Garcia shrugged. He thought: Let's see you quotea shrug, asshole.
"It seems simply ... inconceivable," Bloodworth remarked.
Al Garcia realized that, in effect, he'd just been called a Jell-O-brained moron. That was the beauty of a snotty word like inconceivable.
"The one thing everybody wants to know," Bloodworth continued, "is where the Nights of December are going to attack next."
"I'd like to know, myself."
"You have no idea?"
"Nope," Garcia lied.
Again Bloodworth wrote, "no idea."
"Let me bum a cigarette," the detective said.
"Sorry, but I don't smoke."
"Then what's that in your vest? It looks like a pack of cigarettes."
Bloodworth smiled sheepishly and took out a small Sony Pearlcorder. "A tape recorder," he explained unnecessarily.
"Oh," Garcia said. "Is it on?"
"Well, yes."
"Can I see it?"
Ricky Bloodworth handed the miniature recorder to Garcia.
"Quite a little gadget," the detective said. "You keep the First Amendment in here, do you?"
"Very funny." Bloodworth's bluish mouth opened in a round ratlike smile, all incisors.
Garcia set the Pearlcorder flat on the desktop, its tiny reels still spinning. He reached into his holster and took out his Smith and Wesson service revolver.
"What are you going to do?" Bloodworth asked.
"Watch."
With the butt of the pistol, Garcia pounded the Sony to tiny pieces. He gave the pieces back to Bloodworth, along with a tangle of brown ribbon.
"Don't ever tape me again," Garcia said, "not without asking."
Bloodworth stared in disbelief at the expensive Japanese debris.
"What's the matter with you?" he cried. "Everybody uses tape recorders. It's just a tool, for God's sake ... for accuracy ... to make me a better reporter."
"Brain surgery wouldn't make you a better reporter," Garcia said. "Now get out of here before I have you strip-searched." So much for cooperating with the press.
'This is ... an outrage," Bloodworth stammered.
"Simply inconceivable," Garcia agreed.
For half an hour Bloodworth sat on the steps of the police station and morosely flipped through his notebook. Garcia had given him practically nothing, not one damn usable quote. It had been a dry week, too, newswise. Until last night, Las Nocheshad been quiet: no more kidnappings or murders to goose the story back to page one. Bloodworth was getting itchy. He wondered if Cab Mulcahy would let him do a column about Al Garcia and the bumbling Fuego One Task Force. He wondered what Garcia's boss would say if he found out about the tape-recorder incident.
A local TV crew marched up the steps, around Bloodworth, into police headquarters. He thought: What if Garcia had given them an interview, too? What if the detective actually said something important on television? Identified El Fuego,for instance? Bloodworth's flesh turned clammy. Christ! He'd completely forgotten to ask Sergeant Garcia about El Fuego.
In a panic, Bloodworth dashed back up the steps. He couldn't go back to the newsroom empty-handed, too much was riding on this story—a raise, his very own column, maybe even a job with the New York Times.The stakes were too fantastic to let an oafish Cuban cop ruin everything.
Bloodworth hopped off the elevator at Homicide, but the TV crew was nowhere in sight. He scurried from office to office, unimpeded. At the end of a long hall, he finally spotted the bright TV lights.
It was too late. Through the window of a soundproof interview room, Bloodworth saw Al Garcia talking expansively to a pretty brunette television reporter. She was holding a microphone and he was smiling like it was cocktails at the Four Seasons. The camera rolled.
Bloodworth watched in wretched helplessness, struggling to read the detective's lips. Garcia glanced at Bloodworth's face in the window and mouthed three words: "Up your ass."
In a fury, Bloodworth retreated to Garcia's empty office, where he fumed and cursed and looked at his wristwatch every thirty seconds. How long could it last? What could he be telling her? Bloodworth felt a damp stripe settle down the back of his shirt. He was getting beaten, beaten badly. By a TV bimbo.
A man with a plastic badge that said "Mail Room" came in and piled papers and packages on Garcia's desk.
As soon as the messenger left, Bloodworth slid over and sifted through the goodies. A two-page memo on weapons training. A ten-page memo on pensions. An invoice for softball uniforms.
Crap!
Next he sampled the unopened mail, scanning the return addresses. He found something from the FBI fingerprint section in Washington and held it to the light, without success; the clever Feebs used opaque envelopes.
Underneath the stack of letters was a brown box the size of a toaster.
A bright red courier sticker was glued to the box: Same-day service, fourteen bucks. Oddly, whoever had sent the parcel had tied a luxurious bow in the twine, the kind of bow you'd see on a Fifth Avenue Christmas package.
The address label had been typed neatly:
To Sgt. Alberto Garcia, Maggot and Traitor
Metro-Dade Police Pig Department
Miami, City of Pigs, Florida
Ricky Bloodworth excitedly opened his notebook and copied everything.
In the upper-left-hand corner, on the top of the box, the sender had written:
"De un guerrero y patriota."
From a warrior and patriot.
Ricky Bloodworth went to the door and peered down the hallway. Amazingly, the TV lights were still blazing away. God Almighty, he thought, not even Joe Wambaugh yaps this much.
Bloodworth returned to the desk and picked up the brown box. It was much lighter than he expected. Bloodworth shook it cautiously at first, then briskly. Nothing. It was packed solid.
Bloodworth trembled at the thought of what he was about to do.
We're talking felony, he told himself. This is police evidence, no doubt about it.
But screw Garcia—he busted my tape recorder.
Ricky Bloodworth put the box under one arm and hurried out of the Homicide office. He went down three flights of stairs and came out in the Traffic Division, which was deserted. He found an empty rest room and locked himself in a stall that reeked of ammonia and bad cologne.
The reporter sat on a toilet and set the box on his lap. He propped his notebook on the tissue rack. He stuck the red pen behind his left ear.
Bloodworth's heart was drumming. He actually felt himself getting hard—that's how much he loved this job. Ricky savored his coup: a treasure chest of clues from the Nights of December. An exclusive, too ... that was the part that gave him a hard-on.
He had already decided what he would do.
As soon as he was done peeking, he'd send the package right back to Garcia. He'd wrap it exactly the same and steam the labels—who would ever know?
Lovingly Ricky Bloodworth rubbed the smooth brown paper, fingered the frayed twine.
Then he pinched one end of the magnificent bow and pulled, pulled on it until the knot popped.
And a savage furnace swallowed him.
Tore the air from his lungs.
And the flesh from his cheeks.
Until the universe turned molten white.
It had always puzzled Cab Mulcahy that Mr. Cardoza took such an ardent personal interest in the Miami Sun.Traditionally publishers love to meddle with the news operation (because that's the most exciting part of a newspaper, the only part worth dicking around with), but Cardoza was not a typical publisher. He had little understanding of the tenets of journalism with no paternal affection for the newspaper, for his fortunes did not singularly rise or plummet with the Sun.Rather, Cardoza was a boundless entrepreneur, a man who loved the variety of making money; a man with dozens of incongruous irons in the fire. He owned a soccer team in St. Kitts, a stock car in Darlington, a chain of family cinemas, four butcher shops, a Liberian oil tanker, three thousand coin-operated condom machines, and a phosphate mine. Any single one of those enterprises, Cab Mulcahy thought, was infinitely more amusing as a money toy than the frequently struggling Miami Sun,of which Cardoza owned fifty-one percent. Which automatically made him publisher and meddler-for-life. On the evening of December 28, a Friday, Cab Mulcahy was summoned from an opulent pre-Orange Bowl cocktail party to explain to Mr. Cardoza why Skip Wiley's column had not appeared in the paper since Christmas Eve.