Three Shot Burst

by Phillip DePoy

  ‘But you never used them.’

  ‘The guns.’ She sighed. ‘No. Not until that night at the place.’

  ‘So why make up a story about being a hit man?’

  ‘Seemed like a great way to get invisible protection. If it gets around that I kill people for a living, then people are less likely to mess with me.’

  I shook my head. ‘This is just how little you know of actual human nature. Maybe you scared one or two citizens with that line, but a guy like Ironstone, that kind of thing just makes him curious – like it made me.’

  She looked away. ‘Yeah, OK, maybe I said it a little to impress you, too. I thought you were cool, and I wanted you to like me. And you seemed to like me when you thought I was a bad ass, so.’

  I stood up. ‘I like you just fine. And I’m going to make certain you’re taken care of. For example, I promised you that I’d find your sister, and I’m going to do that. Partly just because I promised, but mostly because I’m in the middle of something I don’t understand.’

  ‘You mean the drug war.’

  ‘I mean you and your sister. I don’t care what the criminal class does with their time. I care about you. I care about what’s happening with your sister, who is still legally a child, and her baby, who is by any definition a child. And, because of those concerns, I also have to figure out about this alleged DEA agent, what happened to her, what she was doing, and why she was posing as your sister, or at least using your sister’s name. See, for me, it all comes down to that night in Mary’s when David Waters tried to collect you and you pronounced him dead.’

  ‘You care about me?’ She had a funny kind of expression on her face. ‘Why?’

  I stood up. ‘That falls under the heading of my background. The short version is that I messed up in Brooklyn, and because of me there’s a kid who’s got no parents. My fault. So I started caring about you because it was a part of my atonement for that. And now I care about you because I know you, and I like you – whether or not you’re a bad ass – and I want you to be all right. Now enough with the psychology from both of us. Let’s get to work.’

  ‘Work?’ She blinked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, motioning for her to get off the sofa. ‘However you got to this point, you don’t seem to mind shooting guys in the leg now. That being the case, I assume you’re not shy about doing the work we need to do to find your sister. Whatever it is.’

  She tossed off the blanket and stood up. ‘You want me to shoot people?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘But I do want you to maintain the attitude that you’ve had so far, the whole take-no-prisoners gestalt.’

  ‘I’m confused,’ she admitted.

  ‘Good.’ I headed for the door. ‘Me too.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Now that I knew Baxter was on Ironstone’s payroll, it would be a lot easier to deal with him. He had an agenda. He was interested in protecting Ironstone and his little fiefdom. That would color all of his behavior, and I could manipulate him.

  But he wasn’t the first stop I intended to make. Lena and I packed ourselves into my car and zipped right over to the hospital for a chat with Maggie Redhawk.

  Maggie and I knew each other pretty well. She was my primary contact at the hospital when I need something for the kids I was helping. And she’d taken care of me more than once when I had run afoul of the more unsavory element.

  Fry’s Bay Hospital was a little ratty around the edges, but it was efficient and small enough to be personal.

  Maggie was the head nurse, in her fifties, and Mister Redhawk’s older sister. When we’d first met she’d made a big deal out of her opinion that I looked more like a Seminole than she did. I didn’t argue because it bonded us.

  I parked the car and we headed in.

  Maggie smiled when she saw me coming. As usual, her hospital uniform was so ill-fitting that she looked like a bag of laundry in a nurse’s hat.

  ‘Foggy!’ she sang. ‘You’re not dead!’

  ‘Not yet,’ I agreed, ‘but I’m working on it.’

  ‘And this must be the little girl who killed David Waters for us,’ Maggie went on, beaming. ‘Come here.’

  Before Lena could protest, Maggie had rounded the nurse’s desk and was squeezing the life out of the kid.

  ‘Her name’s Lena,’ I said. ‘What have you heard about her?’

  ‘Lena,’ Maggie repeated, holding the kid at arm’s length. ‘Everybody’s talking about you. Let me get a good look.’

