Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition

by Moulton, CD

  “Not much. Sylvia Gordas seems to have some kind of connection with drug cartels or whatever. She knows all the wrong people.”

  “I take it Gordas is her real name. Those drug cartels are coming up much too often in this. I worry about them getting any of their shit started here.

  “I think Manny can find something if they’re part of it. We can give him a name to work back from.

  “I think I’ll open a PI agency here. You and Manny do as much as I do in this.”

  “It passes the time.” She grinned. “You still don’t have a definite direction to finding what this was about, do you?”

  “I have several. Only problem is connecting more than two together. Get the third in any angle and the other two don’t fit anymore.”

  They went to the Starfish and had a cup of overpriced coffee, then Clint went back home while Judi went to Almirante and Changuinola with some friends to shop. It’s cheaper to buy almost anything there than in Bocas, so a trip a week for groceries and household needs saved more than enough to pay for the water taxi and bus. A call to Manny got it started as to who and what Sylvia Gordas was and what her part of it might be. That should tie John Brandon in, one way or another. He hoped.

  Next was a little run out toward Drago. He saw a boat on the beach just past The Bluffs and two people, a man and a woman, using a metal detector. People would scour every single inch of the beach area since the find. Several Indios were watching to see they didn’t go onto the private land above the tide line.

  No one would bury anything below the tide line. Couldn’t they see that?

  A couple of the Indios saw Clint and waved to him. He waved back and did the circle to the side of the head with his finger. It said, “Loco.” They agreed and laughed. One of them waved a twenty dollar bill at Clint. Clint put his hands up and shrugged. The Indio pointed inland a little, to a tree about fifteen feet from the tide line, then to the two with the metal detector, which got their attention enough that the man turned to see Clint there – and told Clint that they had paid him to let them go a little above the tide line with their equipment. Clint waved and headed out.

  The Indio didn’t own the land, he was probably just passing by and they offered him twenty bucks for permission to go onto the land. He didn’t have an argument against giving them his permission. He didn’t care. The owner of the property might come at any time to tell them to get out. No one lied to them or claimed the right to give permission. What they assumed was their problem.

  On the other hand, the owner probably didn’t care. The Indios wouldn’t pass through his land if he did. At least, not these particular Indios.

  Clint went on to Drago and started back about an hour later. The people had managed to move about a kilometer on along the beach.

  Clint shook his head. If the spot the chest had been found was any indication he would know any other would be in a hidden recess or somewhere not in direct view of the Caribbean.

  He got back and cleaned up, dressed and headed back into Bocas Town. Dave and Selma were in the parque. He talked awhile and Dave said he could have sworn he saw John Brandon in a boat out by Carenero on the Caribbean side. He and Selma had gone to visit friends on Bastimentos and had seen him when they were coming back. He was alone.

  Curiouser and curiouser. Clint wondered if he had a metal detector with him. Dave said he didn’t know him except to say hello. He and his wife had gone to several places where Dave was playing.

  Those people earlier didn’t mean anything. If Brandon was out treasure-hunting, it might mean there was another chest somewhere close. That would mean ... the shocked reactions of people about the one found was because something was NOT in that chest, not because something extra was.

  What? They weren’t very excited by the money. What could be in a chest somewhere out there?

  Clint suddenly wanted to get to the far side of Carenero to see if Brandon went to a specific spot. He grabbed a taxi and got to his boat to go out fast. He went around the northwest end of Carenero and headed along the outer side fast. He wouldn’t appear to be looking for anything that way. Just a fisherman heading in.

  There were three boats along the beach there. One was at the mouth of a runnel that went onto the island. The water would be too shallow to take a boat in there, so whoever was in that boat had gone onto the island. The runnel also formed a little indent that would leave what whoever was doing there out of view. It was much like the one where the chest was found on Isla Colón. Too much.

  It was getting weirder! Clint hadn’t thought that would be possible. He called Sergio and said to get a boatload of police out there. Bring the metal detectors he had and get the one at his place.

  “What have you discovered?” he asked.

  “I wish to hell I knew!” Clint said, as the saying goes, “With great emotion.”

  Busy Day

  Clint watched as Brandon moved along the inner side of the curve of the runnel with a metal detector. He was slogging around in the loose mud. Chitras were eating him alive if he didn’t have a hell of a lot of Deet. They were always bad on Carenero. Sergio and the police came up and were talking with Clint when Brandon saw them. He casually went to his boat and slid the metal detector in, then pushed it off the beach and started out. Sergio was going to stop him, but Clint said to ignore him for the moment. He wasn’t going far.

  Basilio, an Indio friend on the police force, said the idiot didn’t know much about the area if he was searching the runnel for something that was buried fifty years ago. The runnel wasn’t there that long. “The runnels bring out mud and trees and everything else after a storm and fill in as they move along. You can see there are no old trees around here. If you notice the kinds of trees you can see where the old runnel was. Fifty years ago ... about thirty years ago the runnel filled in so much it moved. You have to find where the trees are all less than thirty years old to know where it was. The hardwoods. The regular trees grow fast enough that you couldn’t tell. I would say it was about fifty meters northward ... just a minute.” He walked along the beach and said it could be there, but he thought it was about fifteen meters farther along. The runnel had moved twice. It might be either spot. The last one could be a very old run.

