“Money got off on everything but the drug-trafficking charge. He spent seven years in Raiford for that, but he’s been out for more than ten years. He’s a suspect in three murders, including the manslaughter charge, so I don’t think running illegals would bother him much at all. He owns three trawler boats, all out of Cortez. The Nellie, the Rebel Witch, and the Nan-Shan. A very bad man.”
I said, “Do they have an address listed for him?”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, pal. Do yourself a favor. Do my conscience a favor. Please don’t go looking for Mr. Dexter Ray Money. I don’t know him, but I know his type. The EPIC has him listed as armed and extremely dangerous, approach with caution-those are the exact words from the data bank. You want to talk to him, do it over the phone.”
I kept my tone light. “Give him a call-yeah. Jesus, murder, extortion, plus he’s smart enough to keep getting off. After what I’ve just heard, that sounds like good advice.”
“Doc, how reliable is your information? You tell me the source, let me look into it. If we find probable cause, we’ll go talk to Mr. Money.”
I answered, “I wish I could. I really do.” And meant it.
I asked Dorsey one last question before signing off. In his opinion, if Janet, Grace, and Michael had been picked up by a vessel smuggling illegal aliens, why hadn’t we heard from them? “Give me some possible scenarios,” I said.
“I can think of two right off the top of my head, neither one very pleasant. A bad actor like Money? He kills the man and keeps the women. He keeps them to use for himself, then probably kills them both when he’s done. Or decides to make a profit on them. The white slave trade is no joke. Drug smuggling gets all the press, but the flesh trade is a multibillion-dollar business. You read the report I’ll send you. There’s big money in selling women in places like Brunei, North Africa. Hell, Amnesty International just issued a paper criticizing Israel because people’re kidnapping women from outside the country, smuggling them in, and selling them over there.”
He added, “Either way, the guy’s dead. If someone picked them up-Michael Sanford?-he’d be the first to go.”
17
When I hung up the phone, I immediately dialed information and asked for the number of Dexter Money, Cortez, Florida. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to work it, but the first thing I had to do was establish the man’s whereabouts. How I would contact him, I’d decide later.
I was relieved when the automated voice responded with the ten-digit number.
Caller ID has mitigated some of our modern problems, and it has created others. I wrote the number on a sheet of paper and walked to shore, then up the shell road to the Hess convenience store next to the old Sanibel Police Station. There’s a pay phone there. I went inside, exchanged dollar bills for coins, then dialed the number.
I listened to it ring several times before a girl’s voice, in a rush, said what sounded like, “Obie, you ain’t got no use to keep callin’ here, pesterin’ me, and if you doan stop I’m gonna set daddy loose on your ass, boy!” A harsh, Dixie-girl accent, very nasal, but with an adolescent, hormonal rasp.
Playing it as I went along, I answered, “’Scuse me, miss, but this ain’t Obie. I’m callin’ for Dexter Money.”
She made a deprecating noise of chagrin. “Aw, I’m sorry, mister. That damn Oberlin Carter, he been calling and calling, just won’t take no for an answer, so that’s who I… well, that don’t mean nothing to you. You want my daddy, right?”
“If your daddy is Dexter Money, yes, miss, I’d like to speak with him.”
“Does it have somethin’ to do with pit bulls?” For some reason I got the impression she was asking me two questions, not one. Respond with the correct password or signal phrase and I’d be recognized as part of the inner sanctum.
I gave it a try. “I’m a big fan of that particular breed, yes I am, miss.”
Wrong answer. In a flat voice, she said, “He’s down working on one of the boats right now, something about one of the flopper-stoppers busted. So I can tell him to give you a call when he gets back to the house.”
“That’s okay, dear. I got a few things to do, I’ll try later.”
“Maybe he’ll be here later, maybe he won’t. You want to talk to my daddy or don’t you?” When I didn’t answer immediately, some of the aggressiveness returned. “I don’t believe you told me what your name is, mister.”
“It’s not important. I can call back. What you think, maybe an hour or two?”
Families that live outside the law are naturally and pointedly suspicious. The girl said, “I think you best give me your name and number, and let Daddy decide who calls who.”
