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No one owns life.But anyone with a frying pan owns death.
CHAPTER 1Tiny Bock heaved his bulk from the sand chair.
CHAPTER 2Commander Bill Henderson, Homicide Division executive officer, Miami Police Department, entered Sergeant Hoke Moseley's cubicle, removed the Miami Herald from the chair beside the desk, tossed it toward the overflowing wastepaper basket, and sat down heavily. He looked at the sheet of paper on his clipboard and sighed.
CHAPTER 3Hoke shared a leased house with Ellita Sanchez; her baby son, Pepe; and Hoke's two teenaged daughters from his broken marriage.
CHAPTER 4The next morning, when Detective Teodoro Gonzalez came into the office, Hoke handed him the garage door opener and told him to go to the late Dr. Russell's house and see if it would open the garage door. Hoke didn't tell Gonzalez why. All he had was a theory, even if the opener did open the garage. If it worked, however, his suspicion would be stronger, and it would confirm that he was at least on to something.
CHAPTER 5After lunch Hoke typed his notes about the opener, his speculations, and put them into the Russell file, together with the receipt Gonzalez brought back from Property. He slid the accordion file back into his pending drawer. He would let his subconscious mind work on the case for a couple of days before he took the file out and looked at it again.
CHAPTER 6Saturday morning after breakfast Hoke mowed the lawn. The lawn mower was old, and the blades needed sharpening; but Hoke enjoyed the exercise. The activity, he felt, was good for him, but he wanted to finish before the sun got too hot. It had been eighty degrees at six-thirty, with humidity to match, when he went out to get the newspaper. The paper stated that the highs would probably be in the low nineties. The Henry J was gone, so Hutton, thankfully, was off somewhere. Hoke was pleased about that. He hadn't relished the thought that Hutton might sit out in his front yard and watch him work for two hours.
CHAPTER 7They took both cars to the party for Tio Arnoldo Sanchez. All of his Miami relatives were there. Except for Ellita's parents, Hoke didn't know any of them. There were cousins and cousins-in-law by marriage and a few old men who had known Arnoldo back in Havana thirty years earlier.
CHAPTER 8Hoke left the house early, stopped for breakfast at a truck stop at Krome and the Trail, and then drove cautiously down the two-lane Everglades highway toward Monroe Station. The Tamiami Trail was an extension of Eighth Street, renamed Calle Ocho by the Cubans, but was still referred to by the old-time Miamians as the "Trail." When the two-lane highway had been built from Naples to Miami, road crews had worked toward each other from both sides of the state. Monroe Station had been a supply camp then for workers and had found its way onto the state map.
CHAPTER 9When Hoke emerged from the shady grotto to stand on the north side of the trail, his Pontiac was gone. Perhaps he should have argued with Brownley to keep the car, but it wouldn't have done any good. A toothless migrant like Adam Jinks could hardly explain how he came to own a 1973 Pontiac with a new engine and a police radio. The rusty Toyota was still there. A tourist family had parked beside the pickup and was disembarking for breakfast (a middle-aged man in green canvas shorts, two teenage children, and an obese woman-the wife, no doubt, carrying a sleepy two-year-old on her hip). Hoke wanted to follow them into the restaurant and drink another beer, but Brownley had told him not to go inside. Besides, he had to guard his eight bucks and change until, somehow, he managed to obtain some more money.
