The Death Box (22 page)

“So you know her every secret?” The fat man’s eyes seemed even more glazed, his lips more engorged.

What is this fat, impaired fool getting at? Gossip?

“Amili and I have one blood,” Orzibel lied, crossing index and middle fingers beside his face. “There are no secrets between us.”

Gonsalves gestured a bodyguard near and whispered in his ear. The man was gone for scant moments. Orzibel saw something dropped from behind into Gonsalves’s hand. When it rose, there was a tiny parcel in his fingers. It was the size of an earring box and wrapped in the paper of one of West Palm’s most exclusive jewelers.

“Señorita Zelaya is a very busy lady, I think, and you can save her this month’s trip, Don Orzibel. Please deliver this to your
amiga
. As you know, the pretty lady needs her dreams, too.”

Orzibel’s hands closed around the package. He bowed just enough to satisfy protocol and backed away.

33

A rooster awakened Leala in the morning and for a moment she thought she was back in her village, safe, her mama cooking breakfast. But instead of the scent of wood smoke and tortillas she smelled the oily rags in the corner of her hideout and rain about to fall. She pushed the door open and saw dark and low clouds above, a lone gull wheeling in the air. The rooster, no further than a couple houses away, crowed again, followed by the sound of an engine cranking into life. A dog began barking. The neighborhood was waking up.

How far to the telephone? Leala thought, her mind tracing the distance to the ice-cream store. Is it worth the attempt?

Si.
Something had to be done today.

Leala rummaged in her purse for a rumpled bill and a few remaining coins. She combed her hair with her fingers, shook her dress until the worst wrinkles fell away, then tied on her scarf and crept between brush to the alley.

The
helado
shop was ten minutes distant and Leala passed no one on the way, averting her face as sparse traffic passed. A bus passed her by, then slowed and stopped for two women who had been standing beside the street. The bus hissed away.

The ice-cream store was closed. Leala thumbed coins into the phone until hearing a chime. Hoping it meant the call was accepted, Leala entered the number in her memory. As the phone rang, she practiced words in her head.

“I have nowhere to go. I will do whatever you wish. Please help me.”

A click, a pause …

A voice: “This is Victoree. I am out of town until Monday. Please leave a message.”

Leala stared at the phone as if it had betrayed her. Should she wait until Monday? What to do?

Would she survive?

She turned to see a man a dozen paces behind, skinny as a stick with filthy hair hanging like snakes from his head. He stared at Leala through bloodshot eyes.

“
Pardóneme
,” Leala said, averting her face and slipping past the staring man. Even passing two meters away the man smelled bad and Leala wondered if the stench came from his arms, red and inflamed on the insides. He was a junkie, she knew, having seen them in her days in Tegucigalpa. He was sick with drugs and the need of them.

She watched the man make his call and continue down the street. Leala had to be bold. There was one thing she might do. But she had to find out certain things first. She had to see a man, a detection
hombre
named Ryder.

But first she had to find out where he was, where he worked.

In the distance, above the trees and low housetops Leala could see the skyline of Miami, terrifying in its height and breadth. Just aiming eyes at the city stole her breath. But it wasn’t far, three kilometers if that. Certainly the man she needed to see worked in one of the tall buildings.

She would go into the city. Just to see. That was all.

Leala waited beside a garage until another bus appeared. She darted to the street holding her dwindling money in one hand and waving at the bus with the other.

Leala sat behind the driver who, as if he’d seen it often before, pointed at the money in Leala’s hand to indicate correct payment. The driver was Hispanic, with a wide and open face and a cheery manner. The bus entered the city, passing from sunshine into the shadows of towering buildings. When the bus stopped at a light Leala leaned forward. “Excuse me, Señor. I seek the building that houses the
policía
. Do you know such a place?”

Be nearby, her heart hoped.

“Miami-Dade
Policía
, señorita?”

Leala frowned, not expecting a choice. She tried to recall Johnson’s words:
He is a special detective from the state of Florida …

“Is there a Florida
policía
?” Leala asked. “Special ones that do the detection?”

