“I wish you didn’t have to go,” I said. “But I guess Miami might not survive another day if you stayed here with me.”
“Miami’s probably not going to survive anyway,” Lucy said. “But that’s what we get paid to do-fight wars already lost. Sort of like Richmond, when you think about it. God, I feel like shit.”
Both of them were in scruffy jeans and wrinkled shirts and had done nothing more than push gel through their hair. All of us were exhausted and hung over as we stood in my driveway. Carriage lanterns and streetlights had gone out as the sky turned dusky blue. We could not see each other well, just our shapes and shining eyes and foggy breath. It was cold. Frost on our cars looked like lace.
“Except the One-Sixty-Fivers aren’t going to survive;” Lucy talked big. “And I’m looking forward to that.”
“The who?” I asked.
“The gun-trafficking assholes we’re after. Remember, I told you we call them that because their ammo of choice is one-sixty-five-grain Speer Gold Dot. Real high end, hot stuff. That and all sorts of goodies-AR-fifteens, twotwenty-three-caliber rifles, fully automatic Russian and Chinese shit-coming in from maggot-promise land. Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico.
“Point is, some of this is being smuggled piecemeal by container ships that have no idea,” she went on. “Take the port in L.A. It unloads one cargo container every one and a half minutes. No way anybody can search all that.”
“Oh, that’s right.” My head was throbbing.
“We’re real flattered to get the assignment,” Jo added dryly. “A couple of months ago, the body of some guy from Panama eventually linked to this cartel turned up in a South Florida canal. When they did the autopsy, they found his tongue in his stomach because his compatriots cut it off and made him eat it.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear all this,” I said as the poison sped into my mind again.
“I’m Terry,” Lucy let me know. “She’s Brandy.” She smiled at Jo. “U of M girls who didn’t quite graduate, but hey, who needs to because during our hardworking semesters of being dopers and getting laid, we learned some pretty good addresses for home invasions. We’ve developed a nice social relationship with a couple One-SixtyFivers who do home invasions for guns, cash, drugs. We’re setting up a guy .on Fisher Island right now who’s got enough guns to open his own damn gun store and enough coke to make it look like it’s fucking snowing:”
I couldn’t stand to hear her talk this way.
“Of course, the victim’s undercover, too,” Lucy went on as big, dark crows began making rude noises and lights went on across the street.
I noticed candles in windows and wreaths on doors. I had given virtually no thought to Christmas and it would be here in less than three weeks. Lucy dug her wallet out of her back pocket and showed me her driver’s license. The photograph was her, but nothing else was.
“Terry Jennifer Davis,” she read to me. “White female, twenty-four years old, five-six, one hundred and twenty-one pounds. It’s really strange to be someone else. You ought to see my setup down there, Aunt Kay. I got this cool little house in South Beach and drive a Benz V-twelve sports car confiscated in a drug raid in Sáo Paulo. Sort of silver, smoky. And you ought to see my Glock. A collector’s model: Forty caliber, stainless steel slide, small. Talk about sweet.”
The poison was beginning to suffocate me. It cast a purple hue behind my eyes and made my hands and feet go numb.
“Lucy, how ’bout we cut the show and tell,” Jo said, sensing how all this was affecting me. “It’s like your watching her do an autopsy. Maybe more than you want to know, right?”
“She’s let me watch,” Lucy bragged on. “I’ve seen maybe half a dozen.”
Jo was getting annoyed now.
“Police academy demos.” My niece shrugged. “No axe murders.”
I was rocked by her insensitivity. It was as if she were talking about restaurants.
“Usually people who died of natural causes or suicide. Families donate the bodies to the anatomical division.”