Return to Sunrise (eBook)

PROLOGUE

The End is in the Beginning

He first met Jimmy forty-one years ago on the streets of Miami while trying to sell him a dime bag of marijuana. Grant Nichols was seventeen then, and it was his first day in the city after having run away from a home that never seemed like one.

He’d brought his stash of marijuana from Daytona to see him through until he could find a legitimate job, but everyone was in a hurry that day and Grant was beginning to worry he might not make a sale. Then he saw a group of rough-looking men shooting craps against the side of a building, men wearing gold chains and fancy watches, expensive looking sneakers. He waited until one of them came his way. The man, tall and blond-haired, thickly built, looked to be in his mid-twenties. The only Anglo in the bunch.

“You watchin’ us for a reason?” the man asked. He seemed to be a hard-ass, but Grant held his ground. “I’ve got something you might want,” he said.

“And what might that be?”

“Good product at a good price.”

A half-smirk crossed the man’s face. “What kind of product?”

Grant pantomimed taking a hit, pulling smoke into his lungs.

Laughing, but not in mean way, the man turned to the others. “Hey, listen up. This dude has ‘product’ he wants to sell. Mar-i-jua-na.” The Spanish boys laughed too, several repeating the word, “mar-i-jua-na,” with a mocking flourish, as though he were trying to sell them shit sandwiches. But the blonde-haired man wasn’t making fun. Instead, he studied Grant with amber eyes that seemed older than the man. “You hungry, kid?” the man asked.

In fact, Grant was starving.

Within an hour, he was in Jimmy’s house in South Miami, inhaling a meal of rice and beans and chicken, Jimmy telling him he’d gotten a kick out of a punk kid trying to sell a dime bag of marijuana to a crew who worked for one of the biggest cocaine dealers in the country. “He’s an epic dude, man,” Jimmy said, spreading the fingers of both hands wide to indicate just how epic. “Name’s Daniel Garcia. He’s in charge of shepherding product once it comes in from Colombia. Cutting it, selling it, cleaning the money.”

Grant had heard about the shift from marijuana to cocaine as the dope smugglers’ drug of choice, but it had been like news from another country, unrelated to his own life. Now, he was sitting across from an actual cocaine cowboy. He didn’t want to seem naïve, but he wanted to know. “The work you do,” he asked. “How dangerous is it?”

Jimmy slowly peeled the skin from a banana. “It’ll test your cojones,” he said. “That’s for sure.” He tore a bite from the end of the banana, chewed on it. “A year ago, two years, it was way worse. All the crews fightin’ for territory, nobody givin’ a fuckin’ inch. Garcia came in, set down some lines, didn’t let nobody cross ‘em no matter who he had to kill. The other crews, they stay out of our way now, except the Cubans. They still give us trouble.” Jimmy looked at Grant as if considering something, then moved closer. “I could use another hand. You interested, little man?”

Grant didn’t like the “little man” comment, and he wasn’t sure what Jimmy was proposing, exactly, but it seemed a hell of a lot more exciting than a job at a fast-food restaurant or grocery store. He’d sold a little weed in Daytona after school and on weekends. How different could this be? Besides, Jimmy had a way about him Grant admired. Confident, but no bully. “What about the cops?” he asked Jimmy.

“This’ll fuckin’ blow your mind,” Jimmy said, illustrating with his free hand a blown mind. “Every Wednesday, I deliver my package to a beach behind the North Bay Village police station a few miles north from here. After I pull up in my go-fast, uniformed police load the bricks into unmarked cars and take the coke where it needs to go.” Jimmy grinned an idiot grin.

Grant wasn’t falling for it. “You aren’t serious,” he said.

“Hell yes, I’m fuckin’ serious,” Jimmy said. “This is the 70’s, man. Cocaine owns this city.” He took another bite of banana. “What’s your last name anyway, Grant from Daytona?”

“Nichols.”

“How old are you? Sixteen, seventeen?”

“Nearly eighteen. How old are you?”

“Nearly twenty-six. So what do you say? Want to work with me? With us?”

Grant knew he would say yes, but he thought he should ask the sensible question. “What would I do?”

