by Moulton, CD
He got one good solid roundhouse into Bert’s face as he lunged at him. Sergio smacked him with his nightstick at the same time. He said he was waiting for an excuse!
Bert went to a cell. Leona, his wife, couldn’t stop talking about the things she had to put up with when he was being a pig like this.
But then, they had him. They didn’t need to hear her story. She knew and did things about and for him that she didn’t want anyone else to know. It was more than obvious.
Well, now she would never be the wife of the DA, governor, or president. That was enough for her to think about.
Maybe.
Dead Wrong
day one
“Judi! You got any extra coffee? I didn’t buy it yesterday and only have enough for one cup,” Clint called to his next door neighbor, Judi Lum. His day didn’t start until he’d had his third cup.
She waved and went inside. He walked over to her place to get it. She had half a sack of the fresh ground from the shop by the dam at Enel Fortuna. A friend grew it there and only a few could get it. It was the best Clint had found – and several coffees from Panamá are known worldwide as being exceptional.
He chatted with Judi awhile, then went back to his place for a light breakfast. He flipped on the computer to check his e-mail. 40 ads and two messages. Normal. He deleted all the ads and opened the first e-mail to find it was from his cousin in Tennessee. He was getting desperate for cash again. He couldn’t sell anything and the real estate market was as much as nonexistent. He tried to get a loan on his farm but the market was so bad the banks had tightened up and he didn’t have perfect credit for three years. Could Clint see a way to spot him maybe five grand? It would be a loan and he would repay it with interest as soon as the market picked up again.
Clint replied that he couldn’t raise five hundred at the moment because the real estate market had also collapsed in Florida and he wasn’t getting anything in. The people buying the place had defaulted and now it was sitting there running up a big tax bill. He sent it. His cousin was a habitual gambler and five grand would be gone in two weeks, then he’d need more. “Been there, done that,” Clint muttered under his breath. He had the money, but wasn’t about to enable a gambling addict. That was a rough rocky slide to nowhere!
The other was from a man named Edwin Brock. He heard about Clint from friends and was about to get involved in a very expensive development deal with a Panamanian company called CIGR C.A. Inversions, S.A. He wanted to hire Clint to investigate the company because he didn’t much care for the snotty attitude of Emilio Cano, their representative. He seemed a bit shady. A retainer would be sent the moment Clint agreed to take the case.
CIGR C. A. was a semi-mob group of thugs from Colombia. It was either a scam or an investment that would end up financing a big drug deal. Clint wasn’t about to get involved in that! He sent back that the company didn’t need any investigation. It was a mob front and he’d be smart to stay as far away from those people as he could get. No charge.
He immediately got a reply: I am already involved and must get out. I need your help. I will pay whatever you ask. I don’t know what is happening anymore. Do you know who or what is E.V.G.?
Clint sent back that he would try to get him in touch with a man who might be able to do something to make them back off. He’d e-mail a reply in an hour or so. E.V.G. didn’t mean anything to him.
He called Manolo, a friend who was undercover for Interpol, but who knew all the big drug lords. He said for Clint not to get involved. He’d try to scare the mob into backing off from Brock by telling them he was being used by the CIA and didn’t have a tiny clue. Maybe they’d decide he wasn’t worth the trouble it could cause. They wouldn’t go after him so long as they thought he was an idiot the CIA was using.
“Stay out of it, Clint.”
“I intend to. If he thinks he can get me into that kind of situation he’s dead wrong!”
He didn’t know how prophetic that was.
day two
“Clint? Sergio here.” Clint had picked up his cell phone to hear Cpt. Sergio Valdez and some noise in the background that sounded like a radio.
“Yo, Serg. Wa-aping, cool?”
“I’m in contact with Panamá City. There’s a man there who was killed last night in some kind of phony mugging or something such. There’s an e-mail on his computer that you sent advising him to stay away from CIGR?
