The Death Box

“I’ve never seen anyone return.”

Amili startled to a tremendous banging. After a distant scream of machines and the rattle of cables the container began to lift. The metal box seemed to sway in the wind and then drop. Another fierce slam from below as the module jolted violently to a standstill. Amili realized the container had been moved to a truck.

“Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll be safe and we can—” Amili held her tongue as she heard dockworkers speaking English outside.

“Is this the one, Joleo?”

“Lock it down fast. We’ve got two minutes before Customs comes by this section.”

Amili felt motion and heard the grinding of gears. She drifted into unconsciousness again, awakened by a shiver in the container. The movement had stopped.

“Lucia?”

Amili patted for her friend’s hand, squeezed it. The squeeze returned, almost imperceptible. “Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll have the agua. And our freedom.”

Amili heard gringo voices from outside.

“I hate this part, opening the shit-stinking containers. They ought to make the monkeys not eat for a couple days before they get packed up.”

“Come on, Ivy. How about you work instead of complaining?”

“I smell it from fifty feet away. Get ready to herd them to the Quonset hut.”

Light poured into the box, so bright it stole Amili’s vision. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Okay, monkeys, welcome to the fuckin’ U S of – Jesus … The smell … I think I’m gonna puke. Come here, Joleo … something’s bad wrong.”

“I smelled that in Iraq. It’s death. Orzibel’s on his way. He’ll know what to do.”

Amili tried to move her head from the floor but it weighed a thousand kilos. She put her effort into moving her hand, lifting …

“I saw one move. Back in the corner. Go get it.”

“It stinks to hell in there, Joleo. And I ain’t gonna walk over all those—”

“Pull your shirt over your nose. Get it, dammit.”

Amili felt hands pull her to her feet and tried to turn back to Lucia. “Wait,” she mumbled. “Mi amiga Lucia está vivo.”

“What’s she saying?”

“Who cares? Haul her out before Orzibel gets here.”

“Orzibel’s crazy. He’ll gut us.”

“Christ, Ivy, it ain’t our fault. We just grab ’em off the dock.”

Amili felt herself thrown atop a shoulder. She grabbed at the body below, trying to make the man see that Lucia was still breathing. The effort was too much and the corners of the box began to spin like a top and Amili collapsed toward an enveloping darkness. Just before her senses spun away, ten final words registered in Amili’s fading mind.

“Oh shit, Joleo, my feet just sunk into a body.”

2 (#u1c272a9a-a57c-5d98-b54d-f1b3d45cec31)

One year later

It seemed like my world had flipped over. Standing on the deck of my previous home on Alabama’s Dauphin Island, the dawn sun rose from the left. My new digs on Florida’s Upper Matecumbe Key faced north, the sun rising from the opposite direction. It would take some getting used to.

On Dauphin Island the morning sun lit a rippled green sea broken only by faint outlines of gas rigs on the horizon. Here I looked out on a small half-moon cove ringed with white sand, the turquoise water punctuated by sandy hummocks and small, flat islands coated with greenery. Like most water surrounding the Keys, it was shallow. I could walk out a hundred yards before it reached my belly.

Which seemed a pleasant way to greet the morning. I set my coffee cup on the deck rail and took the steps to the ground, walking two dozen feet of slatted boardwalk to the shoreline. There were no other houses near and if there had been I wouldn’t have seen them, the land around my rented home a subtropical explosion of wide-frond palms strung with vines, gnarly trees dense with leaves and all interspersed with towering stands of bamboo. It resembled a miniature Eden, complete with lime trees, lemons, mangoes and Barbados cherries. After a rain, the moist and scented air seemed like an intoxicant.

At water’s edge I kicked off my moccasins and stepped into the Gulf, bathtub-warm in August. The sand felt delicious against my soles, conforming to my steps, familiar and assuring. I seemed to smell cigar smoke and scanned the dawn-brightening shoreline, spying only two cakewalking herons pecking for baitfish. Neither was puffing a cigar. I put my hands in the pockets of my cargo shorts and splashed through knee-deep water toward the reeded point marking one horn of the crescent cove, revisiting the conversation that had led me so swiftly and surprisingly to Florida.

“Hello, Carson? This is Roy McDermott. Last time we talked, I mentioned changes in the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. We’re creating a team of consulting specialists.”

“Good for you, Roy.”

“Why I’m calling, Carson … We want you on the team.”

“I don’t have a specialty, Roy. I’m just a standard-issue detective.”

“Really? How about that PSIT team you started … specializing in psychopaths and sociopaths and general melt-downs? And all them freaky goddamn cases you guys solved?”

I smelled cigar smoke again. Looking to my right I saw a black man walking toward the shore with a stogie in his lips, five-seven or thereabouts, slender, his face ovoid, with a strong, straight nose beneath heavy eyebrows. His mouth was wide, garnished with a pencil mustache, and suggested how Tupac Shakur would have looked in his mid-sixties, though I doubt Shakur would have gone for a pink guayabera shirt and lime-green shorts. A crisp straw fedora with bright red band floated on the man’s head and languid eyes studied me as if I were a novel form of waterfowl.

“You the one just moved in that yonder house?” he asked.

“Guilty as charged.”

“The realtor tell you two people got killed in there? That the place was owned by a drug dealer, a Nicaraguan with metal teeth?”

The law allowed the confiscation of property employed in criminal enterprises and the place had indeed been the site of two killings, rivals to the drug dealer who had owned the house. The dealer went to prison and the house almost went on the market, but the FCLE was advised to hold it in anticipation of rising home values. And it wouldn’t hurt for time to lapse between the killings and the showings. When I told Roy I was thinking of looking at places in or near the Keys, he’d said, “Gotta great place you can crib while you’re looking, bud. Just don’t get too used to it.”

I nodded at my impromptu morning companion. “I heard about the murders. Didn’t hear about the teeth.”

“Like goddamn fangs. Heard one had a diamond set in it, but I never got close enough to check. You buyin’ the place from the guv’mint? Nasty history, but the house ain’t bad – kinda small for the neighborhood – but a good, big chunk of land. As wild as it was when Poncy Deleon showed up.”

The house itself – on ten-foot pilings to protect against storm surges – wasn’t overwhelming: single story, three bedrooms. But it had broad skylights and a vaulted ceiling in the main room, so it was bright and open. Outside features included a hot tub and decks on two sides. Mr Cigar was right about the land: four untamed acres, like the house was in a tropical park. Plus the property abutted a wildlife sanctuary, a couple hundred swampy acres of flora gone amok. I figured the dealer had picked the place for the wild buffer zone, privacy for all sorts of bad things.

“Afraid I’m just renting,” I said. “It’s too pricy for me.”

A raised eyebrow. “Kinda work you do, mister?”

“In two weeks I start work for the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. I came from Mobile, where I was a cop, a homicide detective.”

A moment of reflection behind the cigar. “So I guess we both made a living from dead bodies.”

“Pardon me?”