The Death Box (16 page)

“
Andale
, Raoul … Hurry!” one man said. “Let’s make the delivery and get done. My
pito
has a hot date.”

“Your
pito
has a date with your hand. Why can’t we take the food through the club? Why roll it all this way?”

“The
policía
might see us pushing beans and tortillas into the club and wonder what they are for. It’s not a supper club. It is only a place for men to find women.”

“Ha! Who would look that close?”

“It is orders from the Amili one. Things have changed since her arrival.
Muy
cautious, that one.”

“I’ll bet she loses that caution in a bed. I would like to get her to my—”

“Be careful of what you wish. She must surely be the property of Mister Double O.”

“El Diablo! I will push the cart and wish no more.”

Leala retreated down the steps and compressed herself into the recess in the wall, praying the shadows kept her covered as the men wrestled the cart down the steps and rolled by. Fortune lay on Leala’s side, she thought. She had chosen to seek escape on a night when food was being delivered to the
laberinto
. Otherwise the back entrance would have been locked as tight as the front.

When the men entered the maze beneath the
discoteca
Leala ran up the steps. The watchman was not in the windowed room and the door to
el baño
was closed. Leala took a chance the man was relieving himself and ran to the office. As she had hoped, there was a door to the outside. She quietly slipped into hot air that smelled of stale beer and the exhaust of cars.

The night was painted in an electric rainbow, signs beating brightly from every direction. Leala looked for the
discoteca
, but the warehouse was between them and she was on a side street. On the corner was a building the color of a canary, P
ALM
B
REEZE
M
OTEL
,
its sign blared,
HOURLY-DAILY-WEEKLY
.
Next to the motel lights proclaimed P
AWN
S
HOP
–
O
PEN
’TIL
M
IDNITE
E
VERY
N
ITE
.
A bar was beside the pawnshop, no windows, just a sign saying P
ACKY’S
H
OT
S
POT
, B
EER
and L
IQUOR
.
The street seemed paved with trash: newspapers, food wrappers, paper cups, beer cans, cigarette butts. The smell of urine and vomit rose like fog from the gutter.

A traffic signal changed down the block and the street filled with cars and trucks, horns and engines. A rusted station wagon rattled to the curb, the drunken driver leering out the window. “Hey chicka, how much
por felación
?” He mimed pushing a head into his lap.

“What?”

“I got twenny bucks, chicka. I meet you in the motel lot, no?”

Leala walked away as quickly as her legs would carry her, the drunk yelling at her back. The traffic was frightening and Leala turned past a closed bodega. Three men sat atop a car in its parking lot, drinking from bagged bottles. They hooted and whistled at Leala, but didn’t get up.

She kept moving.

Within minutes the clubs and motels and bars turned into tiny houses on palm-fronded lots, the doors and windows grated, vehicles parked haphazardly in the street and across the pavement. Streetlamps dusted the night with a gauzy white, the air steamy and thick. It was a poor neighborhood, Leala knew, but safer than the busy avenue.

After another ten minutes the houses and lots grew larger and their portals were ungrated. The flowers and palms seemed healthier and better-attended, and even through her fear Leala smelled the sweet perfume of jacaranda and bougainvillea.

She heard a roar at her back and saw headlights veer onto the street. Leala ducked into a yard, crouching behind a tall agave until the lights passed. Struck by a crisp and pungent scent, Leala crept toward a picket fence beside a dark house. Behind it was a blue hole centering the backyard with a long plank of wood projecting across water lit blue from beneath.

La piscina.
A pool for swimming.

Leala had been smelling herself and her clothing. Shooting glances at the house, she slunk to the edge of the pool and splashed the clean-smelling water over her face. When the house remained dark she edged into the cool
agua
, dress and all, taking a deep breath and dipping her head beneath the surface, staying under as long as possible, coming up for air, then submerging again, hoping the bright-smelling water was cleaning the filth from her body and her soul and renewing her for the journey ahead.

23

My phone rang and my eyes popped open. I blinked to find focus and read a blurred clock: 10:14 a.m. My hand scrabbled for the phone but my rum-afflicted eyes couldn’t discern the name. “
What
?” I barked into the device, noticing I was still in yesterday’s clothes.

