Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen

think when you can shoot?
    “What? No more rum!” Nelson was standing with his back to the empty fireplace. His cigar had gone out again, and he relit it tenderly.
    “There’s another bottle. And I could use another one, too,” Meadows replied quietly. He felt like a little boy who has heard his first ghost story. Clammy and prickly. He did not want Nelson to leave. He did not want to be alone.
    Then Nelson told him about people who talk to the cops. Angel Arellano.
    He was a Cuban, a nice guy, really; we went to the same high school in Havana. Angel was a hanger-on. No big deals, probably because he had no balls. But he was always around, always ready to drive a truck or run a boat. Just enough to be useful, enough so they’d throw him a bone. Angel made a nice living out of it, too. He had a sexy little wife and a daughter who was as cute as could be. They bought a house out in the suburbs. Man, he was proud of that house. It had natural ceiling beams, you know, like the house of some big shot architect. Angel, he loved those beams. He sanded them and varnished them and did whatever else you do to beams if you are a rich architect or a Cuban hustler on the make. Everything was swell for Angel until we caught him one night with a kilo of uncut coke—eighty-seven point nine percent—the genuine article. There was no chance in the world it belonged to Angelito. He was just baby-sitting it for somebody else, and we knew that, but we sure as hell never let on to Angel. By the time we got finished with Angel he believed he would never see his wife, his daughter or his precious beams again. So we turned him, made him into a snitch. We let the first batch go through smooth as silk, as though nothing had happened. Nobody ever knew we nabbed Angel cold and had let him go. But he belonged to us.
    If you pick up a doper, amigo, and then let him go without any charges, that’s the kiss of death. Everybody knows he has turned.
    His own mother wouldn’t write insurance on him then. But we were real careful with Angel, reeled him in a little bit at a time. We made some pretty good busts out of it and always in such a way that there was never any connection with Angel. Then it went sour. Hell, who knows how or why things like that go sour? But it went real bad. Angel went home one night, and there were his wife and his daughter, hanging from those ceiling beams he loved so much. Poor bastard.
    Meadows was shell-shocked. “Are you powerless to control these people?”
    “You are looking at the first line of defense, amigo,” Nelson replied with a short laugh at what was not meant to be funny. “Powerless, no. Hamstrung, yes. Frustrated, totally. It’s too big, too hard, too complicated. What seems so important for you—what is a matter of life and death for you—is really only a sidelight to the big show.” Nelson gestured toward the oak and mahogany chess set. “You are being pursued by a knight. And you are barely a pawn. I’m after the king, and I would give my soul to get him.”
    Nelson’s teeth gleamed wolfishly. He was feeling the rum.
    “You see, amigo, I am a pioneer of a new branch of police science. Not homicide, not narcotics, but narcocide. Maybe pioneer is wrong. More a gypsy. I pitch my tent at one drug murder after another. Sooner or later one of them will lead me to the king.”
    “Who is he?” Meadows ventured.
    “A Latin, certainly, probably a Cuban. He works out of Miami, and I think he is in trouble. I think the king and his Cubans had the local distribution and transshipment of coke locked up until a few months ago. About seventy percent of the shit that leaves Colombia comes through here, right? Well, from what we hear, a couple of months ago the king began to lose control. The Cubans got hit from two sides: too many Anglo amateurs pissing in the pond, running around like little kids in a schoolyard; too many Colombians getting off the boat to deal in Miami. Right now things are so confused out