Speedball

Speedball

Sirius Black was shot at four thirty-seven in broad daylight on the crowded marina in front of a bar and grill. Two dockworkers saw it happen; one bullet to the chest as he fell down, then another. They jumped into the water after the second shot, floating among the ropes and buoys until the noise quieted down.

The others standing there either ran away or didn't report it. A mother, pushing along her children in a blue stroller, was grazed but not seriously injured. A man, later identified as Miguel Carreira, attended to the fallen man, trying to staunch the bleeding with his own shirt. The paramedics sluggishly wheeled themselves in.

Miguel Carreira later told the packed-in audience at the pub the man's last words were, "Find Harry Potter." No one at the pub knew who Harry Potter was. They couldn't be blamed for lack of trying, however. After buying Miguel another round of beer, he was cajoled into telling them that it was an Anglo, short black hair with shocks of gray in it, medium build and an untrimmed beard. He'd been wearing a stained blue shirt, crocodile sewn on the pocket, and he'd been shot pretty bad. No hope, Miguel said. A goner for sure.

The man who shot Sirius Black was Juan Gallardo. After Gallardo threw away the gun, a Beretta .25, in his haste to get away, a British reporter staying at the Hilton contacted the Spanish police. After a quick chase, they snapped handcuffs on Gallardo and led him back to the police station. One stopped by a shop on the way back, picking up an envelope and a coffee, stopping to chat with Maria while the other flipped through a car magazine. Gallardo was silent the entire way.

During questioning, he kept on repeating another man had ordered him to shoot, a blond with a slight British accent in his Spanish, pale, carrying a leather suitcase. He'd let him look inside of it and it was stuffed with 500-euro notes. The man told Juan that he would pay him half the money in the suitcase, if he just shot the man in the blue shirt that was standing by the woman with the straw hat. Half the money.

The cops just laughed and locked him inside a prison cell with a teenage boy who had robbed a grocery store and a rapist. Juan Gallardo sat on the marked up bench, watching the older man take a piss in the steel toilet, wanting his money.

* * *

The white sun drummed relentlessly on the yacht-choked harbor of Puerto Banus. The sea rolled into the coast from the shores of Africa, carrying with it the dust cast to warmer waters. Puerto Banus boasted two casinos, a department store, and an endless selection of nightclubs and restaurants, populated by the jet-setters, blue-collar workers, and the rich elite alike. They flew in from Britain, France, America, China; businessmen and their mistresses looking for the next St Tropez. The people from other parts of Marbella liked to drive over on the weekends to try their luck at the slots and to soak in the nightlife.

Draco liked the Puerto Banus because the endless activity hid anything suspicious going on. Even some of the locals lived in ignorance, though that ignorance was probably intentional.

"Everything worked out?" Blaise was wearing his tourist outfit: aviator lenses, Hawaiian print shirt, and pink surf shorts. He grinned, spreading his arms out to the sea. "Lovely place you've chosen, Malfoy. Suits me, suits me very well..."

Draco spat into the harbor. "Keep your mind in check. Can't afford any fuck-ups with the Columbians, they're tough customers."

"Tough sellers, you mean."

"True. The shipment should be arriving later this week and on another plane, they weren't clear on how many kilos. They'll only get us that far, we still have to get past the pricks at customs and god knows where else." He smiled, not aimed at anyone in particular.

"We could unload some of it here. Lopez would be more than happy-"

Draco waved a hand in dismissal. "Anymore, they'll burn out their nasal septum. It's the blokes back home that need us."

Blaise squatted down on the wood planks, staring at the debris bobbing in the blue water, so blue they should make a name just for it. Puerto Banus blue, maybe. He was never good at naming things. "Any more plans for the Juan bloke you want to tell me about? Awfully vague the first time around. Whip out the cash, give him a gun, tell him to shoot." He craned his neck back and looked at the stain, roped off with police tape. "It worked."

"You'll see." Draco's mobile rang. He ignored it.

"I hate that."

"You know the type, blows his paycheck at the bar, can't walk into a store without the manager jumping on him for the cash he owes. Uneducated, unmarried, basically a sad fuck."

Blaise squinted up at the sky. "You can tell of that by looking at the fellow, eh?"

"They're the easiest to spot. Look in their eyes, Zabini. All in the eyes." Draco tapped next to his own. "Nothing in them but creditor's phone calls and lust. Pent-up sexual frustration."

"Suffering from a bit of that myself, actually." He paused, looking for a reaction. There was none. "So Black's history?" changing the subject.

"As gone as I could make it. They probably aren't going to investigate too much, though it's not good to assume. They know how the sad fucks like our Juan go. All that angst and beer, boom!" He mimed shooting the mast of a yacht with the name Estella inscribed on its side. "Gone. Dead. Finished."

"People might talk, though, poke around, get some higher forces to investigate. We could be out faster than you can say extradition."

"Extradition," Draco said lazily. "I make very generous loans to the right people. You get on the good side of the right people, Zabini, you can do anything short of screwing their girlfriend and get away with it."

"That why Covas Callas threatened to hunt you down like a dog and make you beg for mercy on bloodied hands and knees?"

Draco shrugged. "You can't win everybody. Just win the ones that'll be useful to you later."

"How do you know?"

"Intuition. Connections. Money. Power."

Blaise snorted. "That'd be every politician and operator on the coast."

