Tanzi's Heat (Vince Tanzi Book 1)

by C I Dennis

  “I didn’t have anything that matched.”

  “Barbara,” I said, “You’re not thinking. Somebody is trying to shoot you.”

  “I thought it would be all right because you were here,” she said.

  “You can’t—” I began, but I was interrupted by headlights in the rearview mirror. It was probably a neighbor. Just to be sure, I started the car and drove down her road toward A-1-A. When we got onto the main road I hit the gas, and the SHO took off like a bottle rocket.

  “Fast car,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “Didn’t mean to show off.”

  “You must be really hungry,” she said, smiling.

  I was hungry, but I was also worried. The headlights had turned right behind us, and I’d had to hustle to lose them. It was foolish to stop at her house, and I needed to set some ground rules.

  *

  We took an outdoor table; it was cooler inside, but I don’t live in Florida to be cold. The August heat is so oppressive during the day that it feels fine by comparison at night, even if it’s still in the eighties. We had a breeze, a low moon over the Atlantic, and a view of the people walking on the beach below us. Barbara ordered a Viognier, light and perfect for a warm evening, and I stuck with water. I had the tuna au poivre with grilled zucchini, roasted peppers, and a sweet onion relish. Barbara had spinach tagliatelle with garlic, olive oil, and parmesan, which was my second choice, and so we decided to share our entrees. No one was watching us, as far as I could tell, though some of the male patrons were sneaking glances at Barbara. I didn’t come here much with Glory; it was a little touristy and she didn’t like fish, which was about the only flaw she had.

  I ran down the events of the day for Barbara. She seemed to have come to terms with the possibility that C.J. had another wife. She had no opinion as to whether there was one C.J., or a C.J. and a D.B. It was too much information to process after twenty years of marriage.

  “What’s he like?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me more about C.J. What does he do besides walk the beach?”

  “Not much,” she said.

  “Come on,” I said.

  She picked up her wine glass and held it out toward me. “Have some,” she said.

  “No thanks.”

  “You need to relax, Vince. You’re grilling me.”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to get personal. I’m just confused about C.J.,” I said.

  “So am I,” she said. She took a long sip from the wine, and I noticed her eyes were getting glassy. “When you said that about another wife—it hit me like a punch in the stomach. I’ve spent half my life living by his rules. He didn’t want me to get a real job, so I didn’t. We didn’t have kids. I’ve been playing house, working out, behaving myself and basically doing nothing. And then you tell me he’s got a whole other life on the side.”

  “I don’t know that for sure, yet,” I said. “Barbara...this is a process. It gets ugly sometimes.”

  “Damn right,” she said. “I already wish he’d just shot me.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said. “I want to talk to you about that, too. You can’t take any more risks. I shouldn’t have brought you here. It was a misjudgment on my part. We’re going straight back to the hotel afterward, and I want you to lay low, OK?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “I’m sorry. And I’m glad you took me out, I was going crazy in there.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while.

  “Mind if I ask you the questions, for a change?” she said.

  “Fire away.”

  “What was jail like?”

  “It sucked. It was incredibly boring. I was in a very bad frame of mind then, so in a way it was a good place for me to be.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Nine months—until they threw the case out. The forensic lab work was a total fiasco, and they couldn’t make a case, although it was clear that I shot her. You probably read about it.”

  “You thought it was an intruder?”

  “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Why didn’t you make bail? I read that you could have.”

  “I think...I was punishing myself.”

  “Have you forgiven yourself yet?”

  “No,” I said. Not yet, and not ever.

  *

  I took the Merrill Barber bridge over to the mainland and turned north up Indian River Drive toward the Spring Hill Suites. It was eleven o’clock—past my bedtime. I wanted to get an early start in the morning, gear up and get back across the state to Tampa. I’d check in with Roberto by text to see if he found anything. Barbara was tired too, and she leaned her head against the car window.

  I dropped her at the porte-cochere at the entrance to the hotel, and she thanked me and went inside. I pulled the Taurus back onto the roadway, in time to see a white Chrysler minivan coming the other way. It went right by me and continued on, past the entrance to the Spring Hill Suites. I drove a few hundred yards farther until the taillights were out of sight.

