CHAPTER THIRTY

I sat there stunned, me and the Little Mermaid.

The first thing that occurred to me was that if Ratón was telling me the truth, then Cousin Cósimo had, in fact, been right about Catalina Cordero. Maybe he had launched that little surprise attack the night before because he didn’t want his family money going to ransom a guerrilla girl. Given his history, you couldn’t really blame him.

Of course, along the way, he had almost gotten me killed, and the Darth Vaders who had almost murdered me in Medellín had little to do with Catalina. Cósimo was still no big buddy of mine.

Eventually, Bill Escalona came to escort me out. I decided it was time to level with Bill about at least some of what Ratón laid on me, especially his alleged involvement in the kidnapping. I also relayed to him Ratón’s threat to cause more mayhem in Miami.

Bill took in what I told him. “If Ratón is going to issue threats against our city, it seems to me that we have to do something to stop him.”

“How do we do that?”

“Well, we’ll slap him in solitary. That will cut him off from his cohorts outside the prison.”

“Can you just do that?”

Bill smiled. “I’m the manager of this hotel. I’m the one who takes the reservations and assigns the suites. Seems our friend Ratón just got himself a complimentary upgrade.”

I left the prison and headed back to Key Biscayne. Ratón was threatening to get really nasty, but I already had people trying to kill me even before Ratón ratcheted up his violent activity. I needed to dissuade those others from targeting me. When it comes to people who want to see you dead, it’s first come, first served.

I made my way toward the Estrada manse and arrived about a half hour later. I was trying to find Cósimo but didn’t see the red Hummer he tooled around in. Don Carlos was out as well. I ducked into the kitchen and found Lorena

“Nothing new from the kidnappers?”

She shook her head. “Nada. Not a word.”

“And Doña Carmen?”

“She’s resting.”

I could tell she was concerned for the lady of the house. So was I, but I had more immediate business.

“Where is Cósimo this time of day?”

She shrugged. “When he’s not here, you can usually find him down at the bar at the end of the Key where they keep the boats. He goes there to play tejo.”

“What’s tejo?”

“It’s a game that some men play in Colombia,” she shrugged.

I knew the bar she was talking about and headed that way. It was located in another beachfront park near the far point of the key. I had knocked back a few beers there myself, although not with drinking buddies of Cósimo’s nasty ilk.

Just like Ratón and the other cartel chieftains, the commanders of Colombian paramilitaries were individuals who were known for their vicious excesses. And just like Ratón, a person such as Cósimo might no longer recognize borders when it came to advancing his interests. The Colombia situation had a way of skewing reality that way. At the very least, I needed to try to convince him I was not fair game.

A guard was in the shack at the entrance to the park, and I paid my visitor’s fee, although paying to see Cósimo wasn’t my idea of money well spent.

As I approached the bar, I saw cars parked outside, including Cósimo’s flashy red Hummer pick-up.

I also saw a couple of goons who had accompanied him to the house in the last days. They were posted outside the bar on each side of the front doors. Like Cósimo the last time I’d seen him, they wore long, loose guayabera shirts, and beneath them I could see the telltale bulges of firearms. Cósimo had decided he had to step-up security. Of course, if you went out at night shooting at people, they might just come around and shoot back.

I got out of my car, approached the goons and asked where I could find Cósimo. They sneered a bit. What good is a goon who doesn’t take the opportunity to sneer? But they obviously recognized me, and one of them hooked a thumb over his shoulder, told me to go through the bar and to look out back on the beach.

I passed through the barroom and was just stepping out onto a patio when something that sounded like a very large firecracker rang out not far from me. Given the gun battle I’d survived just the night before, I flinched, ducked a bit and started to reach for the handgun on my hip.

Just feet away from me, men, women and children were sitting on the patio, not batting an eye. The closest to me was a little kid licking a chocolate ice cream cone, watching me as if I was a weirdo.

Moments later, another small explosion erupted. About twenty yards away from me, just off the sand, a group of men stood near a shuffle-board court, sipping beer and smiling, apparently unfazed.

As I watched, one of the men stepped apart from the others, leaned forward, took one step and lofted through the air what appeared to be a metal disk, about the size of an espresso saucer. He flung it as if he were scaling a small Frisbee. At the other end of the court, several small packets wrapped in brightly colored paper, the size of Hershey’s kisses, were waiting. The disk landed on one of those packets and another sharp pop shattered the silence.

I realized then that I wasn’t caught in a crossfire after all; I was attending a sporting event. To be specific, a game of tejo.

I straightened up slowly and made sure no one else was in the vicinity. The little kid with the cone was laughing at me. Then I headed in that direction, passed another goon keeping guard on the beach and finally reached the edge of the group of people watching the action.

