Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [47]
Heckle and Jeckle were a lot friendlier to me as they escorted me out to the pen.
“How come you stopped being a cop?” Ellis asked me.
“I got tired of writing traffic tickets,” I told him.
“That don’t sound like a very good reason to quit your job,” he said.
“You’re right. Maybe I was too hasty.”
The outdoor cage where they put me might have passed for a schoolyard, except for the razor wire spiraling along the top of the Cyclone fence that surrounded the compound. The sunlight pressed down on the concrete, and the dank air wriggled with the heat, but out to the west the clouds had begun to mass, collecting their strength for the late-afternoon storms that came with the summer months. It was the time of year when hurricanes are born above the coast of West Africa and speed across the ocean like demons made of wind. There was no malice in them, but they were full of destruction. Most died as soon as they were named or else wandered off and disappeared. Some, like Andrew, make it to land, where they changed history. Lay a thousand yards of sidewalk a day and the jungle rains would come again someday and try to take it all back.
But I had a more personal storm to worry about.
How had Williams gotten hold of Vivian’s cell phone?
I walked through the gate and looked around and wished that a tempest would suddenly appear and scatter everything I saw to the four directions, including myself. There are places on this earth so full of distress and inertia that only chaos can set them free. Neither is it a mystery that all of those places are made by men and maintained by men, and such a place was the Krome Detention Center that day in late August. I heard the gate close behind me and felt the heat clamp down on my neck in the same instant.
No way I can stay here until Monday, I thought. I had to know what had happened to Vivian.
What was he doing with her cell phone, and why had he tried to kill me? Those thoughts kept circling in my mind like dust devils in a sandstorm, and the only way to stop their incessant whirling was clear though far-fetched. I had to get out of Krome. Two days was too long to wait for answers.
I walked across the yard toward the shadows and the promise of shade. The asphalt threatened to burn through the thin soles of the worn-down sneakers they’d given me. There was a long, dented canopy of corrugated steel that ran the length of the fence and abutted a concrete shoe box of a building. Under the canopy were wooden benches and picnic tables with canisters of water on them. Thirty or forty people sat in the shadows, some of them playing dominoes and others reading quietly in the bad light. A few merely sat staring over the expanse of the yard, watching me come. I was just another stranger walking across the desert toward them, bearing no gifts and bringing no good news.
At the west end of the yard where the clouds were closing fast, three men were playing basketball under a rim with a net made, appropriately enough, of chain. The ball refused to bounce more than a foot above the ground. The man dribbling was forced to run doubled over like a hunchback in order to stay with the ball. When he was twenty feet from the basket, he straightened up suddenly and launched the ball at the rusted rim. It sailed through the hoop and landed in a puddle without bouncing. The men came and looked down at the ball the way you look at a dead dog that belongs to somebody else. There was a brief discussion, and then the men turned and walked away, forfeiting the ball to the sun-cracked concrete.
The Haitians sat with the Haitians, and the Cubans sat with the Cubans. There was a blond man who looked like a sun-drunk German, and a small group of Central Americans with straight black hair and Mayan faces. It was like being at the United Nations, except we were all in jail, a fact that tends to kill much of the joy of the multicultural experience. Everyone was speaking either in Creole or in Spanish. The beleaguered-looking man with the blond hair stood alone by the fence, talking to himself. In his natty, beige,