“We’re making progress on that front,” he answered. “Bennett Boudreaux gave us the name of the boat. We’re running down ownership, which appears to be a little convoluted, and trying to track down the boat itself.”
“How was your talk with Boudreaux?” she asked.
“That’s an interesting guy you have there,” he said.
“Yeah, we’re aware,” she said. “But what did he tell you?”
“Said his only involvement was that he was in contact with a priest from time to time, and every now and again, this priest knew of locals who had paid for passage to Florida or Alabama or Mississippi. When they came here, Boudreaux took care of them, got ’em situated.”
“So what’s going to happen to Boudreaux?” she asked.
“Not a thing, so far as I can see.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass, pardon the expression, whether I threaten him with federal prosecution. That man’s as Catholic as they come. He’s not giving the name of the priest and he didn’t even actually say the priest was a facilitator in all this, or if he just knows what’s going on.”
“So who is running it over there?”
Tomlinson rubbed at his face. “These guys with the boat probably have people working there. For all we know, the priest hears about this stuff during confession. We’re not talking about some Catholic Charities human trafficking operation.”
“But Boudreaux’s still doing something illegal, right?”
“Sure. If we had proof, which we don’t,” he said. “And if he didn’t have so many senators and congressmen as friends, which he does.”
Maggie shook her head. “Wow,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. Well, listen. If he was paying by the head for these people to be brought over, and then putting them to work, we’d probably have more leeway, since that’s akin to slavery right there.” Tomlinson coughed into his fist. “But he says the only thing he paid out was diesel. He sent a boat out to their coordinates off of Louisiana to refuel them.”
Maggie stood up. “Okay. Well.” She held out her hand. “I’ll talk to you later, I guess.”
“You bet,” he said, standing to shake her hand.
He closed the hotel room door behind her, and she stood on the second-story walkway, unavoidably faced with the river. The morning sun glinted off of it like there were diamonds just below the surface, and the smaller boats in the marina bobbed gently in the wake of a large Chris Craft center console that was headed out to the bay.
Maggie chewed her lip for a moment, then pulled out her cell phone.
“Hey, Sunshine,” her dad answered.
“Hey, Daddy. You care if I take the runabout out for a little bit?”
“Where you headed?”
“Just out to, uh…just out past the Reserve,” she answered, referring to the State Reserve at the eastern tip of St. George Island. She knew her father understood what she meant.
He paused for just a moment, and when he answered, his voice was even gentler than usual. “You got the fuel for it,” he said.
Wyatt turned off of Twin Lakes Road in Eastpoint, not that far from the Sheriff’s Office, and onto a gravel road that divided two rows of rundown trailers.
The last trailer on the right was a gray singlewide with light blue trim, and accent colors of rust and black mold. A Chevelle that would have been worth something if it had paint, a hood, and one more tire sat in the gravel driveway. A battered 80s-era Corolla sat next to it. Wyatt pulled in behind the Chevelle and shut off the engine.
In front of the trailer, there was an old wooden cable spool being used as a table, with three aluminum folding chairs arranged around it. In one of them sat a very pretty girl in her mid-twenties, with long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, and equally long, tan legs stretched out in front of her.
She looked up as Wyatt got out of the cruiser, and he saw a flicker of interest or surprise cross her face as she took a drag off of her cigarette. Then she looked down at her bare feet and wiggled her toes as Wyatt walked up to the table. Three bottles of nail polish sat on the table next to a pack of Maverick cigarettes, a peace sign lighter, and a plastic cup holding what looked like Kool-Aid.
“Hi,” Wyatt said pleasantly. “Are you Carrie Fleming?”
The girl looked up at him, squinting against the sun. “Yeah?”
On closer inspection, she was less pretty than she obviously used to be. She was a little underweight, and it made the planes of her face too sharp. Her gray eyes had dirty yellow smudges beneath them, and there was a fresh scar just beneath her lower lip.
