by Matt Lincoln
29
LaShawn
I met Jake at his marina, as I had been waiting for him to get back for an hour now. What I needed to tell him was too important to tell him over the phone, and as he had his team with him now, they’d need to know too. Things were going fast, and the news that was coming in was confusing and sometimes unverified, at best. The guy that lived there, Lael something or other, was nice enough to let me hang out in the office until they got there. He was not too talkative, but that was okay. I didn’t mind just sitting there and soaking in the ambiance of the marina’s office.
I must have checked my phone a dozen times, looking for anything from either Cecily or Jake. But nothing. I finally just called him up and got an answer for the first time in an hour.
“Hey!” I cried out in relief. “Finally. Jake, how close are you to getting back? Because I’m at your marina right now, and I have some very disturbing news.”
“What are you talking about? What’s going on?” Jake asked me. His voice was calm, and he probably thought that I was simply overreacting. But oh, boy, I certainly was not. If anything, I was low-key in my first level panic mode.
“How far out are you?” I asked hurriedly. “I’m not saying all this over the phone, and your friends are going to need to know this too. It’s about the case and the witnesses, and, well, it's going nuts over here.” I didn’t think that was overstating it. I could hear dead silence on his end, and I thought that maybe the call got dropped.
“Give me ten minutes. Where exactly are you?” I was never so glad to hear that steady voice of his, and I could detect that he was taking me seriously.
“I’m in the office. Your office at the marina. Where do you want me to go?” I was willing to go anywhere as long as I got to him soon.
“Just stay there. Ten minutes tops. See you soon.” And then Jake hung up, and I had to wait some more, but at least there was an ETA, and I knew that he was on his way soon.
Lael had been trying not to listen to the call, but how could he not, sitting in this tiny room with me. “He says he’ll be here in a few minutes. I’m supposed to just wait here for him.” I relayed this as I nodded and tried to think of something, anything else to talk about with this guy.
Lael got up from his turquoise armchair and went over to the mini-fridge on the other side of the room.
“You thirsty?” He asked as he bent down, looked inside, and gave me the rundown of what was available. “There’s some bottled water, some orange juice, a near-beer…”
“Nah, I’m good, thanks.” I was already too nervous, sitting here and waiting. Drinking something wouldn’t help me in the least. I just needed to sit here, remain calm, and get ready for when Jake got here.
Sure enough, within ten minutes, I saw a shadow against the window and heard the door open behind me. I jumped up and came face-to-face with my buddy, Jake.
“Thank God!” I exclaimed.
“You missed me that much, huh?” Jake smiled at me and reached out to shake my hand. I responded with a sigh and a shake of my head at him.
“Not so much, but there is a lot going on that you need to know about.” I looked out behind him, hoping that the team I’d heard so much about was right behind him. But I didn’t see a soul. “Are your friends not with you? I wanted to let them know about all of this too.” My heart sank a little at this.
“Oh, uh, Xavier’s getting a shower over on his yacht, and Rosa is…” He glanced back outside as if he was expecting her to be there, too. “I guess she needed to do something else. They’ll be over here as soon as they can. I promise.” Jake took this time to nod over at Lael. “Hey, how are things going here? Anything I should know about while I was gone?”
Lael shook his head in a barely noticeable manner at Jake. “Nothing major. The guest restrooms are acting up, but that’s a regular thing this time of year. I called the plumber. He’ll be out tomorrow morning.” His tone seemed bored and undisturbed by much, I guessed. Maybe he was just a mellow guy. I didn’t know him well enough to say.
Jake smiled and bowed his head, kind of like when there was just so much going on that nothing surprised you anymore. “Great. Well, anyway, you can take off now, Lael. Thanks for keeping my friend here company until I got back.” He reached out his hand to shake Lael’s hand in appreciation, and after that, the guy exited, leaving Jake and me alone in the office to discuss.
He looked rough, but I hated to mention that, as he undoubtedly already knew. Jake had just come back for a sea voyage or something equally mysterious, and that could take a lot out of people, especially if he’d been doing casework. So instead, I avoided all mention of his appearance and complimented his new business.
“This place is looking great, man,” I said, looking around for emphasis. “Really nice to see so much effort put into a small business these days. I hope it does well for you.” That was a sincere compliment.
Jake grinned and stretched himself, rotating his neck and shoulders to loosen them up. “It’s taking a lot more than I thought it would when I got the crazy idea to do this. But it's fine, just a new experience for me.” He stared at me straight on and got right to the point. “So, give me a little heads up, LaShawn. You sounded very serious on the phone, and my worries are working overtime, trying to figure out what you’re going to tell the team and me.”
I couldn’t lie to the man. It was serious. I checked my cell one more time to see if Cecily had returned any texts, but there wasn’t anything from her yet. So, I started to fill him in on what had gone down since he’d been away.
“It’s about Jozie, the witness Cecily’s been watching for us,” I began. “She’s gone. She left her safehouse location this afternoon and never came back. The detectives found her tracker, the cell they gave her, ditched in a dumpster miles from where she should have been. They’ve been looking for her all afternoon, but nothing’s turned up.”
