The Death Box(62)

“What is all that noise, Chaku? Roll down the windows.”

Hot air poured into the cool vehicle. Orzibel stuck his head out the window, listening. “Head down the street. Toward the sounds.”

Morales turned onto the cross street. His eyes stared in disbelief as a flash of blue crossed a hundred meters ahead.

“Her!” Morales yelled. “There, by the white house.”

“Go!”

The big engine roared, tires squealing as it spun and headed in the reverse direction. “She’s jumping that fence,” Orzibel said. Morales stood on the brakes, Orzibel’s feet hitting pavement before the vehicle halted.

“Come here NOW or I will kill your madre!” he screamed, seeing a small body tumbling over a fence and disappearing between a house and a garage.

“She’s going for the alley. Head her off, Chaku!”

Morales burned rubber around the end of the block. “Come to me, bitch!” Orzibel howled. “Or I’ll SLICE OFF YOUR FACE!”

Lights flicked off in nearby houses. Doors were locked and residents scurried to central rooms where bullets couldn’t reach. There had been gang wars and gunshots were familiar. The police were rarely called, for fear of retribution. Orzibel pushed at shrubs and bushes, checking for a crouching girl. Nothing.

Morales nodded across the street, an old man brave enough to step to his porch. “Someone’s gonna call the cops, Orlando. They might get to her ahead of us.”

The pair retreated into the vehicle. “She’s here, Chaku,” Orzibel said, staring out the window. “She found a garage, an empty house, a boat in a backyard.” They passed a corner holding a closed and shuttered grocery, three junkies jittering on the steps. The wretches were everywhere. Orzibel stared at the junkies as they passed, a fingertip tapping his lips as he thought.

“I’m doing this all wrong, Chaku. Go to the local junkies. Tell them the right information buys a month’s worth of the finest scag.”

Morales wheeled around the corner, checked his rearview. “The junkies hear many lies, Orlando. It would be best to have the drug in hand. And give a taste to a select few so they might tell others of the quality.”

Orzibel grinned and pulled out his cell phone. “Brilliant thinking, my large friend. I will schedule a meeting with Pablo Gonsalves. Dangle pure H before the junkies and they will scour the streets like starving rats.”

Leala sat shaking in the corner of the shed. One knee screamed in pain from a fall over fence to a brick patio. Her left palm hurt from a cut, left by the ragged top of a metal gate. Her hair was still soaking wet.

“Come here NOW or I will kill your madre!”

It had been so terribly close. One time Leala had been beneath a van as the huge man’s feet had slapped past. Had he slowed in his run he would have heard Leala’s ragged, gasping breaths. When he turned past a corner she had continued to run, jumping from shadow to shadow until she had reached the shed.

“Come to me, bitch. Or I’ll SLICE OFF YOUR FACE!”

She couldn’t hide much longer, the pool proved there were eyes everywhere, even behind darkened windows. Leala clutched herself tight, but even though the night was as steamy as a jungle, she continued to shake. In the morning she would call the woman from the poster again. Her only chance of escape was in trusting someone.

It would have to be Victoree Johnson.

“To what do I owe the honor of a visit from such a successful businessman?” Pablo Gonsalves said. “Sit, Orlando Orzibel, and tell me why I am so favored.”

Gonsalves was dark-skinned, in his forties and hugely obese, his small bright eyes peering over cheeks like bags of pudding, his outsized lips wet and floating over a frog’s chin that became his chest. His black silk shirt opened to display a golden crucifix as large as a saucer nestling in a cleavage many women would have envied.

Gonsalves hunkered at a back table on the balcony of the club in Miami Beach, the cavernous room almost empty, another hour before the trust-fund babies queued at the front door. Three cholos sat at the round table, gophers and bodyguards, large, but not as large as Chaku Morales, who stood a dozen feet away and watched as Orzibel neared the table. Gonsalves seemed high on something, Orzibel noted, the man’s eyes glassy and his words carefully controlled.

Orzibel saw the tiny glass half-filled with a green liqueur, absinthe, the real deal. On the floor below a smattering of dancers gyrated to thudding techno-pop as lights flashed pink and orange and green. The DJ sat in a booth in a corner, a black man in a white and sequined suit with a Miami Dolphins ball cap slung sideways on his head. The music was loud, but the upstairs speakers were turned down, allowing normal conversation.