Word: cruz
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...Hula, fat and fiftyish, owns a small marine salvage firm in Miami. Out of nowhere, he gets a phone call from his younger half brother, Michael Cruz. They have heretofore shared only a mother and mutual indifference (Hula's father was Polish, Cruz's a Portuguese seaman). Now Cruz, a New York mobster, needs Hula's help, offers him half a million dollars and threatens to destroy his business if he refuses. Hula does not. Cruz has somehow got hold of a ton of cocaine in Colombia and transported it to the Bahamas. A boat carrying this...
Once the cocaine is transferred to a van, Hula relaxes and tells Cruz: "So it's done. I'm glad it's over." Of course it is not done, either for Hula, Cruz, Wally Liberty (the pilot of the boat) or Hula's girlfriend Lisa Bishop. It is bad enough that Arthur Rawden, a canny investigator for the Drug Enforcement Agency, has picked up their scent. It is worse that a mysterious bald man continues to stalk Cruz, threatening to kill him and his associates. Worst of all, some of the ablest hired guns...
...impossible to watch this plot unfold without rooting for the underdog and then remembering that Cruz is as bad as his pursuers, a wildcat crook with delusions of grandeur. Palmer does not blink at Cruz's venomous ethics, but he sinks this character in a landscape of almost unrelieved corruption. He portrays a Miami and environs where the heat is always on: "The sun was a bludgeon hanging over the landscape, poised to smash whatever might attempt to set itself above the level, and nothing larger than a dragonfly dared to venture into its sight; not from lassitude...
...enriching undesirables and demoralizing the forces of civic order. Rawden knows that he and his agents can achieve only hollow victories on the side of law and order: "There's so much stuff coming in that we could arrest just the grandmothers and do just as well." Even Cruz complains about what has happened to the neighborhood: "People used to come down here just to spend their money, but now they're not happy unless they go back with more. They see all this money and they think all they have to do is reach out and take...
...Cruz smiled. 'Let me tell you what we're up against...