by Tom Clancy
A quick examination of the skid load Hendricks had cited did reveal evidence of a leak in the topmost crate, and irrespective of his feelings about the inspector, Bruford couldn’t deny it looked fairly serious. Most of the spillage was at the lower left-hand corner, where he saw a wet, dark red slime that appeared to consist of blood, mucous, and maybe some water from melted packing ice. The heavy goop had run onto the lid of the crate underneath, and then gone dripping down over the crate’s side panel, soaking through most of the adhesive markers there and causing a couple of them to warp and peel away at the edges.
That, Bruford decided, was the discouraging part. On the positive flip side, he didn’t notice any visible damage to either of the crates, which meant that the problem in all likelihood could be attributed to the upper container’s load exceeding its weight limit rather than a break in the wood or insulating material during transport—that second possibility a worst-case mishap liable to spoil the fish inside.
“That fluid’s been seeping out so fast you ought to be glad I held back the crates,” Hendricks commented from behind him now. “If I’d let them stay together with the rest of your freight, sent ’em ahead to check-in, there’d be botulism and God knows what other germs crawling on everything off the plane. It’d leave you open to all kinds of financial liability.”
Bruford had to bite his lip in annoyance. Yeah, right, he thought. Such big-hearted concern. Hendricks breaking his chops was bad enough. Hendricks chumming up to him, freely offering his sage advice, took the prize cake. As if the guy was doing anybody here a favor. As if he didn’t have the slightest inkling freight forwarders were indemnified against that sort of thing. And as if it made more sense from a public health standpoint to keep the boxes sitting out in the baking Miami sunlight than to have them segregated inside the terminal’s enormous cool room, where their perishable contents could be refrigerated while awaiting inspection.
Bruford sighed, rose from his knees. “You want both crates opened?” he said resignedly.
Hendricks nodded.
“Be safest for everybody involved,” he said.
Bruford raised a hand and beckoned over a couple of his waiting freight handlers, one of whom had already pulled a crowbar from his leather tool-belt holster. “The inspector would appreciate a peek inside these two,” he said, motioning toward the crates.
The handlers looked at him unhappily.
“Right here, huh?” said the guy with the crowbar.
“Yeah,” Bruford said with a commiserative nod. “Here.”
The handlers turned toward the skid truck and got to work.
For a minute Bruford stood watching them start on the top crate. Then he turned to Hendricks, figuring he’d see how his theory about excess weight had gone over.
“Suppose the crate’s leaking because it was overpacked,” he asked. “We going to need to put it on a scale for you?”
Hendricks shrugged.
“Look at it from my position,” he said. “There’s a big enough difference between its declared and actual weight, it could be an intentional duty violation.”
“Or an honest mistake.”
Another shrug. “Subject to enforcement either way.”
Bruford frowned. He was guessing his question had been answered with the closest equivalent of a solid yes available in this piss-pond bureaucrat’s lingo. He was also wondering what cosmic sin he could have committed to merit God’s having punished him with the ridiculous crap being squarely dished out on his head today. But maybe there was no cause-and-effect explanation. Maybe sometimes you just had put it down to a hump being a hump to his core.
Bruford expelled another breath. Behind him the fish crate creaked and squealed in protest as its lid was wedged upward with the flat end of the crowbar.
He had started turning toward it again to check on his men’s progress when the most awful scream he’d ever heard tore through the air from that same direction, shredding through the loud turbine roar of planes that were landing and departing on the airport’s busy runways.
His skin erupting into gooseflesh, Bruford whirled around the rest of the way to discover the brawny six-footer who’d been working at the crate howling his lungs out, shrieking like a terrified little kid. He had his back to the skid truck and was pressing his fists into his temples, the crowbar he’d been using dropped heedlessly on the tarmac beside the box’s displaced lid. Meanwhile the other handler had remained by the crate, staring into it, his eyes so wide Bruford could see their bulging whites from where he stood.
He rushed forward, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be too eager to find out what inside those boxes could have sent a pair of grown men into crazed and seemingly unashamed fits of hysteria, but letting his feet take him over to the skid truck anyway, moving up to it with three or four long, hurried strides.
And then he was standing there looking down into the crate, feeling his stomach seize with horror and revulsion.
There were body parts inside. Instantly recognizable human body parts. Bruford’s disbelieving eyes picked out a headless torso with white knobs of bone protruding from its arm sockets. Then another beneath it, partially exposed under torn plastic wrapping and a scattered layer of freezer gel packs. One of them had belonged to a light-skinned person. The other to someone with skin that was a very dark shade of brown.
Both looked like they were male to Bruford, though he couldn’t be sure. He had also had no way to be positive the severed limbs packed in the crate belonged to the same two people. The only thing he did know before recoiling in shock and aversion was that there was a hacked-up anatomical jumble crammed against the container’s bloodstained foam liner. He could see everything, everything, wedged into every possible space, awash in a soup of gore. Arms, legs, feet, other pieces of human beings he either couldn’t or didn’t want to identify . . .
