Royal had been in Belleville about the time the car blew up. Every time the lawyer used his credit card, the Hacker was aware of it. He could track Royal’s movements just by his charges. So, what was Royal doing in the Swamp Rat Bar? Who blew up the car? Was that Royal’s car? If so, where did he get the documents to rent it under a name that didn’t exist?
This whole mess had started with a lawyer down in Belleville. The Hacker knew that much and he knew that Matt Royal and Logan Hamilton were involved. After all, he’d been hired to kill them and the black guy who claimed to be an Indian. But he hated to be kept in the dark about an operation he was involved in. Plus, there was a lot of money riding on the successful completion of this one.
The Belleville lawyer had been killed in a drive-by. The cops figured it was some gangbangers from Miami. Maybe not. Maybe somebody else was horning in on the Hacker’s action, trying to get the money. His brain was cramped from thinking about it.
Blakemoore’s name had popped up in a police database that was linked to the Sarasota County computer entries dealing with Osceola and the attempts on Hamilton’s life. The Hacker figured there was a connection between the lawyer’s death and Osceola. He just couldn’t figure out what.
He called James Baggett, the biker leader. “Who were those guys you sent after Royal in the boat?”
“They weren’t my men.”
“Who were they?”
“Just call them some of my associates.”
“Well, your associates fucked up.”
“Yeah. And they paid a high price, too. They’re both dead.”
“I know that. You keep fucking up and you’re going to be dead.”
“I’ll get’em next time.”
“I ain’t paying you another dime until those two fuckers are dead.”
“Royal and Hamilton?”
“Bet your ass.” He slammed his phone closed.
Time to call the old man.
The Hacker logged onto the Web site, got the day’s phone number, and dialed it on another prepaid cell of his own. He’d long since figured out what the old man was doing with the phones. Every number the Hacker had gotten off the Web site had been assigned to a prepaid bought at some convenience store. He’d checked every last one of them.
The woman answered and he asked to speak to the man. She put the phone down and came back in a few minutes. “He is unable to come to the phone,” she said.
“Then take the goddamned phone to him.”
“He is indisposed at the moment.”
“If that means he’s on the crapper, I don’t care. Give him the fucking phone.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but he cannot talk to you at the moment.”
“You tell that old bastard that he’s got ten minutes to call me back at this number. If I haven’t heard from him, I’m going to start throwing wrenches into his machine. I promise you he won’t like that.” He closed the phone in a rage.
The damn birds were still at it. He needed a drink, but he was all out. He’d have to drive into town to get some booze and food. He’d been laying low, hated the thought of having to deal with another human being, even that stupid nose-picking clerk at the package store.
He went out onto the front porch, the high sun making him squint. He hollered as loud as he could for the birds to shut up. Silence fell on him, but within seconds the sounds assaulted him again. He shook his head. “Fucking birds,” he mumbled and went back inside.
His cell phone was ringing. He sat in his chair, picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
It was the scratchy voice of the old man, ancient sounding, weak but steady, a hint of anger. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Calling my home and making demands and threats.”
“I’m the guy you need most right now, old man. Have you commissioned someone else to do my job?”
“No. You’ve got your job, but it doesn’t seem to be getting done. If it’s not completed by Saturday at noon, you’re finished. Off the case. No more money. Period. You understand?”
“Yeah,” he said, sullenly. “I’ll get it done. Just don’t forget the wire transfer to my bank.”
“I won’t. If you do what you’ve contracted to do.” The phone went dead.
You old bastard, the Hacker thought. Maybe as soon as that wire transfer goes through, I’ll come take care of you personally. But he knew he wouldn’t. He was the brains not the brawn. He didn’t care for violence, never took part in it. He just directed it.
The Hacker shrugged, got up from his chair, and walked out the door to the old beater parked next to the house. He’d have to deal with that fucking nose-picker if he wanted to get drunk tonight.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
There were two Greyhound Bus terminals nearby, one in Bradenton and the other in Sarasota. Abraham had been staying at a motel in Sarasota, so it made sense to start with the one closest to the place where he managed to get his head bashed in.
I had told Jock and Logan about what I’d learned and then left them at my house and drove the rental to North Washington Boulevard in Sarasota. I found the terminal at the corner of Sixth Street. It was housed in a rectangular, flat-roofed building, a utilitarian structure designed by an architect with no vision. Or maybe the executives who ordered it built cared nothing of esthetics and just wanted a place for the buses to load and unload their passengers. Several parking spaces were painted on the asphalt that bordered the eastern side of the building adjacent to Washington Boulevard.
On the south side, an extension of the roof hung over four long parking spaces. A bus sat in one, its door open, the driver standing by the steps leading up into the interior, wearing a uniform that included vest and tie. He smiled as I walked by. His bus was empty and the sign on the front above the windshield announced that he was heading to Ft. Myers. As I entered the building, he put the bus in gear and moved out southbound. No passengers.
