Legally Dead Read online

  Marine memorabilia decorated the walls and shelves, and his old guitar stood in a corner, next to a locked gun cabinet. There were a leather couch, several chairs and a desk, a computer, a printer, and a fax.

  “I was a security specialist for a while,” Danny was saying, “an independent contractor. The sky’s the limit. Some people will pay anything for security. But Luz wanted to live in Miami. She’s Cuban, has family here.

  “Miami,” he said fondly, “is not like living stateside. It’s not your USA, bro. It’s high octane, a foreign capital alive with rumors of war, plots, schemes, international intrigue, alien smuggling, and drug trafficking. This town is full of thieves, liars, con men, and killers all caught up in superstition, greed, lust, and espionage. It is so damn cool. I love it, man.

  “And my Spanish is good.” He winked. “You know I can pass for Cuban, Colombian, whatever.”

  Both men were multilingual and with a talent for dialects that had served them well in Force Recon.

  Danny took a long swallow from his beer. “This whole damn state’s a disaster theme park. People like you and me fit right in here. Being trained to kill gives us an edge. And I still see action, occasional missions to the old familiar places and a few new ones. The rest of the time I stay busy as hell here.”

  Venturi looked puzzled. “Doing what, Danny?”

  “Spy catching mostly, foreign agents operating clandestinely in South Florida. Miami’s crawling with them.”

  “You with the FBI?”

  “No, not the fat boys in suits.” He leaned happily back in his chair, knees apart, grin widening. “The company, man. The boys with big toys.”

  “CIA?”

  He nodded.

  Made sense to Venturi. Danny’s innate street smarts and love of action generated a freewheeling charm that made him the best at what he did. Men and women were attracted to him. He could walk into a crowded bar in a strange city, or country, and in fifteen minutes know everything that was going on—and he’d be the new best friend of everybody there. People gravitated to him.

  “Your cover?”

  “I manage a funeral home in Little Havana. Don’t laugh. It’s perfect. The customers never talk back and you wouldn’t believe the intel you pick up from the bereaved. They’re surprisingly talkative, bro. Of course I had to learn a lot of new skills that could come in handy some day. Like embalming.”

  The two friends picked up where they’d left off, as though they had never been apart. For the first time, Venturi told the full story of his trip to New Hampshire: the surveillance, the house, the freezer, the armored car, and what followed.

  “Salvi’s nephew, the damn lookout, was wearing military camouflage, body armor, and firing a silver AK-47.”

  “Kidding me! Wish I’d been there.” Danny paced the room, indignant at missing the action.

  “Wished you were. Surveillance is damn hard alone, to say nothing of engaging the enemy when you’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

  Danny shrugged nonchalantly. “Not the first time.”

  “First time on American soil. That felt strange as hell.”

  “A preview of what’s to come,” Danny said darkly. “The world is shrinking into a smaller, scarier place, bro.”

  “Ever notice how training kicks back in when you need it?” Venturi said. Relaxed, he was beginning to feel the fatigue. “Amazing how that happens.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Danny grinned and popped another beer. “A great high, if it doesn’t kill you. Had a messy little mission to Colombia recently. Illegal paramilitary group with close links to a U.S. company was executing the local union leaders.

  “Was down in Cancún six weeks ago, where five people who smuggled Cubans into the U.S. through Mexico were shot in the head and dumped in a sinkhole. The shooters painted red arrows pointing to the bodies, wanted to be sure everybody got the message.

  “And in Miami, everybody who’s anybody has an assault weapon. Had four cops shot with one a month ago. Homeless guy killed a detective the other day. Used to be that every street punk had a Saturday night special, now it’s an AK-47.” Danny checked his watch. “What are your plans now?”

  Venturi blinked at his own watch, eyes gritty. “Find a place to stay, then go fishing.”

  “Saltwater? I know a guy with a deep-sea fishing boat.”

  “Nah, nothing elaborate. I just want to go into the Everglades and fish for bass.”

