the action. Without your heart trying to break out of your rib cage, you or a superior had to decide on the plan the odds favored and have the discipline to stick to it… the way Hernandez had planned the stakeout in Overtown… ¡Coño! Why couldn’t he stop thinking about it? There you had it. That was his Deep Worry.
But now it was himself and John Smith waiting in his Camaro for the quarry… and John Smith was no Sergeant Hernandez.
“Suppose he’s not even going home,” said John Smith. “What if he’s going to a girlfriend’s or something? What do we do then?”
“Maybe there’s somebody who spends three or four nights a week at some strip club and then goes home at three or four in the morning to see his girlfriend, but I don’t think the odds are very good. This guy strikes me as a little pathetic. His idea of a love life is the Honey Pot?”
“It doesn’t have to be a girlfriend,” said John Smith. “That was just an example. It could be a—”
“Look, John, so anything can happen. What does that tell you? Exactly nothing. You got to start with what’s likely to happen and go from there. Listen, this has been a pretty good night! This is the first time we’ve made any contact with the guy. Now we know what he actually looks like.”
“I still don’t know how you did that,” said John Smith.
“I swear, it was that black shirt he wears open down the front. He was wearing the same shirt in that picture we got from the Miami-Dade County cops. He’s just spent five or six hours doing whatever the hell he likes to do in a whole building full of whores. I don’t see him driving all the way back to Wynwood at three in the morning. Let’s see where he does go.”
John Smith sank back in the passenger seat and let out a sigh and closed his eyes.
About half an hour later, a heavyset guy in a black shirt open down the front, displaying the vast terrain of his hairy chest, came out of the Honey Pot by himself. Nestor nudged John Smith in the ribs and said, “Well—there’s our boy.”
John Smith sat low in the seat and eyed Igor Drukovich. “Jesus! He doesn’t look very steady on his feet to me.”
The man headed into the Honey Pot’s parking lot. With the lights off, Nestor started up the Camaro.
No more than a minute had gone by when John Smith’s conspiracy-muffled voice said, “What’s he doing? Suppose he just walks through the lot and out the other side?”
John Smith stared at the exit from the parking lot and more minutes crawled by.
Finally, a Volvo, the big one, the Vulcan, emerged from the lot. Nestor had to look twice to see the hairy chest driving it.
Nestor took his cool sweet time folding up the reflector screen… all the while saying, “You wanna know my idea of the worst possible way—”
John Smith, bewildered: “He’s speeding up!”
“—to die? Getting run over by a Volvo Vulcan or a Cadillac Escalade. Why I don’t—”
“—Jesus!—he’s almost reached that bend in the road and we haven’t even—”
“—know except it would be so humiliating. I know that much.”
“Nestor!”
“Cool it. I gotta let him go around the bend before I turn on the lights and start tailing him. Otherwise he’s gonna wonder why he leaves the lot and some car’s lights come on and start following him.”
“But he’s gonna disappear.”
“Yeah, for about five seconds. There—he’s just gone around it. Watch this.”
Nestor turned on the Camaro’s lights and drove it onto the road slowly… then shot past the Honey Pot with a good show-off burst of Camaro acceleration and reached the bend in the road in a heartbeat… slowed down going around it… and sure enough, about 150 feet ahead there was the Volvo Vulcan… The body seemed to recede in the dark… but there was no mistaking the taillights. They were huge and rose up two feet higher than any ordinary vehicle’s and wrapped around the corners in extravagant bands of light. Nestor was able to hang back this far and still keep track of it. Igor and the Vulcan were heading east… but only for half a mile… Igor turned left and headed north on A1A, the little highway that ran right along the coast. There was a fair amount of traffic, and Nestor was able to tail Igor more closely without being noticed. The green highway signs seemed