Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  ‘You seem to be fairly agitated about it,’ John Horse allowed.

  ‘Agitated!’ I snapped back. ‘The guy doesn’t even know me, and he sent McReedy to kill me. He took advantage of … he takes advantage of everybody and gets away with. It’s my opinion that he’s a much bigger crook than Red Levine, or any of the wise guys I know in Brooklyn. He’s … he’s the main thing that’s wrong.’

  ‘Wrong with what?’

  ‘Everything!’ I snarled. ‘Damn. Look at what he and his tribe did to you and yours, for God’s sake! Plus, I’ve figured a few things out that I haven’t told you about yet, about him and his older daughter Sharon, my boss. But he’s behind it all, that’s what I think.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said to me, ‘But what is it that you think you can do?’

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ I told him firmly, ‘but let me ask you this. Could I borrow your gun?’

  PART THREE

  Fry’s Bay

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was raining in Fry’s Bay by the time the Jeep pulled on to the side street, close to Yudda’s Crab Palace. Philip was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and Joseph was wedged in behind us. We’d stopped at a gas station earlier, along the way, and Philip had made a call. When we got into town, there was Mister Redhawk waiting for us outside Yudda’s. Mister Redhawk stood under a very large black umbrella and told everyone else what part they were to play in our master plan to mess with Pascal Henderson.

  First, Philip was to go with Mister Redhawk directly to Rich Man Henderson. They were going to lay down the law, to wit. Not only would they make a claim on the swamp land with the oil on it because they’re Seminoles and the actual rightful owners, but they would also make legal claim on behalf of Mr Henderson’s new infant daughter by Lynette, who deserved her fair share, infant though she may have been. When that failed, which they were pretty sure it would, they intended to use the baby as some kind of ransom or blackmail or something. That particular part of the plan needed work, in my opinion. My opinion, loudly voiced, was that I would rather just walk into Henderson’s penthouse and pop the guy.

  Now, I probably didn’t really mean that. I was probably just blowing off steam from being kidnapped and shot at and drugged and etcetera.

  First, I never popped a guy in my life, and second, my first thing should have been to come to an arrangement with this McReedy character, which is why I got McReedy’s gun from John Horse. My feeling was that if he saw his own gun pointed at his own head, he might listen before he killed me, at least a little.

  So, while Philip and Mister Redhawk went to muscle old man Henderson, Joseph and I returned to my office. We all planned to meet back at Yudda’s shortly.

  Joseph and I went to my office so that McReedy would know I was back, because it was a good bet that either he had the office staked out or that my boss and so-called friend Sharon would tell him where I was the minute I set foot through the door. This was better than going to my apartment, which he might also be watching. My place was a little secluded. I believed that, if you wanted to avoid being killed, it was better to have people around. No matter how hardened a criminal is, he would always rather do his work in private. Nobody wants witnesses. So we went to my office under the theory that we could get the drop on McReedy and eliminate him from our list of worries. This part of the plan was also half-baked, obviously, but by that time I had figured a few more things out, and I had to confront my so-called friend Sharon with these newfound ideas.

  So we walked, Joseph and I, as quickly as we could, keeping to the sides of the buildings so that we wouldn’t get too wet. It only helped a little. By the time we reached the building where I worked, we were pretty much soaked. Joseph’s denim jacket was like a sponge, and the blanket that I had wrapped around me to keep out the cold and rain was wet as a lake.

  I had McReedy’s pistol in my belt, safety on. Joseph wore a shoulder holster, just like a real gangster, under his jacket. We both looked a little like drowned rats when we marched through the door of the office suite which said, in bold and relatively new letters, CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES.

  The lights were on. Sharon was in her office, at her desk. I addressed her thusly: ‘I have it all figured out.’

  I shrugged off my wet blanket by the side of the door.

  She looked up, startled. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘No,’ I corrected her. ‘Foggy.’

  ‘You can’t be here.’ She stood.

