The door opened. The dark-haired one said, “After you,” and Jackie walked off pulling her wheels into the dim parking structure. She moved past rows of cars expecting the other one, more boyish-looking, short brown hair down on his forehead, to step out in front of her. He didn’t though. She had the trunk of her gray Honda open and was lifting the aluminum frame to put it inside before she heard him and looked over her shoulder. He came holding open his ID case.
“Hi, I’m Special Agent Faron Tyler, Florida Department of Law Enforcement?”
Not sounding too sure about it. The case held a badge and an ID that had fdle printed on it in bold letters.
Jackie said, “Fiddle? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Yeah, but there it is,” Tyler said. “Can I ask what you have in that bag?”
Giving her that official deadpan delivery. His voice soft, though, kind of Southern. Jackie had a good idea what was going to happen, but wanted to be absolutely sure and said, “The usual things, clothes, hair curlers. I’m a flight attendant with Islands Air.”
Tyler said, “And your name’s Jackie Burke?”
It was going to happen.
She felt the urge again to have a cigarette and lowered the frame to rest on its wheels. The dark-haired one appeared behind Tyler, coming out of the row of cars, as she was getting her cigarettes from her shoulder bag.
The dark-haired one said, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but observe your plight. Can I be of assistance?”
Jackie said, “Gimme a break,” and held her Bic lighter to a cigarette.
Now Tyler, the FDLE guy, was introducing him. “This is Special Agent Ray Nicolet, with Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Would you mind if we looked in that bag?”
“Would I mind? Do I have a choice?”
“You can say no,” Tyler said, “and wait here with him while I go get a warrant. Or we can take you in on suspicion.”
“Of what?”
“All he wants to do is peek in your bag,” Nicolet said. “I’ll watch he doesn’t take anything.”
“It’s just a routine spot check,” Tyler said. “Okay?”
Jackie drew on the cigarette, let her breath out, shrugged. “Go ahead.”
She watched Tyler hunch down to unhook the elastic straps and lay the flight bag on the pavement. Nicolet lifted the cart out of the way, placed it in her trunk. Tyler had the bag open now and was feeling through her things, a soiled blouse, uniform skirt, bringing out a manila envelope, a fat one, nine by twelve. Jackie watched him straighten the clasp, open it, and look inside. Nicolet stepped closer as Tyler pulled out several packets of one-hundred-dollar bills secured with rubber bands, and Nicolet whistled, a sound that was like a sigh. Tyler looked up at her.
“I’d say there’s, oh, fifty thousand dollars in here. What would you say?”
Jackie wasn’t saying anything at the moment. They knew how much was in the envelope. Without counting it.
Tyler said, “This is your money?”
Jackie said, “If I were to tell you, no, it isn’t . . .”
She saw Tyler start to grin.
“That I was supposed to wait in the cafeteria and a man I don’t know would come by and pick it up . . .” Without looking at the other one she knew he was grinning too. It made her mad. “And I saw you cowboys looking at T-shirts and thought one of you might be the person . . . Listen, if it’s yours, take it.” She glanced at Nicolet.
He was grinning. Both of them having fun.
Tyler said, “You should know if you bring in anything over ten thousand you have to declare it. You forgot or what? You could get a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar fine and two years in prison. You want to talk to us about it, or you want to talk to Customs?”
Jackie said, “I’m not saying another fucking word.”
Mad. At these guys, their attitude, and at herself for being so dumb.
Nicolet said to Tyler, “You tried,” and put his hand on her shoulder. He said, “Those Customs guys, all day they see people coming back from their vacations, trips to Europe, the Caribbean, while they have to sit there working. You can understand it makes them hard to get along with. You want to talk to them or a couple of good-natured guys like us? Someplace quiet we can sit down and take it easy.”
“I don’t have to talk to anybody,” Jackie said.
“No, you don’t,” Nicolet said. “But would you extend us the courtesy of listening to what we have to say? Help you get this straightened out?”
