Offside Trap

by A. J. Stewart

  “Yes? It’s who?” His eyes looked in my direction, but not at me. More like he was staring into another dimension of space and time. The corners of his mouth dropped. “All right. Put him through.” Millet’s body shrank in his natty suit. He listened for a moment. “Yes, Mr. Edwards, this is he.” More listening, then: “I’m afraid I don’t have the particulars in front of me . . . Yes, Rinti Developments are involved in the feasibility study, but it really hasn’t progressed from there . . . I believe some members from Tallahassee have visited, but I can’t specifically recall who . . . Senator Lawry? No, I don’t recall him either way . . . A formal time to answer your questions? I suppose I could . . . Monday next? Fine, that’s fine . . . Until then. Goodbye.” Millet slowly placed the receiver down. His vision focused back into the room.

  “Not Senator Lawry, then,” I said.

  Millet shook his head. “State attorney’s office. Somebody Edwards.”

  “Ooh, Edwards. He’s a real Elliot Ness type.”

  “But I’ve done nothing wrong.” Millet looked at me, pleading. I’m not sure if he was trying to convince me or himself.

  “Yeah, look—it’s just me, but I think you might want to give yourself five or ten minutes to reassess that position, then get cracking on putting the kibosh on this whole mega-campus deal. Then you might consider jumping on Craigslist and checking out some middle school engineering teaching positions. Just a thought.” I turned and left him openmouthed, and ambled back out to the atrium. I apologized to the receptionist for barging in, and then danced my way down the fire stairs two at a time. I got across the lobby and my cell phone rang. I thought it was Eric Edwards. It wasn’t.

  “Jones? This is Maggie Nettles. I checked out your story. Looks like your info’s good.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Lawry has a bank account in Nassau.”

  “Figures.”

  “I have a copy of the wire transfer note, from another Bahamas account that I can link back to Rinti Developments.”

  “Nice.”

  “And the transfer note. It’s from one of those old-fashioned printers. Dot matrix? All the little dots. Anyway, the comments field is interesting.”

  “Because it says . . .“

  “1132 College,” she said.

  “Which means?”

  “The university admin office, Millet’s office, is at 1132 College Drive.”

  “Thin.”

  “I don’t need to follow the rules of evidence, Jones. I just need to sway the jury of public opinion.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “More background. And don’t worry, you are unnamed sources.”

  So I sat on the steps of the administration building, right under Millet’s window, and outlined the story in more detail. Maggie was good. She had already connected most of the dots. I left out my personal interludes again, but left her with a pretty meaty story.

  “And you might want to hit up Millet one more time,” I said. “See if he wants to get anything off his chest.”

  I rang off and wandered to my Jeep. Pink blankets of cloud sat on the horizon, giving the sky a good dose of character. I felt pretty good, considering a very nasty guy wanted me and my as yet unobtained pet dead. I may not have been a rocket scientist, but I had good days. And this was turning out to be one of them. I got in the Jeep and fired it up. I was tossing up between the turnpike and I-95 at rush hour when my phone rang again.

  “Jones? Ronzoni.”

  “Detective Ronzoni.” I felt so good I didn’t even consider messing with his name for once. “How goes it?”

  “Plaza Lakes. Mean anything to you?”

  “Danielle has a townhouse in that community.”

  “That’s what I thought. I just heard a call on the radio. Plaza Lakes.”

  “What call?”

  “Officer down.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  HOSPITALS GET BUSY at the strangest hours. Accidents and sickness don’t follow the sundial. Wellington Regional was a smaller facility than Broward General, but it was still a tangle of humanity. I parked in the lot out front of the new building that looked like an office complex, and asked a nurse at the front desk for directions. For all I knew she may have been the same nurse I got directions from at Broward General when I visited Jake Turner. Those pink or blue pajamas they wear make them all look the same.

  Danielle’s colleague Burke stood in the hallway outside the room. He was on a call, but when he saw me he cut it off and walked to me.

  “She’s okay,” he said.

  “Define okay.”

  “GSW to the arm and lower torso. She’s just out of OR. The doc says stable. Nothing major hit. She’ll be okay.”

  “I need to see her.”

  “You can stick your head in the door. But she’s still drugged up.”

  We walked to the room, where a nurse protested without energy. Burke gave her a look and she relented. I stepped into the room. I was struck by the silence. There were no beeps and machines whirring. I couldn’t even hear Danielle breathe. She was tight under crisp sheets, her arms on top, punctured by IV drips. Her hair was matted back like she’d been swimming or had used too much gel, and her skin lacked the color of life. I bent down to check she was breathing and heard the steady one-two, in-out, that I had grown to love waking up to. It was solid, not raspy or gurgling, and it gave me confidence. It was the only thing about the room that did. A monitor on the other side of the bed showed her pulse on a graph, and her BPM. Peaks and troughs. I kissed her on the forehead, and she felt cool and clammy on my lips. Then I slipped back out of the room. Burke was waiting.

  “We got a partial witness, a neighbor. He didn’t see the event, but he heard the shots. He hunts, so he knew the sound. He saw a guy, dark and solid, get into a car he described as green and sporty, but not that sporty.”

