“Nice? Expensive? Economy? You want fleas and bedbugs, or caviar and champagne?”

Dewey made out the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Just take me to a fucking hotel.”

The cab lurched forward.

“There are more than two hundred hotels in Miami,” said the cabbie.

“Well, then you have a lot of choices, don’t you?”

“Bars,” said the cabbie. “I have a feeling you want to be near some bars.”

Dewey sat back, a slight grin spread across his face at the cabbie, but he said nothing.

“What brings you to Miami?” asked the cabbie.

“None of your fucking business,” said Dewey, looking at him with bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror.

“All right, I’ll shut up.”

Fifteen minutes later, the cab pulled into the Delano Hotel, stopping as a valet grabbed the back door of the cab and opened it.

“The Delano,” said the cabbie, grinning. “Great place for assholes like you.”

Dewey did a double take as he reached into his pocket for some cash.

“Did you just call me an asshole?”

“You weren’t going to tip me anyway.”

The fare was thirty dollars and Dewey threw down an extra twenty.

“What’s that for?” asked the cabbie.

“For having a set of balls, unlike most people.”

Dewey shut the door and went inside. It was an old hotel but modern, having been redesigned and decorated with a meticulous array of uncomfortable-looking modern furniture, strange art, and odd photographs.

“Bonjour,” said a pompadoured greeter in a white button-down shirt. “Welcome to the Delano. Consider this your home away from home.”

Dewey did a U-turn. He walked down the block to a plainer-looking hotel, the National. There was no greeter, and he walked to the front desk. He paid in cash for three nights and registered under the name Tom Smith.

The room was on the tenth floor, overlooking South Beach. He looked at the clock by the bed. It was 6:00 P.M. He stripped down to his underwear, opened up the door to the small balcony, then ordered a steak from room service. He took a can of beer from the minibar and went out on the balcony. He sat down in one of the chaises and smoked a cigarette as the sky over South Beach turned purple with the coming sunset. The beach below was less crowded than he would have thought. He sat staring at the water and the beach, purging his mind of any sort of semblance of thoughts, until his dinner arrived.

After dinner, he went to the pocket of his jeans and removed the finger. He went into the bathroom and inspected it under the light. The finger was nearly black now, beginning to rot. He examined the fingerprint lines. Who would want him dead? Hector was right: maybe it was Iran. The dead man? Perhaps a mercenary. But who were the other two men?

He went to the minibar and removed a small bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He chugged it down, then went to the full-length mirror. He stared into his own eyes.

When Holly died, part of him died with her. Holly had been the only love Dewey had ever known. His first love. He didn’t know anything else, and it was pure. Losing her had been devastating. It had taken Dewey more than a decade to will the thought of her out of his head, ten long years of the hardest labor he’d ever experienced just to get over her. Dewey had found the most punishing work imaginable, as a roughneck on a succession of oil platforms, hundreds of miles offshore, first in the bitter winters of northern Europe, then in the miserable heat off the coast of South America. It had taken the punishing hell of hard labor to restore himself.

Jessica was different. He hadn’t been expecting it. She understood him, challenged him, accepted him. He’d grown to know her, then love her. They’d talked about different places to settle down. Jessica liked Portland, Maine, close enough to Castine for visits but also a city, with great restaurants. A place you could raise a kid. It wasn’t too late for that, they both knew. But there would probably be time enough for only one. Would it be a boy or a girl? They talked about names. For a girl, they liked the name Summer. For a boy, Hobey, after Dewey’s brother.

Now it was gone. It was destroyed. And the memories were like ashes in his mouth. They reminded Dewey that he was different. They fed his innermost fear, that he wasn’t meant to be happy, that he’d been chosen somehow to be tested in the cruelest of ways.

He stared at his reflection in the mirror.

“She was innocent,” Dewey said aloud, to no one.

Dewey swung his right fist against the mirror. He struck it once, but nothing happened. The next time, he swung harder. The mirror cracked, a spiderweb emanating out from the center of the glass, where he’d hit it. He looked at his fist. The knuckles were bloody where the skin had just been torn off. He punched again, harder this time. He felt glass enter his skin, then watched as a few pieces fell to the floor and shattered. He swung yet again, harder this time. The spiderweb disappeared as the wall of glass flashed silver, then cascaded to the floor at his feet, hundreds of shards of glass shattering around him.

He walked into the center of the bedroom, pulling pieces of glass from between the knuckles of his right fist. He got down on his knees, then put his hands down. He did a push-up, then another, and soon was moving up and down, up and down, up and down, his arms burning, sweat pouring off his chest and head.

Walk away, he thought. Leave it behind.

After fifty push-ups, he felt like throwing up. Blood dripped from his right fist onto the floor. He kept going. At a hundred push-ups, he did throw up, whiskey mostly. It poured from his mouth as he kept moving up and down. His arms burned like they were on fire.

He was back there, at the edge of it all, back where it began, in Ranger school, that long winter in Georgia. Nothing would ever be harder than Delta, but that first time, that pain that they drove you to, that first time only occurs once, and for Dewey it was Rangers. He threw up so many times that first week of Ranger school that he lost count. He got so used to it that he came to understand that beyond the throw-up, beyond the wall of pain that paralyzed you, came the other pain, the one that was from God, the one that told you that you alone could get to that point, you alone could bear it, you alone were forged in steel strong enough to endure it.

Blood and vomit covered the floor now, and tears of pain dripped from his eyes as he drove himself further, first 130, then, at some point, 200 push-ups.

Dewey needed to go back to that time and place now. He needed to go back and find that inner steel he knew existed, the steel he would need to survive Jessica’s death. The steel he would stab into the heart of those who’d taken her.

He lost count sometime after 220 push-ups, passing out on the floor, lying in a pool of his own sweat, vomit, tears, and blood. He curled up into a fetal position, sobbing, and fell into a deep sleep.

32

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

The phone started ringing precisely at midnight.

The only woman in the small Recoleta apartment was in bed. Francita Marti, a frail woman of eighty-four, let it ring for more than a minute. After that, she realized whoever it was wasn’t going away. It required nearly another minute to get out of bed, with her arthritis.

“Yes,” she said in a soft but annoyed voice. “Who is it? If this is one of those calls—”

“Good evening,” came the voice. It sounded distorted and loud, as if the man on the other end had a disability. She could not have known he was using a device to cloak his voice.

“Who is this?”

“It’s about your son.”

The woman became alert. She reached for the lamp next to the phone and turned it on. She found a pad and pen to write with. It didn’t happen often, but in matters having to do with her son, she knew to listen and to obey. After all, he was the top law-enforcement officer in all of Argentina.