Seminole Bend

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Seminole Bend Page 30

by Tom Hansen


  Only one German shepherd was coming his way and he appeared fixated on tearing Willy to shreds. NFL announcers would have nicknamed him Canine Express, a shoe-in for the Pro Bowl. But as Willy darted his eyes left and right to locate the rest of the hounds, strangely the other dogs had stopped running and stayed within a predetermined area, almost like they were playing a zone defense. The barking continued, but Willy fortunately had only one pooch to manhandle.

  During his days in Army boot camp, Willy learned the choke-out maneuver, a choke hold that would cause a syncope and render an opponent unconscious. He didn’t want to kill the dog, so he hoped he could grapple him into a temporary coma. The German shepherd was sprinting Willy’s direction at about thirty miles per hour. If Willy tried to run, he would be torn apart, so he maintained his defensive stance and readied himself for impact.

  From five feet away, the shepherd leaped at Willy’s chest, fangs glittering in the moonlight. Willy caught him in midair around the neck, but the dog’s momentum had driven him to the ground. With all the strength he could muster, Willy kept the jolted dog at arm’s length from his face. Quickly, he rolled over and trapped the shepherd between his massive muscular body and the soft, sandy earth below, then moved his biceps into position under the hound’s chin. One swift snap upward and Canine Express was fast asleep.

  Willy loosened his clamp around the dog’s neck and left him lying in the dirt. He was still breathing and would probably be unconscious for only a few seconds. Willy hastily got up, dashed onto the asphalt and hid behind the first car he could see: a black limousine with license plate number BADASS77. Didn’t take much thought to picture why that car was impounded in the FBI’s lot. The other German shepherds were barking incessantly, but none had moved out of their zone. Excellent trainers, questionable security procedures.

  The nineteen-inch diameter, four and a half million candlepower searchlight attached to the roof of the guardhouse fired up and the beam moved in a clockwise revolution slowly around the parking lot. The guard on duty heard barks from every direction, so he couldn’t pinpoint the actual location of an intruder. He carefully swept the entire facility with the stream of light. Willy was certain the guard was trained to press an alert button to call for backup and he knew FBI agents would be swarming soon. He had about ten minutes to work with before the G-Men would be arriving from Miami in their patented black sedans.

  Three vehicles down from the limo was a charred and semi-flattened Ford L-series pickup truck. All four wheels were crammed with a bulk of dried sludge. Willy didn’t need to check a plate number to know this was Coach Berry’s truck. He remembered the fire department talking about the accident and the difficulty they had putting out the fire on the truck’s rubber tires. They ended up packing the tires with mud to cut off the oxygen and reduce the smoke.

  The searchlight beam was in the opposite direction, and amid nonstop howls and woofs from the watchdogs, Willy scurried to the truck’s passenger door and climbed through the narrow, glassless window frame onto the charred, but intact front seat. The roof had caved in only slightly, thanks to a heavy-duty roll bar installed on the bed behind the cab’s rear window, and the bench seat was in relatively fair condition due to fibers infused with asbestos, a flame retardant. Willy didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he hoped the penlight attached to his key chain would shed some light as to why the FBI wanted to impound the vehicle.

  Except for globs of dark gray muck stemming from the mixture of ash and the water used to douse the flames, there wasn’t much to see. The truck and everything in it, apart from the scorched front seat, had obviously been torched beyond recognition and there was a good chance that Willy was now defiling Sheryl Berry’s cremated remains. While lying face down on the seat, he flickered the penlight’s narrow ray of light all around the cab, from the roof to the floorboards. Nothing. “What in the world does the FBI think they will find in this incinerated mess?” muttered Willy to himself.

