I wait for him to get out of the car, but he stays put. I get the message. This is his hometown. Forget my few years here. Tonight I’m just a guest.
“Roosevelt, I’ll call you back.”
Hopping out of the van, I put on a Homeland Security baseball cap, squint through the light rain, and then walk over to the passenger side of his car. It’s nearly three in the morning, when everyone in the world looks like crap—except Timothy, who, as I open the door, has a crisp white button-down and a perfect side part in his just trimmed brown hair.
“You’re sweating,” Timothy says, reading me perfectly as always.
I’ve known him since my very first days on the job—before we got promoted to agent (him first, of course, then me)—when we were both lower-level Customs inspectors who spent every day X-raying containers filled with everything from bananas to buzz saws to belt buckles. Even back then, when I’d be dripping in the Miami sun, his shirt didn’t have a wrinkle, which is probably why, when all the bad went down and I tipped off Miss Deirdre, even though he was right there next to me, Timothy never tumbled. He should’ve—he was always the bigger outlaw, and that night he had his own Miss Deirdre as well. But I don’t resent him for it. I told him I’d never tattle. And tonight, that’s the only reason he’s risking his job for me.
“Cal, if anyone finds out I’m bringing you inside—” He holsters the threat and reaches for a new one. “Is this really that important?”
“Would I ask if it wasn’t?”
He stays silent. He knows it isn’t just about finding some shipment. I’m searching for something far bigger than that.
Timothy’s blue lights—the movable siren that sits on his dash—remind me of the consequences. I expect him to give me the weary glare. Instead, he tosses me an expired copy of his own ICE agent credentials. After 9/11, security at our nation’s ports got better. But it didn’t get that much better.
“We all set?” I ask.
“The hold is gone, if that’s what you’re asking.” Reading the panic in my reaction, he adds, “What? You said you wanted it cleared so you could check it outside.”
“I also said I wanted to get a look first,” I tell him, ripping open his car door. “I bet he’s already on his way.”
I look up at the tall light poles that peek out above the port’s nearby container storage yard. On top of each pole, there’s a small videocamera, along with chemical sniffers and shotgun microphones. Those are new.
“Don’t panic just yet,” he says.
I hop in, he hits the gas, and we head straight for my latest federal crime.
11
It was nearly four in the morning as Lloyd Harper flashed his ID and pulled the tractor truck with the long empty trailer through the main gate at the Port of Miami. Sure, he was tired—his side ached as the anesthetic wore off—but he knew what was at stake. When he got the e-mail notification that the hold was off, well, some rewards were better than cash.
He’d been at this long enough to know that juicy worms usually had a hidden hook. And he’d lived in Miami long enough to know that if he got caught, the payback would be unforgiving. But what the doctor said tonight: the pains he’d been having in his shoulders and chest, plus the way his hands started shaking over the past few years . . . He’d lost his wife, lost his family, in prison they took his dignity—life had already taken so much from him. Was it really so bad to try to get something back?
With a tap of the gas and a sharp right turn, Lloyd headed for the open metal fence of the shipping yard, where dozens of forty-foot metal containers were piled up on top of one another—rusted rectangular monoliths, each one as long as a train car.
But as Lloyd tugged the wide steering wheel, a lightning bolt of pain knifed his side. He told himself it was the bullet wound, but he knew the truth: just seeing Cal tonight—seeing the white hair and the heartbroken eyes—just like the ones that burned through him nineteen years ago. Tonight’s bullet wound was nothing. The sharpest pains in life come from our own swords. Lloyd had spent the past two decades building his shield, but this was one blade he couldn’t stop.
“I’m here for GATH 601174-7,” Lloyd called out his window as he read the container number from the yellow sheet.
Across the open lot, an older black man was sitting on a pyramid of three boxes as he read yesterday’s newspaper. He didn’t bother looking up.
“Excuse me . . . sir . . .” Lloyd began.
“I ain’t deaf. My shift don’t start till four.”
Lloyd glanced at the digital clock on his dash: 3:58. Typical union.
“Okay, whatcha need?” the black man called out two minutes later, approaching Lloyd’s truck and reaching up for the paperwork. “Lemme guess: Startin’ this early—y’r trynna make Virginia by nightfall.”
“Something like that,” Lloyd replied.
From there, it didn’t take long for the man to find the rust-colored forty-foot container with 601174-7 painted on the outside or to climb on his forklift and load it onto the back of Lloyd’s tractor trailer. To be safe, Lloyd came out to check the numbers for himself. And the seal they put on the back to make sure the container hadn’t been opened during transit.
As he was about to climb back in his cab, he took a quick glance around the metal towers of the container yard. No one in sight. Back in the driver’s seat, he checked again, peering in his rearview as he shifted the truck through the first few gears and headed for the exit. And he checked again as he drove toward the final security checkpoint—a three-story-tall radiation portal monitor that looked like an enormous upside-down letter U. The detector was new, designed to catch smuggled nuclear devices. Everyone who left the port had to drive through it. For a moment, Lloyd edged his foot toward the brakes.
He held his breath as he approached the detector. The truck bounced slightly. Slowly rolling forward, he kept his eye on the red and green bulbs that were embedded in the roof of the detector. Once again, a bolt of pain burned at his side. But when the green light blinked, he smiled, slammed the gas, and never looked back.
And that’s why, as the eighteen-wheeler climbed and lumbered over the bridge toward Miami . . . and as he stared into the darkness, searching for the coming sunrise . . . Lloyd Harper didn’t notice the white, unmarked Crown Vic that was trailing a few hundred feet behind him.
“Think he knows what he’s hauling in back?” Timothy asked.
“I don’t really care,” Cal replied from the passenger seat, never taking his eyes off his father’s truck. “But we’re about to find out.”
12
Guns or drugs—gotta be,” Timothy says as my dad’s eighteen-wheeler makes a slow, sharp left toward the entrance for I-95. We’re at least three football fields behind him, with our lights still off. But at four-thirty in the morning, with only a few cars between us, he’s impossible to miss.
“Maybe your dad’s container—”
“Maybe it’s not my dad’s. For all I know, he’s just another feeb doing a pickup.”
“But if you thought that, would you really have shown up at three in the morning? Or would he have shown up at four, fresh from his new bullet wound? I know you can’t bring yourself to say it—and I know it was just a random hold—but you should be worried about him,” Timothy says. “Don’t apologize, Cal. I got twin teenage girls—and no matter how much they hate me, only monsters would let their father take a beating. In fact, it’s not that different from Deirdre—”
“Can we just focus on what’s in the shipment? Please.”
To his credit, Timothy lets it go. And I try my best to ignore my crooked pinkies.