The Death Box

by J. A. Kerley

  “One of them, at least.”

  “How do we find it?”

  “We feel strongly and it finds us.”

  Gershwin gave me a look but said nothing. I waited until my bottle was emptied and meandered into the brush to stand on a rotting few inches of stump. A black clot of vultures broke from a nearby tree and tumbled to a further one, content to watch and hope for death. Gershwin walked up with a two-foot length of iron.

  “Where’d you get the shillelagh?” I asked.

  He swung it like a ball bat. “Poking from the ground.”

  I jumped from the stump and kicked at sandy soil studded with prickly pear, my mind seeing the agonized swimmer in the stone. I pictured her stroking free of the earth, face breaking the ground as her hands pulled desperately toward the light. And then she disappeared into crumbled dirt and a walnut-sized locknut pushing from the land. I kicked it free and picked it up, thumbing dirt from the hole, ready to launch it toward the vulture tree, send the bastards fleeing.

  But stopped. In my wandering around the former tent, I’d picked up a couple other locknuts and a bolt or two. A shard of tempered metal.

  What were they from? How did they get here? When?

  I fixed my eyes on the dirt and walked circles. After a few minutes I saw a rust-colored vine coiling from a clump of weeds. I pulled … not a vine, a section of baling wire that left a slender furrow as it tore free. Gershwin walked up bouncing a rusty, heavy-duty clamp in his palm.

  “You know, Big Ryde, I’ve been thinking …”

  “Me too,” I said, pulling my phone. “What else is down there?”

  The forensics folks showed up within an hour, led by Deb Clayton, her day to pull a double. The sun was turning the western sky to layers of pink and purple and the trees grew long shadows.

  “You have the metal detectors?” I asked.

  She smiled, not looking the least bit tired after an afternoon working the scene at Tiki Tiki. “Six, highly sensitive for ferrous and non-ferrous. They’ll detect a nickel at eighteen inches. We looking for nickels?”

  “You’re looking for stuff like this,” I said, holding up the wire, steel bar and clamp. “Supposedly this land has always been vacant. But something was here.”

  “You find those subsurface?”

  “Partially. We’re wondering what else is down there.”

  “Where’d you start scratching? We should probably begin there.”

  Ziggy took the Rover and made a run for coffee and snacks, always appreciated, and I showed Clayton the general area where we’d found the scraps. The sun dropping fast, Clayton’s team set up a generator and three banks of high-intensity lamps and went out waving detectors over the hard ground.

  I saw headlights closing, a red sports-racked Outback pulling beside me. Vivian Morningstar jumped out wearing lightweight running shorts and one of those advertising-intensive shirts given to participants in sporting events. Her feet were in neon-green running shoes. “I don’t recall requesting a pathologist,” I said. “Even such a highly decorated one.”

  “A two-shift day,” she said, stretching her back. “I break them with a run to clear my head. When Deb asked could she borrow the ME’s two metal detectors, I got curious about my site.”

  “Your site?”

  She nodded at the pit. “I release the site to the developer on Monday. ’Til then, I own it.” She flashed me a grin. “So whatcha looking for in such a hurry?”

  I explained that it was a fishing expedition and showed her the relics Gershwin and I had unearthed.

  “We found a couple things like that when the excavation started. I set them aside in case they meant something.” She led me to the rear of the mound. Atop a plastic sheet were two long bolts and another heavy-duty clamp. “What’s the stuff mean?”

  I knelt and studied the clamp, the kind I’d seen on hydraulic hoses. “Probably nothing. The rancher drove a piece of machinery here years back and it fell apart. Still …”

  “I’m starting to understand you, Ryder, a bit obsessive.”

  We leaned against Morningstar’s vehicle and watched the techs work. If I’d hoped for a case-breaker to leap from the soil, it wasn’t happening. After thirty minutes and hundreds of square meters covered, all we had was a rusty flange and a five-foot length of cable.

  I heard my Rover in the distance and saw it zooming through the trees like Gershwin thought he was in the Daytona 500. He wasn’t coming down the usual path to the pit, but a couple dozen meters to the east.

