Rough Draft (20 page)

Hannah glanced down at her paper target riffling in the air-conditioned breeze.

“Yes,” she said. “It's that important.”

The patrons of Garcia's Café were mostly Cuban and they were in high spirits, eating and talking with the boisterous gusto of a fiesta crowd. Marcus withdrew a tiny sugar spoon from the breast pocket of his overalls and dipped it carefully into his bouillon. He brought the spoon to his mouth and inhaled the fumes rising off it, then with his eyes going dreamy, he closed his lips around the broth.

Hannah dabbled with her Caesar salad and watched Marcus as he pored silently over the pages of
First Light,
making noises in his throat that sounded like the moans and grumbles of a sleeping dog. Out of his pants pocket he fished a leather pouch and opened it and withdrew what looked like a jeweler's magnifying glass. He bent to various pages and peered at the mad scrawl. After a while, he came to the inside front pages where the numbers were written. He studied the scribbles for several moments, then drew a long breath and lifted his eyes and stared at her.

“What?” she said.

Marcus Shoenfeldt set his magnifying glass down next to his saucer. His gaze roamed the café for a moment as if he were surveying the place for eavesdroppers.

For a moment Marcus stared down at his steaming cup of bouillon, then he suddenly bent forward, leaning his heavy forearms against the small wooden table and glowered into Hannah's eyes.

“This some kind of trick?”

Hannah drew back in her chair.

“What're you talking about?”

“I'm talking about this.” He thumped a thick finger against the cover of her book. “I'm talking about loops and tilts, pressure, size, width of margins, crossing
t
's and dotting
i
's, rhythm and regularity. I'm not some amateur, Hannah. This is what I do for a living.”

“What's going on with you, Marcus?”

“Is this some kind of test the department put you up to? Somebody wants to put a turd in my file, so they send you out here with this little joke. Test my reflexes, see if I'm still sharp.”

“No, Marcus. This is me and you. It's no setup. This is a book I found with some strange writing in it. And it's very important to me. I want to know everything I can about the guy who wrote this. Anything that might help me find out where he's hiding.”

He sat back in his chair, not fully convinced.

“A guy didn't write this,” Marcus said.

“What?”

The waitress came to the table and asked Marcus if his bouillon was okay.

“Terrific,” Marcus said. “Best damn bouillon I ever had.”

The waitress gave Hannah a pitying look and stalked away.

“Talk to me, Marcus.”

He peered into her eyes with a cagey look. Then he stared at the waitress hurrying between tables.

“It was written by a woman, a badass woman,” he said.
“From the tiny size of the script, the intense pressure, the extreme rightward slant of the letters, it's clear she's agitated, defiant, probably intensely disturbed.”

“Disturbed as in unstable?”

Marcus looked at her with a hint of a smile.

“I'd say this lady is about as stable as a gyroscope on its last revolution.”

“What else?”

“The buckle on her uppercase
K
indicates a strong ambition. A woman who's tough and resourceful, and willing to do whatever it takes to get where she wants to be.”

“All that from the
K
?”

“Don't mock me. Not just the
K
. It's her full, clean lowercase
e
loops, the openness of the
o
's and
a
's. And the big hooks on the
H
and
E
show a hypersensitivity. A woman who can be badly wounded by destructive criticism. A dangerous combination, warring sides of her personality. Tough and ambitious, but hypersensitive. Insecure.”

“A woman,” Hannah said.

“That's right,” said Marcus. “A hateful woman. Not much sympathy for others. Very smart, very cold.”

“But why did you think this was some kind of trick?”

“Because this isn't real,” he said.

“Isn't real?”

“The handwriting. It's faked.”

“I'm not following you, Marcus.”

“A person who writes something like these numbers, say, they'll have certain characteristics in their handwriting, certain things that show up over and over. And there's some of that here. That's how I can tell you a little about the woman who wrote this, because despite what she did to conceal herself, some of it leaks through. But there's a lot more of this that's artificial. It's inconsistent, like she was writing it for effect, trying to create an illusion.”

“What illusion?”

