Finding Gideon(113)
• • •
Classical music played. Flat-screen televisions were on CNN, the international version, the sound on mute. The scent of cloves assaulted my senses the moment I stepped on the plane. That aroma came from Djarum, an Indonesian kretek. It was a clove cigarette made in Kudus, Central Java. It was as classy as wearing a two-thousand-dollar Italian suit while playing Beethoven on a baby grand piano. Djarum was Scamz’s brand, his trademark smoke, as it had been his father’s brand and trademark. I smelled cloves and knew the legacy of Scamz hadn’t died with him at sea. A woman spoke in Tagalog. She was angry, yelling at someone. I knew her voice. I knew her Filipina voice well, better than I knew my own voice. Used to hear her voice in my dreams. It was Arizona, the woman many knew as Queen Scamz. To me she would always be Arizona. She was at the back of the plane. When I stepped on the Ferrari of airplanes, I felt an ache in my heart.
Shotgun should have been here taking this trip. He’d have a funeral and I wouldn’t be able to attend. If I did I would still feel so much anger.
As soon as I moved beyond the smiling flight attendants, I saw a different Filipina woman. She wore a short white blouse. Tight black skirt. High heels with red soles. Sierra was slightly darker than Arizona, in energy and complexion, owned a fuller body, more ass and tits to serve as a distraction, her meanness and coldness boundless, her damage deeper than the average sociopath. She was a woman who disturbed men, destroyed men, left them coming back for more. That Pussycat Doll had dyed her hair from black to strawberry blond since I saw her last. Usually she wore it pulled back in a ponytail, so her face looked ten years younger than she was, but now it was half-up, half-down, in a gorgeous style. Even with the schoolgirl face, she had a body that said she was a woman. A diabolical, cunning woman who had barely survived Buenos Aires. She was Arizona’s sister. She was Queen Scamz’s younger sister, so I guess that made her the Princess Scamz.
Her perfume was musky and sweet, an olfactory negligee.
Last time I saw Sierra, it was after she, Scamz, her sister, Arizona, Konstantin, and her brother had been in a shootout with the Four Horsemen. She had been shot and beaten, was almost dead. She was fucked-up. Her hair was matted from almost being blown up in the streets of Buenos Aires, lips chapped, face battered and bruised, lips and cheeks swollen, on a stretcher, a victim of a gunshot wound, shivering from pain and cold, and being loaded onto a yacht in Puerto Madero. I wasn’t sure she had survived. I thought she was on the yacht with Scamz when the Four Horsemen had hunted them down, then sank them like the Titanic.
It was nice to know that while I was fighting for my life, while my family was being attacked, while Shotgun was being hunted and murdered, she was out getting her nails done and her ass waxed.
I nodded once. My expression remained no-nonsense.
She nodded once and maintained her stoic countenance.
I said, “I need a laptop and the Internet, please. As soon as you can.”
She moved out of my way.
When I looked back at her from the next compartment, Sierra was still watching me.
We looked at each other and held eye contact for half a minute. She had a way of looking at a man in an expressionless way that made him feel like he was less than the scum on the bottom of her shoes. Then she turned, and the woman I had been ordered to kill once upon a time walked away, moving her ass like it was talking in code, her tight skirt making her butt cheeks wink left and right with her bipedal stride. I saw what father and son had seen in her. Arizona had been the brains, the one giving orders. Her sister was a quiet seductress. Neither was weak. I had seen both of them put men in the ground. When we had been in a shootout in Miami off I-95, I had seen Sierra kill a man in the most horrible of ways. Then she went and had ice cream.
• • •
Arizona’s hair was the same as it had been before, long, dyed light brown with highlights. Her perfume was the kind that gave men erections before they ever laid an eye on her. Her perfume wore stilettos, had Kathleen Turner’s voice in Body Heat, and could get a man to kill for her. Last time I saw the woman who used area code 809, the area code used by con men and con women around the world, she had been fucked-up too. Had damn near been FUBAR. It was after she had given birth to her and Scamz’s so-called baby in a safe house across from the Thelonious Club in Buenos Aires’ Centro Armenio. Her face had been crushed into the street when the Beast had used his foot and tried to grind her face into the concrete. Her face had been marred, lips swollen and busted, had cuts all over. It was hard to tell now, not without looking close, beyond the makeup. Her sister looked like lust, but Arizona looked like love unrequited.