“Jesse, no,” Savannah said. “He can stay here, and we’ll stay in the bunkhouse.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it, ma’…er…Savannah. I’ve lived most of my life in a squad bay. It’ll be more comfortable for me than the Grand Hotel.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, opening the door to our house.
“Absolutely,” Tank replied, shrugging his seabag off his shoulder, and dropping it to the deck to accentuate his resolve.
“Well then, come in and rest,” she said, moving toward the door. “I was just starting dinner and was getting worried.”
“We found a lead in the Cobie Murphy case,” I said. “Sorry it took so long.”
We went inside and Tank asked if there was anything he could help with.
“No,” she replied. “The steaks are marinating, and I just put the potatoes in the oven. There’s nothing to do right now. I was going to cut up some vegetables for a salad.”
Finn and Woden entered, then followed one another around the big rug a couple of times before lying down, both facing the tree.
Tank looked around. “Gotta hand it to you, Gunny. This is the way to live. He carried his small bag toward the tree and pointed to the center of it. “But you’re missing something right here.”
With great care, he opened his bag and reached inside, then extracted a small wooden box and opened it. After removing wads of tissue paper, he removed the blue and scarlet tree ornament. “May I?”
“Be honored,” I said, my voice catching in my throat a little when I saw it.
It’d been over thirty-seven years, but the memory of that fateful day was as clear in my mind as ever. I no longer dwelled on it, and there were times when several days would pass without the names entering my consciousness. Tank being here, though, brought a flood of emotions.
Savannah stepped over beside him. “Jesse and Savannah,” she read from the ball. “October 23, 1983. You do me a great honor, including my name with that date.”
“You probably weren’t much more than a girl,” Tank said.
“I was twelve. And I remember watching it on the news.”
“Hey, Dad,” Florence said, coming through the open door.
Tank wheeled.
“Come in, Florence,” I said. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
“Did this pretty little girl call you Dad?” he asked.
Florence blushed.
“Tank, this is my youngest daughter, Florence. She’s a freshman at University of Florida. Florence, meet Owen ‘Tank’ Tankersley, my mentor when I was in the Marines.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mister Tankersley,” she said, offering her hand.
“Whenever someone calls me that, I look around for my dad,” Tank said. “Everyone has always just called me Tank. Even when I was a kid.”
Florence glanced quickly at her mother, who nodded. Though she hadn’t grown up in the Deep South, as Savannah had, she’d been taught all the social graces, as if she were a South Carolina debutante.
“Sweetie,” Savannah said to Florence, “would you mind going down to the garden and picking some of that broccoli and a couple summer squash?”
“You have a garden?” Tank asked. “I’d like to see that.”
“Follow me,” Florence said, heading toward the door. Woden rose from his spot on the rug and trotted after her.
“It’s an aquaculture garden,” she said, as they walked across the deck. “Do you know what that is?”
Tank replied that he didn’t, and Florence explained as they went down the back steps to the island’s interior.
“You said you found out something?” Savannah asked.
I told her about my meeting with Manny and Donna, then our visit to the sketchy board builder’s house, and the difference in their stories. Then I told her about the car seat being moved, and the black sportscar I’d seen at the Anchor and on the video.
“A flashy car like that ought to be easy to find,” she said, breaking open a head of lettuce for a salad. Have Rusty put the word out on the coconut telegraph.”
“Good idea,” I said, pulling my phone out and writing a text message.
“Do you think the drug dealer and this Ty Sampson know one another?”
“They might,” I said, looking out the window at my daughter showing Tank the garden. “Why?”
“What is it you call it? Target fixation? You’re concentrating too much on just one thing. Step back and look at the big picture.”
“What big picture? I really don’t have much to go on yet.”
“If the car seat was pushed back,” she said, “then somebody else drove her car. How did that person leave Kmart? What if Cobie went to this Ty Sampson’s house and the drug dealer in the sportscar was there? They might have abducted her together and one of them drove her car to Kmart.”
I turned slowly and faced Savannah. “You know, that makes perfect sense. Now, how do I get this intel to the cops without telling them we hacked their computers?”
“Oh, that part’s easy,” she said, as she picked up a knife and started chopping celery. “Buy a cheap throwaway phone and call them.”
I put a finger under her chin, tilted her face up toward mine, and kissed her. “You’re a genius.”
“Yes, I know,” she replied, smiling. “In fact, I remember seeing some cheap cell phones at Old Wooden Bridge Marina the other day.”
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” I said, heading for the door. “Come on, Finn.”
“The potatoes will be ready in an hour,” she said.
“The steaks won’t take but fifteen minutes.”
Outside, I went to the rail and yelled down at Tank. “I gotta run to the store. You wanna go?”
“You go ahead,” he called back up, as he and Florence started up the steps. “Flo’s going to show me the squad bay and I’m going to unpack.”
“Bleib bei Florence,” I said to Woden, commanding him to stay with her.
Finn followed me down the front steps and I quickly stepped aboard the Grady, started the Suzuki, and untied the lines. Finn jumped onto the forward casting deck as we idled toward Harbor Channel.
