Dead Money Run

by J. Frank James

  Dead Money Run

  By

  J. Frank James

  ©Copyright 2013 by J. Frank James

  Published 2013 by J. Frank James, LLC

  PO Box 674899, Marietta, Georgia 30006

  All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copy-right Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction Furthermore, any reference to persons, places or things as well as all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The cover of this book is owned by the author of the book and subject to the copyright laws as set forth herein and the little man in a hat appearing in the lower right hand corner of the cover is a registered trademark.

  Other Books By

  J. Frank James

  Lou Malloy Novels:

  Lou Malloy: The Run Begins

  Dedication

  To Lieutenant James Franklin Johnson, Sr., Army Air Force, WWII, KIA, October 14, 1944. He will remain in my thoughts and prayers forever.

  Chapter 1

  The warden was a small man, but dressed neatly. Everything about him was neat-from his hair to his shoes. He was almost too neat.

  “So what are your plans, Lou?”

  When I walked into the room, the warden turned over a little hour glass full of sand. We both watched it for a few seconds and then looked at each other. This was the first time I ever met the man. What did he care about me now? Since he never cared before, I figured the man was just looking for information. Perhaps he wanted to give me a warning. I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you ever think about time, Lou?”

  “After fifteen years, what do you think?” I said.

  He smiled and said, “Most valuable thing we have and no one seems to mourn its passing until it’s too late.”

  I had nothing to say to that. Conversations with a prison warden came with a lot of maybes. While in prison I trained myself to watch a man’s hands. If he rubbed his hands in a washing motion, he was lying. If he messed with his fingernails, he wasn’t interested in the conversation. The warden was rubbing his hands as if he had touched something distasteful.

  “I haven’t given it a lot of thought, Warden Edwards.”

  “Call me John, Lou. We are friends now,” Edwards said while rubbing his hands in a determined kind of way.

  So now we were friends. I wanted to tell him he was a liar, but my better judgment stopped me. Probably a good way to delay my release-things get lost, papers go unsigned. Things happen.

  “Okay, John,” I said.

  “You know, we never found the fifteen million dollars,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you were looking for it.”

  I watched his eyes flicker briefly. I seemed to hit a sweet spot.

  “No, Lou. You misunderstand,” he said as he caught himself. “There is a reward for the recovery of the money. Did you know that?”

  Edwards said it more as a statement than a question. I said nothing and waited. Edwards shifted in his chair and started to rub his hands again.

  “It would be in your best interest to tell them what you know.”

  “Who’s the ‘them’ John?” I asked.

  “They’re people looking for the money.”

  I thought about that for a few moments. The statement covered a lot of ground.

  “Since I didn’t take the money in the first place, I don’t have anything to tell them. They need to ask the people that took it,” I said.

  Edwards was smiling now and he stopped rubbing his hands.

  “There are some people that think you do.”

  “I can’t help what people think.”

  “Ten percent,” he said.

  “Ten percent of what,” I said.

  “The money, Lou. Ten percent of fifteen million dollars is a lot of money.”

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” I said.

  “Yeah, it seems the Indian Casino had insurance. The insurance company that paid off on the claim put up a ten percent reward for the return of the money. A million five is a lot of money.”

  “I hope they find it,” I said.

  Edwards blinked his eyes signaling he was moving on to something else.

  “Sorry to hear about your sister,” he said. “I understand they are doing all they can to find her killer.”

  Edwards was a real card and running out of things to say. On any other day, in any other place, he would be dead or wishing he was.

  “Thanks John. Your words are real comforting,” I said and returned my gaze to the little hour glass and the sand as it accumulated on the bottom.

  I had nothing else to say except make him happy. Make them all happy. Just one big happy group sitting around smiling at each other; happy, happy, now let’s just get the money and spread it all around and we can go on being happy. In the meantime my sister lies in a hole feeding worms. I had money on the worms being real happy. No word on how my sister felt.

  Edwards looked disappointed when I didn’t add to our conversation.

  “Lou, it might be a good idea for you to help them find the money. It could be a big windfall.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. Just like all the rest of the treasure hunters, the miserable bastard was just in it for the money.

  “Windfall for who, John-me or you?”

  As if tasting a lemon, Edwards twisted his face and, at the same time, waived his hands at an imaginary fly.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Lou. I am just trying to give you a head start. If it was my decision, you would still be with us. Fifteen million dollars is a lot of money to lose.”

  “It still is,” I said.

  I sat and watched Edwards shift in his chair some more. We had nothing left to talk about. I could feel him working out in his mind how he was going to present his failure to get a lead out of me on the money.

  “So, what are you going to do now?” Edwards said.

  Finally, I had enough.

