DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  “Well, Maria is Pedro’s cousin or something, I guess. She’s the one works out things at Tireman’s. She was . . . Pedro gimme her number when we was inside together. Day I got out I called her up. She told me to take a bus, so I did. She told me to go to Tireman’s and apply for a job. So I did that, too. Filled out an application and everything.”

  “She ever ask you about cops?”

  “No. She checked me for a wire once. Looked at my debit card for a micro-recorder — everything.”

  “Because she suspected you were talking to the police or what?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “She seemed pretty ready to throw you under the bus when I showed up. And you were sure I’d blown it for you. Here’s my question . . . why does Pedro get his girlfriend to bond you out? Because you have to understand how this looks . . . Two weeks before this burglary happens and you’re out. And because you’re out, I’m up here looking at you. Like somebody wants me looking at certain things over here to keep me distracted from other things happening who knows where.”

  Beck watched the TV, his jaw twitching. “They just didn’t like me, that’s all I know.”

  “Maria Lucia ever talk about killing a statewide attorney?”

  “No.”

  “How about robbing one? Breaking into her house and taking stuff from her?”

  “No.”

  “What about when you heard Lemon’s name mentioned? Was it Maria talking? Alejandro talking?”

  “Could be.”

  “Could be? What’s that mean? Back in the diner you said you’d heard the girl’s name mentioned. Now you’re not sure? Come on, man, don’t jerk me around.”

  “Yeah, I heard Maria and Alejandro talking the other night. They were in the other room. I heard the word ‘Lemon.’ But I ain’t sayin’ I know what it meant. They coulda been talking about cookin’ food.”

  Tom heard a car rolling up outside, tires crunching gravel. “Hang on.”

  He got up, stepped to the side of the door and leaned in to look through the peephole with his hand on the grip of his gun. It was hard to see anything. He ducked down and eased the curtain aside. Outside, he spotted a middle-aged man and woman get out of a sedan. They looked like tourists. They walked to the front office and went inside.

  Beck was looking worried. “They out there?”

  “Nah.”

  Tom sat down, his mind instantly back on Beck’s half-baked story. “So. Cooking food? What the hell just happened? I’m going to bat for you with my people, trying to get you help and you’re playing games with me?”

  “Look, here it is.” Beck’s lower lip trembled. His hands were shaking. “Pedro wanted me to burn it down, okay?”

  “Burn it down? The rim shop?”

  “They’re stealing from him.”

  “Who? Maria?”

  “Maria, Teddy Alfonso, Alejandro — all of them. Pedro said they was stealin’ from him. He bonded me out to come up here and burn it down. The shop, their place — burn it down. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I went to work for them. But it’s like they could smell it on me.”

  Tom let that sink in: Pedro’s willingness to kill his own family because he believed they were stealing some of his money while they cleaned it. What a messy life, drug trafficking. He cracked a fresh beer and handed it to Beck. Beck had his head lowered to hide the fact that he was crying. He drank the beer and regained some composure.

  Tom said, “So you never heard anything about the girl. You just need protection, is that it?”

  Beck struggled to meet Tom’s eyes. He nodded.

  “Okay.” He pawed at his face. That Beck had lied about the girl was hugely disheartening. But there was still more to be pulled out of him, information that might possibly lead him to the girl. “Well, we can work that out — your protection. But let’s stay on the straight and narrow here, okay? Whatever you give me from this point on has to be one-hundred-percent legit. All right? No more bullshit.”

  “All right.”

  “When you were inside with him, Pedro ever talk about fences?”

  “Fences?”

  “People who can take something like Treasury bonds and liquidate them — turn them into cash. And for the record, I don’t think Maria Lucia and Alejandro Colon are those people.”

  “Pedro didn’t talk about that.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “His daughters.”

  Tom slid his notepad out of his bag and searched for a pen. “Which ones?”

  “Uhm, Valentina. He called her Evvy.”

  “Oh yeah? Evvy? What does she do?” He wrote down the name.

