Warriors

CHAPTER 19

Stokely Jones and his business partner Luis Gonzales-Gonzales were huddled over a small table in the rear of the joint, a notorious Miami waterfront dive called Marker 9. This was one week after the attack on Arlington, and they were waiting for Harry Brock. Brock, like every other CIA operative on the planet, had been called back to Langley for briefings on the ongoing search to identify the perpetrators.

He’d arrived back in Miami two days ago but was mum on the subject of the drone attack whenever Stoke asked him about it. Just gave him a look of Don’t go there, man.

Stoke didn’t take that as a sign of progress. He glanced at his watch. Harry was CIA, yeah, okay, but his track record for promptness, Stoke had long believed, was sketchy.

At one point in its shady history, Marker 9 had been a wildly popular mob bar. Capo di tutti capo fatti Santo Trafficante out of Tampa ruled his South Florida roost from a bar stool there for nearly a decade. Then in the 1950s it was a cop joint. Crooked cops mostly. A big corruption scandal had resulted in the grisly revenge murder of two dirty vice squad detectives on the premises in the summer of 1959.

Now the place was crowded with stevedores, day laborers, commercial fishermen, charter boat skippers, the occasional hooker who’d forsaken all pretense of hope, and the simple, straightforward, clear, sweet, and blue-sky alcoholics.

The Mark, yeah, that’s what the local rum-dums called it now. The place had a nautical thing going on, “atmosphere,” as the hoi polloi liked to call it. Each and every battered table had a solid brass ship’s lantern in the center, either red or green glass, port or starboard, take your pick, Cap.

The conditioned air inside the Mark was choked with reefer and cigarette smoke; from the rear wafted the pungent aroma of fried fish and the stink of stale beer and powerful bathroom disinfectant. A colorful old Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner was deafening: Neil Diamond crooning “Love on the Rocks,” Elvis, the Ramones, whatever. The sharks shooting nine-ball at the threadbare table made a point of hammering balls into the corner pockets and then slamming the rack down on the slate as hard as they possibly could.

That kind of place. Go on TripAdvisor for Miami? Definitely wouldn’t recommend a romantic evening for two with a view at Marker 9.

Stokely and his business partner, Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, were not regular customers. Not that anyone in the place was sober enough or cared enough to take any notice of the two of them. Even if they did, they wouldn’t say anything. Blind drunk or bored stiff, the Mark’s clientele had seen it all, or imagined they had, anyway. That’s why Stoke liked the old Mark. Under the radar. Way, way under the radar.

“Una mesa para dos, con ocho cervezas muy frías,” Luis had said to the guy on the door when they first walked in.

The Cuban waiter guy laughed and Stoke said to Luis, “Did you just say, ‘A table for two and eight cold beers?’ ”

“It’s a joke, okay,” Sharkey said to Stoke. “Don’t worry, he gets it.”

“Oh, it’s a joke,” Stoke said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He loved the little guy.

Sharkey reached up and put his hand on Stoke’s shoulder. It felt like a chunk of concrete.

Sharkey, as Luis was popularly known, was pretty tough for a one-armed little hombre. Cuban. Stringy. But a guy who looked like he’d need only one arm to take you out. People naturally stepped out of his way as they made their way back to the table at the rear. Luis and his compadre, a handsome African-American gentleman named Stokely Jones Jr. Stoke was one of the larger individuals on the planet. The man was a freelance counterterrorist who sometimes liked to go by the name of Sheldon Levy when the tactical situation called for it.

Like tonight: Lieutenant Sheldon Levy, United States Coast Guard. Stoke had used the Levy nom de guerre many times before. Its absurdity, he believed, made it all the more plausible. Yeah, he knew he “really didn’t look all that Jewish” was what he would say to people whom he wished to mislead. And they laughed to show they got the joke and believed him.

Stokely Jones was an American warrior in his late middle age or early-onset maturity, depending on who you asked. He was a former Navy SEAL, former New York Jet (one season), and ex — NYPD cop. Pretty impressive résumé. He was a man of whom it was often said, by his closest friend, Alex Hawke, that he was “about the size of your average armoire.”

Whatever.

He was black. He was big. He was bad.

Deal with it.

Stoke’s life story was that he had gotten himself caught dealing product on a Harlem street corner at age seventeen. Judge gave him a choice, Rikers Island or the U.S. Navy. Stoke manned his ass up and took a Greyhound bus out to Coronado in California, blew through the SEAL training program, then did two combat tours as a bona fide Navy SEAL. Back home, he played one season at right tackle with the Jets, got injured in the season opener, and joined the NYPD, rising to the rank of detective, working goodfellas all the hell over Brooklyn.

One day he’d saved the life of a kidnap victim, pulling a beat-to-shit Brit from a burning warehouse in Bed-Stuy where some Jersey mob punks had left him handcuffed to a steam pipe to die. The man he saved that day just happened to be the sixth-richest man in England. A fellow descended from pirates, as it turned out, who went by the name of Lord Alexander Hawke.

The sky outside the bar was black, and hard rain thumped down on the tin roof and rapped its knuckles against the windowpanes.

The Christmas-like glow of all the red and green lamps inside the joint lent the place a nautical air that seemed superfluous in light of its location fifty yards from one of the world’s busiest and, from a criminal standpoint, most notorious harbors. Not to even mention a hard-core clientele that literally reeked of the oil-slick sea and assorted finny denizens of the deep.

It was almost midnight.

