Operation Caribe by Mack Maloney

reason they came to Badtown was to pick up their bribe money.
    *   *   *
    BLACK WAS IN an especially bad mood tonight.
    The gang was again low on funds. A raiding party he’d sent out the night before had spent nearly all of its profits over in Bimini. Doubling their sin, the same four men had not returned from a raid they’d gone out on earlier this night. Again, the big selling week was coming up, and gang’s coffers were seriously depleted. But even worse, the thought that his men might be holding out on him was enough to make Black’s blood boil.
    He walked over to the table where his gang members were playing cards and viciously slapped the first man he saw. The man fell to the floor, his nose broken, his mouth bloody.
    “When I slap you, you goin’ to stay slap,” Black roared at his astonished victim. “You understand? Or do you need more cut lip?”
    The man didn’t reply; he just scrambled away.
    Black took his seat, which was all he really wanted.
    The pirate captain also commandeered the man’s meager pile of money and began playing poker, but clearly, he was distracted. He was constantly checking his watch, waiting for his raiding party to show up with some much-needed capital. But as each minute ticked by, that possibility seemed more and more remote.
    Into this swirl of dangerous vibes stumbled a man named Petey Chops. He was small and rodentlike, and he’d spent more than half his life in jail for murdering a child. These days he was a low-level drug mule for Black’s crew; his forte was pushing powdered coke on American college students here on school break or for a long weekend.
    Chops was supposed to be carrying a $10,000 payment for a load of coke Black’s men had given him the week before. Tonight was the night to pay up, which was the reason Black had left his hideout in the first place. He wanted that money in his own pocket, no one else’s. But when Chops walked in and saw Black himself in the flesh, he immediately tried to turn and run. Black’s bodyguards stopped him at the door, though, and the pirate captain motioned them to bring him over.
    By the time Chops reached the table and sat down, he’d turned ghost white. He also looked beat up. His eyes were puffy, his lips swollen.
    “I’m sorry,” he blurted out, not daring to look at Black across the table. “But I don’t have your scratch.”
    Black glared back at him. “What do you mean?”
    Chops was trembling. “I had the money. But I was rolled thirty minutes ago. Two guys in military uniforms. They took everything I had.”
    Black drank an entire glass of rum without taking his eyes off Chops. “I got rolled” was the oldest excuse in the book, and everyone at the table knew it.
    “But it’s true,” Chops insisted. “I was leaving my crib and these two army dudes came out of nowhere. Masked faces, billy clubs. They hit me from behind, then dragged me into the alley and took my roll. Ten grand in tens and twenties. It was like they were waiting for me. It was like they knew I was coming here with your money.”
    Black never broke his gaze. The tension in the room was nearly unbearable.
    He asked Chops, “So, when can you get us the money? Tomorrow? The next day?”
    Chops’s relief was so apparent, he nearly fell out of his seat.
    “For sure, Captain,” he said. “Tomorrow, for sure.”
    Black reached across the table and tapped Chops lightly on his face.
    “Tomorrow,” the pirate captain told him. “Or else.”
    More blood trickled from Chops’s busted-up nose. But he didn’t care. He’d somehow escaped with his life.
    “Yes, Captain,” he said, wiping the blood away. “I won’t gin it up.”
    Black reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a joint the size of a cigar.
    “Let’s smoke this outside,” he told the others at the table. “It’s new stuff—from Panama. We don’t want everyone out there to be smelling us.”
    Everyone at the table got up and filed through the secret doorway