The Death Box(80)

“You were at the health club?” Orzibel said as Morales tossed his duffle into the corner. “You heard something from our man inside the system?”

“Ryder is unharmed.”

“Fuck!”

“The source did not think the operation was well planned. He said …” Morales frowned and paused.

“What did he say? WHAT?”

“He asked who set the clowns loose.”

Orzibel’s dark eyes blazed as he strode across the room. “Bastardo! I should go to his fancy downtown office and slice off his—”

“I told him about the girl, Orlando. That she escaped.”

Orzibel spun. “You did what?”

“The man’s job means ears on the street. Big ears. He’d heard we sought some form of information. He said he should have been told from the start.”

Orzibel shut his eyes. Forced himself to be calm. If their insider’s ears had heard of Leala’s escape, could not the information soon reach El Jefé? That would be a very bad complication in his plans.

“Yes, yes … I did not expect little Leala to elude us for so long. Did he speak of her?”

“Only that we must catch her fast. And that she must never escape again.”

A phone rang from Chaku Morales’s plush blue warm-up jacket, a burner purchased to broadcast its number to the junkies and others looking for Leala Rosales. “What?” he said into the phone. He froze, asked, “Where?” He listened, said, “We’re on our way.”

Morales closed the phone, dropped it to the floor and crushed it beneath a massive heel. Its use was over.

“We have her, Orlando. Leala Rosales.”

“A junkie spotted her?”

A nod. “He followed her to a shed behind an empty house. She is there now. Shall we go and grab our prize?”

Orzibel pulled back the sleeve of his leather jacket and checked the time.

“You take care of it, Chaku. I have a meeting I cannot ignore.”





40





The restaurant, a single-story ramshackle assemblage named The Fishing Hole, sat where the asphalt crumbled into gravel. There was a half-decayed trailer court behind it and tiny pastel houses on the far side of the street. The restaurant’s sign boasted Air Conditioned! like it had been invented yesterday. A faded Texaco sign was nailed to the side of the building.

It was like looking at the south Everglades, circa 1950.

We parked at the edge of the shell lot, a few battered pickup trucks closer to the door. I peeked through the window, seeing pine walls hung with taxidermied fish, a short wooden bar and a dozen tables. Patsy Cline was singing about walking after midnight. Two men sat at the bar as a guy behind it flipped meat on a grill. Three other guys played cards at a table, a pile of coins centering the tableau. The cook-bartender was maybe fifty and no one else looked under eighty.

I figured if I went in flashing tin I’d make them nervous. Two cops would be worse. I jogged back to the Rover. “You’re staying here,” I told Gershwin. “It’s old guys night.”

“Drink your Geritol, Big Ryde. Go get ’em.”

I entered the bar tentatively, a genial guy a little lost and a lot thirsty. “Howdy,” I said, my Alabama accent dialed to ten. “Good to see y’all still open.”

“’Til midnight,” the barkeep said.

“That ol’ rain reach out heah today?” I asked.

“Ten minutes of fallin’, two hours a turnin’ to steam. Get you something?”

Not the place to ask for a Bass. “Bud.”

I looked at the card players and nodded, nods came back. “What brings you out here?” the barkeep asked.

“Yeah,” one of the guys at the card table asked, a slender man wearing a brown Stetson over a deeply wrinkled face, his low-lidded eyes and bolo tie giving him a resemblance to Roy Rogers. “It ain’t zactly like we’re in the travel brochures.”

Laughter, me joining in. I jammed my thumb toward the development. “A big dozer’s busted at the construction site down the way. I came in from Tampa, gotta get that sumbitch up an’ runnin’ by Monday.”

“What’s wrong wit’ it?” one of the players asked as he pushed a couple nickels to the pile.

I shrugged. “Somethin’ electrical. I drove out to look at it tonight, see if I needed to call for parts. Got dark on me.”

“Yeah,” Roy Rogers chuckled, thumbing a few coins to the pile and checking his cards. “Night does that.”

“Had me a flashlight and time to kill. I ended up wandering around, that or go back to the motel and watch the Weather Channel.”

“Ain’t nothin’ left on that land, was there?”