a cool face. The Witness’s face was not cool at all. She kept looking here… looking there… all the while gnawing at the knuckle of her index finger… or that was what it looked like.
“Magdalena, don’t keep thinking about the worst that can happen. Nothing at all has happened so far… but if you’re really worried, why don’t you move in with someone else for a few days?”
The look she gave him made him think she was waiting for him to say, “Why don’t you move in with me?”… He had no urge at all… He couldn’t see her lowering her panties anymore… He didn’t need a witness in his tiny apartment… He looked at his watch… “Seven-fifteen.” He said it aloud. “I’ve got forty-five minutes to get home before the curfew begins.”
Nestor didn’t actually think of driving home for a second. He was just keeping a Witness on an even keel. In fact, he headed straight for I-95 up to Hallandale.
He braked the Camaro down from sixty miles an hour to forty-five and not one m.p.h. faster—now that it was a couple of minutes past 8:00 a.m…. and all he needed was to do something stupid like getting himself pulled over by a state trooper for speeding and have his violation of the curfew come out that way. He was down closer to forty as he swung around that last big curve on Hallandale Beach Boulevard—
—and there it was, the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults, baking a little harder beneath the great Miami heat lamp… crumbling a little more… the “terraces” sagging a little more and that much closer to giving up and plunging upon the concrete below in a pile. The place was silent as a tomb… Like 99-plus percent of the citizens of South Florida, Nestor had never seen a tomb… and “silent”—how would he know? From here inside the Camaro with the windows up and the air-conditioning struggling to push a gale through the vents, Nestor could hear nothing from outside. He just assumed it was silent. He thought of everybody in the Alhambra Lakes Home for Active Adults as—well, not as dead exactly, but they weren’t what he would call alive, either. They were in Purgatory. In Nestor’s take on how the nuns had explained Purgatory, it was a huge space… a space too big to be called a room… like those huge spaces in the Miami Convention Center… and all the newly dead souls milled about anxiously in that space, wondering what region of life after death God was going to dispatch them to… for eternity, which of course never ends.
Once more he parked in the visitors’ parking zone nearest the highway and farthest from the building’s main entrance. He was already wearing his darker-than-dark CVS wire-rim sunglasses… in the name of vanity, not subterfuge… but now he reached under the front seat and pulled out his white looks-like-woven-straw plastic porkpie hat with its big brim… in the name of disguise.
How long? Maybe five seconds?—after the air-conditioning turned off, a suffocating heat took over the Camaro’s interior. When he got out, there was no fresh air… just stultifying heat from the great heat lamp. His clothes felt like they were made of blanket wool and leather, even his mock-gingham polyester shirt. He had picked it out to meet Magdalena because it had long sleeves. He didn’t want to flex so much as an inch of Camacho muscles. His chino pants might as well have been leather. They were tailored so tight in the seat, every step he took seemed to squeeze more sweat out of the flesh of his crotch. A couple of times he looked down to see if it showed. The vast parking lot was a dazzle of sunlight flashing off metal trim, so much so that the cars became mere shapes and shadows—even when peered upon through darker-than-dark cop shades. By squinting he was able to make out Igor’s Vulcan SUV. Well, he hadn’t gone off somewhere, in any case—not that he was in any mood to venture out into public, from the way John Smith described his paranoia. Uh-oh, up at the curb near the entrance there were two police cruisers from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. That was all he needed… some cops standing around who could easily recognize, cop shades and all, the curfew-coshing, relieved-of-duty Miami cop who had insisted on getting himself a lot of publicity—most recently bad.