Three Shot Burst

by Phillip DePoy

  ‘How long have you been working here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Near five years. Yudda got me this job, matter of fact. After I got out of Lake Correctional.’

  ‘Ah.’ That was all I said.

  The Lake Correctional Institution had originally been a migrant labor camp. After that it was a bait farm, if my memory served me. A couple of years ago, maybe 1973, it was converted to a men’s prison.

  ‘You ain’t ask me what I was in for?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Not my business,’ I said. ‘You got a past. I do too.’

  ‘I was Yudda’s, like, apprentice after I got out,’ he went on, a little relieved by my nonchalance. ‘Which I always figured was just a fancy way to say busboy. But he was good to me.’

  ‘Right. So what about the new boss?’

  ‘Came in one day,’ Tony said, ‘and told me he’d bought the whole area. Said he liked to fish. Then he sat down and told me to order some beer ain’t nobody heard of. I did. He’s the only one that drinks it, and he drinks it all the time. And you’re right about the profits. This place don’t hardly break even.’

  Something, some little spark, was trying to light up a darker corner of my brain.

  ‘What’s the beer with the odd name?’

  ‘I can’t pronounce it,’ he complained.

  He went behind the bar and got a bottle, plunked it down in front of me. It was a bottle of Cantillon Kriek, the same stuff that Yudda had given me at his place. I guess that was why I had the little spark pestering me.

  ‘Look, Tony,’ I began, ‘I want you to know that I was a crook in a former life, in Brooklyn. So when I ask you something, I want you to be honest with me, and I promise I won’t rat no matter what your answer is.’

  ‘I got no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said warily.

  ‘It’s this: besides learning to cook a fish just right, what else did you do for Yudda?’

  ‘I told you. I bussed tables, washed dishes, cleaned the joint – including the grease trap, which, let me tell you, is one disgusting way to spend Sunday morning.’

  ‘No.’ I stopped him. ‘I mean what else did you do?’

  I locked eyes with him.

  He spent several seconds trying to figure out what to say to me, but in the end my winning ways got to him.

  ‘You mean the stuff,’ he said.

  ‘A little more specific,’ I encouraged.

  ‘Yudda’s from New Orleans,’ he said.

  ‘And won’t go back there on account of his ex-wife. I know all that. Skip on down.’

  ‘It’s some of the finer weed ever grown down there in Louisiana. They say it’s the climate.’

  I was wise. ‘And Yudda imports weed from his hometown.’

  ‘And, you know, distributes it too. But it’s just weed.’

  ‘I always wondered how Yudda stayed in business when his place was empty except for me most of the time.’

  ‘Oh, he’s very well-to-do,’ Tony assured me. ‘Got a big old boat he bought from the Fort Lauderdale yacht brokerage.’

  ‘Really.’ I was beginning to add a few things up, and I really didn’t like where my thinking was going.

  It was a thin thread, but there was more to it than just a little harmless redistribution of cannabis. It was something that involved Ironstone Waters, I was sure of that. And he wasn’t a small potatoes kind of person, worried about a dinky marijuana operation. His potatoes were, in fact, very much bigger than that.

  TWELVE

  My new friend Tony fixed me up with a discreet fishing cabin about halfway in between the bar and the so-called Three Tee Pees camp. I was sore, beat, and confused. I needed sleep, and I knew it wouldn’t do any good romping around in the mud and moonlight looking for signs of what happened to Lena.

  The cabin was a single room with a bed and a chair, a very small kitchen area in one corner, and a floor lamp that flickered. It smelled like mildew and bacon fat. I opened all the windows, but then I got a nice whiff of sulfur and fish guts, the natural ambience of the place. I didn’t take my suit off, and I didn’t get under the covers. I was absolutely certain that I would never fall asleep in this particular backroom of Purgatory.

  So I was very surprised when the sun blasted in through the windows the next morning.

  I sat up. Somehow the smell was better. Or maybe I’d just gotten used to it. I had no idea what time it was, and I thought again about getting a watch. But if I got a watch, then people would start thinking I was the sort of person who knew what time it was, so I rejected the idea, as I always did.