  “She runs the boat place. You know what I’m saying, the stone-crabbing place? Everglades City.”

  “What did he say about her?”

  “You know, just talk. He’s proud of her.”

  “Is she in the business?”

  “Yeah, she’s in the business.”

  “Who else? He talk about his other kids?”

  “Isabella’s his youngest girl. She got hitched to some TV guy or something and they live in Fort Myers. Pedro’s oldest son, Edgar, he’s dead. But Pedro’s got another son — I forget his name — Emilio, maybe.”

  “What about Pedro’s brothers?”

  “He didn’t talk about them much. I don’t think they get along. Only one of ’em lives in Florida, anyway.”

  Tom reached into the twelve-pack and took out a beer for himself. They talked for two more hours, Tom occasionally getting up to check the windows. He didn’t think anyone would find them — he’d lost them way back before the interstate.

  At around midnight, he called Detective Gomez to tell him where he was and what was happening. Skokie hadn’t called back or texted.

  By twelve thirty, Beck had finished half the beer and was telling stories about his childhood and talking freely about his time inside with Pedro. “We didn’t talk all the time. I didn’t share a cell with him. We would see each other in the yard, sometimes at mealtimes. He’d asked me how I’s doin. And we’d just . . . talk. Shoot the breeze. After a while, though, we didn’t talk as much. He had this guy in there . . . Lupton.”

  “Lupton?”

  “Yeah. Pedro spent more time hangin’ with him than me. Didn’t have much more to say to me until he came up with the thing to burn down the rim shop. I thought, ‘I’ll say yes, and then I’ll stall on it.’ I just wanted to make enough money to get up to Georgia — see my girl.”

  “Tell me more about Lupton. First name?”

  “Michael. They call him Mick.”

  “Okay. Tell me.”

  Beck shrugged. His eyelids were dropping. “Not sure what there is to tell. Lupton was friendly with a correctional officer and — well, there was this one time I could tell they were talking about something important. They got together, but it was behind this pillar. Know what I did? I watched them in a reflection in some glass.” Beck seemed pleased with his spying abilities. Tom asked where Lupton was at and Beck said he didn’t know.

  Tom rolled his neck and shoulders. “So, which is it? You think Pedro robbed Statewide Prosecutor Stephanie Balfour to help pay for his bond? Or you think he still wants to kill her?”

  “I don’t know. He was — for a little while — he was scheming about how to come up with the bond money. And he talked about killing her a couple times. But I did hear him talking with Lupton once. In the yard.”

  “Oh yeah? About what?”

  “About somebody in debt or something. Somebody who owed.”

  “Owed? Owed what? Like a gambling debt?”

  “I don’t know. But kinda like . . . I got the feeling they were talking about somebody like me, you know? Somebody to take advantage of.”

  “A debt.” Tom pulled out the notebook and wrote it down. “What else? Come on, man. Who did Pedro hire to hit the Balfour place?”

  “I don’t know! He’s got people all over.” Beck’s expressions were exaggerated from his beer buzz,
his head lolling.

  “I need names, man.”

  “I don’t remember. I was in there for four months. Pedro talked about a lot of people. I’m tired.”

  “Was Lupton one of the guys in this heist?”

  “Maybe.” Beck lay back on the bed and set his beer bottle on the floor but it fell over. He ran his hands over his face and took a deep breath. A minute later he was snoring.

  Tom looked over all his notes and then lay looking up at the ceiling, thinking until he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ELIMINATING POSSIBILITIES

  In the morning, Tom went around to the truck while assessing the other parked cars for potential threats. He took out his bag of clothes and brought it inside, showered quickly and changed, then gave Wilbur Beck some of the clothes. Beck went into the bathroom. Tom turned on the TV with the volume up and called Skokie.

  “So you didn’t get much,” Skokie said. “We already know about Evvy’s little operation — Everglades County have had a wire up on Valentina Vasquez and her people for months. Jarvis has been running it.”

  “I thought that all went down in the storm.”

