Miami Midnight (29 page)

In all that time no one had seen her, sounded an alarm, or called the police, as though dragging a bound, gagged woman in an eighteenth-century Venetian costume through the streets of Miami was nothing unusual.

It was too late, now, for Gaby to realize that she should have screamed at the first sight of the men in the boat at, Vizcaya. It might be hours before Crissette thought to call the police. After all, her last words had been that she was going for help!

Gaby choked back a helpless sob under the tape that sealed her lips. If Crissette waited until she got back to the
Times-Journal
newsroom before she reported Gaby’s disappearance, it might be morning before anyone notified the police.

Unless Dodd...

Dodd
, Gaby thought with a leap of hope. Dodd would know something was wrong right away when he called, tonight, and didn’t find her at home.

But would he? she asked herself suddenly. The last time she’d broken a date with him she’d refused to explain anything, told him, in effect, to mind his own business.

The man beside Gaby leaned forward to peer into her face. Talk was impossible, for the roar of the airboat’s propeller blades was deafening. The shadowy driver on his high seat behind them wore big metal ear guards. Since they’d gotten into the airboat the Colombians had communicated by sign language.

Gaby felt the touch of his big hand on her cheek as he checked to see if she had stopped crying. She jerked her head away violently.

She’d been sobbing for hours. She knew now it was stupid, useless, but she’d wept helplessly in the first burst of panic when she was sure they were going to kill her. In the pickup truck, as they’d crossed the outlying streets of South Miami, she’d cried fresh tears of frustration, because by that time the Colombians had told her what they wanted her for. Not to kill. No, they’d assured her, not that. Only, the bigger Colombian had said, grinning at her, as a last resort.

A burst of wind rushed across the swampland. The airboat passengers sat hunched, unprotected, as the downpour began. In the darkness the shadows of shallow islands passed, veiled by the deluge, as they roared deeper into the labyrinth of the everglades.

Even Gaby knew the vast marsh was a natural refuge for drug dealers. There were crude air strips in its depths where planes from South America delivered their cargoes of cocaine. The everglades was so vast, so impenetrable, that even the police, special drug enforcement agencies, the United States military, couldn’t patrol it adequately. That was where they were taking her.

The man next to her put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. In the darkness she remembered a broad, brutal face and hot black eyes, a beer belly already lapping over his belt. He was more friendly than the other man. He was the one who’d told her why they’d kidnapped her. He’d also explained that they knew she was James Santo Marin’s sister.

Stiff with cold, Gaby was in a drenched, semiconscious stupor when they stopped. The older Colombian tried to rouse her by shaking her violently. It was daylight, she saw through half-closed eyes, stormy and gray, still raining in bursts. They were somewhere in the depths of the everglades at a large, thickly wooded island big enough to accommodate several wooden sheds roofed with palm fronds to camouflage them from the air. A sleek white seaplane rested under a camouflage net in a tiny lagoon.

When she didn’t respond quickly enough, the man impatiently grabbed her under the arms and hauled her out of the boat. He was visibly disgusted when she fell to her knees on the sandy strip of shore, her legs too cramped by spending all night in the boat to hold her up. The younger Colombian finally picked her up in his arms and carried her to the nearest shed.

“Don’t worry,” he told her as he pushed open the door with one knee. “
No queremos violarte
. Understand?” He barely spoke English. His hands lingered in a friendly way on her knees as he settled her on an empty wooden box. “No rape—no
violencia
.”

Gaby understood what he was trying to tell her, but he liked touching her too much. She didn’t really believe him about the rape.

The
violencia
was something else.

He squatted in front of her, black gaze on the revealing front of the low-cut gown. “Pee pee?” he asked huskily. “I bring bucket.”

She shook her head. Her body was still stunned. It had been hours since she’d had any food or water. She didn’t need the offered bucket.

After a few minutes of looking at her hungrily, the man went outside.

