by Chris Draper
“He was always around to pick her up at 9 when her meeting ended and if she was a bit late or said she had to go somewhere else, he would yell at her outside. We could hear it from the meeting room. Guy sounded like he had quite the temper.”
“Jeez.”
“The guy was a tough dude for sure, I never saw him again after that last time he gave me a smoke though. And funny thing is Dottie stopped coming a week after that too, I thought that was a bit weird.”
“That is strange.” Hawk said then got up from the chair and gave Choudry his card. “If you think of anything else give me a call.”
“Will do, good luck man.”
Hawk got up to leave and said, “Hope you enjoy that whiskey. Take it easy on that stuff though or it'll burn a hole right through your liver.”
Choudry laughed, “I like it that way.”
Hawk went back to his car and pulled back onto the main boulevard, heading South to his hotel. He called Wagner to give him the news and said he'd call him back if he had any more updates.
He thought about what Choudry had told him. He had a feeling that if he found Byron in Aldwell, he'd find Dottie as well. Sure it was possible that Byron had no connection whatsoever to Dottie's disappearance, but judging from what he'd learned so far Byron was his best bet at taking the next step in the search of her. He had a hunch – small but it was still a hunch – that he was going to find something big in the Everglades. Somehow though he had a feeling that things weren't going to be that easy.
8
The next morning Hawk plugged in Aldwell on his GPS and within a few minutes was on the highway heading North-East. The day was overcast but a few rays of sunlight had managed to creep through the clouds like bright daggers shooting through a veil of smoke. The scenery quickly changed from gas stations and outlet malls to smooth rolling countryside with occasional houses and lush greenery passing by. He rolled down the window and caught the scent of swamp water coming in off the wind, knew Everglades territory was getting closer.
On the way there he thought about Helen again, he did that sometimes when he was driving. Out of nowhere an image would start floating around in his mind like a mirage and stay with him for the duration of a drive. His thoughts would ramble and the next thing he knew he'd be thinking about her. It was like a type of catharsis for him thinking of her this way, kept his head above water when things started to pile up. He was remembering now how happy they'd both been when his daughter Sophia was born, how small and tender her body looked when the nurse wrapped it in a small blanket. It filled him with a sense of accomplishment he'd never known bringing Sophia into the world. A small wonder that would someday grow up to be a police officer like he'd been – or a doctor, or an artist or whatever really, it didn't matter in the end. He would have let Sophia been whatever she'd wanted. He'd let Helen pick the name for her, that was their deal. If it was a boy, Hawk would decide the name (he'd settled on Lucas after a favourite baseball player) and if it were a girl Helen would get top pick. She'd decided on Sophia as it had been her mother's middle name and one that she always took to heart. And so their little family had blossomed and Hawk had become a budding father and devoted husband, cutting back hours at work to spend more time at home.
Sometimes now whenever he saw a young woman on the street he'd wonder if that's how his daughter would have looked if she'd been allowed to live past her cruelly short one year of life. Hawk kept a photo of the three of them in his wallet that he'd look at sometimes when he felt down or lonely – which could come at any time really. He also kept another image but this one wasn't in his wallet, it was burned into his mind like an effigy. It was an image of Tony Risotto. The man who'd destroyed his family and ruined his life, the man who'd taken so much away from him. The man he'd punish someday.
It had been over a year now since he had retired from the San Francisco Police Force as a vice cop, leaving at the height of his career after a case went sour. He had been investigating a drug operation run by twin brothers Joey and Tony Risotto who were responsible for a series of violent murders on the San Francisco harbour dating back to 2001. The Risotto's worked with a gang of thugs who pushed methamphetamine on college campuses around California and Hawk had been investigating them since 2008 after the former detective on the case had retired. He'd received a lot of publicity in the press for his young age and rugged good looks and there had been pressure from top brass to get some evidence linking the Risotto's to the harbour murders. He was eventually able to get Joey Risotto on a murder charge after linking his gun to the murder of a man found floating near Angel Island just off the harbourfront. The case didn't sit well with Joey's brother Tony though, who ordered a hit on Hawk from the underworld.
