A Shark in Calle Ocho (8 page)

“Just one or two more questions,” he said.

“That’s fine.”

“Care Ambulance Service has been in the news as of late.”

“Yes, we have,” Lauren said, a serious expression on her face now as she launched into a finely honed PR statement. “We at Care Ambulance Service are saddened by the loss of one of our employees and have taken every step to assure the public and our customers that this kind of incident will not happen again.”

“Did the driver have any previous traffic violations and arrests? Any past history with drugs?”

“No,” she said shortly.

“I read that he committed suicide in jail. Is that true?” Bob asked.

Lauren reached over the desk to Bob’s recorder and turned it off.

“I think our time is up, Bob.”

“By my watch, we have three more minutes.”

“Our time is up. Would you like to be shown out?”

“No, I believe I can find my own way,” he said, picking up his recorder and putting his notebook in pocket.

“You have a nice day, Bob.”

“It’s south Florida, Lauren. That’s not hard to do,” he said, walking out.

Bob reached the beauty queen. He sat there for a few minutes, going over in his mind what just happened.
She was definitely hiding something
, he thought. The queen cranked up after the third try, and he drove out the parking lot. Next stop: the Miami Police Station.

As Bob pulled out of the parking lot, Lauren was watching from her window
. With a rusty old car like that
, she thought,
the nerd hasn’t published many articles.

***

Mary Catherine, Hector, and three other of Shark’s associates left a rain-soaked Miami International Airport on Tenish 4, an Airbus 300. Hector breathed a breath of relief. They were still on schedule with only a relatively short delay, considering the rain sweeping in from the tropical storm.

Tenish 4 was a medium range passenger plane converted into a cargo plane. At one time, the 222-inch diameter circular fuselage seated eight passengers across. Now it was mostly gutted and wide enough to hold two LD3 cargo containers side-by-side. The passengers were comfortable in a space right behind the pilot and copilot. The plane used the same basic engines and major systems as the DC-10 and had a cruising speed of nearly mach 1. This would be the longest trip Tenish Packaging had made by far. The exhausting trip with two layovers would not bother Mary Catherine. She’d specifically assigned two of her best and most trusted pilots to this flight.

“I wish you were younger,” Hector hissed, looking over Mary Catherine. “This is such a long flight, and it could be so much more interesting if the sight of an old woman didn’t sicken my manhood.” His three associates laughed and agreed with Hector, who was now rubbing his bushy mustache and showing his nicotine stained teeth.

Mary Catherine unbuckled her seatbelt, and with all the feminine wiles she could muster walked seductively to Hector, surprising him and his associates. Their catcalls added to the heat of the moment. She bent down till she was just a few centimeters from his face. That close she noticed his blackheads and oily skin and could smell and taste his stale breath.

“Hector.”

“
Si, mi puta,
” he said to muffled laughter in the background, the pilot and copilot looking nervously over their shoulders.

“When you were born, your mother should have put you in a sack and drowned you like the dog that you are.”

Laughter erupted like a volcano. Hector’s pals grabbed their stomachs and slapped each other on the back, and the pilots gave each other high fives. Hector’s blood drained out from his face as Mary Catherine turned around and seductively walked back to her seat. She hadn’t felt so good in years. She wore a coy smile for the rest of the trip, and Hector hardly said a word.

***

Bob’s mind was working overtime. While driving to the police station, he started mentally going over the interview. There were a few things that didn’t add up. First, the newspaper article said somebody stole the ambulance and was thrown in jail. Lauren failed to mention that. Also, while he’d heard of prisoners committing suicide in jail, the fact that the guy was connected to a drug lord set off alarms in Bob’s head.

“Very strange,” he said aloud, keeping his eyes on the road. He liked what he was feeling. All his senses were working together, trying to figure out a puzzle that had disturbed so many lives. Bob sped up. He was excited; this was adventure like he’d never experienced before.

