The Way We Die Now (18 page)

Hake went over to the body and took Bock's wallet out of the hip pocket. It contained $103, a VISA card, three gas credit cards, and the registration for the Ford half-ton truck. There were some business cards in the wallet as well. The keys to the Ford and the keys to the semi were in Bock's right front pocket. Hoke pocketed the money, the registration slip, and the keys and dropped the wallet on the floor.

Hoke reloaded the shotgun, stepped over Bock's body, and opened the front door. The two pit dogs were whining and sniffing, smelling the blood, and they were at the ends of their chains. Bath dogs were only two feet away from him. Hake killed them both with the shotgun, stepped over their bodies, and crossed the yard to the trailers beneath the trees. The first trailer was empty, and so was the third, although there were signs that they had been occupied in the recent past. When Hoke looked at the closed door of the middle trailer, he solved the mystery. When the door had closed from inside, a flat metal bar on the outside, fixed with a spring at the top, dropped into a welded metal slot on the outside, and locked the men in. The bar could be raised and would stay put in its original position from the outside, but there was no way to lift it from inside the trailer.

Hoke raised the bar and opened the door. There was a brick on the floor to wedge the door open, and Hake kicked it into place. The trailer was the same size as Elena's had been, but there was no furniture. Without moving away from the door, Hake surveyed the interior. There was a stave and a counter, and a goat stew was cooking on the stove. The other half of a dressed kid was on the counter. The five men slept on the floor apparently. The stench from the overflowing toilet in the tiny bathroom was overpowering, and the bathroom door was missing. Four Haitians sat on the floor, their backs to the wall, and the fifth man was at the stove, holding a lang-handled metal ladle. The five men looked at Hake without moving; their eyes were wide, but their faces were expressionless. There was a stack of metal pie pans on the counter. The man with the ladle dropped his hands to his sides. The man sitting closest to the stove quivered like an Australian pine in a heavy wind and stared at Hoke's leveled shotgun. His bare black heels beat a tattoo on the metal floor.

"Who speaks English?"

"I speak a little," the man at the stove said.

"You ever hear of Delray Beach?"

He nodded. "I know Delray Beach."

Hoke took out the bills he had taken from Bock's wallet and handed each man twenty dollars. He put the remaining three dollars into his pocket. He gave the man at the stove the keys to the Ford pickup and the folded yellow registration slip.

"There're about ten thousand Haitians in Deiray Beach," Hake said. "Go to Deiray, and join them. There's no more work for you here, or in Irnmokalee either. So take the black truck and drive to Delray Beach. You got a driver's license?"

"No, sir."

"A green card?"

"No, sir."

"D'you know how to drive?"

"I drove a taxi in Port-au-Prince."

"If you're stopped, this registration won't do you any good, but maybe one of the Haitians in Delray will know what to do with it. Don't take the Tamiami Trail into Miami. Take Alligator Alley instead and then the Sunshine Parkway to Delray. Do you understand me?"

The man nodded and put the keys into his pocket. "I know Delray Beach."

"The smart thing to do is to abandon--I mean, just -leave- the truck on the street somewhere after you get to Delray. And forget that you ever worked here for Mr. Bock. Understand?"

"Yes, sir." He nodded and licked his lips.

"All right. Tell the others."

The man said something to the others in Creole. Hoke watched them as they nodded their heads. They all had broken into smiles when he had given them money, but their faces were solemn again now. Hake left the trailer and its stench and waited in the yard until the men came out. They all had small bundles and blankets; one man had a faded quilt. The tall man also brought the pot of steaming goat stew, and they had their tin plates and spoons. The short, quivering man carried the other half of the dressed kid and had an OD army blanket rolled up and over one shoulder. Helping each other, they climbed into the pickup, two in front and three in back. Hake waited until the truck was well down the graveled road before he returned to the house.

