Heat Wave Read online

  Still caught up in fleeting seconds that felt like lingering minutes, Wallace heard Stevens’s gun clatter to the tile floor as the bodyguard went down. The assassin smiled at Wallace, and flame leapt from the weapon’s barrel, and Wallace felt like he’d been prodded in the chest, once, twice, and then a third time, as if an obnoxious know-it-all had been thumping his chest with a thick forefinger, making a point.

  Suddenly he was on his back looking up at the black sky. He had no idea how he’d ended up like this, but when he went to get up, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t. An invisible hand kept him pressed to the concrete of the porch.

  Relieved he’d not been seriously hurt, Wallace felt no pain, though he couldn’t really see anything but the inky clouds and…how strange!…the shooter’s grin dangling in space above him like a crescent moon. Like Alice in Wonderland, when that cat disappeared and left his grin behind….

  The acrid smell of cordite hung heavy in the moist air and—though he tried to listen for sounds—all Wallace heard was the echo of a thousand gunshots. Turning his head, he saw Anthony on his stomach next to him, a neat red hole in the bodyguard’s forehead. Anthony had died rushing out of the bar to save him.

  How sad.

  Goddamn Culebras. Someone would pay for this.

  Antonio Mendoza, Padillo’s Culebras successor, was not only smarter than his predecessor but also far more ruthless. This attempted hit had Mendoza’s name signed to it. Where Padillo would have just tried to muscle in and take a piece, Mendoza was the type who’d figure that if he whacked Wallace, he could have the whole damn pie his own self.

  Mendoza, Wallace knew, fancied himself the incarnation of Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in that movie, Scarface. Many of the local gang members looked up to that character as a hero. Wallace, on the other hand, felt contempt for anyone who couldn’t see that Montana was arrogant and stupid and, in the end, had wound up dead, riddled with bullets in a pool of blood.

  That was not the ending Wallace saw for himself. He would pick himself up from this close scrape and teach Mendoza that Miami could not so easily be taken away from Kurt Wallace.

  He gazed up at the sky again, unaware that his perception was still turning seconds into minutes, and the first drop of rain fell and kissed his forehead.

  The sensation was a kind of wake-up call, and Wallace tried to sit up again. Funny—he still couldn’t seem to move. A woman’s face crossed into his field of vision. Her lips moved, but Wallace couldn’t figure out what she was saying.

  She was beautiful, though, an angel whose long hair was a rich black that matched the sky as dark arcs swung around, the wind coming up. Her brown eyes were wide with, what was that…alarm? Fear?

  Wallace opened his mouth to tell this bystander—understandably spooked by the drive-by shooting—that everything was all right. Instead he coughed and rather than words coming out, scarlet spittle did.

  The woman’s eyes went even wider, and the crime boss felt himself choking. For the first time, he realized he’d been hit. The rain came down harder now, pelting his face, and he felt cold all over. The storm had come quickly. He thought about his wife, Christina, sitting at home waiting for him. She was going to be pissed about this.

  Finally he managed to speak, looking up at the hovering beauty: “My…wife’ll…kill me.”

  Her face no longer soothed Wallace, and he closed his eyes.

  He was lucky to have found a wife as good as Christina, who put up with his cheating ways and the kind of business he was in. He hoped Christina understood—as finally, all at once, he understood that the blackness before him was not the sky—that he hadn’t meant for it to end like this.

  With one last cool exhale, Kurt Wallace was gone.

  Six feet and slim, Lieutenant Horatio Caine—in black slacks and a navy blue CSI windbreaker—leaned into the weather as he moved to the back of the Hummer to collect his crime scene kit. With a stiff wind whipping his red hair, he wondered glumly how much damage Mother Nature had done to his crime scene already.

  Right now the gale snarled in off the ocean, nothing to abate it, ripping across Ocean Drive, rain slanting in, stinging like needles. Preserving a crime scene was impossible under such conditions, but at least he’d have his whole team with him for damage control.

