bail, a guy could have an accident in the county jail waiting for trial.”
Lassiter looked at the bay where orange flames still licked at black fuel spread across the water. A dozen bleary-eyed tourists gathered on the dock, gawking at the scene. Lassiter turned back, staring into the reflection of the fire in the cop’s sunglasses. “If that’s supposed to scare me, forget it, I’m done being scared. Nothing you can say, nothing you can do, means anything. Do you understand?”
The captain studied him.
“Go ahead, arrest me. I’ll sing a tune about a corrupt police captain that’ll get headlines all the way to Tokyo.”
Lassiter watched Mikala Kalehauwehe sizing him up.
Maybe figuring he underestimated the haole first go-round. I’m still alive and that beat the odds, Lassiter knew. A guy who could cause trouble. They both heard radios crackling, a woman dispatcher’s voice, two more police cars pulling up at the end of the dock.
“You want to talk, go ahead,” the captain said. “Or if you want, it’s over, no more blood. There’s a flight to the mainland this afternoon. Be on it.” Which is what Jake Lassiter did, there being nothing to do on Maui but get framed for two murders, maybe get shot in the back by a cop in a holding cell.
Jake Lassiter returned to Miami the day somebody stole the mayor’s gun. And somebody else stole the fast- food bandit’s gun. The newspapers were brimming with stolen gun stories.
Most readers hadn’t even known that Mayor Rafael Benitez kept a city-issued 380 Beretta automatic in the glove compartment of his city-issued Buick. Apparently, the mayor needed protection in case citizens objected to an increase in cable television rates. Mayor Benitez lost the pistol when his car was stolen from his reserved parking place in front of Les Violins, a downtown nightclub where he solicited advice and cash from the Hispanic Builders’ Association.
The fast-food bandit lost his gun and then some. Trying to hold up a supermercado on Lejeune Road, the bandit ran into two female vice detectives taking a break from a “John detail.” The bandit loped into the parking lot carrying $104.75 from the cash register and when he laughed at two women in leather hot pants who ordered him to freeze, they peppered him with five shots in the chest. In the confusion that followed, a bystander with a fine eye for firearms picked up the bandit’s Desert Eagle. 357 Magnum and coolly walked away.
Neither event would have mattered much to Jake Lassiter if Metro hadn’t cordoned off two lanes of Lejeune Road, backing him up into a vicious gridlock on the way home from the airport. Not that he was in a hurry. Jake Lassiter was in a fog. The flights from Maui to the West Coast, then to Miami, were a blur. He hadn’t talked to anyone, hadn’t touched the cardboard airline food.
After working his way out of the traffic jam south of the airport, Jake Lassiter drove to Cindy’s place where they talked about Tubby. He held her while she wept and then he left.
The next day, Lassiter lay in the hammock behind his coral rock house between Poinciana and Kumquat. He unplugged the phone and didn’t bother to read the mail. At sundown, he coaxed the old yellow convertible to turn over and drove toward Key Biscayne, where he parked on the sandy berm of the Rickenbacker Causeway and walked under the bridge. Leaning against the third piling from the end, a short man with bowed legs in canvas shorts expertly flicked a wrist, and his casting reel whined in the evening air.
“If I were you, I’d use an oil-colored George-N-Shad rubber fish, maybe three-quarter ounce,” Jake Lassiter said.
The man turned and waggled his bushy eyebrows. “If you were me,” Charlie Riggs said, “you would have called an old friend when you had some trouble out there in the islands. And I’m using a Bang-O-Lure shallow running plug, blue on the back, white underneath.”
“How’d you know?”
“Cindy called last night. Figured you’d get around to me when you felt like talking.”
Lassiter watched the water ripple over the plug. “I miscalculated, Charlie. I tried to help Sam and Berto and let them both down. Tubby, too. He was a good man, and he’s dead because of me. And a couple guys who weren’t so good. Plus a woman, a woman who was beautiful and fearless and lived by no rules except her own. Maybe I could have changed her, saved her…”
“Did you learn from your experience?”
“Yes, but too late.”
“No. We give ourselves the name Homo sapiens, which means ‘wise man,’ but of course, We are not born that way, and we don’t gain wisdom from books. We learn how to live by living. Vive ut vivas — “
A splash interrupted him, then a flash of silver erupted from the water, and Charlie’s rod bent violently toward the bay.
“Tarpon, Charlie!”
“ Megalops atlanticus, a great game fish, eh?” Charlie Riggs jerked the rod tip straight up, and six feet of fighting fish exploded into the air, then began its run. “ Deo volente, my twelve-pound line will hold.”
After giving a hundred yards of line, Charlie turned the tarpon with thumb pressure on the reel, and the fish jumped, end over end, and hit the water again. Then it threw the hook and was gone.
“Sorry,” Jake Lassiter said.
“Doesn’t matter. Can’t eat ‘em. Too many bones. And I never mounted a fish in my life. Would have liked to land it, but sometimes, the big ones put up such a fight, they don’t survive it. With some animals it’s better to just enjoy their beauty, leave them alone.”
“You trying to teach me about life, Charlie?”
“Just about fishing, Jake. Just fishing.”
The next morning, Jake Lassiter drove to Kazdoy’s All-Nite Deli where he knew Sam would have his hot tea and prune danish at seven-thirty sharp. Lassiter spotted his friend’s bald head over the back of the red vinyl-covered booth. There alongside him was the platinum mop of Violet Belfrey. Just like a couple of kids sharing a soda.
Jake Lassiter told Sam Kazdoy that the bonds were gone, torn to shreds in an explosion. It was okay, Kazdoy said, could use the write-off, lots more where those came from, and his stock portfolio was doing fine. And good thing too, because a married man’s got obligations. “A what?” Jake Lassiter asked him.
“A married man,” Sam Kazdoy said again, and Violet Belfrey flashed a seven-carat rock and they each twirled gold wedding bands, shiny in the fluorescent lighting.
Lassiter was about to mumble congratulations but the waitress called him to the phone.
“Thought you’d be there,” Cindy said, trying to put the old bounce into her voice. “Got some good news for you. The partners’ executive committee says you’re to come back to work, pronto. They want you and need you.”
“I suppose that’s good,” Lassiter said without enthusiasm.
“It didn’t hurt your case that Thad Whitney called. Seems the wife of the bank president has a problem. Her poodle bit a neighbor down in Gables Estates. Well, the families haven’t spoken for years before this happened, some dumb dispute over whose yacht smacked the seawall. Now the neighbor hits them with a big suit over the dog, he wants punitive damages, the works. Thad the Cad says you’ve got to handle it or he’ll take the bank’s work elsewhere.”
Only thing worse than a slip-and-fall, Lassiter knew, was a dog-bite case, the bargain basement of the legal profession. “It’s my penance,” he said. “Thad’s way of getting even.”
“Jake.”
“Yeah?”
“Please come back. I miss you.”
Lassiter hung up and returned to the table where Sam Kazdoy held each of Violet Belfrey’s bony hands. “You’re too late to be best man, but you can still wish us mazel tov,” Kazdoy said.
“Sure, Sam.”
“Jake, boychik, you look all farchadat, like you’re in a daze.
Nu? We’re off on our honeymoon. Flying to Los Angeles tonight, then tomorrow, a cruise to Hawaii.”
