"How we gonna do this, Zanzo?" Malavida finally asked. "Don't know," Lockwood replied. "Gotta find…"
"No shit."
Again they fell into silence. Then Malavida continued, "Before she went on TV yesterday, she showed me this picture of Shirley Land. It was an obit photo or something. She said she got it at the library along with some articles on how she died. I accessed the Miami library computer to see if I could pull anything up on Shirley, but this stuff must be too old. It's not in their information bank… probably on microfilm."
"Microfilm," Lockwood repeated, as if he'd never heard the word before.
"Hey, get on board here, will ya? She could be in bad trouble. We probably don't have much time," Malavida said sharply.
"I'm, ah… not… I." Lockwood couldn't get his thought out. Periodically his vocabulary just seemed to disappear. He knew what he wanted to say but couldn't find the words. And then without warning, his grasp of language would come back. It was one of the most frustrating feelings he'd ever experienced.
Malavida watched him and knew it had been a time-wasting mistake to bring Lockwood down. He was worse than useless. "We're gonna get smoked," he said. "Neither of us can move and you need a brain transplant. The gimp squad to the rescue. All we need is Martin Short to drive the car."
Lockwood sat and looked at him, still waiting for the right words to form. "You shouldn'ta loved her," he said. "Wrong verb," he added.
"And you weren't trying?"
"Shouldn'ta done it. I told you. Said she was. She couldn't…"
He stopped as the right words left him but his anger swelled. "Fuck!" he shouted.
"Hey, Lockwood, did it ever occur to you that I might be honest about my feelings toward her?"
"No."
They glowered at one another.
The rental agent showed up with the car ten minutes later. They had agreed to pay a fifty-dollar delivery charge, which, of course, would never get charged to them because Malavida had executed the whole thing by computer. All that needed to happen now was for Lockwood to take delivery of the car and sign the contract. Malavida was in a chair by the window when the agent knocked on the door. Lockwood used his hospital walker to get to the door. He folded it, placed it out of the way, opened the door, and stood teetering like the last drunk at a party. The agent took Lockwood's license and watched while he signed the contract. Before he left, the young man turned. "You guys okay?" he asked, concerned by their appearance.
"Sure are." Malavida smiled painfully.
"Upsy daisy," Lockwood chipped in, selecting the wrong cliche.
Malavida and Lockwood got into the rented gray Lincoln Town Car with some difficulty. They agreed that Malavida would drive because of Lockwood's impaired vision. Malavida got carefully behind the wheel and put his laptop on the seat. He watched the ex-Customs agent struggling to get into the passenger side.
"Get in there, cocksucker," Lockwood cursed at himself as he fumbled to get his legs into the car. Then he looked at Malavida for instructions.
"We got one choice," Malavida said. "We go to the library, see if we can get that material on Shirley Land. The picture Karen had was of the same woman we saw taped up inside that barge."
Lockwood knew there was a better move but he couldn't pin it down. He struggled to think what it was.
Malavida put the car in gear and started to pull out of The Swallow Inn.
"No," Lockwood said.
"Whatta you mean no? You got a better idea?"
"Yeah."
"Let's hear it."
Lockwood looked at him blankly. "Can't remember."
"You can't remember?" Malavida shook his head in disgust. "At least you're finally acting like a regular G-Man," he said, and accelerated out of the parking lot, heading back along the river toward the highway.
"Tashay Roberts," Lockwood finally said, "knows something."
"Who's Tashay Roberts?"
Lockwood remembered now that Malavida had been in the hospital when he and Karen had talked to Bob Shiff and Tashay. He slowly formed the words, telling Malavida who they were and that Tashay had tried to contact them with information about Leonard Land. "Don't know address," he finally said.
Malavida pulled over, grabbed his cellphone out of his pocket, and called Tampa and Miami Information. There was no listing for either of them.
"These punk kids got unlisted numbers? Why?" Malavida complained.
"Owe money… junkies," Lockwood finally managed to say.
Malavida grabbed the computer off the seat beside him. He reached into the pocket of his jacket, took out a small leather cracking kit, then removed a fone-phreaking diskette. He hooked his cellphone to the computer's external modem and started to go to work on the phone company's computer. Lockwood was sweating in the late-afternoon heat. He put down the window but it was still unbearably hot in the gray sedan. It took Malavida twenty minutes to break through. There was no listing for Tashay Roberts, but Bob Shift's number was there. The billing address was 1818 Coral Grove Road, Miami… less than ten minutes from where they were parked.
Chapter 38
This time when Karen woke up she was surprisingly alert. She still felt horrible and her head and jaw ached. Her muscles screamed at her, but her senses were tingling. Even before she opened her eyes she could smell mildew and dust. She knew she was tied up, sitting on a cold floor. She could hear Tashay crying. Karen's hands were lashed behind a wood post. She opened her eyes and looked around; there were boxes and junk piled everywhere. She determined that she was in a garage, but there was no room for a car. The garage had been completely taken over as a junk room. She could hear Tashay but couldn't see her. Karen craned her neck and finally saw that Tashay was standing, slumped over, her hands tied to a chain under an old block-and-tackle that was hooked to the heavy center beam. Tashay was half hanging by her wrists, sagging with her knees bent, her head tilted down, her gaze on the floor between her legs.
Karen took a moment and pushed everything but her terrible dilemma out of her mind. Her mouth was a pulsating bright spot of agony. The broken teeth had exposed nerves that screamed in pain. Karen knew she had to blot it out in order to function. She knew from past experience that if she acknowledged the pain, it would control her. She had been through bouts of agony before. She knew she had to put it on another level. Focus hard on something else. In the hospital, after the ALFA Wing fiasco, she'd had a lot of time to practice. She now focused her mind on her current dilemma and tried to dial the pain down. Her mind started to rapidly collect facts. She looked over at Tashay and saw that she had stopped bleeding. The blood that was on the floor between her feet was caked and dry. That told her they had been there for at least an hour. Satan T. Bone must be waiting for someone or something, she reasoned. Where were they? she wondered. From what she could see, the garage was a mess. Extremely drganized She didn't think the mess belonged to Leonard Land. She had profiled him as compulsive and obsessive. He would be a neat freak; this garage would drive him nuts. She now focused on Tashay, who had stopped crying.
"Tashay," she said, her voice low and whispery.
"Oh, God… oh, God… Why is he doing this? Why?" Tashay said and started to cry again, but she didn't look up.
"Tashay, you've gotta stop it. We've gotta get something going here." Karen tried to straighten up but her arms and shoulders screamed at her. She winced as she struggled to push herself up the wood post. She was still dizzy, so she stopped and sat back on the cold concrete.