  The lab’s resident firearms expert, Calleigh Duquesne, met him at the back of the vehicle. The petite platinum-blonde had a cool beauty balanced by a warm nature; her Miami-Dade PD ballcap was snug on her head, her hair tied back in a long ponytail pulled through the hole in the back. When Caine opened the rear Hummer door, Calleigh withdrew her crime scene kit and headed straight for the street and any possible shell casings she might find before they were carried away by the rushing water. What Caine prized most about CSI Duquesne—kiddingly dubbed “Bullet Girl” by her peers—was her passion for collecting and interpreting evidence in her area of expertise.

  Caine hoped she was carrying bricks in the pockets of her CSI windbreaker, else she might just get swept away by either the wind or the torrent racing toward the sewer.

  A second Hummer rolled to a stop, and, almost before the vehicle’s engine died, Tim Speedle and Eric Delko—also in CSI windbreakers—were standing next to Caine, peering at their supervisor through the driving downpour.

  “What have we got, H?” Speedle asked, working his voice up over the storm.

  Speedle was the one member of the team that the whipping wind seemed unable to faze. His short, dark hair hugged his head, he appeared not to have shaved yet this week, and his eyes had a look that belied both his alertness and a keen intelligence.

  “Drive-by shooting,” Caine said, with a sideways glance toward the crime scene—the Archer hotel. “And the weather’s going to get worse before it gets better. Let’s collect everything we can before the rain wipes this slate clean.”

  “Fatalities?” Delko asked.

  Delko—the newest member of their squad, taller than Speed—had an alert wide-eyed look on his latte-colored face that one could misread for naivete.

  “At least six,” Caine said. “And maybe more, according to the nine-one-one call. Let’s get wet, guys.”

  The other two CSIs turned toward the back of their Hummer. Delko’s specialty was underwater recovery work, and Caine wondered wryly if the weather would grow so bad that Eric would end up in his scuba suit before this was over. The rain clawed at Caine as he lugged his crime scene kit toward the sidewalk.

  Detective Frank Tripp, blinking his brown eyes against the wind and moisture, stepped forward to meet Caine. “Horatio.”

  Caine nodded. “Frank. How bad?”

  “Eight dead, eleven wounded.”

  His upper lip tightened. “How many witnesses?”

  “Ooooh,” Tripp said, with a head tilt, “how about all of South Beach?…including Ken LaRussa.”

  “A U.S. attorney at a drive-by?” Caine asked. “Are we talking target?”

  “He wasn’t here—he was having dinner down the street. Came runnin’ when he heard the shooting and screaming.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Inside. But your instincts are right, Horatio.”

  “How so?”

  Tripp gestured toward the restaurant. “It probably was a hit. Kurt Wallace and three of his bodyguards are among the dead. Another guy at Wallace’s table bought it, too, only him I don’t recognize.”

  “Public place, lots of civilians…not exactly mob style.”

  Tripp shrugged and his shoulders threw raindrops. “Which mob? There’s a lot more than one these days…and they all got their own sense of ‘style.’ ”

  “Too true,” Caine said hollowly. “Is it finally here, Frank?”

  “Is what here, Horatio?”

  “That all-out gang war we’ve been dreading?”

  Tripp sighed. “If not, it’s a damn good imitation.”

  “You’ve been interviewing witnesses?”

  Tripp nodded. “And I got more to do.
”

  “Anything so far?”

  The detective let out a bitter laugh. “Twenty wits—guess how many stories?”

  “Twenty,” Caine said with a shrug. “In the end, the evidence will tell its own tale.”

  “One thing they all agree on, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “The vehicle that carried the killer clipped a parked car back on the corner of Twelfth. Haven’t found the owner yet.”

  “That’s what we call a happy accident—we’ll check it out.” Caine touched the detective’s wet sleeve, briefly. “I better get started before the evidence is all washed away.”