As if I hadn’t heard her clearly, I said, “Okay, about two hours then,” and hung up.
I’d gotten only a few steps away when the pay phone began to ring. Yep, Money had caller ID.
There was no reason to put the father or daughter on guard, so I answered the phone and listened to the girl say, “Mister, you best tell me who the hell you are and what it is you want.”
I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, miss! No need to get upset. My company gives me a list of potential clients, and I’m down here on Sanibel, gettin’ ready to swing north. Your daddy’s name’s on the printout sheet they give me. That’s all.”
“Oh, really? What kind’a business you in?”
I tried to add a solemn note to my voice when I said, “I sell full memorial packages, miss. From the funeral to a final resting place, and on easy monthly payments. None of us are too young to plan ahead and spare our loved ones the pain of dealing with financial details during their time of grief.”
The girl thought that was hilarious. “Mister, you walk onto our property and say that to Daddy, he put you in a hole. Your final resting place be right here!”
I was relieved when she hung up.
I checked my watch: 2:15 on a Friday afternoon. I looked overhead: The sky was a December blue with a few cumulus clouds suspended in isolated plateaus over the mangroves, motionless. No wind. I’d already listened to the VHF weather that morning, the maddening computer voice predicting winds to ten knots, seas calm. It’s difficult to imagine what kind of idiotic agency would employ an indistinguishable computerized voice to communicate information so valuable.
In my six-cylinder Chevy pickup, it would probably take me two and a half hours to drive the eighty miles to Cortez. In my new twenty-one-foot Maverick flats boat, though, I could chop a lot of miles and half an hour off the time, and the trip would be a hell of a lot more enjoyable.
Another consideration was that, if need be, I could more easily escape unnoticed in a boat, and there was less chance of being intercepted by law enforcement. No way of telling how Money would react to my questions or what I’d have to do to get information.
At the marina, I topped off the fifty-gallon fuel tank and the oil reservoir, then loaded on block ice, beer, and liter bottles of water. In the big hatch beneath the swivel seats, I’d already stowed extra clothes, a tent, minimal camping gear, and several MREs-the military acronym for meals ready to eat-in their rubberized, brown bags.
At just after 3 P.M., I turned my skiff toward Pine Island Sound, the massive 225-horsepower Yamaha rumbling like a Harley Davidson roadster, and touched the throttle forward. There was a rocket sled sense of acceleration as the skiff reared, lifted, and then flattened itself on plane, rising slightly in the water, gaining buoyancy and speed as I trimmed the engine upward. At nearly fifty miles an hour, the blue horizon rushed toward me, and I left the safety of Dinkin’s Bay rolling in my slow, expanding wake.
At Redfish Pass, I cut along South Seas Plantation, waved at Johnny, the resort’s enduring tennis teacher-he was wearing a Santa’s hat, of all things-then exited into the open Gulf and turned parallel the beach.
After that, it was beach all the way: the glitter of mica-bright sand, palm trees leaning in windward strands, high-rise condos in schematic rows, and seaside estates in the shadows of hardwoods, secur
e behind walls, on their own grounds.
It was Gulf Coast Florida: part tropical idyllic, part Shaker-Heights-by-the-Sea, part theme-park deco.
I love the region and love being on a fast boat alone. I cracked a cold beer, sat back in the swivel seat, and watched the barrier islands slide past-Gasparilla, Manasota Key, Venice, and Siesta Key-sunglasses on, ball cap pulled low, feet up on the console, steering that solid skiff with one bare toe.
Cortez is a village of four thousand or so souls, a settlement of piling houses and gray docks clustered on Sarasota Bay, south of St. Pete and just across the bridge from Bradenton Beach.
Just before 5 P.M., I raised the bridge. I banked east through Longboat Pass, its riverine tide fast beneath my hull, the water tannin-stained, a perfect place for snook or bull sharks on a feed. Ahead was Jewfish Key, a few tin roofs silver in the late sunlight beneath a canopy of palms. The bridge was to the north; Cortez a clutter of buildings and docks to the northeast.
