“There’s not much to tell.”
“I’ll help you look for cars if you tell me the story.”
“You should be looking anyway. It’s your job.”
“Why won’t you tell me? I’ve heard it from the other guys.”
“Then you don’t need me to repeat it.”
“How about just the embarrassing parts?”
GUS WAS A twenty-six-year-old rookie in 1985. Some officers get lucky and stumble over big cases. Gus had one crash into him — literally. Happened three A.M., a Saturday morning. Gus sat parked in his cruiser outside Overseas Liquors. The dome light was on. Gus filled out a report. The suspects were in the backseat on the other side of the mesh screen. Two of them, that is. The other six had already been carted away by backup. Gus nabbed them all single-handed — the “Overseas Eight,” as they became known in law-enforcement circles.
Overseas Liquors has the coolest 1950s neon signs in all the Keys. Red and aqua. It also has one of the few basements, if you want to call it that. Four feet deep, hewn into the limestone; you have to stoop over the whole time. The access door is an unassuming square panel on the bottom of the wall behind the cash register that looks more like a cabinet. They keep the liquor stock down there. Once upon a time, they also used to rent cheap rooms in the back of the bar over the basement. If you go in the basement today, there’s a diamond-shaped grid of bare alarm wires under the ceiling boards. The reason is the Overseas Eight.
Gus was the nearest deputy when the call came in. He found the store’s front door unlocked. His flashlight beam worked its way along a shelf of vodka bottles, then across the room to the dust-covered liqueurs. Nothing. Until he looked over the counter. A facedown body hung halfway through the basement access. He pulled his service revolver and crept around the counter. He got down on one knee. The flashlight and pistol were together in his hands to form a single unit. He shined over the body and through the opening into the basement.
The dispatchers told Gus to slow down; they couldn’t understand him. He was hyperventilating. “…Seven bodies. Maybe eight.”
Squad cars arrived. And kept arriving, until the whole shift was there. The laughter wouldn’t quit as the last of the passed-out burglars was dragged from the building. One of the tenants in the back of the store had sawed through the floor. Burglary wasn’t intended. He didn’t even know there was a basement. Sometimes he just started drinking and liked to saw stuff. Word of the discovery quickly spread on the bum telegraph. Dark figures converged from all directions. At its peak, twenty-nine people were crammed in that basement. Most grabbed as many bottles as they could and fled, but eight decided to party on the spot, like rats finding tasty poison in a fake cheese wedge.
Gus knew he’d never hear the end of it. That’s why he didn’t mind staying behind in the parking lot to start the report. He flicked on the dome light and scribbled to get a difficult pen to write. That’s when the Camaro doing a hundred on U.S. 1 flew through the guard rail. It scattered a row of news boxes and clipped the nose of Gus’s cruiser before wrapping itself around a cement light base. Gus saw the ejected driver, and jumped from the cruiser. His feet went out from under him and he slammed to the ground, sending up a fine white cloud. Gus stood and dusted himself.
The parking lot was full of patrol cars again. This time the day-shift commander was called in from home. Then an evidence team from Key Largo and federal agents with latex gloves, who collected ruptured cocaine packs that had spilled from the Camaro’s blown tires.
“Of all the dumb-ass luck!”
“That idiot’s going to get a drawer full of commendations for sure!”
He did. Bunches of them. Plaques and ribbons and shiny medals, one for each politician who got to shake Gus’s hand in a separate ceremony for the newspaper photographers. Not that Gus’s nonactions were particularly heroic, but his colleagues knew what the rookie didn’t. Funding for the War on Drugs was based on volume of press clippings. Thanks to Gus, Monroe County shot up forty-seven budget positions.
After all the headlines, Gus became too valuable for patrol duty. They made him the department’s token liaison with the multiagency state and federal task force fighting the war on South Florida’s flank. That way they could have a local face at the press conferences to ensure all the hometown media ran the story on the great work of the multiagency state and federal task force.
And darned if Gus didn’t do it again!
Everyone was thinking cocaine back then, watching for big, rusty foreign-flagged mother ships beyond territorial limits offloading to supercharged go-boats. Profits were so insane that the kingpins began sending shotgun waves of vessels at the overwhelmed Coast Guard. At least a couple had to make it. Then word came. A Liberian freighter expected off Fort Lauderdale any day now. Time to ship Gus to Key West.
