STAYING ALIVE (Book Three of The Miami Crime Trilogy) Read online

  BY

  DON DONOVAN

  BOOK THREE OF

  THE MIAMI CRIME TRILOGY

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is unintended and entirely coincidental. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any means not yet known, without permission in writing from the author.

  Published 2016 by Don Donovan

  Edited by Tony Held

  http://heldeditingservices.blogspot.com/

  Copyright 2016 by Don Donovan

  http://www.DonDonovan.Miami

  Thank you very much for reading my novel. If you'd like to be eligible for a free short story containing characters from The Miami Crime Trilogy, and to learn about future releases,

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  ALSO FROM DON DONOVAN

  WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN

  Book One Of

  The Miami Crime Trilogy

  Available in ebook and paperback

  "I slowed way down for the speed bumps on the narrow, wet street. The cemetery loomed in its eternal silence on our right, and I felt the eyes of the dead opening under heavy lids to watch us pass by in the rainy night, somehow knowing we were on our way to do murder, to send them some company."

  ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈ ≈

  AGAINST THE WIND

  Book Two Of

  The Miami Crime Trilogy

  Available in ebook and paperback

  In Miami, crime never sleeps. Drugs, prostitution,

  money laundering, murder … it's all in a day's work. A powerful County Commissioner is found murdered in a seedy motel, triggering a sequence of events reaching far beyond Miami, shadowed by bloodlust that can never be quenched, and of course, the driving force behind it all: the money.

  "Everybody thinks they're the good guys."

  --Reaper Holmes

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE CUBANS,

  Miami, Florida. August 14, 2012

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  THE RUSSIANS,

  Hollywood, Florida. August 22, 2012

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  THE RHYTHM KINGS,

  Overtown, Miami, Florida. September 12, 2012

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE CUBANS

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2012

  1

  Jimmy

  Miami, Florida

  Tuesday, August 14, 2012

  1:45 AM

  THE DOBBS HOTEL WASN'T MUCH TO LOOK AT, a cheap dump really, but if you were going to kill someone, it was the perfect spot.

  Nestled down a dark side street in Overtown, one of Miami's rougher areas, about a half-block off Northwest Seventh Street, it was little more than a flop — not even good enough for whores and their johns — surrounded by a neighborhood of closed eyes and silent tongues. Just what Jimmy Quintana needed for this job.

  He and Raúl pulled up in front. No other cars in sight. Three young men walked in their direction down the sidewalk from Seventh Street, lost in excited conversation. A dim streetlamp down on the corner and the vertical neon sign in front of the hotel were the only sources of light, and they weren't much. The moon was blacked out by low clouds moving in from the Keys, assuring a late-night rain.

  While they waited for the three men to pass, Jimmy and Raúl checked their weapons — both .380 semi-autos — affixing silencers to their barrels and each jacking a round into the chamber. Their eyes met, only briefly, but long enough to cement the bond between them and confirm the act they were about to commit. They got out of their car into the steamy night.

  Inside, the night clerk dozed behind an ancient front desk. Cigarette smoke of sixty years lingered in the air, staining the off-white walls and choking what life was left out of the dusty armchair and threadbare rug in the small lobby.

  Wilfredo was in room ten, according to the snitch. The men tiptoed up the sagging stairs to the second story, where room ten greeted them right away. Jimmy took up position by the wall nearest the doorknob and motioned Raúl to the opposite side of the door. They drew their guns. Jimmy turned the knob slowly and soundlessly.

  Locked.

  He looked up and down the empty hall. No sign of anything, no noise. He wiped sweat from his eyelids.

  He nodded to Raúl, who pulled two long, pointed instruments from the pocket of his shirt. Inserting them soundlessly into the lock, Raúl skillfully twisted them and jiggled them until he heard a soft click. He withdrew the picks and shoved the door open.

  They rushed in, guns flashing. In the semi-darkness, they quickly scanned the small room. No one, no opposition. A slim shaft of light slipped in through the room's only window from a warehouse building's security bulb in the adjacent lot off the alley behind the hotel. Jimmy eased the door almost all the way shut. The men adjusted their eyes and took stock.

  Your basic shabby room. Twin bed in the corner on a metal frame, messed up sheets, no case on the sweat-stained pillow. Rickety chair against the wall next to a card table. Low-rise veneer dresser with two drawers, a small lamp and a fan sitting on top. Sink on the opposite wall with a metal prison-style mirror. A worn little suitcase lay flat under the bed. Jimmy pulled it out. Only old clothes and shaving stuff. Regalia of a guy on the move, laying low. Air conditioning: forget about it.

  Jimmy took a seat in the chair.

