“Oh, he’s coming back?”
“Just shut the fuck up and sit. What Rico’s gonna do ain’t none of your affair no more.”
Frank made a zipping gesture across his lips with his thumb and forefinger.
“That’s right. Keep your trap shut.”
Footsteps approached from behind Frank, who slowly turned to see Errol Malay strolling toward the desk. He wore a suit and tie and looked ready to appear in court. An expensive suit and tie, Frank imagined.
“Sorry for the delay, detective,” Malay said as he reached Frank’s chair.
“I sat him down here like you said,” Gaither said, standing.
“Did you get the detective’s guns?” Malay asked.
“Yep, got ‘em right here,” Gaither said and pointed to them.
“You’ll understand, detective, that I don’t want any gunplay to spoil our chat,” Malay said and picked up the semi-automatic with gloved hands and studied it.
Frank noted the gloves with suspicion. He didn’t like giving up his Browning, but he knew, without even the .38, things could get ugly.
“A Browning Hi-Power. Been around a long time, but still a fashionable choice. Ernie, please go lock the door. I want to talk with detective Dugan in private.
“How was your session at the range?” Malay asked.
“I hit the target once in a while.”
“I’m sure you did.”
Gaither strode over to the entrance and bolted the door, while Malay watched. When Gaither returned, Malay approached him.
“Hand me your gun, Ernie. We don’t need any firearms being brandished about, do we? The detective didn’t come here to cause trouble. He’s kindly agreed to meet with me to discuss some important things with me concerning Mr. Guzman.”
Gaither’s expression turned sour, but he reluctantly did as he was told and extended his pistol to Malay, who tucked it into his waistband, along with the Browning.
“Come with me, detective. I want to show you why this building was so important to Mr. Guzman. You come too, Ernie.”
Malay disappeared into the blackness of the cavernous warehouse. Frank saw Gaither looking at the .38 on the desk, but he moved to follow Malay rather than pick it up. Frank slowly pulled up the rear, narrowing his eyes to better discern a safe path in the unlit area.
“Over here,” Malay said, casting a flashlight beam to mark the way.
Frank stepped cautiously toward the light.
“These are the controls for the two massive cranes high above us,” Malay said as he shone his light on a yellow box containing buttons, which hung from heavy electric wires extending upward into the darkness. “These cranes were used to lift and position Rico’s extremely fast cigarette boats when they came here for maintenance.”
“Drug runners?” Frank said.
“I’m not sure what he used them for …”
“Perhaps water skiing?”
“At 70 miles an hour, I imagine that could be exhilarating.”
Malay aimed his flashlight upward to reveal the massive cranes opposed to each other on railroad-size steel rails.
“The cranes could load the boats into pools and test them within this building without having to reveal their presence outside. Pools like this one.”
Malay placed his hand behind Frank’s back and gently directed him to a black abyss less than six feet behind them. He cast the beam of the flashlight into the dry concrete pit more than twelve feet below with sheer vertical walls. As Frank neared the edge, Malay shoved him forward with a force that Frank couldn’t counter in time to avoid toppling into the deep void. He landed on his feet, but the speed of the drop made his legs buckle and dash his body forward onto the gritty floor of the pit. His knees and right shoulder took the brunt of the fall and filed pain reports to Frank’s brain that nearly blacked him out. In his groggy damage assessment, Frank heard a voice from above.
It wasn’t God welcoming him home.
Chapter 37
Frank struggled to his feet and moved to the rear of the sixty-foot space to get a better angle of view on the upper floor of the warehouse. As he squinted in the darkness, the main work lights of the building went on overhead. The pit was too deep to see much above its high walls, so Frank slid down against the back of the enclosure and sank to the floor.
After scanning every foot of the dry pool, Frank realized that escape without help would be impossible. The feeling of helplessness that accompanied his predicament depressed him. He tightened his jaw and massaged his aching leg and shoulder and checked to make sure all was still functioning.
