Silent City

by Alex Segura

  “Nada,” Broche said. “We have enough on Contreras to nab him on laundering money. Seems like he had a nice operation going from his restaurant. A big bookie, that guy. A waitress from Casa Pepe’s gave us a statement after we barged in with the info about Javier being killed. Says she spoke to a private detective not long before. Wonder who that might have been?”

  Pete didn’t bother to deny the truth. He knew Broche was baiting him. He deserved it.

  “What are you gonna do now?” Broche said. “Don’t let all this be a waste. Let it be a lesson.”

  “I don’t know yet,” Pete said, looking out onto the busy Bird Road traffic. “I just feel like sitting in the dark.”

  He didn’t mention to Broche that he had, in fact, been sitting alone. But with a light on. Taking notes. Thinking over everything that had happened. He couldn’t stop. Mike’s death compelled him. His desire for vengeance replaced the strange curiosity that had entertained him before things derailed. His best friend was dead, this was true, but someone he could find had strapped the bomb to Mike’s car, and he wasn’t inclined to let that slide.

  “Take a few days for yourself,” Broche said, putting a hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Then start looking for work. The rest will fall into place over time.”

  Pete nodded and shook Broche’s hand. He couldn’t bear to enter the chapel and see Mike’s casket, so he decided to head for his car. He was only slightly surprised to find Emily leaning on it, waiting for him.

  “Hey,” Pete said, pulling his car keys out of his pocket absentmindedly. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Emily said. Her arms were crossed. She looked at the funeral home entrance and then back at Pete. He waited a second before realizing she wasn’t going to say anything else.

  “Look,” Pete started before Emily raised a hand to silence him.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her voice clear and strong. “I just wanted you to know—in person and not from a voicemail—that I can’t have you in my life anymore.”

  Pete bristled a bit. He’d beaten himself up enough. He was a little tired of getting beaten up by everyone around him, deserved or not.

  “You came here to repeat your message to me?” Pete said, his voice low. “Should I help you load up your car with your bags, just like old times? Because, really, this ‘leave me alone forever’ routine is getting old.”

  “I just felt like I needed to say it to you directly,” Emily said, slightly surprised that Pete was being argumentative. “And I came here to make sure you were done with all this.”

  “Done with all what, Emily?” Pete said. “I’ve got nothing. No job, no friends, no home. If this isn’t ‘done,’ then what the fuck is? If you’re asking me if I’m sitting in the dark drinking myself to death, then the answer might be yes. If you’re asking me to stop trying to figure out what happened to Mike, or to stop trying to bring the people that did this in for some kind of punishment, then no. Mike’s killer is out there.”

  “He wouldn’t be dead if you hadn’t dragged us into this,” she said. Pete noticed her face contort slightly. She hadn’t meant to be so harsh.

  “You’re right,” Pete said, taking a step toward his car. “And I have to live with that.”

  Emily looked down at her feet.

  “I don’t want to hate you,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to you, either.”

  Pete felt his hands gripping his keys. It hurt.

  “Look at me,” he said. She did. “What more can I say? How else can I apologize? Don’t you think I’m torn up inside about this?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But you haven’t learned anything. If you die doing this, you make Mike’s death worthless, too.”

  “It’s not about learning anything or any value,” Pete said. “It’s about finding the people that did all this. Killed Mike. Took Kathy. Everything. Then I can go do something else.”

  Emily frowned. She stared past Pete, past the funeral home. Her eyes looked tired.

  “What can you do?” she said, some contempt in her voice.

  “I’m not sure,” Pete said. Emily stepped back. He opened the door and got in. He turned to her, the driver’s side window sliding down. “You have every right to hate me.”

  With that, he closed the door and started his Celica’s creaky engine. Pete felt a slight rap on the driver’s side window.

  Pete waited for more. But it wasn’t forthcoming. He nodded. She backed away from the car as he pulled out of the parking space and turned to leave. He watched her as he drove by, standing alone in the dark parking lot, her pale skin in stark contrast to the darkness around her.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It had started to pour halfway from the funeral home to his father’s house. It took Pete an extra moment to notice her, huddled by his front door with a hoodie over her head, as he walked over from the carport. He recognized the lanky figure as Kathy. She was soaked. He scampered over and stood in front of her, letting the rain pelt them both, for a moment before she spoke.

  “I had nowhere else to go,” she sputtered, rain on her face and in her mouth.

  Pete said nothing, but motioned for her to follow him. He got the key in the door and opened it quickly. He flicked on the parlor light and she doffed her hoodie without asking, letting it drop. Pete looked at the clothes on the floor, then at her.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” Pete said, turning and entering the living room. “Do you need a towel?”

  “Sure.”

  Pete darted to the bathroom and returned, handing Kathy a large gray towel. She began feverishly drying her face and hair.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?” she said, her voice muffled slightly by the towel.

