The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  But he’d been revealed in the village and could never return.

  Decisions, Amili learned, must be made from the head and not the heart. The heart dealt with the moment. A decision had to be made for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, all the way to the horizon. It could seem harsh, but decisions made from a soft heart often went wrong. One always had to look at what decisions did for the tomorrows.

  Her hardest decision had come one month ago, when the smiling man drove into the village in a car as bright as silver, scattering dust and chickens. His belly was big and heavy and when he held it in his hands and shook it, he told of how much food there was in America. “Everywhere you look,” he told the astonished faces, “there is food.” The smiling mouth told shining tales about how much money could be made in Los Estados Unitos, how one brave person could lift a family from the dirt. He had spoken directly to Amili, holding her hands and looking into her eyes.

  “You have been learning English, Amili Zelaya. You speak it well. Why?”

  “I suppose I am good in school, Señor Tolandoro.”

  “I’ve heard. But there’s more, I think. Perhaps you yearn for another future, no?”

  “I have thought that … maybe in a few years. When my family can—”

  “Do it today, Amili. Start the flow of munificence to your family. Or do they not need money?”

  Amili was frightened of the US, of its distance and strange customs. The heart fighting the head, she knew, the heart wanting the known quantity of the village community, aching for the closeness of her loved ones.

  But her head saw the tomorrows and tomorrows and knew the only escape from barren lives came with money. Amili’s sister Pari was old enough to care for the children. Thinking how their lives would change when money started to arrive from America, Amili swallowed hard and told the smiling man she would make the trip.

  “I work six months to pay off the travel?”

  “You’ll still have much to send home, sweet Amili.”

  “How will I send money home if I am paying a debt?”

  “You can live with others just like you. To save money.”

  “What if I am unhappy there?”

  “Say the word and you’ll come back to your village.”

  “How many times does that happen?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone return.”

  Amili startled to a tremendous banging from above. After a distant scream of machines and the rattle of cables the container began to lift. The metal box seemed to sway in the wind and then drop. Another fierce slam from below as the module jolted violently to a standstill. Amili realized the container had been moved to a truck.

  “Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll be safe and we can—” Amili held her tongue as she heard dockworkers speaking English outside.

  “Is this the one, Joleo?”

  “Lock it down fast. We’ve got two minutes before Customs comes by this section.”

  “What if the man inside is wrong?”

  “He’s never wrong, Ivy. Move it!”

  Amili felt motion and heard the grinding of gears. She drifted into unconsciousness again, awakened by a shiver in the container. The movement had stopped.

  “Lucia?”

  Amili patted for her friend’s hand, squeezed it. The squeeze returned, even weaker now, almost imperceptible. “Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll have the aqua. And our freedom.”

  Amili heard voices from outside, gringo voices.

  “I hate this part, opening the shit-stinking containers. They ought to make the monkeys not eat for a couple days before they get packed up.”

  “Come on, Ivy. How about you work instead of complaining?”

  “I smell it from fifty feet away. Get ready to herd them to the boat.”

  Light poured into the box, so bright it stole Amili’s vision. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Okay, monkeys, welcome to the fuckin’ U S of— Jesus … The smell … I think I’m gonna puke. Come here, Joleo … something’s bad wrong.”

  “I smelled that in Iraq. It’s death. Call Orzibel. Tell him the shipment got spoiled. And ask what to do.”

  Amili tried to move her head from the floor but it weighed a thousand kilos. She put her effort into moving her hand, lifting …

  “I saw one move. Back in the corner. Go get it.”

  “It stinks to hell in there, Joleo. And I ain’t gonna walk over all those—”

  “Pull your shirt over your nose. Get it, dammit.”

  Amili felt hands pull her to her feet. She tried to turn back to Lucia.

  “Wait,” Amili mumbled. “Mi amiga Lucia está vive.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “Who cares? Get her out of there, pour water in her mouth and call Orzibel.”

  “Orzibel’s crazy. He’ll gut us.”

  “Christ, Ivy, it ain’t our fault. We just grab ’em off the dock.”

