The Death Box (26 page)

“Oh? You didn’t care if the blood was mine or not?”

She put the shades on and stared at me through expressionless black. “Sometimes you make sense, Detective, sometimes you don’t.” She started away, paused, turned. “But I’m happy you survived.”

“As long as I keep making sense?”

She backpedaled and spun away. “Actually, I’m beginning to prefer when you don’t.”

“
Oy caramba
,” said a voice at my shoulder, Gershwin. “The doctor lady has wheels.”

“Consuelo all right?” I asked, ignoring his reference to Morningstar. “Not distraught about the damage?”

“Auntie has plenty of insurance. But I’d hate to be one of our attackers if she got hold of them. Ever see a roast suckling pig?”

“I’d help baste. Where were we before we were sitting ducks, Zigs?”

“You wanted to look at the cistern site. Or do you need a nap after the big dance?”

38

Leala had taken a wrong turn. The streets were growing dirtier and there were bars and nightclubs and fences on the windows and the smell of drinking and garbage made the air feel like oil on her face. Cars were on the street, growling, honking, radios blasting rock, rap, mariachi. There were taxicabs as well, as yellow as flame.

She pushed back into the vestibule of a store with wood where once were windows. If she’d been smarter, she’d have bought a map, and not blundered into this busy, dirty area.

She decided to re-trace her steps one block over, cutting down a slender side street. At the corner was a drive-in
taqueria
, its window thick glass with orders passed through a little door. A tall and skinny Hispanic man was at the window, a sequined cowboy hat on his head and sequins on his white cowboy shirt. His trousers were tight and black and he wore white boots. Leala had seen such men when visiting Tegucigalpa …

He was a
proxeneta
, a pimp.

Leala backed up until hidden by the corner of a building while the pimp received a bag of food and drinks. He complained about something and whoever was behind the window told him to
irse
in the style that meant
get lost, loser.
The pimp cursed at the window and spat on it, turning and striding back to the big car. Leala shot a look inside and saw four women, all crushed together in the back seat so the man could own the front.

One of the women was Yolanda.

Leala almost gasped aloud as she watched the man pass out a taco and drink to each of the women. Yolanda shook her head,
no
, but the man barked something and she took the food.

The car screeched from the curb, heading down the block and stopping at a red light. Leala started to run after it but realized the futility. She saw a taxicab and waved it to a halt. Leala climbed into the back seat, pointing forward, breathless. “Please, sir. You must follow that black car.”

The driver was a heavy man with a mustache like a line drawn over his lip. He spoke in the Caribbean manner.

“The pimpmobile, hon? Why? You get lef’ behind?”

“Please to follow black car.”

“You gotta the
dinero
, girl?”

Leala threw all her remaining bills at the man and he pulled away, following as the pimp crossed Flagler, went right another several blocks. Leala’s mind registered the street: it would lead her back to her safe place. Get Yolanda, run, wait until Monday and call Johnson.

The neighborhood grew even worse. Bars lined the street. They passed a burned-out shell of a car. Windows were broken or filled with wood. Once-bright paint was faded toward memory. A skinny dog vomited yellow froth as two women laughed from the steps of a dirty building. The women were barely dressed, their faces painted like corpses.

The car holding Yolanda pulled to the curb. Yolanda and a second girl exited, both in tiny skirts and tube tops and high-heeled boots that climbed to skinny knees.

“Stop,” Leala told the driver. “I must get out.”

Leala jumped from the cab and flattened against a brick building. When the black car drove away she ran to her friend.

“Yolanda! I found a woman who might help us. Her name is Victoree—”

Yolanda turned, her eyes wide with fear. “Go away, Leala. You are in great danger.”

“You must come with me,” Leala pleaded.

“They will kill
mi madre
if I do not do as they say. They are filth and they are making me into filth. Go fast, run.”

“Not without you.” Leala grabbed Yolanda’s arm, but Yolanda yanked it away. Yolanda’s companion looked between the two and slunk off as if the drama was a threat to her life.

“What are you doing?” Leala said. “I came to save you.”

“I am here for ever, Leala,” Yolanda said. “Get away.”

Leala saw motion and turned to see two young men with hollow eyes and ragged, dirty clothes, one black, one white. They stared with open mouths. The white junkie pointed. “IT’S HER!” he screamed. “WE GET THE STUFF!”

