by Andrew Mayne
“A friend’s place,” he replies.
“Uh, that sounds rapey.”
Solar shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “For crying out loud. It’s my girlfriend’s place on the water. It’s where I dock this boat.”
Blue lights begin to splash treetops as a police car races down the road. Solar nods to the direction of the sound. “You want to wait for that? I’m sure they’re going to have all kinds of questions for you.”
“Um . . . no.” I toss him back the rope to my kayak and hop aboard his boat.
Solar pulls us away from the ramp as a Broward Sheriff’s Office car rolls into the shipyard. With the boat’s running lights off, we’re effectively invisible as we glide away.
Once we’re back on the main canal, Solar throws me a beach towel from the center console.
I take it but can’t help wondering why he’s acting so helpful.
What is he up to?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SEASIDE
Solar and I exchange few words as he navigates the canals to an older residential neighborhood in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. We pass a marine-patrol boat, and I casually wave and receive one in return. It would seem the arriving police never saw us leave.
I’m still trying to figure George Solar out. His interest in the case is suspicious. Either he’s after the money, or he’s really a retired lawman vigilante trying to right unfinished business.
The latter I find hard to believe. Sure, I could be looked upon as a vigilante of sorts, but that’s only because my life is on the line.
Or is it?
I started my own little side investigation when I realized I had a connection to Stacey. While my own personal safety is a factor, I’m also motivated by my own sense of justice—I guess. Or maybe it’s my way of dealing with the fact that Stacey may have sought me out for help when she knew she was in trouble.
We reach a long wooden dock, where a pack of mutts of questionable breeding come yapping and barking at us as Solar ties off the boat. I step onto the dock and am surrounded by a mass of fur, sniffing and inspecting me.
“Don’t mind the hounds,” says Solar. “Cindy’s into rescues.”
The yard has been torn up by the marauding dogs, but the wooden deck and house are in nice condition. It’s a large one-floor design with rows of windows and sliding glass doors overlooking a pool and expansive view.
“Nice place,” I say. It’s something you could afford on a cop salary if you got into real estate back in the 1980s. It would take me thirty years and ramen-only dinners to buy something like this.
“It’s Cindy’s. You’ll like her. She’s nosy like you.” Solar pats the scrum of dog fur and sends them off chasing a tennis ball into the bushes.
We go through a sliding glass door into a kitchen with takeout boxes piling up in the trash. “We don’t cook much,” Solar explains as he leads me into a nicely furnished living room. Beige leather couches surround a large glass coffee table covered in books and magazines. The walls are lined with bookcases and framed newspaper articles.
I take a closer look. They’re mostly investigative pieces on crime and corruption. The byline is Cynthia Trenton. She’s been a South Florida crime reporter for decades. Pulitzers, Peabodys—whatever else they give good reporters, she’s won them.
“Wait? Is your Cindy Cynthia Trenton?”
“Yep.” Solar takes a seat in an armchair and places two beers on the table. “I framed those. She hates it.”
“Huh. I never knew you two were a thing.”
“It’s not exactly a secret, but not exactly a thing we tell anyone.” He emphasizes the last part to suggest I keep my mouth shut.
I drift through the different headlines, realizing the major stories Trenton has covered. One article catches my eye in particular.
SIX NEW RIVER POLICE OFFICERS ARRESTED FOR BRIBERY
The headline isn’t that eye-catching, but the photos of the cops who were arrested are. A young George Solar’s stern police graduation photo is in the middle.
I look back at Solar. He gives me a small nod. “Framed that one too.”
“You guys have a weird relationship.”
“It’s complicated.”
I recall Jackie chastising me for saying that about Run and me. “I can imagine.” I stare at the couch next to Solar and realize I’m still wet. “Have another towel?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He grabs a towel from a hall closet and lays it on the couch. “When Cindy gets home, she can find you something.”
I get a little nervous that the talk of the girlfriend and her being home soon is just a ploy to put me at ease. What if it’s all a lie and she’s really lying dead in another room?
Solar could be at the center of all this, and I just walked into his trap.
There’s a loud knock, and I jump.
“Babe, we need to get this door fixed,” a woman shouts from the front of the house.
“I’m on it,” Solar shouts back. “We have company.”
“I hope it’s a carpenter,” she replies.
“Better. A McPherson.”
“That is interesting,” says Cynthia Trenton as she enters the room. “Ooh, and my favorite one.”
She’s probably in her late fifties, but she looks younger. Dark skinned with a disarming smile, she makes me think of a Jamaican Meryl Streep.
My hand is wrapped in hers before I know it, and she gives me a firm shake. “Georgie’s told me everything.” She notices I’m wet. “Maybe not everything. Let me find you something. I used to be skinny once. I’ll leave it on the guest-bathroom counter.”
Cynthia disappears into the back of the house, leaving me alone again with George Solar. Or Georgie, as he’s known around here.
I’m reasonably certain I’m not about to get murdered, unless this is an even more elaborate ruse than strictly necessary.
Naturally, Solar reads my mind. “Still think I’m here to kill you?”
“No,” I reply with a little hesitation.
