Hawke: A Novel by Ted Bell Read Free Book Online Page A

of Ban Roll-on? And stir in some of the stinky perfume the little jineteras wore who followed him everywhere, that’d be good, too.
    Hookers, they were everywhere, and cops, too, cracking down on the hookers. It was like cracking down on roaches. They were in the woodwork.
    There were two kinds of cops, he’d found out the hard way. The “tourist cops” who were okay, merely a pain in the ass. But the other ones, the ones with the berets, the national police, they were definitely not okay. You even look at them funny they whack you with a baton or haul your ass to jail.
    But even they couldn’t stop the jineteras. Talk about a kid in a candy store. He’d landed in hooker heaven. There were crowds of them outside his hotel, morning, noon, and night. There had been a bunch waiting when he came out of the little family-owned paladar where he’d had lunch the day before.
    Christ. He couldn’t shake ’em. It was like, despite his guayabera and his chinos, he had “American Sailor” tattooed on his goddamn forehead. He wondered if this was how movie stars felt. Or Elvis. Not that he especially minded being chased by hookers everywhere he went. That was the only good part of this whole two-day pass. The bad part, the really bad part, had been the last two hours at his dying mother’s bedside listening to her scream.
    She had cancer of the gut. Bad. Now, you would think that the quote unquote best hospital in Havana would have some kind of painkillers for her. Let her die with some kind of goddamn peace and dignity. He had certainly been wiring her doctor enough money under the table to take special care of her.
    Pain management, they called it, every time he called the hospital to check on her. All they could do at this stage, one doctor had said to him. Pain management, señor.
    Yeah, well, that doctor had zoomed right to the top of Gomez’s personal shit list. A true chartbuster.
    What had he given her for the pain today? Or yesterday? Or the whole last month as far as he could tell? Nada. Zippo. Not even one teensy little baby aspirin. No, the United States government had taken care of that department with their stupid embargo on food and medicine. Still, they had to do something for her.
    Finally, he’d pitched a complete shitfit with the doctors and nurses. They told him it wasn’t their fault. Blamed it all on America. He’d nearly beat that doctor’s brains out before they all pulled him off the guy. Some gorilla orderly had whacked his head on the floor and split his lip. The coppery taste of blood was still in his mouth and he bent over and spit his bloody saliva in the gutter.
    Jesus H. Christ, was that a tooth going down the drain? He felt around inside his mouth with his tongue. Yes indeedy, one tooth missing. Okay, now he was getting major league pissed off.
    That’s why he was now on his way over to the Swiss embassy. Kick some serious butt. Open a big can of whupass on somebody. The head nurse said they had an American desk there. A desk? She said she meant there were some American officials there, even though it was the Swiss embassy.
    Make sense? No, but what the hell. Nothing in Cuba made sense anymore. Anyway, he was going to go over there to find one of those little bureaucratic dipshits and rip his goddamn head off.
    Murder. That was the ultimate pain management.
    That was the plan. First, kick some ass. Next, go get some ass. He bought a tourist map and some condoms from a street vendor. He paid one dollar American (nobody took pesos, only greenbacks) and located the embassy on the map. Only eight blocks. He’d hotfoot it over there and pound a few more heads.
    Problem was, he found out when he finally got there, the damn embassy was closed. He banged on the door for ten minutes before he realized it was Sunday. Weren’t embassies supposed to be open seven days a week? Like 7-Eleven? What if he had an emergency? Which, by the way, he did. He needed some medicine. He was an American citizen.