  “Leave. Isn’t that what we all do?”

  His smile vanished. He knew he was wasting his time on someone who had maxed out. He also knew he couldn’t hold me. There would be no parole violation with the threat to re-incarcerate me. No work release effort to rehabilitate me. Just a new suit made in the prison cut and sew area and a hundred bucks was the sum total of it. That probably hadn’t changed since the 30s. I wondered if Al Capone wore the suit they gave him when he got out.

  We were both looking at the little hour glass of sand now. The sand had drained from the top of the glass to the bottom. Suddenly, as if being shot out of a cannon, we both stood up. Edwards stuck out his hand. I turned and left the room. I didn’t shake his hand. I didn’t want to touch him.

  Chapter 2

  Six months before my scheduled release, a letter came from a Jake Lockman notifying me of my sister’s death. It had been typed on one of those old vintage style typewriters that had a well-used half black and half red cloth ribbon. All the letters with closed loops were filled in and some of the red had bled onto the paper, but I got their meaning. My sister had been found dead in an Indian casino in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Lockman had signed the letter and wrote a telephone number under his signature.

  In the letter, Lockman referred to my sister as Kandi, but her real name was Susan, Susan Malloy. I remembered when she called to tell me about her decision to change her name to that of Kandi Kain. I didn’t like it and said so.

  “Lou, for a crook, you’re so old fashioned. I need my name to be someth
ing snappy,” was the way Susan put it.

  When I told her the only women with names like that were pole dancers and hookers. I never heard from her again.

  “So how do you know my sister, Lockman,” I said, when I called.

  “Please, Lou, call me Jake,” he said.

  “Okay, Jake.”

  “I lived with your sister in Jacksonville Beach. We own a condo there together.”

  His explanation didn’t answer my question.

  “I don’t call that a relationship, Jake. Sounds more like an investment.” My next question went for the fences.

  “My sister was a prostitute, Jake. You wouldn’t have been her pimp, by any chance?”

  “That’s laying it on the line a little bit, don’t you think, Lou?”

  “Lockman, I’m about to max out in one of the toughest prison systems in America and I quit worrying about feelings a long time ago.”

  “When do you get out?”

  “Answer my question,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t call our relationship as being one just based on economics,” he said.

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “Look, Lou, I just wanted to know when you were getting out and to offer you a place to stay. That’s it. What’s the big deal about when you get out?”

  “Why do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Thought you might want to stay here at the condo, you know. Like, take some time to get things behind you. Besides, I suppose you are entitled to Kandi’s half of the deal.”

  “Tell me, Jake, what was my sister’s half exactly?”

  “There was no deal, just some gigs involving parties I set up from time to time for some of the girls at the Casino. Kandi would get the girls and I would set up the parties. That was it.”

  “I get it,” I said. “You were like a tour director for sex.”

  “Why do you want to keep bringing sex into the deal,” said Lockman.

  “Lockman, there are three reasons why people do things today-power, money and sex. So far you’ve hit two out of three of them.”

  “Lou, I’m just calling to give you a hand. That’s it.”

  “I appreciate the thought, Jake, but I have other plans and Jacksonville Beach isn’t part of them.”

  Over the past fifteen years, I had received four letters from my sister. While she told me about her condo investment, she never mentioned a Jake Lockman.

  “Oh, well you have my number and if you need anything just give me a call. I would like to find the people who killed your sister too. She was an important part of my life.”

  I wanted to tell the jerk that she was all the life I had, but I didn’t and hung up.

  Chapter 3

  For fifteen years I lived in a room the size of a walk-in closet. After about a year I felt like a zoo animal and it went down from there.

  As a guest of the Federal Correctional System, I was the only one left from a gang that robbed an Indian casino on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia known as the Golden Slipper Casino and Resort. Even though the crime took place on Indian land, my crime came under the Federal Penal Code and that landed me in the Atlanta Correctional Penitentiary for fifteen years.

  The use of the term ‘Correctional’ was a joke. About 13 million people serve time in a prison or jail each year somewhere, according to a study by some goodie two-shoes outfit. The report went on to state that 67 percent of those released commit new offenses and 52 percent return to prison within three years. So where did the ‘Correction’ come into it?

  Without crime, wardens, correctional officers or CO’s, food commissaries, and parole boards would all be without jobs. Whoever said that crime didn’t pay didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Chapter 4

  The Timucua Indians, at one time, numbered over two hundred thousand, but disease and loss of their hunting grounds condemned them almost to extinction by the early 1700’s. Unlike many of their brothers such as the Seminoles, Cherokee and Creek, the Timucua stayed on their lands. By the time they received the permit to build the casino, less than a thousand of them remained and none of them lived in tepees. But they were Indians and with the passing of The Regulatory Gaming Act, they had the right to control their destiny. And, though they were riding high, they still relied on the white man to run the casinos, provide the slot machines, gaming tables and everything else necessary for a casino to make money.