  “I’m not. But I guess you’re going to tell me,” Pete said, walking into his father’s kitchen and rummaging through the cabinets. He found what he was looking for—a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and two glasses—and set them on the counter, the bottle and glasses clinking as they made contact. He pulled an ice tray from the freezer and dropped a few cubes in each glass. “Though, I imagine this isn’t a social call.”

  Pete returned to the living room and placed the two glasses—now relatively full and on the rocks—on the dining table, which was close to the front door. Pete felt strange drinking liquor in his father’s house, but he didn’t really care at this point. Everything made him feel strange these days.

  Kathy sat down next to Pete, picked up the other glass, and took a long sip.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I had to do some digging to find you. You weren’t at your apartment.”

  “That’d be stupid.”

  “Probably, yeah,” she said.

  The house was silent for a few seconds as Pete took a sip of his drink. He let the glass touch the table before he spoke again. “What do you want? The last time I saw you, you were pointing a gun at me.”

  “I know,” Kathy said, slinking back into her chair. “I’m sorry for that. I just—I was just losing it. I’d been trapped for days; your friend’s car—which we’d been driving in for hours—had just blown up. It was too much. I saw the money as my out, and I didn’t really feel like spending hours talking to the cops about everything that had happened.”

  Pete put his elbows on the table and rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He had no sense of what to do next, and finding Kathy on his doorstep was the last thing he wanted.

  “Why are you here?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “Who’s alive?”

  “Contreras,” Kathy said. “He’s alive, and he’s been following me—sending me messages. Not written notes and shit, but little things. Newspaper clippings in my car while I’m at the store. Following me in another car. I just know he’s around. It’s driving me nuts.”

  Pete moved his hands away from his face and gave Kathy a surprised stare.

  “Are you telling me that Contreras has been following you and you led
him here, to me?” Pete said. “This is just a sick joke, right?”

  Kathy took another long swig from her glass. She was thinking.

  “I don’t think he’s been following me the whole time, I don’t know,” she said. “I just know we need to do something. I can’t live like this. I made a mistake. I want my life back.”

  Pete got up without warning and walked toward the back of the house. He returned a few minutes later, a large box in his hand. He dropped it loudly on the table. He tossed a tiny, portable USB drive next to it.

  “Let’s get our lives back.”

  • • •

  “Oh my God, Nigel!”

  “What?” Pete said. He was sitting by his laptop at the dining room table, reading over the text file containing Kathy’s notes on the Silent Death when he heard her screech. She’d taken a break to use the bathroom. He walked briskly over to where the squeal had come from to find her petting her cat—the cat Pete had basically adopted since discovering him a few weeks back while searching her apartment.

  “Nigel?”

  Kathy ignored Pete’s snark and continued to snuggle with the cat, who was more than happy to take the overflow of petting. Pete wasn’t exactly the most loving cat owner. Costello meowed plaintively and began rubbing his side on Pete’s left leg.

  “Too many cats in here,” Pete said.

  Kathy turned to Pete.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Seriously. I thought he’d just run away or gotten stolen. You watched him for me. That’s wonderful.”

  She stood up, Nigel in her arms, and walked back toward the dining room area. She plopped the cat in her lap as she went back to flipping through the stack of manila folders that were around her area. Pete’s father had been an extremely organized detective, which meant that sorting through his notes on the case would take some time.

  • • •

  The bottle of Johnny Walker stood at half-mast, but Pete felt alert. The decision came to him quickly, especially after talking to Amy outside Caballero. The only way out—and the only skills he could rely on—were the newspaper. As much as he loathed putting any faith in the Miami Times, he knew that going to the police was fruitless. Only a story that received the proper attention would force those above the local police to take action and, in the process, save both Pete and Kathy from living the rest of their lives in fear.

  They’d set up a mini war room on the dining room table, Pete using his laptop to read Kathy’s saved notes more closely and Kathy—with a printout of her notes in hand—focused on scanning Pete’s father’s box of reports and notations. They’d been at it for a few hours, and the clock was now at three in the morning. They were far from being done.

  “So, why isn’t it Contreras?” Pete said, his eyes still on the laptop, his hand scrolling down the page with the mouse.

  Kathy looked up from the files.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, everything points to him,” Pete said. “The drug front, the record, the relationship with your father, the place in the Keys. What made you hesitate on publishing this earlier?”

  “That’s all good evidence,” Kathy said, looking back at the file she had in her hand for a moment. “Trust me, because I worked really hard to get it. But it’s circumstantial. That’s the problem with Contreras as a suspect. There’s just enough evidence to make you think it’s him—we saw Javier’s body, he took credit for my father’s murder, you tussled with him in your apartment. But he has no connections to the ‘official’ Silent Death murders. And it’s not like the Silent Death hasn’t killed. From what your father thinks, there are at least a dozen, if not more. All with two silencer bullets in the head. All with reports of witnesses saying they saw a man in a dark overcoat and hat in the area, or near the victim. There’s something funny there. I feel like we’re missing something.”

  It felt like they were close, but even with the stacks of evidence surrounding them, he wasn’t sure there was anything in the files to guarantee a story worth printing. Plus, Kathy and Pete were not exactly lauded Miami Times alums.

