for it here, whatever it was.

Then they had gone after Tango herself.

So far they hadn’t found it, and she hadn’t given it to them, probably because she had no idea what the hell her torturers were after.

I left everything as it was and went back downstairs. George Prosser was still motionless on the couch, his breath burbling between his lips. He had pissed his pants without knowing since I last saw him, a few minutes ago. Well, it was cold in the house, on this rainy night, so maybe it would keep him warm a while.

Not that hard to figure, why Tango left home.

When I reached the section where the Club Mandor operated, I found the opening to the maze that led to Gaita’s room. I had the route so well sketched out in my mind, I didn’t need a light anymore.

I carefully went up the stairs, slid the door open, stepped inside, and closed it with a flick of my hand.

The only illumination came from the partially opened bathroom door, a pale yellow glow that was enough to barely outline the shapely female figure on the bed.

I felt a twinge of annoyance because as pleasant a bedroom companion as she would make, I really didn’t want Gaita to be here tonight. I was tired, I had thinking to do, and being with me right now was inherently dangerous for her.

But what the hell, it was her room, and there was no trace of anything but affection in my voice, as I said, “You asleep, Gaita?”

“No, Morgan, I’m not asleep....”

But it wasn’t Gaita at all.

It was another lovely dark-haired woman, with a revolver leveled at my gut.

Kim Stacy.

My wife.

CHAPTER TEN

The gun in Kim’s hand lowered—maybe the little automatic was meant for anyone who came in Gaita’s secret door, and not me specifically.

Then a lush smile blossomed on that lovely oval with the violet almond-shaped eyes.

“Hello, husband.”

She’d been resting on top of that bed, waiting—for me?—and curled up with a panther-like poise, a luscious doll who made a simple short-sleeve pink blouse and short black shift skirt with no nylons into something wildly sensual. Yet the only real effort to look fetching at all came from the scarlet-red painted toenails showing in the open-toed sandals that matched the red of her full, moist lips.

“Hello, wife,” I said.

The gun tumbled from her hands onto the bed and she came off it and into my arms and our kiss was a devouring thing, the greeting of two starving creatures too long away from the table.

I held her to me with one arm around her waist and my other hand touching the dark tresses, cut shorter now, just to her chin, not her shoulders, and the sun streaks were gone. Her features were the same, perhaps some lines of worry around her eyes, for her husband, I hoped, and she was searching my face, studying it as one of her hands was splayed against my back and the other dug into my hair gripping, stroking, gripping, stroking.

I glanced meaningfully at the bed, and she drew away, still in my arms but shaking her head. “Not now, my love. Not here. Not in this place.”

I didn’t let go of her, said, “Who cares where?” and I kissed her again, and my tongue got insistent about it, and hers held its own, until the moment came when she pulled away, out of my arms now, and found her way to Gaita’s dressing table stool and sat here. Her eyes directed me to the bed, but only to sit there. Only to sit.

And perhaps that reminder of Gaita played a part in why I didn’t just throw her down on that bed—that this room and the nearby bathroom with shower stall marked the site of my sole failing in staying true to her, over these long months....

That, and the grave expression that had erased her look of love and pleasure at seeing me again.

So I sat on the edge of the bed across from where she perched at the dressing table, her back to its mirror.

“We may not have a lot of time,” she said. “I’m breaking every rule in the B-4 book just being here.”

She was with the CIA’s B-4 Intelligence, Section A.

“We have to talk, Morg. There’s so much you need to know. And you have things to tell me, too.”

I gave her half a smile. “Doll, you want to go the foreplay route, that’s fine with me.”

“Not foreplay, darling. Forewarning—you are in dangerous waters, even for you. This Halaquez inquiry...I’m breaking deep cover to warn you off of it. Let the pros handle it.”

I grinned at her. “Back together only a few minutes, and you’re already insulting me? Reminds me of when we first met. How’d you know to find me here?”

But she didn’t grin back or smile—her expression remained somber, and her forehead was creased with concern. “Never mind any of that now. Will you just listen? For these many months...almost a year, Morgan...I’ve been doing my own investigating within the agency. It’s risky and I’ve tossed protocol out the window. If what I’ve done is ever found out, I won’t just lose my pension, I may face treason charges.”

I stood, and I made a crooking finger at her. “Come over here. I won’t rape you—I promise. But I need to be close to you.”

She didn’t have to think about it. Just did trust me, however much a horny son of a bitch she knew me to be—she knew that more than anything, I loved her, and wouldn’t dishonor her.

We arranged ourselves on the bed, with pillows propped up on the headboard behind us, and with my arm around her, so that when she spoke to me, I could feel the warmth of her breath. Curled up against me like a kid. Now and then I would interrupt her to crush those cushiony lips in the gentlest, friendliest way, never pressing to where things might get away from us. She clearly didn’t want that.

“Let’s start,” she said, “with what you’ve been up to. I’ve tracked you, your every move. I could have been in touch with you any number of times—we were in the same city three times, once San Francisco, again in Boston, and then in New York.”

“Why didn’t you...?”

“I’m being watched. You must know I went to bat for you. I told my superiors I’d witnessed that old pal of yours confess to complicity in the robbery, heard with my own ears his claim to have taken possession of the entire forty-mil boodle.” Her mouth tightened bitterly. “But it was just like you warned me, in the plane, before you jumped.”

They figured that the in-name-only marriage vows Kim and I took had turned into the real thing, working undercover together. Under covers was their assumption, and though we never consummated our marriage, we had fallen in love, hadn’t we?

I said, “Your bosses figured that a wife would say or do anything for her husband. As simple as that.”

She sighed and nodded, nestled against me, one full breast mashed against my chest. She smelled great—no perfume, just a freshly scrubbed scent.

“It was all I could do,” she said, “all I could risk, to conduct an after-hours, off-the-books investigation. There are two things that I think will shock you. First, on the money-truck heist—”

“There was an inside man. A government traitor.”

The natural long lashes were tiny whips as she blinked at me. “What? How did you—”

“The route the armored car took from the Washington mint to New York was top secret. Standard operating procedure would be to have at least three such routes, and alternate in a shifting, unknowable pattern. Same goes for when the truck would leave and be scheduled for arrival. Also, the knowledge that this particular shipment would be forty million in common bills, nothing over a fifty. You don’t pull down a score like that without inside information.”

She was smiling, more admiration than love in it, and her head was shaking. “You are one smart bastard, Morgan. You’ve known this all along?”

“Oh, only since the day I heard they were after me. But for me, it’s a theory. You sound like you’re passing along a fact.”

The almond eyes narrowed. “I can’t say that it’s a fact of the kind that might hold up in court—not yet. And the people I talked to are unlikely to go on the record. But let me just say that you’re in the right city for us to be having this conversation.”

I frowned. “Sounds more likely to be a Washington D.C. conversation than a Miami one.”

“No, Miami all the way....Morg, I believe that forty mil was a very inside job. That it was a CIA black op.”

“What?”

Now she had surprised me.

“That money,” she said, “was earmarked for the Cuban freedom fighters’ cause. Just a few years ago, remember, the Company was funding and shaping the efforts to take Castro down, but it was strictly sub rosa—the White House starting with Vice President Nixon and on to both JFK and his attorney general brother knew all about it, from exploding cigars designed to kill Castro to the secret commando training camps in the Florida Everglades...all of it top secret.”

I was ahead of her now. “But then the Bay of Pigs came along, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and—”

“And the president shot down in a Dallas street, and all of the plans to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba became a political embarrassment, a Cold War liability. If Castro had JFK killed, nobody wanted to say so—at best, it meant that embarrassing proof we’d been plotting to kill a foreign leader would come out, and at worst that a hailstorm of nukes would fall all over the world.”

“Wait,” I said, and I touched her hand, squeezed it. “The money-truck heist—that was well after the Kennedy hit. All of these Cuba plans would have been shut down by then.”

She nodded. “Yes, but there were rogue elements within the Company that still wanted those efforts to move forward. That forty-million-dollar heist was a last ditch effort by those forces to fund an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles.”

“Actually a noble cause,” I said, then rolled my eyes. “All except for the part where Morgan the Raider gets framed for the heist.”

“That was a genius stroke,” Kim said, with a wry half-smile. “Somebody must have enlisted your crew and either painted it as a money-making effort, or possibly brought them in as patriots. You were all highly decorated heroes of the European theater.”

“They would have come aboard as patriots,” I said, “stand-up guys willing to re-up with Uncle Sam for one last mission...with one exception—the son of a bitch who wound up with the money. A man who had been disfigured in the war and felt his government owed him in a big way. The man you heard confess, Kim. The man I shot on a windy runway in Nuevo Cadiz.”

Kim had nodded all through that, but now she held my eyes with so much concern in hers, I knew something bad was coming.

She said, “I agree with your high assessment of the character of your old war buddies...with that one notable exception. But Morgan...I’m sorry to have to tell you this...your friend, Art Keefer—last surviving member of your original Army heist crew—was killed last month.”

“Shit,” I said. I felt like I’d taken a body blow. “How?”

Art had helped us with surreptitious transport on the Nuevo Cadiz mission, but I’d stayed out of contact with him since, for his own protection—or anyway, what I’d thought was his own protection.

“A plane crash,” she said. “He was a pilot—what better way? Pilot error, they say, flying one of his small aircraft.”

“In a pig’s ass,” I said.

“You said Art wasn’t in on that forty-million haul, Morgan ...but are you sure?”

“I guess under the circumstances, I can’t be. Maybe that’s why Art helped me out when he shouldn’t have risked it—maybe he felt bad that I wound up blamed for a score I had nothing to do with.”

“But a score somebody signed your name to,” Kim said. “What about the other two on your crew?”

“Deceased. You know that.”

“Just in the last couple of years, right? Again, well after the money-truck heist? Meaning everybody on your crew but you, Morg, is dead now.”

I frowned, thinking it through. “One died of cancer, the other in an automobile accident—I never considered their deaths might have been liquidations.”

She cocked her head, raised an eyebrow. “The Company has given more people cancer than Phillip Morris. And do I have to tell you that a car crash can be staged?”

I shook my head. “Damn. I should have seen that. Damn!”

“Don’t beat yourself up—until Keefer’s convenient death, I didn’t put it together, either.”

She stroked my cheek. Kissed me with a tenderness that made my heart ache almost as much as something else was aching.

“Darling,” she said, “we’ve both been working on this, from our respective positions. I know what you’ve been doing, all these months. Besides keeping your head down, you’ve been moving from coastal city to coastal city, going to museums and rare book stores and university libraries, tracking your namesake....”

“Sir Henry Morgan,” I said, nodding. “Before I shot my old buddy in the head, back in Nuevo Cadiz, he said he’d hidden the forty mil where Sir Henry kept his treasure. I figure the original Morgan’s treasure is long gone, but my old pal found one of the treasure hideaways and buried the loot. I have half a dozen good leads to track down between Panama and Jamaica.”

“Find that money,” she said, “and turn it in, and with my testimony to back you up, you’re a free man again. No more federal hounds on your trail.”

“Right.”

“But, darling, don’t you see, there’s another way...expose the government traitor who set you up! And I believe the name of that traitor can be found, right here in Miami.”

I squinted at her, as if I were trying to bring that lovely face into sharper focus. “You said you were deep cover. What are you doing in Miami?”

“You and I are after the same prey—Jaimie Halaquez, the man who raided the treasury of the Cuban exiles here.”

“I thought the CIA was out of the Cuba business.”

“Overtly we are. Even covertly, not so much now. But these people were our allies, are our allies, and we keep an eye on them, their activities, and those who move against them. And they have something in common with the Company that I work for—they, too, have a traitor in their midst.”

“Halaquez,” I said.

