Free Operation Caribe by Mack Maloney Page B

would soon besiege the islands, and this meant dozens of pounds of coke and hundreds of pounds of pot could be sold in just one week.
    These days, the people moving all these drugs around were, more often than not, the most feared, if most secretive pirate gang in the islands: the Muy Capaz.
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    OF THE TWO dozen bars in Badtown, most were little more than shacks with mud roofs. But one stood out, because it was made not of metal, but of stone.
    It was as old as anything could be in this part of the Bahamas. Built more than two hundred years before by the British Army to house prostitutes close to one of its many forts, it was known then, as now, as the Tainted Lady.
    The bar inside was as rundown as the building itself. Made of rotting wood from a nineteenth-century schooner, it was bordered by three shelves of bootleg liquor. There were a few tables, a few chairs and that was it. Cigarette smoke, pot smoke, spilled beer and blood combined to give the place a unique aroma. It was always dark inside, no matter what the time of day.
    Just off the bar was a small room whose door was hidden behind a false wood panel. Few people knew the room existed. Inside it tonight were four members of the Muy Capaz. There were dressed badly even by Badtown standards, in stained, ragged shorts, dirty beach shirts and tattered straw hats. Each man had a gun in his belt and a machete by his side. Several bottles of rum sat on the table.
    The pirates had been playing Cuban Poker since midnight. At about 2 A.M. , the secret door opened and four heavily armed men came in. Everyone in the room froze. The four men weren’t rival gang members—they were bodyguards. Their sudden appearance could mean only one thing.
    Another man walked in a few moments later. He was six-foot-two, with the build of an ex-boxer and the scars of an ex-con. He was dressed all in white, and his hands, cracked and rough, were an odd shade of red, as if they were permanently stained with blood.
    He was Charles Black, the boss of the Muy Capaz.
    This was not good—and the four pirates knew it. For Black to show himself in public was a rare event. He almost never left the gang’s secret hideout. His presence here meant something was wrong inside the world of the Muy Capaz.
    And that could be bad for everybody.
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    BLACK’S MAIN SOURCE of income was buying and selling large quantities of pot and coke. His suppliers were from Jamaica; the business was strictly cash up front. Whenever Black and his men needed an injection of funds to get resupplied, they did what pirates do: They robbed vessels at sea. Turning that booty into money, they bought the drugs wholesale, and then resold them to mid-level dealers, most right here in Badtown, for a good profit.
    The problem was, Black and his men were pirates from skin to bones. Like their predecessors of centuries past, they had something in their genes that caused them to be quickly separated from any extra money they came across. Despite their reputation for moving like ghosts when it came to committing crimes at sea, they were terrible businessmen. When they made a score, they would take the profits and hit Badtown hard. And whether their visit lasted several days or even a week or more, after a bender of booze, drugs, gambling and paying for the boom-boom, most if not all of their ill-gotten gains were gone.
    This was why the gang was almost always broke, forcing them to knock off more yachts, to get some more seed money, to buy more stuff from the Jamaicans, to sell again, to blow the profits again. It was a vicious cycle. And had it had nothing to do with voodoo or the full moon.
    The problem flowed from the top. Black himself was prone to recklessness when he was in the chips, and to foul moods when the well went dry. In the past year alone he’d murdered six people, three inside this very bar, all over money matters.
    There was no way the local police were going to arrest him, though. The only