The Stingray Shuffle Page 7

  The owner stuck his head through the beads. “What is it?”

  “Some nosy person asking a lot of questions about books. Really suspicious.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Says he’s a publisher.”

  “You idiot! Of course it’s a publisher! This is a fucking bookstore. Just get rid of him.”

  “Right.” The employee uncovered the receiver and had a short conversation, jotting something on a scrap of paper before hanging up.

  “What did they say?”

  “They wanted an author to do a book signing here.”

  The boss started laughing. “Here?” He broke up again. “That’s a riot!”

  The employee started laughing, too.

  The laughing gradually tapered off, and the boss caught his breath. “How’d you get rid of him?”

  “Said Tuesday would be fine.”

  “What! We can’t have a book signing here!”

  “You just told me to get rid of him. You didn’t say no signing.”

  The boss pulled a gold bullet of coke from his shirt pocket, stuck it under his nose. “Who’s this author, anyway?”

  The employee checked his piece of paper. “Ralph Krunkleton.”

  The boss sniffled and bunched his eyebrows in concentration. “Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton. Where have I heard that name before? Hmmm…”

  The others continued slicing books.

  “…Ralph Krunkleton, Ralph Krunkleton…” The boss looked down at the table full of paperbacks. “Oh, my God! Not Ralph Krunkleton!”

  “Who’s Ralph Krunkleton?”

  “The guy who wrote this book!” The owner snorted up again, and the coke began marching him in a circle. “We don’t need this kind of attention! We’ve worked hard to develop this book as our code title—one of the worst-selling novels in history, one that no law-abiding customer would ever, ever ask for. A signing is the last thing we need—it’ll screw up the entire procedure. And there’ll be press, TV…”

  An employee slit into another paperback. “We’ll need snack mix.”

  9

  At the end of the twentieth century, major drug cartels were displaying enormous ingenuity and limitless finances. Cocaine was found encased in concrete posts, dissolved in soda pop, injected in breast implants.

  But nobody expected what was discovered one cool morning high up the mountains twenty-eight kilometers west of Cartagena. Police were tipped off by farmers in a remote village, who said three strangers had moved into an old warehouse, never came out and appeared to subsist entirely on takeout delivered from God knew where. They heard drilling sounds at night.

  There was no sign of the three men when the policia swarmed the warehouse in a coordinated predawn raid and found precision tools, welding tanks and Russian engineering manuals. But nobody was looking at that stuff. They were staring up at The Tube—the arc-welded, double-hulled, twenty-foot-wide steel cylinder running the entire length of the building. It couldn’t possibly be what they thought it was, not at this altitude.

  Military experts soon confirmed their worst suspicions: a nearly complete military-class submarine that could dive to three hundred feet and carry ten tons of cocaine. The sub was to be built, then dismantled and trucked to the coast for reassembly. The estimated cost: twenty-five million U.S. dollars. The police had to shake their heads with grudging admiration. This was even more ambitious than the previous high-water mark in 1995, when the Cali Cartel attempted to purchase a used Soviet navy sub before the deal was uncovered and scuttled. But that was dismissed as a grandiose scheme doomed from the start. This, on the other hand, was frighteningly close to fruition. There was a wave of relief. Thank heaven they’d arrived when they did.

  A police captain with as much imagination as the cartels deflated the mood. “How do we know there aren’t other subs already in the water?”

  A tall, rugged man in a white linen suit stood on a sandy beach near the southern end of the Windward Islands and looked out to sea with binoculars. It was a beautiful horseshoe harbor of clear blue water, the shore ringed with quaint pastel buildings. Behind the man, the island rose quickly through coconut palms and a rain forest to the volcanic peak of Mount St. Catherine, the highest point in Grenada.

  The man kept his binoculars trained on the water and for some reason remembered reading that Grenada had 154 TV sets per thousand residents. He looked a little like Gene Hackman and wore an expression of grave concern. Nobody knew the man’s name, but they all called him Mr. Grande, head of the infamous Mierda Cartel.

