When the guy walked into the Jolly Jackal, Puggy was sitting at the bar, watching a rebroadcast of The Jerry Springer Show. The topic was husbands who wanted their wives to shave the fuzz off their upper lips. The position of the wives was that fuzz is natural; the position of the husbands was, OK, maybe it's natural, but it's also ugly. The wives were now arguing that if the husbands wanted to see ugly, they might look at their own selves in the mirror, because they were not exactly a threat to Brad Pitt. n.o.body on either side of this debate weighed under 250 pounds. So far, there had not been any punching, but Puggy could tell, from the way Jerry Springer was edging away from the stage into the audience, that there soon would be.

The guy who walked into the Jolly Jackal was carrying a briefcase, so Puggy figured he was going to go to the back to talk to the bearded guy, John. That's what the guys with briefcases usually did.

Puggy was not the sharpest quill on the porcupine, but he had figured out that the Jolly Jackal was not a regular bar. There were few drinking patrons: The best customer, as measured in total beers consumed, was, by a large margin, Puggy, who did not pay. The real action at the Jolly Jackal, Puggy noted, took place in the back, at the table where John sat. A couple of times a day, a guy, or maybe several guys, would come in to talk to John. Every few days, Leo the bartender would call Puggy back to the locked room with the crates, and they'd grunt and shove and heave a crate or two into, or out of, the Mercedes, or some van, or sometimes a U-Haul.

Puggy still didn't know what was in the crates. If he had to guess, he'd say it was drugs, although it seemed kind of heavy to be drugs. But basically his position was, as long as they let him watch TV and drink beer, it didn't concern him what was in the crates, or who John and Leo were.

In point of fact, John and Leo-whose real names were Ivan Chukov and Leonid Yudanski-were Russians. They had met in 1986, when they'd both served as maintenance technicians in a Soviet army division whose mission was to protect and defend-which meant occupy and, if necessary, stomp on-the Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan.

This was not a plum a.s.signment. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan was a remote, harsh, mountainous, extremely tribal nation whose economy was based primarily on revenge. The Grzkjistanis spent their adult lives thinking up and carrying out elaborate plots to kill and maim each other in connection with bitter, centuries-old grudges, many of them involving goats.

The only group that the Grzkjistanis hated more than each other was outsiders, which meant that the Russian soldiers were as popular as ringworm. Fraternization between the two cultures was officially banned, but every now and then a soldier would try to hook up with one of the Grzkjistani women. This required a breathtaking level of horniness, because after centuries of inbreeding, the average Grzkjistani was, in terms of physical attractiveness, on a par with the average Grzkjistani goat.

Nevertheless, such liaisons did occasionally take place, and when they were discovered, as they inevitably were, the army had learned that it was wise to get the soldier involved out of the country immediately, because otherwise, sooner or later, he would be found tied naked to a rock with his genitals nowhere near the rest of his body.

And thus most of the soldiers a.s.signed to protect the Republic of Grzkjistan wisely elected to perform their mission by staying in their barracks and getting as drunk as humanly possible. Ivan and Leonid were in an excellent position to facilitate this mission, because, as maintenance technicians, they had access to large metal drums full of solvents and fluids that could, taken internally, put a real buzz in a person's brain. Unfortunately, some of these chemicals could also permanently shut down a person's central nervous system; the trick was to know exactly what was safe to consume, and in what quant.i.ties. Ivan and Leonid had developed considerable expertise in this branch of maintenance, and pretty soon they built up a nice little franchise, supplying recreational beverages to their comrades in exchange for money, cigarettes, Debbie Does Dallas videos, et cetera. Ivan was the brains, good at organizing and negotiating; Leonid was the muscle, good at keeping customers in line, if necessary by fracturing their skulls. As their business grew, word got around that if you needed something-and not just something to drink-Ivan and Leonid were the guys to see.