“Not a morning person, I take it?” Morningstar’s voice.

“Sorry,” I said. “Not this morning, at least.”

“At least you slept, Ryder. Some of us have been working all night. I just thought you’d like to hear that you were right.”

“Right about what?”

“We’re nearing the bottom of the column and found two seams, which I’ll interpret as two additional and disparate dumping events in the cistern. Makes sense, right?”

“I, uh …”

“It will, Ryder. Go back to sleep.”

I fumbled to my feet to face the excesses of last night’s pityfest. Fuzzy recollections arrived as I showered: A diminishing bottle of Myers’s. Gershwin cajoling me to the deck as he attempted conversation. Me waving it off and taking a swim, stepping on a lobster and getting my toe pinched before splashing back to shore. When I found Gershwin had left, I’d headed inside and tried to Skype Jeremy while leaning back in the chair with feet on desk and somewhere in there the chair tipped over backward and that’s all I could remember.

The kitchen floor was strewn with limes for some reason. I drank a mug of coffee and headed to my car, figuring to drive to the site and see what Morningstar was talking about. My belly fought the coffee and my spinning head felt like monks had used it for gong practice.

I retreated inside, dressed in cutoffs and launched my kayak. The day was already hot and the humidity was in wet-sponge range and I was sweating like a roofer within a minute. I paddled to open water and pulled intervals – racing full-tilt boogie for a minute, arms and shoulders screaming, heart roaring in my ears – then dropping to a lower rhythm for a minute. The toxins started clearing and along with them, my head. I returned to shore a half-hour later and was feeling halfway decent by the time I arrived at the site.

Morningstar’s busy night was evident in the diminution of the column, now the height of a footstool, a gray circle in the soil like a Yap Island money disk. She was on the upper level with the tables and equipment, a coterie of techs dusting and bagging and labeling. To my surprise, Gershwin sat to the side, watching the process. His eyebrows raised at my approach.

“Glad you didn’t drown,” he said. “The last time I saw you was splashing out into the cove. I was afraid you’d swim to open sea, but it seemed you could only go in circles.”

“I’m aiming straighter today,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Watching. Never experienced an on-site operation.”

“If Rayles sees you he’ll probably boot your ass back to Miami.”

“Rayles wouldn’t come here, Big Ryde. He’d get too much dust on his shiny shoes. He’d prefer to read the reports. Or maybe have the flunkie read them to him.”

Morningstar walked up, her knee-length lab coat flapping open to show jeans and a gray tee. Her hair was cinched back in a ponytail and her knees were dusty from kneeling beside the column.

“Morning, Ryder. I hear you had difficulty accepting the loss of the case last night.”

I looked at Gershwin, mouthed
Snitch
. He grinned.

“You said something about seams, Doctor?”

She cranked a finger in the
follow-me
motion and we entered the pit. A pair of techs were carefully ticking matrix from a human form, now half-removed from the concrete. The body wore what appeared to be a dress suit, much degraded.

“There was a discernible seam between JDMS and the Honduran layer,” Morningstar said, “averaging two-point-one meters in depth.”

“JMD …?”

“JDMS for John Doe, Middle Stratum.” Morningstar knelt beside the circle of concrete and remains and I knelt beside her. “We’re calling it middle stratum because another seam indicates a bottom layer of concrete. It’s actually a bit different here, more sand in the conglomerate.”

She pulled a small LED flashlight from a pocket and shone it twenty centimeters above the base. I saw a defined separation between the concrete, the lower layer having dried before the upper portion was added.

“Keep me posted,” I said.

“It’s not your case, Ryder. It belongs to Homeland Security and Rayles. You’re long gone, remember?”

I checked to make sure no one was within hearing range. “Is it possible to send me daily reports, Doctor? Maybe without Rayles seeing where they’re going?”

“Having trouble letting go?”

I looked at her without reply.

“I guess sending a few reports is within the realm of possibility,” she said.

“Yo-ho-ho,” called a voice from above. We looked up to see Vince Delmara’s nose coming down to the pit, followed shortly thereafter by the man himself, usual dark suit and fedora.