“But you don’t trust me . . . That’s fine. It’s a good instinct. Saved my life a lot of times. We can work with that.”
“What exactly is our work?”
“Getting ourselves out from underneath this pile of crap that’s been dropped on us. Making it so you don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder.”
“And you? What’s your part in this?”
“Unfinished business.”
“That sounds ominous,” I reply.
“You have no idea. No matter how messed up and corrupt you think things are, you have no idea.”
“Enlighten me.”
“This isn’t just about a bunch of drug money that went missing. Reputations are at stake.”
“Cops?”
“Feds. Others. People who intentionally did things and people who got caught up in things they didn’t understand until too late.”
I glance over at the article on the wall with his photo. “Like you.”
“Ha. That’s a story for another day. This is bigger—more complicated.”
That word again: complicated.
“Okay. Explain.”
“We’ll start with the people back at the secret boatyard.”
“They were cops? Right?”
“No.”
“Cartel?”
“Nope.”
“Then—”
“Let me explain,” he interrupts to stop my interrupting. “DIA contractors.”
“CIA?”
“Nope. DIA. Defense Intelligence Agency. They’re kind of like the Pentagon’s own CIA. You hardly ever hear about them in the news, which they prefer.” He pauses, takes a breath, thinking. “This is oversimplified, but I’ll paint the big picture for you. Historically, the DIA ignored drug trafficking because they were focused on armed conflict. The one exception was that they were actually helping facilitate poppy farmers in Afghanistan. They let the heroin business continue so they could stabilize the country’s economy and bargai
n with the locals. Of course, this being the US government, that DIA division, called K-Group, did more than tell farmers it was okay. After some congressman raised the point that it seemed against our own interests to help the heroin trade only to have it show up in emergency rooms in the United States, K-Group decided to insist upon certain conditions in their little opiate business. Basically, better purity.”
“That’s insane,” I reply.
“Ever check the back of a pack of cigarettes? Who makes sure that nicotine is the only thing killing you? The same people collecting a dollar on every pack. The same government that spends more money on advertising the lottery among low-income populations with poor math skills than promoting adult education.” He pauses. “Damn, I’m sounding like Cindy.
“Anyway. I’m not pushing some grand conspiracy. It’s just that people will do what they’re incentivized to do. When K-Group was told to allow the sale of some heroin while making sure it was less deadly, that’s what they did. Sort of. Only, ensuring purity doesn’t make it less harmful. Worse, actually. Notice that heroin deaths are up five hundred percent since we invaded Afghanistan? Thank K-Group for part of that. Of course, the Taliban going into production overdrive, and later, ISIS, didn’t help. Nor did K-Group’s attempt to price them out of the market by lowering costs and supplying expert assistance. They even had Harvard economists making local-language manuals on cost pricing.” Solar shakes his head. “On one end are you and me, trying to put drug dealers and gunrunners away. On the other are these assholes making our jobs harder.”
“Like the CIA and the cocaine trade?” I ask. “I thought that was an exaggeration.”
“It was. The CIA hired dirtbags to drop guns into South America. Those same dirtbags used their planes and contacts to bring cocaine back. It’s not the same as saying the CIA controlled the drug trade, but it had the same effect.
“With K-Group, it was the government asking a bunch of contractors to make sure poppy farmers didn’t help the Taliban. It ended up with people on the government payroll helping to build a better product and trafficking network. Perverse incentives, as Cindy calls them.”
“Why the hell were they in South Florida? We’re not a major heroin hub, are we?”
“I’m getting to that. Mission creep. K-Group actually started to wind down as it looked like they were a little too effective. Of course, part of the problem is that K-Group didn’t want to shut down—certainly not the contractors and bankers they had working with them. Half of them were former government employees who left to start subcontracting businesses with K-Group. People made millions. They didn’t want to stop.”
“The American dream.”
Solar nods. “Then, in the middle of closed-door congressional sessions deciding the program’s fate, a miracle happened for K-Group. A miracle for them and a nightmare for the rest of us.
“DEA agents raided a cocaine-processing plant in Bolivia and found two things that freaked the hell out of them. One was a narco submarine better constructed than any they’d encountered before. The other thing is why K-Group received funding to keep doing what they’d done for heroin, now with the cocaine trade, all under the auspices of protecting our national security.”
“What was the other thing?” I ask, taking his bait.
“A North Korean nuclear scientist.”
“Wait? What?”
“Lee Yung-Un was actually a Chinese-trained engineer, but he also studied physics and shared his name with a North Korean involved in their weapons program. This made our intelligence community lose their shit. ‘What if the North Koreans were going to use a narco submarine to smuggle in a nuclear bomb?’ they asked. Why the hell the cartels would allow that, I have no idea. But they’re not exactly known as stalwarts of sanity. Pablo Escobar himself tried to get ahold of a nuclear bomb as a bargaining chip. Either way, I’m pretty sure Yung-Un was in Bolivia to build a sub for cocaine, not bombs, but that was pretense enough. The government decided that it had to do something. Since they’d spent decades fighting a losing war on drugs, the new plan was to let K-Group take over a sector of the trade to keep tabs on it. They surmised a nuclear bomb in New York was a greater threat than a bunch of cocaine flowing into Miami.”
