“He’s probably gonna shoot you.”
“I’m getting tired waitin’ down here. You want I shoot a couple a rounds your way? Maybe I get lucky,” says Herman. “And the noise is gonna bring Ibarra that much faster. Or maybe I just come up there and kick your ass, throw you off that fuckin’ thing.” Herman gets off the bike, drops it on the ground, and starts marching this way.
“What’s he doing?” says Adam.
“I don’t know.”
“You tell him to stop, or so help me I will shoot you here and now.”
“Herman. Stay there. Don’t come up.”
Herman doesn’t listen. He just keeps coming, talking to himself, muttering under his breath. I can hear him all the way down at the bottom of the steps. He starts climbing, taking the two-foot steps in stride like they were built for him.
“Herman, stay there. ”
He keeps coming.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” says Adam. He points the gun at him, takes aim.
I hit his arm with my shoulder just as he pulls the trigger. The snap of the round, the explosion next to my ear, sends a ringing vibration through my head.
A thousand birds lift out of the jungle. Flitting black specks like bugs on a windshield, they fill the sky.
Herman stops on the stairs and looks up. “Now you fuckin’ did it.” Herman unholsters his automatic, the sun glinting off the polished stainless steel.
Adam tries to push me over the edge. I push back, the rubber soles of my shoes gripping the stone, my toes right at the edge. He tries to twist for leverage, one arm around my neck. We struggle at the edge of the stone precipice.
I slip his grip and end up landing on my butt on the hard stone platform behind him.
Adam points the pistol at me, and then out of the corner of his eye he sees Herman still coming, charging up the stairs. Adam turns and aims, both hands this time on the Glock, taking a careful bead on Herman’s bulk now only ten or twelve steps from the top. He fires, and I hear the bullet as it hits flesh.
Herman stops, looks down, puts his hand to his chest, and staggers. Then he looks at Adam and starts coming again.
I reach for the pistol in my pocket, and it snags on my jacket.
Adam aims and fires again. I hear the same thud as the bullet hits home. This time Herman goes down on one knee. He drops his pistol and it clatters down several steps. I can see Herman’s face pumped with blood, the veins bulging on his neck. He’s holding his side with one hand.
The small Walther is out of my pocket. I pull the slide and cycle a round into the chamber, aim at Adam, and squeeze. Nothing.
The safety is on. I bring it back, fumble with the tiny lever, click, and it shows red.
Adam has the Glock up, taking careful aim at Herman’s back as he struggles to reach for his pistol on the stairs.
I squeeze off a round. The little Walther torques in my hand and the bullet catches Adam in the arm, jerking his body just as he pulls the trigger. His shot goes wide.
He turns and looks at me, his eyes like two eggs sunny-side up in a platter, wondering where I got the gun. Adam missed it when he frisked me. The small pistol was underneath, inside the pocket of my zippered jacket as I lay on the ground. He failed to check the front when I got up.
He has the Glock lowered at his side, the muzzle pointed down at the stone as he stares in disbelief at the gun in my hand.
If he raises the Glock, Adam knows I will shoot him again. Instead he looks at me, smiles, then shakes his head as if he is daring me to do it. He turns toward the motion on the stairs.
Herman is reaching for the automatic.
Adam takes aim.
This time, with the crack of the Walther, it barely moves in my hand. Tolt’s head snaps sideways as a tiny red dot appears on his temple, followed by blood like someone tapped a barrel. His knees buckle. His ass hits the stone. For an instant his torso sits upright. Then gravity takes it sideways. When I blink he is gone, over the edge of the platform.
EPILOGUE
Harry is out of the hospital, his memory and faculties intact, and Herman is in.
Surgeons removed one bullet that lodged in the muscle of Herman’s chest, up high near his clavicle. The other passed through his side, piercing what Herman called one of his love handles. He is talking about decorating it with a diamond stud, a conversation piece for the ladies that he can flash above his trunks whenever he struts the beach.
As for Adam, a Mexican medical examiner picked up pieces of him with a sponge from a rock outcropping five stories below the top of the Noche Mul. I suppose you could say that Adam was a victim of his own management style.
Adam had wounded Nick’s ego in ways he probably never understood. Some lawyers, unhappy in their position at a firm, might take a client or two, like candy from a dish, on their way out the door. But not Nick. He wanted it all, right down to the gold ashtrays and Persian carpets.
Nick was making a run, trying to peel off partners like a monkey stripping fruit from a tree. His plan was not only to take the best part of Rocker, Dusha’s talent, but as many of the firm’s major clients as he could scoop up in a single pass, swinging from the branches. A new firm with his own name on the letterhead’s top line.
Like every palace coup in the making, this one could ruin careers if those on the move were caught in the act. The other players, some of the partners upstairs, key people in the other offices, stayed in the shadows while Nick set the munitions at Rocker, Dusha for self-destruct.
Adam’s obsession with empire, his constant expansion onto turf for more offices, was cutting into his partners’ take-home. These were fertile grounds of discontent for Nick. He planted the age-old seed of every revolution: Nick offered them a better deal.
When he was killed in what looked like an accident, a drive-by aimed at a client, there must have been some damp carpets in the firm’s executive suites-and it wasn’t from crying. The people involved in his coup had to wonder what careless notes Nick might have left behind.
He was the one taking all the chances. Of course, he had nothing to lose and the most to gain, the kind of odds Nick would like-managing partner, overnight, in one of the largest firms in the state. It was the kind of edgy action that would give a normal person peptic ulcers. To Nick it was the etching acid of independence, the stuff of which new beginnings are made. Revolution in a banana republic.
What he needed to pull it off was a source of ready cash. Partners in an established firm don’t jump ship en masse, unless somebody with a healthy line of credit is standing ready to bankroll the new venture. It was one thing to move to a new office. It was another to give up your Lexus.
Where was Nick going to get that kind of money? Actually, he told me, that morning over coffee, but I wasn’t listening. It was one of Nick’s character flaws, unfortunately not his worst: the irresistible compulsion, if not to crow, at least to hint of victories, before they were won.
The money would come from the old Capri Hotel itself, Nick’s watering hole with its coffee shop in the dismal basement where he and I had our last conversation.
The hastily formed limited partnership, the seemingly defunct Jamaile Enterprises had only one asset. It owned the property on which the hotel sat.
All the pieces snapped together like a puzzle. Nick had leveraged the purchase of the hotel with a multimillion-dollar mortgage. He would have amortized this over a short term. He didn’t plan on holding the property for long. It was where all of Nick’s money went, the hefty fees he was taking home from the firm, the money Dana was no longer seeing to pay for the house and the car, to support her in the style to which she had become
