by Moulton, CD
Clint Faraday Mysteries collection B
This Job is Murder
5 books
Collector’s edition
Storm Front
Comedy of Terrors
Omen
Follow the Blood
... Or So the Gods Said
© 2014 by C. D. Moulton
Smashwords edition © 2014
all rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright holder/publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. any resemblances to persons or events is purely coincidental unless otherwise stated
About the author
CD Moulton has traveled extensively over much of the world both in the music business, where he was a rock guitarist, songwriter and arranger and in an import/export business. He has been everything from a bar owner to auto salvage (junkyard) manager, longshoreman to high steel worker, orchid grower to landscaper, tropical fish farmer to commercial fisherman. He started writing books in 1983 and has published more than 200 books as of January 1, 2014. His most popular books to date are about research with orchids, though much of his science fiction and fantasy work has proven popular. He wrote the CD Grimes, PI series and the Det. Nick Storie series, Clint Faraday series and many other works.
He now resides in Puerto Armuelles, Panamá, where he writes books, plays music with friends, does research with orchids and medicinal plants – and pursues his favorite ways to spend his time: beach bum and roaming the mountain jungles doing his botanical research. He has lately become involved in fighting for the rights of the indigenous people, who are among his closest friends, and in fighting the extreme corruption in the courts and police in Panamá.
He offers the free e-book, Fading Paradise, that explains what he has been through because of the corruption.
Clint Faraday Mysteries
Book six
Storm Front
(c)2010 & 2013 by C. D. Moulton
There is a storm front approaching from the southeast. A boatload of cocaine is forced in to near Bocas. There is a torture-murder. Everyone except Clint believes that the two things are connected. At first.
Contents
Approaching Weatherfront
No Time for Torture
Assumptions
Neighborly Visit
Stupid Treasure Hunters
Facts and Suspicions
Good Life
Storm Front
Approaching Weatherfront
“Clint, do you have the TV on?” Judi Lum, Clint’s neighbor in Bocas del Toro called from her deck on Saigon Bay to Clint Faraday, retired PI from Florida, who was on his own deck. He called back that he didn’t turn the thing on unless he expected something special.
“On the news. There’s a storm front coming in from the southeast. It seems to be a pretty bad one. They’re trying to call all the boats in to port. Nasty.”
“Bad enough for us to worry about?” he asked. She didn’t know. She would watch it.
Clint finished his coffee and hojaldres and flipped on the radio to the emergency channel to be sure there was no call that he should respond to. There was a lot of chatter, but of very short duration. People were calling to say they were alright, then would leave the channel clear for emergency and m’aidez calls. He heard the police break that said for all officers to monitor channel ess2. That meant that it came from the US Coast guard so someone was in trouble or there was some illegal activity they observed. They would call for the Panamanian police to respond in those cases.
This was that a very fast cigarette boat was headed inward at the Zapatillas. It was suspected of being a drug carrier. One passenger. Male. Had automatic weapon(s). Fifteen minutes later the police chopper coming back from searching to warn boaters radioed that the boat was between Bastimentos and Solarte and had run up on a piece of reef. The police boats were dispatched and ordered to take no chances. If they were fired on they were to return fire and were to shoot to kill in all instances.
Ten minutes later a boat reported that the boat had no one aboard. There were several large packages wrapped in plastic. There were four synchronized two hundred fifty horsepower outboards that had been running it. The bottom was holed, but would not sink further as the coral head would hold it where it was. There was a plastic cover for an inflatable dingy on board so the passenger had apparently gone ashore somewhere in it. The other boats were to fan out and search the shoreline on both of the islands. No such craft had come anywhere close to either end of the bay between the islands so it was there.
Almost an hour later, as the wind was kicking up very strongly, they found the inflatable near the shore of Solarte under the mangroves. No one was in it. It was being processed. The passenger could not go far there because it was as much as impenetrable. There was no evidence of a path being chopped onto the island at the shoreline, but the passenger could have made his way inland past the mangroves that fringed the island and could move a good distance. He was trapped. They would find him.
Fifteen minutes later a body was discovered a short distance from the inflatable. The man had been shot in the back of the head. There was no identification on him. There were signs he had been tortured before being shot.
That seemed a bit strange to Clint. There wouldn’t have been time to torture anyone. There was only one passenger on that boat so the body would have to be the pilot or someone who chanced on him – which made torture ridiculous.
He had to finish battening down his stuff so he didn’t think much about it.
Then.
No Time for Torture
The storm was coming onshore strongly now. Clint rode his Ducatti to the police station to be there if they needed help. People could act like idiots with a storm coming. Already, Sergio had arrested four surfers who were headed out for a thrill ride. The raging surf would grind them to hamburger on the reefs. Idiots!
