Vacant Shore

by Jack Hardin

  Warren moved more slowly than usual, the large lunch of fried shrimp and conch that he had shared with Frank and Katie sat delightfully heavy in his stomach. At lunch Katie had challenged him to a competition to see who could throw down the most shrimp. He had her beat in ten minutes and accepted her offer to do a load of dishes at The Salty Mangrove. He loved the three he called “his girls.” Warren had no children of his own, and Ellie, Katie, and Katrina were the daughters he never had.

  Katrina. The brightest smile he had ever seen. She was turning twelve tomorrow and he had a surprise party planned for her. Even her father didn’t know. With help from Sharla Potter, Warren had spent the last three days getting in touch with all of Katrina’s friends, planning a party for the ages to be held in her hospital room. Sharla had sweet-talked and Warren had charmed every nurse and administrative personnel needed to get the approval pushed through. A clown was even coming. After that, a magician.

  Katrina hadn’t gotten into the trials...yet. Warren had put in several calls to people who had pockets deeper than their pants legs, and he was just waiting to hear back.

  They couldn’t lose her.

  Her father had opened up a bait shop on Monroe Canal when she was but an infant, wanting to anchor his life so he could give her a stable upbringing. As a fellow member of the Chamber of Commerce and wishing goodwill toward anyone brave enough to open their own small business, Warren had wasted no time introducing himself to Quinton Davis. He even offered to sell Quinton’s bait at his own marina. They soon became fast friends. Sometime after Katrina had entered kindergarten, her father started bringing her by The Salty Mangrove on Friday afternoons, where they would grab a late afternoon snack of fried grouper before going out on the water together. It had remained a tradition of sorts ever since. Warren went with them on a couple of occasions but had somehow felt that he was encroaching on sacred time between father and daughter. From then on he would wave them off when they asked him to join them. At least on Friday afternoons.

  Katrina had matured with a sense of humor that none could attribute to her father nor her mother. Without fail she would have the bar in stitches, embellishing stories about her father’s fishing mishaps, or Warren’s receding hairline, or taking long-winded guesses as to what old man Chesterfield was really saying, being that he never wore his dentures.

  And then she got cancer.

  And not just any cancer. Katrina had been diagnosed with the dreaded APL. She had been riding her bicycle around her cul-de-sac two months earlier when her nose started dumping rivers of blood onto her T-shirt, and shorts, and legs. The next day a bone marrow sample was followed by a bleak diagnosis.

  But if Warren knew anything, he knew that Katrina was a fighter. She should have gotten into trials a month ago. People coming out of them were getting better. But the money just wasn’t there. Last week they thought she might be able to get into a spot that had opened up. But they had been wrong. Still, Warren hadn’t given up. He was going to get that girl into those trials no matter who he had to beg, regardless of the favors he would owe.

  The automatic doors to the hospital shuffled open, and Warren’s Birkenstocks slapped quietly on the vinyl composition floor. He walked to the elevator and pressed the small circular light mounted in the wall. When it opened, he stepped in and went up. He got off on her floor and turned down the corridor. Nurses were whispering at the station, their backs to him. He pushed on the door to Katrina’s room and walked in. Her father was sitting in an armchair looking out the window, his back toward the door.

  Katrina’s bed was missing from the room.

  “Quinton?” Warren said. “Did they take her for more testing?”

  “I hate that willow,” Quinton said, staring out the glass, looking down toward the front of the hospital. “It looks like it’s in constant mourning.” His voice cracked.

  Warren’s throat tightened. “Quinton. Where is Katrina?”

  Quinton turned around. His eyes were puffy, moist with tears. “She’s...gone,” he said it like he was still trying to believe it.

  “What? Gone?”

  “She died, Warren.”

  “Oh, God.” Warren choked, and grabbed at a chair and sat into it.

  “When?”

  “Half hour ago.”

  “I thought—”

  “Intracranial hemorrhage is what they’re calling it. Brain…” he faltered. “Brain bleed.”

