For once luck was with them: the battered jeep beside the house had a set of keys lying with the mail on the passenger seat. Maddy took the wheel.
If nothing else, Okoya had left them with one kernel of information. He had told them that Winston was in a different time zone. Assuming he had stayed in the country, that meant he was somewhere to the west. The dirt road opened to a rural highway that led them to the interstate, and they disappeared into the flow of nondescript vehicles headed west.
16. BLIND-SIDED
* * *
THE FLASHPOINT OF HUMAN FLESH, WINSTON RECALLED, WAS 451 degrees Fahrenheit, just like that of most other organic matter.
With both the front door and rear iron doors closed, the chamber was lightless, and Winston couldn’t fight the urge to turn on his flashlight. The claustrophobic space in which he and Drew now crouched was the most uninviting place Winston had ever had the misfortune to visit. Oversized gas nozzles spaced at precise intervals on the side walls and on the low coffered ceiling were an ever-present reminder of the chamber’s purpose. The soot charred bricks of the crematorium walls still retained residual warmth from earlier that day.
Commercial mortuary crematoria, Winston recalled, reached 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing balsa wood caskets and their occupants to cinders in under three hours.
Winston turned off his flashlight, deciding that darkness was better than the view.
“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” delivered Drew, in an impressively accurate Oliver Hardy.
“Quiet—you’ll give us away.” Winston’s nerves were frayed, and it annoyed him that Drew could keep calm. The room was dusty and dry, but quickly growing humid from their sweat. It was all he could do not to cough and give away their presence to the funeral director, who loitered just outside the closed furnace door. They had heard him on the phone, then flipping papers, opening and closing drawers, taking care of odds and ends in his lucrative business of morbidity. Although they hadn’t heard him for at least ten minutes, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still lurking after hours.
The average funeral home, Winston recalled, processed about four earthly departures a day. The ashes of a human body weighed approximately two pounds.
Winston’s mind, as always, was a traffic jam of salient facts, none of which helped matters. So he tried to reinitialize his mind, reminding himself of what had brought them here in the first place.
Their path to this hiding place had been a circuitous one, beginning with an investigation into the scant clues left behind by the would-be grave robber. Winston, with his vast supply of knowledge, was not a puzzler like Dillon, who could pull patterns and solutions out of chaos. And although Drew was insightful, he was no investigator either.
They had first submerged the footlocker in Lake Arrowhead, behind Drew’s cabin. No grave site, no way for Briscoe or any other lunatic to find Michael’s resting place. Then the two had returned from Lake Arrowhead to Drew’s Newport Beach home to begin their search.
Drew’s parents were awkward and stand-offish around Winston, not knowing his relationship with Drew and not wanting to ask. Aside from complaining to Drew that the lawn needed mowing (which unbeknownst to them, was twice daily, now that Winston was around), his parents left them alone.
Their investigative efforts led them to the hotel from which Briscoe had taken the Gideon Bible, and they tried unsuccessfully to ferret out the room from which it had been stolen before being evicted by security. Then, they spent the better part of two days sifting through the Internet in search of Vicki Sanders—the single name scribbled on the bible’s inside cover. Vicki Sanders of Des Moines was a retired school teacher who enjoyed quilting and Harleys. Vicki Sanders of Liverpool was a frustrated factory worker who haunted sex chat rooms while her husband worked the night shift. Vicki Sanders of Minneapolis was actually Victor Sanders, and was damned pissed off at whatever half-assed computer had proliferated an electronic sex change. And Vicki Sanders of rural Tennessee was an SWF looking for a long-term relationship, and currently doing five-to-twenty for armed robbery.
“It’s pointless,” Winston had complained to Drew. “Even if we found the right one, how would we know? We don’t even know what connection she has to Briscoe, if any.”
Then, toward the end of the second day, Winston tripped a land mine within his own thoughts. Something that had been there, underfoot, all along, that he should have considered earlier.
