And a pinpoint LED light: a security system.
But the light was dark. He probably disarmed the system when he was at home.
So maybe he was here. Good.
I didn’t even look around. In case one of the neighbors was up early and happened to see me, I wanted to look like I was supposed to be there.
I worked quickly but casually. First I inserted the tension tool, roughly the size of a straightened paper clip, into the keyhole and worked it a bit. Grasping the snap gun in my right hand, I poked its needle into the keyhole beside the tension tool, careful not to touch the pins, and squeezed the handle.
A loud snap.
I had to snap it ten or eleven more times. The sound echoed in the gulley between the houses. Unless Perreira was a sound sleeper, he must have heard it.
Finally I felt the lock turn.
And I was in.
40.
The air was cold. An air conditioner was on somewhere, in another room. I was hit at once by the fetid, festering-swamp stench of old bong water.
Someone was here.
All the curtains were closed. The front room was almost completely dark. In a few seconds, though, my eyes became accustomed, and I was able to make my way through the cluttered room, weaving between an enormous flat-screen TV and an outsize leather couch, the path strewn with discarded beer and wine bottles. Somehow managing not to knock anything over, I approached the loud snoring that came from an open bedroom door. At the threshold I stopped. A lump in the bed, I saw. No, two lumps.
Long blond hair lay atop a pillow as if a lion had coughed up a hairball. I saw the nape of a woman’s neck, her well-defined shoulders. Next to her, mouth gaping, snoring like a buzz saw, was the man I recognized as Lorenzo. The guy from the security video at Slammer. The guy who’d abducted Alexa. No question about it.
I thought for just a second. Ran through my options.
Decided on the simplest one.
I came around to the side of the bed where Perreira lay under the rumpled sheet, half under the blanket. My footsteps were muffled by the wall-to-wall carpet. An old air conditioner rattled and roared like a jet engine. The room was ice-cold and smelled of rancid sweat. His face was turned away, toward the blond girl, the sheet pulled up to his chin.
In my left fist I grabbed the end of the sheet. With a swift jerk I yanked it up and over his head, then under, trapping his head. He began to flail. He cursed and shouted and thrashed his arms and legs. But he was wrapped as tight as a mummy. My right hand gripped his throat and squeezed. His struggles grew more frenzied, his screams muffled by the sheet.
The blond girl in the bed next to him screamed too and scrambled out of the bed, the screams strangely deep and masculine. As I clambered on top of Mauricio’s writhing body, pinning him down with my knees, I saw that the long-haired blond was in fact a skinny, delicate-looking young man.
“I don’t have anything to do with anything!” the boy shouted. “Dude, I barely know this guy!”
He backed away, as if he expected me to lunge at him too, but I turned and let him go.
I was afraid Perreira might pass out, so I eased up a bit on his throat. He gasped, then said hoarsely: “O que você quer? O que diabos você quer?”
I had no idea what he was saying. I don’t speak Portuguese. “Where is she?” I said.
“Entreguei o pacote!”
“Where is she?”
“Eu entreguei a menina!”
“Speak English.”
“O pacote! Entreguei o pacote!”
One of the words sounded sort of familiar. “The package?”
“I deliver”-he gasped-“the package. I deliver the package!”
“Package?” A white-hot anger crackled in my blood like a live wire. It took great restraint to keep from crushing his windpipe.
Clearly he thought I was connected to the kidnapping. Someone he worked for. So he was just the delivery boy. The first link in the chain. He’d been hired to abduct Alexa and hand her over to someone else.
And since he thought I was one of his employers, that meant he probably didn’t know them, hadn’t met them. This could be useful. I relaxed my grip on his throat, and he croaked, “Entreguei a cadela, qual é?”
Though I don’t speak Portuguese, I do know a few obscenities in several languages, and I was pretty sure he’d just used one in reference to Alexa. This displeased me. I squeezed his throat until I felt the soft cartilage start to give way, and then I made myself stop. Killing this cockroach was pointless. He was useful to me only alive.
“I’m going to let you go so you can answer a few questions,” I said. “If you lie about anything at all, no matter how trivial, I’m going to slice your ear off and send it to your father at the UN. For his office wall. The second lie, you lose the other ear. That one goes-”
“No! No! I tell you everything! What do you want? I do what you say! I do everything you say! I gave you this girl and I shut my mouth.”
“Where is she?”
“Why you asking me this? You tell me to pick the bitch up and drug her and bring her to you, I do it. What do you want, man? You got the girl. I got the money. I say nothing. We’re all done here. It’s all good.”
It’s all good. A phrase I really despise. He was slick and polished and used to dealing with high-end customers who’d never buy “party favors” from some slinger with prison ink and low riders. Most college kids and rich kids didn’t like thinking what they did was criminal, really. They considered the goods he sold them just another arbitrarily outlawed delicacy, like Iranian caviar or unpasteurized Camembert. A man like Mauricio made the drug trade seem not unlawful but exclusive.
“For you I’d say it’s pretty much all bad right now.”
On his bedside table was a Nokia cell phone. I grabbed it with my free hand and slipped it in my pocket.
Then I reached behind the headboard and found what felt a lot like a gun duct-taped back there. A very expensive STI pistol, I saw. I pocketed that too, then released my grip on his throat entirely. He drew a deep, rattling breath. His face was deep red, and he looked like he was on the verge of blacking out. Maybe I’d pushed it too far.
“All right,” I said, climbing off and standing beside the bed. “Get up.”
He struggled to sit up, tangled up in the sheets and weak from oxygen deprivation. He was wearing only red Speedos. Weakly, he shifted his legs over the side of the bed. His fingernails and toenails were manicured to a high gloss. “Jesus Cristo,” he gasped, “what you want from me, man?”
“You screwed up,” I said.
He shook his head, eyes terrified. “I gave you-I gave it to-the guy.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy who gave me the phone. You-you guys? What the hell, man? You work for them, too?”
“Which one?” I said.
“No one give me names. What is this? Who are you, man?”
“What was his name?” I shouted.
“I don’t know anyone’s name, man! I can’t talk. The guy got eyes on the back of his head!”
I was about to ask what he meant when I heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairs outside. He heard it too. His face was tight with fear. “Oh, Jesus Cristo, that’s them! That’s them! He said they kill me if I talk to anyone. I didn’t tell you nothing, man!”
Then came a crash and the splintering sound of his door being broken down with a metal ram.
The men who burst into the room were wearing green uniforms with green ballistic vests and black Kevlar helmets and goggles that made them look like giant insects from some bad science-fiction flick. Right behind the breachers came the assaulters with their H &K MP5 submachine guns. The ones with shields carried Glocks. They all had FBI patches on their shoulders and chests.