The Death Box (6 page)

I replayed Gershwin’s action in my head. Saw the looming knife. The need for a split-second decision. “You know the odds against that kid coming back alive, Roy? Gershwin did a helluva job.”

Roy sighed. “What troubles folks is how he did it. If the Albanians had launched an RPG a dozen cops could have been massacred. Gershwin didn’t have the pay grade to make that decision, Carson.”

“Maybe Gershwin didn’t have time to argue seniority.”

Roy started to argue, paused. “Thing is, Gershwin is here and we gotta deal with him for a few days.”

I gave him a puzzled frown.

“History lesson, Carson: The abducted kid’s grandfather hit Miami with ten pesos in his skivvies and within a year owned a grocery store selling Latin specialties. Now they’re coast to coast. The kid’s family has power in Tallahassee and told some major politicos that Gershwin deserved his assignment of choice.”

I nodded. “Gershwin picked the FCLE, obviously.”

“I get a lot of favors from Tallahassee, Carson. Sometimes I have to do one.”

“What’s gonna happen with Gershwin?”

“I’ll let Degan seem to train the kid for a couple weeks, then get Gershwin a desk in Vehicle Theft.” Roy winked. “You can’t hotdog much there.”

7

I left Roy to his Machiavellian hijinks and headed out to the forensics dig, since I now owned the case. The site was as busy as a beehive in spring, chisels tapping, soil being sifted through mesh, photos flashing as bits of fabric or bone were removed from the grisly sculpture, new horrors revealed beneath the old. Morningstar was beside the column, arms folded as she watched a pair of techs extricate shards of clothing from a torso still half-buried in the matrix. I stood aside as they fastidiously bagged the evidence and passed me on the steps.

Morningstar shot me a look when I hit bottom.

“Rumor has it this monster is gonna be your first case, Ryder.”

“Not my choice, Doctor.”

“Roy’s concept of baptism would be to fling the kid into a pond. You still on board with Delmara’s serial-killer theory?”

I circled the mass of concretized humanity, still unable to absorb the full horror. “If so, he’s as angry as a psycho can get. Incredible rage.”

“We have four complete bodies free. Every spine is shattered, most limbs broken, usually compound. A jumbled mess.”

A tech called out a question from above and Morningstar muttered, “Do I have to do all the thinking?” and started up the steps. “Look, but don’t touch, Ryder,” she said over her shoulder. “It may be your baby, but I’m in charge of birthing it.”

It was just me remaining in the pit and I leaned against the buttressed wall and stared as if waiting for a voice to call from the tumble of bodies, a voice to say,
Here is the story of our death, please let it not be in vain.

But the stone lay as silent as the ruins of Ozymandias, and after a few minutes I climbed to the upper level and quietly left the tent. Until Morningstar’s team found something to point me in a direction, I was a compass in a world without North.

Orlando Orzibel was bored. Most of the clients were paying their fees and he’d not had to go out on a threat run, always a nice time-killer: one hand held the knife, the other an open palm, fingers waving for money. If the money didn’t materialize, arrangements were made. If the arrangements weren’t honored, the knife went to work.

He checked his phone, no word from Chaku, who should be dumping the hillbilly biker, Ivy, in an hour or so, five minutes to throw the fat scuzzer down the hole, pour a couple bags of dry ’crete, book away. That fucking hole had been a gift from the universe.

Orzibel sighed and grabbed his remote, playing a porn DVD on the five-foot screen in the corner. He watched for several minutes, his hand drifting to his crotch as a burly bodybuilder with lightning-zagged tattoos pounded away at a diminutive Asian. The woman screamed and pretended to resist, but it was obvious she was a professional, probably wondering what kind of pizza she’d order after she drank the guy’s jizz.

Fuck fuck.
Orzibel flicked off the video and tugged at his genitals. How long since he’d gone to the basement? There were four girls tucked away down there, plus Chaku’s new toy. All were fresh procures, raw, not yet ready for assignment, though getting close.

The process could always be sped up.

With the pounding bass of electronic dance music pulsing through the walls, Orlando Orzibel descended to the shadowy basement of the nightclub, a warren of concrete-walled rooms. The nightclub had been built by Mob money during Prohibition, the main floor a speakeasy, the basement used for prostitution and other illicit activities. The water-seeping wall was still strung with dozens of ancient and fraying wires mounted on ceramic insulators; the wires originally connected to banks of telephones forming a subterranean bookie operation, the largest in all Miami.

