DEAD OR ALIVE a totally addictive thriller with a breathtaking twist

by T. J. Brearton

  Rhodes had another pull and finished his beer. He was looking to catch their waitress’s eye as he explained, “The Trail People have got a single reservation. Alligator Alley drives right through it. And there’s the Miccosukee Indian Village on 41. Tourist stuff, but with residences back in there. The long house — you know, the place the tribal elders get together. So anyway, if the two of you saw someone and they were an American Indian, then that probably makes them Miccosukee. Otherwise it was someone maybe trying to be Miccosukee or Seminole based on something they saw online. But I don’t know why they’d do that.”

  The waitress came with their breakfasts. Rhodes ordered another beer, Malone opted for water and then they dove into the food. Rhodes dropped the rest of his knowledge while chewing. The Miccosukee were not Seminole, but some Seminole were Miccosukee. The Seminole tribe was originally an alliance between some Creek, Miccosukee, Hitchiti, Oconee and other Indians. Most Miccosukee joined the Seminole, while others considered themselves distinct.

  “And, like the Seminole,” Rhodes said, sucking the grease off his fingers, “not all Miccosukee live on the res.” He wiped up with a napkin, pushed his latest empty beer bottle aside and started picking at his teeth. “So, listen, I like a good clusterfuck as much as the next guy . . .”

  Malone shook his head. “We don’t think he left the state.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are only a couple of ways out of Florida — on the main roads anyway. Day before Hector made landfall — literally just a few hours before it came into Naples — traffic on 75 was insane. Gas stations closed and there were people with multiple gas cans on trailers or on top of their vehicles. Georgia had military at the exits to keep people from trying to get gas. There are side roads he could’ve taken, of course, but people were winding all over through the little towns and taking forever.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I know . . .” Rhodes said, “Florida does not have a very good mass evacuation plan.”

  Malone shook his head, agreeing. “Not at all. And we’ve got this other one coming.”

  Tom looked at Malone. “Another one?”

  “Yeah, I forget, you’ve been running around off-grid. Another hurricane is coming. It’s way out in the Atlantic right now. Might not be as bad, but National Weather Service is saying now we’re about a week out.”

  “So he stays in the state,” Rhodes said. “He comes down here with the girl, gives her to Valentina Vasquez and she sends the girl up to Emilio’s. That’s the thinking? And then what? Where do they go from there?”

  “They didn’t hear us,” Tom said.

  “No, I don’t think they heard us,” Malone agreed. “They were already gone.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Rhodes said after a moment. “A property owned by a Vasquez family member deep in a wild state preserve but close to Evvy’s.”

  Maybe Valentina had a heart after all and had sent the little girl up there to keep her hidden. Maybe they’d moved her when Tom confronted Valentina and then Mick Lupton. Someone local might have seen something. A Miccosukee Indian who’d then gotten into some ancient ritual. For what? To try and scare people off?

  Or, it was meaningless. He and Malone had been out there in endless square miles of swamp and could have wandered into tribal territory accidentally.

  “So, what do you do now?” Rhodes asked. He looked between Tom and Malone. “You send everybody in and canvass the swamp?”

  Malone answered again. “Not until there’s confirmation the girl was at Emilio’s cabin. We got to prove it with the stuffed animal.”

  “If the parents can confirm it visually . . .” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe.”

  They finished eating, paid the bill and walked out into the bright morning. The day was still heating up, and they heard the distant turbulence of thunder. Rhodes took off in his Acura for Miami to get the equipment he needed to come back and retrieve and fix his buggy. Tom and Malone rode north to Naples and Tom stopped into the Naples field office. Tom checked for emails from Blythe and Skokie, who said they’d gotten the pictures and were talking to people, including the girl’s parents. Then he said goodbye to Malone, got in his pickup truck and drove another fifteen miles north to Bonita Springs. He’d been expecting Jack Vance at the security gate, but when he pulled up, there was another guy, Ortiz, in his place. Ortiz smiled and waved at Tom.

  Tom slowed. “Didn’t Jack have a shift this morning?”

