“I want this to be the end,” Kara Lynn said quietly.
“Well, maybe it is.”
“But you don’t believe they’re really dead,” she said.
“The way it happened, it’s too perfect.”
“The Prince of Cynics. You don’t believe life can ever be perfect?”
“Nope,” Keyes said. “Death, either.”
Later, when Kara Lynn was in the shower, Al Garcia phoned.
“It’s about damn time,” Keyes groused.
“Been kinda hectic around here,” the detective said. “I saw this stack of messages from you and Mulcahy. Figured your conscience finally woke up.”
“We had our reasons, Al. Now it’s time to talk.”
“Oh, I can’t wait. But it just so happens I already got a line on El Fuego”
So Garcia knew.
Keyes felt lousy about not telling him in the first place, but Wiley’s threats had seemed serious and, in retrospect, believable. Garcia would have to understand.
“When we were doing routine checks on Wilson and Bernal, I had a pal search the morgue at the newspaper,” the detective said. “Easy, really. I guess it’s all on computer now. Funny thing, Brian. About four months ago your asshole buddy Wiley does this story on whatever happened to Daniel Viceroy Wilson, the famous football star. Very sympathetic. Hard-times-for-the-troubled-black-athlete number. Typical liberal shit. Anyway, three weeks later, guess what? Guy does a column about Jesus Bernal. Our precious Jesus. Fire burns in the breast of a young Cuban freedom fighter—that’s how the story starts off. Makes me sick, too, I gotta tell you. Nearly tossed my black beans. So I’m thinking, what a weird coincidence this is: two of the four Nights of December getting a big ride in the newspaper just before the ca-ca hits the fan. So, for the hell of it, what d’you suppose I do?”
“Pull all Wiley’s columns.”
“Right. Big stack of ‘em, and they’re full of geeks and cons and losers … shit, if you threw them all together you’d have the scariest nest of bizarros in the history of the planet Earth. Took me a week to wade through that crap, too—hey, the guy can write, I told you that. He can put the words together okay, but it’s his attitude that hacks me off. Such an arrogant hump. Anyway, out of all these columns, guess who pops up next? Your Indian, Brian, the guy with the airboat, Tommy Tigerpaws or whatever the hell it is. A fucking full-blooded gator-wrestling white-hating Seminole Indian. I got more stuff out of Wiley’s column than I’ve been able to squeeze out of the whole Seminole tribe. Turns out ole Tommy’s richer than your average Colombian snowbird. And he’s also very bitter about all the bad shit to come down on his ancestors—for that I can’t blame him, Brian. That was your people, too. The Cubans had nothing to do with screwing the Indians out of Florida.”
“Al, let’s—”
“I’m almost done, amigo. So after all this I look on my desk and what have I got? I got an angry black racist football player, a crazy bomb-happy Cuban revolutionary, and a filthy-rich Indian with a bingo chip on his shoulder. Three of the four. So the rest was easy, even for a dumb cop like me—the trick was to read everything Wiley wrote for the last two years. Cristo! What a strange guy.”
“Funny you didn’t mention all this at the press conference,” Keyes said.
“Gee, guess I forgot.”
Which meant Garcia wasn’t ready to buy the chopper crash.
“It bugs me,” he said. “I think to myself, why would El Fuego pick a stunt like this to show his face?”
“If only they’d found some bodies,” Keyes said. The words sounded stark and bloodless, but he meant them. He said to Garcia: “What do we do now?”
“The smart guys in the suits say it’s all over.”
“What do you say, Al?”
“I say we wait till after the parade before we open the fucking champagne.”
“Good idea. In the meantime, I’ll stick with the queen.”
“One more thing, Brian. Since I’m nice enough not to immediately throw your ass in jail for obstruction, the least you could do is stop by later and tell me about your crazy batshit friend.”