  “Gone?” Warren repeated, and then his face took on the same disbelieving look as his friend’s. He leaned forward and put a strong hand on Quinton’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.” His heavy body shook as he wept.

  “What do I do now?” Quinton finally whispered. “I can’t...I can’t go home. She won’t ever be there again.”

  “You’ll stay at my place for a while.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll worry about ‘what’ down the road.”

  “I don’t think I can keep my promise, Warren.”

  “What promise?”

  “She...she told me to finish the remaining stadiums. I don’t think I can do it.”

  Warren swallowed back another sob. “You don’t need to think about all that right now.”

  Quinton nodded and wailed into his hands.

  Warren sat with his friend for the next half-hour, the nurses and staff leaving them to their privacy for the time being. It wasn’t until a priest and an old family friend showed up at the same time that Warren decided to step out.

  He didn’t walk back to his Jeep. Instead, he turned left after stepping out of the elevator, walking the length of the hospital wing before exiting out a side door. A winding sidewalk led past a prayer garden and around a banyan tree that stood sentinel over a small lake, a place of serenity created for the solace of the grieving and the prayers of the hopeful.

  Warren sat down on a metal slat bench and looked out over the water where a small fountain threw misty water into the air. Millions of droplets sparkled in the sunlight like tiny diamonds, as if there were something to be celebrated. A duck swam by. A frog hopped off a pad and splashed as it entered the water. Swans paddled to the other side. How could such a place as this incubate such grief?

  An unseen dissonance raged within Warren Hall.

  Why hadn’t the world stopped? Why were the birds still singing, the roots of the banyan tree swaying gently, almost happily, just above him, the ducks and the frogs animated, the clematis and coneflower still in vibrant bloom?

  If only they had the money. People were being healed by this new retinoic acid treatment. The only reason Katrina didn't make it was because of funding—money. How many more fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and grandparents would have to suffer because there was no money left in benevolent coffers?

  Warren Hall didn’t move from his seat on that slatted bench for the next two hours, questions churning in him like an infant hurricane coming off the coast of Africa, stirring up a darkness that would change how Warren Hall would now look at the world.

  He owned a bar and a marina. Quinton owned a bait shop. They weren’t in a position to help others, to keep more families from feeling like some merciless force had reached down into their souls and cut away the best parts of them.

  And it was there, next to the lake, beneath the magnificence of the banyan tree, that it came to him. It came to him in a flash of inspiration that could only be called unholy, cutting through all his moral inhibitions as swiftly as the great lie that had been whispered to Adam as he stood naked in the garden. Warren’s lip curled and his chin rose. He stood up. He walked to the edge of the water, his jaw set hard, the resolve that was hardening deep within his heart finally overcoming the tears still pooled in his eyes.

  A quote from Nietzsche’s pen slowly distilled from his mind to his heart: To survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

  They would be able to help. Warren would ensure that money wasn’t the reason children died and families mourned. He would get
the money.

  He would get it by the kilo.

  Chapter Eight

  “Mark,” Ellie said. “Come in.”

  Mark, who was generally a pressed polo and khakis kind of guy, was wearing shorts and a rainbow tie dye T-shirt with a black and white image of the Fonz stamped across the front. He stepped in and Ellie shut the door.

  The door to the hallway bathroom opened, and Chloe came out wearing fresh clothes and wet hair. She stopped when she saw the unexpected man. She shriveled her nose. “Who are you?” she asked. “Your shirt is weird.”

  “Chloe,” her mother chided, looking at Mark apologetically from across the room, “let’s go to the bedroom and see if we can find something on Netflix.” Katie escorted her daughter back down the short hallway.

  Mark shrugged. “Crazy shirt day at the office. Raising money for the food bank.”

  “Let’s talk outside,” Ellie said, and led the way out. She motioned toward a plastic chair on the edge of her back porch. “Have a seat.” She took the chair across from him.

