The Escobar house was quiet. The movie mannequins and action figures looked at each other across the rooms of draped furniture.
Without Cari Mora to adjust them, the automatic blinds, which used to go up in the morning and come down in the hot afternoon, remained mostly in the down position, running up and down at random with their timers awry. They made twilight in the house for most of the day. The sprinkler system turned on and off several times in an hour.
Shortly before daylight a tree rat pushed open the cabinet under the sink from the inside and, staying close to the wall, found and ate the spilled seed on the floor from the absent cockatoo.
At first light Cari Mora got out of a landscape truck at the front gate and poked in the access code. The gate swung open and Marco drove in with his crew, Ignacio and Esteban along with Benito and Cari.
Gomez was in a second car parked a block away with Don Ernesto.
“Better keep your mouth open a little bit, Gomez, in case there’s a loud noise and a pressure wave,” Don Ernesto said.
Bobby Joe’s truck still stood in the driveway near the front door.
The truck’s windows were down and one door was open, as though it was still waiting for Bobby Joe. It had rained in the night and the truck was wet inside.
Cari looked at the truck. Sitting there wet, it was about the same color as Bobby Joe’s brains.
They piled out, armed, with their pockets full of doorstops. Standing on each side of the front door, they tried the lock. Locked. Cari had the key. They shoved open the door and covered Cari while she checked the alarm panel. All off. She turned on the motion sensors upstairs.
“Watch the doorways for trip wires,” she said.
Esteban held up a pressure can of jock-itch powder.
Cari shook her head. “No beams in here.”
They moved around the side of the house, staying low beneath the windows. A side door stood open. The tree rat heard them coming in and disappeared back under the sink, leaving the cabinet door ajar.
They cleared the downstairs, room by room, yelling “Clear!” as each space was found empty.
They heard something upstairs, a voice. They watched the motion sensor lights but nothing was moving upstairs. Cari shut the alarm off and Esteban set up to cover the big staircase. Marco and Cari went up fast, Cari carrying the AK-47 at the low ready, using the sling.
In a small bedroom upstairs they found the marks of a swift departure. Some clothes abandoned, a TV on. A wasp had flown in the open window and now batted against the ceiling.
The only empty bedrooms were the master, where Hans-Peter had slept, and the room Mateo had used. The other rooms held scattered belongings of the dead: a shaving kit, a pair of burglar shoes with a stud finder taped to one toe.
Leaning in the corner of a bedroom was the AR-15 of the late Umberto, who put Antonio’s head in the crab trap and tried to drown Cari.
In the pool house Marco found the harness Felix had worn when he went into the hole. The straps were crusted with blood and sand. Marco looked at it for several minutes. Drag marks in blood led to the dock. He sent Esteban to hose the blood out of the pool house.
Marco went to the basement room and stood on the stairs looking at the face of the cube. His instructions were to leave it alone.
The life-size image of the Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre, vivid on the vault door, made the room feel like a chapel. The struggling boatmen were painted on the sea in front of her. A fresh curl of metal hung from a shallow hole drilled in the saint’s side. The big drill lay on the floor.
Captain Marco looked at the desperate boatmen in the Virgin’s care and crossed himself.
Don Ernesto was waiting in his car. His telephone rang. Antonio’s telephone was calling. He looked at his phone for a moment before he answered it.
“So you have the house,” Hans-Peter Schneider said. “I can send the brass there in five minutes.”
“Unless I do what?” Don Ernesto said.
“Give me one-third, that’s very reasonable.”
“Have you got a market?”
“Yes.”
“Your market will show me cash?”
“Or a wire transfer anywhere you like.”
“All right.”
“And there’s one other thing I want.” Hans-Peter whispered his heart’s desire.
Don Ernesto closed his eyes, listening.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “I cannot do that.”
“I don’t think you understand yourself, Don Ernesto. For two-thirds of twenty-five million dollars, you would do anything.”
The phone went dead.