  The cocaine business had always been a tricky proposition, and everyone knew the risks. The absurd amounts of money made it worthwhile. Except for the Mierda Cartel. It was the sixty-eighth-largest cartel in the world, which was last place, and it was broke. The other cartels fought extradition; the Mierda gang was hounded by bill collectors.

  Everyone naturally assumed that all cartels were extremely rich and ruthless, and the residents of Grenada initially treated their hometown traffickers with the appropriate mixture of respect and fear. But a different picture soon emerged. The cartel was running up tabs all over town. Nobody wanted to say anything at first. They had heard the stories. But when the cartel couldn’t pay for transmission work on a Mercedes, and the mechanic impounded the car—and was still alive a week later—everything changed. The merchants started getting nudgey, and the cartel began avoiding town.

  It was eating at the Mierda organization. The newspaper stories touting the triumphs of the other cartels only rubbed it in. The cocaine business was an intensely competitive one, with a pecking order as rigid as the seating chart at the Oscars. Word of the submarine discovered in the Colombian highlands had reached Grenada, and it got under Mr. Grande’s skin.

  This called for a sit-down.

  Mr. Grande drove his golf cart up the winding road to cartel headquarters, a top secret mountain hideaway concealed in the thickest part of the rain forest, near the top of Mount St. Catherine. He stopped at the mailbox and removed a stack of threatening collection notices. His men were already waiting in the study, submachine guns hanging from shoulder straps. They stood when Mr. Grande entered, and they sat when he sat. When they did, one of the submachine guns accidentally went off, a quick burst of bullets whistling across the room into the saltwater aquarium.

  “Who did that?” demanded Mr. Grande, clownfish flopping on the floor.

  They pointed at Paco.

  “Give it!”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  Paco shuffled across the room, head down, and handed the weapon to Mr. Grande, who stuck it in the bottom drawer of his desk and closed it.

  Mr. Grande then held up the newspaper with the submarine article. He slapped the page with the back of his hand. “This is what we should be doing!” He picked up the phone.

  After a brief conversation, he hung up and turned to his men. “Our problems are solved.”

  Mr. Grande had phoned the cartel that lost the submarine. He knew the raid had put them behind schedule, and he made a persuasive argument to subcontract his own boys for rush delivery of a new thirty-million-dollar sub.

  “Where are we going to get a sub?” asked Paco.

  “Estupido!” yelled Mr. Grande.

  The men crowded around as their boss rolled his office chair over to the computer and logged onto Yahoo! Five minutes later, he stood at the printer. Out came a crosshatch schematic blueprint of the submarine H. L. Hunley. What attracted Mr. Grande was the Hunley’s elegant simplicity.

  “We can build one of these with our eyes closed,” he said. “Then we’ll have all the money we need…and some respect!”

  The phone rang.

  “What now?” said Mr. Grande.

  It was the power company.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he screamed in the receiver. “I could have you killed just for saying that! One word from me and your whole family will be blown up!…Hello? Hello?…”

/>   Mr. Grande put down the phone, and the lights went out.

  A month later, the Mierda Cartel packed themselves into a convoy of pickup trucks and drove down from their mountain headquarters to the coastal capital of St. George’s. The curious townspeople came out of the shops and restaurants as the cartel backed a trailer up to the water. The residents faintly recognized the object on the trailer but couldn’t quite place it.

  One of the cartel stood knee-deep in the surf and motioned to the driver, who watched in the side mirror as he backed up.

  “Keep coming. Keep coming. Keep coming…” He held up a hand. “Stop!”

  They untied the restraining straps, and a large, bulbous object slid gently into the water. Then they opened a hatch on top and the entire cartel got inside except Mr. Grande, who stood on the beach focusing binoculars.

  The onlookers inched forward and formed a semicircle around their local kingpin. Mr. Grande didn’t look at them, but he knew they were there, and he swelled with pride. Finally, respect.