  “You can tell where the shores were. There are older hardwoods to the edge. See those with the small leaves? They have been there for several hundred years. No less than one hundred. Move along just outside of them ... no, just inside of them. The box would have been buried by the shore, not in the runnel. We have to check both places.”

  Clint didn’t doubt the information would be one hundred percent accurate.

  They didn’t find anything there before it started getting dark. Sergio left two officers in one of the boats to sit out a bit to observe if anyone came. He would send two others out to relieve them at the end of their shift.

  “Just observe and note time and exact locations they go to. Don’t interfere or try to approach them. We have to know more before we do the wrong thing,” Clint suggested. They agreed and would come back at daybreak to continue their search. Clint went in to his house, cleaned up and dressed again, then went in to meet Gina to go to The Plank, where Dave would be playing. Not much else happened. It was a good evening. Selma had gone with Judi to see Almirante and Changuinola, so Clint, Ben, Manny (who had come in to take care of some business) and two Indio friends finished the night after Gina went back to the hotel. She wanted to be alone awhile to figure out what she was going to do now. She still wasn’t altogether convinced she was going to get any thousands of dollars, much less millions.

  Clint went home. Dave went home. Ben went home – with the Indios.

  “I’ll take the older runnel with Ronaldo and David. You take the newer one with Sandoval and Pablito,” Sergio instructed. “Move along where you can cover about five meters from where the shore was. Go up the north side and return along the south.”

  They all agreed and started the search. It would be slow progress. The
y had machetes to chop their way through the lighter brush. Just after one o’clock Ronaldo called that he had found a large piece of metal. Sergio called to keep looking in case it wasn’t what they were after. He used a probe and started to dig down to the object. It was about three feet deep. The covering soil was a little rocky and hard to dig, but there were no large stones. Just as he called that it did seem to be some kind of metal box Pablito found something, so they would probe and dig if it seemed likely. It was also a metal box. By the time they had reached it Sergio had the whole top of his box uncovered. He said it would take them all to lift it out of there, so they went to take some poles they cut to use as levers and got it to the surface. It had a large padlock that had rusted almost off holding the lid closed through brass hasps. All the hinges and bands were brass. The box was wood covered in copper, inside and out. The wood had rotted away.

  Sergio said they would have to take it back to Bocas before it was opened. He wouldn’t take responsibility for it here. They agreed and put it in one of the boats, then went together to dig up the other. It was much like the first, but appeared to be much newer. It didn’t have such fancy brasswork. It was basically steel. It was more like a copy of an old treasure chest for the movies or something.

  “You know what?” Clint asked.

  “I would suggest that we found an actual pirate treasure and what we were looking for. Both,” Sergio answered.

  “This is even weirder than I thought,” Clint agreed.

  They took their loot back to Bocas Town and put it in the secure vault before they opened it. The entire crew who dug it up were there. They had the right.

  The treasure chest, the authentic one, had some very good jewelry and a lot of gold in it. There were almost a hundred pounds of gold coins, alone. They very carefully listed every piece. Clint put a handfull of the more common coins in a bucket and held the bucket at eye level, then told each one in the crew to reach in and take one coin. Sergio started to protest, but Clint said this was less than usual and these people deserved a souvenir. He would expect Sergio to see that they got them out of the vault. Sergio laughed and said he was going to take one himself, in that case.

  They remade one list with the coins selected omitted.

  They turned to the other chest. It was the one that interested them is why they left it for last. It was stacked full of money. Nothing else. No codes or anything. Hundred dollar bills, all more than fifty years old.

  Clint sat back to think while the men counted the stacks.

  “Sergio, they used a code on the others. I think this was the real object – but why? Why not write it off? If they got by without it for fifty years, why come for it in a panic now?”

  “I would say because the existence of this much money buried at that time told a story we haven’t been able to read yet.”

  “That doesn’t work. There would be no way to connect this to anything, after all that time. There has to be something that would point directly to someone or something. Something deadly to someone. Someone big enough that he didn’t come after however much is in there a long time ago.”

  “How much is here?” Serge asked Ronaldo.

  “We have listed less than an eighth of it. It is more than twelve (Clint said he HATED that damned number) million dollars. The stacks are 114 deep by ten long by twenty six wide. That comes to twenty nine thousand six hundred twenty packages. There is five thousand dollars in each package. That is one hundred forty eight million two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “With no way to know who put it there, so we still don’t have a reason for any of this.”

  “There’s a code in there somewhere that tells us exactly who. Are you sure there’s nothing on those bills?” Clint asked.

  “Nothing,” Sergio said. “Other than the fact so many of them are in series and can ... Clint! This is marked money! Those serial numbers will tell us who!”

