Dead Fast

by A. J. Stewart

  “And then what?”

  “Den he smart. He use his celebrity to get bidness. He landed in Fort Lauderdale, and I hear dare is many Jamaicans dare. So he do bidness.”

  Garfield was right. Lauderdale, and specifically Lauderhill, west of Lauderdale, had become one of the biggest Jamaican communities outside of Jamaica.

  “What sort of business did he get into?”

  Garfield tilted his head like he didn’t want to tell, but it didn’t stop him. “Lots of bidness. Not so legal bidness, dots what I hear.”

  I could imagine the business. Drugs, loan sharking, protection, good old racketeering. It all happened in varying degrees in the shadows of Lauderhill.

  “So if he’s so well set up in the States, why is he messing around with school-age athletes in Jamaica?”

  “He wan what no coil can buy. Prestige.”

  I nodded. It fit with what I’d heard from Lucia and Arthurs. Richmond had made his fortune the hard way in the US, doing goodness knows what kind of dirty stuff, and now he wanted to come home and be the BMOC. Big Man on Campus. He was just like Winston. They both wanted to be seen as legitimate, as heroes to a nation. And just as Arthurs had said, Winston needed to foster winners to get his IOC position, so Richmond was doing the same. Maybe a few years behind, but the same track. And then it occurred to me. What if he wasn’t a few years behind? What if Richmond was climbing the ladder faster than Winston? What if Richmond also coveted the same IOC position, and Winston knew it? Lucia had told us that Winston had been setting up a network outside Jamaica that didn’t completely make sense to someone with no real international positions. But it did make sense if Winston thought that Richmond was already in the States, and had built a network out of Lauderhill into the wealthy and connected homes of South Florida and beyond. That might be driving him. And it might be a reason why Winston’s goons had assaulted one of Richmond’s athletes.

  I thanked Garfield for the background and went for a wander through the house. People were relaxed in the yard, and less so in the kitchen. By the time I got to the living room I felt the tension. It was like Richmond was a planet and his gravitational pull was putting stress on those bodies closest to him. He nodded from a matted sofa where he was holding court. I edged through and sat on the armrest of the sofa, next to Richmond.

  “Markus is a good runner,” I said.

  “Yes, suh, he is that.”

  “You know, there are colleges in the US that offer athletes like him scholarships. He might be good enough to get one.”

  Richmond smiled. “He don’t need no scholarship, Mr. Jones. He just needs to run.”

  “Sure. But college athletes get to run, and they get some of the best coaching in the world. Great facilities and a degree at the end, if the running doesn’t pan out.”

  Richmond shook his head. “That might be the American way, but that’s not for a Jamaican. For us there is already a path. Races here, races in Europe. The Diamond League. Not more school that Jamaicans cannot afford. We need to stay hungry, to race for our lives. That is why we win, and Americans do not.”

  “Maybe you’re right. But I can’t help think Mrs. Swan would like to know there is that option.”

  “Mr. Jones. Let me tell you something.” The smile disappeared and the eyes bore into me. “Mrs. Swan don’t need some crazy ideas being put into her head. She knows what is best for her boy, and she knows that I share her desire for her boy to make the best of his gift.” Richmond edged himself around so he was facing me. “I thanked you for your help, but now I must insist that you leave the poor woman alone, and not put unrealistic ideas in her mind.”

  His sharp eyes underlined his insistence, and I didn’t think it wise to push it, so I nodded my agreement.

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I am, Mr. Jones. I am.”

  I excused myself and wandered back through the party. I noted as I moved through the throng that Richmond’s man, the guy who had handed him the envelope full of cash to give to me, was following me. The house wasn’t that big, so he might have just been going to the kitchen for a drink, but I saw Mrs. Swan in the corner of the kitchen, and Richmond’s guy took up position between Mrs. Swan and me.

  As I passed out of the kitchen I noted some butcher’s paper that had been wrapped around some meat that had arrived earlier that day and was now roasting over coals in the yard, and I tore a piece off. I went outside and asked Garfield if he had a pen, and he disappeared and came back with a lead pencil. He wandered away and I wrote a quick note, which I folded and handed to Danielle. I whispered in her ear, like we were exchanging sweet nothings, and we were interrupted by Garfield clearing his throat.

  “Sorry, Miami.”

  “That’s okay, Garfield.”

  “No, I mean, dare is someone at da front door fo’ you.”

  “Someone?”

  “Da police.”

  I nodded and Danielle and I got up. I thanked Garfield and told him not to worry. I returned the pencil, and we weaved our way out. Markus was in the kitchen, and I collected my drawstring bag, thanked him for the party and wished him well for the upcoming races. We shook hands and for the first time he looked me in the eye.

  “Tank you,” he said.

