Stick Read online

  The last time would have been in ’76, but he couldn’t remember the clothes, outside of a Hawaiian shirt that had sailboats and palm trees on it.

  He was to wear a white or light blue shirt, black regular tie. He was to wear the black suit with the black Cadillac, the gray suit with the Rolls, the tan suit with the beige Continental. He could wear anything he wanted when he drove Mrs. Stam; usually she took the green Mercedes.

  Stick said, “In the morning when I get up, do I sit around in my underwear, wait till I find out what car we’re taking?”

  “That’s very funny,” Barry said. “No, you don’t sit around in your underwear, I tell you the night before.” His eyes serious, questioning. Like he might be having a few doubts. “You keep the cars washed, gassed, ready to go, either for a time I tell you or within ten minutes of my call. You think you can handle that?”

  Saying it to a man who had never been in the armed forces but had recently taken seven years of penal shit and was full up. Stick waited a moment, as though he was getting it straight in his mind but concerned about something. He let himself ease back and said, “Yes, sir. But if we have to synchronize our watches we’re in trouble. I don’t have a watch.”

  He would remember Barry’s solemn eyes staring at him. Where were the one-liners?

  He asked Cornell about it later on: the guy seemed different from one day to the next.

  Cornell said, “What’s wrong with you? I explained, didn’t I? The man’s top bill. We don’t say the line, the man says the line. What we do, we grin and chuckle. Shit, I told you that.”

  Stick said, “Yeah, but he gave me a watch to use.”

  “Sure he did,” Cornell said. “The same time he wants you to respect him he remembers you coming with that gasoline can . . . Man wants you to be stupid but happy.”

  * * *

  They took the Cadillac limousine to Leucadendra. Barry sat in back and made phone calls. He talked to his broker, Arthur, told him he’d get back to him. He dialed three numbers asking for someone named Kyle, was unable to find her and was short with Arthur when he spoke to him again; he’d get back. Then spoke to a girl who was “Rorie” at first—Barry laying down a field of soft snow about how much he missed her—then “Aurora” as he explained almost deal by deal how busy he was, why he hadn’t been able to see her. Stick, all dressed up in his black suit, would glance at the rearview mirror and see Barry in his tennis whites acting into the phone, telling the girl he was on his way at this very moment to a meeting with his lawyers, but hey, how about meeting on the boat later, around six or so.

  He said to Stick, “You know the difference between a wife and a mistress? . . . Night and day, man.”

  Stick looked at the rearview mirror. “That’s right, isn’t it?” With a note of appreciation, but not giving it too much.

  “Sometimes you ask yourself,” Barry said, “is it worth it?” He waited for Stick to look at the mirror again. “Bet your ass it is.”

  Stick looked at the mirror again and nodded. Why not?

  They drove into the grounds of Leucadendra past fairways to the tennis courts that were off beyond the stucco Spanish clubhouse with its red tile roof. Getting out, Barry pointed to a side entrance that went into the men’s grill and told Stick to “park over there somewhere and hang out, I’ll be an hour or so.”

  Barry walked off carrying three tennis racquets in an athletic bag, a sweater tied around his shoulders. Stick watched him from the air-conditioned car. It was about ninety degrees out there, the sky almost cloudless. He put the Cadillac in “drive” and swung it around.

  Park and wait. All right.

  But wait a minute . . .

  It startled him, something he had failed to consider: that on a job like this he could spend more than half the time doing nothing, waiting. Twenty minutes from Bal Harbour to Coral Gables, now he’d be “an hour or so.” Did that mean more than one hour but less than two? If Barry played tennis and then had drinks and maybe lunch in the men’s grill . . . Stick realized he could be hanging around here for two hours at least. Or even three hours . . . Driving, he was doing something, he could shut himself off from the man in the backseat. But waiting, he was waiting for the man to come and set him in motion again. Wind him up. He could wait all day and have no right to complain—”Hey, you said you were going to be an hour or so”—because waiting was part of the job. Chauffeurs waited. There were some right here, standing by their cars lined up in the circular drive. Three uniformed chauffeurs. Older guys, all of them in their late fifties or early sixties.

