No Right Turn

by A. J. Stewart

  “The video’s not going anywhere, hon.”

  “Do you have official law enforcement ID?” she asked. “Because I don’t. I gave back my PBSO badge, and my FDLE ID has me as a trainee.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Tomorrow morning is when the guy who owns the gas station is going to be at work. Not now. You don’t do the graveyard shift if you’re the owner. Graveyard shifts are for college kids who don’t know a badge from a bullet.”

  There was not going to be any convincing her otherwise, so I threw her the keys as I should have in Palm Beach and we headed back down to Blue Heron Boulevard. We both worked really hard not to look out toward the dark ocean and our house thereabouts.

  The college kid on the graveyard shift turned out to be a middle-aged man with a healthy disrespect of authority. I figure if you worked the graveyard shift in any kind of store, you got robbed sooner or later. Maybe more than once. And that either made you the greatest fan of the local police, or it made you wonder why you were paying their salaries.

  The store part was locked up tight and the guy wasn’t letting us in. Then he asked for ID. Then he noted that Danielle’s ID said she was a trainee, and then he said he wanted to see a warrant. And then I slipped him a fifty. He was alone on the shift, so Danielle offered to stay out front and call if a customer arrived.

  I went back to a room the same as the one we had been in with Todd. Fuelex probably had a blueprint on file for putting up their outlets. Like a kit. The security system was the same, right down to the crummy screen. This guy wasn’t nearly as adept at using the scrolling squash ball as Todd had been. He took so long I considered calling Todd and asking him to drive over. But the guy eventually got it going. We saw a similar picture as we had at the last Fuelex station. I-95 passed over the top of most of the area, so the video showed a similar overpass. We followed the timestamp on the video and got a few minutes from when we had seen the truck at the next gas station. We saw nothing.

  The guy put his hands up like that was all he could do and I told him to back it up and try it fifteen minutes before.

  “This is not worth a fifty,” he moaned.

  “What else would you be doing?”

  “Watching Netflix.”

  “Netflix will wait.”

  “How about another fifty?”

  “How about I tell your boss you already let me in here? Make it play.”

  He grumbled and made the video start. I had no intention of spending the entire night with this engaging fellow, so I asked him if it could go double time. It could. The cars sped by and we watched for several minutes in fast motion but saw no truck.

  It seemed that Rex had not come this way. For the sake of completely covering the bases, I told the guy to go back an hour and roll it fast. I figured we should be able to see a semitrailer. We watched. It was hard on the eyes. Cars zoomed by, and the eye followed across the screen and then zipped back to the other side to watch another car, and so on. It was like watching speed tennis.

  And then I saw a truck. Or more specifically the cabin. I had been inside it. I had seen it up nice and close. The guy stopped the speed and slowed the video, and we watched the DBR-badged cabin pull a trailer off the freeway and cut underneath and head west on Blue Heron. It didn’t stop at the gas station. I noted the timestamp.

  “Is that time accurate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Note it. Can you show me the exact same time looking the other way?”

  “I’m really gonna need another fifty.”

  “What’s your boss’s number again?”

  “This is slave labor.”

  “Dude, you’re sitting on your butt getting fifty bucks for twenty minutes’ work. You mention slave labor again and I will slap you into tomorrow.”

  He gave me a look that suggested we weren’t going to form a darts team anytime soon and then fumbled with the squash ball. Again it took longer than was necessary. Danielle called out to see if we were okay. I called back that we would be five minutes.

  We were less. The guy found the right video and then fast-forwarded to the right time. Then he slowed it down. I watched the DBR cabin zoom by again. It stopped at the next traffic light to the west, Military Trail, which would have been the exact spot Rex would turn right if he wanted to cut back up to the Fuelex on PGA Boulevard.

  But he didn’t. He stopped at the lights, and then on green he went dead ahead. I watched his taillights until they became nothing more than pixels on the grainy screen.

  I told the guy that I was done. I was going to thank him for his time, but I’d given him a fifty and he had given me grief, so I left it. We walked back out into the store, and the guy asked Danielle if any customers had come.

  “Three or four,” she said. “They all paid at the pump.”

  “Tough job,” I said.

  The guy snarled. “You ever had a gun pointed in your face at your work?”

  The fact was I had. I didn’t like it, not one little bit. And although I hadn’t taken a shine to this guy, I didn’t like the idea that someone had stuck a gun in his face at his graveyard shift job, either. So I didn’t answer his question.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  Danielle took the wheel as we headed home.

  “So?” she asked.

  “He got off.”

  “See?”

  “And he went straight through the lights. He didn’t go up Military Trail.”

  “He went straight?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s straight?” she asked rhetorically. She knew what was straight ahead from there.

  “Beeline Highway.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “That’s not the weird part.”

  “What’s the weird part?”

  “The timestamp on the video showed him passing by a half an hour before the timestamp on the video at the Fuelex where he got gas.”

  “What was he doing for half an hour?”

  “Or to put it another way, where did that half hour go?”

  “Same question.”