The light changed and the bus pulled forward. “You are probably talking about the Florida State Police, or maybe the FCLE, who are—”

“That’s it!” Leala said, recalling the odd sequence of letters. “Is it in the city?”

The driver nodded. “I have a regular, a gentleman who does maintenance there. He usually takes the bus after this one, which arrives at seven forty-five.”

“Drop me where you drop the gentleman,
por favor
,” Leala said. “And point me in the way he goes.”

At seven fifteen a.m., Ernesto “Chaku” Morales strode into the downtown Miami health club with his black gym bag over a granite shoulder, his small, tight eyes scanning the vast room. A white fan the size of a helicopter’s rotors spun overhead as men and women pumped free weights on the floor. Others used machines or ran the encircling track. Rap-beat dance tracks pounded from speakers in the ceiling.

Chaku Morales didn’t visit the locker room. He simply stripped off his turquoise jumpsuit, revealing a brief scarlet bodysuit that embraced every cut, every ripple of muscle. His genitals stood out like a fist in a driving glove. Eyes drifted to the hulking entrant, some lingering in shaded curiosity, others turning away in fear or shame.

Morales fell forward, catching himself on his fingertips and warming up with pushups before progressing to squats and crunches. After an effortless ten minutes he crossed the room to a weight bench in a far corner, loading the holder with a hundred pounds of barbell carried one-handed from the rack. He lay on the bench and began his warm-up reps, the ham-thick biceps engorging with the push, relaxing at the bottom.

“Need a spot?” a voice said from behind.

Chaku Morales nodded. He looked from side to side and saw that he and the voice were alone. Morales continued to pump, speaking as the weight came down, stopping as it lifted.

“Have you had enough time to find out …” The weight went up, started down. “… what is going on?”

“There’s a new guy sticking his nose into things. Some hotshot from Mobile.”

“Hotshot?” Morales said.

“Carson Ryder. The guy solves things, a specialist. A lot of people are in prison because of him and now he’s in Miami.”

Morales pumped harder. The veins in his arms stood out like the burrows of miniature moles. “You have advice about what … can be done?” he grunted. “Can the hotshot be convinced to go blind to certain things?”

“I know these types. He can’t be bought, a believer.”

“Leverage?” Morales grunted.

“No wife, kids, not even fucking anyone at present.”

“Advice?”

“I’ll keep an eye out. If he starts down a road dangerous to us all, you might have to take him off the board.”

“But someone else takes his place, isn’t that” – Morales pushed the barbell above him like it was a broom – “what happens?”

“A new nose will be sniffing the air, true. But this Ryder guy has a unique nose. You don’t want it near the business. You don’t want it near Miami. It’s a dangerous nose.”

“I will pass this on.
Gracias
.”

“Nice spotting for you, buddy.”

Morales watched his spotter disappear into the locker room and emerge a minute later in khakis and blue polo shirt, neither man acknowledging the other as the spotter disappeared out the door. Morales followed ten minutes later. He knew Orlando Orzibel well enough to hear the man’s response before he told him the news and advice:

“Why wait, Chaku? Let’s take Ryder off the board now, and be done with him.”

34

I hit the department a bit past nine and headed to the investigative section to finally introduce myself to the rest of the dicks, then grudgingly seek a place to live. But I arrived to find the place as empty as a politician’s promises and I realized it was Friday and everyone was on the streets trying to get far enough ahead to take a couple days off.

Pushing dark thoughts to the back of my head, I took the stairs up a floor to my office, passing the small whiteboard giving the crew’s current whereabouts, Canseco in Jacksonville, Degan in Boca, Valdez listed as DO, Day Off. Tatum was in town, just not here. I pined for one of my so-called colleagues to pass me in the hall, say something like,
Got a tough case with a perp in Fort Myers, looking like a psycho. Gotta couple minutes to kick it around, bud?

All was silence save for the sound of a radio nearby, an announcer giving the forecast.

“… rain giving way to clearing skies and the heat and humidity returning …”

I headed to my corner office until stopped by hearing my name, and turned to see Bobby Erickson, a retired Florida State Police Sergeant who worked the phones. He proudly wore his dress blues daily, but had bad feet so Roy allowed him to wear slippers, big pillows of tan suede with fleece pushing up around his ankles. Erickson was short and round and looked perpetually concerned, lips pursed, eyes in a frown over half-glasses. He seemed to bear me no animosity and I figured I hadn’t waylaid any of his money.

