Forever.
Sorrowfully, by dawn’s first light, I study my visitor, who still slumbers in the small living room, her hair spread across the pillow, hair as red as fire.
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey!”
The woman can sleep anywhere, at any time: in small planes, speeding boats, during deadly riots, revolutions, political coups, killer storms, and behind enemy lines. Yet she always captures the big one, the heart-stopping moment, the football at the fingertips, the front-page picture. Nobody is better at being in the right place at the right time.
“Hey!” I said again. A toenail painted with hot pink polish protruded from beneath the sheet. I nudged it and Lottie Dane, the best photographer I ever worked with, the best friend I ever had, stirred, stretched, and yawned awake, alert, comfortable, and at home, as always, wherever she happened to be.
An hour later, we were trudging across white sand carrying surfboards. Her unannounced arrival the night before hadn’t totally surprised me.
Good reporters—and photographers—can track down just about anybody. What did surprise me about Lottie’s arrival was how happy I was to see her. Fearless and dedicated, funny and full of life, she is more outgoing than I, with a Texas twang in her molasses-smooth voice and a readier laugh.
Unlike me, she had slept soundly and radiated energy. Born in Gun Barrel, Texas, she had learned to surf in the rough waters off Galveston.
Where I grew up, surfing off Miami Beach was sporadic and dependent on rare inclement weather. This out island’s towering surf and splendid isolation were its chief attractions.
Lottie, a sturdy and statuesque five-eight, looked like a tomboy in her blue two-piece L. L. Bean bathing suit, her freckled nose smeared with sunblock, her frizzy red hair as wild and unmanageable as ever.
“Not bad.” She surveyed the pristine, almost empty beach. “Surf’s up.”
Fishing boats dotted a blue-green sea. The vessel I had seen anchored offshore in the dark must have sailed at daybreak. It was no longer even a speck on the horizon.
“I could stay here forever,” I said fervently.
“Paradise,” she agreed.
“Well, there is one weird local,” I said. “He roams the sand dunes at night stark naked, posing like a statue on the highest one. I guess he’s playing king of the mountain.”
“Is he hot?”
“More hairy Sasquatch than hot. Maybe that’s why he thinks he doesn’t need clothes. Seems harmless enough. The locals act like he’s part of the scenery. Nobody complains.”
“Let me know if you see ’im,” she said. “Shouldn’t have left my camera at the cottage.”
We had reached the special place where the waves barreled in out of deep water. Mostly I watched her, as she paddled furiously to catch them as they hit the reef. Hitting that shallow shelf was like a free fall into a trough, the energy converting tons of water into a powerful bottom turn. I watched a wave sweep over her and then collapse, pasting her to the bottom turbulence. She fell, opened her eyes, and swam down beneath the power. Free and exhilarated, she rode one steep makeable wave after another. That was the part I’d always loved, with no time to think of anything but the waves and the primitive high brought by riding them.
“How’d you find this spot?” Lottie panted, as she paused for breath knee deep in the surf.
“Met a surfer rat from Daytona. Came here to surf four or five years ago and forgot to go home. He stays at the other end of the beach. This is one of his secret spots.”
She rolled her eyes. “A guy, huh?”
“For Pete’s sake, Lottie. He showed me some surfing tips and shared this spot with me. That’s all.”
“Too bad,” she murmured sympathetically, then asked again, “Is he hot?”
I sighed. “Why are you always thinking about sex and romance? There’s a time and a place for everything. This isn’t it. Not for me.”
Lottie has been divorced for years, with no children. But she yearns for family, and hope springs eternal in her heart.
“I just hoped maybe that was why you forgot to come home.”
Later, we sat on the white sand in the shade of coconut palms to unwrap the fruit and sandwiches we’d brought. “What bums me,” I said, “is that I still don’t get it. I’ve always been intuitive, like my Aunt Odalys, the one who practices Santería. She can sense bad things before they happen. You and I know more than anybody how life can spin out of control in a heartbeat. We go to work every day hoping for the best but expecting the worst, and we’re usually right. But, damn, McDonald’s death totally blindsided me. Sucker-punched when I least expected it. Not a clue, no warning, not even a whisper from that little voice we all have in our heads.”
