Vacant Shore

by Jack Hardin

  Andrés’s eyes seemed to droop with heaviness. So did his voice. “When?” he asked.

  “Over the next couple weeks I’ll be turning things over to Quinton. I need to remain until we know how this new situation with Kyle Armstrong will resolve.”

  Quinton sighed deeply again. “Have you spoken with Aldrich about this?”

  “No.”

  “He’s not going to like it.”

  “We did this for eight years without him. He can walk away anytime he wants.”

  Quinton shook his head. “He likes the money, the power, too much.”

  “And that concerns me,” Ringo said.

  Quinton looked to his right. “Chewy?” Chewy’s eyes were locked on a marble ashtray atop the coffee table. He didn’t look up, just shook his head.

  Ringo ran a hand across his mouth. “This will be hard on all of us.”

  “We work well together,” Quinton said. “All of us. You’ve always been at the helm.”

  “When you and I entered into this,” Ringo said, “you were plodding through a swamp of grief. One of us needed to think clearly. So I took the lead. You’re just as capable at running this show as I am. Nothing should change, fundamentally. Ringo is greatly feared. But there has been a lot of heat lately. Whatever you do, you must keep the rules we established.”

  Quinton nodded and ran his tongue across his teeth again.

  “Come down to the bar soon and tell us about your trip,” Ringo said. “Everyone over there has missed you.”

  “Certainly.”

  Ten minutes later, Quinton left to return to St. James City, a subdued Andrés and Chewy not far behind him, an appointment of their own to keep. Ringo stood looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the magnificent green lawn, gardens, and the pool that was surrounded by a flagstone path and Cuban palms. He would miss this view, this place. Here he could allow a darker part of himself to flourish. A part of himself that remained hidden from the rest of the world.

  But that wasn’t the hardest thing. In an unspoken way, Ringo had just told Chewy and Andrés that he was giving up one family for another, that they hadn’t made the cut.

  Still, they would all work just as well together without him. And standing there, looking past the terrace and out toward the mighty Caloosahatchee River, Ringo rested in the surety that Quinton would do a fine job.

  There was, however, only one problem.

  Ringo did not know what had happened to Quinton while he was in Chicago. And now, Quinton was not sure he was going to tell him.

  Chapter Ten

  The warehouse in Cape Coral had been used as a storage facility for surplus lumber until it closed its doors at the turn of the millennium. Bob C. Mefford—and he had always used the C: “Hello, I’m Bob C. Mefford...Bob C. Mefford to see Mr. Ferris”—had been in the lumber business his whole life, callusing his hands early on by following his father’s example and spending his first six years out of high school as a lumberjack in the sawtimber forests of North Dakota. From there he moved into roles such as foreman and procurement manager before finishing up his career in the modest C-suite of a small cap logging company. He finally retired down to South Florida until the unhappy discovery that you could only collect so many seashells and play so much golf before you started to feel a little light between the ears. He loved lumber and he knew lumber, so for the last decade of his life he sourced and sold it surplus. Then, in 1998 Bob C. Mefford took ill and died of a faulty ticker. Nobody knew until he was in a fancy lumber box that he had been up to his earlobes in debt, that for the last five years Bob C. Mefford had been robbing Peter, Paul, and all the rest of the apostles, to pay for month-long trips with his wife to Brazil and South Africa and Sweden, to name a few. His banker, who never was paid on half a dozen loans, was heard quipping that the old man’s brain had quit before his heart. The banker just hadn’t known it at the time.

  The fifty thousand square foot building and its nine-acre lot had sat vacant until six years ago, at which time Duncan Industries had grabbed it up. They never did any upkeep, however. At least not where the exterior was concerned. Large flakes of sun-baked paint were peeling off the walls like dry skin, and a chain link fence that separated the parking lot from the loading bays was rusted out, sections of it near to collapse. Short wooden posts threaded with steel cable formed the boundaries of the parking lot, a hard-packed dirt surface from which weeds happily grew at scattered intervals. An ancillary building made of unpainted clay bricks stood alone, nearer the parking lot, a single electrical wire running from a meter mast on the roofline to the main building twenty yards away.

