by Don Bruns
“Keep prying.” Markim stepped a little closer, his gun pointing at James’s head.
The wood creaked and James moved down a couple of inches.
“And why did you kill him?” Em kept pressing.
“We didn’t know you had the translation. But my dumbass brother went to your room instead of the lady’s room. By mistake. Your reservation was in her name. Then the idiot calls me on his cell and is going on about how this lady’s room has guy’s clothes and everything. I figured that he’s in the wrong room, and Markim and I were tired of covering his sorry ass.”
“So you killed him? Pretty serious action for someone who gets the wrong room.”
“I went up to straighten him out, and we got into a fight. He hit his head on the little dresser and,” he paused, “you got a brother?”
I didn’t. James didn’t. We were like brothers, and there were times when I’d like to kill James. Still—
“No.”
“I don’t either. Not any more.” He smiled, a cold, calculated grin.
“We kept bailing his ass out, over and over again,” said Markim.
I did understand that.
“Keep prying.”
James worked the bar again. He glanced up at me, cocked his eyebrow and I knew what he was saying. Two of them and a gun. Four of us. If we get the gun, we win. What do you think, pard?
Wiping sweat from his forehead, James looked once more at me and I nodded. These guys had taken a shot at Em and me, so I was certain they’d think nothing of shooting us now.
“It’s almost off. You guys want to step up here and see what we’ve got?”
Weezle took two more steps and took his eyes off James, staring at the box with its raised lid.
James threw the crowbar as hard as he could, hitting Weezle across the face. Markim stopped, stunned, and I turned and hit him on the jaw. Dèjá vu. And all of us heard the explosion as a gun roared.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
I stood there dazed, hearing the muffled voice.
“Are you there? Are you alive? Are you there? Answer me.”
It took several seconds to realize it was coming from my pocket. Pulling the phone out, I shouted into it. “I’m alive.”
Taking a quick survey, I saw James standing by the box, Maria cowering behind the forklift, Weezle unconscious on the ground, and Markim kneeling, holding his shoulder where blood was seeping onto his shirt. And then there was Em, standing behind the wooden coffin, her right arm hanging by her side with the pistol in her hand.
“Yeah. We’re all alive.”
“What was that dreadful noise?”
I took a deep breath. “Em shot Markim, and James took out Weezle with a crowbar.”
“Oh, my God. What have you gotten yourselves into?”
I swallowed hard. “We’re about to find out, Mrs. T. I really think I need to call you back later.” With that, I clicked off the phone.
Maria had duct tape. Rolls and rolls of gray duct tape.
A forklift, a pry bar, duct tape? “What do you do with all this stuff you’ve got in your rental unit?” She seemed to have every tool imaginable.
“I rent properties, Skip. You need a variety of things to manage properties. I probably should take a course in plumbing, so I would have all those tools and wouldn’t have to rely on phonies like you to fix my leaks.”
She tossed a roll to me and one to James and we proceeded to wrap up the two PIs. We taped their arms to their sides, their legs together, then we repeated the process, over and over.
“Maybe Markim will bleed to death?”
“Nah. You shot him once before, Em. He’s a tough one.”
Weezle’s face looked like he’d been in a heavyweight title bout. The crowbar had crunched his nose and split his lip, and there were purple bruises forming under both eyes.
“Finish opening the crate.” Em turned her attention to the box. With all the excitement and the rush of adrenaline, we were at an emotional high. We had to get back to business.
I took the crowbar, wiped it on the damp grass to remove any blood, and continued to pry, leveraging my weight, my strength, to pull up the last couple of nails. I then worked around the wooden lid, prying it free. We all gathered ’round as James lifted off the cover.
“You know, we had that letter before you did,” Weezle said. We’d propped him up against the forklift and a little blood was still running from his lip. “That’s when we decided to find this treasure ourselves. Just the two of us. Without anyone interfering.” He sniffed. “Problem was, we never figured out the damned code. So we followed you guys. We figured if the lady was with you, she’d know where the treasure map was located.”
And James and I had decided to follow them, just in case they knew more than we did. That didn’t seem to be the case.
Weezle spoke like his nose was stuffed up. Actually, it was broken and the blood probably had filled his nasal passages.
“If there’s any gold in those boxes, some of it should be ours.”
The low-hanging light cast shadows, but we could see inside. There was a top layer of rocks, pieces of coquina and limestone that covered the surface.
I reached in and tossed them to the ground, anxious to get to the bottom of things.
Lying on the bottom of the box were small chunks of rusted iron.
“This is not possible.” James stood back, a stoic look on his face.
“What’s the purpose?” Em stared into the box, shaking her head.
“It’s only one crate.” Maria looked at the four unopened crates on the ground. “There are nine more crates. Let’s not give up so fast.”
Our two trussed captives looked up from their position on the ground.
“No gold?” Weezle croaked.
I bit my bottom lip.
