Shattered Sky (23 page)

“The law says I gotta take you where you want to go,” the cabby told Martin. “But that don't mean I gotta like it.”

The cabby shrugged his shoulder uncomfortably, revealing the edge of a nicotine patch on his neck. It was obviously not doing the job, because the cab reeked of stale smoke, and the open mouth of the ashtray bulged with twisted Marlboro butts.

The cabby glanced at Martin in the rearview mirror. “Detached retina?” he asked, taking notice of the bandage over his right eye. “My son had a detached retina—hit in the face with a goddamn hockey stick.”

Martin took a deep breath. A thousand cabbies in Miami,
and he had to get the one who spoke English. He answered by not answering, hoping the cabby got the hint.

“Yeah, eye trouble is the worst,” blathered the cabby. “Can't set it like a bone, can't lance it like a boil.”

“How much farther?”

“Almost there.”

Martin smoothed out a ruffle in his eye dressing. Although he had pared down the gauze and tape to a bare minimum, there was no way to hide the wound. The eye Drew Camden had blinded with a starter pistol still ached and oozed, having been untreated for more than a week, or at least untreated by anyone but him. Emergency rooms were out of the question—he was wanted in Eureka, and surely that damn kid had set the Newport Beach police on his tail as well. Self-treatment was the word of the day, but dentistry was a far cry from ocular triage. After six days, he suspected that his sight wasn't coming back, and infection had taken hold.

Pain is good, he told himself. It reminded him of his failure in the graveyard—which made him determined not to fail again.

Martin unzipped the travel bag beside him to check that the lid hadn't come off the urn he carried. Once he was satisfied it was secure, he glanced with his good eye at the address on a crumbled slip of paper and looked at the neighborhood around him. It was a neighborhood that decayed more with each block they drove, looking even worse painted in the half-tones and shadows of a failing twilight. “Exactly what part of Miami are we going to?” he asked.

The cabby spat out a rueful chuckle. “Haven't been here before, have you?”

Martin shook his head.

“You're going right to the middle of ‘The Miami Miasma.' ”

Martin sank back in the worn seat. “Sounds wonderful.”

“It got voted ‘Best place to drop the bomb,' three times in a row,” the cabby told him.

They crossed an intersection, and the bottom seemed to drop out of whatever fabric held the neighborhood together. They had entered an overpopulated slum; a human sump that caught the dregs of every cultural group; the bitter bottom of the melting pot.

The cabby hit his lock button, even though all the locks were already down. “Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times,” he said. “The animals bite.”

The streets were infused with a sense of despair that permeated the souls around them: pushers and prostitutes competed for clients; angry youth with carnivorous glares. Bleak alley-shadows crouching in cardboard dwellings. Even the decaying, graffiti-tagged walls seemed to breathe hopelessness in the oppressive Floridian humidity.

Martin had known his mission would take him to the edge of hell, but he had assumed it would only be figurative. “How much farther?”

“Just a few more blocks.”

They turned a corner where children played in and around an abandoned rust-bucket Buick straddling the sidewalk. A brick fragment was lobbed like a grenade across the hood of the taxi.

“Son of a bitch,” grumbled the cabby, but just drove on.

Martin reached into his bag, nervously rubbing the side of the funeral urn he had brought as if it were a gene's lamp. When he looked at its polished surface, he could see a faint reflection of his own face, oblate and distorted by the curvature of the brass. Were the angels watching him now? he wondered. The sense of intangible paranoia told him that they
were still there. Observing. Judging. Perhaps the loss of his eye was a judgment as well. Perhaps bliss could only be achieved through pain. Or maybe they were just screwing with him.

“A loved one?” the cabby asked.

“Excuse me?”

“That's an urn in your bag, isn't it?”

Martin toyed with the various indignant remarks he could respond with, and the various ways in which the cabby might be silenced both temporarily and permanently, but in the end decided none of it was worth the trouble. “I'm a funeral director,” he said, trying the lie on for size.

The cabby raised an eyebrow. “I didn't know you guys made house calls.”

