Dead Silence (41 page)

Metal-eyes must have been returning because Hump finished with, “Here, take this. I’ll be back. I swear!”

The man had tossed an object into the coffin, something hard and gray and round. Will thought it was a coconut shell at first. But in the last wedge of light, before the Cuban quietly closed the lid, Will realized it wasn’t a coconut.

Will was screaming as Hump began shoveling sand onto the coffin. Will twisted his body to get as close as he could to the PVC air tube so Hump could hear him, but Hump ignored Will’s screams and only shoveled faster. He was afraid Farfel would return from the cabin to ask questions.

Now, feeling water moving near his ears, Will thought,
He’s the devil. The real devil,
picturing Metal-eyes. Then the boy began to buck, thrusting his abdomen upward, trying to crush the hard gray object against the coffin lid.

Instead, the thing bounced off his chest like a pinball, then came to rest between the side of the coffin and Will’s neck.

It was a human skull.

Water was still rising, and the density of old bone on young skin was maddening. Because there was nothing left to try, Will began using his own skull to hammer at the coffin’s lid, hoping to knock himself unconscious before he drowned.

W
hen I peeked through a side window of the horse stable on the ten-acre Shelter Cottage estate, I wasn’t prepared for the shock of what the Cubans had done to Nelson Myles. The precision wounds, the surgical technique, told me it could have been no one else.

Beyond the windowpane, the source of the odd whirring sound Detective Palmer and I had heard was revealed. It was a power drill. Horror is commonly amplified by imagination, rarely mitigated, because the limits of our fears are boundaryless, or so I’d believed until that moment.

The scene—Nelson Myles, hanging by his feet from a rafter, hands bound behind him—expanded the reach of my secret fears and proved that I at least had found false refuge in my own limited imagination.

No, I wasn’t prepared. No one could have been, although I knew the Cubans were nearby when I saw Fred Gardiner’s cabin cruiser banging itself to pieces, grounded on the beach at the western edge of the property.

René Navárro and his partner, Angel Yanquez, had already killed one person, used a knife to stab a limo driver to death. Now, trapped in the U.S., they were becoming desperate. They were calling on their old skills, using
Malvados
techniques to help them escape into international waters or to Cuba before the deadline, in time for the C-130’s drop of the Castro Files.

Gardiner’s boat was as described: a boxy little tincan of a cruiser, aluminum hull, dented cowling, broken VHF antenna. The out drive was tilted upward like the stubby tail of a scorpion. The boat was a walleyed weekender out of its league in the Gulf Stream.

Navárro and Yanquez had run the cruiser up onto the beach, probably not long ago. I knew because of the tide. It was two hours before high, but the flood had only recently floated the boat enough to swing it sideways, beam to the sea. There was no ground tackle deployed, no attempt to secure the boat. The interrogators didn’t plan on coming back to use it again.

It told me their escape hadn’t gone well in the tricky backwaters of the Gulf Coast. Now they’d returned to strong-arm Nelson Myles into flying them out of the country or to commandeer his long-range yacht. I hoped Will Chaser was with them. Reason and instinct told me, however, the boy was either dead . . . or dying.

I was on the seaward side of the Myles property. A few minutes earlier, Detective Palmer and I had rung the front doorbell, then banged the knocker, until it became evident that the house either was empty or whoever was inside wasn’t going to answer. Through windows, the place appeared peaceful, no sign of a struggle, no indication of forced entry. It reinforced the detective’s suspicion that Myles had meant precisely what he’d told me on the phone: He was fine, stop calling, leave him alone.

When I’d suggested we break in, Palmer gave me an
Are you nuts?
look but told me she’d wait for a few more minutes while I circled the property, then added, “If you’re carrying a concealed weapon, I swear to God I’ll take you straight to jail.”

I didn’t ask if she planned on arresting me on a weapons charge, or for murder, because I didn’t want to force a decision. But I broke the old rule and lied.

There wasn’t an option. No competent cop would accompany an armed civilian onto private property. To Palmer, I was a vigilante first, a marine biologist second—nothing more. It was too much to ask of her. So I didn’t, even though, in the pockets of my foul-weather jacket, I was carrying items she wouldn’t have tolerated, including an old, fail-safe SIG Sauer 9mm pistol.