“No,” she said, and shook her head firmly. “Halaquez is just a henchman for a traitor still among them. But if we can find Halaquez, and make him talk...and we can make him talk, Morgan...he will lead us to the one he’s working for. The one who has seen to it that for the last several years, all of the efforts of Little Havana’s Cuban exiles have gone for nothing.”

I laughed without humor. “I had that bastard in my damn hands, but he slipped out of them.”

“Halaquez?”

“Yes,” I said, and filled her in on my side of things.

It took a good ten minutes, going through in a linear fashion, starting with Pedro and company recruiting me to recover the stolen seventy-five grand, and winding up with the beating of Tango in her motel room, with me killing Halaquez’s crony there and Halaquez himself getting away.

“This has to be about more than just the seventy-five thousand dollars,” she said, when I finished, her expression and tone intense. “Two Cuban heavies, imported to back Halaquez up? It has to be much more.”

“The answer,” I said, “is tied up with this Richard Best character.”

“Him I’ve never heard of,” she admitted. “That’s a new lead...and maybe you should keep chasing it down.” She took my face in her hands and said, “We’re very close. You keep up your efforts on the Best front. Can I contact you here?”

“Yes, through the madam—Bunny.”

She nodded. “I know Bunny. This house is an intelligence resource for the Company. Morg, you can reach me at the Raleigh Hotel. I’m registered as Kim Winters.”

That made me smile—Winters was the name I’d married her under, using “Morgan” as a first name.

“Spies shouldn’t be sentimental slobs,” I told her.

Her smile turned up wickedly at one corner. “I never said I was perfect, did I?”

“No. That was me who said that about you.”

She gave me a kiss, nothing hot, just friendly, and slid off the bed.

“Gotta go,” she said.

I followed her to the hidden door. “Why? Look, that bed is as good as any other. We’ve talked our business. So let’s get down to business.”

She shook her head. “I would like nothing better than to crawl under those covers with you and not come out for a week. But we don’t have a week, and I’m just stubborn enough to want to start this marriage off with better than a quickie.”

“Aw, Kim, for Christ’s sake....”

“Morg, do you know who I report to? Do you know who’s in town, running the Halaquez operation? Or did your ego tell you you were the star of the show?”

My mouth dropped and the words crawled out. “Not... Crowley.”

“Yes. Your own personal Inspector Gerard himself. I report directly to him, and he knows about us, so he’s been watching me like a hawk. That’s why I’ve waited for days to risk this. My love...we must be careful.”

I took her by the arms, firm, almost rough. Almost. “I want to see him.”

“What?”

“Crowley. Goddamnit, Kim, we’re working on the same case. I want Halaquez, and so, apparently, does he. I want a chance to sit down with him at a neutral place, and see if we can’t come up with a truce till this thing is over.”

“Morgan, I don’t really think that’s—”

“Kim, I am trying to conduct an investigation, a manhunt, from a goddamn whorehouse bedroom. I have something in common with the Cubans—I want some freedom. What do you say?”

Her eyes were slitted with worry. “If he knows we’ve had contact, I would be in a shitload of trouble.”

“Then make up a story. Say I tracked you down, and we talked just long enough for me to make this request.”

She thought about it.

Then she nodded, crisply. “All right. Is there a phone in here?”

“No, but Bunny has one.”

Bunny—who was learning not to ask too many questions—gave us the use of both her office and her phone.

Kim dialed the Raleigh, said, “Room 414, please,” and moments later had Crowley on the line, telling him she was sitting in an all-night diner near the City Curb Market, and that I’d come out of nowhere and braced her.

“Crowley wants to talk to you,” she said, putting just the right alarm and hesitancy in her voice.

She gave me the receiver.

“Hi, Walter. Long time no see.”

“Morgan,” Crowley said, giving it the inflection of a curse. “I guess I should have kept a tail on that wife of yours.”

“She’s not my wife. That was just a cover story, old buddy. I want a few minutes of your time. We have some mutual interests here in Miami that could be served.”

“...All right. You’ll want the meet in a neutral place.”

“Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, Bayfront Park. Find yourself a seat in that amphitheater, and come alone. Keep in mind what happened to Mayor Cermak in that arena.”

“All right, Morgan. I’ll keep that in mind. And I’ll come alone.”

“I see any sign of agents backing you up, no meet. Got it?”

“Got it.”

I hung up.

Kim said, “He agreed to it?”

“Yeah.”

“He’ll have agents there, Morg.”

“Oh, I know. They’ll be hard to spot. They’ll be the assholes in dark suits and ties.”

That made her smile.

Then I walked her up to Gaita’s room and, before I could convince her that another half an hour would be worth risking, my bride had flown.

The cab dropped me under the front awning of the Raleigh Hotel, a 1930s-modern hotel dating to the pre-war boom, when that ten-mile sandbar called Miami Beach really took off. In a black sport jacket, charcoal sport shirt, and gray trousers, I looked like just another fairly well-off tourist, though my only baggage was the .45 under my arm.

I didn’t enter the lobby, instead skirting around the building to where a massive if oddly shaped swimming pool was alive with Latin-styled popular music, laughter, and splashing. A nice salty breeze was rolling in off the ocean, but it was still a warm night. Lots of pretty girls in bikinis sunning by Hawaiian-type torchlight were getting plied with mixed drinks by determined guys in bathing suits, who knew that at a little after one o’clock a.m., they better get lucky damn soon.

Avoiding the lobby probably hadn’t been a necessity—I wasn’t checking in, or even asking for information, so the desk having my photo probably didn’t come into play. Though I supposed it was possible that some security was lounging in the lobby.

But I didn’t think so. An advantage the hunted has over the hunter is that the hunter is seldom in hiding. The hunter never thinks about getting stalked himself.

So when I knocked on the door of room 414, it only took two knocks before it cracked open, without even a “Who is it?” Which meant I’d wasted time coming up with the “Telegram, Mr. Crowley” gag.

I pushed the door open, grabbing Crowley by the arm with one hand—he was in a terrycloth Raleigh bathrobe over blue silk pajamas—and with the other whipping the .45 out, kicking the door closed behind me.

I dragged him into the hotel room—not a suite, just a good-size room with sea-foam coloration and modern furnishings, if 1937 was your idea of modern. I dumped him on the bed, went over and double-locked the door, using the night latch, commenting, “You ought to try this thing—it’s the latest in security measures,” then came back, pulled up a rounded pink chair that was more comfortable than it looked and sat across from him. Pointing the .45 at him in a not terribly menacing way.

Just menacing enough.

“Hello, Walter.”

“You’re out of your goddamn mind!” Crowley spat.

That bland mug of his actually worked up some emotion, the tiny dark eyes dancing with outrage in the pale oval face under the thinning amber hair. His fists were clenched, and they looked small, like a child’s. He wasn’t a small man, but he was smaller than me, and fish-belly pale.

Bureaucrats can make your life a living hell, but they often don’t look like much in the flesh.

“I decided to move our meeting up a few hours,” I said. “And change the location. Last-minute changes for meets, there’s another security measure you Company boys may want to consider.”

“Morgan, there are half a dozen agents on this floor!”

“Yeah, all snug in their beds, or maybe down by the pool trying to get laid. Guys on your side of the fence never figure they need any protection. You’re big bad G-men, after all.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“Like I said on the phone—I want to talk. I just don’t want to get my ass hauled off to the slammer before we have the chance to confab.”

“I told you I’d come alone tomorrow.”

“Yeah, well, you were lying. But I don’t hold that against you. I already knew I wasn’t going to show up at that park.”

His upper lip curled back in outrage, exposing too much gum and tiny white teeth. “Where is Kim Stacy? What have you done with Kim Stacy!”

“I left her in that diner. She’s probably back in her room, by now, down the hall, if you’re to be believed. Why don’t you call her? But she might be cross, if you wake her up.”

His eyes tightened. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this?”

“No. But I did talk to her, and she did admit that you people are looking for Jaimie Halaquez, too.”

His eyes stayed tight and his chin crinkled. Should he talk to me? Finally he decided. “That’s right, Morgan. We are.”

I grinned at him. “You weren’t in Miami looking for me. You were already here on the Halaquez case. And I just walked into it.”

Crowley nodded. “But I think we gave you proper attention. I don’t think you need to feel neglected.”

“No, no complaints. You’ve kept me hopping. It’s tempting just to shoot you, so I can hijack that bed for a decent night’s sleep.”

He smiled a little. It bordered on a sneer. “But you’re not a killer, Morgan. You kill, but only in self-defense.”

“Well, Walter, I’d guess I’d have to agree with you. But that’s more a rule of thumb than a rule. You still don’t want to get on my bad side.”

“I would guess I already am.”

“Not really. You’re just a guy trying to do your job. You’re a working stiff who’s confused and doesn’t know it, because you’re on the wrong track. I’m not the guy you should be going after.”

That got half a smile out of him, putting a dimple in that smooth face. “Really? Who is the guy I should looking for?”

“Hell, I don’t know. All I know is, I didn’t take down that money truck. Kim Stacy told you what she heard on that runway in Nuevo Cadiz, didn’t she?”

“She did. But we discounted it. You have a reputation for having a certain...charm. Especially with the ladies.”

“And yet you kept her on the company payroll? Didn’t discipline her in any way?”

Crowley’s tone was gently mocking. “Why should a woman be disciplined for loyalty to her own husband? Besides, she’s a fine agent.”

“Sure, Walter. And there’s that other little thing.”

“What other little thing is that, Morgan?”

“That someday she might lead you to me.”

“And here you sit.”

“And there you sit. While here I sit with a gun.”

“You won’t use it.”

“Don’t push it, Walter. Look, I don’t expect you not to do your job. But since you didn’t come to Miami looking for me—since Jaimie Halaquez was the man you were after—why don’t you just postpone the Morgan manhunt until the other job is done?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because I’m looking for Halaquez, too. I’m working on behalf of the Cuban exiles he robbed. I want to get their money back for them. And I’d be glad to turn him over to you when I’ve shaken that dough out of him.”

He laughed. A small laugh, but a laugh. “You think you’ll get him before we do? We have an operation already well underway.”

“Well, I have my charm, remember. It’s possible, going down my own paths and byways, that I might get to him before you do. My priority is that money.”

He stopped smiling. He was thinking.

Finally, cocking his head, he said, “What are you proposing?”

“Not that we throw in together, not exactly. Just call off the dogs. Let me move freely through this city. I’ll keep you informed, calling you here at the hotel. And if I find him, and don’t have to kill him...he’s yours.”

Crowley’s eyes moved with thought as he tried to find a flaw in my proposal.

Then he asked, “And what then?”

“After I turn him over...or after you catch him, if I’m not part of it...you pay me the courtesy of giving me twenty-four hours before you open the Company kennels again. It’s a fair request, Walter.”

“It’s fair, but it’s nothing my superiors would endorse.”

“Don’t ask them. Someday I’ll prove my innocence, and you’ll know you did the right thing.”

Crowley thought some more.

Then: “Oh-kay....but there’s nothing I can give you but my word.”

“I accept that.”

He laughed, loud enough to ring off the plaster walls. “Are you sure? You didn’t believe me on the phone when I said I’d come alone tomorrow.”

“We’re in the same room, and we’re looking at each other. And you’re looking down the barrel of my gun. I’ll take your word.”

He nodded. “What now?”

“I’ve already briefed Kim Stacy on my activities of the last few days. She can fill you in.”

And that would leave how much she told Crowley to her own discretion.

I went on: “But with one of the byways I’m going down, I could use some help.”

“You said we wouldn’t be working together.”

“This is just some information that I could use. You may not even have it.”

“All right. Go ahead, Morgan. Ask.”

“Does the name Richard Best mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“How about Richard Parvain?”