I walked through the entrance into an air-conditioned space that had not been upgraded in years. There were a few people sprawled on uncomfortable plastic chairs bolted to the floor, their baggage at their feet. Most were rough looking, men and women who worked on construction crews doing the unskilled labor or washed dishes in a restaurant or picked up a few bucks as day laborers. Some were sleeping, awaiting their transportation to another place, one that would treat them better than our tourist mecca.
Gray, scuffed linoleum covered the floor. A ticket counter took up part of one wall, thick glass between the agent and his customers. A small hole covered by a metal grid was built into the glass, a place to talk through. An office was adjacent to the counter, small and plain, filled with cheap metal furnishings. A man in a uniform shirt bearing the bus company’s logo was busy at a computer behind the counter. On the opposite side of the waiting room was a small alcove that held a Pepsi and a Coke machine. There were two restroom doors, one on either side of a drinking fountain. In the corner, next to the men’s room, stood seven lockers in various sizes, all gray, all scratched and dirty and ancient looking. Two columns, seven lockers. Not much.
I looked at the key, walked to the lockers, and found the one with a number that corresponded to the number on the key. I tried to open it, but found that the keyhole was plugged. I walked over to the man behind the counter. “Sorry to bother you, but I don’t think this key works.”
“Let me see,” he said. I put the key in the little tray that gave access through the glass. He looked at the key, punched his keyboard, peered at the monitor. He looked up at me. “We’ve plugged the locker. The dollar rental is only for twenty-four hours. If you don’t get your stuff by then we plug it.”
“This isn’t my key,” I said. “A friend left it for me to retrieve some stuff for him.”
“Don’t matter. If you got the key, you get access. As soon as you pay the rental.”
“How much?”
He studied the monitor, looked up. “Your friend rented that locker last Friday, so you owe me for six days, but he already paid a dollar. Five
bucks will do it.”
I gave him the money and walked with him to the lockers. He unplugged it and left. I opened the door and found a large manila envelope with my name on it. There was nothing else in the locker. I shut the door, leaving the key in the lock and walked out, waving to the clerk.
Once in my car I opened the envelope and found another letter from Abraham, this one several pages in length. There was also a document, handwritten in a florid style, on paper that was turning brown with age. Splotches of something, coffee maybe, marred the surface, but did not obscure any of the writing.
I put the old paper aside and began to read Abraham’s letter. As I read, things became clearer for the first time in a week. When I finished the letter, I looked closely at the old document and read the exaggerated cursive used by many government scribes of the day. My heart rate shot up and I felt something akin to euphoria. I sat looking at the document, rereading it, slowly this time. I tried to decipher the signatures at the bottom. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I recognized the names. I couldn’t tell if the document was authentic, but I thought I knew who could help. I folded the papers and returned them to the envelope. I sat there for what seemed like a long time, puzzling it out, trying to discern some truth, separate fact from fancy. What had Abraham stumbled onto? If the document was real, if it could be authenticated in a court of law, it would change the way business was done in large parts of Florida.
My lawyer brain kicked in as I pieced together how it would play out in a federal court. Could I or any other lawyer make a credible argument that the document was genuine? What witnesses would be needed to convince the judge that the document was legally binding on the parties, that it was even real and not somebody’s idea of a joke or an outright fraud? How would the court sort out the beneficiaries, the real parties of interest? A receiver would be necessary, but who could take on such a mammoth job? Could all the details of ownership built up over the centuries be unraveled? Perhaps, but it would be one hell of a fight, with very largemoneyed interests on one side and a poverty-stricken group of islanders on the other.
I turned off the flow of thoughts about legal things. The lawyer’s brain is a frightful receptacle of law and facts, always churning about a case, looking for the edge that often means the difference between winning and losing. I reminded myself that I had retired from all that, turned off the spigot of issues that keeps the lawyer unsettled and tense, retreated to an island where the beer was cold, the fish plentiful, and an occasional pretty girl took a liking to me, where the most important decision I made every day was whether to make happy hour at Tiny’s, Mar Vista, Moores, Pattigeorge’s, or the Hilton.
I was beginning to see the edges of the puzzle that my life had been for the past week. Pieces were falling into place, the picture taking on a semblance of reality, turning jumbled pieces of the jigsaw into a recognizable whole. I still didn’t know who was trying to kill Logan and me, or who had made the attempts on Abraham’s life, but I now knew why.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
I dialed Professor Newman. He was in and told me he’d see me if I could get to his office within the next thirty minutes. I told him I’d be there. I pulled out onto Washington Boulevard and drove north. I turned left onto University Parkway and drove past the entrance to the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and onto the New College campus.
The professor was in his cramped office, his feet on his desk, a journal on his lap. He held a bottle of water in his left hand. He looked up as I entered, put down his feet, and stood to shake hands. “Well, Counselor. What can I do for you today?”
“I think I found the codicil,” I said.
“Codicil?”
“It’s not really a codicil, but it does appear to be an attachment to a treaty. I thought you might be able to tell me what it is.”
