by Sean Rowe
“They might.”
“Good. Helpin’ someone don’t count if it don’t cost you nothin’.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I guess you did some boxing.”
“I done all kinds of foolish shit before I found my personal Savior,” he said. “Look. Calm down and go in there and take your clothes off. I’m goin’ to help you. Why you didn’t just ask me in the first place?”
I went in the stall and took off my shoes and got undressed. Someone came in and took a leak at the urinal, washed his hands, and went back out. I passed my pants over the door, and the old man passed his back. I put them on. They were almost a perfect fit. He handed me his shirt, and I put that on.
“You want your belt?” he said.
“No, you keep it.”
“It’s a nice one. Thank you.”
I put my own shoes on my feet and came out of the stall. He handed me a razor, and I soaped up and started shaving.
“This ain’t goin’ to smell too good, but it might do the trick.” He was holding a can of white shoe polish. He dipped some out and mixed it with a smaller amount of black from another can and went to work on my hair, making it gray.
A little pillow lay on the stool where he waited for customers. He picked it up and pointed to the stall.
“Take the laces out your shoes,” he said.
I did and then unbuttoned my new shirt. He tied the pillow so that when I buttoned up the shirt I had grown a paunch.
“That cane, I just keep it for company. I don’t need it, so you take it.”
He watched me walk with the cane, and then he took it and walked with it, showing me how.
“Listen,” he said. “They had me in a box once, just like you in a box now. It took me a long time to figure my way out of it. You know what I figured out? There wasn’t any box. Just the box I made for myself. I’ll bet the box you in now got to do with money. Money or pussy. Or money and pussy. You get out of your box and you still got your hands on some money, you send me a little piece of it.”
He handed the cane back. “Every crutch is a weapon,” he said. “You think about that, maybe figure out what I mean. Do your ribs hurt?”
“Yes, they do.”
He laughed. “That way you remember me. Good luck.”
I went out past the bar and into the street and up Flagler toward the bay, taking it slow and limping up a storm. When I got to the Seybold Building I crossed the street and walked inside and kept going past all the jewelry shops until I came out the other side of the arcade onto First Street. I waited until I saw a cab, flagged it down, and told the driver to head for the airport.
I walked up four levels of ramps in the long-term parking garage before I found what I was after. I’d been hoping for a delivery truck, but this was even better: a big V-8 Buick with New York plates and a U-Haul trailer hitched to the back. I could see the parking receipt tucked in a slot on the dashboard. The inside of the car was clean and tidy. It belonged to someone older, someone careful, and that told me something.
It took me less than a minute to find the magnetic hide-a-key under the front bumper.
22
THE MEETING PLACE was the corner of Fifth and Ocean, every day at noon. I came over the causeway, crossed Washington, and started paying attention. At the corner I kept looking until the light changed, then circled the block to make another pass. I was five minutes early. A girl on Rollerblades got up from a bench across the street and skated diagonally right through the intersection. She was ten feet away before I realized it was Julia. She got in the car, taking a pair of binoculars from around her neck. The light changed.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said. “You look ridiculous.”
“So do you.”
She laughed, and I laughed.
“Any sign of the others?”
“No, none,” she said, unlacing the Rollerblades. “When did they let you out?”
“About ten thirty this morning. I’m going to circle around once or twice more.”
I did. No Kip, no Manny.
“Fontana’s in the hospital,” I said.
“I know. I went to see him this morning after I got out.”
“And?”
“Well, he’s plenty sick.”
We crossed the bay, and I got on the expressway. Then I turned off onto U.S. 1, heading south. When we were passing the Dixie Creme, she said, “You’re going to the warehouse. To get a gun?”
“Yes.”
Ten minutes later I pulled off the highway and stopped the car at the end of the broad alley, looking down it at the door of the shop space. The alley was empty. I parked two spaces down from the door.
“I’m going in with you,” she said. “There’s something I want, too.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“You don’t know where it is.”
Before picking up Julia I had stopped at a hardware store and bought a pair of bolt cutters, and now I got them out of the trunk. She kept an eye on the alley while I bent down and set the blades on the loop of the padlock and cut it. The lock dropped onto the concrete, and I thought I heard something from inside. I listened, trying to count up to twenty. I got to twelve and didn’t want to keep standing in the alley holding a pair of bolt cutters.
She looked at me.
“I thought I heard something,” I said.
She listened. Then she bent down, grabbing the door handle. I felt like telling her to wait, but the door was already running up on its slides.
She stepped inside and turned on the lights. As she was reaching for the switch, the smell hit me. It was something acrid and strong mixed up with the cement dust and epoxy odor and another new smell of fresh sawdust. The lights came on and she screamed and turned the lights off. In the darkness there was a voice from the back of the room. It was trying to shout, but it wasn’t a shout. It was more of a croak. The voice had said: “Under the water! It’s under the water!”
I didn’t think I had really seen what I thought I had. I bumped her getting to the light switch, and she jumped and screamed again, even louder. When she screamed, I yelled. Then I turned on the lights and looked into the shop space, all the way to the back of the long room.