Florida Department of Law Enforcement was on the eighth floor of a glassy gray-blue building on Centrepark Boulevard in West Palm. They were in an office Faron Tyler shared with another agent, gone for the day: two clean desks, a wide expanse of windows looking east, a calendar on the wall, and a sign that read: “Bad planning on your part does not automatically constitute an emergency on my part.”
Jackie Burke thought it might be true, but so what? She stood at the windows. With a slight turn of her head to the left she could see Ray Nicolet’s legs extending toward her, his cowboy boots resting on the corner of the desk. He said, “You see that canal right below us? I was up here one time, I saw an osprey circle around, dive down there, and pick up a bass, a pretty good-size one. Faron, you remember that?”
“Last summer.”
Faron Tyler was somewhere behind her.
She heard Nicolet say, “It’s starting to get dark, huh? Rush-hour traffic on the freeway picking up, everybody going home . . .”
“I want a lawyer,” Jackie said. She got her cigarettes out of the shoulder bag, feeling only about four or five left in the pack. She wondered if she should save them.
But then Tyler’s voice said, “There’s no smoking here.”
So Jackie lit the cigarette, using the tan Bic that matched her uniform, and dropped it back in the bag. Without looking at Tyler she said, “Arrest me.”
“It can happen,” Tyler said. His voice closer this time. “Or we can work out what’s called a Substantial Assistance Agreement. That’s if you’re willing to cooperate, tell us who gave you the money and who you’re giving it to.”
There was a silence.
It was a game to them. Nicolet playing the good guy, out of character but having fun. Tyler, though, came off as a decent guy and wasn’t too convincing as the heavy. Jackie was fairly sure they didn’t want to charge her. Cooperate, name a few names, and they’d give her a break. About all she could do was try keeping her mouth shut. Maybe send out for cigarettes.
When Nicolet said, “You have a good lawyer?” she didn’t answer.
“Can she afford a good one,” Tyler’s voice said, “is the question.”
He had a point.
“Otherwise she’ll be in the Stockade three weeks, easy, before a public defender gets around to her. In there with all those bad girls . . . I don’t know, maybe they pay her enough she can afford a high-priced defense.”
“Jackie, you have an apartment in Palm Beach Gardens?” Nicolet said, the ATF agent getting into it now. “That’s a pretty nice neighborhood.”
“Considering,” Tyler said, “she works for a little shuttle airline.”
There was a silence again, Jackie looking at downtown West Palm Beach in the distance, the sky still blue but fading. She heard a drawer open. Nicolet said, “Here,” offering her an ashtray. “I brought this myself, to have when I visit, and I used to smoke.” The good guy again, saying now, “That parking lot you see right there? Behind the hotel? You can sit here and watch drug deals go down. By the time you get over there everybody’s split.”
Jackie placed the ashtray on the windowsill. “Is that what you think I’m into?”
Behind her, Tyler said, “I notice you have a prior. Wasn’t that about drugs?”
“I was carrying money.”
“Four years ago,” Tyler said. “With another airline then and they fired you. But you didn’t answer my question. Wasn’t it money for a drug payoff? Taking it out of the country?”
“
I think,” Nicolet said, “Jackie was carrying it for one of the pilots. Guy that happened to be her husband at the time. They found her guilty of conspiring . . .”
“I entered a plea,” Jackie said.
“You mean they offered you a deal and you grabbed it. A year’s probation and your hubby drew five to ten. He must be out by now.”
“I think so,” Jackie said.
“That’s right, you got a divorce. You remarried— what about your present husband?”
“He died last year.”
“You go through ’em,” Nicolet said. “What kind of work did he do?”
“He drank,” Jackie said.
They let it go and she heard Tyler’s voice say, “Now you’re in a different kind of business, coming the other way with a payoff, selling instead of buying. Wasn’t this money given to you by a Bahamian named Walker? I believe it’s Cedric Walker. Lives in Freeport?”
Jackie didn’t answer, watching her reflection in the glass raise the cigarette.
“Name doesn’t ring a bell? How about a guy named Beaumont Livingston?”
