Cari Mora Read online

  Miami Beach SWAT and a fire truck arrived first at the Escobar house on the bay. The Miami-Dade Marine Patrol came on the water with two boats, no lights, no sirens. SWAT went in from the front and the back of the house at the same time.

  A police helicopter was overhead, flapping the frayed old wind sock by the house’s helipad.

  Programmed to avoid entanglement, the robot was dubious about the narrow staircase but, with some encouragement from its operator, it went down the steps to the basement room. The barrel of the robot’s twelve-gauge shotgun was filled with water to interrupt the firing circuit in a bomb. The shotgun shell had an electric cap where the primer used to be.

  The robot’s camera showed the open vault, its upper shelves empty, kilo packs of Semtex on the bottom shelf. The bomb squad was glad to see through the robot’s camera a tangle of bright detonating cord, detached from the explosives and piled on the card table, and beside the cord was a mercury switch, harmless now. This was a courtesy not lost on the bomb squad.

  Three heavy magnets and Favorito’s tools, wiped down with oil, were in a loose pile under the stairs.

  They found no one in the house but the mannequins, the plaster monsters, the toys.

  Police from the various agencies milled in the house. When the explosives left in the bomb truck the dread went with them.

  The bomb squad gathered around the antique electric chair in the living room and speculated on whether or not you could use it to heat a pizza. Their sergeant, sitting in the electric chair, said it would simmer but not sauté and that’s why it was not still at Sing Sing. Everything seemed funny to them when the bomb was gone.

  The Marine Patrol closed off the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway and the Julia Tuttle Causeway and searched every boat passing beneath.

  Terry Robles gathered the weapons at the house, one AK and the AR-15 from the room of the late Umberto. Wearing gloves, he shucked the AR-15 and took out the sear, a small boxlike aluminum structure from the fire control group that permitted the gun to fire full auto. He showed the sear to the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers at the scene.

  An ATF agent looked at it. His eyebrows went up. “New made,” the agent said.

  Legal drop-in sears for an AR-15 were all made before 1986. A legal, registered sear will cost you $15,000 if you can find a bargain and have a Class 3 license.

  A newly made illegal sear will cost you up to $250,000 in fines and twenty years in Coleman federal prison without possibility of parole.

  “Do me a favor,” Robles said to the ATF agent. “See if you can move this through the lab pretty quick.”

  In Hans-Peter’s room he found a folder, copies of drawings that were terrible to look at.

  Two days later Detective Robles would be undercover with the ATF at the windowless self-storage that looked like a slaughterhouse, where both Don Ernesto’s crew and Hans-Peter rented guns.

  The proprietor told Robles to call him Bud. His real name, on the warrant in Detective Robles’s pocket, was David Vaughn Webber, WM 48, two priors for cocaine possession, and a DUI.

  Detective Robles and agents of the ATF found him because his fingerprint was inside the little drop-in sear on Umberto’s rifle.

  Chapter Forty

  At the airport the van pulled close to the old airplane, and with a dolly Don Ernesto’s crew rolled the washing machines onto the cargo lift. The machines loaded with gold disappeared into the airplane to take their places in a line of ordinary washing machines going to South America.

  Rain on the tarmac. Reflections of the gray sky pocked with rain. An old 707 taxied by and drowned out the talk. When it had passed, Don Ernesto said, “Come with me, Cari. Come work with me. This place is trouble for you.”

  “Thank you, Don Ernesto, this is my home now.”

  “I seriously advise you to come.”

  She shook her head. In the rain her face looked younger than her twenty-five years.

  He nodded. “When I sell the gold you’ll hear from me. Find a place to store cash. Get a big safe-deposit box. When you have the money, feed it into your finances a little at a time until you can invest in a business to run it through. I can recommend an accountant when the time comes.”

  “My aunt?”

  “I will take care of that, I promise you.”