  “It did, but there was no prior intelligence that she was planning a heist. What else did Beck give you?”

  “What have we got on Mick Lupton?”

  “Pedro’s number-two guy?”

  “That’s his number-two guy? Then that’s what I’ve got. Beck said he did a lot of talking with Pedro while they were both inside — about some guy who owed Pedro, Beck thinks. Could be Lupton and this other guy are our house burglars.”

  “Beck never told Everglades County about any of that.”

  “About Lupton being important? Or the thing with the debt?”

  “Neither one. Far as I know, Lupton got out but vaporized in the hurricane like everybody else.”

  “I want to check him out,” Tom said. “What’s his usual deal?”

  “Uhm . . .” Skokie shuffled some papers, did some clicking. “He’s not really anybody of any significance. If he was Pedro’s main man inside, it’s probably only because Pedro didn’t have anybody else. Lupton is just a maintenance guy. He works on the boats.”

  “At Evvy’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well that’s where I’m going next.”

  “Oh yeah? Just roll on down there and start asking questions?”

  “That’s the whole point of me being part of this thing, isn’t it?”

  “You’d be like a hunk of bread dropped in a koi pond.”

  “Delicious, you mean.”

  “We need Beck on the record,” Skokie said. “With Pedro’s specific plan for killing a prosecutor.”

  “Pedro never laid out any such plan for Beck. County acted on the threat alone, called us up. That’s it. Beck says Pedro dropped it after a while.”

  “Well he clearly had a plan for the heist. For hurting Balfour if not killing her.”

  “Maybe. Or it’s his daughter Valentina who was behind it. She gets an idea to put a little hurt on the statewide prosecutor who added another lock on her father’s cage. Pedro . . . maybe he doesn’t even know how it happened. Maybe that way he has plausible deniability — it can’t come back to him.”

  “I don’t know, that’s—”

  “This is how I think.”

  “We need Beck on record first and then we’ll get a warrant to search Evvy’s.”

  “You can take him, get him on record, but we don’t need a warrant. I’m just going to ask a few questions. You get a warrant, everybody shows up in body armor, and if they’ve got the girl stashed there, they move her.”

  “Lange, this isn’t how—”

  “Everglades County went through six targets before they got to the Vasquez family. I don’t want to take that and throw it all away — years of Danny Coburn’s work that precedes Jarvis — because some informant told me Pedro Vasquez has loyal children. The warrant wouldn’t hold up. And there’s already bad blood between our department and county vice narcotics.”

  “Bad blood? What the hell are y—?”

  “County hate FDLE because sometimes we investigate other cops. There’s no point pretending they don’t. Ed, just let me ask some questions on my own, okay? I don’t think we’re ready for the cavalry yet.”

  Skokie was quiet for a moment. “Listen . . . on our end we got ballistics back on the bullet inside Brian Hollister and the one from the Jaguar. They’re a match, which isn’t surprising. Both 9mms. We’re missing one round. It could’ve gone with the storm or it could be embedded in the shooter’s vehicle. Reconstruction tells us the cars were side by side. The man was shot first, pop-pop. Woman probably tried to get out of the car — we found her prints streaking the glass — then she gets shot too.”

  “There you go.”

  “There you go what?”

  “If there’s a lookout, he’s sitting in the vehicle. So the angles are wrong.”

  “The angles are wrong for what? For your theory that one of the burglars is a swell guy? Let’s deal with what we know. It’s the round that went through the woman’s head we haven’t recovered. Meaning it managed to get through her and the window.”

  “Forensics show which way the window broke?”

  “From the inside out. We’ve got eyes out for anything with a bullet hole in the side of it. And that’s an end you can work. Quietly, peaceably. Go around to wrecking companies, auto salvage yards, use your street charms.”

  “With all due respect, you need to come here, take Beck, get him up to Tallahassee and on the record. In the meantime, I can just talk to Valentina. Then, I swear, if there’s nothing there, I’ll go around looking for bullet holes.”