He took the document, sat back in his chair, and was quiet for a time, carefully studying the writing. “Do you know anything about treaties?”
“Not much,” I said.
“I think this might be a protocol, which is sort of a supplement to the treaty of 1832. It references the Camp Moultrie Treaty in 1823, which gave the Seminoles a great deal of land in return for many of them emigrating to the Oklahoma Territory. But in 1832 some of the chiefs entered into another treaty. In this one they gave up the land reserved to them by the Camp Moultrie Treaty. Some, but not all, of the Seminole chiefs agreed to the 1832 treaty. One of the sticking points on all the treaties was what to do with the blacks whom the Seminoles treated as members of the tribe. A lot of white southerners wanted them brought back to their states as slaves.
“This 1832 treaty gave certain lands to some of the chiefs and an annuity in return for their relinquishing any claims to the reservation granted by the Camp Moultrie Treaty. This created a schism among the chiefs and led directly to the Second Seminole War when the dissidents refused to abide by a treaty they’d not been a party to.”
“So the Indians got screwed,” I said.
“Yeah. They always did.”
“How did the U.S. government uphold the treaty of thirty-two if all the chiefs didn’t sign it?”
“We won the war. There was no formal surrender, but by the mid 1840s most of the Seminoles had been transported to Oklahoma. Most of their blacks went with them. There were only about three hundred Seminoles left in Florida, and they were all pushed down into the Everglades.”
“Sounds like a good lawyer might beat that ’32 treaty if all the parties didn’t sign it.”
“Some good lawyers tried. The Seminoles filed a claims suit in 1950 seeking compensation for the whole state. The case took twenty-six years to conclude. The Indian Claims Commission found that the Seminoles owned almost all of Florida at the time of the 1823 treaty and weren’t fairly compensated. The Commission assessed the 1823 value of the almost twenty-four million acres at $12,500,000. The Indians finally settled in 1976 for $16,000,000 to be split between the Oklahoma and Florida tribes. That settled for all time any claims the Seminoles had.”
“But, if that document is any good, if it is a protocol to the original 1832 treaty, the blacks would have an interest separate from the Indians. One that wasn’t extinguished by the lawsuit.”
“Maybe,” Newman said. “But remember, the blacks claimed to be part of the tribe.”
“The government didn’t recognize them as such. I think it’d be hard-pressed now to claim in a court of law that they were Seminoles and their claims were extinguished by the lawsuit that they weren’t a party to.”
“You’re the lawyer, but I can’t see the government trying to sort this out after all these years. The property titles alone would be almost impossible to unravel.”
“Not really. All the land today would have deeds in the county courthouses showing who owned it.”
“Yeah, but there’re towns and subdivisions built on a lot of that land.”
“The protocol only reserves the mineral rights. All that phosphate out in the center of the state would go to the Black Seminoles. They wouldn’t have a right to the property on which this college sits, for instance. Only the minerals under it. There’d be no economically feasible way to mine this land. They’d have to tear down the buildings and pay compensation to the owners. The mineral rights would be minuscule compared to the value of the land and buildings.”
“There’d be hell to pay from the phosphate interests. They’ve paid for those rights.”
“Yes, but the law contemplates what it calls a ‘bona fide purchaser.’ Since the owner could not have known of any claims on the mineral rights, he would have to be fairly compensated for what he bought.”
“That could amount to a lot of money.”
“Not nearly as much as those rights are worth today. And the new owners could make a claim for all the profits made off their minerals during all the years of mining out there.”
“Christ. This could open up a Pandora’s box.”
I shook my head. “A huge one. Can we prove
that the protocol is legitimate?”
Newman studied the document for a long time. “The names of the signatories are right, I think. I can get a copy of the original treaty from the national archives and compare them.”
“How long will that take?”
“I can probably get one e-mailed to me by this evening. I’m a registered researcher and most of those old records have been digitized. Do you really think you could make a case out of this?”
“I don’t know. It looks as if this protocol was entered into at about the same time as the treaty. If the people who signed it for the government had the right to do that, and the Senate ratified it, I would think it’s good.”
“That seems a little iffy. Why would the government give away something so valuable?”
“Mineral rights in Florida at the time of the treaty were essentially worthless,” I said. “There was no gold, no silver, no fountain of youth. Phosphate wasn’t discovered until many years later. This was probably an afterthought. Maybe it was a sop to the Indians who were worried about their black friends. The government gave the blacks the mineral rights to all of the reservation lands contained in the 1823 treaty, and the Indians, ignorant as they were of white man’s law, probably didn’t know that the mineral rights were absolutely worthless.”
“And the government couldn’t foresee the uses for phosphate. Or even know that millions of tons of the stuff lay just under the surface.”
“Exactly,” I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
I drove back to Longboat, musing on the vagaries of life. If the protocol was valid, then there was going to be a lot of money moved from big corporations to a small group of Andros Island Bahamians who had very little institutional memory of their Seminole ties. It was going to be one hell of a lawsuit.
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