Silencer

by James W. Hall

  “Look,” Rusty said. “We’re here to speak to Frisco. We don’t want any trouble. My friend was only protecting himself against your thug over there.”

  “Feisty alert,” Antwan called out. “Tough broad on aisle three.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  Browning Hammond dug a hand into his shirt pocket and came out with a toothpick of gold, which he slid between his lips. The toothpick jiggled up and down like some juvenile taunt.

  Sugarman cut a warning look her way. Stay cool.

  But no, not Rusty, not Taco Shine’s half-sister.

  She took a half step forward and said, “My name is Rusty Stabler.”

  Sugarman groaned to himself.

  The toothpick stopped wagging. Browning turned to look at his grinning buddy.

  “Our situation,” Antwan said, “is compounding in interest.”

  Rusty stayed put, staring defiantly at the two of them.

  “You a lawyer?” Hammond asked her.

  “No.”

  “A real estate broker?”

  “None of that,” she said. “Your name was on some paperwork I been studying. Rusty Stabler.”

  “That’s right. My name was on some paperwork.”

  “A few weeks back, Earl showed me those papers, just gave me a peek. I saw your name and I saw the name of a man I never heard of before. A fellow called Thorn. So when Earl passed on, I was mighty curious about what kind of business the two of you were doing behind my back with my own family. So this afternoon I go to the bank, open Earl’s lockbox, and let my lawyer take a good long look at that document. He didn’t know what to make of it, either. A very strange agreement with your name on it. Rusty Stabler.”

  “So?”

  “You’re not a lawyer, you’re not a broker. What are you then?”

  “I’m the woman you’ve got to deal with.”

  “And I’m the man,” said Sugar.

  But neither of them could take their eyes off Rusty.

  “Raise the gate, Hector,” Hammond called out.

  “How we doing this?” Antwan sidled up to his buddy.

  “You take brown sugar,” Hammond said. “The woman goes with me.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Sugarman. “The lady and I are together. We’re staying together.”

  “Take him, Antwan. Be nice. Don’t break any bones he might need later on.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  CLAIRE CHANGED STATIONS ON THE radio dial, and changed them again. Only football and talk shows and someone selling vitamins. No news, no music that soothed her nerves. Frisco was silent, driving his pickup one-handed, his eyes on the road.

  He’d used the ranch’s south exit, unlocking the gate with a key from his chain. When she asked why they were using that less-traveled route to leave the ranch, he just looked at her and said nothing. She felt like she was being kidnapped by a stranger. In the last hour after they’d returned to the barn, settled the horses in their stalls, he’d barely acknowledged her existence. He’d walked away without a word. She followed him to the lodge and into the kitchen, where he had a hushed conversation with Deloria.

  Claire hovered at the kitchen door, and when she started to stalk away, he ordered her to stop. They were going for a drive. He wouldn’t say where. He led her out to his pickup and hadn’t spoken for the last ten miles.

  South of Clewiston he turned east on highway 80 toward Belle Glade.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Ten more minutes,” he said. “Hold on.”

  On the outskirts of the shabby town, he wheeled the truck onto a side road that had no sign and bumped down a potholed stretch past rows of trailer homes where the pickers lived and the migrants who’d saved enough to get off the road and rest for a while. Three mutts chased them down the street, barking at the wheels of the truck.

  Darkness was gathering. The wind had died. The approaching cold front must have stalled north of them as they so often did that time of year.

  He parked in front of a green-and-white mobile home that was neater than any on the street. A flag emblazoned with a Pilgrim holding a roasted turkey fluttered over the doorway.

  As they got out, the dogs surrounded them and snarled, but Frisco waded through the pack, shepherded Claire along, and headed for the door. It opened before he could knock.

  A short heavy Mexican with bleary eyes and an undershirt spattered with flecks of salsa blocked the way. He stared at the front of Frisco’s Miami PD T-shirt, then stepped back.

  “You out of your territory, aren’t you, my friend?”

  “This used to be my area once,” Frisco said. “A long time back.”

  “I don’t think I got any warrants on me from Miami. But I could be wrong.”

  “Is Ana Pinto here?”

  “Her name’s not Pinto anymore.”

  “Is she here?”

  “What you want with Ana?”

  “Tell her it’s Frisco.”

  “Aw, man. I told that woman. I said you’d come and she got all hostile at me. When that woman gets mean, she’ll shut up for a week. That’s how she is. Goddamn woman.”

  Ana came to the door with a baby in her arms, two toddlers tagging along. Her black hair was long and straight and her dark eyes full of a resolute calm. She wore tight blue jeans and a T-shirt that hung to her knees. The man in the undershirt padded back inside, and Claire saw him take hold of the arm of a boy who had squirmed into the man’s lounge chair. He yanked him out, scolding him in Spanish, swatted the boy on the butt, and sent him yowling into the back rooms.

  “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Deloria,” he said. “She’s worried about you.”

  “I’m not part of this, Frisco.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “My father, I told him, no, don’t do it. God would judge him and he would burn in hell for this.”

  “Why, Ana? Why did this happen?”

  “It wasn’t out of anything but love.”

