Clearly the plan was to murder Avila and take control of his crooked roofers. Where was the mighty fist of Chango? Avila wondered grimly. Had the double-chicken sacrifice misfired?
Then the man from New York explained himself- who he was, what had happened to his mother, and why Avila must die a horrible drawn-out death. At first Avila pleaded innocence, feigning outrage at the fate of Beatrice Jackson. Soon he realized that the survival skills so essential to a county bureaucrat-the ability on a moment’s notice to shift blame, dodge responsibility and misplace crucial paperwork-were of no use to him now.
Avila reasoned it was better to tell the truth than to have it tortured out of him. So, out of sheer bladder-shriveling fear, he confessed to Ira Jackson.
Yes, it was he who’d been assigned to approve the mobile homes at Suncoast Leisure Village. And yes, he’d failed to perform thorough and timely inspections. And-yes, yes! God forgive me!-he’d taken bribes to overlook code violations.
“Didn’t you see those goddamn rotten straps?” demanded Ira Jackson, who was making a crucifix with fallen roof beams.
“No,” Avila admitted.
“The augers?”
“No, I swear.”
“Never even checked?” Ira Jackson pounded ferociously with a hammer.
“I didn’t see them,” Avila said morosely, “because I never drove out there.”
Ira Jackson’s hammer halted in midair. Avila, who was lashed to a broken commode in a bathroom, lowered his eyes in a pantomime of shame. That’s when he saw that the toilet bowl was alive with bright-green frogs and mottled brown snakes, splashing beneath him in fetid water.
With a shiver he said, “I never went to the trailer park. The guy sent me the money-”
“How much?”
“Fifty bucks a unit. He sent it to the office, so I figured what the hell, why waste gas? Instead of driving all the way down there, I…” Here Avila caught himself. It seemed unnecessary to reveal that he’d played golf on the afternoon he was supposed to inspect Suncoast Leisure Village.
“…I didn’t go.”
“You’re shittin’me.”
“No. I’m very, very sorry.”
The expression on Ira Jackson’s face caused Avila to reevaluate his decision to be candid. Evidently the doughnut man intended to torture him, no matter what. Ira Jackson bent over the crucifix and went back to work.
Raising his voice over the racket, Avila said, “Christ, if I knew what he was doing with those trailers, he never woulda got permits. You gotta believe me, there’s no amount of money would make me take a pass on cut augers. No way!”
“Shut up.” Ira Jackson carried the cross to the backyard and began nailing it to the trunk of a pine. It had been a tall lush tree until the hurricane sheared off the top thirty feet; now it was merely a bark-covered pole.
With each plonk of the hammer, Avila’s spirits sank. He said a prayer to Change, then tried a “Hail Mary” in the wan hope that traditional Catholic entreaty would be more potent in staving off a crucifixion.
As the man from New York dragged him to the tree, Avila cried, “Please, I’ll do anything you want!”
“OK,” said Ira Jackson, “I want you to die.”
He positioned Avila upright against the cross and wrapped duct tape around his ankles and wrists to minimize the squirming. Avila shut his eyes when he saw the doughnut man snatch up the hammer. The moment the cold point of the nail punctured his palm, Avila emitted a puppy yelp and fainted.
When he awoke, he saw that Chango had answered his prayers with a fury.
SIXTEEN
At nine sharp on the morning of August 31, an attractive brunette woman carrying two miniature dachshunds walked into a Hialeah branch of the Barnett Bank and opened an account under the name of “Neria G. Torres.”
For identification, the woman provided an expired automobile registration and a handful of soggy mail. The bank officer politely requested a driver’s license or passport, any document bearing a photograph. The woman said her most personal papers, including driver’s license, were washed away by the hurricane. As the bank officer questioned her more closely, the woman became distraught. Soon her little dogs began to bark plangently; one of them squirted from her arms and dashed in circles around the lobby, nipping at other customers. To quiet the scene, the banker agreed to accept the woman’s auto registration as identification. His own aunt had lost all her immigration papers in the storm, so Mrs Torres’s excuse seemed plausible. To open the account she gave him one hundred dollars cash, and said she’d be back in a few days to deposit a large insurance check.