Beaumont—she had met him only once, with Mr. Walker. No, she had seen him that time and was told later who he was. She could say she had never met him; but made up her mind not to say anything.
“You don’t know Beaumont?”
Not a word—staring through her reflection at a dark strip on the horizon she believed was the ocean.
“He knows you,” Nicolet said. “Beaumont’s Jamaican. That is, he was. Beaumont ain’t no more.”
Jackie could feel them waiting. She didn’t move.
“He used to fly over to Freeport a couple of times a month,” Nicolet said. “Maybe you’d recognize him. Faron, we could arrange for Ms. Burke to look at the body, couldn’t we?”
Tyler’s voice said, “No problem.”
She turned her head enough to see Ray Nicolet reaching into his cowboy boot, the left one crossed over the right. He drew out a snub-nosed revolver, laid it on the desk, and slipped his hand into the boot again to rub his ankle.
He said, “They found Beaumont yesterday morning in the trunk of a car, a brand-new Olds registered to a guy in Ocean Ridge. He’d reported it stolen. I had a chance to speak to Beaumont just the day before, about his future. He was in jail at the time, not too sure he wanted to do ten years.” There was a pause before Nicolet said, “Beaumont was bonded out and got popped before I could talk to him again.” There was another pause. Nicolet said, “You may not know Beaumont, but what if the guy who popped him knows you?”
There was a silence.
Jackie drew on the cigarette. Beaumont—she had listened to him talking to Mr. Walker. He left and Mr. Walker told her Beaumont could do tricks with numbers, add columns of figures in his head.
Tyler’s voice said, “If you don’t want to talk to us, I guess we’ll have to hand you over to Customs.”
She stubbed out the cigarette, intent on it for several moments, staring at the black plastic ashtray before turning now to face Tyler.
She said, “Okay, let’s go.”
He stood by the other desk in the office, where they had placed her flight bag, an open file folder in his hands.
“Now you’re gonna get him mad,” Nicolet said. “You know Faron could bring you up on a RICO violation? That fifty grand suggesting you’re mixed up in some kind of racketeering activity. And if I know Faron he’ll file a Probable Cause affidavit and take it all the way to the wall.”
Tyler was staring at her. She watched him lay the folder on the desk and place his hand on the flight bag. He said, “I’d like your permission to open this again. Is that okay? So we’ll know exactly how much we’re talking about here.”
Jackie walked over to the desk and unzipped the bag. She brought out the manila envelope, dropped it on the desk, and said, “Help yourself.”
“While you’re at it,” Tyler said, “let’s see what else is in there. You mind?”
Jackie looked at him for a moment.
She brought out a leather kit. “My toothbrush and bathroom stuff.” Next, a plastic travel case. “My curlers. You want me to open it?”
“Let’s see what else’s in there first,” Tyler said.
Jackie picked up the flight bag with both hands, turned it upside down, and shook it. A white blouse, a skirt, underwear, a bra, and pantyhose fell to the desk on top of the manila envelope. She set the bag aside. Tyler picked up the envelope and she watched him open it and shake out the packets of currency.
She watched him look in the envelope and then at her and saw his look of surprise become a grin. His hand went into the envelope and he said, “Well, what have we here?”
Jackie said, “Now wait a minute,” as Tyler’s hand came out and she heard Nicolet’s boots hit the floor.
He approached them saying, “Is that Sweet’n Low or what I think it is?”
Tyler was holding a clear cellophane sandwich bag that showed a rounded half inch or so of white powder inside. He raised it toward the overhead light saying, “Is it to sell or get stoned with? That’s the question.”
“It’s not mine,” Jackie said.
It wasn’t.
“Listen, okay? Really . . .”
“It isn’t enough for trafficking,” Nicolet said. “How about possession with intent to distribute?”
“Considering all the cash,” Tyler said, “I think I could go with conspiracy to traffic.”
A couple of happy guys.
Jackie was shaking her head. She said, “I don’t believe this.”
