When their conversation was finished, Leslie waited while the red-haired woman walked back to her SUV, opened the rear hatch, and hailed Prince. She handed Leslie a liquor box, and from the cargo hold Cameron dragged out a large sheet of fiberboard covered by a white sheet. With both hands he raised it above his head and carried it to the house.
The red-haired woman handed Leslie a set of keys, turned, and headed back down the drive on foot. In the distance, the geyser continued to spew. Sirens were screaming out on the highway.
Prince angled the fiberboard through the French doors and laid it on the dining-room table. The long, rectangular oak table where Thorn had eaten his first meals, learned what table manners he knew, and later on, when the house became his, shared countless dinners with friends and lovers.
Leslie set the liquor box on a counter and walked over to the fiberboard.
“What’s in the box?” Wally said.
“Uniforms. FBI.” Leslie took hold of the end of the white sheet and drew it away.
In all the years Thorn had passed the place offshore, he’d never paid much attention to the Turkey Point nuclear plant, so he hadn’t realized how vast it was, how numerous were its domes and smokestacks, cooling towers and guardhouses and office buildings, roadways and transmission lines. An industrial city. Twenty cooling canals shot straight south for about ten miles, the crocodile breeding grounds that Leslie once patrolled.
This scale model was meticulously crafted with plastic windows in the office buildings and runty trees lining the entrance drive and half-inch hard-hatted workers scattered around the site. Each structure had a printed label attached. Cars, trucks, earthmoving equipment, even an airboat docked beside a small, rectangular building that was labeled BIOLOGY LAB.
Pauly and Cameron stood on one side of the table, Flynn and Thorn and Leslie on the other. Even Wally broke away from his laptop to take a look.
Leslie lifted the lid off one of the structures. Inside were more handcrafted details. An enormous control room full of electronic hardware with sweeping desks and podiums and a wall of computer screens.
As one who created miniature replicas for a living, Thorn marveled at the detail. The model had required months of work by a highly skilled craftsman. Every door, beam, column, truss, pipe, valve, tube, tank, storage area, skylight, stairway, elevator shaft. Ladders and machinery and earthmovers.
“You’ll be studying this layout until it’s as familiar as your face in the mirror. You’ll learn where every visible defensive device is placed, and where all the hidden trip wires and motion detectors are planted, the entire sensing system. From this point on, there’ll be no more games. This is real.”
“Who’s the babe?” Wally said. “I’d take a dip in that spasm chasm.”
Leslie fixed him with a cold smile. “Her name is Cassandra. Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing her again. As soon as we’re done.”
Leslie’s tone had hardened. Even Wally heard it and shut the hell up.
THIRTY-THREE
MONDAY MORNING ON HIS WAY to the office, knowing this would probably be the last free minute he had for a few days, Sheffield swung off I-95 at Seventy-ninth Street and headed east into Little Haiti. Operating on an hour’s ragged sleep, but still so wired from the night before, the disastrous raid on Prince Key, Frank tapped out a mindless beat on the steering wheel the whole way.
He parked in the lot of Motel Blu on Biscayne Boulevard, a block down from Seventy-ninth. The sign out front said MIAMI STYLE AT AFFORDABLE RATES. Behind Motel Blu he could see a cool, shady section of Little River. Frank got out, walked over to the small bridge along the boulevard, and looked down at the sluggish green flow.
About a mile east the river emptied into the northern end of Biscayne Bay. Despite the heavy traffic on the thoroughfare behind him, standing there you got a peaceful hint of how this part of town had been once, maybe fifty years back, locals picnicking along the riverbank, fishing, napping in the shadows of the cabbage palms. Snowbirds staying at motels like this one, back in its earlier incarnation before all the seedy bars and nudie theaters, hookers and Haitian markets, and fast-food joints moved in.
As a motel owner himself, one who was trying hard to revive his own slice of Miami history, Sheffield wasn’t impressed with the attempts at rebirth along this stretch of Biscayne. The gentrifiers had given the architecture a new name, MiMo, Miami Modern, and designated it historic. Space age with bold angles, lots of plate glass, and extreme, weird-angled roofs. The 1950s version of Tomorrowland. Or a bowling alley built for the Jetsons.
To Frank it told a different story. Mom and Pop got scared and sold out thirty years ago and fled when the hookers and the crack dealers and the johns moved in, and now a bunch of thirty-year-old trust-fund kids had scooped up the places supercheap, slapped on trendy colors, added tubes of neon, then rechristened their best rooms Bayview and Ocean Vista even though the bay and the ocean were miles away. But Frank was willing to bet real money that those kids hadn’t gotten around to throwing out all the bloodstained mattresses or patching the bullet holes.