It was going to be a long wait until Judd and the police came to rescue him. He believed if Malay intended to kill him, he’d have already done so. But the shove into the pit had surprised him. And Frank hated surprises, even the ones associated with birthdays.
Judd’s warnings blared in his head. Maybe a little back-up wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.
* * *
Malay called to Ernie Gaither.
“Ernie, come over here. Where I’m standing. I need your help.”
Gaither moseyed over to Malay, devoid of enthusiasm in his slow, measured steps.
“Yeah, what do you want?” Gaither asked.
Malay raised Frank’s Browning and shot Gaither in both knees. Gaither collapsed to the concrete floor and wailed in agony, blood pouring from the wounds.
“Oh, my God,” Gaither grunted, writhing from side to side, clutching his lower thighs. “My God, why, Errol? Why, man?”
Gaither continued to bellow and moan as he attempted to stem the bleeding from his legs.
“What the hell are you doing?” Gaither said.
“I’m tidying up a lot of loose ends,” Malay said. “Rico has no further use for his Baker Street Irregulars and wants me to retire them. The detective kindly took care of Pinkney and Fisher, leaving us now with you and Davis to expunge.”
“What are you doing to me?” Gaither asked, his voice hoarse, his breathing labored.
“Why, I’m killing you, you useless waste of humanity.”
Malay stepped a few feet away and picked up a steel cable and a shackled chain, which he secured around Gaither’s ankles. He attached the loop on the cable onto a heavy hook dangling from the crane high above his head. Gaither attempted to cast off the chain, but his feeble kicks only added to his pain and he gave up, flopping onto his back.
“Going up,” Malay said, as he pressed a button on the crane control box.
The crane with the hook holding the cable to Gaither’s legs whirred high above and pulled upward. With the slack taken up, the crane hoisted Gaither’s body from the floor and carried his screaming head to five feet above the floor, where he dangled.
“Now, for the final touches,” Malay said, wrapping another chain and cable tightly around Gaither’s chest under his armpits.
“Don’t do this,” Gaither said, his voice weak, flailing his arms at Malay. “Please don’t do this.”
“Isn’t that what Dugan’s wife said to you before you murdered her and the children?”
“Guzman wanted them killed. I just did what I was told.”
“Well, I’m just doing what I was told … by the same man.”
“Guzman wants me dead? After all I done for him?”
“He appreciates your loyal service,” Malay said and hit two buttons on the control box.
The two cranes near the ceiling moved in opposite directions on their steel rails. The chains binding Gaither tightened as he rose toward the ceiling. In seconds, his body lay horizontal between both cranes thirty feet above Malay. Gaither screamed as the chains pulled in opposing directions. Then the screaming stopped and Gaither’s body was ripped apart, his legs swung in a downward arc on one side while his upper torso spun away in the other direction. Blood showered onto the floor below, splattering in patterns as the cables twirled in a pendulous motion. A twist of intestines still connected the body’s halves like a drooping clothesline.
“You brought me here to witness this?” Frank said from the pit. “What the hell are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that you’re going to be my patsy.”
“How?”
“Here’s your pistol, detective,” Malay said, peeking over the edge and dropping the gun with a clunk on the floor below. “Not that it will offer you much assistance. Those walls are twelve-feet high and straight up. There’s no door and I removed the nice ladder that used to be here below my feet.”
Frank scooted on his haunches to his Browning and examined it for damage and for ammo. It was still loaded and had incurred only minor scratches on the slide from the drop. He checked the action and found that it functioned properly.
Frank looked up and Malay ducked from view.
“Why, Malay?” Frank asked.
“Mr. Guzman has no intention of withering away at your mosquito-infested resort,” Malay said, his voice fading. “He doesn’t want to return only to find he has a quartet of idiots who intimately know about his numerous drug dealings. Idiots who, upon arrest, could use their knowledge to leverage better plea bargains, more lenient sentencing.”
“How about you?”