  That looked a hell of a lot like C.J.’s van. I retrieved the laptop from the back seat and opened it up. It was still programmed to find the Lexus, which was in the driveway at Hibiscus Pond Drive in Tampa. I re-entered the information on the tracker for the van.

  It was in Vero. I zoomed in on the map.

  The little blue dot was moving, and then it slowed and made a U-turn. It slowed again, turned into a drive and stopped—in the parking lot at the Spring Hill Suites.

  I left the Taurus at the hotel entrance and went straight to Barbara’s room. I hadn’t seen the van when I pulled in, but I knew it was there, and if there was someone sitting in it with a gun, I was not going to take any chances. I knocked at Barbara’s door and yelled. She opened it, still in the black dress. I told her to pack a bag of essentials, we were leaving immediately, and we could come back later for whatever she left. She heard the worry in my voice and quickly stuffed a few things into a large purse. I led her out to the car, told her to keep her head down, and we roared out of the lot. I got the Taurus up to over ninety on Indian River Drive—no one was going to follow us this time. After a few miles I stopped on a side road and parked. The laptop was still on, and the van was still at the Spring Hill Suites. I finally took a few breaths, and Barbara stopped looking terrified.

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “So, you couldn’t wait to see me again?” she said. There was a pause until I got the joke, and we both burst out laughing. I explained what I had seen, and we tried to figure it out, but it was late and I couldn’t think straight.

  “I think I’m going to take you to my place,” I said, “if that’s not too awkward. I have an alarm system. There’s a separate bedroom. I have—”

  “You don’t have to sell me on it, Vince.”

  I drove her to my house, parked in the garage and led her inside. Glory and I had our own bedrooms because I snore like a Harley Davidson going uphill, and Glory’s room was untouched. It was awkward—awkward as hell, but Barbara smiled, thanked me, entered her room and shut the door.

  THURSDAY

  I got up before sunrise, showered, put on a fresh shirt and wrote out a note for Barbara. I told her to stay put, it was OK if she needed to use any of Glory’s stuff, and we’d pick up the rest of her things when I was back from Tampa. I said if it was an absolute emergency she could use the other car in the garage, Glory’s BMW convertible which had sat there, unused. I’d kept the battery charged and rolled the tires around every so often so they wouldn’t get flat spots, but I never took it out past the driveway. I couldn’t bear to drive it, and I wasn’t ready to sell it.

  I started up the SHO and got on the road. This time I had every snooping toy that I own. I had also opened the padded envelope on top of the refrigerator and packed my Glock 26. The “baby” Glock, as it’s called, is the ideal concealed-carry weapon, and I have a permit because technically I
’m a retired cop although that’s a long story.

  I booted up the laptop in the car; the van was now showing up back in Lake Wales, stationary. The Lexus was on the move in Tampa. I guessed that D.B. was going out to the driving range; serious golfers hit balls for hours and hours every day, like musicians play endless scales until their neighbors beg for mercy.

  Roberto had left me an email—not his usual mode of communication, but he had a lot of info to pass on. He hadn’t turned up anything new about C.J., D.B. or Le, and there was very little to be found on them on the web. He’d found Tan Tieng; it was a South Vietnamese hamlet that appeared on maps prior to 1973 but not afterward. He said he was going to check that out at the library. That seemed strangely anachronistic, but not everything is on the internet. Yet.

  He had also discovered that young Philip Johannsen was indeed a hellcat as the neighbor had put it. The kid had half a dozen grand theft auto arrests. None of that was supposed to be public record because he was a juvenile, but that didn’t hamper Roberto, though it worried me that he could so easily hack into a court file. So—the younger Johannsen liked to steal cars. We used to call it joyriding when I was that age, and it was no big deal as long as we brought the car back in one piece. It was a good thing the boy was still a juvie, GTA is a minimum one-year sentence in Florida.