  ‘She’s actually the reason we’re here,’ I went on. ‘We’re looking for her sister. Ellen Greenberg.’

  ‘Ellen’s your sister?’ Maggie asked. ‘The woman who worked in the gift shop? Gee. You don’t look anything alike.’

  I produced the picture I had in my pocket. ‘This is Ellen Greenberg.’

  Maggie stared. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘This woman,’ I said, ‘in this picture – is not the person you know as Ellen Greenberg?’

  ‘No.’ Maggie studied the picture. ‘But I see that Lena, here, does look like this person. I’m confused.’

  ‘The woman you know,’ I continued, ‘worked here for how long?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe a year – less. She was real nice.’

  ‘How long has it been since you’ve seen her?’

  ‘Four or five months, I guess.’ She cocked her head. ‘What’s it about, Foggy?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’ I put the picture away. ‘Look, is there any chance that there would be a picture of the woman you know around here? Like in her employment record or maybe she had an ID badge with her mug on it?’

  ‘Well,’ Maggie said, ‘we don’t have photo IDs, and I don’t know about her personnel file. Let me just go get it.’

  And away she went, down the hall to some office.

  Lena poked me in the arm.

  ‘We’re not looking for the person who worked here,’ she said under her breath. ‘We’re looking for my sister.’

  ‘Yeah, but you see they’re connected, right? If we find this person who borrowed your sister’s made-up name – if she’s still alive – then don’t you think she might shed some light on this whole business?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Let me get this timeline clear in my head,’ I said, leaning against the countertop of the nurse’s station. ‘Your sister left home five years ago. In that time, she fell in with a Seminole crowd, as you said, and got mixed up with David Waters. The unsavory manner of their first encounter led to your sister’s baby and probably a drug habit. But at some point she got wise enough to get in touch with you. Was that at home in Rio?’

  ‘No,’ she answered, ‘I’d already gone to Disney.’

  ‘Which, P.S., you were ten; how did they hire you?’

  ‘I lied about my age,’ she told me like I was stupid. ‘You’ve met me. I seem older than my age. I told them that I had a form of dwarfism. They believed me. And then they hired me to be a dwarf. I mean, you have to see the humor in that.’

  ‘Yeah, but back to our story,’ I said. ‘How did your sister know you were at Disneyland or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘We kept in touch. She wrote me letters all the time. I wrote back.’

  I suddenly smacked the top of the counter. ‘Wait a minute. If you’d never met David before the night you zotzed him, where did you get the letters that you put in the safe deposit box?’

  ‘Oh, yeah – about those.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Maybe I should have mentioned before that my sister is crazy.’

  I stared.

  When I refused to say anything, she went on.

  ‘She wasn’t all that stable before she left home,’ Lena said quietly. ‘But after what happened with David, she lost it completely. I guess. She sent those letters to me. To my address in Kissimmee. They were written to her fantasy of David. It didn’t take me long to figure that out. So I realized she’d really gone round the bend. When I met you, I thought you might help me, so I le
ft them in the safe deposit box. And then, you know, you did help me. So say something.’

  ‘You just went right to the Chalet Suzanne when you left my hospital room.’

  She nodded. ‘Good guess.’

  ‘Because you thought that was the last place she’d been, on account of the stationery.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You came to Fry’s Bay to look for David, thinking he might help you,’ I surmised. ‘But then you found out all the dirt on the guy and realized that your sister might have been a little off. And then you had your encounter, and then David was dead and you didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘And that brings us back to Doe a Deer,’ she said impatiently. ‘I think we found the place where my sister and her baby were hiding out, in that crummy camp-slum in the Cherry Pocket. I don’t know why we’re not back there, following the trail!’

  ‘Because it’s not a trail,’ I said. ‘If that was her place, she hadn’t been there in months. Your sister came here to Fry’s Bay. That’s where everything went wrong for her, and for you too. We may have to go back to the Cherry Pocket eventually, but would you let me handle this my way?’