“Like maybe she wanted you to think she was in a highly agitated state. But this wasn't written that way. It was composed very carefully. Written slowly and thoughtfully. If you
ask me, someone's trying to con you, Hannah. Dupe you into believing something that's not true.”

Hannah turned her head and looked at the next table. A heavy woman in a flowered dress was sitting with two young girls in pink frocks who appeared to be her granddaughters. All three were eating roasted chicken, laughing between bites, their hands greasy.

Marcus picked up his sugar spoon, licked it off, and dropped it back in his breast pocket. He slid the magnifier into its leather case and stood up.

“Well, I've got to go,” he said.

“Already? We just got here.”

“I should've told you when you called. I don't get out in public much. I can only take it for an hour or two, then I get these attacks. Panic things. Something happens in my belly, my timer goes off, I start getting dizzy and weird. I need to go home.”

“Well, sure, okay. I understand.”

“I'm trying to get better, but it's not easy.”

“It's all right, Marcus. Really, it's fine. I need to go pick Randall up after school anyway.”

“How's the little guy making out?”

“Randall's fine.”

“He's talking now?”

“He's talking, yes.”

“He's a good kid. It's sad he got traumatized like that.”

“It was pretty bad,” she said. “But he's just about over it now.”

Marcus took a deep swallow and smiled at the back wall of the restaurant.

“I'd watch out if I were you, Hannah. The woman who wrote that shit in your book, she's serious trouble. She's one tricky customer.”

“I'll be careful, Marcus. Thanks.”

Without looking her way, he nodded mechanically, then turned and trudged toward the door.

Hal was in the waiting room of a dentist's office. Armando Lopez-Lima, DDS. Over the years he'd discovered that doctors' offices were good places to wait. No one bothered you. No one cared if you were there or not there.

He was sitting with five other people, all of them with toothaches. No one looked happy. Everyone was reading a magazine except for one young woman who was on a cell phone, talking in loud Spanish. He sat next to the window of the dentist office so he could see the door of the restaurant where Hannah was eating lunch. She was eating with a fat guy. A very fat guy. They had been in the gun range down at the shopping center and then they went to the restaurant and now the fat guy was walking out the door of the restaurant and heading across the parking lot.

Hal had been looking at the pictures in an issue of
National Geographic
he'd picked off the dentist's magazine rack, an article about bees. About a dance the explorer bee did when it returned to the hive after finding a patch of flowers. Bees had two different dances. One to tell the other bees that the flowers were nearby and another dance to tell the bees that the flowers were a long distance away. Inside the hive the other bees were arranged in a circle, all facing inward, and the bee with the flower information did his dance in the center of the circle with all his bee friends watching.

It was called a waggle dance because the dancing bee waggled his rear end in a certain way and made certain movements that told the other bees exactly which direction they should fly to find the new nectar. The dancing bee
showed them in his dance where the flowers were in relation to the sun. The exact angle they should take to find them.

While waiting for Hannah Keller to finish lunch, Hal read the article about bees three times. It took him that long to understand everything. He still wasn't sure about how the waggle dance worked, how that one bee told the other bees the exact angle to take to get to the flowers. He was about to read the article a fourth time when he saw the fat guy waddle out of the restaurant.

He sat there a minute more watching the fat guy wedge himself into his blue Ford. Hal didn't know what to do. He wanted to know who the fat guy was. But he didn't want to lose sight of Hannah either.

He also wanted to read the article about bees a fourth time. But work came first. His job. To find J. J. Fielding and recover the money. So he stood up and looked around the waiting room at all the unhappy people waiting to see the dentist.

A couple of them looked up at Hal, then looked quickly back at their magazines. Hal decided to follow the fat guy. He knew where Hannah Keller lived, and he was fairly sure she would be going to pick up her kid at school and take him back home, so that gave Hal a little while to follow the fat guy and find out who he was. Plus, it occurred to him that he could take the copy of
National Geographic
with him and read the article about bees a fourth time later on. The receptionist was behind a frosted glass window and hadn't even noticed him when he came in and took a seat, so she probably wouldn't see him steal the magazine.

