Tanzi's Heat (Vince Tanzi Book 1)

by C I Dennis

  I decided to drive over to Le’s office. The morning traffic had thinned out, and I made it to Pinellas Park in half an hour. I parked in the same spot as the day before, behind a pile of stacked telephone poles but with a view of the door.

  It must have been lunchtime for Le’s business because in the space of fifteen minutes a dozen panel trucks came into the yard. The drivers parked and entered the office, each carrying a large bank bag. Coins—lots and lots of quarters, dimes, and nickels—in heavy bags. I guessed that they made a cash drop at noon so that if they were robbed it would only be for part of the day’s take. After the drop they backed up to an adjacent warehouse and loaded up. Candy, sodas, potato chips—all that good old, all-American crap that was puffing people up to morbidly obese levels and killing us off at great expense to the economy. Don’t get me started. At least there weren’t any cigarette vending machines anymore, although this stuff was just as lethal. The drivers ate their sandwiches in their trucks; there was a picnic table, but it was just too damn hot. I noticed they were mostly big guys, and they looked strong. I guess you have to be pretty solid to lug all that soda around, unless you were in charge of the potato chips.

  I thought about getting the long-range microphone out of my trunk, but I was feeling lazy and was enjoying sitting still. Watching the guys eat was making me hungry, and I was thinking I’d look for a deli. At that moment the office door opened and two women came out, a small, slender Asian and a taller Caucasian, nicely dressed, with blonde hair. I did a double take. It was Barbara Butler, my employer and temporary captive. I looked over to the line of cars parked next to the office and there it was, a nice shiny white BMW 325ci with a black cloth top, Glory’s car. I was somewhere between amazed...and extremely pissed off.

  The two of them chatted outside for a few minutes, and then Barbara walked to the BMW while the other woman went back inside. Either something funny was going on or my client was just asking to get shot, a third time. I could feel my face getting hot, just like my father’s used to turn red right before we’d get a whipping with his belt. My father’s version of anger management was to beat the hell out of our backsides until he felt better. I inherited some of his temper for sure, but I don’t hit kids or women, just bad guys, sometimes.

  Barbara spotted me as she was pulling back into the street. She swung in alongside the SHO, her motor running. “Hop in,” she yelled through her open window. I got out of my car and leaned into her window.

  “Perhaps you’d like to tell me exactly what the hell you’re doing in Tampa? In my wife’s car?”

  “This was important. You said I could take the car.”

  I calmed down enough to speak in full sentences. “Barbara, somebody is trying to shoot you. Trying to kill you, OK? You don’t want to give them the chance. You’re not safe here, and if that woman is involved you could be at even more risk.”

  “Vince,” she said, “Get in the car.” Her eyes were shiny with tears. Shit. I never could give a ticket to a woman who was crying. I opened the door and took the passenger seat.

  “I stewed over this all last night. If she and I are married to the same man, then I need to know right now. Not that you couldn’t have found out, but I was in there for half an hour and I learned a lot. Let’s get some food somewhere, and I’ll fill you in.”

  I went quiet and she drove. Maybe I’d made a huge mistake taking this case. Barbara was too impulsive and that could get her killed. I adhere to a strict double standard whereby it’s fine for me to stir things up and make things happen, but it’s definitely not OK for my clients to do it. I simmered in the passenger seat, pissed off and at the same time curious to know what they’d talked about.

  We went to Rosie’s Clam Shack on 49th Street in Pinellas Park, where I’d eaten before. The place is a little rough around the edges, but one of the few things I miss about my childhood in New England is fried clams, and Rosie’s rivaled anything on the Maine coast. I ordered a large side order, meaning it didn’t come with fries, just a big, hot heap of battered clam bellies. To maintain a little Florida in the culinary mix I also ordered a sweet tea. Barbara had the wahoo burger, which the waitress had enthusiastically recommended. The crowd was mostly local business people except for a group of bikers and a group of nuns at adjacent tables, giving the place a slightly surreal vibe. I wondered if the bikers would offer to buy the nuns a beer—and if the nuns would then whack the bikers’ knuckles with a ruler, like they used to do to me at parochial school.

  Barbara knocked me out of my reverie. “Her name is Bao Quyen Le. “Le” for short. She’s a year younger than me, born in 1968. She lived in a hamlet in South Vietnam, but there was an attack and her whole family got killed except for her and her grandmother, who was sort of the village matriarch.”

  “You mean in the war? Americans?”

  “Yes. She said she was a little girl, like four years old. The village was wiped out, but the story her grandmother told her is that an American soldier saved them. He was in some kind of trouble for doing that; she didn’t explain why. He deserted, and the grandmother smuggled him into Cambodia, which was neutral, and somehow he got out. Then he went back to Vietnam in 1991 as a tourist, when the country first opened up to Americans again. The guy goes to find the village and it’s gone; there’s nothing there except jungle. But his interpreters get the word out, and they locate her. The grandmother has died and Le is—”

  “Is what?”

  She avoided my glance. “A prostitute.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She was completely straightforward. Remember, this is girl-to-girl. Sorry, but you wouldn’t have found that out.”

