Dead Silence

by Randy Wayne White

  She didn’t. “The guy’s not answering?”

  I said, “He’s got my cell phone,” meaning I’d try that next.

  This time, Nelson Myles answered. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I hadn’t already heard the way his voice changed when he was afraid. It was a note higher. He spoke with a frantic, tonal precision.

  He said, “What?”

  “Nelson?”

  “What do you want?”

  I heard a click, and the background silence became cavernous. Someone had switched to speakerphone.

  I tapped Palmer’s arm as I also switched to speaker, then said, “I called about our appointment. Are we still on?”

  “No! You . . . should call back tomorrow.”

  Spacing my words, I said, “Are you . . . all right?,” then added, “What time should I call?,” emphasizing the word, hoping he would use a number.

  “I’m fine! Stop bothering me. I’m . . . I’m trying to sleep!”

  In the background was a strange whirring noise, high-pitched, like a beehive . . . or a dentist’s drill. I looked at Palmer. She was puzzling over it, too.

  Again, I said carefully, “Are you sure you’re okay? What time should I call, Nelson? The time’s important, if you’re okay. Seven? Or eight?”

  It took a moment but he caught on. “Oh! Call at . . . seven. Definitely, seven. That’s when you should call. Seven.”

  Skull and Bones code. Seven meant no. No, he wasn’t okay.

  I said, “Will you be alone?,” hoping he understood I wasn’t talking about tomorrow.

  “What does it matter who I’m with! Seven. Didn’t you hear me? Call at seven.”

  No, he wasn’t alone.

  Palmer was giving me an odd look now, confused but aware something wasn’t right. She mouthed the words What’s that sound? The whirring noise was getting louder.

  I shook my head and said into the phone, “I was hoping to meet the other investors, the men from Spain. Did they stop by earlier?”

  “Why are you asking so many questions? No! No one has been here. Call at eight, if you want. Eight’s fine, but leave me alone until then.”

  Yes, the Cuban interrogators—the Malvados—were there.

  “Look, buddy,” I said, sounding indignant, “I’ve invested a quarter million in this project, you need to show me some respect! Should I meet you at the boat or—”

  I heard Myles grunt and start to say something but then heard click. Line dead.

  Palmer said, “What the hell was that all about?”

  I told her, “Let’s move! The kidnappers have him. Cubans—Spaniards—that’s what I was asking about. But I don’t know if he’s at home or aboard his boat.” I was about to add, “You didn’t hear his answers?,” but realized all she’d gotten from the conversation was that Myles wanted me to leave him alone.

  We were a hundred yards from the palm-lined corridor that led to the Falcon Landing entrance. Rental cops would be there. I didn’t want them anywhere near me if the Cubans were waiting. Palmer was already slowing to turn, but I slapped the dash and said, “Straight ahead. Drive straight to the beach, I’ll climb over the wall. You can cut me loose.”

  “Ford, have you gone crazy? The man told you to get lost!”

  I said, “You heard his voice, and whatever the hell that was in the background. A drill?”

  “Drills aren’t illegal. Trespassing is.”

  “Shelly,” I said, “something’s wrong, and you know it. Get on the radio, call for backup.”

  “And tell them what? I’m worried about dangerous hand tools?”

  I didn’t want to wait while she thought it over. “Goddamn it, trust me. Do it! You want proof I’m serious?” My mouth was moving before I’d thought it out. “Okay, here’s proof: I killed Bern Heller, I’m confessing. I dumped him two miles offshore. I told him to swim for shore but knew he wouldn’t make it.”

  I expected some word or gesture of surprise. Instead, she took a long, slow breath, before she flipped off the emergency lights, then accelerated through the intersection. “I know that,” she said, her voice calm. “It’s why I tipped you off about the witness . . . and offered you the chance to cancel. When you stepped out into that parking lot, I thought you were an idiot.”

  I said, “I thought you’d slipped up.”

  Palmer shook her head. “I was giving you a chance to put it together. Did you?”

  “You tell me. The woman’s a physician at Memorial Hospital, right?”

  That did surprise her. “How did you know?”