  Before she could answer, Maggie returned with a manila folder.

  ‘This is very odd,’ she said, setting the folder down in front of me.

  ‘What’s odd?’ I asked.

  ‘Ellen – the Ellen I knew? She was hired directly by Dr Glendale.’

  ‘And he is?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘The chief hospital administrator. He hires head surgeons, not gift shop girls.’

  ‘That is odd,’ I agreed. ‘Is there a picture?’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said. ‘There’s really not anything. No application, no references, no time sheet. Nothing. Just a letter of approval confirming her hiring and a note that says everything else is in Dr Glendale’s office.’

  I didn’t even bother to look in the folder. ‘Then I guess I’d better go speak with Dr Glendale.’

  ‘No, Foggy,’ Maggie insisted. ‘You can’t just go careening into the boss’s office!’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on careening,’ I told her. ‘Just talking. Which way is it?’

  ‘No!’ Maggie insisted.

  ‘Look,’ I said reasonably, ‘if you don’t tell me, I’ll just go ask someone else, very politely, and I’ll get there one way or the other. I won’t mention your name.’

  ‘I don’t care if you mention my name,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve been the head nurse here for three administrators. They can all kiss my ass. I just don’t want you messing with something that you don’t know anything about.’

  That stopped me.

  ‘What?’ I stared at Maggie.

  She avoided eye contact. ‘You don’t know what you’re getting into.’

  ‘And you do?’

  Lena looked back and forth between us for a minute and then said, ‘David Waters got my sister pregnant, hooked on drugs, and then abandoned her. She was only fourteen or fifteen when it happened. We’re trying to save her life. You have to help us.’

  Coming from me, that wouldn’t have meant much, but coming from an urchin in a school girl outfit, it packed a wallop. I didn’t know how much of Lena’s little speech was genuine and how much was theatre, but it didn’t matter. Because it worked.

  ‘The Ellen Greenberg that I knew,’ Maggie said to Lena, ‘that worked here, was undercover for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Why she took your sister’s name I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say that it gave her some sort of edge with David Waters and his growing cocaine enterprise.’

  I wasn’t surprised that Maggie knew such a secret – she was Mister Redhawk’s sister, and Redhawk knew everything. I just moved on.

  ‘If David really did accost lots of people the way he did with you,’ I said to Lena, ‘and he’s sampling the product that he sells, it’s possible that he might not know the difference between your sister and this woman.’

  ‘Or that the ancillary thugs who worked for David would know the name and the general look of the girl,’ Lena added, ‘and just assume they were the same person.’

  ‘Then it’s possible that this DEA agent approached your sister with the idea of taking over her identity,’ I went on, ‘to get closer to the inner workings of David’s operation.’

  ‘My sister looked older than she was,’ Lena told me. ‘You said that. If this DEA agent was in her twenties …’

  ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t move.

  ‘What is it?’ Lena asked me.

  I squinted. ‘You know how you said your upbringing didn’t exactly encourage you to be trusting?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Me too. I don’t have any idea who to trust at the moment. I mean, I trust Maggie, but maybe this Dr Gladstone—’

  ‘Glendale,’ Maggie corrected.

  ‘Maybe he’s involved in the wrong end of all this. Baxter probably is. And it’s possible that Yudda’s not telling us everything.’

  ‘Foggy,’ Lena began.

  ‘Also you have not exactly helped matters,’ I interrupted, irritated. ‘Every five seconds you tell me a new story. I have no idea what’s what with you.’

  As it turned out, that hurt her feelings. She looked down and mumbled, ‘Yeah, well most of the time I don’t know what’s what with me either.’

  Maggie didn’t quite understand what was going on.

  ‘So,’ she began, ‘what are you going to do now?’

  I just shrugged.

  ‘You can’t give up on this, Foggy,’ Lena said, sounding especially like a little kid.

  Then, like a smack in the head, I remembered the other item that had been in the safe deposit box.

