by Jack Hardin
“Ionia, right down the blueway from here. That poor boy’s family. They said they found traces of drugs not far from him,” Gloria said. “Like maybe he stumbled onto something by accident.”
A picture flashed onto the screen of a young family sitting on a beach. Father and son wearing khaki pants rolled up at the ankles and matching button-down shirts. The mother and baby girl wore matching yellow sundresses, and they all stared into the camera as if life had only ever blown a sweet breeze across their bows. The newscast slowly zoomed in on the face of the boy, but before the mother's face disappeared Ellie caught a clear view of it and gasped. Visions of long, tan legs standing on top of a cheerleading pyramid and a homecoming queen’s crown flitted across Ellie’s memory. The newscaster said she was Gina Stark. Back then she was Gina Higgs, the most popular girl in high school, the embodiment of all clichés: head of the cheerleading squad, homecoming queen, straight As. But she was kind, and Ellie had always liked her. She was even prettier now than she had been back then.
Ellie grabbed her cell phone from off the side of the cash register. She had two missed calls from her uncle. She thumbed over her contacts and selected the one she wanted.
“Hello?”
“Garrett,” she said softly.
It took him five heartbeats to answer. “You heard?” His tone was quiet, sober.
“Yeah.”
“That’s Gina Higgs, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Ellie blinked back tears. It was strange how she could feel for a woman she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. But no one should have to lose a son. Especially like that.
“They said there were drugs. Did they bring you in on this?”
“Of course. I got on scene a few minutes ago. We’re getting samples of the drugs. It was cocaine. A lot of it by the looks of it. There’s tire tracks all over here.”
“You don’t think the boy was in on it, do you?”
“Not a chance in hell. This kid was your upper middle class, baseball playing, ‘I want to go to Disney for my birthday’ type of kid. Twelve, Ellie. He was twelve. We’re not talking about a rich, clean-looking college kid who never had the chance to hear Nancy Reagan tell him to say no to drugs.”
Cell phones across the bar started ringing. The news was spreading quickly.
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay,” she said.
The news anchor sent the program into commercial, and Ellie stared into the plastic container of lime wedges.
“Hey, I’ve got to go, okay?” he said.
Ellie blinked. “Yeah. Of course.” She hung up without saying goodbye. She slipped her phone into her pocket and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were damp, and she did her best to blink the moisture away.
Two customers were mumbling down the bar about the story, and Gloria stared at Ellie. “You knew the mother?” she asked.
“Not for a long time. But, yes. I knew her.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
Ellie nodded. Fu nodded.
“Hard to believe this kind of thing happened a couple miles from here,” Gloria said. “These drug monsters are playing in our own backyard.”
“Excuse me,” Ellie said, and stepped out from under the tiki hut. She walked toward the pier as hot waves of anger pulsed through her. What kind of person does that to a kid? It was surreal. In the Middle East this kind of thing happened all the time. Terrorist groups gave no thought to who they hurt or how they hurt them. They recruited children as soldiers and used them as shields. But here? The picture of the boy's legs flashed across her vision. She stopped at the wooden rail and looked down into the dark, stirring water. The wind whipped strands of hair across her face. If those bringing drugs into their coasts were willing for a twelve-year-old boy to be incidental collateral in their dark enterprise, then they would be willing to do anything. That young boy wouldn’t be the last.
A couple large, cold raindrops hit her skin. Ellie pulled her phone back out and tapped the glass, set it to her ear. It rang twice.
“Garrett. Hey.” She sighed and swallowed hard. “I’m in.”
Chapter Eight
Ellie pulled her Silverado next to the guard house that commanded access to the parking lot of the Fort Myers DEA office. She plucked her temporary badge from a pocket in her backpack and rolled down her window. She handed it to the guard. “Good morning, Sam.”