Now he frowned. “Parvain you say? You wouldn’t be talking about an inventor by any chance?”

“That’s right. What’s the story on him?”

His eyebrows went up, stayed there a few seconds, then came down again. “Well, he never worked for the government, not as an employee. Always on contract. I can’t tell you what he was working on—”

“I can tell you. He was developing a sort of Geiger counter that could make its readings from a great distance. Like in an airplane.”

His eyebrows went up and down again, more quickly this time. “All right. I won’t deny that. The device was helpful. But then Parvain had a nervous breakdown, and a drinking problem, and he became a bad risk. He had another, even more important concept that he never delivered on. Finally, ties were cut with him.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh...five years...seven years.”

“What was the ‘important concept’?”

“Morgan, that’s classified—you know I can’t...”

“Crowley, you said yourself Parvain never delivered. What was the concept?”

“Why?”

“Because he was murdered two days ago. Under the Richard Best name.”

Crowley’s eyes widened. “Christ. What were the circumstances?”

I told him.

Then I said, “What was the invention he promised but couldn’t come through on?”

Crowley’s sigh seemed to come from his toes. “It was an extension, an expansion of his original idea. This was a device that could detect the presence of atomic materials on the ground...from the air.”

“You mean—a spy plane could know if an enemy had a storehouse of nuclear materials? Could pinpoint the location of missiles in silos? Could—”

He raised his hand. “Those applications and many more. When Parvain began his work on the project, we were especially sensitive to the threat of nuclear warheads in Cuba—it was a way to make sure the Russians hadn’t secretly outfitted Cuba with missiles.”

I let out a low whistle.

With a weary shrug, the man in the bathrobe said, “The government put a lot of money into the project, but finally pulled the plug. Parvain insisted on working alone, without supervision. He was, frankly, a crank. And then a crazy crank, and finally an alcoholic one. Morgan, you don’t seriously believe he did finalize those plans?”

Now it was my turn to sigh from my shoes. I rose. I put the .45 away.

“Walter, if a scientist being crazy or a boozer precluded his ability to come up with innovations, you and I would be going to work every day in a horse and buggy.”

And I left him there to think that over.

That and the rest of it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There’s an old Army dodge that anyone carrying a clipboard stacked with printed forms, a pocketful of yellow pencils, and one of those inspection team expressions was a guy to stay away from. In a hospital, just add a white lab-type coat, and watch everybody you pass get suddenly too busy to talk, finding only enough time to smile politely and scurry away on unknown business.

Watch out for the man with clipboard, people! What you don’t tell him, he can’t write down....

So there was no trouble getting to the right floor and the right room at Miami General. The police guard on the door was a sleepy-eyed kid of maybe twenty-three sitting on a folding chair. His head was down and he might have been napping when I approached and cleared my throat. His eyes popped open and his chin jutted upward.

In my most officious tone, I asked, “Has any unauthorized party tried to get in to see Miss Prosser?”

“N-no, sir,” he said, and began to get up.

I motioned for him to stay put. “Has she had any visitors this morning?”

“Just Sgt. Patterson of Homicide and Lt. Davis from Burglary. You’re, uh, with the hospital, sir?”

I glared at him. “You’re just getting around to asking me that?”

And I shook my head disgustedly and went into Tango’s room, shutting the door on the young cop’s sputtered apology.

Her eyes were closed. Possibly she was asleep, but in any case, breathing regularly, hooked up on an I.V., the shapely slenderness of her tall frame obvious under the sheet. Even battered and swollen and bandaged, her face held the striking exotic beauty that had allowed her to get out of her drunken father’s house—of course, she’d only traded it for a brothel, but still an improvement. Her bed was cranked up some-what, and her arms weren’t under the covers, her dark tan a stark contrast with the hospital gown and sheets.

As I approached the bed, her eyes half opened. “Doctor...?”

“No,” I said. “My name’s Morgan.”

Her eyes opened all the way, not quite startled, big dark brown pools. This was a lovely woman, all right, even after that bastard Halaquez had got through with her.

“You’re Bunny’s friend,” she said.

“Yes.” I gestured to the white lab coat, and tossed the clipboard onto her bedside table next to the water and Kleenex box. “This is just a get-up to avoid too many questions, coming to see you. How you doing, kid?”

She smiled. “I have a little button I can press when I want more morphine.”

Her mouth, even without lipstick, provided a wide, attractive frame for perfect teeth that must have come from God, because her old man surely hadn’t paid many dental bills.

“You been pushing the happy button much?”

Her laugh was just a little punch of air. “Now and then. I’m doing all right. Nothing was broken. But that Jaimie... he, uh...really knows how to hurt a girl’s feelings, huh?”

I leaned in. Spoke softly. “You prefer Tango or Theresa?”

“I feel more like Theresa right now.”

“Okay, Theresa. Did they tell you that Halaquez got away, but that his helper didn’t? That the helper got killed in a struggle there in your motel room?”

She nodded.

“Don’t spread it around,” I said, and risked a smile, “but I’m the guy who cluttered your room up with that trash. I wish I’d gotten there sooner. And your friend Jaimie slipped through my damn fingers, I’m not proud to say.”

“Jaimie was...was never my friend. I knew him from the Mandor, a little. I heard about him from other girls. I don’t go that route.”

“What route?”

“The bondage route. That’s Jaimie’s thing, you know. He wants to be hurt. Then later...he wants to hurt you. That’s what I hear, anyway, from my co-workers. He, uh...really does seem to know his way around torture.”

“Then why did you have his picture? It was in one of your purses in your room at the club.”

“Dickie gave that to me.”

“Dickie. Dick Best?”

She nodded. “He gave me that picture and said that if anything ever happened to him, give it to the police. I took it and said I would, but never did, or...haven’t yet. When I heard Dickie was dead, I was sorry...I cried. But I didn’t want to get involved any more than I already was.”

“But you recognized the picture.”

“Yes, only I didn’t tell Dickie. He might have misunderstood if he thought I knew Jaimie. Might’ve thought I’d been one of Jaimie’s girls at the Mandor, even though I wasn’t. You see, Dickie...he was different. He was...special.”

“How so, Theresa?”

“He was an older man, you know...he only wanted to protect me. Wanted me to go off with him and...and we would start over somewhere. Dickie was a very smart man. He was an inventor....”

“I know. Theresa, I have to ask this. You don’t really like men, do you? I have an idea you like women better.”

Her smile was a tiny white thing in the beautiful battered face. “I don’t like sex at all, Mr. Morgan.”

“Just ‘Morgan.’ Then why would you go into the sex-formoney trade?”

“Because it’s just that. A trade. I am a good-looking woman, or anyway I am when I’m not covered in bruises and burns. My looks, Morgan...they’re really all I’ve got. I’m not stupid, but I’m not smart.” The exotic face took on a sudden hard cast. “I’m a good-looking piece of ass, and so that’s the commodity I sell.”

“Is that how Dickie Best looked at you? As a good-looking piece of ass?”

Her smile disappeared. Her eyes moistened. “No. He said I was his...his poor little lost lamb.”

“Your relationship wasn’t sexual?”

“Not...not mostly sexual. Dickie, he...oh, he liked sex. We had sex sometimes. Mostly I just...I just used my hand. That seemed enough. He was more a friend to me. Someone I admired. Someone who was kind. Someone who loved me, but didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to.”

The decent father she never had, if you factored out the hand jobs.

“We were going to go off together,” she said. “Dickie said he already had a...his words were, ‘Decent amount of money.’ But he could get more. He said he thought he could...I don’t know exactly what this means, Morgan, but this is what he said...he said, ‘I think I can shake half a million out of them. Then we can go to Mexico and live like royalty.’ He said it was cheap to live in Mexico.”

“Do you have any idea who it was he planned to shake that money out of?”

“It must have been Jaimie Halaquez. Otherwise, why would Dickie leave me that picture? And why would Jaimie come to my motel room and...and do what he did?”

“What did Jaimie want from you?”

“He wanted to know everything that Dickie had said. I told him. I didn’t tell him about the photo because I thought that might get me killed. But I told him everything else. Only...that wasn’t enough. Jaimie was convinced that I had something, something valuable, something that Dickie had given me. But I didn’t. I don’t.”

“What was that valuable thing?”

“I don’t know!”

“When he worked you over, Theresa, didn’t Halaquez say what he was looking for?”

“No! Just...’Where is it?’ Over and over again...where is it!”

The door opened and I turned, wondering if I’d been made, hoping that if it was cops, Crowley calling off the dogs included alerting the local canines that I was off the federal wanted list.

But it wasn’t a dog at all—it was a Bunny.

Funny to see her in a black-and-gray business suit, looking more like an officer at a bank than a whorehouse madam. Even all that blonde hair was pinned back in a dignified way, though there was no hiding the purple streaks.

“Morgan,” Bunny said, and rushed to my side. “How’s my girl doing?”

“Ask her yourself,” I said, turned to smile and nod at the patient, then stepped aside.

I took a chair in the corner while the two women talked for about five minutes. Nothing touched upon why I was here. Finally I called Bunny over and she pulled a chair around, so we were facing each other. I saw Theresa thumb her morphine button, and her eyes closed, and she drifted off early in my conversation with Bunny, which was whispered.

“You’re taking a chance, being here,” Bunny said to me.

“Not as big as it used to be. I’ve worked out a truce with that fed, Crowley, though I’m not sure the white flag extends to the local fuzz.”

“I can spread that word to my contacts on the Miami PD,” Bunny said, “if it’ll help.”

“Worth a try. What do those cop contacts have to say about Tango’s situation?”

“Nobody has any idea that Morgan the Raider was in that motel room. They think another guest at the Vincalla heard the scuffle, got involved, and one of Tango’s torturers got himself plugged with his own gun in the process. The fuzz figure this guest called it in and then made himself scarce.”

“And that’s as far as it goes?”

“No, they’re investigating. Questioning the other motel guests.”

“Good. That’ll keep ’em busy. Did they say anything about the Best killing? I understand cops from both Homicide and Burglary were here talking to Tango this morning.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared like a filly’s on its hind legs. “Damn, Morgan—you pick up information like blue serge does lint. As it happens, there’s an oddity about the Best killing that’s come up. Seems two neighbors at Best’s apartment house report hearing what might have been a scuffle next door, tallying with the approximate time of death.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“No, but these neighbors also heard noises later on...not another scuffle, but sounds that could have been Best’s room being tossed...that same night. About two hours after.”

“Really? Interesting.”

“Interesting? That all you have to say, Morg? What’s it mean?”

It might mean Halaquez had killed Best prematurely, and whoever he reported to had sent Jaimie’s dumb ass back to search for the same unknown item that Tango had been tortured over.

“No idea,” I told her.

“Listen, there’s something that may or may not mean a damn thing. Gaita’s kind of...well, fallen off the map.”

“What?”

“Morgan—easy. I probably overstated it. She took off early yesterday, without saying anything, which is unusual. Today’s her regular day off, but I don’t get any answer where she stays, when she isn’t at the Mandor.”

“I should check this.”

She held up a hand. “I already did. I stopped by on my way here. Her landlady was there and said Gaita hasn’t been around for several days. I asked to look in her room, but she wasn’t there.”

“Any sign of a struggle? Anything unusual?”

“No. Sometimes that girl just takes off, to be by herself. The only thing really unusual is, well...with what’s going on lately, I would think she would stick around. In case she was needed.”

“Did you check with her friends in Little Havana? Pedro and Maria...?”

“Yes. They haven’t heard from her either. Really, it’s probably nothing. Hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. But I figured you should know.”

I nodded, troubled but not sure if I needed to be, and not knowing what the hell I could do about it, if I did need to be.

Theresa was asleep as I headed out, so when Bunny called to stop me, her voice was hushed: “Oh—Morgan. Something else....”

