CUTTING ROOM -THE- (33 page)

Manny was grabbing a treat for Rufus with his good hand and a dish towel for his bad when his cell rang. It was a number he didn't recognize off the bat, and one he normally wouldn't answer, but nothing was normal today. His phone had been buzzing all morning, with a lot of calls coming from his department.

‘Alvarez.'

‘Detective Alvarez, this is Sergeant Jose Castano down at Miami-Dade County Corrections. I hate to have to call you, sir, particularly with, you know, a storm bearing down on us and all. I know you're probably very busy …' He sounded young. And nervous.

‘It's a little crazy round here. I'm sure it's the same where you are. What seems to be the problem?' Manny's chest tightened. It sounded as though the man was going to tell him his momma had died. Except, of course, Corrections wouldn't be the department calling to tell him that. They had on occasion called him when one of his defendants offed themselves or got into a fight. And they had called when one of 'em was ratted out by another. But this call didn't have that intimation. And with the clock ticking down to Doomsday, chances were nobody would be calling him about either of those situations right now.

‘Well, there's been a misunderstanding. A mistake, actually, Detective, to be honest. It's being investigated as we speak, so you know.' The sergeant cleared his throat. ‘But we felt it was only right for you to know and for you to perhaps initiate the proper security protocol that might be involved on your end. You know, sound the alarm, so to speak. Notify the feds, maybe. And we are doing all we can at this time internally to locate the defendant, so you know.'

‘What the hell are you talking about, Sergeant? And who the hell are you talking about? Let's go, spit it out.'

‘The inmate that you had transferred down here to DCJ was, well, it looks like he was released by accident. He was placed on the wrong evacuation bus and, well — we can't locate him, sir. It's been complete chaos, here, sir. Not that that's an excuse, but it has, what with the evacuations and all. I've never seen it—'

Manny cut him off. ‘What inmate? I didn't have no one transferred down here. Not recently, anyhow. I do have a couple of murder suspects sitting in DCJ and Metro-West. Let's see — Herrera, Hoslem, Wilfredo Lemar. Who you talking about?'

‘None of those names, sir. I'm calling about the inmate from Florida State Prison that arrived here several days ago.'

Manny sat down at his kitchen counter. His fist was clenched so hard, blood from his injured thumb oozed through the fingers and down his wrist, dripping into a small puddle on to the white stone. ‘Again, I didn't transfer nobody. You must have the wrong detective.'

‘Well, it had your name, sir, as the arresting officer on the intake sheet. You and an Agent Falconetti with FDLE as original arresting officers. I just assumed you'd authorized the transfer. Maybe the judge ordered it, but you should still be notified if it's your prisoner, I would think. Maybe I'm wrong, sir.'

Manny stared out the kitchen window. On the windowsill was a framed picture of him and Daria on South Beach. Across the street, his neighbor was teetering precariously on the top rung of a ladder while drilling a plywood sheet across his second-story window. Any minute he was going to come crashing down, and, ironically enough, it wasn't going to be the damn monster hurricane he was preparing for that did him in. It would be his own stupidity. His own misplaced trust. The ladder rocked. Like Manny, the guy only had a few seconds left before his world changed for ever. He closed his eyes.

‘Who was it that was released, Sergeant?' Manny asked, although he already knew the answer.

He opened his eyes.

The ladder tipped. His neighbor flailed his arms, trying to keep his footing on a ladder that was no longer there. His body seemed suspended in mid-air, like a cartoon character who has just walked off a cliff.

‘Um …' the young man swallowed hard, as if he himself did not want to hear the name. ‘William R. Bantling, sir.'

And with those words, Manny's world came crashing down, just like his neighbor's.

When Hurricane Andrew devastated Miami, Daria was eleven and living in the same modest three-bedroom house in Cooper City that her parents still lived in today. She didn't remember much about the days leading up to Andrew, except watching the news — which was on every single channel without commercial break in the twenty-four hours before the storm made landfall. And no matter who was talking, in the bottom-right corner of the screen on continuous replay was the time-elapsed picture of the white swirling blob with the small hole in the center that was slowly but surely making its way across the Atlantic to Florida. While Marco and Anthony had helped their dad nail heavy, cumbersome sheets of plywood over the windows, Daria's job had been to make sure that every room in the house had a flashlight with fresh batteries. Their mother had completely panicked — screaming out longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates every five minutes like they made sense while she made vats of marinara sauce in the kitchen.