Everything but the heads, and the hands.
He turned away from the horrible sight, clapped a palm over his mouth to fend off an attack of nausea. He was aware of Hendricks behind him now, peering over his shoulder at the gross butchery inside the crate. His radio up against his ear, the inspector was calling out for assistance in a cracking, excited voice—either from airport security or the police, Bruford was too far out of his skull to tell. He heard a response squawk from the Customs inspector’s handset, jerked his head around, and knew at a glance that Hendricks was struggling with the same kind of paroxysms he’d managed to subdue a moment before.
Their eyes met for an instant. The color had drained from Hendricks’s cheeks until they turned an ashen gray.
“I told you,” he gasped hoarsely, wringing the words through livid, contorted lips. “Fucking Trinidad!”
Then he covered his stomach with his hands, doubled over, produced an awful retching noise, and threw up all over his shoes.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA
“Hey, you!” said Marissa Vasquez without slowing her jog in the sand. “Watch it!”
Felipe, who’d fallen a step or two behind Marissa, reacted about the way she would have expected and ignored her. Of course her zippy tone wasn’t what she might have called high in the intimidation factor . . .
“Ouch!” she said, feeling him pinch her rear end again. “Thought I warned you to quit—”
Before she could finish protesting, Felipe caught up to her, hooked an arm around her waist, and drew her into his embrace.
“Sorry.” He gave her a slyly playful smile. “Tried to check myself.”
Marissa threw her hands around his neck and stood facing him on the beach in the chill early morning breeze.
“You’re hopeless,” she said.
He shrugged and pulled her gently but irresistibly closer.
“You’re also fouling up my pace,” she said.
Felipe pulled her still closer, kissed her in the middle of her forehead.
“Bringing me down off my targeted heart rate,” Marissa said. And who did she think she was kidding? She fell
into his arms, her heart racing right along, her increasingly short breaths having more to do with what Felipe did to her—on and sometimes before contact—than the exertion of their run along the shore.
He kissed her again, lightly, his lips touching her left brow, her right, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, then brushing down over the corners of her mouth, and further down to her neck as his hand glided up and up over the front of her running jacket.
Marissa felt ripples of warmth. “Felipe . . .”
He tilted his head back, a glint in his dark brown eyes.
“I think you’re heartbeat feels just fine,” he said, putting his hand right there, cupping it over the firm swell of her breast.
“Felipe . . .”
“Fine as can be,” he said huskily, and raised his other hand to her cheek, stroked her hair back behind her ear with delicate fingertips, a few strands at a time, and then guided her mouth to his mouth, and kissed her long and fully and deeply.
Her lips parted wide, hungry for him, Marissa felt his hand slide under her jacket and pressed herself against him to make it clear he could keep right on doing what he was, all the while surprised and further excited by her utter lack of modesty and self-consciousness. The early hour aside, this little beach on the Miller-Knox shoreline was a public place, and before Felipe Escalona entered her life that would have her made her far too uptight to carry on like a teenager having her first heavy make-out session. But this was what he did to her, and was how it had been for her since they’d met here almost a month ago to the hour, both out for Sunday morning jogs on the weekend before Easter.
They were yin and yang, opposites attracting, choose your favorite advice column canard for two very different types of people who seemed to make an ideal fit.
The only child of a Latino entrepreneur who ran a large San Francisco construction and real-estate development firm of his founding, Marissa was a few months shy of her twenty-first birthday, which would roughly coincide with her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she’d studied toward a BA in business administration and a minor degree in political science. Felipe, who was five years her senior, and whose trace of an accent hinted at his Mexican origins—he’d told her that his parents had immigrated from Guadalajara when he was a boy, and that he’d spent a couple of years in his native country earning a master’s in Spanish language and literature—made his living as a freelance writer of bilingual educational materials, and was presently contracted with a software designer called Golden Triangle to work on a program meant for high school classrooms. Easygoing and spontaneous, his tongue partially in cheek (or so Marissa assumed), Felipe insisted the key to his happiness and productivity was wearing sweatpants in his home office, and claimed the prospect of having to put on a suit and tie five days a week canceled out whatever lure a guaranteed wage might present.
By sharp contrast Marissa was pragmatic, sober, and normally controlled to an extreme, traits she believed came straight from her father, a man of strict discipline who had raised her as a single parent since she was ten, when terminal uterine cancer had claimed a still-youthful Yolanda Vasquez to deprive Marissa of a mother’s affection. All her life Marissa had found that her success within ruled social and scholastic lines had been the surest way to please him, and pleasing him remained as important to her now as it ever was. She felt the need to channel her considerable energy and intelligence within the structure of an imposed routine, thrived in the academic grid of scheduled classes and exams, and could not envision a career without organizational security and a regular weekly paycheck. On entering the employment market after commencement, she hoped to expeditiously find a position with one of the corporate multinationals that would utilize her specialized academic skills.
