Lost (19 page)

Shane smiles back. “I’ve got it, Special Agent Healy.”

“Good, because that’s all I’ve got. We’re finished here.” Healy leans back as the waitress delivers his melty thing on a hot plate, with enough fries on the side to stop a healthy young heart. He grunts happily as he reaches for the ketchup, dismissing his audience.

We stand up to leave.

“Oh,” says Healy without lifting his head, “there is one other thing. Edwin Manning is in the house.”

“Yeah? Like Elvis?” Shane responds.

“Exactly like Elvis. Manning arrived in Opa-locka on a Gulfstream charter flight two hours ago, went directly to his condo.”

“Alone?”

Healy shakes his head, slurps a fry. “Guys like that never travel alone. He’s got a security detail with him.”

“Bald head, arm in a sling?”

For the first time the agent looks surprised. “Careful,” he says, chewing with his mouth open. “You got big shot friends can call in favors, I’ll grant you that. But you’re no longer a law enforcement officer, pal. You get in trouble, call the cops. Maybe they’ll call us. We’ll open a file, get this party started.”

Shane herds me to the exit before I can comment on Mr. Healy’s table manners.

7. Stinking Badges

Have I mentioned that my father was a cop? Have I mentioned my father at all? There’s a good reason for that. File it under secrets to be revealed later, if ever. And no, I wasn’t sexually abused, so put that out of your dirty mind. Anyhow, my dad was New York State Police. A trooper. The black knee-high boots, the peaked hat, holstered sidearm, the whole six-foot package designed to impress and intimidate. As a small child I assumed that being a trooper meant he was not allowed to smile, not even when he was off duty. Later, after he was transferred to warrants, he rarely wore the uniform, although it was always ready in the closet, carefully draped in plastic. I was twelve before I realized that “warrants” meant arresting criminals and that he was, in fact, engaged in a dangerous business. Maybe that explained his dark view of the human race, or maybe the sour attitude was just his nature. My mother said he was different when he was young, and he must have been, for her to marry him. It wasn’t because she had to marry him. I came along five years later, at a time, she later confessed, when she was considering divorce. Years after that, after the final ugliness, I asked her what happened, what was wrong with my father, and she
shrugged and said he changed. People do, she told me, and not always for the better.

I like to think that all the good in me, whatever warmth and humor I inherited, it all comes from my mother. Plus the little thumbprint dimple on her chin. The one thing I did get from my father is a temper. The difference is, Dad was more or less always in a bad mood, whereas I’m reasonably cheerful most of the time, and it takes a lot to set me off. When I do lose my temper (once or twice a year—really, it’s that rare) I become another person, a darker version of me. As Kelly once observed, after seeing me get ugly with a doctor who hadn’t bothered to read her file, my passive gets aggressive. I seethe, rage, lose control to the point that it scares me. Witnessing it for the first time, people who know me tend to be shocked by the transformation.

Shane gives no indication of shock. Possibly because he saw a hint of it when I vented on Edwin Manning. Whatever, he apparently notices the telltale signs—my face getting red, my eyes getting huge—and he hustles me out of Denny’s before I can explode in the general direction of Special Agent Sean Healy.

“You have to calm down,” he urges, steering me toward the rental car. “Do you need the paper bag? Are you hyperventilating?”

In full fury I yank my arm away and start raging about Healy, his obvious inadequacies, his piglike mental state, his animal rudeness. How it will be his fault if Kelly is dead out there in the stinking swamp, because all the effing FBI cares about is opening official files and scoffing disgusting food and staring at my breasts. How the lowlife bureaucratic bully represents all the stupid and evil things in the world and makes me so angry I want to explode or die. Then I start
bawling and banging my hands on the hot fender of the Crown Vic.

In the past, some men have responded to this kind of display by attempting to hold or hug me. Bad idea. Human grenades don’t want to be held. Shane has good instincts. He doesn’t touch, he gets Kleenex from the car, then says, with great confidence, that he’s convinced that my daughter is alive and that we’ll find her.

“That’s what you’re thinking, right?” he wants to know. “That the worst has happened? It was seeing the Everglades. Somehow that made you think she was dead.”