  "What do we do now?" Raúl asked. He was short, some even called him "Tiny", but never to his face. Jimmy knew Raúl was a lot tougher than he looked, fearless, and a good man to have along on jobs like this one. From Cuban heritage, he grew up on the hard streets of East Hialeah.

  Jimmy was born and raised in another part of Hialeah, from the same Cuban heritage, learning the ways of crime at an early age. His grandfather had run brothels in Havana and his father had learned the business from boyhood. When they came to Miami, they did what they kne
w best, and Jimmy grew up in whorehouses. Eventually, he branched out into drugs like everyone else because that was where the real money was. Now, at thirty, he had entrenched himself in Hialeah as the number two man and top crew chief in Maxie Méndez's organization. He looked at Raúl.

  "We wait," he said. The air hung heavy in the close, humid room. A trail of sweat started down Jimmy's forehead into his eye and onto his cheek. He wiped it with his shirtsleeve.

  Raúl got up, saying, "I'll get the door." He went to close it.

  Jimmy noted the half-open door. And remembered he'd closed it nearly shut.

  "Raúl! No! No!"

  Two shots rang out from the hallway. Raúl was blown backward across the room, red splotches on his chest squirting blood. Jimmy pulled his weapon into firing position and ran to the doorway.

  He caught sight of a T-shirted figure leaping down the last five or six steps toward the front door of the hotel. Jimmy flew down the stairs past the now-roused desk clerk and across the lobby. Out the door into the empty night. He looked in both directions and saw no movement. Heard no sounds other than the distant hum of activity trying to be heard all the way from Northwest Seventh Street. He stayed absolutely still, even stopped breathing, to listen for something, anything, a tell as to where that fucking Wilfredo was hiding.

  Across the street was a small parking lot in front of a boarded-up storefront. Jimmy ran over to the lot and behind the building. Only trash and neglect back here, and big doses of both. Crouching in the weeds, he cast quick glances all around him. Nothing but darkness. He could only identify the heavy stench of human shit from somewhere in the immediate vicinity.

  The rain from the Keys made its appearance, big wet drops plopping on Jimmy's head and all around him. Within a minute, it would be pounding down from the sky. He dropped his gun to his side and thought about Raúl and his death on this silent night.

  They'd known each other since third grade at Hialeah Elementary and they'd always had each other's back. Always. Jimmy recalled that big scrape he found himself in back in '03 when those punks from Coral Way ventured up into Hialeah. Four of them, all with shanks, and they had him cornered out behind a bar. He was armed, too, but he knew he couldn't take them all. He was mentally ready to go down when Raúl ventured out of the bar and appeared behind the punks. He dropped two of them right away with a .38. The third wheeled around and cut him on his gun hand and the two struggled. That gave Jimmy the opening to take out the remaining one himself. Raúl prevailed over his opponent, and he and Jimmy went back inside and got drunk.

  But now, Jimmy couldn't even go back for him. The cruisers would be here any minute and he couldn't be seen carrying a corpse out of the hotel. Raúl's mother would have to claim him later on.

  As for Wilfredo, that prick would turn up sooner or later. Tonight he got lucky. But just like in poker, luck only lasts for so long.

  2

  Jimmy

  Hialeah, Florida

  Tuesday, August 14, 2012

  3:05 AM

  JIMMY STEWED ABOUT RAÚL ALL THE WAY HOME. As he pulled up to his house in the pouring rain, tears found their way onto his face. He dabbed at them with a handkerchief and entered through the garage into the kitchen. Nora was still up.

  She saw his wet eyes, knew from the reddening it wasn't the rain. "What is it, honey? What's wrong? Are you okay?"

  He dropped soaking wet into a chair at the dinette table, shoulders slumped, head straight into his hands. "Yeah, I-I'm all right. But … but Raúl …"

  "Oh, no! Not … don't tell me …"

  He nodded. "Took … took two shots in the chest. He's gone. I had to leave him there. Fuck me!"

  "My God, Jimmy! What happened? Who did it?"

  He wiped his eyes and ran it all down for her. There were no secrets between them. Nora had full knowledge of Jimmy's activities, or a lot of them, anyway. She had always insisted on it. She didn't want to be one of these wives who thought her husband was a real estate salesman when the FBI came busting in with their blue windbreakers and a warrant.

  She came from a decent family, hard-working Cuban exiles who came to the United States with the clothes on their backs and never had much more than that, but managed to raise their family in a loving home in East Hialeah. She graduated from high school with decent grades and after a brief tenure working in a supermarket, she met and married Jimmy Quintana. He had told her right away what he did for a living and she didn't flinch.

  "One night I may not come home," he had said after one of their early dates. "I mean permanently. My job is dangerous."

  "I don't care," she said.

  "You're willing to take that risk?"

  She gave him a slow nod while looking him straight in the eye, and he knew he had found the love of his life.