“What brings you here, Vince?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear the case has been expropriated by HS?”

He nodded at the short column. “This case, maybe. I wanted to ask the Doc if she’d found anything new I could use in the Carosso murder. Maybe match the concrete here with stuff at Carosso’s home.”

Confusion. “The Carosso case went back to Miami-Dade? What?”

“Those HS guys don’t want the Carosso investigation, can you believe that?” Delmara said. “They said the Carosso killing was Miami-Dade’s responsibility.”

“Homeland Security didn’t want a case that might have a link to the Hondurans?”

“That’s what I got from Rayles’s flunkie. He was like, ‘Screw Carosso, what does a dead truck driver have to do with NatSec’s investigation?’ That’s bureaucratese for national security, by the way, not insect love.”

I shook my head. “Like I figured, the only reason they wanted the Hondurans was for the Importance Portfolio.”

“Carosso’s now Miami-Dade’s problem. It seems like his next-door neighbor’s back from a trip, and I’m going to see if she can add to what you guys dug up when the case was FCLE’s. Jeez … I can’t keep up any more.”

“I’ve got nothing I can add, Vince,” Morningstar said, answering Delmara’s question. “No way I can connect the concrete here to anything Carosso might have had on his clothes. It’s been months, years.”

“Hope springs eternal, Doctor,” Delmara sighed.

Gershwin and I followed him from the tent. A hawk circled above, as if hoping we’d keel over and provide breakfast. Delmara pushed back his hat and wiped his sweating brow on the sleeve of his blue suit.

“It ain’t even ten and I’m wilted.”

“Maybe the suit? The dark fedora?”

“It’s a summer suit. The hat provides shade. This has gotta be global warming.”

Heat shimmered from the flat ground and I toed a half-buried iron nut from the parched sand, the nut now crusted with scaly rust. I suddenly recalled a question I’d had for Delmara.

“That first day, Vince. You said you were checking the provenance of this land tract. Anything come of that?”

“Yeah,” Gershwin added. “Someone knew the cistern was here.”

Delmara shook his head sadly. “I circulated the report, guess you weren’t in the loop yet. This parcel, twenty-eight acres, got bought three months back by Darco Development, a consortium that builds mini malls. They ID patterns of upscale residential growth, find cheap land a couple miles past where the growth is heading … build and wait.” He nodded toward the uncleared land. “We see scrub and buzzards, Darco sees a future population center.”

“Before Darco?” Gershwin prompted.

“Owned by Allen Feldstein, a retiree who had a cab company in New Jersey and retired to Coral Gables in 2001. He bought the parcel seven years back and built a home, planning to subdivide the rest into plots … never happened because Mr Feldstein stroked out a year later. Darco bought it from his widow, who’s now eighty-eight.”

“Maybe Feldstein knew about the cistern.”

“I talked to the wife. Feldstein walked the land exactly once, a few days before signing the deal. ‘He went out to see about places to put houses and getting all that junk cleared off,’ is what she said. She said Feldstein wouldn’t have gone out there again by himself. He was terrified of snakes.”

“Before Feldstein?”

“Owned by a guy named Driscoll for almost forty years, cattle-rancher type. Never ran many cattle out here, having a bigger tract a few miles north. Might have been Driscoll who built the cistern, maybe to trap extra water for his stock. I’d have asked, but Driscoll’s been dead a dozen years.”

“Leaves him out. Anyone else around? Or any thing?”

“A couple miles down the road there’s a dying town with a dock, bait shop and grocery, and a little restaurant-bar-gas station. I put the average age of the residents at a hundred and thirty-seven.”

I knelt and scuffed my hands through the sand like it could tell me something. My fingers pulled a ten-inch bolt from the soil, rusted half through. I stood, tossed it deep into the scrubby trees, and turned to Delmara.

“So who knew the cistern was here, Vince?”

“Probably not anyone still alive.”

He sighed and turned to his cruiser, off to interview the last remaining neighbor who might know Paul Carosso.

“Mind if Ziggy and I tag along?” I asked.

“Sure, come meet Hattie Doyle, though I’m doubting she has anything to add. You sure you want to waste your time?”