On a Clear Day (20 page)

“What?” she was asking. Only it came out “Wha?”

“Who the fuck is Pretty Boy dealing for?” Drego said again. “I ain’t got all night. She’s going to kill you if you don’t give it up.”

The girl twisted her head as much as she could with Drego holding her by the jaw. When she turned her face
toward me, I saw it was the same chick who was shooting up before.

“Conrad,” the girl mumbled.

“Conrad Butler?” Drego. “And don’t lie or she’ll shoot you.”

“Yeah. Really.” She was twisting again, obviously scared, trying to see what I was doing. I slid my hand behind my back.

“Get rid of her.” Drego.

I opened the door, and she started moving away from me. I put my foot on her back and pushed her. Drego had the car moving as she hit the ground.

“Conrad Butler is from Atlanta. He took over half the South when things were getting dicey around five years ago,” Drego said. “Get in the front again so dudes don’t think I’m pimping you.”

“How?”

“Blackouts,” Drego said. “Anybody who stood up against him got killed along with their whole families. He’s a total scumbag.”

“I mean how am I going to get back in the front with you driving like a friggin’ maniac?”

He stopped. I got over the backseat into the front, scraping my belly on the headrest. There had to be a better way of seeing Florida.

The “hotel” on Fairway Drive looked more like a maximumsecurity prison than a place to spend a night. It was gray
and forbidding. The iron bars on the pretend balconies were rusted and bent. We went in, and a woman with short red hair shuffled over to where we were standing.

“You got to show some ID,” she said, pointing to a scanner on the counter.

Drego lifted the scanner and moved it to his shoulder. The woman pursed her lips and nodded approvingly.

“Most people who check in here don’t have their chips anymore,” she said.

Upstairs to the third floor. Down the hall to 367. Drego slid the key card through the lock and pushed the door open.

It could have been worse. It was musty and smelled of tobacco, but the bed was made. There was a hot water heater on a small desk—maybe it was a coffeemaker—and a plastic ice bucket. The bathroom was dingy, with a toilet seat I wouldn’t have been comfortable standing on in high heels.

Drego was back on his phones in a minute. How he talked on two phones at the same time was beyond me, but he did. I powered up my gear and saw that I had nine messages. Six were from people trying to sell me something, and three were from Anja.

I went to the blog site, which I knew was a stupid, rightwing, racist one. There were a bunch of entries about how some black baseball player couldn’t read, a few about his
white wife who was dyslexic, and a couple about his dog being gay. It would have been funny if these people, like Anja said, weren’t true believers and serious about their rants. I was wondering why Anja wanted me to see these, but then I came across a post that maybe Natural Farming was going to grow hashish in North Africa and that was why they were connected to the splibs.

“Drego, did you see this?” I asked. “Anja told me to check it out.”

He was looking at something on his smartphone. He checked my screen out and was surprised.

“Anja hacked into their site?” he asked. “I haven’t heard black people being called splibs for years.”

I scrolled down and there were more rants against the ballplayer, and a lot more against his dog, and more posts about Natural Farming and Africans. Some of them, like the first ones, talked about hash plantations. Anja, and whoever was working the media with her, was kicking it.

Anja sounded upbeat. I felt miserable. At first I didn’t know why. The misery of a hotel room didn’t bother me that much, so I knew it was something else. I looked over at Drego, and he was working the phones again. I imagined him doing it in Detroit with a bunch of hoochie mamas surrounding him.

“Drego, how long are we going to stay here?” I asked.

“I’m trying to track down one more guy,” Drego said. “He’s got a head on his shoulders and owes me from the old days.”

“Owes you money?” I asked. “I thought Sayeed was flooding the place with money?”

“He owes me his life,” Drego said. “I had a reason to kill him and I didn’t.”

I hoped that was drama.

“What do we need from him?” I asked.

“To find out who Sayeed is sure of and who’s sitting on the bench waiting to see which side to come down on,” Drego said. “Sayeed doesn’t know enough to move into a different territory, let alone a different country, and get everybody to line up on his side. We find who’s most paranoid, who’s getting the most spooked, and we can work it.”

