by Layton Green
Fred waved a hand. “She’s shallow hot, like a one-night stand with a model. Overtown’s on the other side of those buildings.”
“Since when do you complain about one-night stands?”
Fred rubbed at his wedding ring, out of habit. “I may hit it, but I’d never see a girl twice who can’t speak English or follow a single damn law.”
“You’re the most racist Latino I’ve ever known.”
“The term would be self-loathing, which I’m not. Why do you think half the product in the country flows through this city? Because everyone turns up a palm and looks the other way. You want to talk racist, talk to the Cubans. Being Mexican in this town is like being a third-class citizen. Anyway, look at these rundown strip malls and barefoot mothers. Miami’s like any banana republic, a pair of perky silicone titties surrounded by a cancer-ridden body.”
Fred chewed on a toothpick and kept marveling at the dichotomies of wealth. Seven- and eight-figure mansions on the right overlooking the water, cheap pastel motels on the left, flat sprawling ghettos extending to the horizon behind them.
They passed Little Haiti, which Fred considered to be the eighth circle of Hell. A few minutes later they turned onto an unmarked side street with low-hanging wires, entering a no-man’s-land between Little Haiti and El Portal. They cruised by a trailer park that looked more like an internment camp, dozens of dilapidated single-wides arranged in a tight square and enclosed within a chainlink fence, hard-eyed shirtless men sitting on stoops, trash littering the grounds, naked children dashing between the trailers, the sun wringing every last drop of life out of the shadeless compound.
Fred grimaced. A few more months, he told himself, and my dues are paid. Maybe I will think twice before I shoot another playground-stalking meth dealer in the head.
Nah, probably not.
A few blocks later they reached their destination, an empty field comprised of weeds and gravel. A few emaciated palms and banyans dotted the periphery. Officers and lab techs were gathered in the center of the field, hovering over the crime scene.
They parked next to the squad cars. When Fred opened the door, the humidity whisked his breath away. He swatted at the mosquitoes and gnats and tramped across the field, already catching a whiff of decomposition. The sun pulsated overhead, sapping his energy, the morning shower a distant memory.
If I wanted to tramp through a goddamn rain forest, I’d go live in Borneo.
It was a bloodbath. Four bodies were sprawled a few feet apart, but blood had spattered in a much wider swath, coagulating out to a thirty-foot radius. Even stranger, there was some sort of pot in the center of the bodies, a round iron container with splayed legs.
One of the cops, a tall and bronzed Cuban, turned to Fred. “DEA?”
“Yeah. What is this, a cooking show gone bad? What the hell’s that iron pot doing here?”
The cop didn’t smile. “Look inside.”
Fred stepped to the container. The rest of the entourage stopped talking and watched him. He peered inside, then had to force himself not to jerk away. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, crossing himself.
The pot was full of dirt, sticks, leaves, a few unidentifiable objects, and bones. Lots of bones. They poked out of the debris at all angles, a dozen or more, one of them a half-buried human skull.
Fred turned to Anthony, who was peering over his shoulder. “You said a bag of bones. I was picturing a Ziploc from forensics, not a . . . cauldron.”
“I might have mistranslated,” Anthony muttered.
“What’s with all this blood?” Fred asked, to no one in particular.
One of the forensics approached, a petite blond woman with alabaster skin. Fred got an immediate vibe of competency from her. “Most of the blood on the ground is avian.”
“What, like animal sacrifices? Classy.” Fred stood and folded his arms, sweeping his gaze across the small gathering. “So who wants to tell me what the hell’s going on here? Some kind of gang initiation? Is Lord Voldemort dealing drugs now? What kind of ice we talking? Whose territory is this?”
The tall cop, whose badge read Jimenez, answered. “It’s a bit of a free-for-all up here. Maybe Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican. The vic closest to the, um, cauldron is Frankie García, a known dealer. And not an insignificant one.”
“He is now.”
“Is he Cuban?” Anthony asked.