I had noticed the cabin cruiser as I circled near the beach onto the back lawn. It was visible beyond a stand of coconut palms, beneath a skull-gray moon, bucking and rolling in the random cadence of abandonment as waves rolled landward. The moon, half full, orbited above the Gulf horizon, casting a milky, funneled pathway to Mexico. It didn’t generate much light, but I didn’t need light to see. Something else concealed in my jacket was a night vision monocular mounted on headgear.

The monocular was a fifth-generation wonder made by Nivisys Industries. I wore it over my right eye like a surgical optic. Flip the little switch and the darkest night became lime-green day, bright as high noon.

Not only did it give me an edge over the Cubans, it provided a comforting safety factor. Palmer had told me she’d stay at the front while I looped the property. But if she got restless, changed her mind and came searching, there was no risk of mistaking her for one of the bad guys.

The interrogators had lied to Nelson Myles about smuggling illegal weapons. But that didn’t mean they weren’t carrying illegal weapons.

I got close enough to the cabin cruiser to convince myself no one was aboard—no one who was conscious anyway. The random seesaw banging would have made the cabin unbearable.

Behind the main house, near the pool, I’d seen two guest cottages and remembered there was a horse stable to the south. Before jogging toward the cottages, I drew the familiar weight of my SIG Sauer pistol and confirmed the magazine was full, a round in the chamber.

Lights were off in the cottages but the doors were unlocked. I did a quick search: Nothing.

Next, I headed to the stable. And there was Myles . . .

 

 

 

The Yale grad and multimillionaire was hanging by his feet, glasses gone, hair in suspended disarray as if he were adrift underwater.

The man was wearing fresh cotton slacks and a gray tailored shirt. He had probably scrubbed himself clean after I left with the police, then dressed in his cocktail-hour best to counter the humiliation he had suffered on the dirt road.

“I feel filthy,” he had told me, a psychological reaction to my bullying. Looking at the man now, I found no comfort in the fact that what I had done to him did not compare to the outrage the interrogators had inflicted.

Nelson’s head was four feet off the floor. The floor beneath was stained. On a nearby wall hung a phone that had been ripped from its mounting. Beneath it, on a bench, was the electric drill, plugged into an extension cord. They’d probably found the drill in the tool closet. The closet door was open.

The Cubans had done a poor job of duct-taping Myles’s hands. They hadn’t secured his thumbs, but clearly the Yale grad hadn’t realized the opportunity it could have afforded him.

They hadn’t bothered taping his mouth. Ten acres of seclusion and the percussion of waves from the nearby beach guaranteed privacy. To bind his feet, instead of tape the
Malvados
had skewered holes in the fleshy space between ankle bones and Achilles tendons to insert the cable hooks that now strained against the man’s suspended weight. It was the same technique used in meat lockers to hang beef.

I’m no carpenter, but I recognized the polished drill bit. It was stainless steel, the diameter finer than pencil lead but forged solid, designed to bore through tile or concrete. It, too, was stained.

Myles appeared to be dead. I couldn’t be sure.

The stable consisted of a half dozen stalls, doors open. There were also ancillary rooms, but I didn’t pause to weigh the possibility that Navárro and Yanquez were hiding inside. I crashed through bushes to the front entrance and kicked open the office door, pistol at eye level, flipping off lights as I hurried to the barn’s main area. Darkness was to my advantage.

The ceiling was pitched, twenty feet high, with a loft. On the main beam, a winch was bolted to a boom, used for hauling up bales of hay or machinery that needed to be stored in the loft. It was an electric winch. Tonight, it had hauled up a six-foot man, suspending him like a trophy fish.

Myles heard me as I banged my way into the room, or the sudden darkness had frightened him, because I heard his scarred vocal chords whisper, “Don’t! Don’t . . .
Please
don’t hurt me anymore.”

Surprise! He was alive. When he pleaded, “Lights on . . . can’t see,” I hesitated before finding the nearest switch. I removed the night vision monocular as banks of neon flooded the room with the cheery luminescence of a retail shop. Anyone outside could see us now. I didn’t like it, but the man had been through enough without adding to his fear.

I knelt beside him, saying, “It’s me . . . Ford. I’ll get you down. You’ll be okay.”

