DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  She’d lost her smile. “You were doing so well. You were doing so well and then you had to make a threat.”

  “Not a threat, just the facts. Like you said, cards on the table.”

  Her eyes went cold. “Mr. Lange, we’re a struggling business, a small family operation, just trying to recover from a devastating storm. And because my father — who has nothing to do with me . . .” She trailed off, shook her head. “I’ve got to get back to work. There’s a lot to do around here. You can show yourself out.”

  “I’m sorry.” He raised his hands and stood up. “Thank you for your time.”

  He left.

  * * *

  He drove off Plantation Island and into Everglades City, passing trailers, small houses, and fishing and chartering operations, the newest theory — or branch of a theory — roaring in his head. The dark patch of dirt . . . the holes in the shed. It was hard to detect signs of a skirmish when everything had been so disrupted by the storm, but they were there if you looked. Right or wrong, they staged a certain scene, in which a couple of men hightail it back to Evvy’s after the botched heist, washed out roads or not, and then have their confrontation over the girl they’ve brought with them.

  The warrant wasn’t exactly a bluff. From what he’d seen and what Valentina had said, Blythe could certainly get a state judge to sign off on one. And Skokie seemed ready for it based on Wilbur Beck alone. But, as Tom had warned Skokie, if someone was hiding the girl — if there was any chance she was alive — a warrant could end it all. Coming to Evvy’s had been a move to stir the pot and see what came to the surface. And what had surfaced for Tom was a clear feeling that the girl was nearby.

  On the outskirts of Everglades City, he swung around to a place he’d been on a previous case. The overwater bungalow was wrecked, just a pile of boards someone had dragged up onto the shore, a few broken pieces floating around at the edge of the sawgrass.

  Further up on shore, the airboat with Jungle Ned painted on the side was still there, too. As far as Tom knew, Ned himself remained in Jerome Correctional, sharing air with Pedro Vasquez. He’d once run airboats for tourists to cruise the Glades looking for alligators and panthers. Tom had worked the case with an agent named Rhodes out of the Miami ROC. If Pedro, or maybe Valentina, had needed transportation through the swamp, why not ask old Jungle Ned?

  He got back in his car and drove north to Carnestown and pulled back into the diner. Iowa Schnell, Ned’s daughter, might still work there. But first he had a call to make.

  In Florida, the DEA had their Miami Field Division in Weston and a district office in Tampa covering the west-central part of the state. Tom keyed in the number for Miami.

  “We don’t give out information on ongoing operations to state agents,” the man on the phone said, irritable.

  “I’m not looking for anything specific. Just general info. How much activity there might be in the southeast, southwest part of the state — any known hideouts, things like that. Could you get me someone willing to talk about it? Have them call me back.”

  “All right, sir.”

  Tom left his number and ended the call.

  The Drug Enforcement Agency in Miami was primarily concerned about stuff coming in from Columbia. Occasionally they might bust a growing operation. What had happened in Lee County a few years before was a good example: a guy had half a million in plants growing in his converted garage and the DEA took it down. Sometimes they fought with the pharmacies over the sale of hydrocodone and oxy. And in the central part of the state, meth was the big challenge — where it was coming in from. But in the southwest, it was like Jack Vance was always saying: wide open. There was plenty of room to spread out and hide: backwaters and swamps, nature preserves and Indian reservations — untouched, off-grid and no cell towers to ping off of.

  Tom left the car and tracked across the dirt parking lot toward the diner, everything dry and hot, the sun’s fire beating down on his head. He took a table at the far end of the row of booths, furthest from the door. When the waitress came, he ordered an iced tea and asked if Iowa Schnell still worked there.

  “Not for a couple months.” She looked sweaty and bored, like she could arm-wrestle him and win. “I’ll go get you your tea.”

  He sat there watching the gas station across the road, and he could just make out the radio antenna sticking up from the small sheriff’s office half a mile away. It was the place where he’d interviewed Iowa Schnell when her boyfriend had turned up dead in his boat.

