The Consummata

There we stood in the bare little room, with the ball-gagged, handcuffed, very helpless Halaquez a mute witness to our little marital squabble, a husband with his knife and gun, a wife in her black bondage gown.

But she didn’t argue any further.

“He’s yours,” Kim said. “Let them have him.”

I had Halaquez’s arm by one hand, but I took her arm by the other and grinned. “You look pretty damn good in black, doll.”

And she grinned back at me, her mouth full and moist and red. “Do you like it? Then why don’t you kiss me?”

I did. Hard and sweet and tender and rough, mashing my lips into hers with a fierceness that was anything but role play.

“Help me haul his ass out of here,” I said.

“All right,” she said, and pulled on the Consummata mask and again became the blonde dominatrix who ran things around here.

I tagged along as she dragged the whimpering Halaquez out into the corridor and down the wide stairway, and not a single security guy gave us even a second glance. We paused on the landing.

“I’ve got a boat waiting at the dock,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed in the mask holes. “You understand I have to stay behind....”

“You need to do what you need to do,” I said ambiguously, and she towed our quaking prisoner down the rest of the way.

Before long, we had moved through the downstairs and back through the kitchen, and outside where the night had grown a little chilly, wind riffling the palms.

Now we had the handcuffed, ankles-chained Halaquez between us, me with one arm, her with the other, dragging him along like the bag of garbage he was. He was trying to scream behind the ball-gag, but only a muffled grunting emerged, like something unpleasant on the tube with the volume way down.

As we moved along the row of gently swaying palms, he finally stopped his screaming, ceased any protest, his body slumping with despair, almost as if he were asleep or dead, and we had to tow him along. It slowed us, but not much.

When got to the dock, Saladar was still seated up in the flybridge. He stood, his eyes wide and gleaming, his smile the same. Ever so slightly, he rocked with the motion of the moored craft.

“You have done it, Senor Morgan!”

“We’ve done it, Luis.” We were almost close enough to the boat to step on board now, with Halaquez between us, like parents hauling a reluctant trick-or-treater to the next house. Kim stepped to one side to remove her mask, while I held our captive loosely by one arm.

“Luis, this is Kim, my wife,” I said. “She’s a government agent. Turns out this whole S & M set-up was an enormous sting.”

Looking up at Saladar in the flybridge, Kim said, “You should know, sir, that you have the option of leaving this prisoner in my charge, for interrogation and maybe prosecution.”

Halaquez straightened suddenly and his eyes were wide with something that was not fear, and I would have sworn he was trying to smile around that ball-gag. And was he laughing?

Could he be laughing...and why?

Saladar drew the .38 from his gunfighter’s holster and shot Halaquez in the head, the report a whip crack that echoed off the water. The near-naked man in the black latex shorts went down in a pile on the dock leaving only a bloody mist behind.

Kim blurted, “What in the hell—”

I said nothing, my eyes meeting Saladar’s. He lowered the gun but did not holster it.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, bowing his head. He fumbled for words: “I am afraid...the emotion, it...seeing this traitor...forgive me....”

“I can’t, Luis,” I said.

His chin came up, his eyes implored me. “Senor....”

“You’re the real traitor, aren’t you, Luis? I suspected as much. I even thought you might try to kill Jaimie here on the voyage home, which would have confirmed it. But you didn’t want to take that risk. You figured I might read the relief in his face when he saw you, the man he reported to...the man who has looted, manipulated, sold out, and betrayed his fellow Cubans in Little Havana, for how many years?”

The gun came up, though its snout pointed down at us from his perch. His sneering smile suited his devil’s beard.

“I careened into Little Havana,” I said, “and Pedro and the others embraced me as a possible savior. You played along, but betrayed me from the start. The very start. You were part of that small group, that first night, who knew of my masquerade, and knew I’d be at the Amherst Hotel.”

He may have been a Commie, but his manner was imperial. “There is no need for this, Senor Morgan. You waste your words and your final moments. I am a soldier. I fight for a cause. You are a mercenary, the worst kind of capitalist.”

If I distracted him enough, I might get to the .45. My suit coat hung open, after all. Then there was the knife sheathed on my left forearm.

Which could I get to faster?

“I wonder,” I said. “Were you chasing Dick Best’s nonexistent new invention for your cause? Or did you only see the wealth it promised?”

But I would never know the answer, because a second whip crack cut through the night and interrupted our conversation, a shot cutting through Saladar’s shoulder in a blurt of blood, shoving him off balance, his .38 tumbling from his hand and plunking into the water like a stone.

Gaita stepped from the shadows and onto the dock, a striking, strange, barefoot vision in a metal-studded black bikini. She too had a .38, not a long-barreled one like Saladar had dropped in the bay, but a little police special that did the job just as well.

“Ladron!” she spat, and shot him in the chest.

Saladar teetered on the flybridge.

“Asesino!”

And shot him the stomach.

He lurched.

“Traidor!”

And shot him in the head.

Finally he tumbled.

Tumbled from the flybridge to the rear deck, and landed hard but surely didn’t feel it, a limp rag of a human hitting with a thud that made the boat rock slightly, a death with none of the dignity he’d worn in life as part of his disguise.

Gaita came over to me and I held her. She was crying, but it seemed more anger than anything else. She started telling me how she’d seen Kim leave the ballroom with me, and how she had gone downstairs to wait to see if we would lead Halaquez out. The little avenger had been one of the girls hired by Kim to work tonight’s affair. Bunny had been unaware, and...

I stopped her before she went into too much detail, saying, “All I care about is that you’re here, and that you shot that bastard.”

Then I told her to go, and to take the gun with her, advising that she dispose of it.

“Tell Pedro everything!” I called.

“Si, Senor Morgan!”

She disappeared into the night.

Taking his wrists while I took his feet, Kim helped me swing Jaimie Halaquez’s mostly naked corpse up and onto the rear deck of the Black Beauty, where he landed with a noisy thump next to the equally dead Saladar. We hadn’t bothered discussing the obvious—that I would dump the bodies in the ocean.

The whip cracks had sent no one running down the backyard to see what the commotion was. Perhaps nobody heard anything over the blaring strip-club jazz. And the neighbors on either side were a world away.