Bitter Tide

by Jack Hardin

  The front door opened, and Garrett and Mark walked in. They acknowledged Ellie, ordered their drinks, and then, after filling them at the coffee bar, came over and took a seat with her. Ellie folded the paper and set it down.

  “Cool place,” Mark noted, looking at the mural of the water on the far wall. “I’ve never been here before.”

  Garrett checked his watch and took a sip of his coffee. “Thanks for being flexible and rescheduling with me,” he said. “So, what do we need to talk about?”

  It was mid-afternoon, and they were the only ones on this side of the restaurant. Ellie kept her voice low and for the next ten minutes filled her partner and her boss in on the situation with Ronnie and his connection to Eli Oswald. She told them about the drugs and weapons, about Dawson and how he had yet to turn up, and the orange Mustang that passed them as she was bringing Ronnie back. When she finished, Mark looked intrigued, Garrett sober. He asked, “So what are you proposing?” Garrett was always looking for solutions, not just facts. It was why his office was getting things done.

  “To start with, Mark and I need to see what we can find on this Oswald guy and his little crew. From what Ronnie says, there’s less than a dozen people left who have fallen in line behind him and do his bidding. But those folks are all in and are moving cocaine. If that’s the case I don’t want to let this just slip on by.”

  “Where are his stomping grounds?” Mark asked.

  “Don’t know yet. Ronnie said Oswald recently moved out to the country and has what he now calls his compound.”

  “That sounds promising,” Garrett quipped. “I’ve never had good associations with the word ‘compound’ when used in a domestic context.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Sounds cultish. Makes me think of Waco.”

  “So that’s what we’re dealing with,” Ellie said. “I’ve called Dawson’s parole officer, and she says Dawson is on her whisk list.”

  “Whisk list?”

  “I took it as a cute way of saying that once they find Dawson he’s getting whisked back to prison. Anyway, she didn’t have anything for me. I did get the license plate off Curtis Smith’s Mustang when he passed me yesterday. It was registered five months ago in his name. Smith spent three years in juvie for physically assaulting his foster mother. Oswald spent two years in the federal system for leading an illegal protest in Tallahassee, burning the American flag, and resisting arrest. Both of those incidents were nearly twenty years ago when both men were still teenagers. The only other item of interest on either of them was a DUI suffered by Smith six years ago. All that aside, their records, as far as the government is concerned, are clean. I think Mark and I will start working on visiting known residences and hot spots.”

  “Good,” Garrett said. “Make it happen. I am going to throw out a caveat though. If we find these guys and it really does look like everything your friend Ronnie says is true, then we now have an interagency investigation on our hands. Ellie, you haven't been involved with one of those yet, but let me tell you, they’re about as fun as asking your cousins to help you plan a family reunion. It moves slowly, inefficiently, and everyone starts fighting for what they think is priority. Guns? We’re talking about looping in ATF. Kidnapping? The FBI. I’m not sure I want to get involved in something where the ATF will want to tag along too, especially if you’re not even sure that any drugs these guys might be involved with are being moved through my jurisdiction. Are we sure this Dawson fellow has been kidnapped?”

  “No,” Ellie said. “It’s speculation at this point, but since they obviously know where Jean’s cabin is and Dawson has skipped probation it’s certainly feasible.”

  “He could just be hiding out somewhere,” Mark said. “You know, trying to stay abreast of these people he thinks he’s upset?”

  “Sure,” Ellie said. “It’s a possibility. You know how these things go. He’s a grown man and no one saw him get nabbed, so there isn’t a lot of gusto in anyone’s sails to go out and try to find him. Anyway, it sounds like he was responsible for ensuring that a lot of cocaine swapped hands. The sooner we start looking into it the better.”

  “Make it happen.” Garrett said it with finality.