  The craft began its maiden voyage, moving under its own power at modest speed until it reached deeper water and submerged, just the periscope showing. The impressed crowd murmured.

  Mr. Grande had become supremely confident the moment he saw the H. L. Hunley on the Internet. He immediately recognized the shape and knew exactly where he could lay his hands on something watertight to use for the pressure hull. He cajoled Grenada Power & Light to turn the electricity back on and talked a local merchant into extending credit one last time. “You won’t be sorry.”

  The cartel took delivery of the “hull” the next afternoon and worked round the clock with drills, jigsaws and rivet guns, carefully following their computer diagrams. They attached hand cranks to underwater paddles with axles fitted through greased nylon gaskets in the hull, and they employed a similar shaft design for the rudder. They bought plastic fifty-gallon outboard gas containers for ballast tanks, which also acted as the keel. A shuttlecock valve let water into the tanks, and an air-mattress foot pump pushed it out. And finally, they installed a periscope, a hatch and a series of portholes in the hull, which was a fiberglass septic tank.

  Mr. Grande’s smile broadened as he watched through the binoculars. The crowd’s approval grew louder until cheering broke out. The sub moved into deeper and deeper water, until the periscope finally disappeared. Bubbles. Then nothing.

  They waited.

  The reason for the Hunley’s simplicity: It was the first submarine ever used in combat. Built during the Civil War, it was launched off Charleston in 1864.

  The Mierda Cartel couldn’t read English, so they didn’t know the vintage or history of the Hunley, but they had no problem with the diagrams. They followed them perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact, and, like its historic predecessor, the cartel’s sub promptly sank on its maiden voyage with all hands.

  Mr. Grande lowered his binoculars. “Damn.”

  The crowd was silent. The cartel owed all of them money, but they decided it was an awkward time to bring it up, and they parted and let Mr. Grande pass through unmolested.

  10

  A pink Cadillac sat quietly at the end of an empty parking lot, catching shade from some jasmine. Lenny sat alone in the car, head back over the headrest, exhaling smoke straight up, flicking the nub of a roach out on the pavement. He turned and squinted toward the long, bright-white building with the string of Mediterranean arches facing some train tracks. The building had twin cupolas in the middle, topped with Moorish domes, and between them, curved over the main arch: ORLANDO.

  “Will you come on!” yelled Lenny.

  Serge’s shout came back faintly: “A couple more seconds!” Lenny watched him in the distance, standing in the middle of the train tracks, snapping photos of the back of a departing Amtrak heading south to Kissimmee. A handful of weary passengers had just gotten off and carried suitcases across the pavement toward the depot. Otherwise, the place was deserted, the Florida sun directly overhead without clouds. No wind. Crickets, sandspurs. The stagnant heat seemed to have weight.

  “Will you come on! I’m getting something on the tracker!”

  Serge took a couple parting shots, then sprinted back to the car and vaulted into the passenger seat without opening the door.

  “What the hell were you doing?” asked Lenny.

  “I’ve decided to completely dedicate my life to the study of trains and things that look like trains.”

  Lenny started up the engine. “I knew I should never have asked you about trains. Now we’ll never catch up with that briefcase.”

  “This was on the way to the briefcase—sort of. And besides, we’ve got them cornered with the five million.”

  “Really?” said Lenny. “I thought this was just fucking around. Not that I’m against that.”

  Serge pointed his arms in two different directions. “The logical escape routes are Daytona and Miami. But the tracker’s pinging due east, which can only mean the port and the cruise ships out of the country. The next one leaves Friday.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have the schedule memorized,” said Serge. “I go over my own escape routes all the time. To survive in this state, you have to think like the French Resistance.”

  Lenny took the entrance ramp for I-4, and Serge stood to snap a final elevated photo back toward the train station. He sat down and stowed the camera. “I can’t believe nobody visits that depot anymore. They’re all too busy heading for the Tower of Terror or the Aerosmith roller coaster. What’s happening to us as a people?…”

  “They have an Aerosmith roller coaster?”