There were three wooden crosses about twelve feet high. A man was hanging from the one on the left, naked. Another man, skinnier and also naked, was hanging from the one on the right. The cross in the middle was empty, but the fresh lumber was flecked with blood. The man on the left moved his head, the muscles and tendons in his neck straining. “Under the water!” he croaked.
It was Kip. The man on the right must have been Manny. He hadn’t moved.
I reached out and got hold of Julia’s shoulder, but she pushed my hand away. I made myself turn around and roll down the door.
I walked in slowly. Julia stayed where she was.
The crosses were a neat job, two-by-ten floor joists put together with lag bolts. The empty one in the middle let me see how they were done. I noticed a little white card stapled to it about five feet off the ground, below where the horizontal and vertical joists came together. I took it down.
It was the lawyer’s business card: Carl Sandolin, embossed, with a cell phone number, no address.
Kip was trying to yell again, but he choked. I looked at him. His eyes were half open but I could tell he couldn’t see anything. Someone had driven galvanized sixty-penny nails neatly through both wrists, leaving about an inch of nail sticking out. The someone had wrapped fencing wire around each nail head and then around his wrists and around the joist. His feet hung down free against the cross. Shit was on his legs and on the cross and a little bit on the floor beneath both Kip and Manny. Manny seemed to be dead. His tongue was swollen and sticking out from between his teeth.
“It’s under the water!” Kip whispered. When he spoke, his rib cage heaved up and down. I saw he was wearing a pair of headphones, taped in place. A wire ran down to a tape recorder fastened to the back of the cross. The tape ins
ide it was turning.
I stood on a bait cooler and pulled the duct tape away from Kip’s hair, keeping my eyes on him while I put the headset over my ears and listened. There was nothing at first. Then, after a few seconds, the voice of Miriam Benages said: “Where—is—the money?” I waited, and waited some more. Then she said it again, calmly: “Where—is—the money?” I listened to the question a third time, and it was exactly the same, no change in the way she said it. The entire tape was the one question, repeated over and over.
I jumped when I heard movement, but it was Julia crossing the room behind me. She went to a toolbox, opened it, and took the tray out. She dug around in the bottom and brought out a Gerber’s baby-food bottle, unscrewing the lid. She dipped a key into the bottle and brought the key up to her face, held one side of her nose and sniffed, then dipped the key through the mouth of the bottle and brought it up to her face again, inhaling with the other side of her nose.
I couldn’t figure out how to get him down from there. The cross was held up with chains hooked into the metal ceiling girders. The whole cross, with Kip on it, hung from the ceiling, swaying slightly. Kip didn’t move or say anything, but I saw his eyes flicker. Something black was coming out the edge of his mouth and dripping down his chin.
The smell didn’t seem so bad now. I picked up a handgun from the table and checked the action and the breach, popped out the clip. It was full. I kept the gun in my hand and looked at Julia. I found another gun and checked it and gave it to her.
We went out the door leaving the lights on, rolling the door back down.
THERE WAS A PHONE in the car. When we had turned onto the highway, I called 911 and gave the address of the warehouse and the shop-space number and hung up.
We turned west on Kendall and drove until we hit Krome, then turned south. I pulled over and asked her for the baby-food jar and took a couple of key bumps, one for each nostril.
“I don’t think we can do this by ourselves,” I said.
She looked at me. Then she got out of the car and came around to my side. She opened the door.
“Get out,” she said.
“No.”
“Yes. Get out. If you want to quit, OK. But I’m not. I’m going all the way.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why? Because it’s dark inside a tobacco barn. Because I once ate nothing but kale and rotting pears for two straight weeks. Because the world is what it is, and people who allow themselves to become nothing don’t have a place in it. That’s why,” she said.
“All right.”
“All right what?
“We’ll do it by ourselves. Together.”
She looked at me steadily, then walked around to the passenger side and got back in.
We drove on for a time, and I asked her if she was OK.
“Yes.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I never really thought about how you do it. I just assumed you put the nails through the palms. Not through the wrists. Not right between the radius and ulna.”
I took my arm down off the seat and put both hands on the steering wheel, trying to think about the next move.
23
YOU KEEP LOOKING at me,” she said when she woke up between Homestead and Key Largo.
“You’re nice to look at.”
“That’s not what I mean. You were already doing it in my room at the Cardozo the first time we talked.”
I shrugged. “Some of the things you say. The way you say them. It reminds me of someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
A car passed.
“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?”
“Fontana?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Sure. He’s a survivor. So are you.”
I looked over at her. She had her back against the door, watching me.
“Do you ever sit around and wonder about the child you and your wife gave up?”
“I don’t know about the sitting around part, but yes, of course.”
“But you never found out,” she said.
“No. The law makes it pretty much impossible.”
“A lot of those laws have changed.”
“OK. But I’m not sure what the point would be. I guess I was never sure it was a good idea. I mean, look at you.”
“What about me?”
“I thought you told me you were adopted. The music professor and his wife. It seems like they did fine by you.”
