"Van Lustbader, Eric - Dark Homecoming(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

At length, his mouth twisted in a parody of a smile. "Let me go, Lewis, and we will speak of it."
He watched as Croaker slowly and very deliberately unfurled his fingers one by one. "With so little effort you could have ground to powder every bone in my wrist." His voice had about it a disarming lassitude, as if he were speaking of inconsequential matters while basking in the sun. "You would have caused me great pain and no little inconvenience." Now he did smile, and as he did so he revealed the .22 he had drawn. "But I would have shot you in the belly. Then I could have done anything to you, Lewis. Anything at all."
There was a terrible stillness in the air, as if all at once the oxygen had been sucked from the room by some monstrous creature that had appeared out of nowhere.
Bennie shrugged. "But this is no way for friends to talk-or even to think."
"Maybe you're right," Croaker said. "Or maybe you have a screwed-up idea of friendship."
Bennie, jamming the gun back into its holster, threw his hands wide. "What, are you pissed, Lewis? Now we are no longer friends?"
Croaker stared at him.
Bennie nodded. "Okay, okay, you made your fuckin' point. God hears me, you got the cojones of a Latino." He stuck out his hand. "Let no bad blood begin here." When Croaker took it, he squeezed it with obvious affection. "I wasn't lying. I got this thing "bout death-it's got to be treated with a certain degree of respect, otherwise"-he shrugged-"the spirit that lives on is clouded with uncertainty." He waved a hand. "But, you're right, that's not the whole story." He shook his head, "No way I'm gonna let the police get clued in 'bout this, Lewis. Their interference I cannot allow. Unequivocally. This is why I told you to leave, why I didn't want you to become involved."
"Hey, Bennie, wake the hell up. This is the scene of a major crime you're messing with," Croaker said. "You'd better have a damn fine explanation."
Bennie gave him an evil grin. "The electrical line, the pillow, the answering machine, I seem to remember you doing your share of tampering." He calmly resumed folding the towels over Sonia's head. "But to be less argumentative, my fuckin' business is explanations." Beneath the razzle-dazzle ripostes, he seemed immensely relieved that Croaker made no move to stop him this time.
"Give me one, then."
"I never do anything without just cause, remember that." He opened several kitchen drawers in turn, rummaging through them. At length, he came up with a roll of twine you use to truss up chickens or turkeys for roasting. "As sure as we're amigos I know who killed her." He began to bind the package with the twine. "That's why Sonia's murder must be kept between the two of us." He looked up at Croaker. "An' when you hear the history of it, I religiously believe you'll agree with me."
Maria freaked out when Bennie told her about Sonia. They took her back to Bennie's place, a nineteen-room extravaganza built in the Venetian palazzo style overlooking the Intracoastal on Forty-ninth Street in Miami Beach, not two blocks from the Eden Roc Hotel across the water on Collins Avenue. The place was exhausting. There were seven bedrooms-one presumably for each night of the week-all with open-air whirlpools. There was a European-style library, a billiards room, a fully automated film screening theater, a stone-encased wine cellar, even a louvered cigar patio off the formal dining room. It had water frontage with a landing stage guarded by ornate stone winged lions that appeared flown whole from the Grand Canal in Venice. Tied up to it was a sleek midnight blue cigarette, one of those sexy boats built for speed and nothing else.
Croaker and Bennie walked out onto the dock. The lush, Deco colors of sunset dappled the Intracoastal. Far out, over the southern ocean, the last remnants of the afternoon's thunderstorm hung against the horizon like a black and impenetrable curtain. A soft breeze ruffled their hair, washed their faces with sea salt. All across South Florida, it was a time for easy drinking and, if you were a fisherman, talk of the day's exploits.
Though he had an ice-cold Corona in his hand, Croaker did not feel like drinking. The day's events gnawed at his heart. Bennie deposited the large round package under his arm into the cigarette. The doctor he had summoned, a small balding Colombian with a thin mustache that did not quite cover a harelip, ministered to Maria behind the closed doors of one of the many upstairs bedrooms.
Croaker stared at the carefully wrapped package rolling with the waves of the Intracoastal. Now Sonia's head was here, and with Bennie's call to her partners at Lord Constantine that she was attending to a family emergency, there was no reason for anyone to suspect foul play.