“I’m Sheriff Hamilton,” Wyatt said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He ran his finger along a wet condensation ring in front of the empty chair beside her. When he looked back at the girl, she was trying to fix a slightly flirtatious look onto her face that made him sad for her.
“That depends,” she answered. “I haven’t done anything, and Charlie’s dead, dude.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to ask you some questions about Charlie, anyway.” He gave her one of his dimpled smiles, the polite one. “If you have a minute.”
Her eyes cut over to the trailer door for a second, then she shrugged. Wyatt sat down in the chair beside her as she crushed out her cigarette on the bottom of the cable spool, then picked up a bottle of light green nail polish and shook it.
“Is this Charlie’s place or yours?” Wyatt asked.
“It’s his. But nobody’s asked for it back, and the rent’s paid til the 15th.” She opened the bottle and pulled a foot up onto the edge of her chair.
“How long you been living here?”
She focused on her pinky toe as she carefully slid some polish on it. “I don’t know. Six months, maybe?” She glanced over at him and gave him part of a grin. “Why, you looking for a new place?”
Wyatt smiled in polite appreciation of her wit. “So, I guess you won’t need to bother going to court about Charlie beating you up last month.”
“No, but obviously I didn’t kill him,” she said to her toes.
“No, that was me,” Wyatt said.
She looked up at him, and there was a new look in her eyes that depressed him a little. It wasn’t so much surprise as it was titillation. “Yeah?” she asked.
Just then, the front door of the trailer opened, and a guy in jeans and a black tee shirt stepped out, a bottle of Bud in his hand. He hesitated on the top step when he saw Wyatt, then tried to blow it off as he walked down the metal steps.
He had thinning brown hair, despite being in his late twenties at the most. A small collection of hairs on his chin had been optimistically fashioned into a future goatee.
Carrie looked up at him as he stopped by the table. “Sheriff’s talkin’ to me about Charlie,” she said.
The guy looked slightly relieved. “Well, I didn’t know Charlie,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Wyatt said. “I’m not here to talk to you.”
“Well, should I sit back down or go back inside?” the guy asked, a slight, nervous grin on his face.
“Is that your Toyota?” Wyatt asked.
The guy shifted his feet. “Uh, yeah.”
“Then why don’t you set your beer down and go renew those tags real quick,” Wyatt said with a smile.
“I’ve been meaning to do that, man, just been workin’ weird hours,” the guy said.
“Well, you’re not working now,” Wyatt offered helpfully.
“Uh, yeah. Sure.” He put his beer down on the table and glanced at Carrie. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Carrie shrugged a shoulder and concentrated on her big toenail. The guy got in his car, and Wyatt watched him back out and head up the gravel road.
“That’s Jesse Vickers, isn’t it?” he asked the girl.
“Yeah,” she said noncommittally.
“New boyfriend?”
Carrie looked over at him as she put the brush back in the b
ottle. “Maybe.” She smiled. “Why?”
“Not much better than Charlie,” Wyatt said. “You ever think about going for a guy that doesn’t toss women around?”
“I don’t meet a lot of nice guys,” she said.
“Maybe you should try waiting more than ten minutes,” Wyatt said kindly.
“Look, if you’re interested, just say so and we’ll talk,” she said. “But if not, well, you’re not my dad.”
Wyatt nodded. “No, I’m not, on either count,” he said. “But you could do better.”
Carrie shrugged again, pulled her other foot up onto the chair, and grabbed the brush out of the polish bottle. She dabbed the sides a bit before applying it to her other big toe.
“Who hired Charlie to shoot Lieutenant Redmond?” Wyatt asked.
“You guys already asked me all that,” she said. “I told you, I don’t know anything about that. He didn’t talk to me unless he wanted something or he was feeling mean.”
“Well, somebody hired him.”
“Maybe he just had it in for her,” she said. “She’s a cop.”
“No. He might not like us, but he didn’t know her.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, dude.”
“Somebody paid him $20,000 to kill a law enforcement officer.”