  I nodded like it was nothing, and I made for the hallway. Danielle was giving Mrs. Swan a hug, and as she did I saw her press my note into Mrs. Swan’s hand. Danielle thanked her again, then stepped around Richmond’s man and joined me in the hallway. We walked out, saying our goodbyes, and I offered a wave to Richmond, who was still on the sofa. He returned my wave with one of his own, and a smile that looked more like relief that I was leaving. But I might have been reading too much into it. We stepped outside. The evening was cool but not unpleasant. A group of partygoers was smoking out the front as they do, and we walked through them to the road, where Lucia Tellis stood waiting by a dark blue Suzuki Vitara.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE ROAD INTO the mountains was less a road than a river bed. The mountains were so green because the tropical clouds gathered on an almost daily basis and dropped their bounty on the foliage. But the water then ran down the manmade gravel roads, washing them away in rivulets of mud. We bounced around in the Suzuki Vitara, but it was better than a motorcycle, and better than the other option Lucia said she had, which was a Crown Vic. The Ford wouldn’t have made it halfway. As it was, it took over an hour of careful driving by Lucia to reach our destination. The thick canopy of juniper cedar and pawpaw trees kept the moonlight at bay, so only the headlights showed us a path through the maze of ferns and orchids. Lucia stopped a couple times to check her notes, and then continued on. The headlights captured a broken-down shell of an old car, and Lucia slowed as we reached it. She passed me a hefty flashlight and told me to point it out past the wreck. I did so, slowly panning across the green blanket until I reached what looked like a small logging hut. I held the beam on the hut. It was a hundred yards from the road, and looked like it was being consumed by the forest around it.

  “This is it,” said Lucia, and she cut the engine.

  The noise of the engine was replaced by a chorus of forest noises, insects and creatures moving through the brush and across the branches above us. Lucia checked her notes.

  “My information is that the gang you named, Winston’s thugs, have a ganja plantation here. The cabin there is the marker. The plantation is behind it.”

  Danielle leaned over from the backseat. “Can I ask a question? Why do you not raid it if you know where the plantations are?”

  “Resources,” said Lucia. “And motivation. Ganja is part of the Rastafari culture, so it’s part of Jamaican culture. In small lots it is therefore tolerated. But you’ve met the assistant commissioner. There is not a lot of motivation to do more unless the problem starts spilling out on the streets of MoBay or Kingston. Lots of the stuff grown here will leave our shores and end up in your country, so the feeling is that it isn’t really our problem.”

  “
It’s ours,” said Danielle.

  “Precisely. There are occasional raids, but the growers just move from one spot to another, and half the time the raids are on old plantations because the growers knew we were coming.”

  I turned to Lucia. “But these guys don’t know we’re coming, right?”

  “No. There’s no paperwork on this little tour.”

  “Good,” I said, punching the lever and opening the door. The sound was louder out of the car, like a white noise machine turned all the way up. There was no one discernible sound, just a mass of organic chatter. I grabbed my drawstring bag and headed off into the forest. There wasn’t a track to speak of until I got well past the car wreck, and then I happened upon a thin line of crushed foliage, which I followed to the logging hut. The hut was made from wood that I assumed was local, and had been worn a dark, dank brown by the years and the almost constant moisture. I shone my flashlight across the hut as Lucia and Danielle arrived with flashlights of their own.

  “Do they use this hut?” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Lucia. “For rest, when they are working the crop. But I doubt they would store anything in here.”

  I scanned the hut and found a door, from which hung a large, rust-colored padlock. I considered the lock for a moment. I learned a trick to pick a padlock with a cut-up soda can, back when I was doing my graduate program in criminology, but I didn’t have a can on me.

  “If we break in, they’ll know we’ve been here,” said Lucia.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Good. ’Cause they’re gonna know. One way or another.” I shone the light around and, not seeing another way in that didn’t leave a mark, I turned to Lucia.

  “Let’s see this crop.”

  Lucia led us around the hut and into a wall of thick greenery—ferns and banana trees and vines hanging like Tarzan’s drapes. To the eye it looked impenetrable, but that was just an illusion. Lucia pushed her way into the foliage and disappeared, like a wormhole in a science fiction movie. I glanced at Danielle and then followed Lucia in. The sheet of greenery was a veneer, and I swept it aside as easy as a thick blanket. On the other side Lucia stood shining her light across a field of more green. But this green was different. It was lower, the canopy having been hacked back to offer the plants below access to the sunlight. The space was wild, yet cultivated. And it was all one species. The long, thin, distinctive leaves of cannabis sativa. Marijuana. Ganja.

  The field was large, but with just three shafts of light it was difficult to conceive of how large. The open canopy above might have offered more moonlight, except for the thick clouds that hung above like a ceiling.

  “This doesn’t look recreational,” said Danielle, sweeping her light across the field.

  “No,” said Lucia. She turned to me—although I couldn’t see her in the darkness, I felt her voice directed at me. “What now?”

  “This definitely belongs to Winston’s guys?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “And is he involved?”

  “My intelligence says not directly. But who knows. They are getting this stuff out of the country, and Winston is making all kinds of connections in America.”

  “You think he’s working a drug network?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no evidence of it, and at his age, I’d have thought those days were behind him. He wants to be legitimate. His legacy, remember. But tigers don’t change their stripes easily.”

  That was true, but it didn’t matter. The guys growing this stuff didn’t just grow, they used. And that meant their loyalties could be divided. I slipped the drawstring bag off my shoulder and dropped it to the moist ground. The ladies shone their lights down, and I pulled out two bottles of brake fluid.

