in the area do it. If they see somebody in a car and it looks suspicious or maybe it just looks highly unusual, they’ll stop it on some pretext—they were going five or ten miles an hour over the speed limit, or the car’s license plate begins with certain digits, or the registration sticker’s peeling off—any damned thing—and they check IDs and record them, and they take pictures like this one. Why they stopped Korolyov’s car I don’t really know, except it’s unusual, all right, and it looks like a lot of money.”
John Smith couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t believe this!” he kept saying, and then he asked, “How did you actually get this? Did you just call up the Miami-Dade Police and ask them what they had on Korolyov and Drukovich, and they just gave it to you?”
Nestor chuckled the happy chuckle of the man who knows secrets and you don’t. “No, they didn’t just give it to me. I called a cop I used to work with on the Marine Patrol. You’d never get something like this by going through ‘channels.’ You have to get on the brothernet.”
“What’s the brothernet?”
“If you know a brother officer and you ask him for a favor, he’s gonna do it for you if he possibly can. That’s the brothernet. My guy also—”
“God, Nestor,” said John Smith, absorbed in the photograph, “that’s great. If the time comes and we have to prove that Korolyov knew Igor all along—here we have him tooling around with him in this half-a-million-dollar toy. What we need now is some more information about Igor’s personal life. I’d like to meet him in some—you know—some casual way.”
“Well, I was just about to tell you something else my guy passed along. This is not in any file. In fact, it’s out-and-out hearsay, but the word is—and Igor’s pretty hard to not notice—the word is that he’s a regular at some strip club in Sunny Isles called the Honey Pot. You game for trying to find a mustache in the middle of a herd of whores?”
8
The Columbus Day Regatta
Second week in October—and so what? That great tropical skillet in the sky still boiled your blood, seared your flesh, turned your eyeballs into aching migraine globes if you insisted on staring at anything, even through the midnight-black sunglasses they were both wearing.
In the front seat of Dr. Lewis’s convertible the wind blew through Magdalena’s hair. But the air was warm as soup. Letting it stream through your hair was like filling your glass from the HOT tap. Norman had the side windows up and the air conditioner on as high as it would go. But all she got out of it was an insipid wisp of cool breeze on her shins every now and then :::::: Forget the maximum air-conditioning, Norman! Just put the top back up, for God’s sake!::::::
But she knew better than to say it out loud. Norman had a thing about… panache—a white Audi A5 convertible with the top down… and the top had to be down… had to have hair streaming in the wind… his longish light-brown hair and her very long dark hair… miles of hair streaming back from the shiny wraparound black shades they both wore… had to have the shades—all that, she deduced, must be panache.
Norman had given her a little discourse on panache two months ago. At the time she hadn’t known why. For that matter, she hadn’t a clue what panache was. But by now she no longer came right out and asked him what new words meant. Now she waited and looked these terms up on Google. Aha… panache… the gist of it seemed to be… at this moment… that if you weren’t driving a Mercedes, a Ferrari, or a Porsche at the very, borderline least… you had to compensate for it with panache. And if a humble Audi A5, such as he possessed, were to have panache, it had to be startlingly white, had to have the top down… had to have a really good-looking couple in the front seat wearing big shiny bug-eyed black sunglasses… dazzling one and all with youth and glamour. But to have that panache, you couldn’t leave out any element, and keeping the top down was one of them.
Right now panache was a killer out here on the MacArthur Causeway. Magdalena was burning up. Just before the causeway reached Miami Beach, a sign said FISHER ISLAND. Over the past two days Norman must