by Wolf Riedel
“And Lesperance?” asked Kurt.
“Worst of the worst,” said the major. “He’s never deigned to come up here and visit either myself or any of my staff. When I came here in January to do my handover I was briefed about him by my predecessor; confidentially of course. I made it my business to get out there for a contact visit and quickly was left with the same opinion as what I’d been told. Lesperance had his own game going on down there and had no intention of tying in his operations with those of my people. Stay to your roads and I’ll take care of the border he told me. Arrogant and condescending, you see.”
Kurt again waited him out. In his pocket his Blackberry vibrated silently; Kurt ignored it.
“I talked to his chief in Kandahar,” the Romanian continued. “He said he’d take care of it but we’re into our third month now and I still have no idea as to what Lesperance is doing down there.”
The Romanian held up both hands in a gesture of futility. “The ANA don’t like him and neither do the 4th Infantry’s platoon down at FOB SWEENEY. He’s more of their problem than he is mine. They’re located about forty kilometers closer to him than I am and, honestly, I am more concerned about the highway and Qalat than I am about a few villages on the border. We’ve got no indication of any significant Taliban rat-lines going through there that affect us here.”
Kurt stood on the steps of the headquarters building watching yet another Romanian patrol of armored cars and trucks leave the FOB. As he stood there a pair of young Romanian female soldiers squeezed past him and made a sharp left turn walking away from him. One, the smaller of the two, had a lengthy pony-tail that swung back and forth across the back of her brown and tan combat shirt. The hair and the walk was a sharp reminder of Heather and the never ending question in his mind as to whether their longstanding intermittent relationship would ever develop into a permanent one. They certainly enjoyed each other’s company tremendously, at least Kurt did and he felt certain that she did as well, but the geographic distances were a constant challenge. Like Phil and Marie, it was hard to find a fit that would allow them both to concurrently move their respective careers and their relationships forward.
Kurt set aside the momentary flight into woolgathering to return his focus to the present task and the various emails that had come in during his meeting with the Romanian commander.
His Blackberry showed twelve new messages having come in since the last time he had cleared his in box; eleven were of the obnoxious minutiae of administrative crap that fouled every staff officer’s email account. He deleted them after briefly looking at the Subject line and the first sentence of the message. The twelfth was another matter and he opened it:
FROM: [email protected]
SENT: Friday, Mar 16, 2005, 7:22 PM
TO: [email protected]
AND TO: Colin O’[email protected]
SUBJECT: PO2 Michael Fletcher
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Law Enforcement Sensitive
1. Sir. During the course of the recent murder/abduction investigation we became aware of the fact that a person of interest has recently served at FOB LAGMAN. CSM SOCCENT has advised that you may currently be or will shortly arrive at FOB LAGMAN.
2. Fletcher was a navy reservist constructionman who was attached to the QALAT PRT Sep 05 to Sep 06.
3. Our interest is to determine details of where in Zabul he was employed and who his coworkers/superiors were at the time.
4. I am asking for your assistance in this matter because of the urgency in our investigation. I will understand if you are not able to fit the inquiries into your schedule. If so please advise ASAP and I will seek CID agent Kandahar’s assistance.
Perfect timing, he thought as he looked across the compound to where the PRT’s headquarters were located. This will give me something else to get that Air Force wog to work on.
CHAPTER 37
N. Franklin St. and E. Twiggs St., Tampa, Florida
Friday 16 Mar 07 1305 hrs EDT
Tuffy contemplated the Chilorio Taco in his hand as he added some more Ancho chili sauce to this Mexican version of pulled pork with rice and refried beans. He sat on a concrete planter next to the tacqueria truck which occupied a parking slot in the midst of several of Tampa’s high-rises. The truck had become one of his favorite lunch spots now that he could count on a few extra dollars in his jeans. His hands moved almost unconsciously while his mind was far from the mundane task of eating. He let out an audible sigh as his shoulders slumped.
Tuffy was acutely aware of how his mind worked. He’d identified three distinct levels.
First, there was the way it worked the bulk of the time; day-to-day. As things happened around him they just registered and his actions or reactions were mostly automatic; without any real thought or much deliberation. In general, his life wasn’t complicated and required little mental effort.
Next, there was the way it worked when he planned things out. This too required little effort on his part. Whatever it was that he had to do, the steps that had to be taken just came to him intuitively. It was like being given a computer slide show at school that assembled his course of action for him frame by frame simply popping up before him. Things had always just logically fallen into place for him.
The third and last level, however, manifested itself quite differently. When he argued with himself, that was the only time that he was actually aware of the fact that he was thinking. In fact, it was extreme to the point that he could clearly hear the voices in his head as they debated issues back and forth. He rarely came to this state except in those very few circumstances when the rational part of him showed him the clear plan that he should be taking but something internal kept him from going down the logical route.
Most often this internal debate happened at night while he lay in bed trying to sleep. The voices would tug him back and forth. Options for diverting from the logical plan would be thrown out, debated again, shot down, resurrected, modified, abandoned. Sometimes there would be a few minutes of fitful sleep before the voices started up again; all too often, in this exhausted state, he’d just cover the same ground time and time again.
