by C I Dennis
The only lock was an old Kwikset in the side door handle. I went back to the Taurus and got the small duffel bag that held my tools. I popped the door lock with a #2 short hook and a tension wrench; it only took a few seconds and no one was in the area watching. It was dark and blissfully cool inside with the shades drawn. The space was divided into two sections, with a mini-apartment at one end and an office at the other. I started with the office. No computer, just a phone and a vintage adding machine on a grey metal desk. Everything looked like it might have fifty years ago; there was even a rotating fan on a file cabinet. I opened a file drawer and flipped through it. Growers, groves, shippers—nothing stuck out, everything looked normal but oddly unused. The phone was too old to have a stored-numbers feature, so that was useless. There were no photographs, no artwork, just an orange blossom calendar that was several years out of date. It was like a set for a low-budget porn movie, and everything looked as fake as the orgasms.
I searched the apartment side next. I usually start with the fridge, which can sometimes tell a story. In my cop days we’d find money, dope, weapons, body parts—you name it, they refrigerated it. C.J.’s held a six-pack of bottled water and an open box of baking soda. A row of shirts hung in the closet, freshly laundered and still in plastic bags. Several summer-weight suits were neatly arranged on wooden hangers, and a bureau held some socks and underwear. There was no television, no radio, no books, not even a magazine. The bathroom had fewer toiletries than you’d find in a hotel. If C.J. was having a fling with somebody, he wasn’t doing it here; this was like a monk’s cell, minus the crucifix. I was coming up empty again. What had he done here for all that time, while I’d baked in my feeble air-conditioning? I needed to look harder; this guy had secrets and they were somewhere.
It took me fifteen minutes to find his stash. I’d noticed that the toilet looked new. It was also mounted slightly off-center and there were scratches on the bolts that held it down. Nobody but plumbers, dope dealers and cops knew it, but there was a space in there.
I shut off the water feed, drained the tank and unbolted the toilet from the floor. It had a big pedestal base and when I tilted it off the wax ring I could reach my hand into the opening underneath. There were two plastic bags. One had five bundles of wrapped hundreds—fifty grand. It also held a Canadian passport, issued to “Avery Bellar” with a picture of a man I assumed was C.J., although I’d only seen him from a distance. In the other bag was a vintage Colt Commander automatic with three clips of nine-millimeter Super Velo ammunition. That was not a gun you saw every day unless you were into nineteen-seventies-era firearms. It felt awkward and unpleasant in my hand—a long time had passed since I’d handled a weapon. I put the gun and the clips back in the bag and taped it back to the porcelain. My fingers found something else there, something I’d missed.
It was another ziplock bag, with a map inside. At the top it said “South Vietnam” in letters faded from age and use. There were red grid lines overlaying it and markings in black ball point ink. One of the village names was underlined, twice: TAN TIENG.
The SHO’s leather seats scorched my legs right through my trousers as I slid back into the car. I checked the computer—C.J. hadn’t gone far, his van was just up the road on Highway 60 barely east of Lake Wales. I followed the blinking dot until I saw him, backing into a self-storage unit next to Quinn’s, a modest-looking eatery on the highway. I drove to the far end of the restaurant’s lot and parked, out of sight of the storage units. It was almost lunchtime, and I guessed that once he stashed the van he would be walking over here to eat.
After ten minutes I wondered if I was wrong. The van was still at the storage unit according to the tracker, but no one had entered the restaurant except for two high school girls in a beat-up Plymouth Neon. I was missing something—and now my tracker was locked in a storage unit, useless to me.
A dark red Lexus crawled into the restaurant driveway and parked next to my car. It was an ES 600 sedan, the biggest one they sold. A man got out, dressed in a golf shirt and slacks, tall and broad-shouldered, with the same confident gait. It had to be C.J., although if it was, he’d changed clothes. In the storage unit? And where had the Lexus come from? I waited and watched as he entered the restaurant.