  “Brake fluid?” said Lucia.

  “Faster than Roundup. Works in the wet too.”

  “Works to do what?”

  “When I was a kid in Connecticut we had a neighbor growing weed in a hothouse by our side fence one summer. My dad called the cops and they blew him off. So one night he took a ladder, some shears and some brake fluid and he poured it over the plants. It started raining while he was doing his thing, but it didn’t matter. Those plants were dead before morning.”

  “You want to kill all these plants?” said Lucia.

  “As many as we can, yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “Danielle and I will take a bottle each and work from the outside in. Lucia, you stay and direct us with your flashlight.”

  “You don’t want me out there?” she said.

  “You’re a cop and this is your turf. You shouldn’t be doing this, even if it is a drug. This way you’re just holding a flashlight.”

  Danielle and I made our way to the edges of the plantation, where the jungle immediately took over. We were about the width of a football field apart. We opened our bottles and walked away from Lucia, pouring a little brake fluid on each plant as we went. About a half-length of a football field later I hit the jungle. I waited until Danielle’s flashlight reached the same point, and then we walked back toward Lucia, her flashlight like a beacon on a New England shore. We marched up and down two more times before our makeshift weed killer ran out, accounting for about two-thirds of the crop, at a rough guess. It wasn’t as good as I had hoped, but it would send the message well enough. We packed the empty bottles back in my bag and left the crop to die. When we reached the wooden hut I stopped.

  “One second,” I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out the spray paint I had bought. The lock was too substantial to break, but a lock is only as good as its door. The wood that made up this door was hardy stuff, but the hinges were rusted and the screws holding the hinges in place more so. I kicked at the door with the heel of my boot. It took a dozen good kicks to get movement, and ten more for the lower hinge to give way. Then I put my shoulder into it, and on the third drive I was flung onto the floor of the hut as the door opened the wrong way, the hinges busted and the door now hanging by the padlock. Inside the hut was basic. A couple of wooden chairs and a table. It seemed whatever they brought up with them, they packed out again. The Sierra Club would have been proud. Danielle and Lucia stepped inside and lit the wall up. I shook the spray can and painted a message in lemon yellow, to underscore the point made in the field out the back.

  Work for Winston OR grow ganja. Can’t do both, mon!

  “Nice color,” said Danielle.

  I looked over the can. “I thought it was white.”

  Lucia stepped up to inspect my work. “They’ll probably drive themselves crazy trying to figure out what the yellow means.”

  “I can live with that.”

  We pushed our way out and marched back single file to the car. Lucia did a K-turn and pointed the Vitara back down the mountain.

  “I should feel bad about this,” she said. “We did just break the law.”

  “No, we did that. I told you. You were just holding a flashlight.”

  Lucia let the car idle as she looked at me. “You didn’t finish the story, about your dad. Didn’t your neighbor know who had killed their ganja?”

  “Of course. But what were they going to do? Call the cops? My neighbor killed my illegal weed crop. I don’t think so. No, they knew. And they knew who to mess with, and who not to mess with.”

  “What did they choose?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Either way there is resolution.”

  “Was, you mean. Was resolution.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, that’s what I meant. Was.”

  Chapter Twenty

  WE WOKE LATE after our mountain sojourn, the sun high in the sky and the waves gently lapping at the beach outside our window. I got up and pulled the drapes, flooding the room with fresh light. A catamaran skipped across a light chop, the scent of spices and coconut lotion mixing on the air. Danielle tossed on a sarong over her bathing suit, and I put on a shirt with old wood-sided wagons and surfboards on it, over a pair of board shorts in t
he Miami Hurricanes colors.

  We wandered the beach, picking at shells, looking at starfish in the clear water, watching small children splash in the shallows. After our walk we wandered up past the pool, where a crew of kids barely out of college had taken up post at the swim-up bar. We got a carafe of coffee and a tropical fruit bowl and sat in the sunshine. The buffet room behind us was rotating into lunch mode, trolleys of plates and silverware being pushed from the kitchen to the restaurant along a palm-shaded path. I was pouring a second cup of coffee when a guy I recognized as having taken care of our motorcycle came to our table.

  “Suh, you have a visitor,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Yah, mon.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Mrs. Swan, suh.”

  Danielle and I exchanged glances and stood. We followed the guy back into the lobby, the breeze wafting through, to the front of house, where Mrs. Swan stood. She was dressed in her Sunday best, a blue knee-length dress with a white belt around her thin waist, and a wide-brimmed hat with a small bouquet on top. She held white gloves in her hand.

  “Mrs. Swan. Is everything alright? Is Markus okay?” Danielle asked.

  “Yes, tank you.”

  “What can we do for you?”

  Mrs. Swan looked at me. “I got your note.”

  I nodded. “I see. Good. Let’s sit.” I looked around and saw some plush chairs arranged around a travel trunk that was playing the part of a coffee table. We sat and I asked Mrs. Swan if she wanted anything to drink. She declined.

  “I am sorry to bodda you on your holiday, especially after ev’ryting you’ve done.”

  “It’s no bother at all.”

  “It’s just you said to call you, but I got no phone.”