"The smart guys in the suits say it's all over."
"What do you say, Al?"
"I say we wait till after the parade before we open the fucking champagne."
"Good idea. In the meantime, I'll stick with the queen."
"One more thing, Brian. Since I'm nice enough not to immediately throw your ass in jail for obstruction, the least you could do is stop by later and tell me about your crazy batshit friend."
"Yeah," Keyes said, "I guess I'd better."
As Al Garcia hung up, he chided himself for not hollering more at Brian Keyes. He didn't know why Keyes had held back about Skip Wiley all these weeks, but he certainly would find out. The gamesmanship of trading information always irritated Garcia, but he accepted it as essential to the job. Reporters, cops, politicians, private detectives—all gifted in the coy art of you-tell-me, I-tell-you. Afterward you felt like either an oracle or a whore.
Garcia assumed there was a compelling reason for what Keyes had done. There better have been. A trade-off of some sort, maybe even extortion. Wiley seemed capable of anything.
Besides, the question had diminished in urgency since the helicopter crash. No sooner had the Sunday press conference ended than the chief had slipped Garcia a terse note: "Consider disbanding Fuego One Task Force. We could have a press release ready by tomorrow A.M."
Garcia had acknowledged the suggestion without committing to it. As all good detectives, he had learned to subsist on the bittersweet. Good guys, bad guys, you had to watch your step. He'd met crooks to whom he'd entrusted his life, and cops who'd steal crackers from the blind. Garcia was seldom moved by the wisdom of his superiors, and more often dazzled by the cleverness of the criminal mind. The Fuegocase had been a peculiar challenge; all along he had felt as if he were battling two sides, Las Nochesand the Miami establishment.
The detective was ambivalent about the mysterious helicopter crash. Part of him wanted to believe that the Nights of December was dead. It had nothing to do with the Orange Bowl or civic boosterism or preserving the tourist trade. Rather, it seemed a marvelous example of bad guys getting their due; justice in the biblical sense. And as a practical matter, there was no tidier way to solve a homicide than to have all your suspects suddenly croak. God knows the small fortune it would save the taxpayers.
On the other hand was the tug of professional pride: Garcia didn't like the Chamber of Commerce opening and closing his murder cases. The self-congratulatory tone of the TV press conference had been farcical; the truth was, Garcia's crack squad never had come close to finding, much less capturing, Las Noches de Diciembre.It had been a frustrating assignment for a cop unaccustomed to being outwitted, and Garcia didn't like the taste of it. To see Skip Wiley and his weird crew vanquished by a sputtering old Army helicopter seemed mundane and anticlimactic. From Garcia's view, it would have been immensely more satisfying to have tracked the bastards to their Everglades hideout and smoked them in a blazing firefight.
Which is why he wasn't ready to call it quits.
Intuition told Garcia that the ending didn't fit. A bunch of crazy Cubans or Nicaraguans?—sure, that's the sort of fuck-up you'd expect, running a chopper clean out of fuel. But from the very first victim, the Nights of December had been different. They had approached each act of violence with a certain selectivity and elan. Choking Sparky Harper with a toy alligator was more than murder; it was terrorism with imagination. It was the stamp of a blade like Wiley.
Wiley—who, in Al Garcia's opinion, was too damn smart to flame out over the deep blue sea. It'd be just like that cagey sonofabitch to fake his own death, lull everyone to sleep, then swoop down on the Orange Bowl parade and snatch the queen—just like he'd planned all along.
The detective crumpled the chiefs directive and dropped it into a trashcan. He flipped through a stack of clippings until he came to the infamous hurricane column:
What South Florida needs most is a killer hurricane, sudden and furious, an implacable tempest that would raze the concrete shorelines and rake away the scum and corruption ...
As he read it for the second time, Garcia felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.
The tidal surge, a swollen gargoyle of a wave, is born beyond the Gulf Stream. Gaining size and thunder by the minute, it races under a deafening wind toward Florida's sleeping coastline. In purple darkness it pulverizes Miami Beach with a twenty-foot wall of water, flooding Carl Fisher's billion-dollar island of muck. Picture it: corpses upon corpses, clogging the flooded lobbies of once-majestic condominiums; dead dreamers, swollen, blue-veined, carplike.
They will die in bewilderment, in the fierce arms of the beloved ocean that brought them here in the first place. Fools! the wind will scream, fools all.
Garcia thought: These are the words of a pathologically bitter man, if not a certified fruitcake. He was dying to hear what Keyes could tell him about the guy.
Somebody rapped lightly on the door.
"Come on in, Brian," Garcia said.
The door flew open with a crash.
Garcia's left hand found the butt of his revolver but he changed his mind. Nothing like a sawed-off shotgun to argue for prudence.
"Buenas noches,"the detective said to the man in the soiled undershirt.
"Hello, maggot," said Jesus Bernal. "Let's go for a ride, just you and me."
Since spurning the Nights of December, Jesus Bernal had slipped into a desperate and harried state. He had pinned his grandiose hope of redemption on his last homemade bomb, only to see it claim the wrong victim, some goofball news reporter. Once again serendipity had taunted Bernal, reducing his most passionate and calculated crimes to slapstick. His long career as a terrorist had been marred by such misfortune, and he had come to fear that he might be forever cheated of his place in radical history, that he had blown his last big chance. That morning's press conference had pitched the little Cuban into an orgy of self-pity—he had screeched at the television screen, pummeled the walls, kicked holes in the doors of his motel room. He knewthat the helicopter stunt was a frivolous idea, that the first plan had been the best. He had triedto teach the others about discipline and efficiency, about the fatal dangers of impetuosity. But that fuckhead Wiley was beyond reason, and the dope-wasted nigger and the creepy Seminole Indian had trailed along like zombies. They were babies playing a man's game.
Now they were dead, and so for all practical purposes was Las Noches de Diciembre,leaving Jesus Bernal an orphan of the cause. Wretchedly he wondered what his ex-comrades in the First Weekend in July Movement were saying about him; he could hear the comandante'ssneering laughter. Who could blame the old fart? For all the fanfare about Las Noches,nothing historic had been proven, nothing of permanence achieved. So there was no point calling the old man to beg again for readmission.
Bernal knew his options were limited. Strategically, it would be futile to revive the name of the organization—as far as the world was concerned, the Nights of December no longer existed. Even the fucking stationery was useless.
One possibility was to start his own underground terrorist movement. To hell with the crazy Wileys and the feeble old Bay of Piggers; it was time for daring new blood. Yet there was still the problem of credibility, and shedding the stigma of recent failures.
Which was why Jesus Bernal sneaked into Metro-Dade police headquarters on Sunday evening, December 30.