by Rex Burns
This Advantage plant was a series of sharp roof peaks marching like a saw blade across half a city block. A railroad spur holding a line of tank cars ran down the foot of the corrugated steel walls. A large pair of smokestacks rose toward spongy cumulus clouds whose shadow occasionally lifted the weight of sun but carried the heft of rain. Mr. Colby’s office was in a corner of the third and topmost floor and had a view across a point of pine-and oak-shaded houses to the bay and Santa Rosa Island. Out over the Gulf, the sky was dotted with airplanes from the Naval Air Station. If he craned to look past Colby, Kirk could make out the massive gray shadow of an aircraft carrier looming over pale yellow buildings on another point of land.
“I have the employment records of the man Mr. Reznick mentioned, Mr. Kirk. I find it extremely hard to believe this sort of thing is going on in my plant.”
“Three people at the other end were arrested yesterday afternoon, Mr. Colby. That’s the name one of them gave us.”
“Yes, of course. There’s no arguing with that fact. Still, my plant security …” Colby stood taller than Kirk but weighed only half as much. His head seemed mostly bony jaw and large nose. Devlin took a few seconds to realize that the man’s blue eyes goggled not from surprise but because of the thick lenses in his horn-rimmed glasses. “What do you propose to do about all this?”
“You can have him arrested on a warrant from Colorado. That, however, involves the police and a lot of legal paperwork and might bring the company name into the papers—something I’ve been instructed to avoid if at all possible.”
“Yes. Certainly. We don’t want that.” His long fingers played with an ornate medallion which served as a paperweight and said something about a Fiesta of Five Flags Award. A row of photographs reminded him that he had a wife and four children.
“The quietest way would be to fire him,” said Devlin.
“Would that be punishment enough? After all, Schuler is a criminal.”
Kirk agreed. “I suspect he and his partner have a good-size nest egg tucked away. So losing their jobs wouldn’t hurt them. It would protect you, however.”
“Well, it just doesn’t seem right to almost condone …” Colby’s eyes glanced at the photographs and he said earnestly, “Drugs are a very serious problem for the youth of this nation, Mr. Kirk.”
Tell me about it, thought Kirk. “Why don’t you let me pick up Schuler and his partner and talk to them off company grounds? I’ll try to find out if they’re working alone or if there’s a larger organization behind them. Then we can turn them over to the Drug Enforcement Agency. That way, we can find out what we need to know, and even if there’s not enough for a case against them, they’ll have a record with the feds. Frankly, Mr. Colby, I think that’s the best we’ll be able to do and still keep the company name out of the press.”
Colby knew how Stewart felt about the company name. And he also knew that Stewart liked to give his plant managers plenty of slack to run their operations. Enough slack, even, to hang themselves. He sighed. This was the kind of problem Colby hated: the ones that came in already so tangled that he couldn’t pick the threads up at the beginning. How many times had he told his staff, “Come to me at the first sign of trouble”? It was so much easier to correct problems early on.
Pushing one of the buttons on a metal panel made to look like burled wood, he said, “Mrs. Swearingen, will you have Mr. Mills come up to my office right away, please?” He explained to Kirk, “Randy Mills is our head of security. He’ll go with you to pick up Schuler.”
He was an ex-sheriff’s officer, Mills told Kirk, who had been turned out in a past election when the office changed hands. Devlin was to call him Randy. “I made the mistake of being ambitious, you know? Became the old sheriff’s number-one sidekick. New sheriff said he couldn’t trust me, so here I am—getting rich in the private sector.” He, too, was tall, with straight black hair and skin dark less from the sun than from a trace of Cherokee or Seminole. He waited until they were off the executive floor before pumping Kirk. “So what you after down here, Devlin?”
Kirk told the man as much as he needed to know.
“Gawd damn! Right here in my plant?” His forefinger scratched at the corner of his mouth where a small scar made a pale line. “Old lady Colby just about pissed on his shoelaces when you told him, didn’t he?”
“He wasn’t happy.”
“Probably thinks I’m not worth shit at this job now.” Mills glanced at Kirk.
