Lost(52)

A moment later, I was at Marie’s side. She was on the deck and bleeding badly from cuts on her face. I could barely recognize her under all the blood. It pooled and dripped off her nose like a cheap faucet.

She said, “I swear, it’s not that bad. Some of the blood isn’t mine. Check on the girls in the container.”

A moment later I was in front of the storage container. The smell turned my stomach. A haze seemed to have settled over the few people still in the container. Piles of garbage filled the back corners. Junk-food wrappers, empty water bottles, and used toilet paper overflowed from one small garbage can to form a small mountain. Cockroaches scattered when I stepped inside.

A bucket used as a toilet was visible through a flimsy plastic curtain. I had a hard time imagining what the nine-day trip from Europe had been like for these poor souls.

Steph was checking the pulse of a man on the ground. He was ashen and his eyes looked up lifelessly at the rusty walls of the container. One leather loafer was missing from his left foot.

Steph looked up at me and shook her head.

I said, “Hit by a stray bullet?”

Steph said, “No. We have four dead in here. It looks like they all died from illness or heat exhaustion.” She indicated another man on the ground and two girls against the rear wall. There were three young women, alive, huddling together near the door to the container. Steph went to comfort them.

I went over to the rear wall. The two girls looked like they had been dead a couple of days. They had been placed next to each other and covered with a plastic tarp.

Both the girls looked like young teenagers; they had long hair and pretty faces. Faces with eyes that would never see home or family again. It was heartbreaking.

I thought about how these poor people had lived for the last nine days and I got mad. Fury washed over me like a wave. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this pissed off. And I knew just who I could focus my anger on.

I stepped out of the container with my hand on my pistol and said, “Where is that goddamn Inspector Vacile?”

Lorena Perez just pointed.

Across the cluttered deck, our best source of information lay flat, half of his face missing. Blood had gushed from the gunshot wound on his left cheek. Based on where he’d landed, I guessed he’d been shot by the men who surprised us. I wondered if it was done on purpose to keep him from talking to us.

I stepped over to Lorena. She wasn’t injured but she didn’t look too good. Her hands were shaking and she was leaning back against a storage container.

I put my arm around her shoulder. “You saved our asses. You okay?”

She looked up and nodded but didn’t say a word. I’d seen it before. The aftermath of police shooting could be devastating. She’d done her duty and proved she had talent.

Anthony Chilleo was holding pressure on the wound on Rick Morris’s arm.

I said, “Chill, how bad is it?”

“I’ll survive,” the Customs supervisor said.

“We’ve got help on the way. Nothing we can do for the others,” Chill said.

I searched the two dead men’s pockets, found some ID, and said, “They’re Russian.”

Chill mumbled, “Shocker.”





CHAPTER 77





HANNA SLAPPED THE wall in frustration. “Why can’t we get a decent reading on the tracker?”

Albert didn’t take his eyes off his phone as he tried again to refresh the location of the tracker sewn into the red backpack.

They’d spent two hours near the port looking for Magda with the red backpack.

During a quick break, sitting on the seawall in Bayside with the trendy shops behind them all closing down for the evening, Hanna turned to her brother and said, “Why did you shoot a Russian in the back?”

Albert looked at her as if she were speaking Martian. “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I shoot him? They were trying to rip us off. It was our best chance to rid ourselves of the Russians here in Miami.”

“Did you see what happened to Billy?”

“No. It was too crazy. We’re lucky we got out of there alive.” Albert focused on his phone as he tried to bring up the tracker again.

Hanna said, “It’s getting late. Let’s head back to the hotel.”

As soon as the cab pulled into the Miami Gardens Inn, Hanna saw that the lights to their first-floor room were off. There was no way Josie and Tasi had gone to bed this early. There should have been a glow from the TV set, at the very least.

They rushed to the door, Albert with his pistol out.

Hanna fumbled with the key in the low light, then shoved the heavy door open and immediately flicked on a light so that Albert could scan the room.

The first thing she noticed was the blood spattered across the sheet on the foldout bed.

The second was a bloody handprint on the bathroom door.

Hanna’s whole world started to spin as she tried to comprehend what had happened. She cried out, “Josie,” praying to God she would get some kind of response.

There was just dead silence.





CHAPTER 78





HANNA FOUGHT THE urge to scream. Nothing had prepared her for the scene she was witnessing. She cried out again, “Josie!” Then she heard a sound coming from the bathroom.