Erik grinned. “I might wanna come back here later. You know, if we end up spending the night.”
“They left here half an hour ago. Let’s split up again.” GT pointed to the right end of the long dock, with even longer piers sticking out into the little harbor. “You go that way and I’ll go the other. Circle around the block and we’ll meet in the parking lot out front. Text or call if you see him.”
Without waiting for an answer, GT turned and started down the long dock. The first two piers he came to had gates in front of them with signs saying they were off limits to anyone but residents. Beyond the gates, a number of boats were lit up and he could hear music coming from a couple.
Residents only? GT thought. They’re boats, not houses.
Moving on to the next pier, it looked more like a gas dock. He went out on it anyway. There was a small shack at the end where two people could hide behind.
The girl with the ugly guy being a prostitute told GT that they’d go to a secluded place, not her house. Street whores were cheap and drugs were expensive. They had to make up for in volume, what the call girls GT paid got for a single date. So, they’d go someplace close. Someplace quick.
Finding nobody behind the dockmaster’s shack, GT moved quickly back to the main dock. The next pier only had a handful of boats tied up and he didn’t see any place on the pier where a person could hide, but he walked out just the same. Any one of the boats, all of which were dark, could be used for a quickie.
One by one GT searched the piers, catching an occasional glimpse of Erik doing the same, working the north end. Reaching the end, where the marina office was located and still open, he marveled at the size of the huge sailboats taking up two entire piers, their masts soaring far above the other smaller sailboats.
Turning inland, GT walked the nearly empty block toward Caroline Street, angling through a large parking lot on the corner. He scanned the shadowy places between the parked cars, knowing that street whores liked parking lots. When his phone vibrated in his pocket, he pulled it out and read the text from Erik, then immediately called him.
“I’m headed your way. Follow the guy.”
Walking at a brisk pace with the phone to his ear, he followed Erik’s running dialogue. This wasn’t the first time they’d had to chase someone down in a busy city. Hell, GT thought, this is easy compared to Pittsburgh.
Out of nowhere, a guy stumbled onto the sidewalk and nearly collided with GT. The big black man stopped in his tracks. The guy in front of him couldn’t be more than five three, with stingy dark hair, a crooked nose and old acne scars all over his face and neck.
“You!” GT roared, nearly taking the guy’s head off with a sharp right cross. Erik came up behind the little man and managed to grab him from behind before the guy hit the ground, then stood holding him up under the shoulders.
“Take him down that alley and then go get the car,” GT ordered.
Dragging the limp little man into the alley, Erik deposited him next to a dumpster, then bent to check his pulse. “Out cold, boss. The car’s a coupla blocks away. It’ll take me a few minutes.”
“Go, I’ll stay here with him.”
“He won’t be able to tell us anything if you hurt him more, boss.”
GT turned and glowered at his employee, the rage barely contained behind his dark eyes. “You just go get the fucking car and get back here.”
Erik took off at a jog, not wanting to anger his boss any further. GT paced the alley entrance for a few minutes. When he was sure nobody was around, he entered the alley and looked down at the little man on the ground. Drawing his foot back, GT kicked him hard in the meaty part of the thigh with the toe of his shoe.
The pain shot through Byers’s body, waking him with a muffled groan. As he reached down to his injured thigh. GT knelt beside him. “Good, you’re awake.”
Looking into the big man’s eyes, Byers realized he was in really big trouble. “Why’d you punch me, man? I didn’t do nothing to you.”
“You know something I want to know, you little turd fondler. And you’re gonna tell me what it is. If you lie, you’re gonna get hurt real bad.”
A revolting smell drifted up and GT realized it wasn’t the putrid garbage in the dumpster. The guy had just shit his pants.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, man. Just don’t hurt me anymore.”
“You’ve been using a credit card that belongs to a guy by the name of Grabowski.”
“In my pocket, man. Take it. I’m sorry.” Byers thought for sure that this hulking black guy must work for the coke dealer.