The junkies circled like wolves, backing Leala into the vestibule of a vacant storefront. The black one pulled a small knife from his pocket.

“Easy, chicka,” he said. “Stop right there and you don’t get cut, right?”

Leala feinted left and jumped to the right, but the knife was ahead of her. The other junkie pulled a gun from his pants, small and rusty, the grips gone from the handle, now just a frame wrapped with string.

“Keep your mouth shut and don’t move, chicka,” he told her. To the junkie with the knife he said, “Keep her there and I’ll call the number.”

Leala held up her hands in surrender as her eyes searched for escape. But there was none: the vestibule surrounded her on three sides and the junkies held the fourth.

Then, seemingly for no reason, the white junkie spun across the pavement and fell to the ground, landing atop the gun.

“THE FUCK YOU DOIN’ WITH MY BITCH?” a voice yelled.

Leala looked up to see the big-hatted pimp, his car twenty meters away, the door wide. He held a bat like the kind used for the
béisbol
, but smaller. The junkie with the knife retreated.

The pimp stared at Leala. “You ain’t my …” his mouth moved from surprise to gold-toothed grin. “Are you the one they’re looking for? It’s you, ain’t it? Baby, you gonna make me money an’ all I got to do is make a call.”

Leala spun to escape but the pimp was on her, one hand clamped over her mouth, pulling her to his body, his dirty breath against her cheek. Yolanda grabbed the pimp’s arm, pulling with all her might, but the pimp grinned as his fist caught Yolanda in the mouth. She tumbled backwards to the pavement.

“NO!” a voice screeched. Leala felt the arms loosen on her throat. She struggled loose as the pimp staggered backwards, the black junkie hanging from his neck and stabbing wildly at the pimp’s face with the little knife. The cowboy hat tumbled to the pavement.

“She’s ours, bitch,” the junkie yelled. “WE SAW HER FIRST!”

The pimp swatted the junkie away, blood streaming from torn cheeks as he lurched back to find room to swing the bat. The white junkie stumbled to his feet and stood in front of the pimp, pulling the trigger on the pistol. All it did was click. He hit the pimp across the face with the gun, which broke into pieces, the magazine tumbling one way, the frame another. The pimp slashed with the bat, catching the junkie’s arm. A scream. The black junkie sunk his knife into the pimp’s forearm, the blade breaking off as the bat rolled into the street. The pimp roared as the white junkie began kicking at the pimp’s groin. The pimp caught him in the nose with a fist as a kick landed. Both went down. The junkie, nose pouring blood, screeched and fell atop the pimp, slapping desperately at everything in reach as the black junkie furiously kicked at the pimp’s legs.

Leala staggered to her feet and looked at Yolanda, moaning on the ground but alive, beside her the grunting, screaming, furious tangle of pimp and junkies. Yolanda waved her away.

“Run, Leala,” she gasped, blood streaming from her nose. “Run to save your soul.”

Leala turned and ran. She was too frightened to look back and did not see the black junkie break from the tangle and turn after her with a phone in his hand.

39

There were still a couple hours of daylight, so I opted for the cistern site, one reason being its potential for opening up the case, the other being that the locale was peaceful and rural and after this afternoon’s mayhem, some quiet was called for. I also liked that the landscape made it hard for anyone to sneak up on us.

With the column dismantled and carted to the lab, all that remained was a forlorn rectangular depression with the bottom now swampy from the afternoon rain and, it being Florida, probably breeding mosquitos the size of fruit bats. Beside it was the mound of excavated earth. The construction would begin anew on Monday and I hoped the first job was filling the grave.

I parked a dozen paces from the pit. Somehow on our journey a six-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale had fallen into Gershwin’s lap and we exited with bottles in hand. “You think the answers are here?” Gershwin asked, looking out over low, gnarled trees and desert-brown soil.

“One of them, at least.”

“How do we find it?”

“We feel strongly and it finds us.”

Gershwin gave me a look but said nothing. I waited until my bottle was emptied and meandered into the brush to stand on a rotting few inches of stump. A black clot of vultures broke from a nearby tree and tumbled to a further one, content to watch and hope for death. Gershwin walked up with a two-foot length of iron.

“Where’d you get the shillelagh?” I asked.