  “Okay, but we’ll have to fight off the mosquitoes this time of year. By the way, forget finding a place to stay. We’ve got a little guesthouse out back, behind the pool. Nothing fancy,” he said, “but it’s off the radar. Crash as long as you want. Looks like you could use some shut-eye right now.”

  The shaded cottage surrounded by palms and banana trees was small, clean, and comfortable. Venturi backed his car up the driveway beside the house so the tag couldn’t be seen from the street, brought in his bag, then walked Scout around the block with Danny’s two oldest children, Javi and Julee. He let the boy hold the leash. He held the little girl’s hand.

  “Are you really our uncle?” the boy asked dubiously.

  “Sure,” Venturi answered. “That’s what your dad said. Friends are the family you choose.”

  “Then why didn’t you come before?” he protested, his brow furrowed.

  “I was working far away.”

  “Very, very far away?” Julee asked.

  “Very far,” he said, then changed the subject. “So what’s the best thing about a big brother?”

  “Kisses!” She giggled.

  He turned to the boy. “And the best thing about a little sister?”

  “Nothing.” He grimaced. “I don’t like her.”

  By the time he returned to the cottage, the room was cool, and the water hot. Luz had turned on both the room air-conditioner and the water heater. The linens were fresh, the towels fluffy, and she had turned down the bed. There was even a cold bottle of water and a bowl of fresh fruit on the dresser.

  He shaved, showered, drank some of the bottled water, drew the blackout drapes, pulled back the crisp cool sheets, and sighed contentedly. Though the semitropical sun blazed outside, the room was totally dark. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

  He awoke rested but disoriented. For a moment, in a strange bed in the dark, he didn’t know where he was. The last time he had slept was twelve hundred miles away in his own apartment, which he would likely never see again. He sat up bewildered then heard a sound in the dark, a dog’s claws clicking across the tile floor.

  “Scout?”

  The dog panted patiently at his bedside.

  Venturi fumbled for the night table lamp and turned it on. He saw the fruit bowl and water bottle on the dresser and his familiar suitcase open on a chair. It wasn’t a dream, he was really in Miami, with Danny and his family.

  He’d slept for seven hours. He dressed quickly, in khakis and a white shirt, and stepped outside. The air was fragrant and overheated. Pink clouds etched in gold drifted across an azure sky. The turquoise surface of the pool shimmered in the late afternoon light, as a fiery orange sun dipped behind the trees.

  “Uncle Mike’s awake!” little Javi shouted as Venturi approached the screened-in back patio. “He’s awake!”

  Mouthwatering aromas wafted from the kitchen. He hadn’t realized he was so hungry.

  The kids were playing with Gil the gerbil, who was driving his Critter Cruiser, a bright red toy car with a racing stripe, at breakneck speed through the house. The furry creature, with a pink nose and a tail as long as his body, propelled the car by running on an exercise wheel in the passenger compartment. The faster he ran, the faster the car sped, straight ahead.

  Adults laughed, the kids loved it, and so did Scout, who watched, fascinated.

  Danny wore jeans and a black T-shirt that read: TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE. NEITHER IS MARINE POLICY. He captured the children and carried them off to bed despite their protests.

  Luz was
in the kitchen when he returned. “Don’t be surprised,” Danny warned Venturi, “if some woman, or women, show up.”

  “Women?”

  “Luz asked if you were single. She cried when I told her what happened, then she wanted to know which one of her girlfriends is your type.

  “Don’t panic,” he said, seeing Venturi’s expression. “The woman is Miami’s matchmaking queen. It’s in her blood, and her friends are hot. I mean smoking.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Venturi said. “But right now, all I want to do is go fishing.”

  “I told her that,” Danny said. “But she won’t be happy until everybody is married and making babies.”

  “I tried that once,” Venturi said.

  “It’s been, what, more than three years?” Danny asked.

  Venturi nodded. “She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was the worst that could happen to her.”

  “How so? I only met her once, but you seemed great together.”

  “But if we hadn’t met, she wouldn’t have been pregnant or on that ferry when it smashed into the pier. She’d be alive.”