“I ain’t reaching in your nasty pants, asshole! Don’t want the card, anyway. Keep it. I want Grabowski. Where’d you get his card?”
“At the Miami bus station, man,” Byers replied, somewhat confused. “I lifted his wallet in a crowd.”
“You picked Grabowski’s pocket in Miami?” GT roared, realizing that he and Erik had not only been following the wrong guy, but were over a hundred miles from where Grabowski and the card had gotten separated. To make matters worse, the city where the split had happened was one of the biggest in all of Florida.
GT stood up as the big Escalade stopped at the alley corner. He was very tempted to just stomp the man’s head until it cracked open like a ripe watermelon.
Byers lay trembling on the ground at the big man’s feet. He realized suddenly that the guy didn’t work for the coke dealer he’d robbed at all. He was looking for him.
Byers often traded information for drugs, money, or food. He remembered things and traded little scraps of information to the cops, to dealers, to pimps, anybody who didn’t have that one particular scrap of information which he held. Information was valuable. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter. A lot of times lies were much easier to sell.
Byers knew he had an ace in the hole and played it. “Yeah, but he’s here, man. He’s right here in Key West.”
Why do I let shit like this bother me? I thought, lying awake in the forward stateroom of the Revenge. The dock area has shore power, and the boats were connected to the island’s main power source. I’d just never felt the need to connect the house. Until this summer. And tonight was one of those nights. The disappearance of the sun did nothing to squelch the heat and humidity.
The wind here is nearly always from the eastern quadrant, and there are few completely calm days. They’re so predictable and constant that early mariners called them “trade winds.” They learned that sailing south out of Spain to lower latitudes, then turning due west was usually faster than sailing a direct route to the southwest. These huge ships carried trade goods to and from the islands of the Caribbean, and the size of a captain’s purse was measured by his ship’s speed.
Now and then, we get a night like this, the air completely still and miserably hot. Sitting high above the water, my house remained a little cooler most of the time, even on nights like this. But the Trents’ house sits lower and on the lee side of the island. While the slightest shift in the atmosphere brings fresh air over the banyans and mangroves and through the windows of my house, the Trents’ house is blocked by the rest of the island and the tree canopy that keeps it cool during the day. Charlie insisted that the view of the setting sun from their front porch was worth it. Until last night, and tonight was hotter.
Simple enough to remedy, when you live like we do here on the island. The Trents crash in my house and I come down to the boat and switch on the air conditioning. Unable to sleep, I got up and went to the salon, the low hum of the air conditioner sounding strange to my ears, but a necessary distraction. When the boat’s closed up, it gets really hot inside.
My boat is the second to carry the name Gaspar’s Revenge. Nearly identical to the first, this one has a dark blue hull all the way up to the gunwale and quite a few improvements over the original, which had a number of non-factory upgrades itself.
Unable to sleep, I padded into the salon, wearing only my boxers. Between Jimmy and Chyrel, my boat
was a floating data center. I’d been secretly learning my way around the Internet, always surprised at the amount of information that was available. Jimmy had set up the hardware, turning my boat into what he called a “hot-spot.” When the modem is turned on, my laptop and even my phone connect to it without any wires. The modem is connected to the Internet through a satellite link. A small dome on the roof picks up a signal from a communications satellite in space and my charter business has an account with a satellite Internet service provider.
Knowing from experience how easily these things can be tracked, I leave most electronic devices turned off unless I’m underway. When I want to know something, it’s simply a matter of opening my laptop, which automatically turns on the modem. Powering up the laptop, it took only a few seconds before my cell phone, which I’d forgotten to power off and was sitting on the settee, vibrated after connecting to the modem and the screen on the laptop came to life.
For nearly an hour, I dug into Mister Gerald Tremont “GT” Bradley’s background. He actually had a page on Wikipedia, but I’d learned not to put too much stock in that. The websites I visited spoke of a troubled childhood and adolescence. Yet he’d managed to get a full-ride athletic scholarship at Pennsylvania State University. His off-the-field antics had gotten him in trouble with the law more than once, but that hadn’t stopped the Pittsburgh Steelers from drafting him in the first round as a linebacker in ’96.
