Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  We got off the elevator and walked along the concrete concourse until we found the box. Inside white leather sofas and flat screen televisions greeted us. A lovely young lady in a white blouse and black skirt asked us if we cared for a drink, and we ordered two beers. Sal took a seat on a sofa that sat before a cutout in the wall that allowed a view down at the field. It was like looking through a giant flat screen. Sal looked at me like he’d sat on broken glass.

  “All right?”

  “Is this seat made of ice? I keep sliding off.”

  The girl came back and handed us beers, and then offered us access to the buffet of hot dogs and burgers. We each took a china plate and looked over the chafing dishes at the hot dogs. Sal was looking at the whole setup like he’d just been introduced to food.

  “You know what I’d like?” asked Sal.

  I looked down at him. “Yeah, Sal. I think I do.”

  So we left the box and found some seats in the stands. I handed Sally a plastic cup of beer and a hot dog wrapped in foil and he looked as happy as a pig in the proverbial. Sally was a man of considerable means and even more considerable connections, but his wants were simple. We ate our dogs as the players took the field, and as the Mets pitcher took the mound, Sal dropped into analysis mode.

  “Kid needs to stand up—he’s losing a good five miles an hour on his throws.”

  “He should curve it, though.”

  “Not much point curving it if the batter has all day to adjust.”

  The Mets dropped to three-zip to Fort Myers by the fourth inning, and Sally suggested I get my uniform on.

  “We all have days like these.”

  “Aach.”

  I got Sal another beer and he nodded his thanks.

  “So how’s the PI business?”

  “Can’t complain. Keeps me in beer and shrimps. Lenny offered to make me a partner. ”

  “So he should. You paid off that degree yet?”

  “Yeah, that’s done.”

  “What the hell is a master of criminology anyway?”

  “I thought you were.”

  “Wise guy. You take a look at that house, the one in the brochure I gave you?” asked Sally.

  “I took a look around.”

  “You took a look around.”

  “Yeah, nice view. The house is decent.”

  “It’s on the auction block tomorrow, you know that,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “Good. You can pick me up.”

  I smiled. Some conversations with Sally were a fait accompli .

  “That’s reminds me. I saw your young lady on the TV.”

  “Beccy?”

  “The blond one. She’s gonna go far.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second. You know we’re not together anymore, right?”

  “I’m old, not senile. I’m just saying she was on TV.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The Mets batters faced only eleven pitches for the innings, and headed back out to the field.

  “Sal, you know many of the folks in the sheriff’s office?”

  “A few, for better or worse.”

  “You heard of a Deputy Castle?”

  “Not sure. Describe him.”

  “Her. Long brown hair, athletic build. Not bad-looking.”

  Sal looked at me from under his cap and gave me his full nicotine grin. “Not bad-looking? Yeah, I know the one. And not bad-looking is like calling Texas not that big .”

  “What do you know about her? ”

  “Good cop, smart. I think she was a triathlete or some such garbage at college. Why do you ask?”

  “She’s been involved in this thing with Ron. Just trying to understand who’s who.”

  “That right?” He shook his head and turned to a crack of a bat as the Fort Myers catcher smacked one over the right field fence for two more runs.

  “I’ll tell you one other thing I know,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Deputy Castle. She’s married.”

  I nodded. Sal didn’t look at me and I sure didn’t look at him. I shouldn’t have been bothered, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. For all Lenny’s joking, she was just doing her job. And it hit my pride, my ego more than I thought it should. We watched the game for a while in silence, sipping our beers. Finally I asked the question I shouldn’t have cared about but did.

  “So, who’s she married to? Do you know?”

  Sal nodded. “A lawyer.”

  “A lawyer? Really? Who? Do I know him?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” His smile turned into a chuckle that he tried to suppress but failed. “She’s married to State Attorney Eric Edwards.”

  If I had eaten cinderblock I wouldn’t have felt as heavy in my guts. I suddenly felt like I’d been played. The state attorney who was after Ron was sending his wife the deputy to feed us intel that was probably misleading. I wondered how Lenny didn’t know that. But then I recalled his jokes, and I realized he had to have known it. Which meant he would have seen through the ruse, if there was one. Which meant it was possible that the state attorney’s wife was telling us stuff behind her husband’s back. Which really made no sense to me at all.

  Sally was ready to leave after the seventh inning stretch. St. Lucie was going down in flames, so we wandered out to the lot. The Caddy wasn’t that hard to find. It practically had its own zip code. The kid, Christopher, was sitting in the front with a textbook open and notepad in his lap. He seemed to be preparing for an exam in microeconomics, which I would think about later that night to help me get to sleep.

  “How was the game, Mr. Mondavi?”

  “The hot dogs were good, kid.”

  We drove back down to Sally’s store, and he asked Christopher to wait for ten minutes, as he needed a ride home. We went inside and Sally led me into the back room. It was an office-cum-storeroom, like a slightly less orderly version of the store itself. Another young guy was sitting at a laptop at the desk in the room.

  “Did you find anything, Jordan?”

