by Brad Meltzer
Surprised by my own outburst, I sit there silently, my chest rising and falling far too rapidly. I’m not stupid. I know all the emotional reasons I went chasing after my dad instead of just writing him off after the hospital. I still believe in those reasons. But that doesn’t mean I believe him.
“Cal, I promise you, I have no idea what book Ellis is after, or what’s inside that container.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I shoot back. “We’re about to get our answer.”
20
Here?” my father asks, looking inside the dark doorway. Our clothes were soaked from the water, but he’s still fidgeting with the spare dry T-shirt and jeans I always keep stored in the van. “Y’sure?”
I nod, holding open the door with no doorknob and thankful that the punch-code lock is still so easy to jimmy. Inside the old warehouse, the walls are bare and peeling, while each corner hosts a small hill of crumpled newspapers and garbage. Up high, the few horizontal windows are shattered. And the sign out front carries the spray-painted love note “LO” (a gang-inspired tag that means “Latinos Only” just in case anyone misses the welcome mat).
But as I flick a switch and the fluorescent lights blink to life, they reveal what we’re really after: the navy blue container with black tracking number 601174-7 painted across its back. Beached like a metal whale, it rests its tail against the narrow loading dock that runs along the back of the room.
“You sure it’s safe?” my father asks, racing for the container.
He’s missing the point. The warehouse may be decorated in modern dungeon, but that’s the goal. Hidden under layers of fake corporate names, this place is owned by the U.S. government.
We— They. They own them all around the city: fake warehouses that ICE, Customs, and the FBI can use for whatever sting operations they happen to be running. When Timothy offered to have the container delivered here, I thought he was doing me a favor. All he was really doing—once he presumably got rid of me and my dad—was swiping it for himself.
“So you don’t think Ellis knows this’s here?” my father asks.
“If he did, you really think he’d’ve driven off with a truck full of plastic pineapples? Now c’mon—I figure we’ve got an hour on him. Time to see what’s behind door number two.”
“Y’sure there’s no door number three?” my father moans forty-five minutes later, up to his knees in the rancid smell of slowly melting frozen shrimp.
Back in the day, I’d have half a dozen agents burrow to the center of a four-thousand-pound container, send in the dogs, and empty whatever looked suspicious, all within twenty minutes. I don’t have half a dozen agents. Or dogs. I have my dad, and all my dad has is a gunshot wound and a bad back.
“Y’okay?” I ask, walking backward and dragging yet another fifty-pound carton of shrimp out the back doors of the truck, onto the ledge of the loading dock.
My father nods, nudging the carton with his foot so he doesn’t have to bend over. But the sun is up—it’s nearly seven a.m., and the warm air is baking us in the seafood stench—I can see it reflecting off the sweat on his face.
“Halfway through,” I tell him.
With a sharp kick, he sends the newest box toward the maze of cartons that crowd the left half of the loading area. On a small radio in the corner, he put on the local Paul and Young Ron morning show. Still, my dad’s not laughing. From the hospital to being up all night, he’s had it. But as he turns my way, he suddenly looks oddly . . . proud.
“When’d you start wearing it facing in?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“Your watch,” he says, pointing to the inside of my wrist. “You wear it facing in.” He then lifts his arm so his palm and the face of his own watch are aimed at me. “Me, too,” he says. “Funny, huh?”
I look down at my watch, then over at his. Both are cheap. Both are digital. Both have nearly identical thick black bands.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I insist.
“N-No, I know—I just meant—”
“It’s a stupid coincidence, okay, Lloyd? Now can we drop it and finish unloading the rest of this?”
I squat down and tug another wet box full of shrimp toward my dad. Using his foot like a broom, he sweeps it along and adds it to the pile.
“You’re right,” he says. “We need to focus on what’s important.”
“Okay, now what?”
“Just gimme a sec,” I say, shoving aside the last box and staring into the now completely empty container.
“I don’t think we have a sec,” my dad replies as he turns his wrist and stares down at his watch.