  Ortiz shrugged and hitched his pants. “Yeah, think it was Jack. I got called in for the shift. I took it.”

  “Know why?”

  “No, sorry. I don’t. Have a good day, Mr. Lange.”

  Mr. Lange. He’d never get used to hearing that. Living in a gated community made him feel strange sometimes. Even though this wasn’t some place for the rich — the people living here were mostly working or retired — and he’d busted his butt to get here, he couldn’t shake the feeling he didn’t belong. Maybe it was because he’d bought his place here using some of Nick’s money left over after paying down Nick’s debts and selling his big place over by the Gulf. Like it was ill-gotten, even if Nick would’ve wanted it for him.

  By the time he keyed into his condo it was just before 9 a.m. He showered in the spare bathroom and climbed into bed, conked out within five minutes. It seemed like only a few seconds had passed before he woke to someone kissing him. He opened his eyes and saw that the light in the room had changed; the clock on the bedside table said it was 2 p.m. Katie bent down and kissed him again. This time he kissed her back, arched his back, grabbed her, took her into the bed with him.

  He rolled over on top of her, stopped and looked into her eyes, trying to get a read. She wiped the tear from his eye with the ball of her thumb, then stretched to kiss him. She pulled his boxer shorts down and pushed them the rest of the way with her foot. He slid her underpants down her thighs. Then she took a hold of him and guided him inside her. Her breath was warm in his ear as they moved together. The trees swayed beyond the lanai as the sun dropped towards the Gulf.

  It felt like the kind of sex you have before she leaves you.

  * * *

  After they were done and she’d showered off, she sat on the edge of the bed looking at him. “You okay?”

  “I saw a bear,” he said. “And an alligator.”

  “You find anything else?”

  “Maybe something.” He checked his phone and saw three calls he’d slept through, two from Blythe.

  He hit the callback button on his phone and Blythe’s end was ringing as Katie stood and walked away.

  “Hey, wait,” he said. “Let’s . . .”

  She was already gone by the time Blythe answered. “Father and mother both separately confirmed the toy is hers. The father is losing his mind. I don’t think he’s slept for the past three days. He demanded I tell him where it was found.”

  “You called him?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “No, I mean . . . Never mind. What’s next?”

  “What’s next is the toy goes to the lab for testing.”

  “I don’t have it . . .”

  “I know you don’t have it. A team has already been sent back in with a warrant.”

  Blythe worked fast. Or someone was working fast — someone powerful enough to alert a judge, get a warrant and assemble a team to go retrieve a child’s toy from a remote cabin in the swamp all in a few hours.

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did.”

  “I mean, why didn’t you come break down my door.”

  “I thought you’d need some rest.”

  He heard Katie in the kitchen. It sounded like she was getting ready to leave. “Testing that stuffed animal is going to take five, six weeks,” he said. “We’ll have to compare with Lemon’s parents’ genetic profiles since she’s not going to be in any database.”

  “We’ll push it.”

  “We can’t reinvent chemistry. That’s not going to get
us Lemon Madras.”

  Blythe was silent a moment. “I know that.”

  “So, like I said, what’s next?”

  “I think you gotta work the car.”

  He stood up in his underwear, looking for his pants. “Katie!” he called. “Hang on!” To Blythe he said, “That’s the same angle. The car gets us a name, maybe. What about the other guy? Do we have anything on him yet? Lupton said he was ex-military.”

  “Right, and we’re digging.”

  “Military records? All Florida enlisted servicemen, anyone who recently—”

  “I have people crunching the numbers.”

  He sighed. If the best use of him was scouring scrap yards for a discarded getaway car, so be it. But it still felt like Blythe was playing something close to the vest. “Lauren—”

  “I want you to take today and recuperate,” she said quickly. “Skokie is pleased. Everyone is charged up. We’re getting somewhere. The federal search is focusing on Big Cypress now, with DOD assisting. That’s a lot of manpower for a little girl. People are saying there’s a chance she’s alive and that was never really the case before.”

