After a while, a Florida Power and Light van rolled up and parked across the street. Two men in hard hats and harnesses emerged who, despite this apparatus, did not visibly engage themselves in improving the flow of electricity. Paz waved to them and was ignored. Perhaps they would fool a primitive native of the Orinoco, but he doubted it. He smoked another cigar and wandered over to the water fountain near the school and drank from it. He hoped that no one called any other police; people nowadays so often did when they observed a grown man hanging around an elementary school. Thinking this, his mind moved to the general phenomenon of men behaving monstrously, and thence to the kidnapped girl, Jenny. Why had they taken her? For information, obviously, but he could not figure out what a girl described by Cooksey as somewhat dim could know that would inspire a bunch of Colombian drogeros to snatch her from a Miami street, committing a murder in the process. Unless she wasn’t that dim; unless Cooksey was lying about that and other things; unless there were connections between all these ongoing crimes that no one had thought of.
