“Get in the car,” Keyes said to Kara Lynn. “The police radio’s under the front seat. Try to call Garcia.”
Kara Lynn got in the driver’s side of the VW and rolled down the window. “Where are you going?”
“That’s the asshole who stabbed me.”
“Brian—”
But he was already gone, strolling across the parking lot. He looked perfectly calm, a tennis bum on his way home. Kara Lynn could hear him whistling a song. “Yesterday,” it sounded like. She saw Keyes slip the leather sheath off her father’s tennis racket.
“Oh no,” Kara Lynn said.
Jesus Bernal did not recognize Brian Keyes immediately. He wouldn’t have been looking for him, anyway. Jesus Bernal’s mission was to scout for cops; Skip Wiley had wanted to know if there were policemen assigned to the girl. So far, Bernal hadn’t seen the first patrol car; the lunatic Wiley was wrong again, as usual. Bernal was just about ready to call it quits and cruise back to the warehouse when the tennis player ambled up to him.
“Hey, muchacho, remember me?”
Bernal looked hard at the boyish face and, after a moment or two, remembered.
But not fast enough.
Keyes swung the tennis racket and hit Jesus Bernal flush in the face. A nicely timed forehand smash. Broke three strings on the racket.
The Cuban’s head bounced off the Cadillac’s bumper. He landed faceup on the pavement, snorkeling his own blood. The undershirt hung in shreds from the hood ornament.
Keyes bent over Jesus Bernal and whacked him again, this time a solid backhand to the throat. The Cuban kicked his legs and made a sound like a garbage disposal.
“Gggrrrnnnn,” he burbled.
“You should see my serve,” said Brian Keyes.
Kara Lynn Shivers pulled the VW alongside the Cadillac. Keyes got in and she stomped the accelerator.
“God Almighty, you killed him!”
“No such luck. You get hold of the cops?”
“No, the radio—” She was too excited to talk.
“Find a phone booth,” Keyes said.
“Brian, he looked … really … dead!”
“He wasn’t. Not by a long shot. I gotta call Garcia. Find a goddamn phone booth.”
She nodded, and kept nodding, like a dashboard puppy. She was scared as hell.
“Was he one … of … them?” Kara Lynn spoke in breathless gulps, as if she’d been crying, but she hadn’t. Her knuckles were red on the steering wheel.
Keyes touched her arm, felt her flinch.
“Kara Lynn, it’ll be all right.” But he was thinking: Maybe this means Wiley’s back.
“It’s scary,” Kara Lynn said shakily, staring hard at the road ahead. “It’s insane.”
“Honest to God, it’ll be all right.”
23
When Sergeant Al Garcia’s squad finally got to the country club, all they found beneath the banyan tree were radial tire tracks, a syrupy puddle of blood, and several kernels of corn, which turned out to be human teeth. The police searched all night for the Seville. They roared in convoys through Coral Gables and Little Havana, stopping every Cadillac in sight, rousting every poor sap in an undershirt.
Yet the Fuego One Task Force did not find the injured Jesus Bernal, and by eight o’clock the next morning Al Garcia’s phone was ringing off the hook. Reed Shivers. The chief. The Orange Bowl chairman. Ricky Bloodworth. The Chamber of Commerce. Even NBC, for Christ’s sake.
Garcia carried three Styrofoam cups of black coffee to his office and locked the door behind him. He dialed the Shivers house and Brian Keyes picked up on the first ring.
“He got away,” the detective said.
“You don’t say.”
“Hey, it’s not our fault Shirley Temple couldn’t figure out the police radio.”
“She was scared stiff,” Keyes said. “I was on the phone five minutes later. Five lousy minutes.”
“That’s all it takes,” Garcia said. “If it makes you feel any better, the sonofabitch leaked pretty good. He’s got to be hurting.”
Hurt or not, it was unimaginable that Jesus Bernal would turn up at a hospital; he was probably out in the Glades drinking Tommy Tigertail’s home-brewed medicines. Which meant he was probably going to recover.
Brian Keyes figured Jesus Bernal probably could make a career out of getting revenge.