  ‘Where did that bullet come from?’ I asked Lena. ‘The one that was in there with the letters and the photos?’

  ‘Came in that last letter,’ she said. ‘It scared me. It’s what made me leave Kissimmee and come to Fry’s Bay to find my sister.’

  ‘Why in God’s name would your sister send you a spent bullet?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what scared me, I said,’ she insisted.

  ‘Unless she didn’t,’ I said slowly. ‘Here’s a weird idea. Your sister wrote those letters and actually sent them to David. But the mystery girl, the DEA agent, found them, got them, maybe intercepted them, and sent them to you instead. That would make the bullet really important. Like: evidence in something big.’

  ‘This is either the most far-fetched invention of the decade,’ Lena said, ‘or the best guess of the century.’

  ‘Not really a guess, entirely,’ I said. ‘Given the facts at this point, and the cast of characters, who would be the most likely person to send a spent bullet from a Colt M1911A1?’

  ‘A what?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘That’s the gun that fired a bullet that Ellen, one of the Ellens, sent to the kid, here, in a letter.’

  ‘This is too much for me.’ Maggie shook her head. ‘Probably why my brother told me to stay out of all this mess. He told me you’d come looking for this woman, and he told me not to tell you anything.’

  ‘Mister Redhawk told you to hide things from me?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘he just didn’t want me getting involved. But now that you’ve talked with me and gotten me involved – you’d better go see him.’

  I nodded. ‘OK.’

  Without further ado I headed for the exit.

  ‘Wait,’ Lena protested, ‘you don’t trust the cops and you don’t trust me but you do trust the Indian who busted your door down and scared me out of my wits?’

  ‘First, what did I tell you about the word Indian?’ I began. ‘And second, you didn’t seem remotely scared out of your wits.’

  ‘I was hyper!’ she snapped.

  ‘We’re going to see Mister Redhawk!’ I countered as we exited the hospital.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mister Redhawk stayed in a big condo when he was in Fry’s Bay. His was the only building in town designed for the very wealthy. It was a swanky edifice right d
owntown that was lousy with phony art deco details and a big marble lobby, all show-off and no comfort. If Redhawk was in town, that was as good a place as any to start looking for him.

  I insisted that Lena change out of her ridiculous costume before we went to see him. Rolled up in her torn backpack was a pair of jeans and a flapper fringe top she’d found in a thrift store, also platform sandals with cork soles. I’d changed my tie: a thin burgundy number that was so far out of fashion it was cool again. Wardrobe refreshed, we sallied forth to the rich man’s condo.

  As we navigated through the odd revolving door, all glass and copper, I prepared myself for the security guard. We’d had several encounters. Once we were in the lobby, I was momentarily distracted by the paintings on the walls: women in blue dresses playing musical instruments. The floor sported an angular sunburst design, and the ceiling was a huge chandelier. I’d forgotten about all that.

  Lena was impressed. ‘Jesus,’ she whispered.

  The security guard stood up.

  ‘You again?’ he whined.

  I reached in my hip pocket and showed my badge. ‘Florida Child Protective Services,’ I reminded him. ‘And this is a child.’

  Lena waved.

  ‘Part of protecting her involves seeing Mister Redhawk.’ I stopped right there. I thought it best to let silence convince him that I was serious.

  He was staring at Lena, trying to decide what to do. It was obvious that thinking hurt his brain. So he gave up.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ he mumbled, reaching for the phone at his station.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Lena said in a very small voice.

  I tried to keep from smiling.

  ‘Yes, sir, Mister Redhawk, sorry to bother you,’ the guard said tentatively, ‘there’s someone here in the lobby that wants to see you. It’s Moscowitz, that guy from …’

  He trailed off, listening to whatever it was that Redhawk was saying. He nodded and hung up.

  ‘Third floor,’ he said.

  ‘The top floor suite?’ I asked. ‘The whole floor, right?’

  The guy nodded, ‘Just renovated it.’

  ‘You’ve been there before,’ Lena surmised.