*
D.B. ordered the crab cakes. He always seemed to know what item on the menu would be the freshest and the best. I said I’d share; I wasn’t that hungry, it was too hot, all I wanted was an iced coffee. The air conditioning was strong enough, but all you had to do was look out the window and see the heat radiating from the car hoods to know it was as hot as the jungle. The Ford Taurus was at the far end of the lot, the same one that had been across the street from the office. D.B. would never notice those small details, but they screamed at me. Noticing details was the only reason I was still alive, forty years later. D.B. was talking about golf. He had a new hustle, and he had taken in a lot of money so far, though it was getting harder to find a country club where no one knew him. He said he might have to start driving to St. Pete or even Naples, where the big money and the biggest pigeons were. I looked out the window and picked at the crab cakes on his plate. I wasn’t paying attention; I was concerned about Barbara and why she’d taken off so suddenly. Barbara knew that I didn’t like surprises. I insisted on that, and she usually complied although she could be impulsive.
D.B. finished his crab cakes and drained the rest of my iced coffee. I was tired—I hadn’t slept well, and the heat was sapping my energy. Not D.B., his batteries were now fully charged. He said he needed to get going, there was a country club he’d heard about in Dunedin where he wasn’t known. He paid the bill and left.
*
After about half an hour the broad-shouldered guy came out of Quinn’s and got into the Lexus. The side windows on the SHO were heavily tinted, so he couldn’t see that I was in the car. He backed out carefully, and I got a better look at him. It was the same person, but—different.
I could see why Barbara had said she knew the car; there were plenty of that model around, but Florida cars are invariably white, and this was a sensuous, wine-red color—I could almost taste the lingering Bordeaux in my mouth as he passed me in the dusty driveway and accelerated onto 60 West.
So there had been a hand-off of sorts, and people, identities, and cars had been exchanged. My quarry had arrived in his van, dressed in a suit, and then this guy leaves in a slick luxury car in his golf clothes. OK. But this created one small hitch I hadn’t planned for. The GPS unit was on the van, not the Lexus. I could tail him, but he’d see me. I had the impression from the stash in his office that he was very careful, if not paranoid. No matter, there were other ways to find him.
I texted Roberto. See what you can find on FL plate NL5-8PT. Big Lexus.
He answered immediately. In gym class. Will hv it by lunch.
Little bugger was in school, I forgot. And he was wearing his phone while in gym shorts, no doubt. These kids. I decided I might as well get some food while I waited for Roberto to text back.
*
Quinn’s was part tourist trap, part local hangout. You can’t smoke indoors in Florida anymore, but that didn’t mean that the nicotine odor didn’t linger in the pine walls, the Gators pennants, or the stuffed game that made up what you might generously call the décor. There was a deer, an elk, a boar, a sailfish and even a heavily-shellacked giant lobster that was a long way from New England. The clientele was a mix of workmen in caps, some business people, the two girls from the Neon and a wary tourist family wondering if they were about to get salmonella. I ordered red snapper with hush puppies, and the fish was fresh and delicious. To make it even better, some patron had the good taste to invest a stack of quarters in the Seeburg jukebox and play Patsy Cline. The songs were older than I was, but they still made the hair stand up on my forearms.
A teenaged waitress refilled my coffee. I asked her if she knew the man who had just left in the red Lexus.
“Oh yeah. We call him “Big Tip”.
He leaves twenty percent, sometimes more than that. Super-generous. Not like his brother.”
“His brother?”
“Yeah. That’s the one we call “Little Tip”. I guess they’re twins, one’s just as good-lookin’ as the other. Big Tip is nice. Little Tip is kind of a jerk. Not really, but he never leaves more than a dollar. Doesn’t talk, kind of a stiff, and nobody wants to wait on him for his lousy dollar. Somebody would say something but his brother is too nice.”