Inside the brightly colored packets was gunpowder. I could tell that from telltale aroma in the air. The idea was to scale the metal disk and the team that set off the most twists of gunpowder won the match.

It made you shake your head. The Colombians had been involved in serious civil war and drug-trade mayhem for more than fifty years. I guess it made some kind of warped sense that they would invent a sport that featured explosives. You had to wonder: if the guys who invented this tejo were in charge of organizing the Olympic games, would they include sprinting through minefields? Shotputting grenades? Marksmanship . . . with live targets?

It turned out that the man who had caused the last two detonations was Cousin Cósimo himself. Given what I’d heard about him, it didn’t surprise me that he might be very good at the sport. Who knew? Maybe the small blue crosses on his forearms referred to tejo titles won, but I doubted it.

Cósimo tossed another disk, but this time it bounced away without a blast. He turned, saw me and glared. He wore a long white beach shirt, and his gold religious medal glistened in his moist chest hairs. I saw now that the figure carved into it was an angel. I guess that was fitting because he had turned a lot of people into angels over the years.

“You brought me bad luck, Cuesta. What are you doing here? You don’t play tejo.”

“No, I don’t. I’ve heard enough gunfire in my life. In fact, I heard some in Medellín and also last night, right here in Miami.”

Of course, I didn’t mention to him in any way what Ratón had related to me about Catalina. Cósimo had suspected her from the get-go, and I didn’t want to empower him even one bit more. If there was a guy in the world who didn’t need encouragement it was him.

He squinted at me as if he were reading my mind. I noticed he had a fine mist of sweat on his swarthy shaved head. He lit a cigarette and exhaled luxuriously.

“So you have been shot at twice in a few days? That’s funny. You don’t seem like the type who would do anything too dangerous.”

His full lips twisted in a kind of smile.

Around him were more of his buddies, who I would have bet were part of his paramilitary platoon back in Colombia. At the moment they were all smirking in sympathy with him.

“I’m told you have heard your share of gunfire,” I said to him.

He nodded slowly. “I have heard shooting, yes. In my country, it is sometimes as frequent as the beat of your heart.”

An AK-47 on full automatic unleashes thirty rounds in three seconds: a very rapid heartbeat indeed. I wondered how many times Cósimo had emptied a clip at a Colombian compatriot.

“I’ve heard that you’ve been very, very close to some of that shooting in Colombia. In fact, I’ve been told you were on the shooting side and not the target side.”

Over the next few seconds, Cósimo’s smirk disappeared, like a flower closing in a nature film. His gaze went from gleeful to wary.

“Is that what you’ve heard?”

I nodded. “Yes. It’s not a good thing to have such rumors floating around if you are a visitor here. Immigration authorities become very upset when they hear that an individual is in this country who might have questionable connections back home. It’s especially bad if the rumors involve human rights abuses. Then your visa can disappear as fast as a snowflake in the Miami summer.”

I paused just for dramatic effect. I had a captive audience, so I went on.

“People like that have been arrested and forced to face trial for their sins back home,” I said. “In such cases, you’re confronted with the possibility of going to prison for the rest of your life . . . and here you can’t buy your way out of that kind of trouble, no matter how much money you have.”

Just enough of a breeze was blowing to ruffle the fronds of the palms around us and the hair of everyone hanging with him, but Cósimo was completely bald, like a café au lait cue ball. The movement around him made it very clear just how still Cósimo had suddenly become. His eyes were the muddy brown of a Colombian river in the rainy season. But just like a rain-swollen river, all sorts of stuff was moving underneath the surface.

In their own country, people obviously didn’t risk that kind of discourse with Cósimo and his colleagues. They were experiencing a large dose of culture shock there on the shores of Key Biscayne, and I enjoyed being the one who gave them that bit of education.

I reached over and smoothed a pleat on his guayabera.

“Take it from me,” I said, “a former Miami policeman with lots of friends on the force. You have to be careful. You wouldn’t want to cause Doña Carmen and your father any more trouble than they already have.”

I laid the information on my police past on him just in case he was thinking of flexing his muscles again, specifically against me. He now understood that if he wanted to cause me trouble, I could cause him more than my share.

He fingered one of those metal disks he held in his hand, and I had the feeling he wanted to drop it on me and make me explode. But he didn’t do that. He decided it was time to get back to his game, turned and walked away.

I did the same, sauntering toward the bar and my car as insouciantly as possible. I was halfway there when another twist of gunpowder exploded behind my back. I flinched just a bit and heard someone behind me chuckle.

Always leave ’em laughing.