  I said, “You told me. The rest I figured out. Mid-twenties, brown hair, attractive. Emotionally traumatized, which is no surprise—”

  “No . . . early thirties, just finishing her internship. Her name is . . .” Palmer hesitated. Sharing information went against her cop instincts. “Her name’s Leslie DiAngelo. She’s got the looks, and all the brains in the world. That’s why, I guess, it makes me mad, how stupid she was.”

  Her flat inflection said she knew the price of throwing something good away.

  “Call for backup, Shelly. Trust me.”

  As we skidded into the beach parking lot, Palmer said, “I’ll call in our location and schedule recontact every half hour. That’s the best I can do,” then surprised me by locking her vehicle as I returned from my rental car carrying a foul-weather jacket and the little ASP Triad flashlight.

  “I’m going with you,” she told me.

  Meaning, over the wall.

  30

  Water was beginning to seep into Will Chaser’s coffin. He had told himself things couldn’t possibly get any worse, but here it was.

  Because his jeans were already soaked, he hadn’t noticed the water until it began sloshing at his earlobes. He had been dozing, or drifting, or hallucinating—Will could no longer differentiate—but the sudden reality that the box was flooding caused him to flinch so hard that he’d banged his face against the lid. The thing was only inches from his nose.

  He had banged the lid before but intentionally. This was as Buffalo-head began shoveling dirt, filling the grave. That steady drumming of earth on wood was a Sunday sound, a sound that smelled of greenhouse flowers—or suffocation—and Will had reacted by slamming his head against the coffin over and over and over, ramming it with his forehead.

  Will had continued hammering until the coffin vibrated like a drum skin. He timed the blows to countersynch with Buffalo-head’s shoveling as he shrieked for the Cuban to stop, please stop!

  Incredibly, the man did. After a minute of silence, Will could hardly believe his good fortune when the lid creaked open, sunlight streaming in, and there was Buffalo-head’s massive face.

  “You have chewed through the tape already?” For some reason, the man had cast a furtive, guilty look over his shoulder, as if fearful Metal-eyes was watching.

  “Don’t tape my mouth again,” Will had pleaded. “Please. I can’t breath. Do you want to kill me?”

  Hump said, “Yes, of course. But Farfel won’t let me. I’m sorry.” Again, the man glanced over his shoulder.

  Will had almost asked why but decided not to risk a long list of reasons. Hump was an idiot but he had a temper, and it was a bad move to remind him.

  Instead, Will had asked, “Why are you burying me if you’re not allowed to kill me?”

  “We all have our own reasons,” Hump had replied. “The maricon from Venezuela wants to protect the church from scandal. Farfel wants to protect us from Nazi hunters. And the American—well, who knows? He is a silent one, that man, and I don’t trust him.”

  Will had no idea what Buffalo-head was talking about, but he spoke so earnestly Will didn’t doubt the truth of it. But the information wasn’t going to help him escape from the damn coffin.

  “I have my own reasons for not wanting to die,” Will said. “Let me out—only for a minute or two—and I’ll tell you.”

  “Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?” Buffalo-head said, then took another quick look
around before leaning closer to whisper, “May I ask you a question?”

  Will wanted to spit in the man’s face but sensed an opening. “We’re friends. You said so yourself, at the horse ranch.”

  Before Hump could respond with “Where you chewed my ear off?,” Will had added quickly, “I would like to be friends. This is a competitive situation, like a baseball game . . . or a gunfight like in the westerns on TV. Of course, we both fight hard to win, but I’ve come to admire your great strength, and your”—Will couldn’t think of another reason—“and your great strength. Ask me anything.”

  Hump had caught himself leaning yet closer but pulled away when he remembered Farfel’s bloody hand. “In Havana,” he said, “I know many Santería priests. It is why I wear these beads.”

  Will hadn’t noticed the string of red, black and blue beads around the man’s neck, but now he saw them and heard them rattle.

  “Very beautiful,” Will offered. “Plastic?”