Gaby sat hunched on the box in the shed, her tied hands in her lap. Her costume was a soaked shroud around her, but she didn’t dare ask for a blanket or call attention to what she was wearing. She longed to be able to rub her eyes, burning from so much weeping, but her wrists were bound together too tightly. She could only manage to bring her knuckles up to swipe, ineffectually, at her face. The freezing costume and her aching, bound hands were nothing, Gaby knew, compared with what could actually be in store for her. Anyone who lived in Miami knew about Colombian drug dealers and their specialty,
la violencia
.

In Spanish the phrase meant simply “the violence.” But for the savage Colombians, who had made it their own special way of doing business in the already unspeakably brutal drug trade, it was much more.
La violencia
stunned even hardened criminals. It was very direct, and very thorough. In one apartment in north Florida a drug dealer’s entire family had been massacred; the police had found the hacked corpse of a week-old baby in the kitchen sink. Cutting off a finger or two as a message to holdouts was considered trivial. The Colombians preferred to gouge out an eye with the promise of the other to be delivered quickly if an agreement couldn’t be met.

James Santo Marin, Gaby had been told, was a holdout.

She stared at the dirt floor, too exhausted to hold her head up. The rain drummed on the shed’s leaking roof and a drip of water struck her arm. The morning air was noticeably cooler. She shivered uncontrollably, from both nerves and the penetrating chill.

She tried to will herself not to think about James. She’d been led to her destruction by her own stupidity and a beautiful, reckless man who’d made love to her. What a fool she’d been, she told herself, trying not to weep again. When the Colombians found out who she really was they would kill her. After they’d done other things.

She struggled to keep her control, fighting hysteria. The younger man spoke only a few words of English. He’d made it clear, though, that they wouldn’t rape James Santo Marin’s
sister
. They only wished to persuade him a little. They wanted Santo Marin’s cooperation, not a blood vendetta.

Gaby closed her aching eyes to rest them. She had figured out that the drug dealers had gone to her house on Palm Island looking for her. They had found David Fothergill there, and had beat him up when he wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to know. Their alternate plan had been, apparently, to go in search of the rest of the Santo Marin family at the masked ball at Vizcaya.

She’d had several hours now to think about what the Colombians would do to her when they found out she wasn’t James Santo Marin’s sister.

Gaby was on the verge of another bout of tears when the older Colombian came in with the airboat man. They stood and looked at her for a long moment. The older man said something at length in Spanish.

“We no touch you,” the airboat driver translated. “When your brother understands we have let you stay pure, he will do what we want. We leaved that message for him in Miami.”

Gaby lifted her head. She was deathly afraid of these men, the way they thought, the savage, rules they lived by. They were animals. “You’ve got to take me back,” she said thickly.

The airboat man folded his arms over his chest. “Santo Marin must do business with us, that is what we want.” When she only stared, uncomprehending, he went on, “
Nuestro tigre
is a hard man to deal with. We persuade him with you.”

Nuestro tigre
. Our tiger.

It was what the
babalawo
had called James. Yes, he was a hard man to deal with, she’d agree with that. She knew now she’d been caught in some kind of drug dealing between James and the Colombians.

The airboat driver shifted from one foot to the other. “We left message in Miami that we take you. We say Tomás do so-and-so with you, while we wait for answer. And more so-and-so if we wait long.”

The older Colombian lifted his hand.
“No violar su hermana,”
he said gutturally.
“Solamente persuadir, no más que eso.”

Not really to rape her. Just to say so
.

The door to the shed banged open with a gust of wind and rain. The younger Colombian stood there with a blanket in his hand.

“Your brother,” the airboat man said, glancing at the other man, “better hurry up and answer.”

There was a shortwave radio close by in one of the other sheds. Gaby could hear it. Between the storm bursts the tinny radio voices penetrated the shed where she was. Listening to them, Gaby supposed the Colombians were waiting for their answer from James.