  ‘I can and I am,’ I told her. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Look, Foggy,’ she said, starting to come around her desk. ‘I understand that you’re upset, and I know that there are a few things we have to discuss.’

  I pulled out McReedy’s gun. I didn’t point it at her because I still liked her, I guess. But the sight of the gun stopped her in her tracks.

  I held up the gun so she could see it really clearly, and a .44 Auto Mag Pistol, made a nice show. It was a handsome sidearm, with magnum power and short recoil, semi-automatic. It looked like it could stop an elephant, which it probably could. It certainly got Sharon’s attention.

  ‘This pistol belongs to McReedy. I think you should know that.’ I let that sink in, then waved it around a little and put it back in my belt. ‘But where are my manners. Sharon, this is Joseph. Joseph, Sharon.’

  Neither acknowledged the introduction.

  ‘So, as I say,’ I resumed, ‘I finally figured things out. Please have a seat and let’s talk it over until McReedy gets here.’

  ‘Why would he come here?’ she asked, and you could see that she was genuinely panicked. ‘Did you tell him to meet you here?’

  ‘Did I tell him?’ I actually laughed. ‘That’s a good one. You don’t think he’s got this place staked out in some way or another? And besides, I thought you would tell him.’

  ‘Me?’ She seemed stunned. ‘Why would I tell him where you were?’

  ‘This is all part and parcel of what I have figured out. Now would you please sit down? You’re making Joseph nervous.’

  She glanced at him.

  Joseph also made a nice appearance. He was tall and stern and chiseled looking, like he was made out of granite. He looked like the kind of thug who would just as soon shoot you as look at you.

  The truth was much different, as I had learned on our long drive back from the swamp. Joseph was studying at FSU to be an accountant. He had a head for numbers. He was the one who came up with the particulars of how you could make money off of the oil and the timber in the swamp where John Horse lived. He was, apparently, something of a genius at this. So, while going to school in Oklahoma did him little good, going to college in Florida did him and his whole tribe a big favor. I learned that he was going for his doctorate. By the end of next year, he’d be Dr Joseph Yahola. Seriously. He was Lou Yahola’s little brother. That’s what he told me on the ride back into town. Lou Yahola had put the kid through school – on the salary he made from the donut shop. At least, this is what the kid thought. I thought Lou Yahola might have made a little extra on the side with Jody the pusher, but who was I, of all people, to consider that a problem?

  The point was, Joseph looked tough. So Sharon sat down behind her desk.

  ‘Good,’ I said, taking a chair in front of her desk.

  Joseph went to the entrance to the office suite, grabbed a handy chair, and positioned himself in the shadows so as not to be immediately seen by anyone who might come in unexpectedly.

  ‘This is what I’ve figured out,’ I announced. ‘You set me up from the start.’

  ‘Foggy,’ she began, clearly nervous.

  ‘I mean when I first started working here,’ I went on, ‘not just the past few days. I figure I’m a dope for not wondering why I got this job so easily in the first place, given my background, outstanding warrant and all. I thought that just because I gave my real first name instead of Foggy, and a different spelling of my last name, I figured I’d foiled the system – because the system is that s
tupid. But now I figure that your rich and powerful father not only pulled strings to get you this cushy government gig, but he also did the same for me so that I would be working here for a little while before his daughter – his newly arrived baby daughter – was born. You needed a fall guy, as they say in the Bogart movies. You needed me to snatch the baby from the hospital when you told me to, when you said that that baby was in danger from a junkie mother. I’d turn it over to you. That way, the father could do whatever he wanted with the tyke. Only Lynette, despite being drugged to the gills, knew she was in trouble and scrammed. That meant you had to get me to find the baby, bring it back to the hospital where, let me guess, your father is on the board, or owns it, or is the major contributor, or something. How am I doing?’

  She stared down at her desk. ‘Look,’ she began again.

  But I was on a roll. ‘Anyway, you didn’t reckon on the Seminole network being as good as it is. They wanted the baby too. I suppose you know why.’

  She did not respond.

