Leighton Gage - Dying Gasp

“I told you, Chief, there were three of them, and they all-”

“I haven’t got time for this. Get your stuff together and get out of there. If Rosario recognized you, they’ll be at your place next. Hell, they might be on their way over there right now.”

Pinto was locking his front door, when he heard the rustle of leaves. Hector stepped out of the samambaia ferns that lined the path.

“ Bom dia, Chief,” he said, “You’re up early.”

“Yeah, I am. Not that it’s any of your business. What do you want?”

Hector crossed his arms. He wasn’t holding a gun.

“To arrest you,” he said.

“On what charge?”

“Racketeering.”

“You’ll never make it stick.”

“Oh, I think we will.”

The chief’s hand dropped to the revolver on his belt.

Enrique, behind him, said, “Thumb and forefinger, Chief. Just the thumb and forefinger. Then hold it up so I can grab it.”

The chief closed his thumb and forefinger around the butt of his Taurus. Then, in a last gesture of defiance, he tossed it into the bushes.

There were two cell blocks in Manaus’s delegacia central: a larger one, with ten cells divided equally on either side of a concrete corridor, and a smaller one, with two. The smaller block was on the second floor and reserved for female prisoners. The female cells were depressing and damp, but they were five-star accommodations when compared with the cells down in the basement. There, an area originally designed to hold a maximum of forty prisoners held almost two hundred men. They had to sleep in shifts, because there wasn’t room for all of them to lie down at once.

The light, the little there was, came from five fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the corridor. At one time, there’d been lights inside the cells as well, but after the bulbs had been smashed half a dozen times the warders had given up replacing them.

The prisoners were expected to clean their own cells, which they never did. The place was a dim paradise for vermin. The plumbing had long since given up the ghost, and the inmates were reduced to using buckets for human waste. The smell of unwashed bodies mingled with the rank odors of urine and excrement.

Arnaldo, to whom Pinto had been entrusted, pushed the chief through the door at the head of the corridor and followed along behind him, jangling a ring of keys as he went. The chief was still in uniform and his arrival was greeted by grim silence until the prisoners realized that his hands were cuffed behind his back. Then the jeering broke out.

“Who wants to share a cell with him?” Arnaldo said, taking a position in the center of the corridor, just out of reach of groping hands.

Everyone did, but one voice, deeper than the others, cut through the rest.

“Put that fresh piece of meat in here.”

The man who owned the voice stepped forward into the dim light. His shaved and tattooed head towered above the shoulders of every other man in his cell.

“Friend of the chief’s, are you?” Arnaldo said.

The man gripped the bars with hands the size of hams. His smile was pearly white against his dark skin.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me and the chief, we go back a long way,”

“Get me out of here,” Pinto croaked.

“Give me a good reason why I should,” Arnaldo said.

“I’ll tell you everything.”

“That’s a good reason,” Arnaldo said.

While the chief and Coimbra were giving their statements, and falling all over each other in an attempt to shift blame, Silva dispatched Gloria’s team to find and bring in the men Pinto had called just prior to his arrest.

When Sargento Carvalho and Tenente Jordao found out that the chief and Coimbra were cooperating, they entered into the spirit of the thing. They talked about the bribes being paid to the mayor and the governor. They talked about their involvement in the drug trade. They talked about the traffic in underage girls and confirmed that the felons on the list taken from Coimbra had been paying for protection. Silva went from interrogation room to interrogation room, letting the confessions ring like music in his ears.

There was only one false note, one area of dissonance: not a single member of the chorus had any information about the current whereabouts of the woman they’d known as Carla Antunes.

The three federal cops went from the delegacia central to The Goat’s boate. By the time they got there, it was half an hour after sunrise.

Roselia received them at the front door, wearing a nightgown and suppressing a yawn. Her hair was in disarray. There were circles under her eyes.

“I already told you,” she said. “I have no idea where he goes fishing. Somewhere on the river, that’s all I know. So why don’t the three of you get lost.”

Silva waved a paper under her nose.

“What’s that?” she said.

“A search warrant. Assemble the girls.”

She looked from the warrant back to him.

“You’re wasting your time,” she said. “They don’t know a damned thing.”

The girls all looked as disheveled as Roselia did. Silva addressed them as a group.

“We’ve arrested Chief Pinto,” he said, “and some other cops along with him. They’re going to prison, and so is The Goat.”

“He’s lying,” Roselia said, loud enough for even the girls in the back of the room to hear it.

“If any of you want to leave,” Silva continued, “you’re free to go. No one is going to follow you. No one is going to force you to come back.”

Silence.

Silva tried again.

“Who knows where I can find The Goat?”

More silence.

“The sooner I find him,” he said, “the sooner he’ll be in jail.”

One of the girls, olive-skinned and with a broken nose, looked like she was about to say something.

“You?” he said, pointing at her.

The other girls turned to look at her.

Roselia didn’t look, she glared.

The girl pressed her lips firmly together and shook her head.

Silva sensed she didn’t believe him. She wanted to, but she didn’t.

The journalists he’d called hadn’t believed him either. They’d told him they’d have to send reporters to the delegacia central to check the story out. That had been forty-five minutes ago. In Manaus, even the media moved at a snail’s pace.

“It’ll be on the radio any time now,” Silva said, hoping it would. “Hector, see if that thing works.”

He pointed to the audio system on the bar. All you could pick up in Manaus were local stations, and Hector chose one at random. They were broadcasting an old Roberto Carlos tune.

“You might be worried about where to go,” Silva said, still addressing the girls. “There’s a hospice in the city run by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. I’ve spoken to them. They’ll give you a place to sleep, give you food, help anyone who wants to do something else with their lives.”

Not one of the girls met his eyes. They were all staring at the wall, or at the floor, or at Roselia.

“When I leave here,” Silva said, “I’ll be taking Roselia with me. You have nothing more to fear from her.”

Roselia shot him a nervous glance.

As if on cue, Hector turned up the volume on the radio.

A breathless female voice replaced the music:

… were arrested at their homes in the early hours of this morning. Formal charges have yet to be brought, but we’ve been informed that Chief Pinto and his associates will be accused of racketeering, extortion, and murder. The federal police…

The girls’ voices overwhelmed that of the news reader.

Hector lowered the volume.

The girls fell silent, and every face turned toward Silva. They were looking at him differently now. Some of them were smiling.