  Hans-Peter Schneider watched the airplane from the shoulder of the road outside the airport fence. His telephone was in his lap. On a piece of paper he had the numbers of air traffic control, the airport precinct headquarters of the Miami-Dade Police, the Transportation Security Administration and ICE.

  Don Ernesto jogged to the bathroom. He was dialing his telephone, talking as he went in the door. When he remembered to look under the door of the toilet stall he saw no feet.

  Don Ernesto talked while he stood at the urinal.

  “She works at the Seabird Station, on the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway,” he said.

  Sirens in the distance, maybe a fire, maybe coming for them. Don Ernesto jogged back to the airplane and climbed aboard.

  When the bathroom door slammed, Benito on the toilet could put his feet back down on the floor.

  In his SUV, Hans-Peter turned off his telephone, put it in his pocket and wadded up his list of phone numbers. He watched the pilots do the walk-around on the old DC-6A, and then he drove away.

  The plane rolled and rolled and rolled down the runway, its four propellers clawing at the air, blowing the grass flat beside the runway. Packed full of washing machines and a few dishwashers—only three heavy ones—at last it labored into the sky, wheeling in a long curve out of traffic and headed south over the sea toward Haiti.

  Don Ernesto closed his eyes and thought about Candy and good times gone, and he thought about good times coming. Gomez, directed by the crew to a seat behind the airplane’s center of gravity, looked at the massage ads in the New Times.

  The two names that Diego Riva knew were Don Ernesto and Isidro Gomez.

  Arrest warrants were duly issued but by then their old airplane was groaning out over the Florida Straits, free and away.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Two weeks passed and nobody heard anything from Don Ernesto.

  Marco bought a phone card and, on a burner phone, called Alfredo’s Academy of Dance. He was told that no one named Don Ernest—was it Ernesto or Ernest?—worked there.

  A pleasant morning in North Miami Beach at Greynolds Park beside the lake. Couples in rented boats paddled over the still water. Picnickers were under the trees spreading tablecloths and someone played an accordion. Blue smoke drifted over the water from the barbecue grills.

  Cari Mora looked at her watch and took a seat on the edge of the dock. She wore a straw garden hat with a bright ribbon.

  A flat-bowed skiff approached the dock.

  Favorito was paddling in the stern, his wheelchair folded in front of him on the bottom of the boat. Cari had not seen him since they opened the vault. They had spoken once, for fifteen seconds on the telephone.

  In the bow of the skiff Iliana Spraggs was paddling too, her leg propped in an inflatable cast. They wore life jackets. Iliana’s face was already pink from the sun.

  Favorito smiled at Cari.

  “Hi,” Favorito said. “Tick tock. This is Iliana.”

  “Tick tock,” Cari said. “Hi, Iliana.”

  Iliana Spraggs would not look at Cari and did not return her greeting.

  “Cari, nobody’s heard from our friend from the south,” Favorito said. “We might not ever hear anything from him. He took off with it, I think.”

  Favorito handed up a picnic basket. “Look under the sandwiches,” he said.

  Cari moved the food aside and saw the bright yellow glint underneath.

  She looked around. The closest picnickers were back under the trees. She rooted in the basket. In a loose cloth bag were nine fat little tola bars, stamped 3.75 OZ.

  “Eighteen of these fell into my toolbox,” Favorito said. “Nine for you, nine for us.” He cont
inued talking, as much for Iliana as for Cari. “If it weren’t for you, Cari, if you hadn’t come down the basement steps, I would be hamburger. I been blown up before. These nine are worth around forty-four thousand dollars. They’re marked Credit Suisse and not numbered. In time they will be easy to sell. Do it slowly, scatter it out, feed the money little by little into whatever you are doing. Make deposits of less than five thousand dollars. Pay your taxes.”

  “Thank you, Favorito,” Cari said. She took out the bag of tolas and put the picnic basket in the boat on top of the folded wheelchair. “Somebody’s getting too much sun,” she said.

  She offered Iliana her garden hat. Iliana made no move to take it.