  “What will he do, you think? Orzibel?”

  “Orzibel will fucking call the big boss, Ivy … what do you think he’s gonna do?”

  “Whoever’s in charge better deal with this fast, is what I think.”

  Amili felt herself thrown atop someone’s shoulder. She grabbed at the body below, trying to make the man turn back and see that Lucia was still breathing. The effort was too much and the corners of the box began to spin like a top and Amili collapsed toward an enveloping darkness. Just before her senses spun away, ten final words registered in Amili’s fading mind.

  “Oh shit, Joleo, my feet just sunk into a body.”

  2

  One year later

  It seemed like my world had flipped over. Standing on the deck of my previous home on Alabama’s Dauphin Island, the dawn sun rose from the left. My new digs on Florida’s Upper Matecumbe Key faced north, the sun rising from the opposite direction. It would take some getting used to.

  On Dauphin Island the morning sun lit a rippled green sea broken only by faint outlines of gas rigs on the horizon. Here I looked out on three acres of half-moon cove ringed with white sand, the turquoise water punctuated by sandy hummocks and small, flat islands coated with greenery. Like most water surrounding the Keys, it was shallow. I could walk out a hundred yards before it reached my belly.

  Which seemed a pleasant way to greet the morning. I set my coffee cup on the deck rail and took the steps to the ground, walking two dozen feet of slatted boardwalk to the shoreline. There were no other houses near and if there had been I wouldn’t have seen them, the land around my rented home a subtropical explosion of wide-frond palms strung with vines, gnarly trees dense with leaves and all interspersed with towering stands of bamboo. It resembled a miniature Eden, complete with lime trees, lemons, mangoes and Barbados cherries. After a rain, the moist and scented air seemed like an intoxicant.

  At water’s edge I kicked off my moccasins and stepped into the Gulf, bathtub-warm in August. The sand felt delicious against my soles, conforming to my steps, familiar and assuring. I seemed to smell cigar smoke and scanned the dawn-brightening shoreline, spying only two cakewalking herons pecking for baitfish. Neither was puffing a cigar. I put my hands in the pockets of my cargo shorts and splashed through knee-deep water toward the reeded point marking one horn of the tiny crescent cove, revisiting the conversation that had led me so swiftly and surprisingly to Florida.

  “Hello, Carson? This is Roy McDermott. Last time we talked, I mentioned changes in the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. We’re creating a team of consulting specialists.”

  “Good for you, Roy.”

  “Why I’m calling, Carson … We want you on the team.”

  “I don’t have a speciality, Roy. I’m just a standard-issue detective.”

  “Really? How about that PSIT team you started … specializing in psychopaths and sociopaths and general melt-downs? And all them freaky goddamn cases you guys solved?”

  I smelled cigar smoke again. Looking to my right I saw a black man walking toward the shore with a stogie in his lips, five-
seven or thereabouts, slender, his face ovoid, with a strong, straight nose beneath heavy eyebrows. His mouth was wide, garnished with a pencil mustache, and suggested how Tupac Shakur would have looked in his mid-sixties, though I doubt Shakur would have gone for a pink guayabera shirt and lime-green shorts. A crisp straw fedora with bright red band floated on the man’s head and languid eyes studied me as if I were a novel form of waterfowl.

  “You the one just moved in that yonder house?” he asked.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “The realtor tell you two people got killed in there? That the place was owned by a drug dealer, a Nicaraguan with metal teeth?”

  The law allowed the confiscation of property employed in criminal enterprises and the place had indeed been the site of two killings, rivals to the drug dealer who had owned the house. The dealer went to prison and the house almost went on the market, but the FCLE was advised to hold it in anticipation of rising home values. And it wouldn’t hurt for time to lapse between the killings and the showings. When I told Roy I was thinking of looking at places in or near the Keys, he’d said, “Gotta great place you can crib while you’re looking, bud. Just don’t get too used to it.”

  I nodded at my impromptu morning companion. “I heard about the murders. Didn’t hear about the teeth.”