Sergio told Clint what they knew. It wasn’t a lot and it was. It would depend on which angle you chose to view it. Clint could see Sergio’s point that there was little reason to investigate a drug killing because you either caught them in the act or there would be no prosecution of the case due to lack of evidence. It wasted the time and resources of the police department.
Clint said he agreed one hundred percent, but there was no evidence this killing had anything to do with drugs and druggies.
Sergio said they had scoured the parts of Solarte where the runner could have gone and he wasn’t there. The body was probably the runner. He was supposed to meet someone there. The someone didn’t care to take the chance of being identified and took care of that little problem.
Clint said that left the torture bit. There was definitely no time for anyone to torture anyone. Sergio shrugged and said Clint could look into it if he wanted. Clint had little else to do so he would look into it.
The calls started coming in about the storm damage. Nothing too serious. Clint waited it out at the station with the police. He knew most of them. When it was fairly certain the storm would stay under anything that could cause particularly bad effects on the island Clint went home. It was just minutes after three AM so he slept until almost nine. Extremely late for him. The main part of the storm had passed. It was a drizzly morning with little patches of sunlight here and there.
His ba
ttery went dead on his boat sometime during the night and the pump stopped. There were almost two feet of water in it he had to bail. He put the battery on the charger. It was totally discharged from being under water. He used the backup hand pump to finish bailing. The rain wouldn’t completely stop for the day. There would be small heavy rains for a couple of minutes, then it would drop back to the way it was at present. He would have it to do again until he had the battery charged. He thought about it and went into town to buy another battery. It would be smart to have a backup. He usually thought of that kind of thing before it was needed.
He stopped at the station, but there was nothing new. The autopsy wouldn’t be done until the next day. The lab had suffered a bit of water damage and had to be repaired.
Clint went to the Golden Grill to listen to the local gossip. There wasn’t much. Everybody was talking about the storm and how it wasn’t anything to the one back in etc. etc. etc. There was a little talk about the drug boat. More than half a ton of fully processed cocaine. Worth more than fifteen million even before it was cut like it would have been. Clint figured it at the going wholesale price. About eight hundred thousand. Two million on the streets. There was some talk about someone trying to get some land on Isla Popa by killing off some people, brought out because of Wild Bill having done that. Somebody was missing. That kind of thing was still around, but less than there was a few years ago. They talked a little about the body and what was going to happen to all that dope.
He asked if they had any idea who the body might have been. Jim said he was sure it wasn’t the runner like the cops said. They just didn’t want to be bothered. The runner was alone on the boat so who would have killed him?
“Maybe a rival drug dealer,” Tom suggested. Jim said that made even less sense.
Clint left before the argument started. He went across to The Pirate and chatted with a few people. Same general ideas. No one knew of anyone who had gone missing from Solarte. It was noticed very quickly when anyone was missing now that Wild Bill’s exploits and murders were known.
There was nothing more to be done now so he went home to relax a bit and call all the people he knew the storm might have affected. It appeared the front was a series of waves that would come in about one every ten hours for two more so it wouldn’t be very smart to relax. The up side was that it wasn’t one broad band like the innundation two years past. There would be damage to the roads and things on the river banks, but not extensive like before.
Clint then went to the morgue to talk with Dr. Avanzas, who was presently doing the autopsies. He said the body’s time of death couldn’t be established within more than six hours because of the sudden cooling from the storm. It was so long before the body was brought in that lividity couldn’t determine much. The torture was with cuts and crushing the finger bones and burns and was over a period of at least an hour. Probably closer to two hours. That ruled out the drug boat having anything to do with it. Clint went to the station and reported on the information from Doc. He said that meant the runner had someone there to pick him up. He left the inflatable to make them concentrate on searching Solarte for a bit of time to allow him to escape. If the person who picked him up had tried to exit the alley by either end he surely would have been seen. It was someone on either Solarte or Bastimentos. No one had any idea who it might have been.
The wind was picking up strongly as Clint headed back home. The next band was coming in.
Clint called a friend who was a secret agent for Interpol so knew much of what was going on in the area, particularly concerning drugs. He said the shipment was probably from the Peruvian connection going out of Medillin. He didn’t have much information except that a large shipment was supposed to go or have gone. Clint thanked him and decided to forget it until the fronts were past. He had a lot to occupy him simply keeping his stuff secure. This was supposed to be a little worse than the first. The next one was back to about what the first was if it didn’t increase in the time it would take to reach Panamá.