  “I did, Mr. Mondavi. I found that most of the shipping containers coming through Port of Palm Beach are owned by the shipping companies. But your containers are different.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “This is Miami Jones, Jordan,” said Sally. “Jordan’s a junior at the college. He does a bit of computer work for me to pay for his books.”

  The kid and I offered each other nods. We both knew he earned more than a little to buy schoolbooks. Sally didn’t know much about new technology, but he was okay with that. He often hired smart kids from the college to do odd jobs for him, like computer work or chauffeuring him to ball games. And he had a habit of helping those kids finish college with no student debt whatsoever .

  “So your containers are owned by another company, not a shipping company,” said Jordan.

  “What company?”

  He clicked a key on his computer. “Cyntech.”

  “Will Colfax’s company,” I said.

  “That’s right. He’s the CEO and major shareholder.”

  “So do you know where these containers came from?”

  “I do. They came from Guangzhou, China, via the Suez Canal.”

  “Guangzhou? Where is that?” I asked.

  “It’s the provincial capital of Guangdong province, that used to be known as Canton,” said Jordan. “It’s mainland China, just north of Hong Kong.” Maybe this kid was a geography major.

  “Okay. So do we know what’s in the containers?”

  Jordan shook his head. “No, there’s no way to access that without hacking into the Cyntech system.” He looked at Sally. “And that might take a day or two.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. I didn’t want the kid breaking into systems that the FBI might be looking at right now.

  “But I can tell you what Cyntech does,” said Jordan.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s kind of arbitrage. They buy failing companies in Chi
na, often the Chinese offshoot or joint venture of a foreign company, or they buy the excess and remainder stock of companies that have gone bankrupt for cents on the dollar.”

  “What sort of stock?”

  “Anything and everything. Past shipments have included athletic socks, cheap MP3 players and even those little plastic American flags that they hand out at parades.”

  “So what happens to the stuff? ”

  “Cyntech sells it for cents plus a percentage, often to dollar stores, pop-up stores, other businesses.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it?” Jordan frowned at me. “Dude, you don’t get it. The stuff might be garbage that people don’t really need, but that garbage is worth hundred of millions every year. Any given shipment could net them between one-half and five million.”

  “Dollars?” I asked, shocked.

  “Not yuan.”

  “In little plastic flags?”

  “You know how many of those things get sold every fourth of July?”

  “A few?”

  “About three for every American. That’s close on a billion.”

  I nodded. “That’s quite a few.”

  “It is. Plus they then break up the companies they buy, auction their stuff. The desks, the cubicles, the light fixtures. Or they sell the whole lot to the next joint venture starting up. They make money right down to the pencils. In one example I found, they sold the furniture and fittings to a company, and when it failed, they bought the same stuff back at auction for pennies on the dollar, then sold it to the next company. They’ve so far sold that same block of furniture and fittings four times to four different companies that have all failed.”

  “Nice business. So why is Alec Meechan delivering these containers for a guy who is now dead?”

  “I don’t know who that is, but I’ll tell you something. From what the public data says, the containers are going back to China empty.”

  “So? ”

  “So a shipping company would never do that. They take up space on the ship and don’t earn any money if they’re empty. For a company that’s pretty crafty about the business they’re in, paying for freighting empty containers seems pretty dumb. There are plenty of brokers who will fill empty containers, for a cut.”

  The kid was right. That did seem pretty dumb. And he was right again. To make millions out of the business they were in not only meant that Will understood business fundamentals but also meant he had plenty of contacts to find the deals.

  I thanked the kid for his efforts, and Sally walked us all out and locked up again, and then offered Jordan a ride home. Sal got in the back again, and Jordan slipped in beside Christopher.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for the beer and the dog,” Sally said with a wave.

  “Thanks for everything else,” I replied as the huge car made its wide turn and headed away. I put on my helmet and sat on my bike for a while, talking myself out of going where I really didn’t want to go, and failing.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I HOPPED ONTO the turnpike for a bit and the traffic was light. By the time I pulled off at North Jog Road the traffic signals were my only companions. I rode back over the turnpike and as I turned onto the Beeline Highway I dropped into another world. It was like Jurassic Park or Journey to the Center of the Earth . There were no other vehicles on the road and the sad yellow headlight on my bike was the only source of light. I was riding through a tunnel of foliage and atmosphere, the barely tamed trees and shrubs either side of the road arching inward, their nightly coup underway as they attempted to reclaim the state from the asphalt and the cars and the people. Above me there was no starlight, no moon. A celestial blackout, a dreadful blanket thrown over the Everglades.

  I pushed the bike further and faster. While there was no traffic at all, if any kind of animal wandered onto the road it would end badly for the both of us. The dark tunnel sent shivers down me, a supernatural force at work that pushed my bike forward despite what should have been my protestations.

  Stopping didn’t make anything better. As I pulled over and wheeled my bike into the thick-grassed water catchment channel beside the highway, I was assaulted by the noise. The night was alive, and the whining of the bike was replaced by something loud and organic. A trillion bugs sang a tuneless chorus, competing with frogs for the audible bandwidth. I wanted to know what was going on with the containers, and why Alec had collected them when they belonged to Will and Will was dead. But standing in the darkness observed by a million little eyes, I wondered how badly I wanted to know. But I shook it off, hung my helmet on the bars and grabbed a couple tools from the small pouch that every rider who had a bike with the reliability of mine learned to carry.