  Watching him from the shade. They’d know the Cadillac from the vanity plate, BS-2. The Rolls was BS-1, the Continental BS-3. Mrs. Stam’s Mercedes bore a conventional number. Stick got out and walked up the drive. Yeah, they were at least in their sixties. All three wore dark uniforms, white shirts, glasses.

  The one wearing a chauffeur’s cap, cocked a little to one side, said to him, “Looks like Cecil finally got let go.” Stick nodded, coming up to join them—a younger look-alike in his uniform, the new guy—and the one in the chauffeur’s cap glanced at the other two. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?” Then to Stick again, “He got looped once too often, didn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” Stick said.

  They shook their heads talking about Cecil and it surprised Stick that they seemed disappointed. They told their names: Harvey with the cap, Edgar and John, who didn’t say much, and told who they worked for as though Stick would recognize the names. They smoked cigarettes with one hand in their pants pocket and referred to other club member names that Stick realized he was supposed to know. He saw that you acquired a casualness in this job: Yes, you knew all those people and nothing anyone said surprised you. Though Stick let what they said surprise him when they got around to Cecil again, talking about his memory, how ignorant he was but had this knack for remembering things. While Owen, who was Mr. Stam’s driver before Cecil, Owen would jot things down he couldn’t remember. The three talking among themselves about Cecil and Owen, Stick listening.

  Until Harvey turned to him and asked, “How’s Mr. Stam doing on that deal he’s got in California, that seed company?”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Stick told him but paid closer attention now. These old guys were taking their time but gradually moving in on him, the new man.

  Harvey said, “You play the market?”

  Stick said no and the three of them acted mildly surprised. “Gee, that’s a shame,” Harvey said, “sitting where you are, right there in the catbird seat.”

  Stick knew he was supposed to ask Harvey what he meant, so he did.

  “Working for Barry Stam,” Harvey said, sounding surprised.

  “We ask him, what looks good, Mr. Stam?” Edgar said, “and he tells us. Gives us some pretty good tips.”

  The one named John smirked, said, “Not bad a’tall.”

  Harvey said, “You know, over-the-counter stuff mostly, companies nobody knows anything about.”

  Edgar said, “Or some hasn’t reached the counter yet. Some of those brand-new stock deals he gets into.”

  Stick said, “Well, I hear him talking on the phone. It’s about all he does.”

  Harvey said, “That’s right. Now Cecil, he’d recall the names and numbers for you from mem’ry. Owen, he’d have to jot ’em down. But Cecil, he was like a jukebox. You put a coin in him and he played you a tune. Look off at number two fairway there, get a squint on his face and go right down a list of stocks, tell you the bid and the ask.”

  Edgar said, “He did pretty well, too.”

  John said, “Well? He cleaned up.”

  Harvey said, “I betcha he was making a hundred a week, easy.”

  Stick said, “Cecil played the stock market?”

  “No, from tips,” Edgar said.

  “Don’t confuse the man,” Harvey said. “Cecil’d give us a stock tip and get the regular kind of tip back. But I’m not talking about a buck or a five. A good one, like a ne
w company Mr. Stam was going into? That could be worth fifty bucks.”

  Stick said, “You guys must do all right, you can afford a fifty-buck tip.”

  Harvey looked at Edgar and back to Stick. “I work for a lady who don’t know shit but what her broker tells her and her broker don’t know shit either outside of what’s on the Big Board. You follow me? Ten years ago Barry Stam was a little smarty kid’d get mad and hit his tennis racquet down on the pavement, bust about two a week. Today little Barry could buy this whole club they ever wanted to sell it. He started out with a rich daddy like everybody else around here, but he passed his daddy by—I mean he could buy his daddy, he wanted to. Started in real estate but makes all his money from stock investments now, mostly the last few years. He’s the man with the touch a gold. So if I give old Mrs. Wilson a tip sounds good to her, she gives me a tip and then I turn around and split it with Cecil. You see how it works? And not just with me or Edgar or John. You can work it with pretty near any one of the fellas you see here.”

  “Waiting around,” Stick said.

  “Yeah, right here.”

  Stick said, “Doesn’t it bore the shit out of you?”