I went over to her. She was getting in her purse.

“This came today,” she said, and handed me an opened envelope. It was addressed to Bunny at the Mandor Club, no return address, and inside was a kid’s birthday card with bunnies on it.

Tucked in the card was a thousand dollars in C-notes.

No signature.

“Best?” I said.

She shrugged and nodded at the same time. “I think it’s that late birthday present he promised me. Must have been forwarded by a lawyer or something.”

“Was there anything else in the envelope?”

“Yes...but not addressed to me.”

She got back in her purse and found a tiny manila envelope that said: Please give to Tango for me. R.B.

My fingers told me it was a key.

“I’m taking this,” I said.

She didn’t argue. “What is it?”

I tore open the envelope, shook the contents into my palm, showed her the key there. It said UBS 117.

Glancing over at the battered beauty, I said, “I think it’s what Tango got the hell beat out of her over.”

I gave the startled-looking Bunny a kiss on the cheek, slipped the key back in its little envelope, and dropped it in my sportcoat pocket.

On the way out I told the young cop at the door to stay sharp.

“Somebody may to try to kill that woman,” I told him, jerking a thumb at the hospital room door.

His eyes popped. “You really think so?”

“A possibility. One other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Start checking I.D.”

He was nodding at the wisdom of that as I walked away.

The Union Bus Station on Northeast First Street was fairly dead just after lunch. I was all alone at the wall of lockers when I searched out number 117, tried the key, and found nestled within a black leather bag that resembled the sort of bag doctors carried, back when house calls were more common.

I admit to being surprised—I figured on finding an envelope, a much larger manila one than the little key had come in. Surely what Halaquez and his boss were after were the finished plans to that improved version of Best’s atomic divining rod.

How else could the crackpot inventor have expected to come up with the kind of loot he’d told Tango he could “shake out of them”?

I wandered into the men’s room. There were half a dozen sinks and as many stalls, but right now I had the place to myself. Taking no chances, I selected a stall, faced the toilet, put a foot on the stool, and propped the Gladstone bag against my leg—no lock on the thing, it just popped right open....

The money was stacked in there with a scientist’s precision. It was all kinds of bills, mostly small and well-used, and I wasn’t about to take the time and trouble to count it; but odds were this was the bulk of the seventy-five grand that my Little Havana employers had asked me to recover.

It should be at least $1000 short, because Bunny had earned her late birthday present for being the buffer between Tango and the hidden loot.

And now I got it.

Now it made sense, everything falling into place like the tumblers of a lock picked by an expert safecracker.

Dick Best recognizes Jaimie Halaquez at the Mandor Club from back when both were working with the CIA on various Cuba libre projects. The aging inventor approaches Halaquez and tells the Cuban that he’s developing an atomic-materials detector, a potentially key discovery in the Cold War arms race.

Halaquez steals $75,000 from the Cuban exiles’ treasury and funds Best’s research project. In the meantime, Halaquez goes into hiding, moving from one safe house in one city to another in another, until finally returning to Miami to collect on his investment.

But for reasons unknown, Best does not or cannot deliver— possibly the inventor had been scamming his angel all along, or likely Best demanded more money, saying additional research was required.

Either way, Halaquez decides to cut his losses, and the only further payment Best gets is a fatal karate chop to the back of the neck.

But when Halaquez reports in, his superior sends his heavyhanded minion back to Best’s apartment to search it—for either the atomic plans, the money...or both.

Torturing Tango was likely an attempt to find those plans, not retrieve the relatively paltry seventy-five grand. But the importance of the invention Best was dangling in front of the Commies explained why heavies from Cuba had been imported to give Halaquez a hand....

This was speculation, of course, but informed speculation, and as if more proof were needed, the door to my stall was kicked open, swiping me across the back and sending me off balance, only to catch myself with a hand against the wall. I looked back and saw a guy a head taller than me with skin the color of coffee-with-cream—spiffy in a sharply cut brown suit with black lapels—grinning (he had a golden incisor) the way a big rapist does at a little girl.

Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me out of the stall and flung me against the row of sinks. The doctor’s bag of money, which I hadn’t snapped shut, stayed in the stall, clunking on its side on the tile floor, spilling cash.

I hit hard, but not so hard that I couldn’t whip my .45 out from under my arm, only the big guy, who looked like a linebacker but had a ballet dancer’s grace, nimbly kicked the gun from my hand, his pointy Cuban boot jabbing my right wrist. The automatic skittered and spun on the tile floor, way out of reach. He was coming at me with clawed hands outstretched and with a gold-toothed grin that seemed at once menacing and simple-minded, and I braced my hands on the edge of sink behind me, lifted myself and kicked out with both feet and caught him in the chest.

He went windmilling back, slapping open and returning to the stall he’d dragged me from, moisture catching his fancy boots and depositing him on the floor, the stool stopping him, and this time it was my attacker who was clawing for a rod under his arm, a .22 automatic that was aimed right at me when I was all but on top of him, and I batted it away and took him by the legs and upended him. He conked his head on the porcelain edge of the crapper, dazing himself, and then I lifted him up and over and dunked him in, so that he made a splashing underwater headstand in the bowl. I had him around the waist and I hugged him like I loved him, his feet kicking harmlessly above me, his hands trying to swim in the air but getting nowhere, swiping at me but seldom landing and then with more hysteria than power, and it took him probably two gurgling minutes to drown.

I pulled him up and out and sat him loosely on the stool. His eyes were open but not seeing anything, and his hair, which had been slicked back like George Raft’s, was trailing down his forehead in damp seaweed tendrils now. I had gotten pretty wet myself, my pants anyway, and I was exhausted. You try holding a two-hundred-pound bastard upside down in a john and see if you don’t come out wiped.

When I shut him in there, all you could see were two feet visible under the door of a stall. The floor was a little waterpooled in there, but otherwise it was normal enough a sight.

I retrieved my .45 and stuck it back under my arm.

At the row of sinks, I repacked the Gladstone bag, some of the bills pretty damp. With the party over, I was more attuned to the danger of somebody coming in on me, but either nobody at the bus station had time to go before catching their ride, or I was even luckier than usual.

I even took time to throw some water on my face and stand there till my breathing was back to normal. I looked at myself in the mirror and answered my own unasked question.

He must have been watching the hospital, spotted me, and followed me here. Whoever he was.

But I knew, didn’t I? This was the third Castro Cuban I’d killed in two days....

On the way out, I understood why we hadn’t been disturbed— my assailant had thoughtfully hung an out of order sign on the door. I guessed I owed him one, but didn’t feel too bad I’d never get the chance to repay him.

The diner I was meeting Muddy Harris at was only half a dozen blocks from the bus station, so I walked it, and the Miami sunshine dried my trousers by the time I got there. I spotted the bail bondsman in a back booth, waved at him, he waved back, but first I needed the men’s room.

For a less strenuous session, I hoped.

It was a one-seater with a single urinal, and you could lock the door, which I did. At the sink, I unloaded the bag of money, and did a fast but probably accurate count.

There was one-hundred-and-twenty grand in the bag. So Best had squeezed that $75,000 out of Halaquez, and a little more. That gave me an extra $45,000 to play with. If I were a great guy, I would hand that over to the Cuban exiles, too. But I was Morgan the Raider, who just drowned a guy in a toilet, so I would pocket the excess for my trouble.

That Muddy was having a piece of pie did not surprise me. That he could eat that way, and carry all that weight around, and still find clothes that looked baggy on him, remained a mystery.

“I hear the heat’s off,” he said cheerfully.

“Temporarily,” I said. “I struck a deal with Crowley.”

“Do you trust him?”

“We have mutual interests. He’s after Jaimie Halaquez, too. What is that, coconut cream? À la mode? Are you kidding?”

His frown was disgusted and disgusting, white-smeared as it was. “Do I look like I need health tips from Morgan the Raider? Listen, I can assure you the Mob is no part of what’s been going down.”

“You can, huh?”

He nodded, licked ice cream from his upper lip. “The Mob boys have really distanced themselves from the Cuban exile crowd, the last couple years. Not to mention the CIA— they feel they got burned. Anyway, it’s looking obvious the casinos aren’t going back in, in Havana, any time soon. And you were right—Castro’s made a deal with Trafficante, and dope is flowing. Big heroin source.”

“Which means...the Mob isn’t part of this.”

“Yeah, didn’t I say that? But that’s not the big news.”

“Do I have to buy you more pie before you spill it?”

“Naw. I’m just having the one piece...that bring-yourown- whips-and-chains party on Palm Beach? At that rented mansion? It happens tonight.”

I sat forward. “You know this how?”

“I have ops staking out the area, like you requested. They have this very day seen hookers streaming into that joint like ants to a picnic. These are not your run-of-the-mill chippies —real beautiful pieces, and word is, they are specialists. Domination. Bondage. The whole ball-gag bit.”

“Coming from out of town, you think?”

“Oh, no question—some, anyway. There aren’t that many of this specialized type of sex worker in Miami.”

“And the Consummata herself?”

He shrugged, patting his comb-over in place. “Well, we don’t know for a fact that this is the Consummata, Morgan. It just fits her M.O., is all. And how would I know her if I saw her? Other than she’s a well-preserved old broad, by all accounts. I mean, she wears a leather mask and the whole nine yards. You know, the Lone Ranger or Zorro, they got nothing on her, and they don’t have tits.”

“What if I wanted a blueprint on this mansion?”

He didn’t bother hiding his smugness. Both his grin and tone conveyed it. “I’m ahead of you, Morgan...but it’ll cost you a thousand.”

“What do I get for it?”

“How about floor plans? Also, the position of the dock off the back lawn, if you should want to show up by boat.”

“Done.”

The fleshy face creased in a smile and he pushed the cleaned plate aside, just as the waitress was coming by. She snagged it but Muddy stopped her, touching her arm. “Do that again, sweetheart, would you? But hold the ice cream. I’m watching my figure.”

“Bring me a Key Lime,” I said, smiling at her. She was a cute kid. “And some unsweetened iced tea.”

I’d worked up an appetite.

“And sweetheart?” Muddy said to her back. She glanced over her shoulder. “Give my friend the check, would you?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

From a phone booth outside a gas station, I tried to get Kim at her room at the Raleigh. She didn’t answer, but I did catch Crowley in his.

He said, “Was that your handiwork at the bus station?”

“It was self-defense.”

“How do you drown somebody in self-defense?”

“Well, you have to be willing to get wet. Prick shouldn’t have interrupted me in that stall. Whatever happened to common courtesy?”

“Jesus, Morgan. I give you a free pass and you—”

“What do the cops know?”

“Nothing to speak of. I haven’t seen the body yet, but judging by the description, I’m thinking it’s another of these hardcases imported from Cuba. I’m pretty sure we’ll come up bupkus on prints.”

“Yeah, I sincerely doubt he had a green card.”

Crowley grunted. “Something a lot more important than a seventy-five grand score brings that kind of talent to town.”

“No argument. I recovered the seventy-five thousand, by the way.”

“How?”

“Not important. Let’s just say, I found what those tourists from Havana were looking for. Any objection to my turning those greenbacks back over to the Cuban exiles?”

“If I had any objections, would it do any good?”

“No.”

“Well...you have my blessing, anyway. More power to them. We weren’t looking to recover that money as much as Halaquez himself. He could be a major source of information, under the right interrogation techniques.”

“You better find him before I do.”

“Morgan, you’ve done enough killing....”

“I’m not going to kill the bastard.”

“No?”

“No. I’m just going to turn him in to the people he screwed over. Maybe they’ll have some ideas of their own.”

“Morgan—”

I hung up.