Orzibel wrinkled his nose at the smell of mold and unlocked the heavy gate at the base of the steps. Built of cyclone fence welded within a reinforced steel frame, the gate had taken three powerful men plus Chaku Morales to hang it on its industrial-grade hinges. Orzibel pushed open the first door he came to, seeing two girls asleep on a mattress, a ragged cover over their bodies. What were their names? Did it fucking matter? They were heading to Jacksonville tomorrow. He bypassed the next portal, the room holding Chaku’s fresh bride, not Orzibel’s business. He pushed open the following door, saw one of the new acquisitions – Yolanda? Her eyes grew huge and terrified. He’d had a session with her yesterday.

“Later,
puta
,” Orzibel said, pulling the door tight. He reached the next door. Who was in here? Ahh … little Leala, the pretty one. Orzibel replayed the trip back from the delivery, felt her struggle under his hands. He touched himself.

Yes!

Orzibel pushed open the door to a cramped room, the walls gray and stained with leakage, pipes and ducts crowding the ceiling. Two king-size mattresses were on a frayed green carpet and an open toilet was in the corner. A small and battered television sat on a stool in the corner, the program – a soap opera on Univision – blurry and tinted a bilious green.

On a mattress and swiftly pushing back into the corner was the girl. She was a beauty and Orzibel felt a wild grin propelled to his face. “Ah, how’s our little Leala today?” Orzibel crooned. The girl cowered in the corner, pulling a blanket over her ragged yellow dress.

“G-go away, señor.”

“What did you say to me?”

“Please, señor. No.”

Though she was terrified, there was something in her eyes.
Dios
… could it actually be defiance? He snapped the blanket away and threw it to the floor. “You do not make the rules here, Leala,” he said, unbuckling his belt. “Let me see … where did we leave off?”

“I do not w-want to—”

‘YOU DO NOT TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT. I TELL YOU WHAT TO DO!” Orzibel dove onto the bed and grabbed the girl’s arms. “Open that pretty mouth, Leala.”

“No!”

What was it with this one? His hand slashed and Leala’s head spun. “One call and I can have your mama’s eyes carved from her head. Do you know what that feels like, Leala?”

Crying. Orzibel’s frenzied hands pulled his pants and silk boxers lower as he perched on his knees, his fingers grasping the girl’s hair as he pulled her close. “Work on this the way I taught you. With tenderness.”

Her head moved closer and her lips parted. But her face seized in agony and her hands rose as if guided by a separate force, pushing him away. Leala’s legs kicked at Orzibel as she backpedaled across the mattress.

“Filthy little bitch,” he hissed, yanking his pants to his ankles. He seized her hair and wrestled her to him, climbing over her, clamping her arms to the mattress and spreading her with his knees. A hand tore away her underwear.

“OPEN IT UP!”

“NO NO NO …”

He spit in his palm and rubbed it over his penis, then grabbed Leala’s shoulders and fell across her, his tongue licking her face as his buttocks rose and fell. The act took under a minute and he emptied into her with a shuddering gasp. He startled to a sound at the open door but when he turned saw no one. He withdrew and Leala sprawled as if dead, her slender legs wide and a circle of blood at the apex.

“You are a woman, now, Leala,” Orzibel proclaimed as he stood unsteadily. “You can do a woman’s work.”

8

The horrific column at the forefront of my mind, I drove home to Matecumbe Key, unable to understand the level of violence frozen into the concrete. I had a couple of pieces of fried chicken in the fridge and took them to the deck. The sun was riding a pillow of purple clouds to the horizon and a golden light suffused the air. A wobbling strand of pelicans skimmed across the cove barely a foot above the waves.

“Hey neighbor,” a voice called, suspending my unsettled thoughts. I saw Dubois Burnside at the point of the cove. “You doing anything important?” he called through cupped hands.

“Not sure I ever have,” I returned.

“How about you come by the house?” he said, overlarge gestures miming the pouring of a drink.

I shot a thumbs up. “There in fifteen.”

I threw on a fresh shirt and snatched up a bottle of liquor I’d received at a going-away party last month, dropping it into a brown bag. Burnside’s home was past a football-field-long buffer of vegetation and surrounded by a cream-colored wall with an ornamental gate at the entrance, a pair of mirroring flamingos perched on single legs. I hit the buzzer and heard the gate unlatch.