  “Like goddamn fangs. Heard one had a diamond set in it, but I never got close enough to check. Saw him twice at the Indigo Lounge. He come in, I left out. You buyin’ the place from the guv’mint? Nasty history, but the house ain’t bad – kinda small for the neighborhood – but a good, big chunk of land. As wild as it was when Poncy Deleon showed up.”

  The house itself – on ten-foot pilings to protect against storm surges – wasn’t overwhelming: single story, three bedrooms. But it had broad skylights and a vaulted ceiling in the main room, so it was bright and open. Outside features included decks on two sides, plus another small deck on the roof. Mr Cigar was right about the land: four untamed acres, like the house was in a tropical park. Plus the property abutted a wildlife sanctuary, eighty swampy acres of flora gone amok. I figured the dealer had picked the place for the wild buffer zone, privacy for all sorts of bad things.

  “Afraid I’m just renting,” I said. “It’s too pricy for me.”

  A raised eyebrow. “Kinda work you do, mister?”

  “In two weeks I start work for the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. I came from Mobile, where I was a cop, a homicide detective.”

  A moment of reflection behind the cigar. “So I guess we both made a living from dead bodies.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I used to own funeral parlors in Atlanta, started with one, ended up with six. Retired here last year when my wife passed away.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I like it here.”

  “I mean about your wife. Was she ill?”

  “Healthy as a damn horse. But she was twenny-five years younger’n me an’ only died cuz one a her boyfriends shot her.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I walked his way, splashing up to shore with my hand outstretched. “Guess we’ll be neighbors, then. At least for a while. Name’s Carson Ryder.”

  His palm was mortician-soft but his grip was hard. “Dubois B. Burnside.”

  “The B for Burghardt?” I asked, a shot in the dark. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American civil-rights leader, author, educator and about a dozen other things who lived from the late 1800s to the sixties. The intellectual influence of W.E.B. Du Bois was, and still is, felt widely.

  “That would be right,” he said, giving me a closer look.

  “You live close by, Mr Burnside?”

  He nodded at a line of black mangroves. “Other side of the trees. Daybreak used to find me heading to the mortuary to get working. Now I head out here and watch the water birds.” He took another draw, letting blue smoke dribble from pursed lips. “I like this better.”

  “Dubois!” bayed a woman’s voice from a distance, sending a half-dozen ravens fleeing from a nearby tree. “Du-bwaah! Where you at?”

  “Not your wife, I take it?” I said.

  “Duuuuuuuu-bwah!”

  My neighbor winced, shook his head, pulled low the brim of the hat and started to turn away. “Stop by for a drink some night, Mister Ryder. We can talk about dead bodies. I may even have one you can look at.”

  I splashed away, the sun now above the trees and sending shadows of my temporary home out into the water to guide me ashore. I slipped wet feet into my moccasins and jogged the boardwalk to the porch, moving faster when I heard the phone ringing from inside the house, immediately followed by my cell phone chirping from the deck.

  I got to the cell first, the ID showing my call was from Roy. I checked my watch, not quite 6.30.

  “Morning, Roy. You’re up early.”

  “Looks like we got a regular Sunshine State welcome for you, Carson. I’m looking at the weirdest damn thing I ever saw. Scariest, too. I know you don’t officially get on the clock for a couple weeks, but I’m pretty sure this can’t wait.”

  “What is it you’re looking at, Roy?”

  “No one truly knows. Procurement gave you a decent car, I expect?”

  “I signed some papers. Haven’t seen a car.”

  A sigh. “I’m gonna kick some bureaucratic ass. Whatever you’re driving, how about you pretend it’s the Batmobile and kick on the afterburners. Come help me make sense of what I’m seeing.”

  I hurled myself through the shower and pulled on a pair of khakis and a blue oxford shirt, stepping into desert boots and tossing on a blue blazer. My accessorizing was minimal, the Smith & Wesson Airweight in a clip-on holster. On my way out I grabbed a couple Clif Bars for sustenance and headed down the stairs.