He didn't answer. The beginnings of sunburn were taking hold on his nose and forehead, despite the coconut suntan lotion he'd slathered on during the ride down from Malaga airport. The air was filled with it too, the sweat and tropical oils of a million sunbathers, a million pina coladas and ice cubes, infinite stifling afternoons of mosquito wiring and hand fans.

"We've got business, Zabini. Just remember, eh?" Draco smiled, his capped teeth flashing briefly in the sun. "We can spin the wheel, bet a few numbers. Just don't blow more cash than we earn. Watch your back," he added, almost as an afterthought.

"We don't try to steal somebody's else's load, they don't kill us. Not unless they want another street shooting Armageddon," Blaise said, recalling the paper he'd read on the airplane ride.

"You know what's more dangerous than a gun pointed at you, Zabini?"

"What?" he said, not really caring.

"How it got there. Naïveté. After last month, I expected a little more caution from you."

Blaise shrugged.

* * *

The two cops were laughing at him, Juan could see. The cop on his right was smoking a Lucky Strike; the smell was driving him wild. He had to quit a few weeks ago when he didn't have money for food anymore. The one on the left was a skinny one, big black mustache. Vero cabrón, he wanted to spit in their faces. Bastards. He wished he had the gun now, he would put the barrel in Lucky Strike's mouth, he'd laugh, have him beg, but he'd just press deeper and deeper into his throat until the cop was gagging and just like he had pulled it before and adiós. Skinny, he'd just shoot him in the crotch. How do you like that, he'd ask.

Lucky Strike said something to Skinny in a heavy Madrid accent. Juan almost caught it. The steel folding chair was intey uncomfortable and a fluorescent white light hung above him, like he was waiting for a crucifixion, hands nailed up, onlookers jeering. Lucky Strike stubbed out his cigarette and glanced over at Skinny, who shuffled a pile of papers.

"Let's have a look," Skinny said in clipped Spanish, showing his yellowing teeth; Juan wants to punch them out like brittle piano keys. Bang, bang, bang. Nothing but a black gaping hole. "You owe over twenty thousand euros to four different people and your landlord was about to evict you. Yes?"

Juan stared fixedly at Ana Gonzalez's tetas on the poster next to the calendar, opened to the wrong month. "Yes," he replied.

Said Lucky Strike, "Your neighbor, Patricia García Ramírez, filed a report-" he pointed something out, Juan still kept his gaze on the poster, working very carefully in mentally removing the scraps of cloth- "here, where she accused you of raping her. Anything to say on that?"

Vero cabrón, Juan thought again, the veins in his temples popping out. His hands gripped the cold sides of the chair. They didn't care what he has to say, didn't give a damn, he was just another plaything.

Lucky Strike's smile was ugly. "You answer our questions," he said, "or we place you in the cell with the cannibal. We haven't fed him for days."

He meant it, too. "I didn't," Juan said and he meant it. Patricia had been angry with him after she found out he'd been sleeping with her sister and he'd found out too late an angry woman was capable more than he had thought.

Skinny laughed, a cross between a snort and a wheeze. "Yeah, we believe you."

's top refused to come off. He resigned himself to resting his eyes on the brown curve of thigh. "I want a lawyer." He had been watching TV at the bar, that's what all the innocent suspects always said and then they got assigned some leggy broad who freed them, yeah, Juan thought. A plan. "I want a lawyer," he repeated, louder.

Lucky Strike almost died laughing. Real smart, Gallardo, real smart. If he had the knife under his pillow right now, he'd take it and plunge it into Lucky Strike's gut, wipe the blood on the green rug, he'd burn it afterwards. Blood going into smoke. Into Lucky Strike's jowls, the ones that were shaking in their fatty glory, laughing, laughing at him...

"You been watching TV?" Skinny asked. "This isn't some show. This is life. You fire the shot, boom!" Skinny took the gun from his holster, pointing it at him in some macabre demonstration. "You pressed the trigger, man's dead, it isn't a joke."

For a moment, Juan thought Skinny was going to shoot him. He wanted to roll the die one last time, hear the click between his palms, whisper magic words, and throw them out. He knew if he could roll them one more time that he would win it all back, he knew this, just one more time. He'd get a pretty girl, the one with the tanned skin and blonde hair and red dress, he'd take up to his room. After all, that was what all the casinos do with the high rollers; they'd give him free rooms, meals, women. Treat him like a king.

He could still see the man clutching his chest, falling to the ground. Blood. He'd always had a good shot. Otra vez, somebody commanded, and Juan had pulled the trigger again, feeling the recoil, another bullet finding its mark. He might have fired another shot, he didn't remember, just that he wanted out of there.

He'd killed somebody.

Funny, it hadn't sunk in yet. All he could see were those hands, shining warm in their own blood, the money, so much of it. Enough to solve every fucking problem. Money. It was all he needs, pay off everybody, he would buy a nice car, a Merc like everybody was driving these days. Those silver eyes promised him, fingers unclasping the lock and letting him see the solution. Easy.

Sparkling on the fingers, red as the water was blue, the darkest pure hue Juan had ever seen. The man's eyes looking down in horror, realizing he'd been shot, the white of his eyeballs, the way the his knees buckled under their weightlessness.

Bang.

Lucky Strike asked him some more questions before locking him back in the cell again. "Good for you I didn't put you in with the cannibal," he snarled and Juan wondered if he was reminding him how lucky he was.

"Fuck you," he managed.

The teenage boy smiled.

Dead.