The Whisperers (21 page)

Tobias killed the engine and climbed down from the cab. His burned hand felt damp beneath the bandages, and he knew that the wounds were seeping. The only consolation for the pain and humiliation was the knowledge that payback would not be long in coming. The wetbacks had crossed the wrong people.

He walked up to the cabin and called Proctor’s name, but there was still no response from inside. He knocked on the door.

‘Hey, Harold, wake up,’ he called. ‘It’s Joel.’

Only then did he try the door. Even so, he was careful, and slow. Proctor slept with a gun close by, and Tobias didn’t want him coming out of a drunk’s sleep and loosing a couple of shots at a suspected intruder.

It was empty. Even in the gloom created by the mismatched drapes, he could see that. He hit the lightswitch and took in the unmade bed, the wrecked television and the demolished phone, the laundry spilling from a basket in the corner, and the smell of neglect, of a man who had let himself go. To his right was the kitchen-cum-living room. Tobias saw what it contained, and swore. Proctor had lost it, the asshole.

The remaining crates and boxes, the ones that were supposed to stay hidden in rooms 11, 12, 14 and 15, were stacked almost to the ceiling, visible to anyone who might just happen to stick a nose into Proctor’s place to see what was going on. The crazy old bastard had hauled them up here by himself instead of waiting for Tobias to come and take them off his hands. He hadn’t even bothered closing most of them. The stone face of a woman stared out of one; another contained more of the seals, their gemstones glittering as Tobias approached.

Worst of all, on the kitchen table, entirely unconcealed, stood a gold box, about two feet long, two feet wide, and a foot deep, its lid comparatively plain apart from a series of concentric circles radiating from a small spike. There was Arabic lettering along the margins, and its sides were decorated with intertwined bodies: twisted, distended figures with horns protruding from their heads.

Just like the figures I imagined in the motel rooms, thought Tobias. He had helped to move the box on that first night, recalling how they had opened the lead casket in which it was contained, revealing it to the flashlights. The gold had gleamed dully; later, Bernie Kramer, who came from a family of jewelers, would tell him that the box had recently been cleaned. There were traces of paint still visible, as though it had once been disguised to hide its true value. He had barely glanced at it then, for there were so many other artifacts to take in, and adrenalin was still coursing through his body in the aftermath of the fight. He hadn’t even seen the sides until now, just the top. There was no way that he could have known about the creatures carved into it, no way that he could have pictured them so clearly in his mind.

Warily, he approached the box. Three of its sides were sealed with twin locking devices shaped like spiders, with a single large spider lock on the front: seven locks in all. He heard that Kramer had tried to open it, but hadn’t been able to figure out how the mechanisms worked. They had discussed the possibility of breaking the box open to see what it contained, but wiser counsel had prevailed. A bribe was paid, and the box was x-rayed. It was found to be not one box but a series of interconnected boxes, each of the interior boxes having only three sides, the fourth in every case being one of the walls of the larger box surrounding it, but every box still appeared to have seven locks, only the arrangement of them differing slightly, the locks themselves growing smaller and smaller. Seven boxes, seven locks on each, forty-nine locks in total. It was a puzzle contraption, and it was empty apart from what the radiographer identified as fragments of bone, wrapped in what appeared to be wire, each wire connected in turn to the locks on the boxes. It might have looked like a bomb on the x-ray, but the box, Kramer had suggested, was a reliquary of some kind. He had also translated the Arabic writing on the lid.
Ashrab min Damhum
: ‘I will drink their blood.’ It was decided that the box should remain intact, the locks unbroken.

Now they were so close, and Proctor had almost blown it for them. Well, Proctor could stay out here and drink himself to death as far as Tobias was concerned. He’d said that he didn’t care about his cut of the final total, just wanted the stuff gone, and Tobias was happy to stick to that arrangement.

It took him more than an hour to get everything into the rig. Two of the pieces of statuary were particularly heavy. He had to use the dolly, and even then it was a struggle.