“His name’s García, in Miami,” Fred snapped. “Send what you’ve got on him to my office. We have any idea what happened?”
Jimenez gazed over the crime scene. “Not yet. Someone called it in at first light. It looked like this when we arrived.”
“And the witness?”
The cop gave a bitter laugh. “If you want to call her that. Dumb puta wandered over here, high as a kite, wanted a hundred bucks to talk. Probably didn’t see a thing.”
“Nah,” Fred said, “she saw something, or she wouldn’t risk talking to us. I’ll talk to her.” He turned to the blond forensics woman. “Looks like Frankie got his throat slit, what’s the cause of death on the others? I don’t see any gunshot wounds. Surely these guys were packing?”
She flicked a bead of sweat off the pointed tip of her nose, then walked him to a foldout evidence table near the vans. Four guns in baggies lay on top of the table.
“Two of them were fired, two weren’t,” she said. “We haven’t found the bullets yet.”
Fred took a closer look at the bodies, noticing each had blood-caked indentations on the sides or backs of their heads. “What’re those?”
“Those,” the woman said, holding up a plastic bag filled with three spherical stones about an inch in diameter, “were made by these.”
Fred said nothing, looking from the stones back to the woman. She looked him in the eye. “My best guess is a slingshot.”
Fred laughed. “You don’t need DEA, you need Steven Spielberg. Lady, I’ve seen trunks full of severed heads, cocaine stuffed inside frozen shark carcasses, underground drug tunnels with escalators and air conditioning, and more insane, depressing shit than Mother Teresa could imagine. But I gotta say, I’ve never seen a drug dealer’s crew killed by a slingshot next to a bucket full of bones.” He waved a hand. “Let me know what the autopsy shows, who wanted this guy rubbed. Only rival cartels hit drug dealers.”
Fred opened a bottle of water and took a sip. His powerful wrestler’s body was layered by a slab of middle-aged fat, now dripping sweat. His hometown of Lawrenceville, Georgia wasn’t exactly the French Riviera, but it was nothing like this. “Anything else?” he asked.
No one answered.
“Then let’s see this witness.”
A short, middle-aged Latina with rheumy eyes waited in the back of one of the cop cars. Her pockmarked skin and hollowed-out cheekbones betrayed her hobby of choice.
Fred slid into one side of the back seat, Anthony the other. Fred sighed in pleasure from the air conditioning. “Where’re you from?”
The witness couldn’t keep her hands still, and her head kept jerking forward, like a human penguin. “Nicaragua. Ya les dijo que—”
“Speak English.”
She looked Fred over, confused. “Why?”
“Because my gringo partner speaks cocktail Spanish he learned in community college, not Nica crack-whore ghetto Spanish, and he won’t understand a word you’re saying. So where’re your kids?”
“What?”
Fred talked slowly so the woman could understand him. “People cross the border at your age for their kids. Let me guess, you went through hell and back to get across the border, then found yourself in a safe house in some no-name town, got raped and hooked on drugs, you couldn’t get a job, and now you can’t think about anything but that high, including your kids. I was just curious if they’re still in Mexico or in the States, whether I should call them for you.”
She licked her lips and looked as if she might vomit, and then her whole body started trembling violently. “What you want?”
“Just what
happened here.”
Her mouth started moving back and forth, as if she were chewing with her mouth closed. “What you got for me? Like I told them, I got some information for sale.”
Fred brayed and slapped his knee. “I know you’re desperate, but you haven’t been to prison yet, have you? If you had, you’d never have risked sticking around to talk to us. You know how it feels as if there’s insects crawling under your skin when you don’t have a hit? Probably like it is right now? And how it gets worse, until your skin’s on fire and your brain feels like it’s gonna pop right out of your skull? Imagine that times one thousand, in a jail cell, with no hope of relief. You’ll suffer like the saints never did. What I have for you is that I’ll open this door and let you out of this car so you can go back to your whoring and panhandling until you get enough money to see your dealer. If I’m in a good mood, maybe a pair of doubles.”