***

It was a twenty-minute drive from Care Ambulance Service to Shark’s mansion. That worked out for Lauren. It gave her time to go over the entire interview and get her facts straight before seeing her boss. He didn’t like when one of his employees would call to see him and be only half ready to share information. She turned her Audi into Shark’s driveway and stopped at the gates. They were nearly twenty feet tall. Each gate had a shark with its mouth open at a visitor in the middle. She rolled her window down and waved at the camera. The gates creaked open, and she drove through. It was a long, winding driveway with thick twenty-foot greenery on both sides that created a canopy over the road. This provided more privacy from snoops on the highway and in the air, and if he had to bail suddenly the thick mass of shrubs and vines made a perfect cover. Lauren finally pulled up to the mansion with its adobe front and large, perfectly aged wooden doors. The driveway culminated in a circle whose pavement turned from asphalt to cobblestone, with a huge fountain in the middle. It was an angel whose hands were raised to the heavens, with water coming out of her palms to flow down her body and into the pool, which was filled with colorful oriental goldfish. Coming around the circle to the front of the mansion made Lauren feel as if she were on an ancient road in Europe. She exited her car, and the gardener greeted her with a nod as he raked the grass. The perfection of the manicured lawn made it look like an emerald green carpet that ran along the front of the house and accentuated the tropical bushes that dotted the lawn. Lauren returned the nod and noticed the side arm that he wore. He must have noticed Lauren’s eyes scanning him, and with a wink he patted his Glock.

A tall, middle-aged Hispanic women greeted her at the doors and bid her to come in with a warm smile. Lauren didn’t know the woman’s name, but she’d seen her many times on previous visits.

“This way. Shark has been expecting you,” the woman said in broken English. She turned, and they walked down the hall by ancient works of art—mainly pottery in this section of the house. Lauren followed closely, inspecting the woman and realizing she resembled Mary Poppins from the old Walt Disney movie. She suppressed a laugh.

Mary Poppins showed her to the room where Shark was waiting. It was deep in the mansion, and because of the mahogany lined walls it was dark. Aside from the bit of light that leaked between the thick drapes in front of the windows covering the back wall, there were two Tiffany lamps—one on a coffee stand next to a large leather sofa, and the other on the opposite side of the room, which was dominated by an expansive book shelf. He was leaning against a huge dark red desk covered with ornately carved sharks and dragons engaged in an endless battle of survival. He was dressed all in white in a natural fabric. His shirt was loosely buttoned.

“Hello, Shark,” she said

“Darling—it has been too long.”

“It was just yesterday,” Lauren said through a smile as she walked to him and put her arms around his waist. She leaned in to kiss him on the neck, but he stopped her.

“Wait. Tell me about the journalist,” he said, turning his head away from her. That was Shark—business first, pleasure later, whenever he had time for it.

“Okay,” she said, patting him on the chest. “His name is Bob McKaren. He said he was a freelance journalist writing a story about non-profit medical facilities like ours. I wasn’t suspicious until he started asking questions about Jeremy. I cut him off and sent him away.”

“You say his name was Bob McKaren?” Shark said, thinking over all the names of his enemies.

“Yes, that was his name.”

“And he just showed up without an appointment?”

“Yes.”

“Silly, silly girl,” Shark said, shaking his head as he flexed his hands into fists. Lauren started to back away from him. She’d seen this before.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said, hands in front of her as if trying to deflect blows that might come.

Shark glared at her.

“I will take care of this. Just be sure I am notified immediately the next time our journalist friend shows back up at Care Ambulance Service.” Shark dropped his hands. She closed her eyes, knowing she wouldn’t be punished this time for any wrongdoings.

***

Bob entered the police station like a man on a mission. The last episode was fresh in his mind, when he was the butt of jokes. The front desk was manned by an obese twenty-something college fraternity member who called every visitor dude. He was working part time at the station to pay for his fraternity dues and the associated perks.

“Yeah, dude. Can I help you?” he said, looking up from his portable play station as he toyed with his black curly hair.

Bob smiled, realizing he was about to use the lad’s ignorance against him.

“Yeah, I’m from the
Miami
Herald
,” he said in a hurried, tense voice. “I’m here to pick up the police report that Officer Elroy pulled for me.” Officer Elroy was the precinct’s head records keeper. Bob knew he worked days, Monday through Friday.

