“Uh, just a water,” Beck said.
“Get a Coke,” Tom told him. “Two Cokes, please,” he said to the waitress. “We could both use the glucose,” he said to Beck after the waitress had left. “So you’re working at Tireman Teddy’s as a mechanic or what?”
“Right.” It came out as raht.
“Okay. So let’s look at your story . . . you get busted, sent to Jerome Correctional while you await trail. Pedro Vasquez starts talking to you there, making friends, so you turn around and start talking to Everglades County vice narcotics. Did they ever help your girlfriend and her kid?”
“They sent ’em home.”
“To Georgia.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s nice, then. You ever hear from her since?”
Beck gazed out the window and didn’t answer.
“So, you’re in there . . . first you’re dealing with Sergeant Coburn, then Sergeant Jarvis.”
Memories of Tom’s outburst glinted in Beck’s eyes. “Yeah. The two of them. Mostly the other one — Jarvis.”
“Okay. You’re in there and you’re dealing with vice narcotics who want you to inform on Pedro. And after a while, Pedro tells you things. Why? What makes him want to talk to you? Why trust you? No offense, man, but you don’t impress me as a big player. Your rap sheet is pretty tame. Why risk it?”
“I don’t know, man — you ever met Pedro?”
“No.”
“He likes to talk.”
“Fair enough. So he’ll just talk to anybody, or what?”
Beck shrugged. He seemed to make a decision. “Man, he’s got so many people in there he’s dealing with. He’s got COs and he’s got inmates. He’s working just as hard in there as if he was out in free society. Don’t make any difference if he’s inside — it’s just business as usual.”
Tom knew that much was true. He glanced at his menu. “Know what you want?”
“Whatever. Steak or something.”
They placed their orders when the waitress came back with the sodas: Salisbury steak and home fries for the kid, turkey club on white with a side salad for Tom. After they settled in some more and looked around the diner, Tom said, “You informed about the hit on a statewide attorney.”
“If you say so. You’re not a bounty hunter then what are you?”
“I’m a cop.” Tom showed his badge. “Your friends were yelling about it.”
“They think everyone white is a cop. But you don’t look like one to me. Maybe I need a lawyer.”
“I’m not here to mess with you. I’m here because three days ago somebody burglarized the prosecutor’s home, yeah? And there were witnesses. And these witnesses are either dead or they’ve been taken.” Tom took out his phone and showed Beck the picture. “This little girl.”
Beck looked at Lemon’s face for a few seconds. “I figured that’s what you wanted. You said the girl, but — you’ve seen her, right? She’s brown. If she was white, she’d be on national news.”
“She will be.”
“Well then 20/20 and stuff. But they ain’t gonna do that. Nobody cares about brown kids — even I know that.”
Tom set the phone down with the picture facing up. “Have you seen her or not?”
“Nah, man, I ain’t seen her.” Beck stared off.
“Hey, let me ask you. I’m going to recite a little poem, okay? It’s called a syllogism. Three lines, and the third line is a conclusion based on the premise of the first two lines. Okay?”
“What?”
Tom shifted in his seat and leaned forward. “Just tell me if this makes sense to you, if you think this is a valid statement or not. Ready? All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore, some roses fade quickly.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Just take a guess.”
“Yeah. Some roses fade, ah — whatever.”
Tom leaned back and looked at Beck. “It’s a flawed argument. Know why? Because I said some flowers. But you don’t know which flowers. So it’s possible that there are no roses among those flowers that fade quickly.”
“If you say so.”
“There’s a dilemma to being a cop. To trust your gut or not.”
“You’re the weirdest cop I ever met.”
“My gut says you’re telling the truth, but maybe I just find you sympathetic. Maybe you remind me of someone. Look at the picture again.”
Beck glared at Tom and then studied the picture some more. “Her name is Lemon Madras,” Tom reminded him. “She’s in the second grade. Hiding or taken because she was a witness to a crime. Ever seen her?”
Beck looked at Tom, slowly, deliberately. “No. I swear to God I never seen her.”
“You’re religious?”
“What?”
“If you’re swearing to God. You know — here’s something I heard on the radio. I wrote it down and memorized it. ‘A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.’ It’s from James, I think. Know why it bothers me?”
Beck sipped his Coke, widened his eyes and shook his head.
“Because a lot of the time, I’m torn. And right now, I want to make my mind up. So I’m going to ask this in a different way, and then I’ll drop it. Maybe you haven’t seen her, but have you heard anything about her? Anything about a little girl being taken?”
Beck put his elbows on the table, rolled his shoulders forward and looked down at the phone.
“Well, that’s a different question, ain’t it?”
* * *
His stomach full, Tom stood in the parking lot and watched Beck get back in the truck.
Skokie was not happy. “I feel like you went around my back.”
“I thought we were coloring outside the lines.”
“I need to be apprised of whatever lines you’re drawing.”
Tom shifted the phone to the other side of his head. “Ed, you weren’t there. You want me to be out here like this, you gotta let me do what I gotta do.”
A pause, a sigh. “All right. You’re right. What’s he saying?”
“He’s saying he heard something about a girl. Just in the past forty-eight hours.”