One day in 1989, a man came all the way from Moscow to visit Ivan and Leonid. He wore nice clothes that actually fit, and he identified himself as a businessman, which Ivan and Leonid correctly understood to mean that he was a criminal. The man had an attractive proposition: He was willing to give Ivan and Leonid cash American dollars, and all he wanted in return was some machine guns that-while not technically the property of Ivan and Leonid-were basically just sitting around.

And thus Ivan and Leonid moved up the career ladder from bootleggers to arms merchants. The timing was perfect: The Soviet Union was imploding, and Moscow was having trouble feeding, let alone paying, its far-flung troops. At remote outposts such as Grzkjistan, discipline and morale-not to mention inventory controls-were virtually nonexistent. Ivan and Leonid found that if you were paying American dollars, you could have just about any piece of military hardware you wanted. You need machine guns? Right over here! A tank? Pick one out, comrade!

Ivan and Leonid had a knack for procuring and selling army property, and their new business grew rapidly. When their terms of enlistment expired, they left the army, but they maintained their network of contacts throughout the vast and increasingly chaotic Soviet military complex. They expanded their customer base, sometimes traveling abroad; soon they were dealing with foreign governments, terrorists, revolutionaries, paramilitary organizations, religious leaders, and random wackos in places all over the world, such as Idaho.

In the marketplace of international arms sales, Ivan and Leonid developed a reputation for flexibility and customer service. Unlike their larger compet.i.tors in the arms trade, particularly the American government, Ivan and Leonid didn't put you through a lot of red tape, and they would go the extra mile to locate that hard-to-find item. For example, when a Jamaican Marxist group called the People's United Front was looking to trade a large quant.i.ty of high-grade marijuana for an attack submarine, Ivan was able to broker a complex deal involving-in addition to the Soviet navy-the government of Paraguay, a Chicago street gang named the Cruds, and the Church of Scientology. The deal culminated, six months later, in the delivery of a semi-reconditioned World War n-era Russian sub, the Vrmsk, which the People's United Front renamed the Mighty Sea Lion. As it turned out, the People's United Front had considerably more zeal than nautical expertise, and the Mighty Sea Lion, while attempting a dive on its first revolutionary mission-an attack outside Kingston Harbor on the new Disney-built luxury cruise ship Goofy-sank like an anvil. But this did not reflect badly on Ivan and Leonid. They were in sales, not training.

By the late 1990s, with the Russian economy melting down, Ivan and Leonid decided to move their operation abroad, and they settled on South Florida. They had visited the area when they had worked on the submarine deal, and they liked the warm weather. They also liked the seaport and airport, which were very hospitable to the international businessperson; if you dealt with the right people, you could bring in almost anything, including probably live human slaves, without having to answer a bunch of pesky questions from Customs. Guns were easy. Ivan and Leonid always got a kick out of going through the airport security checkpoint, seeing surly personnel in bad-fitting blazers grimly scrutinizing the Toshiba laptops of certified public accountants, while, in the cargo tunnels a few feet below, crates containing weapons that could bring down a building were whizzing past like s.h.i.t through a goose.

So Ivan and Leonid, now calling themselves John and Leo, became the proprietors of the Jolly Jackal. They found it amusing to be, once again, in the field of recreational beverages. And the bar was good cover for their real business: Random people could come and go at all hours, and n.o.body official cared what was going on, as long as John and Leo paid off the various munic.i.p.al inspectors. The only downside to owning a bar, they found, was that people sometimes came in and actually wanted to buy drinks. But Leo was able to keep that to a minimum via a combination of poor service and occasionally hitting patrons with his bat.

Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the h.e.l.l out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your "collectors" and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit.

But their best local customer, by far, was a local outfit that was always in the market for serious, big-ticket weapons, the kind of weapons real armies fight real wars with. John and Leo had no idea why anybody in Miami would need so much firepower, nor did they care. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was that when they got hold of a serious weapon, this outfit would usually buy it, no haggling, for cash.