Once again, a taxi took me to Little Havana. By sunlight, it was a different place, with only the familiar coffee and tobacco scents to say otherwise. The Spanish architecture of Calle Ocho, its sidewalks shaded by nicely spaced palms, made an authentic backdrop to the outdoor cafes, gift shops and magic-potion dens courting tourists.

I was in a tan suit with a brown sport shirt and Ray-Bans, just another gringo rubbernecker. Only this gringo had a .45 under his arm and a money bag in his fist.

I’d called ahead, and soon I was sitting at the familiar dining table in the simple room of second-hand furnishings and Catholic icons in the living quarters over that grocery. Pedro, in a yellow pleated button-down shirt, had a matching cap before him on the table, like a dish he was preparing to eat. Next to him, dignified Luis Saladar—his plantationowner white hat on the table—wore a cream-color suit with yet another black bolo tie.

Both men were smiling, but especially Pedro, his upraised grin at odds with his down-tipped bandito mustache.

No food was being served at this table—Maria wasn’t with us this afternoon, working downstairs in the tiendo—but a feast had been served up. By me. I had dumped the black leather bag onto the table and turned Richard Best’s neat stacks into an ungainly pile of money, all sorts of denominations, though rarely over $20, representing hundreds of small but hard-earned contributions from the Cuban exile community.

“That’s seventy-five thousand,” I said, “on the nose.”

Saladar’s smile became a curious frown. “Halaquez had not turned it into foreign currency, as you had thought?”

“No. No need. He was using it to fund a project here in the States.”

“What project, señor?”

“Not important. What is important is that pile of cash.”

Pedro, so happy his eyes brimmed with tears, said, “But you did not take out your payment, Señor Morgan! Do we not owe you another six-thousand-and—”

I held up a hand. “The five-thousand-dollar down payment will cover it, and my expenses. I recovered more money than this...” I nodded toward the cash “...and I’ve helped myself to the excess.”

Saladar was really frowning now. “How much more, señor?”

“Does that matter? I fulfilled my contract at a bargain rate.”

Pedro didn’t care about such trivialities, though the exile leader remained troubled.

“I don’t know where Halaquez got the extra dough,” I said, answering the question in Saladar’s eyes. “I will say he was working on something bigger than raiding your treasury. Three asesinos from Castro’s Cuba have been backing him up, of late. I’ve taken out all three.”

Pedro’s smile finally vanished and he raised his hands as if in surrender. “Perhaps it is best you do not share all of this informacion with us, señor. We are very satisfied with these results. We do not...begrudge, is that the word? We do not begrudge you making a profit from your hard and most dangerous work.”

“You’re only disappointed,” I said, reading it in his voice, “that I haven’t killed Halaquez, or better still turned his sorry ass over to you.”

“Señor....”

“Well, me, too, Pedro. But before I move on...and soon I’ll have to, because the federales will come down on me before long...I have one last chance to catch this bastardo, Halaquez.”

Still troubled, Saladar asked, “Would this require further payment, Señor Morgan?”

“No. This is something I can do toward that extra money I recovered. Plus, three times this son of a bitch has tried to have me killed. And who’s to say he won’t stay at it?”

Pedro said, “What can we do to help, amigo?”

“I need a boat. A cruiser, if possible. Something I can arrive in quickly, and leave the same way, with room for a passenger or two.”

Saladar had lost his frown, and was thinking about smiling again. “A passenger like Jaimie Halaquez?”

“You got it. And I may need to keep it.”

“Keep the boat, señor?”

“It may become my getaway ride from this part of the world. If I do keep it, I’ll pay the freight, but you might have to wait for the money till I’m somewhere I can properly get it to you.”

Pedro looked pointedly at Saladar. “What about your boat, Luis?”

That Saladar had access to a boat did not surprise me—the Cuban exiles would have any number of uses for one.

Saladar was already nodding. “I was thinking the same. Señor Morgan, I have the Chris-Craft. It is thirty-three feet. Two V8 engines. Would that do?”

I grinned at him, nodding. “That would do fine. It’s your boat, you say?”

“Si, señor.”

“What value would you place on it?”

“It is hard to say. It is several years old. Perhaps ten years. Still, it would be a considerable cost to replace it. And we would, señor, need to get another.”

“How considerable?”

“I would say...fifteen thousand American?”

“All right. I may not have to hang onto it. That’s just one of a number of things that I won’t know until the time comes.”

Saladar sat forward. “Do you need someone to watch your back, amigo?”

“Luis, I would hate to impose on your generosity yet again....”

He made a bowing gesture like a Middle Eastern pasha. “To accompany you would be an honor, señor. I will bring a gun, no?”

“You will bring a gun,” I said, “yes.”

The night was as clear and warmly windy as you might imagine of Miami, though under a sickle slice of moon, Biscayne Bay seemed uncommonly dark, with more light from the shorelines than the sky. And shorelines was right, because there were assorted islands to navigate, some—like Palm Island—man-made.

I sat with Saladar up on the flybridge of the Chris-Craft Futura, letting him play captain—these were his waters, after all, smooth waters right now, with only a gentle refreshing spray to remind us where we were.

We’d started out in a marina near Bayfront Park and cut between islands and under the MacArthur Causeway, which ran parallel to the ten-mile-wide Palm Island, coming up on the dockside down behind the old stucco mansion.

The boat Saladar provided was a good one, a rare Sport Express model dating to ’57, black hull with brown and white trim, rakish as hell, the words Black Beauty on its stern. The cabin below had built-in couches and tables, and a wellequipped galley, with forward sleeping quarters. Not a bad candidate for Morgan the Raider’s new galleon.

Cutting a dashing figure with his well-trimmed mustache and spade beard, Saladar had at my request worn black, a cap in place of his plantation hat, his shirt another of those pleated button-down jobs, his pants sporting a gaucho flare, with a .38 long-barrel revolver low on his hip, gunfighter-style.

My suit was a sharp charcoal number I picked up in Miami Beach, though the coat was a size up to help disguise the shoulder sling with .45, and to give me easy access to the razor-sharp six-inch throwing knife in the sheath strapped to my left forearm. My shirt was black, my tie midnight blue—dark enough to blend into the night, but a look suitable for just another sleazy well-off guest.

When we tied up, ours was the only boat at the little dock—no surprise, since no one lived at the mansion right now. Rows of palms bordered a back yard big enough to build half a dozen tract homes on, and there was just enough moonlight to reveal that the swimming pool was empty, cracked, and dirty looking.

The abandoned pool was halfway between here and the mansion, its neo-Spanish structure typical of the 1920’s real estate boom, a little landscaped rise putting the massive structure up on a pedestal it no longer quite deserved. In the meager moonlight, I couldn’t tell whether the house was white or beige or yellow, though the tile roof appeared to be a shade of dark green.

“Just sit up in the flybridge,” I advised Saladar.

Right now we were on the dock.

He frowned and cocked his head. “I will be out in the open, Señor Morgan.”

“Yes, and there’ll be security working this shindig. They may notice you. Be friendly and just say you are waiting for the senator.”

“What senator, señor?”

“Any senator. That’s all you’ll have to say, most likely. If they get nasty, show them your gun, then tie them up with that green tape I gave you.”

“Si, señor.”

I had a roll of duck tape in my jacket pocket, too—I’d learned in the military that you could fix anything from a gun to a jeep with that stuff, and it made excellent gags and bindings. No way to conceal that bulge...but a necessary tool tonight.

I hoped not to kill anybody on this mission—even Halaquez. This was, after all, just a party for perverts, who probably deserved a spanking but not to be shot. And why spank somebody who would only enjoy it, unless maybe it’s a beautiful willing woman?

“If you hear gunshots,” I advised the exile leader, “don’t leave until you see people streaming your way...but, man, if I’m running out in front of ’em, hold up.”

“Si, señor. Do you anticipate trouble?”

“I’m delivering it.”

“...But I am to avoid...” He frowned, calling up a phrase I’d used earlier. “...avoid the deadly force.”

“You got it, Luis. Good luck, amigo.”

“Good luck, my friend.”

Gun still tucked under my arm, I hugged the line of palms at left, moving low and slow. The mission-style mansion had only a few lights on downstairs, but plenty burning on the upper floor. I didn’t see anybody back here patrolling the grounds.

That is, not until I assumed a more normal gait and posture, moving past the empty swimming pool and walking up the concrete steps to a patio devoid of outdoor furniture. Around the mansion to my right came a burly young guy with a short military haircut. Like me, he was in a dark suit, though his was indifferently tailored, making no attempt to conceal the gun under the left armpit of his unbuttoned coat.

“Can I help you, sir?” he said, his voice a no-nonsense baritone. Like a lot of military types, he could frown at you without any wrinkling around the eyes.

“Good evening,” I said, and walked right up to him. “I just stepped out for some air.” I grinned. “Things were gettin’ a little hairy in there, know what I mean?”

But he wasn’t having any of the we’re-just-a-couple-ofregular- guys routine.

“I’ll have to see your invitation, sir.”

“Sure,” I said, and whipped the .45 out, slamming the barrel against the side of his head, catching the edge of his face, opening it up to bleed some. He went down on one side and was either out or damn near, so I risked hauling him by the feet over to some bushes before I removed and tossed away his gun (a Glock) then duck-taped his hands behind him, and his ankles. He was just coming around when I smeared the slab of tape across his mouth.

Then I knelt and whispered in his ear: “You might be able to get to your feet and waddle around like an asshole. But then my friend keeping watch back here would have to shoot you.”

His eyes, which had bulged with indignation as he craned back at me, turned wary—probably as close to fear as this apparent ex-Marine could feel—and his muttering beneath the duck-tape gag ceased.

“You just stay put, catch a little nap. You’re going to have a scar on your face that the ladies will just love.”

I would have left it at that, but the wariness of those eyes turned a nasty shade of cold, so I had to kick him in the head. It wouldn’t kill him, I didn’t think. But it did guarantee that nap I’d suggested.

I went up half a dozen cement steps onto a stoop, then in the unlocked back door into a good-size white ’30s-modern kitchen—the only light on was over the sink. Despite the party underway, this was a kitchen empty of food or any preparation thereof, with the exception of an impressive array of liquor bottles on a counter—back-up supplies, perhaps, for various wet bars around the facilities.

Though I shut the door as silently as I could, another military-trained bouncer type came in from a hallway and asked, “May I help you, sir?”

“Just getting some air.” I gave him a shaggy grin. “You need to see my invitation, I bet.”

I left him in the otherwise empty pantry.

The downstairs and its many rooms of various sizes was vacant—no furniture, no people, a light on in the hall and on the stairs, but nowhere else. I moved through like a ghost haunting the dark, musty house, which wasn’t rundown but really could stand renovation. Like the high ceilings with their vintage light fixtures, the walls were cracked here and there, with occasional nails and faded patches indicating where pictures had once hung, and the dark woodwork had seen better days. The floors were parquet and I was glad my shoes had rubber soles.

I took this tour uninterrupted—the guy who’d met me in the kitchen must have been working the front door, or perhaps somebody was standing outside, checking invitations. I didn’t see the percentage in going out there. Funny, though, for the first floor of this big, grand, if out-of-date house to be such a hollow deserted shell, while the muffled yet distinct soundtrack of jazz bleeding down from upstairs told a different story...

...pulsing, discordant minor key music, unfamiliar to me, heavy on the sax and strip-club percussion, night music with a jungle beat and savage edge.

Just within the front door was a wide stairway that went up to a landing and took a left. I went up and on the landing almost ran into a plump barefoot near-naked bald man coming down. A nationally prominent Miami financier, he was wearing a diaper and a pink baby bonnet.

He nodded at me, said, “Nature calls,” and went on his way.

This meant two things to me.

First, they served a variety of fetishes at this hullabaloo.