  Ellie observed through her Chevy’s windshield as down-and-outers slowly emerged from the darkness like wandering spirits and started to form the loose semblance of a line; people with bad debt to pay, empty stomachs, users looking for quick cash. The first to arrive stopped at the base of a short metal staircase that led up to an exterior door. Ellie glanced at the time. Twenty minutes before eleven.

  Thirty-six hours ago, when Mark slipped Ellie the information on the warehouse, Ellie knew that he had done so with full knowledge that she wouldn't be able to stay away. Being released by the DEA had left Ellie experiencing a functional paralysis; wanting to keep moving forward but unable to do so.

  Eventually, the DEA would go after Ringo. Tracking drug dealers and their sources was what they did. But as things currently stood, the local Fort Myers office, being subject to derelict leadership at the Miami division, was caught up in a perfect storm of misplaced priorities, underfunded budgets, and brown-nosing politics. Mark had given Ellie this new bit of information because their office wanted Ringo as badly as she did. If she could find anything substantial on Ringo, then Mark could get the agency to move against him.

  A dullness crept into Ellie’s chest whenever she thought of her misstep with Eli Oswald. She had found Oswald, and she had found the man he had kidnapped and tortured. But what hadn’t stopped gnawing at her since was her failure to press Oswald for anything further about Ringo. His words, now a ghostly taunt, echoed through her mind: “Curtis seems to think that whoever Ringo is owns a business down in St. James City.” At the time she’d been so focused on finding Oswald’s kidnap victim. She also assumed she would have time to question him later and hadn’t pressed him any further on the matter. But now Oswald was dead and all that he had known about Ringo was gone with him. His buddy Curtis Smith still remained at large, not currently a resource.

  A small skirmish had started in the center of the line. A few men wearing durags and baggy clothes were gesturing and laughing at an older man leaning into a crutch. One of them grabbed the old man by the shoulders and spun him around, then kicked his crutch out from under him. The agitators stood back, pointing and laughing. Ellie put her hand on the door handle, ready to jump out, to defend the old man and help him up. But then she removed her hand from the door. She wouldn’t risk being seen.

  The old man struggled back to his feet, assisted by a middle-aged lady, his accosters snickering at him before turning back to each other and talking amongst themselves.

  At exactly eleven o’clock the exterior door swung open and two men emerged, one holding a clipboard, one with enough muscle to act the part of a bouncer. Starting with the first in line, Clipboard Guy took names and, after scribbling each one down, allowed them to enter the building one by one. Ellie counted thirteen people before the man with the clipboard held up his hand and said something that made the line groan unhappily. Then he went inside, his larger associate following. The door was pulled shut and the rest of the line quietly dissembled, everyone going back to their homes, tents, or boxes.

  Ellie waited until darkness reabsorbed everyone before starting her truck and pulling out. Tomorrow night she would be homeless, in need of a job.

  But first, a trip to the thrift store was in order.

  Chapter Eleven

  Washington, D.C.

  The packet sat unwanted and undesired on his desk l
ike it was yesterday’s lunch. Deputy Secretary of Energy Scott Reardon steepled his fingers beneath his chin and stared at the large white envelope into which he had just returned sixteen printed photos and a USB drive containing three audio files.

