“I have witnesses to put you there when it all went down.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Whatever you think. I have a signed warrant.”

  Rivera smiled. “Great. Arrest me again. I think you’re sweet on me, Dodge.”

  “I know you killed Charlie Wall, and I know this girl saw it. I know Carl Walker and those cops were dirty, and I know the job became a big fucking mess. But I need you to help me. I need for you to tell me who gave the order on Charlie Wall and on the girl. If you don’t, you’ll take the heat for every ounce of shit on this. Work with me and don’t get left holding the bag.”

  Rivera smiled. “Really? That’s going to be a hell of a magic trick with no evidence. No weapon. And witnesses. Like I said, I got nothing to do with this. The girl was just some cooze. She worked for me. She used to blow me in the back room, and I went to see her. What happened was between her and those cops.”

  “So you know.”

  “I can read a fucking paper,” Rivera said. “I’m telling you, Dodge, for the last time, I didn’t kill Charlie Wall. Now, get out of my way. ”

  Gonzalez and Navarro stood in the door, dressed in their black linen suits and black knit ties. They looked at Dodge and Dodge nodded, and they grabbed Johnny Rivera by the arms. The crutches fell to the floor, and they let Rivera drop with them.

  Navarro leaned back and kicked Rivera in the side and he rolled to his face, and Gonzalez kicked him hard in the jaw.

  But Dodge launched between them and pulled them both back. He wrapped his forearm around Navarro’s throat and threw him against the tiled wall.

  “Enough,” he shouted. He shouted some more until they stopped.

  He helped Rivera to his crutches.

  Rivera straightened himself out and combed his hair. He leaned in and spit blood in the sink. He looked hard at Dodge and hobbled slowly away.

  The Cuban cops followed and pushed him hard with the flat of their hands.

  Friday, May 6, 1955

  NICK SCAGLIONE braced me as I walked from the Hillsborough County Jail after checking the morning arrest log. I spent my mornings there looking to see who’d been arrested and booked overnight in hopes we’d find the mayor or a councilman or somebody famous or known who’d slipped through our sources at the sheriff’s office or at TPD. I knew Nick, but not very well. I knew he was the son of one of the old Sicilians in town, and that he ran a bar called The Dream. I knew he’d been the last person to see Charlie Wall alive and had been questioned by Dodge and McEwen.

  He stopped me as I tucked my notebook into my back pocket and made my way over to my Chevy. It was shaded close to the cemetery, and he waited in a cool shadow under an enormous oak, wearing a bright yellow short-sleeved shirt and black-framed glasses. His hair was blondish and slicked back, and a cigarette hung from his mouth when he said hello. He looked like an old greaser.

  I told him hello. And then I waited awkwardly. Whatever he wanted to say wasn’t coming out too easy, and it all sort of rushed out as we talked.

  “Baby Joe tells me that you and Wall were tight.”

  I looked at him. I looked over his shoulder to make sure his car was empty. I looked out for other cars to see if a shotgun barrel was balancing out a back window. I looked down at his hands.

  I stepped back.

  He laughed out some smoke. “No,” he said. “It’s fine. I just needed to talk to a newspaperman, is all. Joe says you can be trusted.”

  I stared at him some more.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I have a guy that wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  “I need to know you’ll follow through, you know,” he said. His voice was kind of shaky, and he took off his glasses to wipe the lenses on his shirttail.

  “Sure,” I said. “About?”

  “Charlie,” he said. “This guy says Charlie Wall told him not to go to the cops. He said he’d been talking to this newspaperman and that if anything happened to him, go to him. He said the cops were all dirty and they’d kill him.”

  I looked at him. I tilted my head. “What’s going on, Nick?”

  “Are you in?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you call me later?” I said. “I got to go.”

  He stepped in front of me. I tried to step around. It was an awkward dance.

  “But you’re the one, right?” he said. “You’re the man that Charlie trusted?”

  I shook my head. “You got the wrong fella,” I said. “I knew Charlie Wall, and we talked a few times. But it was all bullshit. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Nick smiled at me and kind of seemed genuinely relieved.

  “I was just asking, is all,” he said.