I glance down at my own, ignoring the slight throb of my dog bite. He may be right. Outside, there’s a siren in the distance. This neighborhood hears them all the time. But I can still picture Ellis’s blue lights pulsing in the dark. We don’t have much time.
Of the seventy-six cartons we pulled from the container, all are the same size, same shape, and, from what we can tell, same weight. And as they melt in the Florida heat, each one has a slowly growing puddle beneath it.
“You were hoping one of them wouldn’t be packed with ice?” my dad asks.
“Something like that. Anything to save us from opening and digging through each one.”
“Maybe one of them has a tattooed frozen head in it. Or someone’s brain.”
“A tattooed head?”
“Okay, not a tattooed head. But y’know what I mean—maybe it’s a different kinda book. Either way—it’s almost nine—time to get out of here, Calvin.”
“And where you plan on going? To your apartment? To mine? You think those aren’t the first places Ellis is gonna look? He shot a federal agent, Lloyd! Trust me, the only way to bargain with this nutbag is if we have his favorite chip.”
My father steps back at the outburst—not at the words, but at who it came from.
“And stop giving me that my-boy’s-become-a-man look!” I quickly add. “It’s fifty times past annoying already!”
“I wasn’t looking at you,” he admits. “I was . . . There . . .” he says, motioning over my shoulder.
I turn around, following his finger to the open doors of the yawning, empty container.
“Where’s that water go to?” my father asks. Reading my confusion, he points again. “There. Right along . . .”
I crane my head and finally see it: on the floor of the container, in the very back. To the untrained eye, it’s another of the many thin puddles from the now melted ice. Something you’d never look twice at. Unless you happen to notice that the puddle is somehow running and disappearing underneath the container’s back wall.
I’ve seen this magic trick before: bad guys adding fake floors and ceilings in the hopes of smuggling something in.
My father kicks one of the shrimp boxes and sends it slamming into the back wall. There’s a hollow echo. No question, there’s something behind there.
Within thirty seconds, my dad’s got the handle from the jack in my van. He rams it like a shovel at the bottom right corner of the back wall, where there’s a small gap at the floor. After wedging it in place, he grabs the handle, pushes down with all his weight, and tries to pry it open. “It’s screwed into the—”
“Lemme try,” I say.
He pushes again. It doesn’t budge.
Outside, the siren keeps getting louder. As if it’s coming right at us.
“Lloyd!”
“I’m trying, it’s just— I can’t . . .” he blurts, clearly upset as he lets go, and I take over. The computer said he’s fifty-two years old. At this moment, the way he looks away and scratches his beard . . . he looks north of sixty.
With both hands gripping the handle, I wedge one foot against the wall, lean backward, and pull down as hard as I can. The wood is cheap, but it barely gives.
I reset my foot and pull harder. The siren howls toward us.
Krrrk.
The wood gives way and there’s a loud snap, sending me falling backward
. As I crash on my ass, two screws tumble and ping along the metal floor, freeing the bottom right corner of the wall.
“Now here!” my dad blurts, pointing to the next set of screws on the far right side of the wall. They’re at waist height and, with the makeshift crowbar, easy to get at, but all I’m focused on is the unnerving excitement in my dad’s voice.
“C’mon, Cal—we got it!” he says as I put my weight into it and another hunk of wood is pulled away from the screws. Years ago during my father’s trial, his lawyer argued that the true cause of my mother’s death was her mental instability—he said she had an alter ego, like a second face: one that was good, one that was evil. Naturally, the prosecutor pounced on it, saying my dad was the one with the alter ego: Lloyd the Saintly Defendant and Lloyd the Reckless Killer.
Three minutes ago, my dad was winded and hobbling. Suddenly, he’s gripping the right side of the thin wooden wall, prying and bending it open and thrilled to find his treasure. One man. Two faces.
“This is it! Grab it here!” he says, tugging the right side of the thin wall, which has now lost enough screws that the harder we pull, the more it curves toward us. I try to see what’s behind it—some kind of box with its long side running against the true back wall—but with the shadow of the wood, it’s too dark to see. “Keep pulling!” my father says, still cheerleading as the wood finally begins to crack. “Uno . . . dos . . .”