“We found the other end by accident. We were looking for a guy selling grass and came up with this operation.”
“Yeah, well, still it don’t make me look good. I’m supposed to know what goes on in this place and take care of it. Colby don’t like no trouble at all.”
That was Mills’s worry. “I’d like to do this quietly—nothing for the newspapers to get hold of. And I want to talk to them before we bring in the DEA.”
“Oh, yeah. We’ll do that, all right. And I damn well plan to talk to the security guards for that section, too.”
“Not until after we’re through, though, right?”
The man glanced at him again, understanding. “Right.” Another worry that was all his: possible leaks and collusion in his own section. Mills lengthened his stride, a red tinge marking the back of his neck. They clanked down a metal staircase and through a fire door to the main floor of a vast shipping room. Pallets of boxed goods were stacked almost to the ceiling, and a forklift ground back and forth in the shadowy aisles. Its backup horn was an intermittent, shrill tweet. Mills called to a black man in tan overalls. “Heyo, Johnson—where’s Schuler at?”
“Coffee break.”
The employee lounge for this corner of the sprawling factory was recessed from the main floor and marked by a pair of worn Naugahyde couches and a coldly lit line of vending machines. Half a dozen men in tan coveralls sat and drank coffee and talked. They fell silent and wary when Mills and Kirk walked up.
“Schuler, I see you a minute? Fella got emergency message for you.”
A short man with cropped, graying hair set down his steaming Styrofoam cup and stood, eyes widening slightly as he looked from Mills to Devlin. Quiet and frowning, he followed them away from the lounge and around the corner into an alley between boxes.
Equally silent, almost lazily, Mills turned on his heel and drove a fist into the older man’s middle. He doubled over with a whoosh of coffee-smelling breath. Quickly Mills twisted Schuler’s arm behind his back and yanked up to lever the man’s shoulder against his neck. “You and Mr. Kirk, here, going to have a talk, Schuler. You going to tell him all about your little cocaine delivery service. Ain’t you?”
“Ahhh—I—”
He yanked again. “Who else you working with, Schuler? Name ‘em!”
“I don’t—”
That was as far as he got before Mills levered the shoulder again.
Schuler’s voice was a strangled, hurting whine. “Hall … shipping … Keith Hall …”
Mills shoved the man toward Kirk and nodded his head at the wide door leading into the yard. “I know that little butter-ball. You take this piece of shit on out, Devlin. Blue van out there. Says ‘Security.’ I’ll fetch Hall.”
Schuler didn’t speak until he and Kirk were in the windowless back of the van and squatting on the narrow folding bench that ran down one side. “You—ah … you with the police?”
“Company security.”
He massaged the twisted muscles in his shoulder. “What you and him going to do?”
“It’s not what we’re going to do, Schuler. It’s what you’re going to do: talk to us.”
A salt-and-pepper scatter of whiskers showed up darkly against the paleness of his face and he probed his tongue at the corner of his dry mouth.
“We’ve already got Scotty Martin. That’s how we found out about you.”
“Oh.”
Kirk let him think about that. The sound of boots on gravel came up to the van, and the back door burst open. A fat
-faced man sprawled across the metal floor, and Mills followed, yanking savagely at the man’s collar to jam him on the end of the bench.
“You keep your fucking mouth shut, Hall—I heard enough from you!” Handcuffs clicked into place as Hall and Schuler were locked to a strut. Mills told Kirk to sit between the two and keep them apart. “I’ll drive, Devlin. Either one these shit-heads opens his mouth you close it hard.” He jerked a nod at Hall. “Especially that there fat turd.”