Nicolet pulled the chair out from the desk. He said, “Why don’t we sit down and start over,” giving Jackie a nice smile. “What do you say.”
5
Louis Gara could sound like a decent guy, an excon with possibilities. It came through, Max thought, in the way Louis played down his career as a bank robber.
He said what he’d do was hand the teller a note that read: Take it easy. This is a holdup. Get out your 50s and 100s right now. I will tell you what to do next. Louis said he wrote the note on a typewriter in an office supply store and made copies. Max asked him how many, to see how optimistic the guy was. “Twenty,” Louis said. “I could always have some more run off.” The first seven banks he did okay, making a little over twenty grand, total. He said people thought banks were always big scores. No, the bank robbers he’d met at Starke were amateurs, mostly crackheads. “On the next one I got seventeen hundred loose and five hundred in a strap the teller handed me I should never’ve taken. It was a dye pack. I get out in the street it pops and there’s this red dye on my hands, my arms, all down the front of my clothes. I got away though.” Max asked if the dye washed off. Louis said, “Yeah, it washes off, but some of the bills I didn’t do a good job on and were kinda pink. You try and pass a pink twenty, which I should never’ve done, they have an idea how it got that way. The next thing I know the police are at my door. I got eight years and did forty-six months. Came back to Miami and got picked up for violating my probation on a fraud charge, using somebody else’s credit card I found. See, I did the bank while I was on probation and would’ve done two and a half on the violation, but the judge was a good guy. He counted the time served on the bank conviction and I walked.”
How about that? Told in a quiet manner with what seemed a reasonable attitude, get caught for the crime, you do the time.
He said he worked in auto repair at Florida State Prison—referring to it as Starke or FSP—the food wasn’t too bad, and he got along with his cellmate, an older guy from Miami who had put away his wife. According to the cellmate his wife never shut up, was always nagging him about something until finally he had enough.
Max said, “How did he do it?” Renee had called earlier and he listened to her for twenty minutes before he could get off the phone.
Louis said the guy smothered her with a pillow. “He’d lift it off. ‘You gonna shut up?’ She’d start yapping at him and he’d push the pillow down over her face, hold
it, lift it off. ‘You gonna shut up?’ No, she kept yapping until the last time he lifted it off she had shut up.”
Max believed it could happen, you lose control for a minute and it’s done. What bothered him about Louis, the guy was a repeat offender. Grand theft auto in Ohio, felonious assault in Texas, fraud and bank robbery here in Florida. Louis was forty-seven with a hard, weathered look to him, dark curly hair showing some gray; he had a pretty good build from working out with weights at FSP. The three falls had only taken seven years out of his life, which Louis said didn’t set him back too much. Actually six years and ten months. That sounded like a positive-thinking guy, didn’t it? Louis never complained or acted resentful.
It was his eyes that gave him away.
Max saw it. Those dull eyes that didn’t seem to have life in them but didn’t miss anything. Three falls, you don’t come out, put on a new suit of clothes, and become a normal person again. That life changed you. Max said to Winston, “Watch him.”
Winston said, “I know who he is.” Winston asked Louis had he ever boxed in the slam. Louis said, a little; but would never put the gloves on with Winston.
Max said, “He isn’t stupid.”
Winston said, “One round, I could bust him up good. We wouldn’t see him for a while.”
Max said, “But he’d get you if you did. Don’t you know how that works? Don’t you see that in his eyes?”
He had told Glades Mutual Casualty he didn’t need Louis or want him; a convicted felon, Louis would never be able to apply for a surety license. The guy at Glades Mutual told Max to “use him for heavy work,” like picking up guys that failed to appear. So Max had Louis helping out with some of the more violent FTAs, guys that were likely to give them trouble. Louis could carry a pair of cuffs, that’s all. They’d never let him pack a gun or even touch the ones they had in the office: revolvers and a nickel-plated Mossberg 500 12-gauge, a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip and a laser scope. They kept the guns locked in a cabinet in the meeting room. They didn’t give Louis even a key to the office.
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