The Death Box Read online

  To James Lewinski,

  Who showed me Prufrock

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by J.A. Kerley

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The stench of rotting flesh filled the box like black fog. Death surrounded Amili Zelaya, the floor a patchwork of clothing bearing the decomposing bodies of seventeen human beings. Amili was alive, barely, staring into the shadowed dark of a shipping container the size of a semi-trailer. Besides the reek of death, there was bone-deep heat and graveyard silence save for waves breaking against a hull far below.

  You’re lucky, the smiling man in Honduras had said before closing the door, ten days and you’ll be in Los Estados Unitos, the United States, think of that. Amili had thought of it, grinning at Lucia Belen in the last flash of sunlight before the box slammed shut. They’d crouched in the dark thinking their luck was boundless: They were going to America.

  “Lucia,” Amili rasped. “Please don’t leave me now.”

  Lucia’s hand lay motionless in Amili’s fingers. Then, for the span of a second, the fingers twitched. “Fight for life, Lucia,” Amili whispered, her parched tongue so swollen it barely moved. Lucia was from Amili’s village. They’d grown up together – born in the same week eighteen years ago – ragged but happy. Only when fragments of the outside world intruded did they realize the desperate poverty strangling everyone in the village.

  “Fight for life,” Amili repeated, drifting into unconsciousness. Sometime later Amili’s mind registered the deep notes of ship horns. The roar and rattle of machinery. Something had changed.

  “The ship has stopped, Lucia,” Amili rasped, holes from popped rivets allowing light to outline the inside of the module, one of thousands on the deck of the container ship bound for Miami, Florida. The illegal human cargo had been repeatedly warned to stay quiet through the journey.

  If you reveal yourselves you will be thrown in a gringo prison, raped, beaten … men, women, children, it makes no difference. Never make a sound, understand?

  Eventually they’d feel the ship stop and the box would be offloaded and driven to a hidden location where they’d receive papers, work assignments, places to live. They had only to perform six months of house-keeping, yard work or light factory labor to relieve the debt of their travel. After that, they owned their lives. A dream beyond belief.

  “It must be Miami, Lucia,” Amili said. “Stay with me.”

  But their drinking water had leaked away early in the voyage, a split opening in the side of the huge plastic drum, water washing across the floor of the container, pouring out through the seams. No one worried much about the loss, fearing only that escaping liquid would attract attention and they’d be put in chains to await prison. The ship had been traveling through fierce storms, rainwater dripping into the module from above like a dozen mountain springs. Water was everywhere.

  This had been many days back. Before the ship had lumbered into searing summer heat. The rusty water in the bottom of the module was swiftly consumed. For days they ached for water, the inside of the container like an oven. Teresa Maldone prayed until her voice burned away. Pablo Entero drank from the urine pail. Maria Poblana banged on the walls of the box until wrestled to the floor.

  She was the first to die.

  Amili Zelaya had initially claimed a sitting area by a small hole in the container, hoping to peek out and watch for America. An older and larger woman named Postan Rendoza had bullied Amili away, cursing and slapping her to a far corner by the toilet bucket.

  But the module was slightly lower in Amili’s square meter of squatting room. Rainwater had pooled in the depressed corner, dampening the underside of Amili’s ragged yellow dress.

  When the heat came, Amili’s secret oasis held water even as others tongued the metal floor for the remaining rain. When no one was looking Amili slipped the hem of her dress to her mouth and squeezed life over her tongue, brown, rusty water sullied by sloshings from the toilet bucket, but enough to keep her insides from shriveling.

  Postan Rendoza’s bullying had spared Amili’s life. And the life of Lucia, with whom Amili had shared her hidden water.

  Rendoza had been the eighth to die.

  Three days ago, the hidden cache had disappeared. By then, four were left alive, and by yesterday it was only Amili and Lucia. Amili felt guilt that she had watched the others perish from lack of water. But she had made her decision early, when she saw past tomorrow and tomorrow that water would be a life-and-death problem. Had she shared there would be no one alive in the steaming container: there was barely enough for one, much less two.

  It was a hard decision and terrible to keep through screams and moans and prayers, but decisions were Amili’s job: Every morning before leaving for the coffee plantation Amili’s mother would gather five wide-eyed and barefoot children into the main room of their mud-brick home, point at Amili and say, “Amili is the oldest and the one who makes the good decisions.”

  A good decision, Amili knew, was for tomorrow, not today. When the foreign dentistas came, it was Amili who cajoled her terrified siblings into getting their teeth fixed and learning how to care for them, so their mouths did not become empty holes. When the drunken, lizard-eyed Federale gave thirteen-year-old Pablo money to walk into the woods, Amili had followed to see the Federale showing Pablo his man thing. Though the man had official power it had been Amili’s decision to throw a big stone at him, the blood pouring from his face as he chased Amili down and beat her until she could not stand.

