“What’s the PB say about Mister Oh-Oh?” I asked. I heard myself, paused, looked at Gershwin.
“Oh-Oh,” I repeated.
“DOUBLE OUGHT!” he yelled. I saw the pilot wince beneath his amplified headset.
I scanned the pages, heart pounding. “Orzibel went to work for Kazankis three and a half years ago. He hit all his meetings with his parole officer. The reports from Kazankis were glowing: Model employee, hard and dedicated worker, always on time. Even so, Mr Oh-Oh left the employ of Redi-flow after only eight months, just as he went off parole.”
“Going where?”
“Said he planned to work in the entertainment industry.”
I grabbed the chopper’s land link and called Warden Sloan.
“I thought Orzibel the oddest of Kazankis’s choices.” Sloan said. “A good-looking SOB, big smile, articulate, but …”
I noted Sloan was no longer calling Kazankis by his first name.
“Never turn your back on him?”
“We suspected Orzibel of nasty incidents, two killings among them. One victim got his genitals carved off. Another, a rock-bodied psychotic fuck, by the way, got his neck slit. Of course …”
“No one saw a thing.”
“While I’m amazed Kazankis sponsored a borderline sociopath like Orzibel,” Sloan said, “I’m more amazed someone as violence-prone wasn’t back inside within two weeks.”
“Maybe Mr Oh-Oh got to keep cutting people apart,” I theorized. “But found he could get paid for it.”
Amili looked from her desk to the couch, currently occupied by Juan Guzman, one of Orzibel’s lieutenants. He was heavy, with dull eyes and bad skin. His fat and tattooed fingers twiddled at a video game on his phone. Another cholo leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
“Are you to watch me all the day?” she asked Guzman.
“I apologize, Señorita, but it is Señor Orzibel’s request. You must stay in my sight and not use the phone.”
Amili studied herself in the mirror above her credenza. Who was this woman? She had two subhumans watching her, Orzibel’s foul seed within her. Music came through the floor and below danced young girls she had helped bring here under all manner of lies. There were so many others as well, stretching into Alabama and up to Georgia.
But today was the first time she had sent one to certain death.
There had been a plan once, hadn’t there? Conceived in those first days when she’d slowly gained small pieces of freedom. When she’d moved into the enterprise she’d realized both the limits of her life and its unique access. The plan was how she had kept her sanity. That and the drug … the only way she had found to sleep without nightmares.
Had the plan been a lie she’d made to herself, a way to live in long-ago dreams? A justification? There was little she could change in the Today, she had told herself time and time again. It was all for Tomorrow. Gifts came from El Jefé, raises, designer clothing, a nicer place to live. For Tomorrow, Amili had told herself. I’m doing this for Tomorrow. For many Tomorrows.
She closed her eyes against the image in the mirror and turned to Guzman. “I must do my work.”
“Si. But you must do it here without using the phone.”
Amili thought for a long moment. She frowned at Guzman. “It is a delivery day, you know that? The money.”
His mouth drooped open. “Uh, si. I think.”
“I must prepare the records for the bank. You have been given importance, so perhaps you understand.”
Guzman’s chin jutted with pride. “Si. I understand.”
No, Amili thought. You do not. She withdrew her computer and began preparing the records.
It was becoming Tomorrow.
43
The sky was a searing blue as the chopper roared south and banked toward Miami, now a distant cluster of jagged forms breaking the horizon. I wondered what we could accomplish at our desks. We were doing damned good at present: pulling the case together a half-mile in the air with little more than snippets of history, some inside information from a prison warden, and a lap full of records. I suddenly needed a sense of place and tapped the pilot on his shoulder.
“Think you could spare time to fly over a concrete plant below Homestead?”
The pilot’s eyes shot a quizzical look. “You’re a Senior Investigator from FCLE, sir. You don’t ask, you tell.”
Well, damn, I thought. Score one for Roy. We banked into a sky blazing with promise as I turned to Gershwin with more pieces assembling in my head. “Kazankis worked us like puppets, Ziggy. Expressing sorrow about Carosso while pointing us directly at him.”
“Who gave Carosso the occasional packages? The guys Scaggs saw from the Redi-flow tower?”