On the third day of Antonio’s absence from work, and with his truck unaccounted for, the pool service company reported Antonio missing. A BOLO alert issued on his truck had been in effect only two hours when the truck was found at the strip mall.
A fellow worker, holding an ice pack against her throat, looked at the medical examiner’s video and identified Antonio’s tattoos.
When Hans-Peter Schneider saw Antonio’s identity on the news he knew time was short. The police would be working Antonio’s customer list.
Hans-Peter had watched and waited for two days. He spent the time replacing the men he had lost. He had lost two men, not counting Felix. He had only Mateo left.
Hans-Peter preferred an ethnic and language mix in his crews. He believed this made it more unlikely that the crew would scheme against him.
At a whorehouse and novelty store off Interstate 95 he looked up Finn Carter, a burglar handy with tools who had worked for him before. Finn Carter jumped a little when he saw Hans-Peter, but Finn was fresh off serving a nickel at Union Correctional, Raiford, and open to any proposition. The other was Flaco Nuñez, a body-and-fender man and chop-shop operator from Immokalee with two convictions for domestic violence. Flaco used to be a bouncer at Hans-Peter’s bars before the health department shut them down.
When the police did not come to the Escobar house, Hans-Peter went back to work.
Carter was grinding along with Flaco.
Hans-Peter Schneider watched from the basement stairs. He was wearing Antonio’s black Gothic cross earring, and thought it gave him a certain dash.
He said nothing to his new employees about the possibility of explosives. Jesús could be lying, who knew?
It is not possible to have a subterranean basement in Miami Beach, as the water table is too high. A true basement would either fill with water or float your house. To stay above tidal surges in a hurricane, the Escobar house was elevated on pilings, as was the patio, and the whole surrounded by added dirt. So its basement room, though surrounded by earth, was high enough not to flood except in the king tides.
Carter and Flaco had scraped away the cement from the basement wall to reveal the landward face of the steel cube. A vault door was set into the cube and the entire front face was painted with the vivid larger-than-life-size image of Our Lady of Charity, Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre, patroness of Cuba, and of boatmen. There was no dial or keyhole on the vault door, only a small handle that did not turn.
Carter put an eight percent cobalt bit into his heavy electric drill and coated the cutting tip with black oxide. To get 220 volts they had to run the cord down the stairs from behind the kitchen stove.
Carter crossed himself before he pressed the drill against the breast of the image and squeezed the trigger. Noise and only a small curl of metal.
Hans-Peter considered. He winced at the sound of the drill. His lashless eyelids half closed. He heard in his mind the voice of Jesús Villarreal: The Lady has an explosive temper.
He had to yell to stop Carter. He went out into the garden to make a telephone call. He waited three minutes for an answer. Hans-Peter heard the gasp of the respirator before the thin voice of Jesús Villarreal in Barranquilla, Colombia, came on the line.
“Jesús, it is time for you to earn the money I have sent you,” Schneider said.
“Señor Schneider, it is time for you to send the rest of the money I have earned,” Jesús said.
“I have a vault door.”
“To which I guided you.”
“There is no dial, only a small handle. Should I open it?”
A gasp and a pause and the thin voice came again. “It is locked.”
“Should I force it open?”
“Not if you wish to remain in this world.”
“Then advise me, my old and good friend Jesús.”
“The arrival of funds will stimulate my memory.”
“Danger is everywhere and time is short,” Schneider said. “You want to provide for your family. I want to protect my men. What threatens one also threatens the other—is your mind clear enough to follow that?”
“My mind is clear enough to count money. This is a simple matter: Pay what you said you would pay and do it now.” Jesús had to stop for several breaths and suck oxygen. “Others might be more generous. Meanwhile I would not disturb Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre, my good friend Señor Schneider.” The line went dead.
Schneider reached behind the kitchen stove and unplugged the power cord to the big drill. He went down the stairs and told his men, “We have to wait, or take it out in one piece. We have to take it some-place where we can work on it. It’s a big block of steel, Carter. We need privacy.”
The television news at noon repeated Antonio’s identity and put the police tip line number on the screen.
Schneider called Clyde Hopper in Fort Lauderdale. Hopper did marine construction and had a lucrative sideline in destroying historic houses for developers in Miami.
It is notoriously difficult to obtain demolition permits for historic houses in Miami and Miami Beach. A developer might wait weeks or months for a permit to cut down the old oak trees on a property and knock down a historic house.
Clyde Hopper’s Hitachi double-front demolition machine could reduce a house to a pile of rubble in a few hours on Sunday when the building inspector was home with the wife and kids.
The machine had a pack of trash bags by the driver’s seat for nests and nestlings and all the animal dwellings that come down with a tree.
When the destruction was discovered, the historical society would bleat and the contractor would be fined maybe $125,000—considered a popcorn fart compared to the cost of waiting for a permit, with the bankers perched on the roof like buzzards.
But it was Hopper’s barge-mounted fifty-ton winch and crane that Hans-Peter wanted. He mentioned a sum to Clyde Hopper. Then he mentioned a second sum, and a meeting was set.
“We’re pulling it out Sunday, in the daytime,” Schneider told the men, sweating in the basement in their wifebeaters.