  “Damn,” Morningstar said. “He’s moving.”

  “He bangs up my ride he’ll spend eternity in Vehicle Theft,” I muttered. The Rover finished the final hundred feet of its trip at a cautious pace, pulling beside Morningstar’s cruiser. Gershwin jumped out with a bag cradled in each arm. “The burrito king has arrived,” he proclaimed. “And I’ve got about a gallon of coffee in the back.”

  “Where’d you find the chow?”

  “A little bar-restaurant a couple miles west. It’s an old-timey joint, but good stuff, homemade while I waited.” He passed out paper-wrapped burritos to nearby company. Morningstar grabbed a chicken and black bean and watched the techs sweep the ground. Gershwin grinned at her and elbowed me.

  “You call her?” he whispered. “Or she just in the area?”

  “She’s still in charge of the site. And she’s interested.”

  “I know what interests the Doc,” he grinned.

  “What was with that piece of driving coming in?” I said to change the subject. “I thought you’d wrap around a tree. Why not use the path?”

  “I was driving a path,” he protested. “Like a lane.”

  “There’s no road there.”

  “I saw a natural opening to the east of the one everyone’s been using. It’s rugged – you bump over some stumps, but that’s what the jungle buggy’s built for, no?”

  I’m not sure if I was dubious or curious.

  “Show me.”

  He retraced his path to the paved road and circled around, the headlamps transforming the vegetation into a pattern of dark and light. In the daytime the landscape blended into a panorama of sameness. At night the headlamps suggested an entry into the low trees and scruffy bushes. He was right about the stumps as well. There were only a few but they seemed to step a path through the heavier growth.

  “See?” he said. “What do you think caused it?”

  I crouched beside a desiccated stump and picked at it with a fingernail. Another was five meters distant, another two beyond that, and so on. There was just enough room to drive a vehicle without scratching the doors.

  I stood, slapping wood chips from my palms and picturing a crew taking down trees with chainsaws, behind them a Cat dozer scraping away the brush. The path was like a fire lane in a forest, passable if you didn’t mind a bumpy ride.

  But where had the road led?

  I jumped in the driver’s seat, waving Gershwin aboard. “Let’s head past the pit site and see where this goes.”

  We bounced down the lightly demarked path until the brush scratched at the Rover. I eased into a clearing, if that’s what it could be called, lighter growth. It was just a hundred or so paces from the cistern.

  I ran back and pointed the area out to Clayton. “Let’s try over there,” I said. “And cross your fingers.”

  The team reset in a line at the edge of the clearing and began walking. In addition to a buzz sounding in the earphones, a yellow light blinked atop the detectors when an object was located. By the time the team was a dozen steps into the hunt the lights were blinking like fireflies and I could hear the stronger audio signals. Whenever a tech with a detector yelled, Strike! a pair raced in with a shovel and sifting screen.

  Within a half-hour the team had unearthed a bushel of smaller objects, plus three L-shaped pieces of rusted steel, two, four and eight feet long, a hole at both ends and obviously structural in purpose. Clayton crouched in light with the finds arrayed on a plastic sheet, stu
dying each piece with a magnifier.

  “Wish we still had the field lab set up,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Might help read this—”

  She handed me a gray strip of thin aluminum, a tag once affixed to another object. I took the glass and saw meaningless runes.

  “Wait,” Clayton said. “Let’s try something.”

  She spat on the tag and wiped it on her jacket. The runes were now a strip of numbers and some kind of logo. “Science,” she grinned.

  It was past ten and the mosquitos were ignoring the DEET so I closed down the operation. Clayton said she’d study the tag in the morning, but I expected she’d be on it yet tonight. When the final forensics van pulled away, I turned to Gershwin.

  “This place you got the chow. Where?”

  “At the end of the two-lane, the edge of the ’glades, an old village or the bones of one centered by a combo gas station and bar-restaurant. I don’t think I saw anyone under a hundred years old.”

  “Why’d you go there and not toward civilization?” I said.

  “When I came to watch the dig I overshot the road. Ended up there asking directions and grabbed a burrito.”