  “Bullshit,” Danny said.

  “No, it’s not. I blew it. I was so damn careful. Wouldn’t let her breathe the fumes when I painted the nursery, but I let her and her mother take that ferry to Manhattan for the baby shower her coworkers gave.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, man. She would have been on that same damn ferry, or hit by lightning or a goddamn taxi cab whether she knew you or not. You know my theory: There’s a big blackboard up in the sky. If your name is on it, you’re gonna die that day. If it ain’t, you ain’t—no matter what.”

  Danny’s Blackboard Theory was older than their friendship.

  It neatly explained fatal bolts from the blue on sunny days, and stray bullets that fall from the sky on New Year’s Eve and find their mark.

  “How else do you explain a guy who uses the same electric drill for twenty years and all of a sudden one day it electrocutes him?” Danny asked. “Or the motorist who drives under a familiar overpass just as a giant concrete slab falls off a crane? How do you explain that?”

  “Shit happens?” Venturi asked.

  “Nope. Danny’s Blackboard Theory. Here’s a new one. Look at this.” He fumbled among the newspapers on his desk and found the story about a snorkler attacked by an alligator. The gator ripped the man’s arm off at the shoulder. Bleeding profusely, with minutes to live, he staggered out of the remote lake and collapsed—in front of five strangers on a picnic.

  “And who were the strangers?” Danny asked triumphantly. “Five registered nurses with a cooler full of ice.”

  Their fast action saved the man’s life. Doctors called it a miracle. Danny’s explanation? “His name wasn’t on the damn blackboard.”

  Dinner was boliche—Cuban pot roast, slow-cooked in light gravy, thick slices that melted succulently in their mouths, moros—black beans and rice—and fat, sweet, moist plantains.

  “Now you know why I married her,” Danny said fondly, “and why I work out every day and run six miles every night.”

  The doorbell rang as they ate tres leches, a sweet and spongy milk-soaked cake, and drank Cuban coffee.

  Danny lifted an eyebrow at Mike.

  Tanya, a leggy, brown-eyed blond aerobics instructor, had dropped by and was invited to join them for dessert. Then Luz insisted that Danny go with her to see something in the garage.

  Tanya and Venturi made small talk. As their hosts returned he heard Luz ask, “Why is an organized garage an impossible dream?”

  Venturi smiled. Tanya smiled back. She smiled a lot, he thought. She was friendly, had a hard, lithe body, and offered to show him around Miami, but his heart wasn’t in it. Somehow he and Danny wound up watching the news in his study, while Luz and Tanya talked in the kitchen.

  Danny assured him in the days that followed that the Miami media focused only on Castro, Cuban and Haitian issues, and the city’s constant public corruption scandals. And he was right. The distance between Venturi and the headlines the Salvi case still generated in New York, middle America, and Washington, D.C., was a relief.

  Luz persisted in her efforts to find him a mate. She and Danny invited Venturi on family outings to parks with pony rides, to the Children’s Museum, and to an oceanside picnic where Mirta, another of her friends, demonstrated a tracker’s skill by finding them on a crowded beach. She wore a black thong bikini, a thin gold chain around her waist, and a demure gold cross on a chain that dangled deep into her decolletage.

  She and Luz greeted each other with glad cries.

  “Oh, man,” Danny muttered, nudging Venturi, “she’s the one I was telling you about. Boobs out to her elbows.”

  Luz gave them a look then pretended to ignore them.

  When Venturi mentioned fishing, Mirta wrinkled her nose.

  “Please,” she said, “do me a favor. Do not kiss them on the mouth.”

  “Excuse me?” What was Luz telling her friends about him?

  “You didn’t see the show?” Her long red fingernails slowly brushed sand from her inner thighs.

  “The show?” Where did Luz find these women? He found it difficult to focus on her face and not her skimpy bikini top. When she suddenly darted off to help Luz chase down Javi, who had plunged headlong into the surf, he and every other man on the beach could not help but gape at her even skimpier string bottom.