  ‘Lynette Baker is half Seminole,’ I explained, ‘and they want the kid for all kinds of reasons, maybe even some of the reasons your father wants it, I don’t know.’

  Sharon looked up then. Her face was pale. ‘I think I’m going to be sick, Foggy,’ she said, and it didn’t seem like a lie. ‘I think I’m going to throw up, honest to God.’

  I wasn’t certain what was going on, but my sympathy quotient for her was fairly low at this point, so I said, ‘This is what a wastebasket is for. Throw up if you have to.’

  Without hesitation, she bent over and, indeed, tossed up into the garbage can she had by her desk.

  ‘God,’ she muttered to herself, straightening back up.

  ‘What the hell?’ I asked.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re into, man,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘This guy, my so-called father, Pascal Henderson? He’s nobody to mess with. I mean it. You have to understand. He does what he wants. There’s nobody to tell him otherwise. I’ve got a reason to be nice to him because he’s done right by me every once in a while, but that doesn’t keep me from realizing that he’s Satan.’

  ‘He’s not Satan,’ I told her. ‘Satan lives in New York. Trust me. Central Park West. Throws a nice party. But your father? He can be Satan’s cousin if he wants. That’s up for grabs.’

  ‘You don’t know what he’s capable of.’

  ‘He’s capable of getting some young junkie pregnant when he’s at an advanced age – though exactly how he met Lynette is a puzzler. He’s capable of figuring out how I might be a sap. He figured that out pretty good. And he knows how to steal large. Very large. So I’ll give him that. But, in general, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. I have always believed this.’

  ‘You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Foggy.’ She leaned forward. ‘Look. I like you. I’ve grown to like you. Sure, I hired you at first just because my father told me to. He found you. He knows all about you. He knows your motivations. And he knew at some point that he’d want to get … look. By the time I hired you, Lynette was already pregnant and causing trouble. It was only a matter of time before something went wrong, see? So, yes, you were supposed to be a kind of a fall guy, if that’s how you want to put it. You were supposed to get the baby from the hospital, bring it to me, and I’d give it to him. No questions asked. Or answered. But then Lynette freaked out and skipped with the kid, so we went to plan B. Only plan B was screwed up too because of the goddamned Indians! Which, after a second, I figured out all my own. I don’t have any idea what my father plans to do with this baby, but it won’t be good, I can tell you that. It won’t be good for anyone. Except him.’

  I nodded. ‘Nice speech. Did you write it down and memorize it, or was that improvised?’

  She closed her eyes for a second. ‘I did kind of get it together in my head last night, just in case. But that doesn’t make it any less true.’

  ‘So, just for my own amusement,’ I said, ‘can you give me any idea how a guy like Henderson met a kid like Lynette?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’ She looked away.

  ‘Come on. We have to talk about something ’til McReedy gets here.’

  ‘Seriously, Foggy, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Because it’s a family thing,’ I surmised.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  And then she threw up again.

  ‘Do you have some kind of a bug or something?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she told me, still all bent over.

  ‘Then what the hell is going on? Why do you keep doing that?’

  She shot up, red in the face. ‘Because it makes me sick! What he does makes me sick enough to die!’

  ‘What he does?’ I repeated, a little startled by her vehemence. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘I told you. He’s Satan. What does Satan do? He wants to be God. That’s what my father wants. He wants to be God in people’s lives. He likes to pick a subject, usually a girl, and warp her life all out of shape, just to see what she’ll do. Just because he can. It’s his hobby. He picked out Lynette when she was a toddler. There was an escapee from the Columbus Stockade, a solider in the army, a deserter from Korea.’

  ‘I’ve heard this story,’ I began.

  ‘No you haven’t,’ she snapped. ‘This deserter got as far as Fry’s Bay. He came to my father for money.’

  ‘The deserter? Why did he … how in the world did he even know …’ but I did not get a chance to get my question or my thoughts together.