He left the gold box until last. As he was lifting it from the table, he thought that he felt something shift inside. Carefully, he tipped it, listening for any sign of movement, but there was nothing. The bone fragments, he knew, were slotted into holes carved in the metal, and held in place with the wire. Anyway, what he had felt was not a piece of bone moving, but an identifiable change in the distribution of the weight from right to left, as though an animal were crawling inside.

Then it was gone, and the box felt normal again. Not empty, exactly, but not as though anything had come loose. He carried it to the rig and placed it beside a pair of wall carvings. The interior was a mess of animal feed and torn sacks, but he’d done his best to clean it up. Most of the sacks had been salvageable and they were now serving as additional packing for the artifacts. He’d have to come up with a story, and compensation, for the customer in South Portland, but he could manage both. He locked the box trailer and climbed into the cab. He backed the rig carefully toward the forest in order to turn back on to the road. He was now facing the motel. He wondered if Proctor was down there. After all, his truck wasn’t gone, which meant that Proctor shouldn’t have been gone either. Something might have happened to him. He could have taken a fall.

Then Tobias thought again of the treasures left in open view in Proctor’s cabin, and the effort of moving them alone into the trailer, and the pain in his hands and face that had begun to return, and of Karen waiting for him back home, Karen with her smooth, unblemished skin, and her firm breasts, and her soft, red lips. The urge to see her, to take her, came to him so strongly that he almost wavered on his feet.

To hell with Proctor, he thought. Let him rot.

As he drove south, he felt no guilt at not searching the motel, at the possibility that he might have abandoned an injured man to death in a deserted motel, a veteran who had served his country just as he had served it. It did not strike him that such an action was not in his nature, for his thoughts and desires were elsewhere, and his nature was already changing. In truth, it had been changing ever since he had first set eyes on the box, and his willingness to countenance the killing of Jandreau and the torture of the detective was simply another aspect of it, but now the pace of that change was about to accelerate greatly. Only once, as he passed Augusta, did he feel discomfited. There was a sound in his head like waves breaking, as of the sea calling to the shore. It troubled him at first, but as the miles rolled by beneath him he began to find it soothing, even soporific. He no longer wanted that drink. He just wanted Karen. He would take her, and then he would sleep.

The road unspooled before him, and the sea sang softly in his head: breaking, hissing.

Whispering.

13

T
he Rojas warehouse stood on the northern outskirts of Lewiston. It had formerly been a bakery owned by the same family for half a century, and the family name, Bunder, was still visible, written in faded white paint, across the front of the building. The company’s slogan – ‘Bunder – the Wonder Bread!’ – used to run on local radio, sung to a tune not a million miles removed from that of the TV serial
Champion the Wonder Horse
. Franz Bunder, the father figure of the business in every way, had come up with the idea of using the tune himself, and neither he, nor the gentlemen responsible for creating the ad, bothered to concern themselves greatly with issues such as copyright or royalties. Given that the ad was only heard in eastern Maine, and no aggrieved fans of black-and-white horse dramas had ever complained, the tune remained in use until Bunder’s Bakery eventually baked its last loaf, forced out of business by the big boys in the early eighties long before people began to understand the value to a community of small, family-run operations.

Antonio Rojas, known to most of those in his ambit by his preferred pseudonym of Raul, could never be accused of making a similar mistake, for his business was entirely dependent on family, near and extended, and he was acutely aware of his links to the larger community, since it bought pot, cocaine, heroin, and, more recently, crystal meth from him, for which he was very grateful. Methamphetamine was the mostly widely abused narcotic in the state, both as powder and ‘ice,’ and Rojas had been quick to realize its profit potential, especially since its addictiveness guaranteed a greedy, and constantly expanding, market. He was further aided by the popularity of the Mexican variety of the drug, which meant that he was able to tap into his own connections south of the border instead of relying on local two-man meth labs which, even if they could source the raw materials, including ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, could rarely maintain the long-term consistency of supply that an operation like Rojas’s required. Instead, Rojas had it transported by road from Mexico, and now supplied not only Maine but the adjacent New England states. When necessary, he could call upon the smaller operations to boost his own supply. He tolerated these labs as long as they didn’t threaten him, and he made sure that they were taxed accordingly.