The last few nights had been like that.
His timeline had been thrown off and Tuffy had been working furiously to get it back on track.
It had all started last Tuesday with Sandy’s He’s back message. That had proven to be only partly right. Her father had come back, without any explanation for his absence, and when Sandy pressed him too hard it had earned a sharp slapping around followed by a fast bit of paternal make-up sex. By the time Tuffy showed up the old man was gone again and Sandy was even more determined—if that was possible—to get the bastard into the ground.
Tuffy had promised Meraz and Hernandez that he’d have the little Lewis girl issue wrapped up by last Wednesday night and then turn his attention to the new targets. That hadn’t happened. Without Sandy’s old man dead he simply couldn’t do that.
In frustration he’d told Sandy flat out that the Lewis girl simply had to go; none of this bring her home to the house bullshit. She had to die.
Sandy pushed back just as adamantly that the girl would live or Tuffy could just bloody well forget about ever being with Sandy again. The argument went on well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Tuffy’s trump card—the money he was now earning—didn’t mean shit to Sandy. There was a principle here that Tuffy just couldn’t fathom. It had been no sweat that he killed the kid’s parents and was now going to kill Sandy’s father but for some reason which totally eluded him, she held fast on the Lewis girl knowing full well that the risks were mounting and were getting enormous.
Wednesday morning, with no sign of the old man, with no sleep—just a Provigil and a couple of cans of Redline—and well before Sandy went off to school, Tuffy figured that he might as well jump the new mission forward and start scoping out the two new targets. He had names and home addresses but nothing about where they were employed.
The first was close, living just across the Gandy Bridge on the west side of Old Tampa Bay on Bayou Grande Blvd NE in the Tanglewood community of northeastern St Petersburg. He got there at dawn and drove through what was a small community of looped roads with a mixture of small older bungalows and more modern two-storey rebuilds. More than half of them had water access and all of them had a plethora of tropical trees and bushes.
The trip was successful. On his first drive-by he spotted the house immediately; a bi-level pink Spanish waterfront rambler with a late-model, blue Mustang convertible in the driveway. The street itself was too narrow to have curbside parking available. On the other hand, just a hundred feet north of Bayou Grande’s intersection with 62nd Ave NE—the community’s sole exit to the rest St Petersburg—sat a wide, empty, well-treed waterfront lot. It looked like the perfect place for a person to pull into to spend the day doing some off-shore fishing. Tuffy pulled his car up over the low curb and behind a massive hydrangea—one of the few bushes Tuffy could recognize nine times out of ten—and waited for the Mustang.
He hadn’t long to wait; fifteen minutes later the target’s car cruised by and made the turn onto 62nd. Tuffy followed discretely all the way to 4th Street N and then across the long Gandy Bridge causeway back toward Tampa. The traffic was light but the numerous traffic lights forced Tuffy to stay entirely too close in order not to lose his target. The drive on Gandy ended when his quarry made a turn south on S Dale Mabry Highway at which point Tuffy became sure that the man in the Mustang, Tulio Cabello—who apparently went by the nickname Wicked—worked at MacDill. Sure enough the car turned into the main gate, an area inaccessible to Tuffy, and which he was able to avoid by continuing around a traffic circle laid out just before the gatehouse. He headed back north.
The morning traffic was thickening as he returned to Cabello’s house to give it another look and to see what if any family lived with him. The easiest would have been to follow a school bus around but there was a school within easy walking distance on 62nd so the chance of there being a bus here was low. Again, luck was with him because as he had arrived back to the house, he could see that the garage door was now open. It was a single-door, two-car garage containing a black Mercedes on one side and a cluster of bicycles, a trampoline, yard equipment and numerous other bundles of trash on the other.
That’s why he parks his car in the driveway, he thought. Looks like a wife for sure and at least two kids judging by the size of the bikes. That’s good enough for the time being. Let’s look at the other one.
The trip to scope out the second target was mostly a bust. The target—Segundo Noda—lived some sixty miles southeast of Tampa on Terrell Road in Wauchula. The house was about a mile west of the small town’s center in a semi-rural—primarily orchards—setting. A quick drive-by disclosed the house to be a brick and steel-roofed bungalow set back well from the road. There was no garage just a large driveway that could accommodate at least four vehicles. An above ground pool, yet another trampoline and various scattered toys around the house gave evidence of a family with children but the absence of any cars or activity basically led Tuffy to conclude that no one was home.
I’ve gotta go back and crash, he thought. Tomorrow morning, unless Sandy’s old man shows up, I’ll be here before dawn and set up in one of these orchards and follow them to work. It’ll be tough here. He’d thought.
Sandy’s old man hadn’t shown up by the time Tuffy had made it back to Tampa. He immediately went to the couch and ended up sleeping through the rest of the day and well into Wednesday night.
It was dark when Tuffy had found himself being roughly shaken while in the middle of a deep dream. It took him a few seconds to shake the feeling that he was drowning and get his bearings.
Sandy was kneeling beside the couch, naked.
“He’s back again,” she had whispered into his ear. “We’ve got to do it, now!”
