Miami Midnight (33 page)

“Gabrielle, I hate to leave you like this.” Crissette took her arm to stop her even though it had begun to rain. “What are you going to do? Honey, you gotta realize—”

Gaby gently freed her arm. “I do, I really do, Crissette. I’m working on a lot of decisions. The best way I can.”

She didn’t want to say anything to Crissette to take the edge off her joy over her marriage to David. But until that moment, in spite of their friendship, Gaby hadn’t known the extent of her envy.

“Actually,” she said lightly, “I think it was easier stabbing a drug dealer. Then I didn’t have to think about anything. I just did it.”

The wind increased as Gaby looped through downtown Miami and took MacArthur Causeway out to Palm Island. She switched on the radio for a weather report, but could only get bulletins about low pressure areas across southern Florida with little chance of hurricane development, so she turned it off.

When she pulled up to the front door, however, the driveway was already thickly littered with wind-torn leaves. A bucket left behind by Harrison Tigertail’s roofers had been pushed out onto the grass by the gusts. Gaby stood back for a moment to look at the replaced roof, its barrel tiles glowing brownish pink in the murky light.

Harrison was the key to so much that had happened, she thought. In a very direct way she owed him her life. No one but a Miccosukee Seminole could have guided Castaneda and James into the everglades so skillfully to look for the Colombians’ drug base and rescue her.

It was common knowledge in south Florida that the Seminoles knew most of what went on in the everglades. In the sixties, when the Cuban exiles were being trained for the Bay of Pigs at a secret base in the swamps, the Miccosukees not only knew they were there, they tracked the exiles’ every movement. But because the Seminoles regarded it as basically the white man’s business, they said nothing. This time Harrison’s tribe had helped. Otherwise, Gaby knew, she’d never have been rescued.

Gaby walked through the
sala grande
, the terrazzo floors echoing to the click of her heels, and closed and locked the louvered windows on the sun porch and checked the door. The big house had a spare, cool feel to it now that the furniture was gone.

Upstairs, she took one last look at her mother’s bedroom, the banks of mirrors, faded coral wallpaper, the vast walk-in closet that had once held hundreds of Jeannette’s fabulous gowns.

As she closed the windows and drew the blinds, Gaby was still surprised that Jeannette had accepted the idea of a condominium apartment in Surfside so easily. Only time would tell if it would really stick.

Her own bedroom wasn’t quite empty since the movers hadn’t taken her bed, a folding chair she intended to leave behind, and her suitcase. She rolled up the sheets tidily, then realizing the laundry hamper was gone, left the linens in the middle of the mattress. A check of the bathroom reminded her that a small box and some equipment from the drugstore were in the bedroom wastebasket. She picked it up to carry it downstairs to the kitchen garbage.

At the top of the stairs, on the gallery that ran around three sides of the
sala,
Gaby stopped, savoring the stillness of the vast room below. Closed up, the air was already growing warm and slightly stuffy.

Did she feel sad? she asked herself. Sentimental? The house was full of memories. She remembered her grandfather sitting in his wing chair by the hooded baronial fireplace, sipping his four o’clock Scotch and water. She’d been allowed to watch Paul and Jeannette’s elaborate, exciting parties from the darkened second-floor gallery. Now the framed photographs of Arthur Godfrey, Jackie Gleason, and the Miami Beach celebrities of the past, taken down for storage, left ghostly, empty rectangles on the plaster walls.

Standing there, it was also impossible for Gaby not to remember the strange, haunted nights following the
Santería,
the nightmares and the dreams. But whatever had been there once, it was gone now.

The sound of a car in the driveway broke her reverie. She picked up her handful of trash and ran downstairs, stopping in the kitchen to toss the empty box into the last container of garbage.

She stepped out the front door just as Dodd got out of his Porsche. He watched as she put the key in the front door and locked it for the last time.

“Mouse—” He seemed to remember suddenly she detested the old nickname. “Gaby, you don’t have to do this, you know.”