He’d suffered a career-ending knee fracture in a game against the Miami Dolphins eight years ago. Everything since then was mostly arrest records and newspaper headlines about the arrests. It looked like he’d quickly replaced his exorbitant NFL income with a pretty good illegal drug profit, building a small empire among the middle class in the Pittsburgh area. Not one of the charges stuck, but he’d been investigated nine ways to Sunday on everything from extortion to trafficking, even murder.
Opening another, very recent, news website, I thought, Okay, so he’s a shit-bird. None of my business. Or as Sergeant Russ Livingston used to say, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”
But it was my circus. My friend and her family had been exposed to a world far from the idyllic one she and Carl wanted their kids to grow up in when the ugly guy had tried to sell her crack cocaine. Then the near-violent altercation when GT had arrived and asked about the pusher.
My monkeys, too, I thought, looking at a close-up picture of GT Bradley and his chauffeur, Erik Lowery. They were coming out of a federal courthouse in Pittsburgh with his accountant, who had gotten Bradley off of a tax-dodging charge on a technicality.
An icon on the bottom of my laptop screen flashed. I had an incoming instant message. When I clicked on it, a small window opened, a picture of Chyrel above a message that read, “Not a good guy.”
Below the message was an icon for a camera and I clicked on it. The window expanded, Chyrel’s picture being replaced with a live video feed.
The background was different, though. She wasn’t in her office in Homestead. It looked more like a house or an apartment. The background in her office is a bare white wall that doesn’t give anything away as to time or location. Behind her now was a window and through the drapes, streetlights shone.
“The DHS snooping on me again?” I asked.
“Nope,” Chyrel replied, unperturbed. “I’m on my home computer, my own connection. With some people, I keep an instant message box open, and it tells me when they’re online. What’s the interest in the Pittsburgh coke dealer?”
“Deuce tell you to monitor my Internet activity?”
“No, Jesse. In fact he told everyone on the team that, until you and he iron out the problem you’re having, we’re not supposed to have any professional contact with you.”
“So why are you snooping on what I’m looking at?”
“You’re my friend, Jesse. I look out for my friends. And I wasn’t actually snooping. Well, yeah, I guess I was, but only if you used certain search words that might get you in trouble.”
Exasperated, I realized that it was well past midnight. “What are you doing up this late, anyway?”
“Late? It’s not even one o’clock. I never go to bed before three. So, is this Bradley guy a threat to national security? I can’t help you if he is. That’d be breaking Deuce’s rules.”
“Purely PerSec,” I replied, meaning it had to do with personal security, which it did. In a way.
“In that case, I wouldn’t be violating Deuce’s rules. Can I help you with something? This poor football player ruffle someone’s feathers in the Keys?”
“What do you mean poor football player?”
“He’s on your radar, right? That can’t be good for his health.”
A plan started formulating in my mind. Chyrel could run circles around most computer hackers and was leaps and bounds ahead of me. “Maybe there is something you can help me with.”
“Just name it,” Chyrel eagerly responded, hunching forward over the keyboard.
“Can you create a fake background for me?” Chyrel cocked her head and lifted an eyebrow. “Never mind, of course you can.”
“Who do you want to be?” she asked.
“Stretch Buchannan. Make me a big-time cocaine importer, with ties to a Cuban cartel. Throw in a few arrests, trafficking, attempted murder, that kind of stuff.”
Her fingers were already flying on the keyboard. “I’ll have it in a couple of hours. It won’t withstand scrutiny by the CIA or FBI, but I can make it deep enough to fool local LEOs and any bad guys that look you up on the web—some postdated news reports, stuff like that.”
“That’ll be a big help. Thanks.”
“I’ll email you the dossier. You’ll have it before sunrise.” She stopped typing for a minute and looked at the screen. “Deuce isn’t involved, Jesse.”