  “Love? What kind of love kills an old man like Earl?”

  “Gustavo was sick. He wouldn’t go to the doctor till too late.”

  “Sick with what?”

  She turned away from him and drew open a drawer just inside the door. When she came back, she held out a sheaf of papers in her hand, and Frisco took them. Baptist Hospital, Miami. He shuffled through them, scanned the print quickly. Lab results, bills, blood tests, scheduled exams with oncologists and other specialists.

  “Cancer?” Frisco said.

  “His pancreas,” she said, touching a shy hand to her belly. “Doctors told him he had only two, three weeks. Not even that, if you’d asked me. At the end he was down to Miami for chemo once a week, but it made him so sick. He wasn’t right in his head. In so much pain.”

  He returned the papers, and Ana set them on the cabinet by the door.

  “Where’d your mother go? Your brothers.”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I’ll find out, Ana.”

  “Don’t steal this away. I’m asking you, Frisco. It’s all Mama has now. This was my father’s gift to her. He meant to do right. You knew him. He was a good Catholic, worked hard all his life, but he lost it all at the end, the hospital, the treatments, he had nothing left, no savings, nothing. Then the devil got in his face when he was sick and confused, and the devil knew he was dying, and he makes my father a terrible offer. What was he going to do? This was his chance to give my mother something and my brothers.”

  “What devil, Ana?”

  She shut her mouth and shook her head.

  Her eyes strayed to Claire for a moment, and Ana inspected her with a weary frankness. Whatever she saw made her sigh and stroke the downy head of her baby. She shifted her gaze back to Frisco.

  “Gustavo shot Earl dead, Ana. Two bullets in the heart. That’s not a good man. That’s not doing a good thing.”

  “It’s not simple as that,” she said. “Goo
d and bad. Maybe for you it is, but for a man who never had nothing, it was too much temptation.”

  Frisco looked past her into the trailer.

  “I’m sorry, Frisco,” Ana said. “Your grandpa was a fine man. He didn’t deserve no death like that.”

  “Tell me where your mother went. The rest of your family.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m going to find out what happened. I won’t stop till I do.”

  “I know that. That’s how you always were.”

  They looked at each other for several moments.

  Frisco said, “Does my brother know where you live?”

  “I don’t know what your brother knows.”

  “Does the man in there own a gun?”

  “He’s my husband,” she said. “He’s not some man.”

  “Does he own a gun, Ana?”

  “He keeps a pistol in the closet.”

  “Good. You tell him to take it down, load it, stash it away from the kids but somewhere he can get to it quickly.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll know when this is over, Ana. I’ll let you know. But until then, have him keep it loaded and close at hand.”

  Claire kept quiet till they were in the truck and rolling away.

  “What the hell were you saying back there? That Browning might threaten that woman’s life?”

  “That’s about right.”

  Something smacked Frisco’s door and he slowed.

  The boy who’d perched in the lounge chair was running alongside, slapping at the truck.

  Frisco came to a stop and rolled down his window.

  “This is from Mama.”

  He handed Frisco a white slip of paper.

  Frisco looked at it for a moment and told the boy to wait. Then he leaned across to the glove compartment, brushing Claire’s knees with his arm, opened the glove box, and dug out a handful of peppermint sticks.

  “Make sure you share them,” he said, and handed them to the boy.

  TWENTY-SIX

  * * *

  IT WAS AN HOUR AND a half to Coconut Grove. Frisco took shortcuts across Miami on backstreets Claire had never seen, finally gliding to a stop on a quiet avenue just off Ingram Highway in a neighborhood of old Florida homes with new BMWs and sleek Italian roadsters in the driveways. Lots of oaks and ficus, a fashionably unkempt jungle. This part of the Grove was home to artists and musicians, news anchors and a certain kind of stockbroker who liked funky charm. It was an unusual combination for Miami, where old money mingled with new, and the well-to-do lived next door to thrift-shop bohemians, with everyone sharing the same live-and-let-live creed.

  The address on Ana’s note was a wood-frame two-story house, white and yellow with a tin roof. In an earlier era it might have housed a hippie commune or a band of Hari Krishnas, but now it had been painted and remodeled to fit in with the neighborhood’s elevated status. There were giant banyans on one side and a coral wall running down the other. The garage door was open, and two men in their late twenties were looking under the raised hood of a yellow Corvette while a third young man sat behind the wheel and gunned the engine. A neighbor was standing on his front porch, holding his newspaper in one hand and trying not to scowl at the boys.

  “There goes the neighborhood,” Frisco said. “Bunch of Mexicans.”

  “That’s Juan, Gustavo Junior, and Victor.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this, Frisco?”

  “I’d say this is the payoff. That house has to be worth over a million, and that car is the cherry on top.”

  “A payoff for killing Earl.”

  “The devil discovered Gustavo was ill, he preyed on his vulnerability.”

  “You mean Browning.”

  “I hope it’s not Browning.”

  “But that’s who you think it is. That’s crazy, Frisco. That’s impossible.”

  “So the devil comes to Gustavo and makes him an offer. If you kill old man Hammond, your family will live in style.”