“Uh, let me see if he left the report on this desk,” frat dude said while shuffling through the mess of papers that had accumulated. “No, nothing here for the
Herald
.”

To make life harder for the kid, Bob pressed him.

“Come on—I’m on deadline.”

“Sure,” he said nervously, picking up the phone. “It’s not here. Let me call Officer Elroy.”

“No!” Bob blurted out. “You don’t want to bother Elroy. If you bother him he might fire you on the spot!”

Fraternity dude quickly hung up the phone and said thanks.

“What do you want me to do then?”

“You have to go get the record yourself. It’s the ambulance crash that happened a few days ago.” Bob reached across the desk and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You can help make the news that thousands of people will read tomorrow.” Stars suddenly lit up in the young man’s eyes. Bob nearly started laughing out loud.

“I’ll go get it for you right now,” he said, nearly jumping from his seat with excitement.

“You hurry back,” Bob said, waving him off and turning his back to the desk so he could hide the excitement on his face.

A few moments passed when Bob heard an adult voice say, “Excuse me, Sir.” Alarmed, he quickly turned to see a real cop with frat dude meekly in tow. “What’s your name?”

Bob knew he was backed into a corner.

“Bob McKaren.”

“Are you really from the
Herald
?” the officer asked, looking over his glasses at the shrinking Bob.

“Uh, not really. I’m with A-1 Personal Recovery Services.”

“Yeah, I thought you looked familiar. You teamed up with the retired librarian to take down that Big Mike character,” the officer said, laughing now.

“Oh, dude—you told me about this guy.” Frat dude now joined in the laughter.

The officer stopped laughing and gave Bob a serious look.

“Come by tomorrow morning, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

Bob couldn’t believe his luck.

“Okay—I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” He waved and turned.

As he walked out the door, fraternity dude called out, “Hey, tell Miss Granny Panties I said hi,” which generated another round of laughter.

Chapter Eight

Hector and Mary Catherine were still glaring at each other when the Airbus 300 landed in beautiful weather at Alexander Bay, forty-eight miles from their destination. Upon deplaning, Mary Catherine told the pilots to stay put, that she and her company would be back sometime in the evening. With worried looks, the pilots reluctantly agreed.

“Hello—you must be Hector and Miss Tenish,” a medium built African man with a broad smile said in strongly accented English. “Ayize is waiting for you.” His eyes kept wandering to the suitcase in Mary Catherine’s hands. This made her uncomfortable. She tightened her grip on the handle. “Follow me.” He turned and walked to the small, dark green cargo truck.

The cargo truck rocked back and forth on the substandard road. The African man sang to a radio station that played American tunes. It seemed Prince was his favorite artist, because when the song “Little Red Corvette” came on he gleefully joined in.

“Little Red Corvette, baby you’re much too fast . . .” Mary Catherine gripped the seats as the driver pressed down on the accelerator, making the trip more like a theme park roller coaster ride than a day trip to a seaside port.

After a grueling hour of sliding, braking and accelerating, everyone seemed to breathe easier when Port Nolloth came into sight. Mary Catherine broke the silence.

“Here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” the African man said with a smile, showing a gold canine. Hector looked at the man, then at Mary Catherine and the suitcase, and then at the three associates who’d been silent for the entire trip, their hands close to their semiautomatics conveniently stashed in their coats. The truck came to a stop, and their chauffeur got out and led the way into Ayize’s black market diamond trading headquarters, also known as the spider’s web. Due to the darkness on the inside, the visitors entered the small building blind as their eyes took a moment to adjust. After they adjusted to the light, none of them were impressed with the interior. Ayize purposely kept the light low to hide the faint bloodstains on the walls and floors from past encounters.

Soon they were greeted by a smiling Ayize.

“Good afternoon, and welcome to Port Nolloth,” he said like some murderous travel agent. “I hope Berko did not scare you too much with his driving.” He patted their chauffeur on the back as both shared a light laugh.