  Roberto asked if there was any way I could get to their computer. Then, all I would have to do was log on to my Gmail account and send him an email. He’d send back a program which I would install, and then he’d cover my tracks. That way he could hack his way back into their computer and look around. I doubted I could get into Le’s office unseen; it was too open and I had noticed security cameras on the exterior, but I had an idea of how I might get in the house without alerting Hawkeye, the nosy neighbor, and a home alarm system wouldn’t present much of a challenge.

  I was beyond Lake Wales and halfway to Brandon when my cell rang—it was Frank Velutto at the Sheriff’s office. I hadn’t seen Frank since the night I went to jail. That was the way it had been with most of my cop friends—awkward. When I got out they all swore they never thought it was me, although the evidence wasn’t so clear. Frank and I were the only two Italian Americans in the department, although Frank is about as Italian as a Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza.

  “Vinny, you fucking homo,” he addressed me, like he always did.

  “Frank, you fucking homophobe,” I replied. He was the only person who I would allow to call me “Vinny” except for my mother.

  “So Vin, did you do a hit-and-run in the Bono’s Barbecue lot yesterday afternoon?”

  “I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.” When cops are talking to each other they are expected to employ the f-word at least five times per sentence, interchangeably as a noun, adjective, or verb. Frank could use it in the pluperfect subjunctive.

  “Dispatch got a call last night asking for a plate ID. From a civilian, not an insurance company. The guy calls at midnight. He said you bumped him in the parking lot and took off, but he got the plate.”

  “You tell him he needs to go through the insurance company?”

  “Yeah, he said he didn’t want to report it, just find you and settle.”

  “Well it wasn’t me.”

  “I figured. Fuckin’ whack-jobs out there.”

  “Can you give me the phone number?” I asked.

  “Sure but guess what? It was from a pay phone,” he said. “So—you making some kind of trouble?”

  “Not yet. But I guess I’m back on a case.”

  “Good for you.”

  We chatted for a while about nothing in particular. Frank and his wife Carole used to be close friends. Glory and Carole did everything together; neither of them had children and that created a sort of bond. Frank is a handsome dog, and it shocks people sometimes when they’re expecting a bullet-headed deputy to roll out of the cruiser and they get this movie star. Like I said, I never had that problem. We said our f-you’s and our goodbyes and hung up.

  *

  By the time I got into downtown Tampa the traffic was knotted up tighter than a wino’s dreadlocks. I had to cross through the middle of the city to get to the peninsula where the Johannsen house was and the roads were clogged with old people going to one doctor or another. That accounts for approximately ninety-nine percent of the morning traffic in Florida.

  I passed Sunset Park and continued down the east side of Old Tampa Bay. The shoreline is a mixture of attractive housing developments, mangrove swamp, and industrial wasteland. Alongside the Army Reserve Center was a tumbledown yacht club that I’d Googled on the ride over. It was the nearest place that would rent me a boat.

  By nine thirty I was motoring north up the bay in a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler with an elderly outboard motor that was about as stealthy as my Taurus’ bad muffler. I had rented fishing gear to complete my cover. I also had my snooping toys, my lock-picking kit, and the Glock. To the untrained observer I looked like a cop, in a boat, with a fishing pole.

  It was already ungodly hot, even out on the water. There was no breeze, and I had forgotten my hat. I motored under the Gandy Boulevard causeway and continued past some sand flats and residential neighborhoods. There was a nice stretch of beach punctuated by docks and boathouses about three hundred feet apart, some with boats attached and some without. Quite a few fancy boats had been repo’ed in the last few years since the economy went under. The GPS application on my phone directed me into a canal that was lined with big houses. No repo’s here; this is where the one percent lived, and nearly every house had a yacht out back. I slowed the Whaler as I approached a cul-de-sac in the canal that backed up to 1221 Hibiscus Pond Drive. I cut the engine, dropped a line and began to “fish”. With my luck I would probably hook an actual fish, so I took the precaution of not using any bait.

