Part of me wanted to suit up and do battle against the titans, go into the pit that was the courtroom and slay them with my rapier-like mind, my wit, and superior intellect. I laughed at myself. I was well out of it. I’d done my time in the courtroom and I thought I’d acquitted myself well. I’d lost some cases, but I knew that the lawyer who’d never lost a case, hadn’t tried very many. I wanted no part of that circus again.
I’d been checking on Abraham regularly. The desk clerk on his floor would only tell me that there had been no change. He was hanging in, but who knew if he’d make it. He was in great shape, but he was still an eighty-year-old man. He might not survive this.
For that matter, I might not either. We were going to Gibsonton to invade the Snake Dance Inn, to try and jerk the West Coast Marauder leader Baggett out of there and get some answers. If we managed it, it’d be a close thing, and the odds weren’t exactly in our favor. Jock had called in some firepower from his agency, people in debt to him, who admired him and would come without asking why. His long career had given him many friends, men who owed him their lives. These guys lived by the soldier creed of taking care of your buddy. It was one reason I admired Jock so much. He had never been in the military, but he’d been a soldier in service to his country since he joined the agency right out of Clemson University.
My service was receding into the misty distance. I’d been a soldier, and I think some of that stays with you. There’s an old saying about veterans, “All gave some, and some gave all.” I think the corollary to that would go something like, “When you’ve been part of the military, the military is forever part of you.”
I was getting a little maudlin, but cheered up as I drove across the John Ringling Bridge. Longboat Key shimmered at the edge of the bay and the boats moored at the Sarasota Yacht Club gleamed in the late afternoon sun. A schooner, its sails furled, puttered under the bridge, a middle-aged couple lounging in the cockpit.
I had been having dreams of late, bad dreams, not of soldiers dead in the jungle, but of my childhood, a time cloaked in a darkness of the soul that I’d rather forget. I hadn’t dreamed of that time in years, gave no thought to it, banished it from my mind. Perhaps the war memories, so vivid and bloody, had supplanted those baleful reflections of a time a child could not quite comprehend. But the incident in the Swamp Rat Bar, when I’d been thrust backward in time for a second or two, was troubling. There was a dissonance in my universe, a warping of time and space that propelled me into the past, into a time I thought I’d forgotten and didn’t want to remember. A certain smell or a piece of a song would trigger the mechanism, roiling the amygdala, wrenching long-repressed memories over dormant synapses, and bringing them bounding into the present. I knew it was nothing to worry about, but there it was. I didn’t want to relive my childhood, not even in snatches of memory.
My journey had been long and sometime harder than I would have liked, but in the end I had arrived at a sort of peace, living on an island among people of warmth and substance. Yet, the old demons haunted me, and on rare occasions would rise up like bile and flood my system with despair. Dark images invaded my sleep and roused memories of the depredations of my youth and of a time when circumstances beyond my control plundered my innocence and robbed me of the equanimity that every child deserves. It was those nightmares that drove me into a blackness that I feared I’d never escape. Sometimes the dreams were of war and death and soldiers gone to Valhalla, and sometimes the dreams came when I was fully awake, in the form of flashbacks to times best forgotten.
Stressful events brought the demons rollicking to the fore, but I had learned to ignore them, or to at least not allow them to take control. I brushed them aside like so much fluff and went on about my life. I took a certain amount of pride in my ability to move past these chimerical fantasies and hold the blackness at bay, fighting a deadly duel that I could not lose and continue to live. My own death lurked in the deep shadows of depression, beckoning me with its promise of relief, of peace at last. But I always won, stuffing the incubi back into the pit from which they sprang and wrenching my own happiness from their grasping fingers.
Perhaps the stress of the past few days had unleashed the long-buried demons. I’d gone from a boat-loving beach bum to a hunted man in the space of a few hours. People were trying to kill me and I still wasn’t clear as to why, although now I could see the outlines of the answer forming. I hoped that the coming evening would clear away the mist, turn the shadows into substance, and give me the answers I needed to bring this mess to an end.
Jock and Logan were going to meet me at the Hilton for a burger. We were staying away from the booze until this night was finished. We needed sustenance, and on a pleasant spring evening, the outside bar would be hard to beat. I drove down the key and pulled into the hotel parking lot, parked, and walked in the back way, past the great white egret that hangs around waiting for a treat. He shuffled over a little at my approach and looked at me, waiting for me to feed him something. I shrugged at him and took a seat at the bar.
“Miller Lite?” asked Billy from behind the bar.
“Not tonight, buddy. Got some work to do.”
“I heard Jock was in town.”
“He is. He’ll be here shortly.”
“Good. I always enjoy seeing him. Logan coming too?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Billy laughed. He had known Logan for many years. When they were younger and Logan was just back from Vietnam, they had worked together in a bar at the Tampa airport.
Logan and Jock arrived and we took a table on the deck overlooking the Gulf. We talked as we ate our burgers. Jock had called Bubba at the DEA to ask about Morton.
“What did you find out?” I asked.