Jake’s facial features twitched, and his jaw clenched tightly. I knew he understood how bad this could become if it wasn’t already.
“Where was she supposed to be when they lost her?” He asked me as he started to walk over to the desk chair.
“At a court-appointed meeting with her sister, the one that has custody of her,” I answered directly. He needed to know everything I knew if we were going to do anything of value in finding her now.
“The one she didn’t want to go back to, right?” Jake’s eyebrow raised, and I knew what he was getting at. I was pleased to see that he’d remembered that detail about Jozie and her home life. He wasn’t business all the time, I guessed. I nodded to confirm that.
Jake fired off a few more questions. “Could she have run away again to avoid seeing her family? Or maybe the other way? She snuck off to see them, or her friends?” He swiveled the chair around but didn’t sit in it.
That was a logical take on it. “Nah, that’s all been covered. The sister seemed pissed that Jozie didn’t show, Cecily told me. She’s pulling all kinds of drama about suing, and well, she doesn’t think the sister is directly involved, though. And the two sisters didn’t meet up beforehand at any time. The cell’s location app didn’t ping them anywhere near each other before the police found it.”
“They think as I would, or vice versa.” Jake smiled to himself about that, but I didn’t know why. “What does that leave? Could she have left town, trying to run away from having to testify or just ID the trio? Is she that important to the investigation the MPD is building?”
I shook my head. “I really don’t know. Cecily can’t tell me much, and so I don’t ask. What I do know is that Jozie saw her friend get killed by the trio and that she heard them using their names and talking about some labs. That’s what her witness position is about.” Then I smirked at him facetiously. “But I guess you knew about those already, huh?”
He didn’t react. Jake just kept his straight, unwavering gaze on me and spoke about other things. “Did Detective Musik happen to share those names with you by any chanc
e?”
“No. Privileged information. I don’t have that, sorry.” And I was. I wished that I could have given him more, but there it was. But then, his two team members came strolling into the office and introduced themselves. The redhead was Rosa, a pretty lady who only spoke in ASL, and beside her was a younger guy named Xavier. He was carrying a laptop and a red notebook, so I deduced that he was Jake’s tech guy.
“Nice to meet you both,” I said by way of introduction. Once we’d all taken seats and settled in, I started explaining what I had just told Jake, and then the rest of it, too. “Now, losing the only witness is bad, but now there are reports that a lot of people are checking into the hospitals with poisoning symptoms and overdoses. Like, a lot. Way too many to have it be coincidental.”
Jake and his friends exchanged looks, and the guy with the laptop opened it and quickly started to look up something.
“What else had been going on?” Jake asked me.
I continued. “It’s not just the homeless and ex-addicts and runaways being used now. It’s also lots of kids, lots of young hustlers, and people looking for a quick party high. Some pretty elite local celebrities and social climbers, too.” I didn’t know what else to say. It was going everywhere, mainstream, and it was still killing and adversely affecting people.
Jake nodded his head, and he had that look in his eye that I used to see back in our training days. The one that made him determined not to give an inch to whoever was dumb enough to challenge him on something. “What are you planning, Jake? You have something going on. I can see it just about to roll off of you right here. What have you been doing?”
He sneered in a funny little way before he answered me. “We got some intelligence on the trio. Only they were originally a foursome, a quartet. The Yabut connection is a Colombian ex-Intel officer named Astreya, with no last name on record. The muscle’s gone. You’re welcome, but we still have a chemist out there, and I think another doctor or medical type. And we know that they have another lab, down at the docks someplace.”
That was some intel. I sat back, my mind buzzing around with all this new data. “That’s… wow. I, um, I guess you know where to hit next then, huh?” I wasn’t going to miss this chance, not again. “Now, I’m only going to say this once, and I won’t take no for an answer, you got it?” I paused only long enough to make myself sure that I really needed to do this. “I’m coming with you to the docks. I owe it to Colby, and Jozie, and to all my people down at Edler to help you take these guys out. Okay?”
I wasn’t sure how he’d react to that, but I knew he understood how much this meant to me. I knew that he’d respect what I was asking of him. And I knew that he was aware that I could hold my own.
Jake didn’t even check with his friends, his teammates. He just nodded and said, “I wouldn’t have it any other way, brother.” Then he looked over to the other two in the room, and they seemed to be accepting of what he said without questioning it. “We’re waiting until dark to hit the docks. Xavier here has some research to work on before we do anything. And I’m going to need a shower and a hot meal.” That made him smile. “And I need to rethink my armament. We’re going to head back to my place for a bit and regroup. Plus, it’s closer to the docks from there. You’re welcome to ride along with us.”
I appreciated the offer, but I had my own truck here, and I didn’t want to leave it. “Nah, I’ll just follow you to your condo. What’s the timeline looking like?” Then I thought that I’d better stop by my place beforehand, too. There were some things that I needed to take care of.
“Let’s say… Meet me at my condo in an hour. Come ready to get messy and tear some stuff up.” Jake smiled at me, and his team all had similar grins and amusing looks on their faces now.