  Citrus scurried up his little ramp and padded across the grass toward Mark. He pulled up and paused, tilted his head as he realized that the man sitting on his back porch was not Tyler. He looked quizzically at Ellie, Mark, and then back to his owner.

  “Sorry. I guess he doesn’t remember you,” she said. “Citrus, this is Mark. He was here a week ago.”

  Citrus yipped like of course he remembered, and then his ears perked and he placed two paws in the grass and leaned in like he was listening for something. Then he jumped up and chased his tail for several revolutions before running to the edge of the yard and jumping up into the boat.

  “I think I had that much energy...never,” Mark chuckled. “I have never had that much energy.”

  “So what’s up?” Ellie said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too,” he said. “Okay, so, two things. First one...Jet is retiring in a few weeks and we all want you at the retirement party.”

  Ellie nearly missed the last half of the sentence because of the first half. Special Agent Tim “Jet” Jahner was nearing sixty and had been with the Fort Myers DEA for twenty of his thirty-plus years with the agency. He was the operational backbone of the local field office, his experience unmatched.

  “Retiring? How did I miss the rumors on that?”

  “Because there were no rumors. He just announced it out of the blue a couple days ago. He’s tired and claims he wants to have more time with his grandkids. If you ask me, I think them letting you go the way they did was the tipping point for him.”

  “Where is the party going to be?”

  “Garrett and his wife are hosting at their place.”

  “Put me down. I wouldn’t miss it. What’s your number two?”

  “Number two…” Mark teased out. His eyes went to her boat, the engine, and the fresh water pouring off it into the canal. “So just how busy are you these days?”

  Ellie’s brow lifted.

  “As you can imagine, I’m back at a desk for now.” Mark was an Intelligence Research Specialist, a role that had him running research into drug trafficking routes and analyzing the flow of money in and out of illegal operations. “I’ve been poking through the ashes of Nunez’s organization, trying to follow the money. Most of his larger transactions occurred offshore, and I’m still waiting to get access to those records. I won’t charm you with all the details, but a local address keeps showing up. A warehouse in Cape Coral. It belongs to a wholesale distribution company—Duncan Industries—that takes on short-term contracts. Basically, in any given month they could be moving sports gear or furniture or widgets. So I get to thinking that they were a logistical arm for Nunez’s product.”

  “Makes sense,” Ellie said.

  “Yes. Except I would be wrong. And you’ll appreciate this next part—the arrests we made at the stash house the night we nabbed Cardoza and Nunez—one of them has finally started talking. Seems that he actually likes his kids and wants to watch them grow up.”

  “And?”

  “And he says the warehouse wasn’t used to move anything for Nunez, that it’s a side operation used as a funnel to get people on the street selling, dealing, pushing product. An employee agency of sorts. Basically, if you want to bring someone on who’s willing to sell dope, this place can provide them.”

  “And Nunez got some of his guys from there?”

  “Yes. And apparently some smaller fish do too.”

  “Any idea how it works?” Ellie stood up and turned off the water that was feeding the hose. She returned to her chair.

  “Our source—Sanchez—said Duncan Industries employs a third shift from off the street. Every weeknight they’ll let in X number of people to work their assembly lines, deliveries, clean up, et cetera. First come, first work, type of thing. Pay you in cash. It’s probably a little setup to get cheap labor and avoid additional payroll taxes. Eventually, if the right people like you they tap you on the shoulder and ask you if you want a real job.”

  “Selling dope?” Ellie said.

  “Yep.”

  Something stirred inside Ellie. Regret that she no longer had a badge. Frustration that she could no longer play with the big boys. Like Citrus being told he had to stay home while everyone went out on the boat. “So why bring this to me?” she asked.

  The back door growled along its track and Katie popped her head out. “Hey, sorry to interrupt,” she said. “Chloe’s getting a little whiny and she needs a nap. I can’t get her to sleep here. I think I’m going to take her back home.”