They swung out of the factory compound and across a small bridge, taking a wide avenue bordered by stubby palm trees and the green of a well-kept golf course. Traffic lights periodically halted them among a tangle of hot cars. In the closed van, Kirk felt sweat start to run in little trickles down his back as the humidity began to stifle him. After almost half an hour, Mills turned the van off the highway onto a sandy road that ran in two gray ruts among pin oak and scrawny slash pines. They passed a tar -paper shack where two white-haired children—a boy and a girl—looked up from playing in a patch of shady sand to watch the van rattle by. Then they branched again into denser growth thickened by clumps of palmetto. Kirk smelled the rankness of old grass mixed with the odor of brackish water. The van stopped. Mills went around to the back doors. They opened to a narrow arm of still, dark water and a marshy shore covered with tall grass and tree snags bearded with Spanish moss. Beneath the grass, the gray sand merged imperceptibly with the water. The abandoned clearing had been used as a dump, and Kirk could see bedsprings and tin cans rusting to a dull red and shreds of cloth and stuffing ground into dark blotches of old oil. A jaybird squawked loudly and flew across the bayou—a flutter of iridescent blue against the silent, hot green.
“Well, Devlin, which one you want to start with?”
“Schuler.”
Mills tossed Kirk a key for the cuffs. “Right. We’ll be back for you, Hall. Wait for us, hear?”
Schuler’s first words were, “You can’t do this!”
Mills hit him in the stomach. “Hell, boy, it’s already done!” He winked at Kirk over the sweat-stained back of the doubled and gasping man. “I got friends in the S.O. and PPD. They ain’t going to believe shit he says.” As soon as Schuler began to breathe more regularly, he hit him again. “Did this all the time in the sheriff’s office. Got downright old after a while.” Schuler stayed down this time—knees to chest, and arms trying to hide his paper-white face. Mills hauled him up by the shirt. “We got all day. All night, too. Whenever you’re ready, just start singing.”
He hit him again, harder, this time digging the blade of his knuckles up under the older man’s ribs at the side of his soft paunch. Schuler doubled over again and heaved a lump of puke and skittered around in the dirt and sandspurs hunting for his breath. Mills sat on a fallen tree trunk to watch him. “It’ll take a few minutes,” he told Kirk. “I should have thought to stop and buy us some soda pop.” He looked over his shoulder at the fat-faced man who peered from the dark of the van door. “You watching this. Hall? Good—you just sit tight. We’ll get to you, okay?”
“Can you hear me, Schuler?” asked Kirk.
The gray and black stubble of hair jerked a nod.
“Who’s Tony?”
The head froze and the man’s grunting paused.
“Mr. Kirk here asked you a question, Schuler.”
“He’ll … he’ll kill me.”
“Gawd damn! Gawd Jesus damn!” Mills pulled the man up by the pectorals and jammed his face against Schuler’s eyes. “He’ll kill you? He’ll kill you! Gawd damn you, boy, you more afraid of somebody else than you are of me? You that goddamn dumb?” Schuler’s fist plunged wrist-deep under the man’s ribs and Mills dropped him to stand with a boot on the cuffed wrists and strike again at the man’s stomach. “You really that goddamned dumb?”
“Tell us about it, Schuler. Everything.”
The head jerked.
Mills snorted and leaned over him waiting. His shadow fell across Schuler like a dark threat and the curled man clenched tighter. “Well shit, man, you want to talk or not? Get up and talk!”
Schuler scuttled back and flopped to his knees and, wincing against the pain of his ribs, grunted himself upright. “I can’t … He’ll—”
Mills’s boot caught him under the jaw and snapped his head back in a short jab. A thread of bloody spittle swung in a bright, crimson arc through the sunlight. Across the bayou, the jay squawked twice and was silent.
Mills’s tense voice was gentle now, almost pleading as he bent over the moaning figure. “It’s hot out here, Schuler. And I’m starting to get pissed. You don’t want to get me pissed, Schuler. You really don’t want that, now.”
The man said something.
“What? Talk up, boy!”
“Pierson. Tony Pierson.”
Mills sighed and leaned back from him. “All right. That’s good. Now you just let it all hang out.”
He did, words mushy and slurred through the bloody spittle. Once, a shard of tooth hung on his lip, a pink speck of bone, before dropping into the sandy weeds. Three of them were in on it at this end. They didn’t want to split the money any more than that. Pierson had started them off by borrowing from Schuler to invest in a sure thing, a load of coke that one of his—Tony’s—contacts was eager to sell. Schuler came up with the idea of shipping the dope out to his buddy in Denver, Scotty Martin. He was a cellmate from the medium-security prison up in Menard. Pierson liked the idea and improved on it.