He asked Drew for his initial notes on the phone numbers also scrawled on the bible’s watermark. Drew had tested each phone number in more than a dozen different area codes, and the combinations that actually yielded connections had no obvious relevance.
The only number that was the slightest bit troubling was that of a funeral home in the California desert town of Barstow. Barstow, aside from being home to the world’s largest McDonald’s, had been in national news a year ago. With the morgues and mortuaries of Las Vegas as overbooked as the hotels in the grim aftermath of the Backwash, a good number of the dead had been diverted to Barstow.
The names of those who had died had filled news reports for weeks. The more famous names took the spotlight, of course. The former senator from Wisconsin; the prominent architect; the notorious celebrity attorney. But the names of the common people were washed into obscurity just as quickly as their bodies had been taken under the waters.
It didn’t take much searching to discover one Vicki Sanders among the dead.
“I don’t get it,” Drew had said. “What would this guy want with some woman who died in the Backwash?”
The answer came to Winston in a slow and sickening revelation.
And so now they hunched in a Barstow crematorium chamber.
It had been hard enough to slip into the establishment unnoticed before closing, and although climbing into the chamber had seemed the only way to hide from an approaching staff member, the idea had quickly fallen out of favor, for the funeral director didn’t leave the anteroom for more than forty-five minutes. Winston couldn’t help but worry whether these devices were set to some cleaning cycle after hours.
Twenty-eight people, Winston recalled, suffered accidental deaths each year in funeral homes.
When all had been quiet for twenty minutes, Winston slowly pushed open the heavy furnace door, and they climbed into a dark room that seemed bright when compared to the chamber. There were no windows, but someone had left a light on in an adjacent closet, and a perimeter of light escaped around its closed door. The coolness of the antechamber was a welcome relief.
“I saw the main office when we came in,” Drew said. “It should be this way.”
They passed through a large medicinal-smelling room with a stainless steel table, and instruments that were mercifully obscured in the darkness; then they opened a door into the business office. Winston turned on his flashlight to reveal a room that could have been part of any business establishment. A secretary’s desk decorated with family pictures around a computer; a copy and fax machine in the corner; and against the far wall, a row of black filing cabinets. Those cabinets suddenly were more ominous to Winston than the crematorium.
Please, let me be wrong . . . let me be completely wrong.
He had told Drew of his suspicions, but Drew reserved judgment, not wanting to extrapolate until all the facts were in. Now, neither would speak of it, as if speaking it aloud would baptize their hunch into reality.
I’m wrong, Winston told himself as they approached the filing cabinets. I have to be wrong.
Winston found the drawer labeled “SA-SN” and tugged it open. The files smelled of age—apparently these folders went back for many years, and since the dead rarely returned to audit their own records, no one had bothered to input them into computers.
“There it is,” Drew said.
“I see it.”
Vicki Sanders’s file was a new manila folder, sandwiched between the aging ones. Winston pulled it out, but didn’t look at it just yet. He took a deep
breath, and then another, feeling lightheaded from the stench of embalming fluid that had followed them in from the mortician’s station.
“You want me to read it?” Drew asked.
“I’ll do it.” Winston clenched his jaw. There was some knowledge that came easily, and other knowledge that came with great pain. Either way, he couldn’t wait anymore. He flipped open the file, spread it across the open drawer, and shone his light at it. It was minimal—just a few pages. Information forms, medical examiner’s report, death certificate, liability releases, and finally a signed order to cremate.
“Tell me,” said Drew, who, despite the calm he had showed earlier, wouldn’t bring himself to look at the pages.
“Vicki Sanders,” began Winston. “Body found in the Nevada desert, last October 21st. Cause of death: acute physical trauma consistent with fall. Sixteen years old.”
“Oh, Jesus . . .”
Winston blinked then blinked again, the information leaping off the page making his eyes sting. “Her mother came all the way from Florida to claim the remains.” He took a deep breath before imparting the news. “Her mother’s name was Sharon Smythe.”
