day. That’s state time, prison.”
“Great.”
“But they won’t want to take you to trial. They’ll offer you simple possession, a few months county time, and a year or two probation.” Max took a sip of his drink, bourbon over crushed ice. “You were brought up once before. Didn’t that tell you anything? You ever get hooked on that stuff . . . I wrote a woman last year, a crack addict. I saw her again the other day in court. She looked like she’d had a face transplant.”
“I don’t do drugs,” Jackie said. “I haven’t even smoked grass in years.”
“You were carrying the forty-two grams for somebody else.”
“Apparently. I knew I had the money, but not the coke.”
“Who packs your suitcase, the maid?”
She said, “You’re as much fun as the cops.”
In her quiet tone, looking right at him in cocktail lounge half-light with those sparkly green eyes, and he said, “Okay, you don’t know how it got in your bag.”
It wasn’t good enough. She sipped her drink, not seeming to care if he believed her or not.
So he started over. He said, “I figured out the other day I’ve written something like fifteen thousand bonds since I’ve been in business. About eighty percent of them for drug offenses or you could say were drug-related. I know how the system works. If you want, I can help you look at your options.”
She surprised him.
“You’re not tired of it?”
“I am, as a matter of fact.” Max let it go at that; he didn’t need to hear himself talk. “What about you? You spend half your life up in the air?”
“Even when I’m not flying,” Jackie said. “I think I’m having trouble mid-lifing. At this point, with no idea where I’m going.” She looked up at him, stubbing her cigarette out. “I know where I
Able to say things like that because he was older than she was by a dozen years. That was the feeling he got. He said, “Let’s see if we can figure out what you should do. You want another drink?”
Jackie nodded, lighting a cigarette. One after another. Max gestured to the waitress to do it again. Jackie was looking at the piano player now, a middle-aged guy in a tux and an obvious rug working over the theme from
She said, “The poor guy.”
Max looked over. “He uses every one of those keys, doesn’t he?” And looked at Jackie again. “You know who put the dope in your bag?”
She looked at him for a moment before nodding. “But that’s not what this is about. They were waiting for me.”
“It wasn’t a random search?”
“They knew I was carrying money. They even knew the amount. The one who searched my bag, Tyler, didn’t do much more than look at the money. ‘Oh, I’d say there’s fifty thousand here. What would you say?’ Not the least bit surprised. But all they could do was threaten to hand me over to Customs, and I could see they didn’t want to do that.”
“Get tied up in federal court,” Max said. “They were hoping you’d tell them about it.”
“What they did was stall, till they lucked out and found the coke.” She raised her glass and then held it. “You have to understand, they were as surprised as I was. But now they had something to use as leverage.”
“What’d they ask you?”
“If I knew a man named Walker, in Freeport. They mentioned a Jamaican . . .”
The waitress came with their drinks.
“Beaumont Livingston,” Max said.
Jackie stared at him while the waitress picked up their empty glasses and placed the drinks on fresh napkins, while the waitress asked if they’d care for some mixed nuts, and shook her head when Max looked at her and waited until he told her no thanks and the waitress walked off.
“How do you know Beaumont?”
“I wrote him on Monday,” Max said. “Yesterday morning they found him in the trunk of a car.”
She said, “Ordell put up his bond?”
“Ten thousand, the same as yours.”
She said, “Shit,” and picked up her drink. “They told me what happened to him. . . . The federal agent, the way he put it, Beaumont got popped.”
Max hunched over the table. “You didn’t mention that. One of the guys was federal? What, DEA?”
“Ray Nicolet, he’s with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I thought I told you.” Jackie’s gaze moved to the piano player. “Now it’s ‘The Sound of Music.’ He likes big production numbers.”
“When he starts to do ‘Climb Every Mountain,’ ” Max said, “we’re going someplace else.” He felt animated and could have smiled, beginning to understand what this was about. He said, “Ray Nicolet—I don’t know him, but I’ve seen his name on arrest reports. He’s the one who wants you. He uses you to get a line on Ordell, makes a case, and takes him federal.”
Max was pleased with himself.
Until Jackie said, “They never mentioned his name.”
And it stopped him. “You’re kidding.”
“I don’t think they know anything about him.”
“They talked to Beaumont.”
“Yeah, and what did he tell them?”
“Well, you know what Ordell’s into, don’t you?”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Jackie said. “If it isn’t alcohol or tobacco, what’s left that would get an ATF guy after me?”
Max said, “He never told you he sells guns?”
“I never asked.”
“That wouldn’t stop him.”
She said, “You want to argue about it?”
Max shook his head and watched as she leaned in closer, over her arms on the edge of the table, that gleam in her eyes.
“What kind of guns are we talking about?”
It gave him the feeling they were into something together here and he liked it and if she was putting him on, using him, so what.
He said, “You name it. We’re living in the arms capital of America, South Florida. You can buy an assault rifle here in less time than it takes to get a library card. Last summer I wrote a guy on a dope charge. While he’s out on bond they get him trying to move thirty AK-47s, the Chinese version, through Miami International going to Bolivia. You know what gun I’m talking about?” She shrugged, maybe nodding, and Max said, “It’s a copy of the Russian military weapon. Couple of weeks ago there was a story in the paper, how the cops pulled a sting on a guy who was buying TEC-9s in Martin County, no waiting, and selling them to drug dealers in West Palm, Lake Worth, all convicted felons. There’s a guy in Coral Springs sold cluster bombs to the Iraqis, he says before we went to war in the Gulf. I don’t see Ordell into military hardware, but you never know. What amazes me about him, he’s a bad guy, there’s no doubt in my mind, but he’s only had one conviction and that was twenty years ago.”
“He told you that?”
“A friend of mine at the Sheriff’s office ran his name. And Ordell’s the kind of guy loves to talk about himself.”
“Not to me,” Jackie said. “When I first met him he was flying over to Freeport a lot, he said to gamble. He’d tell me how much he won, or lost. How much he paid for clothes . . .”
“He hints around,” Max said, “wants you to guess what he does. Tell him you think he deals in guns and watch his face, he’ll give it away. Gets paid in the Bahamas, so he’s dealing out of the country. You bring the payoff here on one of your flights . . .” Max waited.
So did Jackie.
After a moment she said, “I used to bring over ten thousand at a time. Never more than that or any of my