  “A Jaguar?”

  “Maybe. He did say as the car peeled away toward the community exit, it braked hard and he noticed only one brake light worked.”

  The other one being busted by yours truly, but I kept that to myself.

  “How did they get into a gated community?”

  “We’re looking into that. It seems the security guy at the front gate might have stepped away for moment.”

  “Stepped away? I’ll step him away.”

  “Cool yourself, Miami. We don’t need you flying off the handle.”

  “What do you need, Burke? Two dead kids, a woman threatened at knife point and now a deputy shot. And you’re oh for four. Zippo, zilch.”

  “Right now it’s not about what I need—it’s about what Danielle needs.”

  I took a deep breath. What I really wanted was to put my fist through a wall. Which would hurt both my bones and my wallet. Burke gave me a moment. He was clearly used to waiting for angry people to collect themselves. And technically Jake and Cassandra weren’t PBSO cases, but he had the good grace to not defend himself. I guess oh for two wasn’t really any better.

  “You going after him?”

  Burke nodded. “Miami PD got stakeouts covering the car, the apartment, a house in Coral Gables and his office on Brickell.”

  “Miami PD let him walk, so I won’t hold my breath waiting for them to sneak up on him.”

  “Not much we can do about that. We can’t go down there ourselves. Anywhere else we need to add?”

  “Not that I know of. My office manager was checking him out. I’ll ask her.”

  “We need to get the weapon.”

  “So that means they’ll get rid of it.”

  “Where?”

  “Hell, could be anywhere.”

  “How many perps just choose anywhere?”

  “You’re the cop—you tell me.”

  “Almost none. Half toss it on a direct path from the crime scene to wherever they’re going. The other half choose somewhere known to them. It’s rarely random.”

  “So you’re checking around Plaza Lakes.”
r />   “Needle in a haystack, but yeah.”

  “Or somewhere they know.”

  “Like I say, Miami PD are staking the locales in case they show up. But where aren’t we looking?”

  I thought on it for a moment, and one face leaped into my mind.

  “Alligator Alley, where they left Angel.”

  “Maybe. I’ll get a patrol out there.” Burke stepped away to make his call. I felt like I should do something too, so I called the office. Lizzy was still there.

  “I’m glad you didn’t leave yet,” I said.

  “Detective Ronzoni said I should stay until he came to get me.”

  “Ronzoni’s coming to get you?”

  “He said he would drive me home to get some things, then take me somewhere safe. He told me about Danielle. Is she okay?”

  “Stable. Listen, you checked on Montgomery’s property, was there anything we didn’t know?”

  I heard paper shuffling, and then Lizzy came back. “An apartment, house, the office, the Jag. There is another car, a Land Rover, registered to the company. And another house in Nassau, also registered to the company, and a boat.”

  “A boat? Where?”

  “Registered and berthed in Miami.”

  “Lizzy, thanks. You keep the door locked until Ronzoni gets there, and make sure it’s him before you let him in.”

  “It’s under control. And you. You be safe. I’ll be praying for you both.”

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I appreciate that. I need all the help I can get right now.”

  I rang off and looked at Burke, still busy on a call. I figured it made him feel better to be doing something, but also figured whatever he was doing to be pointless. If Miami PD were covering Montgomery’s hideouts, then Montgomery had any number of outs, because there was no way to know who we could trust down there. And as Burke had said, we couldn’t go down there ourselves. Which got me thinking. About trust and location. We couldn’t know who to trust in Vice down in Miami, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t trust anyone. And the fact was Burke couldn’t go down there. Didn’t mean no one could. I made another couple of calls. In baseball parlance, I was positioning my field. If it came to it, I needed to be able to maneuver the batter to where I wanted him. Then I made a third call, to set the sucker pitch into play. Stoat answered.

  “It’s Miami. You guys are watching Montgomery.”

  “It’s all plainclothes, coordinated by Vice.”

  “That’s what I thought. Do you have uniformed guys you trust?”

  “Of course.”

  “I need you to do drive-bys. Constantly. At all his properties and office.”

  “We’ll be in patrol cars. If he doesn’t see us, someone he owns will.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Burke wandered over, and I rang off with Stoat, who promised to have patrol cars doing laps of Montgomery’s hangouts.

  “Anything?” said Burke.

  “Lizzy found a house on Nassau.”

  “I can alert Homeland Security to watch all ports, in case he tries to slip out of the country. Anything else?”

  “No. Call Homeland Security.”

