Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  It was impossible to talk to him now, she saw, disappointed.

  “Will you call me at the newsroom?” she yelled.

  She lost her grip on his arm as the governor’s bodyguards cleared a way toward the show area. Dodd turned, walking backward a few steps. “Ill be late,” he said apologetically. “I’ll call your house when I get through. Midnight?”

  She nodded and waved her hand. She was left just outside the yew arch as the crowd followed the governor’s party and the TV cameras. For the first time she saw a tall man in a white ruffled shirt and red satin military coat standing a few feet away, inside the maze. He’d apparently been watching her.

  The light was dim. At that moment they were the only ones near the clipped green hedges of the labyrinth. As he walked toward her, Gaby couldn’t tear her gaze from his leanly powerful body, magnificent in the tight-fitting breeches and scarlet coat. He stopped in front of her and she looked up, straight into the black gypsy eyes of James Santo Marin.

  “Why can’t you do what Harrison Tigertail told you to do?” he asked in exasperation. “Stay where he can watch you. Dammit, if anything happens to you I’ll...”

  He left it dangling, staring at her with an expression of angry frustration. He looked tense and edgy in spite of his brilliant costume; the dark smudges of fatigue under his eyes were more pronounced than she remembered.

  That wasn’t the only thing Gaby remembered.

  For the first time, as she stared at James’s handsome face, the full realization of where she’d been with the iyalocha and what she’d done on board the luxurious yacht, with him, flooded over her.

  She’d managed to bury it all in the back of her mind somehow so as not to think about it. Now it popped out. Every detail. Inescapable.

  “It was some sort of trick!” The words spilled out of her. “The party, the clothes, the weird ceremony and chanting. It was all to get me in bed with you,” she cried. “When I didn’t even know what I was doing!”

  “Gabriela, look, don’t let’s argue about anything right now, especially not what happened that night. I’ll explain it to you later.” He seized her wrist, pulling her to the maze’s entrance. “You’ve got to go back where Harrison can watch you. It’s important.”

  “I don’t have to do anything? Her wrist felt as though it would break, she was twisting so hard to get free. She was close to weeping with rage and humiliation. “What a rotten thing to do to get sex! Did you pay the iyalocha to slip me something in all that rum?”

  “Will you shut up?” He wrapped strong arms around her, holding her still as she fought him. “Listen to me, Gabriela, this is all my fault. Jesus—you don’t know how much I blame myself! I would never have done this to you. It wasn’t my idea.” His voice cracked. “Say that you believe me, for God’s sake!”

  She was too amazed by his vehement words to say anything. She tilted her head back and looked up into his anguished face with alarm.

  “Please, my darling,” he murmured, lowering his head, “do what I tell you.”

  When he kissed her, his desperation marked her with soul-destroying power. It was as though he was claiming her for all eternity, fiercely branding her with his overpowering need. Gaby, whimpering under his blazing onslaught, was too confused to respond. She felt the skin on her lip part, painfully.

  She used both hands to wrench herself away. “What are you trying to do to me?” she cried. She put her fingers to her mouth.

  He stepped back, his face drawn. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “I don’t think you mean to do anything,” she hurled at him. She dabbed at her sore lip. “I don’t think your friends do, either. But that doesn’t mean I’m crazy enough to put up with any of this!”

  “Wait a minute.” He started for her as she turned away. “Gabriela, go back to Harrison and stay with him,” he ordered. “I can’t explain. Just do it!”

  But she’d had enough. “Get out of my life!” she yelled, flailing at his hands as he sought to grab her. “Stay away from me!”

  She broke and ran, holding up her skirts with both hands, racing into the night as though her very life depended on it.

  If James followed her, Gaby soon lost him. At the water pools she paused long enough to look back, and he was nowhere in sight.

  At the back of the casino a green lawn swept down to a small waterway, partly choked with water lilies, that led to the outer bay. The lagoon had been designed originally to bring one of James Deering’s yachts to the little pleasure house at the end of the gardens to pick up guests after an afternoon’s tea and card playing.