  I shook my head, to myself as much as anyone. It wasn’t the same question. Not the way I was thinking about it.

  “Either way, I know what he was doing.”

  “How?”

  “The trailer that came through here? The one that delivered the F-88.”

  “Yes?”

  “Not the same trailer that we see on the video at the PGA Boulevard gas station.”

  “If it’s a different truck, how do you know it’s him?”

  “Not a different truck, a different trailer. The tractor—the cabin part—that’s the same. But the trailer is different. I couldn’t see it in the video at Dale Beadman’s garage, and I didn’t know to look when Leo showed me the video of him getting on the freeway. I should have gotten it when I was in Charlotte. But now, seeing these two videos one after the other? He gets off here with a plain blue soft sided transporter trailer. No DBR signage.”

  “The trailer at PGA Boulevard had Dale Beadman Racing all over it.”

  “Exactly. A NASCAR hauler. Fuelex and other sponsors, too. Moving billboards.”

  “So he swapped trailers?”

  “It would seem.”

  We drove back to the condo. I got tech support to login and set the security video running.

  “You’re going to watch it again?” Danielle asked.

  “I don’t need to watch it again. Does the oven have a stopwatch on it?”

  “No. It has a countdown timer.”

  “Need a stopwatch.”

  “On your phone,” Danielle said. She took my phone from me and set the stopwatch running. Then she left the video on the television and brought up a map of West Palm Beach on the laptop screen. She zoomed in so Blue Heron Boulevard was at the bottom and PGA Boulevard was at the top. The Beeline Highway headed off on a northwest route, through miles of nothing toward Indiantown and Okeechobee, on the north end of its namesake lake.
Between the two boulevards it formed a triangle.

  “What’s out there?” asked Danielle, thinking. She knew the county well. She knew what was out there.

  So did I. I’d been out there a few times. On cases. There was a lot of nothing out there. Geographically it was the start of the start of the Everglades. “There’s some warehouses out there. Distribution-type places.”

  Danielle used her finger to move the map along the Beeline like she was driving it.

  “Aircraft manufacturers,” she said. “An airfield. And—”

  “What?” I said, leaning into her to see the screen. She pointed at the edge of the screen.

  Palm Beach International Raceway.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I didn’t sleep well. I was like a kid the night before an SAT exam who knew he hadn’t studied enough. I knew there were things I knew for sure, and I knew for sure there were things I didn’t know. We had agreed that there was no point in heading out in the middle of the night. I got up early and checked the stopwatch on my phone. I looked at the video. It told me exactly what I’d thought it would tell me. We went for a run around the quiet streets of PGA National. The grass on the golf course was glistening. We ran until Danielle decided it was time to turn, and then we ran back. Then we showered and ate breakfast, and Danielle declared she was coming with me.

  We drove west from PGA and cut up the Beeline. The further we got from the coast, the less dense the houses became. And then it ended. Just like that. Like there was a line, them and us. Which was true in a manner of speaking. Under the veneer that commercialism had laid over the top, Florida was really just a primordial swamp. And out along the Beeline, you really got to see the difference. One moment it was all houses and golf courses and the next thing the nature was pulsing at the edge of the road, ready to take over if someone forgot just once to cut it back.

  In between the wild foliage are pockets of human resistance. We drove up past nondescript buildings that gave no inkling as to what they did, and that made me think of clandestine agencies and biochemical labs creating killer viruses and humanity-destroying robots. I really needed more sleep.

  The Palm Beach International Raceway is not all it might seem, if you’re just going by the name. The name brings forth images of Daytona and Talladega and Indianapolis all rolled into one. It ain’t that. There aren’t any stands. There aren’t any motels. What there is is a space carved out of the wilds with a blacktop track laid on it. The wide-open parking lot was completely empty when we arrived. There was a sign advertising go-karts that looked like it might have once been legible from the road. The gate to the track stood open, as did the door to a shed just beyond. The place had an end-of-the-world feel to it.

  We drove into a shed that might have been a garage. There was a popup canopy out front, just like the one Simon Lees had used when testing at Charlotte. This was not Charlotte. This was where Travis Zanchuk was racing. It was park softball compared to the major leagues. This was a place for low-budget and no-budget race fanatics to come and race their cars. It didn’t look like much, but neither did plenty of baseball fields I had played on. It was there to do a job. When the fans all brought their cars in for a few laps or a drag race, they weren’t looking at the cracks in the pavement or the peeling paint on the shed. They were racing and that’s all they cared about. All I cared about was that this gave them a place to do it that wasn’t a public road.

  We stopped outside the shed that was the biggest building in sight. There was a banner advertising drag races. A lone guy wandered out and stood by the door. He was lean and wore a hoodie. He looked like he was expecting someone, and he looked like we weren’t them.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Another one,” he replied.

  “You work here?”

  “As much as anyone.”

  “I’m wondering if you hold cars here?”

  “Hold them?”

  “You know, store them.”

  He shook his head. “You see anywhere to store a car?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You want a storage facility.”

  “I thought there might be one at a race track.”

  “Afraid not. How many cars you want to store?”