She looked up at him sharply. “He didn’t have no $20,000.”
“That’s ’cause he used it to pay his bail for knocking you around again,” Wyatt said.
Carrie paused, nail brush in hand, and squinted over at him a moment. “That wasn’t gonna go anywhere anyway,” she said.
“Sure it was,” Wyatt said. “And since Charlie was a two-time loser, he was gonna go back to State.”
“No, he wasn’t. His lawyer said it was gonna get dropped.” She put the cap back on her polish and stretched her legs out in front of her to inspect her toes. “He couldn’t wait to tell me that, either, like it wouldn’t do me any good if the neighbors called the cops again.”
“Why would the charges get dropped?” Wyatt asked.
“How do I know? Something about the cops didn’t have a reason to come in the house.”
“Said who?”
“The lawyer, dude. He said the DA or whatever was gonna drop the charges.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
“Something Green.”
“That’s very helpful,” Wyatt said, smiling. “You mind coming down to the station with me, just for a minute, to sign a statement to that effect?”
“To what effect?”
“Just what you’ve told me, about what the lawyer said.”
“Can’t you bring it here?”
“I’m asking you to do it there. Please.” He gave her another smile.
She sighed. “Will you bring me home?”
“Actually, I need to be somewhere,” he said. “But I’ll have one of the deputies run you back. Half an hour, tops.”
She sighed again. “Can you at least run me by the store on the way?” she asked. “I’m almost out of cigarettes.”
“I can do that.”
Boudreaux was sitting at the teak desk in his study. Light from the French doors out to the side porch cast rectangular patterns of day onto the desk and the wool rug on which it sat. The shafts of light were accompanied by very little else on the surface of the desk: a small Tiffany lamp, a piece of driftwood that had been made into a pen holder, a leather portfolio that held Boudreaux’s appointment book and checkbooks.
Boudreaux sat back in his brown leather chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin, staring at an oil painting of shrimp boats headed out to sea.
His gaze shifted to the door from the hallway, as Patrick opened it and came inside. He closed the door behind him and stopped, looking at Boudreaux. He was dressed as impeccably as always, if a tad too much on the GQ side, but there were shadows beneath his eyes.
“I’m here,” he said.
Boudreaux’s left eye twitched almost invisibly, and he slowly straightened up and leaned his elbows on his desk. “Sit down,” he said quietly.
“I’m on my way to work, so I don’t have much time to chat,” Patrick said, as he made his way to one of the leather armchairs in front of the desk.
“No, you don’t,” Boudreaux said flatly. He could see that Patrick was trying to amble, to walk as though he had no concerns, but he was failing.
Patrick glanced up at him as he sat, then looked away. “So what’s up?” he asked.
Boudreaux took a cleansing breath, staring at Patrick as he did. Patrick attempted to meet his gaze, but held it for only a moment before he needed to look elsewhere.
“You’ve done a remarkably foolish thing, even for you,” Boudreaux said.
Patrick threw an ankle onto his knee and fiddled with the cuff of his five-hundred dollar trousers. “Is this about the pot again, Pop?”
Patrick had admitted, almost proudly, that he had been the one to kill Myron Graham and steal Fain’s pot, after Graham had told him he wouldn’t be paying any more “commissions.” He’d also been pretty proud that David Seward had taken the blame for it.
“It’s about Fain,” Boudreaux said. “And this man Charlie Harper.”
Patrick glanced up nervously, trying visibly not to look it, then looked back down at his cuff. “Yeah, I heard about Fain,” he said, and tried for a sardonic smile. “Ironic, huh?”
Boudreaux placed his palms on his desk, splayed his fingers. “You didn’t really think anyone would suspect Maggie Redmond, did you?”
This time, Patrick skipped the smile when he looked at Boudreaux. “I don’t really care, actually.”
“Tell me about you and Charlie Harper,” Boudreaux said, his bright blue eyes hard and steady.
