CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

So the good soldier, me, set out again to do his duty. It was just past business hours when I hit the street. I tried calling Inter-American Construction, but I got no answer. The office was closed. I phoned 411, found an address on Miami Beach for one C. Nettles and figured I’d take my chances. After our last chilly conversation, I didn’t think it would do any good to try to talk to Nettles on the phone. So I headed that way, once again crossing beautiful Biscayne Bay.

I found the address, and in the semi-circular driveway, I spotted Nettles’ new silver Lincoln, the same one I had last seen at the Estrada ranch. It was clear from the size and location of the place that the construction business had been very good to Conrad Nettles. The residence was a large, two-story Spanish colonial manse right on the Intracoastal Waterway, just two blocks from the sea. The property was shaded by various varieties of palms and also a full-grown Royal Poinciana tree. Along the top of the front wall of the house, just below the roofline, a distinctive symbol had been engraved in the stucco finish: a blue anchor just like the one Nettles “The Captain” had worn on his cap the first time I’d met him. The estate was, in effect, monogrammed.

I parked behind the Lincoln and made sure I had my handgun in my back holster. If you are going to accuse an individual of a capital crime, you better be ready for the possibility that he will try to kill you.

I got out and rang the bell. The doors were white, about nine feet tall with brass handles and knockers, also engraved with anchors. I banged the knocker on the front door, and the sound of it echoed emptily in the house. I tried it again, but I didn’t rouse anyone—neither Nettles nor anybody else.

I headed around the side. Docked in the canal behind the house, I saw a big, white cabin cruiser, about forty feet long, with a high bridge and a sleek bow, sculpted for speed. I figured Nettles was the skipper of that big skiff, which further explained the hat, the anchor motif and the nickname.

At the rear of the house, I found sliding glass doors leading into an empty dining room. I tapped them with my car key. Nothing happened, so I tapped harder and finally tried the door. It slid open. I called out, and my voice echoed in what seemed, again, to be an empty house.

I stepped in, crossed the dining room and peered into the kitchen. From one end of the large room to the other, cupboards and drawers gaped open. They had been ransacked, and their contents were thrown all over: food, appliances, broken plates and glasses, utensils, you name it.

I kept going, entered the living room and found all the furniture turned upside down, cushions embroidered with anchors sliced open, stuffing strewn everywhere, paintings removed from walls. In places, sheetrock was staved in. It was a living space that had been turned inside out. Even if I weren’t a professional private investigator I could have told you someone had been searching for something.

I pulled my gun from its back holster and moved to the head of the hallway that led to the bedrooms. In the middle of the passageway, I saw a small pool of blood and leading away from it large drops.

I stopped and stared at it. The blood had not congealed at all, which told me it hadn’t sat there very long—minutes rather than hours.

I moved along the edge of that hallway to evade the pool and the splatters. I passed an empty bedroom and then stopped before the next door. Lying in the middle of the floor, face up, was the former Conrad Nettles, wearing his blue captain’s cap. I say “former” because he very definitely was dead. He had reached his last anchorage.

I couldn’t tell how many bullets he had taken in the torso, but it had been enough to let all the blood out of him in various directions. He was surrounded by his blood the way saints in religious paintings are sometimes surrounded by their auras. Nettles’ aura had never been good, and now it was as bad as it could get.

I stooped down next to him and touched his bare arm. He was still warm. He had been dead less than an hour, maybe just a matter of minutes.

I remembered Nettles’ words the last time we had talked. He had told me that the people we were dealing with were very dangerous. I had accused him of threatening me, but he had maintained that he was just trying to warn me. In retrospect, he had been right, and he should probably have taken his own advice.

I backed out, headed farther down the hall and came to an office with a desk in it. This room, too, had been ransacked: drawers had all been pulled from the desk, the wood-paneled walls splintered, the carpet had been pried up as if a person or persons had been searching for a trap door underneath it.

Strangely enough, the desk itself had remained upright and sitting on it was the bounty for which someone had been searching. A balled up wad of thick, clear plastic wrapping sat to one side and right next to it was a perfectly conical mound of white powder, almost one foot high and about one foot in radius; it had to be cocaine. People didn’t stave in walls looking for talcum powder.

I stepped to the desk, licked my index finger and gave it a taste. A DEA agent had once let me do that with a cache of coke found at Miami International Airport and, if memory served, it tasted just about the same.

When I looked down behind the desk, I saw several more such bundles wrapped in clear plastic. If it was all uncut and pure, I had to be looking at millions of dollars. I guess when you do business with cocaine barons, you have the option of being paid in-kind.

On the desk near the mound sat something else I recognized: a rubber mask just like the hideous ones the kidnappers had worn. I held it up in front of me, and it leered at me. I shoved it in my pocket, and, at that moment, I heard a noise behind me in the house. I looked up just as the man with the snake-like scar on his face, who I had seen several times, came into view at the end of the hallway. The moment he saw me, he flinched, stopped, gaped, whirled on a dime and sprinted toward the back door. I bolted after him and tried to jump the splattered blood but hit the very edge of the puddle, slipped and went sprawling.

