Nights of the Red Moon

by Milton T. Burton

  “What we have,” Toby said, “is one Mr. Willard Peet of St. Louis, Missouri. Mr. Peet has been careening around town in his eighty-thousand-dollar Beemer, smoking dope and snorting coke and trying to find Emmet Zorn.”

  That was the most interesting thing I’d heard all day, and I said so. I also said, “I assume he made a bit of a nuisance of himself, which brought him to your attention.”

  Otis spoke, “That’s right. We’d already gotten a couple of complaints on this bird, and so had the city police. When nobody at the Pak-a-Sak would tell him anything about Zorn, he started asking people on the streets, being verbally abusive in several cases when our good citizens couldn’t satisfy him. Then we saw him run a stop sign. We pulled him over and smelled weed when he rolled down the window. Probable cause for a search, etc., etc., bang-bang-bang. The domino effect. And here he is, and there on your desk is his bag of marijuana and a little glass vial that no doubt contains nose candy.”

  “I want a lawyer!” Peet yelled once again. “What’s wrong with you people? Can’t you understand what a man’s saying?”

  “Bo, all this talk about lawyers and stuff is getting on my nerves,” Toby said.

  “Who do you think you are, niggah?” Peet asked, looking up at Toby. “You think you’re some kind of top-shit mutha because these peckerwoods let you wear a badge and carry a gun? Sheet, I bet it ain’t even got no bullets in it. I want a lawyer! I know my rights.”

  Toby leaned down where their faces were about a foot apart and braced his arms on Peet’s chair, and said softly, “Who do I think I am? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m ex–Staff Sergeant Tobias Parsons, formerly of the U.S. Army Special Forces. First wave into Iraq. Ever shot it out with somebody who’s shooting back at you, Willard? I don’t mean some gangbang bullshit. I’m talking about real fighting men who’ve been trained to kill. Ever done that? I have. For several weeks. Then I caught a big chunk of shrapnel in the belly. I’d show you the scar, but I don’t want to see you puke all over our nice floor.”

  “Man, I don’t need this jive-ass crap—”

  “You’re gonna think jive in about fifteen minutes, my friend. What’s going to happen is that me and Sheriff Handel are going to go down to the Caravan and have ourselves each a nice medium-rare rib eye for supper. And while we’re gone, we’re going to leave you to the tender mercies of Billy Don and Otis standing right over yonder. In a special, soundproof room we have here just for that purpose. Then when we come back you’re going to tell us what we want to know, and you’re going to be happy to have the opportunity to do it.”

  “You can’t get away with this kind of shit no more.”

  “This is deep East Texas, fool,” Toby said. “This is the land of midnight burials in unmarked graves. We can get away with any damn thing we want to down here because nobody will ever care what happened to you. It’s not like you’re a civil rights worker or anybody worth worrying over. Take a good look at this room. Do you see any federal cops hovering around with the Bill of Rights in their hands? No, what you see is a comfy old pine-paneled office in the basement of an old-timey courthouse. You see mounted deer heads, fine shotguns, Winchester calendars, all that good Southern shit. And you see three good-ole-boy cops, plus one truly badass black dude who does not view you as a credit to our race. This is your worst nightmare come true, Willard. Believe it.”

  Peet gaped around frantically for a few moments, his face greasy with sweat. “Man, this ain’t happening.”

  “Oh, but it is,” I said softly.

  “Can’t we cut some kind of deal?” Peet asked.

  “Why should we deal when we’re holding all the aces?” I asked.

  “No deals, Willard,” Toby said. “Maybe a little charity if we’re approached right, but no deals. We don’t need to deal for what we’ve already got.”

  “Say what?”

  “Charity,” I said. “It’s a lot like divine grace. An unmerited favor given to an undeserving individual. You better listen up because here it comes, and you only get one chance to grab the brass ring. You tell us what we need to know, and out of the goodness of our hearts we’ll stick this weed and this vial of coke somewhere and forget all about them. Then when we get through, I’ll have somebody escort you to the county line and turn your car back over to you and let you get on your way back up to St. Louis.”