  Willy’s line of vision was hampered by the uncomfortable position of his body, so he rotated his substantial frame awkwardly onto his back in order to have a better angle to shine the light at the driver’s side door. He unclipped the penlight from his key chain to make it easier to maneuver. Willy’s extra-large hands didn’t do well with small objects and the tiny flashlight fell to the floor and rolled under the bench. He again clumsily turned back onto his stomach and tried unsuccessfully to grab the light with his outstretched arms. Springs from the seat had broken off and were preventing a clear path to grasp anything beneath him. And to top it off, the damn barking mutts were still protecting their areas, but remained relentlessly growling in the direction of Berry’s truck. Willy was becoming especially nervous. He didn’t have much time.

  Willy stuck his head down and peered under the seat. As he grabbed for the penlight, he noticed a tiny, ball-shaped copper object lying next to it. He pinched it between his forefinger and thumb, then swept the light out with his other three fingers.

  Willy switched the penlight to his left hand and laid back down on the front seat. He examined the object. It was definitely copper, although blackened somewhat by the ashes in the vehicle. Willy knew immediately that is was a bb, either from an air gun or a shot gun shell. Then he heard the sirens in the distance. He slipped the bb into his pants pocket and shifted into position to exit the truck through the same window he came in.

  At that moment the watchtower searchlight was sweeping towards him, so Willy ducked back down. As the beam glimmered through the interior of the truck, Willy noticed something attached to the bottom of the steering column. It was a small, rectangular box with a concave fitting that set perfectly on the cylindrical support. Willy wiggled and waggled down to the floorboard to get a better look. The box had loosened from the fire, so Willy clutched it with his fingers and yanked hard. It detached from the steering column, but two wires remained connected from the box to another gadget inside the metal tube. Willy would need to dismantle the steering support in order to extract the internal gadget and he didn’t have time. With one powerful jerk, the wires from the box dislodged from whatever they were attached to inside the steering column. The box was too large to put in his pocket, so he tossed it out the window for the moment. He stayed low as the searchlight continued its clockwise sweep away from the truck.

  Flashing red lights lit up the night sky as three FBI vehicles screeched to a halt at the front gate. The watchtower guard pressed a switch and the gate swung open. The FBI cars entered quickly, then slammed on their brakes. Leaving their cars running and ready, six agents ran towards the watchtower. A few minutes later they returned to their cars and took off slowly and deliberately in different directions through the lot, with driver and passenger side floodlights scouring the facility.

  Willy tried to budge open the passenger door, but it had been fused to the chassis from the blaze. Even his muscular mass couldn’t force it to dislodge. With no other option, he squeezed his body through the window and tumbled onto the asphalt. He picked up the box and sprinted towards the hole he had made in the fence. The German shepherds were still barking wildly, but miraculously they did just what they were trained to do: stay put and guard their assigned area.

  Willy was twenty-five yards from the hole when the FBI agents in the closest car spotted him. They locked the passenger side floodlight on him and floored the accelerator. A few seconds later a piercing whistle blew from the watchtower and the dogs were on the chase. The other two sedans abruptly U-turned and raced towards the gate heading for Highway 41. “So this is what it looks like when all hell breaks loose,” mumbled Willy to himself as he ducked and dove through the opening in the fence he had created a few minutes earlier. His back was skinned from his fall to the asphalt while exiting the truck, and now his head was bleeding as the hibiscus bush scraped his scalp. No matter, he pushed away the branches and moved towards the road.

  The FBI agents slammed on the brakes a few feet from the fence, opened their doo
rs to use as a shield and pulled out their weapons. They had assumed that Willy was armed. “Halt or we’ll shoot!” Willy wasn’t about to take their advice.

  The agents began rapidly firing their semi-automatic Smith and Wesson 459’s into the bushes, but by that time Willy had reached Tamiami Trail and was sprinting towards Everglades Estates. The two other FBI cars had just fishtailed out of the impound lot onto the highway and were speeding towards Willy with lights blazing and sirens wailing.

