* * *
Lucca's limo and the seafood truck arrived first.
Mendez and Lucca stepped out into the clearing, next to the abandoned marina building that was being swallowed up in vines. Lucca took a leak in a shallow puddle ringed by mangrove roots.
His hand was still on his zipper when Ziggy's rusted Oldsmobile came hulking down the road, its pitted paint and faulty muffler at one with the general decay. He parked. With the engines all turned off, the place seemed very quiet for a moment but then grew loud with the noises of frogs and locusts, the burble of doves and the peeps of warblers.
On the edges of the clearing, the Feds in camouflage hunkered lower in the muck, pulled in cautious breaths, steadied weapons at their sides.
Ziggy and Carmen Salazar got out of the car. Tommy Lucca stared at them, counted them, and the first thing he said was, "Fuck's Amaro?"
Eyes flicked around the clearing, like maybe the New York mobster was lurking in the shadows. People looked back up the road but there was no other vehicle approaching. Mendez glanced at his watch, then at Salazar. Salazar looked at Ziggy. Ziggy blinked and shrugged.
Lucca's eyes were pulsing. He said, "The cunt don't even show? We're supposed to pay 'im and the cunt don't even show?"
Ziggy said, "He mighta missed the turnoff. Pretty easy turn to miss."
"Didn't stop nobody else from finding it," said Lucca.
Johnny Castro had strolled over from his boat, his odd freckles big dark ovals in the moonlight. He didn't care about the differences among the men on land. He cared about conditions for the crossing to Havana. He said, "Come on, we gotta load. We fuck around, it's daylight before I make the harbor."
Pacing among the mangrove roots, Lucca spluttered, "But the fucker said he'd be here."
As soothingly as he could manage, Carlos Mendez said, "We don't need him here, Tommy."
Lucca paced until he found a victory in this. "Fuckin' A, we don't," he said. "Isn't 'iss what I been sayin' all along?"
They started transferring the crates of guns.
The driver of the seafood truck dragged them to the edge of the trailer. He shook off watery ice that had slipped down from the pompano and conch, and handed the boxes to Ziggy, who carried them as far as he dared along the rotting pier, then hefted them over the gunwale to Castro, who stashed them in the hold.
On U.S. 1, the agents in charge of the dark sedans counted off ten minutes, then started driving very slowly down the unpaved road, blocking off escape.
Keith McCullough watched as the crates of guns moved steadily past in the moonlight. He, too, was wondering where Paul Amaro was, why the group was incomplete. But he was running low on time.
Boards creaked on the dock. The truck emptied and the boat filled; it rocked just slightly with Johnny Castro's movements, water lapped against its sides. McCullough understood that if he wanted the full symmetry of the smuggling—guns moving, guns in smugglers' arms, the bosses gazing on—he had to grab it now.
He hesitated. He wanted Paul Amaro. Amaro was target number one. But finally he filled his lungs, screamed out above the frogs and the birds and the bugs, "Freeze, assholes!"
In the next instant the floodlights came on, called forth from the night a crisply etched tableau of guilt and shock. Johnny Castro ducked by reflex into the cockpit of his craft. Carlos Mendez wheeled, cringed, sought anonymity behind the halo of his hat. Ziggy made a point of dropping a crate of guns, they bounced off the dock's edge and spanked through the skin of the water.
McCullough's voice rang out again. "Hands way up in the air."
Everybody's hands went up but Tommy Lucca's.
Lucca, heroically paranoid, obsessed more with betrayal than with life itself, lashed out at the darkness. "Amaro!" he screamed. He made it sound obscene, a curse that coated the night like oil stains water. "Where the fuck's Amaro? Cocksucker ratted us out."
"Hands up in the air," McCullough yelled again.
"Fuck you," said Tommy Lucca, and though he was blinded by the floodlights, had no chance of seeing his tormentors, he pulled his pistol from his pocket, insanely confident that in a world filled with enemies, a bullet anywhere would find one.
Terry Sykes, not a bright fellow but a fine marksman, was sighting on the mobster's chest.
Maybe Lucca meant to fire, maybe his hopped-up finger twitched around the trigger. His bullet whined and scratched through mangrove leaves and lodged somewhere in mud.
Sykes, with the unhurry of the practiced, squinted down, held his breath, and shot the mobster through the heart. The frogs fell briefly silent as the dead man stumbled back a step, then paused, as though to reconsider, to call for time, a replay. At last he pitched forward, facedown in the marl at that undramatic edge of Florida that was not quite land and not quite sea.