LITMIR.BIZ

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friend Yolanda come as well?” She pointed to a nearby girl.

      “Perhaps the next time, Leala. There is only so much room in the car.”

      “It looks very big.”

      “Appearances can be deceiving. Hurry to the car, Leala. I will meet you there in a moment.”

      The girl ran to the Escalade. The man’s white teeth flashed. “Did you want a fresh boy, Chaku?” he said in English. “Come look at the selection.”

      The first sign of life in the driver’s eyes. He tapped the skinny shoulder of a male youth no older than fourteen, and pointed to the van. The boy understood nothing but that he was to move toward the vehicle, so he moved.

      The handsome man walked among the Hispanics, directing three more women to the van, pointing the others toward the Quonset hut. The driver and passenger jumped from the van, two bandana-headed Hispanics with tattoos on arms and necks. They hurried the four selections into the rear of the vehicle. As the new occupants climbed inside, the driver opened a side door and retrieved two magnetic signs saying A-1 WINDOW TREATMENTS and applied them to the sides of the van.

      The handsome man turned to the hulking driver. “Let me talk to these gentlemen in private, Chaku.” The comment was followed by a small and cryptic flick of the blue eyes. The driver retreated to the Escalade as the man gestured Ivy and Joleo to the side of the trailer. In the distance the Hispanics walked toward the gray hut. They were smiling and laughing.

      The handsome man’s eyes flicked between the men. “Did it go smoothly?”

      “Yes, sir,” Joleo said. “Like always.”

      “Are you receiving your compensation correctly?” He turned his eyes to Ivy.

      “Yes, sir,” Ivy said, trying to keep his gaze from falling to his shoes. “A day after every delivery. Th-thank you, Mr Orzibel.”

      Orlando Orzibel flashed his supernova smile. “Good work deserves no less. And good work means quiet work, right?”

      Both heads bobbed. Orzibel nodded in satisfaction and turned away. He stopped and turned back. The smile had disappeared. “So how is it I heard of lips speaking my name in a filthy little bar last month? A rathole called Three Aces?”

      Ivy seemed to waver on his knees. His mouth fell open to show darkened teeth. “I … I … it was a mistake, Mr Orzibel. It’ll never happen again. And all I said, was—”

      An arm from nowhere wrapped around Ivy’s neck, lifting him off the ground. The huge driver had somehow left the Escalade and crept across the crunchy sand and beneath the trailer without making a sound.

      “And your lips not only used my name,” Orzibel said, “they implied my business.”

      “A mistake …” Ivy gasped, pulling at the arm around his neck as his face reddened. “It’ll never hap … gain. Please—”

      Orzibel nodded and the hulk named Chaku opened his arms and Ivy fell to the ground. Orzibel lowered to a squat. A knife had appeared in his hand, a dark-bladed commando knife with few purposes but destruction.

      “Please, Mr Orzibel …” Ivy begged, tears falling down his cheeks. “Remember how I helped you with the cement last year … made your problem go away? How I worked all night for you …”

      The knife whispered through the air and Ivy’s lower lip dropped in the dirt below his face. His eyes were disbelieving as his fingers touched the open teeth, coming away shining with blood.

      Orzibel picked up the lip with the point of the knife and held it before Ivy’s horrified eyes. “Eat it,” he hissed. “Eat it or die.”

      “No, pleagggh …” Ivy wailed.

      “Eat,” Orzibel commanded. “Eat the lip that spoke my name.”

      “I ca-ca-cand,” Ivy bubbled, blood spattering with his words.

      “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

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