was racing down the row ahead of us. A shotgun blast reverberated from the Jeep in front of us, and the pickup swerved but stayed on the road. Another shot, and I heard the ping of buckshot off the rear gate of the pickup.
'Son of a bitch! We'll head them off,' Guy shouted, and again the driver blew the horn.
The Jeep in front peeled off to the left, the one behind to the right. We gained on the pickup. Guy reached under his seat and came up holding a Glock nine-millimeter handgun. He stood and held the gun in both hands, reminding me of his half sister in the club, though this weapon was bigger and packed more punch. The pop-pop- pop-pop was followed by Guy's grunt, then, 'Damn! Can't steady it.' He braced himself, then fired off several more rounds. Another shotgun blast from the Jeep to the left. The aim must have been high, because in a second, a tree was dripping with eviscerated fruit.
As we approached a T-intersection at the end of the grove, the pickup swung to the right, but one of the Jeeps was headed straight at it. The pickup swerved back to the left, but the third Jeep was coming from that direction. The truck tried to straighten out, slid in the mud, and flew straight across the road and up and over an earthen levee.
We heard the splash as our Jeep skidded to a stop at the base of the levee. Guy was the first one out, and he tromped up the slope, pistol in hand. I followed, and by the time I reached the top, two guards were aiming shotguns at the overturned pickup truck. Three men tumbled out of the cab and stood with their hands over their heads in the shallow water. A thousand pounds of freshly picked mangoes were dribbling into the water and slowly floating down the irrigation channel.
Guy Bernhardt pointed the Glock in the general direction of the mango rustlers. 'Bastards! Chickenshit thieving bastards! I ought to kill you.'
His face was red, and his little eyes were slits in his porcine face. 'You know what I do to shitheads who steal from me! I kill them! Who would even miss you, buried under a jacaranda tree, you jerk-offs!' He aimed at one of the men, who trembled visibly. 'What about it, Lassiter?'
'What?'
'You're my lawyer. If you can get Sis off, what about me? If I kill these pukes, do I have a problem?'
'Are you in imminent fear for your life?'
'Hell, no! But they are.'
'Then you'd better not shoot them.'
'Fucking poachers! And fucking lawyers! Everybody wants something for nothing. But nothing worth having is free. Not water. Not mangoes. Not nothing. I've worked for everything I've got, Lassiter.'
He fingered his earring with one hand and held the gun with the other. 'You ready, poachers? You ready to die?'
'Guy, I think that's enough venting for today,' Schein said placidly. 'I believe the gentlemen get the point.'
Guy Bernhardt shot Schein an angry look, then swung the gun toward the channel. He emptied the magazine, killing several innocent mangoes as they floated toward Biscayne Bay.
As the echoes died down, my mind wandered. Had Chrissy worked for everything, too? Or had it all come too easily? The career. And now the inheritance. I was still thinking about red-faced Guy and his half sister when I noticed that there was something vaguely familiar about the pickup. Just then the driver, knee-deep in the channel, spoke for the first time.
'Jake, mi amigo, am I glad to see you,' Roberto Condom said, hands high over his head, blood dripping from his nose.
9
Step into the lobby of the Fontainebleau, and it's 1959. You can almost hear Bobby Darin singing 'Mack the Knife,' and you expect to see Sammy Davis, Jr., walking out of the Poodle Lounge, maybe chatting up Frank Sinatra. The architecture-all gilt and marble-is a combination of faux French and Miami Beach kitsch. We've lost a lot of our local landmarks in recent years. Gone is the Coppertone sign on Biscayne Boulevard with the puppy pulling off the little girl's bikini bottom. Gone are Eastern Air Lines, Pan Am, and the Miami News. But the Fontainebleau is still here, and I love the place. It has no pretensions about its pretensions and is off limits to the South Beach terminally trendy crowd.
From the lobby, I took the escalator down to the ground floor, strolled past the obligatory sunglasses and sundries stores, and found something new. A spy shop. In the window were voice-activated tape recorders to catch a cheating spouse or business partner, bionic binoculars with earphones, telephone scramblers, bomb suppression blankets, and ninety-thousand-volt stun guns. A nice touch, I thought, but the hotel could do even more. With rampant mayhem against tourists, shouldn't the Fontainebleau offer a modified American plan: breakfast and dinner plus a bulletproof vest and transportation from the airport in a Humvee?
The Season was over, and summer is still an afterthought here, so the pool deck was mostly deserted, except for a few Chileans escaping their cold season. The day was sweltering, but a breeze from the ocean rattled the palm fronds and kept things bearable.
It wasn't hard to find Chrissy. She wore a white one-piece swimsuit cut low in front and high on the sides. She slouched in one of those canvas-backed director's chairs under an umbrella, a queen bee, while the drones buzzed around her. A makeup artist-a pale young woman sans makeup-dusted her forehead. A hair stylist-a skinny guy with unruly shoulder-length curls- used a portable dryer to comb out her hair. A barefoot male assistant in khaki shorts fanned Chrissy with a magazine.
A scrawny young man I took to be the director hovered over her, gesturing with a rolled-up script toward the free-form pool, where a waterfall tumbled over Disneyesque rocks. He looked about twenty-five and was lost inside a huge gray T-shirt that claimed to be the property of the Chicago Bears, though I doubted the guy had ever heard of Mike Ditka, much less sweated through a nutcracker drill.
'Chrissy, you look positively fab,' he gushed. 'Perfecto! Next, scene three, catching rays in the lagoon.'
Okay, so it wasn't Gone With the Wind.
Sitting in a matching chair was another model, a dark-haired, deeply tanned young woman in a green bikini. She seemed to be pouting, maybe because Chrissy was getting all the attention, or maybe it was just her normal look. A photographer toted a video camera to the edge of the pool while an assistant took readings with a light meter. Several technicians and production people busied themselves around the pool with lights, reflectors, and assorted accoutrements of their trade. The place hummed with serious activity, Mission Control before a launch. Everyone wore shorts and T-shirts, except this big lug of a lawyer, whose blue oxford-cloth shirt was already beginning to show sweat stains.
I headed toward Chrissy when a young woman with a stopwatch hanging from her neck held up her hand. 'Whoa! Crew only.'
'I'm with Chrissy,' I said.
She looked at me dubiously, but I was saved by my client. 'Jake! Over here. We'll just be a minute.'
I gave the stopwatch woman my best crooked grin. 'Making a commercial is pretty intense, I guess.'
'An advertorial, not a commercial.' She sounded offended.
'Sorry.' I walked past her and into the little circle around Chrissy. My social standing had just improved by several strata.
The director was talking to Chrissy and gesturing with his hands. 'It's not merely suntan oil. It's an attitude, a way of life. It makes you glow on the inside, as well as outside.'
'Only if you drink it,' I said.
Chrissy suppressed a grin. Annoyed, the director looked up then continued talking to this stunning young woman who, at this precise moment, was facing a murder charge but looked ready for a relaxing week in Barbados. 'Let them see your joie de vivre. Let your beauty radiate outward like the rays of the sun, warming you with its breath, a lover's kiss. The sun gives us hope, renewal…'
'Cancer,' I added helpfully.
