I crouched beside a desiccated stump and picked at it with a fingernail. Another was five meters distant, another two beyond that, and so on. There was just enough room to drive a vehicle without scratching the doors.
I stood, slapping wood chips from my palms and picturing a crew taking down trees with chainsaws, behind them a Cat dozer scraping away the brush. The path was like a fire lane in a forest, passable if you didn’t mind a bumpy ride.
But where had the road led?
I jumped in the driver’s seat, waving Gershwin aboard. “Let’s head past the pit site and see where this goes.”
We bounced down the lightly demarked path until the brush scratched at the Rover. I eased into a clearing, if that’s what it could be called, lighter growth. It was just a hundred or so paces from the cistern.
I ran back and pointed the area out to Clayton. “Let’s try over there,” I said. “And cross your fingers.”
The team reset in a line at the edge of the clearing and began walking. In addition to a buzz sounding in the earphones, a yellow light blinked atop the detectors when an object was located. By the time the team was a dozen steps into the hunt the lights were blinking like fireflies and I could hear the stronger audio signals. Whenever a tech with a detector yelled, Strike! a pair raced in with a shovel and sifting screen.
Within a half-hour the team had unearthed a bushel of smaller objects, plus three L-shaped pieces of rusted steel, two, four and eight feet long, a hole at both ends and obviously structural in purpose. Clayton crouched in light with the finds arrayed on a plastic sheet, studying each piece with a magnifier.
“Wish we still had the field lab set up,” she said.
“Why?”
“Might help read this—”
She handed me a gray strip of thin aluminum, a tag once affixed to another object. I took the glass and saw meaningless runes.
“Wait,” Clayton said. “Let’s try something.”
She spat on the tag and wiped it on her jacket. The runes were now a strip of numbers and some kind of logo. “Science,” she grinned.
It was past ten and the mosquitos were ignoring the DEET so I closed down the operation. Clayton said she’d study the tag in the morning, but I expected she’d be on it yet tonight. When the final forensics van pulled away, I turned to Gershwin.
“This place you got the chow. Where?”
“At the end of the two-lane, the edge of the ’glades, an old village or the bones of one centered by a combo gas station and bar-restaurant. I don’t think I saw anyone under a hundred years old.”
“Why’d you go there and not toward civilization?” I said.
“When I came to watch the dig I overshot the road. Ended up there asking directions and grabbed a burrito.”
“Old guys, you say?”
“Even older than you, kemo sabe.”
“Let’s go see what the old heads remember.”
Orzibel was in a back booth at the club. Onstage, a pair of women mimed sex with lolling tongues and grinding hips. Few seats remained at the long bar, most filled with men in business garb, conventioneers. The majority would only drink, Orzibel knew. But a few would get heated up by the dancers and seek personal entertainment, ending up at the motel across the street, more money moving from their wallets to the enterprise.
Similar scenes were being replayed across Florida. And that didn’t take into account the products working in factories and private homes, mainly the males and women too ugly for the clubs and whorehouses and massage parlors. Every piece of product generated a weekly or monthly fee, depending on the contract. In return, fresh girls were sent out on a regular basis, and all their costs were handled by the enterprise.
Brilliant … though too much tilted toward El Jefé on the money side. What work did he do, really? Jefé had a whole other life … how hard could he work? It was Orzibel who set up the shipping times with Miguel Tolandoro and who maintained order: chopping off the works of the guy screwing Jefé’s then-favorite whore, removing the hands and slicing the neck of the gordo Perlman, removing Carosso from the world – and handling similar but lesser operations on a daily basis. El Jefé negotiated the terms with the customers, not in person but through Amili Zelaya, who also kept the contracts, tracked the product, and handled all of the accounting from her quiet office and tiny computer.
Jefé stayed clear of almost everything that might connect him to the enterprise, which was smart, of course, but why should he make so much money when Orlando Orzibel and Amili Zelaya did most of the work?
Orzibel saw a flash of motion to his right, Chaku waving from the entryway as a fresh clot of conventioneers staggered inside, hooting when they saw the girls writhing on the stage. He followed Morales upstairs to his office and closed the door, the music shivering through the floor.