“The PC police want to know what it’s about. Anything to do with them is of interest. If they killed him it could bring a connection that could cramp their business, if you get what they’re saying.”
“I think the other e-mails will explain what was going on. I doubt they hit him.
“Why do you think it was a phony mugging?”
“Because a mugger would have taken his watch, ring and wallet.”
“Oh.”
“He had apparently erased all his former e-mails with you for some reason. This was the only one to you on the machine. I think maybe he should have erased this one, too!”
“It didn’t say much. I had Manolo get in touch with them and tell them it would be smart to back off and not get involved with him. They surely wouldn’t be stupid enough to hit him if they thought it would just bring on the trouble they wanted to avoid. I don’t get why they would erase the earlier e-mails and not the last.”
Sergio said something into the radio Clint couldn’t quite hear, then said that he apparently erased a lot of his e-mails. The cache only had a couple in it, both from late yesterday. One from him and one from someone named Veras about a golf course.
They chatted for a minute, then Clint went back to finish his breakfast. He didn’t see that Brock should concern him. He had warned him and tried to see he didn’t get into trouble with that bunch.
Maybe that wasn’t the only crooked bunch he was involved with. If he was really wealthy and gullible they would descend on him like ... don’t get into silly metaphors. They’d come to him with fifty deals he simply couldn’t pass up if he wanted to get in on the ground floor of whatever scam they were running.
He, Manny (a close friend living on Isla San Cristóbal), Judi, and his weird author friend, Dave, went fishing. When he returned at four thirty his place had been searched by someone who wanted him to know it was searched. They left a mess. There was a note on his computer screen: “Be most careful what you say and who you say it to. You could end up laying next to Mr. Edwin Brock in some cemetery.”
He went to his special program to see who had been there. They found the camera in the comp room, but not the ones in the kitchen and bedroom. It was a dark bullish man and a small dark intense Latino woman. They made a rather professional search, obviously didn’t find what they were looking for and went back to the comp room. They looked pissed because what they wanted wasn’t there.
What was it?
Whatever it was, Clint Faraday could get at least as pissed as those two, if for different reasons. He cleaned up the place, changed clothes and headed for town. If those two were still around he’d find them and explain a thing or two to them.
“I think I know who you mean,” Jim said. He was at his regular table in front of the Golden Grill with some friends. They met there almost every day. “He was pretty mean-looking. The woman was a fiery type. They were going out toward Saigon Bay, but that would be to your house. I haven’t seen them since, oh, maybe two thirty.”
“She was hot!” Charlie, another of the regular group said. “Sort of a dangerous look.”
“Oh, those two who were at the Suites? They were headed back toward The Reef about twenty minutes ago. I was at The Gourmet and saw them go in,” Bob added.
Clint thanked them and headed for The Reef, a popular restaurant. Arturo, a waiter, said they went through and got on a boat on the outer deck. She was cursing at the guy. Called him Hondo.
“What kind of boat? Cayuca?”
“One of those fast cigarette boats. They headed toward Dolfin Point.”
> They were probably heading for the canal and Panamá City – or Colón.
Manolo! Clint called him and asked about a Hondo and the cigarette boat,
“Direct to Medellin, very probably. Hondo Cano and Lana Bardoti. She’s Italian. They work for a hood called Gordo Cordoba.
“Why would they be interested in you?”
“I wish to hell I knew! They mentioned Brock. They said I could soon join him in the cemetery if I said the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
“Brock? He’s dead?”
“Yeah. Phony mugging.”
“It wasn’t CIGR. They thanked me and said I might have saved their asses bigtime. I told them he didn’t know he was being used. It would be stupid to do anything to him because that would probably bring the CIA onto them like a swarm of killer bees. They said they knew it. They’d maybe tell him the deal fell through because the owner of the property decided to try to develop it himself and they’d be in touch if anything new came along blah, blah, blah.
“Oh, shit! Gordo is a rival group. Maybe he had Brock hit to bring grief on CIGR!
