The Death Box(67)
“Victoree Johnson was here?” Leala asked, shooting a glance at the guard. He looked like he was yawning, but it might be a trick. “Señorita Johnson is the real woman?”
“As you get, I expect. I was in the front row of the audience and …” the man paused, his eye narrowing. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked.
The man’s eyes had turned into question marks. All he had to do was point at Leala and yell “Criminal!” and the guardia would throw a net over Leala and pull her away to be raped and tortured. She shot a concerned look at her bare wrist and slapped her forehead.
“Dios mio … I am mas late to an appointment. I will return in the mañana.” Leala pushed a bright smile to her face and turned for the door.
“You’re not wearing a watch,” the man called to her back.
But Leala was outside and ducking between and around pedestrians. She sprinted across the street, hastening down another block to a bus stop on the opposite side of the street from where she was dropped off. She boarded a westward-bound bus, the direction of her safe place. She paid her fare and sat behind the driver, her mind racing.
“Damn,” I muttered, studying the surveillance video and watching a pretty teenage girl in a white scarf and blue dress speaking to one of the clerks at the Clark Center’s info desk. The building’s security office was in the basement, and the chief of security, a square-jawed ex-cop named Talbot, stood beside me as a minion ran a playback from a camera at the front desk.
“I’m to speak to Señor Ryder,” the woman was saying, her soft voice picked up by one of the sensitive mics mounted in the desk. “He said I am to … to meet him in the lobby. But I cannot know who is he. Es possible you show me a fotografía please?”
I watched the clerk pop my ID pic onto the screen, turn it to the woman. She was the one I had the fleeting interaction with on the plaza. She must have been terrified to be in a government building that housed a major police agency, but she held herself with amazing aplomb, the façade dropping for a split second as a uniformed cop walked to the desk. When the girl’s eyes saw the cop they widened as her shoulders tightened. When the cop turned away and the girl’s face re-assumed the mask of concerned citizen, standing on tip-toe to study my photo before thanking the clerk and retreating.
Her story about having a meeting with me – at my request – and needing to ID me in the crowded lobby was pitch-perfect, delivered with sincere confusion and disarming innocence. Whoever the girl was, she had brains and bravery … getting me outside so she could look me over.
Had I passed a test? Failed?
“Someone you know?” Talbot asked.
“Someone I’d like to.” I thanked him for pulling the video and headed back upstairs, nothing to do but go back to my office and hope the girl phoned.
35
The establishment known as O’s Cupboard sat a block off Duval and one of the delights of the workers was seeing the faces of middle-aged Midwestern tourist ladies stepping inside expecting a trendy bistro and beholding racks of rubber bondage suits, whips and riding crops, X-rated videos, and a display counter of dildoes and vibrators.
Spyder Rockwylde, né Bruce Hastings, was in the back room finishing lunch. He tossed the sloppy remains of the tuna salad sandwich into the trash can in the corner. He belched and stepped into the tiny high-fenced courtyard out back and polished off the joint he’d started before work, then paused in the high sun to pull up his skin-tight black tee to admire his latest tattoo, a Gibson Les Paul guitar running from his pubic hair to his sternum.
Too cool.
He heard the door pull shut as he entered the front section, seeing his shift partner and drummer – when he could borrow a kit – pushing the drawer closed on the register. Billy T. Rexx, né Kent Buttram, jumped back up on a stool and tugged at the inch-round black plug distending his ear lobe.
“Yo, Spyd … just made two hundred-eighty bucks,” he smiled, holding up a fifty. “And a tip just for ringing things up. The man said to split it with you.”
Rockwylde smiled. There was only one customer who tipped: Babyface Sanders.
Neither knew the customer’s real name, the moniker coming from the man’s childlike visage and affectation for white suits à la Colonel Sanders. Both enjoyed inventing backgrounds for customers and speculated Babyface was the secret love child of Harlan Sanders and the Chucky character of horror-flick fame.
“Babyface load up on more freaky teeny flickies?” Rexx asked, referring to the man’s devotion to Hispanic porn flicks featuring the most youthful-looking actors, preferably movies involving simulated kidnap and rape.