The man who delivered the cash was the man who walked into the Jolly Jackal with the briefcase while Puggy was watching the couples argue about lip fuzz on Jerry Springer. Leo, standing at the cash register, nodded as the man walked past. John rose from his table and quietly greeted the customer by name.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Herk," he said.

It was, indeed, Arthur Herk, spouse abuser, embezzler, and legal owner of Puggy's tree. Arthur's employer, Penultimate, Inc., builder of faulty buildings, was John and Leo's big local customer. The reason Penultimate was buying weapons-in fact the whole reason Penultimate existed in the first place-was that it was planning to take over Cuba once Fidel was dead. Quite a few organizations in South Florida, not to mention Cuba, were planning to do this. One thing you could say for sure about post-Castro Cuba: It would not lack for leadership.

Arthur was the bag man for Penultimate. That was pretty much his entire mid-level-executive job: delivering bribes and other illegal payments. He had done this job reasonably well until a few months before, when his gambling problem had begun to get out of hand. He'd come out of work one day and found two men waiting for him in the parking lot; they'd informed him that, unless he came up with a very specific amount of money within twenty-four hours, they would have no choice but to remove one of his fingers without benefit of anesthetic. They'd taken Arthur around to the back of their car, opened the trunk, and made him look inside. On the floor of the trunk was a pair of pruning shears. Arthur peed his pants.

So Arthur began skimming cash from the bribes, just enough to keep all his digits through the next week. He hoped, with the irrational hope of the true loser, that somehow the money would not be missed, or that its loss would be blamed on somebody else. But of course it was missed. Arthur's superiors said nothing to him; they didn't want to spook him into running to the police. They let him continue his bribe deliveries while they quietly brought Henry and Leonard down from New Jersey to take care of the situation. Their intention was that it would look like a gambling-related mob hit, nothing to do with Penultimate.

When Arthur's thirty-five-inch Sony TV got a.s.sa.s.sinated, he had figured out that he was meant to be the victim, and that whoever fired the shot had been hired by Penultimate. But when Arthur walked into the Jolly Jackal, John and Leo did not know anything about this. As far as they were concerned, Arthur was connected to a valued customer, and so they treated him courteously, although like everybody else who dealt with him, they thought he was an a.s.shole.

"Do you want something to drink?" asked John.

"Vodka," said Arthur, who always wanted something to drink.

John said something in Russian to Leo, who brought over a gla.s.s of vodka. Arthur grabbed it, gulped the contents, set the gla.s.s down, and leaned in toward John. His eyes were red; his voice raspy.

"Like I told you on the phone," he said, "I need a missile."

"I see," said John. "This is for you? This is personal missile?"

"What the f.u.c.k do you care?" said Arthur.

It was a good point. John did not really care. He was just curious, because Arthur had never before mentioned, let alone taken delivery of, a weapon. He always just dropped off the money.

"It must be missile?" John asked "Is mat a problem?" Arthur asked.

"Unfortunately," said John, "right now we do not have missile. Missile is very hard to get." It was true. The market for missiles was tight; somebody was snapping them all up. Rumor was that it was either Iraq or Microsoft.

"Well," said Arthur, "I want you to try very f.u.c.king hard to come up with something for me." Arthur mocked John's p.r.o.nunciation of "very," so it sounded like "wary."

John, hearing the mockery, considered having Leo escort Arthur out. But John was a businessman, and a customer was a customer.

"How are you wanting to use this weapon?" he asked.

"Never mind how I am vonting to use this vep-pon," mimicked Arthur. "Just gimme a serious vep-pon."

Arthur did not plan to use the weapon as a weapon. He knew nothing about weapons. The whole reason he wanted one was that he was planning to save his b.u.t.t by going to the feds and telling them what he knew about Penultimate-the contracts, the bribes, the Jolly Jackal, and anything else he could think up or make up. In his panicked, alcohol-impaired mental state, he had concluded that the surest way he could get the feds' attention would be to show up with an actual Russian missile.