Second, since the baby man was unaccompanied, the downstairs (despite the lack of activity) was not off limits—the guests were free to come down to use the john. Fine. That indicated that—as long as I was perceived as just another guest—I wouldn’t get much if any hassle upstairs....

Indeed I didn’t. More security guys with guns under their dark suit coats were stationed in the hallway, off of which were half a dozen closed doors, behind which God knew what was transpiring. I counted four watchdogs, three that seemed to be maintaining their posts, and one who was strolling, just generally keeping an eye on things.

The latter stopped me, when I was about to head down the hallway to the right.

“Help you, sir?”

As it was, I knew right where I was going, thanks to the floor plan Muddy Harris had sold me. Plus, the muffled jungle jazz seemed to emanate from that direction, louder up here.

“Ballroom,” I said, nodding in the direction I’d been heading.

I assumed the ballroom would be a more general entertainment area than the sealed-off bedrooms represented.

Right then, a guy exited one of the latter in a black leather vest and matching leather shorts and shiny-chained ankles that made him hop. He had a red ball gag in his mouth, like he was biting Bozo’s nose, his hands cuffed behind him. A Latin gal in a redheaded wig and a black leather bikini with sheer black tights and very high heels was walking him along by a chain leash. They headed downstairs. I assumed, once there, she would thoughtfully help him use the head. He was, by the way, a nationally syndicated political columnist.

The watchdog said to me, “Ballroom? Double doors at the end of the hall.”

I’d known that, but said, “Thanks, buddy.”

I pushed through the double doors.

The music was almost deafening now, not a live combo, just jazz piped in via strategically positioned loudspeakers, a sax wailing above machine-gunning bongos while a thumping bass made rough love to itself. The combination of bright light and no light made my eyes go blurry for a while, but trying to focus on the spectacle before me would have been a challenge anyway. Cigar and cigarette smoke drifted like fog, and I had an idea maybe one of those dry-ice fog machines was adding to the weird, hazy atmosphere.

Here, bathed in red light, a bouffant blonde in a black corset and black stockings and garters and high heels was tying a redhead in a sheer green negligee to a tall sawhorse, the redhead’s ankles spread and bound by cord to the rough wooden legs, wrists bound to the wood as well, body encased by an elaborately constricting leather harness with a padlock dangling at the crotch, her eyes wild, screaming silently behind a knotted gag.

What this ballroom had been in its day I had no idea, but right now it resembled nothing so much as a television studio, minus the cameramen. The walls were draped in black, and a lighting grid above sent its various beams crisscrossing through the big room to take aim at four platforms, one in each corner, where bondage tableaus were being staged.

There, drenched in blue lighting, a black-haired doll with Bettie Page bangs in a black bra and black latex toreador pants was tying a curly-headed brunette wearing sheer black bikini underthings to a prone metal tubular contraption that looked like a bizarre chiropractic table, the victim’s eyes crazed above a red ball-gag, waist roped, wrists roped, ankles roped, to keep her legs wide spread.

These living pageants of pain were being performed for men who either sat in comfortable leather chairs arranged as front-row seating or simply stood for a while and moved on to the next living display, like Stations of the Cross. There was no laughter, no yelling, no taunting or encouragement for the women performing, instead an almost church-like hushed awe came off the glazed, sometimes trembling spectators, prisoners of their obsessions, or perhaps wretched souls merely pummeled into silence by the bongo-driven, sax-screaming jazz.

Across the way, in a flickering strobe, two shapely young women in bra and panties and nylons with garters—one with French maid touches and both with the kind of spike heels that could put an eye out—were wrestling, each holding the other down, then wriggling free, and trading places in taking a prisoner.

These stages were perhaps three feet off the parquet dance floor, straddling the room’s corners, the spotlights perfectly positioned, as no one was up there working them. This was a rehearsed show, well-practiced routines choreographed by a latter-day Marquis de Sade.

Opposite, in a green glow, an elaborate wooden rack with pulleys and ropes with straps held a saucer-eyed Asian beauty by the wide-spread wrists, while her face silently screamed with yet another ball-gag held in place by a head-hugging gizmo that might have come from a demented dentist, ankles held by other straps connecting to the elaborate rope set-up, and she wore nothing but black nylons and high heels, otherwise stark naked, while a German-looking pigtailed beauty in a black bra and panties and sheer black stockings and matching heels methodically went around pulling on and tightening the ropes.

Not my scene.

But I made the rounds anyway, moving from one tableau to another, until I fell in with a guy in a conservative brown suit who had a kind of State Fair demeanor. He was about forty, with a graying crew cut, and looked vaguely like Ozzie Nelson. He noticed me and I smiled, nodded, held up a hand for him to stop. He did.

“I got here late,” I said, having to work to get heard over the blare of raunchy jazz. “What’s the drill?”

“Your number’s on the back of your invitation,” he said.

“It is?”

“Yeah. When you hear it, just go over to the doors.”

“And?”

His face burst into a goofball grin. “That’s when you get your private party.”

So this ballroom was just one big waiting room. A warmup for the real deal. But just as I was thinking that I hadn’t heard any numbers read, a sultry, throaty female voice cut in over the jazz on the loudspeakers: “Number twelve. Number twelve.”

My pal turned to me and his eyes went wide and he was beaming like Christmas. That’s me! his stupid expression said.

And here I was without a number. Hell, without an invitation. What was my next move?

In making the rounds, I had already checked to see if Jaimie Halaquez was among the men waiting at this S & M Baskin Robbins. And there was no sign of him.

Maybe he was off in his private session. Or maybe he’d had it already and gone home, happily humiliated. Worse still, maybe he hadn’t shown up at all, and wouldn’t show, and I’d gone to all this trouble just to crash the kind of sex party that did nothing for me.

There were modest wet bars hugging opposite walls. I was about to order from the pretty little Latin bartender, who was in a black leather bikini outlined in silver studs, when I squinted through the smoky semi-darkness and realized who she was.

“Hiya, Gaita,” I said to her. “What’s a nice girl like you...? Skip it.”

“I have been watching you.” Her lush mouth was painted blood red, a moist glowing thing that surrounded her amused smile. “You do not stay long to look at the women as they play their games.”

“Not my thing,” I said. “I was worried about you, kid. I thought maybe Halaquez or his people had grabbed you.”

She shook her head. She got me a beer without my asking for it, waited on another guest, and when we were alone again said, “No, this is just a job I took.”

That was vague, but I didn’t push it. “Gaita, is he here? Have you spotted him? Is Jaimie Halaquez here?”

But she was looking past me at something else.

Someone else.

“There she is, señor,” she said. “The legend. The living legend.”

I turned and at once I saw her...

...moving through the ballroom with regal grace, floating like a ghost, and yet commanding attention and respect and even subservience, a dominatrix of stunning beauty and power, entirely in black, tall (but then those tightly-laced knee-high gladiator boots with the impossibly high heels contributed to the effect), in a latex gown, floor length but snapped open at the top of her sheer-dark-stockinged thighs, long black latex gloves almost to her bare shoulders, her face concealed by a mask that revealed little more than red lips and chin, with little devil horns, blonde hair spilling out onto her shoulders from under the mask.

The Consummata.

“Christ,” I said admiringly. “She looks like the Catwoman in the old Batman funny books.”

Gaita arched an eyebrow. “They say she has been around forever, señor. But does she look it? No. She is timeless. She is ageless.”

Was Gaita making fun of me? There was something mocking in her tone. Or was there? With that ever-pounding, blaring grindhouse jazz, I couldn’t tell.

My eyes were on the Consummata, who was moving slowly around her kingdom, legs flashing out of the floor-length gown, as she nodded to those subjects who dared to acknowledge her with a glance.

“Never mind her,” I said, and turned my head halfway so Gaita could hear me. “Is he here, doll? Is Halaquez here?”

“He is,” she said. Now her tone was cold. “Not long before you came in, his number came up.”

“His number is up all right,” I said. “Do you know which private room he’s in?”

“No. Only the Consummata does. You will have to deal with her.”

I shrugged. “You know what they say. You want something done, see the top man.”

So I waited till our masked hostess had made her circuit and came near where I stood at the bar, and I stepped behind her. There was enough fog and smoke to conceal the fact that I was holding the point of a very sharp knife to the base of her back.

Because of her heels, we were on the same level when I leaned in to whisper: “Pain as fantasy is one thing, Connie. But you won’t dig the real thing. Take me to Jaimie Halaquez...now.”

The hooded head nodded.

I couldn’t walk behind her like that and not attract attention, so I fell in at her side. She knew I had the knife, which I palmed, and her sideways glance and the resulting up-tilt of her chin made me think she could sense I was truly dangerous.

So together we exited the ballroom, right past a security guy, and were in that hallway off of which the private sessions were conducted behind closed doors. None of the security staff spoke to her, but they all watched her close—she was clearly the boss.

Only the guy guarding the last door on the other end of the hall said anything, when the masked woman reached for the doorknob.

“Mistress,” he said, and it sounded silly because he was another of the burr-headed Marine types, “you do know there is a session in progress.”

She merely nodded, and went on in, and I followed her.

What we saw was the best tableau yet, and the only one that I found really entertaining.

In a fairly small room otherwise stripped bare, Jaimie Halaquez was on his knees on the carpeted floor, wearing only black latex skivvies, and his hands were cuffed behind him and a ball-gag was in his mouth. His back was red and bleeding here and there, laced with maybe a dozen slashes thanks to a thin-lashed metal-tipped whip in the hands of a black-corseted young woman with very short dark hair. She had spike heels and sheer dark stockings and the familiar trappings of the Consummata’s craft. But like Gaita, she was a Latin girl.

Apparently Jaimie preferred to be beaten by his own kind.

He looked over his shoulder at us as the Consummata came in first, and swiveled around to gaze up at her like a praying man seeing a vision of the Madonna. He seemed delighted, seeing her, perhaps thinking he’d get special attention now from that fabled dominatrix.

He was half-right.

Then he saw me, and his eyes reflected a level of fear to which those play-acting girls in the ballroom could only aspire.

In her low, throaty tone, the Consummata said to her helper, “You may go,” and the little Latin chick rolled up her whip and vamoosed.

I grabbed Halaquez by the arm and hauled him to his bare feet.

“I’m taking this clown with me,” I said to my reluctant hostess. “It can be messy, or you can walk us out, and nobody gets hurt who didn’t pay to be.”

Halaquez, that big bad man, was shaking like he was freezing. Suddenly being in handcuffs and ankle chains wasn’t a good time.

The eyes in the mask holes narrowed, and the Consummata raised a “shush” finger to her lips. Without asking permission, she went to the door, cracked it open, and—before I could do a damn thing about it—she said, “Turn off machine number six. Right now.”

The security guy out there said, “Yes, mistress.”

She shut the door, turned to me and pulled off the mask. The blonde hair went with it, a wig that was part of the getup. She shook her head and the dark hair fell into place.

And I got it.

I understood.

The Consummata was no one woman, rather a character used in the spy game by our side over the years to entrap sick bastards like Halaquez and to ensnare important people with kinks in their make-up who could be interrogated and blackmailed and generally manipulated, because the hidden cameras feeding video-tape (“Turn off machine number six”) would provide the CIA with leverage the likes of which old J. Edgar Hoover himself might envy.

“I told you I was deep cover,” Kim whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You could walk away,” Kim said, “and let us handle Halaquez in our own way.”

“What,” I said, “and put this bastard back on the Company chessboard, to play more double-agent games? I intend to deliver him to the people he betrayed!”

Her gloved fists were on her latex-clad hips. “We have interrogators who make Consummata-type torture look like the playtime it is. We have truth-inducing drugs and deprivation techniques and psychological manipulation that can—”

“The only thing in this fucking skull worth knowing,” I said, and slapped Halaquez alongside the head, “is the name of the traitor in the Little Havana ranks. And they will get that out of him, and deal with it, just fine. Trust me, my love.”