“Morton is on their radar, but he’s a shadow. They haven’t been able to identify him and nobody has a picture or prints or anything else. Morton may not even be his name. He’s tied in some way with one of the Mexican drug cartels. They think he’s the southwest Florida distributor. He owns several businesses around Sarasota and uses them to launder his drug money. On paper, he’s a forty-nine percent owner of Baggett’s place, the Snake Dance Inn. DEA is pretty sure there’s a lot of drug money being washed through that bar.”
“He might be the connection between the bikers and the other shooters,” Logan said.
Jock nodded. “Probably.”
“Is Morton his first name or last name?” I asked.
“According to the paperwork on the Snake Dance Inn, it’s both. He goes by Morton Morton.”
“Like Major Major in Catch 22,” said Logan.
Jock laughed. “Right, Logan. I didn’t know you could read.”
“If we can get hold of Baggett, maybe he can enlighten us,” I said. “The island gossip mill has sure been full of Morton today. He must have had a couple of bald headed guys. The one Logan took out and another one still with him.”
“Let’s get through tonight,” Jock said. “Then we’ll worry about Morton.”
I nodded in agreement. “I’ll call Bill Lester and let him know that we’re going after Baggett.” I pulled out my phone. It was dark, the battery dead. Crap. “Logan, can I use your phone?”
“I never carry the damn thing. Those minutes cost too much.”
Jock handed me his phone and I called Bill, got his voice mail, and left a message that we were trying to run down a witness and would talk to him later. I tried J.D. again. Got the voice mail again and left another message, telling her about the document and what Newman had said. I told her I’d catch up with her the next morning and we could try to put everything together. I also asked if she had found anything on Morton.
The sun was starting its languid dive into the Gulf, slowly sinking, its orb flattening out as it disappeared over the horizon. No matter how many times I’d seen that happen, it still caused a flutter of pleasure in my system. It was an affirmation that the world was going around, its daily progress uninterrupted, that no matter how bad things se
emed, the earth kept a steady pace in its rotations. That was a soothing thought, but I reflected on the night ahead and began to wonder if I would be alive to see it happen again the next day.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The Snake Dance Inn was a gritty place, taking up the entire first floor of a used-up building. There was a stairway at the side leading up to a veranda that ran along the front of the structure. Four doors were placed along the front, opening onto the walkway. A couple were off their hinges and leaning against the side of the building. They were flanked by old-fashioned double-hung sash windows, some broken, the remaining glass shards standing like alligator teeth in their mullions.
The first floor had one entrance door. The rest of the façade was faded brick. Motorcycles were parked haphazardly along the street in front, interspersed among the few cars that shared the space. More bikes were in a dirt parking lot on the east side of the building. A sign identifying the place as the Snake Dance Inn hung over the door. Above the sign, a single lightbulb encased in an aluminum shade and affixed to the building by a short stanchion illuminated it. This was not a place that invited strangers. Its customers were the regulars, and in this place that meant bikers.
Gibsonton lies south of Tampa on Highway 41 just south of the Alafia River, about fifty miles from Longboat Key. It is an unincorporated hamlet that has long been the winter home of circus and carnival workers, many of whom are now retired and live there year round. It can be a rough place at times and this bar didn’t add much to the town’s ambience.
We’d driven north on Highway 41, turned right on Gibsonton Drive, and then left onto a side street leading to the river. The Snake Dance Inn sat in a block of decrepit buildings, long ago abandoned. It was the only place in the area with lights showing. I suspected this was on purpose, a way to keep the really bad guys separated from the elderly retirees who made their homes in the area. This part of town was simply squalid.
Jock, Logan, and I were dressed in jeans, plain white T-shirts, ball caps, athletic shoes, and windbreakers. We didn’t look much like bikers and hadn’t meant to. We wanted to stand out as different. We sat for a few minutes in Logan’s car, trying to get an idea of what to expect. Several people on motorcycles roared up, parked, and went in. Nobody left.
“I don’t see your buddies, Jock,” said Logan.
“They’re here.”
“Can you see them?”
“No, but they said they’d be here and they will.”
“I sure hope to hell you’re right,” said Logan.
I silently agreed with him. This was going to be interesting. We were planning to take Baggett out the front door, into the car, and to someplace to, as Jock said, have a discussion with him. I’d seen Jock’s discussions before, his interrogations to be more exact, and he wasn’t one to waste time with a lot of nonsense. The subject either talked immediately or Jock persuaded him to talk later. If Jock made a threat, he carried it out. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective and quick. The big problem was going to be getting Baggett out of the Snake Dance Inn.
The place was large, crowded with men and women in biker gear sitting at tables placed randomly on an ancient hardwood floor. There was an L-shaped bar across the right side as we walked in, three men behind it, dressed as their guests, slinging drinks to the women who served as waitresses. Several hard-looking men sat at the bar, drinking shots of liquor, not talking or looking around. They were dedicated to getting drunk in the quickest way possible. A woman sat at the short arm of the bar, near the corner, surveying the place. Her long blonde hair was dirty and tangled and hung past her shoulders, bangs down to her eyes, barely visible beneath a ball cap pulled low on her forehead. Her eyes were obscured behind opaque sunglasses. She wore jeans, biker boots, and a sleeveless blouse scooped so low in the front that it barely covered her nipples. She had a tattoo on her left bicep, a gaudy picture of a motorcycle, a similar one on the outside of her right arm just above the wrist. Curiously, a whimsical drawing of a yellow Vespa motor scooter was tattooed on her right breast, clearly visible in the low-cut blouse. A cigarette dangled from her mouth, smoke rising. A half-full ashtray sat on the bar in front of her next to a glass of dark whiskey. She’d been here for a while.