  Gaby lunged over the grass recklessly, filled with a hurting, thwarted despair. She couldn’t stay in Miami knowing that James Santo Marin was there, appearing anytime, anywhere, to haunt her with—oh, God—the memory of what it was like to love him! She couldn’t make any sort of life for herself with Dodd Brickell, when the ghost of someone she could never love again was always there to confront her!

  She stepped on the edge of her gown, heard it rip, and halted. Several television vans were parked under the trees. Except for one portable floodlight pointed at the threatening sky, the space was dark.

  Where was Crissette? she wondered. The back of the casino was so dark there was little chance of finding anyone.

  Gaby had just turned to retrace her steps when she saw the familiar satin coat and blue knee breeches of Crissette’s cisisbeo costume coming around the far side of the casino. The photographer had obviously gone around one side just as Gaby had gone around the other.

  “Gabrielle?” the other woman called to her. “What are we doing back here in the dark?”

  Gaby opened her mouth to answer, then caught her breath. A shadow was following Crissette. A large, stumbling figure, indistinct, that the other woman couldn’t see.

  Several things passed through Gaby’s mind in that instant with surprising clarity. Whoever was trying to catch up with Crissette was a maintenance worker or other museum employee, and no one to worry about. Then the shadowy figure staggered and nearly fell, and she thought he could be a drunk or a gate-crasher. The figure dropped slowly to his hands and knees and stayed there. At precisely that moment Gaby could see him well enough to know that the man following Crissette was David Fothergill.

  Gaby started to run.

  Crissette turned, astounded, as Gaby charged past her in the darkness. “What is it?” she yelled after her.

  “David?” Gaby was screaming. “Is that really you?”

  He was still on his hands and knees, unable to get up, just a few feet beyond the casino’s walkway. Shakily, the big Trinidadian lifted his head. Gaby gasped. Blood was pouring from David’s nose and his eyes were half closed. Behind her, Gaby heard Crissette scream.

  “They came to your house,” David managed hoarsely. “There are men looking for you. Bad ones. They beat me up, they wanted me to tell where you go tonight.”

  Crissette threw herself down on her knees beside David. “Oh, God,” she cried, “what the hell happened?”

  “Men...” David began again. He slowly lowered himself to his elbows, shaking his head, not able to go on.

  But Gaby had heard enough. “Wait right here,” she said irrelevantly, as David was in no condition to move. “Don’t try to do anything. I’ll get somebody to help!”

  “Get the security guards,” Crissette shouted after her. “Around the front.”

  Gaby raced across the back lawn of the casino, staggering in the soft, lumpy turf. A motor launch was coming slowly up the dark little lagoon from the bay, a small searchlight playing on the shore.

  Vizcaya security guards in a patrol boat, Gaby knew, instantly relieved. She veered off and ran down to the water’s edge, waving her arms. “Over here!” she called to the boat. “He’s hurt. Over here!”

  The launch slowed and the bow bumped the muddy shore. A man, indistinct in the darkness, leaned forward, peering into the gloom.

  “Quién es?” he asked.
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  Gaby stepped out into the mud at the edge of the grass. “Can you get a doctor? Please hurry, there’s a friend of mine who’s—”

  “Es ella!” another voice exclaimed.

  Before Gaby could step back, the figure in the bow had jumped ashore. It wrapped its arms around her, one hand covering her mouth quickly to muffle her startled cry.

  As Gaby stared up at the men, she realized this time these were the Colombians. Even in the dark. Mirror sunglasses and all.

  Ya es la hora

  De empezar a morir. La noche is buena para decir adios.

  Now is the time

  To begin dying. The night is ready for good-byes.

  JOSÉ MARTÍ

  Chapter 19

  The River of Grass is fifty miles wide but only six inches deep. It begins as a broad, freshwater drainage from Lake Okeechobee that flows down across the everglades for hundreds of miles to the southernmost tip of Florida, where it eventually meets the sea.

