Shoot the Moon by Joseph T. Klempner Page A

the wheel, starts the engine, and pulls out of the spot. He knows a little turnoff about ten minutes away, where he can make sure that everything’s the way it’s supposed to be.
    Goodman looks at his watch, sees he’s got an hour to kill before his flight. He decides he’s going to have to take a chance and check his luggage, at least the larger duffel bag. They’d only take it away from him at the gate: It’s much too big to carry on.
    While he knows they don’t make you open checked-in luggage on a domestic flight, he has no idea what they do to the bags before putting them on the plane. But he figures he has no choice.
    He buys a newspaper, wanders into a souvenir shop. They’ve got all this Miami Dolphin and Florida Marlin stuff, picture frames covered with shells, and plastic dolphins and killer whales that can spout water. He buys Kelly a dolphin. Then, as an afterthought, he buys his mother-in-law a bottle of toilet water called Florida Breeze. He figures a little peace offering can’t hurt.
    His purchases come to $19.85, leaving him $27.62.
    He finds a quiet corner to unzip the big duffel bag. He rearranges the contents until they look like nothing but clothes and dirty laundry. He puts the dolphin and the toilet water on top, then zips the bag closed again. He finds a piece of string in a trash can and uses it to tie the zipper pull closed. Then he goes back to the Delta counter and checks the big duffel bag with them.
    Cuervas pulls the Camry off the highway and into a little turnoff between the north and south lanes. It’s a heavily wooded portion of the divider, where he can back his car between the trees in such a way as to make it invisible to passing traffic. He knows the spot because a friend of his who used to be with the Highway Patrol pointed it out to him. The cops use to use it to “coop” - to catch some sleep on the job - or even to conduct a quick out-of-court settlement of a speeding infraction committed by some pretty young thing who’s afraid of losing her license.
    He opens the trunk and lifts the lid, revealing the spare tire. He unscrews the dust cap from the valve. Using the blade of a silver pocketknife, he presses against the valve stem to let air out of the tire. He knows there’s supposed to be twenty kilos inside, so he figures there can’t be much air, maybe only five or ten seconds’ worth.
    To his surprise, air keeps hissing out. Fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty. As the tire empties, Cuervas fills with panic. By the time the hissing noise stops, the sidewall of the tire is soft enough to push away from the rim.
    Though he could easily pry the tire from its rim by hand to inspect the inside, Cuervas instead stabs at the rubber with the blade of his knife, cutting into it and ripping it.
    “Fuckin’ gringo!” he shouts. “Fuckin’ gringo maricón!” He continues to slash away at the empty tire until the knife blade closes across his fingers, drawing blood. He slams the lid and the trunk, gets back into the car, pulls out onto the highway in a violent spray of cinders and dirt, and heads back to the airport.
    He covers the seven miles in just over six minutes, weaving in and out in the midday traffic. He remembers making the same drive, more or less, last night, only to arrive at the Avis counter after closing time. This time, it’s not the Avis counter he’s racing to; it’s the guy in the rolled-up jeans who’s stolen the twenty kilos from the spare tire.
    Cuervas has no idea how the guy knew the stuff would be there. He figures somebody has to have tipped him off; he just doesn’t know who or why yet. The thought that the guy might have stumbled onto the drugs by pure accident never once occurs to him. In Raul Cuervas’s business, there is no such thing as coincidence; there are no pure accidents.
    He pulls the Camry right up to the terminal and leaves it there. They can tow it back to fuckin’ Japan , for all he cares. He strides into the terminal, starts