“Would you like my card?”

The cabby shrugged his neck uncomfortably again, glanced at the ashtray, and scratched his nicotine patch. “No. No, that's okay.”

Martin grinned smugly. Yes, he was sufficiently funereal to pull off his current charade. He cleared a smudge from the urn, then glanced out of the window again.

To his surprise, the neighborhood had changed.

Gone were the graffiti-burdened walls and boarded windows. The gutters that had been filled with debris were clean, and the stench of misery was replaced by the smell of wet paint.

Just up ahead a barrier blocked the sidewalk, and narrowed the road to a single lane. It had the semblance of a civilian barricade: chairs, tables—anything that could be piled upon, had been wedged into the blockade, and smaller household objects became the mortar in the gaps. Through the barricade, Martin caught the blue flickering of an arc welder.

“What's going on here?”

“Urban renewal,” the cabby told him.

They pulled over near a clean black and white sign that said
PARDON OUR DUST DURING BEAUTIFICATION
.

“This is as far as I go,” the cabby said. “They don't let taxis into the Miasma. Nowadays it's what you might call a ‘gated community.' ”

Martin turned to look out the back window, where several blocks away he could still see the crumbling streets. “I thought we just passed through the Miasma.”

“Naah,” the cabby said. “That was the funk around the pearl.”

“I thought you said it was a horrible place.”

“That was then,” explained the cabby. “This is now. The Miasma cleaned up real good . . . if you call that clean.”

Martin almost asked how such a thing could happen to such a localized area in such a short period of time . . . but he answered his own question. “Tory Smythe . . .” he mumbled under his breath, but this cabby missed nothing, and threw him a knowing grin.

“She used to live here. That's the rumor, anyway. Kind of makes you wonder.”

Martin opened the door, but didn't pull out his wallet. “You'll wait for me,” Martin instructed. “I won't be long—keep the meter running.”

The cabby threw him a disgusted look. “Yeah, yeah.” He threw the cab into park. “Why did I know you were going to say that.” He rolled down his window and lit a cigarette.

As Martin approached the gap in the barricade, a guard with a clipboard came out to greet him, Cuban-dark and as clean-cut as Ward Cleaver.

“I need your name and destination,” the guard said.

“Marcus D'Angelo,” said Martin, giving his alias of the day. “I'm going to 414 Las Estacas Street, apartment 3-C.”

The guard glanced up at him at the mention of the address, then back down to his clipboard and curtly said, “I'm sorry—you're not on my guest list.”

Martin tipped the clipboard so he could see it, and quickly found his name. There were only a handful of names on the list—and no way the guard could have missed it.

“Funny, I could see it fine with one eye.”

“You have business with Sharon Smythe?”

“My business is no business of yours.”

The guard stared at him, mad-dogging him a moment more, then backed down. “Two blocks down, then make a left. If she's not home, you might try the church across the street.” The guard's eyes turned to Martin's suit coat. He picked a shred of lint from Martin's jacket, rolled it into a ball in his fingers, then glanced down at Martin's rumpled slacks. “We have a dress code here,” he said. “Maybe next time you'll remember to get those pressed.” Then he stepped aside.

Martin crossed between the banks of the barricade, to find that the Miasma had been transmuted into an inner-city Mayberry.

Just inside the barricade, a welder worked to erect a wrought iron fence that would soon take the place of the barricade. Painters coated the gate with primer.

The buildings were of the same construction as those outside of the barricade, but here, the brick had been sandblasted clean. The hydrants were painted a cheery orange, and there was not as much as a single candy wrapper in the gutter. A man in front of an appliance store swept dust from the sidewalk. An elderly couple holding hands strolled leisurely down the street and teens hanging out on a street corner greeted the couple with a smile, tipping their caps like boy scouts. A block down, children played in a park that had probably been a syringe-mined
vacant lot before Tory's cleansing presence had mutated everything caught within her sphere of influence. In a sense, a bomb
had
been dropped on the Miasma; a cleansing salvo that had sanitized the streets, the hearts and souls of those who lived here.