“From whom?”
“Says he doesn’t know. He was in the other room at Alejandro Colon’s place, but he thought he heard the name Lemon.”
“So this Alejandro Colon . . . and his woman, Maria Lucia — they could be our burglars?”
“I’m not convinced.”
“You’re not.”
“You know, what if . . .”
“What?”
“Listen, I’ll work on Beck. If there’s any truth to what he’s saying, I’ll get it out. This guy’s got a pain body like I haven’t seen in years.”
“A what? Lange, listen. They found the woman. Ann Hollister. County CSB found her an hour ago. She washed up on shore about half a mile south of the Ingram place. She was positively identified by her dentition. And they found a casing from a 9mm. It could be a match for the projectile inside Brian Hollister. We’re going to analyze it for fingerprints, but it was washed way down the street. DNA will take longer.”
“Okay. But still no sign of the girl.”
“None. That whole area has been canvassed. She’s not hiding. Maybe she got picked up by someone — you know — or somehow or another . . . well, it’s looking more like the burglars took her all the time.”
“How are you going to handle the TV people?”
“Press conference tomorrow morning. Same as any other.”
Tom watched a Boeing 747 come in low toward the airport in the distance. Police and searchers had found a body and a bullet casing but no little girl. And Skokie didn’t think she was alive — it was in his voice. Now that he’d come around to thinking the burglars had taken her, he suspected they’d killed her in another location along the way.
“I mean, we gotta do it,” Skokie said.
“What? Sorry, it’s loud out here.”
“I said, we gotta do the press conference.”<
br />
“It won’t tip anybody off?”
“You know how it goes. We’ll show her picture, give the number for a hotline and assurances that everybody is out looking. I mean, if the burglars are already hiding, it’s not like they can hide any harder.”
The 747 slipped out of view, jet engines whining, and Tom said, “They didn’t kill her, though.”
“We can’t know that.”
“Not if they took her. Why take her if . . .? You know, we would have found her by now.”
“These guys clipped both the Hollisters without hesitating? Then pulled them out of the vehicle and left them for the storm to chew up like dolls, knowing the damage it would do, how it would slow us down? But they don’t kill the girl?”
“Could be the circumstances. Things we don’t know.”
Skokie said something, but Tom was momentarily lost in his own thoughts, considering the forensics — all 9mm, same gun. A single shooter, then. A single shooter but multiple burglars. There might have been conflict between them. Sparing the girl, taking her, would cause problems, and not everyone associated with the burglary effort would be pleased with that choice. Probably most wouldn’t. If someone had taken her — and Tom held out hope that they had — that someone would be out there on his own. You’re a thief, possibly a murderer, or at least a party to a murder, and you abscond with a little girl who can ID you. If you can’t bring yourself to harm her, what do you do? Where do you go?
“You hearing me, Lange?”
“Say again?”
“I said the governor is here, assessing the hurricane damage, staying at his place in Naples tonight. In addition to everything else, governor protection is stretched thin. Anyway, he’s getting in on the press conference. It’s a PR thing.”
“I didn’t have you pegged as a cynic.”
“I’m not cynical. I’m seasoned. And I’m telling you right now the governor is breathing down the Commissioner’s neck, who’s breathing down my neck because we’ve got a statewide attorney who’s going under protection again, unable to do her job, an unsolved burglary at her home, guys running around maybe looking to clip her and we don’t know who or when. It’s an anxious situation. And people are getting pissed. They want answers. They want somebody behind bars.”
Tom glanced at Beck, smoking a cigarette in his truck, looking forlorn. “What am I going to do with this guy?”
“What do you mean what are you going to do with him? You won him, he’s yours. Book a room, have yourself a night of it. I’m still a little pissed at you, Lange. Got my own pain body going now. But I guess you have that effect on people.”
“I woke up this morning not knowing if I had a job. It’s been a busy day.”
Skokie eased up. “All right. I know.”
“I need authorization to work with this guy, Ed. I’ve got to be able to strike a deal. He’s paying it out in dribs and drabs. Maybe some of it is bullshit, but what it is — he’s terrified that his ass is grassed the second we turn him loose. If I could talk to the governor—”
“Lange—”
“You said it yourself . . . the governor wants to make the right moves. This is the right move . . . turn him as a state’s witness. Plus, the governor knows me. I spent over half a year in GP watching his back. I’ll get you a piece of paper tomorrow and you get it to him and he signs it. Tell him I’ll let him win the next time we play cards.”
“You trust this guy — Beck? You think he’s that valuable?”
“Like I said . . . I think there’s some truth in him.” Tom looked at the skinny informant in the truck. “I gotta try.”
* * *
They stopped at a convenience store and Tom went inside. That was twice now he’d left Beck sitting there, keys swinging from the ignition. It proved Beck had nowhere to run. Or — as Tom had almost suggested to Skokie — that maybe Beck had been planted in their path as a diversion. Maybe both were true. Tom bought a twelve-pack of cheap domestic beer with cash and walked back to the truck. He got in and set the beer in Beck’s lap.