“Only natural,” she said flatly. “You were on a high, in love, returning from a romantic vacation, sporting a new engagement ring. Who’da thought?”
“I wrote about sudden death and tragedy every day,” I said. “I’d work weekends and holidays because there was more action then: Christmas Day tragedies, Fourth of July shootings. Remember the dad shot to death at his surprise birthday party? I would comfort the survivors. I believed I knew how they felt. I didn’t. But I do now.
“I didn’t expect to live in a world without M in it. I keep feeling nostalgic for times that never happened: the honeymoon we didn’t have, our first Christmas tree, becoming parents. All the days and nights, weekends, and holidays as we grew old together. The wedding that never was. You were going to catch the bouquet, you know.”
“Damn straight,” she said. “No matter who I had to wrestle to the ground.” She shoved her wet hair out of her eyes and turned to me, her expression serious. “The newsroom sure isn’t the same without you, Britt. You can run, but you can’t hide forever. Speakin’ of forever”—she leaned back against the trunk of a coconut palm, relaxing with a contented sigh—“you can almost see it from here. Wish I hadn’t left my camera back at your place. Would’ve liked to make a picture of that little wipeout of yours. It’d look good on the bulletin board in the newsroom.”
The photo ops here were endless.
“I could make some pictures for a travel piece,” she mused lazily. “But you know what would happen.”
“Right. The world would beat a path and ruin all this. Same thing that happens when a food critic writes a rave about your favorite restaurant. The paper hits the street, readers mob the place, and regulars can’t get a table. The quality of the food and service drop because the staff is overworked. Prices soar because the owner has to hire more help. And it’s never the same.”
She nodded, nibbling on her sandwich and basking in the warm sun. “A travel piece would turn this stretch of sand into wall-to-wall beach blanket Bingo.”
“Littered with beer cans, broken glass, and used condoms.”
“Damn right. Paris Hilton would show up. That’s a sure sign. Cruise ships would make it a stop on their itinerary. They’d dump their garbage offshore, screw up the reef, and kill all the sea life. Developers would be right behind them, building luxury high-rises and resort hotels you and I couldn’t afford, right down to the waterline.”
She stood, stretched, and brushed the sand off her long legs.
“God bless the power of the press.”
We surveyed our surroundings, more aware than ever of their fragile beauty and grateful for our good luck at being there.
“Damn, still wish I had my camera.”
“Me too.”
At low tide, the reef was too exposed to surf, so we strolled the sand watching for sea life as we collected gleaming lettered olive shells, swirling Scotch bonnets, and angel wings. Then I spotted something awash in the shallows, propelled by the tide into a coral pocket on the reef.
A gift from the sea, but it wasn’t aquatic.
My glad cry startled gulls into flight as I splashed through ankle-deep water to snatch up my find.
“Can you believe this?” I waved it in the air. “What did we just wish for?”
“The good Lord always provides,” she said, eyes piously raised to the cerulean sky.
The camera was waterproof, preloaded, and disposable. We scanned the beach. Not a soul in sight.
“They say to be careful what you wish for, you might get it,” I said. “I wonder who lost it.”
An unexpected breeze suddenly whipped across the water, and I felt a chill.
“No telling. Lemme see that.” She checked the camera and grinned gleefully. “Don’t look much the worse for wear,” she said. “No damage. Twenty-seven shots, twenty-four exposed. We’ve got us three pictures to play with.”
“Maybe we’ll know who lost it when we see the film.”
Thunderclouds began to tumble across the horizon, and the sea beyond the reef turned dark.
Traffic was deadlier, city officials sleazier, and the scandals hotter than ever.
Lottie filled me in on the hometown news that evening, without my asking, as we dined beneath the thatched roof of an open-air restaurant on fish caught that day.