  Then I saw a single light in the distance, like an oncoming train. I tensed and waited, transfixed by this singular source of light, as a sailor alone at sea would be on sighting a lighthouse. The light grew closer, and as it did it broke apart, one cell becoming two, life dividing and multiplying, until it became two distinct lights. Then the bank of light on top of the cab showed itself, orange from the white of the headlights, and a big rig bellowed through, the sound of the truck not hitting me until it was almost past. I watched it flash by, a roar and gone, swallowed by the cacophony and the night.

  I rolled out the tension in my shoulders and stepped up onto the edge of the road. No points of light in the distance, so I walked along the strip of blacktop toward the warehouse where Alec Meechan had delivered the containers. I reached the main gate of the warehouse as a light appeared behind me on the road, and I pressed myself into the scrub and waited for another lonely truck to pass.

  The warehouse was lit with sodium lamps, casting an amber tint across the low cloud and the lot. There was no sign of life. Human life at any rate. The swirls of amber made the building appear like an apparition, and then the lights petered out before they reached the edges of the lot, where the trucks had waited in line earlier that day, and where in the darkness the army of the night waited to take over, if given half a chance.

  I noted the sign for the security company that patrolled the facility, attached to the main gate. The gate was locked tight, and coils of razor wire wound across the top of the wire gate and fence. I put my left hand on the fence and moved right, away from the gate, away from the light, from the solidity of man-made ground. The fence dove into the foliage and I followed. I kept my hand on the wire, as if it were my last tenuous grasp on civilization. I hit the corner of the facility, a thick steel pole folding the wire ninety degrees, across to the side of the parking lot, as far from the warehouse as one could get.

  The trees and scrub had been cleared beyond the fence line when the facility was built, but after that had been left to encroach into the space against the fence. Keeping the tropical fauna at bay was a necessary task in South Florida, whether it was a warehouse on the outskirts of town or a gated community by a golf course. Even the lawns spoke of a desire to reclaim the state, and it was never more than a few months away from doing it. I swear some nights I could hear the grass outside my apartment growing. But the battle was also an expensive one, and in facilities like this, where aesthetics were of minimal concern, the wilds were left to themselves until they promised damage to the expensive security fences, at which point they would be hacked back again.

  I stopped about one-third of the way along the far side of the square lot, and halfway between two of the poles holding the fence in place. I took out the pliers I had grabbed from my bike’s tool bag, and I unclipped a series of ties at the base of the fence. When I thought I had enough, I returned to the center between the poles and lifted the wire. It was taut and solid, but with a bit of grunt and a few muffled profanities, I managed to lift it a few inches off the pavement. I got on my back and wiggled like a beached dolphin under the wire fence.

  It took a lot more energy than I thought it would. I was puffing when I was done, and badly needed a drink, of the agua kind. But I brushed myself off and m
oved at a slow jog, away from the gate further, following the fence line beyond the gaze of the sodium lamps. In a couple of minutes I stood behind the warehouse. Here at the back there were more lamps, and with only five feet between the structure and the fence, I was bathed in amber. Fortunately there were no human eyes to see me. I checked the length of the building for a way in. It would be tricky. The fence was for show, and to keep flora and fauna at bay. The warehouse would have alarms, probably silent. No point putting in a siren out here, where there was no one to hear it. But the security company would, and at this time of night they could be here in as little as ten minutes. Unless a patrol was in the area, when that time could be cut in half.

  The only option I could see was a window about ten feet above my head, and it would be locked or alarmed, or both. But it got me looking at a pile of pallets that had been lazily dumped on the back side of the building. They were in a bad shape, many missing slats, the wood discolored by old rain. But they were piled seven feet high, in an unsteady mound under the eaves of the warehouse. I figured the roof might provide the only way in, but climbing a makeshift ladder of unstable pallets didn't strike me as a genius of an idea. They were heavy and jagged. The cuts I could handle—having a pile of pallets land on me was another story. I tried pushing them into an orderly stack with no success, and I searched for another way but found none. I resolved to climb, genius idea or not. I spat on my hands for reasons that eluded me, and then grabbed the pallet above my eye level. The pile wobbled but held. I stuck my foot into a lower pallet and levered myself up, then reached for the top pallet. Then Jack came tumbling down. The piled pallets groaned and leaned, and I knew I was done for. I kicked away from the pile like a swimmer pushing off the end of a pool, and flipped in midair. The pallets dropped like a house of cards, crashing and splintering into the pavement. I landed and rolled and hit the fence, but did so just clear of the collapsed pile. I put my hand to my hip. There was blood, but not a flow. I had torn my pants and grazed my skin, but I’d done worse before, and would again. I stood gingerly to check that I could walk, and found that I could. I was canvasing the idea of getting the hell out of there when the paved lot exploded in light.