In her amorous affairs Marissa’s patterns of behavior always had been much the same—partitioned and ordered so as not to upset her normal balance. She’d cared for her two previous lovers and enjoyed the physical aspects of those relationships, but in each case the divide between their sexual intimacies and Marissa’s reserved expressions of emotion had left both partners ultimately dissatisfied, and made her wonder if she suffered from an irremediable personality glitch. Yet from the very beginning with Felipe, their sex had been a sort of catalytic conversion, an act of abandon binding her heart and body to his in a wholly fulfilling way she had never believed she would experience.
Still Marissa knew that she and Felipe were really, essentially different from one another in many ways . . . just as she undeniably knew she’d fallen in love with him. For three of the past four weekends they had spent together, she had continued to allow that it might be simple infatuation, albeit with a giddy extra charge. But lying drowsily wrapped around Felipe at her Oxford Avenue apartment Friday night, her thoughts getting into a relaxed flow after they had exhausted their passions in bed, Marissa had found it impossible to conceive of losing what he had brought out in her, or sharing it with any other man, and acknowledged then that it was time to release whatever emotional reins she’d persisted in holding onto.
Being who she was, however, letting go of her emotions did not mean she could simply have them bolt the fences. Marissa needed a framework within which to display and share them, and sought unambiguous definition for her relationship with Felipe if she was to feel altogether comfortable with it. If the two of them were not yet a mutually and openly declared, exclusive, official couple, then maybe what they were having was just a disruptive sidetrack in the well-coordinated progress of her life, a fling that—like the others that had preceded it—would lead nowhere in the end. In those moments late Friday night after he’d brought her to unprecedented pleasure and gratification, taken her as far out of control as she had ever been, Marissa had drifted off to sleep thinking she wanted to take the next step toward romantic legitimacy and introduce him to her father, whose stamp of approval she strongly desired, even while worrying more than a bit that she might be rushing things. But to her relief Felipe had met the idea with enthusiasm when she broached it the next morning, and, seeing no point in further delay, she’d arranged for them to meet for brunch up at the family home in San Rafael later on today.
Right now though . . . right now Felipe was once again making it hard to think about later on. Or about anything.
Not with what he was doing to her.
He kept his eyes open while they kissed, as did Marissa, their gazes locked, remaining that way until after their mouths came apart.
“We should quit,” she said, taking a breath, “before we do something against the law.”
“I won’t snitch.”
“Somebody might see us.”
“There’s no one else around.”
“This is a public beach.”
“No one’s around,” he repeated. “It’s six A.M.”
“Right about the time it was when we met.”
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
“I know where,” he said. “Let’s go back to the car.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
Marissa’s heart pounded. And those tingles coming from all the way down inside her . . .
“Felipe, this is crazy, we aren’t through with our run,” she said, her last bit of resistance sounding unbelievably lame to her own ears.
He slid his hand from under her jacket and T-shirt now, wrapped both arms around her waist, and pulled her hips against him, held her so close their clothes hardly seemed to give them any separation.
She gasped, swallowed.
“Omigod.”
Felipe nodded.
“Forget about running,” he said. “Let’s go while I can still walk.”
She understood perfectly what he meant.
They had driven down from Marissa’s place near the Berkeley campus, leaving her Outback in a sandy access road east of the tunnel that cut through the hills below Richmond Plunge. Tucked into a cove past the marina, the beach was a fairly secluded cul-de-sac pocketed in
on its landward side by the split and crumbled remnants of an ancient cliff face, with the road where Marissa parked about midway along its irregular curve on the bay shore. Her usual habit was to trot to the cove from the vehicle and then start her laps in earnest, running to one end of the beach, then the other, and then doubling on back toward the access road to wind things up. She and Felipe had been in that final stage of their run when he had gotten to her with his bottom-pinching seduction, and they could see the road through some waist-high beach grass a short distance ahead to their right.
Her pulse raced as they walked toward it, holding hands. Felipe had gotten to her all right, gotten her weak-kneed with eagerness. Reaching the foot of the access road, she could feel whatever was left of her inhibitions sailing off toward the white gulls and cloud puffs overhead like helium balloons snipped from their strings.
Which made the unexpected sight of another parked vehicle a wholly frustrating comedown.
It was a Saturn wagon, one of those sporty new models designed to resemble sleeked out minivans, and it had been angled onto the side of the road opposite her car a few yards closer to the beach. Standing by the closed rear hatch with his back to them was a guy in a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and an army green field or baseball cap. He was bent over one of those large red-and-white beer coolers as if reorganizing its contents.
They paused at the foot of the road and exchanged looks.
“So much for us being alone,” Marissa said, thinking Felipe seemed especially out of sorts. She sighed, let go of his hand to slip her water bottle from its pouch in her runner’s belt, and took a long gulp. “Better have some,” she said and handed him the bottle. “It’ll cool you down.”
