Jarvis let out a sigh. “All right. I’m gonna tell you this, but if my name ever comes up, if any of this comes back to me, I’ll deny everything. And then I’ll find you and put my foot in your ass.”
“You can try. It’s a little tight in there, though. Hey, look — I’m not going to use anything directly.”
“You think you’re bad-ass enough to handle Valentina Vasquez and her crew?”
“I just want to talk to her. I mean, I have a pretty decent vocabulary.”
“Valentina Vasquez is as slick as they come. The way this thing works is, the Vasquez crew takes one of the crabbing boats way out, and then they meet a Mexican cartel out over the water. We don’t know who for sure — could be Gulf Cartel, could be Sinaloa — you also got guys who organize for multiple cartels. They offload the dope and the Vasquez family gives them the cash. We don’t see it — we don’t have the marine patrol to cover water that big, and if they saw us, the deal would fall apart anyway. They’d see us coming and dump everything in the drink before we got there. You can’t surprise anyone out on miles of open water.”
“Okay.”
“Then they pack it in with the stone crab claws. It goes up the Gulf Coast into Fort Myers and into Tampa. That’s as far as we’ve tracked it. Like I said, we’re not talking about the biggest dope operation, but Valentina is looking to take it to the next level. With Vasquez family rival Mario Palumbo awaiting trial, she’s seizing the day and making moves. And maybe she’s looking for payback for her brother Edgar’s death because that, as you know, hooks into Mario Palumbo. Palumbo was basically trying to absorb the Vasquez business — like a takeover.”
“Right.”
“Okay, so we’re talking about a woman motivated by revenge, motivated to get her father out of prison, motivated by the opportunity to become the premier dope runner in southwest Florida. You think she’s going to let some couple of hired guns and a little Mexican girl get in the way of that? And not cover her tracks? You know what she would’ve done? These guys come down to Evvy’s with the money and the bonds and whatever else and the little girl in the back of their vehicle — she’s going to ice all three of them. She’s gonna take what they’ve got and she’s going to kill them, sink them in the ocean. Little girl takes a lungful of seawater and that’s that.”
“She could’ve been crippled by the hurricane — not able to handle business that way.”
“Nothing cripples this woman. And you’re full of could-haves. Listen to me . . . I’m telling you stories outside of school, sticking my neck out, and you’re not listening. You want to go down there, Lange, and do your poking around, you do it with my blessing. I’ll make the popcorn and watch. But you’re not going to accomplish a fucking thing except get a target on your back. Right now, you’re nobody. You go sticking your nose in and you’re going to be somebody with a problem.”
Jarvis hung up. In addition to being chatty, he had a flair for the dramatic. Tom scratched his head. His dark hair was getting long, starting to curl around his ears and neck. Time for a cut. It was too damn hot.
CHAPTER EIGHT: A HUNK OF BREAD IN A KOI POND
At Carnestown, he took a road that ran the edge of Plantation Island with unbroken blue sky above and white mangrove to either side of him. The road curved for a long time and then there was Evvy’s at its end. Tom counted three boats up on scaffolding, two stone crab boats and one skiff. They all looked battered, with chipped paint and dents; the entire wheelhouse of one had been smashed flat. A large warehouse gaped with two open bays — dark inside. A smaller, single-story building was down to the board and batten, its exterior siding sheared away by the storm.
Tom parked on the outer edge of the dirt parking lot and got out into the sudden quiet. There was no one around that he could see, just two pickup trucks, a nice-looking sedan and a Gator cart sitting beside a metal shed that looked ready to collapse in the heat. A patch of dark dirt nearby looked like it might have been stained by oil or blood. A couple of holes in the corrugated metal could’ve been from bullets.
He walked toward the docks, a bay for mooring boats encircled by mangrove, gnarly vegetation that seemed to just sit atop the water. A generator turned over somewhere out of sight and Tom halted. A guy came out from behind the open warehouse, cleaning his hands off on a rag. He moved toward Tom with a squinty expression. There was a bruise under one of his eyes.
“Help you?”
Mick Lupton: Pedro’s friend from Jerome Correctional, according to Wilbur Beck; just a guy who worked on the boats, according to Skokie.
Tom showed his badge and Lupton stopped walking. “Domestic Security. How you doing today?”
“Fine.”
“Pretty messed up around here. Looks like you guys got hit pretty bad. Man, what a thing, huh?”