Astonishment makes me stop sobbing and stare at him with watery eyes. How could he possibly know what I was thinking?

“It was the look on your face,” he explains. “Unmistakable.”

“The look?”

“Like you’d hit a wall, suddenly lost hope. I thought a meeting with Special Agent Healy might put things right. My bad.”

“He really is an idiot.”

Shane shakes his head. “I seriously doubt that. There’s a special test for new recruits, it weeds out the idiots.”

“You’re making a joke.”

“A bad one, apparently. Can’t say I warmed up to Mr. Healy, but understand he’s in a difficult position. Guys in the trenches, they always resent it when word comes down to do something off the books. They hate getting their strings pulled. Young guys like Healy, they’re aware the agency has a bad history of being manipulated by the powers that be. He thinks I’m using the agency, trying to get leverage on Edwin Manning for my own purposes, and he’s right.”

“We’re trying to find my daughter.”

Shane nods. “And one of our best sources is Manning, if
only we can persuade him to share what he knows, or at least confirm what we suspect. So we
are
looking for leverage any way we can get it. And absent a ransom call, a witness, or physical evidence of abduction—none of which we have—the agency protocol is to assume Kelly left home of her own free will. ‘Missing of her own volition’ is the phrase.”

“She’d never do that, not without telling me.”

“Agreed, but Healy has convinced himself that we’re misusing agency resources to locate a headstrong teenager who ran off with her boyfriend. He thinks that because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s what happens.” Shane pauses, lets his summary of the situation soak in, then adds with a wry smile, “Plus he’s a mouth-breathing moron who should be crucified.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “Did I say that? Crucified?”

“I believe the phrase was ‘nail the bastard to his stinking badge.’”

“Really?”

Shane glances at the restaurant. “He’ll be licking his plate about now,” he says. “I suggest we leave before he decides to have us for dessert.”

A few minutes later we’ve exited the parking lot unscathed and are blending into traffic. Stinking badge? Where did I get that? Then it hits me.
We don’t need no stinking badges,
is a phrase Kelly used for a while when she was in the hospital. Something she picked up from TV, or from the oncology nurses, who were always trying to be humorous with the kids, making jokes and feeding them lines as well as medication. Out of the blue Kel would say “we don’t need no stinking badges” in a bad Mexican accent, then erupt in giggles at her own cleverness. I think she was acting out a
part, pretending to be someone who wasn’t sick. If you’re laughing you can’t be dying, right?

“Where are we going?”

“The first motel that looks decent,” Shane says. Reacting to my quizzical look, he adds. “We need a base of operations. Somewhere I can recharge my laptop, take a shower, make a few calls, decide what the next move should be.”

“You said you had a plan,” I remind him.

“Seth’s father is in town,” he says. “That changes things.”

“You think he’s here to make a payoff?”

“I do, yes,” Shane admits. “A payoff or some other contact with the abductor. Either way, we have to find out exactly what he’s doing, where he’s going, who he’s seeing. If he finds Seth, we find Kelly.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It won’t be,” he says. “But Manning in Miami, that’s good. It means he’s convinced that his son is alive.”

We drive for a while. I’ve no idea what road or street we’re on, anything other than a vague sense we’re traveling south in heavy traffic, stoplight to stoplight. I could turn off at any corner, find a motel or hotel easily enough, but something keeps me on the road. Like I’m waiting for a shoe to drop, an idea to reveal itself.

“Where is he staying?” I ask suddenly. “Edwin Manning, where’s his condo?”

“Somewhere on Brickell,” Shane responds warily, giving me a quizzical look. “Healy said Brickell Avenue, the financial district.”

“Will there be motels on Brickell?”

“It’s Miami. There are motels everywhere. But the Brickell area is high-end, very pricey.”

“Whatever. Just get us there,” I suggest. “Tell me the way.”