She held out the key and, reluctantly, he took it from her. “You haven’t thought this over.” He followed her down the driveway to her mother’s car. “All these weeks, and now you change your mind. A telephone call, for God’s sake, this afternoon. Left on my answering machine.”

“I didn’t want to call you at the office,” she said.

“That’s crazy. You just didn’t want to talk to me. Look, I haven’t mentioned this to my family. There’s still time—”

“I think you’d better.” She opened the trunk of her mother’s old Cadillac and put her suitcase inside with the others. “At least we don’t have an engagement party to cancel again. And I haven’t picked up your ring at the jewelers. You’ll have that back.”

“This is just nerves,” he said, frustrated. “They tell me that’s normal with these things. You’re just feeling a little—”

“Dodd,” she interrupted, turning to face him, “do you think I’m a coward?”

“Coward?” He looked momentarily disconcerted. “On the contrary, I think you have the normal good manners of someone raised in your circumstances. You do need someone to look after you, though, someone to love and provide for you. That doesn’t necessarily mean—”

She turned away. ‘It would be a mistake,” she said shortly. “I’m sorry, but it would.”

He followed her around to the driver’s side. “Gaby, believe me, it wasn’t the house. Is that what’s bothering you? This place was just the last property on the island to complete the parcel. I was going to explain it to you later.”

She kept her back to him. “Dodd, don’t you know you always wait too long to explain things?” She took a deep breath. Although she’d thought this over on her drive home from Sunday’s and knew all of it was true, it was still hard to say. “I waited years for you to explain why you never called me, spoke to me after we made love that time. I waited and waited for you to explain to me why you got married. I even waited in Florence for four years for you to tell me you’d gotten divorced. I know it was stupid of me not to realize you weren’t going to tell me you were going to make a big profit on my mother’s house, either.”

“Now, whoa there, I told you it was nothing illegal! For God’s sake, we were going to get married!”

“It’s my fault.” She turned now to face him squarely. “I was waiting all this time for you to do something about loving me. I never stopped to think about doing something about it myself.”

“Doing
what
?” he cried, exasperated.

“It just happened again. Something else has been decided for me. It’s sort of crazy.” She hesitated. “But you don’t believe in anything like that, do you?”

“How can I tell what I believe in if I don’t understand what you’re talking about?”

She wanted to make this easier for him. After all, it was hardly fair to blame Dodd for her own illusions. “You won’t miss my loving you, Dodd, you never have. You’ll find someone else.”

“Dammit, you haven’t given me one good reason for any of this. Not yesterday. Not this morning when I tried to talk to you. Not now!”

“Oh, Dodd,” she said softly, “you were always someone I wanted to run to. Maybe you were the safe, caring lover I never found.” She got in the car and swung the door shut. “But I think I discovered that loving someone is really very, very different. Not safe, not predictable at all.”

He looked not only angry but baffled. “Gaby, don’t just give me the key to the house and walk away! Dammit, where the hell do you think you’re going?”

She started the engine. It really wasn’t necessary to answer Dodd anymore. She was going somewhere to keep an appointment that would take all the courage she ever possessed.

She hoped it would work, she thought as she backed the car around Dodd’s Porsche and out of the drive. After all, she’d been pretty brave with the Colombians.

Chapter 22

“I’ll check you past security at the gate,” Harrison Tigertail had said, “and take you down to the spooks’ flight area. It might take some time, the debriefing, and I don’t know when it started, so I’ll wait with you.”

No, Gaby had told him. She wanted to do it alone.

They stood in the parking lot of a Class A restricted area of Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami, and Harrison was reluctant to leave her.

He raised his voice to shout over the mind-shattering roar of jets taking off from the runway just beyond. “Just don’t stray from the parking lot, hear? You don’t have a pass and this is a high security area.”

Gaby tried to keep him from seeing the extent of her terror, but her knees were wobbling.

“This was your idea, remember,” he said. “Still want to go through with it?”