“No. There was something else behind it. There had to be. None of them are nearly that stupid, just amateurish. I don’t know what it’s about, Clint. I’ll try to find out.”
They talked for a few minutes, then Clint cut to call to Judi, who was passing by. He told her about his place. She said her place had been searched, he showed her how to leave the little traps, but nothing was trashed or damaged. It was professional.
Clint looked thoughtful. He might have to accept this challenge to ever find out what it was about. Brock was into something. Did he know what it was? Was someone using him?
Who? Gordo? Was he hit because Gordo was afraid he was leading the wrong people in the wrong direction?
Then why search HIS place? All he had was a couple of e-mails.
Why did Brock erase his earlier e-mails? What was in them?
Clint remembered that last one. E.V.G.? Was that behind this? Who or what WAS E.V.G.?
One thing was certain! He was going to do his damnedest to find out!
Clint went back to his place to re-read the e-mails, though he was certain he’d gotten every word. He’d copied the threatening note and saved it to a special file. The e-mails were erased except for the last one. No more leaving the automatic log-on in place. If he’d logged off it would still be there.
Well, there were the backup copies automatically stored at the server. He knew that much about computers and e-mail!
The cache was emptied. He sighed and went to the secondary he’d had Doug install. All e-mail both ways was recorded on another part of his hard drive. Doug had replaced to old one when it fried. He used a 120G drive and had sectioned it to three parts of 40G apiece. If they didn’t know about that they would think that the old 40G was already totally up.
It was there. He re-read everything from Brock before the last one carefully, looking for a word or phrase, but it was the same he remembered. Nothing. He brought up the last one. It was the same except that the last sentence wasn’t there.
He thought a minute. They very damned well had found the sections! He brought up his replies. There was no mention of “E.V.G.” on them.
So. E.V.G. was the important part. It was something anyone might forget.
So? What was it they didn’t find?
Anything to do with E.V.G. stupid! That was the key. They made a huge mistake by not just leaving it there. He wouldn’t have attached much importance to it and would have possibly made a couple of minor enquiries, then forgotten it. Now he was going to find who or what E.V.G. was. It was important. In fact it was the most important part of his very short bit of communication with Edwin Brock.
He put the computer back on standby mode and called Manny Mathews (Who was actually Marko Boccini. Only Clint, Dave, Judi and Manolo knew he was a retired mafia don from California who had moved here to get away from the business and to raise a family who wouldn’t be ashamed of what Papa was.) to ask if he had a clue as to who or what E.V.G. was. He didn’t, but would try to check it out. Clint told him the whole story. He said this was another one of those things where someone had heard a word and misinterpreted it. They were assuming he knew something he did NOT know. He damned well was going to find out!
And he was going to be VERY careful with this one. He might actually end up in a cemetery – and never know why.
day three
Clint hadn’t learned anything more. No one knew anything about any E.V.G. He didn’t have one clue as to what it meant.
He sipped his too-hot coffee slowly and nibbled the delicious pineapple upside-down cake Judi made for Christmas.
Hell! It was New Year’s eve! One of the two nights Clint Faraday stayed home. The whole damned town would probably be drunk, noisy and generally obnoxious. He would be, too, if he joined them. Crap!
Was there anything in either his e-mail or that one from Veras? Just a golfing buddy?
Maybe an investment in a golf course. The e-mail was about a golf course, not a game of golf.
Veras was a “V” – long shot, but barely in the park.
How trite.
Where was Veras? Panamá City?
Clint called Doug and asked if there was any way to find where an e-mail came from. He said to trace the IPO or something such. Clint didn’t know what he was talking about and he said he could do it. It was in the codes on the e-mail. Clint didn’t know there were codes on e-mails. Doug said to save the e-mail to documents or something and they would be right there on top. Clint did remember seeing that a few times.
After ten minutes of trying to explain Doug said to forward the e-mail to him. He’d do it.
