There was a crash then, and an impact that sent all of them rocking wildly in the deep-cushioned seats. Russell jerked the transmission into drive without missing a beat. There was a rending shriek of metal, then the Caddy lurched free. He twisted hard on the wheel and the Caddy bounded up over a curb, starting away down a lane that ran perpendicular to the intersection.
“That’ll teach them to tailgate,” Driscoll said, casting a glance through the rear window.
Russell checked his rearview mirror. A man struggled out from the driver’s seat of a greatly foreshortened and steaming Fiat, its front bumper torn loose, and tumbled to the pavement. He saw muzzle flashes and heard the explosion of shots, but the Caddy was well away by now, swinging out onto the broad avenue that led back toward the Malecón. Russell pressed down even harder on the Caddy’s accelerator and gave the big car its head.
“How fast are we going?” Driscoll said. He had one arm across the top of the seat between them, his other folded with his elbow out the window. Maybe he was trying to look casual, Russell thought, but his voice gave him away.
“You worried?” Russell asked above the groan of the Cadillac’s mighty engine.
“No,” Driscoll said. “I figure you for at least half a dozen instances of grand-theft-auto.”
“You’ve seen my sheet,” Russell countered. “There’s no such entry on there.”
“And now I know why,” Driscoll said. He was trying to keep himself from leaning as they blew around the big curve just past the U.S. Interests Section.
“You want to stop and pick up reinforcements?” Russell called into the back, where Vines and his men sat silently.
“You can forget that,” Vines called. “So far as the Section’s concerned, none of us even exist.”
“That’s a comfort,” Russell said. He glanced down at the Caddy’s speedometer. Eighty-five, it said, but the heavy car gripped the pavement like a freight train.
“You’re not worried about getting us picked up?” Driscoll asked.
“Not in
this
car,” Russell said. They were approaching the tunnel that ducked under the river to the suburb of Miramar. There was a flashy restaurant just on the other end, and he slowed a bit as they emerged just in case a carload of drunken diplomats might be pulling out in front of them.
He needn’t have worried about drunken patrons. It was past midnight, and the restaurant’s parking lot was virtually empty.
There did happen to be a motorcycle cop there, though. The guy was leaning against the seat of his bike, his arms folded, his chin on his chest. He glanced up when he heard the Caddy’s approach, had a closer look, then turned away as they sped past.
“What’d I tell you?” Russell said.
“I’m just glad we didn’t have to run over him,” Driscoll said.
They were approaching the entrance to the Marina Hemingway now, and Russell brought the Caddy down to a speed approaching normal as he prepared to turn.
“What the hell is that?” Vines called from the backseat. He leaned forward to point at something approaching from the direction of the guard’s shack.
Russell slowed even further, staring in disbelief. It was a guy in khakis who’d been gagged and bound to a wheeled office chair, he realized. The guy was pretty well taped up, but he had managed to work one leg free and must have pushed himself out from the guard shack and down the little concrete ramp that led from its open doorway. Now he was kicking himself frantically along the rough asphalt pavement of the access road, desperate to make the highway, Russell supposed.
It looked like the process would have taken a while, even if they hadn’t come along. Every kick sent him in a spiraling turn that lost him almost as much yardage as he gained.
When the guy saw the lights of the Caddy, his eyes bugged and his checks bulged as if he were trying to call out to them. “He probably thinks we’re Tomás,” Russell observed.
“I’ll bet he does,” Driscoll said.
Russell eased the Caddy up to a near crawl as they approached the man in the lurching chair. “Hold on tight,” he called out the window, then gunned the engine.
The Caddy bumped into the guy and his chair and began to push him forward. The guy was staring at them in disbelief, his eyes going frantic as the Caddy picked up speed.
“You really going to do it?” Driscoll asked, as the edge of the seawall loomed up ahead.
“Why not?” Russell asked.
“He’s just a slob like you and me,” Driscoll said.
“I know,” Russell said. “I couldn’t do a thing like that.”
He swung the wheel away from the water, and the guy in the chair shot away from the front of the Caddy like a puck from a mechanized stick. The wheels of the chair hit a tangle of cable beside a remote storage building, then went over sideways with a crash. Even if the guy got himself upright, he was looking at maybe a year’s worth of circling back out to the highway.
Meanwhile, Russell was scanning the far reaches of the marina, his eyes searching for the distant slip where the
Bellísima
had tied up. He hadn’t paid all that much attention when they’d left the place. He never did when someone else was driving. A bad habit, he was thinking. Something he would have to work on.