  Chucky was looking at a ton and a half of next to top-grade Colombian marijuana that had a street value of almost two million dollars. Nestor Soto had bought it in Santa Marta for forty dollars a pound, brought it up from Colombia by sea and air and delivered it to Chucky for two hundred dollars a pound. Now Chucky would turn it over to jobbers and dealers in odd lots—eating extra pills for the next two days—and double his investment.

  It was pressure time in the old horse barn—off NW 16th Avenue, out past Hialeah—waiting to move the grass. Dishonest people in the business could hear about it and rip him off. Or somebody could cop to the DEA or the FBI or the BNDD or Dade County Public Safety and they’d confiscate the load, smoke it up in the municipal incinerator and he’d still have to pay Nestor six hundred grand. Within forty-eight hours, that was the deal. Nestor could even steal it from him, sell it again to some other dealer.

  Chucky had guys with shotguns in the stables, out in a stand of scrub pine and down NW 16th in a car with a PREP radio. Lionel carried a radio hooked to his belt, his suitcoat hanging open. Chucky wore his hardhat and a long white lab coat, his duster, that he left here on a nail or draped over the handle of a pitchfork.

  He said to Lionel, “What I should do, I’m thinking seriously, get out of the wholesale end, work strictly as a broker. I didn’t have to stockpile I could be a normal human being.” Looking up at the bales, seeing daylight through the rickety boards. He imagined a wind raising dust across the yard, swooping in to blow away the barn, rip the lab coat from his back and he’d be standing here with his stacked bales, exposed. “I brokered I could do it all on the phone. Or having my dinner where people stop in. Way I used to do it. What do you need?—see Chucky Buck, the first booth there.”

  “Sounds good,” Lionel said, “but you don’t make no money. Five, ten bucks a pound.”

  “I’m talking about just the weed. What’s this load worth if I brokered it? I wouldn’t make the deal for less’n thirty grand, on the telephone, never have to look at it. Okay, take the thirty and buy half a kilo of good Peruvian flake. You see what I mean? Look at this pile of horseshit—look at it.”

  “I’m looking at it,” Lionel said.

  “Cost me what, six hundred grand. Same as ten kilos of Peruvian. Only you don’t have to lease a fucking barn to stockpile coke. Listen, this stockpiling—I didn’t have to sit on it and wonder who in the hell knows about it outside of enough people we could have a dance we all got together, I wouldn’t have this pressure. Right here’s where I feel it,” Chucky said, slipping a hand inside his white lab coat to touch his abdomen. “Locks up the intestines, man. Every night I’m watching the late news I have a vodka and citrate of magnesia . . . You saw they found Rainy. You see it? It was on the news and this morning’s Herald had it, way in the back.”

  Lionel shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so,” Chucky said. “You mean—here it’s about the same guy you handed a suitcase to goes out and gets shot six times and maybe you saw it, maybe you didn’t?”

  “No, I don’t guess I did.”

  “They pulled him out at the Bay Front yacht basin. Cause of death gunshot. And they identify him ’cause he’s got his wallet in his pocket with the driver’s license. You believe it?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s too bad. I like Rainy okay,” Lionel said. “I work for a guy three years ago; man, I didn’t like to work for him at all. He got shot, too. I was very happy about it . . .”

  Chucky wondered if Lionel was going to make some kind of point, but never found out. Lionel’s walkie-talkie squawked and began speaking to them in Spanish. Lionel unhooked it from his belt and spoke back to it in Spanish, Chucky waiting.

  “He say it look like Nestor’s car coming. The white Cadillac.”

  Chucky straightened. “How many?”

  “He say only three. It look like Moke and Avilanosa with him.”

  Chucky said, “Shit,” and stepped over to the barn opening to see the car already approaching, its dust trail blowing into the pines that bordered the road in from the highway. Coming past the stables the car drew two of Chucky’s men from the shade to follow along behind, one of them with a pump-action shotgun.

  Moke, getting out, glanced back at them unimpressed. He had on his cowboy hat, the front of the brim bent down on a line with his nose. He said to Chucky, “Brought somebody wants to visit with you, partner.” Moke wearing his new shitkicker image for all to see.

  Avilanosa, coming from the driver’s side, was another type entirely and Chucky felt no vibes from that direction. He saw Avilanosa as primitive man in a plaid sportcoat: the cane cutter, with his big hands, his big gut, his bowed legs, who served as Nestor’s bodyguard and current father-in-law. A Cuban redneck. Chucky found it hard even to say hi to him. Though he did, with a grin.

