Hendricks shrugged.
“Look at it from my position,” he said. “There’s a big enough difference between its declared and actual weight, it could be an intentional duty violation.”
“Or an honest mistake.”
Another shrug. “Subject to enforcement either way.”
Bruford frowned. He was guessing his question had been answered with the closest equivalent of a solid yes available in this piss-pond bureaucrat’s lingo. He was also wondering what cosmic sin he could have committed to merit God’s having punished him with the ridiculous crap being squarely dished out on his head today. But maybe there was no cause-and-effect explanation. Maybe sometimes you just had put it down to a hump being a hump to his core.
Bruford expelled another breath. Behind him the fish crate creaked and squealed in protest as its lid was wedged upward with the flat end of the crowbar.
He had started turning toward it again to check on his men’s progress when the most awful scream he’d ever heard tore through the air from that same direction, shredding through the loud turbine roar of planes that were landing and departing on the airport’s busy runways.
His skin erupting into gooseflesh, Bruford whirled around the rest of the way to discover the brawny six-footer who’d been working at the crate howling his lungs out, shrieking like a terrified little kid. He had his back to the skid truck and was pressing his fists into his temples, the crowbar he’d been using dropped heedlessly on the tarmac beside the box’s displaced lid. Meanwhile the other handler had remained by the crate, staring into it, his eyes so wide Bruford could see their bulging whites from where he stood.
He rushed forward, thinking maybe he shouldn’t be too eager to find out what inside those boxes could have sent a pair of grown men into crazed and seemingly unashamed fits of hysteria, but letting his feet take him over to the skid truck anyway, moving up to it with three or four long, hurried strides.
And then he was standing there looking down into the crate, feeling his stomach seize with horror and revulsion.
There were body parts inside. Instantly recognizable human body parts. Bruford’s disbelieving eyes picked out a headless torso with white knobs of bone protruding from its arm sockets. Then another beneath it, partially exposed under torn plastic wrapping and a scattered layer of freezer gel packs. One of them had belonged to a light-skinned person. The other to someone with skin that was a very dark shade of brown.
Both looked like they were male to Bruford, though he couldn’t be sure. He had also had no way to be positive the severed limbs packed in the crate belonged to the same two people. The only thing he did know before recoiling in shock and aversion was that there was a hacked-up anatomical jumble crammed against the container’s bloodstained foam liner. He could see everything, everything, wedged into every possible space, awash in a soup of gore. Arms, legs, feet, other pieces of human beings he either couldn’t or didn’t want to identify…
Everything but the heads, and the hands.
He turned away from the horrible sight, clapped a palm over his mouth to fend off an attack of nausea. He was aware of Hendricks behind him now, peering over his shoulder at the gross butchery inside the crate. His radio up against his ear, the inspector was calling out for assistance in a cracking, excited voice — either from airport security or the police, Bruford was too far out of his skull to tell. He heard a response squawk from the Customs inspector’s handset, jerked his head around, and knew at a glance that Hendricks was struggling with the same kind of paroxysms he’d managed to subdue a moment before.
Their eyes met for an instant. The color had drained from Hendricks’s cheeks until they turned an ashen gray.
“I told you,” he gasped hoarsely, wringing the words through livid, contorted lips. “Fucking Trinidad!”
Then he covered his stomach with his hands, doubled over, produced an awful retching noise, and threw up all over his shoes.
“Hey, you!” said Marissa Vasquez without slowing her jog in the sand. “Watch it!”
Felipe, who’d fallen a step or two behind Marissa, reacted about the way she would have expected and ignored her. Of course her zippy tone wasn’t what she might have called high in the intimidation factor…
“Ouch!” she said, feeling him pinch her rear end again. “Thought I warned you to quit—”
Before she could finish protesting, Felipe caught up to her, hooked an arm around her waist, and drew her into his embrace.
“Sorry.” He gave her a slyly playful smile. “Tried to check myself.”
Marissa threw her hands around his neck and stood facing him on the beach in the chill early morning breeze.
“You’re hopeless,” she said.
He shrugged and pulled her gently but irresistibly closer.
“You’re also fouling up my pace,” she said.
Felipe pulled her still closer, kissed her in the middle of her forehead.
“Bringing me down off my targeted heart rate,” Marissa said. And who did she think she was kidding? She fell into his arms, her heart racing right along, her increasingly short breaths having more to do with what Felipe did to her — on and sometimes before contact — than the exertion of their run along the shore.
He kissed her again, lightly, his lips touching her left brow, her right, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, then brushing down over the corners of her mouth, and further down to her neck as his hand glided up and up over the front of her running jacket.
Marissa felt ripples of warmth. “Felipe…”
He tilted his head back, a glint in his dark brown eyes.
“I think you’re heartbeat feels just fine,” he said, putting his hand right there, cupping it over the firm swell of her breast.
“Felipe…”
“Fine as can be,” he said huskily, and raised his other hand to her cheek, stroked her hair back behind her ear with delicate fingertips, a few strands at a time, and then guided her mouth to his mouth, and kissed her long and fully and deeply.
Her lips parted wide, hungry for him, Marissa felt his hand slide under her jacket and pressed herself against him to make it clear he could keep right on doing what he was, all the while surprised and further excited by her utter lack of modesty and self-consciousness. The early hour aside, this little beach on the Miller-Knox shoreline was a public place, and before Felipe Escalona entered her life that would have her made her far too uptight to carry on like a teenager having her first heavy make-out session. But this was what he did to her, and was how it had been for her since they’d met here almost a month ago to the hour, both out for Sunday morning jogs on the weekend before Easter.
They were yin and yang, opposites attracting, choose your favorite advice column canard for two very different types of people who seemed to make an ideal fit.
The only child of a Latino entrepreneur who ran a large San Francisco construction and real-estate development firm of his founding, Marissa was a few months shy of her twenty-first birthday, which would roughly coincide with her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she’d studied toward a BA in business administration and a minor degree in political science. Felipe, who was five years her senior, and whose trace of an accent hinted at his Mexican origins — he’d told her that his parents had immigrated from Guadalajara when he was a boy, and that he’d spent a couple of years in his native country earning a master’s in Spanish language and literature — made his living as a freelance writer of bilingual educational materials, and was presently contracted with a software designer called Golden Triangle to work on a program meant for high school classrooms. Easygoing and spontaneous, his tongue partially in cheek (or so Marissa assumed), Felipe insisted the key to his happiness and productivity was wearing sweatpants in his home office, and claimed the prospect of having to put on a suit and tie five days a week canceled out whatever lure a guaranteed wage might present.