  Our food arrived and I dipped a fried clam in tartar sauce and took a bite. My clam ratings are good, excellent, and hold me. This was a hold me.

  “So let me guess. The kind-hearted American guy rescues the poor hooker and brings her to the USA.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She gave me a cold stare.

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to judge.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “It took him three trips. It was a crazy process, and she has no idea how much he spent, but everybody had to be bribed.”

  “So,” I said, mid-clam, “was it love? Or guilt?”

  “Who knows,” Barbara said. “But I’ll ask him. C.J.”

  “So you think they’re the same person? C.J. and D.B.?”

  “We were married in 1990. Back then C.J.’s citrus business was really good, and his biggest buyers were the Japanese. They paid top prices for Indian River grapefruit. He flew back and forth to Japan every few months.”

  “With a side trip to Vietnam,” I said.

  “Several, apparently.”

  “Whoa.”

  “No kidding. I don’t even know how to feel,” she said. She took a bite from her sandwich and looked away from me. “I’m part angry, part shocked. And part...sympathetic. She and I have something in common.”

  “You told her who you are?”

  “Yes. She didn’t seem surprised. She’s kind of tough to read.”

  “Did you say anything about getting shot at?”

  “No. I didn’t want to scare her.”

  “So you’re sure it was C.J.? It’s not two brothers?”

  “I think so. One thing though. There was a picture of the three of them on her wall, in a big fishing boat. The guy certainly looked like C.J., but it was strange.”

  “What was strange?”

  “He was smiling. Happy little family, big grins. C.J. doesn’t really have a sense of humor. He’s a brooder. I used to think that was what attracted me to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile, not like that.”

  “Did that bother you? Make you jealous?”

  “It’s not that. I mean, these two men have got to be the same person. But when I saw that picture, it was like, that can’t be C.J. He just doesn’t do that.”

  We ate the rest of our lunch without talking. Barbara was processing
what she had learned and so was I. I was also leaning toward the one-guy theory, but it was hard to reconcile her description of her husband and the beer-drinking golf hustler I’d met the day before. If it was the same person, he was either a good actor or he was messed up. There were more than a few people who had had their brains scrambled in Vietnam, and the VA hospitals were still dealing with the consequences almost two generations later.

  *

  Barbara drove me back to Le’s office so that I could pick up my car. I’d made her promise to drive herself straight back to Vero, to my place, and hole up. I told her I’d be home tonight and to have dinner ready and she giggled. She had a laugh like a tipsy soprano; I liked it. I wasn’t upset with her anymore, I was glad that she had learned what she did. It was quite a story, and the wheels were turning in my head, working it out, playing what-if.

  She pulled the convertible into the lot next to Le’s, and I did a double take. The Taurus was gone. I realized I had been so angry at Barbara when I saw her that I’d left the car wide open, and someone had apparently stolen it. I cursed myself. I never do that, but I did, and there went not only my favorite car ever but also my computer, my lock-picking kit, a whole bag of snooping equipment and—I patted my side pocket just to make sure—the Glock. I’d left it on the seat in a moment of sheer unprofessional idiocy.

  I called Roberto. He let it go to voicemail, and texted back. I’m in class.

  Gotta talk, emergency, I texted.

  My phone rang in five minutes—five long minutes. “It’s me,” he said.

  “Somebody stole my car. It’s got my computer in it.”

  “Did you put it on sleep?” I heard a flushing noise. He must be in the boys’ room.

  “Probably not, I had the tracking software on.”

  “Let’s try something,” he said.

  Roberto showed me how to get to an application he’d installed on my phone, called “Find My Mac”. He patiently walked me through the process to log in. A Google map came up, with a pulsating blue dot that said “Vince’s Mac”. Slick.

  “Got it,” I said. “Go back to class. You’re a god.”

  “I know.”

  Barbara drove while I gave directions. The blue dot was moving. My Taurus was going east on Gandy Boulevard, toward the causeway, and the dot was well ahead of us. I told Barbara to get a move on, and she obliged—the woman could drive. The Beemer had the sport package and Barbara was using the Steptronic transmission to manually shift. She leaned hard on the tires while we weaved through traffic, drifting through curves as I held on tight and tried to focus on the map. We got onto Gandy Boulevard and she drove as fast as she could, but the road was congested. We began to gain on the blue dot when it made a hard right turn onto Snug Harbor Road, just before the causeway crossed Old Tampa Bay. The dot slowed down, and for a moment I thought we’d catch up—but suddenly, the traffic around us came to a halt. There was an accident ahead, and the cars were stopped in both directions. We were stuck, with nothing to do but watch the blinking blue dot on the phone.

  The dot stopped at the end of Snug Harbor Road where it met the water, the Masters Bayou, according to the map. Barbara and I watched the screen as it slowly began to move again. It was now located over the water, in the bayou, and then it stopped blinking.

  *

  The cops must have been snarled in the same mess on Gandy Boulevard as it took them half an hour to show up at the water’s edge. We’d parked the BMW at the top of a concrete boat-launching ramp, where someone had decided to launch my venerable Taurus. It must have floated for a while because it was a good thirty yards out, stuck in the silt of the bayou, the green roof barely visible over the waterline. Barbara gave the cops the details, and they began filling out their report; I was on the phone with Frank Velutto at the Indian River County Sheriff’s office. I had a hunch that I wanted to play out.