"There was something even weirder than finding the decapitated head," Croaker said at length.
Deep aquamarine water could be glimpsed through the carved stanchions of the stone balustrade. It seemed a symbol of purity in which the cigarette's cargo had been unceremoniously dropped.
Bennie took out a cigar and went through the ritual of lighting up. "Yeah? Then I missed it."
"'Cause it wasn't there. No blood, Bennie. How come? She was smothered by a pillow in her bedroom." A flash of Sonia's long legs spun through Croaker's consciousness like a shining lure that's just been struck by a game fish. He felt a wave of intense sadness mixed with anger at how her life had been cut short. "We find her head in the 'fridge and the only blood's dripping from it. There's not a speck inside the house."
Bennie continued to smoke, staring out at the light of day slowly being extinguished.
"The killer didn't have a lot of time," Croaker continued. "So what did he do after he smothered her? We know he didn't decapitate her inside the house."
"But there were those two parallel marks," Bennie said. "Suppose he dragged her outside an' did her there?"
Croaker shook his head. "Uh-uh. We checked the outside. Except for those two parallel marks there was nothing. No blood, no viscera, no bits of skin or bone. Besides, doing it outside's too risky. A neighbor or a passerby could see him."
"So what the hell happened?" Bennie asked.
"I have no idea."
Croaker was abruptly overwhelmed by an image of Sonia's surprised and happy face as he merengued with her across the dance floor at the Shark Bar. Part of him marveled at the calm with which he was dissecting the last few hours' events. Another part of him was ashamed.
Bennie must have had some inkling of what was happening. He kept his own counsel as Croaker turned away. Taking a deep breath, Croaker leaned against the balustrade and watched a white fishing boat plying the dark, purling waters of the Intracoastal. As it passed, its wake sent wavelets sloshing against the wooden pylons so that the cigarette rolled at its berth.
He could see Stone Tree, limned against the kind of lime and orange sunsets you got only in the Keys. The Seminole was aft in the small boat as he navigated it through the mangrove islets. "Do you see it?" he said. Croaker thought he was going to point but he didn't. "I don't see anything," Croaker replied. "It's getting dark." Stone Tree had said, "Not for me," telling Croaker as much as he needed to know.
The doctor emerged from Bennie's house, came down the marble stairs to join them. "Maria's resting easily now," he said in Spanish. "She's obviously had a difficult time." He knew better than to ask the cause of her shock. "With what I gave her she'll sleep deeply, and chances are when she wakes up she'll be fine. If not-" A card appeared between his fingers, and Bennie took it. "This is the name of a friend of mine. He's a counselor. If your friend is in need . . ' He tapped his mustache, as if it had tilted out of place. "You have my assurance that he is the soul of discretion."
Bennie showed the doctor out to the part of the carpark where his emerald BMW stood beside the Hummer and Croaker's T-bird. Croaker saw no money change hands. That was not how Bennie did business. Debt was amassed and discharged in intangible ways. Favors, influence, accommodations, were the invisible but potent coin of his realm. Bennie disappeared into the house, presumably to look in on Maria.
Watching the lights coming on along the strand of Collins Avenue Croaker wondered just what his friendship with Bennie and Sonia had gotten him into. Suddenly, shockingly, he felt that the moment he had crossed over the Little River Canal this afternoon he had become part of Bennie's shadowy world, and he did not yet know what that might entail. He only had the unsettling presentiment that everything in his life had changed.
Shaking off this evil feeling, he used his cell phone to place three calls to friends in different sectors of the federal government. Two were unavailable, and he left detailed messages on their voice mail. The third answered and, after hearing about the desperate plight Rachel was in, transferred the call to a doctor pal of his at Walter Reed Hospital. The doctor pretty much reiterated what Jenny Marsh had told Croaker.
"Major organs are in hellishly short supply," he said. "And because she's a user I'm afraid her chances of jumping the line are nil." He paused. "The one good thing is she's in very capable hands. I know Dr. Marsh by reputation, and she's first-rate. If there's a way to save your niece you can be sure shell find it. But if the situation is as you have described it . . ." He sighed. "I wish I had better news for you, Mr. Croaker. Right now, I don't think there's anything anyone can do except pray for a miracle."
