Page 78 of The Secret Dinner

Antunes nodded, looking right through me like I was a ghost. The cubicle smelled stuffy and the creaking sound of the ceiling fan slowly turning was torturous. Umberto sat down in one of the chairs near the wall, rummaged around the messy desk until he found a crossword magazine, and began doing a puzzle.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait. Sometimes it takes a while.”

Umberto focused on his crossword. I just stood there speechless, keeping an eye on the station’s activity, watching uneasily as people came and went, and the cops exchanged glances and meaningful gestures I couldn’t make head nor tail of.

“Stop pacing, it’s annoying,” said Umberto without looking up from his crossword. “Help me out here. Characteristic of metaphysical or moral doctrines which assert the supremacy of evil over good. Nine letters.”

“Realism.”

Umberto tried it, but it didn’t fit. “That’s only seven letters.”

“Try pessimism,” I said with a wink. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

In the hallway, the door was easy to find, courtesy of the sheet of printer paper taped to it that read Pisser. I went in, locked the door, and tried to think quickly. Since I still had a signal, I shared a dropped pin with Cora via WhatsApp and texted her: If I go missing, let the guys know. I couldn’t send it to the group chat; Miguel might freak out and show up unexpectedly. And if I sent it to Hugo … well, truth be told, I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in him.

Before leaving the bathroom, I remembered to flush the toilet to justify why I was taking so long and splashed some water on my face, taking deep breaths to try to stop sweating. I had no idea what was in store for me, so I decided to turn on my phone’s voice recorder. When I got back to the little room, Umberto was still working on his crossword puzzle while Officer Antunes was stamping papers. He looked at me like one would a buzzing fly but soon went back to his task. It felt like time had stopped.

After a few minutes, another officer walked in. I kept my head down, trying to make it look like I wasn’t paying much attention. There was no name tag on his uniform.

“Potential pair of seagulls,” he said. “That’s the guy, over there.”

Through the partition, I looked over to the other room and saw the young man from the Nissan. He shifted in his chair, hands resting on the desk, looking worried.

“Where are they going?” asked Antunes.

“Ilha Grande.”

“Great. If they disappear, people will think it was on the island. What are you waiting for?”

“There’s a problem,” the police officer said. “Apparently, they’re going to meet some people there, the guy’s supposed to return his friend’s wallet. Plus, they drive a nice car, and the girl took some sleeping pills so she wouldn’t get carsick. They look well-off; it might be dangerous. That’s why I wanted to check with you first.”

Antunes and Umberto looked at each other, considering, until the boss made the decision.

“Better not risk it. Give them a Breathalyzer, see if you can squeeze a little money from the nerd, and let them go.”

“Okay.”

Something about the officer’s gait as he turned away made me instantly recognize him. It was Detective Amóz. He looked a little different—his hair was thinning, and he was sporting a bushy mustache that distracted from his plain features, but there was no doubt: He was the same man who’d come to my apartment the year before with a report of an alleged hit-and-run at Largo do Machado. Not knowing how to react, I just froze. It had been a setup from the start. Umberto had engineered that whole situation to put pressure on us. That’s how he’d convinced us to join the business. Was Hugo part of it, too? Or was he just another victim?

“That’s the guy—” I started to say.

“There’s no point in revisiting that, Dante,” Umberto interrupted me, standing up. “Give me a hand here.”

He bent down to unzip a duffel bag in the corner. He pulled out a pistol and a shotgun and checked that they were loaded. Antunes walked to the door and looked outside, where Amóz and two other officers were approaching a couple in an old red Civic. It was close to lunchtime and traffic had thinned. The Honda was the only vehicle on the shoulder, aside from the police cars and mine.

Through the window, I watched Amóz ask the driver—a tall, handsome Black man—to step out of the vehicle and head inside the station. One of the agents stuck close to the car, keeping the woman company, while the others went inside. Sporting a serious frown, the driver walked down the hallway to the small office across from ours. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Amóz motioned for him to sit down and left him alone.

“Another couple of seagulls on a vacation to Ilha Grande,” he said, coming into our room. “But they’re driving a beat-up Civic. They’re a couple of fuckups. I don’t think anybody’ll miss them.”

Antunes glanced briefly at Umberto and nodded to Amóz. Without saying a word, the officer left the room. Antunes cocked his pistol as Umberto handed me the shotgun.

“What the—?”

“Time to go hunting!” he said, breaking into a grin.

They turned in to the hallway, guns raised. It all happened so fast. As soon as he entered the room where the man was waiting, Amóz shot him twice in the back, just below the nape. The man fell bleeding onto the desk and tried to crawl away, still alive, before receiving one last bullet in the head. The woman must have heard the sounds from inside because she ducked, startled. She opened the passenger door and ran crouching for the woods before the cop watching her could react.