  Under the blazing subtropical sun the vast, crawling river appears as a giant mirror reflecting the sky, broken by islands of oaks and palm trees called hammocks, its surface covered thinly with the waving marsh grass that gives it its name.

  At night, it is an endless black void of faintly glimmering swamp measured in time, not distance. It was also, as the airboat pounded and roared over it, the inescapable tunnel of Gaby’s nightmare. She sat slumped in the front seat between the two heavyset men, the airboat driver on his platform behind them. In the hours since they’d left Vizcaya, she’d experienced a slow climb back from stunned, mindless terror to frantic, fruitless plotting to escape, to a resigned attempt to try not to think, not to feel too much in order to survive.

  She still couldn’t believe that she’d been dragged from the masked ball and into a motor launch without, apparently, anyone knowing what was taking place. Sometime later—it could have been an hour, or more or even less, she didn’t have a way to gauge time—she’d been transferred with her mouth taped, her hands tied in front of her, but still very much alert and conscious, to a pickup truck on a bayfront street somewhere in Miami. They’d driven miles along a highway, off onto a dirt road, and finally to a deserted launching ramp where she was half lifted, half dragged into a waiting airboat.

  In all that time no one had seen her, sounded an alarm, or called the police, as though dragging a bound, gagged woman in an eighteenth-century Venetian costume through the streets of Miami was nothing unusual.

  It was too late, now, for Gaby to realize that she should have screamed at the first sight of the men in the boat at, Vizcaya. It might be hours before Crissette thought to call the police. After all, her last words had been that she was going for help!

  Gaby choked back a helpless sob under the tape that sealed her lips. If Crissette waited until she got back to the Times-Journal newsroom before she reported Gaby’s disappearance, it might be morning before anyone notified the police.

  Unless Dodd...

  Dodd, Gaby thought with a leap of hope. Dodd would know something was wrong right away when he called, tonight, and didn’t find her at home.

  But would he? she asked herself suddenly. The last time she’d broken a date with him she’d refused to explain anything, told him, in effect, to mind his own business.

  The man beside Gaby leaned forward to peer into her face. Talk was impossible, for the roar of the airboat’s propeller blades was deafening. The shadowy driver on his high seat behind them wore big metal ear guards. Since they’d gotten into the airboat the Colombians had communicated by sign language.

  Gaby felt the touch of his big hand on her cheek as he checked to see if she had stopped crying. She jerked her head away violently.

  She’d been sobbing for hours. She knew now it was stupid, useless, but she’d wept helplessly in the first burst of panic when she was sure they were going to kill her. In the pickup truck, as they’d crossed the outlying streets of South Miami, she’d cried fresh tears of frustration, because by that time the Colombians had told her what they wanted her for. Not to kill. No, they’d assured her, not that. Only, the bigger Colombian had said, grinning at her, as a last resort.

  A burst of wind rushed across the swampland. The airboat passengers sat hunched, unprotected, as the downpour began. In the darkness the shadows of shallow islands passed, veiled by the deluge, as they roared deeper into the labyrinth of the everglades.

  Even Gaby knew the vast marsh was a natural refuge for drug dealers. There were crude air strips in its depths where planes from South America delivered their cargoes of cocaine. The everglades was so vast, so impenetrable, that even the police, special drug enforcement agencies, the United States military, couldn’t patrol it adequately. That was where they were taking her.

  The man next to her put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. In the darkness she remembered a broad, brutal face and hot black eyes, a beer belly already lapping over his belt. He was more friendly than the other man. He was the one who’d told her why they’d kidnapped her. He’d also explained that they knew she was James Santo Marin’s sister.