By now, of course, the Santo Marins knew none of their family were missing. Oh, God, she thought frantically, would James think of her, know she was the one the Colombians were holding? She was too exhausted, now, for panic. She was filled with hollow blankness in which her thoughts ceaselessly chased themselves around in her mind and wouldn’t stop.

The
Times-Journal
must have notified the police by now that one of their reporters was missing. The odds for finding her weren’t good.

The everglades swallowed drug smugglers. Law enforcement officers searched endlessly in the marshes and swamps for hidden airstrips and receiving sheds just like this one. The newspapers were always full of such stories.

Gaby’s tied hands were swelling from lack of circulation; she no longer had much feeling in them. By noontime she was crying again with the pain.

The younger Colombian brought her some beans and rice on a plate. She turned her face away. He stuck a fork in her tied hands. Her fingers were too numb to drop it.

“I no untie your hands. You eat.” When she didn’t answer he shrugged and put the food down on the floor. But this time he didn’t go away. He leaned over her, fleshy-faced, grinning, and pulled the adhesive tape from her lips slowly, watching her pain as it ripped the skin away.

“Tu no eres su hermana,”
he said softly.

You are not his sister
.

Gaby looked up at him, eyes wide with fear.

He carefully set the strip of adhesive tape down by the plate of beans and rice. “Yeah, you not his sister.” The smile grew. “I know. You don’t speak Spanish.”

Gaby trembled as she felt his big fingers unfastening the hooks and eyes of the costume’s bodice. When she tried to pull away, he jerked her back to him roughly.

“Don’t hurt me,” she managed to say hoarsely.

“Not hurt, just fool around a little. Maybe,” he breathed as he freed the last hook and opened the front of the costume, “Santo Marin no answer. Then maybe we do more. But...” He hesitated, distracted, as his thumb brushed the soft undercurve of her breast. “Not now.”

She should have been trembling with fright as he pulled her clothes away to expose the white rise of her breasts, then abruptly jerked the bodice down to reveal the thrusting pink nipples. But a more primitive need kept her very still, waiting for his next move.

He sucked in his breath, his stare fixed on her naked breasts. “You lookin’ good,” he muttered.

He was such a jerk, she thought. Her mind throbbed evilly with the knowledge. He’d given her a
fork
, not a spoon.

His big, rough hands closed over her breasts, cupping them as he half closed his eyes. He began to stroke them in molding circles, breathing heavily.

“You’re not supposed to touch me,” she whispered.

“Not suppose to touch
sister
,” he corrected her. He kept one hand on her breast, kneading it, as the other hand seized her knee and shoved up the soggy heavy skirt. When she jerked her legs away, he grabbed her knee again, this time not gently.

She moved her bound hands, experimentally. “You’re not supposed to touch me,” she repeated.

He stepped back, never moving his gaze from her exposed breast, and undid his belt. Gaby tried to rise from the box, but he caught her with one hand and pushed her back down again. The small black eyes were heavy-lidded with desire as he watched her struggles. “Open mouth,” he said huskily.

Stubbornly, Gaby clamped her lips shut.

The front of his clothes were open and the long fleshy shaft of his sex protruded, dark with engorged blood. Slowly, deliberately, he leaned toward her, both hands now toying with her breasts, squeezing them together, forming a deep, silken valley.

“He’ll kill you for this.” As the words tumbled out she knew they were true. Whatever else she knew about James Santo Marin, she was certain of this. He might be a drug-dealing criminal, but as surely as she was trapped now and helpless, forced to submit to what was being done to her, she knew James would kill this stupid, brutal animal just for touching her.

She clenched her teeth as the man very deliberately massaged her face, her tightened, unyielding lips with the tip of his rigid flesh. He thrust against her, his deep rasping breaths loud over the roar of the rain, his fingers tangled in her hair at the back of her neck, holding her still as he moved, his big, lumbering body shuddering. He breathed out a noise that was part bellow, part ecstatic groan.