  “Vinny?” he said, when they put the call through. His voice was flat—even a little tentative, and he’d forgotten to tell me to go fuck myself, which was strange.

  “What’s up, Frank?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Did I say something?”

  “What do you want, Vin?”

  “I need a favor. Can you look up a juvenile and get me some background? Philip Johannsen, in Tampa.” I gave him the home address. I didn’t tell him I already knew he had a record—that information might tip him to Roberto’s hacking and that would be bad. I could have had Roberto dig deeper, but I wanted a cop’s perspective. I may have been way off base, but I wondered if the hellcat kid with the auto thefts on his record had just baptized my car. Frank said he’d look into it.

  “Hey,” I said. “You OK?”

  “Forget about it,” he said.

  *

  The cops gave me the name of a guy who owned a tow truck and was also a diver. This is not an unusual combination of skills in Florida, and it is also quite lucrative. He quoted me five hundred dollars, and when I complained he said there was a guy in Bradenton who would do it for a thousand. We agreed to meet the next morning as he was booked for the rest of the afternoon. I decided that there was no rush; the electronic devices would already be dead, and the rest of the gear would just have to be dried out.

  The cops and I shot the breeze for a few minutes while Barbara waited in the BMW. They gave me some shit about leaving the Taurus unlocked. I probably should have told them about the Glock, but I had endured enough humiliation for one afternoon.

  I got back in the car and told Barbara I was going to stay the night in Tampa; I’d get a hotel and a rental car, and she should get back to Vero. She wouldn’t have to cook me dinner after all. She just smiled.

  I drove this time. I hadn’t driven Glory’s car in a long time and it was a beautiful ride, but it felt strange to be in it. It didn’t have the pure balls that the SHO had, although it could motor right along. Barbara was on my phone, Googling something, with a look of concentration on her face. “Look for a car rental place, ok?” I said.

  “You’re going to need a new computer,” she said. “There’s an Apple store in the mall out by the airport.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “Aren’t you the efficient one?”

  “There’s some good shopping at the mall,” she said.

  “Barbara, I don’t shop, as you can probably tell from my wardrobe.”

  “I’ll shop while you get your computer and a wireless card. Are you Verizon?”

  “AT&T.”

  “There’s one at the mall.”

  She continued surfing on the smartphone while I drove us across the Gandy Boulevard causeway. “If you can find me a hotel too, go for it,” I said. “Nothing fancy.”

  “I just booked us at the Hyatt, downtown.”

  “Barbara—”

  “Don’t worry, we have a two-room suite.”

  “Barbara, you should go back. I have a feeling this is going to heat up. You’ll be safe in my house.”

  “Vince, I haven’t felt safe in two weeks. I can help you. And I think I need to be around you right now, so don’t freak out, OK?”

  Maybe she had a point. Someone was already trying to find me from my license plate, and perhaps she wasn’t so safe in my house. It might be smart to keep her close. But I was in the work mode; I didn’t need any distractions if I was going to get the job done, and having her around could be dangerous if things got nasty.

  I put my foot down. “No. I’m sorry, but the answer is no.”

  “Then you’re fired, and I’ll do my own investigating.”

  “Fucking A,” I said, under my breath but loud enough for her to hear. She was in non-negotiable mode, I could recognize it. Glory behaved exactly the same way.

  “OK,” I said. “But I need to find a gun shop or a pawn shop somewhere. I have to get another gun.”

  “This is Florida,” she said. “We’ve already passed three of them.”

  *

  It took about an hour to get the laptop up and run
ning. Buying it at the Apple store was a cinch, but the salespeople at the AT&T store tried to sell me everything in the shop while they filled out my new contract and got me a replacement card. I didn’t even ask how much it was all going to cost; they said not to worry, it would show up on my next bill, which filled me with dread as their statements were about as readable as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  I sat at a table outside a Starbucks in the lower level of the mall and sipped an iced coffee while I set up the Mac. It ran about twice as fast as my old one, which was only a couple years old. I called Roberto, who was now out of school and at home, and he began emailing me links to the software programs I needed. He said that when I got back to Vero he would finish the job; he’d backed up everything on my old computer to a portable hard drive. Whatever I was paying this kid, it wasn’t enough. Giving him Glory’s laptop was the least I could do, and I was glad to be rid of it.

  Barbara had disappeared into the mall. She would come back periodically to check on me and drop off shopping bags at my table, and then she’d go out again, like a pearl diver coming up for air. Setting up the computer was taking all my attention, but when I took a break, I noticed that quite a few bags had accumulated in a short period of time. I was trying to get the tracking software restored so I could check on the whereabouts of the van and the Lexus. It finally booted up, and showed C.J.’s van right where it was supposed to be, in Lake Wales. The Lexus was parked at Hibiscus Pond Drive. All quiet, all good. For a guy who had just watched his car float off, I felt remarkably calm. Being an ex-cop, I wondered how long it would take until all hell broke loose, because feeling calm was usually a bad sign.