  Ellie looked out the window, saw a father and son heading toward the bridge, poles bouncing on their shoulders, tackle box and bucket in hand, and it reminded her who the three of them were really working for.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The “M” key was broken. Kyle Armstrong pounded it several times in a vain hope that it might start working again. Nothing appeared on the screen. Frustrated, he muttered under his breath and pressed the speaker button on his desk phone. It beeped. At least that button worked. “Laurie?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was strained.

  “My keyboard is kaput. Can you get me another one by the end of the day? A wireless one, please?”

  “I can, yes. Um...Kyle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are some people here to see you. They just walked past me and are heading to your office.”

  “Okay…”

  At that moment Kyle’s office door opened, revealing a tall, hairy man in a wool trench coat and another man of Spanish-looking descent, the sides of whose head were shaved and the longer hair on top pulled back into a short ponytail. A lady in a dark dress suit and heels followed behind them. They entered, shut the door, and stopped in front of his desk.

  Laurie, still on the speakerphone: “Kyle? Is everything all right?”

  Kyle answered, all the while keeping his eyes on the intruders. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, Laurie. Just fine. I forgot that I had called and invited a consulting agency to come over. Just get me the keyboard, please.”

  “Okay…”

  He disconnected and stood up. “What is this?”

  “Well, hello to you too,” Chewy said. “Ringo asked us to come over and say hello.”

  Kyle grit his teeth and whispered through a clenched jaw. “You guys can’t just show up like this. I can’t have people asking questions or getting suspicious. You just freaked my receptionist out.”

  “Ringo knows what he is doing, so please, sit down.” It was Andrés who spoke, and he leaned over the desk until Kyle could smell the scent of a musk cologne. “Sit. Down.”

  Kyle complied and Andrés smiled, leaned back. “Thank you. Kyle, we would like to be on good terms with you. So far you have managed to get our product across state lines in a very comfortable fashion. Ringo sends his thanks.”

  “Well, you can tell him this last truck going to Birmingham is it. After that I’m done. If I’d had any idea I was getting involved with this kind of stuff, I never would have borrowed money from him.”

  “But you did,” Chewy said. “And I believe he forgave that debt.”

  “He made me move his drugs on my trucks,” Kyle growled.

  “He did no such thing. What you did, you did of your own free will.”

  “He threatened my family, you jackass. Quit acting like I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “But you did, Kyle. At any time you could have gone to the police and turned us all in. But you did not. Now if you did, we have enough of your documented involvement these last couple months that, even with a plea deal, you would end up in the clink for at least a solid ten. How old will your son and daughter be in ten years? I wonder if your wife would decide to remarry instead of waiting for you to get out.”

  A vein, like a centipede, worked its way across Kyle’s forehead. “Shut up! Just shut up.” He gathered himself and then asked, “What do you want anyway? What did you really come here for?”

  Andrés turned toward the lady that had come with them and in a show of courtesy declined his chin. “This is Yolanda. Your newest employee.”

  Kyle looked at her suspiciously. She was calm, composed. Her long black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail that started high up on her head. She had a long neck and long, smooth legs that stood out of a short skirt. “I’m not hiring right now. Not unless she ca
n drive a forklift.”

  “This is Yolanda. She is your newest employee,” Andrés repeated. “From now on she will be helping with your books. Your...accounting.” Andrés’s broad smile seemed to indicate that he thought he was doing Kyle a favor.

  “I already have an accountant. Laurie. She works up there at the front, doubles as our secretary.”

  “Kyle. I will say that Ringo expects Yolanda to work here. As an accountant. He has hired her, and she is good at what she does.”

  “But I don’t need—”

  “You do not know what you need. Kyle, you have partnered with Ringo to move some of his product. However, he has identified an additional way in which the two of you might...work together. You move much rum, and, well, that is good for us all. You can help us by selling more rum than you currently do. Yolanda will make sure that happens.”