Myles moaned, “No more hurt me . . . Please, can’t . . . Sit it . . . ? Can’t
stand
it no more!,” as the cable made abbreviated pendulum arcs, caused by his recent convulsing, a musculature response to pain. He was having difficulty selecting words and forming sentences. It was because of what Navárro and Yanquez had done to his brain.

I found the winch toggle and lowered Myles almost to the floor before using one arm to lift his weight while my free hand threaded the cable hooks out of his ankles. I attempted a slow, gentle pull, but his reaction told me it was better to do it fast, in one swift motion, like ripping adhesive tape off a wound.

The man screamed again, twice, then began to sob, as I carried him to a stack of hay bales in the corner and placed him on his back. His body felt as light as that of a withered old man.

As I freed his hands, I asked, “Why’d they do this? What did they want?” Myles’s eyes blinked open.
“Dr. Ford . .
.
?”
His relief was audible—and also misplaced, considering what I had done to him earlier.

“You’re safe. You’ll be okay after I call an ambulance.”

It was a lie, but he was too damaged to discern truth.

“Where’s my phone?”

“Phone,” he whispered. “They took . . . your phone . . . the Spanish man . . . sillll-verr-haired man . . . Woman called . . . the . . . the Cuban answered . . . Woman’s name is . . . I saw her picture in the . . .
Nawww York Times
. . .” Myles stuttered, fighting to retrieve words. “The woman . . . she is in . . . the Amerr-ii-can Sin . . . Sin . . .
Senate
.”

Barbara Hayes-Sorrento had tried to call me. René Navárro had answered, and still had my phone.

“Did the man know who she was?” A pointless question. Of course he knew, for the same reason Myles knew. I log names with the same exacting consistency I log specimens: last name, first name, title, address. The data would have flashed on the caller-ID screen.

“The Cuban . . . called her . . . Snn-Snn-Senator. He asked her . . . to come . . .”

“Where? Did she agree?”

Myles replied with a helpless shrug:
Don’t know.

I said, “Rest for a second, maybe you’ll remember,” as my brain began a rapid review of associated data. Barbara had told me that she was meeting Will Chaser’s foster grandparents tonight in Tampa, then going to a vacation home owned by a senator from Oklahoma. Barbara would have arrived by now. It was likely she’d called me from the airport. Just as likely, she was in a hurry, as always, and started talking the instant the man answered, telling him, “We just landed in Tampa,” or something like that.

I asked, “Your neighbor, the senator, is he from Minnesota?” I was trying to compute the odds. The Senate is the most exclusive club in the country—only a hundred members—but about half spend part of the winter in Florida. A statistical guess: twenty-some on the Atlantic Coast, twenty-some on the Gulf. Still, the coincidence was unlikely, unless . . .

Myles appeared to shake his head—
No, not from Minnesota—
more concerned with what had happened to his wife. He whispered, “Did they . . . hurt her? I didn’t tell them . . . where my wife . . . where Roxanne . . . was hiding! They hurt me . . . threatened to kill me . . . but I didn’t . . . tell them!”

The man’s eyes widened, proud he had defended his wife, but his wife was Connie, not Roxanne Sofvia. It was impossible to know if he’d confused the names or his loyalty. But he had refused. Nothing else mattered.

“Hiding where?” I asked.

“Drove to a friend’s . . . house . . . Saw them coming . . . from the beach . . . the . . . Cubans. Told her it . . . was business . . . didn’t want her . . . around.”

I was thinking about Detective Palmer, worried she would confront the Cubans if they’d gone to the house, searching for Connie Myles. I was also looking around the room for a water spigot and a working telephone, or even an alarm button like the one in the Range Rover.

There wasn’t much I could do for the man but summon an ambulance and try to get some water down him. He’d lost a lot of blood and needed fluids. I told myself water might keep him alive, but it wasn’t true. Even if he did live, would he want to?

Myles continued talking as I filled an empty Coke bottle from a water-trough spigot, but he was difficult to understand because the wiring of his brain had been scrambled. Most of what he said was disconnected gibberish. He transposed words or selected nonsensical ones that conveyed no meaning. Inside his head, I guessed, the synapse junctions had to be sparking like meteorites. Even so, I managed to piece together the story.