“No. No gold. Congratulations,” James said. “It appears that you guys gave up your business to find some stones and old pieces of iron.”
There was a long sigh from Markim. He hadn’t bled to death. Yet.
We picked the fourth crate, just to make it a random search. Twenty minutes later we popped the top. Rocks. More rocks and iron.
“Why would someone bury rocks and iron?” Maria looked like she could cry.
I sat on the ground, closing my eyes, and remembering the conversation with Bernie Blattner. It came back to me and for a moment I was almost nauseous.
“Jackie Logan.”
“Who?” James was propped up against a tree.
The quiet of the early morning was cloying, and it was almost by necessity that we made noise.
“Come on, man.” I was shouting. “Jackie Logan. Bernie Blattner’s coworker.”
“What about him?”
“Remember the story? The local pineapple growers needed to make more money, so what did Bernie and Jackie do?”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Em had finally gotten the message. “They’d add scrap iron from the railroad to the shipments of fruit to up the price. It translated into more pounds of fruit. Until they got caught.”
“So?” James looked back and forth at the two of us. “So?”
I turned to him, raising my arms, my palms up.
“Oh, my God, Skip.” He shouted the name just as I had. “Jackie Logan. That bastard Jackie Logan.”
“Son of a bitch figured it out.”
“The rich son of a bitch. Damn. And this poor Matthew Kriegel, looking out for the Eastern Railway Company, is dying of fever—”
“Probably did die of fever, James. No one ever found him or the boxes. But Jackie Logan, he figures that with the right weight and the metal straps, the nails in the lid, it would take someone a while to figure out that these boxes didn’t contain the original gold.”
“Jackie Logan. He figures out those boxes are worth more than five dollars to haul them to a graveyard.” Em sat on the corner of the box, her chin in her hands.
“He and the guys who helped bury the crates, dig them up, open them, lift the g
old, fill ’em back up and somehow take off with all of that treasure.” I knew in my gut that’s what had happened.
“And anyone from the railroad who dug them up would assume they still had the gold.” It was all making sense. “It gave Jackie more time to get away.”
“Only,” James said, “no one ever came back for the gold. Until now.”
“Who’s going to call Mrs. T.?” Em was always the pragmatic one.
“She’ll be devastated.” Maria had only met her once, but knew the lady would not be happy.
“Jackie Logan. What did he end up doing?” James was pissed.
“Split the loot with the black guys who helped him, buried boxes of rocks and iron to approximate the weight of gold, and went to some other South American country. Bernie said he bought a plantation down there.”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I do not believe that we’ve been screwed like this.”
“Worst part of this, James. What do you think is the worst part of this entire experience?”
He thought for a moment. “That we don’t get the money?”
“No. That we can’t go after the damned guy. Jackie Logan is long since dead. I’m sure of it.”
“Point well taken, amigo.” He breathed deeply. “And the money is long since spent, Skip.”
“There’s probably one more person who should feel worse than we do.”
“Who’s that?”
“Bernie Blattner. Bernard.”
“Oh, yeah,” Em said. “He turned down the moving job so he could help the railroad. And how did that work out for him?”
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Somebody had kneed me in the groin, or taken away my oxygen. There was no gold. There was no treasure. No dreams, no more surprises.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. We had a couple of surprises left.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Maria borrowed the private investigator’s Harley with the gold fender that had been parked about halfway down the shell road and took off for home. We’d called the sheriff’s office and left a message for Big D. We also told him who had killed Stiffle at Pelican Cove. We told him that Weezle was the same guy who took a shot at us at the Cove and whose blood had stained the walkway outside our room.
Then we called 911 and told the concerned lady who answered that there were two badly injured men at a storage lot off of the highway just south of Islamorada.
It was Em’s idea to visit Mrs. T. in person. I figured she’d still be awake, and we would break the news to her gently.
“Skip, it’s not the end of the world.” Em was already sitting pretty good. A new Porsche, a rich daddy. James and I didn’t even have a running start.
“I know. But this was going to be huge.”
“Think about Mrs. Trueblood. I mean, she expected forty million dollars. Forty million, Skip.”
“She did. All we expected was—”
“Two million, compadre.” James shook his head, driving north on the highway. “Two million dollars. I think we’d already spent it.”
We drove past the strip club, empty now at three in the morning, and down to the post office. I was the first one to see the flashing blue-and-red light.
“James. Cops.”
“Damn. If we had a new truck we could outrun ’em.”
“So they got the message about Weezle and Markim?” Em didn’t seem too concerned.
James pulled over, gritting his teeth as the uniformed officer approached.
“Mr. Royster, I need to see your driver’s license.”
The young man stood ramrod straight, his hand out for the piece of plastic.
“I’m not Mr. Royster.”
“Are you borrowing his truck?”
“I don’t know who the hell you’re looking for but I’m not—”
I reached across Em and hit him on the shoulder.
“What the—”
“James. Tell the officer.”