The hit came on a cheerfully bright Saturday morning and it came hard – Hawk had been driving with Helen and Sophia on Los Lobos Avenue after dining at a restaurant there when he noticed they were being tailed by a large black Cadillac. The thugs had driven up alongside his car and opened fired causing him to lose control of his vehicle while going into a tight curve. The vehicle had then tumbled down a steep cliff before crashing onto the sands below in a cacophony of torn metal and splintered glass. The thugs had left him there in that burning wreck to die but he'd come out alive with a broken arm, managing to rescue his wife and child before the infernal flames overtook what remained of his car.
They hadn't been so lucky though. Sophia had sustained multiple fractures to her spine and thorax and died in hospital the same day. Helen had been a bit more lucky - if only slightly. She had survived the initial crash but the intensity of the collision had left her in a comatose state – a condition she'd been in ever since.
The death of his daughter and serious injury of his wife had left Hawk torn apart. It was as if when his car had barrelled down that cliffside the impact had destroyed him as well, leaving all that was left strewn across that beach somewhere. The once personable and charming young cop had shape shifted into something tougher, someone with an obsession so great that it fluttered throughout the hollows of his mind even when he slept at night. For the first week afterward he'd been so devastated that he'd refused to leave the house – but then afterwards he'd shown up on Monday at the precinct for his regular shift, much to the shock of his colleagues, and had planted himself down in his office as if it was just another day. His chief Bobby Tulock had come in and had offered Hawk an extended leave of absence but he'd declined, saying that he preferred to stay on the Risotto case.
He became so obsessed with the case that he started working 80-hour weeks to find the thugs who had caused the accident as well as bring Tony Risotto to justice. A break in the case came when one of the thugs, a slimeball known as Anthony Cabela, was captured in 2012 and confessed to being in the car that had caused the accident, admitting that the driver in the car who had fired the fatal shot had been none other than Tony Risotto himself. The confession had received a lot of media attention and Tony was eventually brought in on murder charges.
Unfortunately when it came time to go to trial Anthony Cabela, the lone witness in the case, was found hanged in his room at the Starlight motel in Sausalito under suspicious circumstances while being guarded by two uniformed SFPD police officers. Without his testimony in court Tony Risotto's lawyer was able to convince the jury that he wasn't in the car based on eye witness accounts as well as the fact that the steering wheel had too many fingerprints on it to conclusively pinpoint Risotto as the sole driver of the car that day. The judge had ruled there just wasn't enough evidence to convict Risotto of anything and all charges were dropped letting him walk away a free man.
Simon Hawk lost faith in the judicial system that day as he watched Tony leave the court room with his lawyer, smiling to the Channel 4 news teams huddled outside on the street. There had been this idea floating around in his head for sometime, the idea of being his own detective and going into business for himself. He had gained notoriety in the press during the Risotto case for being his own cop and
disobeying orders from those higher up in the police force.
The fact that Tony Risotto was now a free man was the final push that he needed to put this idea into action. Much to the dismay of his chief he gave his notice with the SFPD, completed a short bail bondsman training course at Wright College in Oakland and became a licensed bounty hunter going into business for himself. It was also during this time that new evidence came out on Tony Risotto. A surveillance video taken from a gas station the day of Hawk's car accident showed Tony Risotto stepping out of the front seat of the Black Cadillac used in the crime. The gas station was 5 minutes away from where the accident had occurred and police were able to nail down a timeframe proving Risotto had lied about not being the driver of the Cadillac and had in fact been behind the wheel at the time of the accident. A warrant was again put out for Risotto's arrest who this time had seemed to disappear into thin air.