She nodded again, wordlessly, wrapping her arms around herself, holding down by sheer force some of her body’s desperate shivering. She’d chosen to make this effort to bridge that terrible gap between herself and James, and here she was, so riddled with nerves that she was in danger of falling apart! It was almost too much to be thrown right into the middle of all the dreams, the nightmares coming true. It took all of what was left of her control not to grab the big man beside her and start screaming that the engines of the military jets that rose into the stormy sky were the transparent circles of fire she’d seen before, in her dreams.

But how did you talk of nightmares and dreams and voodoo spells to someone as stolidly matter-of-fact as Harrison Tigertail? Who, according to what he’d told her, had been doing impossibly dangerous things for more than a decade since he’d been back from Vietnam? And who talked about perilous top-secret missions as casually as others would talk about a perfectly ordinary part-time job here south of Miami?

He looked down at her, squinting against the storm’s fading light. “Are you all right?”

Gaby had steeled herself for this, told herself that perhaps she had known all along that under the layers of deceptions, fantasies, unbelievable illusions, there lay a deeper, final secret.

She’d been right.

The first thing Harrison had told her was that if a mission failed, if anything happened to them on their secret flights, the United States government would deny that any such operation existed. Even the pilot and electronic surveillance systems officer did not exist. There would be no record of their names. The Cuban government, if responsible for any incident like shooting them down, would issue a full denial also.

“If anything goes wrong, nobody knows anything,” Harrison had said. “Those are the rules of the game.”

Even the military jets they flew, A-6-E’s, were painted black, with no registration numbers on their body or wings, no forms of identification anywhere. The runways were top secret, restricted, separate from Homestead Air Force Base’s regular military operations. Two or three times a month James Santo Marin and Harrison Tigertail flew out of there with not even their families knowing what they were doing, on their dangerous, supersecret missions. A special operations branch of the CIA had recruited them for this years ago, when they’d been a top air reconnaissance team in Vietnam.

Beside her, Harrison hitched up the groin pad he still wore over his flight coverall and shifted his helmet to his other arm.
Just don’t make him more miserable than he already is,
he’d warned her.
He’s edgy, maxed-out from a bunch of night flights like this because he’s the only Cuban Spanish-speaker we got in the A-sixes to monitor their transmissions, plus all this on top of what Castaneda got him into. He’s pure hell to live with.

“Jimmy’s going to kill me for this,” Harrison muttered now. He had finished his part of the debriefing for the mission they’d just completed. Now they were waiting in the parking lot outside the building where James was finishing his. “I should never have let you talk me into this. It’s a good thing this was the last sortie in this series.” He scratched the back of his neck. “But that don’t mean Jimmy ain’t gonna blow sky high when he sees you.”

In the next few minutes, Gaby thought, James would cross the parking lot on his way to the equipment room where he would turn over his pressurized flight coverall, his helmet, and his other gear, and get into civilian clothes. She was shaking. She still hadn’t formed the all-important words that she was going to say. She only knew that she had to see James Santo Marin.

Harrison held out his hand, testing for a few drops of rain. “Looks like we’re going to get that storm that’s coming. You sure this is what you want, honey? It ain’t too late to back out.”

“This is what I want,” she said.

He planted a hasty kiss on her cheek. “Okay, I’m going to get out of here then, because here he comes. All hell’s going to break loose.”

The door in the low concrete building on the far side of the parking lot opened. A figure, silhouetted against the light, looked up at the darkening sky with its occasional flashes of silent lightning, then stepped outside.

Gaby watched that familiar silhouette with a wild fluttering of her heart. She had almost forgotten that James moved like no other man she’d ever seen. In the oncoming storm’s light, the fluid grace of his body in the fighter pilot’s coverall of olive-green nylon, swinging his heavy helmet by its strap, revealed him as the man with whom she had somehow fallen in love, never so perfectly realized as in that moment: powerful, quietly confident, solitary, his dark head bent. A beautiful man, brave and strong. By some instinct she’d always known that. Even when she thought the worst of him.