Ed McBain - Lullaby

'Let me tell you what I suspect,' Henry said.

'Yes,' Juan said. 'Please.'

He had exquisite manners. Henry figured the manners were from his Chinese side.

'I believe Herrera is spreading this rumor in order to serve his own needs. Whatever they maybe.'

This rumor that around Christmastime . . .'

'The twenty seventh.'

'Yes. That on the twenty-seventh, your people intercepted a shipment earmarked for the Hamilton . . .'

'Not the shipment. The money intended to pay for the shipment.'

'Coming from where, this shipment?'

'How do I know?'

'You said . . .'

'I said that's the rumor. That I knew about this shipment. Knew where it would be delivered, and intercepted the money for it.'

'Stole it.'

'Yes, of course, stole it.'

'From the Hamilton posse.'

'Yes.'

'Was this supposed to be a big shipment? In the rumor?'

'In the rumor, it was supposed to be three kilos.'

'Of cocaine.'

'Of cocaine, yes.'

'But you don't know from where?'

'No. That's not important, from where. It could be Miami, it could be Canada, it could be the West - up through Mexico, you know - it could even be from Europe through the airport in a suitcase. Three kilos is a tiny amount. Why would I even bother with such a small amount? Three kilos isn't even seven fucking pounds. You can buy a Thanksgiving turkey that weighs more than that.'

'But which doesn't cost as much,' Juan said, and both men laughed.

'Fifty thousand,' Henry said. 'In the rumor.'

'That you are supposed to have stolen.'

'Not the cocaine.'

'No, the money.'

'Yes.'

'From Herrera.'

'Yes, this little . . .'

Henry almost said 'spic,' but then he remembered that his guest was half-Spanish.

'This little person Herrera, who by the way used to do work for the Chang people. When they had the Yellow Paper Gang. This was before your time.'

'I've read a lot about Walter Chang,' Juan said.

He was only twenty-four years old and still making a rep. He figured it didn't hurt to say he'd read a lot about every famous gangster this city had ever had. Make everyone think he had gone out of his way to learn such things. Actually, though, he did know about the Yellow Paper Gang because his father had once leaned on some people for them. Juan's father was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds, which was very large for a Chinese. Everybody joked that there must have been a eunuch in his ancestry someplace. Juan's father found this comical. That was because he had a keen reputation as a ladies' man.

'So as I understand this,' Juan said, wanting to get the entire story straight before he went out of here on a wild pony, 'you'd like to know what really went down on the night of December twenty-seventh.'

'Yes. And why Herrera is saying we cold-cocked him.'

'And stole the fifty.'

'Yes. The story on the street is that Herrera went to take delivery of this lousy three keys . . .'

'Where? Do you know where?'

'Yes, in Riverhead. Where isn't important. Herrera is saying he went there with fifty dollars of Hamilton's money, to make the buy and take delivery, and as he was going in the building he was jumped by two Chinese men he later . . .'

'Your people? In the rumor?'

'Yes,' Henry said. 'I was about to say that he later identified them - this is all in the rumor that's going around - as two people who work for me.'

'And none of this is true.'

'None of it.'

'And you think it's Herrera who's spreading the rumor?'

'Who else would be spreading it?'

'If it's someone else, you want to know that, too.'

'Yes. And why? There has to be a reason for such bullshit.'

'I'll find out,' Juan promised.

But he wasn't sure he could.

It all sounded so fucking Chinese.

* * * *

The way Hamilton had found out was through a person he'd done a favor for in Miami three years ago. The favor happened to have been killing the man's cousin. The man was a Cuban heavily involved in dealing dope. His name was Carlos Felipe Ortega. You kill a man's cousin for him, without charging him anything for it, the man might be grateful later on, if he could find an opportunity. Or so Hamilton thought at first.

The information was that the Tsu gang up here was going to take delivery on a million-dollar shipment of coke.

A hundred keys.

On the twenty-third of January.

The reason Ortega was calling - this was two weeks before Christmas - was that he'd found out the Miami people were insisting on a very low profile. They had gone along with Tsu's bullshit about testing and tasting five keys of the stuff in one place and taking delivery of the rest someplace else, but they didn't want a big fucking Sino-Colombian mob scene up there. In the first instance, they were insisting that one guy from the Chinese side meet one guy from their side, fifty grand here, five keys there. You test, you pay, you take the high road, we take the low, it was nice seeing you. If the stuff tested pure, you sent two other guys to pay for and pick up the rest of the shit. No more than two guys. No crowds from the Forbidden City. Two guys who'd come and go in the night, thank you very much, and so long. Tsu had agreed to the terms. Which meant, Ortega said, that instead of a thousand guys standing around with automatic weapons in their hands and threatening looks on their faces, you had a one-on-one in the first instance, and only two people from each side when the later exchange took place.

'Which sounds very thin to me,' Ortega had said.

'Very,' Hamilton said.

'Unless, of course, there are no thieves in your city.'

Both men chuckled.

'Do you want to know where all this is going to take place, Lewis?' Ortega asked.

'That might be nice to know,' Hamilton said.

'But no messing with the Miami people, please,' Ortega said. 'I live here.'

'I understand.'

'Whatever you decide to do is between you and the Chinese.'

'Yes, I understand.'

'And if a little happens to fall my way . . .'

Ortega's voice shrugged.

'How much do you think should fall your way, Carlos?' Hamilton asked, thinking You cheap bastard, I killed somebody for you. As a fucking gift.

'I thought ten percent,' Ortega said. 'For the address of where the big buy is going down.'

'You have a deal,' Hamilton said.

'Ten keys, correct?'

'No, that's more than ten percent.'

'No, it's ten percent of a hundred keys.'

'You told me five keys would be someplace else.'

'I know. But ten keys is the price, Lewis.'

'All right.'

'Do we have a deal?'

'I said all right.'

'You deliver.'

'No. You pick up.'

'Certainly,' Ortega said.

'The address,' Hamilton said.

Ortega gave it to him.

This was back in December.

Two weeks before Christmas. The tenth, the eleventh, somewhere in there.

Ortega had told him that the shipment would be arriving in Florida on the twenty-first of January. In Florida, there had to be at least eight zillion canals with private boats on them. A lot of those boats were Cigarette types - high-powered speedboats like an Excalibur or a Donzi or a Wellcraft Scarab that could outrun almost any Coast Guard vessel on the water. Zipped out to where the ship was waiting beyond the three-mile limit, zipped back in to their own little dock behind their own little house. Did it in broad daylight. Safer in the daytime than at night, when the Coast Guard might hail you and stop you. During the daytime, you were just some pleasure-seeking boaters out on the water to get some sun. Out there on the briny, you sometimes wouldn't see another vessel for miles and miles. Your ship'd be standing still out there, you lay to in her shadow, you could load seven tons of cocaine, there'd be nobody to see you or to challenge you. Coast Guard? Come suck my toe, man. What you needed to stop dope coming into Florida on either of its coasts was a fleet of ten thousand US Navy destroyers and even then they might not be able to do the job.