I picked myself up, slid some more on the slick marble floor, and by the time I made it to the sliding doors, he was already across the long back yard and at the cabin cruiser. He pulled off the rope attached to the bow and jumped aboard.

I sprinted across the yard as fast as I could go. I was halfway to the boat when he reached the bridge, hit the ignition button, cranked the engines and threw it into gear.

The boat was still tied in the stern, but he simply gunned the engine and tore that piling right out of the mud like a rotten tooth. He was about six feet from the dock when my foot hit the wooden retaining wall. I jumped without breaking stride and hung in the air as the boat tried to speed away from underneath me. I just barely caught the lip of the port gunwale with the tip of my shoe, threw myself forward and hit the rear deck hard, face down.

With the engines gunned, the bow was pointed in the air and the stern was low. I slid toward the back and slammed against the rear bulwark. When I looked up, Scarface was at the controls, staring down at me. Then he groped under his shirt, pulled out a pistol, aimed at me and pulled off three quick shots. I rolled hard to starboard, and the shots splintered the deck right behind me.

As I rolled, I pulled my gun from the small of my back and pointed it at him. Just as I did, he turned the wheel hard to the right, so as I shot, I was rolling. My shot went wild just as the boat slammed into the wooden pilings of the canal retaining wall.

The impact almost knocked him off his feet, but he held on with one hand and fired again with the other. I rolled, but it was the movement of the boat that made him miss again. The bullet hit a chair bolted to the deck. It was the chair they strap you into when you are fighting to land a big marlin. I understood how the marlin feels. This dude with the gun was trying to land me.

I couldn’t give him another clear shot. The next time, he wouldn’t miss. I lifted my gun, but he had ducked down behind a bulkhead so I couldn’t see him. I took the opportunity to scramble to my feet and head for the ladder. He must have sensed that’s what I would do, because he reached up, cut the wheel suddenly and slammed the port side of the boat hard against the retaining wall on the opposite side of the canal. That sent me flying.

Maybe he was trying to send me overboard, but he didn’t quite make it. Instead, my head smacked the starboard gunwale, and I fell back onto the deck.

The canal was lined with back yards of Miami Beach waterfront mansions. Some of the owners must have heard or seen us ricocheting down the retaining walls, splintering their pilings, because over the engine noise, I heard shouts.

I probably would have been better off in the water because he gunned it again, and we went bouncing up the canal with the bow pointed at the sky. That made me slide once more back toward the stern, where once I hit the bulwark, he could again get a clear shot at me.

Instead of indulging him, I grabbed the housing of the engine compartment as I slid by and managed to swing myself behind it where he couldn’t see me. So he again aimed the boat at the retaining wall to port side, trying to knock me loose. But I knew what was coming. I wedged my knees under the lip of the engine housing and, even though we bounced hard off the pilings, he didn’t budge me.

He didn’t know that right away. I peeked out from behind the casing, lifted my gun and just moments later saw his scarred face appear above the bulkhead. His eyes quickly searched the back deck for me.

I saw a split second of surprise as our eyes met. I pulled the trigger three times. One bullet hit him in the middle of the forehead, not far above the snake carved into his face. Because I was shooting from below, the impact knocked him up and out of his crouch and he toppled back, out of sight.

As he did that, he must’ve made a grab for the controls or fallen on them, because the bow lifted again, and we were suddenly bucking the surface of the water at full speed.

The canal we were on made a sharp right turn not far ahead and we were speeding point-blank at another retaining wall, this one made of concrete. I headed for the ladder to try and stop the boat before we reached that point, but there wasn’t time. About two seconds and some forty feet before it crashed, I dove into the water.

The boat hit the wall square. The fiberglass bow shattered with a deafening crash. The bridge, including the wheel and the scar-faced captain, separated and went sailing into the yard of a pink stucco villa just beyond the wall. Then the bottom of the boat exploded, a fireball mushrooming into the sky and also spreading across the surface of the canal toward me.

I ducked under the water to escape the wave of flame and swam ten yards back down the canal. I surfaced and watched the conflagration for a few moments, already feeling the water begin to heat around me. If I stayed there long enough, it might boil me like an egg. Instead, I breast-stroked my way to the pilings and hauled myself up into an empty back yard. I don’t know if anyone saw me. Anybody around would be watching that fireball. I did that, too, for a few seconds, and then I hustled several blocks back to Nettles’ house.

Sirens were already sounding. Somebody in the neighborhood would identify the boat, and soon the police would be marching in.

With bubbles coming out of my shoes, I made for my car. In the distance, black smoke sullied the high, blue, cloudless sky.