  “How do I know you’ll do what you say?”

  I started to rise from my chair with a long-suffering sigh. “Toby, I’m hungry. Let’s see about those rib eyes.”

  This galvanized Mr. Peet into action. “Wait! Wait! Okay, I’ll go for it. You don’t leave a dude no choice.”

  “Wise move, Willard,” Billy Don said, speaking for the first time.

  I sat back down. “Then start talking,” I said.

  “Okay, what do you need first?”

  “Once again, why were you looking for Emmet Zorn?”

  “I was sent down here to set up a transaction, you know? Like for some merchandise this Zorn dude is supposed to have.”

  “What kind of merchandise?” Toby asked.

  Peet wiggled around in his chair and shrugged off-handedly. “You know, product.”

  “There’s lots of products in this old world,” I said. “Cars, trucks, boom boxes, grapefruit…”

  Peet twittered. “It ain’t none of that shit, man. That’s for sure.”

  “You wouldn’t be talking about cocaine, now would you?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess. Blow. Toot. Whatever. I mean, I hate to mention the word outright, if you see what I’m saying. It’s like I got one of them inhabitations against it.”

  “I think you mean inhibitions,” Toby said.

  “Yeah, I got one of them things.”

  “How much coke?” I asked.

  He shrugged and wiggled and looked down at the floor. “I don’t know for sure. People other than me got to grade the stuff and weigh it and all that shit. I’m just the negotiator, but it looks like maybe a million worth.”

  For one of the few times in my life I felt my mouth fall open. “A million dollars…?”

  “That’s what my man said.” He leaned forward and put his hands about an inch apart and pointed them first in one direction, then in another as he spoke. “See, some dude that my man knows and trusts also knows this Zorn dude, and he says Zorn is the real deal, man. It’s like Zorn gets the shit from his man down in Houston, see? Then he holds it here for some other dude from Dallas to come get it. Or maybe he takes it to Dallas, I dunno. But Zorn don’t buy the shit and resell it, you understand. He just gets a transfer fee for getting it up to Dallas. Like UPS or whatever. But on this deal, my man is willing to pay more than the dude in Dallas. I mean, you see what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying that Zorn is screwing his man in Houston, whoever he is,” I said.

  “Sounds like it, don’t it?”

  “So do you know who Zorn’s man is?”

  “No, dude.”

  “Come on, Willard,” Toby said. “Get cracking with the facts. The sheriff and I can still go have those steaks if we need to.”

  “Man, I don’t got a clue. I mean, this business ain’t like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs getting together and doing a big deal with their names all over contracts and pictures in the newspapers and shit like that. It’s more like a need-to-know kind of setup, if you see what I’m saying. And I try not to absorb any information I don’t really need.”

  “Yeah, I bet you don’t,” I said. “Why is your man so desperate for this particular shipment? He has to know it’s going to be a onetime deal because Zorn sure as hell isn’t going to be able to do it again.”

  “Like, the Feds pulled a big bust and my man’s supplier is out of business. Lots of other dudes hurting too. Big drought on the street, man. I mean, it’s like supply and demand, if you know what I’m saying. If my man could get this shit out there in the next couple of weeks or so, then…”

  “Speaking of your man, who is he?” I asked.
>
  “Aw, no, dude! You can’t expect me to answer no question like that! I mean, you’re talking about God there when you talk about my man. You ought to know I can’t give that up. You trying to get me killed?”

  I shook my head and laughed. “Willard, this may come as a shock to you but you can bet the Feds and the St. Louis cops know who you and your man both are. It’s just that I don’t know. And I want to. So give it up.”

  “You think they really know?”

  “Sure they do. Unless your man started up in the business in the last month or so.”

  “Naaah,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “My man, he ain’t none of this Johnny-come-lately shit. He’s old school. I mean, the dude been doin’ this shit three, fo years at least.”

  “Then you can be sure they know, so you just give his name up, and then we’ll know too.”

