The boy seemed surprised Louis knew his name. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Do you live here on this island, Roberto?” Louis asked.
The boy blinked and took a step back. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Just you and your family?”
Roberto grinned, his cheeks reddening. “It’s a big family, sir.”
“Really?” Louis said. “How many people?”
Roberto looked at the floor. “There’s my father and Uncle Pedro and Uncle Orlando, and I have —-”
“Roberto!”
Louis turned to see one of the waiters motioning for Roberto to come away from the table. Roberto slunk away, and the waiter came forward, a dish towel in his large hands.
“Can I take your order?”
Louis glanced at him. No name tag. The man’s eyes, deep-set and black as coal, were fixed on Louis’s face. Landeta drew his attention by ordering the blackened grouper and a Diet Coke. Louis did the same and the man drifted away, disappearing into the kitchen.
“That guy looks like he’s wound a little too tight,” Louis said. “He’s staring at us.”
Landeta took a drink of his water. “Relax. We’re just tourists, here for some lunch and a little local color.”
Louis looked out the window, trying not to stare back at the waiter.
“You know, I was thinking we might be dealing with a cult here,” Landeta said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“When you were a cop, you ever have any experience with cults?” Landeta asked quietly.
“No,” Louis said. “You?”
“You ever hear of the Yahwehs?”
“No,” Louis said.
“It’s a cult of black racist extremists led by this wacko named Hulon Mitchell. He calls himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh and they have a headquarters over in Miami’s Liberty City called the Temple of Love. Before I quit Miami PD, I was one of the guys assigned to work the case with the FBI for a while.”
Louis heard a note of pride in Landeta’s voice. “What was it like?” Louis asked.
“We had all this shit on Mitchell, like he was forcing minors to have sex with him and that he had this squad he called the Death Angels, who were going around murdering white people. It was an initiation thing to get into the brotherhood, and you had to bring back severed heads or ears as proof.”
Louis shook his head slowly.
“The thing is, people think shit like that doesn’t happen in their nice little towns,” Landeta said. “They don’t want to believe it. Like Bessie Levy said, every town has a weird family. Question is, where does weird leave off and cult begin?”
Louis was staring at the black-eyed waiter again.
“You remember that case out in Salt Lake a couple of years ago?” Landeta asked.
“That Mormon guy with ten wives?” Louis asked.
“Four wives,” Landeta said. “He had four wives and twenty-nine kids who he kept like slaves. The girls were married off at fourteen and then lived in poverty and abuse with their babies. They finally busted the guy for welfare fraud. Maybe something like that is going on here —- polygamy, slavery.”
Louis leaned forward. “There are no women here, Mel.”
“Just a thought.”
The waiter returned with their Diet Cokes, his eyes still on Louis.
“Could I have a lemon wedge, please?” Landeta asked.
The waiter’s black eyes flicked to Landeta. “You’ll get lemon with your fish,” he said, and moved away.
“Service just isn’t what it used to be,” Landeta said, taking a drink of the Diet Coke.
Louis sat back, his eyes drifting out the window to the dock and the water beyond. Polygamy, slavery, cults. It was all one big swirling mess in his brain now, images of rape, torture, sexual sadism, ritualistic sacrifices held in the deep of night, miles from anywhere, out of sight of anyone who cared.
He thought about what Landeta had asked him last night. What did the island feel like?
He could feel it now, feel the emptiness of this strange place, the emptiness that he now knew was the absence of anything good, warm, or normal.
“Louis, what are you thinking about?”
“That thing you read me last night, the wolf-into-man thing.”
“About the raping and cannibalizing?”
“Yeah. And that rite-of-passage thing in Asturias.” Louis glanced at a waiter as he delivered a plate of food to a nearby table.
“Maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here,” Louis said. “A warped old family tradition or religion of some kind. Maybe they worship the wolf and are killing the women in some sacrifice or something. Maybe they actually think they turn into wolves.”