  The waitress set down his iced tea with a clunk and some of it slopped over onto the table. He put aside the straw and sucked down the cold, sugary drink. When it was gone, he pulled out a five-dollar bill to leave on the table.

  Someone was looking at him.

  It was just for a second from across the restaurant, the booth almost all the way to the front door at the other end. He had short black hair and brown skin — Latino. He’d just been clocking Tom, their eyes had connected for a beat, and now he was tucking into his meal.

  Tom relaxed. Maybe it was paranoia. But if it was something else, it was a good sign. He was on the right trail, maybe.

  Next, he called Dale Rhodes, who owned a little slice of swamp in the area, nothing on it but a shack and his own chained-up airboat for cruising around in the glades. Tom had gone on a trip with him when they’d finished their investigation.

  “Lange? Shit, buddy, good to hear from you.”

  “How you doing, Dale?” Tom kept his eye on the stranger and his voice low.

  “I’m good, man, I’m good. Two months into retirement. If the rest of it is as good as this, I think I’ll renew my membership.”

  “Listen, I’m over here in Carnestown . . .”

  “Oh boy — you sniffing around after Iowa Schnell? I thought you had a woman?”

  “I need a favor.”

  * * *

  He went back out into the full heat of the day and found shade round the side of the diner. He hung back in the shadows, keeping watch on the front door for his new friend from the diner. While he was waiting, his cell phone jittered in his pocket.

  “Lange.”

  “Agent Lange? John Kitteridge, DEA.”

  “Hey, thanks for calling me back.”

  “You wanted to know about, ah . . . hideouts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, if we know about it, it’s not a hideout. Anyway, before I say anything else, I’m going to need some identity verification.”

  “Sure.” Tom rattled off his badge number to the drug agent.

  “And what’s this for?”

  “Doing research.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’re just looking at southwest Florida?”

  “Well, you know, anything south of Orlando, for starters.”

  “I mean . . . that’s twenty, thirty sites that are now defunct.”

  “There’s got to be some hot spots that you guys know about.”

  “No. And even if there were, nothing I could tell you about. For your, ah, research project.”

  “Would it help if I said I was looking for Lemon Madras?”

  A pause. “The kid from the hurricane heist?”

  “Is that what it’s being called?”

  “Press conference was this morning. From your department. You sure you’re, ah—”

  “I’m on the move,” Tom said. “They’ve kind of got me out here on my own, so I didn’t see it. Listen, I’ll tell you what . . . I’ll give you a secure email address and if you can send me those defunct sites, I’d appreciate it. And, you know, you want to send anything else you think might help, that would be appreciated, too.”

  “Agent Lange, huh?”

  Tom could hear the smirk in Kitteridge’s voice.

  “That’s me.”

  “Let me give you something. We had a guy once — we were looking for a place . . . hideout, stash house, whatever you want to call it. So we got into the guy’s taxes. He had a second home, a third home. And he wrote them o
ff as business expenses. You know, big cheesedick dope runner, but he’s going to be sure he’s keeping everything he can from Uncle Sam. He claims the properties as deductions on his Schedule-C. So, there it was. We flew over, got the infrared out, found his cocaine operation, and that was it.”

  “I’ll look forward to your email.”

  “You got to get Uncle Sam working for you.”

  “Good advice. Thanks, Kitteridge.”

  As he rang off, the wind kicked up clouds of sand that tickled against his skin. After it blew through, he saw the guy from the diner leave through the front door, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The guy headed to a black Yukon at the far end of the lot and got in, started it up. He drove off and headed north, back to 41 and Tom wrote down the plate number.

  Rhodes arrived about twenty minutes later. He wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, jeans and a battered white t-shirt. As they switched vehicles, Rhodes asked, “You going to tell me what this is about?”

  “I will when I can. By the way, I forgot to tell you — the A/C is out in the truck.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Florida hot doesn’t have nothing on Texas hot.”

  “When are you going to let that go?”

  “What?”

  “Being from Texas.”

  “Soon as you let go being from New England or wherever the fuck. People here are all from somewhere else.”