There we stood in the bare little room, with the ball-gagged, handcuffed, very helpless Halaquez a mute witness to our little marital squabble, a husband with his knife and gun, a wife in her black bondage gown.

But she didn’t argue any further.

“He’s yours,” Kim said. “Let them have him.”

I had Halaquez’s arm by one hand, but I took her arm by the other and grinned. “You look pretty damn good in black, doll.”

And she grinned back at me, her mouth full and moist and red. “Do you like it? Then why don’t you kiss me?”

I did. Hard and sweet and tender and rough, mashing my lips into hers with a fierceness that was anything but role play.

“Help me haul his ass out of here,” I said.

“All right,” she said, and pulled on the Consummata mask and again became the blonde dominatrix who ran things around here.

I tagged along as she dragged the whimpering Halaquez out into the corridor and down the wide stairway, and not a single security guy gave us even a second glance. We paused on the landing.

“I’ve got a boat waiting at the dock,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed in the mask holes. “You understand I have to stay behind....”

“You need to do what you need to do,” I said ambiguously, and she towed our quaking prisoner down the rest of the way.

Before long, we had moved through the downstairs and back through the kitchen, and outside where the night had grown a little chilly, wind riffling the palms.

Now we had the handcuffed, ankles-chained Halaquez between us, me with one arm, her with the other, dragging him along like the bag of garbage he was. He was trying to scream behind the ball-gag, but only a muffled grunting emerged, like something unpleasant on the tube with the volume way down.

As we moved along the row of gently swaying palms, he finally stopped his screaming, ceased any protest, his body slumping with despair, almost as if he were asleep or dead, and we had to tow him along. It slowed us, but not much.

When got to the dock, Saladar was still seated up in the flybridge. He stood, his eyes wide and gleaming, his smile the same. Ever so slightly, he rocked with the motion of the moored craft.

“You have done it, Señor Morgan!”

“We’ve done it, Luis.” We were almost close enough to the boat to step on board now, with Halaquez between us, like parents hauling a reluctant trick-or-treater to the next house. Kim stepped to one side to remove her mask, while I held our captive loosely by one arm.

“Luis, this is Kim, my wife,” I said. “She’s a government agent. Turns out this whole S & M set-up was an enormous sting.”

Looking up at Saladar in the flybridge, Kim said, “You should know, sir, that you have the option of leaving this prisoner in my charge, for interrogation and maybe prosecution.”

Halaquez straightened suddenly and his eyes were wide with something that was not fear, and I would have sworn he was trying to smile around that ball-gag. And was he laughing?

Could he be laughing...and why?

Saladar drew the .38 from his gunfighter’s holster and shot Halaquez in the head, the report a whip crack that echoed off the water. The near-naked man in the black latex shorts went down in a pile on the dock leaving only a bloody mist behind.

Kim blurted, “What in the hell—”

I said nothing, my eyes meeting Saladar’s. He lowered the gun but did not holster it.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, bowing his head. He fumbled for words: “I am afraid...the emotion, it...seeing this traitor...forgive me....”

“I can’t, Luis,” I said.

His chin came up, his eyes implored me. “Señor....”

“You’re the real traitor, aren’t you, Luis? I suspected as much. I even thought you might try to kill Jaimie here on the voyage home, which would have confirmed it. But you didn’t want to take that risk. You figured I might read the relief in his face when he saw you, the man he reported to...the man who has looted, manipulated, sold out, and betrayed his fellow Cubans in Little Havana, for how many years?”

The gun came up, though its snout pointed down at us from his perch. His sneering smile suited his devil’s beard.

“I careened into Little Havana,” I said, “and Pedro and the others embraced me as a possible savior. You played along, but betrayed me from the start. The very start. You were part of that small group, that first night, who knew of my masquerade, and knew I’d be at the Amherst Hotel.”

He may have been a Commie, but his manner was imperial. “There is no need for this, Señor Morgan. You waste your words and your final moments. I am a soldier. I fight for a cause. You are a mercenary, the worst kind of capitalist.”

If I distracted him enough, I might get to the .45. My suit coat hung open, after all. Then there was the knife sheathed on my left forearm.

Which could I get to faster?

“I wonder,” I said. “Were you chasing Dick Best’s nonexistent new invention for your cause? Or did you only see the wealth it promised?”

But I would never know the answer, because a second whip crack cut through the night and interrupted our conversation, a shot cutting through Saladar’s shoulder in a blurt of blood, shoving him off balance, his .38 tumbling from his hand and plunking into the water like a stone.

Gaita stepped from the shadows and onto the dock, a striking, strange, barefoot vision in a metal-studded black bikini. She too had a .38, not a long-barreled one like Saladar had dropped in the bay, but a little police special that did the job just as well.

“Ladron!” she spat, and shot him in the chest.

Saladar teetered on the flybridge.

“Asesino!”

And shot him the stomach.

He lurched.

“Traidor!”

And shot him in the head.

Finally he tumbled.

Tumbled from the flybridge to the rear deck, and landed hard but surely didn’t feel it, a limp rag of a human hitting with a thud that made the boat rock slightly, a death with none of the dignity he’d worn in life as part of his disguise.

Gaita came over to me and I held her. She was crying, but it seemed more anger than anything else. She started telling me how she’d seen Kim leave the ballroom with me, and how she had gone downstairs to wait to see if we would lead Halaquez out. The little avenger had been one of the girls hired by Kim to work tonight’s affair. Bunny had been unaware, and...

I stopped her before she went into too much detail, saying, “All I care about is that you’re here, and that you shot that bastard.”

Then I told her to go, and to take the gun with her, advising that she dispose of it.

“Tell Pedro everything!” I called.

“Si, Señor Morgan!”

She disappeared into the night.

Taking his wrists while I took his feet, Kim helped me swing Jaimie Halaquez’s mostly naked corpse up and onto the rear deck of the Black Beauty, where he landed with a noisy thump next to the equally dead Saladar. We hadn’t bothered discussing the obvious—that I would dump the bodies in the ocean.

The whip cracks had sent no one running down the backyard to see what the commotion was. Perhaps nobody heard anything over the blaring strip-club jazz. And the neighbors on either side were a world away.

“Come with me,” I said to my wife. “I have this boat—it’s mine now.”

“You bought it?”

“Luis there sort of bequeathed it to me. And I have enough of a stake for us to get a good start on finding which of Sir Henry’s hiding places holds the money-truck treasure.”

We were on the dock, the wood spongy under our feet, standing down a ways from the bloody mess Halaquez had made. Nearby, on the rear deck of the craft, two corpses were sunning themselves in the dim moonlight. I had some blood spatter on me from Jaimie dying so nearby, and she had some on her black latex gown. Not as romantic a setting as I might have liked. Unusual, though....

“I have to stay,” Kim told me, though the violet eyes revealed she hated saying it. “It’s better if I clear you from the inside.... Someone’s coming.”

A single figure was running down the backyard toward us—not at a breakneck speed, just jogging, and alone. One of the security guys?

“I can handle whoever this is,” I said.

“So can I. You have time to get on the boat and out of here....”

“Wait...it’s Crowley.”

“Morgan, go!”

“No. No, he and I have a truce. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No! He didn’t.”

She and I hadn’t talked since the fed and I had made our pact.

Then Crowley—in a dark suit that was similar to those of his agents up at the mansion, only better tailored—was on the dock with us. The breeze had picked up and was flapping his unbuttoned suit coat and ruffling his wispy amber hair. He glanced almost casually in the boat and saw the bodies there. Only a minor flinch registered on those bland features.

“So those were gunshots,” he said to himself. Then to me, without a greeting, explained, “Guy on the door thought he heard gunfire down here. You do this?”

“No,” I said. “A little Cuban girl who was working for you tonight. That’s your incentive to keep the lid on.”

“Oh,” he sighed, rolling his eyes, “I plan to.... Are you all right, Miss Stacy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’ll excuse me....” He moved away from us, down the dock, and used a walkie-talkie. He told somebody—presumably the man on the door—that there was no problem on the dock, but he would check out the grounds personally. No need for backup.

Then he came back and said to me, “You planning on dumping these dead fish?”

“I am. You have a better idea?”

“No. But I’m coming with you.”

Kim pushed forward. “Walter, let’s just walk away. Let Morgan deal with this. Don’t you two have a truce?”

Crowley said, “A truce until the end of the mission.”

“Actually,” I said, “you promised me twenty-fours after I delivered Halaquez. Well, there he is.”

“Morgan, I already had Halaquez, and you stole him out of my custody. Now he’s dead and worthless as an intelligence resource. You violated our agreement. It’s null and void. Now...here’s what we’re going to do.”

And his small hand brought out the big nine millimeter from under his arm with admirable speed. I really hadn’t anticipated it.

“Just a precaution,” he said. “I can’t send you out on that boat to dump those casualties without riding along. Miss Stacy, you come, too. Morgan, I promise you I will do everything I can to help clear you. But there’ll be no getting away from me this time—and with Art Keefer gone, there’s no one to come bail you out like after Nuevo Cadiz.”

We got on the boat.

Up on the flybridge, I played captain and Kim sat next to me, and Crowley sat on the teakwood deck supervising the dead, hanging onto the rail with one hand and keeping the nine millimeter ready in the other. Not menacing about it or threatening, though he had asked me for my .45, which I’d handed over—it was in his waistband.

When the lights of Miami had disappeared behind us, and the ocean was an endless black ripple around us, touched with the barest shimmer of ivory from that slice of moon, I stopped the engines, and looked down at Crowley.

“Is this all right?”

“This will do,” he said. “Come down, both of you, and give me a hand.”

We did.

He held the gun on us as my wife in her black latex gown helped me take the corpses by their arms and legs and fling them into the drink. One at a time. The bodies floated, though as soon as the air in their lungs got replaced by water, they’d sink like stones; but right now they floated. And almost immediately I saw something chilling in the moonlight.

I pointed, and they both looked.

Nobody had to say it.

Fins.

Black fins cutting a white foamy path in the moonlighttouched blackness of the ocean.

For the first time, alarm registered in Crowley’s voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” He motioned with the gun. “Back up there, you two.”

In the flybridge in our side-by-side seats, I started the engines up, and under their throbbing, Kim whispered: “He’s the one, Morg. He’s my suspect. And something he said....”

I whispered back, “I know.”

I glanced back. Crowley was looking toward where the bodies had been floating, and sharks were now circling.

I called out: “Hey, Walter! Let me ask you something.”

He turned toward us and frowned. “No small talk! Just get us back to that dock.”

“Okay, let me ask Kim, then.” I spoke to her but my eyes remained locked with his, and my voice loud. “Did you report in to Walter about Art Keefer’s death? Is there any reason for him to know Art’s name at all?”

“No,” she said.

And I threw the knife.

It sank into his shoulder and, as part of his reaction, the gun in his hand went off, but luckily not at me or even at the teakwood deck, just off into the night, echoing, bouncing, fading.

I leapt from the flybridge onto him, knocking him back against the rail, then yanked my .45 from his waistband and shoved it in his belly.

“Drop the piece, Walter. Let Davy Jones have it.”

He did, and it barely made a splash.

Kim cut the engines. From her seat in the flybridge, she turned a grave, pitiless expression on him, looking more like the Consummata right now than my tender bride.

“That money-truck heist was a CIA black op,” I said right into his terrified face, “and I was your patsy! You killed my friends, you’ve stolen years of my life!”

“You can’t prove it!”

“I don’t have to. I’m going out and I’ll recover that missing forty mil, and turn it in, and all my sins will be forgiven. But it’s something I have to do alone...well, almost alone. I’ll have my wife with me.”

