“Please, get me out of here,” she pleaded. Dried blood stained her legs, a harsh reminder of the anguish she had endured. Micah felt his heart drop as he stared at the young girl, thinking of his kid sister. Reality shattered in that moment. Of all the terrible things he had done in his life, this seemed to exist on another plane entirely. The sirens grew louder, but the cops hadn’t yet made their way to the motel. “Look, I don’t care where you take me, just get me away from this damn toilet. I’m begging you.”
Micah snapped back to the present. “Hold that thought.” He ran over to Bennett and rummaged through the man’s pockets. “Won’t be needing this anymore,” he said, grabbing a wallet, “but it’s not going to help me much.” He stood in thought for a moment before approaching Jeremiah. The search was more fruitful. He came away with a wallet and a keyring.
“I figured you left,” the girl said as Micah walked over and unlocked the handcuffs securing her to the toilet.
“No, just had to find a way to get you out of there,” he said. Micah threw the handcuffs into the bathtub and motioned for the girl to follow him. “Come on, we need to move.”
She didn’t hesitate. Stopping briefly to spit on the pair of corpses, she stayed close to Micah until they reached the Impala. Castillo wore a look of confusion mixed with annoyance as he stepped out of the car.
“Wasn’t planning on dipping into that market yet, my friend.”
“Not like that, Jimmy,” Micah replied, tossing the duffel bag into the trunk. “Get in. We need to get the fuck out of here.” The girl slithered into the backseat and buckled herself in. Micah and Castillo slipped into their seats soon after. “I couldn’t just leave her in there.”
“Of course, you could’ve,” Jimmy said, glancing back at the girl. “No offense, chica.” She blew him off.
“She’s been through enough shit, Jimmy,” Micah said, mashing the gas and peeling away from the motel in a cloud of tire-smoke. “Couldn’t leave her to the boys in blue. There are a lot of ways it could get worse from where she sits now.”
“And what do you plan on doing, exactly? Adopting her?” Castillo chuckled at the thought of Micah caring for another life when he existed professionally to remove the very option from so many.
“If it comes to that, maybe,” Micah said, gripping the steering wheel tightly. “But right now, none of that matters.” The sirens were louder now, the crescendo growing uncomfortably close. Micah looked up, instinctively, at the rearview and saw flashing lights.
“This is the Miami-Dade Metro Police Department,” came a voice over the loudspeaker of one police cruiser. “Pull over now. If you resist, we will be forced to use aggressive measures to subdue you.” Micah pushed the pedal further, creating some distance between himself and the cruisers. “This is your last warning. Pull over now. Failure to comply will result in damage to your property.”
“You up for this, Jimmy?” Micah looked over at Castillo, who was sweating profusely. He seemed in that moment like the guy who talked the talk but had rarely found himself in a situation where reprisals for his action was a serious consideration. “How about you?” Micah glanced in the rearview at the girl.
“Do what you gotta do. I’ll be fine.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” Without warning, Micah ripped the handbrake up and forced the Impala into a dangerous turn down a side street. He narrowly missed a parked car as he straightened out the wheel and mashed the gas. The first cruiser tried to follow suit and plowed into the parked car. The second cruiser slammed on their brakes and maneuvered around the carnage, picking up speed when they cleared the wreckage. The trick had bought Micah some time, but he had to create a larger stretch of space between his car and the trailing cruiser if the situation had any hope of ending without gunfire being exchanged.
Castillo sat in his seat, rigid. He tensed up whenever Micah took a sharp turn, but he locked his eyes on the road. It was almost trancelike the way his eyes focused on nothing. “I’ve got a safe house a couple of blocks away from here,” he blurted.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Micah said, shifting gears and weaving through another side street.
“Let’s see,” Castillo said, glancing at the quickly disappearing street signs. “Continue down this road for two more blocks. Turn left at the gas station, then take your first right, then left again. You’ll see a rundown townhouse with a garage. That’s the place. We can lie low there for a little while.”
Micah obliged and drove over to the safe house. The second cruiser hadn’t come close to catching up, but they could still hear the sirens off in the distance.
“Pull over here,” Castillo said, guiding Micah to a spot in front of a dilapidated structure that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. “Let’s get out quick. We still have some walking to do.”
The trio walked down the block, ten buildings away, before stopping beside a similarly run-down building. Castillo kneeled and fumbled with a padlock on the front of a one-car garage. Inside the structure sat an immaculate McLaren P1. The curves of the exotic piece of machinery, along with the bright orange hue, existed in stark contrast to the dull, industrial world surrounding it.
“That’s a beautiful ride, Jimmy,” Micah said. “Don’t think it’ll fit all three of us.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Castillo said, pulling a key ring off an adjacent wall and tossing it to Micah. He pocketed a fresh set. “I’ve got my own wheels in a garage nearby. It’s better if we split up. You take care of this situation,” he said, gesturing at the girl, “and we’ll meet up again later.”
“Thanks, Jimmy.”
“Yea, thanks,” the girl chimed in, meekly.
Castillo nodded. “When you hear the signal, get out of here and just drive. You’ve got a full tank so just create as much separation as possible before returning to anywhere familiar.”