  Skokie let out a frustrated exhalation. “Christ, you’re stubborn.” He paused. “All right. Jesus. But you need to let Everglades County know what you’re doing. Okay?”

  Tom heard a flush and Beck moving around in the bathroom. “Thanks, Ed.”

  “Just keep it in the pocket. I need you to stay in one whole piece, Lange.”

  Beck came out and sat down wearing Tom’s clothes, a bit big on him but better than the grubby mechanic’s outfit. Tom hung up, slipped his phone into his pocket and they watched the news while waiting for Florida Highway Patrol to take Beck to the state capitol.

  * * *

  A missing person’s case was like a murder. You started with a lot of possibilities and then had to eliminate them, one by one. Certain possibilities were persistent and fought against elimination.

  When Tom was a kid, he and Nick would steal cigarettes and vodka from Don Omar, his foster family’s neighbor. Tom would keep watch while Nick snuck through the cellar door and up into the house to make the grab. There was always a guy on lookout.

  Forensics pointed to one weapon, so it was a single shooter. One of the burglars clipped the Hollisters, and it was a guy standing in the street. But a lookout wouldn’t have been standing in the street. He’d have been sitting in the getaway car, ready to hit the gas. Beck had mentioned some guy he thought Pedro was taking advantage of, in some sort of indentured servitude because the guy owed him something. Maybe there was a connection. Maybe such a guy had been there at the scene but not by choice. And the killing of the Hollisters had left a living witness: a little girl. He could have decided to take her away instead of killing her.

  If there had been conflict between burglars, there was no evidence it had turned violent. And anyway, they weren’t going to waste time arguing for long; they had to get to work dealing with the bodies — dragging them out of the Jaguar to be consumed by the storm. Then what? The hurricane is coming back, so they take the girl, put her in their car and hightail it out of there.

  Would they stay together? Not for long. Two men and a little girl looks worse than one. If they’d split up, when and where did it happen? Was one of them still running? Halfway across the country by now maybe? Going where? The risks would increase with every hour they were on the road. You take a kid on a long car ride and it�
�s going to raise eyebrows — a seven-year-old girl who just witnessed a murder? She’s freaked out, she’s crying, she doesn’t want to be with the killers.

  Somebody had to have seen or heard something. A scared kid in a rest area or store parking lot? A tantrum? A moment she tried to get away on foot? No one had reported anything like that. The feds had given out information to thousands of cops across the country and it was all about to go public, so maybe that would change and they’d hear something about a kid in distress halfway to Mexico.

  You’ve got a little girl, a freaked-out living witness, what do you do?

  Maybe you’ve got your own neck to save so you dump her somewhere. If she wasn’t holed up with Maria Lucia and Alejandro Colon, maybe it was Valentina Vasquez herself who had Lemon Madras.

  You leave the girl with them, and then you disappear.

  It was a lot of ifs and maybes, but what was the alternative? That the girl was no longer alive. That the storm had swallowed her up.

  In order to get past the possibility that Valentina Vasquez had her, he needed to eliminate it.

  * * *

  He drove with the windows down, sweat-soaked clothes clinging to him like a second skin. The A/C in his truck wasn’t working. He’d been living in Florida for years now, yet he still had the thick blood of a northerner, allergic to too much heat.

  The wind thundered in the open windows and his mind swung from the missing girl to Katie, working for the County Crime Scene Bureau and dealing with dead bodies. Then to Vance, who hadn’t looked so good when they’d met for lunch. He’d seemed withdrawn, even considering the usual distance Vance kept. Something else had been present in the corner of his eyes, crouched there.

  Carnestown was near the very southernmost tip of Florida, a hundred miles south of Tampa. Tom pulled into a dirt lot outside a diner and called Terry Jarvis. The vice narcotics sergeant was not happy to hear Tom’s plan.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m not.” Tom hit the dashboard with the heel of his palm, trying to fix his stalling A/C.

  Jarvis was quiet a moment. “You and I met, you know. Well . . . we might have met. Up in Tampa. During your Gallo case.”