Drew pounded his fist on the filing cabinet, the sound tolling through the moribund silence of the funeral home.
“Vicki Sanders—Victoria Sanders—went by her mother’s last name,” said Winston. “It’s Tory.”
MARTIN BRISCOE COULDN’T BE bothered with the taxi’s seatbelt. No matter how bad the Miami cabby drove, Martin knew there could be no accident. His mission put him above such things. He was protected against such inconsequential concerns.
“The law says I gotta take you where you want to go,” the cabby told Martin. “But that don’t mean I gotta like it.”
The cabby shrugged his shoulder uncomfortably, revealing the edge of a nicotine patch on his neck. It was obviously not doing the job, because the cab reeked of stale smoke, and the open mouth of the ashtray bulged with twisted Marlboro butts.
The cabby glanced at Martin in the rearview mirror. “Detached retina?” he asked, taking notice of the bandage over his right eye. “My son had a detached retina—hit in the face with a goddamn hockey stick.”
Martin took a deep breath. A thousand cabbies in Miami, and he had to get the one who spoke English. He answered by not answering, hoping the cabby got the hint.
“Yeah, eye trouble is the worst,” blathered the cabby. “Can’t set it like a bone, can’t lance it like a boil.”
“How much farther?”
“Almost there.”
Martin smoothed out a ruffle in his eye dressing. Although he had pared down the gauze and tape to a bare minimum, there was no way to hide the wound. The eye Drew Camden had blinded with a starter pistol still ached and oozed, having been untreated for more than a week, or at least untreated by anyone but him. Emergency rooms were out of the question—he was wanted in Eureka, and surely that damn kid had set the Newport Beach police on his tail as well. Self-treatment was the word of the day, but dentistry was a far cry from ocular triage. After six days, he suspected that his sight wasn’t coming back, and infection had taken hold.
Pain is good, he told himself. It reminded him of his failure in the graveyard—which made him determined not to fail again.
Martin unzipped the travel bag beside him to check that the lid hadn’t come off the urn he carried. Once he was satisfied it was secure, he glanced with his good eye at the address on a crumbled slip of paper and looked at the neighborhood around him. It was a neighborhood that decayed more with each block they drove, looking even worse painted in the half-tones and shadows of a failing twilight. “Exactly what part of Miami are we going to?” he asked.
The cabby spat out a rueful chuckle. “Haven’t been here before, have you?”
Martin shook his head.
“You’re going right to the middle of ‘The Miami Miasma.’ ”
Martin sank back in the worn seat. “Sounds wonderful.”
“It got voted ‘Best place to drop the bomb,’ three times in a row,” the cabby told him.
They crossed an intersection, and the bottom seemed to drop out of whatever fabric held the neighborhood together. They had entered an overpopulated slum; a human sump that caught the dregs of every cultural group; the bitter bottom of the melting pot.
The cabby hit his lock button, even though all the locks were already down. “Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times,” he said. “The animals bite.”
The streets were infused with a sense of despair that permeated the souls around them: pushers and prostitutes competed for clients; angry youth with carnivorous glares. Bleak alley-shadows crouching in cardboard dwellings. Even the decaying, graffiti-tagged walls seemed to breathe hopelessness in the oppressive Floridian humidity.
Martin had known his mission would take him to the edge of hell, but he had assumed it would only be figurative. “How much farther?”
“Just a few more blocks.”
They turned a corner where children played in and around an abandoned rust-bucket Buick straddling the sidewalk. A brick fragment was lobbed like a grenade across the hood of the taxi.
“Son of a bitch,” grumbled the cabby, but just drove on.