My lunch came to twelve dollars. I left her a twenty on the table—that was cheap enough for some good information. C.J. either had a twin brother or he was a quick-change artist. Either way, I’d stumbled onto something odd, and I wondered how much Barbara Butler really knew about this. Wives are supposed to know these things.
*
My phone buzzed with a text from Roberto.
David Butler Johannsen, 1221 Hibiscus Pond Drive, Tampa.
Thanks, talk latr ok? I answered.
OK, “latr” lol. Roberto got a kick out of my attempts at abbreviating words in a text message. There were certain unwritten rules about texting, but no one over the drinking age knew them.
I tapped the address that Roberto had given me into my phone’s GPS and swung the Taurus onto 60 West. It was only an hour drive, enough time for me to listen to the rest of the Emmylou tape and cogitate a little on the Butler/Johannsen twins. It was apparently David Butler Johannsen’s car that Barbara had seen, not C.J.’s, when somebody took a shot at her purse at the Publix. She said she’d seen C.J. driving it that time she followed him to Lake Wales. The waitress said it was Big Tip, not Little Tip who was having lunch today, so maybe I had seen Johannsen? Or it was the same guy, playing some kind of game with the waitstaff? That seemed like a longshot. I called Barbara.
“How’s the hostage?”
“I’m sorry if I got a little carried away last night on the phone. I have a slight headache. Where are you?”
“On the way to Tampa. Does C.J. ever go there?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know. He goes wherever the groves are.”
“Does he have a brother?”
“C.J. doesn’t have any family anymore. Just me.”
“What do you mean by anymore?”
“They are all dead. It was that way when we first met.”
“So how did you two meet?” I said.
“In a bar.”
“Where?”
“Is that important? What’s going on?”
“Is he a veteran? Was he in Vietnam?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
“This is what I do, remember?”
“Well, you’re good at it then, because no one knows that except me. He won’t talk about it. I guess the war was a horrible experience for him, like it was for most vets.”
“You’re sure about the family? He never talked about a brother, or a twin?”
“No. If we see family it’s my sister, for holidays and so on, but she comes to see us. We mostly stay home.”
She sounded like she was telling the truth. “So,” I said, “are you plowing through all that great literature?”
“Nope. I’m nursing a hangover, eating rolled-up prosciutto and watching Friends reruns. “
“I might be back tonight. Need anything?”
“More prosciutto. I only bought a pound.”
*
The sun was directly overhead and the old Ford was trying valiantly to keep me cool, but it was a losing battle, and I was feeling queasy. I had to pull over in Brandon at a Seven Eleven and get a big bottle of water and a roll of antacids. I’d eaten too much at lunch, but it wasn’t the hush puppies, it was me—handling C.J.’s gun in his office had given me a shock and it was just now hitting home. The last time I’d held a gun was a year ago when I had put two shots into Glory’s chest in the pitch dark living room of our house. The Glock had been returned to me by the Sheriff after I was released and it had been checked out of evidence. It still lay in a padded envelope, unopened, on top of my refrigerator. I wished I would never have to open it, but unless I was going to do something else for a living I eventually would.
The remainder of the drive to Tampa was easy; most people stayed indoors in the intense heat so traffic was light. Hibiscus Pond Drive was in Sunset Park out by MacDill Air Force Base and the houses I passed were modest but well-kept. Number 1221 was at the end of a cul-de-sac and was bigger than its neighbors. It looked like it had canal frontage out to Old Tampa Bay, which would up the value considerably. That kind of house could have been worth a million or more before the crash; it might get half of that now.
No cars were visible, although there was a three-bay garage attached to the house. An elderly neighbor was working on his shrubs across the street. I parked and walked across his lawn, getting a disapproving frown.
“Not selling anything,” I said. “Just looking for the Johannsens’ place.”
“That’s it across the street.”
“Anybody home?”
“Nope.” Good. That meant that he, like any nosy neighbor, kept track of their comings and goings. He had a deep tan and wore no shirt though he should have, as his abundant belly was something best kept covered, like a crash victim.