I got back on my tablet and tried correcting one of my earlier models. I had been starting Sayeed off with weak ties. But if he was spreading money around, then there had to be a stronger trail back to its source. I texted that to Anja. Then, against my instincts, I turned to Drego. Something had been bothering me and I had to let him know.

“You—we—didn’t have to be so brutal to that girl,” I said.

“You feel bad about it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good.” Drego was punching in numbers on his phone. “Sometimes people are so far out of the loop that there’s no basis for logic, and no time to be teaching them shit
about what’s good for them. You can’t reason with somebody when dope takes over their life. I didn’t feel good about adding to her misery either.”

“You seemed fine with it,” I said.

“I wasn’t,” Drego answered. “Maybe a little too used to it, though. But I felt bad. When you stop feeling bad about hurting people, then you’re in trouble. Until then, you do what you got to do.”

Bullshit. Or, at least, maybe bullshit. Was this the way it really worked? You kept telling yourself that whatever you did was friggin’ okay because it was you and your heart was good, because when you asked yourself, you came back with the answers you wanted to hear? I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my eyes were puffy and my cheeks shiny with dried tears. Would makeup cover that shit?

Could makeup cover the shit of the world?

“Drego, how can you live with yourself?”

“Dahlia, I look at myself real hard to see if I can see a soul. When I find it, when I see it’s not a mask or some kind of symbol—I move on,” Drego said. “It’s like my soul is a shining star. I leave people, I step on people, I hit people who need to be cradled and loved, and I move on. It ain’t easy, girl.”

I knew.

Back to the models. I looked at them and they were like little graphs I had worked with in elementary school. I switched to time-lapse projection and watched the red and blue dots move slowly through the graphs. The red dots
were Sayeed’s people, and the blue ones were the locals. What Drego was saying seemed right. If Sayeed couldn’t depend on all the locals, he would have to change his plans. But I didn’t think he would. He was a creature of habit.

“Yeah! Yeah!” Drego was on his feet, snapping his fingers at me. Then he made a motion that he wanted something to write with.

I tossed him a notepad with a keyboard, and he put it on his lap as he held the phone between his cheek and shoulder. He typed furiously for two minutes, then signed off.

“There’s nobody buying too heavy into Sayeed’s program,” Drego said. “Everybody I’m talking to is pumping
me
for information. They want to know what the deal is, and they’re in as much of a hurry as we are. Sayeed’s supposed to make his move sometime Wednesday.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “If he grabs the headlines Wednesday, then Natural Farming can make the acquisition announcement Friday and there won’t be any business blogs over the weekend.”

“And by Monday, it’s all postmortem time,” Drego said.

“Did you send that information to Michael?”

“No, I’ll leave that to you so you can earn your brownie points,” Drego said. “Then let’s get this place cleaned up. I got a guy coming here in about five minutes with some information.”

“Get it cleaned up? This place is like a toilet with a television and a desk, Drego,” I said. “What are you going to clean up?”

Drego thought for a second. “Put all your gear in sight,” he said. “He thinks I’m operating big-time, and he’s going
to want to see signs. And if he asks you anything, I hope you got your shit together, because he’s no dummy.”

“
My shit?
Just worry about your own shit, okay? I know what I’m doing.”

I put my tablets and two phones on the desk, and Drego put his two phones, with the screens lit up, on one of the end tables. I didn’t know how that was going to impress anybody.

The room was dingy and musty. Dusting it wasn’t going to help. The window I was going to open was nailed shut. The rug had a dark stain that could have been blood, and the paint was peeling around the light switch. Wonderful.

My stomach was hurting a little, but the thought of the filthy john turned me off, so I just sat down and mean-mugged Drego. He asked me what my problem was.

“If you can’t see it, you should be able to smell it,” I said.

A couple of minutes passed and there was a knock on the door. Drego produced a gun from somewhere—it looked like a Glock—and asked who it was. He flattened himself against the wall as he was talking.

Thanks for looking out for me.

“Count!” came the answer.

Drego opened the door, and a big fat guy came into the room. His shirt was open, and you could see the scar across the front of his throat under a gold crucifix. A little greasy dude came in, looked around the room, and settled on a chair. He either had a real bad tumor or he was packing a gun under his left arm.

“What’s happening?” Drego.

“You the man!” Count. They exchanged daps and bumped shoulders.