  “Well, how you doing?” Saving his concentration for Nestor, hoping to read the wooden-face little dude before he surprised him with some new demand.

  Nestor got out of the backseat of the Fleetwood Cadillac to stand gazing about through tinted glasses as though he’d never been here before. It was typical of him—the sandbagger—he’d distract you while he crept up, get you looking the other way. He raised his hand now in a limp gesture of recognition and gold gleamed, a diamond flashed in dusty sunlight. The little king with gigolo hair and mahogany skin. Nestor passed himself off as Spanish Cuban; but there were people who said he was part Lengua Indian from the wild, miserable Chaco country of Paraguay originally—raised on the alkaline flats and fed spider eggs. Which had made him evil and mean. Another primitive passing for a South Miami dude. Chucky felt he should be trading him beads instead of crisp new cash.

  He said, “Nestor,” grinning, “you’re some kind of rare exhibit, you know it? You’re a fucking floor show, man, all by yourself, and you don’t even have to perform.”

  Nestor seemed to like that. He smiled and said, “Chucky,” coming into the barn shade, his dark-brown suit losing some of its silky sheen. He looked at the bales of grass, nodding. “You got it okay, uh? It’s very good grade Santa Marta. You like it?”

  “It’s all right,” Chucky said. “If I’m lucky, I don’t get ripped off or busted I’ll make a few bucks . . . You hear about Steinberg? You remember him?”

  “Yes, of course,” Nestor said, “but I don’t see him for, I think, five years.”

  “Right, he was busted in ‘Seventy-eight and ran out on his bond. I just heard they picked him up again out in California. But you know how they found him? You remember that big goddamn St. Bernard he had?”

  “Yes, of course. Sasha.”

  “Right. And you recall how many different names Steinberg used? I don’t know what he was using out there, California, but he never changed the dog’s name, Sasha. How do they find him? Through the vet
. Sasha’s doctor.”

  He got a smile from Nestor, that’s all. Not enough to loosen him up, if he needed it.

  “The moral of the story,” Chucky said, “the punto, any time you go a.k.a. you better be sure everybody with you does too. You had a goat, didn’t you? Different animals?”

  “They all die,” Nestor said.

  “Oh,” Chucky said. With the awful feeling he’d said the wrong thing. He wasn’t going to mention chickens.

  Nestor said, “What is it you wear? You dress like you gonna kill something. This place a carniceria?”

  Chucky held his arms out, showing off his lab coat. “Just one of my many outfits.”

  “You look like you gonna kill the pollo.”

  Shit. “Not me, Nestor.” And couldn’t help saying, “I like chickens.” He felt Avilanosa come up on him and turned enough to see the pitchfork—Christ!—and tried to get out of the way, hunching. But Avilanosa only gave him a tap with it, hitting the tines flat on top of his hardhat.

  Nestor smiled. “Like that you kill the cow, yes?”

  Avilanosa tapped him again, a little harder. Chucky felt the jolt down through his neck.

  “Yes, for fat cows,” Nestor said.

  Avilanosa raised the pitchfork again and there was nothing Chucky could do but grin and hunch his shoulders playing pie-in-the-face straightman to the free-basing Cubans. But this time Avilanosa used two hands and brought the edge of the pitchfork down with force and Chucky was driven to his hands and knees, pole-axed, the hardhat cracked down the middle rolling away from him. He felt Avilanosa’s foot jab him in the ribs to push him over, head ringing, an awful pain down the back of his neck. Now he saw Avilanosa and Nestor looking down at him. He saw Moke, his arms folded. Turning his head he could see his bodyguard, Lionel, standing by the barn opening, two more figures behind Lionel against the sunlight. Now a bale was coming down on him and he tried to roll away but a foot held him. Another bale came down, more bales—his head was free, he could see the faces, but he couldn’t move his arms or his legs, the bales piling on top of each other, some rolling off. The weight didn’t hurt but he couldn’t move. He tried. He couldn’t move. He tried again, straining, looking at Nestor, pleading with his eyes. He couldn’t move! And now he began to scream . . .