Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries)

by Griffin, H. Terrell

  But what the hell. He was in his final days. Day, maybe. He knew death was close, very close. He could feel it. He only wanted to live long enough to finish the job, his final effort, and the one that would save his empire.

  If anyone found out about his part in the deaths that came from that infernal black Indian’s meddling in things that didn’t concern him, it would be too late to prosecute. He’d beat the charge because he would be dead. There was nothing the law could do to him. He was worried about Donna, though. She was culpable, had been part of the plan, part of the orders that had gone out from this mansion by the bay. They would come for her and she would take his place in the maw of the unrelenting justice system that would grind her into nothingness.

  He turned off the lamp, bringing the darkness in close, cloying in its ability to conceal the deprivations of age, the torpid state of his existence, the only illumination the rhythmic green flashing of the channel marker in the bay. He felt the mesmerizing effect from its constant repetition, each flash evenly spaced, equally bright.

  His mind drifted into the past, that shadowy time of his youth, before he understood that life was brutal and that only the fiercest of men would survive and prosper. He had loved a girl then, a woman really, a slim beautiful woman with a lilting laugh and eyes that shone with a wisdom not common in one so young, a smile that lightened his heart and gave meaning to his life.

  They’d met in the library of the university up in Gainesville. She was the daughter of a clothier, a widower, who owned a small chain of men’s stores along the east coast from Daytona Beach to West Palm. He was the son of a man of wealth and station and, some said, ruthlessness. But the young student couldn’t appreciate the decadence required to amass a large fortune. That knowledge was in his future, and when he met the girl in the library, he knew the stirring warmth of true love that perhaps only comes once in every lifetime.

  In the days before birth control pills, a time of faulty condoms and mistaken understandings of fertility, pregnancy was a great risk that attended each and every coupling. The sweet girl with the lilting laugh became pregnant. When she began to show, when her belly got so big that she could no longer hide it under flowing dresses, she left school and went home to her father. He was a kind man who loved his daughter, and he took her in and cared for her and called the doctor when her labor pains came. Medicine was less refined in that time, less sure of itself, less a science and more of an art. Complications set in that were beyond the minimal abilities possessed by the doctor. The woman with the wise eyes did not survive the delivery, and the baby that was born of that glorious coupling in Gainesville was a freak, a child that should never have been conceived.

  The young student had come to the house of the clothier to see his child and to bury his love. He left the child in the clothier’s care, went on with his life, and grieved for what he’d lost. He never visited the child, not even once, but he sent a check every month to the clothier who raised her.

  He wondered, as he often did in these final days, how his life would have differed if he’d married the girl with the wondrous smile, if she had lived, if she’d birthed a normal child, and if he’d dodged the evil that had infused his life since the day of their parting.

  He wiped a tear from his cheek, cursed himself for his self-pity, and crept carefully off to the hospice bed. Sleep, that cursed state that brought him only nightmares, took him gently onto another plane of existence. Outside, in the dark bay, the channel light winked on and off and on and off, consistent in its nightly cadence.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The sound of a pistol shot quieted the crowd, but I took little notice. I was in that nanosecond between the time I saw Jock’s assailant moving toward him with the knife and my reaction. A hole appeared in the temple of the man with the knife, a larger hole on the other side of his head spewing bone and blood and brain matter. He stopped cold, no movement except the fall to the floor.

  Jock didn’t flinch. He grabbed Baggett’s hair, pulling his head back, his pistol coming out of his pocket and boring into the man’s back, pushing him toward the door. I saw a bearded man wearing a watch cap and a biker vest over a long-sleeve shirt and jeans turn toward the crowd, his pistol pointing outward. Three other men spaced around the room did the same. “Be cool,” said the one who’d shot Jock’s attacker. “Be cool, and nobody dies.” Jock’s buddies had shown up.