“Morning, Bobby,” I said. “Whatcha need?”

“A woman came to the downstairs desk a half hour ago. She asked if there was a detection man named Señor Ryder in this building.”

“Detection man?”

“The desk folks have your name, of course. They phoned up here but I told them you hadn’t arrived yet, expected soon. When they went to tell that to the woman, she was gone.”

“A half-hour ago?”

“There’s more. Five minutes later this note was left at the desk. It was delivered by a clerk with the assessor’s office, asked to deliver it by a woman resembling the one at the desk.”

I opened the folded note, my name on the outside.

MET AT A POOL FOR SWIMING PLESE 10 TO-DAY it said in a flowing hand more precise than the spelling.

“Met at a swimming pool at ten?” I scowled. “Met what?”

Erickson eyeballed the note. “Maybe it’s meet. You’re supposed to meet her at the swimming pool.”

“Where’s a swimming pool around here?”

He shrugged and pushed the lips out further. “Got me.”

I started away but he called again. “Almost forgot, Detective. She asked what you looked like.”

Though I hadn’t seen surveillance at the entry, I figured it was there, just nicely tucked away. “There are cameras at the entry, right? How can I get a look?”

“The surveillance center’s in the basement. But unless it’s an emergency it’s gonna take an hour to pull the stuff.”

Erickson padded away on his tan cushions. I gazed out windows, wondering if there was a nearby hotel with a pool. My eyes wandered the plaza, wide walkways overhung with shade trees, people strolling or sitting the steps around the fountain, a center spray of water into a shallow circle pool of …

Pool.
Was that what my caller meant?

I checked my watch, saw 9.56, and elevatored down to the wide promenade. The pavement was damp from rain but the sky was breaking through in the west, a bright blue shout through tattered cumulus. Gulls darted above the trees as pedestrians moved below. I crossed to the fountain – swimming pool? – and surveyed the surroundings: Business types bustling to work, joggers, a man pushing a food cart, a long-haired kid sitting a bench and tuning a guitar, a busload of school kids wrangled by a trio of teachers, probably visiting the center as part of a class in government.

I sprinted to the far side of the fountain to scope things from that angle. No one seemed interested in me. I continued to circle the pool, hands in my pockets, studying everyone within sight. More office workers. A trio of teens playing hacky-sack. A group of tourists, German by their voices, cameras strung around necks craning toward the skyline.

I heard footsteps and turned to see a woman passing behind me, face hidden beneath a pulled-low white scarf and large sunglasses, age indeterminate, but youthful in her profile. The blue dress needed a session at the ironing board and she seemed to have a slight limp.

“Miss?” I called. “Excuse me, miss?”

She turned. “
Si?
”

I jammed my hands in my pockets and smiled benignly. “I’m Carson Ryder. Does that mean anything to you?”

A pause. The shades seemed riveted on me.

“
No hablo inglés, señor
.”

“Sorry,” I said. She continued away.

Leala moved quickly from the plaza, needing time to weigh information. The man was a gringo, bad. But he was not a hulking, stoop-shouldered monster, probably good. He was actually nice looking, slender, with dark hair and eyes. Still, there was something that seemed threatening about the man, but it did not seem directed at her. Perhaps it was his eyes, scanning all directions at once. Or maybe it was how he walked, almost carelessly but with surprising speed. She had seen him exit the building, but had looked away when distracted by a vendor. When she looked back, he was on the far side of the pool.

Cats did that sort of thing, and cats could not be trusted.

But when he’d spoken, there was no threat in his voice, only curiosity. That was good. Could such an
hombre
with such a concerned voice be bad in his heart? Or were he and the woman named Victoree wolves in disguise?

What was true, what was a lie?

Questions without answers. Leala passed a large building, her eyes catching the sign, seeing the word
Library
. That meant the building was a
biblioteca
, a place where the books lived. There was a
biblioteca
in the village six kilometers distant and Leala’s mother made sure Leala got there once a month for books.