  The elevated house was its own carport, room for a half-dozen vehicles underneath. My ancient gray pickup looked lonely on all that concrete. I’d bought it years ago, second-hand, the previous owner a science-fiction fan who’d had Darth Vader air-brushed on the hood. After a bit too much bourbon one night, I’d taken a roller and a can of marine-grade paint and painted everything a sedate, if patchy, gray.

  The grounds hadn’t been groomed since the dope dealer had ownership, overgrown brush and palmetto fronds grazing the doors as I snaked down the long crushed-shell drive to the electronic gate, eight feet of white steel grate between brick stanchions shaded by towering palms. I panicked until remembering I could open the gate with my phone and dialed the number provided by the realtor.

  Phoning a gate, I thought. Welcome to the Third Millennium.

  I aimed the truck toward the mainland, an hour away, cruised through Key Largo and across the big bridge to the mainland. My destination was nearby, a bit shy of Homestead. Roy had said to turn right at a sign saying FUTURE SITE OF PLANTATION POINT, A NEW ADVENTURE IN SHOPPING and head a quarter mile down a gravel road.

  “You can’t miss the place,” he’d added. “It’s the only circus tent in miles.”

  3

  It wasn’t a circus tent in the distance, but it was side-show size, bright white against scrubby land scarred by heavy equipment, three Cat ’dozers and a grader sitting idle beside a house-sized pile of uprooted trees. Plastic-ribboned stakes marked future roads and foundations as the early stages of a construction project.

  A Florida Highway Patrol cruiser was slanted across the road, a slab-shouldered trooper leaning on the trunk with arms crossed and black aviators tracking my approach. He snapped from the car like elastic, a hand up in the universal symbol for Halt.

  I rolled down my window with driver’s license in hand. “I’m Carson Ryder, here at the request of Captain Roy McDermott.”

  The eyes measured the gap between a top dog in the FCLE and a guy driving a battered pickup. He checked a clipboard and hid his surprise at finding my name.

  “Cap’n McDermott’s in the tent, Mr Ryder. Please park behind it.”

  I nodded thanks and pulled past. It felt strange that my only i
dentification was a driver’s license. I’d had my MPD gold for a decade, flashed it hundreds of times. I’d twice handed it in when suspended, twice had it returned. I’d once been holding it in my left hand while my right hand shot a man dead; his gamble, his loss. It felt strange and foreign to not produce my Mobile shield.

  You made the right decision, my head said. My heart still wasn’t sure.

  I pulled away from the concrete road and angled five hundred feet down a slender dirt road scraped through the brush, stopping behind the tent, one of those rental jobs used for weddings and whatnot, maybe sixty feet long and forty wide. I was happy to see a portable AC unit pumping air inside. On the far side of the tent, beside a tall mound of freshly dug dirt, were a half-dozen official-looking vehicles including a large black step van which I figured belonged to the Medical Examiner or Forensics department.

  On the other side of the van I saw three men and a woman clustered in conversation. Cops. Don’t ask how I knew, but I always did. A dozen feet away a younger guy was sitting atop a car hood looking bored. I wasn’t sure about him.

  The entrance was a plastic door with a handmade sign yelling ADMITTANCE BY CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY!!! the ONLY underscored twice. Though I hadn’t been cleared – whatever that meant – I’d been called, so I pressed through the door.

  It was cool inside and smelled of damp earth, the reason obvious. Centering the tented space was a pit about twenty feet by twenty. Above the pit, at the far end of the tent at ground level, were several folding tables. A woman in a lab coat was labeling bags atop two of the tables. Another table held a small microscope and centrifuge. I’d seen this before, an on-site forensics processing center.

  I returned my attention to the pit, which resembled the excavation for an in-ground swimming pool. Centering the hole was an eight-foot-tall column with two lab-jacketed workers ticking on its surface with hammers. I estimated the column’s diameter at five feet and watched as a chipped-off shard was dropped into an evidence bag by a lab coat. When the lab coat stepped away, a photographer jumped in. The scene reminded me of a movie where scientists examine a mysterious object from the heavens. Shortly thereafter, of course, the object begins to glow and hum and everyone gets zapped by death beams.