If they didn't speed, the chances were fairly good that the pickup would make it safely to Delray, with its huge Haitian colony alongside the railroad tracks. Trucks and old buses filled with laborers were plentiful on the Alligator Alley route to the Sunshine Parkway, and if a trooper did stop them, he would turn them over to the INS. The INS would, in turn, take them to the Krome Detention Center, but all the illegal Haitians knew by now to say that they came to America to escape political persecution. Now that Duvalier had been deposed, the persecution gambit didn't work any longer, but there were still enough immigration shysters in Miami to keep them in the States for months, sometimes years. And if they could contact a relative of any kind here in the U.S. who had somehow obtained a green card, a lawyer could get them paroled. Once paroled, they disappeared again, either to New York or to New Jersey. They wouldn't be able to explain how they got the truck if they were stopped, but Bock would never report the truck stolen.

There were additional papers and letters in the sideboard and in the highboy as well. From these, Hoke discovered that Bock had a married daughter living in Fitzgerald, Georgia. He also found the death certificate for Bock's wife in a drawer.

The Mexican hadn't owned much of anything. He had a yellow linen suit in his closet, fresh from the cleaners and encased in plastic, and a pair of polished cordovan loafers. But there was no correspondence from anyone, either in Spanish or English, or any personal papers. There was a coiled leather whip and a P-38 in a bottom dresser drawer, and Hake left them there. The other drawers held underwear, T-shirts, and a half dozen pairs of argyle socks--none of them worn.

Hoke left the house and looked inside the utility shed outside the house. There was a generator in the shed, to be used for emergency power, Hoke surmised. It was an old Sears generator and hadn't been used for some time. There were four five-gallon jerricans in the shed, and two of them were filled with gasoline. There were two aluminum tanks in one corner. DANGER! VIKANE was stenciled in red paint on both tanks. Hoke took the two filled cans of gas back to the house. He put them down in the kitchen and went into the bathroom to take a leak. When he looked at his face in the mirror, he shuddered. His face was haggard, and his eyes were red. Bits of oatmeal were lodged in his beard. He looked at least ten years older than he should look, even without his teeth. He swallowed three aspirin with water and then shaved off his beard, using a new Bic razor he found in the medicine cabinet. He put a Band-Aid over the puncture wound in his chin. He felt better, even if he didn't look a lot better.

Hoke poured a half can of gasoline over Bock's body and then splashed the rest of the gas throughout the living room. With the last of the gas, he made a wide line to the doorway and out onto the veranda. He lit the gas with his lighter, and the fire snaked across the porch. It blazed fiercely when it reached Bock's body.

Taking the second can with him, Hake got into the semi cab, made a wide turn in the yard, and drove it into the barn as far as it would go. He poured half the can over the Mexican, more on the pile of loose boards, and splashed the remainder on the engine of the truck. He found his straw hat and put it on. He lit the gas from outside the barn and walked dawn the gravel road toward the highway. He looked over his shoulder but kept walking. The house and the barn both were on fire. In the middle of the yard the nanny goat, bleating, stood on her milking box.

When Hake reached the highway, almost a mile away from the farm, he could still see black smoke from the two fires. No one driving down the highway, either way, would pay any attention to the smoke, and the farm itself was shielded by the palmetto trees on both sides of the gravel road. Farmers set fire to their fields to clear them all year round.

No one stopped to give Hoke a ride, and it took him almost four hours to walk the nine and a half miles back to Immokalee.

CHAPTER 12

There were a good many things to think about on his walk back to Immokalee, and Hake had to sit down frequently to rest. During his rest periods he picked out most of the splinters embedded in his hands. His tailbone hurt with every jarring step, especially when he stumbled slightly, and his arms felt heavy and sore. Swinging that two-by-four had been like two hours of batting practice, and his muscles weren't used to being stretched.