Martin reached into his bag, nervously rubbing the side of the funeral urn he had brought as if it were a gene’s lamp. When he looked at its polished surface, he could see a faint reflection of his own face, oblate and distorted by the curvature of the brass. Were the angels watching him now? he wondered. The sense of intangible paranoia told him that they were still there. Observing. Judging. Perhaps the loss of his eye was a judgment as well. Perhaps bliss could only be achieved through pain. Or maybe they were just screwing with him.
“A loved one?” the cabby asked.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s an urn in your bag, isn’t it?”
Martin toyed with the various indignant remarks he could respond with, and the various ways in which the cabby might be silenced both temporarily and permanently, but in the end decided none of it was worth the trouble. “I’m a funeral director,” he said, trying the lie on for size.
The cabby raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you guys made house calls.”
“Would you like my card?”
The cabby shrugged his neck uncomfortably again, glanced at the ashtray, and scratched his nicotine patch. “No. No, that’s okay.”
Martin grinned smugly. Yes, he was sufficiently funereal to pull off his current charade. He cleared a smudge from the urn, then glanced out of the window again.
To his surprise, the neighborhood had changed.
Gone were the graffiti-burdened walls and boarded windows. The gutters that had been filled with debris were clean, and the stench of misery was replaced by the smell of wet paint.
Just up ahead a barrier blocked the sidewalk, and narrowed the road to a single lane. It had the semblance of a civilian barricade: chairs, tables—anything that could be piled upon, had been wedged into the blockade, and smaller household objects became the mortar in the gaps. Through the barricade, Martin caught the blue flickering of an arc welder.
“What’s going on here?”
“Urban renewal,” the cabby told him.
They pulled over near a clean black and white sign that said PARDON OUR DUST DURING BEAUTIFICATION.
“This is as far as I go,” the cabby said. “They don’t let taxis into the Miasma. Nowadays it’s what you might call a ‘gated community.’ ”
Martin turned to look out the back window, where several blocks away he could still see the crumbling streets. “I thought we just passed through the Miasma.”
“Naah,” the cabby said. “That was the funk around the pearl.”
“I thought you said it was a horrible place.”
“That was then,” explained the cabby. “This is now. The Miasma cleaned up real good . . . if you call that clean.”
Martin almost asked how such a thing could happen to such a localized
area in such a short period of time . . . but he answered his own question. “Tory Smythe . . .” he mumbled under his breath, but this cabby missed nothing, and threw him a knowing grin.
“She used to live here. That’s the rumor, anyway. Kind of makes you wonder.”
Martin opened the door, but didn’t pull out his wallet. “You’ll wait for me,” Martin instructed. “I won’t be long—keep the meter running.”
The cabby threw him a disgusted look. “Yeah, yeah.” He threw the cab into park. “Why did I know you were going to say that.” He rolled down his window and lit a cigarette.
As Martin approached the gap in the barricade, a guard with a clipboard came out to greet him, Cuban-dark and as clean-cut as Ward Cleaver.
“I need your name and destination,” the guard said.
“Marcus D’Angelo,” said Martin, giving his alias of the day. “I’m going to 414 Las Estacas Street, apartment 3-C.”
The guard glanced up at him at the mention of the address, then back down to his clipboard and curtly said, “I’m sorry—you’re not on my guest list.”
Martin tipped the clipboard so he could see it, and quickly found his name. There were only a handful of names on the list—and no way the guard could have missed it.
“Funny, I could see it fine with one eye.”
“You have business with Sharon Smythe?”
“My business is no business of yours.”
The guard stared at him, mad-dogging him a moment more, then backed down. “Two blocks down, then make a left. If she’s not home, you might try the church across the street.” The guard’s eyes turned to Martin’s suit coat. He picked a shred of lint from Martin’s jacket, rolled it into a ball in his fingers, then glanced down at Martin’s rumpled slacks. “We have a dress code here,” he said. “Maybe next time you’ll remember to get those pressed.” Then he stepped aside.
Martin crossed between the banks of the barricade, to find that the Miasma had been transmuted into an inner-city Mayberry.