He swung it like a ball bat. “Poking from the ground.”

I jumped from the stump and kicked at sandy soil studded with prickly pear, my mind seeing the agonized swimmer in the stone. I pictured her stroking free of the earth, face breaking the ground as her hands pulled desperately toward the light. And then she disappeared into crumbled dirt and a walnut-sized locknut pushing from the land. I kicked it free and picked it up, thumbing dirt from the hole, ready to launch it toward the vulture tree, send the bastards fleeing.

But stopped. In my wandering around the former tent, I’d picked up a couple other locknuts and a bolt or two. A shard of tempered metal.

What were they from? How did they get here? When?

I fixed my eyes on the dirt and walked circles. After a few minutes I saw a rust-colored vine coiling from a clump of weeds. I pulled … not a vine, a section of baling wire that left a slender furrow as it tore free. Gershwin walked up bouncing a rusty, heavy-duty clamp in his palm.

“You know, Big Ryde, I’ve been thinking …”

“Me too,” I said, pulling my phone. “What else is down there?”

The forensics folks showed up within an hour, led by Deb Clayton, her day to pull a double. The sun was turning the western sky to layers of pink and purple and the trees grew long shadows.

“You have the metal detectors?” I asked.

She smiled, not looking the least bit tired after an afternoon working the scene at Tiki Tiki. “Six, highly sensitive for ferrous and non-ferrous. They’ll detect a nickel at eighteen inches. We looking for nickels?”

“You’re looking for stuff like this,” I said, holding up the wire, steel bar and clamp. “Supposedly this land has always been vacant. But something was here.”

“You find those subsurface?”

“Partially. We’re wondering what else is down there.”

“Where’d you start scratching? We should probably begin there.”

Ziggy took the Rover and made a run for coffee and snacks, always appreciated, and I showed Clayton the general area where we’d found the scraps. The sun dropping fast, Clayton’s team set up a generator and three banks of high-intensity lamps and went out waving detectors over the hard ground.

I saw headlights closing, a red sports-racked Outback pulling beside me. Vivian Morningstar jumped out wearing lightweight running shorts and one of those advertising-intensive shirts given to participants in sporting events. Her feet were in neon-green running shoes. “I don’t recall requesting a pathologist,” I said. “Even such a highly decorated one.”

“A two-shift day,” she said, stretching her back. “I break them with a run to clear my head. When Deb asked could she borrow the ME’s two metal detectors, I got curious about my site.”

“Your site?”

She nodded at the pit. “I release the site to the developer on Monday. ’Til then, I own it.” She flashed me a grin. “So whatcha looking for in such a hurry?”

I explained that it was a fishing expedition and showed her the relics Gershwin and I had unearthed.

“We found a couple things like that when the excavation started. I set them aside in case they meant something.” She led me to the rear of the mound. Atop a plastic sheet were two long bolts and another heavy-duty clamp. “What’s the stuff mean?”

I knelt and studied the clamp, the kind I’d seen on hydraulic hoses. “Probably nothing. The rancher drove a piece of machinery here years back and it fell apart. Still …”

“I’m starting to understand you, Ryder, a bit obsessive.”

We leaned against Morningstar’s vehicle and watched the techs work. If I’d hoped for a case-breaker to leap from the soil, it wasn’t happening. After thirty minutes and hundreds of square meters covered, all we had was a rusty flange and a five-foot length of cable.

I heard my Rover in the distance and saw it zooming through the trees like Gershwin thought he was in the Daytona 500. He wasn’t coming down the usual path to the pit, but a couple dozen meters to the east.

“Damn,” Morningstar said. “He’s moving.”

“He bangs up my ride he’ll spend eternity in Vehicle Theft,” I muttered. The Rover finished the final hundred feet of its trip at a cautious pace, pulling beside Morningstar’s cruiser. Gershwin jumped out with a bag cradled in each arm. “The burrito king has arrived,” he proclaimed. “And I’ve got about a gallon of coffee in the back.”

“Where’d you find the chow?”

“A little bar-restaurant a couple miles west. It’s an old-timey joint, but good stuff, homemade while I waited.” He passed out paper-wrapped burritos to nearby company. Morningstar grabbed a chicken and black bean and watched the techs sweep the ground. Gershwin grinned at her and elbowed me.