  But he’d been revealed in the village and could never return.

  Good decisions, Amili learned, came from the head and not the heart. The heart dealt with the moment. A decision had to be made for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, all the way to the horizon. It could seem harsh, but decisions made from a soft heart often went wrong. One always had to look at what decisions did for the tomorrows.

  Her hardest decision had come one month ago, when Miguel Tolandoro drove into the village in a truck as bright as silver, scattering dust and chickens. His belly was big and heavy and when he held it in his hands and shook it, he told of how much food there was in America. “Everywhere you look,” he told the astonished faces, “there is fo
od.” Tolandoro’s smiling mouth told shining tales about how one brave person could lift a family from the dirt. He had spoken directly to Amili, holding her hands and looking into her eyes.

  “You have been learning English, Amili Zelaya. You speak it well. Why?”

  “I suppose I am good in school, Señor Tolandoro.”

  “I’ve also heard of your prowess with the mathematics and studies in accounting. Perhaps you yearn for another future, no?”

  “I have thought that … maybe in a few years. When my family can—”

  “Do it today, Amili. Start the flow of munificence to your family. Or do they not need money?”

  Amili was frightened of the US, of its distance and strange customs. But her head saw the tomorrows and tomorrows and knew the only escape from barren lives came with money. Amili swallowed hard and told the smiling man she would make the trip.

  “I work six months to pay off the travel?”

  “You’ll still have much to send home, sweet Amili.”

  “What if I am unhappy there?”

  “Say the word and you’ll come back to your village.”

  “How many times does that happen?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone return.”

  Amili startled to a tremendous banging. After a distant scream of machines and the rattle of cables the container began to lift. The metal box seemed to sway in the wind and then drop. Another fierce slam from below as the module jolted violently to a standstill. Amili realized the container had been moved to a truck.

  “Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll be safe and we can—” Amili held her tongue as she heard dockworkers speaking English outside.

  “Is this the one, Joleo?”

  “Lock it down fast. We’ve got two minutes before Customs comes by this section.”

  Amili felt motion and heard the grinding of gears. She drifted into unconsciousness again, awakened by a shiver in the container. The movement had stopped.

  “Lucia?”

  Amili patted for her friend’s hand, squeezed it. The squeeze returned, almost imperceptible. “Hang on, Lucia. Soon we’ll have the agua. And our freedom.”

  Amili heard gringo voices from outside.

  “I hate this part, opening the shit-stinking containers. They ought to make the monkeys not eat for a couple days before they get packed up.”

  “Come on, Ivy. How about you work instead of complaining?”

  “I smell it from fifty feet away. Get ready to herd them to the Quonset hut.”

  Light poured into the box, so bright it stole Amili’s vision. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Okay, monkeys, welcome to the fuckin’ U S of – Jesus … The smell … I think I’m gonna puke. Come here, Joleo … something’s bad wrong.”

  “I smelled that in Iraq. It’s death. Orzibel’s on his way. He’ll know what to do.”

  Amili tried to move her head from the floor but it weighed a thousand kilos. She put her effort into moving her hand, lifting …

  “I saw one move. Back in the corner. Go get it.”

  “It stinks to hell in there, Joleo. And I ain’t gonna walk over all those—”

  “Pull your shirt over your nose. Get it, dammit.”

  Amili felt hands pull her to her feet and tried to turn back to Lucia. “Wait,” she mumbled. “Mi amiga Lucia está vivo.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “Who cares? Haul her out before Orzibel gets here.”

  “Orzibel’s crazy. He’ll gut us.”

  “Christ, Ivy, it ain’t our fault. We just grab ’em off the dock.”

  Amili felt herself thrown atop a shoulder. She grabbed at the body below, trying to make the man see that Lucia was still breathing. The effort was too much and the corners of the box began to spin like a top and Amili collapsed toward an enveloping darkness. Just before her senses spun away, ten final words registered in Amili’s fading mind.

  “Oh shit, Joleo, my feet just sunk into a body.”

  2

  One year later

  It seemed like my world had flipped over. Standing on the deck of my previous home on Alabama’s Dauphin Island, the dawn sun rose from the left. My new digs on Florida’s Upper Matecumbe Key faced north, the sun rising from the opposite direction. It would take some getting used to.

  On Dauphin Island the morning sun lit a rippled green sea broken only by faint outlines of gas rigs on the horizon. Here I looked out on a small half-moon cove ringed with white sand, the turquoise water punctuated by sandy hummocks and small, flat islands coated with greenery. Like most water surrounding the Keys, it was shallow. I could walk out a hundred yards before it reached my belly.