  “Yes, and they’ve been blessed. They are supposed to protect me from things that would frighten any man. Snakes, for instance. Or giant alligators. I’ve heard there are many on American golf courses. Mostly, though, the beads protect me from the curse of an evil person.”

  Will nodded as if that made sense.

  “That is what I want to ask. Have you placed a curse on me? It is nothing to be ashamed of if you have done this thing. I believe the devil is in you. In fact, I call you Devil Child.” The man said it as if Will should be proud.

  Will had realized that his answer was important. He glanced at the blue sky, longing to be beneath it. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve placed a curse on your head. The worst curse I know. I’ve cast a secret spell but now would like to remove it. But I can’t—not now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . because . . .”—Will was thinking, Shit, try to remember some Indian superstitions—“because I am an Indian shaman,” he said, “and we can’t remove curses unless we are . . . on a boat . . . on the water. I think of you as my friend now. I want to take back my curse. So if you would only—”

  “I can’t,” Hump whispered, suddenly in a rush. “But I’ll come back—I promise. Until then, I thought that if I brought you an offering it would help. Something powerful, such as an object used by the Santería priests, that you would at least reduce this curse.”

  Metal-eyes must have been returning because Hump finished with, “Here, take this. I’ll be back. I swear!”

  The man had tossed an object into the coffin, something hard and gray and round. Will thought it was a coconut shell at first. But in the last wedge of light, before the Cuban quietly closed the lid, Will realized it wasn’t a coconut.

  Will was screaming as Hump began shoveling sand onto the coffin. Will twisted his body to get as close as he could to the PVC air tube so Hump could hear him, but Hump ignored Will’s screams and only shoveled faster. He was afraid Farfel would return from the cabin to ask questions.

  Now, feeling water moving near his ears, Will thought, He’s the devil. The real devil, picturing Metal-eyes. Then the boy began to buck, thrusting his abdomen upward, trying to crush the hard gray object against the coffin lid.

  Instead, the thing bounced off his chest like a pinball, then came to rest between the side of the coffin and Will’s neck.

  It was a human skull.

  Water was still rising, and the density of old bone on young skin was maddening. Because there was nothing left to try, Will began using his own skull to hammer at the coffin’s lid, hoping to knock himself unconscious before he drowned.

  31

  When I peeked through a side window of the horse stable on the ten-acre Shelter Cottage estate, I wasn’t prepared for the shock of what the Cubans had done to Nelson Myles. The precision wounds, the surgical technique, told me it could have been no one else.

  Beyond the windowpane, the source of the odd whirring sound Detective Palmer and I had heard was revealed. It was a power drill. Horror is commonly amplified by imagination, rarely mitigated, because the limits of our fears are boundaryless, or so I’d believed until that moment.

  The scene—Nelson Myles, hanging by his feet from a rafter, hands bound behind him—expanded the reach of my secret fears and proved that I at least had found false refuge in my own limited imagination.

  No, I wasn’t prepared. No one could have been, although I knew the Cubans were nearby when I saw Fred Gardiner’s cabin cruiser banging itself to pieces, grounded on the beach at the western edge of the property.

  René Navárro and his partner, Angel Yanquez, had already killed one person, used a knife to stab a limo driver to death. Now, trapped in the U.S., they were becoming desperate. They were calling on their old skills, using Malvados techniques to help them escape into international waters or to Cuba before the deadline, in time for the C-130’s drop of the Castro Files.

  Gardiner’s boat was as described: a boxy little tincan of a cruiser, aluminum hull, dented cowling, broken VHF antenna. The out drive was tilted upward like the stubby tail of a scorpion. The boat was a walleyed weekender out of its league in the Gulf Stream.

  Navárro and Yanquez had run the cruiser up onto the beach, probably not long ago. I knew because of the tide. It was two hours before high, but the flood had only recently floated the boat enough to swing it sideways, beam to the sea. There was no ground tackle deployed, no attempt to secure the boat. The interrogators didn’t plan on coming back to use it again.

  It told me their escape hadn’t gone well in the tricky backwaters of the Gulf Coast. Now they’d returned to strong-arm Nelson Myles into flying them out of the country or to commandeer his long-range yacht. I hoped Will Chaser was with them. Reason and instinct told me, however, the boy was either dead . . . or dying.