“They did. But I wasn’t adopted until I was thirteen.”
“That sounds unusual.”
“It is. My adoptive mother did volunteer work as a guardian ad litem. She got involved in my case, and they wound up taking me on full time, so to speak.”
“Your case?”
“For the first thirteen years I was raised in a series of foster homes. Some were just OK. Some weren’t. It appears I was a very clumsy child. I kept falling down and having to go to the hospital. The year before I was adopted I was living with a couple on a farm in North Carolina. The husband and his brother liked to wake me up early and take me down to the tobacco barn for photo sessions. One of them would tie me up and fuck me while the other took pictures. Then they would trade off. Sometimes they would lock me up in the tobacco barn and leave me there all day. Until they came back at night. Have you ever been inside a tobacco barn, Matt? It’s very dark, even in the day. It’s hot. Snakes love it.”
“Jesus.”
“Yep.”
“Then what happened?”
“A small-town scandal. They went to trial but in the end they were acquitted. They died earlier this month in a hunting accident.”
“A hunting accident.”
“Three days after Jack got out of prison.”
I looked at her. “What are you telling me, Julia?”
She was silent.
“Are you telling me Jack had something to do with those men’s deaths?”
“Toward the end, my foster father bought a movie camera, and a couple of years after the trial he started selling his film to an offshore Web site. It was a pioneer in live video streaming, primitive but popular. He made enough money to buy a new tractor.”
She turned and looked at me. “Jack knew all about it. He helped shut down the Web site in ninety-four, when he was still working for the FBI. But he was never able to arrest the people behind it. Or at least not the main person. Miriam Benages.”
I was glad to stop talking about it. It all left a bad set of images. But what had started us talking stayed put: something made me sure I had known her before, had met her, even though I knew I never had. She seemed to want to say something else, but she stopped talking when I turned off the highway onto the road leading up Big Pine Key. I was so tired I almost missed the turn, braking hard and throwing my arm out toward her the way my dad used to do with me. I had a plan now because I had remembered Dennis the Dentist.
The house stood on pilings all the way at the end of a sandy lane lined with empty lots. The dentist had built the house years ago, before the county put a moratorium on new construction and before he got caught trafficking Oxycontin and went to work for me as a government informant. He had planted all sorts of exotic trees, and now they had grown up and walled in the sandy yard. I could see a clue to what I was after over the crown of the roof—the top of a sailboat mast. I pulled in and kept going, getting around the back of the house to the canal where the sailboat lay roped to a faded dock. The dentist came down from Miami on weekends, and the boat waited for him.
I backed the trailer up to the storage space under the house. We walked down to the dock and looked at the boat, a Morgan sloop, thirty-eight feet and plenty slow, but with lots of space inside. Julia went around to the stern and read the name, Nellie, and laughed.
We went up a staircase to the screened porch, and Julia flicked a button on the hot tub, and it started bubbling and rolling. The dentist had a collection of wind chi
mes on the porch, lots of them, and a big aquarium inside the house that I could see through the panes of the door. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my arm and broke out one section of glass, then reached through and turned the handle. We went into the living room and sat down, looking at the aquarium.
IT WAS THE KIND OF PLACE I would have liked to have, and maybe someday I would. The dentist kept it neat as a pin. Lots of pictures of sea creatures decorated the walls, and a big piece of polished driftwood sat by the fireplace.
Julia walked across the living room, and I followed her. A door led into a little office and another opened into a bedroom. We stood in the doorway and looked at the bed. It was the biggest bed I had ever seen. On the table beside it was an expensive-looking sculpture of two men wrestling.
“This guy knows how to have fun,” she said.
I wondered about that while I left her in the house to sweep up the glass and get some things together in the kitchen. The sun had gone down, but there was still light in the sky. I used the bolt cutters to open the trailer and used them again on the padlock on the hatch of the Nellie. Down inside the salon I found the panel box and flipped all the breakers. The engine key hung on a hook. I took it up into the cockpit and turned the engine over, letting it rumble while I checked the fuel and the running lights and the masthead light. The inside of the boat was like the inside of the house, clean and tidy. All the charts I needed were right there in a drawer beneath the navigation table. A teakettle waited on the gimballed stove in the galley, and a skinny little mock-Persian carpet was on the narrow cabin sole leading up to a V-berth in the bow. I shut down the engine and went to the car and got the guns and put one in the galley cabinet behind a coffee can and one in a compartment in the cockpit next to a winch handle. Then I went back to the trailer and started unloading. There were boxes of books and clothing and two bicycles; there was furniture, including a big armchair and a couch. I dragged the couch out last and got it into the storage space underneath the house.
When I went back up the steps Julia was in the hot tub, her hair spread out over the edge to stay dry. She dipped down when I came onto the screened porch. The baby-food jar sat on the corner of the tub. Under the moving water I could see the outline of her body. She laughed at me, her eyes sparkling, and I watched her as I kept moving across the deck through the door of the house and into the kitchen. Everything I had asked her to do was done. I carried a bag of food and two gallon jugs of drinking water onto the porch.