With a final awkward semi-karate move, my father kicks the wood panel, which snaps on impact and sends us both stumbling back. As the last splinters of particleboard somersault through the morning sun, we both stare at what my dad was really transporting—the true object of Ellis’s desire.
That’s not just a box.
It’s a coffin.
21
It’s a casket,” my father stutters.
“I know what it is. Is it—? Is someone in it?”
He doesn’t move, still staring at the dark wood box as another siren begins to scream in the distance. It’s only a matter of time till one’s headed here.
In front of us, it’s definitely a coffin, though it’s oddly rounded at the edges. Along the top, yellow and white papers are pasted randomly in place, while a thin band of copper piping runs along the bottom. To be honest, I thought my dad was bullshitting when he said he didn’t know what was in the truck, but from the confusion on his face, this is news to him.
“Help me get it out,” my dad says, rushing forward and grabbing one of the wooden handles at the head of the casket. “Yuuuh!” he yells, leaping back and frantically wiping his hand on his pants.
“What? Something’s on there?”
He holds up his open palm, which is dotted with small black flecks of dirt. Fresh soil. I look back at the coffin. Most of it’s wiped clean, but you can still see chunks of soil caked in the edges of the trim.
“Someone dug this out of the ground,” I say.
“Before Panama, the sheet said it was in Hong Kong,” my dad says. “Do they have rounded coffins there?”
“You think there’s a body inside?”
There’s a loud chirp as my phone shrieks through the warehouse. It’s nearly ten a.m. and we still haven’t slept. Caller ID tells me who it is. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t pick up.
“Cal here,” I answer.
“Good time, bad time?” a fast-talking man with a deep baritone asks through my cell as yet another siren yet again gets louder.
I watch my father wrap a page of old newspaper around the pull bar on the coffin, which is only half sticking out through the hole in the fake wall. My dad tugs hard, but he can’t do it alone. Pinching the phone with my shoulder, I race next to him, grip the other pull bar along the side, and pull as hard as I can.
“No . . . ruhhhh . . . perfect time,” I say into the phone, feeling every hour of my exhaustion.
No surprise, Benny laughs.
Two years ago, Benny Ocala came tearing out of the local Seminole Indian reservation, searching for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandfather, who had wandered, literally, off the reservation. Roosevelt and I found the old man in a Pembroke Pines front yard, sitting in a kiddie pool with his socks on. Today, Benny’s the Seminole tribe’s very own chief of police. His own sovereign nation. Which explains why, when I left the hospital earlier tonight, I drove the extra six miles to give Benny the bullet that the doctor pulled outta my dad.
“Please tell me you were able to trace it,” I say with another tug. The casket rolls to the right, shedding bits of dirt along the floor as we angle it through the open hole.
“We’re Indians, Cal. My ancestors traced deer farts.”
I’m tempted to point out he went to Tulane and drives a Camry, but I’m far too focused on the yellow and white papers pasted to the coffin. I can’t read the writing—it’s either Chinese or Japanese—but there’s no mistaking the small crosses at the bottom of each page. Across the top of one of the pages it says, in English, “Ecclesiastes.” These are Bible pages. Is that what Ellis meant by a book?
“This is a bad one, isn’t it?” Benny asks, suddenly serious.
I stand up straight, letting go of the coffin. “What’d the trace say?” I ask.
“That’s the thing, Cal—bullets aren’t like fingerprints. If I only have the bullet, unless it’s a rare gun, which’ll leave signature grooves on th—”
“Benny, I hate CSI. I don’t wanna learn.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t wanna call up that woman with the fangy teeth who runs the computer room at the Broward Sheriff’s Office, and then pretend to flirt with her just so she’ll do me a favor and run a bullet through the ATF database and their experts there.”
“But you did, didn’t you?”