Hoke hadn't spent any time looking around the farm for any buried bodies. Beyond the farm and the field of Brussels sprouts, the Everglades began, stretching to the horizon. If Bock and Chico had buried any bodies, they would have driven them to the sea of grass and dumped them into some deep water-filled sinkhole where the alligators would eat them. There was no way to prove it now, but Hake had no doubt that Tiny Bock had killed his Haitian workers when they finished their jobs instead of paying them. All Back had to do, when it came to payoff time, was to lock the men in their trailers, attach the Vikane gas tanks to the copper tubes that were used for propane cooking gas for the stave, and turn them on. Bock and Chico could then throw the bodies into the truck and drive through the fields to the water-soaked Glades and dump them. That still didn't account for the dead Haitian found behind the billboard an the road to Bonita Springs. With a hundred square miles of swamp in his backyard to dump bodies, why would Bock and Chico bury a dead Haitian behind a billboard on a fairly busy state road? It didn't make sense, because the body was bound to be found. Someday, perhaps, an illegal hunter might find a skull out in the middle of the Glades, but an illegal hunter wouldn't report a find like that; he would take it home and put it on his mantel as a -memento mori-. Someone else, other than Bock, must have buried the dead Haitian behind the billboard. After all, Bock wasn't the only grower going broke in Immokalee or in the so-called green belt surrounding Lake Okeechobee. In recent years many farmers had given up agriculture altogether and started catfish farming instead. And they were prospering. Five years ago catfish were hard to find in Miami, but now a man could get fried catfish in every seafood restaurant in South Florida, and it didn't have the muddy taste of wild catfish either.

By the time Hoke reached the outskirts of Immokalee he was depressed. Part of his depression was caused, he knew, by the unnecessary killing of Bock and Chico, but mandatory under the circumstances. If Bock hadn't been groggy from the blows to his head, he certainly would have killed Hake with his first shot. He must have had double vision to miss at such short range.

There weren't many people on the dusty streets. A few Mexicans lingered beneath the pepper tree, and there was the same mix of homeless white winos and blacks in the parking lot of the Cafeteria, but the other townspeople-- those with shelter--stayed inside during the middle of the day. Immokalee did not as yet have an enclosed airconditioned mall, so many townspeople--those with cars, anyway--were probably shopping in Naples or Fort Myers. Local shop owners stayed inside their air-conditioned stores. There were workers in the row of packinghouses, of course, and huge sixteen-wheelers, both loaded and unloaded, rumbled through the streets; but there was a dead, lethargic feel to the town.

Hoke passed Myrtle's discount drugstore, stopped, and then went back to the store. He bought a roll of three-inch adhesive tape, the widest she had on hand, and a small box of extra-strength Tylenol, but decided against cigarettes. It hurt his side every time he took a shallow breath, so he would have to give up smoking for a few days whether he wanted to or not. He went past the 66 gas station on the next corner. Noseworthy's Guesthouse sign was on the following corner, as Mel Peoples had told him. The guesthouse was two blocks east, right next to an empty lot that had been used as a dump. The lot was littered with piles of bottles and tin cans and the burned-out wreck of an automobile. The twisted mass of metal was so black Hoke couldn't determine the make of the car.

The guesthouse, however, a two-story wooden structure with a sloping cedar-shingled roof, had been painted recently--a shiny off gray, with white trim on the windows. All the windows, upstairs and down, had slanting wooden Bahama blinds on the outside. The house would be dark inside, but the slotted blinds would make it cooler. The small front yard was covered with gravel instead of grass and was surrounded by a low rock wall about two feet high. Such walls were common in the Bahamas, where homeowners always marked their boundaries with rock walls, but they were rare in Florida. There were some hanging plants on the porch, and three wicker rockers painted a glaring white. The guesthouse sign,

NOSEWORTHY'S

GUESTHOUSE

(est. 1983)

in black lettering on a white board, had been tacked above the front door. The tipper half of the front door was glass but was curtained with white draperies, so Hoke couldn't see inside. A smaller sign beside the bell read "Ring and Enter." Hoke rang the bell and opened the door. There was a maple costumer and an elephant-foot umbrella stand in the foyer. Straight ahead, to the left of the stairs, were a table and a chair. There was a sign-in book and a silver bowl containing jelly beans on the table. The living room, on Hoke's right, was crowded with mid-Victorian chairs and spindly-legged walnut tables, short and tall, either beside or in front of each chair. There was a brick fireplace containing a large bowl of daisies and a tall glass-fronted bookcase beside it. The walls were covered with old and faded pink wallpaper and cluttered with watercolors, photos, mirrors, mounted birds and small animals. Beyond the living room, a step up, was the dining area--a bare buffet table against the wall. A long mirror on the wall behind the table reflected the living room and made the crowded interior appear larger. There was a swinging door with a beveled glass window that opened to the kitchen beyond the dining area.