  The biker who’d been at the table with Baggett had moved with us. As I turned toward the shooter, I saw the biker coming at me, a knife at waist height, out of sight of any of Jock’s men. I pulled my gun from my jacket pocket and was raising it to shoot my attacker. An arm snaked around my back, grabbing my right arm, pushing it down. Somebody was behind me, one arm around my throat and the other in control of my gun hand. I helped him out, pushing my arm all the way down to my side and pulling the trigger. The bullet entered the foot of the man behind me. He screamed and let go, but not before he ripped the pistol out of my hand. The one with the knife was a couple of feet from me, his weapon pointed at my gut. I didn’t have time to pick up my gun. The guy wasn’t a professional. He was a little clumsy, mad as hell, oblivious to the men holding guns on the crowd. He was trying for a kill, his rage overshadowing his instinct for survival. Surely he knew that if he got me, he would be shot down like a dog in the street.

  Another biker, a big guy with a lot of gut, was coming from my left, a knife in his hand. He was moving quickly, was no more than three steps from me, arm cocked to thrust the blade into my heart.

  I pivoted to my right, turning inside the right arm of the first guy, my back to him throwing my right arm over his, pinning him to me. The fat guy was two steps from me, coming hard and fast. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure move toward us, coming from my left. A booted foot came up, lighting fast, striking the man in the wrist. The knife fell to the floor. The booted foot struck again, so fast I thought I might have imagined the first strike. The boot caught the fat guy in the jaw, snapping his head back. He dropped like a big lead blimp.

  At the same second that the boot was flying, I head butted my guy in the face, twice, quickly, stepped forward and grabbed his right elbow with my right hand. He was reeling, his nose a bloody pulp. I pivoted to my right, still holding his elbow, grabbed his right wrist with my left hand. His grip was loosening on the knife when I raised his arm, my right hand on his elbow and my left on his wrist, and brought it down forcefully onto the back of a chair. I heard the bone snap and the man cry out in anguish. The knife clattered to the floor.

  I turned in time to see my booted savior smash the heel of her hand into the nose of another biker. Blood and mucus splattered. He went to his knees, holding his face, moaning in pain. The tattooed blonde from the bar wheeled again, her back to me, ready to strike the next assailant. A surprise. One of Jock’s people. A gun fired. One of Jock’s men put a bullet into the ceiling. The room went quiet, people stopped where they were. For a second there was no movement in the room.

  The shooter, Jock’s buddy, had moved toward us in the second that the action took. The biker who had grabbed me from behind was writhing on the floor, moaning, his boot bloody, a bullet hole on the top above his instep. The one from the table lay on the floor in a fetal position holding his broken arm against his crotch, blood streaming from his nose.

  “Let’s move,” said the shooter, backing toward the door. I picked up my pistol and trained it on the crowd. The three other men were moving toward the front of the bar, each with a pistol trained on the room, pointing in different directions, their fields of fire covering everybody in the place. The blonde moved with us, staying close, eyes darting.

  We reached the front door. Logan was in the driver’s seat of his car, a pistol pointed at the rear seat. Jock had pushed Baggett into the back and restrained his hands behind him with flex cuffs. Logan was making sure he didn’t move. Jock was standing by the car watching the entrance to the bar, his weapon pointing toward it. He’d propped the door open
with a brick. The six of us came out, slowly, one giving cover to the next guy backing out of the building. One of them had a machine pistol. He pointed it into the building, aimed high, and let off a quick burst.

  “Where’s your car, Fred?” Jock shouted.

  “Right here, boss. The Mercury,” said the man with the machine pistol.

  “Give me that Uzi, and you guys get the hell out of here. I’ll call you when we get moving.”

  Fred tossed the gun to Jock and he and the others got in the car. Jock let off another burst of gun fire into the bar’s ceiling. “That ought to keep them on their toes until we’re gone.”

  The blonde was standing next to me. “Aren’t you going with them?” I asked.

  “I’m not with them.” She smiled.

