James Grippando - When Darkness Falls

“Alicia!” she shouted.

Still no sight of her.

“Alicia Mendoza!”

The old woman hurried through the crowd, but she saw only strange faces. People were starting to stare, as if something was wrong with her. Breathless, she could go no farther. From the top of the stairs, she spotted Alicia racing toward the revolving door. Her instincts told her to give chase, but it was pointless. In utter desperation, she reached inside her handbag, grabbed a tube of lipstick, and hurled it down from the top of the steps. It flew across the lobby, and, like a dart finding the bull’s-eye, hit Alicia squarely in the back.

Alicia stopped.

The women exchanged glances from afar. Then Alicia saw the tube on the floor and picked it up.

She seemed to recognize it as her own.

The old woman was about to climb down the stairs, hopeful that Alicia would speak to her. Before she could move, however, Alicia hurried through the revolving door. The old woman could only stand and watch helplessly through the plate-glass window as Alicia ran across the parking lot, jumped in her car, and even burned a little rubber in her haste to get away.

I n downtown Miami, construction sites were outnumbered only by traffic jams. Jack passed seven or eight of the former before he was ensnarled in the latter. He left his car in a loading zone near Flagler Street and hoofed it down the sidewalk. After a couple of wrong turns, he came to the construction site that marked the way to the people-mover station where he and Zack were supposed to meet.

No city on earth had more skyscrapers in the works than Miami-not New York, not Tokyo, not even Hong Kong. Many would eventually be built; just as many, if not more, would develop no further than the weedy construction site that served as the landmark for Jack’s destination. The downtown people-mover was an elevated tram that ran on rubber tires and a concrete track. As Jack climbed the stairs to the station’s platform, he had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Most of the fencing was covered with a green nylon mesh, but the long stretch facing the street had been transformed into an architectural gallery of sorts, with impressive drawings of a future seventy-story multi-use facility. The sign at the gate boasted that sixty percent of the condominium units had already been sold. The big question was, “To whom?” Miami was to condo speculation what Las Vegas was to roulette wheels, and Jack figured that many of those units had been bought in bulk by the type of investor who would stash away his money at an institution shrouded in secrecy, like the Greater Bahamian Bank amp; Trust Company, all with the help of a man like Riley.

When Jack arrived, however, there was no sign of Riley. Zack was leaning against the lighted billboard by his lonesome-all seven feet of him.

“Where’s Riley?” said Jack.

“Sorry,” said Zack as he stepped toward him. “You may be Theo’s best friend, but any lawyer makes me nervous. After the way you were talking on the phone, I half-expected you to show up with the cops in tow. I left Riley behind.”

Images of that vat of boiling oil suddenly resurfaced in Jack’s brain. “Where?”

“Back at the hangar. He’s cool, okay? Frankly, he’s glad to be out of the Bahamas. So long as the guys who are out to get him don’t know he’s out of the Bahamas.”

“Who’s out to get him?”

“I’m not sure. Somebody showed up at his house yesterday morning, pulled a gun, and told him to keep his trap shut about Falcon’s box. I pressed Riley pretty hard on it, but honestly, I’m not sure that he even knows who it was.”

“Not everyone in the islands follows the Swiss model of ‘know your customer.’ I’m not so sure the Swiss even follow it. Bank secrecy has more exceptions than rules.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But if you grew up where Theo and me did, you know this much: nobody sings like a scared canary.”

Somewhere in Zack’s sentence was a more familiar cliché, but Jack got the drift. “What did you get out of Riley so far?”

“First off, your boy Falcon set up the safe deposit box and did all the paperwork himself.”

“We knew that. His signature specimens were on file with the bank.”

“Yeah, but here’s something you didn’t know. He did all this years ago, probably before he started living on the street. And here’s something else. Falcon never even opened the box.”

“You mean after he put the two hundred grand in it.”

“No. I mean never.”

“How can that be?”

“That’s what I asked Riley. But he says Falcon just rented the box sight unseen. Never put a thing in it.”

“Then how did the money get there?”

“According to Riley, some other guy shows up about two months later. He’s got a key and a power of attorney signed by Falcon to let him open the box. Now, we don’t know what he did when he opened the box, but Riley says the guy came with a briefcase.”

“Big enough to hold two hundred thousand in cash?”

“Yup. He used the name Bernard Sikes. Totally bogus identity, of course.”

“So this guy Sikes, or whatever his real name is, puts two hundred thousand dollars cash in an empty safe deposit box rented by Falcon. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“You got it.”

“Why?”

Zack shrugged. “Hell if I know. Why don’t you ask Falcon?”

“I just might do that. But obviously there has to be more to the story. There was two hundred thousand in the box when Theo and I went there. I took ten thousand for Falcon’s bail. So who came after me and took what was left? Riley?”

“No,” said Zack. “He swears he didn’t.”

“Sikes?”

“Uh-uh. Riley says it was a woman. An old woman at that. The way Falcon set things up with the bank, three people were authorized to access the box. Falcon, Sikes, and the woman.”

“She got a name?”

“Marianna Cruz Pedrosa.”

Jack searched his mind for some recognition, but there was none. “Have the Bahamians tracked her down?”

“This is where it gets interesting. I didn’t hear this from Riley, but I was talking to a buddy on the Bahamian police about this.”

“And?”

“As you can imagine, there are more than a few women by this name in the world. But the local cops have checked all kinds of databanks and computer lists, and one woman has really caught their interest.”

“Why?”

“A woman named Marianna Cruz Pedrosa went missing over twenty-five years ago. She was a university professor in La Plata, Argentina, back in the mid-seventies. She and her husband were taken from their home in the middle of the night. No one ever heard from them again. It’s like they just vanished.”

Jack fell silent for a moment. “No,” he said finally, “I’ll bet they disappeared.”

“Vanished. Disappeared. Same thing.”

“Not exactly,” Jack said, as the pieces to Falcon’s puzzle finally started to fall into place.

V ince was not getting the response he wanted from the headquarters. He was listening to Chief Renfro on speakerphone, and she didn’t like the idea of Vince-with or without Swyteck-approaching the motel in any kind of swap for the injured hostage. Vince was prepared to make a host of arguments to the contrary, but he was a lone voice. The mobile command vehicle was starting to feel less like the nerve center of negotiations and more like a SWAT staging area. Sergeant Chavez, two members of his tactical team, and his best sniper were standing near the door, as if waiting for the chief to say “Go.” The Miami Dade Police Department had its negotiator in the room, but if body language meant anything, she was actually standing behind the MDPD’s SWAT leader. The MDPD director himself-the local equivalent of the county sheriff-was participating by conference call, and he was siding completely with Chief Renfro.