Exactly one hundred years later, at the end of November, the last month of the official hurricane season, the village chief brought out the ceremonial dog after dinner. It had been a light hurricane season for the islands, and there had been no need to press the dog into service. He lived the good life in his own hut and had grown quite fat on the grateful and excessive amount of food the island people provided. Tonight, however, the chief had a feeling in his bones. The sky was strange, the fishing futile, and the birds were flying into things.
Following a dinner of stewed mollusk, the chief arrived with the sacred dog in a bamboo cage. The dog was dressed in his ceremonial costume. The inhabitants of the island were a carefree people, and the only thing they wore was a thong woven from palm fronds and bound tightly between the legs. The dog’s costume was a smaller version.
The chief placed the cage atop a tree stump and said the magic incantations. He lifted the door of the cage and the dog scampered under a bush and started chewing off the painful thong. There was no dance of the dog in the village circle. The chief raised his arms and decreed that the sacred dog had spoken: All was safe on the island.
Shortly after midnight, the village was awakened by a newly formed hurricane ripping huts off their stilts. Everyone was able to climb to safety, due to well-timed panic and mad scrambling. But dog was back on the menu.
A childless Colombian couple named Juanita and José Cerbeza moved into a four-bedroom million-dollar waterfront home in Tampa ’s prestigious Culbreath Isles community.
The residence had been the original model home for the Tampa Bay Tile Company. It had a Spanish tile roof and a circular driveway of brick-red paver tiles that curved around the giant fan of a traveler’s palm. The front porch was a colorful mishmash of broken porcelain and pottery set randomly in the mortar. The spleen-shaped swimming pool had a rim of violet ceramic bullnose tile and a large patio of glazed Mexican tile. From the pool was a clear view of Tampa Bay over a seawall capped with coquina tile.
The moving van arrived Saturday night. The Cerbezas began hand-to-hand combat Sunday morning.
José was a small, powerfully packed man with a falsetto voice and explosive temper. In contrast, Juanita was a woman of impressive avoirdupois, and if she could ever hold José still, she’d squeeze the breath out of him. Necessarily, José’s strategy was jab-and-run, and he danced around Juanita and darted in and out of the reach of her bologna arms, registering sharp jabs in the kidneys that caused her to make the birthing sounds of a Cape buffalo.
The clash was the age-old balance of the natural order, size against speed, and it was a fascinating thing to watch. However, early on a Sunday morning in one of Tampa’s toniest neighborhoods, the residents had yet to acquire an appreciation for a South American midget screaming Spanish profanities like Frankie Valli and sucker-punching a fat woman into submission between the jacarandas.
The police drove Juanita and José away in separate patrol cars.
Hours later-calm restored and bail posted-the couple was released at sunset for a tearful reunion outside the Orient Road Jail. They took a cab back to Culbreath Isles and embraced again on the red-tile driveway before going inside.
An hour later they were back at it on the front lawn, and a careless José got a little too close. Juanita began crushing him in a Kodiak hug.
Neighbors with cell phones filled the sidewalks as Juanita caved in José until his cries became mere peeps. Before police could respond to the eleven simultaneous 911 complaints from Culbreath Isles, a black Beemer pulled up to the house and cut the headlights. The engine and parking lights stayed on. Two men in gray jogging suits got out. They raised their right arms, fully extended, and aimed SIG 9mm automatic pistols, the P-210 model with the attractive scored wooden grip. They fired ten to twelve shots each, and the silencers gave the gunfire a docile, metallic ka-ching ka-ching sound that made it seem not quite real to the neighbors.
The BMW sped away, and the neighbors slowly approached to inspect the lifeless pile of José and Juanita.
T he Diaz Boys were crazy.
Three brothers and a cousin, they had smuggled, trafficked, extorted and strong-armed their way around Tampa Bay for fifteen years. They were the last of their breed. The average shelf life of their peers was three years, and the Diaz Boys had outlived them all. The Garcia Brothers, the Rodriguez Brothers, the Uptown Gang, the O’Malley Triplets, the Caballero Siamese Twins and Octopus Boy.
The Diaz Boys were lucky, because it certainly wasn’t brains. They were the statistical exception that proves the rule, and they were completely psycho. Whenever a light touch of sophistication was required, they kicked the door in. Their brazenness survived the odds the way the occasional drunk can weave across a freeway and not get splattered.
Florida still had its scars from the cocaine eighties. Prison expansion, after-care centers, foreclosed waterfront mansions, luxury yachts in dry dock. Like Germany after the war-lots of people fleeing to South America, abandoning cars, houses and artwork. Stashes of currency and gold were plastered into walls or buried at the base of a crooked tree. With a single haul of coke worth up to a hundred million dollars, smuggling methods became the stuff of Florida lore. Expensive airplanes and speedboats were ditched after a single shipment. When customs agents began giving “swallowers” laxatives at the airport, surgeons sewed the coke into their legs. Law enforcement had thought they’d seen it all.
Then came disposable real estate.
Smugglers set up “moles” in posh waterfront Florida homes with docks. The moles were married couples, and they’d live at the home about a year. They were given a sailboat and told to use it often. Every expense paid. All they had to do was blend in and keep a low profile until the day their “uncle” visited and went sailing with them at sunset and came back after dark with the boat riding much lower in the water.
It was simple in theory and profoundly problematic in practice. The people the Diaz Boys recruited could not for the life of them keep it together a full year. They went loopy from the wealth and drugs, partying and attacking each other in front of the neighbors. They tried using local talent-gringos-but the results were the same except the screaming on the front lawn was in English. Hundreds of thousands invested in one mole house. Poof! Wasted in a single violent incident that traumatized the whole block and ensured the couple’s every move would be watched closely from then on. The Diaz Boys had had it. In the last year alone, there’d been five aggravated batteries and a DeLorean driven into a swimming pool. When José and Juanita Cerbeza didn’t last two days in Culbreath Isles, the Diaz Boys had already made their decision.
A green Jaguar crested the hump of the Gandy Boulevard Bridge heading across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa. A few fishermen worked nets and rods on the old Gandy Bridge, now closed down, running alongside the new span. The illuminated red letters of “Misener Marine” glowed on the shore and reflected in the choppy midnight water.
Two men sat in the front seat of the Jag and one in the back.
“What do you think? Should they tear down the old Gandy or leave it up for a jogging trail?” asked the front passenger.
“I don’t jog,” said the driver.
“Sake of discussion.”
“Leave it up, I guess.”
“Why don’t you take your arm in from the window and roll it up?”
“You cold?” asked the driver.
“No, I don’t want you trying to signal the police or other drivers.” He pushed the six-inch barrel of the.44 Magnum into the driver’s ribs.