Fred saw Anthony’s eyes slide away. “Now,” Fred said, “what’d you see last night?”
She started plucking at her forearms, her movements exaggerated. “I no afford the bus anoche and I find this field. I sleeping under the big palma when I hear people. I see’a four men carry in that big pot and dos chickens, and I know is brujería—”
“Witchcraft,” Fred said to Anthony. “The Cubans are into all kinds of crazy shit. Do you know what it was?” he said to the woman. “Santeria?”
“I no mess with that, you know? I Catholic.”
“Yeah, I can tell. So what happened? They killed the chickens, did some chanting and dancing?”
“I no see much, they kill the chickens and stand next to the pot and put things in it. Then three of them, they die.”
“Come again?”
“I hear something like’a . . .” She looked at a loss for words, then brought her hands together in a sharp clap. Anthony jumped.
The witness grinned, showcasing rotting teeth. “One man falls over, he no scream or nothing. The other three no move for a momentico and then they have their guns. Then another,” she clapped again, “and another dead man.” Again she struck her hands together, grinning, enjoying the game.
“Three men down, just like that?”
“Sí.”
“Then what?”
She leaned her head back against the seat and started cackling. “Then I went loco.”
Fred snapped his fingers in her face. “Stay with me.”
“The last man, he walk around that pot and I hear him saying words very fast, like he praying. I no understand the words, it was no Spanish. He has a gun and he wave it in the dark. There is one more”—she clapped a fourth time—“and he make a yell and drop the gun like something hit him in the hand. Then there is a blue woman right next to him and he looks at her and scream and says ‘Los muertos!’”
“As in, the dead?” Fred asked. “What are you talking about?”
“I tell you I crazy.”
“A blue woman?” Fred pressed. “I thought you said it was dark.”
“The last man, he have a light. He point it at her.”
“And all you know is that she was blue. Oh, and dead.”
“She look alive to me, he say she dead.”
“Was she a gringa, a Latina, a Russian?”
“Indígena.”
“An Indian? A blue Indian.”
She cackled. “Sí.”
Anthony laughed, and Fred grimaced. He didn’t think she was lying. He just thought she had been bombed out of her mind and didn’t know a blue Indian from Bill Clinton.
“And this blue Indian,” Fred said, “what’d she do?”
She grinned a final time, tracing a finger across the base of her neck. “She kill him with her knife.”
MIAMI BEACH
The door opened and Nya stood in front of him, her caramel skin glowing in the afternoon light streaming in from the balcony. Her hair was scattered and lovely, her lithe body thinner than when Grey had last seen her.
She hesitated for a moment, cool and reserved as ever, then came to him and buried her face in his shoulder. He felt her sobs but never heard them, and when she lifted her head the only evidence of her grief was the redness of her mascara-free eyes.
She held him at arm’s length. “Thank you for coming. Do you mind to wait on the balcony? I’ve a call to make, and then I’ll join you. There’s tea by the counter and beer in the fridge.”
He took the beer and moved to the balcony, a rectangle of white with a view of Miami Beach. A steady ocean breeze ruffled his dark hair and popped the sleeves of his black linen shirt.
At least she had touched him. When he’d last seen her, standing in her garden in Harare and unable to deal with the demons inside him, she couldn’t even hug him good-bye.
They had met when Grey was a diplomatic security officer posted in Harare, on a case involving the disappearance of an American diplomat. Grey was the lead investigator, Viktor the expert on African religion, and Nya was their local liaison, an agent with the Zimbabwean Ministry of Defense. However controlled, Grey’s capacity for violence had become for Nya a reminder of her torture at the hands of the sadistic priest they had faced. She had been scarred beyond imagining, inside and out.
She knew who Grey was—it had brought them together, the anger and darkness inside them both and their struggle against it—but in the end it pulled them apart.
He understood.
He abhorred it himself.
It was his price to pay. He had taken too many lives and so the violence had taken what he loved, a quietly confident girl from a forgotten country, achingly beautiful and sincere.