  “Don’t fight it, amigo,” Danny said. “Miami’s Matchmaking Queen never fails.”

  Mirta returned out of breath, chest heaving, water dripping, breasts struggling to escape the confines of her bikini top.

  “Where were we?” She tossed her long thick hair and smiled, her teeth flashing.

  “The show?” He licked his lips.

  It was a national cable television series starring sportsmen devoted to wildlife and the environment, she explained. As cameras zoomed in for close-ups, the TV anglers would kiss the fish they caught on the mouth, then release them.

  That symbolic signature gesture caught on and was emulated by viewers and sportsmen. Advertising writers seized upon it. Resort and tourism ads urged vacationers to “kiss a fish,” among other idyllic experiences.

  Nationwide warnings were issued after an unfortunate rash of incidents received much less coverage. Yet the shows still aired, and the ads were still being published.

  “Snook and leatherjackets have teeth,” Mirta explained. “The bites are very nasty.”

  Only yesterday, she said, another angler had been rushed to surgery, “Plastic surgery,” she said, on his upper lip and right nostril. Mirta was an emergency-room nurse.

  “Never kiss them.”

  Venturi vowed he wouldn’t. He had never thought about kissing a fish. Now, like a child warned not to lick a frozen pump handle, he wondered what it would be like. Bemused, he went as far as asking Mirta for her phone number but never called.

  He felt most at home—at peace—in the Everglades, where time slows and ancient instincts awaken. He loved to see the congestion of the city give way to vast open spaces at the end of the road. He liked it so much that he leased a house with an option to buy. It had once been a remote fishing camp deep in the Glades. Through the years, as Miami’s urban sprawl crept west, it had been improved and added on to and was now a rambling one-story four-bedroom house in a relatively isolated area now on the fringe of the great swamp. The property backed onto a wide canal with a wooden dock. It was fenced in, too, with room for Scout to run and roam.

  He bought an eighteen-foot bass boat with a shallow draft hull that could float in eight inches of water. It had a small windshield, a seventy-five-horsepower engine, and locked compartments with deck hatches to store equipment. He and the dog took daily trips into the wild. No danger he’d become lost. As a boy he’d hike as far as he could into the woods, then find his way back. As a Force Recon Marine he aced courses in land navigation, and Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) Training. He was a sco
ut sniper. What he enjoyed most now was being out on the boat among the tree islands, surrounded by birds, sky, and water. Nothing else interested Michael Venturi. He felt stalled in a holding pattern, and he hated feeling aimless. At early ages, he and Danny had become part of something larger than themselves, had learned the value of teamwork, discipline, and tradition.

  Now, he felt part of nothing except this ancient sea of grass. He was waiting, watching for a signal that would point the way to a new direction in life.

  The day it happened, he took sandwiches, water, and the dog to an area he wanted to explore further.

  He anchored near a placid lake and listened to the wind and the birds, mesmerized by low-hanging clouds and his vast surroundings. He baited a hook but paid little attention to the line.

  He thought they were alone. The low moan he heard first could have been the wind astir in the saw grass. The louder anguished human groan caught him off guard. He stood to get a read on the direction. The dog got to his feet, as well, stiff-legged in the small wooden boat, whimpering under his breath. Another groan was followed by an almost inhuman cry of despair, then a gunshot.

  Scout leaped from the boat and splashed barking in the direction of the sounds.

  Venturi cursed. It was too dangerous for the dog. There were pythons and alligators out here—and somebody with a gun.

  He called the dog again, then picked up his own gun and went after him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Venturi found the dog at a small campsite, barking furiously at something in the serene woodland lake. A man floated facedown in the water, his unbuttoned white shirt billowing around him as he drifted farther from shore.

  There was no one else in sight.

  Venturi cursed, stripped off his own shirt, yanked off his boots, and waded into the tea-colored lake. When his footing dropped off into deep water, he swam out to the man, trying to avoid the reeds, vines, and aquatic grasses reaching like tentacles to entangle an unwary swimmer.