Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [39]
He would have to remain silent. He would have to disappear. Then no one would ever know it was the shy architect who had, in terror, dispatched the fearful Mono. Only he would have that satisfaction.
As the police three-wheeler neared, he sank behind the car that had supported him, crouching in the shadow of its hood. The Cushman passed him going up. A couple of minutes later it whirled back down. The policeman driving it had seen nothing, suspected nothing. Who would check out a deserted stairway at this hour on a quiet night?
Meadows felt a great weight lift from his chest. Now he was truly free. So there was justice after all. Adios, Señor Mono. May your death have come hard. May the shades of hell rejoice in your company. There is nothing to link me to you.
There was the knife, of course, but that was easy, wasn’t it? There had to be a dozen places in the garage where he could safely discard the knife. No one would look for it very hard. Where could he hide it? Not under a car; cars move away. Not in the stairwell. He could throw it out the side, but it might fall somewhere easy to see. It might even hit somebody. He could hide it in the ashtray by the elevator, but even if it fitted, ashtrays must be cleaned occasionally.
Damn, but the garage was an austere, functional place. Meadows wondered fleetingly who had designed it. If he ever—God forbid!—had to design a garage, he would see to it there were places where a law-abiding man could hide a knife.
Meadows thought of crawling under a car and jamming the knife into the muffler or between the springs. But he had been on the ground too much that night already. Besides, the knife would probably fall out just when the car stopped at the booth to pay the parking fee.
In the end Meadows decided to lose the knife in a flowerpot by the elevator that held a scraggly ponytail palm. Once he had to hide from a passing car, but he made a good job of it. He dug a deep hole at the back of the pot with the point of the knife and stuck it in the earth, handle down. Carefully he packed dirt over the tip and arranged the palm fronds so that they obscured the burial ground.
It was a long way up the ramp to the top level, and every step pounded. But there was a spring in Meadows’s limp. He would look back on the nightmare as a maturing aberration. He would be better for it. He would never speak of how the terror had ended with the ripping of cloth, the awful sensation of the knife going home. In time, perhaps, he would even convince himself he had thrust with the knife, rather than witlessly, accidentally, allowing the killer to impale himself. Or perhaps he would one day feel remorse at having taken a human life, at having allowed his intellect to fail him.
Meadows felt no remorse as he passed the stairway door at level five. The door was closed. Meadows stopped to retrieve his overnight bag from where he had flung it.
Now, once he moved the car, there would be nothing whatsoever to link him to the garage or the grisly corpse in the stairwell. Meadows headed for the Ghia. Then he froze in his tracks.
Mono’s big black and gold Trans Am was gone.
Chapter 10
THE OLD MAN from Bogotá walked among his flowers. They were beautiful, and he was proud. In the high Andean valley the flowers stretched for nearly half a mile in all directions. Mostly they were carnations, red, pink, white. There were also mums, daisies, pompons and delicate roses of many hues. They grew in string-encircled beds under a giant polyethylene roof to protect them from rain and hail. Dusky, flat-faced girls in blue smocks tended the beds, tended the flowers, one at a time, trimming unwanted growth, catching the delicate buds with rubber bands to keep them from opening too fully too soon.
“The altitude, climate, temperature, sunlight—everything here is ideal for raising flowers,” the old man boasted. “What you see are more than six million flowers. When they are ready, they will be cut and flown overnight to the United States.