  I felt the back of my head. There was quite a lump, but I’ve been told that’s good. Maggie Redhawk had taught me that you had to have a lump after you got hit in the head or something was very wrong.

  Then I checked my vision, and it seemed OK. I pronounced myself fit for work and launched myself off the bed and out the door.

  The day was much nicer than the night had been: dry, warm, sunny.

  I headed in the direction of the Three Tee Pees area.

  It didn’t look any better in the sunlight. There was Spanish moss hanging down to the ground. Roots had grown over some of the table bases. Fallen branches and dead leaves were everywhere.

  I did my best to remember which way I’d been headed, toward Lena’s voice, when I’d been conked, and wandered more or less in that direction.

  After a minute I realized something odd about the whole area. There wasn’t any garbage; no beer cans or paper plates or chip bags anywhere. Which made it, in my experience, an unusual picnic area.

  The old guy had called it a campsite. I was only seeing the tables. Somewhere around there would be some kind of sectioned-off plots for campers’ tents and the like. They just weren’t immediately visible. Maybe that’s what Lena had found.

  I walked right up to a low growing hedge, stepped over it, muscled through a little more overgrowth, and there they were: half a dozen spacious campsites. Each one had a small stone grill and a knee-high water faucet on a pipe rising out of the ground.

  And there was a very large tent pitched on the last site in the row closest to the lake.

  It looked like it had been there for a while, but it was untended. There were black leaves on top, and there was a small rip in one side, near the base. Still, I approached it like there might be a bear inside.

  ‘Hello?’ I called out.

  No answer.

  I moved as quietly as I could to the front flap. I thought better of standing directly in front of it when I tossed it open. I was crouched way over to the side.

  I threw the flap, half-expecting some kind of brouhaha, but there was nothing. I peeked inside. Two sleeping bags, a couple of Igloo coolers, and a duffle bag. There was also the smell of mildew and some evidence of critter droppings, along with more leaves and a little mold on the inside of the tent.

  It was conceivable that Lena’s sister Ellen had been hiding out in the tent, along with the daughter. But whoever’d pitched the tent, they hadn’t been there for a while.

  I looked around, making sure there weren’t any other Seminole bulls snorting in my direction, and then I stood up.

  I figured that Ironstone Waters had dispatched more goons than just the two Lena and I had found in the hotel room. We’d been followed to the Cherry Pocket. When we’d come to the campsite, these secondary goons had gotten the better of us. That meant Lena was in trouble, probably back in Fry’s Bay with Ironstone. I didn’t believe for a second that he was interested in helping out his grandchild. He was interested in revenge. And it wasn’t for the murder of a son he didn’t much like. Somehow Lena had messed up some larger picture.

  What that larger picture was eluded me, but I knew I had to get back to Fry’s Bay. The problem was, I also knew I had to stay at the Cherry Pocket and figure out who the new owner really was and what part he had to play in Ironstone’s larger picture. I didn’t want to believe that Yudda was involved, but he probably was. That was an odd trio to contemplate: Y
udda, Ironstone, and the Cuban geezer. But I had a terrible intuition that they were somehow related.

  What to do?

  I backed away from the tent and was about to head for the bar when I noticed that there was something stuck in the tear I’d seen at the base of the tent. I took a few steps, got up close. I couldn’t figure out what was stuck in the hole. It was like a flat half-circle of rubber. I pulled it out and wished I hadn’t. It was a flip flop. Like the ones Lena had been wearing.

  All the way back to the bar I worked hard not to picture how it had gotten there.

  When I did make it back to the bar, it was empty. No Tony, no geezer, no general hoi polloi. I called out, I went into the kitchen – it was eerie, like no one had been in the place for years. The stove was cold, the place was clean – no dirty dishes, no pots left in the sink.

  So I sat at the bar to gather what was left of my wits. Maybe I was making up the connection between Yudda and the Cherry Pocket, but the back of my neck felt prickly all the same.