As Martin crossed another spotless intersection, he could see, on either side about a half mile away, other barricades keeping out the rest of the impure world. This place was an oasis in the midst of squalor. An abnormal, unnatural place. It reminded Martin why he was there, and what he had to do.

People nodded him a polite greeting as he passed, but their stares lingered on his bandaged eye a moment too long, and he could read an aftertaste of suspicion. They made it very clear that he was an outsider, unclean in some fundamental way. It wasn't just his eye, or his rumpled clothes, he realized—it was the fact that he wasn't one of them. He didn't possess their particular brand of purity. He was half tempted to go take a piss in some corner, just out of spite—but he didn't need to draw further attention to himself. Not now, when he was so close.

No one answered at Sharon Smythe's apartment, and so, following the guard's advice, he crossed the street to a church, climbing a set of wide stone steps, and entering through a partially open door.

It was a high-ceilinged cathedral. Stained glass pictorials of the life of Christ painted the sanctuary in a colorful mosaic of light, slowly fading as the sun slipped off the horizon.

A man near the entrance was on hands and knees with a scrub brush and bucket, polishing the tile floor in little circles.

“Shoes off!” he demanded as Martin stepped in. “Shoes off!” It took a moment for Martin to realize from the man's vestments that he was the priest. Martin removed his shoes
and left them in a rear pew, then strode slowly down the center aisle.

There was only one congregant in the empty church—a blonde woman of forty, hair beginning to gray at the temples. She sat in the second pew from the front, as if being in the front pew would put her too deep under God's scrutiny.

“Ms. Smythe?”

The woman didn't look up. She stayed in her kneeling position, finishing whatever prayer she silently recited. Martin had little patience for it. “I don't mean to disturb you . . .” he said, loudly enough to make it clear that he
did
mean to disturb her.

Finally she looked up at him. If she was put off by his bandaged eye, she didn't show it. “I suppose you're Mr. D'Angelo.”

Far in the back, the priest grumbled upon finding his shoes in the rear pew, and took them to the entrance mat.

“Don't mind Father Martinez,” said Sharon Smythe. “He doesn't have much to do these days. Oh, for a while the place was packed with repentant souls and daily sermons. Now nobody comes to confession anymore. I imagine they've all convinced themselves they're free of sin.”

Martin didn't care to make small talk, or linger longer than he had to within this sterile field.

“Perhaps we should go back to your apartment, Ms. Smythe—we can make the exchange.”

She looked at the object bulging in his leather carrying case.

“Are you certain that those are my daughter's ashes?”

“Absolutely.”

She eyed the carrying case a moment more, then she reached beneath her pew. “I have it right here.” From beneath the pew, she pulled out a box, and from inside the box she pulled out an
urn. It was a white ceramic vessel, much more appealing than the one Martin had brought.

“Her life was riddled with bad luck,” Sharon Smythe said. “I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that it wouldn't end with her death.”

Martin opened his carrying case, and removed his urn, making a point to handle it with more care than he really had. “It was a horrible time. So many had died when the dam burst.”

“I suppose your business was good.”

“We earn our money relieving people's misery, not creating it.” He held the brass urn out to her, but she didn't take it.

“I should be heartened to find a funeral home so honest it corrects errors that no one would know about. You didn't have to tell me I had the wrong ashes—I would never have known.”

He couldn't pull his eyes from her urn, and wondered if there might be some unholy magic yet in those ashes. “Some funeral homes have more integrity than others. But I give you my personal assurance that Tory has been respectfully cared for, and I regret any further suffering this mix-up may have caused.” He waited for her to accept the exchange, but she still held firmly onto the ceramic urn.

“So where are the papers?” she asked.

“Which papers?”

“The ones I have to sign—the ones that state I won't sue for gross negligence.”

Martin released a quick impatient breath, then regretted it. He tried to regain a sullen semblance of empathy. “You don't have to sign anything, Ms. Smythe.”