  As he knew they would be, his team was already hard at it. They scurried around at their various duties, but none of them hurrying. Work fast, Caine had taught them, invoking an old coaching rule, but don’t rush. This was no empty mantra: When you rushed, you missed things. But the weather was upon them and time was running short, Mother Nature playing accomplice to a killer.

  Since the shooting had been a drive-by, Calleigh started at the corner and combed the street for shell casings. Speedle photographed the deceased victims while EMTs aided the wounded. Delko pried slugs from the hotel facade and furniture, and Caine took photos and paint scrapings from the parked car that had been hit by the perp’s vehicle.

  In the end, however, the storm won.

  Less than an hour later, Caine found himself standing in the bullet-pocked lobby bar of the Archer, broken glass crunching under his shoes, his team around him, shaking off water.

  The dead had been taken away, the wounded transferred to South Shore Hospital. All that remained now were Caine’s team, Detective Tripp, and one of the witnesses…albeit a significant one: U.S. attorney Kenneth LaRussa.

  Olive-skinned, in his late thirties or perhaps early forties, the attorney wore longish black hair over his ears and swept straight back, à la Miami Heat basketball coach Pat Riley. LaRussa wore a white button-down shirt, dark slacks, and black tassel loafers. In the middle of the white shirt was a huge red splotch: not a bullet wound but a marinara sauce stain.

  The ambitious attorney had burst on the scene a few years ago with a DA’s office post, then had risen to his current position through hard work and an exemplary conviction rate. Rumor had it his goal was becoming the next Democratic senator from this largely Republican state.

  Caine had no real problem with LaRussa, or the attorney’s ambitions; no question, LaRussa had accomplished some positive things.

  What Caine did have a problem with was LaRussa tossing loser cases back to the state and plucking the prime cases on some technicality that would allow him to charge a perp in federal court. Sure, that might mean that some bad guys did longer stretches when they got federal time, which was not a bad thing; but a couple of truly evil men had walked in federal court when their cases would have been a slam dunk at the state level.

  Those cases, of course, LaRussa never talked about in his frequent media interviews.

  Caine motioned the attorney off to one side, in a corner of the bar untouched by the drive-by shooter. They stood near a table over which a pastel impressionistic watercolor of an ocean sunset made an ironic counterpoint to the shattered room around them.

  “Lieutenant Caine,” LaRussa said, extending his hand. His other one gestured toward the red stain on his shirt. “Pardon the mess—afraid I spilled my lasagna when we dove for cover.”

  Like any good politician, LaRussa had a ready, easy smile that put people at ease, as well as a firm handshake that was supposed to imply he was strong but not overbearing, steadfast but not stodgy, and just a plain good guy to know.

  Caine thought the man might be better off practicing law and not his handshake.

  “Mr. LaRussa,” Caine said, waving off the attorney’s apology. “I’m a little more concerned with this other…mess.”

  “Call me Ken.” This he said with a smile, then studiously applied a somber expression to his face. “It’s good to know that you and your celebrated staff will be working this case.”

  “Your confidence is appreciated,” Caine said with no conviction and motioned to the table, where the two men sat. Just a small civilized conversation in a room shot to hell.

  Forcing himself to use the lawyer’s name, the CSI asked, “Did you see what happened, Ken?”

  The attorney shook his head as a frown etched itself in place. “No, Horatio…it is Horatio, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t. I was with my wife and some friends, having dinner at the Surfsider.”

  Caine knew the hotel, another Art Deco structure with front porch dining a block south.

  “When I heard the shots,” the attorney continued, “I dove over the table to Nance, to get her under cover.” He offered a rueful chuckle; everything this guy did or said seemed forced. “That’s when I got the lasagna stain.”

  “And Nancy…your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nancy wasn’t hurt?”

  “No. None of us were, thank God. The shooting was only at the Archer…but everybody dove for cover anyway. We had no idea when or where the shooting would stop.”

  Caine’s eyes narrowed; he made himself smile, a little. “I’m surprised you could hear the shots.”

  “Why is that, Horatio?”

