James Grippando - A King's ransom

“He says you were blocking traffic. He was making room for the trucks to pass.”

It was possible he was telling the truth, though it was also possible that if J.C. hadn’t caught them, my beloved Jeep would have been a boat ride away from South American license plates. Four-wheel-drive vehicles were in hot demand down there-just ask any Miamian who used to own a Range Rover.

J.C. and I moved my Jeep to a safer place, a parking spot beside the warehouse that was inaccessible by forklift. As I killed the engine, I noticed the goofy expression on J.C.’s face.

“What?” I asked.

“I was just thinking, this is broad daylight. What must go on down here at one o’clock in the morning?”

“God only knows.”

“Actually, I think God must look the other way.”

“Yeah,” I said. “God and my old man.”

“Get out. Your dad’s as straight as they come.”

“You and I know that. But I have this feeling that everybody else lumps him together with every snake who’s ever slithered down the Miami River.”

“Why?”

“ Why? It’s like you just said, this is the day shift. Who do you think works here at night? Nuns?”

“You’re making too much of that. So what if your dad spends a lot of time at the port. He travels back and forth from Nicaragua on fishing business. He has the bad luck of being kidnapped by Colombians. That doesn’t mean. .”

He stopped in midsentence, as if saying those things had made him see my point. “It’s just a perception thing,” he added.

The forklift drove by. The driver beeped his horn and waved. He was hauling a pallet of frozen grouper fingers. Or at least that’s what the markings on the box said. Who knew what was really in there?

I looked at J.C. and asked, “What would you say if I told you that my old man had been shaken down by customs nineteen times in the past five years?”

He was trying hard not to look shocked. “Was he ever charged with anything?”

“Nope. Not a single time could anyone tag him with anything illegal.”

“Then I’d say he’s being harassed.”

“Spoken like a true best friend,” I said, though the accusatory look of Agent Huitt was still burning in my mind. “Of course, another man might say he’s just lucky as hell he never got caught.”

J.C. looked away, saying nothing. In silence, we walked back into the warehouse to see my father’s friend Paco.

More than a week since Dad had disappeared, and still not a word from his kidnappers. Alex assured me that this was normal. The consul’s office told me the same thing in my daily update from the State Department. Families always want the ordeal to end quickly, but the kidnappers move at their own pace. It’s not that they’re incapable of moving faster. They’re simply in control, and they want you to know it.

On Monday morning I went to the office to see if Duncan would extend my personal leave for another week. He agreed, though we both knew the rules. At a large firm like Cool Cash, associates either billed twenty-two-hundred hours annually or took a pay cut. No slack for kids, kidney stones, or kidnappings.

Back in my office I logged on to my computer to enter my time for the week. Lawyers at Cool Cash recorded their time in six-minute intervals. Each billing day had entries for a twenty-four-hour day, as you never knew when you might be stuck in the office till 3:00 A.M. cranking out a brief. I entered zeroes across the board, ten slots per hour, two hundred and forty per day, twelve hundred for the week. Staring at five days’ worth of zeroes, I suddenly realized how incredibly long a day could be. It made me think of Dad sitting in the jungles or mountains somewhere in Colombia and counting each passing minute, nothing to do but survive and wait for his ordeal to end.

I checked my e-mails. Most were office memos, easily deleted. I printed a half dozen updates from the lawyers who were monitoring my caseload in my absence. One that caught my eye was from an address I didn’t recognize. It had arrived just a half hour earlier. I opened it, then froze.

“ I know where Matthew Rey is, ” it read.

I stared at the words. The sender’s screen name was an eight-digit number, not even a word. I scrolled down to check the rest of the message.

“ If this interests you, please come see me. ” An address followed, but no name and no telephone number.

At this stage of the game I had to take every lead seriously. It was only instinct, and my thinking was definitely colored by my meeting with Agent Huitt-but I suspected that if this guy really knew where my father was, he might also know things that were better not shared with the FBI, my negotiator Alex, or even my friend J.C.

I wrote down the address. It wasn’t too far. I could be there in twenty minutes-alone, just me and my family secrets.

As usual, a twenty-minute trip on the Palmetto Expressway turned into forty. With no map, I tried to find my way by using two handy mnemonic devices that helped drivers get around Miami-Dade County. The more well known one was STL: streets, terraces, and lanes ran east to west (think “St. Louis”). The one I seemed to remember better was courts, roads, avenues, and places. In Miami, as at Cool Cash, CRAP flowed north and south, top to bottom.

Unfortunately, someone had stolen most of the street signs in the neighborhood, and I finally realized I was in Hialeah, which had a different street-numbering system entirely. I stopped for directions at a gas station where a big Cuban flag was draped in the window. An old bumper sticker on the counter read, NO CASTRO, NO PROBLEMA. In Spanish, the attendant directed me to one of many rows of two-bedroom, sixties-vintage houses. Once upon a time Hialeah had been synonymous with pink flamingos gracing a manicured infield as powerful thoroughbreds raced around the famous old track. Many areas were beautiful to some, but I was in a declining neighborhood where the flamingos were plastic and front lawns were surrounded by chain link and barbed wire to keep away the car thieves.

I found the right house halfway down the street. An old Chevy was parked in the driveway. Beneath the carport was an aluminum fishing boat on a trailer with two flat tires. As with most of the surrounding homes, the windows and doors were covered with jail-like security bars. I had to wonder what this person could possibly know about my father’s kidnapping. After my conversation with FBI Agent Huitt and his threats against my father’s partner, Guillermo, I supposed it could have been just about anything.

I opened the gate, walked up the cracked sidewalk, and knocked on the front door. A man answered, dressed in sandals, shorts, and a Miami Dolphins T-shirt. It was only 11:00 A.M., but he had a healthy five o’clock shadow, the kind that was chic on a movie star but plain old scruffy on just about everyone else. A protective Doberman pinscher was standing behind him.

“I’m Nick Rey. You sent a message about my father?”

He smiled and unlocked the screen door. “ Si. Come on in.”

I glanced at the dog.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s friendlier than she looks.” He led me down a dark hall to the kitchen. The window shades were pulled shut, and the only light in the house was from the lamp in the living room and the ceiling fixture in the kitchen. Incense burned in a small urn on the kitchen counter, filling the air with an almost sickeningly sweet odor.

“ ?Cafe? ” he offered.

“No, thanks.”

He poured himself half a cup and filled the rest with milk. At his insistence I took the good chair, the one that didn’t have duct tape covering splits and tears in the vinyl covering. He seated himself opposite me at the kitchen table, the dog at his feet.