The Stingray Shuffle полностью

Tires screeched. The Jeep guys looked up. Four doors opened on a Mercedes; ice-cream cones flew out. Easy-listening music piped into the street.

“…On the day that you were born, the angels got together…”

The Jeep’s driver stopped kicking and began laughing. He turned to his pals. “Look at the funny guys with ice cream on their shirts!”

The Mercedes’s driver walked up to the Jeep and saw a baseball bat sticking out of the back. He grabbed it.

The young driver loved his Jeep, with the Fold-and-Tumble rear seat and legendary off-road prowess. His smile dropped. He pointed at the vehicle, then at the man with the baseball bat. “Don’t even think of messing with it!”

He didn’t. He walked past the Jeep and swung with a sharp uppercut, catching the driver under the chin. Teeth scattered across the intersection like a broken pearl necklace on a wooden dance floor.

The other punks fled, but the slowest was caught from behind and swarmed. The tropical shirts knocked him to the ground and formed a tight circle for synchronized groin-kicking.

Mr. Grande sat alone in the mountain hideaway of the Mierda Cartel, tapping his fingers on a wicker desk, gazing out the window at fruit trees. A cockatoo strutted across the porch. It was quiet except for the ceiling fans and a gibbering monkey somewhere in the hills that Mr. Grande had come to believe was personally mocking him.

The phone rang. It was the cartel in Colombia, and they wanted to know where their submarine was.

“There’s been a setback,” said Mr. Grande.

“Setback? It sank with your whole fucking cartel! You’re an embarrassment to the industry!”

“I just need a little more time.”

“You’ve got a week. Then you know what happens.” Click.

It had been a rough year for the Mierda Cartel. It hadn’t started out that way. They had been riding high with five million in the black, all laundered through a Tampa insurance company called Buccaneer Life & Casualty. To make the insurance company appear legit, they employed legit, unsuspecting adjusters, who accidentally paid out all of the cartel’s money in a fraudulent disability claim.

Mr. Grande had dispatched every cartel member to Florida to get the money back, but they were all dead now, the money last seen in a briefcase in Key West. Mr. Grande had replaced the deceased cartel members by recruiting a handful of trusted smugglers, and he had intended to send them back to Florida for the money, but they were now all at the bottom of St. George’s Bay in a modified septic tank. Turnover was getting to be a problem for Mr. Grande, who could no longer get anyone to underwrite group health except Buccaneer Life & Casualty in Tampa.

Complicating matters was the language barrier. The Mierda organization was the only cartel that wasn’t Latin. It was Russian. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, mobsters from Moscow and Leningrad flooded south Florida and the Caribbean, which was a good thing. It infused the region with fresh blood and new ideas. Plus, everything of value in the former republic was being dismantled with cutting torches, crated up and shipped to the West for quick sale. You could buy absolutely anything — suspension bridges, nuclear triggers. The Russians quickly became valued partners. But, as they say, ten percent of all college students graduate in the bottom tenth of their class, and the same held true for the new wave of criminals. Mr. Grande had to take what he could get.

The timing of that last phone call from Colombia was not good. What the hell did they expect him to do, buy a sub?

Wait, that’s it! Soviet subs were all over the place. The Cali gang had tried to buy one a couple years ago, but they had gone about it all wrong. Mr. Grande was Russian. He knew all the right people, where every pitfall lay. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes. What was a sub going for these days, anyway? Mr. Grande checked the Blue Book. Ski lift, styptic pencils, subatomic centrifuge…Here it is: Submarine, like new, never fired, five million dollars, firm. Call Yuri, afternoons. Hmm, thought Mr. Grande, that’s the same amount of money we lost in Florida. That sure would come in handy now.

Mr. Grande flipped open his address book, then picked up the phone.

The old man who had been driving the Oldsmobile regained consciousness in the middle of Collins Avenue. He moaned and grabbed his stomach and fought his way to his feet. The tropical shirts saw him staggering, and they steadied him by the arms and walked him over to the punk from the Jeep.

“Go ahead,” said the tallest.

The old man began kicking. “You ungrateful little prick! I fought in the Big One for you!…”

A phone rang.