He squinted in the light and watched her pace as she talked, head bowed. All he knew was that her deceased father’s eighteen-year-old goddaughter, Sekai, who was like a little sister to Nya, had died from a hit of Ecstasy in a South Beach nightclub, along with five other exchange students. It had been all over the papers. Not an overdose, but a bad batch. Sekai’s family didn’t have any money, so Nya had come to Miami to repatriate the body.
She came outside and set her tea on the table, her smile soft and sad. “Everything’s prepared. I fly back with her tomorrow.”
Grey picked at the label on his beer as he stared off the balcony. “I’m glad you didn’t have any trouble.”
She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer.”
“I understand.”
They held each other’s gaze as the breeze picked up and then settled.
“How’s Zim?” he asked.
“As always, hey? The Chinese steal our resources, and the boss men let them. The power cuts have stabilized to once a day in the northern suburbs. Worse, of course, in other places.” She looked away, bitter. “What is there to say?”
“The dogs?” Grey asked. He wanted to ask if she had recovered enough to go back to work, but he didn’t.
Her smile brightened. “Mischievous as ever. And you? Still working with Viktor? How’s it?”
“I can’t complain. Viktor is never dull, and I’m teaching . . .” He trailed off, hesitant to bring up jujitsu.
She laid a hand on his arm. “It’s okay.”
He took a swallow of beer. “It wasn’t before.”
“I wanted you to know,” she said, lifting the tea to her lips, “that I’m doing a little better.”
“That’s great,” he said carefully. “I’m happy to hear that.”
She set the tea down. Her eyes found his. “Perhaps we could talk again. I understand . . . if you prefer not to, and I know I’ve no right to ask. You’ve probably moved on.”
Grey studied the bottle, telling himself that he should think long and hard about what he said next, telling himself some doors were better left closed, telling himself she lived two continents away and hadn’t said anything except they should talk.
But all he could feel was shivery with hope.
“I’d like that,” he said.
She smiled and placed a hand over his. A tingl
e arced through him, a not-so-dormant reaction to the touch of the one girl he had truly loved.
“There’s something else,” she said, “and I hate to ask. But I can’t stay, and I can no longer . . .”
He finished the beer and rolled the bottle between his palms, knowing what she would ask and already knowing his response.
“Sekai was here as an exchange student,” she continued. “The first person in her family to travel abroad. She”—Nya took a moment to regain control of her expression—“she was a good girl, Grey, and she was family. I promised I’d look after her. I know she did a reckless thing, but she shouldn’t have died because of it.”
“Of course not.”
Then she stared at him, really stared at him, and he saw a flash of the old Nya, a storm cloud of strength and determination sweeping across her visage.
“The police said the tablets were laced with a cheap contaminant,” she said. “This drug dealer, this animal, who did this to her . . . he took her life to save a few extra dollars. What kind of world is this?”
“I don’t know. I never have.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but the cloud passed and the new Nya returned, the one tortured to the edge of her sanity, her father murdered, her beloved country ruined, struggling to deal with the senseless violence and evil that had settled over her life like a toxic cloud.
When she looked away he took her hands in his own. She squeezed them as if she were falling off a building and his hands were the edge of the roof.
“I’ll stay,” Grey said, “and do my best to find who did this.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “And Grey?”
“Yeah?”
“What I said earlier, about talking again? This has nothing to do with that.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
CANCUN, MEXICO
The men—and the lone female, an über-madame with a stake in every pleasure palace from Cancun to Tijuana—clustered around the marble conference table like eagles perched on a hummingbird feeder. Incongruent. Unstable. A simmering teapot of violence.
It was an extremely rare gathering of representatives from some of Mexico’s largest crime syndicates—mainly drug cartels, but also arms dealers, migrant smugglers, and a few outlying specialties. No one present knew why each particular faction was represented, except their leaders were beholden in some manner—and terrified of disobeying—someone named El General. That moniker was rarely used, and he was also known simply as El Jefe.