“Hey, Ellie.” Sam Elton was on the heels of his twentieth year with the Administration. Two years ago he had transferred from forensics to security, a role he was fully overqualified for. He said he still needed the work but wanted life to move a little more slowly. He wore standard-issue cargo pants, and his thick arms and chest swelled underneath his white polo. His graying blonde hair was trimmed tight to his skin, making it easy to confuse him with a Marine. He took her badge, scanned it with a handheld device, and looked at the reading. “Your temp badge expires today. Are you getting a permanent one?”
“Yes. They should have it ready for me inside.”
He paused, looked at the picture printed on the plastic, and then smiled at her. “You’re not all that photogenic, are you?”
She reached out the window and tried to playfully slap his arm. She missed. “Stop it, Sam.”
He handed it to her. “You must be pretty special. Usually takes a good couple of months to get a permanent clearance.”
“Well, there’s a lot of work to get done,” she deflected. “Thanks again.”
“You bet.” He went back in, and the gate slid open. The steel one-way spikes lowered under the weight of the truck as the tires moved over them and clicked back up once it passed. Ellie navigated the truck to an empty section on the far end of the lot. She liked parking further away. It gave her time to think and process on the walk in. She turned off the engine and kept her hands on the steering wheel, staring out her windshield at the four-story building in front of her; beige-painted brick and lined with darkened windows. It was surreal being here, holding a badge that claimed her title as an independent contractor with the Drug Enforcement Administration. A badge that, for all intents and purposes, gave her as much clearance and authority as an actual agent. Seven months ago she had walked across the inlaid seal at Langley for the last time and moved here with the resolve to never work for any kind of of GO again. But little Adam Stark’s murder had immediately softened her resolve, and today would be her first day with her feet on the ground. After agreeing to Garrett’s proposal to come work with him, Ellie had spent her first week here undergoing interviews, personality and cognitive testing, and mounds of onboarding paperwork. As Sam had noted, it was a process that usually happened over the course of a couple months, if not longer, but Garrett had massaged his influence to dramatically speed up the process. The last two weeks Ellie had spent eight to ten hours a day getting up to speed on agency policies and codes and steeping herself in the ‘Who’s Who’ of the local and wider world of drug trafficking. She had also worked out an agreement with Garrett’s office. She would choose when she would work, a minimum of twenty hours a week and no more than thirty, with Garrett reserving the right to call her in if her absence was hindering specific progress or delaying results. Key people in the office would assist her where needed, but Garrett did not yet have the flexibility of pulling them completely off their own cases or workflows. Ellie would be getting Agent Mark Palfrey’s help for up to twenty hours a week. Mark was young, just twenty-eight, and entering his third year with the DEA, coming on after getting a master’s degree in special investigations and spending three years with the forensics division of the Atlanta PD. His current role with the DEA was an Intelligence Research Specialist which had him working closely with Special Agents as well as managing research into drug cultivation and production, trafficking routes, and analyzing the flow of money in and out of those trafficking organizations. As it was, the Miami office had co-opted him to focus so much into the workings of drug movements in the Fort Lauderdale area that he, as yet, did
not have the freedom to cast his gaze and research onto Lee County. Bringing Ellie on and assigning her and Mark to a team was Garrett’s way of subtly giving the finger to his superiors in Miami. He had taken the helm of the Fort Myers office to restrict the cartels’ access to their coasts, and he had decided to make that happen with or without their consent.
Garrett was much different than the person Ellie remembered from their high school and college days. He was grounded and clear thinking, mature and confident. The choice he had made years ago to ensure that his life went a meaningful direction had clearly paid off. It was almost unheard of for someone in their mid-thirties to be in charge of a regional division, but it was easy to see why he was. In the short three weeks Ellie had been coming here, she noticed the high regard in which those in the office held their Special Agent in Charge. He had a reputation as a boss who wasn’t timid about getting his hands dirty or performing routine, ordinary tasks. It was the reason he had bumped into Ellie and Major that day in the Sound. Carl Rickman, a Special Agent, had come down sick that morning, and Garrett took his place out on the water performing routine checks along the coastline. Garrett was also quick to acknowledge his lack of experience in certain areas and often deferred to the experience of older agents. The office loved him for this quality. Know-it-alls didn’t get very far, and Garrett was an expert at creating teams that could function at a high level by drawing on the specialized talents and experiences of each member of the team.