  The slight southern accent, the smile. Suddenly my brain kicked into gear, overriding my sense of confused wonder. “J.D.? Get in the car.” I pushed her into the front seat.

  The Mercury left, its tires squealing as they sought purchase on the asphalt of the road. I got into the front-passenger seat, squeezing J.D. between Logan and me. We followed the Mercury. Jock poked the machine pistol out the window and fired another burst into the ranks of bikes parked next to the road.

  “That seemed to work out nicely,” said Logan. “Did you guys make any new friends tonight? Other than Blondie here.”

  “Watch your mouth, Logan,” J.D. said, and took her sunglasses off.

  He turned, squinted at her in the faint light from the dash. “J.D.?”

  “Yeah. Watch the road.”

  “Hey,” he said. “Nice tats.”

  “They wash off.” She pulled at the top of her blouse, an unconscious attempt to cover her breasts.

  Jock picked up the phone and dialed a number. “You guys go on home. I appreciate the backup. I owe you.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then, “I’ll tell him.” He hung up, looked at me. “Fred said to tell you the one that came after you with the knife was Baggett’s bodyguard. There’s some sort of rule that if you’re the bodyguard and your boss gets wacked, you die too. I guess he figured he had nothing to lose.”

  “He was right,” said Baggett. “He’s a dead man.”

  “You may as well be,” said Jock. “After you get through talking to us, I don’t think they’ll want you to be their leader anymore.”

  “Where’re we going?” asked Logan.

  “We’re going to drop J.D. off.” I turned toward her. “Where’s your car?”

  “About a mile from here. I parked it and walked in.”

  “Show me.”

  She gave Logan directions and we soon pulled up behind a gray Toyota Camry parked in a strip mall lot. “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “Get out. Let’s talk,” I said.

  We walked the few steps to the passenger side of her car. Stopped. Stood silently for a moment. I exploded. “What the hell were you doing in that bar?”

  She pulled the blonde wig off her head, opened the car door, and threw it and her hat into the passenger seat. “Saving your ass,” she said over her shoulder. She retrieved a man’s dress shirt, pulled it on, buttoned it up, and turned back to me.

  “You did that and I appreciate it. But you can’t be here. You’re a cop.”

  “Not any more. I quit.”

  “What?”

  “I gave the chief my gun and badge and a letter of resignation late this afternoon.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed to color outside the lines.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “There’s some evil in the world that can’t be handled by the rules.”

  “Talk to me, J.D. You’re not making much sense.”

  “Have you heard about Jube Smith?”

  “No.”

  “I tried to call you several times. Went straight to your voice mail.

  “Sorry. My battery died.”

  “Logan didn’t answer his phone, and I didn’t have a number for Jock.”

  She was shaken, talking rapidly as if hearing the words pouring from her mouth would ease the pain I saw in her face.

  “J.D.,” I said, sharply. “What’s the problem?”

  “That bastard Baggett killed Jube and his wife, and the law can’t touch him.”

  My heart sagged. Poor Jube. A man driven beyond his level of tolerance who’d tried to do the right thing and was killed because of it.

  “What happened?” My voice sounded tired in my own ears, and I guess I was tired. Tired of death. Tired of the death merchants. Tired of the twisted people who inhabited a subterranean world that most people did not know existed. It was like another dimension, existing side by side with the one we knew, and as imperfect as ours was, the other was many magnitudes worse. A place where death was dealt without thought or even purpose.

  “I was at the north end of the key checking out a car that had been broken into at the Northside Drive beach access when the chief called. Said there had been a murder in Cortez, and I needed to get over there and talk to a Detective David Sims. He said that some boat captain told him that you were involved with Jube. I tried to call, but I guess your battery had died.”

  “It’s okay, J.D. What else?

  “I’ve been a homicide cop for a long time. Seen a lot of bad stuff. This was the worst.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The lady who lives next door to Jube heard a motorcycle pull up and stop. Thirty minutes later she heard a gunshot and saw a man run from the house and leave on the bike. She got the tag number. It was one of those vanity plates that said ‘DBAG.’”