  Then what was I doing? But he held his tongue. He knew they’d assigned him the dual task of looking into Lemon Madras’s disappearance while also finding out more about the hit on Stephanie Balfour.

  “I don’t need time to recuperate.”

  His pants on, he hobbled out of the bedroom, sore everywhere he figured there were muscles attached to his bones. He found the condo empty.

  “It’s not a suggestion, Lange. I know how you get. Stand down for today — what’s left of it. I’ll debrief you tonight on the Emilio Vasquez property and the child’s toy.”

  He went as fast as he could to the stairs and down to the front door. “How’s Beck doing?”

  “He’s fine. I can hear your brain working. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You did good, Tom.”

  “You keep telling me that.” He flung the door open and walked to the street in time to see the back of Katie’s car disappear around the corner.

  “Lange, don’t go there.”

  He stood on the sidewalk, barefoot and in just his jeans. “I’m going to go there. I’m going to say that the guys who broke into the Balfour place didn’t do it to raise money for Pedro Vasquez’s bail bond. And they didn’t do it just to scare her.” He walked back inside, still talking. “Is this about what happened to Pedro’s son Edgar? Payback?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Maybe scaring Balfour into going harder against Mario Palumbo? Was there a note or something the burglars left? Instructions?”

  “No. The payback thing is—”

  “Unlikely? Because Mario Palumbo is a federal informant? Just spitballin’ here . . .”

  He pounded up the stairs. Katie hadn’t been paged, that he’d noticed. When he got back to the main floor and looked around the condo, he realized all her things were missing. She was gone. Katie had left, and not for the first time but the last. He knew it.

  Blythe’s voice was quiet. “You done?”

  “What if they were after something else? Not T-bonds and a little bit of cash — something they could use more directly?”

  “Lange . . .”

  “How about this? A kid back from Iraq gets into the drug game, gets mixed up with Pedro Vasquez. He’s not robbing Balfour from any incentive other than getting out of hock. Does he really go ahead and shoot two witnesses?”

  “If one of the burglars is this phantom man Lupton told you about—”

  “Wilbur Beck, too—”

  “If that’s who he is, he’s a trained killer.”

  Tom didn’t wish to argue the point with her — Blythe had been in the military and he hadn’t.

  “Okay. All I’m saying is, we know it’s one gun. So, one of the burglars executes the rich couple with the pearls and the Rolex, out driving their Jaguar — does it without hesitation. But then they realize there’s a little girl in the back. And that’s when I think our ex-military guy comes in. It’s his decision to take her.”

  “We just found the girl’s toy.”

  “What I’m saying is, maybe this guy has his own relationship with Emilio Vasquez. I just don’t see Valentina risking everything for this. I’ve tried to picture her harboring the girl and I just can’t see it. Not after meeting her. We need him. We need to know who he is and who he knows. He doesn’t want to keep her hostage. But he’s not going to leave her with Valentina. Not if he can help it.”

  “You’re saying he brings her to Emilio Vasquez himself.”

  “Well, to all intents and purposes, Emilio is the nicer of the Vasquez kids. But I don’t know. It just doesn’t . . . I don’t know.”

  “Let’s say Emilio has her for a time at the place in Big Cypress. We know she was there. But then he moves her. Where does he move her?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PURE SPANISH HORSES

  Properties found on tax forms. A place out in Big Cypress Swamp owned by Emilio Vasquez. A little girl’s stuffed animal.

  He replayed various moments from the past night and considered what he’d seen: a grouping of plywood buildings on a fifty-two-acre plot of land, most of it underwater. There wasn’t much to the place, just the bare minimum of blankets on the beds, some basic crockery in the kitchen. Nothing in the dresser drawer. No clothes. No trash anywhere. No pictures on the walls. Just a shell, a hideout. Maybe. No other sign of the girl besides the stuffed rabbit.

  Blythe wanted him to sit tight.