They approached a fork in the narrow service road, and Russell chose the path where the weeds poked up heaviest from the gaps in the cracked pavement. The road made a sharp left between a set of pillars where there might have been a chain stretched once, then hooked back right to run alongside an oily looking channel where trash bobbed up thickly at a dead end.
“Look out!” Driscoll called at his side, and Russell slammed on the brakes as three figures emerged from behind a stacked pile of conduit and hawser rope on the opposite side of the narrow road.
“Sonofabitch!” Russell said, rocking backward as the Caddy stalled and slid to a halt.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Vines said, staring out at the two women and the big man in hospital scrubs, caught there in the Caddy’s headlights.
“Not exactly,” Russell said.
His hand was already clawing at the Caddy’s door. In the next moment, they were out into the muggy night at the side of a sloshing boat slip where the
Bellísima
had once been berthed, listening as the throbbing of heavy boat engines receded in the distance, a sound that battered at them all.
“Steady as she goes, Fuentes,” Deal said. He had the pistol leveled on his former host, who stood now at the wheel in the pilothouse of the
Bellísima
, all his practiced bonhomie vanished. They were well past the end of the breakwater now, the boat beginning to pitch as it hit the swells of the open sea. Maybe ten more miles to international waters, Deal thought, with a glance at the rapidly receding lights on shore. Less than a hundred to Key West.
“I can assure you that your weapon is not necessary,” Fuentes said, glancing nervously at him.
“You’ve been assuring me of a lot of things,” Deal said, holding the pistol steady. “Let’s just say I’m more comfortable this way.”
“I myself am not,” Fuentes replied, giving him a sour look. “Accidents are always happening where guns are concerned.”
“That’s something you should keep in mind,” Deal said. “For every second we’re still in Cuban waters.”
Fuentes might have been tempted to say something else, but Deal gave him a look that stopped him. He would have preferred to be at the helm himself, of course, but he hadn’t had much choice while they were busy casting off. Now, of course, Fuentes was theoretically dispensable, a fact that had surely not eluded the old con artist.
Deal took a glance at his still-sleeping father curled up on a stack of deck cushions at the rear of the compartment. At that moment, the old man’s eyes fluttered open and he croaked something that Deal couldn’t quite catch over the rumbling of the engines.
“What?” he said. He bent down close to his father, his eyes still on Fuentes.
“…give a sucker…an even…break,” his old man said, the words coming in fits and starts.
Deal turned at the last, found his father’s eyes closed once again. Dr. Aponte had assured him the drugs she’d administered would wear off soon enough, but there was no way of telling just when that would happen or how he’d behave when it did. That outburst in the hospital could have gotten them all killed, and even though there were none of Fuentes’ henchmen left on board, Deal wasn’t sure what he’d be faced with when the old man came around again.
A pretty cruel joke, he thought. Get your father handed back after all these years, but look what shape he comes in.
“Who
is
this man?” Fuentes asked, his tone slightly aggrieved. As if he might not otherwise have been kidnapped and forced to pilot his boat out of the Marina Hemingway at gunpoint.
Deal glanced up, his finger tracing the edge of the trigger guard. One little flick of the finger, he was thinking; that’s all it would take. Toss what was left of Fuentes to the fishes, hope his father slept through the ride across the Straits.
“I am sorry,” Fuentes added hastily. Perhaps he had read his mind, Deal thought. Maybe that’s how Fuentes had lived as long as he had in the company he kept. “I was only wondering. In actuality, I do not care who it is.”
Deal nodded, his eyes on Fuentes, his pistol still ready. “This is John F. Kennedy,” he said, after a moment. “He never died that day in Dallas. He’s been in Castro’s prison all this time.”
Fuentes gave him an uncertain look. “Please,” he said. “I was only making conversation.”
“Make some up in your own head,” Deal said. “Do a little life review. You might be finding it useful soon.”
Fuentes nodded, though it didn’t look like he welcomed the prospect. Deal saw that sweat had come to bead on that normally unruffled brow. Good. It was about time someone else felt pressure.
“What’s this thing make, flat out—about twenty knots?”
Fuentes nodded, his eyes fixed ahead. “Twenty-two, perhaps.”
“Good.” Deal glanced at his watch. “We’ll be out of Cuban waters in a few minutes. We can make Key West before morning.”
“If all goes well,” Fuentes said.
“It’s going to go well,” Deal said. “It is going to go unbelievably well.”