  Eventually, Nora insinuated her way into Jimmy's work. His front business was Café Q-Bano, a little Cuban restaurant just off West 49th Street. She organized his books into readable fashion, then developed a second set of books to cover the money he laundered through the restaurant. Now, she was his full-time bookkeeper and trusted adviser, as well as sometimes-manager of Café Q-Bano.

  He got up from the dinette table and went over to pour himself a stiff shot of rum. He took a healthy pull.

  "That fucking Wilfredo is going to pay, I swear," he said. He ran a hand through his dark hair.

  Nora came to him and standing behind him, put her arms around his broad chest. She was a big woman, about five-eight, only a couple of inches shorter than Jimmy, and there was meat on her bones, but all of it in perfect proportion. Her medium-brown hair, stylishly cut, framed a face of pale skin, paler than most Cuban women.

  "You'll make him pay, honey," she whispered.

  Another sip of the rum. "I know. We'll find him." The rum seemed to relax him. "What's happening at the restaurant tomorrow?"

  She led him back to the dinette table and moved her chair next to his. They both sat and she put an arm around his shoulders. "Nothing special," she said. "But there is something we need to talk about."

  He gave her a wary look. "What is it?"

  "It can wait till tomorrow. You've had a rough night."

  "Come on, querida. What is it?"

  Her iPad lay on the table and she clicked it on, navigating to a particular page with a lot of numbers on it in spreadsheet form.

  "We're making a lot of money at the restaurant," she said, gesturing at the numbers. "Without even factoring in all your other income."

  "So? That's good news, right?" He listened to her rather than examine the numbers. Numbers were never his thing.

  "Well, yes. Good news, up to a point. Your other income is way up, too."

  Jimmy nodded. By "other income", he knew she meant drugs. Like every self-respecting drug dealer in Miami, he had carved out a piece of the lucrative cocaine trade for himself — distribution, mostly. Maxie Méndez still had the lion's share of the business, but Jimmy's crumbs added up to pretty big money.

  Very recently, however, heroin had made inroads into the local drug scene. Mexican brown along with black tar. Especially the black tar. It was far cheaper than China white. Mexico was just a few hundred miles away, as opposed to ten thousand miles to Asia, and small planes and boats traversed the Gulf every day carrying their deadly cargo.

  Maxie — and by extension, Jimmy — had dived into the black tar business headfirst. The stuff delivered the same kick and retailed for about twenty dollars for a little balloon bag. Compared to double that for one Oxy pill, the users jumped on it. Sales became robust, money rolled in as fast as they could keep track of it, and the market showed no signs of slacking off. The Feds, meanwhile, were still wrapped up in trying to stop coke coming in from Colombia.

  He kissed her. "You're just full of good news tonight, aren't you." He was almost forgetting about Raúl. Almost. He knew Raúl would never be too far from his front burner as long as Wilfredo ran loose. And Wilfredo had a very short life expectancy from this point on.

/>   Nora said, "Again, up to a point." She turned the iPad around to face him directly, this time showing him graphs shooting upward. "Your income is getting to the stage where you can't run it all through the restaurant."

  "Why not?"

  "Because," she said, "you can't take a hundred thousand dollars a day to the bank, claiming it was restaurant income. No Cuban restaurant does that kind of business."

  "A hundred grand a day! Jesus! Is that what we're doing?"

  "No, not yet. But we're headed in that direction. We'll be there before too long."

  "Well … I'll open another restaurant," he said.

  She shook her head. "That's not going to get it. You can't even do it with a chain of restaurants. Or a chain of strip clubs. Listen, when you're running that much cash through brick and mortar laundries, places people can see and point to, pretty soon the Feds are going to take notice. Strip clubs and restaurants are well-known laundries, anyway. Before you know it, you'll be up to your ass in IRS audits and RICO investigations."

  "So what do we do?"

  Her body turned to face his. "There's this girl I know. I grew up with her in Hialeah. She launders cash for all the big cartel people in Colombia and all the major dealers here in the Miami area. Let me give her a call. Maybe she'll take us on."

  "You think so?"

  Nora said, "I don't know for sure. I know she washes hundreds of millions for the big boys. We may be too small time for her, but I can ask her. She might do it. You know, for old times' sake."

  "The money," he said. "Will it be safe?"

  "A lot safer than it is around here with you stashing it under floorboards and inside walls. Let me call her, honey."

  "What does she do with it?" This was an area Jimmy never gave any thought to.

  "She launders it. You know. She turns it from dirty drug cash to clean money in the bank. Clean money just like everyone else has."

  "How does she do it?" He was having trouble getting a grasp of the concept.

  "It's like you still have the money in the end, but your name is never attached to it. I don't know the details, but I can assure you, if the patrónes in Colombia trust her with their billions, we can trust her."