CHAPTER 10Mrs. Elena Osborne, nee Elena Espenida, lived in the Lucky Star Trailer Park with her son, Warren, about nine sparsely settled blocks away from the cafeteria. As they walked together, Elena told Hoke a few things about her life. She was from San Fernando, Luzon, in the Philippine Islands, and had married a retired army staff sergeant. One of her friends in San Fernando had obtained a copy of a magazine called Asian Roses. The magazine was published and edited in Portland, Oregon. The subscribers were Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders who wanted to marry Asian women. Girls and women from Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, and Hawaii sent in their photographs, short biographies, and five dollars and were listed in the magazine. She and her girlfriend both had sent in snapshots, biographies, and five-dollar money orders. Her girlfriend had received three letters, and Elena had received only two. Her girlfriend was too timid to answer her letters, but Elena had answered one of hers. She hadn't answered the other because it came from a seventy-one- year-old man who had recently lost his wife, and he had merely wanted a young woman to keep him warm at night. But the other letter, from Sergeant Warren Osborne, was very persuasive. He was a very handsome man who wanted a mother for his children and a companion to share his life in Immokalee, Florida. He had been retired from the army for two years, owned his own mobile home in the Lucky Star Trailer Park, and worked as a checker for Sunshine Packers. He also owned a Toyota pickup, only two years old, and he had never been married before. His mother had lived with him in the mobile home, but she had been dead for more than a year, and he was very lonely. He also felt, now that he was forty, that it was time to get married and have a son to carry on his name. He had told the truth about Immokalee, explaining that the town was in a rural area, with the same climate as the Philippines and that there were cities nearby-Naples and Fort Myers-where they could go and shop on weekends and see first-run movies and major-league baseball games during spring training.
CHAPTER 11The Mexican Bock had called Chico-Not Cicatriz-threw Hoke face down on a musty bale of alfalfa. The alfalfa was black with rot. It had been rained on, dried, rained on, and dried again and was so black and crumbly it looked as if it had been charred. The moldy dust made Hoke sneeze, and he felt as if knives were being jabbed into his side. Hoke rolled to his left to relieve the pressure on his right side. He couldn't think clearly; everything had happened too fast. He knew that his ribs were either cracked or broken, and if they were broken, a jagged splinter could pierce his lungs. His arms dangled helplessly over the bale, and he was afraid to move. Hoke suppressed his desire to cough and took shallow breaths through his open mouth.
CHAPTER 12There were a good many things to think about on his walk back to Immokalee, and Hake had to sit down frequently to rest. During his rest periods he picked out most of the splinters embedded in his hands. His tailbone hurt with every jarring step, especially when he stumbled slightly, and his arms felt heavy and sore. Swinging that two-by-four had been like two hours of batting practice, and his muscles weren't used to being stretched.
CHAPTER 13The following day at 1:00 P.M. Noseworthy came up to Hoke's room and got him. Mel Peoples was on the line from Tallahassee. Noseworthy went into the kitchen, and Hoke picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 14The next morning Hoke parked the unmarked Plymouth in the police lot. As he got out of the car, he flipped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. Three cars away, Captain Slater was just getting into his Lincoln Continental. He held up a hand and walked toward Hoke. His shoulders were straight, and his back was stiff, as if someone held a gun to his spine.
CHAPTER 15While Hoke was watching Saturday Night Live on the tube, the phone rang. Hoke cursed and turned the sound down before answering the phone in the kitchen.
CHAPTER 16Hoke awoke with a groan at ten-thirty. His neck, still bruised and sore, had developed a crick in it from his position in the chair. Shooting pains pulsed tiny darts into the backs of his eyes. Hoke showered and shaved, scrubbed his teeth, and rinsed his dentures in Listerine before adjusting them in his mouth. He made coffee, took three Tylenol, and was on his third cup of coffee when the phone rang. It was Major Brownley.
CHAPTER 17Molly's Coffee Shop didn't have much of a breakfast crowd, Hoke thought, but when he examined the menu, he could see why. There was no pass-through coffee bar, and this was an anomaly for Little Havana. Most of the Cuban restaurants on Eighth Street served a desayuno especial-two fried eggs, ham or bacon, long slices of margarined Cuban toast, and cafe con leche-for $1.49. Molly's breakfast was standard American-two eggs (your way), bacon, ham, or sausage, with grits or home fried potatoes and white bread toast for $2.79. Coffee, at fifty cents, was extra, and there were no free refills. Molly probably made her money, if she made her nut at all, he thought, with the white-collar lunch crowd, workers from the office buildings over on Brickell Avenue. There were several salads on the lunch menu and a few light lunch items that would appeal to legal secretaries.
CHAPTER 18Three weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, Hoke was fixing sandwiches in the dining room. He had a plate of assorted cold cuts, a loaf of rye bread, and some freshly picked beefsteak tomatoes he had purchased that afternoon from a stand on Krome Avenue. Aileen sat across the table from him, watching, and Sue Ellen was making potato salad in the kitchen.
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