I resisted the urge to mash the throttle. The combination of the bow rising and the boat shooting forward would throw Finn to the deck. But we were soon on plane and headed toward the cuts near Mac’s island.
Barely slowing, I snaked through the unmarked passages, then turned south. Ten minutes later, I passed under Old Wooden Bridge, which is now made of concrete and steel, then idled into the marina.
I was in and out in a matter of minutes, and back at my own dock just twenty-five minutes after leaving.
Pulling a knife from my pocket, I used it to slit the plastic open on the phone. It was the cheapest one they had, not that they had a large variety, but it only needed to make one call. While I waited for it to power up, I pulled out my iPhone and looked up the non-emergency number for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Marathon sub-station. A woman answered.
“Could I speak with Detective Andersen?”
“Who’s calling?” she asked
“Just tell him it’s about the Cobie Murphy case,” I said. “I’d rather stay anonymous.”
“One moment, please.”
There were a series of clicks.
They would try to pinpoint my location, but the phone I bought didn’t have GPS. The best they’d be able to tell would be that I was pinging the cell tower on the north end of Big Pine Key, as were most of the residents of that island and No Name Key, as well.
“Detective Andersen,” a man’s voice finally said. “Who is this?”
“That’s not important,” I said. “Go through your pictures of Cobie Murphy’s car again. Look closely at the one with the driver’s door open and remember that Cobie is only five-two. Then watch the Kmart video again and look for a black car following Cobie’s into the lot.”
“Who is this?” he repeated. “And how did you see any of that?”
“I told you. That
doesn’t matter. Do you understand what I explained to you?”
“Check the picture of her car,” he said. “And look at the security footage again. Yeah, I get it. Now who—”
I leaned over the gunwale and held the phone underwater for half a minute. When I pulled it out and looked, the screen was blank.
Finn stood on the dock, eyeing me curiously as I pried the phone apart with my knife, yanked the battery out, then wrenched the circuit board loose, tearing it out and breaking the wires.
Putting the pieces in my pocket, I stepped up over to the dock and went up to the deck to grill some steaks.
The phone on the nightstand started playing salsa music. Benito Moreno sat bolt upright, yanking a handgun from under his pillow. It was early afternoon. The girl beside him stirred as the music continued. They’d partied and had sex until they’d exhausted themselves at dawn.
“This better be important,” he hissed, answering the phone.
“We might have trouble,” a voice said.
Benito looked at the number on the screen, then recognized the voice. The new dealer down in the Middle Keys. He stood and padded naked into the bathroom. “What’s this ‘we’ shit, cabrón?”
“Somebody’s snooping around,” Sampson said. “The mother hired a PI and he came by here asking questions.”
“So?” Benito said, as he relieved his bladder. “You were already cleared by the cops. What did you tell him?”
“The same thing I told the cops,” Sampson said. “But this guy was suspicious because I never called the girl about her board.”
“What board?”
“The custom board I made for her that she came to pick up that day. I texted her to come by that afternoon, but she came early, and you know the rest. I never called when she didn’t show up that afternoon.”
Mierda estúpido, Benito thought. The idiota should have followed through as if nothing ever happened.
“I see,” he said, waiting for more.
“I told him that I just figured she was busy that day, and then after the police questioned me the next morning, there wasn’t any reason to call her.”
“Who is this PI?”
There was a pause. Benito made his way back to the bed, waiting.
“He gave me his card,” Sampson said. “Where is it? Ah, here. His name’s Jesse McDermitt, with Livingston and McDermitt Security, in Key Largo.”
“Text me the address,” Benito said, scribbling the name on a notepad lying on the bedside table.
“What are you going to do?”
“I ain’t doin’ shit, pendejo. If he comes around again, tell him exactly the same thing. You don’t know shit about where the puta is.”
Benito ended the call and looked at the girl in his bed for a moment, a stirring in his loins. Her long, black hair was sprawled across the pillow, partially covering her face. Her dark brown skin contrasted to the white garter and nylons she still wore.
“Get up, puta!”
The girl stirred and then sat up. “Timezit?”
“What? You have a board meeting uptown you gotta get to?” he asked sarcastically. “Get your skanky ass outta my bed.”
The girl—Benito couldn’t even remember her name—came to her wits quickly.
“Did I do some—”
“I got shit to do!” Benito yelled. “Get dressed and get out.”
The young woman started grabbing up her clothes, which were strewn all over the room.
Vanessa! Benito thought. That’s it.
“Espere, Vanessa,” he said, taking her arm as she tried to get past him. He turned her roughly to face him, then looked her up and down while pawing at her right breast. He bent and kissed her roughly, biting at her lower lip and tongue.
He pushed her back by the shoulders and let his eyes roam over her body again. “Hey. You were good. I’m just not what you’d call a morning person. Lookit. I want you at the Booby Trap tonight. If you do okay, then you can dance there this weekend, si?”
Her face brightened. At least, as much as a coke whore’s face could, only a few hours after crashing.
“Really, Benny?”
“Yeah, you just show up there at nine and tell Marvin I sent you.”