  Cari looked into Iliana’s closed face. “Hang on to Favorito. He’s a good one.” She put the garden hat in the boat on top of the basket.

  They paddled away. Cari put the tolas in her carryall with her schoolbooks and a bag of Vigoro fruit tree fertilizer.

  Out of earshot, Iliana said without moving her mouth much, “She’s damn fucking good-looking.”

  “Yes she is. And so are you,” Favorito said. A moment passed before Iliana put the hat on and waved to Cari from the boat. Possibly Iliana smiled.

  Cari took the bus to work on her house-to-be near the Snake Creek Canal.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  A warm day near Christmas. The frangipanis had dropped their leaves to face the seventy-five-degree winter. The big leaves blew against Cari Mora’s legs as she walked from the bus stop toward her house near the Snake Creek Canal.

  She carried two canvas bags. A blooming hot-pink shrimp plant was in one bag and her schoolbooks were in the other, together with a copy of Span Tables for Joists and Rafters from the American Wood Council.

  Some neighbor children, average age eight, were putting together a Nativity scene in their front yard.

  They had figures of Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus in the manger, along with the animal residents of the stable: a goat, a donkey, a sheep and three turtles. A pipe tent pole was set in the ground in the center of the scene. Two girls and a boy fastened strings of lights over the pipe and spread them like tent ropes to make a colorful Christmas tree over the manger scene.

  Their mother watched from the porch. She had custody of the low-voltage transformer, the cord coiled under her chair.

  Cari smiled at the woman on the porch. “That’s a nice nacimiento,” she said to the children.

  “Thank you,” the older girl said. “Kmart is the only place you can find a nacimiento of plástico that will stand up to the rain. The plaster ones melt.”

  “You have turtles here in the stable with Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus.”

  “Well, Kmart was out of Wise Men or Kings, and we already had these turtles. They’re wood, but we dipped them in Future in case it rains.”

  “So these turtles are…”

  “Claro—these are the Three Wise Turtles,” the little boy said. “If we can get some Wise Men or Kings of Orient Are, then the turtles will be like regular turtles who live together here in the stable. Friends with the donkey and the sheep.”

  “We’ll grub them up so they look like the ones in Snake Creek,” the girl said.

  “Great nacimiento,” Cari said. “Thanks for sharing it with me.”

  “You’re welcome. Come see it lit up when Mom plugs it in. Feliz Navidad.”

  Cari could hear whistling as she approached her house with the blue tarp on the roof. The whistling started as a peep or two and grew louder and faster up and down the street until it might have been a couple of small steam calliopes. She recognized Silbo Gomero whistle talk.

  She suspected the whistle talk was about the man sitting on the front steps of her house.

  Cari switched the bag with the heavy potted plant to hang from her right hand. It swung loose at her side.

  The man stood up when he saw her coming.

  Cari stopped at the corner of her yard and inspected a plant that was turning yellow.

  She could see her visitor was packing high on the right side of his belt—the butt of the pistol printed against his jacket. Instead of using the walk, she approached across the grass to keep the sun in his eyes.

  “Ms. Mora, I’m Detective Terry Robles, Miami-Dade PD. Could you talk with me for a few minutes?” For courtesy’s sake he showed her his ID instead of the tin.

  She did not go close enough to read the ID. She wondered if he had zip-tie handcuffs on his belt.

  Terry Robles saw that Cari’s face was the face in the drawings he carried in a folder under his arm. The drawings felt like dirty and shameful things to him now instead of just evidence; they felt hot and awful under his arm.

  Cari did not want Terry Robles in her house, where she rearranged her three pieces of furniture several times a week. He was a cop, like ICE. She did not want him in there.

  Cari invited Robles to sit at a table in the garden and not in the house.

  On the back porch the cockatoo was responding to the Silbo Gomero whistling from next door. The bird whistled and yelled back in English and in Spanish.

  “Do you understand whistle talk?” Robles asked.

