Morales did not dignify this last with a response but vanished into the shadowed base of the fig. Paz leaned against the police car and lit a short, thick, black cigar. Occasional cracking sounds reached him from the tree, and frequent curses. The cigar was nearly done before he heard slithering sounds from the tree and a worn and filthy cloth suitcase plopped on the ground amid a small scatter of leaf, twig, and fruit. Shortly thereafter, Morales appeared, amid a larger scatter of the same. He was red-faced, sweating, scratched, disheveled, with his shirttails hanging out and his slacks stained with sap.
“What’s in the case?” asked Paz. “Dried businessman jerky?”
“No, a black suit, a pair of shoes, a hat, and a hammock. And I found these.” He removed a large evidence envelope from his back pocket. In it were three small empty Fritos bags.
“They might have prints.”
“I’m sure,” said Paz. “Among them mine and my daughter’s. But no Indian.”
“No, but he might come back. This is his base. I think we should stake it out.”
“Well, you’re the cop,” said Paz. “And Tito? I’m real glad he wasn’t there this time. Don’t try to take this guy yourself.”
“He’s just an Indian, Jimmy.”
“So was Geronimo. But he’s not just an Indian. And our professor is not just a professor.”
“Meaning what?”
“A little too cool. The guy was some kind of commando. He’s spent a lot of time in Colombia, too. I were you, I’d find out who he’s been calling recently.”
Morales gave him a look to see if he was kidding, saw that he wasn’t, shrugged, and went to his car to call in the latest news to his superiors.
First there was the taste in her mouth, pennies and puke, and then the pain, as if a thick spike covered with grit had been driven across her skull just behind her eyes. A hot spike. She tried to open her mouth to spit and found she could not. It had been taped, and when she tried to take the tape off, she learned that her arms and legs were similarly bound. It took some time for her eyes to register what they were seeing, for the light was dim and the shapes baffling: pipes, oblong objects, wires, hoses, a dim skylight above this tangle. A smell, too, familiar but hard to place-chemical, heavy, a cold sort of smell, and suddenly everything clicked into the gestalt: she was in the repair bay of a garage, looking up at the ceiling. She was taped to one of the hoists, her arms and legs tied to theX — shaped steel beams of the lifting platform, at about table height above the floor. And she was naked.
Heavy footsteps and men’s voices. A shape stepped between her spread legs and she heard a laugh and a cruel insinuating voice speaking in Spanish. A rough finger was thrust into her and she squirmed violently. Someone else spoke in angry tones and the man spat out what sounded like a retort, but he moved away. Then a round, pockmarked brown face appeared above her own, one she recognized with horror. The man who had shot Kevin peeled the tape from her mouth.
“You thirsty?” asked the killer.
“Yes.”
The man produced a plastic squeeze bottle and pushed its tube between her lips. Orange juice, cool and sweet. She sucked at it for what seemed a long time.
“Thank you,” she said, gasping.
The killer said, “Okay, listen, you in lots of trouble, now. You got to tell them everything, comprende? Everything about those Indios killing those people. I try to keep those guys off you, I don’t know, maybe I can’t do, you know? So you tell me before the boss come, ’cause he gonna mess with you, and then you tell him, but maybe you lose some pieces.”
He reached over to one of the tool tables and held up a short bolt cutter. “The boss gonna cut you with this, start with your toes, then he burn you with a torch so it don’t bleed. I seen him do it before. You don’ wanna fuck wit’ him, you know? So you tell me an’ you be all right, yes? Yes?”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He shook his head sadly. “No,chica, that’s not the way to go. You think about this, yes? Where those Indios stay, who sent them, who their boss is, that’s what you got to tell him, you don’ wanna get chopped up.”
Jenny started to cry, and Prudencio Rivera Martinez left her and went back to the garage office, where he found Santiago Iglesias fiddling with a snowy, staticky television set, and Dario Rascon watching.
“I can’t get this whore to work for shit,” said Iglesias.
“Forget it,” said Martinez. “We won’t be here that long. And, Rascon, I told you to keep your hands off that girl.”
Rascon shrugged and grinned. “I was just getting her warmed up.”
“The man said don’t touch her until he gets here. You want to explain playing with her to El Silencio when he told you not to, that’s fine with me.”
“What, you’re going to rat me out?”
“No, but once you get started on a girl, you don’t stop until she’s all messed up.”
Iglesias looked up from the TV. “Yeah, when El Silencio gets finished with her, then you can have her. You can keep her in the parts bin, in those little drawers.”
“Shut up, pendejo!” said Rascon. “I guarantee you she won’t last two cuts, she’ll be telling her whole life story.”
“If she knows,” said Iglesias. “But if not, the man’s going to have to take her apart to make sure she don’t.”
“She knows,” said Rascon confidently. “She was with that little merdita Prudencio shot, and he was with the Indio. She’ll spit the whole thing out. And then…” Rascon leaned back in his chair and massaged his genitals. “You can have her asshole when I’m finished, Iglesias. You like that the best anyway.”
Martinez heard his cell phone ring and he snapped off the television. It was a brief conversation, consisting mainly of affirmatives on his part. When it was over, he said, “That wasel jefe. We got a small problem. The cops raided the houses on Fisher Island and picked up all our people, including El Silencio. They got nothing on them, he says, they’re just fucking us around. He figures they’ll keep them for a day or two and let them go. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to sit tight here and watch the girl, and not go out for any reason.”
Rascon cursed vividly and Iglesias switched on the static again. “Then I better get this piece of shit to work,” he said.
Sixteen
Morales left, but Paz waited in the shade of the tree. After a while, a Florida Power and Light van rolled up and parked across the street. Two men in hard hats and harnesses emerged who, despite this apparatus, did not visibly engage themselves in improving the flow of electricity. Paz waved to them and was ignored. Perhaps they would fool a primitive native of the Orinoco, but he doubted it.
He smoked another cigar and wandered over to the water fountain near the school and drank from it. He hoped that no one called any other police; people nowadays so often did when they observed a grown man hanging around an elementary school. Thinking this, his mind moved to the general phenomenon of men behaving monstrously, and thence to the kidnapped girl, Jenny. Why had they taken her? For information, obviously, but he could not figure out what a girl described by Cooksey as somewhat dim could know that would inspire a bunch of Colombian drogeros to snatch her from a Miami street, committing a murder in the process. Unless she wasn’t that dim; unless Cooksey was lying about that and other things; unless there were connections between all these ongoing crimes that no one had thought of. In any case, the girl was gone, they’d torture the knowledge, if any, out of her and her broken corpse would go into the Glades or the bay. So convenient, Miami, for disposing of the illegally dead; sad about the girl, but only in principle. He didn’t know her and was no longer obliged to concern himself with such pathetic victims. He strolled back to the tree, noting the arrival of some school buses and a number of cars in the lot, good parents, eager to collect their offspring, Paz himself happy to be in their number for a change.
A growing din from the school building and the brightly colored mob of children burst forth. Some were