Another Miami city commissioner had been arrested, this one for brawling with police at the airport. A thief dubbed the Human Fly was bedeviling the cops and the Chamber of Commerce, climbing tall buildings, scaling balconies, and stealing from the sky-high apartments of the rich and famous, who were now poorer and furious. Community leaders, for reasons known only to them and to the devil, had launched long-term construction projects that simultaneously blocked all of Miami and Miami Beach’s traffic-clogged north-south arteries.
“We’re damn close to permanent gridlock,” she said. “Just wait till the next big hurricane boils up and they order everybody to evacuate.”
“SOS,” I said breezily. Same old shit.
She shook her head. “Britt. In Miami, it’s always crazy new shit. We went from a major drought, with wildfires charring half the state, to flash-flood warnings without a breath between. Ain’t no normal anymore, not even for a day. Alligators are slithering out of the swamps and attacking people; the drought fried their environment. Now it’s mating season and they’re on the prowl. Gators killed three women in a week. One woman was scuba diving, another was drugged outa her mind, sitting on the edge of a canal dangling her tootsies in the gator’s habitat. They found the arms of the first girl in a big gator’s belly, but not until they’d captured and cut open every poor swamp critter they could find. Somebody had shot that last one with a BB gun, blinded ’im in one eye. He musta had trouble hunting. Now it’s open season and every shit kicker with a gun is hunting down gators and killing ’em, poor things.”
The drought ended suddenly, she said, when a gigantic thunderstorm dropped more rain in three hours than there’d been in three months. Lightning and gale-force winds toppled trees onto cars. Screened-in patios got torn out again, and thousands of families in Miami-Dade and Broward counties lost power. There were flash floods and more destruction to houses and apartment buildings still protected only by blue tarps after last hurricane season’s roof damage.
“They had to open Red Cross shelters for a thunderstorm, for God’s sake, two months before hurricane season,” she said.
Traffic fatalities had become nightmarish, outnumbering murders, which themselves had doubled since last year.
“’Member, you grew up there. Never was like this before. Even when I first got to Miami, there’d be maybe one spectacular major wreck, like a giant exploding tanker truck, every two weeks or so. Now it’s every rush hour. Just before I left, there were two major unrelated tanker-truck crashes in less than an hour, ten miles apart. Same ol’ story: fishtail, jackknife, topple over. Nine thousand gallons of gasoline splashing across the Golden Glades interchange at the height of rush hour. At least neither of those killed a whole carload of tourists like the one the day before.
“That happened the day after workers drilling a fence posthole ruptured a natural-gas line on Collins Avenue. Buildings were evacuated. People panicked. Businesses closed. Total gridlock for four hours. Some drivers abandoned their cars and ran. Wasn’t pretty, I can tell you. No wonder Florida has three times the national average of mental illness.” She daintily sipped her drink while I gazed dreamily at the red-violet sunset, watched the palms sway, and wished the waves could carry my worries out to sea.
The long-planned $450 million Center for the Performing Arts had actually opened. “Downtown’s still a mess,” she said. “Sidewalks all tore up. Small businesses going bankrupt. Latest tally on the Center’s cost overrun is another $102 mil, and of course they never did plan for parking.”
The project had been on the drawing board for three decades or so. I was surprised it had actually opened. “I thought it would be like that church in Sweden,” I said.
Lottie blinked and cocked her head curiously.
“They broke ground in 1260, in Uppsala, Sweden. None of their children or grandchildren lived to see it finished—a hundred and seventy-five years later in 1435.”
Lottie wrinkled her nose and scratched her sunburned shoulder, bright red despite all the sunscreen. “Where do you find all those obscure stories that never fit into newspapers or cocktail party conversations?”
“I read a lot,” I said testily.
“I’m not criticizing. It’s part of your girlish charm.” She ordered another rum drink and continued bringing me up to speed.