“What signal?”
“You’ll know,” Castillo smiled. “Trust me.”
-#-
The still air was interrupted a few hours later by the sound of a lone police cruiser rolling to a stop behind Castillo’s Impala. An officer stepped out and approached the empty vehicle. “Dispatch, we have secured the vehicle suspected to have been involved in the evasion of officers sent out to the distress call from the Magic City Motel. No sign of life inside. Vehicle is in front of some empty buildings in Overtown. Will report after completing a search.”
“Roger that,” came a voice from his radio.
The officer approached the Impala and jiggled the handle. He felt the lock disengage and pulled up and the handle. The man felt little after that as the whole of his body was consumed in a massive fireball.
“That must be our cue,” Micah said, firing up the McLaren. He rolled the supercar out of the garage with the gingerly hesitation of a teenager scared to scuff the paint for fear of retribution from a parent who spent countless hours perfecting the shine of its pearlescent coat. The smoldering wreckage down the street was a grim reminder of the fate that waited for him if he strayed too far from his goal.
Chapter 43
In the time since Osteen’s death, Vivian hadn’t set foot inside a squad car except to drive to or from the station. Aware that she had taken the loss harder than expected, her superior officers had given her the option to work from her desk for as long as she needed to in order to get herself back in a healthy enough headspace to return to her normal duties. There wasn’t a set parameter for how long she would be away from gruesome crime scenes like the one Osteen met his end in, but she had to stomach the sight of copious amounts of blood without devolving into a nervous wreck.
At first, she spent much of her working hours trying to figure out how best to pass the time with as little visual stimulation as possible. She would organize filing cabinets around the office, careful not to inadvertently open any folders of investigations, ongoing or past, for fear of seeing a corpse in a grotesque display of its last moments on ear
th. She even took it upon herself to be the gopher charged with picking up the round of coffee orders for the Precinct during her shifts, just to have an excuse to escape the stifling air within the building and instead clear her mind. Even if only for a short while.
Gradually, she moved far enough along the stages of grief that the thought of a dead body no longer had the same effect on her as it once had. It wasn’t long before she looked into old investigations, thumbing through the files, hoping to see something new. A clue missed the first time around to tie it to something else. Or to help make more sense of a conviction besides the supposed perp just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Looks like you changed my mind after all,” Vivian whispered. She was thinking of Osteen, and all the times he swore up and down that seemingly untethered murders somehow had a correlation to another that they saw days or weeks down the road, as she thumbed through the file on the Edgar Jennings murder.
They could never solve that one. All they had to go on for the killer was a grainy still from a cheap video camera as he fled the scene of the crime. There wasn’t enough detail to even attempt to get a halfway decent character portrait of the suspect. The location of the murder, and the time of death, made finding witnesses all but impossible. She put the file down and grabbed another from a pile on her desk.
“Cagney, you slimy bastard.” She shook her head in disgust. “Can’t say I feel too bad about how things ended for you.” There were notes scribbled all about the pages within the file. Osteen’s handwriting. Vivian couldn’t find much order to the notes. Rather, it appeared Osteen would jot something down about the case whenever it came to him. The one constant was his incessant belief that something far more nefarious than a murder-suicide had taken place. But what? Double murder seemed the obvious answer, but there hadn’t been any viable suspects. If this were connected to Jennings, what was the common denominator?
Vivian laid the two files out on the desk in front of her and stared. She didn’t make a move for quite some time. Instead, she wracked her brain for any connection to the two men. Or the woman. Jennings and Cagney both had money, but to varying degrees. It didn’t seem likely that they traveled in the same social circles.
“Was it a love triangle?” Vivian wondered for about half a second. “Doubt it. Cagney probably had to pay the woman just for her to act as though he was anything more than a friend.”
Vivian twirled a pen around in her hand. She wasn’t certain either case had anything to do with the other, but Osteen’s last text message to her made it obvious that something tied them together. Plus a few others they knew nothing about. But what was it? Business dealings? Did they score booger sugar from the same dealer?
As though a lightbulb turned on in her mind, Vivian swiveled to face her computer and went to work searching for a connection. Something to tie Cagney and Jennings together while hopefully implicating an unknown third party. Castillo was the person Osteen had gone to meet, and more than likely responsible for his death, so he seemed like a perfect catalyst for the search.
She struck the keys in a melodic way that could have put her to sleep if she weren’t so laser focused. The steady tap—tap-tap—tapping of the keys, broken up periodically by a comically loud click from the mouse. Her search brought up clips of police reports and news stories referencing a drug bust in Castillo’s territory. It hadn’t implicated him directly, but there was no mistaking who the men taken into custody worked for.
“That’s some damn powerful motive if I’ve ever seen it.” Vivian sat back in the chair, exasperated. “How the hell could we miss that? Was I that focused on keeping things simple that I let something that easy slip by?” She shook her head and turned back to the computer, fingers in striking position of the keyboard. “Looks like Dan may have been onto something after all.” She stared silently for a moment, begging to her sub-conscious to keep her shit together. For now, at least. There would be time to let it all out later.