Jimmy peeled the banana the rest of the way, let the skin fall to the table. “Four, five times a week, product is flown in from Colombia and dropped three or four miles offshore. The package is waterproof with a, you know, transmitter thing attached. We fuckin’ run out there, pick up the package and bring it to the mainland. Two other guys, Luis and Jonathon, they meet us with a truck and take the load from there.” Jimmy popped the last piece of banana into his mouth. “You’ll be paid three-fifty a day.”

“You mean three-fifty an hour.”

“No, I mean three hundred fifty a day, my man. This ain’t motherfuckin’ McDonald’s.”

It sounded too good to be true. Like delivering the mail, only way more cool—and way more money.

Then Jimmy said, “Know how to use a forty-five?”

Eight months later, on a remote stretch of beach south of Miami, Grant and Jimmy walked along a white gravel road waiting for Luis and Jonathon to meet them with the truck. The container of cocaine, which they’d lifted from the water half an hour ago, sat in the go-fast ready for transport into the city. With the heat of the sun reflecting off the road, Grant thought about the cold beer he would have as soon as he and Jimmy returned the boat to its slip in Coral Gables. Beer and a hot dog, then a dip in Jimmy’s pool. Maybe Mirriam, Jimmy’s neighbor with the red bikini, who they’d first met when she served them coffee at the corner café and who was now Grant’s girlfriend, would see them in the pool and join in. He turned to share his plan with Jimmy but Jimmy looked worried.

“Luis and Jonathon should have been here twenty minutes ago,” Jimmy said, looking up the road toward Miami. Grant looked there too, then Jimmy turned and squatted low to the ground. “You hear that?” Jimmy asked, pointing beyond the road toward a dense stand of palmettos.

Grant had heard something, a faint rustling of brush, but had thought nothing of it. Surely Jimmy was overreacting. “Cover me,” Jimmy said, taking his forty-five from the waistband of his jeans. Before Grant could ask what he was up to, Jimmy had sprinted into a shallow ditch that ran between the road and the palmettos. Grant snicked the safety off his own forty-five, thinking they’d made this run dozens of times and it’d been a breeze every time. Now, Pop’s words came to mind. Son, one day the stupid in you is gonna get you into a shitload of trouble.

It didn’t take Jimmy long to reach the top of the rise leading into the palmettos, and he motioned for Grant to get down. Grant backed up and flattened himself against the ditch along his side of the road, so he could still see Jimmy but also gain some protection. He studied the palmettos, straining to see or hear anything out of the ordinary. All he could hear was the rhythmic wash of the ocean behind him and the high warble of a solitary birdcall somewhere in the distance. The heat and humidity, the hot sand and gravel, the earthy, weedy smells were all suffocating, and he began to rip oxygen out of the air in short, quick breaths, his heart thumping so hard he thought it might break against the shards of gravel pressing into his chest.

On the other side of the road, Jimmy ran to Grant’s left, toward a stand of brush. Instinctively, Grant looked the opposite direction, to the right, where three figures holding automatic rifles slipped clear of the palmettos. Were they cops? FBI? Apparently not, because they wore only simple, unmarked camouflage. The lead man raised his automatic and pointed it in Jimmy’s direction. Knowing what he must do, and remembering Jimmy’s words that day on the range, Jimmy teaching him how shoot—“You got talent, bro,”—Grant curled his finger around the trigger of his forty-five.

He couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. When he’d taken the job with Jimmy, he’d never really considered the possibility he might have to kill someone. Keeping his forty-five locked on the man’s chest he waited, hoping for some way out. It didn’t come. A burst of gunfire erupted from the man’s automatic and the other two men raised their rifles as well. Grant flinched at the sound of the gunfire, sending a round from his gun high and wide. He thought of Jimmy, of his affection for him, how these men were intent on killing him, and an anger unlike anything he’d known stirred him to action. He steadied his weapon and squeezed off three rounds, the sound of each one louder, harsher, more menacing than the one before, the gun’s recoil so strong he very nearly lost his grip. One by one the men threatening Jimmy fell, puppets whose strings...