I’d parked the Gran Fury two blocks away and put on my old blue-black windbreaker just to give me some cover. The night was quiet and warm. And as I did a perimeter around the trailer, I tried not to underestimate the shooters who had fired first at me and Luz Carmen, and then had tried to chase down Andres. Yes, you could write them off as idiot street criminals hard up for money now that the drug trade had moved to a more businesslike, hand-to-hand market. But these guys had been armed with automatic weapons. And they were brazen enough to stage a wild-ass car chase in the middle of the day. So would they not just storm Andres’s girlfriend’s place if they knew he was there, and kill him the way same they tried to in the cul-de-sac?
Sure, that was an option. But I was hoping that wasn’t going to happen while I was inside talking Andres into leaving. Maybe my little surveillance here had more to do with self-preservation than trying to save the kid again.
As I tightened the circle around the trailer, I took in the sounds and smells of the beaten-down trailer park: the distinctive odor of overused kitty litter dumped behind one place; the leftovers from a recent fish-fry, stashed in an old-style metal garbage can, some procrastinating resident leaving it in the alley instead of at the pickup spot on the street. The overloud blabbing of a television sitcom spilled from a window screen along with canned laughter.
Closing in from the north, I spotted a misplaced light. Closer still, I finally made out some sort of battery-powered candle set on a picnic table. A young girl, middle-school age, was huddled over what looked like a fat textbook, with a pencil in hand, scratching at a notebook. From the trailer beside her came the noise of an argument between two adults. Something crashed inside, and the raw sound of flesh slapping flesh stung the air.
I watched the girl put her forehead down onto the open pages of the book. Though I tried to move away quietly, she looked up at the sound of my footfall, and we made eye contact. I raised my index finger to my lips. Shssss.
She rolled her eyes at me-whatever-and went back to her homework.
Finally, I stepped up to the door of Andres’s and looked first to the spot where Billy and I had seen the pit bull in the light of day. There appeared to be nothing there, though I was half-expecting a glowing pair of evil eyes. Taking one more glance behind me, I rapped on the door. It opened slowly, making that gum rubber sound of a seal being pried.
When I stepped into the light, I was greeted by the black-eyed barrel of an over-under shotgun. At the other end was the scrunched face of a blonde woman, her eyes narrowed to slits, her forehead furrowed beyond her age.
“Who the fuck are you?”
While my hands were shoulder-high, palms facing outward, I explained who I was, and that I did not deserve to die on the rusted iron steps of a faded Florida house trailer. The woman, small-boned and too defiant for her size, finally backed up, but did not put the shotgun down. When I stepped up into the entry, the smell of onion-fried liver hit my nose, which might have been pleasant under other circumstances, but in the claustrophobic space-already ripe with a scent of its own-I felt my stomach twinge.
The teenage kid was still on the couch as if he hadn’t moved since the last time I was here. He cut his eyes to me for only long enough to assure his boredom, and then went back to the television screen running the same Grand Theft Auto game he’d been on before. He was about the same age as the girl out in the dark working on her studies. The juxtaposition made me feel sorry for him.
“Andres,” the woman screeched down the hall. “Your boy is here.”
Your boy?
Andres came out wearing a strap T-shirt that used to pass as white and the floppy blue scrub pants I presumed he wore at work.
“What’s up?”
The girlfriend stepped back next to him as if to present some kind of united front. She was wearing a stained waitress uniform and looked ridiculous holding the big shotgun. I tried to relax my shoulders and clasped my hands in front of me, one holding the other like a salesman during a formal presentation.
I was controlling my anger.
“What’s up? Is it that the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office found the guys who were trying to shoot you?” I said, watching the woman’s dirty-green eyes to see if she’d been brought up-to-date on her boyfriend’s escapades. She didn’t flinch.
“And put that gun down before you accidentally hurt somebody,” I added, now staring into the woman’s eyes.
Andres put his palm out and touched the gun barrel gently.
“It’s OK, Cheryl,” he said.
She looked disappointed, but sat down on a nearby rocking chair and laid the gun across her lap like a hillbilly-which she very well could have been, given her posture and ashen skin.
“Yeah, my friend told me he heard they popped the last guy over near the projects. So that’s a good thing, right?” Andres said. “They’re just a bunch of gang assholes, anyway.”
“Yeah, gang assholes,” I said. “The operative word being gang, which means they’re part of a bigger whole, along with others who share the same information, rumor, word on the street and all. You know-like the word that there’s a price on your head.
“But since you’ve already been out there talking to your friends, you probably already know that, too, right? And since you’ve been out chatting, your friends also know where you are. They’re probably out there yakking to others about that very fact.”
Now I was pissed.
The girlfriend made a show of picking up a cigarette pack, tamping it down on the surface of the table next to her, and then opening it. Andres looked as if he were waiting on her to respond to me. The woman picked a cigarette out of the pack and fit it between her lips.
“We ain’t afraid of a bunch of gang punks,” she said, her voice a pathetic, almost humorous tough-guy growl, the cigarette bouncing with her words.
I shook my head and looked at Andres. “Like I offered earlier,” I said. “I have a place you can go where they won’t find you. You could stay there a few days until the cops get things cooled down a bit. Mr. Manchester is trying to get the feds to talk with your sister, and if they start taking her seriously, they could come in to give both of you witness protection.”
Andres looked away. The girlfriend rolled her eyes and lit the cigarette and whispered “Luz” with an edge of disgust.
I pulled a kitchen chair out from under the nearby table and put it in front of the woman. Then I sat down to indicate that I wasn’t leaving until I got an answer. The place was silent but for the sound of the boy on the couch clacking buttons on his handheld controller.
When I followed his eyes to the television screen, I saw a caricature of a stubble-faced guy holding a handgun. The figure had obviously just crashed his car into a police cruiser. On the ground in front of him was a uniformed caricature of an officer. Stubble-face was shooting the cop as he lay on the street. Each time the boy punched his thumb on the controller, the gun would fire and the cartoon body of the cop would actually jerk. The kid kept doing it over and over again.
I could feel my lips tighten into a hard line. I flexed my fingers to loosen them. When the girlfriend tipped her head back to take another long drag off the cigarette, I snuck a look at her other hand to make sure her finger wasn’t inside the trigger guard of the shotgun. It wasn’t.
When she relaxed to savor the smoke in her lungs, I grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and ripped it from her in one quick motion. She started to yelp, but when I banged the end of the barrel down into the floor, she jumped, coughed out a belch of smoke, and remained silent.
Andres wasn’t moving. I looked over at the kid, his eyes gone big.
“Turn that thing off before I put this gun butt through the screen,” I said, pointing the shotgun stock in the direction of both the television and the hallway. “Go crawl into the place where you sleep.”