Garrett had been spot on when he pitched his offer to Ellie at the coffeehouse last month. Ellie had met most everyone in the office over the last three weeks, and they were all tasked in some capacity with either finding drugs on the street or supporting the agents who did. Not a single team was dedicated to finding those at the top: the men or women connected to the Narcs, the ones actually bringing the drugs into local coastlines. Miami had a cargo ship full of agents designated for such anti-narcotic activity, but not one of them had a cubicle up here. Along the coast from Sarasota to Everglades City, there were hundreds of miles of coastline running along estuaries, coves, rivers, and the fringes of small islands, all providing sufficient opportunity to clandestinely import illicit drugs.
When Ellie had called Tyler and told him she’d accepted the offer, he’d been pleased and said that he would notify The View that she would be declining their offer. The news of the boy's death had spread quickly, raising tempers in every bar and fish house on the island. Tyler, like everyone else in the community, was angry at the apparent cause of, and connection to, young Adam’s murder. It was Citrus who hadn’t been so thrilled that she had taken the job. He was used to his owner being around all the time, coming and going throughout the day, often taking him with her to The Salty Mangrove or out on a run. Now he spent the day on his chain in the backyard, waiting for his beloved owner to get home. She’d given him a good belly scratch this morning and promised him that, now that she was ready to get started, she wouldn’t be stuck at the office as much. Citrus had run five full circles around the living room, yapping the entire time. He would have, of course, done so if she had only said “Good morning.” Ellie had recruited Major to bring Citrus over to the bar on the days she wouldn’t be around.
Ellie grabbed her backpack, stepped from the truck, and started walking across the dark asphalt of the newly paved parking lot. It was a perfect Florida morning. Warm, not chilly. Humid, not wet. A few clouds sliding lazily through the blue sky like stray wisps of cotton candy. A perfect day to be out on the water or lying on a beach.
Or for taking the first steps to track down a young boy’s murderer.
The news of Adam Stark’s murder had hit the wire nearly a month ago, and the county had, as yet, found nothing substantial in the way of clues. Tire treads were discovered in the soft soil from two different trucks, all of them ubiquitous. The cocaine found dusted on a saw palmetto was still at the lab, and results weren’t due for another two weeks. A couple boot prints showing a size fourteen were discovered near the water. That was it. No hairs, no fingerprints, no fibers. Nothing that would lead them beyond the crime scene. No one had seen any trucks go or come out of the trees near the waterline, and there were no cameras within a three-mile radius. If the murderer was going to be found, it would only be through the result of digging into the undergrowth of the local drug industry.
Ellie walked up to the glass door at the front of the building, scanned her badge on the card reader, and opened the door when it beeped and the tiny light on top turned green. The ground floor lobby was everything one would expect from a government building. Gray marble floors, a couple leather couches in the corner that no one ever used. Three artificial trees on either side. She walked up to the guard desk and set her badge on the counter. The man behind it replaced it with three pieces of paper.
“Sign those for me.” He handed Ellie a pen. She signed them and set the pen down.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll scan these in and email them to your SAIC.” He opened a drawer and pulled out her permanent badge. “Here you go. You’re all set.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then set her backpack on the conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector. Another guard watched a monitor as her bag went through and handed it to her when it came out the other side.
“Have a good one,” he said.