  “But if this guy really wants to talk,” I said, “tell him to call me.”

  “You sure?”

  “If I knew some more about Charlie Wall, then why wouldn’t I have put it into the papers?”

  He pumped my hand for a few seconds and then took off in a jalopy Olds station wagon with a coat hanger holding on the muffler. I sat in my car a few moments and listened to the rattling and screaming coming out of the jail, and then I looked into the twisted oaks in the cemetery and the way the Spanish moss made patterns like jigsaws and I thought.

  I was done with Charlie Wall. I hadn’t told Hampton Dunn. I hadn’t told Wilton Martin. Nick Scaglione had been fishing. And I knew it.

  I drove back to the Times and checked in with the sheriff’s office and the police department. I called the fire department and Tampa General. It was mundane, routine work, and I liked it.

  I got roped into a City Hall story about a petition to move the railroad tracks from cutting Tampa in half during rush hour. I made a few calls to the usual folks and typed up my notes for Martin to work into a rewrite.

  It was time for lunch, and I grabbed my straw hat, ready to go over to Goody-Goody for a burger and a slice of butterscotch pie.

  A copyboy plunked down some mail on my desk and I sorted through it. I got two more crazy letters on Charlie Wall’s murder. One addressed to CRIME REPORTER and the other to L. B. TURNER, INVESTIGATOR. Both kind of made me laugh. Both letters asked a lot of questions, and nailed it on Mrs. Audrey Wall. One wanted to know if anyone had checked the locksmiths to see if Audrey had made a spare key. I knew the cops had already checked that angle.

  I read the letter to Wilton Martin, who was tapping his foot and smoking and writing a quickie editorial on the railroads turning a potentially prospering city into an old-time cattle yard. He said we’d always just be a Cracker cow town with the current arrangement.

  “You think Mrs. Wall really shot at old Charlie while he was on the crapper?”

  “I bet she got his attention.”

  “Damn right.” Wilton smiled, his cigarette clamped shut in his teeth, while he zinged through on his new electric Royal colored a hot pink. “Wives. Son of a bitch.”

  I opened some more letters. There was a package at the bottom of the pile. I opened it, too.

  I shuffled a book out into my hands. The Fighting Cock. Gale and Polden. It was a grubby hardcover book with fingerprint stains on the dust jacket. A rooster strutted on the cover with shiny, sharp spurs on its claws. The bird had red eyes.

  I flipped through it and a letter dropped out.

  Mr. Turner—

  I don’t care to be around Mrs. Wall. Don’t care for her much. This was Charlie’s. That book he wanted me to have. Didn’t feel right keeping it. You seemed to have interest in the fights.

  It was signed: Bill Robles.

  I placed it with the letters from the nutcases.

  The bolita people loved the orange groves because you could find little shacks or old farmhouses where your bankers could drive in from Ybor City on Fridays without any cops noticing all the cars. The Bolita King had found a nice little spot on the north end of town off Florida Avenue in a three-room shack with slats of wood missing from the floor. He’d paid off the grove owner and had laid the front door down over a couple of sawhorses as he counted out the bank and kept his own book. He chomped on a cigar and made gentle curving notes as each banker came to him to add to the pot. It was going to be a good bank this weekend, and he’d make a good haul if 13 didn’t come in. Those Cubans loved betting on 13.

  At some point in the counting, a man walked into the room. Who was the man? I don’t know till this day. I don’t believe it was Nick Scaglione or Baby Joe, and I know it wasn’t Johnny Rivera because he was in Cuba. It was someone like Nick, only smarter, and he moved in behind the Bolita King and whispered in his ear, and the Bolita King just kept on writing and counting money and thinking about the weekend haul and unlucky 13 and those Cubans.

  And then the Bolita King nodded and the man—the shadow-faced goon who came from beneath Ybor City—crawled out of the house with no floor and drove away, and then maybe he went to a gas station. He called from an Esso or Gulf or 76 and he waited for it to ring three times and then he asked for someone who wasn’t there.

  Then the man sat and smoked as the long spring evening wore on and he heard the cars hitting the air hose and the bell sounding at the gas station and he saw the attendants monkey on outside to check the oil and tires and fill the tank and hand out a wad of S & H green stamps.

