J. Kerley - The Death Box

I walked to the nearest intersection and felt totally discombobulated. The streets were a pastiche of signs in English and Spanish, the gleaming, multi-tiered skyline foreign to my eyes, the honking lines of traffic larger than any in Mobile. A half-dozen pedestrians passed me by, none speaking English. Palms were everywhere, stubby palms, thick-trunked palms of medium height, slender and graceful palms reaching high into blue.

What have you done? something in my head asked. Why are you here?

The breeze shifted and I smelled salt air and realized the ocean was near. Water had always been my truest address and the voice in my head stilled as I took a deep breath, clutched my briefcase, and strode to the looming building two blocks and one change of life distant.

“Grab a chair, bud,” Roy said, waving me into a spacious corner office on the twenty-third floor of a building rabbit-warrened with government offices.

I sat in a wing-back model and studied the back wall. Instead of the usual grip’n’grin photos with political halfwits, Roy’s wall held about twenty framed photos of him hauling in tarpon and marlin and a shark that looked as long as my truck. I smiled at one shot, Roy and me a few years back on Sanibel, each cradling a yard-long snook and grinning like schoolboys.

“First, here’s your official job confirmation,” Roy said, handing me a page of paper. “Before you leave we’ll get your photo taken for a temp ID. It may not glow in the dark, but even Viv Morningstar will let you live if you show it.”

“When comes permanent ID?” I asked.

“When we decide who you are. You’re the first of the new specialists we’ve hired who’s a cop. Are you cop first, consultant second? Or vice versa? Details, details.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes indeedy-do, my man. In a state-sized bureaucracy every description has its own weight and meaning. F’rinstance, are you a consultant, which gives you the scope to go outside the office and initiate actions on your own? Are you an agent, which means full police powers but stricter adherence to chain of command? Are you solely a specialist, which means you can only be involved for certain crimes? There’s a bureaucratic niche for everything and a word to describe it.”

“Where’s Yossarian?” I asked.

“What?”

I waved it away. Roy leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “I’m looking for the job description that gives you the most clout without having to sit through every useless goddamn meeting. We’re still feeling our way along here.”

“But I am able to command an investigation?”

A wide grin. “You already are, in fact. Or will be after you meet the group. I told them that you’re the lead investigator on this thing, the freak angle and all.”

“How’d they respond? My taking the case?”

Roy seemed to not hear, busy checking his watch. “Whoops, the crew’s been cooling their heels in the meeting room. Let’s put you on the runway and see how pretty you strut.”

I followed Roy to a windowless conference room, fluorescent lights recessed into a white acoustic tile ceiling. A large whiteboard claimed the far end of the room and beside it an urn of coffee centered a rolling cart. I saw four people at the conference table, three men and a woman. They were tight and fit and looked like they knew their way around a gym floor. I tried a smile but got nothing back but eight eyes studying me like a rat crossing sanctified ground.

“My top people, Carson,” Roy boasted. “There are fifteen other investigators and you’ll meet them all soon enough, but this is the A-plus Team: Major Crimes. When it’s too much or too big for the munies to handle, even the big-city departments, it comes to our division of the FCLE, right, my cupcakes?”

No one so much as nodded. A squealing sound pulled my attention to the guy heading the table, pressing fifty and looking like a retired heavyweight boxer, six-four or five, two-fifty or thereabouts, heavy features under a slab brow and steel-gray crew cut. Thick fingers were busy pinching pieces from the lip of a Styrofoam cup. He’d pinch, add the piece to a growing pile beside the cup, pinch again. Each pinch made the cup squeal.

“This is Charlie Degan,” Roy said. “It was Chuckles here who almost single-handedly took down the Ortega mob back in 2004.”

I smiled and nodded. “I remember when the Ortega enterprises went belly-up. Helluva job, Detective Degan.”

He nodded without commitment as the fingernails chomped at the cup. I doubted anyone else could have called the monster Chuckles, but it sounded as natural as rain from Roy McDermott.

Roy moved down the dour queue to the sole woman in the room, early forties, her olive face holding huge dark eyes framed by hair as brightly strident as a new trumpet. Her teeth were toothpaste-commercial white and could be glimpsed in flashes as she chewed pink gum.

“This is Celia Valdez,” Roy said. “Ceel was the FCLE agent of the year last year.”

My offer of congratulations was cut off by a snap of gum. Roy moved to the next guy, fortyish and olive-complected with flint-edged cheekbones and slender, cruel lips below a pencil-thin mustache. His chestnut hair was just long enough to display a curl and he wore a gray silk suit with a pink shirt and turquoise tie. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Roy’d found the guy at a Samba competition.

“That brings us to Lonnie Canseco. Say hi to Carson, Lon.”

Canseco rolled eyes. I hoped it was how he showed joy.

“Lonnie came here from Pensacola, where he did first-rate work in Homicide. But the advancement breaks weren’t coming his way. So I grabbed the collar of his Bill Blass suit and yanked him to my crime crew.”

Canseco yawned. Roy smiled and progressed to the last face at the table, a slender black guy. He was in his mid-thirties with a mobile, puckish face and short hair, wearing a loose brown blazer over blue slacks, his white shirt open at the neck.

“And this fella on the end is Leon Tatum. Lee was a county mountie who got fired for asking questions about the local landfill. He spent the next four months digging into records and asking questions. What you get for that, Lee?”

“Fired.”

“But Lee moved to Tallahassee to root through records up there. Turns out the fill was being used for dumping hazardous chemicals and had been for years, a huge moneymaker for some corrupt politicos.”

“Four or five years back?” I said. “I recall the FBI perp-walking a Florida politico who’d been involved in a chemical-dumping scheme. That was yours?”

Tatum shrugged, no big deal. Roy shook his head. “Unfortunately, our brothers at the federal level managed to grab the lion’s share of the credit and we all know how that goes.”

“Fuckers,” Degan grunted, torturing the cup. “Dirty, rotten, underhanded, ass-sucking federal snotlickers.”

“Two weeks later Lee was here.” Roy beamed. “Jeez, has it been five years, Lee?”

Tatum puckered and blew McDermott a kiss. “Every day one of sweetness and light, Roy.”

Roy looked out over his crew with paternal joy. “And that’s the crime crew, our crème de la crima of investigative specialists and my sweet beauties. Plus there’s our art expert, gang consultant, computer whiz, financial guy. You’ll meet them as you need their specific services.”

A cleared throat. Everyone turned to the guy in the corner, chair tilted back against the wall. When I scanned him my eyes didn’t register Cop , they said, Skate Punk . I ballparked him at twenty-five or so, with the whippy build of a skateboarder though the upper body had spent time with the weights. He wore a floppy tee advertising a bar in Lauderdale under a black leather vest, tight and beltless Levis pulled from the bottom of the laundry basket, white socks and blue suede Vans with rubber soles.