Free Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen

Mathers in the garage. He should have known better. “Nothing,” Nelson said. “The car was clean.”
    “Who’d it come back to?”
    “I don’t even remember. Some doctor, I think. He got bombed one night and forgot where he parked. It was nothing.”
    Pincus seemed to buy it.
    The car had not been clean.
    Roberto Nelson’s Mercedes-Benz sedan had contained 5.7 grams of cocaine hidden in a metallic key box beneath the steering column. Octavio Nelson had found it after a ten-minute search, weighed it and field-tested it himself on a lab kit he had bought one day at a Coconut Grove head shop. Then he flushed the powder down the john.
    He’d never made a report on the coke or even on the tow job, an oversight the boys in the police garage were not likely to forgive soon. He’d given Mathers the same bullshit story about the doctor.
    Then Roberto, idiot Roberto, had waltzed into police headquarters and copped the keys off Octavio’s desk on the fourth floor and driven his goddamn Mercedes off without a word. They would see about that later, he and Roberto.
    In the meantime, there was Wilbur Pincus, Iowa-born-and-bred, a babe in Miami. Pincus was a book man. He dressed by the book, talked by the book, made out all of his A forms by the book. The first time Nelson had caught Pincus shining his shoes, he’d immediately put in for a new partner. His complaints were ignored. Pincus, unfortunately, was a pretty good cop.
    Nelson had tried another approach. He’d worked on Pincus until he planted the idea that the young cop should go to work for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Nelson had even gone so far as to provide three glowing letters of commendation, two of them signed by police captains who had been dead for years.
    The DEA had been interested. Pincus had come out of his first interview with flying colors. Two days later, however, a DEA agent working in Hialeah had been shot down by one of his own men during a busted Quaalude deal. That afternoon Pincus had withdrawn his application. He’d told the feds he’d rather work with Octavio Nelson.
    After all, all the other captains got fat behind desks, chewed out the sergeants, fucked the secretaries and worked up office pools on the Dolphin games. Not Nelson. Here was a big shot cop who really loved street work. Pincus had been impressed. Nelson was sloppy, to be sure, and a bit crude, but he was a cop Pincus could learn from.
    Pincus truly felt that way until he’d discovered Nelson had been trying to dump him. The humiliation had been devastating. For two days he’d trod from floor to floor in search of Captains Donnelly and Lopez, to thank them for their letters. A rookie motor-man had finally told him they were dead. That Nelson would actually counterfeit recommendations and mail them to the DEA —Pincus had been thunderstruck. He’d said nothing to Nelson, but the partnership had become a study in simmering friction. The other narcotics detectives watched closely to see which of them would surrender to the other’s style. The heavy money was on Pincus.
    Then came the Aristidio Cruz beating, and the whole bureau waited for the lid to blow. But Nelson and Pincus both acted as though it never happened. For Nelson, it was forgettable. For Pincus, it was a trauma, never far from his troubled thoughts.…
    “What if these goons go out the back door?” he asked now, motioning toward the restaurant.
    “They won’t,” said Nelson, turning up the car radio again.
    At a corner table inside El Hogar, Domingo Sosa, the man known as Mono, seemed lost in himself while his three companions joked.
    “How much did you lose today?”
    “Four hundred,” said one.
    “Three eighty,” said another.
    “Perros de mierda. I tell you, the whole thing is fixed. They put drugs in the Gainesburgers. Some of them could barely walk around the track, much less run.”
    “We go to jai alai next time.”
    “Ha, that’s worse. I had a friend who was a jai alai player.