Cortez is among the last of Florida’s old-time fish camps. Among the last, because increasingly stringent fishing laws and bans are gradually squeezing independent fisher families out of business, leaving international factory ships to strip the sea bottom and supply the world’s demand for seafood. An irony of government intervention: By disabling the people it can control, bureaucracy empowers the people and nations it cannot control.
Because the village is built out and isolated on a mangrove peninsula, Cortez has a time-warp feel. The firestorm of development that is strip-mall Florida might have blazed past without noticing the little fish markets and piney-woods houses. Back in the 1930s, the men and women of Cortez wove their own nets, grew peppers and pineapples and mangoes; they wholesaled mullet and stone crabs caught from boats that they had built up from wooden stringers and glassed themselves.
Things hadn’t changed much. But they would.
As I dropped down off plane and began to idle toward the docks, I noted mountains of wooden stone crabs traps stacked behind buildings, curtains of shrimp net strung to cure or dry. The air smelled of creosote, diesel, and exposed barnacles.
Ahead was a two-story warehouse made of white cement, a massive blue fuel-storage tank beside it. The sign over the docks read: A. P. Bell Fish Company.
It was a big commercial operation. Inside would be freezers, perhaps even a blast freezer, and container-sized holdings of every variety of salable sea life. From this small place of debarkation, the wealth of waters adjoining Sarasota Bay would be shipped around the world.
Next to the warehouse was Star Fish Company, a two-story building that was spray-creted white. The sign read: Retail Sales amp; Restaurant. Beer on Tap, so I tied up at the dock and went through the door into the air-conditioned market. Nice little place: snapper, grouper, sea trout, clear-eyed and fresh, lined in the display case on a bed of ice, plus oysters, clams, and shrimp, too. Someone had gone to the trouble to hand paint the tiles that decorated the little room. Behind the counter was a nice-looking woman, her brown hair tied back with a red handkerchief, wearing a white apron that read Don’t Kiss the Cook!
I laughed as I said, “If I promise not to kiss you, can I get something to eat?”
The woman had a nice smile and the sort of country-girl face that reminded me a little of Janet. “Skipper, you got here just in time ’cause I was getting ready to shut down the grill. There’s the menu. What’ll you have?”
I ordered a dozen oysters, raw, the grouper sandwich, and a beer with ice. I took the beer out to the picnic tables beneath the awning and sat there looking at the line of commercial boats moored to the docks. There were bay shrimpers, purse seiners, crab haulers, deep-water shrimpers, and maybe thirty grouper boats. A couple had just gotten in-sea gulls screamed overhead in a cloud while fish were offloaded. A couple of vessels were getting ready to head back to sea-men in stained T-shirts muled boxes of groceries, cigarettes, and beer aboard. Most of the boats, though, were stolid, empty-looking, as they sat motionless on the black water. A few had been decorated for Christmas: lights in the rigging, reindeer and plastic Santas waving from wheelhouse windows.
One by one, I checked the names of the oceangoing boats.
There was no Nan-Shan.
When the woman brought my food, I invited her to have a seat. She hesitated, then did; she sat down gratefully, as if her feet hurt.
Her name was Stella. An old-timey name that matched her old-timey face. I sat there and ate the good, cold oysters and listened to her tell me about Cortez, the kind of place it was. How it’d changed since they tore down the Albion Inn to build the Coast Guard station, and now there were banks and 7-Elevens sprouting up out east on 648. The village people were still holding it together, trying to save what they could and preserve their own dying history.
Stella said, “They want to put something on the Endangered Species list? They ought to put the independent commercial fishermen. Now there’s something darn near extinct.” She paused and looked toward the docks. “That your Maverick skiff, skipper? It sure is a pretty boat.”
I nodded.
“Hope you don’t take no offense. I know you sport anglers got a different view of things.”
I told her no offense taken, then used that as an opening to say, “Truth is, a couple of friends and I are thinking about investing in a commercial boat, maybe let someone run it as a shrimper. That should come close to making the payments, and we can use it occasionally for long trips to the Tortugas, or maybe even Belize. I hear the fishing’s pretty good over there.”