  Someone had been tracking him, watching him. The photos were not of him simply getting into his car or walking up the drive toward his house. Rather, the photos had him at two different meetings this past month; one in Nevada, one in Croatia. The trips had been on his formal itinerary; the true content of the meetings, of course, had not. The first meeting had been with Bill Lollard, the Chief Technology Officer of Solaron Solutions, a clean energy corporation that specialized in storing energy created by intermittent sources such as solar and wind. The objective of Reardon’s brief visit with Lollard had been to secure oversight of specific power storage contracts, a move that would put him in control of the contract’s terms and fulfillment options. Illegal, yes. But Reardon had been putting his hand into the wrong cookie jars for most of his life. The second meeting with Venton Vesili had occurred across the Atlantic. The last fifteen years had seen Vesili systematically consolidating most of the energy rights in his country beneath his private control. His meeting with Vesili had been a bit less productive, with Vesili reluctant to continue having Reardon along for the ride. Reardon had already finalized a retaliatory course of action. By this time next week Vesili would be doing business with him, as well as cleaning up a very large mess. The audio captured from the meeting in Croatia was not very clear and, fortunately, would not make for a juicy sound bite for the media to use. On the other hand, the two audio clips from his meeting with Lollard would be a stick full of hand-spun cotton candy for the newscasters. They would eat it right up.

  The photos could easily be dismissed as the Deputy Secretary of Energy conducting archetypal meetings with those at the forefront of global energy innovation and commerce. But the pictures did not stand alone. Reardon did not engage in off-the-books meetings without couching his language in cryptic terms—his own Newspeak, as it were. Nevertheless, the media, always looking for a new bone to pick the meat from, would cull his words.

  His cold gray eyes fixated on the envelope as he considered the irony of its very presence. He had commissioned envelopes and packets just like this one dozens of times over the last three decades. Now, he supposed, it was his turn.

  His recent move from the Defense Intelligence Agency into the Department of Energy had been strategic. After his predecessor had stepped down it didn’t take much maneuvering for the President to appoint Reardon to this new position. It afforded him the opportunity to be close to developing technologies and to forge new connections and relationships with those who were currently running the global energy markets, both existing and developing. The DOE was on the forefront of scientific research into new and innovative means of energy. Reardon wasn’t going to miss out on his share of the energy pie, a pie that had been, over the years, getting much larger.

  His own path into the halls of power had been forged over thirty years ago when he was a summer intern for William Musgrove, the then governor of Indiana, at a time when Reardon was learning the advantages of being diligent and resourceful, idealistic and ambitious.

  He and his girlfriend at the time, Wendy Hooper—and what a red-headed hottie she had been—had just returned to Indianapolis from Elkhart, where he had taken her, an aspiring photographer, to the Ruthmere Mansion. She had wanted to try her new camera out on the home’s stone cartouches, marble piazzas, and hand-painted murals. As he thought back to that evening, Reardon remembered the camera being a Canon T90. Some might think it an odd bit of detail to recall, but then does a Powerball winner easily forget his winning numbers?

  That afternoon the two of them roamed the manicured grounds and the mansion’s interior, and when the bottom of Wendy’s satchel was full of undeveloped film they left and rode the three hours back to Indianapolis bathed in golden light from the west. When they pulled up to her home, her favorite cousin, who had been studying in Barcelona for the past two years, came bounding down the front steps. Wendy squealed, flew out of the car, and, in a hurried fashion that left Reardon mildly agitated, told him she would see him tomorrow. Then she and her cousin, arms locked, giggled all the way up the steps and disappeared inside.

  Reardon pulled off her curb and wove his way through the subdivision. Wendy’s neighborhood was a typical middle-class arrangement, and the fastest way back to Interstate 465 was to cut through Ridgeline Estates, a community of upper-class townhomes, each possessing more square footage than three average homes on Wendy’s street.

  He braked at a stop sign, turned right, and continued down the street. A couple was sitting in a car, talking. Nothing unusual there, except that his heart thumped a little faster when he realized that he recognized one of them. And not just anyone. So he drove around the block again and came back down the same street for a second glance.

  William Musgrove was in the driver’s seat of that car.

  He stopped thirty feet in front of them and flipped his visor down. He had only begun his short internship with the governor’s office three weeks ago—at the end of the summer he would head to D.C. to kick off his first year at George Washington University—so the odds were slim-to-nothing that the old man would even recognize him. Reardon had only met the governor twice. He had begun to understand that unless one looked very much like the young lady sitting in the car with him or had the potential to write a fat check toward his next campaign, the good governor was quite apt to forget you.