They checked into a hotel not far from the airport: a deliberate choice. Something about the sound of jets passing, people coming and going, free to live and travel, might work on Beck’s psyche. Tom parked around back near a dumpster.
One room, two beds. Tom brought his stuff inside: laptop and camera. Beck carried the beer and they set everything on the beds.
“You want a shower or something, go ahead.”
Beck stood there, weighing it up. He shook his head and muttered to himself and went in and closed the bathroom door. When Tom heard the shower running, he turned on the TV. The late news program featured hurricane devastation up and down the coast. A chair had been driven into a wall, all four of its legs embedded in stucco. A couple of shopping carts had gone through the front window of a Walmart. There was a story about a woman who’d been dead for five days, how the family had covered her up and waited for the emergency response.
He picked up his phone and texted Katie. I’m with someone.
She responded quickly. Wear a condom.
You made the news!
I saw that.
How you doing? Were you on the beach today? He was asking if her unit did the evidence recovery on the Hollister woman.
Yeah, I was there.
She didn’t elaborate. Instead: How are you?
Going to be here a bit longer.
K. Be careful.
The shower shut off and he listened to Beck banging around until he came out with a white towel around his waist and his thin wet hair clinging to his forehead. The scars on his torso looked like knife wounds, a couple more on his forearm. Beck returned to the bathroom, emerged again and threw down his clothes. He picked them up and gave them a sniff.
“Guess I don’t have much choice.” He started to dress.
“Wilbur, you got family up there in Georgia?”
“My momma’s still there. Few cousins.”
“So listen, here’s the thing . . . What do you want right now, man? You went to jail for a meth bust. Now you’re working for Teddy Alfonso, who cleans money and sells dope for Pedro Vasquez. If you want out of this life, there’s a way.”
Beck didn’t move a muscle at first, then he shrugged. He stepped into his pants and drew them up beneath the towel. Then dropped the towel on the floor, sat down and pulled on his socks. “I get paid working at Teddy’s, working on cars. That’s all I been doing.”
“You were just working there, huh? Working on cars. Selling rims.”
“Yup.” Beck put his arms through his shirt sleeves and buttoned up. “So, I was up there at Jerome doing pre-trial time. My trial is in two months. I’m out on bond. What happens about that?”
“That’s between the bond agent and Pedro Vasquez. He used some of his property as collateral.”
“Yeah but I was paying that off. Working. That’s the whole point, man.”
“You weren’t paying off a five-thousand-dollar bond working for minimum wage. You couldn’t even cover the ten percent down with that. You were running dope. Okay? For Pedro. Through Maria Lucia or her boyfriend there. Those are fresh charges.”
Beck’s eyebrows knitted together and he looked wounded. “You recording this or something?”
“Not at the moment.”
“I thought you weren’t going to mess with me.”
“I’m just laying it out. Right now you’re not a bail fugitive — unless you leave the state. But you’ve still got the stolen car charge, the intent-to-distribute on the meth. I might be able to make those things go away. Time served for you, Vasquez gets remission, and you get out. Out of the state, out of the life. Clean. But it depends on what you’ve got. And I’ll know if you’re lying.”
Beck sat down on the bed, staring. “Because of the roses. The fading flowers or whatever.”
“Something like that.”
Beck looked at the TV and wrung his hands between his legs. “All right.”
“All rig
ht?”
“Ask me.”
“Ask you . . .?”
Beck dropped his chin to his chest. “Ask me questions. I ain’t gonna say anything just random. You gotta ask.”
Tom thought the kid was on the verge of tears. Tom was skeptical of this show of emotion, but it made some sense. A poor kid from Georgia coming down to Florida with ideas of making some quick cash winds up getting much more into the bargain: jail time, vice narcotics running him as an informant, and then whatever Pedro had filled his head with.
“You got a rough deal,” Tom said. “I’m not here to judge. You had your girlfriend with you, and her kid, and they were stranded. What you did was for them — you got them out of here safe. No reason to feel bad about that.”
Beck’s shoulders hitched with a sob. “It was my uncle’s car. I just took it. I know cars, man, but I didn’t even have to hot wire it. The keys were in it. We were going to be back in two days. But my uncle called the fucking police.” Poh-leese.
“Who hooked you up with the meth? Or were you cooking it?”
“I ain’t no cook. It was a one-time thing.”
“You got the chance here to do some good again, Wilbur.”
He looked up, eyes gone pink. “So ask.”
“Okay, well let’s look at it. Six months ago, after your meth bust, you have your public defender contact Everglades Vice Narcotics Bureau to make a deal. Pedro likes to talk, you say, and he’s talking to you. So you figure you’ll give up some intelligence on him in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“Right.”
Tom watched Beck carefully. “Roughly two months ago, you tell vice narcotics Pedro is talking about killing the statewide attorney.”
“Right again. Said he’d like to see her head split open. Said he knew some guys who would do the job.”
“He say who?”
Beck shook his head. “No. Never mentioned any names.”
“Tell me about Mr. Colon with his NATAS tattoo and Maria with the long fingernails.” He rolled his forearm and looked at the dark scratches. Probably needed to put some antiseptic on those. Between them and the bug bites, his skin was crawling.
DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 6