“It’s been a minute since I laid eyes on you,” Drego said. “What you up to?”

“Trying to get the underground on this Sayeed dude,” Count said. “This your bitch?”

“Yeah.” Drego winked. “She keeps things tight for me.”

Count put one cheek of his fat ass on the table. “You thinking he might be running a game?”

“Everybody’s running a game,” Drego said. “I think he’s just playing the field, seeing where the happenings are. He can’t last in no Miami, but the thing to worry about is, what’s he going to leave behind?”

“I don’t get what he’s after,” Count said. “He’s flashing mad-ass money, they grow the best bye-bye in the world where he comes from, so what’s his shtick?”

“They’re setting up a performance for him,” I said. “He shows up, he grabs some big headlines—big enough for everybody to overlook the real stuff that’s going on—then they feed him to the wolves.”

“Yo, Drego, she know what she talking about?”

“Yeah, she squeezes out some juice,” Drego said. “Any buzz about what Sayeed’s looking for?”

“The talk is that he’s packing up printers to take back to Africa,” Count said. “That don’t make no sense to me.”

“Printers?” Drego looked at me and shrugged.

“Drego, it makes sense big-time,” I said. “They’ve got to be the latest three-dimensional printers. Whatever you can draw, they can reproduce. All you need is a generator,
the raw materials, and some simple machine tools—a metal lathe, a robotic mill, and some way to fabricate circuit boards. In Israel they’re making artificial limbs. There’s even talk about fabricating organs using the same techniques. With a small roomful of equipment, you can make as many guns, bullets, or anything else that’s mass-produced as you want. For a guy who’s semi-isolated, it’s a dream come true.

“And if Sayeed hooks up with the right technicians, he can download unbelievable weapons. He won’t have to come out of the mountains for any supplies,” I went on. “It’ll solve all his supply problems for years.”

“She for real?” Count.

“Yeah, she’s for real,” Drego said.

“Okay, so he’s just in this mess for his take.” Count rubbed the middle of his forehead with a stubby finger, then looked at it. “And he’s using everybody else.”

“You got that,” Drego said. “How did you find out about the printers?”

“They keep seeds in a warehouse downtown, and one of my people saw a limo pull up to it and this Sayeed sucker pops out with some fay boys,” Count said. “The same stuff that keeps the seeds dry keeps weed righteous, so we’re always in there stealing enough to keep our thing going. So we seen boxes with scanning stencils. Scan them with the phones and we know what we know. Maybe we’ll go back and take a few printers and see what we can do with them.”

“You hold off for two or three weeks?” Drego.

“Ain’t no big thing—we don’t need guns,” Count said. “But you here in Miami, so what you want from me?”

“I need to know who’s got Sayeed’s back.”

“Nobody but some punk Little G’s,” Count said. He lifted his cheek and farted. “Don’t mean nothing to nobody except their mamas.”

“Solid.”

“Yeah, look, I got to get into the wind.” Count stood. “Yo, man, you in love or can I cop some of sweet thing here?”

“No hard feelings, but …”

“Yeah, well, if you ever get tired of her, send her down my way.”

When Count and his greaseball left, I was relieved.

We checked out, found the car, and drove to the headquarters hotel.

“Drego, you roll tough downhill,” I said. “But as far as I’m concerned, it sucks big-time.”

“Are you going to tell me that people shouldn’t be living like that?” Drego asked. “Running gangs, smoking crack, making violence part of the community dialogue? Are you saying that, or are you just saying you don’t want to see it?”

I didn’t answer.

Me thinking about what Count had said about just a bunch of wannabes backing up Sayeed.

“The way Count put it, just a group of kids coming in with Sayeed—”

“Nine kids with automatic weapons can wipe out a
neighborhood in thirty minutes,” Drego said. “Just because they’re young doesn’t mean a thing except that they don’t know about dying yet. Give a fool an automatic weapon, maybe fifty to a hundred rounds, and you got dozens of people killed. Take fifty kids who don’t really know what dying is all about and let them hold some automatic weapons, and you can kill a thousand people. You’re trying to make the world a better place for some future time. These kids don’t believe in no future. What do you think all the
favelos
are about? You coming down off your high horse, or should I say your isosceles triangle, yet? Because it’s time to get real, baby.”