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By three-thirty I was seriously in the bag. Across the street, I saw an armored car pull up in front of the bank. It was a shimmering box-like vehicle with a red-and-white paint job that pulsed in the heat like a fresh dental extraction. Three armed guards piled out, opened up the back, and began to lift big canvas satchels with padlocks on the tops onto the pavement. One of the guards was Dallas Klein.
I crossed the street, my drink in one hand, shading my eyes from the glare with the other.
“Where you been, fellow? I’ve had to knock ’em back for both of us,” I said.
Dallas was standing in the shade of the bank, the armpits of his gray shirt dark with moisture. “I’m on the job, here, Dave. Catch you later,” he said.
“What time you get off?”
“I said beat it.”
“Say again?”
“This is a security area. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“You’ve got things mixed up, podna. I’m a police officer.”
“What you are is shit-faced. Now stop making an ass out of yourself and go back in the bar.”
I turned around and walked toward the colonnade, the sun like a wet flame on my skin. I looked back over my shoulder at Dallas, who was now busy with his work, hefting bags of money and carrying them into the bank. My face felt small and tight, the skin dead, freeze-dried in the heat.
“Something wrong, Dave?” the bartender asked.
“Yeah, my glass is empty. Double Beam, beer back,” I said.
While he poured into a shot glass from a bourbon bottle with a chrome nipple on it, I blotted the humidity out of my eyes with a paper napkin, my ears still ringing from the insult Dallas had delivered me. I looked back out the window at the armored car. But the scene had suddenly become surreal, divorced from any of my expectations about that day in my life. A white van came out of nowhere and braked behind the armored car. Four men with cut-down shotguns jumped out on the sidewalk, leaving the driver behind the wheel. They were all dressed in work clothes, their hair and facial features a beige-colored blur under nylon stockings.
“Call nine-one-one, say, ‘Armed robbery in progress,’ and give this address,” I said to the bartender.
I unsnapped the .25 automatic that was strapped to my right ankle. When I got off the barstool, one side of the room seemed to collapse under my foot.
“I wouldn’t go out there,” the bartender said.
“I’m a cop,” I said.
I thought my grandiose words could somehow change the condition I was in. But in the bartender’s eyes I saw a sad knowledge that no amount of rhetoric would ever influence. I walked unsteadily to the front door and jerked it open. The outside world ballooned through the door in a rush of superheated air and carbon monoxide. The street I looked out upon was no longer a part of South Florida. It was a wind-sculpted place in the desert, bleached the color of a biscuit by the sun, home to carrion birds and jackals and blowflies. It was the place that awaits us all, one we don’t allow ourselves to see in our dreams. The .25 auto felt as small and light as plastic in my hand.
I positioned myself behind one of the Arabic columns under the colonnade and steadied my automatic against the stone. “Police officer! Put down your weapons and get on your faces!” I shouted.
But the men robbing the armored car did little more than glance in my direction, as they would at a minor annoyance. It was obvious their timing on the takedown of the car had gone amiss. The van had arrived seconds later than it should have, allowing the guards time to start carrying the canvas money satchels inside the bank. The car guards and the elderly bank guard were down on their knees, against the wall of the bank, their fingers laced behind their heads. The robbers simply needed to pick up the satchels that were within easy reach, head out of Opa-Locka, and dump the van, which was undoubtedly stolen. A few minutes later, they could have disappeared back into the anonymity of the city. But one of them had gotten greedy. One of them had gone into the bank to retrieve the satchels there, racking a round into the chamber of his shotgun.
A teller was already pushing the vault door shut. The robber shot him at point-blank range.
When the shooter emerged from the bank, he was dragging two satchels that were whipsawed with blood, his pump propped against his hip.
“I said on your faces, you motherfuckers!” I shouted.
The first shotgun blast from the robbers on the sidewalk patterned all over the column and the metal door of the bar. A second one caved the window. Then the robbers were shooting at me in unison, blowing dust and powdered stone in the air, peppering the metal door with indentations that looked like shiny nickels.
I crouched at the bottom of the column, unable to move or return fire without being chewed up. Then I heard someone shouting, “Go, go, go, go!” and the sounds of the van doors slamming shut.
It should have been over. But it wasn’t. As the van pulled away from the curb, I was sure I heard the robber in the passenger seat speak to Dallas. “You’re a joke, man,” he said. Then he extended his shotgun straight out from the vehicle and blew most of Dallas Klein’s head off. Chapter 2
T HE ROBBERY OF the armored car and the double homicide were never solved. I gave the FBI and the Dade County authorities as much information as I could about Dallas Klein’s relationship to the bookie Whitey Bruxal and the three collectors who were trying to dun Dallas for his sixteen-thousand-dollar tab. But I was firing in the well. The three collectors all had alibis, were lawyered-up and deaf, dumb, and don’t know from the jump. Whitey Bruxal returned from New Jersey of his own volition and allowed himself to be interviewed three times without benefit of counsel. I came to believe that the account I had given the authorities of Dallas’s connection to the gamblers was being looked upon with the same degree of credibility cops usually give the words of all drunks and junkies: You can always tell when they’re lying—their lips are moving.
I hung up my brief tenure with law enforcement in the tropics, attended my first A.A. meeting, a sunrise group that met in a grove of coconut palms on Fort Lauderdale Beach, and caught a flight the same day back to New Orleans.
That was over two decades ago. I believed Dallas made a deal with the devil and lost. I tried to stop the robbery and failed, but at least I tried, and I did not hold myself responsible for his death. At least, that was what I told myself. Later, I was fired from NOPD. Perhaps my dismissal was my fault, perhaps not. Frankly, I didn’t care. I went back sober to my birthplace, New Iberia, Louisiana, a small city on Bayou Teche, down by the Gulf of Mexico, and started my life over. It’s always the first inning, I said. And this time I was right about something.