“Can’t help it—I’m a sucker for a girl with a snaggletooth,” Benny teases as my dad continues his tug-of-war with the coffin. “The point is,” he adds, “your bullet was fired by a rare gun. Really rare: a Walther from 1930. Apparently, it was made as a prototype for the military—Russian army in this case—then discarded. Only something like twenty ever existed.”
He stops for a moment.
“Benny, why’re you giving me the dramatic pause?”
“It’s just odd, Cal. Guns like this—they don’t show up a lot. Out of the grillions of guns out there, well . . . that gun’s only been used once—one time—apparently during some unsolved murder in Cleveland, Ohio.”
Cleveland. That was the area code from my dad’s phone call. I look at my father, who’s now shimmying the coffin back and forth, trying to angle it through the open hole. As I pace through the empty container, he gives it one final pull, which frees the casket from its hiding spot.
“When was the murder in Cleveland?” I ask.
“Now you’re seeing the problem, Cal. The last time we know that gun was fired was back in 1932,” Benny explains. “In fact, if this is right, it’s the same gun that killed some guy named Mitchell Siegel.”
“Who’s Mitchell Siegel?”
My dad turns to me as I say the name, but not for long. He turns back to the coffin and starts circling it, trying to figure out how to get it open.
“You didn’t look him up?” I ask.
“Of course I looked him up. Deer farts, remember? So according to this, Mitchell Siegel is just a normal 1930s average Joe. Lived in Cleveland for years . . . ran a tailor shop . . . had a nice family.”
“Why’d he get killed?”
“No one knows. Death certificate says two men came in and stole some clothes.”
“He was killed for clothes?”
“It was the Depression—I have no idea. Like I said, the case is unsolved. Just a bullet in this guy from this gun. Just like your dad.”
“Yeah,” I say as my father grips the lid at the top corner of the coffin and tries to lift it open. It doesn’t budge. He tries the bottom corner. Same thing. I went to my first funeral when I was nine years old. With our clientele, Roosevelt and I went to lots more. Even I know coffins are locked w
ith a key.
“Oh, and in case you needed even more news of the odd: This guy Mitchell? He’s the father of Jerry Siegel.”
“Am I supposed to know that name?”
“Jerry Siegel. The writer who created Superman.”
“Like Clark Kent Superman? As in ‘faster than a speeding bullet’?”
“Apparently his dad wasn’t. Bullet hit Mitchell square in the chest,” Benny says. “Kinda kooky, though, huh? The gun that shoots your dad is the same one that shot the dad of Superman’s creator?” He lowers his voice, doing a bad Vincent Price. “Two mysteries, nearly eighty years apart. You not hearing that Twilight Zone music?”
“Yeah, that’s very—” Across from me, my dad reaches into his pocket, pulls out what looks like a small L-wrench, and slides it into a small hole at the upper half of the casket. Is that—? Son of a bitch. He’s got a key.
“Benny, I gotta go,” I say, and slap my phone shut.
I rush toward my dad, whose back is still to me. Outside, the multiple sirens in the distance go suddenly silent, which is even worse. “Where’d you get that?” I shout.
He doesn’t turn around.
“Lloyd, I’m talking to you! Where’d you get that key!?”
Still no response.
There’s a loud thunk as he twists the metal key. The bolt in the coffin slides and unlocks.
When my dad first saw the coffin, he was definitely scared. But the way his hands crawl like tarantulas across the side—as fast as they’re moving—now he’s excited. Digging his fingers into the lip of the casket, he lets out the smallest of grunts.
With that, the coffin opens.
22
Hold on . . . I’m booting up now,” Special Agent Naomi Molina said, reaching down to turn on her home computer while working hard not to spill her oatmeal across her keyboard. It was harder than it looked. But like any Jewban (Jewish mom, Cuban dad), finding balance was everything for her.
It started when Naomi was eleven years old, which was when she discovered her first calling, sports (over Dad’s screaming, “Cuban girls should only wear dresses!”). Taller than all the prepubescent boys, young Naomi was an all-star catcher two years in a row.