  He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and gingerly touched one of the bruises from Lupton’s beating. At least they were fading. He was supposed to go back in a few days to have the hospital remove his stitches. He pulled off the bandage and found scissors and tweezers in the medicine cabinet. He cut away the tiny, knotted end and then pulled on the thread. The wound stayed sealed after he’d taken out all twelve stitches. A fresh bandage was still a good idea.

  Sit tight. Okay.

  After washing up, he left the bathroom and took out the paperwork on Emilio Vasquez that he’d picked up at the Naples office and did just that. He sat tight. Reading.

  The previous year, Emilio Vasquez had made just over three hundred grand. He paid little in taxes for someone in that income bracket; there was a robust list of deductions. So he had a place in the swamp? It was plywood, it was nothing, a family heirloom.

  He also had a place on Estero Bay and a property in Homestead. A nice horse ranch, in fact.

  Tom called Rhodes. “Homestead — that’s near Miami?”

  “You’re getting to know your geography. South of the city. Pretty agricultural. Farms and stuff.”

  “You get the buggy fixed?”

  “Yeah. Nothing can kill that thing.”

  “I’m looking at records of income from a horse-boarding stable . . . Everglades Andalusian Farms. I don’t know what it means. ‘Andalusian’ — is that some kind of horse?”

  “Those are Pure Spanish horses. Andalusians are what we call Spanish horses in the States.”

  If Tom now knew about Emilio Vasquez’s “Pure Spanish” horse ranch, Blythe knew it too. He poked the laptop keys and ran a Google search. Two big barns, five turnout pastures and a full-sized, lighted dressage arena. Boarding, feeding and turnout. À la carte services — bathing, clipping, and tacking.

  The sound of Rhodes lighting a cigar came over the line. “So, Emilio Vasquez has a horse-boarding business on the other side of the state. So what? Do the horses know they’re laundering drug money?”

  “Probably not. Could also be a way to hemorrhage a few tens of thousands of dollars and keep those pesky tax collectors at bay — I haven’t seen whether they’re operating in the red or in the black. Either way, it makes him even more interesting.”

  “A horse ranch in Homestead would be a pretty conspicuous place to hide a girl the entire state is looking for,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah, but to get to Homestead from here, one would most likely
take Route 41, which goes right through the Miccosukee Indian Village.”

  “Ah. The face in the swamp. I don’t think the Trail People paint their faces. Except during their May dance. Like we said.”

  Tom’s phone jiggled with an incoming call he knew he needed to take.

  “Dale, I got one coming in. It’s from Blythe.”

  “Tell her I’m a damned good cook.”

  “Hey . . . thanks for what you did.”

  “All right, partner.”

  Tom switched to the new call. “Blythe? What’s up?”

  “Lange. We’ve got a new target location.”

  He told her about his own research as he hurried into the bedroom. “You’re going in? When?”

  “I just got the call from Skokie ten minutes ago and the warrant is good for the horse farm. We’re going to take it jointly with the FBI and Dade County Sheriff’s. I just wanted you to know.”

  He pulled on some pants and a t-shirt. “I’d like to be there.”

  “Lange—”

  “Lauren, please.” He rolled over the bed and grabbed his gun out of the top drawer of the side table. “Let me.”

  “All right.”

  He found some sneakers, slipped them on without socks and hurried out of the condo.

  * * *

  An unknown subject followed him east to Miami. It was the guy again. The same one he’d seen on the way down to Everglades City the first time he’d stopped off at the diner.

  He pulled out his phone, his eyes flicking constantly back to the rear-view mirror. The guy kept about ten car-lengths between them, neither closing in nor fading back.

  Blythe didn’t answer. He tried Skokie next.

  “I got a tail. Black Yukon. You ever find anything on Janice Hawkes, the registrant?”

  It sounded like Skokie was shuffling some papers. “There was nothing. Came up clean . . . here we go . . . Yeah, just some wealthy housewife.”

  “From Immokalee?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Tom kept watch in the mirror. “Think I’m going to pull over and have a talk with this guy.”

  “Woah — you think that’s a good idea?”

  “If he was going to try something, he already had an opportunity. He wants to see where I’m going.”