  “No. My neighbors save cell phone minutes this way. Never get hacked. Please excuse the bird’s language, she’s always eavesdropping and butting in on their conversations—if she says something to you it’s not personal at all.”

  “Ms. Mora, a lot has happened at the house where you used to work. Do you know any of the people who were staying there?”

  “I was only with them for a couple of days,” Cari said.

  “Who hired you for that couple of days?”

  “They said it was a film company, there was a name on the permit. A lot of people shot film there the last couple of years, commercials for TV using the props there in the house.”

  “Did you know any of this crew?”

  “The boss was a tall man they called Hans-Peter.”

  “Do you know what they found in the house?”

  “No. I didn’t like those people and I quit the second day.”

  “Why?”

  “They were jailbirds. I didn’t like the way they acted.”

  “Did you register a complaint anywhere?”

  “I registered my complaint with them before I left.”

  Robles nodded. “Some of them are dead, others are missing.”

  He could see no reaction in Cari.

  “You’re in school.”

  “Miami Dade. I just started.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to be a veterinarian. I’m taking pre-med.”

  “You recently got your Temporary Protected Status and your work permit extended. Congratulations on that.”

  “Thank you.”

  She could see it coming.

  Robles shifted in his seat. “You’re on the citizenship track. You have a home health license, you’ve nursed old people, you’ve cleaned houses. That crew took a lot of gold out of the house where you worked. Ms. Mora, did you get any of it?”

  “Gold? I got grocery money from them, and not much of that.”

  Three tola bars remained in the possum nest in the attic.

  “Last year you declared just a modest income to the IRS, but recently you were able to buy this house.”

  “It’s still mostly the bank’s house. My cousin’s brother-in-law in Quito owns it. I’m taking care of it. Fixing it up.”

  This was true, on paper. She could show this son of a bitch.

  Anger swelled in Cari, looking into Robles’s face, into dark eyes like hers in the backyard of her own house.

  She did not think it could come here, the trouble. She did not think it would come to her garden, to her house, built on a slab where no child could come to harm underneath.

  Robles’s face looked clearer to her than the garden around him. Her vision was very clear in the center, as it had been when she saw Comandante in Colombia shooting at the child under the house.

  C
ari looked up at her own mango tree, listened to it breathe in the wind, and she took a deep breath and another.

  A bee, pressed for winter forage, came to the shrimp plant in her bag and poked around in the blossoms. Cari flashed on the old naturalist she had cared for in Colombia, his glasses folded in his pocket, his bee hat on his head.

  Her anger at Robles was unreasonable and she knew it.

  Cari stood up at the table. “Detective Robles, I’m going to offer you a glass of iced tea and ask you to state your business.”

  As a young Marine, Terry Robles had been for six surreal weeks the light-heavyweight boxing champion of the Pacific Fleet; he saw something in Cari’s face that he recognized.

  Okay. Okay. Showtime. “Okay,” he said, after hearing “okay” ten times in his head. “Have you got any idea what Hans-Peter Schneider intended to do with you?”

  “No.”

  “Hans-Peter Schneider provides women for the miners in illegal gold mines in Colombia and Peru. A lot of them get mercury poisoning because the mines pollute the water. That makes it hard to sell their organs when they die. He sells human organs that do not have mercury poisoning. He harvests them in motels. He sells mutilated women to specialty clubs in various parts of the world. He does custom modifications on the women. My point is, if he doesn’t catch you he’ll make some other woman squeal and squeal.”

  No visible reaction from Cari.

  “Here are his sketches of designs for you. Again, I apologize for this, but we have to get serious.”

  Robles passed a sheaf of drawings over to Cari, facedown.

  She turned them over one by one. From the standpoint of craftsmanship, they were very good drawings. In the first one, she was left with only one limb—an arm and hand with which to provide pleasure to her masters—and she was tattooed with portraits of Mother Gnis. There was no vestige left of her other extremities. She was like a stump with a single branchy limb. A little note across the corner said “Boston Butt.”