"How much you pay?" asked John.

Arthur pushed the briefcase across the table. "Ten thousand," he said. "You can count it." Arthur himself had counted the briefcase contents earlier. At that time, there had been $15,000, in packages of twenties, but Arthur had taken $5,000 for himself, stuffing $500 in his wallet and the rest into his pants pockets. He was supposed to have delivered the $15,000 two days earlier to a Dade County commissioner, who was then supposed to cast the deciding vote to award Penultimate a contract to build fourteen bus shelters, every single one of which would, what with one thing and another, wind up costing the taxpayers of Dade Country as much as a luxury two-bedroom condominium on Key Biscayne.

John opened the briefcase, glanced inside, then closed the lid. He continued looking at the briefcase as he considered the situation. On the one hand, this whole transaction stank. This idiot across from him was clearly way out of his league here. On the other hand, cash was cash. And if the idiot really didn't care what he was buying, John saw a way not only to make a little money, but also to solve a problem that had been bothering him.

"OK," he said. "Maybe I have item for you."

He led Arthur down the hallway to the back room, unlocked the door, and opened it. He went to a back corner room and grabbed the handle of what looked like a high-tech suitcase, a little bigger than a rolling carry-on bag, made out of a silver-gray metal. He dragged it toward the door, laid it on its side, undid the four heavy-duty latches, and lifted the lid. The inside of the case was lined with yellow foam padding; inside of that was a black metal box with some kind of foreign writing on it and a bank of electrical switches. Next to the box, connected to it by some electrical cables, was a steel cylinder that looked a little like a garbage disposal.

"What the f.u.c.k is that?" asked Arthur.

"Bomb," said John.

"It looks like a f.u.c.king garbage disposal," said Arthur.

"Is bomb," said John.

"How does it work?" asked Arthur.

"Follow instructions," said John, pointing at the foreign writing.

"That supposed to be funny?" asked Arthur.

"No," said John.

"How do I know this is a bomb?" asked Arthur. "How do I know I'm not paying ten grand for a garbage disposal?"

"Take a look," said John, deadpan.

Arthur, compelled by masculine instinct, leaned over and frowned at the contents of the case, exactly the way countless males have frowned at household appliances, plumbing, car engines, and all manner of other mechanical objects that they did not begin to understand. After a few seconds, as if he had seen something that satisfied his hard-nosed masculine skepticism, he straightened up and said, "OK."

John nodded solemnly. He closed the case, relatched it, and called for Puggy to come carry it out to Arthur's car.

John was pleased. At one time or another, he and Leo had kept some very dangerous things in the back room, and none of them had ever bothered him. But this particular thing was different. This was the first thing they'd had back there that made him nervous. He was very glad to see it go.

At 7:45 P.M., Matt was standing outside the Gap at Coco Walk in downtown Coconut Grove, waiting for Jenny to show up so he could kill her. His witness, Andrew, was across the street at Johnny Rockets, buying a milk shake. Matt was too excited about the prospect of seeing Jenny to be hungry.

Not wanting to draw attention to himself in the bustling open-air shopping complex, Matt had left his rifle-sized Squirtmaster Model 9000 at home, and instead was packing the handgun-style JetBlast Junior.

It had nowhere near the water capacity or range, but it would do the job. Periodically, Matt pulled the black plastic water pistol partway from his pocket to check it for leakage, because he didn't want to look like he'd peed his pants.

Matt did not notice that he was being observed by a stocky, balding man sitting one level above him, in an outdoor bar called Fat Tuesday that served slushy, garish-colored alcoholic drinks from a row of clear plastic dispensers, each labeled with a wacky name such as You Gotta Colada. The man's name was Jack Pend.i.c.k. He had just that afternoon lost his job as a salesclerk at a Sungla.s.s Hut, after one too many women customers had complained about his flagrant attempts to look down their blouses when they leaned over to examine the display case.