  “Gustavo wouldn’t agree to that. Never, never. No way.”

  “Ana said he took the deal.”

  “I don’t care how sick he was, he’d never do that.”

  “I don’t expect Gustavo had much choice. It was either accept this reward, or see his family evicted from the ranch. Ana said he did it out of love, but I think there might’ve been fear, too, and desperation. He knew the end was coming. His own, and maybe his family’s. The devil has a lot of bargaining power at times like those.”

  In an upstairs window a woman in a nightgown peered out into the darkness. She was holding a phone to her ear and speaking listlessly.

  “And what about me, Frisco? Am I in league with the devil? Was my job to walk in and shoot Gustavo?”

  “That possibility occurred to me.”

  Claire’s face went hot. She jerked forward, clawed at the door handle, got it open, but Frisco reached across her body and slammed the door shut. He kept his arm there until she’d calmed.

  “For the moment, Claire, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

  She pressed hard against the seat, fuming, unable to speak.

  “Reason I’m giving you that leeway is because of the map you saw. The map the others say wasn’t there. But it’s other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for one, I think last night Browning was yelling at Gustavo, not you.”

  She turned and looked at him.

  “I’m talking about your husband. I’m saying it’s possible you stumbled into the middle of this. Gustavo was supposed to pull the trigger and walk away, spend his last days in this house with his wife and his boys. There’s probably some money in a bank account, too. But then you walked in with the shotgun. That wasn’t in the plan. But the devil adjusted to it. In fact, it had some added benefits. Made the whole thing neater in a messy sort of way.”

  Claire shook her head, her mouth rigid.

  “You thought Browning was yelling at you to shoot, but maybe he was yelling at Gustavo. ‘Do it for your family.’ Maybe this is what he meant. This house, that car. Do it for this.”

  Gustavo’s wife, Angela, opened the upstairs window and called down to her sons. They looked up from the Corvette, then turned one by one to stare across the street at Frisco’s truck. Victor marched back into the house. The other two waited a moment longer as if considering a confrontation, then followed their brother inside.

  “We should go,” Claire said. “They think we’re going to turn them in.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  Frisco pulled the cell phone from his pocket and punched a number.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Claire grabbed at the phone but he turned and blocked her with his shoulder.

  “I’m calling Julia Scarborough. You know Julia, your phone friend. Works at the police department barn. You got her pestering me to come out to the ranch.”

  “Julia? Why?”

  “She’s got some basic computer skills.”

  Frisco dialed, and after several rings Julia answered. He put her on speaker, told Julia that Claire Hammond was listening.

  “Claire? You there?”

  Claire leaned over and said yes, yes she was.

  “You doing okay? I’m so sorry about what happened. It’s terrible.”

  “She’s fine,” Frisco said. “Now listen. You sitting at your computer?”

  No, Julia was outside mucking stalls.

  “Okay, do me a favor, would you? Go inside and look something up on the Miami-Dade website.”

  “What’re you doing, Sergeant?”

  “Some police work. Don’t worry, it’s nothing illegal. At least not yet.”

  A couple of minutes later she came back on.

  “I’m ready. Miami-Dade-dot-gov.”

  Frisco walked her through the steps to the property map. He gave the address of the Grove house.

  “Okay, I’m there, got the aerial view,” Julia said. “Nice neigh
borhood. You shopping for a place?”

  “Who’s the owner?”

  “It’s a four-three, thirty-three hundred feet inside, eleven-thousand-square-foot lot. Bought last year for a million-two. Owner is an LLC with a business address somewhere in North Miami. It’s name is BEG, all caps. You want me to try to track that down?”

  “Do that. Call me back. I’ll keep the cell on. We need to get a bite to eat.”

  “It shouldn’t take long. Don’t you love the Sunshine Law? Everything online. All those secrets, anybody can find out.”

  “If you have secrets,” Frisco said, “it can be a bitch.”

  Frisco took Claire to Scotty’s Landing, ten minutes away, a fish joint on the edge of Biscayne Bay. He left her at an outdoor picnic table and went back to the truck. When he returned, he was carrying a leather cylinder. He set it on the bench beside him, sat down, and had a long sip of his beer.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  “I’m in danger, too? Browning is going to kill me? You’re crazy.”

  “I don’t know what that man is going to do. He’s not somebody I fully understand.”

  “So which is it? Am I innocent or was I part of the conspiracy?”

  “You tell me.”

  She looked out at the glitter and tinkle of sailboats tied up in the bayside marina. She felt the rising flush behind her eyes, goddamn tears coming again. She made a fist and hammered it on the table, pounded it a second and third time until several customers turned to look. By then the burn in her eyes had subsided.

  She leaned forward across the table, bringing her voice down. “I had no part in any plot to kill Earl Hammond.”

  Frisco kept looking into her eyes as if waiting for some facial tic to show itself, a signal she was lying.

  Julia called back. He put her on speaker again, set the phone on the table.

  “Every LLC or corporation has to file a fictitious name form.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love this shit. Snooping on people. Click, click, click, get all the dirt.”

  “I know. You told me once at work how much it turned you on.”