“I’m trying to figure out what to ask.”
Gershwin put his ear to the phone. “The background sound. Tires? A vehicle, maybe?”
“Nice.” I leaned to the microphone. “Leala? Are you in a vehicle?”
thump
“Trunk?”
thump
“Do you know your destination?”
thump thump
“Were you in Miami?” Gershwin asked. Another good question.
thump
“That’s my partner, Leala,” I said. “Ziggy. When you meet him you can ask how he got such a weird name. He knows Spanish. Do you need him to talk to you?”
thump thump
I thought a moment, though my heart knew the answer before I asked the question. “Leala, is the driver a man named Orlando Orzibel? Do you know?”
thump
I blew out a long breath and shook my head, then asked Leala to relax and let us listen. Gershwin and I put our heads together and listened intently for long minutes. The tire sound would slow and stop, then pick up again, traffic lights, we assumed. Or stopping at intersections. The vehicle wasn’t on an interstate or deserted highway. We also heard traffic in the opposite direction or passing, and the occasional growl of a motorcycle or horn honk.
Gershwin looked at his watch. “Twenty-five minutes. If she started in Miami …” He let it hang and I knew where he was going.
“Do you know how long you’ve been …” I asked. “No, wait. Have you been in the car longer than a half-hour, Leala?”
thump
“She’s outside the city by now,” Gershwin said. “But which direction?”
It started raining. We retreated to the kitchen and I plugged my phone into the charger and set it on the counter.
“Check this out, Big Ryde.”
Gershwin had turned on the TV and was pointing to the regional Doppler radar. A slender circle of showers was crossing swiftly from northeast to southwest, the lower band now crossing over Upper Matecumbe. The northern edge was swinging into central Miami. Brilliant.
“Leala,” I said. “Can you tell if it’s raining?”
thump
Rain meant she’d headed south from Miami. There wasn’t much land south, everything turning to water save for the Keys.
“Hello?” an electronic voice said. The gate. “Hello in there?”
I opened the gate and seconds later saw a cop cruiser whip down the drive and slide to a halt. An older guy jumped from the cruiser with a brown duffel in hand, said, “Should just take a few.” He crouched under rain, a short, pudgy man with twinkling eyes behind silver glasses. “I’m Frank Craig, a ham from Islamorada, ten minutes away. I got a call you might need some help.”
Ham was shorthand for an amateur radio operator, folks whose hobby was communicating around the world on special radio frequencies. I’d never met a ham who wasn’t a default electronics geek.
“You’re not with the FCLE?”
“No way your people could make it here fast enough. I brought a couple things. That the phone?”
I nodded. Craig produced what seemed a shoebox-sized tackle box with electronic gizmos inside and a couple small speakers facing outward. “A reception booster for the signal and output amp to enhance volume and fidelity, especially in the voice spectrum. I build these things for hearing-impaired folks.”
He duct-taped the phone to the box and attached some wires. It looked like a makeshift bomb. “You can charge everything by plugging it into a wall socket,” Craig said, which he did. “If you need to move, this is the plug for the car socket.”
“Any way to block our voices from going out unless we want them to?” Gershwin asked.
“Not without getting inside the phone, dicey. Best thing is this.” Craig handed Gershwin a small square of soft putty. “Put it over the mic when you need muting, lift to speak.”
Craig flipped a switch and sound filled the room, the hiss of wet tires now so distinct I heard seams in the roadbed. We could hear the moan of a powerful engine, the shifting of the transmission.
“Damn,” Gershwin said. “It’s like being there.”
“Leala,” I said. “You still OK?”
thump
The sound filled the room like a bass drum. Craig picked up his duffle and boogied away to our complete admiration. We turned back to the phone and startled to a furious scratching sound that seemed to echo from my walls.
Then, utter silence.
“What the hell?” Gershwin said, eyes wide.
“They’ve stopped,” I said, leaning close to the speaker. “I can’t hear an engine.”
“Leala,” I whispered to the phone. “What is it?”
No response. I thought I could hear a faraway drumming of rain on metal. Or maybe it was a terrified heart.