Hawk heard about the warrant before anyone else did. He still had many friends on the force and the moment he heard the news that Risotto was wanted he made a decision: Simon Hawk would be his own first client. He had saved a bit of money from the vice squad and had also sold the apartment he shared with his wife Helen which gave him a bit of cash. He used the money to buy his houseboat as well as pay the costs that kept Helen in her special care unit in Oakland and then prepared to hunt for Tony Risotto.
Naturally the case received a lot of media attention as Hawk had been a respected San Francisco cop who was now hunting for the same man who destroyed his family. The newspapers loved it and he even became a local star for a little while. Simon Hawk had drifted into the San Franciscan underworld and was eventually able to extract information from an informant that Tony Risotto was hiding out in Los Angeles with his cousin who owned a diner. He found the diner, found the cousin, but didn't find Risotto anywhere. It wasn't until a week later that he eventually tracked him to a ranch house in Laurel Canyon where he was hiding out. Hawk had tried taking him peaceably but Risotto had his guard open fire. Hawk had killed the guard in self defence then had taken Tony Risotto back with him to San Francisco to face murder charges for which a trial is still underway. The case had questioned the rights bounty hunters have in bringing criminals to justice and became a topic of hot discussion in law courses around the state. The fact that Hawk had acted in self defence and was a former cop helped matters and any charges against him were immediately dropped. And how funny it was that now he was searching for the lost daughter of someone else. Could it be fate? Could he see a part of his own lost daughter in Dottie Wagner? He couldn't see how as he'd never met Dottie before and couldn't picture his daughter ever running away from home. Yet somehow he felt there was parallels of himself with Harvey Wagner. He wondered about what Wagner had said, about helping Helen out of her coma. Was it possible? Did these specialists Wagner know really have a way to reverse the coma Helen had been in for so long? Could Wagner have lied just to get Hawk to search for his daughter? No, he couldn't think like that. Besides it said in the contract that Wagner would do everything he could to help her, he just had to remain hopeful.
Some raindrops falling on his windshield brought him back to reality. Clouds had started to form over the sky now and he switched on the wipers, had to make a detour and check out the payphone Greg had told him the kidnappers had contacted Wagner from. As Hawk had expected their had been no surveillance footage there, nothing at all in fact besides an old payphone built into a decaying laundry mat shut down years ago. He was surprised the payphone even still worked. He wondered if Dottie was being kept somewhere nearby, maybe locked up in a basement somewhere or someone's shed.
He drove on and watched a few small towns flicker by on the roadside, dinky towns of tiny bungalows with torn window screens, raised wooden porches and gravel driveways filled with Dodge Caravans and rusted RV campers. Hawk started to feel the stifling heat trickle down his neck like a water snake and turned the AC dial up a notch. He passed by a little baseball diamond on the left hand side of the road where a minor league was playing and almost missed a sign on the right that read: Aldwell, population 2000, Home of 'Gerry the crocodile'. Hawk guessed that Gerry the crocodile was some famous local reptile.
Aldwell was a small place built at the foot of the Florida Everglades that was probably constructed back when the Europeans first settled in the area years before. Like the homes he saw earlier, many of the dwellings were simple bungalows built around surrounding swampland and lush vegetation. As he got closer to the town centre the land levelled off a little and a few multiple story houses and old brick buildings came into view. Hawk passed by a rooming house that said it had a vacancy and he pulled up to the drive. The place was a three story building with a faded brown brick exterior and a sagging wraparound porch. An old man was sitting on the porch in a wicker chair reading a newspaper and his eyes flicked up when he heard Hawk pull up the gravel driveway.
“What can I do you for sir?” He asked as Hawk got out and started mounting the crooked steps. “I'm the caretaker 'round here.”
“I need a room for a couple of days.”
“I got one available. Costs $30 a day. Wanna take it?” Hawk thought he could smell a hint of alcohol on the caretaker's breath.
“Can I see it first?”
