“This is personal. No one gives me the finger. Especially not some game-playing, rich bitch in a piece-of-shit Dodge.”
The Corvette and the Viper drove nose to nose as their speed passed one hundred forty-five miles per hour. Briggs squinted through the Corvette’s windshield at two tiny red lights on the highway ahead. By the time he realized that he was seeing the taillights of another vehicle, it was too late to slow down. The speedometer read one fifty. Briggs swerved to the right onto the paved shoulder. He missed the back of the construction truck by inches.
Kimberly screamed hysterically.
“You fucking idiot, you almost killed us.”
***
Pedro de la Garza listened to Tejano music on his truck’s AM radio and sipped hot coffee. The big, lumbering vehicle rumbled down the highway at its max speed of fifty miles per hour, but at least it handled better since the company fixed the steering. His crew of two Haitian laborers dozed beside him in the front seat.
Pedro saw the dark outline of a tractor-trailer on the shoulder just ahead. Pedro almost spilled his coffee when the red and black Dodge Viper went screaming by in the left lane. He did spill his coffee when the Corvette flew by on the right.
***
On the Corvette’s high-end sound system, Molly Hatchet belted out, “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”
Her eyes as big as saucers, Kimberly screamed, “Oh, shit!”
Urine flooded the seat under her.
Molly Hatchet played on, singing about gambling with time and choosing one’s destiny.
In the last seconds of his life, Briggs wondered why life could not be more like his brother’s comic books, where dumb-ass cops could step out of a moving vehicle at sixty-five miles per hour and live to tell about it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Traffic was light on the post-holiday interstate and Jim Demore’s patrol car shot down the freeway doing a hundred. Fourteen seconds from a dead stop standstill to the century mark on the speedometer.
The Florida Highway Patrol had purchased a number of high-performance Dodge Chargers for use on the interstate highways and Jim had snagged one. Even after becoming an accident investigator, his command allowed him to keep the Charger. Of course, he also had to spend a fair amount of time pulling extra shifts after holidays, giving the regular patrol officers much-needed breaks. And of course, that pissed Linda off. However, the Charger was a rocket ship with emergency lights. Personal life — crap, work life — good.
He arrived at the accident scene ahead of the other responders. First among firsts.
According to dispatch, it would be another ten minutes before the EMS units arrived.
Until the current call, it had been an uneventful evening. With the sparse post-holiday traffic, he had only written a couple of tickets and had spent much of the night reflecting on his most recent and most unfortunate encounter with Linda at the hotel pool in Ft. Myers. Nevertheless, that little bit of X-rated, soap opera drama had not kept him from enjoying a late afternoon coffee with Kimberly after her shoot ended.
To Jim, Kimberly was an enigma. Even while she flirted with him over coffee, she had offered to talk to Linda on his behalf and reminded him of Jeff’s offer. However, Linda had been clear about how she felt and Jim definitely needed a break from their drama. He had smiled and shook his head. He gave Kimberly a simple “no,” while inside his head his mind shouted, “Hell no.”
Kimberly had returned Jim’s smile and gave him her cell phone number in the event that he changed his mind on either proposition. He left the resort wondering if the cell phone number might be a third, unspoken deal.
Jim slowed as he approached the accident from the northbound lanes and killed the Charger’s siren. He saw the rear end of a silver Corvette protruding from the back of a tractor-trailer.
“Okay, that can’t be good,” Jim said.
He made a U-turn at a median crossover a short distance beyond the accident. Coming back around, he stopped the Charger next to the rear end of the trailer. He notified dispatch that he had arrived, grabbed his campaign hat and flashlight, and stepped out into the still warm, South Florida night.
Placing the hat on his head, Jim walked around to the rear of the Charger. He pulled out several flairs from the trunk. One by one, he dropped them in a taper, blocking the lane behind his car. He stood still for a moment looking at the Corvette.
