Hawke

Without a word, and only out of respect, every soldier lowered his gun.

“El jefe needs immediate medical attention,” Manso said to his brother Juanito, who had come forward to embrace him. “He has lost a lot of blood.”

“Sн,mi hermano,” Juanito de Herreras said. “The emergency medics are on the way. Welcome and well done.”

Juanito called to Castro. “There is someone most anxious to speak to you, Comandante,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

The formation of soldiers parted and allowed a man onto the pad. He strode toward Manso, Juanito, and Castro, smiling. He was young and handsome, and bore a striking resemblance to someone Castro had not seen in over thirty years.

“Comandante,” Manso said to Castro, “may I present the new presidente of Cuba?”

“Bienvenidos,” Fulgencio Batista said.

It was the grandson of the man Castro had overthrown more than thirty years earlier. The new presidente was to be Fulgencio Batista’s grandson!

Fidel Castro shot Manso a look of palpable hatred.

This was simply more irony than he could stand.

28

Gomez ducked inside the cool gloom of St. Mary’s Cathedral. It was the Naval Air Station’s oldest and most beautiful church.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, hot as hell out in the sun, and he was supposed to be at the pistol range. He’d slept in all morning, then had a long liquid lunch and decided to blow off target practice. Brewskis and bullets don’t mix, he knew that much. Hell, he had a couple of missing toes to prove it.

He’d been blowing off a lot of stuff lately. He’d even spent another few nights in the brig after a stupid fight he got into with a noncom who’d called him a dumb spic in the mess hall. He couldn’t remember who’d started it, but he’d finished it. Look at it this way. He went to the brig. The noncom went to the infirmary. So, you gotta ask yourself. Who won?

Gomez walked quickly up the left side of the nave and entered the confessional booth. As soon as he was seated, the small partition opened and he could see the silhouette of Father Menendez through the screen.

“Father, forgive me, for I have si

Gomez took a deep breath and tried to get his act together. He realized that he was literally shaking. He shook out a few Tic Tacs and popped them into his mouth. He probably smelled like a goddamn brewery. His mouth was dry as dust, too. He’d woken up feeling like a lizard lying on a hot rock.

“Have you had sex outside of your marriage?” the priest asked.

Sex?

Sex had been one of the last things on his mind for nearly a month. But this Menendez, he always wanted to hear about sex. He steered every confession that way. He always asked if you had “spilled your seed.”

Gomez was worried about much more important things than screwing some chiquita and spilling any goddamn seed. Rita had sent him to church to talk about his drinking. His “violence.” What lovely Rita peter maid didn’t know was that his drinking was the result of a few underlying problems.

Problem, name it. Solution, beer. Secret of a happy and successful life.

The nuns at the Catholic schools he’d gone to in Miami always said you should treat your body like a temple. In the last few months, Gomez had been treating his more like an amusement park. And, lately, the combination of beer, Cuban rum, and tranks he’d been on was starting to get to him in some fairly scary ways.

He put his hands together as if in prayer and squeezed them between his knees to stop the shaking.

He began his confession.

“Father, I—” He stopped. “Father, give me a second—please. I’m praying.”

And the truth of it was that he was praying.

At six o’clock on that very morning, Gomez had been sitting in his small kitchen with a gun in his mouth. He was staring out the window at the sunrise. He’d been up all night. There was an empty rum bottle on the kitchen table. A lamp cast its yellow glow on an unfinished letter to Rita and a picture of him and his family.

The barrel of the gun in his mouth tasted like the Hoppe’s gun oil he remembered as smelling pretty good when he was a kid. Didn’t taste all that great, however. Felt like his teeth were coated with it. Pretty goddamn ironic. This was the exact same revolver his grandfather carried at the stupid Bay of Pigs. Grandpa gave the gun to Gomez upon his graduation from St. Ignatius High School. The pistol held six bullets. Gomez had loaded one bullet into the cylinder and spun it a few times.

He had already pulled the trigger four times unsuccessfully.

Click. He pulled it again.

Nada.

How lucky can one guy get? Five pulls, five misses? Five out of five? Nada? Come on. Nobody got that lucky. Maybe somebody up there was trying to tell him something, he told himself. The hell you going to do when you get a message like this, he’d like to know. He took the gun out of his mouth and put it down on the kitchen countertop. He reached over to the little TV and snapped off CNN, which he’d only been sort of half listening to, anyway. Something about Cuba.

The sun was up now.

Everybody in the house was still asleep. He could use a couple of winks himself, couldn’t he? Maybe feel better when he woke up. Unless he dreamed about that damned teddy bear again. The big white one standing in the corner in the little pink room with the white lace curtains.

Goddamn teddy bear was driving him crazy. Ever since the birthday party. He’d imagined it would be easy, handing the bear to the little girl. Walking away. It wasn’t like that. Oh, no. She didn’t let him just walk away.

Little Cindy had laughed when he tore the paper off and showed it to her. Her eyes were wide open, just looking at that bear like it was her favorite present of her whole life or something. She’d stood up on her tippy-toes and given Gomez a big smacker. She hugged that bear to her chest and never let go of it all afternoon. Even though it was almost as big as she was.

Then, when it was finally time to go, Gi

Sleeping right there in the same room with the big white teddy bear.

And the bad thing, the really bad thing, was he’d said to her, “Sure, why not?”

Nothing had happened, of course. That’s not how it was going to work. That was definitely not the Big Plan. Still, he never felt right about himself after that night. He would lie there next to Rita, wideawake, thinking about how he’d let his two kids sleep in that kid’s room with the bear. He tried to get his mind off of it. Think about his million dollars waiting for him in Switzerland. Growing like mushrooms in the dark. A dark vault. With a big white bear in the corner, its eyes glowing bright red.

Rita had finally thrown him out of the house three days prior to this little visit with the padre.

He’d come home pretty messed up that night and she’d gotten more pissed than he’d ever seen her. Gave him living hell. So he’d smacked her a couple of times to shut her up. Nothing serious. No stitches, for chrissakes. No broken anything. Nothing to get your panties in an uproar and kicked out of your own friggin’ house over.

She’d be sorry. Wait till she found out how rich her soon-to-be ex-husband was. That would be something. He could see himself driving up in a brand new Corvette Z06, telling her about the bank in Switzerland, the money. But, hey, just stopped by to say good-bye. See ya.