  Stiff with cold, Gaby was in a drenched, semiconscious stupor when they stopped. The older Colombian tried to rouse her by shaking her violently. It was daylight, she saw through half-closed eyes, stormy and gray, still raining in bursts. They were somewhere in the depths of the everglades at a large, thickly wooded island big enough to accommodate several wooden sheds roofed with palm fronds to camouflage them from the air. A sleek white seaplane rested under a camouflage net in a tiny lagoon.

  When she didn’t respond quickly enough, the man impatiently grabbed her under the arms and hauled her out of the boat. He was visibly disgusted when she fell to her knees on the sandy strip of shore, her legs too cramped by spending all night in the boat to hold her up. The younger Colombian finally picked her up in his arms and carried her to the nearest shed.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her as he pushed open the door with one knee. “No queremos violarte. Understand?” He barely spoke English. His hands lingered in a friendly way on her knees as he settled her on an empty wooden box. “No rape—no violencia.”

  Gaby understood what he was trying to tell her, but he liked touching her too much. She didn’t really believe him about the rape.

  The violencia was something else.

  He squatted in front of her, black gaze on the revealing front of the low-cut gown. “Pee pee?” he asked huskily. “I bring bucket.”

  She shook her head. Her body was still stunned. It had been hours since she’d had any food or water. She didn’t need the offered bucket.

  After a few minutes of looking at her hungrily, the man went outside.

  Gaby sat hunched on the box in the shed, her tied hands in her lap. Her costume was a soaked shroud around her, but she didn’t dare ask for a blanket or call attention to what she was wearing. She longed to be able to rub her eyes, burning from so much weeping, but her wrists were bound together too tightly. She could only manage to bring her knuckles up to swipe, ineffectually, at her face. The freezing costume and her aching, bound hands were nothing, Gaby knew, compared with what could actually be in store for her. Anyone who lived in Miami knew about Colombian drug dealers and their specialty, la violencia.

  In Spanish the phrase meant simply “the violence.” But for the savage Colombians, who had made it their own special way of doing business in the already unspeakably brutal drug trade, it was much more. La violencia stunned even hardened criminals. It was very direct, and very thorough. In one apartment in north Florida a drug dealer’s entire family had been massacred; the police had found the hacked corpse of a week-old baby in the kitchen sink. Cutting off a finger or two as a message to holdouts was considered trivial. The Colombians preferred to gouge out an eye with the promise of the other to be delivered quickly if an agreement couldn’t be met.

  James Santo Marin, Gaby had been told, was a holdout.

  She stared at the dirt floor, too exhausted to hol
d her head up. The rain drummed on the shed’s leaking roof and a drip of water struck her arm. The morning air was noticeably cooler. She shivered uncontrollably, from both nerves and the penetrating chill.

  She tried to will herself not to think about James. She’d been led to her destruction by her own stupidity and a beautiful, reckless man who’d made love to her. What a fool she’d been, she told herself, trying not to weep again. When the Colombians found out who she really was they would kill her. After they’d done other things.

  She struggled to keep her control, fighting hysteria. The younger man spoke only a few words of English. He’d made it clear, though, that they wouldn’t rape James Santo Marin’s sister. They only wished to persuade him a little. They wanted Santo Marin’s cooperation, not a blood vendetta.

  Gaby closed her aching eyes to rest them. She had figured out that the drug dealers had gone to her house on Palm Island looking for her. They had found David Fothergill there, and had beat him up when he wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know. Their alternate plan had been, apparently, to go in search of the rest of the Santo Marin family at the masked ball at Vizcaya.

  She’d had several hours now to think about what the Colombians would do to her when they found out she wasn’t James Santo Marin’s sister.

  Gaby was on the verge of another bout of tears when the older Colombian came in with the airboat man. They stood and looked at her for a long moment. The older man said something at length in Spanish.

  “We no touch you,” the airboat driver translated. “When your brother understands we have let you stay pure, he will do what we want. We leaved that message for him in Miami.”

  Gaby lifted her head. She was deathly afraid of these men, the way they thought, the savage, rules they lived by. They were animals. “You’ve got to take me back,” she said thickly.