  “Well, Ken—over at the Surfsider, the music’s pretty loud, isn’t it? You were almost two blocks away?”

  LaRussa’s face lost all expression; oddly, he finally seemed sincere. “Horatio…Lieutenant…I was just a nineteen-year-old grunt when we invaded Grenada. But I heard the sound of an AK-47 tonight, and let me assure you, Lieutenant, it’s not a sound that you ever forget—even from a distance.”

  Nodding in thought, Caine said, “So, you know what weapon was used—that’s helpful.”

  “Glad to be, but that’s about all I have for you.” He shrugged elaborately. “Like everyone else around us, Nancy and I and our friends were behind an upturned table…hoping the shooting would stop.”

  “You didn’t see anything?”

  LaRussa shook his head. “Just a bunch of scared people. Myself included.”

  Appreciating this surprisingly human comment, Caine gave the lawyer a short nod. “And what did you do after the shooting stopped?”

  LaRussa pondered that a moment. “First, I made sure that everyone was all right. That is, my wife and friends.”

  “Of course. And then?”

  “You understand, we were having dinner with Brad and Darcy Willis.”

  The attorney spoke these names with reverence, but they meant nothing to Caine.

  LaRussa was saying, “I told Brad to get Nance and Darcy back to their car and get them the hell home.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “I thought maybe I could help here.”

  And get some TV air time, Caine thought.

  This must have registered on Caine’s face, because LaRussa blustered, defensively, “Wouldn’t you have done the same thing, Lieutenant? As a law enforcement professional?”

  “Yes,” Caine admitted.

  As if on cue, the first two TV reporters and their cameramen started straining at the yellow crime scene outside.

  His eyes cutting to the media, LaRussa took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

  Suppressing a smile, Caine thought, You wouldn’t want to appear overanxious now…would you, Ken?

  “Are we through here, Horatio?”

  Caine considered that momentarily. “You don’t have any trips scheduled? Work or vacation?”

  “Nothing. As a witness, I’ll make myself available should you need me, whenever that might be.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Thank you, Horatio.”

  LaRussa rose and again stretched out his hand.

  Groaning inwardly, Caine got to his feet and suffered through another LaRussa handshake. Then the attorney was disappearing through the shattered lobby doors, and Caine was not sorry to se
e him go.

  The CSI supervisor sensed someone next to him. He turned to see an eager Delko.

  “Hello, Eric—something?”

  Delko grinned. Nodded. “Something.”

  2

  Dirty Job

  ERIC DELKO KNEW the idea was a good one, and yet somehow he felt a little surprised that Caine liked it.

  It wasn’t that his boss tended to shut him down or anything. Caine always seemed open to suggestions from his team. On the other hand, the strength of their leader’s personality and his focused intensity could have an intimidating quality that had not encouraged Delko to step forward in his early months on the job.

  A frown of disapproval from Caine felt like a slap to Delko, who admired this man very much. But more and more now, Delko was putting that “newbie” sensibility behind him and stepping up to the plate with his views. Risking a disapproving glance from Caine was worth it, when you might receive those two precious words from him: “Good work.”

  Ten minutes after receiving Caine’s approval, Delko emerged from the men’s room in the bar in his black neoprene dive suit, the letters MDPD stenciled in yellow on the back. A man stepping out of a hotel restroom in diving gear might look odd enough, but Delko had gone the extra mile, accessorizing not with flippers but with heavy rubber fireman’s boots.

  Caine, twitching a smile, strolled over and laid a hand on Delko’s shoulder. Quietly he asked, “And where did you get those boots?”

  “Uh, well…they sorta fell off a truck at a call about six months ago.”

  “And you just haven’t got around to turning ’em back in yet.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, then,” Caine said, holding up his hands, “don’t tell me any more—I have no desire to be an accessory after the fact. Ready to get down and dirty?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Caine nodded toward the street. “There’s more rain coming in, Eric…and you know how fast that water runs down there. It would look bad on my record, having a CSI drown in a sewer. Don’t embarrass me, now.”