The Book of Lies

“I’m trying, it’s just— I can’t . . .” he blurts, clearly upset as he lets go, and I take over. The computer said he’s fifty-two years old. At this moment, the way he looks away and scratches his beard . . . he looks north of sixty.

With both hands gripping the handle, I wedge one foot against the wall, lean backward, and pull down as hard as I can. The wood is cheap, but it barely gives.

I reset my foot and pull harder. The siren howls toward us.

Krrrk.

The wood gives way and there’s a loud snap, sending me falling backward. As I crash on my ass, two screws tumble and ping along the metal floor, freeing the bottom right corner of the wall.

“Now here!” my dad blurts, pointing to the next set of screws on the far right side of the wall. They’re at waist height and, with the makeshift crowbar, easy to get at, but all I’m focused on is the unnerving excitement in my dad’s voice.

“C’mon, Cal—we got it!” he says as I put my weight into it and another hunk of wood is pulled away from the screws. Years ago during my father’s trial, his lawyer argued that the true cause of my mother’s death was her mental instability—he said she had an alter ego, like a second face: one that was good, one that was evil. Naturally, the prosecutor pounced on it, saying my dad was the one with the alter ego: Lloyd the Saintly Defendant and Lloyd the Reckless Killer.

Three minutes ago, my dad was winded and hobbling. Suddenly, he’s gripping the right side of the thin wooden wall, prying and bending it open and thrilled to find his treasure. One man. Two faces.

“This is it! Grab it here!” he says, tugging the right side of the thin wall, which has now lost enough screws that the harder we pull, the more it curves toward us. I try to see what’s behind it—some kind of box with its long side running against the true back wall—but with the shadow of the wood, it’s too dark to see. “Keep pulling!” my father says, still cheerleading as the wood finally begins to crack. “Uno . . . dos . . .”

With a final awkward semi-karate move, my father kicks the wood panel, which snaps on impact and sends us both stumbling back. As the last splinters of particleboard somersault through the morning sun, we both stare at what my dad was really transporting—the true object of Ellis’s desire.

That’s not just a box.

It’s a coffin.

21

It’s a casket,” my father stutters.

“I know what it is. Is it—? Is someone in it?”

He doesn’t move, still staring at the dark wood box as another siren begins to scream in the distance. It’s only a matter of time till one’s headed here.

In front of us, it’s definitely a coffin, though it’s oddly rounded at the edges. Along the top, yellow and white papers are pasted randomly in place, while a thin band of copper piping runs along the bottom. To be honest, I thought my dad was bullshitting when he said he didn’t know what was in the truck, but from the confusion on his face, this is news to him.

“Help me get it out,” my dad says, rushing forward and grabbing one of the wooden handles at the head of the casket. “Yuuuh!” he yells, leaping back and frantically wiping his hand on his pants.

“What? Something’s on there?”

He holds up his open palm, which is dotted with small black flecks of dirt. Fresh soil. I look back at the coffin. Most of it’s wiped clean, but you can still see chunks of soil caked in the edges of the trim.

“Someone dug this out of the ground,” I say.

“Before Panama, the sheet said it was in Hong Kong,” my dad says. “Do they have rounded coffins there?”

“You think there’s a body inside?”

There’s a loud chirp as my phone shrieks through the warehouse. It’s nearly ten a.m. and we still haven’t slept. Caller ID tells me who it is. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t pick up.

“Cal here,” I answer.

“Good time, bad time?” a fast-talking man with a deep baritone asks through my cell as yet another siren yet again gets louder.

I watch my father wrap a page of old newspaper around the pull bar on the coffin, which is only half sticking out through the hole in the fake wall. My dad tugs hard, but he can’t do it alone. Pinching the phone with my shoulder, I race next to him, grip the other pull bar along the side, and pull as hard as I can.

“No . . . ruhhhh . . . perfect time,” I say into the phone, feeling every hour of my exhaustion.

No surprise, Benny laughs.

Two years ago, Benny Ocala came tearing out of the local Seminole Indian reservation, searching for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandfather, who had wandered, literally, off the reservation. Roosevelt and I found the old man in a Pembroke Pines front yard, sitting in a kiddie pool with his socks on. Today, Benny’s the Seminole tribe’s very own chief of police. His own sovereign nation. Which explains why, when I left the hospital earlier tonight, I drove the extra six miles to give Benny the bullet that the doctor pulled outta my dad.

“Please tell me you were able to trace it,” I say with another tug. The casket rolls to the right, shedding bits of dirt along the floor as we angle it through the open hole.

“We’re Indians, Cal. My ancestors traced deer farts.”

I’m tempted to point out he went to Tulane and drives a Camry, but I’m far too focused on the yellow and white papers pasted to the coffin. I can’t read the writing—it’s either Chinese or Japanese—but there’s no mistaking the small crosses at the bottom of each page. Across the top of one of the pages it says, in English, “Ecclesiastes.” These are Bible pages. Is that what Ellis meant by a book?

“This is a bad one, isn’t it?” Benny asks, suddenly serious.

I stand up straight, letting go of the coffin. “What’d the trace say?” I ask.

“That’s the thing, Cal—bullets aren’t like fingerprints. If I only have the bullet, unless it’s a rare gun, which’ll leave signature grooves on th—”

“Benny, I hate CSI. I don’t wanna learn.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t wanna call up that woman with the fangy teeth who runs the computer room at the Broward Sheriff’s Office, and then pretend to flirt with her just so she’ll do me a favor and run a bullet through the ATF database and their experts there.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“Can’t help it—I’m a sucker for a girl with a snaggletooth,” Benny teases as my dad continues his tug-of-war with the coffin. “The point is,” he adds, “your bullet was fired by a rare gun. Really rare: a Walther from 1930. Apparently, it was made as a prototype for the military—Russian army in this case—then discarded. Only something like twenty ever existed.”

He stops for a moment.

“Benny, why’re you giving me the dramatic pause?”

“It’s just odd, Cal. Guns like this—they don’t show up a lot. Out of the grillions of guns out there, well . . . that gun’s only been used once—one time—apparently during some unsolved murder in Cleveland, Ohio.”

Cleveland. That was the area code from my dad’s phone call. I look at my father, who’s now shimmying the coffin back and forth, trying to angle it through the open hole. As I pace through the empty container, he gives it one final pull, which frees the casket from its hiding spot.

“When was the murder in Cleveland?” I ask.

“Now you’re seeing the problem, Cal. The last time we know that gun was fired was back in 1932,” Benny explains. “In fact, if this is right, it’s the same gun that killed some guy named Mitchell Siegel.”

“Who’s Mitchell Siegel?”

My dad turns to me as I say the name, but not for long. He turns back to the coffin and starts circling it, trying to figure out how to get it open.

“You didn’t look him up?” I ask.