Clint said the police in Panamá City had the e-mail. He would get Sergio to have them forward it to him.
He finished his breakfast, dressed and went to town to the police station. It was drizzly and the whole place stunk of dead fish. The tide was high and the water didn’t drain off quickly enough, meaning he had to wade through muddy puddles. The whole day was downright depressing with a low pressure dome coming in from the northeast.
Sergio was off today.
He called Sergio and got a promise that the e-mail would be forwarded within the hour. One thing went right.
He walked around town for forty minutes and got a call from Doug. “Puerto Armuelles.”
There was a golf course in Puerto Armuelles? Clint really didn’t think so. He thanked Doug and wandered around some more, thinking. Dave came by looking like warmed-over hell. He said he and some friends were playing music and started on tequila, which he could drink all night, but they ran out and started on Abuelo rum, which he couldn’t handle, particularly after tequila.
“Where’s the guitar?”
“Shit!” Dave replied and turned around, then said, “To hell with it!” and waved as he turned toward his apartment. Clint laughed. Dave was going to feel like unholy hell today!
“Hey, Dave!” Clint called to him. “Is there a golf course anywhere near Puerto Armuelles?”
“There’s talk of building one for the refinery bigshits. They’re doing tennis courts and all that crap. They’d be a lot smarter to wait two years. There won’t be many to use the crap until the refinery’s working if it ever is.” He waved again and walked on.
Maybe Brock was investing in that? Hell, it was legit if premature! Or was it?
Clint decided he was going to spend New Year’s eve in Puerto Armuelles. He went home to pack, told Judi and Sergio where he was going and got the water taxi. It was going to be a rough day all around. There was heavy chop on the bay, making the trip unpleasant with the women who kept screeching whenever the boat sluiced a bit (because they thought it was cute. They rode the water taxis all the time and had been through a hell of a lot worse at least a few of those times).
He just missed the bus and had to wait half an hour. It was dark and drizzly and the coffee at the bus station was bitter and oily.
&n
bsp; The David bus was crowded and he had to sit on a fold-down seat or stand. The salsa was playing too loud. Clint hated salsa since twenty years ago in the states when it was so popular it was all you heard in Florida. These were mostly the same songs done by the same artist. This bus apparently only had one CD and played it three times during the trip, then got radio reception near David and had salsa on then with a DJ who kept interrupting with weird noises and his name in a growling loud tone.
Happy fucking New Year!
The Puerto Armuelles bus wasn’t as bad.
Quite, but it was raining in Puerto Armuelles and there were no rooms available in the hotels.
This was a trip Clint felt he should have stayed home for. Luckily, a friend who had a house there had invited him to stay. He was pretty drunk already. There was a loud drunken party at the house that didn’t break up until after 3:00AM.
There are days like that.
day four
The day dawned much better. The sun was out and the rain was gone. It was late for Clint. Eight ten. He got up and put on shorts, went to the kitchen and fixed coffee. No one else would be up for hours, then would have miserable hangovers to live through.
Clint dressed and went into town. He could get a room in the Hotel Central tonight. The party crowd would be long gone. He left his backpack at the desk where Sylvia would keep it for him. He walked out on the wharf, then went to Yola’s for coffee and a cheese omelet. She had made cinnamon rolls “The way gringos like them.” They were very good.
There was no one about. Clint sat and talked with Yola about things in general. He mentioned the golf course and asked if she knew the people who were going to build it.
“There are two companies,” she replied. “One wants to build more toward Las Olivas, the other to the west past where the refinery will be. I understand there’s a lot of fighting because of someone who complains there won’t be enough business for both of them. That company wants to buy the other. There was trouble because of the titulo or something, but that is alright now, I believe. A government official came and did a survey and said it was all a stupid misunderstanding because the finca number was first recorded as part of another thing in the seventies and no one had changed it. Some old man who died had a big part, but he had already traded it to the ones who have it now for a place in Alanje. It was a lot of noise, nothing more.”