The connection to Jennings proved to be a bit more challenging to locate. Nothing at all seemed to link him with Cagney, or Cagney’s alleged killer. A connection to Castillo wasn’t immediately visible either.
“Let’s look at this thing at a more basic level,” Vivian said, louder than she meant to. No one else in the Precinct seemed to notice. She stared intently at the files, then back at the computer. “There’s no obvious connection like there was with Cagney, but that doesn’t mean we’re shit out of luck.”
“Keep talking to yourself, Viv, and people will think you’re crazy.”
She turned in time to see Detective Ernesto Alvarez rounding the corner on his way out of the building. He was smiling, trying somewhat in vain to cheer her up. “Thanks, Ernie,” she replied. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
The person’s profile for Edgar Jennings was up on Vivian’s screen. She glanced at it once more, trying to make sense of the unknown. He had lived in Coral Gables. Graduated with a degree in Finance from the University of Miami about two decades ago. No prior arrests. Not even an unpaid parking fine. “Guy was a goddamn Boy Scout.” And then she saw it. The three words which seemed unimportant at first. An addendum to an otherwise dull life. Real Estate Agent.
“Hmm… that could be something.” Vivian clicked the link and waited for a secondary tab to load. Eventually, she saw a cookie-cutter splash page for the agency Jennings had worked for. She clicked through to the About Us tab, hoping to find a new breadcrumb for the trail. The topmost picture was a cheesy headshot of one, Edgar Jennings. “Well, I’ll be damned; he owned the place.” She skimmed his bio but stopped cold when her eyes met with a potentially wonderful surprise. Underneath the wall of text was a brief blurb about the service area Jennings showed and sold homes in.
“Fisher Island. Star Isl… wait a second, Fisher Island. There’s something there.” Vivian began tapping incessantly on the desktop. It was as if she were in a trance, unable to connect with the outside world until she solved the puzzle that kept her locked in the void. “Castillo isn’t the head honcho. It’s foolish to think every hit would come from his word and his alone.” She stopped the tapping immediately, opened a new tab on her computer, and typed Carlos Medina into the search bar. Another wall of text filled the screen beside the mugshot of arguably the most dangerous man in all South Florida. Despite the wealth of information, chronicling everything the department knew about the man who had made life hell for law enforcement officers in South Florida for the past few decades, one item stuck out to Vivian. Something familiar though, at the moment, felt like she was seeing it for the first time.
Residence: Fisher Island
“Bingo.”
Chapter 44
Sheridan lay in a near-comatose state on the gurney, oblivious to the loosening of the restraints holding his extremities in place. His body moved away from its perch in the center of the circular room. The world around him felt static, as though everything in existence were nothing more than paint on canvas. Movement just a trick of the mind. He hadn’t slept a full night in weeks. The thought of what was outside the room, and the compound that was his prison, had become so foreign to him he wondered if the sun had ceased to exist. Truth be told, he considered the possibility that he would never see it again. Even if it were to hang high in the sky for all of eternity, never dipping below the horizon, his eyes wouldn’t fall upon it.
He found himself convinced, as the days turned into weeks, that it was his destiny to live the life of another for the rest of his days. No longer did he hold tight to the illusion of free will. It made him want to end things. To force the message and allow himself to drift off into whatever lay beyond this nightmare he found himself trapped inside of. But that, too, was impossible.
And so, he resigned himself to what felt inevitable. Sticking with the shit sandwich that life had served him and eating it without hesitation. Eventually, he had reasoned with himself, in the moments of clarity that still seemed to crop up from time to tim
e, he would have the chance to escape. The opportunity to do something more. This, he felt certain, was the closest thing to a path in life he had left. Whether it existed didn’t matter near as much as his hope that something better lay in wait.
“All right, Mr. Sheridan,” said the nurse whose presence he had all but forgotten. The gurney had rolled to a stop at an examination room that looked as though it belonged on the set of a superhero flick. Sheridan was so engrossed with the high-tech machinery surrounding him, he hadn’t even noticed he was now alone. There were countless banks of computers and enough chairs to suggest this room often housed a considerable staff. But it was conspicuously empty.
“What the hell is this place?”
“I like to think of it as the nucleus.”
Sheridan whipped his head around in time to see Jacob Hurst walk into the room. A sense of dread came over him; a uniquely uncomfortable feeling he couldn’t quite quantify. It did not surprise part of him to see Hurst–nor was he as confused as to Hurst’s assertion of his identity. That part just wanted out of this hell. A smaller part of him, though, one threatening to make its voice heard, to overtake the very fabric of his being, looked at the man in the suit with disdain. A sort of curiosity intertwined with a desire to exact revenge. For what? It wasn’t quite clear.
“My god, Ross, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Sheridan leered at him. Hurst sat down on a stool across the room, a file in his hand, and rolled a flimsy examination table between them. He placed the file on top but left it closed. The word CLASSIFIED was plastered across it in a garish crimson font. “I trust we can handle this like gentleman, yes? No need to put those pesky restraints back in place. Though, if you’d prefer it that way, I can certainly see to it they’re adjusted accordingly.”
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