Tuffy had sat upright and put out his hands, palms down. There was no moon but he could see her skin glistening from the low glow of the streetlight outside.
“Let me get my shit together,” he’d said. “What’s the time?”
“Just after one,” she’d said. “He came home about a half hour ago. He’s asleep now.”
Fuck, he’d thought.
But there was nothing to do but do it. They’d talked about it. They’d prepared everything and had a plan set. Tuffy was sure he knew exactly the right amount of force to use with his sledge to avoid any mess. They still hadn’t selected a place for a body dump but that wasn’t a showstopper. Quite frankly he hadn’t put any thought into coming up with any reason to not do it.
So do it, he would..
They’d managed to stuff the old man—tightly wrapped in plastic—into the freezer on the back porch after first shuffling some old chicken and pork to the fridge in the kitchen. It had been tight but he’d fit.
Sandy had gone back to bed to grab a few more hours of sleep before school while Tuffy, finally feeling fully awake, even if not well-rested, had set out in the pre-dawn to take the road down to Wauchula.
This time as he had driven past the house the security light in the front yard clearly showed a Chrysler minivan and an old Chevy sedan in the driveway. Tuffy had slowed and memorized each car’s tag number before making a right turn heading toward the small town of four thousand.
Several hundred feet down the road, well short of the town, he had switched off his headlights and had taken a left onto a dirt trail and parked between a low orchard and a large, dense treeline that he had marked the day before.
The moon had come up in the east-southeast shortly after five a.m. but the sun wasn’t due to rise until seven-forty. He had spent the interval sitting in the car and occasionally getting out to watch the house with his binoculars. The first time he opened the door, the car’s dome light had come on, a situation he had quickly rectified by opening it and removing the bulb.
Shortly after dawn the Chevy had driven past him heading into town. Tuffy had quickly followed up and trailed the car as it had made its way up US 17 to the area’s Walmart just north of town. Tuffy had followed the car into the lot where it had parked with several other cars off to one side.
Employee parking, he had thought. He probably works here. As Noda exited his car Tuffy marked his description in his mind. True to his name the man had looked Hispanic; light brown skin, black hair, about a hundred and sixty on a sparse five foot six or so frame. The few cars in the main lot indicated that store traffic was light. Not the best time to track him in there. Let’s check the house again.
Tuffy had rolled through the lot and back to the house just in time to have the minivan pass him going toward town. A quick three-point turn in a farm yard driveway had put him on its tail.
First there had been a brief stop within the town at the North Wauchula Elementary School where two young children were dropped off; Tuffy had been too far away to tell whether they were boys or girls. The minivan had then returned to the road and continued on northward along US 17, past the Walmart and on to a driveway in a treeline on the west side of the highway with a sign announcing that the Missus had arrived at Hardee Junior High School. Tuffy had followed the van through one of two red girder arches mounted on brick posts along a wide driveway through the woods. Beyond the woods stretched a large modern-looking red-brick, one-storey complex surrounded by a series of parking lots. Tuffy had slowed and watched as the van came to a halt in one lot where the woman—who Tuffy presumed was Mrs. Noda—got out and made her way purposefully into the school.
No children this time, so she’s probably on staff here, he’d concluded.
Tuffy had turned around and returned to the Walmart complex, noted that Noda’s car was still parked there, and stopped in at the nearby Subway for a late breakfast of a twelve inch cold-cut sub while waiting for the Walmart to get busier.
He’d given it an hour while he had eaten half of the sub and had waited in his car. By just after nine he consider
ed that there were enough customers to allow him to go in. He had grabbed a cart and a twelve-pack of Bounty paper towels and then had walked around the store until he had finally spotted Noda working in the store’s sports section; a section amply stocked with guns and ammo.
Tuffy had paid for the paper towels and had taken a quick drive back to Hardee Junior High where he had confirmed that the minivan was still there. Almost definitely on staff there, he concluded.
By noon he had been on his way north to the community of Thonotosassa. On the way he had given Meraz a call, updated him on the fact that he’d been on the new targets, and assured him that the girl would be taken care of by the end of the week. Meraz hadn’t appeared too concerned by the delay; the work on the new targets had gone a long way to mollifying him.
There wasn’t anything special about Thonotosassa other than that it sat on the southern boundary of thousands upon tens of thousands of acres of swamps and oak hammocks through which the Hillsborough River flowed from the Green Swamp some fifty miles northeast of Tampa, down through the city before it emptied into Hillsborough Bay.
His last job for that afternoon had been to scout out a route to that twelve square feet in that one acre that would become the eternal resting place of the late Mister Jones.
Tuffy finished off the rest of his Chilorio Taco, stood up and tossed the wrapper into a garbage bin beside the tacqueria truck. He felt overcome with another wave of fatigue and managed to stifle a yawn. It had been another late night as Sandy and he had moved her father’s body to several spots in the swamps near Morris Bridge Park just off the 579; the body in one, the hands and head in others. Tuffy had done the heavy lifting while Sandy had stood gator watch. But the job was done, once and for all.
Tired or not, he had one more job. Tonight he would get the girl.