“Sounds like a pretty smart idea, skipper,” she answered affably.
“That’s one reason I’m in the area. Someone told my partner that a shrimper named the Nan-Shan might be on the market. Owned by a guy named Dexter Money. He’s the friend of a friend, I guess. You know where I can find him? Or maybe get a quick look at the boat?”
Her demeanor changed instantly, and so did the expression on her face. It was as if I had just strung together all the foulest words in the language. “The Nan-Shan, ” she said, deadpan. “You say you’re interested in buying the Nan-Shan?”
I said, “Maybe. I haven’t seen her. We’ll be looking at a lot of boats.”
She stood abruptly. “Well, sir, I’m not in the boat-selling business, so I guess I can’t help you.” Her tone was now chilly, formal, and I was no longer “skipper.” I was “sir.”
I held up an index finger, asking her to give me a minute. “Stella, would you please explain something to me. We were getting along great, having a nice conversation, then, suddenly, it’s like I’m poison. Did I say something to offend you?”
“I have no idea what you’re getting at, sir. Is your food okay? I’ve got to get back to work.”
I smiled at her. “Come on, now, somehow I just screwed up. Can’t you give me just a hint about what it was I said?”
She looked at me for a moment, pressed her lips together, thinking. Reluctantly, she said, “Okay, I’m probably being a dope again, but I’ll take a chance. You really do seem like the nice, solid sort, so I’ll risk it. You said you got friends who are friends of Dex Money? Well, mister, you’re keeping the nastiest kind of company, then. And you ain’t got no friends in Cortez if you’re fixing to do business with that kind’a scum. Forgive my French. Or maybe you’re one of the feds after him again, sneaking around trying to get information. Either way, something ain’t right.”
I said softly, “I’ve never met the man, Stella. I meant it when I said I didn’t know where to find him.”
She jerked her head north toward a wooded point on the other side of the bay. “You’ll find him on the far side of Perico Island. He’s got some land there, a couple houses and some docks.”
“I take it you don’t like him. You and the people of Cortez.”
“We don’t claim him, if that’s what you’re asking. Let’s see… it’s Friday night? So at his place tonight he’ll be having dogfights-he raises pit bulls, lets ’em fight ’till their bellies are
ripped open. Or snortin’ up coke with his redneck pals, shooting guns. Or that daughter of his, Shanay, she’s only fifteen or sixteen, and the word that describes her, I won’t say. Shanay’s a party girl and she may have her friends over. Which is maybe understandable what with Dex putting her mama in the hospital so many times she finally just run off and disappeared. Do the people of Cortez like Dex Money? No, sir, we do not.”
Her expression became grim when I asked for more detailed information about where the man lived. She said, “Just past Boca del Rio Marina, there’s a mangrove river cuts in. He’s up the river. Got a little boat way, his own docks. You’ll see the warning signs at the mouth. Keep out. Do what you want, you’re a grown man, but if you’re smart, you’ll do what the signs tell you.”
I paid, and took care not to overtip. The woman had described me as solid-looking when, in fact, she was describing what she valued in herself.
I liked her, wished it hadn’t been necessary to lie to her. A woman like this would not react kindly to the slightest suggestion that I was paying her for information.
I got my first look at Dexter Money just after sunset. The soft December light did nothing to soften the man’s features, or his manner. He came swaggering parallel to the docks, shoulders thrown back, belly pushing a black T-shirt away from his skinny hips, sleeves rolled to show his biceps, two bat-eared pit bull dogs trotting along behind, tongues lolling.
His was a territorial display. There was no doubt who the man was, who owned that land.
The guy was gigantic. Closer to seven feet tall than six, he had to weigh more than three hundred pounds, with a shaved, butter-bean head and a florid, alcoholic’s face. As he approached me, his right eye was squinched, a cigarette between his teeth. He carried a green bottle of beer, and there was something else, too: He had a holster clipped to his hip, the butt of a chrome-plated revolver showing. One of the big ones. Maybe a. 357.
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