  I gave him time to rationalize his actions, time to recall some slight or insult, either real or imagined, that he’d suffered from his “man” sometime in the past. When people are snitching, they always have to have that rationalization to justify what they are doing. They can never quite admit to themselves that they are betraying their associates for no other reason than to save their own skins.

  “Bob Jones,” he said.

  “Damn, Willard!” Otis said. “I could come up with a better lie than that, and I’m just a dumb old country boy.”

  “That’s the dude’s righteous name. I swear. Robert Elwood Jones. He goes by Bob.”

  “I hope you realize that I’m going to check all this out,” I said. “If you’ve lied about anything, then this coke comes back out of my desk and goes to the DA. A nationwide warrant will be issued, and we know where you live.”

  “Ain’t no lies, dude.”

  There were more details, but they didn’t matter. When we were finished with him I called in one of the night-shift deputies and instructed him to follow Peet to the county line. I didn’t bother to tell Peet that it would be very unwise for him ever to come back to Caddo County. Even as dense as he was, he could figure that out.

  “There’s still one question left unanswered,” Otis said. “Where was Zorn and why didn’t he meet with Peet?”

  “And it’s a damned important question too,” I said. “Any speculations?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “What we’ve learned tonight is certainly a new take on Zorn,” Toby said. “I never saw him as into anything this heavy.”

  “Me either,” Billy Don said.

  “The kind of money Peet was talking about does strange things to people,” I said.

  “Looks like he’s been involved in trafficking quite a while,” Otis said. “Long before he decided to stick his man in Houston.”

  “It sure does,” I said. “And this puts him in a different light in relation to the Twiller murder. Or at least it does to me. It may even give us a little leverage with him.”

  “You think?” Toby asked with a grin.

  “Indeed I do,” I said. “There is a lesson in this, my friends. When you’re conducting a murder investigation, you’ve got to be a mole with your eye on the hole and not get sidetracked by any of the peripheral crap that always orbits around. We had a choice tonight of getting some information we needed to help us clear a major case, or of saddling the taxpayers of this state with one more idiot to feed for forty years. We made the right choice. Besides, Peet will either wind up dead or in federal prison before long, anyway.”

  “I think you and Toby should give up law enforcement,” Otis said. “You need to take that two-man act of yours to Broadway.”

  I laughed. “We did do a number on that fool, didn’t we? Soundproof rooms and midnight burials in unmarked graves … Toby, you ought to write crime novels.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Before I left the office I gave Toby the contact numbers of Muldoon and Hotchkiss and told him to get Peet’s license number and info to them in case they wanted to pull him in for their own purposes. Then when I got to the house I made a call to Mack Reynolds, my old friend who was the FBI SAC in Houston. I found him at home, and we had a heart-to-heart talk. He moved fast. Thirty minutes later Hotchkiss called my cell phone to tell me that he would be happy to buy me breakfast at the Caravan the next day.

  * * *

  When I got to the restaurant that morning I found Hotchkiss waiting for me with a pair of coffee cups and two menus. We made small talk until after the waitress had poured our coffee and taken our orders. Then we got down to business.

  “I hope you don’t take it wrong,” he said, “but we just didn’t feel free to give you the whole story the other day. In fact, we thought maybe we’d said too much as it was.”

  “I understand,” I said and gave him a rundown on our session with Willard Peet. “I also know that Sipes has to be the man in Houston that Peet was talking about last night.”

  “He is. This fits in with some other information we’ve gotten. Apparently, Sipes has some missing cocaine.”

  “How in the hell did you find that out?” I asked.

  “We’re keeping close tabs on the man. And that’s all I can say about that. But he has jumped into the cocaine trade with both feet. For a while after that trial in Fillmore, he confined his criminal activities to laundering drug money for other dope dealers through a bank he controls in the Cayman Islands. We’ve had him under scrutiny for years, but he’s managed to avoid any further indictments. He even married a divorced socialite who came from one of the oldest families in Houston. That gave him a little veneer of respectability. But guys like him can’t stay straight, and now it’s coke. Mack assigned me to the Zorn-Sipes connection full-time. We’ll be working together if that’s no problem with you.”