Daria could remember being both scared and excited as the storm approached on the TV map and the hours counted down to Doomsday. There was a secret part of her that wanted the hurricane to hit them dead on, like all the news channels were predicting. She wanted to see the devastation — flipped cars, torn-off roofs, downed trees and stop signs — from the safety and comfort of her bedroom, because of course nothing would happen to her house. When she suggested to her mother that a hurricane would be a lot of fun, Lena had smacked her in the back of her head with the wooden ladle she was using to taste her marinara. Hot red sauce went everywhere, splattering the floor and cabinets and white kitchen walls. In fact, when her dad heard her screaming and rushed inside, he took one look at the scalding red sauce running down her cheeks and neck and thought Daria had split her head open. When he found out what had happened, he blamed the incident on the tensions of the hurricane, which didn't explain away the other beatings he'd walked in on over the years, but it made both him and her still-shaking, screaming mother feel better for the moment. She remembered her brothers standing in the entrance to the kitchen as she explained what she'd said that had sent their mother over the edge, watching wide-eyed as their dad covered the parts of Daria's body that had been splashed with sauce in frozen pea packs. Neither of the boys said a word. Daria knew they, too, were wishing for Hurricane Andrew to pick up their house and fling it harmlessly into Miami, like in
The Wizard of Oz
, but after what had happened to Daria, neither dared mention their fantasy out loud. There were three pots of sauce still simmering on the stove.

Fast-forward nineteen years and the prospect of a major hurricane had Daria worrying about factors that hadn't occurred to her when she was eleven. Economic and environmental devastation. Days, maybe weeks without power in 95 degree heat. No AC, no refrigerator, no hot showers, no cooking. Probably no water or phone service either. Brutal traffic because streetlights and signs and trees would be down. No eating out at restaurants. Increased pain-in-the-ass crime, like looting and contractor fraud that would clog dockets. Domestic violence would go up too as the stress of the storm and its calamitous aftermath exerted its pressure on families. And then there was the worry about how her apartment would fare — if she would even have an apartment to return to. Everything she owned in the world besides her car was in that townhouse. The thought of it all blowing down Federal Highway was too awful to contemplate. She understood now why her mother had prayed over her spaghetti for Andrew to spare them.

Absently touching her cheek where the faded scar from the sauce incident still lingered, Daria stared out the window of the Miami-Dade Emergency Operations Center in western Miami-Dade County where she would be spending the next twenty hours, minimum. The center was built to withstand hurricane-force winds topping two hundred miles per hour and would operate as a central command station for multiple police agencies during the storm. Downstairs, a contingent of emergency responders, dispatchers, cops, technical personnel were waiting out the wrath of Artemis. Daria and two other prosecutors from the State Attorney's Office would be assisting the cops and judges, and dispensing legal advice for all the post-hurricane crimes that would be sure to ravage a crippled metropolitan city. Most of the assembled crew — at least the legal team — were not so much dedicated as they were homeless. Daria herself had nowhere to go besides her parents' house — where Anthony was camped out in his old bedroom, since he lived on the beach in Pompano — or Marco's three-bedroom insane asylum in Coral Springs, neither of which was an option.

