“You here for the fishing?” asked McCready as he studied the brief menu.
“Yep.”
“Odd,” said McCready after ordering Seviche, a dish of raw fish marinated in fresh lime juice. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have said you were a cop.”
He did not mention the long-shot inquiry he had made the previous evening after studying Favaro at the bar—the call to a friend in the Miami office of the FBI—or the answer he had received that morning.
Favaro put down his beer and stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “A British bobby?”
McCready waved his hand deprecatingly. “Oh no, nothing so glamorous. Just a civil servant trying to get a peaceful holiday away from the desk.”
“So what’s this about my being a cop?”
“Instinct. You carry yourself like a cop. Would you mind telling me why you’re really here?”
“Why the hell should I?”
“Because,” McCready suggested mildly, “you arrived just before the Governor was shot. And because of this.”
He handed Favaro a sheet of paper. It was on Foreign Office-headed notepaper. It announced that Mr. Frank Dillon was an official of that office and begged “to whom it may concern” to be as helpful as possible.
> Favaro handed it back and thought things over. Lieutenant Broderick had made it plain that he was on his own once he entered British territory.
“Officially, I’m on vacation,” Favaro began. “No, I don’t fish. Unofficially, I’m trying to find out why my partner was killed last week, and by whom.”
“Tell me about it,” suggested McCready. “I might be able to help.”
Favaro told him how Julio Gomez had died. The Englishman chewed his raw fish and listened.
“I think he may have seen a man on Sunshine, and been seen himself. A man we used to know in Metro-Dade as Francisco Mendes, alias the Scorpion.”
Eight years earlier, the drug-turf wars had started in South Florida, notably in the Metro-Dade area. Prior to that, the Colombians had shipped cocaine into the area, but the Cuban gangs had distributed it. Then the Colombians had decided they could cut out the Cuban middlemen and sell direct to the users. They began to move in on the Cubans’ territory. The Cubans responded, and the turf wars broke out. The killings had continued ever since.
In the summer of 1984, a motorcyclist in red and white leather, astride a Kawasaki, had drawn up outside a liquor store in the heart of the Dadeland Mall, produced an Uzi submachine carbine from a totebag, and calmly emptied the entire magazine into the busy store. Three people had died, fourteen were injured.
Normally, the killer would have gotten away, but a young motorcycle cop was giving a parking ticket two hundred yards away. When the killer threw down his empty Uzi and sped off, the policeman gave chase, broadcasting the description and direction as he went. Halfway down North Kendall Drive, the man on the Kawasaki slowed, pulled over, drew a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer automatic from his blouse front, took aim, and shot the oncoming policeman in the chest. As the young cop crashed over, the killer rode off at top speed, according to witnesses who gave a good description of the bike and the leather clothing. His helmet hid his face.
Although the Baptist Hospital was only four blocks away and the policeman was rushed into intensive care, he died before morning. He was twenty-three, and he left a widow and baby daughter.
His radio calls had alerted two prowl cars, which were closing on the area. A mile down the road, one of them saw the speeding motorcyclist and forced him into a turn so tight that he fell off. Before he could rise, he was under arrest.
By aspect, the man looked Hispanic. The case was given to Gomez and Favaro. For four days and nights they sat opposite the killer trying to get a single word out of him. He said nothing, absolutely nothing, in either Spanish or English. There were no powder traces on his hands, for he had worn gloves. But the gloves were gone, and despite searching every trash can in the area, the police never discovered them. They reckoned the killer had thrown them into the rear of a passing convertible. Public appeals turned up the Sig Sauer, tossed into a neighboring garden. It was the gun that had killed the policeman, but it bore no fingerprints.
Gomez believed the killer was Colombian—the liquor store had been a Cuban cocaine drop. After four days, he and Favaro nicknamed the suspect the Scorpion.
On the fourth day, a very high-priced lawyer turned up. He produced a Mexican passport in the name of Francisco Mendes. It was new and valid, but it bore no U.S. entry stamps. The lawyer conceded that his client might be an illegal immigrant and asked for bail. The police opposed it.
In front of the judge, a noted liberal, the lawyer protested that the police had only apprehended a man in red and white leather riding a Kawasaki, not the man on the Kawasaki who had killed the policeman and the others.
“That asshole of a judge granted bail,” Favaro said to McCready now. “Half a million dollars. Within twenty-four hours, the Scorpion was gone. The bondsman handed over the half million with a grin. Chickenfeed.”
“And you believe ...?” asked McCready.
“He wasn’t just a mule. He was one of their top triggermen, or they’d never have gone to such trouble and expense to get him out. I think Julio saw him here, even found where he was living maybe. He left his fishing vacation early to try to get back so Uncle Sam would file an appeal for extradition from the British.”
“Which we would have granted,” said McCready. “I think we ought to inform the man from Scotland Yard. After all, the Governor was shot four days later. Even if the two cases turn out not to be linked, there’s enough suspicion to comb the island for him. It’s a small place.”
“And if he’s found? What offense has he committed on British territory?” Favaro asked.