The force of the impact had left the Corvette’s cockpit flush against the bottom of the trailer. Broken safety glass and parts from the windshield frame littered the asphalt. The trailer was old and it looked as if the under ride guard had failed completely, allowing the trailer to swallow two-thirds of the Corvette.
Jim squatted next to the driver’s door. The door’s cracked fiberglass panel bulged slightly where the impact had bent the frame. Jim tried the door anyway. It did not budge.
Although the crash had killed the Corvette’s engine, small noises emanated from the engine compartment as damaged and broken parts cooled. Jim reached out with his flashlight and tapped the driver’s door. He listened for a moment and tapped the door again.
“Hey, anybody in there?”
Nothing. Not that Jim expected an answer. He was not looking forward to what he would see when they pulled the Corvette out. The sirens of the EMS vehicles screamed from the south coming up from Naples. Their lights flashed in the darkness. A man walked toward him from the front of the tractor-trailer. He looked to be somewhere around sixty, maybe a bit more, medium height, with a worried look on his face.
“I am Pedro de la Garza,” he said. He pointed toward the front of the tractor-trailer. “That is my truck parked in front of the semi. I have two workers with me. They are sitting in the truck, but they were asleep when the accident happened.”
Jim had a knack for sizing people up quickly and he was seldom wrong. De la Garza looked to be a working man with an honest, if worried, face.
“You saw the accident?”
Pedro nodded as Jim pulled a small notebook and pen out of his shirt pocket.
A county heavy-rescue fire truck, followed by an ambulance, passed by and then turned back south at the crossover, two hundred yards beyond the accident. The EMS vehicles pulled up behind Jim’s car, avoiding the flares. Six firefighters jumped from the rescue truck and two ambulance EMTs soon joined them. The engineer from the heavy rescue truck approached Jim.
“We heard this was a bad one.” He shrugged and looked around. “I don’t see any blood or body parts. Just the one vehicle. Not counting the trailer, of course.”
“I think it’s bad enough for whoever was in the Corvette,” Jim said.
Pedro spoke up, “I think there were two.”
As Pedro spoke, a wrecker passed, its amber lights flashing. It turned around at the crossover and pulled up behind the tractor-trailer.
“Two? Two people in the Corvette?” Jim asked.
“Two cars. I did not see inside the Corvette. But, I did see another car. I think they were racing. One passed me on the left. Very fast. Like a Porsche. I think it was red. The Corvette went to the right. I guess he didn’t see the trailer.”
Jim looked at the Corvette again. “I guess he didn’t.”
The wrecker driver approached the trailer and examined the damage to the Corvette, half talking to the group, half talking to himself.
“Holy Mother of God. I guess whoever was driving is still in there. This ain’t going to be pretty.”
Jim spoke to the group, “Better get started. We need to see who is in there. If it was a race and someone died we don’t have an accident, we have a potential homicide. Be careful what you touch.”
The wrecker driver went back to his vehicle and backed up behind the trailer, stopping close to the rear of the Corvette. Exiting the cab again, he walked around to the back of his rig. He extended the tow cable and attached it to the Corvette’s rear axle. Fiberglass and metal scraped together as he manipulated the controls and slowly extracted the car. The noise overwh
elmed the nighttime chatter coming from the underbrush next to the highway. Pieces of fiberglass and carbon fiber panels, cracked and loosened from both the impact of the collision and the extrication of the vehicle, peeled off and fell to the pavement.
The cockpit of the Corvette cleared the end of the trailer. It was worse than Jim had expected, but surprisingly, there was only a modest amount of blood. There were two bodies. Headless bodies. The collision had guillotined the driver and a female passenger when the cockpit crashed through the trailer’s under-ride guard. The hands of the driver still gripped the steering wheel. The passenger’s left hand clenched the driver’s right leg. Jim smelled urine.
Jim raised a fist signaling the tow truck driver to stop. With the cockpit exposed, the two youngest firefighters turned away from the Corvette, covered their mouths, and trotted toward the grassy roadside. Their vigorous retching accentuating their inexperience. The rescue truck engineer stood across from Jim, next to the Corvette’s passenger door.