Rojas was also careful not to alienate any of his competitors. The Dominican cartels controlled the heroin trade in the state, and their operation was the most professional, so Rojas was scrupulous about buying wholesale from them whenever possible instead of cutting them out entirely and risking reprisals. The Dominicans also had their own meth business, but Rojas had organized a sit-down years before and together they had hammered out an agreement about spheres of influence to which everyone had so far adhered. Cocaine was a relatively open market, and Rojas dealt mainly in crack, which addicts preferred because it was simpler to use. Similarly, illegal pharmaceuticals from Canada represented pretty easy money, and there was a ready market for Viagra, Percocet, Vicodin, and ‘kicker,’ or OxyContin. So: coke and pharmaceuticals were in play for everyone, the Dominicans kept their heroin, Rojas looked after meth and marijuana, and everyone was happy.

Well, nearly everyone. The motorcycle gangs were another matter. Rojas tended to leave them alone. If they wanted to sell meth, or anything else, then God bless them and
vaya con Diós, amigos
. In Maine, the bikers had a big cut of the marijuana market, so Rojas was careful to sell his product, mainly BC bud, out of state. Screwing with the bikers was time-consuming, dangerous, and ultimately counterproductive. As far as Rojas was concerned, the bikers were crazy, and the only people who argued with crazies were other crazies.

Still, the bikers were a known quantity, and they could be factored into the overall equation so that equilibrium was maintained. Equilibrium was important, and in that he and Jimmy Jewel, whose transport links Rojas had long used, and who was a minority shareholder in some of Rojas’s business ventures, were of one mind. Without it, there was the potential for bloodshed, and for attracting the attention of the law.

Recently, though, Rojas had become concerned about a number of issues, including the prospect of forces beyond his control impacting upon his business. Rojas was linked by blood to the small but ambitious La Familia cartel, and La Familia was currently engaged in an escalating war, not merely with its rival cartels, but with the Mexican government of President Felipe Calderón. It meant a definite end to what had been termed the ‘Pax Mafiosa,’ a gentleman’s agreement between the government and the cartels to desist from actions against one another as long as movement of the product remained unaffected.

Rojas had not become a drug dealer in order to start an insurrection against anyone. He had become a drug dealer to get rich, and his ties by marriage to La Familia, and his status as a naturalized US citizen thanks to his now deceased engineer father, had made him eminently suited to his present role. La Familia’s main problem, as far as Rojas was concerned, was its spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno González, also known, with some justification, as El Más Loco, or the Craziest One. While quite content to accept some of El Más Loco’s rulings, such as the ban on the sale of drugs within its home territory, which had no effect on his own operations, Rojas was of the opinion that spiritual leaders had no place in drug cartels. El Más Loco required his dealers and killers to refrain from alcohol, to the extent that he had set up a network of rehab centers from which La Familia actively recruited those who managed to abide by its rules. A couple of these converts had even been forced on Rojas, although he had managed to sideline them by sending them to BC to act as liaisons with the Canadian bud growers. Let the Canucks deal with them, and if the young killers suffered an unfortunate accident somewhere along the way, well, Rojas would smooth any ruffled feathers over a couple of beers, for Rojas liked his beer.

El Más Loco also seemed prepared to indulge, even encourage, what was, in Rojas’s opinion, an unfortunate taste for the theatrical: in 2006, a member of La Familia had walked into a nightclub in Uruapán and dumped five severed heads on the dance floor. Rojas didn’t approve of theatrics. He had learned from many years in the US that the less attention one attracted, the easier it was to do business. More over, he regarded his cousins in the south as barbarians who had forgotten how to behave like ordinary men, if they had ever truly known how to conduct themselves with discretion. He did his best to avoid visiting Mexico unless it was absolutely necessary, preferring to leave such matters to one of his trusted underlings. By now, he found the sight of
los narcos
in their big hats and ostrich leather boots absurd, even comical, and their predilection for beheadings and torture belonged to another time. He was also under increasing pressure through his trucking connections to facilitate the movement of weapons, easily acquired in the gun stores of Texas and Arizona, across the border. As far as Rojas was concerned, it could only be a matter of time before he became a target for La Familia’s rivals or the DEA. Neither eventuality appealed to him.