Deal turned to glance at his father. It
would
go well, he told himself. There was no reason to think otherwise. Boats plied the route with impunity every day. They might run the risk of being stopped by a Coast Guard cutter close to the U.S. mainland, or find themselves approached by Customs or INS at the Key West docks, but certainly they had little to fear from Cuban officials now that they were out of port. Pleasure boats came and went from the Marina Hemingway by the score, their captains encouraged to come and scatter their tourist dollars like bread crumbs, no way to keep track of comings and goings…
Fuentes’ eyes darted toward him, then skipped quickly away. “You are making a huge mistake, you know. No matter what happened back there on land, it can be dealt with. Nothing has to change, as regards our plans…”
“You can save all that,” Deal told him, waving the pistol. “You get us to Key West, then you’re on your own. Bring someone else back to Cuba. I know plenty of builders who’ll be happy for the chance.”
“DealCo,” Deal heard the booming voice behind him, then. He turned to see his father pushing himself up from the cushions, his eyes vacuous but suddenly owl-wide, a loopy salesman’s smile on his grizzled face. It was that same manic energy that had emanated from him back in the hospital. “DealCo’s who you want,” he proclaimed.
“Dad…” Deal said. He’d noted the look in those eyes. Whomever the words were directed toward stood in some other dimension.
“I know the top dog over there,” the old man bellowed in the general direction of Fuentes. “There’s nothing they can’t handle. Let me make a few calls…”
His father pushed himself up from the cushions just as the prow of the
Bellísima
dropped into a trough, then cleaved a following swell. The old man lost his balance and toppled sideways. As Deal lunged for him, he caught sight of Fuentes, clinging to the wheel with one hand, rummaging for something in a cockpit compartment with the other.
Fuentes came out with a flare pistol and was just bringing it around when Deal let his father go and strode forward, swinging his arm in a broad arc. The pistol he was holding cracked into Fuentes’ arm near the wrist. There was a snapping sound that might have been a bone breaking, and a cry, followed by a muffled explosion and a jolt of sulfurous flame as the flare burst from the stubby barrel and began to careen about the closed pilothouse like some hissing, insane creature.
Deal threw one arm up over his face and bent to snatch his father by the collar. He had just dragged the old man through the pilothouse door when the flare finally burst, filling the cockpit with a blossom of brilliant red and gold. The windowpane in the door blew out in a shower of superheated glass pellets, and the force sent Deal tumbling across the deck, all the way to the transom.
Deal struggled groggily to his feet, his ears ringing from the explosion. His old man stood nearby, bent at the waist, his hands propped on his thighs, peering down at him in concern.
“How you fixed, there, son?” the old man asked.
“I’m all right,” Deal said. There’d been nothing familiar in the question. Just the idle curiosity of a man who didn’t know he’d damned near died.
Flames danced inside the pilothouse now, he saw. Fuentes’ body had been blown halfway out one side window. The man lay motionless, head and hands dangling down as if in an endless dive.
The engines of the
Bellísima
were still laboring, he realized, though the boat had its heading and was now wallowing in the swells. “Stay right here,” he said.
He pushed past his bewildered father and snatched a fire extinguisher mounted by the pilothouse door. He shoved his way inside past the inert body of Fuentes, coughing in the acrid smoke as he doused the burning boat cushions with CO
2
, then kicked the smoldering remains out onto the deck and over the side.
He tossed the canister onto the deck, then hurried back into the pilothouse, tearing off his shirt and using it to clutch the blackened and smoking wheel.
The instrument panels were blank, the radio controls a melted mass. He’d expected nothing as he clutched the scorching wheel, but amazingly, the
Bellísima
’s rudder responded to his touch. In moments, he had turned the boat’s prow back into the swells. He felt the engines shudder, but hold.
He glanced at his watch. Out of Cuban waters by now, he thought; they had to be. That much was good news. But how much damage had the boat received? He could smell burned plastic and rubber, but whether it was the wiring eating itself up as he stared or simply the remnants of the melted cushions was impossible to tell. Electrical fires could smolder for a long time before they blew back up full force. Little currents of flame could be burrowing down every conduit in the ship at this very moment.
He turned loose of the wheel for a second and hurried outside, searching about the decks for the fire extinguisher he’d tossed aside. He’d intended to take the canister in and give the instruments a good dousing, when he heard his father’s voice.
“I’ll bet this here is trouble,” the old man called, his tone jolly. He was pointing back in the direction they’d come, toward a set of running lights that was rapidly closing toward them. A cutter with a searchlight sweeping the heaving waters before it, Deal saw, and at the same time he remembered something.
“Come in here and hold this wheel,” he called to the old man. “Do you think you can do that?”
The old man stared at him, offended. “Of course I can. Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”
“I wish I knew,” Deal said. Then he was off and running toward the saloon and the heavy teak table where he’d planted that listening device on a day that seemed to have existed about a hundred years ago.