“More construction workers are getting killed on the job than all the cops, firemen, cabdrivers, and convenience-store clerks put together. Three men drowned in tons of hot quick-drying cement, buried alive at a luxury high-rise oceanfront site. They were pouring concrete on the roof when a frame broke. It buried the workers on the floor below and hardened before anybody could pull ’em out.”
I hate when people go to work in the morning and never come home. It’s always painful to write about a man or a woman who meets a violent sudden end only because he or she is at work—which, at that moment, is the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s lousy to die trying to earn an honest living and care for your family.
“Who were they?”
“Two Haitians and a Mexican,” she said. “Came to join the boom, find their piece of the dream, and feed their folks back home. The apartment prices on that condo project start at a million five. They died building a place they could never live in, or even be welcome at, except maybe as busboys in its rooftop restaurant.”
“They’d have lived longer busing tables,” I said.
“Except as busboys they’d have no place to live, ’cause all the affordable housing is being torn down or converted to pricey condos…. We’re living in interesting times, Britt. I feel like a character in a horror flick. Floods, fires, monsters crawling out of the swamp and eating people alive, big machines crashing, burning, and exploding, men buried in quick-drying cement. But it’s no movie. It’s real life.”
Our conversation seemed surreal in this serene setting beneath a crescent moon.
“And you suggest I go back there? Why?”
“’Cause it’s a great news town, Britt, and you’re a news junkie, just like me. Reporting is what you do best. You and Miami are made for each other.”
I knew she was right. “How are things at the word factory?” I finally asked.
“Worse since the anthrax scare.” She sighed. “Our incoming mail is all diverted to an off-site mail room, where it’s opened by an eighty-year-old man hired by security.”
“Why him?” I wondered aloud. “Is he considered expendable? Is he an old snoop who loves reading other people’s mail, or is he a wild and crazy octogenarian who lives and breathes for danger?” I wistfully recalled the letters that arrived daily at my desk, penned by wackos, gadflies, indignant readers, eager tipsters, jailed felons, and the guy with the foot fetish.
“Maybe he works cheap.” She shrugged. “All I know is that he wears gloves and a surgical mask and is shaky with the scissors. It’s hell, Britt. The mail arrives in pieces with crucial parts missing or mixed up with bits of somebody’s else lett
er. Reading it is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle. Everybody’s complaining.”
But she had good news too.
The Heat won the championship and thousands of crazed Miamians descended on downtown. Confetti cannons blasted. Fans partied hard. They did not attack one another or the cops. Nobody got hurt or went to jail. Hard to imagine.
And the news about our friend Ryan Battle, the feature writer who labors at the desk behind mine, was excellent. His leukemia was still in remission.
“’Member Nell Hunter, that new reporter, the cute little one from Long Island?”
“The blonde?”
“That’s her. Broke Ryan’s heart.”
“Not again,” I lamented.
“No sweat, he bounced back,” she said. “Now he’s hot for an intern, purty little thing from Kansas City. Saw them canoodling at the Eighteen Hundred Club the other night.
“Nell may be cute as a button, but she’s a certified bitch. Wrote a story that burned Sam Stone, the Cold Case Squad detective. Included all kinds of personal stuff about his dead parents and ambushed his elderly grandmother. I felt bad for ’im. He was real upset. No surprise there. The desk sent Nell out to cover a story on your beat a couple weeks ago.”
“Oh?” I didn’t think I’d care, so the hot surge of resentment surprised me. “How’d she do?”
Lottie shook her head. “Not too well. The first Miami cop she met asked, ‘Where’s Britt?’ Nell didn’t take that kindly. Then she meets the Cold Case sergeant, Craig Burch. As he’s answering her questions, he calls ’er Hon.
“‘I am not your honey,’ she says, and blasts him in front of his detectives.”
“Is she crazy?”
“Appears to be,” Lottie said. “Burch is good people. Most likely he said it ’cause he couldn’t remember her name. She sure showed her ass. They showed her the door. So she beefed to their lieutenant.” She paused for effect.
“She went to K. C. Riley?”
Love Kills Page 2