A number of pool tables in the back were busy with games. The air was dense with smoke, the effluvium of scores of cigarettes held in fingers, mouths, and ashtrays, giving the place the look of a foggy day. A jukebox was playing loud heavy-metal music, its raucous and discordant sounds rising above the din of conversation, the sporadic guffaws of drunken men wearing shaggy hair and lots of tattoos, and the yelps of delight from the biker girls ingratiating themselves to men who would think nothing of beating them into submission were they to dare show the slightest glimmer of independence.
Logan had stayed in the car parked at the curb, engine running in case we needed to exit in a hurry. Jock and I stood at the door, taking in a scene that wouldn’t make any of the guests’ mothers proud. Jock whispered, “There he is. In the back on the left.”
I saw our quarry sitting at a table for four, deep in conversation with a large, shaggy man sitting across from him. Two chairs were empty. Jock and I walked toward them. Baggett looked up as we neared, his baleful stare turning to surprise when we pulled out chairs and sat down at his table.
He wasn’t a particularly big man, but he looked tightly coiled, like a snake about to strike. His arms were tattooed with abstract scenes of motorcycles, a little more artistic than the average biker. His hair reached his collar, brown and greasy looking, as if it hadn’t been washed in a while. He had a beard with a patch missing on his right cheek, a place where for some reason hair would not grow. His eyes were blue and he was squinting at us. A scar was visible on his left cheek, high, up near the eyes.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“I don’t need to talk to you, asshole.”
“It would be in your best interest to engage us in conversation,” I said, smiling. “Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm.”
He laughed. “Harm? I’ll have your nuts cut off before you can get out of this bar.”
The man sitting at the table with us snickered. “You tell’em, Dirtbag.”
Jock was staring straight into the eyes of Baggett. “If you so much as move, I’m going to blow your balls off with the nine mil I’ve got pointed at them.”
Baggett’s face suddenly went dark, the merriment leaving as soon as it had arrived, a scowl replacing the laugh. “You’ll be dead before you get to the door.”
“Maybe so,” said Jock. “But you won’t be alive to enjoy it. You’re the first to go if things get nasty.”
“What do you want?”
The other man sitting at the table was still as a rock, afraid to move, his face frozen in a grimace of fear. I looked at him. “You’re not going to cause us any trouble are you? I also have a gun and your balls are not safe today.”
He shook his head. “Stay cool, man.”
I turned to Baggett. “Do you know who I am?”
“No, and I don’t give a shit.”
“My name’s Matt Royal.”
A look of recognition crossed his face, gone in an instant, but I saw it, knew he was shocked that the hunted had become the hunter.
“I don’t know that name,” Baggett said.
“Yes you do, and you’ve been trying to kill me, and now I want some answers.”
“You won’t get any from me.”
“I think we will,” I said. “My friend here is very good at getting people to talk. What we’re going to do, Mr. Baggett, is get up and walk out of here together. We’ll both have our guns in our pockets and pointed at your back. It you move wrong, we’re going to shoot you.” I turned to the other man at the table. “Are you a member of the West Coast Marauders?”
“I am,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice.
“If you don’t want your leader here to end u
p with a slug in his head, you’ll sit quietly and not move until we’re out the door. Do you understand?”
He nodded his head.
“All right,” I said to Baggett. “Get up.”
It started out okay. We moved through the crowd near the bar, passing by disreputable men dressed in biker gear leaning against it, watching Baggett lead us toward the door. We had gotten most of the way there when I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye. A big man was moving toward Jock, only inches away, with a switchblade knife in the open position, going for the thrust to the chest, the one that would pierce the heart and kill a man instantly. I knew I didn’t have time to warn Jock, and Jock had no time to respond to the blade thrusting toward him in the hand of a tattooed man.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The night is full of creepy things, ghosts and goblins and nightmares and bears under the bed. We grow out of those fears, but there always remains some atavistic suspicion of the dark, some delicate tendril of dread that skips across our minds when there is no light, when the night closes in around us and we are alone with our thoughts. So it was with the old man.
Donna had gone to bed, leaving him in his chair with one last tumbler of Scotch, confident that he could make it across the room to the bed provided by hospice. And he could do that, but he could also make it to the pantry where the booze was kept, and he had done that. Now the bottle, half-full, golden in the light of the lamp shining through the whiskey, sat on the table with the tumbler. He sipped for a while, letting the warmth of the booze warm his stomach, knowing that he would pay a price the next day, dreading the fire that would eat at his gut, reminding him that he shouldn’t drink.
But what the hell. He was in his final days. Day, maybe. He knew death was close, very close. He could feel it. He only wanted to live long enough to finish the job, his final effort, and the one that would save his empire.
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