Outside, a tropical squall was passing through, pissing rain inside the wind, the leading edge of a cold front moving up over Biscayne Bay from the northern Florida Keys. Key Largo rain moving over Miami battered the corrugated tin roof overhead so loudly Stoke had to shout to be heard by his buddy three feet across the table.

Luis Gonzales-Gonzales had lost his arm to a bull shark who’d decided he needed it more than the Sharkman did. Better known around the Boca Chica docks ever since as Sharkey, he pulled his fish-gut-stained yellow slicker tighter around his bony shoulders, shivering so bad you could see it.

“Damn, they got the AC in here freezing my ass off, boss.”

This skinny little one-armed Cuban had become something of a dandy lately, a man who chain-smoked yellow, purple, and crimson cigarettes with gold bands at the business end. He was acquiring a lot of Miami and South Beach style notes since moving up from his bonefishing gig in the Dry Tortugas. No socks with his two-tone shoes, like this was Palm Beach or something, rolling up the sleeves of his white linen blazer and drinking Gran Patrón Platinum instead of Bacardi, that kind of thing.

His frame appeared strung together with gristle and long, ropy ligaments. To look at his outside, you’d never guess at the layers of strength and sheer guts deep inside him. So what if a shark had ripped his right arm off? You dealt with it, that’s all. You are the shark. You never stop swimming. Because if you stop, you die. That’s what he told everybody who asked, anyway.

Tonight he wore his signature yellow porkpie hat, strategically dipped below his bushy black left eyebrow. Beneath the brim, he had darting, shiny black eyes that didn’t miss much. Beneath the straight nose, a neatly trimmed little black mustache. His skin was weathered a nutty copper color from decades spent as a bonefishing guide out of Cheeca Lodge down in Islamorada.

The Atlantic Bar at Cheeca, that was where he’d met his employer and companion for this evening, the huge man mountain that Sharkey revered if not loved with all his great big Latin heart.

The giant sipping a tall Diet Coke across the table was the nearest thing he had to a friend in this world. Stoke was his boss at Tactics International in Miami. They had a little office over in the Grove, but most of the government work they did was outside, underwater, or undercover. They operated mainly in South Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Latin America, but they went anywhere in the world their services were needed. Always sailing under a black flag, as Hawke would put it.

Tactics did frequent errands and odd jobs for the U.S. government — hostage rescue, regime changes, running traces — all of them one hundred percent off-the-grid black ops, and near seventy percent were courtesy of a CIA field agent named Harry Brock.

Shark thought Brock was frequently an obnoxious dick, and he knew Stoke did, too. But they all tolerated him because, A, he was their number one client and, B, he was a former marine and a battle-hardened CIA warrior who had personally killed more bad guys than most battalions.

Stoke had once told Sharkey something he never forgot. That God was on the side of the big battalions. And he was right. For Luis, that meant God was on Harry’s side. And any friend of God’s was for damn sure a friend of el señor himself, Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, the dude so nice they named him twice.

Sharkey looked at the Navy SEAL watch the boss had given him and frowned. Harry was late. Very late. Typical. He looked at the boss man and shook his head. “Harry’s late,” Shark said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Ain’t like him, boss, is it? Man is usually always so prompt. And courteous. Surprised he hasn’t texted or called to say, ‘Sorry, running a little late.’ ”

“What can I tell you, Shark? Harry was born with his ass on upside down, that’s all. Ain’t always his fault.”

“Official Mayor of Crazy Town, is all I’m sayin’.”

Stoke smiled and looked over at the pool table, watching a snark in cutoff Levi’s rack ’em up. Luis felt a shimmer of relief. Shit just didn’t get to Stoke like it did to Sharkey himself. Or even if it did, man never showed nothing. Man absorbed the blows, all the bad stuff, owned it, stowed it in the bilge, somewhere deep, and kept moving, a human quicker-picker-upper if there ever was one.

“So tell me. How’s life in the newlywed fast lane, Shark?” Stoke said, his voice a rumble to challenge the thunder above. “Second honeymoon down in Key West? Little Palm Island, right? That pretty little bride of yours treating you okay, taking care of business?”

“Oh, yeah, boss,” Luis said. “I spent at least a couple of hours defrosting the fridge last night, or ‘foreplay,’ as my lady likes to call it.”

“Sharkman,” Stoke said, his white-toothed grin producing a deep rumble of laughter, “that’s funny.”

“Hilarious, right? So then the other night Maria she ask me, say, ‘Luis, how many women you sleep with? Tell me the truth, Luis.’ Know what I told her?”

“I can’t even guess.”

“I tell her, ‘Only you, baby. All the others? They kept me awake all night long.’ ”

Stoke laughed out loud again and slapped the table with his ham-sized palm, hard enough to levitate the glasses and china plates a couple of inches off the table.

“What are you, Shark, like filling in for Jay Leno, now? Guest-hosting Saturday Night Live?” he said to the snappily dressed little guy in the porkpie hat. No matter what Shark said, marriage obviously agreed with him. He was one happy cat.

“You know what I discover, Señor Stokely? All those years down in the Keys, a poor Marielito, a Cubano boy finding bonefish for rich white people? Even President Bush at Cheeca that one time I tole you? Man. I never knew nothing about the real world back then, you know, how to be a real man in it. You know what I mean? But now? Working for you all these many years?”

“Tell me.”

“I discover that maybe I only got one arm? But, baby, let me tell you something. I got two balls. And, you know what, they both solid brass.”