  I waited for a while to see if there was any activity at the house, figuring this would be a good time of day. The last time I checked the laptop the Lexus was going south toward Bradenton—D.B. probably had another golf hustle scheduled. Philip might be in school, although I wasn’t sure if classes had started in Tampa as they had in Vero. Le, a workaholic according to Hawkeye, would be at work. I tied up to their dock, next to a big Riviera sport fisherman that didn’t look like it had seen a lot of use. Nickels and Dimes was stenciled across the transom in shiny black letters. There must be a rule somewhere that if you own a half-million-dollar boat you have to give it a dumbass name.

  I approached the house from the back and tugged on a pair of latex gloves as I walked. A swimming pool was surrounded by a wooden fence with eight-foot-high panels, but there was only a wrought-iron bolt securing the back gate and I was able to slide it open from the outside. I didn’t see security cameras, but the doors and windows were wired. I removed a small black plastic box labeled “X10 Sniffer” from my bag and plugged it into an outdoor electrical outlet on the back patio, next to the pool filter unit. The machine confirmed that the house was protected by a security system that used the phone line. I couldn’t cut the line; that would definitely be leaving tracks. I had a companion box in my duffel, an “X10 Blackout” that would complete the job. It could jam the alarm signal right from the outlet. These were not devices offered at Best Buy.

  Once the alarm was disabled I was inside within five minutes. The deadbolt on the back door was a good quality Medeco and it resisted my lock-picking like a high school virgin, but I prevailed. That never happened in high school.

  The house was one of the strangest homes I’d ever broken into. Everything was ludicrously neat, bordering on antiseptic, like the inside of a hospital but with furniture. Somebody had a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There was little decoration, and all the upholstered furniture was wrapped in clear plastic slipcovers, like people would use if they had an incontinent dog. I went room-to-room, looking for a computer. The only room that was not pin-neat was the kid’s, it was the usual disaster, and the death-metal band posters on the walls co
mpleted the look. There was a computer on his desk, but I wanted to find D.B.’s; that was the one that was most likely to hold some usable info. I finally found his man-cave, in between the garage and the laundry room; it had a steel desk with a Dell computer, a gun cabinet, some files, a TV and four bags of golf clubs. Out of curiosity I picked the gun cabinet lock. It held quite an arsenal—at least a dozen handguns, boxes of ammo, and several rifles, including a Browning BAR Safari .30-06 hunting rifle with a scope. That was a serious weapon, and in the hands of a good marksman it could hit a beer can in a parallel universe.

  *

  It was awkward to type with the latex gloves on. I logged in to Gmail on D.B.’s computer and sent a message to Roberto.

  I’m in.

  He emailed me back, with an attachment. I downloaded it and ran the program. The whole thing took about three minutes. Roberto texted me on my phone.

  All good. Don’t shut it down, just log off Gmail and clr the history.

  Done, I texted back.

  I put everything back where it was and got my bag of tricks out. I planted bugs in the living room, kitchen, man-cave and the master bedroom. That ought to do it. I went outside and taped the control unit for the listening devices to the back of the swimming pool filter and plugged it in to the outdoor AC receptacle. It was not likely that they’d see it, and I’d clean it up on the next visit, I hoped. Everything was voice-activated and stored on a disk, and I could connect remotely with the laptop at my leisure and have an eavesdropping party.

  I went back in to make sure I hadn’t left anything out of place. Somebody knocked loudly at the front door. Christ. Luckily, I was done. I hustled out the back, pulled my X10 gadgets and left through the fence gate to the dock. In a few seconds I was back in the Whaler, breathing easier. I could see the street from the water. A FedEx truck was beep-beeping as it backed away from the Johannsen house. That was a relief. I pointed the little boat down the canal and motored back toward the yacht club.

  *

  I had the afternoon to kill while I waited for the Johannsen family to get home and start talking. I could have driven back to Vero Beach, but I was in no hurry. Between their conversations and Roberto’s hacking I hoped to learn where to point next. I had a fresh concern for Barbara’s safety; Frank Velutto’s call about someone looking for my plate number might have a connection to the case. The car headlights that followed us out of her road could have belonged to the minivan. I thought I had outrun it, but maybe I hadn’t, and they could have picked up the plate number while we were at the restaurant, and then followed us back to the hotel. I didn’t like that at all—the hunter’s worst fear is finding out he’s the quarry.