  “Make sure that happens? An accountant? That’s a job for a sales—” The moment Kyle’s words ceased was the same moment that his synapses fired off and his brain made the intended connection. The color in his face shifted to a sickly hue of ash, and his eyes, rather than widening, drooped down in horror and landed on an unused glass globe paperweight. Kyle said to the paperweight, very slowly, “I’m not laundering money for him too.” His tongue felt unnaturally heavy, like wet cotton, and his throat was now too parched to swallow.

  Andrés’s brows drew together. “Launder money? Kyle, what kind of men do you think we are?” He looked quizzically at Chewy and then toward Yolanda. “We want everything to be above board. That is why we are coming to you. Yolanda is the best, and she will make sure everything is in working order.”

  Kyle ran all ten fingers through his sandy brown hair. He kept his face toward the desktop, closed his eyes, said, “For how long?”

  “As long as you and Ringo are in business,” Chewy said. “Which if I had to guess—and I don’t like to guess, I never win in Vegas—I would guess indefinitely.”

  Kyle rose from his chair. “You tell Ringo I want to see him. If he’s going to do business with me, then I don’t want his henchmen coming around here making trouble.”

  “Trouble? I don’t think we’re making any trouble. And I don’t know what kind of movies you watch, but we’re not henchmen.” Chewy resettled his coat on his shoulders and drew his arms across his chest. He looked liked he was shivering.

  “You’re cold?” Kyle asked.

  “Yes. Very.”

  Kyle stared at him, bewildered. It was eighty-seven degrees outside, and here in the offices the thermostat was set to seventy-two.

  Andrés set a hand on Yolanda’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “We will leave you and Kyle to chat. Kyle, you might tell Laurie that Yolanda was a referral from a good friend. Or something. I am sure you will spin it right. That was Laurie that we met coming in, yes?”

  “Yes.” When Kyle gazed past Andrés, his eyes fell on the framed one dollar bill hanging on the wall beside the door. The symbolic first dollar the distillery ever made. But what got his attention right now, and what made him think that his eyes were playing tricks on him, was that George Washington’s face was no longer a creamy green. It was turning darker. And now it looked black. No, it was black, and not a Frederick Douglass kind of black either; more like coal black, like someone had spilled over the contents of an inkwell.

  “Kyle...are you still with me?”

  And now the ink, or whatever it was, started running out of the small frame and making two thin tracks down the wall. The two tracks grew wider and then branched out into little rivulets, thickened, and Kyle could see that they had now taken the shape of someone’s hands. Not just anyone’s hands. George Washington's hands. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. He knew whose hands they really were. They were his, black and sodden with the filth of dirty money.

  When he looked back to the frame, the ink had gone and ol’ Georgie’s complexion had returned to normal, but now he was looking at Kyle with disdain, shaking his head at him the disappointed way a mother might do when she finds out you’ve been clandestinely smoking a little reefer behind her hibiscus.

  Oh, great. Now he was hearing voices. Or, more precisely, just one: George's. “You wouldn’t tell a lie now, would you, Kyle? Surely not about something like this? Washing someone’s dirty money? Don’t tell me all that talk you heard as a boy about me chopping down that cherry tree did you no good at all, Kyle.” George Washington’s voice was far deeper than Kyle had imagined it might be.

  Chewy snapped his fingers in Kyle’s face. It worked. Kyle gave a kind of shivered jolt and took an unsteady step backwards. “Good. You’re still with us. You had Andrés here worried for a second.”

  Kyle needed to rest. Or a drink. Or both. Yes, certainly both.

  “Laurie looks like a nice lady,” Chewy was saying. “I would hate for her to get nosy and for something unfortunate to happen to her, so handle this wisely. Yolanda will be our eyes and ears from now on. I would suggest you don’t underestimate her.” With that, Andrés and Chewy put their backs to Kyle and walked out of his office.

  Yolanda turned her attention to him, offering a cold, professional smile. “So, where is my desk?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Ellie approached the side door leading into Major’s home, she heard a rhythmic thumping coming from inside, varied and discordant. She opened the door, walked through the kitchen and across the living room, and then took the carpeted stairs up to the second floor. She poked her head into the first room on the right. Ronnie was behind a full drum set, focused and maybe a little irritated. A large poster was pinned to the wall behind him: the Beatles walking across the zebra crossing near their Abbey Road studios. Major was standing to the side, his back to the door, his head moving slightly with the beat of the drums.