“Tell him what?”
“We were going to report the license plate tomorrow. You know, we’d talked about driving down to the station and—”
I saw a glimmer of light in his eyes as he realized what was going on. We were driving on a stolen plate. Some guy named Royster was the owner of this license plate.
“Is this your truck?”
“It is.”
“Is that your plate?”
James looked at me.
“No, sir,” I said. “We believe somebody switched plates with us for some reason We have no idea why, but we just noticed it today. Well, tonight. So we thought that we’d report it first thing this morning.”
And, as I said it, I thought about cameras being everywhere. Maybe they had a security camera outside the strip club where they had digital images of James taking the plate from Royster’s truck and putting it on ours.
I saw the second set of lights, then the third. Three patrol cars were now parked by the side of the road.
“Are you employed by Doctor Praveen Malhotra?”
James looked at me, fear in his eyes. We’d gone from being almost killed to discovering that our fortune had vanished. Now the reviled law enforcement agents were ready to arrest us on identity theft.
“No. I think there’s been some misunderstanding.”
Two more officers walked up and the three of them had a short conference.
“James,” I whispered quickly, “this Royster, he could have switched the plate with us, right?”
“Why? Why would he switch plates with us? I mean, I know why we switched plates with him. So we wouldn’t be identified, but—”
He was back at the window. “If you refuse to surrender your driver’s license, you’ll have to come with us. This truck has been identified as one of several vehicles transporting illegal aliens to Miami.”
“What?”
And there it was. Transporting illegal aliens. That was why Royster could just as easily have switched the plates with our truck. And it was just our luck. The one truck that we picked, the one plate in all of the Florida Keys that we stole, was owned by someone who may be a federal felon. What’s the line? If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
He’d drawn his weapon.
“Exit the vehicle and open the back of your truck. Now.”
James bristled, I scooted out and helped Em. She clutched her bag by her side.
“Open it, sir.”
My best friend’s hand was shaking as he released the lever. The door creaked and rattled as it slid up and I remembered thinking we should use some of that WD-40 on our truck.
Four officers surveyed the empty interior with flashlights, causing a lightshow that bounced off every strut, panel and floor screw. I think they were genuinely disappointed that we didn’t have people stowed in the back.
One of the men finally picked up the magnetic sign, studying it for a moment.
“You gentlemen are plumbers?”
I shot James a dirty look.
“No. Came with the truck.”
“I’ll need to see all three of your licenses.”
We pulled them out and handed them to him. After carefully inspecting each one, he handed them to another officer who walked to his car. They were going to check the computer and see if we had any priors. I’d seen enough TV and movies to know how this worked.
They escorted us back into the truck and we sat there and waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally the original officer walked back to the truck.
“Sir, leave the keys in the vehicle. You and your friends are coming with us.”
We were each cuffed with nylon ties, a first for Em and me, and pushed into the back of a cruiser.
The dashboard looked like some major control panel with a mounted computer, GPS, and other assorted technical stuff I was not familiar with.
“Can you please tell me what we’re being arrested for?” Em had an edge to her voice.
“We’re going to take you to the statio
n until we get this sorted out.”
James was strangely silent, staring straight ahead.
“What time is it?” I couldn’t very well check my cell phone.
The officer checked his watch. “Three twenty-five.”
“Humor us for five or six minutes.”
“This is not exactly a laughing matter.” He started his car.
“Officer, all I’m asking is that you drive by the vacant lot down by the Ocean Air Suites.”
“I’m sorry, we’re headed to the station. If everything checks out, you’ll be free to go in the morning.”
“Officer, we could make you a hero.”
He was silent as the cruiser pulled away. James and Em both gave me strange looks.
“Listen, you said that somebody who works for Dr. Malhotra is using a truck to shuttle illegal aliens up to Miami, am I right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I think there’s a good chance I can show you where those illegal aliens are coming ashore. About two blocks from here.”
“Skip, oh my God, it makes sense.” James’s eyes were big and wide.
“The vacant lot?”
“The vacant lot at three thirty a.m. I think the fishing tournament is still going on.”
“Lines up at three o’clock,” Em said. “Skip, you’re right on the money.” She bumped me with her shoulder. “What we saw those people smuggling was,” she paused, “those people. I’ll bet that the people we saw were being smuggled in from Cuba.”
The officer pulled over to the curb, pulled out his radio, and called someone.
“This is Jakes. I’m going to need backup at the Ocean Air Suites.”
There was a brief pause, then, “Ten-four. How many units would you estimate?”
He looked back at me.
“There will be two attack dogs and thirty-some people.”
“Better send three or four cars.”
“Three or four?”
“It’s about the illegals. I’ve got some persons of interest who seem to think we’re going to catch the smugglers in the act.”
“Ten-four, John. They’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Oh, and bring about forty Tuff-Ties.”
“Forty? You’ve got forty people to cuff?”
