Chapter 1

The beat-up Chevy Cavalier idled on the shimmering asphalt of the Overseas Highway, and it sounded to Irma like an old dog panting on a hot summer afternoon. It was indeed summer, and it was afternoon, and the Chevy’s engine was whimpering and panting in protest against the blazing Florida sun. It was one of thousands of vehicles sitting at a standstill on the 7-Mile Bridge, which connected Marathon Key to Little Duck Key just south of mainland Florida. Anyone with a birds-eye-view of the panorama would see two asphalt ribbons running parallel through the turquoise sea; one of them, the southbound lane, would be as deserted as if its final terminus were a ghost town. The other, the northbound lane, would look like a cemetary of tinker toy cars in bumper-to-bumper gridlock, their metal winking up in the summer sun. Irma and Buggsy’s aging Cavalier was one of these cars, idling and bored, and Irma thought that perhaps the engine would overheat if they didn’t give the A/C a rest for a few minutes; she reached over to the dash panel and shut it off. Plus, they needed to conserve gas. Immediately she hand-cranked her window all the way down to get some semblance of air circulation.

“What the fuck, babe?” Buggsy turned to look at her through his Ray Ban’s, his shaded eyes like twin bores of a shotgun. The stump of a hand-rolled joint poked out of his mouth and pointed accusingly at her. His scrawny chest was bare and tanned to a rich mahogany. There was a pink tattoo of the grinning Cheshire Cat on his right arm.

“It’s going to overheat,” Irma said absently, pulling a tube of lipstick out and applying it in quick, short strokes, more of a nervous tic than anything. “I mean, we’ve been sitting here for two hours. You might as well turn the car off.”

“You don’t gotta remind me how long we’ve been here,” Buggsy muttered, turning the ignition key to the ‘off’ position. The car’s idling cut out. “Feels more like two days than two hours. We shoulda brought our grill and some hot dogs and buns, we coulda had a tailgate party right here on the road. Sell ‘em for a buck each right out of the trunk and had our portable TV right here, we coulda made a killing, babe. Miami’s probably kicking off right about now.” He began flipping through snowy static of the AM stations, trying to pick up the game.

“You sure you want the trunk open now?” she asked rhetorically. For a moment the words hung in the humid air of the car as Buggsy sat stock-still, the words freezing him. He took a long drag off the joint and flicked it out the window. He didn’t respond to her comment. This was the first time on their return trip that either had alluded to the illicit contents of the car’s trunk.

It was 3 p.m. on a Saturday late in August, and the Miami Hurricanes Buggsy alluded to were indeed kicking off their football season, but it was an away game at Clemson. Had it been a home game it would undoubtedly have been postponed; all of south Florida was bracing for the onslaught of a real hurricane, Hurricane Jacquelyn, a category 4 monster. The 7-Mile Bridge was a logjam of bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to escape nature’s impending wrath, and the stress of thousands of motorists seemed palpable in the heavy summer air.

But nature at the moment gave no hint of what was sure to be in store for the Keys twenty-four hours later. The turquoise waters of Florida Bay were as still and serene as sapphire glass. The sky was a dull, hazy blue pocked with billowing puffs of fair weather clouds. No cliché of black curtain clouds rolling ominously on the horizon; just the sea and sky merging seamlessly in an azure dream. The sun continued to beat down. The stifling blanket of humidity that was draped over them was quelled with refreshing breezes that came in now and then off the water. To the casual observer, it looked like an idyllic summer day ... besides the gridlock of thousands of stifling automobiles.

“Yeah, we could have a nice tailgate party,” Irma said, her tone taking on a hard edge. “While we got the hot dogs grilling, we can whip up some hotcakes too, and open up that burlap sack back there. Tell everyone it’s confectioner’s sugar they can sprinkle on. And then watch the madness begin.” She chuckled, a dead hollow sound with no humor.

“Shut up, babe” Buggsy muttered, defeated, not looking at her. To this point on their journey back to the mainland, neither one had spoken of the elephant in the room. That elephant was in the form of ten kilograms of crack-cocaine they had stored in an unmarked burlap sack in the trunk of the Chevy. Five of them were for Buggsy’s dealer, Eldridge; the rest were for some Colombian dealer Eldridge knew in Tamarac, west of Miami.

They had been sent to Key West early yesterday morning with a safety box heavy with rolls of cash. They were to meet up with the supplier, named Sean Dufresne, who lived in a Mediterranean-style mansion a little ways from the historic district. Eldridge wasn’t nervous about sending one of his novice runners to one of his most prestigious suppliers; however clear the promise of payment was for negotiating the trade successfully, the perils of one false step, detour, or slip of tongue were made chillingly clear as well, and when Irma pressed him on it, Buggsy declined to talk about the consequences of a misstep.