“Not much for us to do here.”
Raw meat sat exposed where their heads had once been. Other than the decapitation, there looked to be little other trauma. As Jim looked over the Corvette’s interior, something seemed familiar. He studied the decapitated bodies. The woman had the figure of a swimsuit model. Jim looked at her lifeless hands — perfectly manicured nails — except for two on her left hand that had broken off. Probably not a housewife.
The driver’s hands held onto the steering wheel in what was literally a death grip. On his left wrist was a very expensive watch. Jim had seen that watch before. He walked around to the rear of the vehicle and did what he should have done sooner. Jim looked at the license plate. It read DBL HELIX — Jefferson Briggs’ vanity license plate. That meant the woman was most likely Briggs’ girlfriend, Kimberly. This was a first. Jim had seen dozens of accidents and more than a few fatalities. However, none of the dead had been someone Jim actually knew. He quickly strangled his feelings. Shit.
He reached down, pulled his cell phone from its holder and dialed. A sleepy voice answered.
“Coroner.”
“This is Corporal Demore, Highway Patrol. We have two dead at-the-scene, just north of the Naples rest area. A Corvette underrode a tractor-trailer. Might have been a race. We’re going to handle this as a vehicular homicide.”
“Alright,” the sleepy voice said. “I’ll let the Sheriff know.”
Jim recognized the fatigue in the Coroner’s voice. Labor Day weekend had been tough on the Coroner’s office. Vacationers and alcohol always led to a bonanza business. It did not look as if they would be getting much of a post-holiday break. Jim sighed. Neither would he. He closed his phone and put it away. He glanced at the engineer.
“I could use a little help.”
“Finding their heads?”
“Yeah.” Jim reached for his flashlight. “And we’ll need something to wrap them up in when we find them.”
The engineer glanced at the wreck.
“Wrap them or scoop them?”
Jim stared at the engineer. He kept his voice steady.
“Either way, I’d appreciate some help.” Jim turned on his flashlight.
The engineer gathered up his people. The two youngest firefighters were rinsing out their mouths with bottled water.
“OK, people,” the engineer commanded, “the trooper has asked for our help. Grab some flashlights.” Still speaking, he followed his crew to their truck. “And watch where you step.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was late when Pedro finally got ready for bed. It had been a long day. The Highway Patrol had kept him at the accident scene, throwing off his work schedule for the rest of the day. He did not get home until the sun had gone down again.
The sound of a woman’s soft, sweet voice drifted through the quiet house. She sang in Spanish about the hardships of life. About love lost, and fortune lost, and family honor lost. Pedro knew the themes well. Too well. He pushed the invading, depressing thoughts out of his mind as he neatly folded his paint-covered, concrete-encrusted pants and laid them on the chest that sat at the foot of his bed.
The depressing thoughts fought their way back into his conscience, gaining a toehold in the rubble of tragic memories. He glanced at the chest he had laid his pants on. It had once belonged to his great-grandmother. Pedro’s family, once one of the richest in Florida, had lost virtually everything in the nineteen twenty-nine stock market crash. The wealth had come from his great-grandfather who had been a brilliant, but difficult man. Family legend had it that he had outlived five wives. No one really knew how old he had been when he finally died in nineteen twenty-five. Four years later, the family went broke.
A photo of Pedro’s paternal grandfather and grandmother, dressed in fine clothing in front of a grand house and holding his infant father, sat on one corner of his dresser. The family, under Pedro’s great-grandfather’s relentless drive for success, had achieved their wealth selling water from the spring-fed pool that sat in the clearing behind the house. Gullible Easterners, who wanted to believe in a miraculous fount of enchanted water, a fountain of youth, made the de la Garza family rich. Pedro had only known the wealth in pictures.