He walked to the door with the magazine in his hand.

Hal was proud of himself. Proud he'd figured out a way to do two of the things he wanted to do. Two out of three. Follow the fat guy, learn more about the dance of the bees.

Hal didn't care for bees in real life. He'd been stung a few times and it hurt like hell. But he liked reading about them. There were lessons to be learned from reading about wildlife. Hal Bonner was a slow reader and had to read things over and over before they finally sank in. But that was
okay. He didn't waste his time on other subjects, Hollywood stars or singers or athletes or current events. He was a specialist. He just read about animals and insects and birds. There was a time long ago when he'd been illiterate. In school he couldn't read much more than a few words here and there. None of it made much sense. He might've spent his whole life that way if he hadn't found that book with pictures of animals in it ten years ago. He was on an airplane, flying from one place to another, and the skinny book was in the seat pocket in front of him. Somebody had left it behind. It was a book for kids with big print and not many words, but Hal enjoyed it. The animals were brightly colored and some of them looked dangerous. Hunting, slinking low through the grass, pouncing on their prey. Hal studied the pictures carefully, but he wanted very much to read the captions below the pictures. He wanted to know about these golden animals, these red-faced creatures, these large winged birds. So right then he started to teach himself to read. He sounded out the words in his head like they'd tried to get him to do in school. He put his finger on each word until he'd brought it into his mind and knew what it meant. And now, ten years later, he didn't need to use his finger anymore. He knew a lot of words by sight. He was still a slow reader, but he could usually figure out most of the articles he wanted to figure out. It took him a while, but he could do it.

Sometimes he watched the nature shows on television, but he preferred reading, even though it was difficult. In books the pictures held still. You could study them, look at them as long as you liked, put yourself right there with the animal. On television everything happened too fast.

With the magazine in his hand, Hal walked out the door of the dentist office, and went down the walkway of the shopping plaza and got on his motorcycle. He tucked the magazine under the bungee cord on the seat. He watched the fat guy back out of his space and head out of the parking lot toward the main street. Hal kick-started the dirt bike and pulled on his helmet and flipped his dark visor down.

He thought about that bee coming back to the hive all excited by his discovery. Flowers, flowers, flowers. They're out there a hundred yards, just a little to the right of the sun, a bunch of daisies. He'd like to tell Misty Fielding about the bee dance. He thought she might like to know about the way they waggled their stingers in a certain way to communicate with the other bees. She would probably make a joke about that. She made jokes. Hal wasn't always sure what was funny and what was not, sometimes he laughed at the wrong places, but he liked that Misty had a sense of humor. She'd like the bee stuff, that one bee waggling in front of the other bees, shaking his stinger in their faces. He'd tell her about that later and she'd make a joke. He was almost sure of it.

Hal shifted through the gears. He kept the fat guy's car in sight. The motor racing between his legs, buzzing like a bee.

Just after noon on Tuesday, hour thirty-six of Operation Joanie. Thirty-six to go, and Frank didn't think he could make it till midnight tomorrow without strangling the whole idiotic bunch of them.

Frank, Helen, Andy Barth, Ackerman, and Roosevelt R. Jackson were in the back of the UPS truck being used today as the mobile headquarters. Rosie Jackson was Frank's boss, Special Agent in Charge of the Miami field office. First African-American to hold that post. Twenty-odd years earlier Rosie was starting quarterback for Coral Gables High when Frank Sheffield, outsized and outweighed by every lineman he faced, was Rosie's center. He snapped the ball into Rosie's hands, then dropped back to block the mean dumb linemen who were determined to tear off Rosie Jackson's helmet with his head still inside. Two seasons together and Frank didn't allow a single sack. Now it was Rosie's turn. For the last decade he'd been running interference for Frank. Among other things he composed Frank's yearly reviews with as charitable an interpretation of Sheffield's performance as one could hope for. They had a silent understanding. Frank wouldn't let his lack of ambition turn into gross negligence, and Roosevelt Jackson would do his
best to see that Frank made it through to retirement, four more years.