  The Golden Slipper Casino and Resort was built on land that had been Federal property. Because of some entangled legal issues with people who claimed ownership of the Island and opposed the construction of a casino, it took a few years to get the necessary permits to build the Casino. After a lengthy legal battle, the Government, anxious to amend their many wrongs in their relationship with the American Indian, won out in the end and the Indians got their casino. However, Timucua’s right to use the property was subject to a ninety-nine year lease with the U.S. Department of the Interior.

  After my arrest, I felt like the Indians. I had little hope. The real owners of the Casino were a tangled mess of corporations controlled by some government bureaucrats and mobbed up sharpies from Las Vegas and they wanted their money back or my skin.

  The fact of it was, I had been caught on one of the casino security cameras grabbing bags of money out of a small creek behind the Casino and, with both my partners dead, I became the government’s poster boy on why it was not a good idea to steal from Uncle Sam.

  Without the money to hire a decent lawyer and unwilling to put my fate into the hands of a court appointed legal jockey, I worked out a plea deal for fifteen years that just happened to coincide with the amount of money taken. The prosecutor on the case was less than enthusiastic about taking the deal on the part of the government, but the jurisprudence system being what it was and the fact that the power brokers in the deal did not want to expose their underbelly in the casino operation, the plea agreement went through. Besides, they figured I would make parole in five years, as was the custom, and lead them to the money. I fooled them by taking the whole ride. Having a parole officer with his nose up my ass for the next ten years wasn’t any better than staying in prison as far as I was concerned.

  The good news was that the money was clean. Since it was not from a bank, they never had it poisoned or, what we in the game refer to as, marked. So it was finders, keepers and, me being the finder, I planned on keeping it unless somebody got lucky and took it away from me.

  There had been several attempts to kill me while I was in prison, but a guy named Crusher, who jailed next to my cell, watched my back. A professional wrestler before he turned criminal, he wasn’t called Crusher for nothing. By the time he left, I had worked myself into pretty good shape and most people on the inside left me alone. That didn’t stop them from trying. A couple of guards even gave it a whirl, but I broke both arms on one and the other was in traction for six months and would never walk again without the use of a cane.

  Every now and then some detective would pull me out of general population for a sit down to discuss the advantages of giving up the money. The pitch was always the same. If I cooperated they could make my life inside real sweet and easy. I told him to quit fucking his fist and to leave me alone.

  In the end, I didn’t roll over and give up the money. I figured if I did I would still be in prison and fifteen million dollars poorer. Anyway, once I gave up the money, no matter how tough I thought I was, my life would not be worth an ant’s fart, assuming ants farted. For fifteen years, the money was the only thing keeping me alive.

  Then there was my sister. I was looking forward to seeing her again and patching up any issues between us. News of her death ended all of that.

  I’m not sure finding out who killed my sister was as important to me as finding out why she was killed. The two probably went hand in hand, but I knew one thing, my search had to start with Lockman. He didn’t sound like someone who had just lost his significant other when I talked to him. He sounded more lik
e a person looking for another meal ticket. Fifteen million dollars brought a lot of predators to the surface and I had him marked as one of them.

  In prison I was considered to be tougher than most, but there were rules in a prison that offered some protection. On leaving prison, I was entering the outside where there were no rules. Now, I was going to learn how tough I really was.

  I needed two things, a plan and a starting place. Looking for my sister’s killer and Jacksonville Beach sounded like as good a place as any to fill those bills.

  When I received the letter from the Federal Prison Board, advising me of my release date, included in the letter was a list of the do’s and don’ts of my release. They were simple, really. I was free to travel, unrestricted, anywhere I wanted long as I stayed out of trouble and didn’t violate any gun, liquor or drug laws and not to consort with known criminals. I had planned on taking them seriously until I got the letter about my sister’s death. Now, all bets were off.

  Chapter 5

  For economic reasons, the Atlanta Penitentiary was built on the south side of Atlanta and transportation from the area was limited.

  When I walked out of the prison’s East Gate, I stood for a moment, looking first one way and then the other. Leaning up against a late model Lincoln Town Car was a big shot who looked like he had been raised on prison food. I didn’t take him for a cop because he was dressed in expensive clothes. For the price of his suit alone, I could have bought a car.

  “You look like you could use a ride,” he said, leaning on the Town Car.

  It wasn’t a question, so I ignored him. He had a persistent look to him.

  “I said, ‘you look like you could use a ride.’”

  “What gives you that idea?” I said.