  He smoked maybe two cigarettes before the phone rang and he knew who it was.

  He gave this voice—I know the voice and I hear it in my sleep, even though the man has been dead for years—some instructions, and they lasted maybe about five seconds. And that’s how it was done.

  A nod. A phone call.

  Everyone wipes their dirty hands on their pants legs and drives home. It’s a baton, a relay, and it all goes to the man.

  This man would wait. He’d check his watch. He’d wear dark clothes. He’d steal a car.

  He’d bring a shovel and make sure he had a full tank of gas.

  He was not a sociopath. He took no enjoyment in what he was about to do.

  He simply did the job.

  And tonight, he’d look down at his father’s watch and wait.

  He ate a sandwich. Two hours later, he stole a car.

  There was work tonight.

  LATE EVENING in Havana and the two detectives found Dodge on top of the Ambos Mundos talking to a shapely barmaid, a young Cuban woman, and holding her hand at a small table near the edge of the roof. She wore a yellow dress with red flowers and her hair was soft and black and curly, and she laughed as Dodge tried to speak Spanish to her and she just shook her head with amusement. There were four empty Cristal beer bottles on the table and two mojito glasses. The woman looked up at the cops as they approached the table and she stood and walked back to the bar. Dodge turned to them with a lazy smile, and they sat down.

  “Rivera says he’ll go back with you.”

  Dodge finished off the last of a mojito. He turned and looked back for the barmaid, who’d disappeared. The sun shone soft and yellow on the old stucco of Habana Viejo, and already the old Colonial fort’s roof was covered in shadow. Music had started from the bars on the narrow little Calle Opisbo, and tourists were riding in horse-drawn carriages over the cathedral plaza.

  “Are you hungry?” Navarro asked.

  Dodge dipped his head and said sure.

  He rode with them out of the old district and down into a long tiled tunnel and then up again into the fading light as they headed east. There were big homes in the hills and shanties along the roadside. Small European cars zipped past them as Navarro kept a steady pace and played some big-band music on the Pontiac’s radio.

  “You like Beny Moré?”

  “Sure,” Dodge said. “Very much.”

  Gonzalez passed around a pint of very dark, almost black, rum and the men took a sip. The Pontiac’s top was down and it was windy and hard to talk, so Dodge took in people walking beside the highway or riding on bicycles and boys playing baseball in the fading light on empty, sandy patches of land. They played with sticks and a ball and no gloves, and they looked like they were having a time of it, Dodge thought, knocking back more rum when it was passed to him.

  The Pontiac rounded a little curve and there were more fincas and cows and chickens. Palms and large banyans with twisted roots that looked like feet lined the road; vines and pockets of jungle glowed with the last rays of the day. As soon as they hit the highway, the sky seemed to open up. It was huge. The sky was a never-ending gentle slate curve with a few white clouds covering endless fields of sugarcane. Some of the cane was being burned and the air smelled sweet. They passed men leading oxen pulling huge carts of cane with wheels fashioned out of wood. The men would walk slow, defying the traffic and the big-engine American cars. Boys on the side of the road sold big blocks of sweet cheese and old women without teeth sat in chairs selling dead turkeys and butchered goats.

  They drove forever. They drove for twenty minutes.

  Dodge could’ve gone forever. He liked leaving Havana. He liked the endless sky and the backroads of Cuba. He was offered a cigar. He didn’t want one. He wanted more rum, and he wanted to drive back to the Ambos Mundos and take the girl in the flowered dress to bed. He wanted to be kind to her and be slow with her and he wanted to take her to dinner and walk with her in alleys so rich and tangled that a man could get lost.

  Navarro soon slowed.

  It was night now, and the Pontiac’s headlights lit up a stone wall. They followed the stone wall for several miles until there was a break in the wall and Navarro turned. An unpaved road filled with loose rocks and crushed oyster shells ran past a shack with square windows glowing.

  Near the shack, small palms lined the road.

  There was a horse tied to a fence. Chickens scratched near the wooden porch and a broken refrigerator sat overturned on the closest path.