So they’d arrived at Sean Dufresne’s early Friday morning, yesterday. Irma assumed that dappling in the business he was in, he’d want to tone down his lifestyle to keep a more low-key, unassuming profile, or at least live abroad somewhere. The Cayman Islands, or Cancun. But apparently he was vain enough to want to flaunt his ill-gotten wealth here in the states, and had somehow managed to evade the suspicions of authorities and the IRS so far. Dufresne was late middle-aged, pot-bellied, and wore round John Lennon-like spectacles that lent him the look of a tortured artist. He gave her and Buggsy a tour of his well-manicured grounds and penthouse suite that was decorated with Colombian and Venezuelan indigenous art (he coyly told them that these exotic lands were where his illicit merchandise originated). Much to Irma’s distaste, he had invited Buggsy and herself to a “gentleman’s club” he frequented in town. She had declined, of course, inwardly disgusted by this snobbish and depraved pudge of a man. Buggsy had tactfully accepted while she had sauntered up and down the streets looking at the handsome homes of Key West, mulling over things unrelated to the tropical scenery.

Many thousands of dollars and ten kilograms of snow-white merchandise had exchanged hands that hot, sultry afternoon on the outskirts of Key West. Loading the merchandise into the Chevy felt to Irma like loading a dead body.

Not that Irma had anything to do with it, or so she had tentatively convinced herself after she had learned sixteen months ago, right after they started dating, that Buggsy was an amateur drug runner for a guy she only knew as Eldridge. But, as her best friend Tina was always eager to point out to her, “As long as you go with him on these drug runs, you’re an accomplice. You’re an accessory to some poor sap overdosing and leaving some kid in a broken home.” Irma hated it admit it, but Tina always had been the voice of reason, and her moral compass. Many nights after Buggsy had fallen asleep next to her, she had agonized over this issue. She’d come from a broken home herself--her father had run out on the family when she was ten and her mother had had chronic cirrhosis of the liver from drinking her troubles away--but that fact, far from being a good excuse, only seemed to suggest to her that this was all the more reason she shouldn’t get involved in drugs--or get involved with someone who was involved with drugs, which was the same thing. Sometimes she would lay there in bed, looking over at Buggsy, snoring peacefully through his nose ring and apparently untroubled enough to get to sleep every night. Why was she the one who tossed and turned at night in moral limbo? She alternated between feeling angry at him and feeling pity--she’d known him for a year and a half and she’d long since concluded that he didn’t have the gray matter to know the full implications of his “hustle” lifestyle, as he proudly liked to call it. And, somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind, she felt responsible for him.

Buggsy worked for Waste Management and rode the back of a garbage disposal truck, picking up people’s trash. When Irma had met him he’d been on his regular route through her neighborhood in Hialeah, and he’d see her just about every Tuesday morning; the garbage truck would get to her driveway just about as she was pulling out to go to her waitressing job at Steak n’ Shake. He’d taken the habit of catcalling her from the road, and she would smile and pucker her lips at him as part of their playful repartee. Heck, I have no other excitement in her life, so why not? She told herself. They were both in their mid twenties and Buggsy had a stud in one ear and a barbell through his nostrils; he seemed to strike the perfect balance between innocent boy-next-door and brooding anti-hero. Then one day after work she’d gone down to the end of her driveway to retrieve her emptied trash bin and there’d been a handwritten note at the bottom of it: You are the pearl in the trashcan of my life. Buggsy. She recognized the line from somewhere, but had to look it up. It was a song lyric by the heavy metal band Poisonblack. Irma smiled and saved the note. The next Tuesday when she put the trash out. she’d put his note right on top where he could see it--with her phone number scrawled underneath his writing. He called and they had their first date three days later.

But every Friday night all the guys from Waste Management would meet at O’Laughlin’s Pub for Poker night, and it wasn’t long after she and Buggsy started dating that one of Buggsy’s co-workers there, a man she knew as ‘Eldridge’ had taken a shine to Buggsy’s carefree attitude and gullible nature. He’d taken Buggsy aside one night and asked him if he was interested in some extra work “on the low down.” When she’d grilled him about it later on, she’d gotten it out of him that Buggsy didn’t have any clue on the inner-workings of this hustle except for the word “money,” and he was quickly and enthusiastically on board. She soon learned that Eldridge was one of the biggest dealers in town, and he’d offered Buggsy the position of either a “runner” or a “foot soldier.” Eldridge had explained to him in semantics that were apparently over Buggsy’s head what each of these entailed. He chose to be a runner. He liked to drive, he said. Soon enough Eldridge had Buggsy running his supply in from suppliers across state lines. There was an abandoned textile mile in Plantation that Eldridge used as his headquarters, where all his transactions took place. Soon (and against Irma’s sage pleadings), Buggsy had his own weekend ‘hobby’ going--running his beat up Cavalier to wholesalers in Georgia, Alabama, and the Keys to get Eldridge’s supply for him to distribute to his foot soldiers and wholesale customers.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Irma had pleaded with him to no avail.

“Eldridge sells this shit on about a four hundred percent margin,” Buggsy had said when they had their first of many fights about it. He was trying to sound sophisticated. “Depending on how pure it is ... maybe more. That’s to his regular customers. He gets more from the newbies. So once a kilo’s sold, he’s made about 2 or 3 grand on it. Guess where five percent of that goes?” he raised his eyebrows at her, and his grinned matched the Cheshire Cat on his arm. “Yours truly.”