That bland mug of his finally had some genuine expression, eyes wide, nostrils flared, upper lip curled back in trembling desperation. “You take me back, you can have your twenty-four hours! You can have forty-eight!”

“No, I’m going in another direction, Walter. And this?” I yanked my knife from his shoulder and blood plumed and burbled as he screamed.

“This is where you get off,” I said, and shoved him over the back rail.

His screaming turned into a burbling thing and the white foam in the Black Beauty’s wake was red-tinged as he splashed and yelled and made a huge fuss. As I said, the moon wasn’t providing much light.

But I could see the fins coming.

And so could he.

We lay anchor off a far key and didn’t bother with swabbing the back deck of the blood of betrayers. That could wait. Right now we were celebrating our marriage with a couple of cold beers in the galley.

Sitting across from me, still in black latex, a wedding gown of sorts, she said, “What now?”

“Now we find that money. And when we find it, we can decide whether to clear my name or just spend the damn stuff.”

“I can see how you’d figure you’ve earned it by now.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded, once. “Okay. We’ll go treasure hunting. We’ll follow your namesake Sir Henry’s footsteps around the Caribbean. But there’s something else we need to do first.”

“Yeah?”

And the Consummata rose, took off her long gloves before freeing herself from the black latex gown, letting it pool and clump on the teakwood floor, then propping first one foot, then the other, on the little galley table where I sat, as she unlaced and removed the high-heel boots, stripping off the black lingerie, nose-cone brassiere, silk panties, sheer stockings, garter belt, exposing full breasts, narrow waist, flared hips, long muscular legs, attributes that required no kinky accoutrements, all that lovely pale flesh interrupted only by the dark delta that, as she settled herself on the mattress of the forward berth, parted between creamy thighs to reveal the pink portal where life begins.

Those almond-shaped violet eyes taunted me.

“Don’t you think,” she asked, “it’s about time we consummate this damn marriage?”

“Nag, nag, nag,” I said.

More Great Suspense

From the Authors of

THE CONSUMMATA!

DEAD STREET

by MICKEY SPILLANE

PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION BY

MAX ALLAN COLLINS

For 20 years, former NYPD cop Jack Stang has lived with the memory of his girlfriend’s death in an attempted abduction. But what if she didn’t actually die? What if she somehow survived, but lost her sight, her memory, and everything else she had...except her enemies?

Now Jack has a second chance to save the only woman he ever loved—

or to lose her for good.

Read on for an excerpt

from DEAD STREET—

available now at your

favorite bookstore...

It was quiet today. Overcast with a snap in the air. October was almost here and a fresh season of trouble was gearing up. Sergeant Davy Ross was standing beside an unmarked police vehicle, talking to a tall, thin guy in his fifties wearing black-frame glasses who had a white trench coat draped over his arm. In his hand was an inexpensive cardboard folder people keep receipts in and when Davy turned his head, glanced my way and said something, I knew they were talking about me.

Hell, I was the living anachronism, the old firehorse they couldn’t get out of his stall, a dinosaur at fifty-six. Had to show up at home base the first of every month just to keep an eye on things.

Sergeant Ross grinned while we were shaking hands and said, “You got a fan from Staten Island, Jack. You remember that place?”

“Other side of the river, isn’t it?”

“Roger. I think it still belongs to New York City, though.” He paused and nodded toward the thin guy. “This is Dr. Thomas Brice.”

When I took the doctor’s hand, he said, “I’m a vet.”

“What war?”

He grinned and the eyes behind the specs were alert and blue. “No, I mean I’m an animal doctor, Captain Stang. Don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”

“No sweat,” I told him. “I’m an animal lover myself.”

Davy Ross cut in with, “You guys have your conversation. I’m going back to work.”

We both told him so long and watched for a few seconds as he walked away.

When Dave went through the door, I said, “What’s all this about, Doctor? You know, I’m not on the payroll anymore. I draw a pension.”

Brice stared at me for a couple of seconds, his eyes reading me as though he were examining a strange breed of dog. It was an expression I had seen a lot of times before, but not from someone who didn’t want to kill me.

Softly, Brice said, “Is there somewhere we can sit down? You must have a coffee shop around here somewhere.”

I told him Billy’s was down the avenue two blocks, an old cop’s hangout that was about to go into the chopper when the station house shut its doors. Billy was finally going to have to go home and eat his wife’s cooking for a change.

Two of the detectives from the other shift were winding up their tour and waved at me. Both of them eyed Thomas Brice with one of those cop glances that take in everything in a blink and they both had the shadow of a frown when they realized he was one of those clean civilian types and figured he probably was some distant relation of mine.

I winked and nodded back. They seemed relieved.

Over coffee and a bagel lathered with cream cheese, I said, “I haven’t been to Staten Island since I was a kid.” My eyes were cold and I scanned his face carefully.

“I understand,” he told me.

“Neither do I remember ever having a case that involved that area.”

His tongue ran over his lips lightly and his head bobbed again. “I know that too. I did some research on you and...”

“I’m clean,” I interrupted.

“Yes, I know. You have a lot of commendations.”

“A lot of scars, too.”

I took a bite of the bagel and sipped at my coffee.

“It’s a tough job, Captain,” Brice said quietly.

“But nothing ever happened on Staten Island.”

He was staring back at me now. I knew my eyes were growing colder.

“Captain, you’re wrong,” the doctor told me softly. “Something did happen on Staten Island.”

I laid the bagel on the plate and under the table my fingers were interlaced, each hand telling the other not to reach for the gun on my belt. I didn’t wear the shoulder holster with the old .45 Colt automatic snugged in it anymore. I was a civilian now. Still authorized by the state of New York to pack a firearm. But I wasn’t on the Job anymore. Caution, I kept telling myself. Easy. Play this hand carefully.

Something was going down.

And the doctor was reading me. His hands stayed on the tabletop.

For several seconds his eyes watched mine, but they were encompassing every feature of my face. Then Dr. Thomas Brice broke the ice. It didn’t tinkle like a dropped champagne glass—it crashed like a piece from a glacier. “Long time ago, you were in love with a woman named Bettie...”

A pair of tiny muscles twitched alongside my spine. It wasn’t a new sensation at all. Twice before I had felt those insidious little squirms and both times I had been shot at right afterward.

He was saying, “She was abducted and stuffed into a van but an alert had gone out minutes before and a police car was in pursuit. The chase led to the bridge over the Hudson River where the driver lost control, went through the guardrails and over the fencing and fell a hundred and thirty feet into the water.”

My hand was on the .45 now. My thumb flipped off the leather snap fastener and eased the hammer back. If this was a pathetic jokester he was about to die at this last punch line.

Softly, I said, “There was an immediate search party on the site. They located the wreckage. The driver was dead. There was no other body recovered.”

The doctor’s expression never changed, the eyes behind the lenses unblinking. He let a moment pass and told me, “Correct, Captain, no other body.”

Something seemed to jab into my heart. I waited, my forefinger curling around the trigger.

He added, “The next morning, right after dawn, one of the dogs in the cages at a veterinary clinic began whimpering strangely. It awakened the doctor—”

“A doctor named Brice?”

“Yes. But not this Brice—my late father. I was around, but not a vet yet. May I continue?”

I nodded.

“Anyway, my father got up to see what the trouble was. The animal was fine, but it was whimpering toward the rear lawn that bordered on the Hudson River. My father didn’t quite know what was going on, but went with that dog’s sensitivity and walked out the back.”

Somehow, Dr. Brice read my expression. He knew that if there was a downside to his story, he was never going to finish it....

“There was a young girl there. Alive.”

Alive!

“One arm was gripped fiercely around an inflated inner tube.”

He must have seen my arm move. Somehow he knew there was no tense finger around the hammer of a deadly .45 automatic any longer.

“The night before, we had heard about the altercation in the city, and we both knew at once that this girl was the one who had been abducted. The late news mentioned that it was a Mob snatch, as they called it, because sources within the NYPD indicated she had information that could seriously damage a major Mafia group.”

“So you didn’t report it,” I stated.

“Fortunately not,” he answered quickly. “My father checked with one of his friends on the local police force, who told him that the heat was on like never before and whatever that girl had could break up crime outfits from the city to Las Vegas.”

“But nothing ever happened,” I said. Something had rasped my voice. It sounded low and scratchy.

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” Brice told me.

“Why not?”

He let a few seconds pass before he said, “Because the girl...and she was a girl, twenty, twenty-one...had no memory at all of anything that had happened before the car crash.”

And it was my turn to take a deep breath. “Nothing.”

Dr. Brice shook his head.

I felt like vomiting. “Damn!”

“And that’s not the only thing,” he added.

“Oh?”

The eyes narrowed behind the lenses. “More than her memory was gone, Captain—she was blind. A terrible blow to her head had rendered her totally sightless. She would never be able to identify anybody...or be able to remember her past.”

“So she was no threat to the Mob....”

“Come on, Captain. You know different. Until an identifiable body turned up, those people would never stop looking.”

“That was more than twenty years ago,” I reminded him.

Brice nodded slowly, his eyes on mine.

Before he could say anything, I let the words out slowly. “Where is she?”

He didn’t tell me. He simply said, “That’s why I’m here.”

I knew there was a quiver in my voice when I asked, “Is she still alive?”

He nodded a yes and my pulse rate went up ten points.

She was alive! My Bettie was alive! I didn’t care how she looked or how she remembered things, what she could see or couldn’t see; my Bettie was alive and that’s all that counted.

The old waitress came over, cleaned up what I had left of my bagel and refilled my coffee cup. I dropped in a couple of Sweet’N Lows and stirred them around. She squeezed my shoulder like she always did, and when she had walked away I asked the vet, “Where, Brice?”

“Safe,” he told me.

“I didn’t ask you that.” There was an edge in my voice now.

“Can I finish the story?”

It was moving too damn slowly, but I wasn’t leading the parade this time. It was his fifteen minutes of glory and, unless I wanted to risk slapping him around and losing his good will, I had to let him spell it out his way.

This is what he said:

“My father raised her. He nurtured her, cared for her in every way, educated her, made her self-sufficient in every manner imaginable. She was like a daughter to him.”

“And a sister to you?”

Brice nodded. Then he leaned forward. “But there was always a little twitch in her memory, so to speak, that indicated she had a past somewhere. Not that it ever bothered anybody. In time even that went away.”

“Did it?” I asked. “You’re here now.”

His smile was thinner than he was. “Very astute, Captain.”

“Where is she?” I asked again.

“Safe,” he said again.

“Where?”

“A prelude first...friend?”

“Make it quick. Friend.”

“My father knew he was dying. The disease was incurable, but it gave him time to accomplish what he had to do.”

“Oh?”

“His priority was to make sure Bettie was well taken care of. She had to be protected.” He paused and added, “Well protected.”

I nodded again, wondering where all this was leading.

He asked me, “Have you heard of Sunset Lodge in Florida?”

I bobbed my head quickly. “Sure.”

He waited, wanting a further explanation.

“It’s an SCS place.”

When he scowled, I added, “Special Civil Service. A lot of the retired civil servants from the big city wind up their retirements there. Now they got the Jersey troops and the firemen in for neighbors.”

“What else have you heard?” he asked me.

“Hell, they even have their own fire stations down there and the old cops are playing around with the kind of equipment we used to beg for. Man, the power of retirement voters.”

“Florida loves them,” Brice told me. “The cops all carry badges, legal but generously given, have permits to carry weapons; the firemen have all the best equipment and a real playground to spend their retirement years in.”

“Who pays for all this?”

He didn’t tell me. He simply said, “You’d be surprised.”

We stared at each other across the table.

I finally said, “And she’s there.”

Crazy as it sounded, I knew what he was telling me was the truth and small shivers were beginning to run up my back.

She was alive...!