Jack had not been happy in retail anyway. His dream was to pursue a career in law enforcement. He had twice applied to the Metro-Dade police department, but was rejected both times because his psychological profile indicated that he was, to put it in layperson's terms, stupid. But he remained obsessed with the idea of being a crime fighter, and, as he sucked down the last slurp of his third drink, an iridescent green concoction called the Vulcan Mind Melter, his attention was focused, laser-like, on the suspicious young man just below him.

Jack had watched many real-video police shows on TV, and he believed that he had a sixth sense for when a crime was about to go down. That sense was tingling now. This punk below him was acting nervous, and he'd been checking something in his pocket, something that Jack, through surveillance, had concluded was-there it was again!-a gun.

The punk was getting ready to pull something. Jack knew it.

In his mind, Jack started to hear the song. It was Jack's personal law-enforcement theme song; he'd first heard it in his all-time favorite episode of his all-time favorite show, Miami Vice. It was echoing in his brain now, the voice of Phil Collins, singing ...

I can feel it comin' in the air tonight Ohlawd ...

And Jack, as he observed this perpetrator getting ready to commit some felony, could feel it comin', too-his chance, finally, to step up to the plate; to prove that he was not a loser; to be a hero; to show the world, especially the management of Sungla.s.s Hut, what kind of a man he was. With his right hand, he reached into his pocket and felt the smooth, cold, rea.s.suring hardness of the pistol he'd purchased a week earlier at the Coconut Grove Gun and Knife Show. With his left hand, he signaled to the waitress for another Vulcan Mind Melter.

Nine blocks away, Henry and Leonard were sitting in their rental car, a few car lengths down the dark street from the entrance to the Jolly Jackal. They had tailed Arthur Herk there, and were waiting for him to emerge so they could continue tailing him. They were listening to a sports talk show on the radio. The host was talking.

Where are the Gator fans now? All you Gators call when you WIN, but now that you LOSE, you don't have the guts.

"What the f.u.c.k are Gators?" asked Leonard.

"Football," said Henry. "College."

"Morons," said Leonard, who could not imagine engaging in a violent activity unless he was getting paid.

The radio host took a call.

I'm a Gator fan. And I'm calling.

And what do you have to say?

You said we didn't have the guts to call, so I'm calling.

Yeah, OK, and so what do you have to say?

I'm saying, here I am. I'm calling.

That's it? You're calling to say you're calling?

You said we didn't have the guts.

Because you DON'T have the guts. All week I had all these Gator fans on here, talking trash, and now they run and hide.

Well, I'M calling.

OK, so what's your point?

My point is, you said we didn 't have the guts to call, so I'm ...

Henry, shaking his head, turned off the radio.

"This country," he said.

"No s.h.i.t," agreed Leonard.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, both of them looking at the Jolly Jackal's crippled, grime-encrusted neon sign, beaming "ACKAL" into the night.

"Why'd he come here?" asked Leonard. "Guy like him, nice house, good job, plenty of cheese, what's he doing in a s.h.i.thole like this?"

"Good question," said Henry.

"How about we just bring him out here and find out?" asked Leonard.

Henry shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "I wanna see what he does."

'Too bad," said Leonard. "Because, you give me two minutes with him and this"-he pulled the car cigarette lighter out of its socket-"and he tells us whatever we want to know. He sings like whatshis-name, Luciano Calamari."

"Pavarotti," said Henry.

"Whatever. He sings, we whack him, boom, we're onna plane back to Newark. No more mosquitos, no more guys in trees, no more Gators, no more ... "

"Shut up," said Henry.

Leonard followed Henry's gaze, and saw two men, one of them limping, approach the door of the Jolly Jackal. In the purple-red light of the ACKAL sign, Henry and Leonard could see that both men were wearing what looked like women's stockings over their faces. The limping one was holding a gun.

"Looks like it's happy hour," said Leonard.