Ellie walked toward the elevator. The building had been erected in the sixties and for thirty-odd years had been the offices for local businesses and a couple NGOs. As the decades moved on, tenants became attracted to newer office parks that had greater curb appeal, leaving half the spaces vacant save for the spiders and June bugs that squatted in them. The government finally purchased the building around the turn of the millennium, drove out the remaining tenants, and gave the exterior a facelift. Now, the first floor and half of the second were the local offices for the ATF: Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the third floor was marked for the Department of Homeland but sat eerily vacant; and the fourth was the DEA. Ellie punched the elevator button and mentally massaged two words while she listened to the elevator click and rattle down the shaft.
Mateo Nunez. The name came with an image. Large round face with black hair slicked back into a ponytail. A square chin and a fat nose huddled under small but piercing eyes. He was one of two local men who were known as heads of their respective drug operations and believed to be operating somewhere in the general vicinity of Fort Myers. The other man was Sebastián Zamaco, and a clear picture of him had yet to be put in his file. A sketch from five years ago had been pulled off a surveillance camera at a gas station in Marathon, and it had only showed a third of his face in a grainy black and white. Some had doubted if it was really even him. No other likenesses of Zamaco had been seen. The dubious sketch showed a man with a high forehead and bushy eyebrows, full cheekbones, and thick lips. The image rendered by an artist had the artificial look that seemed inherent in composite sketches: obtuse eyes, unshadowed cheekbones, and overdrawn areas where the actual features were yet unknown or unclear. After spending the last week studying the files of both men, and what little was known of their organizations, Ellie had decided to start with Nunez’s organization. Zamaco’s file was cold, and Nunez’s was warmer only because two drug houses busted in the last year had been his. He had not been on the scene during the raids, and a man in handcuffs had finally admitted the house was Nunez’s. The man was killed in prison four months later, no one admitting to witnessing who had sliced his throat with a shank made from dozens of sharpened paper clips woven together.
The elevator gave a muffled ding, and its stainless steel doors slid open. Once inside the car, Ellie scanned her badge and rode to the top. The doors slid back onto an open floorplan. A pony wall enclosed two thirds of floorspace, interior windows rising off of it all the way up to the tiled ceiling. Behind the glass was a sea of cubicles, and behind them, along the exterior wall, were small offices. Garrett’s was on the far end, was larger than the rest, and looked down
on East Fort Myers. Ellie walked down a hallway and turned left into the main conference room where two people sat with their backs to the windows. They all exchanged greetings, and Ellie took a seat at the other side of the table.
“Ready to get at this?” The voice belonged to Special Agent Tim “Jet” Jahner. Jet was in charge of the office’s Special Response Team and was approaching sixty, his gray hair trying to turn white. He had been a part of the Fort Myers DEA team for twenty of his thirty-one years with the agency, was as fit as a drill sergeant, and often acted like one. His strong, toned muscles pressed out on his blue polo. Jet’s field experience was unsurpassed and envied across the entire floor. If it was illegal and was growing or being cooked in Lee County, Jet’s team would lead the task force that would get it out of the wrong hands. Jet had been in Medellin the day Escobar was gunned down by the Search Bloc nearly three decades ago and had been a key figure in advocating for Garrett - young, talented, and motivated - to lead their office and to begin focusing their sights on the bigger fish. Part of the agency’s agreement with Garrett in giving him the Fort Myers office came with a promise to give him the freedom and resources to dig deeper into the local underworld. Ultimately, they failed to live up to the promise. They gave him the office but kept him centered on street drugs instead of the high-level suppliers. Someone had noted it was like a parent giving their child permission to dig for gold in the backyard while keeping them busy with inside chores. Garrett wasn’t against getting drugs off the streets, but he saw it as a Band-Aid solution instead of addressing the festering wound underneath.
Ellie pulled a notebook out of her backpack and looked at Jet. “You bet I am,” she answered.
“Garrett should be here in a second,” Jet said. “In the meantime I think I’ll grab a cup of coffee.” He got up and walked to the Keurig at the other end of the room. It sat underneath a flat screen television on a small hutch that also held paper cups, coffee condiments, and a couple speakers that were connected to the television.
