Free Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen Page A

He said he never won if he made love to a woman the night before. For three weeks he went to bed alone. He won almost every night. Everybody in the fronton started betting on him. He was a big star. He said he was serving so hard the other players never saw the pelota until it was past them.”
    “Did you go and bet on him?”
    “No, chico. I never trust a man who can’t get laid for three weeks.”
    “What happened to your friend?”
    “He damn near went crazy. Now he screws every night before the match. He’s a shitty jai alai player, but I bet on him every time I go.”
    Ignoring the laughter, Mono motioned to the waitress. “Another pitcher, señorita.” He looked sternly at the other men. “No more of this. We must get back to business.”
    “The gringo at the dog track?”
    “Yes.”
    “You are sure it is the same man?”
    Mono nodded. “Did you see the way he stared?”
    “So what?” One of his men, who looked like a peasant, shrugged. “Many people were staring.”
    “I recognized him,” Mono said flatly. “He was the man down in the Grove that day when the woman was hit by the car.”
    “But you shot him.”
    Mono glared. “In the leg.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Absolutely.”
    He had learned his ballistics from the best of the CIA. He had trained on a beach in the Florida Keys—a mock invasion during a stinging rainstorm; nighttime target practice with the tracer rifles; blasting coconuts out of the palm trees with a .45 pistol at lunch-time. Six months’ worth of training.
    Mono had made many friends among his fellow soldiers-in-training. Two of them had died at the Bay of Pigs. Another, who had gone to jail for seventeen years on the Isle of Pines, had wished he had. He’d been freed, blind and half-crippled, and Mono had been at the airport when the chartered Eastern jetliner had brought him into Miami from Havana. The two men had wept together like children. Mono’s henchmen had never seen him cry, but they understood.
    Over the years Mono forgot nothing of what the CIA had taught him, least of all how to shoot. Now he was cursing himself: You should have killed that gringo when you had the chance. You should have aimed for the chest and squeezed the trigger. Instead you aimed low, not out of compassion but out of common sense—the important difference between aggravated assault and first-degree murder.
    Mono had never dreamed he would see the gringo again or that the gringo would see him.
    “Suppose you are right,” said the peasant. “So what? Do you think he even saw your face? And if he did, do you suppose he would come looking for you?” The man chuckled and lifted his beer.
    “I think you’re full of shit,” said one of the other men, whose ear was deformed, a grotesque knob. “I saw no one staring at you. Forget about it.”
    “No,” Mono said. “Find out who the man is. Ramón, you have a girlfriend who works in the admissions office at Flagler Memorial. Call her. Tell her to check all the gunshot wounds that came in that day. Tell her you are looking for an Anglo in his thirties, thin, brown hair. He was hit in the knee or thigh.” Mono patted his calf.
    “I will get the name,” Ramón answered.
    “Get everything you can,” Mono said.
    “Then what?” the peasant asked.
    Mono went on, “This is a private matter. You will do this as a favor to me.”
    One of the others snorted a laugh. He was drunk. Mono’s face darkened, and the muscles in his neck tightened like a rope. Under any other circumstances he would have smashed the foolish punk with his fists, leaving him bloody but wiser. But now he needed him, and he said nothing.
    “El Jefe said no more shootings,” Ramón reminded. “He was furious about what happened in the Grove.”
    “He will not know about this,” Mono replied sternly. “Find out what you can.”
    “Then what?” asked the man with the cauliflowered ear.
    “Nothing,” Mono said softly. “Then nada. I just want information.”
    He