The Death Box. J. Kerley A.

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      “You have three seconds,” Orzibel said. “One …”

      Ivy’s shaking hands plucked the flesh from the knife, tried to bring it to his mouth, dropped it in the sand. “I c-c-cand,” he moaned, his words mushy through blood and the mucus pouring from his nose.

      “Two.”

      Ivy retrieved his lip and brought it to his open teeth. He began to bite gingerly at the strip of meat, but a torrent of vomit exploded from his throat and washed the lip from his fingers.

      “Three!” The knife whispered again and Ivy grabbed at his throat, his forearms glistening with the blood pouring from his slit neck. After scant seconds his eyes rolled back and he fell backward. Orzibel bent over the twitching body and wiped the knife on its shirt.

      “You have the plastic in the trunk, Chaku?”

      “Always.”

      “When he drains, wrap him tight and put him in the trunk. Tonight we’ll drop him down the hole in the world. Be sure to purchase ample concrete.”

       5

      Ernesto “Chaku” Morales took the shining Escalade on little-known dirt roads skirting the Everglades, driving beside mangrove-studded drainage canals as the sun burned toward zenith in a cloudless sky. The air reeked of heat and stagnation. Lizards darted across the path as listless vultures hunched in low branches.

      Chaku thought about his new boy. The old one had grown vacant in the eyes; the drugs, Chaku knew, both blessing and curse. At first the boys liked flying to dizzying heights where the village lessons turned to vapor. But later they started to hide in the drugs, becoming sullen and useless.

      A new boy would be fun, Chaku knew as he spun the wheel, turning right, then left, ignoring the sounds in the rear of the Escalade. There was much to teach them, although the learning always started hard. Like with the fresh girl in back, Leala Rosales. Once they’d stopped so Mr Orzibel could have Chaku thrust the girl’s sobbing face beneath black water in a drainage canal. That always got a new arrival’s attention and made lessons easier.

      It was a simple lesson Mr Orzibel had started the girl with today, basically a lesson in English.

      She was learning the meaning of the word Blowjob.

      Roy said he’d meet me in Miami and climbed into his vehicle. I aimed in the same direction, taking Highway 1 and angling through South Miami and Coral Gables toward the heart of the city.

      Miami was basically foreign to me, known on a pass-through basis when a vacation found me drifting over from Mobile, my pickup bed clattering with fishing gear. It seemed less a defined city than a metroplex sprawling from Coral Springs to Coral Gables and including Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach, Hialeah, and two dozen more separate communities squeezed between the fragile Everglades and pounding Atlantic. Drive a mile one way and find homes that could satisfy Coleridge’s version of Kubla Khan, a mile the other and you seemed in the slums of Rio.

      The main headquarters of the FCLE was in Tallahassee, in the panhandle. Though it didn’t make logistical sense – Florida crime centered in large cities in the peninsula: Miami, Tampa/St Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville and so forth – Tallahassee was the state’s capital and thus the political center. Like every government agency, FCLE had to keep its ears and voice close to where the funds were allocated.

      But the bulk of the employees in Tallahassee worked on legal and clerical staffs to adjudicate crimes in the capital’s collection of courts. The investigators were spread across the state. The main South Florida office was in Miami. The department leased office space in the towering Clark center, Miami-Dade’s governmental seat, and I figured Roy was somehow responsible for getting FCLE into such a plum address in the heart of the city.

      Roy’s official title was Director of Special Investigations, but the title was misleading, as Roy had never carved a wide swath in the investigative world. He was a showman, a dazzler, a back-slapping reassurance salesman who could zigzag a conversation so fast you wondered where you’d left your head. I’d heard Roy McDermott could waltz into a budget-cutting meeting in Tallahassee, work the room for a few minutes (he knew every face and name, down to spouses, kids, and the family dog), give an impassioned speech too convoluted to follow, and leave with his portion of funds not only unscathed, but increased.

      To pull this off required results, and the endless to-the-ground ear of Roy McDermott tracked careers the way pro horse-track gamblers shadowed thoroughbreds. He had a gift for finding savvy and intuitive cops stymied by red tape or dimwit supervisors and bringing them to the FCLE, filling his department with talented people who credited Roy with saving them from bit-player oblivion. To pay him back, they busted ass and solved crimes.

      I found a parking lot and paid a usurious sum for a patch of steaming asphalt, the attendant staring at my pickup as I backed into a spot.

      “That ’ting gonna start up again when you shut it off?”

      I walked to the nearest intersection and felt totally discombobulated. The streets were a pastiche of signs in English and Spanish, the gleaming, multi-tiered skyline foreign to my eyes, the honking lines of traffic larger than any in Mobile. A half-dozen pedestrians passed me by, none speaking English. Palms were everywhere, stubby palms, thick-trunked palms of medium height, slender and graceful palms reaching high into blue.

      What have you done? something in my head asked. Why are you here?

      The breeze shifted and I smelled salt air and realized the ocean was near. Water had always been my truest address and the voice in my head stilled as I took a deep breath, clutched my briefcase, and strode to the looming building two blocks and one change of life distant.

      “Grab a chair, bud,” Roy said, waving me into a spacious corner office on the twenty-third floor of a building rabbit-warrened with government offices.

      I sat in a wing-back model and studied the back wall. Instead of the usual grip’n’grin photos with political halfwits, Roy’s wall held about twenty framed photos of him hauling in tarpon and marlin and a shark that looked as long as my truck. I smiled at one shot, Roy and me a few years back on Sanibel, each cradling a yard-long snook and grinning like schoolboys.

      “First, here’s your official job confirmation,” Roy said, handing me a page of paper. “Before you leave we’ll get your photo taken for a temp ID. It may not glow in the dark, but even Viv Morningstar will let you live if you show it.”

      “When comes permanent ID?” I asked.

      “When we decide who you are. You’re the first of the new specialists we’ve hired who’s a cop. Are you cop first, consultant second? Or vice versa? Details, details.”

      “Does it matter?”

      “Yes indeedy-do, my man. In a state-sized bureaucracy every description has its own weight and meaning. F’rinstance, are you a consultant, which gives you the scope to go outside the office and initiate actions on your own? Are you an agent, which means full police powers but stricter adherence to chain of command? Are you solely a specialist, which means you can only be involved for certain crimes? There’s a bureaucratic niche for everything and a word to describe it.”

      “Where’s Yossarian?” I asked.

      “What?”

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