The night was a bit noisier than the previous night, but there was no more damage of a major proportion. Clint checked with Judi and Ben, two neighbors who were also close friends. They didn’t have any damage to report. Bocas could take a hell of a lot of wind and rain. Only the tourists worried much about it. He called Manny, a friend (who was an ex-mafia don who moved to Bocas to escape his past and raise a family who wouldn’t be ashamed of how Pops made his) on Isla San Cristóbal, but he didn’t have any damage to report either, though he had spent most of the last two nights at the Indio village helping to move the ones living in the lower parts onto higher ground. Miguel had come from Panamá City and had opened a building on his property for them and had slaughtered a pig so they would have plenty of food. Manny took over a hundred pounds of rice. They grew onions, peppers, and such right there. There were tons of yuca. Bananas and cocoa, yampi – it was all right there. Things were suave and tranquilo at the moment.
That would let Clint concentrate on the body and what happened to him.
Clint went to Bastimentos in his boat to check on friends there. Damage was a bit more severe. Bastimentos didn’t have the natural protection Isla Colón had. It wasn’t terrible. Clint was able to get a little information by asking something in passing and waiting for an opportunity to get the next question inserted. The recent capture of Wild Bill made that a good bit easier because he could ask who seemed strange in that way and who had been closer to Wild Bill. Not many on the island knew him. They wouldn’t. Most are blacks, who he didn’t seem to get along with well at all. The strangest ones associated with druggies and such were Quiroz and Larienze, two who were too often around the wrong people and the wrong places at the wrong times. Quite a number of the people there were minor street dealers so knew something about people who moved there from Colón (The province, not Isla Colón) and who acted too much like assholes all the time. Those two were living right in the middle of the area where so many were using and dealing in drugs, probably met with known biggies in the trade from time to time, yet claimed to not want anything to do with the locals of the same, if less elevated, type. In short, they were NOT liked, even a little bit.
Next was Solarte, where much the same was going on. He learned that there was one person who had a house out along the island a bit more than halfway with his land going from the bay to the alley. He had docks on both sides. Strange things seemed to be going on at night on those docks. His name was McDonald. He was a Bahamian with a Jamaican wife.
Clint figured he had three viable candidates for suspects.
The next wave was coming in. Clint went back to Bocas Town as the winds were getting strong. He secured the boat and went inside, took care of the e-mails and messages, then went to Judi’s for dinner. Ben was there, as was Dave, their nutty musician friend. They talked about general things. Clint didn’t bring up his case. It might be a good idea to keep his friends out of this one, though they could be a great help in some cases. He didn’t like that torture bit. If it weren’t for that they would already know all about it.
He went home after the storm began to subside a little. Dave and Ben went to Ben’s. Dave would go on home later or would stay with Ben. Ben said, “Oh! Thrill!”
Ben’s gay, in his mid twenties. Dave is in his seventies and had a girlfriend from back in Florida staying with him until she found a place in David or Boquete. They were all close and could share jokes and jibes that wouldn’t offend. Clint grinned when he thought of how different it was in Florida and how phony the life and taboos there seemed here. There, if a man were to spend a night with a gay friend he would be considered as being gay among most people. Here, nobody cared and nobody figured it was any of their business. The Indio saying was something like, “If you have an itch, what difference does it make which hand you use to scratch it?”
Clint thought of an itinerary for tomorrow and went to bed.
Over an omelette and coffee in the morning Clint decided to go to Solarte and
Bastimentos and check on storm damage. He was close to the Indios there and could collect a little information the police couldn’t. He would wait until the last wave of the storm front passed. Probably early tomorrow. The wave would hit Bocas about four o’clock. He could handle McDonald this morning and Quiroz and Larienze tomorrow. He may not have to worry tomorrow.
He took his boat out and ran it for awhile to get it hot enough to evaporate all the water that had managed to get under the cowl, then headed to Solarte. He met several of his Indio friends and chatted. They were always up and working by seven. It was ten ‘til when he got there. Magali insisted he have some hojaldras, coffee and patacones, so he sat with her and her husband, Milcare, and their two kids. Milcare said there wasn’t much to say about McDonald except he was a black foreigner with an attitude that would guarantee privacy – whether he wanted it or not.
“If everything’s so horrible here in Panamá, why doesn’t he return to Nassau?” Li asked. “Is there a reason he can’t? Like they don’t like his attitude there either?”
There wasn’t much more. Clint said he was just checking to be sure everyone was alright and that there wasn’t damage that couldn’t be repaired before the next wave hit in the afternoon. The natives had weathered storms a hell of a lot worse than this minor atmospheric disturbance. Clint said he knew it. He just wanted to be sure his friends were OK.
He stopped at two of the other places before coming in close to the McDonald finca. McDonald was on his dock trying to get his boat up. It was sunk. McDonald was a bullish bald man with a lot of gold teeth. He was just fat enough to make him ugly as homemade sin to Clint.
“Leave it there until tomorrow,” Clint called. “There’s another one coming in this afternoon, then it will clear up.”