  “Old guys, you say?”

  “Even older than you, kemo sabe.”

  “Let’s go see what the old heads remember.”

  Orzibel was in a back booth at the club. Onstage, a pair of women mimed sex with lolling tongues and grinding hips. Few seats remained at the long bar, most filled with men in business garb, conventioneers. The majority would only drink, Orzibel knew. But a few would get heated up by the dancers and seek personal entertainment, ending up at the motel across the street, more money moving from their wallets to the enterprise.

  Similar scenes were being replayed across Florida. And that didn’t take into account the products working in factories and private homes, mainly the males and women too ugly for the clubs and whorehouses and massage parlors. Every piece of product generated a weekly or monthly fee, depending on the contract. In return, fresh girls were sent out on a regular basis, and all their costs were handled by the enterprise.

  Brilliant … though too much tilted toward El Jefé on the money side. What work did he do, really? Jefé had a whole other life … how hard could he work? It was Orzibel who set up the shipping times with Miguel Tolandoro and who maintained order: chopping off the works of the guy screwing Jefé’s then-favorite whore, removing the hands and slicing the neck of the gordo Perlman, removing Carosso from the world – and handling similar but lesser operations on a daily basis. El Jefé negotiated the terms with the customers, not in person but through Amili Zelaya, who also kept the contracts, tracked the product, and handled all of the accounting from her quiet office and tiny computer.

  Jefé stayed clear of almost everything that might connect him to the enterprise, which was smart, of course, but why should he make so much money when Orlando Orzibel and Amili Zelaya did most of the work?

  Orzibel saw a flash of motion to his right, Chaku waving from the entryway as a fresh clot of conventioneers staggered inside, hooting when they saw the girls writhing on the stage. He followed Morales upstairs to his office and closed the door, the music shivering through the floor.

  “You were at the health club?” Orzibel said as Morales tossed his duffle into the corner. “You heard something from our man inside the system?”

  “Ryder is unharmed.”

  “Fuck!”

  “The source did not think the operation was well planned. He said …” Morales frowned and paused.

  “What did he say? WHAT?”

  “He asked who set the clowns loose.”

  Orzibel’s dark eyes blazed as he strode across the room. “Bastardo! I should go to his fancy downtown office and slice off his—”

  “I told him about the girl, Orlando. That she escaped.”

  Orzibel spun. “You did what?”

  “The man’s job means ears on the street. Big ears. He’d heard we sought some form of information. He said he should have been told from the start.”

  Orzibel shut his eyes. Forced himself to be calm. If their insider’s ears had heard of Leala’s escape, could not the information soon reach El Jefé? That would be a very bad complication in his plans.

  “Yes, yes … I did not expect little Leala to elude us for so long. Did he speak of her?”

  “Only that we must catch her fast. And that she must never escape again.”

  A phone rang from Chaku Morales’s plush blue warm-up jacket, a burner purchased to broadcast its number to the junkies and others looking for Leala Rosales. “What?” he said into the phone. He froze, asked, “Where?” He listened, said, “We’re on our way.”

  Morales closed the phone, dropped it to the floor and crushed it beneath a massive heel. Its use was over.

  “We have her, Orlando. Leala Rosales.”

  “A junkie spotted her?”

  A nod. “He followed her to a shed behind an empty house. She is there now. Shall we go and grab our prize?”

  Orzibel pulled back the sleeve of his leather jacket and checked the time.

  “You take care of it, Chaku. I have a meeting I cannot ignore.”

  40

  The restaurant, a single-story ramshackle assemblage named The Fishing Hole, sat where the asphalt crumbled into gravel. There was a half-decayed trailer court behind it and tiny pastel houses on the far side of the street. The restaurant’s sign boasted Air Conditioned! like it had been invented yesterday. A faded Texaco sign was nailed to the side of the building.

  It was like looking at the south Everglades, circa 1950.