  “How many people do you think are definitely his kills?” Pete asked.

  Kathy put the file down and thought for a second, then looked at her pad.

  “Like I said, at least a dozen. Most of them other criminals in the Miami underworld—Alfredo Rangel, Jose Aparicio, Andres Fuentes, Rodrigo Perez. Not nice guys, by any means. And all -—according to my sources—people who had fucked up in some way. Either with their gangland bosses or they somehow offended another, opposing leader. The Silent Death didn’t work for anyone, but he did work for everyone, y’know?”

  Pete thought for a second. “Were there any exceptions?”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Well, people that aren’t clearly criminals,” Pete said. “Some kind of inkling as to who this person was, you know? If I was this guy, and I didn’t want anyone to really find out who I was, I’d clear the decks beforehand.”

  Kathy bit her pen and looked at Pete. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said. “Why’d you stop? Weren’t you a sports reporter before?”

  Pete nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I did some investigative stuff in Jersey. It was fun. It felt good to crack a story.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “My dad died,” Pete said, a little too quickly. “I came back here, got tangled up making sure his affairs were in order, and ended up staying.”

  “Hm.”

  “What?”

  “Well, don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, shuffling the papers in front of her. “But do you really think your dad would let you get by using him as an excuse? You’re smart. You could do better than hiding and drinking, you know?”

  Pete turned back to the screen and clicked the mouse, reverting his attention back to the laptop. “Maybe.”

  They each went back to their respective tasks—Pete scanning Kathy’s notes and jotting down any detail of interest, and Kathy doing the same with the box of files.

  “Here’s something,” Kathy said, breaking the silence. She had a police report in her hand, pulled out of one of the older files in the box. “This report’s about 10 years old. Same M.O. as the Silent Death, but before any actual criminals were killed by him, as far as we know. Your dad circled the guy’s name. Scribbled something next to it—’Check to confirm’ it looks like?”

  Pete grabbed the paper from Kathy’s hand and scanned it. His eyes widened slightly. The man’s name—Alfredo Florin—lingered with Pete.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Pete said. “The name’s familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  Pete’s cell phone rang, vibrating loudly on the dining room table.

  “Who the hell is calling you at four in the morning?”

  Pete grabbed it. From his experience, no call at this hour could be positive. He braced himself.

  He listened intently to the voice on the other end; nodded.

  “OK, I’ll be there,” he responded, then pushed a button to end the call. He stood up and put his phone in his pocket, a glazed look on his face.

  “What? What is it?” Kathy said, still seated.

  “Amy’s dead,” Pete said, clearing his throat. “Broche needs me at the scene. It’s the Silent Death, and he left me a message.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Pete pulled his Marlins cap down on his head as the lingering rain soaked him further. He shivered slightly as he waited outside the yellow police tape surrounding Amy’s North Miami Beach condo. From his vantage point, he could see the white tarp that covered Amy’s body, which had been splayed out in the small parking lot that was adjacent to the building. Pete felt a headache forming. Not from the drinks earlier, but from the aching realization that he might have been one of the last people to see Amy alive. Four uniformed officers stood around the scene, trying to preserve as much evidence as possible. Rain was the enemy of homicide police. It washed away vital clues and made a d
ifficult job even harder. Pete felt for them. He remembered many a night when his father would come home soaked to the bone, frustrated at all the information that he’d lost due to an unexpected rainstorm.

  “Any one of those clues could be the one that sends the killer to jail,” he’d said. “And they’re gone. I’m starting at a disadvantage. I have to make up the difference.”

  Broche’s approach brought Pete back to the present. He too, was soaked, his khaki trench coat splattered with raindrops. He moved past the police tape and walked over to Pete.

  “No umbrella?”

  “Came over right after you called.”

  “This is becoming a bad routine,” Broche said, trying to lighten the mood, even a bit.

  Pete didn’t laugh.

  “What happened?”

  “Two shots to the head,” Broche said, in a tone that implied it wasn’t the first time he’d had to utter the lines. “Right outside her apartment. She was getting out of her car. Couple hours ago.”

  After the funeral, Pete thought. Someone knew she’d been there. Someone must have also seen her talking to him. He wiped rain off his face.

  “It’s definitely him?”

  “Gotta be,” Broche said. “Old lady down the streets says she saw a guy—dressed in all black, even a black umbrella—walk up to her. Two shots, she drops. Then he dropped this next to her, made a point of tucking it under her body since it was raining.”

  Broche handed Pete an envelope. In very plain, almost blocky handwriting was Pete’s name. He hesitated before taking it.

  “Don’t worry,” Broche said. “It’s been dusted. No prints on it. Same for the paper inside. You think we’re amateurs?”

  “No,” Pete said. “Not exactly.”

  Broche stiffened a bit at Pete’s comment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said, taking the envelope and opening it.

  Pedro,

  I think it’s about time we ended this little back and forth. You have something I want—namely, the notes you stole from your former workplace and the notes your father stole from his former workplace. An interesting parallel, no?