  “Hey!” she called out.

  Ronnie looked in her direction and lifted his chin to her by way of a greeting, but he kept playing. When Major turned and saw Ellie, his face brightened, and he walked over and gave her firm hug from the side. They watched Ronnie for a while, and when he finally stopped he was breathing heavily.

  “Not bad, Ronnie,” Ellie said. It was, in fact, very bad. But her father had brought her up to be polite. He had also raised her not to lie. In this case, the latter assisted the former.

  “I was texting with a couple old buddies last night,” Ronnie said, “and we got to talking about maybe starting a band. I use to play these things, you know. The drums.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t realize how rusty I’d gotten. Been years since I played.” He paused. “Did you need something?”

  “I wanted to give you an update. Based on the information you’ve provided, my partner and I are going to work on locating Curtis Smith and Eli Oswald.”

  “That’s good, Ellie. That’s real good. It’s like I said, Eli is something else. If you find him you’ve got to be real careful. It took me a while to realize he was no good, but when I did…” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “And you have no idea where this new place of theirs is?”

  “Nope. He only let a handful in on it.”

  “Well, if by a long stretch you do hear from Dawson, make sure I’m the first to know.”

  “You got it.” He twirled a drum stick through his fingers, and it came loose, flew across the room, and hit the floor lamp. He looked guilty at Major. “Sorry.”

  Major walked over and picked it up. “Don’t worry about it.” He handed it back to Ronnie, said to Ellie, “Want to get a drink downstairs with me?”

  “Always.” Ronnie was playing again before they had made it to the top of the stairs, and they went down and into the kitchen. Major pulled a couple Landsharks from the fridge and popped the tops. He handed one to Ellie, and they each found a place to sit in the living room.

  “You’re doing a good job, you know.”

  “With what?”

  “Your work at the DEA. You helped take down that net
work we all read about in the paper. That’s a big deal.”

  “Thanks. It does feel good to be doing something meaningful.”

  “Oh, so pouring drinks at my bar isn’t meaningful?” He winked at her.

  “Totally meaningless. Can’t see how anyone could enjoy that.” She winked back.

  Major took a pull on his beer. “Ronnie’s a good kid. He can stay here for as long as he needs to. Just...be careful out there, okay?”

  “I will. I always am.”

  “You’re tenacious,” he said. “You got that quality from your mother, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Upstairs, the drumming stopped, and they heard the bathroom door shut.

  “I’m going to the Caribbean for a few days after the festival,” Major said.

  “No kidding. Where?”

  “Not sure yet. I’m meeting up with an old friend who’s going to be out that way. Somewhere in the Bahamas if I had to bet. He’s one of those people who doesn’t decide exactly where until he gets close.”

  “I’m glad you’re finding time to take a break,” she said. “You work too hard.”

  “Thanks, kiddo.”

  “How long will you be gone? You’ll be back to pick up Katie and Chloe from the airport with me?”

  He grimaced. “No, but I emailed Katie a couple hours ago to let her know. I’ll be back just a day or two later.”

  “No worries. Don’t forget about your birthday party. Just the four of us.”

  He smiled. “Can’t wait.”

  When Ellie left a half hour later, Ronnie’s rhythm had somehow managed to have gotten worse, the cacophony spilling all the way down the street like a clunky truck.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ellie and Mark had spent all morning at the office combing through printouts of anything they could find on Eli Oswald and Curtis Smith: past residences, old credit and debit card statements noting where purchases were made and how often, utility bills, ISP information for their internet connections, and smartphone geo-locations. The only bank account between the two was with SunTrust and still active, but it had a zero balance, no transactions in the last four months, and when they called the bank had informed them that the statements started coming back last month.