  We parked at the edge of the shell lot, a few battered pickup trucks closer to the door. I peeked through the window, seeing pine walls hung with taxidermied fish, a short wooden bar and a dozen tables. Patsy Cline was singing about walking after midnight. Two men sat at the bar as a guy behind it flipped meat on a grill. Three other guys played cards at a table, a pile of coins centering the tableau. The cook-bartender was maybe fifty and no one else looked under eighty.

  I figured if I went in flashing tin I’d make them nervous. Two cops would be worse. I jogged back to the Rover. “You’re staying here,” I told Gershwin. “It’s old guys night.”

  “Drink your Geritol, Big Ryde. Go get ’em.”

  I entered the bar tentatively, a genial guy a little lost and a lot thirsty. “Howdy,” I said, my Alabama accent dialed to ten. “Good to see y’all still open.”

  “’Til midnight,” the barkeep said.

  “That ol’ rain reach out heah today?” I asked.

  “Ten minutes of fallin’, two hours a turnin’ to steam. Get you something?”

  Not the place to ask for a Bass. “Bud.”

  I looked at the card players and nodded, nods came back. “What brings you out here?” the barkeep asked.

  “Yeah,” one of the guys at the card table asked, a slender man wearing a brown Stetson over a deeply wrinkled face, his low-lidded eyes and bolo tie giving him a resemblance to Roy Rogers. “It ain’t zactly like we’re in the travel brochures.”

  Laughter, me joining in. I jammed my thumb toward the development. “A big dozer’s busted at the construction site down the way. I came in from Tampa, gotta get that sumbitch up an’ runnin’ by Monday.”

  “What’s wrong wit’ it?” one of the players asked as he pushed a couple nickels to the pile.

  I shrugged. “Somethin’ electrical. I drove out to look at it tonight, see if I needed to call for parts. Got dark on me.”

  “Yeah,” Roy Rogers chuckled, thumbing a few coins to the pile and checking his cards. “Night does that.”

  “Had me a flashlight and time to kill. I ended up wandering around, that or go back to the motel and watch the Weather Channel.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ left on that land, was there?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Guess the shopping center people were the first to see somethin’ useful in that scrubby ol’ parcel. Prob�
��ly useless since the dinosaurs.”

  The hand was over. Roy reached out and pulled his winnings close, about three bucks from the look of it. The others flipped cards to the table.

  “You’re wrong there, buddy,” Roy said, setting his coins in stacks. “It was owned from a long time back.” He scraped his chair around to face me, happy to set a stranger straight. “Walt Driscoll owned forty or so acres, ran some cattle there from the late sixties to early eighties. Walt was a buddy. I spoke at his funeral.”

  I took a sip of beer and affected benign curiosity. “Walkin’ that parcel tonight? I nearly fell into a big ol’ hole in the ground. Driscoll ever mention a well or cistern on the land? If I’d gone down that sumbitch I don’t believe Lassie coulda found me.”

  Laughter, but it was an easy room to play. Roy tipped back the hat and the eye crinkles deepened as he scratched his stubbled chin. “’Y’know, I recall Walt digging something for groundwater to seep into. A stash for the occasional drought. Wasn’t long after that Walt got into Brahma bulls and moved the herd to his main ranch by Okeechobee.”

  “Better forage, I expect.” I fake-yawned. “Land go dead after that?”

  “Walt made a few bucks from the land rental. More, I expect, when he sold it to some New York Jew. The guy was gonna build houses, but died.”

  I knew about Feldstein, but this was the first I’d heard of the land being rented out. “Rental?” I asked. “To another rancher?”

  A shrug. “Some company used it to store stuff until it was needed. Derricks, or maybe it was scaffolds. Stacks of long metal frames. There were a couple ol’ trailers parked out there as well, prob’ly to haul the stuff. It was a buncha years back.”

  I drank the rest of my beer and knocked the bar with my knuckles. “Thanks for the history, gennulmen.”

  “Enjoy the Weather Channel, mister.”

  I stood a couple rounds for the house which, judging by the response, was a rare experience. I drove away to a pull-off along the road, telling Gershwin what I’d dug up, then pulled my phone and called Delmara. I heard sounds in the background, muted voices and a jazz tune.