  Clint grabbed his phone and called Manolo to ask if they had the serial numbers of hundred dollar bills from fifty years ago that were used in a deal and have never shown up.

  There was a dead silence for a full minute, then, “Have you found the Juan Toren money? More than one hundred forty five million have never been found or used. That’s fifty one years ago next week.”

  “We found a hundred forty eight million of it. Why is it so important that they’d go to the extremes they have over it?”

  “It’ll prove which major cartel family was in on selling out four others. If that’s found there’ll then be no one to the second cousin in that family alive within three days. Three of the four families sold out have, as we say, recovered their fortunes and power. The fourth earned enough to retire in comfort.”

  “Shit!” Clint cried, making Sergio and the others jump. “Thanks, Manolo. You can arrange for someone to claim the money if it matches the serial numbers – and it will. How much will I get for finding it?”

  “Demand ten percent. You’ll get it.”

  “It’ll be for a school and hospital somewhere in the area,” Clint promised. “We also found a legitimate pirate treasure.”

  “No shit? The other one wasn’t?”

  “The pirate treasure part was. This isn’t quite as good quality, but it’s still good – Oh! Maybe you can find who John Brandon works for. That’ll be the family that won’t be here in a few days.”

  Manolo agreed to try. They talked a minute, then hung up.

  “Clint, be careful. Those people might go wild here and try to kill off everyone who even knows there was a treasure found.”

  “I intend to be careful. I intend to protect my friends and the innocent.”

  They took about another half hour of counting before Clint left to go find Gina at the office. Avenidas was there. Clint told about finding the treasure and the second box. He said they were trying to trace the money because there was nothing there BUT the money. The US treasury was checking to see if they had any records. The bills were in series, so might be marked money.

  Avenidas was about to die of heart failure by the look of him. “Er, how much was there?” he asked.

  “We’d estimate around a hundred fifty million.”

  He squealed and went back to his office. Clint said he was going home to clean up. He’d come back when it was time for her to leave. It might not be a good idea for her to be alone much until something about this was settled, though he was sure her part wasn’t in the danger zone, as he called it. It was the box they found today that was where the danger remained. At least a good part of it was explained. It also explained why there was so little connection to anything before.

  He met Selma and Judi on the way home. They had come back from Changuinola about an hour before. He caught them up. Selma said that kind of money was just plain obscene. She knew one person in Florida who had that kind of money and more who was a decent, worthwhile human being and ten who were pains in the ass and about as worthless as anyone could be.

  Clint saw his place had been searched very professionally. His little traps made that plain, but whoever it was found his cameras and erased the computer records. There wasn’t anything there to find. Clint had been around enough to where he knew what not to leave around. Nothing was bothered much.

  He relaxed a bit, then went to walk with Gina to the Bahia. She wouldn’t stay at his place because that may be dangerous to them both, in her mind. If someone thought she knew anything and it was a serious as Clint said, killing them both would be much more likely. She wouldn’t be alone at anytime, except in her room – and she would manage to move to another without anyone knowing.

  Avenidas had left early. He looked like death warmed over, as she put it. Sergio called to say that an officer had seen Brandon in town and was discretely keeping an eye on him to see who he met.

  Clint went back home. He could use a long night to just sleep, now and then. Either things were going to get more tranquil fast – or all hell was going to break loose.

  “Clint? Someone was w
atching your place from a boat since before dawn. What’s that about?” Judi greeted him in the morning.

  “What kind of boat?”

  “A sixteen or eighteen foot Wellcraft. White with green trim.”

  “Brandon? Why would he be watching me? This shit isn’t going to get weird again, I hope. Thanks, Judi.”

  He went out on the deck with binoculars and made it a point to let Brandon know he was being observed. Brandon waved and came toward the dock. Clint waited until he was right beside the deck to ask what he wanted. He said he had to know what was in that chest. It was important in ways he couldn’t guess.

  “After you drugged me for the information and didn’t get any, you would just come here and ask me?” Clint said. “You’re weird, man.”

  “I figured you might talk without the added aggravation. The scope was NOT my idea.”

  “Okay. Who’s going to end up with no heirs and planted himself?” Clint replied.

  “So you found the significance of the thing. I was worried about that. Sylvia is in it up to her neck. I’m not. I wish I’d never met her. She’s a Cano.”

  Clint nodded in a knowing way to disguise the fact he didn’t have a clue as to who the Canos were.

  “I suppose the states will have traced the serial numbers by now,” he said. “That’s all I can see that would tell anyone about that money. There was nothing else in the chest. Most of the money was in series in the original bank bands.

  “Is Sylvia Darlin’ a Cano – within second cousin?”

  “No, but her half brother is. A nephew.”

  Clint nodded again. “Does he know anything that certain agencies might find interesting?”

  “To hear them brag, you’d think so. I’m not at all convinced any of them stick within spitting distance of the truth. He might.”

  “Then he has a very slight chance if he can get to one of those agencies before the aggressive parties get to him. They’ll make a good deal for protection.”