Patrick cut his eyes to the lamp rather than look at Boudreaux. “I don’t know him.”
“Charlie Harper is the man who shot Maggie Redmond,” Boudreaux said.
“Everybody knows that,” Patrick said. “It was in the paper.”
“At your behest,” Boudreaux said.
Patrick flicked at the corner of his mouth with his tongue. “Fain hired him. He likes to make examples of people who steal from him.”
“Lie to me again,” Boudreaux said quietly.
Patrick knew better than to accept that invitation, but he did it anyway. “I hear Fain hired Harper to kill her.”
“They thought Fain killed Graham, too,” Boudreaux said.
“Look, Pop. We already went over that,” Patrick said. “But I don’t have anything to do with Harper.”
“When you hire someone to kill a person, because you don’t have the guts to do it yourself, you need to avoid contracting imbeciles who think they’re on a TV show,” Boudreaux said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Boudreaux shifted in his chair, and Patrick shrank almost imperceptibly into his beautiful black suit. “It means Harper thought he needed to issue a soundbite before he finished Maggie off.”
“What do you mean?” Patrick asked, the corner of his mouth twitching just a bit.
“I mean he said he was ‘tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes’,” Boudreaux answered.
The two men stared at each other for a long moment. It took a good deal of effort on Patrick’s part; it was effortless for Boudreaux.
“I don’t make messes,” Boudreaux said finally. “And if I did, I’d clean them up myself.”
Patrick swallowed hard.
“Who killed David Seward? Fain or Charlie Harper?” Boudreaux put his hand up as Patrick opened his mouth. “Be careful. Make certain that anything that comes from your mouth at this moment is true.”
Patrick took a moment to answer. “Harper,” he said quietly.
“So you steal Fain’s drugs, sell them to some other lowlife, and then use how much of your profits to kill poor David? Which I can only assume you did so Fain wouldn’t get hold of him and find out he didn’t steal anything after all.”
Boudreaux waited, but Patrick j
ust stared at him. He sighed before speaking again, slowly. “How much did you pay Harper to kill David Seward?”
Patrick chewed the inside of his cheek a moment before answering. “Ten thousand.”
“So you shop at Walmart for your assassins,” Boudreaux said. He took a breath and let it out slowly. “And how much to kill Maggie Redmond?”
It took Patrick just a bit longer to answer that one. “Ten thousand.”
Boudreaux scratched at his left eyebrow for a moment and took a calming breath. “I should think if you were going to defy me, to do something which presented that grave a danger to yourself, that you would have paid much more to someone far more proficient.”
Boudreaux watched Patrick’s pupils expand, saw him lock his teeth together, saw the vein on the side of his neck pulsating. “I told you, in terms even you could understand, not to go anywhere near Maggie Redmond.”
Patrick’s left leg started vibrating up and down against the leather armchair, and his face slowly grew pink. Boudreaux thought it was like watching someone get a sunburn through time-lapse photography.
“Well, Pop,” Patrick said quietly. “You have my sincerest apology for trying to kill your little girlfriend.”
Boudreaux got up slowly from his chair, the creaking of the expensive leather the only sound in the room. Patrick’s eyes followed him, blinking rapidly, as he walked to one of the French doors and stood, hands in his pockets, looking out at the yard.
“That comment will go unaddressed, in the interest of continuing this conversation without bloodshed.”
He sighed, and gathered his thoughts, and his emotions, as he watched a squirrel sifting through the fallen fruit beneath an avocado tree. “I told you that I was working on something with Maggie. Exactly what that is, is none of your business.”
He turned around and regarded Patrick, who tried not to shrink from his gaze.
“So, you going to chop me into little pieces and dump me in the ocean, Pop? Because if you are, I’d like you to get on with it,” Patrick said. “Just don’t subject me any to of your ‘family first’ bull while you’re doing it.”
Boudreaux’s eyes narrowed, while Patrick sat there looking like he might jump from the chair at any moment.
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