Deadly Duo Trilogy

* * *Senor Morales sighed heavily and reached into the top pocket of his Cuban jacket. He took out a long, roughly-made cigar, and slowly, savoring the smell of the fine tobacco, bit off the end, spitting out bits and pieces of frayed tobacco onto the grass floor of the summerhouse. He gazed across the ocean that fronter his property in the Key West, and sighed again. The hazy, oppressive August afternoon held a promise of rain. The air was thick with the smell of fog and oncoming wet. It was difficult for him to breath, more so now after the fine Sunday afternoon meal his wife had prepared. He spat again, loosing the fragments of tobacco from his tongue, and slowly licked the end of the cigar, tasting the bitter, pungent taste of the outer leaf tobaccos. He matches, orhorrorsa lighter. The lighter would absurd the smell of the fuel to the cigar and spoil its taste, ruining the expensive tobacco, and making it unfit to smoke. The only way to light a real cigar was with a wooden match, and he kept a good supply of them available for just this purpose. He struck the match and smelled the sulphur smell that flared up with the white heat of the flame. He waited just a moment until the match was well lit, and the head of sulphur had burned away, and then he slowly, lovingly, placed the flame to his cigar, drawing in huge drafts if air and smoke. He circled the cigar around the match obtaining a full, regular and even light to the end of the cigar. He watched carefully as the flame shot upward for a moment, and then died as he removed the fire from the cigar. He held the flame away, inspecting the lit end of the cigar, making certain that it was drawing properly. Then he shook out the match and dropped it into the huge coach shell that served as an ashtray. A magnificient cigar should have a magnificient ashtray, he thought, grunting with pleasure as he began drawing on the cigar, and holding one hand on his huge belly in contentment. Maria brought him his glass of rum arriving alienfooted across the green scrub grass that blanketed the back lawn, carrying the smokey amber liquid carefully in the wide-mouthed glass. He looked at her, admiring again her slim waist and the handsome long, black hair that fell across her face like a curtain, and her finely chiseled cheekbones. He smiled at her and said, Gracias. She smiled back at him, handing him the tumbler and planting a kiss on his cheek. She left him now, smiling and returning to the kitchen to be with her Mother and her Sisters, to talk and to giggle among themselves, and to clean up the remains of the mid-day feast they had just finished. Senor Morales sipped at his drink and stared off across the water. The gray of the late afternoon and seemed to give him vision of what lay across that water. Ninety miles, he thought. Ninety miles, it seemed to say to him. And he watched the gulls wheeling in the fetid air, turning and dipping ,chasing each other and the elusive fish they needed for food. They could fly there right now, he thought, half aloud. And he began to remember. The white sands of Verdadero Beach, where he had spent so much of his childhood. The sun glancing off the water, the green seaweed, caught in the tidal flow, and moving with the water, the small grass huts that dotted the beach and offered shade from the sometimes merciless sun. Gone now, he thought. Gone forever. Gone with the madam who came from mountain and ruled that tiny Island that had been his home from birth to middle age. And now he sat, comfortable, wealthy, the cigar smoke drifting lazily around his head as he looked out across the ocean that lay calm and serene at his feet, that spread ninety miles to the sandy beaches of his beloved homeland. But now it was too late for him. The years had quickened and sped by, and he had grown old. His chance was gone, in failed midnight sotties that he had supported and that ended in broken bodies and patriots blood mingling with the silv