Croaker thanked the doctor and hung up. He immediately dialed a local number, then entered his Anti-Cartel Task Force access code. As a freelance without official ties to the ACTF, he was given a temporary code each time he was hired. Apparently the last code still worked because he received clearance. He punched in Wade Forrest's extension. Croaker had worked with Forrest before in ACTF. He was fairly high up in the organization and rising. Unlike Croaker, who was a sporadically used freelancer, Forrest was a career man to the core. Though he'd come to Miami from Washington for a specific mission, he'd opted to stay on. Croaker didn't necessarily like Forrest-he was loud, overbearing, and something of a bully. But Croaker respected him; he was loyal. The first rule that Croaker's father had taught him in law enforcement was that loyalty was the one commodity you couldn't buy, borrow, or steal.
Forrest wasn't answering his line, which was not surprising. Out in the field, most likely. What was surprising, however, was that no human voice came on the line. As far as Croaker knew, the ACTF field offices were manned twenty-four hours hours a day. In fact, Croaker thought he heard the distant clicks and whirs he associated with an automatic call switching device. Perhaps it was just his imagination because a moment later Wade Forrest's recorded voice led him through the standard voice mail menu. He left a Most Urgent message. Maybe, just maybe, Forrest had connections with UNOS. But he'd have to speak to him to find out.
He disconnected just as Bennie returned. His friend was carrying a small zippered flight bag.
"Okay, Bennie. It's time for a little show-and-tell."
Bennie nodded. "Bueno." He rolled the cigar meditatively between his lips. "Time an' place, Lewis. In my business they are everything." Bending over, he stowed the flight bag in the cigarette then deftly slipped the aft line, jumped down into the boat. "Andale, muchacho," he said. "We have important business on the Atlantic."
As Croaker stepped into the boat, Bennie scrambled to let go the bow line. Then, back in the shallow cockpit, he fired the powerful engines. The cigarette gave a throaty roar and a puff of blue diesel smoke as Bennie turned her out into the Intracoastal.
The party lights of Miami Beach swept by. On their left, Croaker could see a long line of white limos disgorging a festive wedding party into the gargantuan lobby of the Eden Roc Hotel. Flashbulbs popped like sunspots, and there was a burst of wild applause as the bride pirouetted around the grinning groom for the kneeling photographers.
The bride, who looked like a model, sleek in fitted white satin and organza, reminded him of Sonia. He had a terrible flash of the model's head bouncing like a gaily striped beachball down the staircase of the Eden Roc while flashbulbs fired like cannons. Taking a deep breath, he wrenched his attention away.
Bennie veered off to starboard, heading at low speed for the outlet into Biscayne Bay. This far south, you needed to take the bay to pick up the channel between the tip of Miami Beach and Fisher Island in order to get to the Atlantic Ocean.
Croaker clambered over to Bennie's side. " 'There's something out there waiting for us' " he said over the heavy thrum of the diesels. "Isn't that what you said, Bennie?"
Bennie nodded. "Close enough." Water, churned to white froth, plumed from the rear of the cigarette. "You know, Lewis, there's a certain, what?, inevitability 'bout life. Like with me being in the line of work I'm in. I've made enemies, I've been up-front 'bout that. Okay, that goes with the territory, but there are enemies and then there are enemies."
Croaker could smell something like fish entrails surfacing in the Intracoastal. It was sharp and immediate, like a hit of ammonia; it made his pulse pound.
"God hears me," Bennie was saying, "I've made enemies like that. Case in point. There are, like, these two brothers. Antonio an' Heitor: the Bonitas. An', shit, not jus' brothers. Identical twins. I mean to tell you, Lewis, these cabrones are some bad motherfucking sonsofbitches." Bennie's hands made complex patterns in the air. "It's like, how can I put it? It's like these bastardos popped outta their mother's womb pissed off at the world, know what I mean? They're malicious as shit and, what's worse, they get off on it."
Croaker eyed him. "What do these Bonita twins have to do with Sonia's death?"
A subtle change had come over Bennie, and Croaker was struggling to figure out just what it was. "Everything," Bennie said. "They whacked her cold. I know it"-he smacked the left side of his chest with the heel of his hand-"here."
"That's a mighty big assumption to make." But, in truth, Croaker did not immediately disbelieve him. On the contrary. He had a suspicion that another piece of the enigma that was Bennie Milagros was about to reveal itself. "What're you going on-besides pure instinct, I mean."