  Across the road, Willy noticed a small, shabby concrete-block house set back about seventy-five yards into a sprinkling of palm trees and palmetto bushes. The driveway was white sand and seashells and the entrance was marked with a tin mailbox hanging by its last thread on a well-worn wooden post. It was Willy’s only hope for escape. He hurried across the road and dashed down the driveway clutching to the box he found in Berry’s truck. Willy’s destination was the thick mangrove swamp behind the dwelling that could lead to a promising, yet boggy escape route. But when he came up to the house, he noticed a paltry wooden shed in the back with a 400cc Kawasaki motorcycle leaning up against it. The sirens were getting closer, so Willy darted towards the back of the shed, slipped on a patch of soggy grass and slid into a pile of mud.

  The FBI sedans zipped past the driveway and continued west down Tamiami Trail. They hadn’t seen Willy cross the road. However, the first German shepherd that hurdled through the hole in the fence had locked on to Willy’s scent and was now bolting down the driveway towards the shed. Willy dropped the box into the sludge and readied himself for another attack. There was a very strange smell that was making him gag, but he couldn’t think about that now. He assumed the linebacker stance and was about to turn to face the oncoming aggressor, but his feet gave way and Willy stumbled and fell flat on his face, his eye sockets, nose and mouth filled with muck. That’s when he realized that the shed was not a shed, it was an outhouse, and the sludge he was wallowing in was waste overflowing from the holding tank.

  A split-second later, the vicious canine leaped and landed on Willy’s back, his claws penetrating both skin and muscle tissue. The trained-to-kill beast then dug his fangs deeply into Willy’s neck and Willy was trapped. The dog’s jaw was clamped firmly into the trapezius tendons of his helpless victim, and then he began rapidly shaking his head back and forth. The pain was unbearable and Willy had resigned himself to believing this was the end. He closed his eyes and prayed for a better life in heaven, one without the likes of Roy Jackson.

  Suddenly, Willy’s neck was liberated from the razor-sharp fangs and the claws ripping into his rhomboid tissue were swiftly retracted. But as Willy tried to rise, he was driven back down into the muck by what seemed like a 1,000-pound sledgehammer. He could hear a whining whimper coming from the attacking watchdog, then a crunching sound, like bones being snapped. Willy rolled his head to the side and glimpsed out his feces-slathered eyeballs in time to see the German shepherd’s carcass fall headless to the ground. A fourteen-foot gator was chomping away at the canine cranium and it appeared he was taking deep pleasure in his furry feast. Willy’s backside was a perfect banquet table for the king of the swamp. He hoped the mammoth reptile would pass on dessert.

  CHAPTER 53

  Friday, March 12, 1982

  7:55 a.m.

  A lthough trying to appear calm and collected, Lew Berry didn’t hide his anxiety well. He’d been waiting since seven at the FBI’s headquarters and it was now five minutes to eight. Lew opened the envelope that Agent Jones had left for him yesterday and glanced at the picture again. He still didn’t recognize the man nor did he know why Jones had given it to him. The same front desk receptionist he spoke to yesterday told him that Agent Jones was due to report for work at any minute, but Lew was on the verge of a panic attack.

  At 8:25 a.m., Agent Jones walked into the waiting area at FBI Headquarters. He extended his arm and shook hands with Lew who stood up and greeted him with sweaty palms and apprehensive eyes. “Sorry about yesterday, Lew. I was called over to Tampa by the FAA regarding the air disaster. And I’m sorry I’m late today, but we had a problem earlier this morning over at our auto impound lot. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What is it, Jack? This photo you left for me, have you got news about Janet? Have the Uniontown police opened up an investigation yet?” Lew’s angst was getting the best of him. He didn’t want to tell Agent Jones what his neighbor Ralph Kline had told him for fear of the answer he was hoping to avoid.

  “Don’t know yet what’s happening in Pennsylvania. That photo I gave you was wired from the FBI office in Pittsburgh. It’s from a security camera at Burns Coffee Shop in Harrisburg. Our men had put out a tracer on your bank accounts and credit cards. Janet used a credit card at Burns on Tuesday to pay for coffee and a roll. They rolled back tape from the security camera and located Janet. Do you have any idea who the man sitting with her could be?”