I was happy just to be able to still do this kind of crap. Goodness knows this was most likely my last bit of derring-do if my health kept up in the way it had been. So yeah, I was going for it. And this was as worthy a mission as any to get my last jollies. Also, there was no one I’d rather go into the crazy unknown with other than Jake.
30
Jake
The drive back to my condo was rapid and tensely quiet. While I had been talking and stalling LaShawn in the office, Rosa and Xavier had been unloading and securing Wraith in the barn. I had told them to lock her down tight and to go get whatever they were going to need to hit the docks tonight from their yacht or, in Rosa’s case, her bags. They were then supposed to load down my Mercedes, and we’d go from there.
Now with all the new information from LaShawn, I needed to factor in a few new things. We’d be back up to a four-man team, but minus our lead medic. Rosa was good at patching wounds and the like, but we were going into something that could be more dangerous than a gunshot wound if you could believe it.
We all knew that these drugs could have uncontrollable, unexpected, and even lethal effects, and I was leading my team right into the place where they made the junk. My throat and chest tightened whenever I thought about it. We were comfortable with a certain amount of peril, risk, and unforeseen consequences, but this drug and its effects could have lasting outcomes. I hated having to risk their lives. It was what we did, but still. I didn’t have to like it.
Xavier was giving us the rundown from the backseat as I drove while Rosa stewed on the upcoming events.
“Now that I know that the Miami docks are where this other lab is,” Xavier informed us, “I’ve been going through the notebook that your cop friend gave you, and I think, yeah, here it is. Someone jotted down a few possible locations along the docks where they thought the lab might be.”
“Seriously? That’s in that notebook?” I was kind of awestruck to think that it had been there the whole time. I just didn’t know enough about what they wrote there to know what to look for.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “There’s a bunch of addresses and building descriptions mentioned, in about five different handwriting styles.” Xavier leaned forward so that Rosa and I could hear him better from his place in the backseat. “You all want to hear my theory on this notebook?” He didn’t wait for us to reply at all. “I think since the MPD had it, that it’s been floating between departments, and all of them have been adding little bits of information to it as they discovered it.”
I was willing to hear this theory out. “So then, what’s it for exactly? And why hasn’t anyone put it into some better order before now? You have an idea about that?”
“Yes, I do,” he confirmed. “I think, based on the fact that I’m still going through all of it and trying to build a more user-friendly method of understanding it, that this notebook is all about the Yabut. Their work, or dealings, whatever you want to call it, here in Miami.” That made some sense. “And I think that the people adding to this had to do so covertly. It's only speculation on my part, but I’m going to have to assume that because it involves the DEA, that there was no formal investigation into what the Yabut were or are doing. This notebook is like a secret case file that these officers were compiling and trying to work on.” Xavier stopped for a moment to let us absorb that. “What do you both think?”
Rosa shook her head, but not in a disbelieving way. More of just trying to digest all of it and understand it. For my part, I was interested.
“You know what?” I muttered. “That sounds more plausible than anything I’ve come up with. I didn’t know what to make of it. And quite honestly, I wasn’t even sure that I could trust the few things I did understand about it. But yeah…” The more I considered it, the more I favored the idea. “If you had a potential case that included designer drugs being imported into Miami from a known cartel in Colombia, and if you were trying to prove that the Drug Enforcement Administration and a Federal Judge were implicated alongside it, yeah. You might be hesitant to bring that up around too many people without a helluva lot of evidence to back it up.”
“You said that your Detective Musik gave it to you, right? She just sort of left it at your place and never expl
ained why?” Xavier was getting excited, and I could hear it in his voice. “What if the MPD couldn’t go any further with it? What if they had been knocked down, or back, or told to forget about it, and she wanted someone, namely someone that could do something about it, to have all this information? Just think about that for a minute.”
So, I did. “Your theory is that Cecily, Detective Musik, thought that I, and now this team, could be of more use in taking down a drug cartel than the actual police department of Miami?” That was gratifying, but I wasn’t sold on it.
“No, Header, because when you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous.” Xavier huffed in displeasure at my take on it. “Think about it, please. We had, we still have evidence that Judge Fu is corrupt, but we exchanged turning her in for her leaving her son Arik alone and keeping him safe, right?”
“Yeah.” I still didn’t know if that was the right thing to have done, though.
“Then, maybe these officers that created this notebook made a related deal. They couldn’t expose the DEA or the Judge without getting someone else hurt, or maybe the evidence wasn’t as solid legal-wise as it needed to be, but they didn’t want to just give up on proving that the Yabut, Judge Fu, and agents within the DEA were breaking the law and criminally involved. So, they waited, kept adding to it, and now, Musik gave it to you because she thinks, she hopes, that we’ll be able to take them down in a way that law enforcement can’t.” Xavier was still leaning in between Rosa and me as he’d expounded on all this.
I glanced over at Rosa to see her reaction, or to see at least what she was thinking about this so far. She had been staring straight ahead at the traffic of a Miami night. She sighed a few times that I could hear. I kept looking back between her face and the road as I continued to drive us back to my condo. “Rosa? Do you have anything to add or even say about what Xavier’s trying to tell us?” I kind of wanted to hear from her before I said anything either way.