He thought about his great-grandfather as he busied himself around the small house. Early one spring morning the servants had found his great-grandfather’s body floating in the pool behind the de la Garza estate. No one in the household dared to go into the pool to retrieve the old man’s corpse. It floated for several hours until the sheriff sent out some men with a grappling hook who were able to drag the body to the grassy edge.
Pedro’s father had told him that the corpse had shriveled into almost nothing in the few hours before the sheriff’s men arrived. He said the men made jokes about how the pool could not possibly have been Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth. They said the old man’s corpse looked like one of those Egyptian mummified things that they could occasionally see in the museum in Tampa. Besides, his father explained, everyone in Florida knew that God had hidden the Fountain of Youth somewhere up near St. Augustine. Not that anybody had ever found it there either.
The State of Florida had taken control of the property shortly after the family had moved out. Two college professors doing research on Florida’s original natives had found ancient, native burial grounds on the property, not far from the pool. A decade later, the State deeded the property to the federal government when the Army took over the huge de la Garza house as a headquarters for coastal defense during the Second World War.
The music playing in the background changed. The woman now sang, if at all possible, an even sadder song than the first one. Pedro sighed.
He studied his grandparents’ photo. It never failed to amaze him how large the house was. It stood stately and proud behind his grandparents, more of a mansion than anything. Pedro had only seen it once in person. He had stood outside the government security fence that surrounded the property a few days after his father had died. Fortune lost and family honor lost.
The depressing thoughts, intertwined with the woman’s sad voice, pushed hard against Pedro’s mind. Nevertheless, he ignored the sadness, ignored the depression pushing down on his spirit, and allowed dark memories to wander comfortably through his consciousness.
He thought about the stories that his father told when whiskey gave voice to things a man would rather forget. “While the property sat empty,” Pedro’s father said, “sometime before the soldiers moved in during World War Two, a huge alligator took up residence at the pool. When the soldiers arrived, they named him ‘Tank’ and the Commanding Officer put the pool off limits. Strange that they did not just kill the monster.”
Pedro would hang on every word, believing that someday his father would find a way to defeat the government and restore their honor and their fortune.
“My father, your grandfather, used to tell us that Tank guarded the de la Garza’s family fortune,” Pedro’s father had said. “He told us that your great-grandfather
had made a deal with the devil, and after he died, his spirit haunted the pool. In possession of the beast, his spirit would travel away from the pool searching for children to drag back into its deep waters. Anytime a child disappeared and never returned home, everyone blamed Tank.”
A child-eating alligator controlled by a malevolent spirit scared the crap out of Pedro’s father and the other de la Garza children, and they did not hesitate to share the story with their friends. Even local teenagers stayed away from the enticing spring located behind the estate.
“Some years later,” his father said, “a federal officer shot an alligator when it tried to drag a government biologist into the pool. It was in the papers. The officer swore he hit the alligator, especially since it let go of the biologist, but he also reported that the wounded alligator had escaped back into the pool. The government presumed the gator eventually died of his wounds. No one ever went into the pool to find out.”
Pedro’s father paused and finished the glass of whiskey he had been working on.
“The government put the estate off limits to all but a few federal bureaucrats whose only responsibility was to make sure it stayed off limits. Bastardos.”
Somewhere on that grand estate rested Pedro’s inheritance and he was not even allowed to set foot on the property. Pedro’s father had spoken to him often about how fate and the government had robbed his family.
Pedro sat the photo back on the dresser. Wearing boxer shorts and a tattered T-shirt, he made his way to the kitchen. He took a glass and a bottle of cheap whiskey from one of the cabinets mounted above the diminutive, single-basin sink and sat them on the counter. He went over to a small, antique, writing table. Another antique, a cigar box, sat on top of it beside framed photos and a cut-glass ashtray he had brought back from Germany.
He opened the cigar box and helped himself to one of Castro’s finest. The cigars were a gift from Raul, one of his Haitian laborers. He never asked how Raul got them. He just knew that Raul would be the last worker to go if they ever had a layoff.
The Demon Pool Page 7