  “Except Blythe.”

  “That’s right.” Rhodes got a look in his eye. He had a thing for Blythe. “How’s she doing?”

  “She moved up. She’s SAC.”

  “Man, that’s sexy.”

  “You’re a chauvinist, Rhodes.”

  “I’m a gentleman. Women can have it all . . . I don’t care. Supervisors, presidents — all the better. I’m still going to like them just the same.”

  Tom slipped behind the wheel of Rhodes’s new Acura TLX and rolled the window down. “Thanks for the ride. Be gentle with my truck, all right?”

  Rhodes tipped his hat and got in the pickup. He blew a half-circle in the dirt and sped away in a cloud of boiling dust.

  * * *

  Tom sat in Rhodes’s Acura, luxuriating in the frigid air blowing from the vents. Lupton had to be coming along soon. He lived in Old Marco Junction, twenty miles north. There was no other way out from Plantation Island except through Everglades City and up Route 29 to Route 41, right where Tom was sitting. Only he wouldn’t recognize Tom in this vehicle.

  He turned on the stereo. Rhodes had satellite radio, currently tuned in on a Beethoven symphony. Rhodes? Classical music? People were full of surprises.

  When Lupton drove through at dusk, Tom followed. He hung back and kept the music playing. They went up 41. Not only had the flooding receded, the road was dry as a bone, baking in the heat. You’d never know there had been a hurricane, except for the way the greenery had been stripped and the detritus littered everywhere along the road: scattered bits of mangrove; plastic bags and newspapers clogging the gutters; various bits of junk floating in the creeks — and that lingering sulfurous smell in the air, as though hell was getting closer.

  They passed a cleanup crew, a bunch of landscapers working overtime, no doubt. Tom hung back from Lupton and they drew closer to Old Marco Junction, then Lupton passed by Sandpiper Road. They slowed down to observe a 35-mph sign and wound along a brick road bisected by a median of palm trees, past walled condo estates and man-made ponds.

  When they came out onto Collier Boulevard, Lupton made a left instead of a right. Maybe the address was wrong. Outdated. Tom followed him over the bridge to Marco Island. Within a few minutes, Lupton was pulling into a shopping plaza. Tom rolled past and found a parking spot fifty yards away. He got out of Rhodes’s Acura and watched as Lupton walked into a gym carrying a duffel bag.

  Tom waited a minute, looked around, got back into the car and found a closer spot where he had a partial view through the wide gym windows. He took out his camera — with its telephoto lens — and used the LCD viewing screen to watch.

  Lupton walked into view and posed for himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors as he curled some dumbbells. He was wearing one of those clingy tank tops that showed most of his meaty upper body. He sat down at the overhead press, eyes locked on his reflection and grimacing, his face reddening. His set finished, he got up and moved around a bit, appraising his reflection from different angles. He rotated his arms, flexing the bulging snakes of his triceps muscles. He had another bruise, this one around his elbow, purple and yellow. Tom snapped a few pictures for the sake of it.

  Then Lupton looked in Tom’s direction.

  Tom quickly lowered the camera. “Shit.”

  But there was no way Lupton could have heard anything. Tom was in a car twenty yards away with walls between them. He re-aimed the camera as Lupton strode across the gym and paused to say something to another guy. Lupton laughed and one of his massive slabs of chest muscle twitched, the way Tom imagined a horse’s ass might twitch to reject a fly. Then Lupton moved out of sight.

  Tom put away the camera. So far, he didn’t seem the sympathetic type to abscond with a little girl in order to keep her alive. Not if she was a witness. He didn’t seem the type to trouble himself with anything like that. Maybe both the lookout — if there even was one — and the girl — if she’d been there — were underground or underwater, as Skokie had insinuated all along. It was the grimmest of theories, and to get past it, it too had to be eliminated. There was only one way Tom could think of to do that.

  Keeping a watch on the gym, he picked up the phone to call Skokie. Lupton had only been inside fifteen minutes and guys like him tended to linger — so he figured he had time to make this call. Still, Tom waited until he had a visual again. Lupton reappeared on his way to the bench press and Tom keyed the number.

