hood.
“Were you a Marine? You carry yourself like a Marine.”
“Navy. SEAL. Three tours in the delta.”
Johnny was busy, opening the driver’s door and popping the hood.
“Cool. Semper fi, right? I got a lot of respect for you guys. So, what do we have under the hood? Okay. Very cool. Look at this thing, huh? Chrome headers. Everything you see here is street legal. For starters, we got an Alston chassis with Strange struts, spool and rear housing that holds a—”
“Strange struts?”
“Bear with me, sir, please. Strange is the manufacturer of the after-market struts. Okay? So, the transmission is a 1.96 low Powerglide with brake and TCI4500 converter. The engine powering this eight-second ride is an Indian Adventures special displacing 541 cubic inches and has a Moldex billet crank, Ross pistons, Oliver rods, Edelbrock wide port heads with T&D shaft rockers, a custom sheet-metal intake with two methanol toilets, MSD with crank trigger—”
“Toilets?” Stoke asked, sliding behind the wheel and glancing over his shoulder at the rolled and pleated red leather rear seat.
“It’s a racing terminology thing, Mr. Jones. Okay? Stop looking. There’s no toilet in the vehicle.”
“She’ll do a quarter mile in eight seconds?”
“She will. NHRA certified.”
“And she’s street legal?”
“Absofuckinlutely.”
“Mercy.”
“You want this car, Mr. Jones? I feel that you do.”
“I do.”
“Let’s do it.”
“I need a number.”
“Ballpark?”
“Yeah.”
“Step into my office.”
5
A n hour later, Stokely Jones was cruising south on I-95. He rumbled over the bridge connecting downtown Miami to where he lived on Brickell Key. He was at the wheel of his brand-new 1965 GTO, top down, wearing a super-sized shit-eating grin on his face. He simply couldn’t believe the chick-magnetizing power of a black raspberry GTO convertible. He’d gotten so many admiring glances driving back to Coconut Grove, his left arm and jaw muscles were tired out just from all the waving and smiling back he’d done in acknowledgment.
There’d been a high school car wash going on at the Dixie Creme and a mess of cheerleaders had swarmed over the car when he’d stopped for a light at the intersection. You girls behave, he’d said to them, blipping the throttle and watching them jump back at the throaty roar. Hey, it’s just an old GTO, what are all you ladies so excited about? And it hadn’t stopped there.
Now, as he came over the rise on the Brickell Island bridge, two blonde babes in a red Mustang convertible were pulling out of the Mandarin Hotel entrance. As he cruised by, surprise, surprise, Mustang Sally and her cute friend too were totally magnetized.
He checked the rear view, almost surprised they hadn’t hooked a damn U-ey and followed him home.
He pulled into the underground parking at One Tequesta Point, the tower that was home to his new Miami palazzo in the sky, blipping the GTO’s throttle again as he rumbled past the old security guy, Fast Eddie Falco.
Fast Eddie, cold cigar stub firmly clenched in his teeth, was reading the Miami Herald in his customized golf cart. Reading in the cart seemed to take up a lot of Eddie’s time. When he finished the sports section around noon, Stoke knew, he’d whip out an old paperback and dive into his afternoon reading program.
Because the two of them shared a liking for mysteries, Stoke and Eddie had recently started a small book club, just the two of them. They called it the “John D. MacDonald Men’s Reading Society.” Right now they were reading the Dress Her In Indigo, and it was one of Stoke’s personal favorites. Next Sunday, Eddie’s day off, the two of them were planning to drive up to Bahia Mar in Lauderdale and see if they couldn’t locate slip 14-A where Travis McGee moored his houseboat, the Busted Flush.
Hey, Stoke suddenly realized, they could take the GTO.
“Eight seconds, Eddie,” Stoke said to the security man as he pulled into his reserved parking spot right next to Fast Eddie’s reserved parking place. Reluctantly, he turned the key and shut her down. Fast Eddie still had his nose buried in the paper.
“You hear what I said, Ed? Eight seconds! You believe that?”
“Take your time,” Eddie said, not bothering to look up and flipping to the Living section. “I got all day.”
You had to laugh.
Stoke hit the switch that raised the ragtop, locked it up, gave it one long last look, and headed for the elevator. He punched 35, his floor, and leaned back against the wood-grained elevator wall, trying to imagine the look on Fancha’s face tonight when she saw his new baby pull up outside her place over on Key Biscayne.
It was Saturday and he was taking her to dinner tonight, Sly Stallone’s new fusion place over on South Beach’s main drag. It would be Rollerbladers on parade tonight on Ocean, and all the muscle boys skating outside Sly’s would be ogling the heavy iron parked along the strip. He’d slip the valet guy a twenty to leave the GTO out front where he could keep an eye on it.
Sweet.
He’d been whistling an old tune all the way home, couldn’t get it out of his head. Ronnie and the Daytonas, if he remembered correctly. What were the words?
A wa-waaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaa—
He stepped off the elevator into the bright sunshine of the open-air thirty-fifth-floor lobby, strolled down the corridor, keyed in his number on the pad, and walked through his front door. Had to stop right there and admire the view, the sun lighting up half of Biscayne Bay beyond his living room windows. It was beautiful and it was all his.
A wa-waaaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaaa—
Man. Life was good.
Two bedrooms, two baths, and a wraparound terrace overlooking paradise spread out below. To buy the condo, he’d sold the small house and large apartment building in Bayside, Queens, that his sainted mother had left him. There was still some money left over to decorate the new crib. And now there was a brand-new piece of automotive art in the parking garage downstairs waiting for him.
He walked over to the tall windows to inspect his universe. A huge freighter was being towed out to sea, moving slowly through Government Cut. A new wide-load cruise ship had just arrived at the Port of Miami, probably quarantined because of some weird bacteria. A little farther east, he saw Blackhawke.
The two-hundred-forty-foot black-hulled yacht belonged to his longtime friend Alex Hawke, and she’d been in Miami for the last couple of months and was just out of the yard. Some kind of a weapons and engine refit while Hawke was down in Brazil or Argentina on his quasi-scientific expedition. In reality Alex was doing some unspecified government work. This time it was the British government. Usually, the work was unspecified and so was the government. That was the way Hawke operated.
There was work going on over at the big yacht. Day and night. Tom Quick, Hawke’s chief of security, had ordered bulletproof windows installed on all three decks after the near-miss incident in the harbor down in Santo Domingo. And they were upgrading the weapons and propulsion systems. The boat was Hawke’s floating operations center and he used it all over the world.
Stoke grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge and walked back out into the living room. The light was blinking on his machine and he plunked down into the deep suede chaise and punched the message play button. Probably Sharkey, he guessed.
“Hey. It’s me,” the disembodied voice said, not disappointing him.