  Navarro got out and stretched.

  Dodge let Gonzalez out from the seat behind him.

  Gonzalez bragged of ropa vieja and pollo frito with congris. He said there was more rum and hand-rolled cigars. And they would drink sweet cane juice that would make a man superpotent. And Dodge laughed at that and followed the men up onto the porch. He had to walk slow because it was night and it was very dark.

  Navarro opened the door and called into the house.

  It seemed to be one large room, and Dodge walked ahead of him. Old fishing tackle hung on the wall, and two ancient muskets were mounted above an empty bookcase. The room was lit with oil-burning lamps and it all smelled wet and moldy inside. There was a small iron bed and a nightstand.

  He took another step.

  Navarro stepped behind him and gripped Dodge’s arms against his body.

  Gonzalez fit a plastic bag over Dodge’s head and whipped a rope around his throat.

  Dodge sucked in air and the plastic bag flattened to his face. His face filled with blood and he dropped to his knees. Navarro clamped cuffs on one wrist and kicked him to the floor.

  Dodge fought.

  He knocked Navarro down with a backward head butt. He tore the plastic from his face and gasped for air. Gonzalez reached for the gun in his coat, but Dodge balled up his fist and punched him in the side of the head.

  Dodge reached for the .38 beneath his coat just as Navarro tackled Dodge to the ground. Gonzalez ran back to them and stuck a knee hard in Dodge’s spine.

  The handcuffs were clamped to his free wrist. Gonzalez pressed his knee harder into Dodge’s spine and Dodge again could not breathe.

  The men pulled him by the handcuffs to his feet, and, when he resisted, dragged him along the wood floor, bumping along to a back door. The floor was coated in dust and dirt and heavy mud footprints. His shirt and skin from his shoulder tore on an exposed nail, and the men tossed him out the back door and onto the shell lot.

  Navarro reached for an oil lantern.

  He held it out from his body and flooded the steps and the road with light.

  Gonzalez squatted down and turned Dodge over face-first. He said something quickly in Spanish that Dodge didn’t understand. Then he kicked Dodge in the head.

  He pulled Dodge along by the cuffs, his shoulders feeling like they would tear loose from the sockets and his pants tearing on the sharp crushed shells. Navarro held the light of their path, and birds and insects made sounds far off into the cane fields.

  He tried to dig his heels into the ground like a plow.

  They dragged him for maybe thirty yards and pitched him into a cesspool. The water was brown and thick with foul-smelling shit. Dodge almost vomited as he sucked down air before he went under and tried to find bottom in the deep water.

  Dodge tread water with his feet and he gasped for air. He felt for footing and tried to move around, searching for the shallow edge that he couldn’t find. The water was choked with shit and garbage and old appliances and broken tree limbs and heavy rotten trunks. As he fought to hold on to the edge of a trunk, rats skittered over the loose limbs floating in the thick brown water and crawled over Dodge’s eyes and face before squeaking and finding the higher ground.

  Dodge clawed with his hands trussed behind his back, fighting to find something—anything—in the open water. He tried to breathe; he tried to keep himself quiet in the head. The two men watched in the glow of the lantern and laughed, and Dodge fought more and frightened the rats up onto the piles of garbage and dead trees.

  Gonzalez pulled out a gun and shot at Dodge. He laughed.

  He shot again. Making the water pop close to his head.

  It was all a game.

  Dodge sucked in some air and went under.

  He kept his eyes shut tight.

  The world was quiet and muffled.

  He felt himself drop under everything until his feet found a thick tree trunk, and he wriggled his hands in the cuffs and strained but did not fight. He strained more.

  He was back on Parris Island doing push-ups in the rain and grinning as that sergeant called him a shit-eating pussy. He was a young soldier making love to Italian women, finding pleasure in the scent of olive oil and perfume. He was walking the beat in Ybor City and chasing down purse snatchers and talking to young punks before letting them go with a warning. He was a detective. And then he was back on Skid Row and his mother was passed out in a chair at the flophouse and he was running cigarettes and booze for the B-girls and dancers and he’d watch them change their brassieres in front of him and powder themselves between their legs. And he liked them sweating.