  “Lange! Good stuff. You’re alive.”

  “That’s funny. I’m on Lupton.”

  “How did it go with Valentina Vasquez?”

  “She’s very sweet. I’m seventy-five percent sure she knows what happened to the girl, but I’m ninety-five that Lupton knows. He was in Jerome with Pedro. He’s Pedro’s muscle. He’s loyal — gets out of prison and goes right back to working at Evvy’s.”

  “What’s he driving?”

  “Ford F150.”

  “Got the plate?”

  Tom read it off to Skokie. Skokie asked where he was.

  “Hop’s Gym on Marco Island. Lupton is inside, hitting the free weights.”

  “Okay, here’s the registration . . . the Ford belongs to Valentina Vasquez. She’s got four vehicles in her name . . . a Lexus, the Ford that Lupton is driving, a Camaro and a Honda.”

  “How about a black Yukon? Probably this year’s model.”

  “A what?”

  “A new GMC Yukon.” Tom gave him the plate number for that, too.

  It took a few seconds. “Uh, showing Janice Hawkes as the registrant. Immokalee.”

  “Reported stolen?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Can you see about Hawkes for me? What her story is?”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “But . . . so, Lupton doesn’t come up anywhere? He’s not a known safe-cracker?”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice and easy? I told you, Michael Lupton is a maintenance guy. He went down with Pedro Vasquez when they seized the boat with the stolen motor. He’d done the work on it, so they locked him up, too.”

  “So we at least know he’s good with his hands.”

  “From engine work to safe-cracking, you mean? I don’t think so. We got a guy we like for the safe-cracking. Angus Hale.”

  “Scottish guys don’t crack safes.”

  Skokie was quiet. “Is that a joke? I can never tell with you.”

  “Who are his known associates?”

  “Hale’s? We’re looking. But he seems to work alone. He was arrested back in ’02 for breaking into a Miami hotel. Looted all the valuables in the safe. He’s been out for two years
.”

  “How about someone who was indebted to Pedro? Anyone come up who fits that profile? There could be a guy he helped out? Maybe someone he sprung from jail in return for a little light burgling in the future?”

  “We’re still determining that.”

  It was getting late and Tom found himself missing Katie. “All right. Well, I’m staying with this guy until I can talk to him somewhere private. Right now, he’s on his back with some big guy on top of him.”

  “What?”

  “Just a guy spotting for Lupton as he bench-presses a small car.”

  “Seriously, what did Valentina say?”

  “She thought I was charming. No, she really did. Listen, Ed, this is where it’s at . . . Between Pedro and Valentina and Lupton, these are our people behind the Balfour job.”

  “Let’s say you’re right — what’ve you got that’s solid? Anything I can work with, get you some help?”

  “I’m getting there. Talk to you in a bit.”

  He hung up on Skokie mid-sentence, ran his fingers through his hair then turned the A/C down. It was actually getting too cold for him.

  He watched Lupton some more. Done with the bench press, he checked his phone before moving on to a nautilus machine to do pull-downs. The guy was all over the place, working every muscle group in his upper body. He got up and walked out of sight again. Tom thought he was finished. A wet-haired Lupton came out of the place ten minutes later and walked to the F150 truck. Tom followed him out of the plaza and then off Marco Island.

  They drove north on Collier Boulevard, then Lupton turned right on to Port Au Prince Road. He slowed, observing another 35-mph sign, then made a final right on to Salinas. Tom checked the GPS in the Acura. Salinas was a dead end.

  He drove past the entrance and then did a three-point turn in the road, crept back to Salinas and turned in. Another sign read SLOW! WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN, with the same message written in Spanish on the sign beside it. It was a small, working-class neighborhood. Tom saw the Ford pickup and then Lupton, headed into a little pale blue house with a chain-link fence wrapping the yard.

  Tom drove to the end of the street and stopped, looking at the house in the side mirror, wondering if, by any chance, there happened to be a little girl inside. He sat with the Acura idling.