  I had to remind myself that Lena could take care of herself so that I could stop worrying about her and concentrate on the larger picture. The larger picture hung on David Waters.

  Then all of a sudden out of nowhere, I thought about Hachi and her blue dress. She’d told me that Ellen Greenberg didn’t look like the photograph I had, that she’d used a fake name in Fry’s Bay. Also that she’d worked at the hospital with Maggie Redhawk, in the gift shop.

  Maggie Redhawk knew the woman I was looking for.

  Still, I just sat there all alone in the dark little bar. I knew that I had to get back to Fry’s Bay almost immediately. Lena was at Ironstone’s mansion. Maggie knew Ellen Greenberg, so she was my best hope of finding Ellen, not to mention the child who stood to inherit a lot of dough.

  So why was it that I didn’t get up off the bar stool and out to my car?

  That question was answered about two seconds later. The door to the bar swung open and the geezer-owner, still in camo and wheezing like a squeeze box, stood in the doorway, back-lit by morning.

  ‘You’re still here?’ he growled

  ‘Where else would I be?’ I smiled.

  ‘Tony told me that your young friend has been abducted.’ He didn’t budge. ‘I would have thought you’d be trying to find her.’

  I faked nonchalance. ‘She does a really good job of dealing with bad people. She’ll be fine. I’m more worried about Ironstone’s men. They’re the ones in trouble.’

  It was worth a gamble. If he didn’t know who Ironstone was, no foul. But if he acknowledged their presence in his little fish camp, then that would be quite a nice bit of information.

  ‘That little girl doesn’t stand a chance against very large, very stoned Seminole men,’ he snarled. ‘God only knows what they’re doing to her now.’

  I slid off the bar stool. ‘Yeah, you should probably check the hospital in Lake Wales to see what happened to the last Seminole gangsters that tried to mess with Lena.’

  That shut him up, but only for a second.

  He sighed. ‘You have no idea what you’ve fallen into. It’s a big, big ocean, and you’re a little tiny fish.’

  With that he drew a pistol out of some hidden pocket and leveled it right at me. The way he was lit made it impossible to see what kind of gun he had, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything for me to hide behind or throw at him; I was too far away to lunge. So I tried psychology.

  ‘I agree,’ I told him, careful not to move. ‘My thinking is that I ought to beat it out of here, go back home, and get some rest. You know I just got out of the hospital? I was in a coma on account of Ironstone Waters shot me. So I really don’t need to do that again. You know the old saying: shoot me once, shame on you; shoot me twice …’

  ‘Shut up!’ he snapped. ‘It’s just your bad luck that you didn’t leave this morning when you got up.’

  I could read his body language. He was about to shoot me.

  I sagged, like I was beaten, and leaned on the bar.

  ‘Look,’ I began, staring at the floor.

  Then I dropped, took the stool by the leg, whirled around and tossed the stool right at him. He fired, but the shot went wild. The stool bashed right into him. I heaved myself over the bar and crouched down.

  I could hear him stumbling over the stool and lumbering toward the bar.

  I looked around for a mediator: most bars had one: a club or a gun, something to settle late-night disputes. After a second, there it was: a shotgun. Good choice for a bar of that ilk because it looked very intimidating, and it made a hell of a noise if you shot it.

  I grabbed it and slid backward toward the far end of the bar.

  He fired again and the bullet hit just to my left.

  I moved another couple of inches, pointed the shotgun straight up, and pulled one of the triggers. Sounded like God’s own thunder, and chunks of the ceiling rained down. Really scary.

  I stood bolt up then with the gun pointed right at my nemesis.

  ‘It’s filled with buckshot,’ I explained calmly. ‘That’s why it exploded the ceiling like that. It’ll do the same thing to your gut.’

  I was partially protected by the bar. He was out in the open.

  And for the first time, really, I got a good look at the guy. His eyes were rimmed in red, his hair was like crazy white pipe cleaners sticking out of his head, and his hands were shaking, but not from nerves. He had the DTs. In short, he was a shambles.

  ‘You really ought to put your gun on the floor,’ I said.

  ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

  ‘Not if you put your gun on the floor,’ I said louder.

  And to make my point, I waved the shotgun around a little.

  He thought about it for a minute, but eventually he threw his pistol down and backed away from me.

  ‘I’m going to tell you again,’ he said, and his Cuban accent was even more pronounced than it had been, ‘you’re wading into water way over your head.’

  I lowered the shotgun. ‘Since you seem to be anxious to tell me about it, just what have I stumbled into?’

  He moved his hand slowly up to his neck and pulled out a medallion he was wearing. It was round, about the size of a silver dollar.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he whispered harshly.

  ‘Can’t see it.’

  He moved toward me very slowly, the way Bela Lugosi used to come up on his victims. When he got close enough for me to actually see the necklace, I raised the shotgun again.

  ‘Black Tuna,’ I said.

  He smiled, but it made his face look dead. ‘That’s right.’

  The Black Tuna gang was, as far as I understood, the major marijuana smuggling ring in the United States. They got their name from the radio code for Raul Davila-Jimeno, supposedly a Colombian sugar grower. But he was the major supplier of the organization. And you knew a guy was in his gang if he wore a black tuna medallion like the old guy had around his neck. Raul had a small army at his beck and call, and he ruled Santa Marta, Colombia, like he was king.

  They were very organized, and they had technology. They were good at eavesdropping on radio communications between U.S. Customs officials.

  I’d heard that they operated out of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami and their deliveries came to some houseboat off the coast. I’d also heard that they had some association with the hoity-toity Fort Lauderdale yacht brokerage, so they could get a hold of special boats, the kind of thing that might carry a couple of tons of marijuana without sitting too low in the water. And that was the same place where Yudda had gotten his boat, at least according to Tony.

  But I didn’t buy it.

  ‘If you were Black Tuna,’ I told the old guy, ‘you wouldn’t be holed up in a joint like this, pickling your liver all day long.’

  ‘Well,’ he began, a little despondently, ‘I’m Cuban.’

  ‘I guessed the accent,’ I agreed.

  ‘And maybe you know that the whole Cuban operation has been tak
en over by the Columbians now. The whole thing. They keep me on because I know things that nobody else does, like safe houses and secret routes, so they need me. I’m here at the Cherry Pocket, like, in storage.’

  ‘OK.’ I wanted to see where he was going, so that’s all I said.

  The silence encouraged him to go on.

  ‘Can I sit down?’ he asked.

  I nodded, but I kept the gun on him. I knew better than to underestimate the guy just on account of his age. I’d seen what oldsters trained in Juego de maní could do. It was a combined martial art and dance thing that was developed in Cuba by African slaves, and I knew that a lot of these drug guys were wise to it. And a guy who knew it could kick my ass all over town before I could even pronounce it correctly – regardless of his age.

  So, down he sat and leaned on the bar.

  ‘Can I have a beer?’ he asked.

  ‘You like that Belgian number that Yudda turned you on to, right?’ It was a little bit of a trick question.

  ‘Yeah,’ was all he said.

  I kept my eye on him, but I fetched him a beer.

  ‘So tell me about Columbia,’ I said, plunking the bottle down onto the bar in front of him.

  He took it, bit the top off with his teeth, drank half the bottle, and exhaled.

  ‘It was just marijuana, you understand. I mean, it was a lot of marijuana, like maybe a billion dollars’ worth. But, you know – it’s harmless. That shit shouldn’t even be illegal.’

  ‘But the Columbians are a little more serious,’ I guessed.

  He nodded. ‘Cocaine. By the ton. And it’s good business. I mean, it’s so much money that they weigh it instead of counting it. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I don’t really care,’ I said, ‘I just want to find Ellen Greenberg and her child – and my friend Lena.’

  ‘Ellen’s little sister.’ He nodded and took another long pull on the beer.

  How could he know that? Lena hadn’t told anybody but me that Ellen was her sister. Plus, of course, how did he know Ellen?

  ‘Ellen stayed here for a while,’ I guessed, ‘over there in that crappy campground.’