Life had not been kind to Viceroy Wilson since he was cut from the Miami Dolphins during the preseason of 1978, a month before his own Cadillac Seville had been repossessed. Since then Wilson had been through three wives, two humiliating bankruptcies, a heroin addiction, and one near-fatal shooting. Yet somehow he had managed to maintain his formidable physique in such a way that he could still bring silence to a crowded restaurant just by walking in the door. Wilson’s fissured face looked every day of his thirty-six years, yet his body remained virtually unchanged from his glory days as a star fullback: taut, streamlined calves; a teenager’s spare hips; and a broad, rippling wedge of a chest. Wilson’s strength was in his upper body, always had been; his shoulders had been his best weapons inside the twenty-yard line.
As a rule, Viceroy Wilson didn’t go around clobbering strangers in stinky taverns. He believed in the eternal low profile. He was not homesick for the Orange Bowl locker room, nor did he especially miss getting mobbed for his autograph. A free case of Colt .45 was the only reason he’d signed that football in Pauly’s Bar. Generally Viceroy Wilson believed that the less he was recognized in public, the better. Part of this attitude was personal preference (autographs being a bitter reminder of the Super Bowl years), and part of it was a necessary adjustment in order to lead a successful life of crime.
Exactly why he’d sucker-punched the skinny white guy in Pauly’s, Wilson wasn’t sure. Something—street instinct, maybe—told him not to let the dude get a good look at his face. Something about the back of his head said trouble. Thick brown hair, shiny, straight, razor-cut. Sculptured around the collar. Yeah, that was it. Cops got haircuts like that. Wilson was sure this man wasn’t a cop, which made him even more of a useless jive asshole. Who else would get a haircut like that? It really annoyed Viceroy Wilson just to think about it, and he was glad he’d smacked the guy and put an end to his curiosity. Now was no time to have razor-cut strangers nosing around, asking coplike questions.
Viceroy Wilson did not think of himself as a common criminal. Since leaving the National Football League (after eight bone-battering seasons, seventy-three touchdowns, and 7,889 yards rushing), Wilson had become a dedicated anarchist. He had come to believe that all crimes were perfectly acceptable against rich people, although the term “rich” was admittedly subjective, and varied from one night to the next.
Wilson himself was no longer rich, having been neatly cleaned out by sports agents, orthopedic surgeons, ex-wives, ex-lawyers, accountants, mortgage companies, real-estate swindlers, and an assortment of scag peddlers from Coconut Grove to Liberty City. With a shift in economic fortunes Wilson had been forced to quit shooting heroin, so he’d turned to reading in his spare time. He spent hours upon hours in the old public library at Bayfront Park, amid the snoring winos and bag ladies, and it was there Wilson decided that America sucked, especially white America. It was there that Viceroy Wilson had decided to become a radical.
He soon realized two things: first, that he was ten years too late to find a home in any sort of national radical movement and, second, there were no English-speaking radicals in all of South Florida anyway.
So for years Viceroy Wilson had quietly burgled apartments and scammed dope and boosted cars, all the while nurturing romantic hopes of one day inflicting some serious shit on the white establishment that had mangled his knees and ruined his life. Wilson remained proud of the fact that he’d never robbed a liquor store, or stolen an eight-year-old Chrysler, or snatched a purse bulging with food stamps. Politically, he was careful about picking his victims.
Then El Fuego came along and Viceroy Wilson felt redeemed.
He didn’t know what the name El Fuego actually meant, but it sure sounded bad, and as long as it didn’t translate into something like “The Fart,” Wilson could live with it. They shared the name anyway, all of them. They were a team. More of a team than the goddamn Dolphins ever were.