“What do you want?”
“Well, I guess . . . Is the owner here?”
Lupton’s gaze traveled to the big warehouse. Tom caught the scent of rotten fish, wafting out from the open bays.
“Maybe she’s here,” Lupton said. “I don’t know.” He moved like a con, from the tension in his shoulders to the way he set his feet — like he was ready for Tom to come at him with a shank.
Tom was about to say something in reply when the door of the smaller building opened and a woman emerged and started over. He had seen no pictures of Valentina Vasquez, but this woman was striking to look at, with high cheekbones, wide dark eyes and pitch-black hair. She looked only at Tom.
“Hi. Something we can help you with?”
“Are you Valentina Vasquez?”
“I am.”
He showed her the badge and moved his sunglasses up onto his head so she could see his eyes. “My name is Tom Lange, ma’am. I was hoping we could talk a little bit.”
Her pleasant expression turned sad. “I heard about that little girl.”
“Yeah. Pretty awful thing.”
Pedro’s eldest daughter looked away for a moment and then back at Tom. The way she shielded her eyes from the sun, tilted her head and squinted, the way she looked so “aw-gee” innocent in that moment, Tom felt something squeeze around his stomach. He’d met people like Valentina, come to think of it. People who smiled when they hurt you.
“That’s what you’re here for? You’re looking for her?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come on into my office.” She glanced at Lupton. “Mick? How we coming with the first unit?”
“I replaced the coils,” Lupton said, watching Tom out of the corner of his eye. “I think we’re good.”
“All right. Let’s keep going with the boats.”
“You got it.”
Lupton gave Tom another look and then walked away, a big man lumbering in the heat.
There were no lights on inside Valentina’s office, but it was plenty bright enough. An air-conditioning unit sat beneath an open window. The air was still and humid, worse than outdoors.
“No A/C. Nothing is working. Sorry about that.” Valentina took a seat at a desk and Tom sat across from her. “What a disaster.”
“Naples is still out of power, too. And my truck, would you believe it? My truck’s air conditioning died.”
“Did it get damaged in the storm?”
“It’s just a piece of crap.”
She grinned, raw and distant, then furrowed her brow and looked off into the space beside her. “My friend is in East Naples. Still flooding going on there.” She shook her head then focused on him. “So, you’re here because of my father.”
“Ma’am?”
“Call me Evvy. You say ‘ma’am’ and I think my mother’s here.”
“That’s you? You’re Evvy?”
“My initials are V. V. When we were kids my father called me Evvy.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh, we’ve been here thirty-five years. We’re a family of fishermen. I took it over eight years ago. Renamed it.” She leaned back and looked at him, swinging back and fort
h in her chair, and he got that same uneasy feeling again. She had this childlike way about her. “You’re here because Lemon Madras went missing from Gulf Shore Road,” she said.
“That’s not public information. Not yet.”
“It’s not? I guess that depends on what you consider public. All of my friends and family are aware that she was the daughter of a landscaper who works for the Hollister family. And that she was stranded at the Hollister house during the hurricane, and that the Hollisters left the airport they were supposed to be flying from and went back for her. They’ve both been found dead and yet Lemon has disappeared. It’s also public knowledge, in my sphere of the public, that statewide prosecutor, Stephanie Balfour, has a second home on Gulf Shore with her husband, David. And I know, like you know, that Balfour was the prosecutor who oversaw my father’s incarceration. So, you’re here because of my father.” He had a feeling she was just getting warmed up.
“Yes,” he said. “Threats made by your father have led us to believe he could have been involved in the burglary of her home.”
Her smile widened, splitting her lips to reveal teeth gapped in the middle. “See? That was easy. Too many cops think holding their cards is this big thing that’s going to crack the case. It’s so much better to just lay everything on the table. Now, how can I help you?”
He caught movement out of the window beside them and saw Lupton over by the boats. There were more people here, too. Somewhere. He got that feeling. “How many boats do you have?”
“Six crabbers, four skiffs. We rolled them all out before the hurricane. But we’ve taken a lot of damage. You see that wheelhouse? For the crabbing boats, the wheelhouse is raised up, sits up in front of the deck so you can spot the trap buoys. That one was completely flipped over during the storm.”
“It’s incredible — the damage.”
“Mother nature lets you know who’s in charge.”
“What do you guys do for backup power? I heard a genny start up . . .”