  “Sure,” Ellie said, a little disappointed. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

  “Okay. We had fun this morning.”

  “Me too.” Katie shut the door and Ellie brought her attention back to Mark.

  “So,” he continued, “It’s a long shot, I know, but think of where this could lead. At the end of the day someone, somewhere, is connected to Ringo. You and I both know that he’s still around, probably laughing at us. Someone knows who he is.”

  “And you think this could lead us to him?”

  “All I’m saying is it’s a way back in. Ringo’s not a small fish and he might not even use these people to staff his organization. But someone has to know who he is.”

  Ellie leaned forward and set her elbows on her knees, trying to subdue a budding sense of excitement. “Who else knows that you’re bringing this to me?”

  “No one.”

  “No one else?”

  “I’m not going to trouble Garrett with it. He can’t give us sanction to move internally. If I had something more substantial, he probably could. Since he can’t, that’s why I’m here.”

  “And you want me to look into it?”

  Mark’s mouth curved into a smile. “And I want you to look into it,” he repeated. “Unofficially, of course.” He looked back at her boat. “Unless, you know, you’re too busy.”

  Chapter Nine

  Ringo returned the picture to its spot on the bookshelf, the picture of the young girl with her father. They were behind the bait shop’s front counter, wearing goofy faces, their eyes sparkling with the energy of two people who loved being alive.

  All the photos looked like that. She never did lose that spark. Not even at the end. But after the diagnosis, her father had.

  Ringo adjusted his white fedora as the doorbell rang across the front of the mansion. He shut the door to the upstairs bedroom, walked down the hall, and slid his hand along the iron rail as he slowly descended the narrow spiral staircase. He came down to a room that resembled more of a cathedral than the living room that it was.

  The front door opened and greetings were spoken as Ringo made his way across the Spanish terracotta floor. Quinton Davis appeared beneath the archway wearing board shorts and a sleeveless Cubs T-shirt. The men exchanged smiles and Quinton took the single step down into the living room. They embraced. “You’ve been missed,” Ringo said. He motioned toward the couch and Ringo took the white, ove
rsized chair on the other side of the coffee table. He surveyed his friend. “You look refreshed. Although you have more sunspots on that bald head of yours than when you left,” he said. “It makes you look older than you are.” Andrés and Chewy took seats, Andrés on the other end of the couch, Chewy in a wingback chair.

  “Not all of us can pull off a fedora the way you can,” Quinton said.

  Ringo drummed the tips of his fingers together. “You know they say sunspots are a disease of the soul bubbling up from inside.”

  Quinton’s sinister smile indicated some form of agreement. “Thank you for understanding my need for extra time away. I know it was far longer than we had planned. But it was time for me to come back.”

  “I’m just sorry I couldn't come with you. How was Chicago?”

  Quinton waved him off. “I needed to go it alone. And Chicago was good. Wrigley was everything you would expect.”

  “Good. We’ll talk later, you and I.” Ringo said. “For now, we should get to business.”

  The three men gave Ringo their attention. Ringo idly ran a palm back and forth across the chair’s arm. “I have made a decision that has not come easily,” he said, and looked at each man in turn. The atmosphere in the room suddenly thickened. “I’ll be leaving this business of ours and putting it behind me. For good.”

  He studied their reactions. Andrés’s eyes widened. Quinton raised his brow and slowly sat back into the couch cushion with a long sigh. Chewy presented no visible response. Not even a flick of the eye or a change in his breathing. Just a blank, unreadable stare.

  Ringo waited for them to digest his words. Quinton was the first to speak. “It’s your family,” he finally said.

  “It is.”

  Quinton nodded and ran his tongue across his teeth. Outside, the leaves of a banana tree rubbed gently against the window. “Then I won’t try to talk you out of it.”

  “If I continue down this path,” Ringo said, “there are some things, as you well know, that once you lose, you can never get back.”