  Which seemed a pleasant way to greet the morning. I set my coffee cup on the deck rail and took the steps to the ground, walking two dozen feet of slatted boardwalk to the shoreline. There were no other houses near and if there had been I wouldn’t have seen them, the land around my rented home a subtropical explosion of wide-frond palms strung with vines, gnarly trees dense with leaves and all interspersed with towering stands of bamboo. It resembled a miniature Eden, complete with lime trees, lemons, mangoes and Barbados cherries. After a rain, the moist and scented air seemed like an intoxicant.

  At water’s edge I kicked off my moccasins and stepped into the Gulf, bathtub-warm in August. The sand felt delicious against my soles, conforming to my steps, familiar and assuring. I seemed to smell cigar smoke and scanned the dawn-brightening shoreline, spying only two cakewalking herons pecking for baitfish. Neither was puffing a cigar. I put my hands in the pockets of my cargo shorts and splashed through knee-deep water toward the reeded point marking one horn of the crescent cove, revisiting the conversation that had led me so swiftly and surprisingly to Florida.

  “Hello, Carson? This is Roy McDermott. Last time we talked, I mentioned changes in the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. We’re creating a team of consulting specialists.”

  “Good for you, Roy.”

  “Why I’m calling, Carson … We want you on the team.”

  “I don’t have a specialty, Roy. I’m just a standard-issue detective.”

  “Really? How about that PSIT team you started … specializing in psychopaths and sociopaths and general melt-downs? And all them freaky goddamn cases you guys solved?”

  I smelled cigar smoke again. Looking to my right I saw a black man walking toward the shore with a stogie in his lips, five-seven or thereabouts, slender, his face ovoid, with a strong, straight nose beneath heavy eyebrows. His mouth was wide, garnished with a pencil mustache, and suggested how Tupac Shakur would have looked in his mid-sixties, though I doubt Shakur would have gone for a pink guayabera shirt and lime-green shorts. A crisp straw fedora with bright red band floated on the man’s head and languid eyes studied me as if I were a novel form of waterfowl.

  “You the one just moved in that yonder house?” he asked.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “The realtor tell you two people got killed in there? That the place was owned by a drug dealer, a Nicaraguan with metal teeth?”

  The law allowed the confiscation of property employed in criminal enterprises and the place had indeed been the site of two killings, rivals to the drug dealer who had owned the house. The dealer went to prison and the house almost went on the market, but the FCLE was advised to hold it in anticipation of rising home values. And it wouldn’t hurt for time to lapse between the killings and the showings. When I told Roy I was thinking of looking at places in or near the Keys, he’d said, “Gotta great place you can crib while you’re looking, bud. Just don’t get too used to it.”

  I nodded at my impromptu morning companion. “I heard about the murders. Didn’t hear about the teeth.”

  “Like goddamn fangs. Heard one had a diamond set in it, but I never got close enough to check. You buyin’ the place from the guv’mint? Nasty history, but the house ain’t bad – kinda small for the neighborhood – but a good, big chunk of land. As wild as it was when Poncy Deleon showed up.�
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  The house itself – on ten-foot pilings to protect against storm surges – wasn’t overwhelming: single story, three bedrooms. But it had broad skylights and a vaulted ceiling in the main room, so it was bright and open. Outside features included a hot tub and decks on two sides. Mr Cigar was right about the land: four untamed acres, like the house was in a tropical park. Plus the property abutted a wildlife sanctuary, a couple hundred swampy acres of flora gone amok. I figured the dealer had picked the place for the wild buffer zone, privacy for all sorts of bad things.

  “Afraid I’m just renting,” I said. “It’s too pricy for me.”

  A raised eyebrow. “Kinda work you do, mister?”

  “In two weeks I start work for the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. I came from Mobile, where I was a cop, a homicide detective.”

  A moment of reflection behind the cigar. “So I guess we both made a living from dead bodies.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I used to own funeral parlors in Atlanta, started with one, ended up with six. Retired here last year when my wife passed away.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I like it here.”

  “I mean about your wife. Was she ill?”

  “Healthy as a damn horse. But she was twenny-five years younger’n me an’ only died cuz one a her boyfriends shot her.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I walked his way, splashing up to shore with my hand outstretched. “Guess we’ll be neighbors, then. At least for a while. Name’s Carson Ryder.”

  His palm was mortician-soft but his grip was hard. “Dubois B. Burnside.” He pronounced it Du-boys.

  “The B for Burghardt?” I asked, a shot in the dark. William Edward Burghardt DuBois was an American civil-rights leader, author, educator and about a dozen other things who lived from the late 1800s to the sixties. The intellectual influence of W.E.B. DuBois was, and still is, felt widely.

  “That would be right,” he said, giving me a closer look.

  “You live close by, Mr Burnside?”

  He nodded at a line of black mangroves. “Other side of the trees. Daybreak used to find me heading to the mortuary to get working. Now I head out here and watch the birds.” He took another draw, letting blue smoke dribble from pursed lips. “I like this better.”