  But there was Musgrove, his ample weight forcing the struts to give on the front of the car, alone with a woman who wasn’t his wife and who looked fifty years younger than the man’s mother ought to be. Reardon knew for a fact the governor did not have a daughter, although the young lady he was chatting with certainly could have been. There was no harm, of course, in having a friendly conversation with another adult. Expect that a tiny voice far back in the recesses of his mind was whispering that there was something here to consider and maybe even something to document, and that perhaps the universe had just endowed a magnificent gift upon him.

  Those, of course, were the mid-eighties, prior to disposable Kodaks, digital cameras, or smartphones—before your phone, your television, your music player, and your camera were all the same device. Nevertheless, out of some frantic, unconscious impulse, Reardon looked around for something, anything that could help him record the next several minutes (what was he going to find, an Etch A Sketch?). And that was when he saw Wendy’s camera on the floorboard of his Celica. He grabbed it up, checked the film tray. It was empty. He quickly searched through the car—glove box, between the seats, under the seats, console—and came up empty. Hot little Wendy had left him with a weapon and no ammo. So Reardon had done what any aspiring politician would. He eased off the curb with his head turned away, passed up their car, and, after turning at the next stop sign, gunned his Celica out of the neighborhood and down Avery Avenue until he saw the Buy-Go Mart on the other side of the street. He tore a U-turn at the intersection and double parked in front of the store, where a sign in the window said that everything but dishware was currently ten percent off. Ninety seconds later he was back in the car, speeding up the street while he unwrapped the film and loaded it into the camera. Another half mile and he was screaming back into Ridgeline Estates, and when he glanced into his rear view mirror he saw an older man who was watering his grass, raising a fist toward him, yelling something Reardon couldn't hear but could easily deduce.

  He slowed again at the stop sign and approached where he had seen the Hoosier State’s leader. A genuine surge of excitement shot through him when he saw that they were still there, still sitting in the car talking. Five minutes later, just as Reardon was beginning to think that the tiny voice had misled him and his aspirational zeal had gotten the better of him, both doors opened at the same time and the governor stepped out into the fading sunlight. He quickly produced a flat cap and
set it low over his forehead. Looking briefly around—completely missing his intern less than ten yards away—with his hand across the lower back of his lady friend, he led her toward the door.

  Reardon brought the camera up, watched the couple.

  Walking quickly up the steps hand-in-hand. Snap.

  Kissing in the living room. A living room with a fortuitously wide bay window. Snap.

  Upstairs and the governor glancing briefly out the window before shutting the curtains. Snap. Snap.

  The governor leaving an hour later, quickly walking down the steps with her standing in the doorway wearing a cotton bathrobe, blowing him a kiss goodbye. Snap.

  At the time, Reardon had only seen twenty-two summers and his hands were shaking as he focused the lens and clicked away; not for fear of being caught or because of the vulgarity of what he was witnessing, but out of sheer anticipation for what this was going to mean for his career. He took the film to an overnight lab and, in the morning when he went to pick them up, was nearly gleeful at the quality of the photos, seeing that he had been nearly out of daylight at the time. If politics ever fell through for him—and he knew now that it wouldn't—he could be a photographer.

  He had to wait for his moment until late that afternoon. The governor had been out of the office the first half of the day, speaking to a group of high schoolers in Bloomington about the social benefits of maintaining the moral conscience of America.

  Reardon waited until he got back and, after clearing five minutes with the governor with his secretary, he went in, shut the door, and thanked the governor for giving him a moment.

  “Of course. Now, tell me, who are you again?”

  “I’m one of your summer interns, sir. Scott Reardon.”

  “And what is it I can do for you?”

  Reardon leaned forward and calmly set the photos on the desk. The governor picked them up and Reardon felt a surge of intoxicating adrenaline rush into him as the old man’s face registered the gravity of what he was holding.