  “No idea, Jack. And the most direct way to the Poconos doesn’t go through Harrisburg. Was her credit card used somewhere else in Pennsylvania?”

  “Not sure what the FBI may have found yesterday while I was in Tampa, but I’ll call again. What I needed to tell you, though, is rather strange . . . and just coincidental, I hope.”

  “Can’t it wait?” replied Lew irritably. “You need to make sure the FBI and police are looking for my wife, damn it!”

  “Yes, I’ll call. But you should know that Brett and Sheryl’s truck was broken into last night at our impound lot in Tamiami.”

  “Broken into? How does someone break into an FBI secured area? Can you explain that to me, Jack?” Lew was beside himself with anger. “What did they take out of the truck? I thought everything in it was burned to a crisp.”

  “Yes, everything appeared to be incinerated except for the front bench seat, which was protected somewhat because it contained asbestos fibers. As for what was taken, we’re not sure yet. I was there when our boys went through it looking for prints. We were able to get some clear ones, by the way. Whoever broke in didn’t bother to wear any gloves.”

  “Okay, that’s great, Jack,” replied Lew with a hint of sarcasm. “But you didn’t answer my other question. What did they take?”

  “Lew, what I’m about to tell you is highly classified information at this point in our investigation. I’m only telling you this in the hopes that you will begin to fully cooperate with us. I asked you to stay here in Miami and you disappointed me by renting a car and driving to Seminole Bend.” Agent Jones stared stoically into Lew’s eyes.

  “I’m not your little baby boy, Jack. What I do on my own time is my own business. So you had me followed?”

  “No, but you used your MasterCard to rent the car at the airport and four hours later you bought lunch at the Angler’s Delight restaurant.”

  “You are tracing my credit card, too? Unbelievable! What crime am I suspected of, Jones?” Lew was seething. His hands were firmly on his waist and his red face revealed a rapidly advancing fury.

  “You are not a suspect, Lew, so please relax. It’s standard procedure to monitor all parties when investigating a possible kidnapping, which is what we are doing with your daughter-in-law.”

  “You said you were going to give me some classified information. What is it?” Lew responded harshly.

  “I told you on Monday that we had found some evidence while searching Brett’s truck. We gathered several pellets that were scattered under the seat. The lab concluded the pellets were from a 12-gauge shotgun shell.”

  “So you’re saying someone shot whoever the man was that was driving the truck? Is that what caused him to lose control?” inquired Lew.

  “Well, that would certainly be one theory. The problem is that for a shotgun to be effective killing a human, it must be fired at a fairly close range. The autopsy showed significant damage to the upper portion of the parietal bone, meaning whoever -”

  Lew cut him off tersely, “I’m not a doctor, Jones, speak English, okay?”

 
; Agent Jones replied, “The top of the skull was torn open, meaning whoever fired the shot did so from close proximity and a position above the dead man. That would seem impossible considering the victim was driving the truck, unless he noticed the gunman from a distance of no more than fifteen feet outside the windshield and ducked his head at the last minute.”

  Lew thought about that for a moment. Half to himself, half to Jones he said, “Meaning the gunman would be standing in the middle of the road, right? That would be taking quite a chance with a pickup truck barreling full speed down the highway. And if he waited until the last second to fire the weapon, the truck would have been unable to avoid hitting him.”

  “Yes, you are absolutely right. It’s very unlikely that the truck ended up in the culvert by accident. The autopsy shows damage to the top of the skull, which could have happened in an accident. That’s what Seminole Bend’s sheriff wants us to believe. But we made a call yesterday to Cliff Sutton, the county coroner up there. He says the damage to the cranium is more consistent with a close-range blast from a shotgun shell than blunt force trauma, which would have occurred in a vehicle accident. When I asked why that wasn’t in his report, he said it was originally, but had been redacted by a court order. So, that leaves us with a different theory that is, quite frankly, inexplicable.”

  “Well?” asked Lew curiously. “What theory do you now have?”

  “The man driving the truck was already dead.”

 

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