“Rico Guzman knows I’m beyond reproach. I’m legally bulletproof. Attorney-client confidentiality, all that. And, let’s face it, he has to trust someone, particularly a person he believes can rescue him from his beachy prison.”
“You know that’s impossible,” Frank said.
“They told Orville Wright that mass air transportation was impossible.”
“What about Mitch Davis?”
“I have a new name for him.”
“What’s that?”
“Next.”
Frank wanted to respond, but ached too much to enter into futile banter with a lunatic who, at the moment, held all the trump cards.
“Nothing more to say?” Malay said, his voice sounding closer. “Here’s your other gun.”
Frank’s revolver scraped down the wall loosely tied to a rope by a single overhand knot around the trigger guard. The gun’s rear sight gently touched the floor in the corner farthest from Frank. The rope snapped upward and away, releasing the pistol with a clunk and disappeared over the top of the pit.
“Fine. Goodbye, Detective Dugan. And I do mean goodbye in its most ultimate sense.”
“We’ll be seeing you, Malay.”
“In case you’re interested, I’m calling the cops now,” Malay said.
“Good,” Frank said.
* * *
Frank was confident the cops would come and get him out of this concrete deadfall. The cops would come and Frank would tell them what that crazy sonofabitch had done. The only thing that concerned him was the whacko getting off on an insanity plea.
Being held captive was one of Frank’s primal fears. The mere thought of losing his freedom terrified him.
In a few minutes Frank knew he would feel better. In a few minutes he would be free.
* * *
Mitch Davis knew that it was only a matter of time before he would have to answer for being an associate of Rico Guzman. Dwayne Pinkney and Scottie Fisher had already answered. He watched the news. He saw them bringing back the bodies.
Guzman was gone, but Mitch was never certain that Rico couldn’t connect with outside help. Help that he could call on to eliminate any witnesses to his former crimes, crimes the cops didn’t even know about. Even vicious crimes they suspected, but couldn’t prove, like sucking the police into sending Detective Dugan to Huntington Beach on that jewelry store ruse while he and Ernie Gaither and the gang rushed to Dugan’s home to kill his family before he could return. All because Rico got a premonition that Frank was onto his new mini-submarine drug transports from South America. Paranoid fucker.
Well, Mitch wasn’t about to sit around that big yacht and wait for them to come again with their SWAT guys and kill him. Errol Malay was creepy slick and made him shudder. He could afford to trust no one. Hell, even the yacht wasn’t safe anymore and he couldn’t move the boat himself and sail anywhere without a crew. But staying there was suicide.
There was one ace left in the hole. Malay had sent Gaither to the Seaside Marine warehouse for a reason that made no sense. He planned to meet Detective Dugan there, Ernie had told him. “Gonna do him up right this time,” he’d said. That whole scenario was fishier than the San Diego tuna market. So, Mitch decided to get himself some insurance. Insurance that he could barter with for his safety, even his freedom from doing jail time.
It was quiet now. No one was in sight, so he unscrunched himself out from the cramped parts room in back of the warehouse. He peeked out the door’s dirty window, through the small circle he’d wiped clean. He’d heard Malay drive away and the coast was now clear. The detective had fallen into a deep hole below view, so he felt it was safe to come out. Ernie Gaither sure as hell wasn’t going to squeal on him. Now. all he had to do was hot-foot it unseen back to his car three piers away on the marina quay and scram out of there.
Mitch snugged Rico’s high-definition video camera under his jacket carefully, like it was his baby. He smiled as he stepped out from hiding.
In a weird way, this is my baby.
Chapter 38
A caravan of police vehicles arrived at the Seaside Marina warehouse shortly after 9:30 PM. The doors on a black Chevrolet Suburban flung open on both sides as a uniformed SWAT team jumped to the asphalt of the parking lot and charged to the employee entrance and carefully flowed inside. Judd Kemp emerged from a dark blue Crown Vic, his wounded shoulder aided by an arm sling, and marched to the door where a helmeted officer gave him the okay to enter.