“Gracias,” she said. “Um…”
“Here,” he said, opening a drawer on the side table.
He handed her a tiny plastic bag. It held about half a gram of pure Peruvian. “Go easy on this,” he said. “It ain’t been stepped on at all.”
She snatched the little plastic bag from his hand and hurried into the bathroom.
Benito pulled some clothes from his closet. He could hear the girl talking in Spanish in the bathroom. She was gloating to one of his other girls about the promotion.
Once dressed, he went into the kitchen and set up the coffee maker for one cup of strong Cuban coffee.
While he waited for it to finish, he tapped out a small line of coke on the table and snorted it with a platinum tube. Pinching his nose, he tilted his head up and sniffed, drawing the expensive, uncut cocaine deeper into his sinus passages.
The effect was immediate. His eyes went wide, pupils as big as the iris as the drug reached his brain, firing every synapse at once.
He went back to the bedroom, his libido charged to the limit, and checked the bathroom. Vanessa had left.
“Mierda,” he muttered.
Just as well, he then thought. With a nose full of this shit, he’d end up spending the rest of the day screwing her and he really did have things to do. Like call his Peruvian connection and get more.
Benito Moreno was a Balsero. He’d come to Miami as a child of five, just after the rioting in Havana and the outlying areas. His family had left Cuba in a flotilla of makeshift rafts. They’d stolen away from the coast at sunset—forty-some rafts attempting the crossing together. Benito and his family were on two of them.
The rafts were little more than two big truck innertubes, held together with a net, and strapped to a pair of wooden doors. Each could hold only a few people, and the only power they had was a single handmade wooden oar, fashioned using part of a street sign.
Just before dawn on the first day, as the flotilla was entering the Florida Current, a powerful squall blew up out of the southeast. Wave action in the Florida Straits was rough on a good day, but within minutes, waves up to fifteen feet were tossing the makeshift rafts around like so many Styrofoam cups.
By daybreak, there were only eighteen rafts in sight, and four of those were empty. One of the vacant rafts had been that of Benito’s mother and two older brothers. Benito, his little sister, and their father pressed on with the other Balseros, but he could tell, even at that young age, that his father’s spirit had been broken.
His sister died before they reached land three days later, her little brain cooked by the relentless tropical sun. His father took Benito to a cousin’s house in Miami, then used the only money he had to buy a bottle of rum and a gun, which, after drinking the liquor, he used to blow his brains out. Of a family of six, Benito Moreno was the only one still alive just four days after leaving Cuba.
Little Benito, the orphaned Cuban boy, had not only survived, but in the next twenty-five years, he’d thrived. With his family gone, he didn’t care whether he lived or died, and a young man who couldn’t be threatened was a dangerous thing in Miami.
Benito picked up his phone and made a call to his supplier, across the state on the west coast. The man answered quickly.
“This is Benito,” he said. “That shit was off the hook last night, compadre! Can we do it again?”
“Do what again?” the man growled.
Benito didn’t like dealing directly with his supplier, but the man insisted that was the only way he did things. From the top, to the top. No middleman. He said go-betweens were careless with his product and money.
“Ten times the weight,” Benito said. “Same price as last night?”
“That was a sample. Ten times the weight will be fifteen times the pri
ce per unit.”
“Que carajo!”
“You heard me,” the man bellowed. “I gotta drive across the state with it.”
Benito did the calculation in his head. Even at a fifty percent higher price, he’d clean up. And it would only take a day or two through his club contacts. Still, he had to put his hands on a quarter million dollars first. But at a hundred bucks per gram, cut to a still-potent forty percent purity, ten kilos would bring in well over two million.
“Okay,” Benito said. “Same place and time tomorrow night?”
“Same place,” the supplier said. “I’ll let you know in the morning what time I’ll be there. Bring the girl.”
“Vanessa?”
“She the little dark-haired one in white?”
“Si, I can have her there.”
“I’ll see that she gets home.” the man said with a sadistic growl.
Benito ended the call and went back to the kitchen for his coffee. He didn’t like the big swamp ape. But he was the only one who could supply such pure Peruvian flake. And if he wanted the puta for the night, or permanently, he didn’t care.
After dinner, the four of us went out to the firepit and I started a driftwood fire.
“Why did you stay in the Marines so long?” Florence asked, after learning Tank had spent nearly his whole life in the Corps.
“There were a lot of reasons,” he replied. “I enlisted when I was younger than you. I could’ve taken a partial retirement in ’87, not long after I met your dad. Or in ’97, with a full pension. But I felt a need to stay, to look after my troops, help shape them and motivate them.”
“You motivated the hell out of me,” I said, then took a pull from my beer. “That first time in Beirut, when you stood up on that parapet and aimed down at the leader of the group banging on the embassy gate...”
“Did they have guns?” Florence asked.
I laughed. “Yeah, they sure did. Mostly antique hunting rifles. Tank was in his dress blues—he was a gunny then—and he was aiming an M240 with one hand, holding a bandolier of ammo in the other. He shouted down at them in Arabic, ‘Go away now or be the first martyr.’”
Rising Moon: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 19) Page 6