The caretaker nodded and took Hawk up two flights to a small room sparsely furnished with a single bed, desk and small fan. The room had a single large window that overlooked a backyard overgrown with weeds and sagging oak trees. A lone swingset sat in one corner, a testament to the days when perhaps the rooming house had belonged to a family. Now it looked like one large gust of wind could easily blow the entire structure down. Hawk didn't have time to search around for a better solution though and took out his wallet.
“I'll take it.” Hawk said handing the man enough rent for three days. “Where can I get something to eat around here?”
“Reggie's deli is just down the street.” He said pointing East. “Reg makes the best darn sandwiches this side of the county.”
Hawk thanked him and went back down to the car to fetch his bags. After he'd brought his things up to the room he left again, heading East on Dewey Street until he spotted a single story comprised of a few storefronts on the left hand side of the road. Aldwell's downtown looked like one of those places you'd see in a Tennessee Williams drama, a town stuck in the 1950's with old Ford's parked along the main road and rusted coke signs sitting in store windows. The sidewalks were bare of people and some of the roads were unpaved. He liked it though. It had the kind of simplicity he admired in a place and reminded him of his birthplace in rural California. He spotted the deli at the far end of the building, parked in front then went inside and took a seat on a tall stool in front of the bar. He ordered a turkey on rye with Swiss cheese and a coke and then Reggie, the lanky middle-aged crow who ran the place, came out and started chatting his ear off as soon as he sat down.
“Mornin' mister!” Reggie said with a wide grin plastered across his cheeks as he wiped down the bar, his wiry arms flying around like a spiders. “Whereabouts do you hail from? Don't think I seen you around here before and I know just about every soul from here down to the county line.”
“California.”
“Oh yessir, I been out that way myself maybe 30 years back when you could still find a decent job in those parts. Gettin' so a man has to break his back to earn an honest livin' these days. That's why I got me this little business here see, doesn't break the bank but it pays my bills and then some. I got this one friend, he makes about $100 a day and you know for what?"
“Uh, a door-to-door salesman?” Hawk asked taking a big bite of his sandwich. The old clock on the wall said it was already almost lunchtime and he felt like he was wasting time even sitting here. He hurriedly slurped down the rest of his drink and stuffed the last of the sandwich in his mouth.
“No! Let me tell ya.” Reggie continued. “This crazy feller, he drives all the way down from Ocala everyday and visits a different sperm bank every t
ime he goes. Then when he finds one he goes in, tells them he wants to make a donation and they shut him in a room with a few nudie magazines and a small plastic cup. Well now, after buddy's been in there a few minutes he comes out, hands them the cup with his juices in it and they hand him a cheque for a hundred! Can you imagine that? Strange world I tell ya.”
Hawk looked like he was about to choke on his sandwich.
“Yeah, all buddy has to do is beat it into a cup and he makes more than I do in an hour.” Reggie finished.
Hawk wiped his mouth on a napkin. “I guess everyone's gotta make a living somehow. Say Reggie, who would I talk to if I was trying to find someone around here?”
Reggie smiled through a row of crooked yellow teeth. “Well you could always ask me, hell I've been here more'n 30 years already and seen just about everyone who comes through.”
“I'm looking for a guy named Byron. He's a big guy who rides a motorcycle.”
Reggie looked off for a second thinking, then said, “No I don't think Byron rings a bell. We don't get too many bikers coming through town anymore. I know a Brody though, lots of 'em.”
Hawk laughed and said, “That's okay but thanks anyway,” then got up to leave, throwing a tip on the counter.
“You may want to ask someone down at the docks on the Larabee river.” Reggie said. “Those guys see a lot of people, know the area well. Just head South a few miles on Main Street and you'll come across it. When you get there look for a man named Clyde. He's a former hunter that now gives boat tours around the area and still hunts gator and crocodile from time to time. He might be able to help you. He knows everyone in the area.”
“How do I find him?”
Reggie roared with laughter and winked. “How do you find him? You can't miss the son-of-a-bitch! Just look for a big blonde Frenchman driving an airboat and that'll be him.”
“Clyde. Okay I'll keep that in mind thanks.”