I decided I’d be Bank Security Guard guy.
“I tell you,” I said, “I’ve been sent on some strange trips but this is the strangest. I’m a security cop and the bank I work for is looking for the family. Seems they left an envelope in a safe deposit box and the records got screwed up and the bank isn’t sure who the envelope really belongs to, but the envelope had their name on it. I’m supposed to check them out before the bank decides how to handle it.”
The guy nodded; I think I had his attention. I was making it up as I went along, like usual; it sounds more natural than when you rehearse something.
“So you know them pretty well?”
“Guess so,” he said. “They’re gone a lot. Le runs those coin machines, and D.B. plays a lot of golf.”
“It’s just the two of them?”
“And the boy, Philip, the hellcat.”
“He’s trouble?”
“He’s only sixteen, but he’s got a record. You ain’t the first cop to stop out here.” He tugged his shorts up until they stopped at the belly overhang. “So what did they find in the envelope?”
I leaned toward him and lowered my voice. “A hundred thousand dollars in cash. Don’t repeat that or I’m in deep shit.”
“Wow,” he said. “I figured they have a lot of money. He drives a big Lexus and they got a nice boat out back. Tell the bank they probably got the right people. Unless they want to give it to me.” He laughed.
“Off the record...are they good people? If you know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” he said. “That Le works like a demon. I been here since before they moved in, must be seventeen years ago. She built up a hell of an enterprise with those vending machines, and that’s a cash business. Him I don’t know about. He’s friendly, but he’s away a lot and all I ever see is him getting the golf bags in and out of the car. The kid’s spoiled rotten, but them Asians do that. If the father was around more maybe he’d straighten him out.”
I had thought about tossing the place, but not with Hawkeye here watching. Maybe I could check out the business.
“You know where she works? I could go to her office, if that’s the best place to find her.”
“Over in Pinellas Park, by the Sheriff’s office. I took the boy out there for them once. It’s called Le’s Vending, just a small office with a warehouse out back. I don’t remember the address.”
“Thanks.” I left him to his gardening and Googled “Le’s Vending” on the phone. There wasn’t much information except for the address, which was all I needed.
*
I parked behind a pile of utility poles in a vacant lot adjacent to Le’s building. The GPS had sent me in circles so I eventually found my Florida atlas, got out my reading glasses and located the office. It w
as in the middle of an area that was being renovated, though the work was probably stopped in ‘09 when everything in Florida ground to a halt. There was no equipment and there were no workers around, just half-demolished buildings, partially-built infrastructure, and evidence of lots of money gone down the rat hole. Florida was in the middle of a real estate bust, and it would be a long time until the next boom, but the cycle would happen again and the developers would swarm back like seventeen-year locusts.
The red Lexus was parked in a shady spot between the office and a warehouse building. Perfect. I thought about just barging in and making up a story, but I decided I’d rather be able to follow that car around, and I had a second GPS unit with me. I could get to the car without being seen unless someone came out, as there were no windows on that side of the building. I retrieved the extra tracker from the trunk of the SHO. This one was an older model, battery-powered, and would give me about a week’s worth of service. With any luck that would be enough. I waited to see if there were any comings or goings, but it was quiet, and if I didn’t want to lose the Lexus, I’d better get on with it. I walked across the hot tarmac and held the unit underneath the car, letting the magnets snap it firmly to the metal underbody.
Back in the Taurus I switched on the laptop for a trial run. The signal was clear.
D.B. Johannsen and a young man came out of the building, arguing. The kid was tall with choppy dark hair, Asian features, and a sour expression, and I assumed it was the son, Philip. I own a long-range microphone, but I’d left it at home—too bad, I would have liked to hear the conversation. People give up a lot of useful information when they’re fighting. On the next trip I’d pack my whole arsenal. The two of them got into the Lexus. I gave them a couple of minutes’ head start, then followed.