  I shrugged. “Ten?”

  “Ten?” He looked surprised. “You want a car lot. Or a hangar.”

  I glanced at Danielle and she at me. We thanked the guy and headed straight back out to the Beeline. Back toward the coast. Toward civilization.

  “Why are you driving so fast?” Danielle asked.

  “Sorry, didn’t realize.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Missy Beadman mentioned that they flew their plane out of North Palm Beach County Airport.”

  “And that guy thought a hangar would be a good idea. Worth a shot. It’s down here somewhere.”

  “Somewhere. These trees are taking over.”

  “That’s what trees do. There!” she yelled.

  I hit the skids the same moment as I checked my rearview. We were all alone on the road. The airport was hidden behind throngs of trees and foliage. Even the sign pointing into the airport from the road was half-hidden. I backed up and pulled into the driveway. There was an intercom and a slot for a keycard. I used the intercom.

  We got in and pulled up to a building that might loosely have been referred to as the terminal. Private airfields are a different beast. There were rows of hangars surrounding a runaway that didn’t look long enough to host the Olympics sprint finals. There were small planes parked on the tarmac. We found a spot and went inside. A guy came out of an office wearing one of those white shirts with the epaulets that pilots like to wear. He was sweating.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Well enough,” I said. “Listen, I’m doing an inventory of assets for Dale Beadman Racing.”

  “Mr. Beadman,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.

  “Well, for his daughter. She runs the organization.”

  “Right, Angie.”

  “You know Angie?”

  “Sure. They fly out of here. Mr. Beadman mostly, but Missus and Angie, too.”

  “Right. We need to just make sure of the location of their assets.”

  “Assets?”

  “The aircraft.”

  “The Lear?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s not here. I can tell you that now. Mr. B flew out the other day, and I know for a fact he was staying in Charlotte until Sunday.”

  “Right. We know that. He’s driving down to Darlington and then back up to Charlotte to return here.”

  “So that’s that.”

  “Well, not quite. See, it’s a thing. We have to account for the plane. We know where it is, but we need to tick the box to confirm where it isn’t.”

  “Where it isn’t? It’s in Charlotte. It isn’t everywhere else.”

  He was a wise one, this guy. I guessed he had earned those epaulets. I looked at Danielle. She took the baton.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. She was using her floozy voice.

  “Adam.”

  “Adam, that’s a nice name.”

  Adam blushed. I didn’t know why. His mother had given him the damned name.

  “So this is an IRS thing,” said Danielle. “We’re trying to make sure Mr. Beadman doesn’t run afoul, or worse still, get audited.”

  Adam visibly shook at the idea of being audited by the IRS.

  “So we have to confirm that the aircraft we know is in Charlotte isn’t right now, in fact, for tax purposes, in Palm Beach.”

  “How do you confirm a negative?” he asked.

  “We just need to see the empty hangar, Adam,” she said. It might have been the fan that was blowing warm air at us from behind the desk, but I thought I saw her bat her eyelids.

  “We don’t even have to go in,” she said. “You just open it, we take a photo for proof, that’s it.”

  He frowne
d. He didn’t look convinced.

  “I’d really appreciate it, Adam,” Danielle said. “My boss will tear me a new one if I don’t get this done and Mr. Beadman gets audited.”

  Adam glanced down in the direction of Danielle’s backside, clearly considering the concept of her getting a new one.

  “You don’t have to go in?” he confirmed.

  “Absolutely not.”

  He nodded like he wasn’t sure, and then he nodded again with more authority. “Okay.”

  Adam led us out to a small white pickup with a yellow light on top that could flash if there were an emergency. The truck had a bench seat and Danielle sat in the middle, against my better judgment. Not that I was kidding myself that I got any say in where Danielle sat.

  He drove us toward the runway. A small plane, maybe a four-seater, was dropping out of the sky for a landing. It sounded like a lawnmower. I thought for a moment it was going to land on top of us, but at the last second, Adam turned hard so Danielle leaned into him, and he directed the pickup to a hangar just off the landing strip.

  We got out and Adam stepped forward to open the hangar door. It was a large bifold thing. Too heavy to do by hand. He got some kind of hydraulic system going and it folded in on itself. It was slow going. We waited. And waited. When it was a quarter way open, Adam called us. Danielle and I stepped forward to take a look.

  At nothing. It was an empty hangar. It was a large space with room for an aircraft smaller than a jumbo but bigger than the four-seater we had just seen land.

  “There you go,” Adam said to Danielle.

  “Thanks,” she replied, deflated.

  “Did you want to take a photo?”

  Danielle nodded and continued the ruse. “Thanks for reminding me.” She took out her phone and took a picture. Then we waited for Adam to close the door. I watched another plane land. This one was bigger. It was a jet of some kind, about five windows long. It didn’t sound like a lawn mower. It was the kind of aircraft you could bank on getting you away from a bad storm. It made me think of Dale Beadman’s Learjet. And why it hadn’t come back for Missy and Angie. And then I turned and looked at the small planes on the tarmac.

  Adam came back. “So you got what you need?”