I walked down the drive to his home, a combo of styles, Moorish Art Deco, I suppose, the Moorish displayed in two stories of textured stucco tinted yellow and topped with terracotta tiling, the Deco reflected in flamingo-themed grating over wide and manteled windows. The drive ended in a portico shading a blue 500-series Mercedes and a spiffy red Beamer convertible. The plate on the Merc said FUNRL 1, the Beamer’s said ZAZZI.

The front door was iron-belted mahogany recessed within an arched vestibule, more Moor. Marble slabs framing the portal sported bas reliefs that echoed the Deco flamingos. The door opened as my hand reached for the iron handle. Instead of Dubois Burnside, I beheld a handsome black woman in a floor-length red gown with a décolleté my eyes did not follow to its conclusion because that would have been impolite. I judged the lady in her early forties, and she was not much shorter than my six feet.

“You must be Mister Ryder. I’m Delita Matthews.”

She extended her hand on a long and slender arm dressed in silver hoops. “Dubois will be with us in a minute. I told him to change into some decent clothes and not wear them saggy old pants. Every time I catch up to them pants I toss ’em in the trash.”

“And every time I fish them out, baby,” Burnside said as he strolled into the room in threadbare cargo shorts beneath an extravagantly embroidered Mexican wedding shirt. His feet flapped in ancient huaraches.

Delita aimed a long red fingernail at me like I was Exhibit A in a courtroom. “We got company.”

“He ain’t company, he’s our neighbor.”

The woman shot Burnside a raw glare but when she spun to me the eyes were Kahlua and cream. “You must be thirsty, Mr Ryder. May I get you a drink?”

“Actually,” I said, pulling the bottle, “I brought this along. It’s supposed to be pretty fair and I thought—”

“Hot damn,” Burnside said, plucking the bottle from my hand and squinting at the label. “This is thirty-year-old brandy.” He held the bottle up to Delita Matthews. “
Company
brings hoity-toity wine, girl,
neighbors
bring fine brandy. Grab us a couple tumblers.”

“We have brandy snifters, Dubois.”

“I wanna drink it, not slosh it around.”

But snifters it was and I poured hefty tots for Burnside and myself, Miz Matthews demurring. “I’m meeting friends at the Saddle Club in a few minutes,” she said. “There’s an orchestra and dancing, but Dubois refuses to go.”

“I boogie,” Burnside proclaimed. “I don’t cha-cha.”

Miz Matthews sashayed across the floor to the door, opened it and started out. A second later she leaned back in. “You using them coasters ain’t you, Dubois?”

“Baby, you got ’em covering the table from end to end,” Burnside called over his shoulder. “A man can’t set down his glass without landing on a coaster.”

The door closed and Burnside took a sip of brandy. “I don’t know what this thing is I got for bossy-ass women, but I got it. Had four wives and ever’ one had a face like an angel and a thumb built for mashing me down.”

The psychologist in me wanted to ask about his mother, the diplomat in me demurred. We shot the breeze for twenty minutes, Burnside providing the low-down on local bars and eateries. Talk inevitably drifted to occupations. “In my line of work I’ve seen some badly mangled bodies, Dubois,” I offered. “I’m always amazed when I see what a good mortician can do.”

Burnside set his snifter on the table – between two coasters – and leaned forward. “Remember that scene in
The Godfather
, Sonny’s been shredded by machine guns and Marlon Brando tells the mortician to make Sonny presentable at the funeral? I been there, Carson.”

“You knew Marlon Brando?”

“Ha! I mean I’ve had to do reconstructions where the body was more putty and paint than person. A couple decades back two workers were on a catwalk at a paint company, standing above a huge mixing vat with these big steel propellers choppin’ through the paint. The catwalk tore from the wall and these two poor guys got dumped into the vat. Before the machine shut down the bodies got all busted up and mixed in together.”

“Jesus,” I said, aghast.

“You wouldn’t believe the time I had getting the deceased cleaned and arranged in whole bodies again. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle with meat.”

Pictures started to arrange in my mind. I saw bodies whirling in paint. Arms, legs, faces became a kaleidoscopic jumble as I set my glass down on one of a dozen coasters.

“I gotta go, Dubois. I need to make a call. Give Delita my regards.”