  Burke went to place his call, and I stepped back into Danielle’s room. To hell with visiting hours. The nurses bent the rules for law enforcement. It might not have been fair to the regular folks with loved ones lying in the wards, but things were different for those who put themselves in harm’s way every day. If you didn’t look after the warriors, then who would defend the city walls? I sat with Danielle for what seemed like forever. The human mind has an amazing capacity to process thoughts in such a short time. I thought the Jake Turner case through from beginning to end, Kim Rose and President Millet, internships and Rinti and Senator Lawry, Officer Steele and Angel and an English petroleum executive by the name of Pistachio. I thought about my career, ups and downs, cold winters in Connecticut and hot summers in Florida, and a baseball career of sorts in between. I thought about meeting Danielle, and her kicking my backside in sit-up competitions, and sultry, quiet nights on my back patio, and the smell of her on my pillows when she didn’t stay, and the joy of seeing her wander out of the bedroom in the morning to the smell of fresh brewed coffee, wearing nothing but a threadbare Modesto A’s T-shirt. I did a lifetime’s thinking in an hour as I watched her sleep. And I thought about hitting the streets, doing something, anything, to find this guy and right this wrong. And then I watched Danielle breathing delicately, and figured that was all macho ego and vanity. What I needed to do right now was be the face she saw when she woke.

  And then her eyes opened. Slow and deliberate, like an old animatronic figure at Disneyland years ago. She blinked a few times to clear her vision, get used to the light. Then she saw me. She didn’t smile. I don’t think she had it in her. I held her hand tight and smiled for both of us. Then she opened her parched lips and whispered. I couldn’t hear, so I leaned closer.

  “Pistachio,” she said, and then she gulped a dry swallow that hurt. She closed her eyes, and I moved to get some water but she didn’t let go of my hand. She held on tighter than I thought she could, and she pulled me in. Danielle fixed her eyes on me and licked her lips.

  “MJ, the water is out of the barrel,” she said.

  “I know, sweetie, I know. Everyone’s on it. Burke, the PBSO, Miami PD.”

  She squeezed my hand tighter so it hurt, and ever so slightly shook her head. She gulped again, and then whispered to me.

  “End it.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  I MADE MY way to the ER waiting room. Sal Mondavi was sitting in the corner doing just that. He looked like a patient waiting on a bed. Despite living in Florida longer than I’d known him, he still carried the gray pallor of someone with a terminal disease, which to my knowledge he did not have. He pushed himself up from his chair as I approached.

  “Thanks for coming, Sally. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  He shrugged. “How is she?”

  “She woke up, so that’s something.”

  “Waking up is everything. So, kid, what’s the plan?”

  “Everything about this guy is in Miami.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I appreciate this, Sally. I owe you big time.”

  He gave me a stern look. “You owe nothing, and you mention that again I’ll make you sit through my Superbowl III video.”

  “Cast me into hell, Sal.”

  Sally picked up his leather bag, the sort of thing a doctor would have carried on house calls in Sally’s day. We retrieved the Jeep and headed south. I updated him on the latest goings-on as we headed down I-95.

  “Sounds like this putz needs to learn some respect.”

  “Funny, that’s what he said to me.”

  “In my experience it’s always the ones that lack respect that complain loudest about not having it.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Seems to me that the guy thinks he’s untouchable. But if you’ve ever heard of the grassy knoll, you should know that no one is untouchable. And he’s not from a family, so he doesn’t know the business. He doesn’t follow the rules, such as they are. So I’ve got no doubt that he’s treading on all kinds of toes. No one likes someone making a lot of noise, flashing his cash and connections. These things are done quietly and sparingly.”

  “Well, he certainly got the attention of the South Florida law enforcement community. Especially those he doesn’t own.”

  “That’s my point. You shoot a deputy, you better have a damn good reason, because it’s going to bring some heat. And not just for you, for everyone. The other organizations aren’t going to like it. I remember back in the seventies, a kid called Jonny Cassini gets to thinking he’s the new godfather of the Bronx. He kills a cop he couldn’t buy, just to prove a point. Only point he proved is how quick an up-and-coming crime boss can be disappeared.”

  “You think that might happen? The other organizations take Montgomery out?”

&n
bsp; “I know these families. Most of them are from or at least connected to New York, even the Latinos. If this guy becomes too hot, he’ll end up on a one-way flight to the Bermuda triangle. But they’re smart. They’ll wait and see if he learns his lesson, keeps his head down. No one wants a war.”

  “But he’s not going to keep his head down. He’s arrogant beyond belief.”

  “Which is bad news for you. Because the families don’t know that, so they’ll wait. If they knew him, they’d act fast.”

  “So someone could end up dead before they act.”

  “Exactly. Let’s make sure it’s not you, kid.”

  I burned through Fort Lauderdale and looked west as I did, toward the stillness of the Everglades, and I heard the voice of Lorraine Catchitt, the forensic investigator at Angel’s murder scene: any earlier and the gators would’ve got her. It added an extra bind in my twisted gut. As we got to the first of the Miami exits my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen, which read Lucas. I had placed my field by making two calls from the hospital. One was to Sally, the other to Lucas.

  “Lucas,” I said.

  “G’day mate,” he said in his slow drawl. “You must be a flamin’ psychic. That boat you asked about? Sure enough, the guy just called. I’m to fuel it up and have it prepped in an hour.”

  “Thanks, Lucas.”

  “No worries. See ya shortly.”

  Sal looked at me. “Something?”

  “Montgomery’s running. So I figured I’d limit his options. Patrol guys are making a lot of noise around his hangouts in Miami, so his bent cops won’t be able to secret him away. I left one obvious option open to him, to see if he’d take the bait. Looks like he has.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five