Judd panned the dark expanse of the warehouse, but couldn’t see much past a few feet before him.
“Thanks for the fast response,” Errol Malay said as he approached the police group.
“Where is Detective Dugan?” Judd asked.
“In the boat pool over there,” Malay said, pointing into the blackness to their left, “where he fell.”
Kemp raised a hand to the officers to hold their positions and headed for the pit, followed by Malay.
“He apparently stumbled into the pit in the dark,” Malay said.
“Any chance of getting lights on in this place?” Judd said.
“I think there are some switches somewhere in here,” Malay said and took a pocket flashlight from his jacket and searched the walls around him. He shone his light into the area near the pit and lit the base of a thick supporting column. A panel of electric switches could be seen in the beam. “These could be the ones.”
Malay made his way to the column and began flipping switches. The first three he threw did nothing to illuminate the area where he stood, but number four, five, and six turned on the overhead lights. The cranes and their dangling hooks became visible.
A grisly scene appeared before the new arrivals as the dismembered body hung in two pieces from crane hooks that extended to the railed cranes high above. Blood still dripped from the shredded torso and separated hips held aloft, the floor painted in splattered red like in a macabre Jackson Pollack painting. The stern faces of the officers failed to hide their revulsion at the sight.
“Jesus God,” Judd Kemp said and dropped his eyes to the floor.
“I heard Mr. Gaither screaming as I pulled into the parking lot,” Malay said. “When I got inside, I could barely see him in the dark. I took out my flashlight and saw enough to see him being pulled apart by those cranes up there. Detective Dugan was over to the left. He yelled at me and I pointed my light where I heard the voice. He had his gun aimed at me. Then he stepped toward me. That’s when he stumbled and fell into the pit. When I was sure he couldn’t get out to shoot me, I called 9-1-1.”
Judd crossed to the edge of the pit and looked inside. Frank was sitting against the wall in a corner, his head tilted against the concrete. Passed out
with his gun clutched in his hand.
“Frank!” Judd hollered. “Wake up.”
Frank stirred and looked around the pit with half-open eyelids.
“How can we get him out of there?” Judd asked Malay.
“I don’t know, detective. Maybe there’s a ladder or a rope around here ...”
“Look for a ladder,” Judd said to the officers. “I want Detective Dugan up and out of there.”
* * *
Judd sat next to Frank, who lay tilted up in the bed at the UCSD Medical Center. Judd consulted a notepad on his lap.
“Sergeant Boyle drove your truck back from the crime lab,” Judd said. “The good news is they found nothing incriminating in your Bronco.”
“Did you arrest that sonofabitch?” Frank asked.
“Malay?” Judd said.
“Yeah, Errol Malay, the psycho murderer lawyer.”
“I interrogated him.”
“And …” Frank said, his eyes wide.
“Frank, your story and his story are vastly different.”
“Sure they are. He’ll deny everything. Do you think that lying bastard’s going to cave to the truth? Lying is his stock in trade.”
“He didn’t deny anything. He says you did the killing.”
“And you believe him? Am I talking to my partner right now? Who are you?”
“Frank, I want to prove Malay wrong in everything he said, but I need evidence. The only real evidence we have is to determine the source of the bullets dug out of Ernie Gaither’s legs. If they match your weapon, it won’t go well for you with a Grand Jury.”
“I told you, he took my guns as soon as I arrived.”
“Yeah, you told me,” Judd said and stood. “Do you know how many times I’ve known you to surrender your piece? It starts with a zero.”
“This was different. Malay wanted to keep any possible gunplay out of our talk. He took Gaither’s gun too.”
“We didn’t find a third gun. We found you in possession of your Browning and the revolver from your ankle holster, but that one doesn’t appear to have been fired.”
Resort Isle: Detective Frank Dugan begins (Detective Frank Dugan series) Page 18