8. The Man In The Snakeskin Vest

Edwin Manning and his new associates travel the rutted, unpaved road in the muscular glory of a fusion-orange Hummer. An H2 model, so new it’s barely out of the box, with the Vortex V-8, eight-way leather seats, and every accessorized goody known to manly men. Not really Edwin’s kind of transport, he’s basically a Mercedes kind of guy. It was his son Seth who picked out the Hummer, big grin on his face, going, Dad, you need this. It’ll be a chick magnet—next time we’re down we’ll drive it to Key West and see what happens. The boy always trying to fix him up, kidding but serious in his own earnest, well-intentioned way. And Edwin always responding with the same line: if I wanted another wife I’d buy one. Which they both know is bullshit because in all the ways that really count Edwin is still married to Seth’s late mother. Death is not a divorce, not for Edwin.

Next time we’ll drive to Key West.
He can hear the boy’s voice and the memory brings with it a kind of emotional pulse, almost electrical in nature. Edwin prays there will be a next time. Prays that he can find a way to free his son, make him whole again. That desire, that overwhelming need, is the only reason he’d ever confine himself in this miserable jouncing tin box with a subordinate like Salvatore Popkin and his low-life associates, whose individual names Edwin has blanked from his mind. These are not people he wants to know, they are underlings he must tolerate under a circumstance.

“Oof! Fuggin’ hum-job!” says one of them, a nervous, grinning goon with stringy, unkempt hair, powerful halitosis, and a nose that evidently demands picking on a regular basis.

True enough, the ruts in the road have been rattling their teeth, but out of loyalty to his son Edwin resents any criticism of the Hummer, or the slang reference to it as a hum-job. What he’d like to do is give Mr. Stink Breath a smack on his thick forehead with something heavy, a lead paperweight perhaps. Instead he orders the driver to slow down. That lasts for a few hundred rattling yards and then inevitably the big V-8 finds its own speed and they keep jouncing.

When one of the morons bumps his head on the roof, Edwin has to remind him to tighten his seat belt. The man looks dumbfounded—the idea obviously never occurred to him—then complies and nods his thanks.

I am surrounded by overgrown children, Edwin decides. Big stupid kids with guns. Wonderful.

After three miles on unpaved, rutted road, they come upon a large sign. A very prominent sign that demands attention.

The Hummer idles, huffing fuel like a juvenile delinquent.

“So what do we do?” Sally Pop wants to know, peering at the sign, which is large, professionally lettered, and illuminated with cove lighting.

“You’re asking me?” Edwin says, turning in the passenger seat to stare at him.

“I mean, is this enforced or what?”

Edwin shrugs. “I assume they’ll pat you down.”

“Can they do that?” Stink Breath wants to know. “I mean can an injun really arrest a white man?”

Edwin stares at the man, who is, in his opinion, barely Caucasian. “They make their own rules,” he says.

“But Florida, anybody can carry a piece,” Stink Breath says. “I looked it up.”

“This isn’t Florida,” Edwin points out. “This is the Nakosha Nation.”

“It’s fucked is what it is.”

“Sally?” Edwin says, exasperated. “Handle this please.”

Sally’s plan is they all get out, open the rear door, and secure the handguns in one of the storage wells, under the peel-up carpet. Four men, eight guns. A nice symmetry, Edwin is thinking. You want to know how many weapons, count the bent noses and multiply by two.

The rutted road continues for another eight miles. For all of it, every shudder and jounce, Edwin ponders on the possibility that the Nakosha have another, even more private access road, and that it is as smooth and well paved as the autobahn. Restricted to tribal members, of course. Each of whom now has a net worth in the multiple millions, no small thanks to him. Men who not so long ago trapped reptiles for food, who rarely operated a flush toilet, these same men now logged on to check their diversified portfolios because Edwin Manning had said yes, why not, by all means let the gambling begin. At the time it seemed a prudent investment for the fund, a business decision based on anticipated return, no more, no less. All of which had led him here, to this road from hell, and to the hell his son was enduring.

Talk about unintended consequences.

The road, hemmed in by dense mangrove for most of its winding length, widens as it approaches the settlement. A dozen or so homes built in the traditional manner, on sturdy stilts that lift each building a good ten feet above the flood-plain. Roofs expertly made from thatches of sable palm fronds. Very picturesque. At one time, Edwin knew, most of the family had lived—barely survived was more like it—in a decrepit trailer village, since leveled and replaced by luxury versions of the traditional chickees, the designs borrowed from, if not actually executed by, the neighboring Seminoles.