The driver stomped on the accelerator, and we jolted through muddy potholes off the road and into a row of blooming mango trees. In the Jeep ahead of us, the guard in the passenger seat stood and leveled his shotgun across the top of the open windshield.
Guy spoke excitedly in Spanish into the radio, then turned to me. "You must be psychic, my friend."
"Huh?"
"We got a problem with varmints."
When we rounded a corner, close enough to a tree to rattle the branches and have a couple one-pounders fall into the Jeep, I saw what he meant. A heavy-duty pickup truck with no license plate, its bed filled with mangoes, 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.
Sirens' Song
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