Because Daria herself lived east of US1 — the north–south coastal thoroughfare that ran the length of the state of Florida — she was in an evacuation zone and was supposed to go to a shelter, the closest of which was Arthur Ashe Middle School in Fort Lauderdale. Double ugh. A thousand scared people jammed into a gym eating peanut butter sandwiches and lying on sleeping bags.
That
was also most definitely not an option. Manny had asked her to stay with him, but he, too, lived in an evacuation zone in North Beach, and was only blocks from the beach. The idea was cozy and romantic enough, but with a storm surge of twenty-three feet or higher possible, not only would the hotels and homes directly on the beach exist no more, neither would anything a mile or so inland — at least that's what the cheery meteorologist on Channel 6 was saying. There was also the very real chance Manny would either be called out by the City, or go off and volunteer himself to some entity, task force or in-need friends, leaving her with not only the storm surge to worry about but Rufus too, his shoe-loving pooch who got nervous when the door on the dishwasher slammed shut. Images of the catastrophic March tsunami wiping out coastal Japan filled her head.
No, thanks,
she'd said. Besides, if she volunteered her services and worked the phones at the EOC, she figured she'd at least get some goodwill points from the State Attorney and Vance Collier. And in the event of a complete catastrophe and the end of Miami society as everyone knew it, she'd also be surrounded by trained people who could help dig her body out of the rubble, instead of a bomb-squad drop-out who would swim for shore before he'd risk his furry neck to help his master's girlfriend. So she'd called her mom, Marco, and Manny and told them all:
Thanks, but no thanks
. And that afternoon, after the cops had given up driving through her neighborhood warning everyone to get the hell out, she'd said goodbye to her house, packed a suitcase with her one and only pair of strappy Manolos that she'd gotten on sale at the Neiman Marcus outlet, locked her doors, and driven off down her deserted street. Back into a city that, like a creepy, apocalyptic horror movie, everyone and anyone with a brain was scrambling to get the hell out of.

Driving sheets of water pounded the windows of the EOC as strong gusts bent palm trees in half. The outer bands of Artemis had begun to make landfall. It would only get worse from here on. She hadn't spoken to Manny since late that morning, and now she began to wonder what had become of Rufus, and whether Manny would risk taking him to his step-sister's. She probably could have brought him here. No one looked as though they cared too much. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and checked for new messages. Emergency service only. The towers might even be down already …

A tap on her shoulder made her jump. It was Nigel Peris, one of the Miami-Dade PD cops from downstairs.

‘Jesus, Nigel. You gave me a heart attack. Why don't you just wait for some thunder to boom and the lights to flicker before you sneak up on a person?'

‘Sorry, Daria,' Nigel replied. ‘But you got a call on two. You can take it here at reception.'

‘Who is it?' she asked, walking over to the reception desk.

‘Alvarez from City. And as for them lights, don't worry. We have a generator,' he finished with a nod as he headed off downstairs. ‘You can still see that storm coming — right until it rips the phone out of your hand.'

‘Great,' she replied, then turned her attention to the phone. ‘Hey. Where are you at? I've been—'

‘What have you done?' Manny demanded. He sounded beyond angry.

‘What?' She felt her stomach flip-flop and a wave of guilt of unknown origin washed over her. She didn't even know why he was mad.

‘You dealt him, didn't you? Didn't you?' Manny yelled. ‘Why else was he down here at DCJ?'

Daria closed her eyes. She was hoping not to have to deal with this until after Artemis passed and after she had the names of the snuff-club members in hand. They would definitely soften the blow. ‘Manny, it was Vance's idea—' she began.

‘Collier? Don't you go blaming this on him. You made the deal, didn't you? It was you. 'Cause I know he wasn't gonna talk till you actually brought him down to Miami. He's not stupid. I told you that. I freaking warned you, which is what really pisses me off.'

‘Listen, listen, it will work out, okay? He's giving us names. A lot of names. A whole book, in fact. And they have to all pan out, or he goes back up to Starke. Collier has it covered.'

‘What did he get? Tell me, what did you deal that scumbag?'

There was a long silence. ‘Lifetime parole. With monitoring. He jaywalks and he goes back in. But he's never getting out, Manny,' she added quickly. ‘Vance says the agreement's airtight. We are under no obligation to let him out until he fully cooperates, and that's not gonna happen. He said—'

‘You're a fool, Daria,' he said flatly.

She stood up straight. ‘Don't talk to me like that.'

‘And I'm a fool for falling. Yup. For falling. For liking you. For …' he hesitated, as he struggled to hold back words. ‘For thinking you were different from every other fame-seeking prosecutor that comes out of that goddamned office looking for their fifteen minutes or, better yet, a shot at a reality show. The truth is, you want the fucking limelight. And you think Cupid is your ticket to the show.'