Trying to look unconcerned, I asked, “Involved in what?”
Chyrel grinned. “You and I need to play poker someday. I’d like living on that big, fancy boat of yours.”
I was starting to feel tired and sighed. “Where’s he at with the investigation into Charity’s disappearance?”
“I’d be breaking the rules if I could answer that question. But, since there is no ongoing investigation, I can’t.”
“That doesn’t strike you as odd?”
She stopped typing again and leaned in closer to the screen, as if worried someone would hear. “Deuce is the acting deputy director, remember?”
“Yeah, so?”
“His name hasn’t been submitted to Congress for approval to take over as the formal deputy director, nor has anyone else’s.”
“You mean…”
“I don’t mean anything. We’re not even having this discussion. But I’ll tell you this. There are things only a deputy director can do, and some of those things, an acting deputy director can’t do. As far as no ongoing investigation striking me as odd goes, keep in mind who I used to work for. I’m very good at ignoring stuff that’s above my paygrade.”
I sat back in my seat, searching her face for a clue. Damn, I hate this spy-versus-spy crap, I thought. Then it hit me. “Stockwell’s still in control?”
“I’ll send you the file shortly, Jesse. Oh, and I already located Bradley. He just used an Amex card and checked into the Hyatt in Key West. It was good talking to you. Bye.”
The screen went blank and I was left staring at the image of Bradley, his driver and his accountant. I’d recognized the face of the accountant instantly. With so many government alphabet agencies looking for him, I thought it was odd that Chase Conner had let his picture be taken by a reporter.
Sitting back once more, I closed the laptop and ran this new revelation around in my head. Stockwell had retired just a few days after Charity disappeared this past spring. He’d come to work for me soon after that and it’d worked out pretty good for the most part. We didn’t charter very much, but with neither of us needing the money, we didn’t need to.
It occurred to me that he hadn’t talked much about leaving
the job with Charity’s disappearance hanging over him. I know that after a lifetime of service, with all his accomplishments, something like that had to be bothersome. There’s no way I could just up and walk away from it.
Then there’s the fact that Deuce wasn’t even pursuing an investigation. That, coupled with what Chyrel had intimated about Deuce not actually being in control, meant that he had been ordered to look the other way. Deuce is the kind of guy that follows orders. Especially those with national security implications. He’d put the mission above all else, even friendship.
Was Chyrel really reaching out to me on her own? I wondered. Or is this Deuce’s way of extending an olive branch?
I switched off the lights in the salon and made my way down to my stateroom, just as the generator kicked on. Lying on my bunk, I thought about the more immediate concern. I’d told the psychic lady that I’d meet with her at noon tomorrow. She’d given me an address just off the middle of Duval Street in Key West.
If Bradley was at the Hyatt, I could dock there, or if they were full, Key West Bight had plenty of dock space. I decided I’d leave at the first rays of dawn and maybe do some recon around the Hyatt. I had to figure out a way to get Bradley to think I might be his ticket to a big import contract and hopefully get him to bring his accountant down here.
Chase Conner used to work for Florida Department of Revenue. He had been on hand, representing the state in the sale of a bunch of gold bars recovered from a Confederate blockade runner. The bars were being sold to the Florida History Museum, and Conner was to ensure a proper accounting for taxes. The sale went off without a hitch, but he’d planted a bug on my boat in the hopes of getting a tip on other treasures.
I’m not a treasure hunter. Deuce’s dad, Russ was and Rusty’s a licensed salvor. A few opportunities had presented themselves over the years and we’d found treasure. It’s out there. Conner had learned about the most recent find and enlisted the help of a Croatian crime boss in Miami. My son-in-law and his father handled legal matters for the Croat and they’d become involved, sending mercenaries to take the treasure. Several people had died and Doc had taken a bullet meant for me. Then there was the matter of my boat being blown out of the water. Yeah, I needed to talk to Chase Conner.
Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) Page 11
