PROLOGUE

Tampa, Florida

Sunday, 3:00 a.m.

February 18, 2001

MIGUEL STRUGGLED TO TURN the corner at Seventh Avenue and Sixteenth Street. He grunted with effort as he pushed a heavy plastic trash barrel on wheels, piled high with garbage. The cleaning crew had been working on the streets in Tampa’s Ybor City since the parade ended and the crowd finally dispersed about one a.m. Miguel had a lot of clean up to do before the small businesses along the brick paved streets opened.

Who would believe these rich Americans could be such pigs? Miguel thought. In his country where people were poor, maybe, but not in Florida, “land of flowers.” In his country, people weren’t tidy like they were here, he’d noticed. Tampa was a clean place. Nice. Miguel wanted to stay here, with his father’s family. He liked Tampa.

Miguel bent his head to his task, left hand bracing the garbage towering perilously higher than the five-foot barrel should hold. He felt stretched to his limit. He couldn’t see the ground in front of the small wheels that seemed to catch on every crack in the old sidewalk.

A beer can clattered as it hit the ground. Miguel stooped to pick it up, along with a few candy wrappers that fell off the pile when the barrel stopped rolling. “Pigs,” he spat again, as he leaned his weight into the barrel and got it moving again.

Watching the ground as he walked, Miguel tried to stay close to the buildings because the sidewalk sloped toward the street and he couldn’t control the trash barrel if the small wheels started downhill.

He wasn’t in any mood for delay. He had been picking up beer cans, beads, condoms, half-eaten candy and other human trash from the old urine stenched streets for the past three hours. Miguel was cold and tired. His eyelids felt heavy, scratchy, when he allowed them to close for a few seconds. He wanted to finish his work as quickly as possible and go home. Miguel gave the barrel a mighty shove and smiled to himself as it began to move more quickly.

Suddenly, the left front wheel of the can struck something on the sidewalk. The force and speed of Miguel’s efforts pushed the barrel toward the building on the right. It bumped into the building and bounced back. The rebound blow caught Miguel off guard and nearly knocked him down. Several beer bottles fell to the ground with a loud crash, brown and green glass shards flying everywhere. One sharp edge caught Miguel’s cheek and he felt the burning scratch as the piece of glass sailed past.

Wiping the blood off his face with a grimy work glove, Miguel cursed himself for not paying attention. Impatiently, he pushed the heavy barrel, trying to straighten its path again and avoid the problem in the sidewalk. He would clean up the broken glass on the way back, he thought, his anxiety mounting.

Miguel had been on his way to the large dumpster in back of Maria’s restaurant so that he could dump the barrel and start again. His boss had yelled at him twice already. Miguel didn’t have time to fool around. This was his first week on the job and he was on probation. He couldn’t make his boss angry. He needed this job if he was to stay in this country.

Miguel put both hands on the middle of the plastic barrel, braced himself with one foot against the building, and pushed harder.

The trash barrel pivoted on its left wheel. It turned slightly and the right side rolled downhill on the sloped sidewalk. And stopped. Now both front wheels seemed to be stuck by a block of some kind. Miguel wailed in frustration, but the barrel didn’t move.

Miguel wanted to make as few of these trips to the dumpster as possible, to finish quickly, make his supervisor proud. But he’d piled the barrel too full. A stupid mistake, he realized too late.

The barrel was close to the building and seemed wedged into a hole or something now. Miguel couldn’t back up. Nor could he see in front of the barrel to try to go around the blockage.

Miguel shoved the barrel with all of his strength. Instead of rolling over whatever was blocking its path, the barrel tilted wildly and fell forward, spilling its contents across the sidewalk and into the street.

Shouting a loud stream of Spanish curses, Miguel jumped back as every foul liquid left over from the parade splashed all over his clothes. He swiped ineffectively at the stinky, gooey mess that now covered his overalls. He was drenched through to his tee-shirt and jeans. He could feel the cold as his shirt stuck to his narrow chest.

Still cursing, Miguel walked around to the side, righted the barrel and moved it off the pile of garbage that now covered everything within a two-foot radius. Miguel found the shovel that was knocked off the hook on the side of the barrel when it fell and began to toss the garbage back into the trash can, cursing with every stroke.

On the fourth scoop, his shovel hit something solid on the ground, under the slop the barrel had spewed. The stroke of his shovel against the solid lump jarred his arms sending a sharp pain up to his shoulders. Miguel let out a new and more heartfelt stream of outraged curses.

He bent down from the waist, trying to see what was causing him such a problem without actually touching the disgusting pile. In the vague light from the street lamps, the big lump looked like another pile of garbage. But Miguel thought not. He could see something bright and colorful on the ground. And this pile, even though his trash barrel had been too full, was too high.

Miguel had run across two previous drunken revelers on his route tonight. Now, he could see that this lump on the ground was a third pirate. Causing him so much trouble, making him late. His boss would be very angry. “Americanos!” Miguel spat, giving the lump a sharp, rough nudge with the toe of his heavy work boot. The lump didn’t move.

Miguel removed his glove, reached into his pocket for his flashlight. Re-gloved, he stooped down and swept the garbage off the pirate, pushing aside the slop. When Miguel saw the man’s costume, his impatience and anger returned. These Americanos seemed to have nothing better to do than to party themselves into a stupor while hard-working Latinos cleaned up after them, he complained under his breath.

“Wake up, señor. Wake up,” Miguel said, shaking the man as roughly as he could, given the disparity in their sizes. The drunk didn’t stir. Miguel almost left him there then, to sleep it off, but something about the man didn’t look right. Miguel bent toward him and shook the pirate again, imploring him to wake up and move along. Just then, the angry supervisor came around the corner.

“Miguel, where the hell are you? We need that can over here, now!” the supervisor shouted in Spanish. He walked toward Miguel, moving quickly. He stopped just before he tripped over the mound on the sidewalk. The supervisor looked down. “What the—?”

“He won’t wake up,” Miguel said, a sorrowful expression on his face.

“The hell he won’t,” the supervisor responded. The supervisor had cleaned up after sixteen parades and he knew how to deal with these drunks. He didn’t care who they were in real life. On his watch, they were a menace.

The supervisor pushed the pirate hard with his boot. The man’s head lolled over loosely, revealing a grey-blonde ponytail bound at the base of his skull with a limp, wet ribbon. Even in the weak ambient light, they could both see the bloody depression in the man’s skull where it had been resting on the heavy piece of concrete jutting up out of the sidewalk.

“Miguel, this man is dead,” the supervisor shouted. “Who is this guy?”

Frightened now, Miguel shook his head and lifted both hands, palms up. “I don’t know. I found him here. I don’t know.”

When the police officers got to the scene, they checked for identification on the body and found none. Miguel, the supervisor and the rest of the crew were interviewed, but they had no more information to disclose. There had been outrageous revelry that night, but these workers hadn’t been part of it. None of them recognized the dead man.

The police labeled him “John Doe” and sent him off to the morgue.