  I was on the seaward side of the Myles property. A few minutes earlier, Detective Palmer and I had rung the front doorbell, then banged the knocker, until it became evident that the house either was empty or whoever was inside wasn’t going to answer. Through windows, the place appeared peaceful, no sign of a struggle, no indication of forced entry. It reinforced the detective’s suspicion that Myles had meant precisely what he’d told me on the phone: He was fine, stop calling, leave him alone.

  When I’d suggested we break in, Palmer gave me an Are you nuts? look but told me she’d wait for a few more minutes while I circled the property, then added, “If you’re carrying a concealed weapon, I swear to God I’ll take you straight to jail.”

  I didn’t ask if she planned on arresting me on a weapons charge, or for murder, because I didn’t want to force a decision. But I broke the old rule and lied.

  There wasn’t an option. No competent cop would accompany an armed civilian onto private property. To Palmer, I was a vigilante first, a marine biologist second—nothing more. It was too much to ask of her. So I didn’t, even though, in the pockets of my foul-weather jacket, I was carrying items she wouldn’t have tolerated, including an old, fail-safe SIG Sauer 9mm pistol.

  I had noticed the cabin cruiser as I circled near the beach onto the back lawn. It was visible beyond a stand of coconut palms, beneath a skull-gray moon, bucking and rolling in the random cadence of abandonment as waves rolled landward. The moon, half full, orbited above the Gulf horizon, casting a milky, funneled pathway to Mexico. It didn’t generate much light, but I didn’t need light to see. Something else concealed in my jacket was a night vision monocular mounted on headgear.

  The monocular was a fifth-generation wonder made by Nivisys Industries. I wore it over my right eye like a surgical optic. Flip the little switch and the darkest night became lime-green day, bright as high noon.

  Not only did it give me an edge over the Cubans, it provided a comforting safety factor. Palmer had told me she’d stay at the front while I looped the property. But if she got restless, changed her mind and came searching, there was no risk of mistaking her for one of the bad guys.

  The interrogators had lied to Nelson Myles about smuggli
ng illegal weapons. But that didn’t mean they weren’t carrying illegal weapons.

  I got close enough to the cabin cruiser to convince myself no one was aboard—no one who was conscious anyway. The random seesaw banging would have made the cabin unbearable.

  Behind the main house, near the pool, I’d seen two guest cottages and remembered there was a horse stable to the south. Before jogging toward the cottages, I drew the familiar weight of my SIG Sauer pistol and confirmed the magazine was full, a round in the chamber.

  Lights were off in the cottages but the doors were unlocked. I did a quick search: Nothing.

  Next, I headed to the stable. And there was Myles . . .

  The Yale grad and multimillionaire was hanging by his feet, glasses gone, hair in suspended disarray as if he were adrift underwater.

  The man was wearing fresh cotton slacks and a gray tailored shirt. He had probably scrubbed himself clean after I left with the police, then dressed in his cocktail-hour best to counter the humiliation he had suffered on the dirt road.

  “I feel filthy,” he had told me, a psychological reaction to my bullying. Looking at the man now, I found no comfort in the fact that what I had done to him did not compare to the outrage the interrogators had inflicted.

  Nelson’s head was four feet off the floor. The floor beneath was stained. On a nearby wall hung a phone that had been ripped from its mounting. Beneath it, on a bench, was the electric drill, plugged into an extension cord. They’d probably found the drill in the tool closet. The closet door was open.

  The Cubans had done a poor job of duct-taping Myles’s hands. They hadn’t secured his thumbs, but clearly the Yale grad hadn’t realized the opportunity it could have afforded him.

  They hadn’t bothered taping his mouth. Ten acres of seclusion and the percussion of waves from the nearby beach guaranteed privacy. To bind his feet, instead of tape the Malvados had skewered holes in the fleshy space between ankle bones and Achilles tendons to insert the cable hooks that now strained against the man’s suspended weight. It was the same technique used in meat lockers to hang beef.