Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen Page A

there you wouldn’t know what you were buying if it was your brother who was selling it.
    “So the king is wounded, and that’s when I want to hit him. On the street they call him el Jefe, and every snitch in town knows that I want him, that I’ll deal with the devil to get him. It looks like el Jefe is trying to clean up his act, and I think maybe Mono is his cleanup hitter. So I stay close to Mono. Sooner or later he’ll take me to el Jefe.”
    Nelson dragged on Meadows’s cigar.
    “When I find out who he is, I will track him, and when I find him, I will shoot him.” It was a promise.
    “You mean, arrest him,” Meadows corrected.
    “Shoot him, I said.”
    “You can’t do that. You’re a cop.”
    Nelson’s voice dropped to a feral whisper. “The law and justice are not synonymous, amigo. Not in this country, not in my country, not in any country. Never have been. Never will be.”
    “That is absurd,” Meadows replied. “You can’t have one without the other.”
    They argued for a time, a pas de deux in which naïveté and cynicism danced without embracing. Intellectually it was a draw. As a matter of reality it was Nelson who won.
    “Will you testify against him, amigo?” Nelson asked suddenly. Meadows never saw the bait or the cruel hook it obscured.
    “Against who?”
    “Mono. He shot you and then tried to kill you here again tonight, although we’ll never prove that one. But he shot you, and you can identify him. That’s a crime, and justice demands he go to jail. But you’ll have to testify. Without that, no conviction, no jail, no justice.”
    “Of course I will testify,” Meadows responded.
    “Bueno. Then I’ll arrest him. And I’ll get you all the police protection you want.”
    Meadows nodded, and Nelson set the hook.
    “And I’ll bet you anything that inside of six months you are as dead as that lizard out there. That is not conjecture.”
    Meadows felt sick. He could taste the whiskey rising in his throat. He had trouble catching his breath. Sweat sprouted on his throat. His mind tried to reason, but what it saw was the tiny lizard, gaily jumping: jumping to eternity. It suddenly occurred to Meadows that Nelson’s horror stories had been more than boozy hyperbole. They carried a message to Meadows that he had not understood. With chilling clarity, Meadows saw that Nelson did not want to arrest Mono. And he accepted as conviction that to seek justice against Mono in a courtroom would be to sign his own death warrant. When Meadows spoke, it was a croak.
    “Look, maybe is there some other way? I mean…”
    Octavio Nelson peered at T. Christopher Meadows with the same kind of detached superiority he had shown the lizard. Then Nelson smiled wickedly, his eyes masked by the fire-red O of the cigar.
    “Good thinking, amigo. Testifying is a good way to commit suicide.”
    Meadows felt as though he had been reprieved: a coward allowed to leave the battlefront.
    “What do I do?” he asked weakly. He sounded pathetic, even to himself.
    “Leave. Get out of town. Vete.”
    “Just cut and run?”
    “There is no other good choice. If you stay, you are a sitting duck. If you leave, time is on your side. You are not a major character in this show, and that puts time on your side. Sooner or later they’ll forget about you. Another loose end is bound to take your place. Big things are happening, and you won’t be worth killing long.”
    It would be wrong to run. Meadows knew that. But every fiber screamed at him to go. Sandy and Jessica were dead, and nothing would bring them back. He himself had already suffered enough. It would be running away from a fight, true, so what? Fighting was senseless, and he hated it, avoided it except when there was no alternative—like that night in New York with the mugger. Here there was a clear choice. He could accomplish nothing by staying. And probably save his life by leaving.
    “How long would I have to stay away?”
    “A couple of weeks. It’s