Again, she lapsed into silence. She was doing funny things with her lips, as if her mouth were at war with the words she was about to utter.
“It was what?” said Jack.
Her eyes closed, then opened, and her voice was barely audible as she said, “It was a good bit weirder than that.”
Jack felt that mule kick again.
There was a knock at the door, and Sofia opened it. The bailiff stuck her head into the room. “Judge Garcia’s back on the bench. He wants us back in the courtroom-now.”
Jack was torn, but a federal judge was not the kind of person to keep waiting. “We’ll finish this later,” he said.
“There’s nothing more to say.” Her chin was on her chest, and she seemed to be biting back her shame, if not shutting down the flow of information.
“Like I said. We’ll finish this later.” Jack grabbed his briefcase, then took his client by the arm and led her back to the courtroom.
34
Theo Knight was on a shopping spree. The search was on for the stolen parts-and for the guy who’d torched Jack’s Mustang.
As expected, relatively few shops specialized in classic-car parts, and many of those were highly specialized, dealing exclusively in Corvettes or foreign cars. A dozen phone calls produced no leads. Finally, a call to the Mustang Solution in Hialeah turned up the kind of bumper Theo was looking for. A personal visit to the shop confirmed that it was indeed Jack’s. Theo had washed that car hundreds of times, knew every dent and ding. The rear bumper on Jack’s car had a dimple to the right of the license plate mount. This one had the same dimple.
“How much you want for it?” Theo asked the shop owner.
“Four hundred.”
Fucking thief, thought Theo. He peeled off five bills and said, “An extra hundred if you tell me where you got it.”
“You a cop?”
“Cops take bills, dumbshit. They don’t dish ’em out.”
The owner smiled as he rolled up the cash and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “His name’s Eduardo Gonzalez. Goes by Eddy. Known him since high school.”
“Where do I find this Eddy?”
The guy made a cutesy face, as if he knew but wasn’t telling. Theo laid another fifty on the counter, which did the trick.
“He’s got his own welding shop or studio of some sort over on Flagler and Fifty-seventh. You’ll see it. Says ‘Eddy’s Palace’ on the door.”
Twenty minutes later Theo was headed down Flagler Street with the rear bumper of a ’67 Mustang convertible tied to his roof rack. He parked on a side street and walked up the block, past a liquor store, past a vacant theater, past one of those stores that sells everything you don’t need for just one dollar. He stopped at an old store front with a plate-glass window that bore the words EDDY’S PALACE.
He tried the door, but it was locked. The window looked as though it hadn’t been washed in years. Theo wiped away a little dirt and peered inside. Just enough lights were burning to let him see a few things here and there. At first it looked like nothing but heaps of scrap metal, all shapes and sizes. As he looked closer, however, he could see that the pieces all fit together. They had form. They were sculptures. Eddy’s Palace was an art studio.
Theo cupped his hands like blinders to cut down the glare. The forms came clearer. A huge, metal arm was reaching from the floor, like a hand from the grave. The man beside it was impaled on a lance, his gaping mouth exaggerated to emphasize his suffering. Several other figures seemed normal from the waist up, but the lower halves of their bodies were twisted and melted, overcome by metal tongues of fire. There were hundreds of other figures, some small, some larger than life, all with their mouths wide open, all with that same exaggerated expression of pain.
It looked like one man’s version of hell.
Theo stepped away from the window, and he was about to give the door another try when he noticed a little sign near the doorbell. It read: DOORBELL BROKEN, PLEASE ENTER AT BACK DOOR.
Dusk was turning to dark, and even Theo was having second thoughts about walking down an alley in search of the back door to hell. The neighborhood was at best questionable. The windows on nearby buildings were covered with burglar bars, and Theo recognized the cigar shop across the street from a newscast about a month earlier. The owner had been shot dead in a robbery. But he’d come too far to back down from some metal-worker-turned-artist who didn’t think twice about torching a true work of art, a classic Mustang convertible. Theo walked a few steps north and then turned down the alley.
It was a long, narrow alley, and with each step, Theo put the traffic noise from Flagler Street farther behind him. He was soon alone with the Dumpsters, deep into shadows so dark that he had to stop for a moment to let his eyes adjust. There was a street lamp overhead, and it should have clicked on by now. It had to be burned out. Theo took a few more steps, but then he stopped as he reached the end of the alley and rounded the corner to the back of the building. He heard something. It sounded like hissing.
A snake?
The thought made him shudder. Theo wasn’t afraid of much, but he was definitely not a snake guy.
The hissing continued, and then Theo spotted the source. The door at the studio’s rear entrance was open-wide open, not just unlocked. The hissing was coming from inside. Theo started toward the open door. It couldn’t be a snake. The hissing was continuous. No snake hissed nonstop. He stopped at the open doorway and looked inside.
The back of Eddy’s Palace was more like a metal shop than a studio. Eddy obviously created his sculptures right on the premises. A man-presumably Eddy-was busy at his welding table, his back to the door. He wore a metal visor over his head, the dark kind that protected the eyes from the intense glare of a welding iron. Theo could feel the heat escaping through the open door. Theo had done some welding himself, mostly on cars. He knew the arc could reach several thousand degrees. It was no wonder the door was open.
Theo watched for a minute or two. The artist was totally absorbed in his craft, shaping what appeared to be the all-important gaping mouth of another citizen from hell. Theo could have rolled through the back door in a tank and gone unnoticed.
Which gave him an idea.
Quietly, he stepped inside the studio. Eddy was still focused on work, oblivious to anything else. The gas tanks were near the door. Another torch was hanging on a hook beside the tanks. Theo opened the valve on the extra torch. He could feel the gas coursing through the tubing. He had firepower, which made him smile a little. Then he turned the valve off on the torch Eddy was working with, and he gently closed the door.
The flame on Eddy’s torch grew smaller and smaller until it finally went out. Eddy straightened up, as if ready to switch tanks. As he flipped up his visor and turned toward the tanks, Theo was on top of him like a T. rex on lunch. Eddy was facedown on the cement before he knew what had hit him. He squirmed for a moment, then a foot-long flame scorched the concrete floor just inches from his nose.
“Don’t move,” said Theo. He was sitting on Eddy’s kidneys, pressing him into the floor.
Eddy’s eyes were like silver dollars, his voice shaking. “Don’t hurt me, man.”
“Shut the fuck up, or I start cooking your nose from the inside out.”
Eddy was shaking, but he didn’t say a word.
“Good,” said Theo. “Nice and quiet, and nobody gets hurt. I’m a real lover of the arts, so it would be a shame to toast you. I mean that. I really dig your work. Highly unusual pieces. Very reminiscent of…Oh, what am I thinking of?”
Sweat was pouring down Eddy’s face. His breathing grew louder, but he didn’t answer.
Theo tapped the head of the torch on the concrete, giving Eddy a start. “You can talk when I ask you a question, moron.”
Eddy could barely keep his saliva in his mouth. “What was the question?”