“Mick just got it going. We’re just running equipment off that. Right now, refrigeration, sump pumps and paint sprayers. We haven’t run anything into the office, but I’m about to go crazy without my computer and internet. And the air. Can’t run a business like this.”
“Did you lose a lot of inventory?”
“A hundred pounds of stone crab claws. It’s been awful. Before the storm — you should have seen it . . . I’ve never seen anything like that — all the water was gone. You could see the seabed. It just went on and on, like the storm was sucking up the entire ocean, drawing it in and then throwing it back up.”
“What’s your insurance situation here, if I may ask?”
“Fully covered through private insurance. Hurricane . . . everything. But you know how it is . . . you’ve got to wait on the insurance agent to come in and go over everything with you. Then it’s more time before they get around to cutting you a check. We’re really up against the clock, too. Season starts mid-October.”
“So, those boats out there . . . that’s what you’ve got, right? That’s your whole fleet, or whatever you call it?”
She just watched him, sort of like a cat, unseen tail swishing back and forth.
“There’s not maybe one good working boat unaccounted for? Got dragged out to sea in the storm — something like that?”
Her eyes stayed sharp on him. “No. We’re lucky we didn’t lose any of the boats like that.”
“And you haven’t sent any out? There’s nothing sailed over to Mexico or Cuba or anywhere?”
“No, they’re all in. And we don’t go to Mexico or Cuba.”
Tom nodded, looked around, then clucked his tongue and shook his head. “I gotta tell you . . . I really want to know what happened to that little girl.”
“I’d like to know, too. I hope she’s all right. I wonder . . . did you have any luck up in Gibsonton?”
He’d been waiting for something, but her smooth delivery still caught him off guard. He thought of Jarvis calling her slick. Tom repeated her word like he’d never heard it before. “Gibson-ton?”
She leaned back and crossed her arms. “Well, now, you gotta know that Maria Lucia is my father’s cousin. And so she called me up and told me that a cop came around last night asking about a little girl.”
“She did, huh?”
“Sure. Maria’s great. We like to talk. She also mentioned a guy named Wilbur Beck.” Valentina shook her head and cast her eyes down as if it was a mournful situation. “You know, we try to help people out, and then they just turn on us and inform to the police. You can’t trust anybody.”
“Of course, I don’t know this person, but what would they have to be informing about?”
Valentina laughed. “So, this — so you’re who they send, huh? I gotta tell you, Mr. Lange, you’re not exactly knocking my socks off. How old are you?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Thirty-three.” Her tone became wistful. “The age of Jesus. Buddha under the Bodhi tree.”
“But I feel eighteen.”
She tossed her head back with another laugh, clearly enjoying herself, and the sound of it sliced down to his bones.
“Oh, thirty-three is a good age,” she said. “Still young enough to have the kind of energy you have, but too young to know anything. I’ve been in a fishing family for a long time. I know all about fishing. But I hope . . .” she affected a concerned expression. “I hope Mr. Beck is somewhere safe. My cousin Maria doesn’t like people whose tongues wag at both ends.” She fell silent and watched him closely, evaluating. Tom wondered what Maria Lucia would think about her Uncle Pedro plotting to burn her house down.
After a few seconds, he stood up. “If you, ah, had a couple of guys go up to Naples, burgle Stephanie Balfour’s home, kill a couple of witnesses and then abduct a seven-year-old girl and bring her down here, you’d tell me about it, right?”
Her fresh laughter trickled away. “You’re a real charmer. I like you. Cute, too.”
“Mick seems like a nice guy. How did he get that bruise under his eye?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” She rose from the desk. “Anyway, Mr. Lange, Route 41 was flooded out all the way to Carnestown. It only just opened up. So, entertaining as your hypothesis may be, I’d say there was no way any such hires could’ve made their way down here to me.”
“You understand, though, right? I’ve got to check out every possibility, no matter how wild or crazy. And I guess there’s two ways to go about this particular possibility — involving you and maybe your handyman Mick Lupton out there with the big shiner on his face. One is that the informant who spent a few months with your father provides a disposition on record that gives us a warrant to come down here, shut this all down, drag the bay, dump out all your boxes — you know what I mean? People in white jumpsuits and all of that taking samples for prints, blood, DNA. The other way is for you to let me have a look at everything myself so I can cross it off my list.”
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.
Special Agent Tom Lange Box Set Page 66