“Holy crap,” I reply. “I can’t believe they allowed that.”
“Well, they didn’t, at first. Wiser heads in the intelligence community put a stop to it. So K-Group’s funding was cut off. Only they didn’t shut down. They didn’t need the government’s money. They were selling drugs. They had money. Billions. So instead they worked with a couple of cartels, listed their leaders as confidential informants, and kept things going.”
“Okay. I get the big picture. Why the hell am I pulled into all of this?”
“Bonaventure, one of K-Group’s lawyers and chief money launderers, was facing indictment by the FBI. He gave K-Group an ultimatum: shut down the federal investigation into him or he spills everything. Names, bank accounts. All of it.
“Remember back when he was under investigation and they were about to dig up his estate? K-Group got a friendly judge to grant an injunction. The FBI never found the money or his records.
“That’s what everyone’s after. That’s why people are willing to kill you to find them.”
Uncle Karl was underselling how bad this really is.
“So, what do we do?”
Solar holds his hands open wide. “I’m out of ideas at this point. That’s why I followed you. I was hoping you had a plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HAILER
“So what the hell are they looking for?” I finally ask.
We’ve been sitting in Cynthia’s living room without anything to say while I try to process all that Solar told me.
“Bonaventure’s files, the money. I thought that was clear.”
“Yeah, but what, exactly? Are they in a safe-deposit box? A U-Haul trailer? What were they looking for at the boatyard? And what did they expect to find on my boat?”
Solar shrugs. “Like I said, I’m not sure they even know.”
“Crack team of spies, they are,” I reply.
“In their defense, their expertise is money laundering and drug running. And most of them are K-Group contractors, not DIA employees.” He thinks it over for a moment. “No. They know roughly what they’re looking for.”
“Fine. Whatever. Let’s start with what we know—Winston was involved. What did he have to do with the missing money?”
“His role was building secret compartments for drug runners. Clearly, they must have used his services.”
“Like you said, that yard didn’t seem like the most practical location,” I reply. “Winston did other stuff. I know he worked on cars too. Maybe he made a compartment on a truck?”
“Possibly. I’m not sure why that would involve you. Maybe his daughter was trying to tell you the location of something?”
“I haven’t a clue.” This is so frustrating. We’re running in circles. I slap my damp jeans and realize I’m still holding on to the odd accessory we found from Winston’s pocket. “What about this?” I set it on a copy of The Atlantic in the middle of the coffee table.
“Is it important?” he asks.
“I know boats, and I don’t know what it is. Maybe it can tell us something about what Winston was up to.”
“Should we take a photo and do an internet search?” asks Solar.
I’m surprised by the suggestion. “Okay.” I take out my phone and upload the image to Google. It comes back with a hundred suggestions, from toilet valve to wine cork.
“Well, we tried,” says Solar.
“Wait. I know someone we could ask. Les Albert. He’s a local marine electronics guy. Everyone knows him. I’m sure he did some work with Winston. Electronics stuff.”
“Have his number?” asks Solar.
“Better. I know where he is. The Straw Hut.”
“The dive bar by the beach?”
“Yep.”
Solar ge
ts up and announces to Cynthia across the house, “The McPherson kid and I are going to a bar.”
“Make sure she puts on something dry,” she calls back.
Twenty minutes later I’m riding shotgun in Solar’s truck dressed in a pair of vintage jeans and a Police concert T-shirt.
“You go there on a date?” I ask, staring down at the shirt.
“What? Me and Cindy? I think they’d broken up by the time we met. Maybe. I don’t know. But then again, I never followed music much. Any more personal questions?”
“Sorry,” I say.
“I don’t mean it like that. It’s just that I have a few for you.”
“Me? Like what?”
“How come you have a kid but you’re not married?”
“Because it’s not 1905. Women can vote now too.”
He makes a groan. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you still seem close to your kid’s father. That’s all. I always wondered why you didn’t marry.”
I feel uncomfortable sitting next to him now. I have no idea who the heck he really is. “You always wondered? How does that not sound creepy? How long have you been into my business?”
“Ever since I looked across the courtroom and saw a little girl stare at me with murder in her eyes for tearing her family apart. I worried about what you were going to have to go through. I checked up on you,” he replies. “I know that sounds bad.”
“Maybe we don’t do the personal thing?” I say. “My shit turned out all right. Thank you.”
“Clearly,” he mumbles.
Maybe I’m being too rough on the guy. What would I do in his situation? I’ve spent so long thinking of him as an enemy from the family’s point of view, I never considered him from a cop’s standpoint.
Yeah, I would be pretty torn up watching that happen to a kid. Hell, that was why Uncle Karl’s attorney had me there. He wanted the jurors and the judge to feel bad for this kid in the hopes that they’d go easy on him.
I was a prop, I now realize. Damn it.
Besides my own father, is it possible Solar was the only other adult in the courtroom who cared about the effect the trial was having on me? Man, this is so . . . complicated.