  “Glad to have the help. Where does Zorn fit in the scheme?” I asked.

  “He brings the coke up from Houston and holds it here in town for a buyer from Dallas. The people from Dallas check the grade on the stuff, then make a call on their cell phones authorizing a wire transfer to an offshore account. Other people down in Houston get on their computers, and, once the money is in the bank, Zorn releases the coke.”

  “What’s to keep the Dallas people from just smoking Zorn and taking the merchandise?” I asked.

  “It just doesn’t work that way anymore. At least not with these people. You’ve got old, established customers buying from old, established suppliers. A lot of this stuff gets cooked up into crack and sent on further north. Too much profit to get greedy. Everybody stays cool, and everybody makes out good.”

  I sat back and thought for a few moments. “I never made Zorn for anything like this. Wonder what happened?”

  “Who knows? I think he’s always been a nickel-and-dime chippie nibbling around the edges of the crust. I guess he decided he wanted some of the pie.”

  “How much is Sipes paying him?”

  “Ten thousand a trip.”

  “Why haven’t you just nailed Zorn holding the stuff and made him roll over on Sipes? Seems simple enough.”

  Hotchkiss shook his head. “Even with Zorn’s testimony we need something else to connect Sipes to the drugs. You see, he never actually touches them himself. You can imagine what a really good lawyer like Bean or Holbrook would do to a guy like Zorn on the stand. Besides, Zorn and the Dallas connection is only one conduit that Sipes has going. There’s another guy in San Antonio and another in Little Rock, both doing the same thing.”

  “How do they handle the logistics of it all?” I asked.

  “Zorn gets a call from a prepaid cell that tells him to go to one of several safe deposit boxes in various banks scattered around Houston. Actually, they’re safe deposit bins, the kind businesses rent. The coke is waiting in hermetically sealed containers, along with Zorn’s fee. The deposit boxes are rented to a seemingly legitimate export company in Peru that has no known connection with either Sipes or his bank.”

  “So who puts the coke in the bank box?”

  “A couple of college bo
ys. Can you believe they’re both honor students?”

  I shook my head in wonder. “Where in hell do they get it?”

  “Right off the boat. And they get paid very handsomely to make the delivery to the bank. Being smart boys, they have sense enough to know not to try to screw Sipes. The truth is that they’re just a couple of dipshit rich kids getting some cheap thrills and picking up a thousand apiece for each trip to the bank. We’ll eventually get them, but there’s no point in busting either them or Zorn right now until we have a positive link to Sipes. The DEA is working the case too. We’re on top of the money-laundering angle.”

  “How’s that working out?” I asked. “You guys have gotten your wires crossed with them in the past.”

  “Not a chance this time. The whole thing’s being coordinated by the attorney general’s office. Nobody is going to jump without the go-ahead from Washington.”

  “Where did Lester Sipes come from?” I asked. “I know about the rodeo circuit, but what’s his background?”

  “He grew up dirt poor in the worst part of Fort Worth. His dad was a well-known hood named Dewey Sipes who hung around those old gambling dives out on the Jacksboro Highway and ran with guys like Tincey Eggleston and Asher Rhone. Hell, he was tough enough to work for Benny Binion in the policy racket back in the 1940s. If you’ve ever heard any of those names, you’ve got his number.”

  “I’ve heard them all.”

  “Then you know that Lester was to the manor born, so to speak.”

  “Anything else you need to tell me?” I asked.

  He gave me smile as bland as the one I’d given him the first day we met. “Only that we thought we had Sipes on money laundering a few months ago, but a witness disappeared and the case fell apart. So remember that anybody who gets tangled up with Sipes is dealing with a guy who didn’t hesitate to do away with a federal witness. That’s pretty heavy in my book. And if that isn’t enough, try this. He had another old friend of his who screwed him a couple of years ago, but not nearly as bad as Zorn has.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They fed that guy to the crabs off the South Jetty down at Galveston. A piece at a time. Meat cleavers and bone saws.”