Lost(57)

The man in the suit just stared. He cut his eyes around the filthy alley to see if anyone intended to help the cocky homeless man.

Then the homeless man barked, “Go.” He reached up with his left hand and shoved the man. The long ash from his cigarette broke off and floated down onto a crumpled McDonald’s coffee cup.

The man in the suit seemed astonished that someone would speak to him like that, but he recovered quickly.

Magda watched silently as he punched the man with the bad eye. Everyone in the alley looked away. But Magda saw it all. And she knew the man in the suit was searching for her.

The man stayed on his wobbly feet and glared at his attacker. That set the man in the suit off again. He shoved the man onto the stacked pallets, then leaned in and slapped the homeless man hard across the face. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he screamed as he punched the man over and over.

Magda stared, terrified. She looked over and saw the friendly black man in the red beret. She hoped he wouldn’t tell anyone she was there.

The man in the suit punched the poor homeless man six times in the face. Blood poured out of his nose and lips and, finally, one of his ears. It left a wild, dark pattern on the patched asphalt of the alley.

He slid off the pallets and lay on the garbage-covered ground, whimpering. Flies were already swarming around his bloody face. One fly stuck in the thick blood on the man’s cheek.

The man in the suit cursed at him and kicked him in the ribs several times. When he was finished, he glared around the alley at the other men sitting on broken plastic chairs or stacked boxes. It was a challenge to see if anyone else wanted to cross him.

He disappeared around the corner, and a moment later Magda started to cry.





CHAPTER 83





AFTER MY RUN-IN with Billy, Marie and I continued searching downtown Miami. I had avoided the calls from my boss, but when Stephanie Hall called, I answered.

Stephanie said, “Are you working?”

“Downtown now.”

“You’ve got to be crazy. Do you know how many policies you’re violating by coming in the day after a shooting?”

“Miami PD policies or FBI policies?”

“You are the most infuriating man I have ever met.”

“Are you telling me you’re not working? Because if you say you’re sitting at home, I won’t believe you.”

There was a pause. “Maybe I’m at the office with Chill. But we’re keeping a low profile. We’ll come down to you right now. I checked on Lorena a few minutes ago. She seems to be doing fine.”

“I checked on her too. She’s definitely doing better than the Russian dude she plugged before he could massacre the rest of us. She better not catch any shit over this.”

Steph said, “She won’t. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Why me?”

Steph said, “I heard the boss talking to some DHS bigwigs. They don’t like you. Sounds like you’ve disrespected them several times in the past few weeks.”

“Actually, it’s only been this past week. Unless they want to count their screw-up at the airport.”

“So you’re not worried about it?”

“The only thing I can think about right now is making sure everyone from the shipping container is safe. I put the word out with all the Miami PD and every snitch I ran into on the street that we’re still looking for a Polish girl named Magda.”

When I finished the call, I turned to Marie, who was just ending a call on her own phone. She looked up at me and said, “My informant in Amsterdam who gets information from Miami says that Rostoff’s Russians kidnapped Hanna Greete’s daughter from their hotel here in Miami.”

“It must have something to do with the way Hanna bungled the offload.”

“And what happened with the diamonds.”

I noticed excitement in her voice. She usually spoke English slowly and clearly, but now her Dutch accent was pronounced. Police were the same all over—they got excited when they thought they were about to make a decent arrest.

I said, “So the reason I ran into Billy was that he’s looking for the diamonds.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got to find that girl Magda first. No matter what.”

Marie said, “My informant also says there may be a tracker in the bag. Even with it, Hanna hasn’t been able to locate her.”

“Then why haven’t the others found her already?”

Marie shrugged.

I said, “Trackers can be finicky. If it’s a cheap one, even a metal roof can block the signal.” That gave me something to think about.

Around Third Street and Fourth Avenue, when we were checking another one of the homeless shelters, I ran into one of my earliest informants, a tall, lean black man named Titus Barrow, whom everyone called Bulldog.

I pointed him out to Marie and her first question was “Why do they call him Bulldog?”

“You’ll figure it out when we talk to him.”

Bulldog was standing at his regular corner. He generally sold pot to tourists and crack to his regular customers, although that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule; it was more of a guideline.

As soon as he noticed me, he straightened up and tossed a baggie into the scraggly bushes next to him.