  “…The depot’s barely changed since it was built in 1926. This is where the town began, for heaven’s sake. People should be flocking here whether they’re taking a train or not. But now the only people who still come are forced to after making a horrible mess of their lives through a series of gross miscalculations until they can’t scrape together airplane money.”

  “Now I can see how you got arrested that time in that old train car.”

  “You mean the first time.”

  “There were others?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s like life is out to get me,” said Serge, reaching in the glove compartment for his novelty 3-D glasses.

  “Flashback?” asked Lenny.

  Serge nodded, slipping on the glasses. “Courtroom scene.”

  “You ever watch The People’s Court?” asked Lenny.

  “Shhh,” said Serge. “The flashback is starting…”

  One year earlier, courtroom 3C, Palm Beach County Judicial Circuit.

  The judge levied a stiff fine and probation on a retired banker for killing a prize swan with a pitching wedge at a local golf course.

  “Bailiff, call the next case.”

  “Number six-nine-seven-two-five, People versus Serge A. Storms.”

  “Will the defendant please rise…” The judge stopped midsentence and took off his glasses. “Back already?”

  “I can explain, Your Honor,” said Serge. “This is all a tragic miscarriage. A mockery of justice. If what I did was wrong, I don’t wanna be right!…”

  “Your Honor,” interrupted the prosecutor. “The defendant is charged with burglary, trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and vandalism, to wit: applying paint to an object of historic national importance.”

  “What does that mean in English?” asked the judge. “Spray-painting graffiti? Throwing paint balloons?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what exactly?”

  “Uh, um…”

  “You’re mumbling,” said the judge.

  “He was in a historic railroad car, restoring some detail work that was chipping.”

  The bailiff handed the judge an evidence bag marked “Exhibit A,” an extra-fine camel’s-hair brush with dried gold paint on the tip.

  “There I was,” said Serge, “minding my own business…”

  “Your Honor,” said the public defender. “
This is really a mental-health case. The defendant needs professional care. He shouldn’t be in criminal court at all.”

  “Why is he in my court?” asked the judge. “As I understand it, this all happened in Miami’s jurisdiction, at the…” He paused and flipped through some papers. “The Gold Coast Railroad Museum.”

  “Your Honor, this violates the conditions of the probation that you placed upon him last week for breaking into the railroad car at the Flagler Museum, so it throws it back here,” said the prosecutor. “Most disturbing is the resisting-arrest charge.”

  “What’s that about?” asked the judge.

  The prosecutor picked up a copy of the police report. “When officers arrived, the suspect was applying paint in the dining compartment of an antique passenger car. When said officers attempted to effect arrest, the suspect dove from the car and ran across the museum, where he proceeded to climb into a nearby locomotive engine, refused to come down, and began singing, and I quote: ‘Riding that train. High on cocaine…’”

  The judge ran his fingers through his hair and turned to the public defender. “Is your client on drugs?”

  “That’s just the problem, Your Honor. He refuses to take his drugs.”

  “That locomotive was number one fifty-three, Florida East Coast Railway,” said Serge, “which pulled a rescue train out of the Keys during the Labor Day hurricane of 1935…”

  The judge held up a hand for Serge to stop and turned to the public defender. “So what’s with all the trains, anyway?”

  Serge kept talking in the background: “…and that railroad car I was painting was the famous Ferdinand Magellan, built in 1928 and later retrofitted with armor plating and bulletproof glass for none other than the president of the United States!…”

  “Your Honor, Mr. Storms, like so many other unfortunate Americans, is battling severe mental illness. He’s going through a phase right now.”

  “A phase?”

  “…You see,” said Serge, “this was in the days before Air Force One, when the president had to travel by rail. The Magellan was first used by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942. And it was on the rear platform of this very car that, on November 3, 1948, a grinning Harry Truman held up the Dewey Defeats Truman newspaper in the now-famous photograph…”