  “Baggett’s?”

  “Yes. Sims ran the plate.”

  “Then you’ve got him.”

  “No. He called it in stolen. From a cell phone. The call came in from the east side of the county just about the time the bike appeared at Jube’s.”

  “Could be legit.”

  “And he could have had someone else make the call. Give him some sort of alibi.”

  “You don’t buy it,” I said.

  “Not for a minute.” She took a deep breath, shuddered a little.

  “There’s more. Did you know that Jube’s wife had ovarian cancer?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was near death. Maybe a day or two. Not long. She was just skin and bones. She was tied to the bed. Naked and gagged. Her throat was cut. There were cigarette burns on her stomach and thighs. And cuts. He sliced her before he killed her. All up and down her torso. The ME’s preliminary thinking is that the burns and cuts were premortem. Her heart was still pumping blood when the bastard stuck a cigarette to her and sliced her like a raw carrot.”

  “How do you know it was a cigarette that burned her? Did he leave it at the scene?”

  “Yes, but it was a filter tip, and he tore off the tip and took it with him. No DNA.”

  “Why leave the cigarette?”

  “I think it was to show that he was smarter than we are. That there was no evidence. No way to tie him to the murder.”

  “What about the knife?”

  “One of a set from Jube’s kitchen.”

  “Jube?”

  “He was tied to a chair, facing the bed. Gagged. Shot in the head. He had to watch and listen to Baggett torture his wife.”

  J.D. painted a scene from hell. I hoped Jube didn’t have to see his wife defiled. “Maybe Jube was dead before it took place,” I said.

  “That doesn’t match with the timeline. Baggett was in the house for thirty minutes before the shot was fired, and he left immediately afterward.”

  “Did you talk to the boat captain?”

  “Yeah. It was the one we had lunch with. Nestor Cobol. Nice guy. Said Jube worked for him and that you’d gotten him the job. I remember Jube mentioning that at lunch.”

  “Goddamnit,” I said.

  “Baggett did it. I know that in my gut.”

  “But you can’t prove it.”

  “Not in a million years. He was careful. N
o prints, no DNA, nothing to tie him to the scene.”

  “I suspect he’ll talk to Jock.”

  “That’s what I was hoping for. Can I come along?”

  “This might get rough.”

  “I’ve seen rough before.”

  “What about your car?”

  “I’ll get a ride up here in the morning and pick it up.”

  “Okay.”

  We walked back to Logan’s car. J.D. got in the front seat, scooted over to give me room. “J.D.’s going with us,” I said. “I’ll explain later.” There was no objection.

  “Where’re we going?” Logan asked.

  “Sun City.” I said.

  “Why Sun City?”

  “That’s where K-Dawg lives now.”

  “I know that. Are we going to visit him at this time of the night? Maggie will kill us.”

  “Do you remember that camp the Dawg has way up on the Little Manatee River?”

  “Yeah. I think we did some drinking up there a time or two. Maybe more.”

  “I called him today. We’ll pick up the key at his house and then take this piece of shit up there and have a nice little conversation. Don’t miss your turn.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  We picked up the key from K-Dawg, drove east on Sun City Boulevard, turned south on Highway 301, and after a few miles turned right onto a dirt track that ran along the northern edge of the river. An old citrus grove stretched north from the water, its trees empty of fruit. We drove for a mile or so and came to a small clearing that opened onto the river and was bordered on three sides by ancient grapefruit trees. The camp was little more than an old travel trailer set up on concrete blocks. It had a propane stove, a portable toilet, a small generator for powering lights, and bunks for four people. It sat near the river, which was more like a creek this close to its headwaters. A cleared area behind the trailer provided parking for three or four cars.

  Jock dragged Baggett from the backseat, dropping him on the ground, his feet still in the car. “Get up, asshole,” he said.