  ‘My father thought a person like that would be useful here in a little town like this. But the guy didn’t want to stay here; he only wanted a little travelling money. So my father had him sedated, shot the guy up with some God-awful flu bug, and had him dropped off in the swamp close to where the main Seminole hideout is. He thought that he could give all the Seminoles influenza, see, like germ warfare – kill them off, or some of them, anyway. Because that’s what white people brought the Indians when they first came to America – syphilis and the plague. They don’t have the tolerance or the medicine for it, usually. Because, see, if the Seminoles found someone sick near their camp, they would take care of him. And if they found a dead body, they would give it a proper ceremony. Because that’s the way they are. That’s why Henderson thought they would all get the flu, see? But everybody got lucky, if you want to call it that. The guy was found by some Seminole woman who was a nurse. She took him in, nursed him back to health, saved his life. The short of it is this: they had a baby. Right away. That baby was Lynette.’

  ‘I told you I heard this story several times already in the past couple of days,’ I insisted.

  ‘The story doesn’t end there,’ she snarled. ‘The little family had no peace. My father got wind that his plan didn’t work. So he sent in the army. Seriously, the U.S. Army went into the Seminole camp, arrested the deserter, confiscated the baby. There was a fracas, and some army major got shot. They took in one of the tribal elders, too, and put him in prison.’

  I looked over at Joseph. ‘Are you hearing this? She’s talking about John Horse!’

  ‘Meanwhile, Lynette went to an orphanage.’ Sharon’s voice was growing shrill and more than a little hysterical. I could tell that she was starting to lose it. She was also speeding up, talking faster and faster. ‘But my father had her released when she was fourteen, thrown out on the streets. He sent Jody – I think you know Jody – to get Lynette hooked on junk.’

  ‘Why?’ I was having a very difficult time believing what she was telling me.

  ‘You’ll see. Then, after a while, Lynette was messed up, naturally, and needed money for dope, right? So Lynette partied with an older guy to get the money. Then the older guy … my father …’

  But she stopped right there so that she could throw up again.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ignoring the heinous behavior of the vicious rich and continuing to add things up. ‘Wait just a minute. Are you telling me that th
e Seminole woman we’re talking about was a nurse?’ I looked to Joseph again. ‘Damn it! Is Maggie Redhawk Lynette’s mother?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  He didn’t seem as amazed by this concept as I was.

  ‘Christ!’ I said to Sharon. ‘Your father really does wreak his fair share of havoc around here, doesn’t he?’

  ‘And he doesn’t even stay here most of the time,’ she said, weakly. ‘He likes to come when the tourists are gone and everything’s kind of sleepy. But I’m not finished. I got one more boom to lower. Are you ready?’

  ‘Am I ready?’ I asked. ‘For more? You’ve given me in five minutes more information than I’ve gotten out of you in the previous year. You’re seriously messing with my head. If you’re about to tell me anything whatsoever about the party between your father and Lynette, I’d just as soon not hear it.’

  ‘No, it’s not about that,’ she said, holding her head in her hands, ‘and it’s not about Lynette’s baby either. Did you ask yourself, yet, who Lynette’s father is?’

  ‘Lynette’s father?’ I hesitated. ‘I thought we were talking about—’

  But Sharon didn’t give me time to finish.

  ‘McReedy,’ she hissed. ‘McReedy is the deserter, the army man, and he’s the father of little lost Lynette. McReedy is his first name, see? It’s an old family name. His complete name is McReedy Henderson Baker.’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I stammered.

  ‘See?’ She grinned like a vampire. ‘Welcome to my family.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  It became clear that Pascal Henderson, aside from being one of the sickest human beings I had ever heard about, had a way with motivational management. He kept his distant cousin McReedy in line, a little crazy, and angry enough to do anything, mostly by carefully screwing with McReedy’s daughter beyond all recognition. Apparently McReedy wanted out of the relationship so bad he tried to kill himself less than a year ago. That’s when Henderson took Lynette to bed, just so he could say to McReedy, ‘Look what happens if you’re not around to watch out for your daughter. You think it couldn’t get worse? It could always get worse.’