He had the contacts. He made arrangements for delivery, usually from a freighter coming into Pensacola, Mobile, or New Orleans. Schuler didn’t know, but he thought it was usually brought in aboard sealed cargo carriers, the kind that customs agents had trouble searching. “That’s what gave me the idea about shipping it to Denver to sell. There’s so much stuff around here that the price is bad. Out there, an eight-hundred-dollar ounce goes for fourteen, sixteen hundred. And we don’t have to worry about all the heat that goes with selling it.” At first, Scotty marketed it all, but he didn’t want to move as much as Tony wanted to send. So they came up with the idea of opening up markets in other Advantage sites. “Low profile, like. Cops don’t get too excited that way. So we spread it around and each guy’s got a quota to sell and gets a cut. Nothing too big but everything steady, you know? It adds up.” Gradually, the organization expanded as Pierson and Schuler made contacts in other Advantage locations. Hall was brought in because he ran the crew inspecting the factory’s sealed drums. All they had to do was put it inside the Styrofoam bracing on a particular unit, pressurize the drum, and seal it. Then they stenciled it with a number code that said how many kilos were enclosed—just like the accounting office. Then they shipped it.
“What grade is it when it leaves here?”
“Pure. Sometimes eighty, sometimes ninety percent. It changes, so I don’t know for sure. Tony’s the one who knows, but it’s pretty pure.”
“Where’s it shipped to from Denver?”
“Seven, eight places. It depends on the market. Tony set that up, too. He went around the country to the other Advantage shipping points and got some of his buddies hired on. Took a year, maybe more, but he got his people in the shipping rooms.”
“For ten percent of the dope?”
“Yeah. Ten percent of whatever they’re supposed to sell.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Tony? I don’t know. Home, I guess. We don’t meet too often except on business.”
“Where’s home?”
“Santa Rosa Island—just down from Pensacola Beach.”
“How do I get there?”
He shook his head. “Tony don’t meet people there. I never been there, even.”
“Where do you meet?”
“Here and there. Bars. You know. Sometimes old Fort Pickens. He likes that place.”
“I want him for murder.”
“He killed somebody?” Schuler didn’t sound surprised.
“Yeah. I want him and you’re going to help me.”
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Kirk thought it might take some more convincing, but Schuler was broken. He only nodded and looked sicker. They dragged him back to the van and pulled Hall out. The front of his pants grew dark and he said, “Please don’t please don’t please don’t,” until Mills hit him. He told Kirk it was just to let Hall know it wasn’t so bad— “Might help make a man out of him instead of a fucking crawdad.” Hall, once his breathing was back, told them everything fast before Mills could hit him again. It corroborated Schuler’s story.
The ride back was hot and silent and weary.
They stopped at a pay phone in a shopping center before reaching the factory. Schuler called Pierson to tell him he had a visitor from Denver who claimed he intercepted the last shipment. This man wanted to cut himself in on the operation and had given him—Schuler—one hour to make up his mind. If it was a no, the man said that would be the last shipment anybody sent through the Advantage network. So what should he tell the man?
Schuler tilted the earpiece so Kirk could listen. The line was silent, and in the hot telephone hood, Kirk smelled the sour odor of Schuler’s vomit. Finally a tinny voice, stalling for time to think, told Schuler to bring the man to the Sandcrab Bar at six tonight. Shaking his head, Kirk whispered the reply.
“He says he’ll meet only with me. Alone and in a quiet place.”
Another silence. “How do we know he’s got the goddamn shipment?”
Schuler swallowed. “He found out about me, he says. And he says to call Martin.”
“Why the hell didn’t that son of a bitch Martin call me?”
“He can’t. Somebody’s sitting on him in Denver, this fella says. If the deal don’t go through, he says, Martin’s history and so’s our organization.”