Bitter Tide

by Jack Hardin

  Ideally, they would have another team working through additional information on the other names Ronnie had provided, the names of those who were still counted among Oswald’s little following. But it was just the two of them—Garrett couldn’t put anyone else on this—so for now, their focus was narrow.

  So, they had come away with very little. Eli Oswald, it seemed, had ghosted. The last phone number they had for him now belonged to a Charles Hinkle in Bonita Springs, and no title, utilities, or real estate transactions surfaced with his name on them. And the same with Curtis Smith. The Mustang was registered in his name but remained under an address that he hadn’t lived at in nearly a year. They knew that because that had been the first location they visited earlier today. It was an apartment in Estero, and the mother of four now living there hardly spoke English and had never heard of either Oswald or Smith. The front office was no help either, although Mark was content to grab a couple cookies intended for potential residents on his way out.

  The second location had taken them to a mobile home in Immokalee. It was vacant—gutted really. Nothing there but the carpet. Even the stove had been taken.

  Now, at their third and final stop, they sat on the back porch that belonged to Eli Oswald’s older brother, Drew. The home sat on the west end of the Golden Gate Estates community in Naples. Eli’s brother had done well for himself. The three-acre lot was endowed with dozens of pine and fruit trees, an enclosed pool, and a small barn.

  Drew Oswald was of average height and looked like he might be carrying around two-twenty. His face was full and elongated, not dissimilar to a horse, albeit less pronounced. He hadn’t looked surprised when he opened his front door, glanced at Ellie’s badge, and heard the topic of conversation. He escorted them to his back porch where he was grilling and directed Ellie and Mark into a couple lawn chairs. He stood near the grill as he spoke. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t expect you guys, or someone like you, before now.”

  “Why’s that?” Ellie asked.

  “If Eli’s in trouble, it doesn’t surprise me. What’s he gotten himself into?”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t provide specifics,” she said. “But we were hoping you might have an idea as to his whereabouts.”

  Drew huffed. “I wish I did. He never tells me, and I never ask.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Mark asked.

  “I guess that would have been about three, maybe four months ago?”

  “Is that typical?” Ellie asked. “So much time in between visits?”

  “Oh sure. Sometimes longer. You never know with him. And ‘typical’ isn’t a word you would use in the same sentence with Eli. He’s unpredictable. Eccentric.”

  Ronnie had also used that last word to describe Eli. “Eccentric?”

  “Just, well, I would say flamboyant, but that holds a certain connotation these days. He has a...colorful personality.”

  “What about any contact when he’s not here? Phone calls? Emails?”

  “No. He’s not so great about any of that stuff.” Drew lifted the lid to the grill and flipped the two chicken breasts. He shut the lid again.

  Ellie asked, “What you know about Harlan Tucker?”

  Drew blew a long puff of air from his cheeks, lowered his brows. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I never met the guy. Eli left me a copy of his book a couple years ago.” He pointed inside with his head. “It’s on a bookshelf in there. I’d be lying if I said I’d read the whole thing. It’s not bad...just not my thing. I think Harlan Tucker was probably a good guy and meant well. Don’t know that I could say more than that. Eli liked him though.”

  “So your brother was close to him?”

  “Couldn’t say. I’m not sure Eli is all that close to anyone. But if it suits him, he’ll let them think he is.”

  “Does that apply to you as well?”

  “Absolutely. Eli and I aren't close. I love him, and he’s always welcome here, but it’s hard for me to trust someone who hides behind an ever-changing exterior.”

  They spent the next several minutes inquiring about Drew’s own career, how long he had lived here, and his and Eli’s family. Drew had spent his entire adult life with an agricultural engineering firm, never married, and he and Eli were the only children of parents already passed.

  “Here’s the thing you have to keep in mind about my brother. He’s smart. And he knows he’s smart. He can put up a front better than Howie Mandel. On one hand he’s talking with you and laughing with you, but all the while,” Drew whirled an index finger near his temple, “he’s got something going on up in here.”

  “As in crazy?” Mark asked.

  “Oh no, no. Not crazy at all. Brilliant. The cogs are whirling, and you couldn’t tell that he was scheming something if you got up close and stared deep into his icy blues. I won’t say I got the short end of the stick because I’ve done well for myself. But Eli, he got an extra stick altogether.”

  “Does he have any favorite hangouts that you know of?”

  “I don’t.”

  “This address is on your brother’s driver’s license.” Ellie left the question implied.

  “My home is a constant in Eli’s life. He knows he’s always welcome, and from time to time he sticks his head in for a few weeks.”

  “Did he say anything out of the ordinary or look any different the last time you saw him?”

  “So something you need to know about Eli is that he’s always saying things out the ordinary. Like ‘I do wish it would snow tonight,’ or ‘When the saints come marching in heads are gonna roll.’ I know it sounds like he’s nuts, but he’s speaking to himself in his own vernacular. He just says and does random things all the time. Last time I saw him he had just gotten a tattoo of a parrot on his shoulder. A purple parrot.” He shook his head. “Big eyes, deep purple feathers. I don’t get it, but then that’s Eli.”

  “Does any mail come for him?”

  “Oh sure. But I just toss it out. He’d never open them.” He lifted the lid again and poked at the meat. “I don’t know if someone else pays his bills or if he just doesn't pay them. He just never gives attention to it. He’ll leave after staying a month or so, and a thin stack of envelopes with his name on them will still be sitting on my kitchen counter, untouched.”

  “Would you hold onto anything that comes in?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  Ellie stood, and Mark followed suit. They thanked Drew for his time.

  “Look, I don’t know what he’s into,” Drew said. “I wish I could say you’re barking up the wrong tree, but you may very well not be. If I hear from him, you’ll be the first to know.”

  They said their goodbyes, and Ellie and Mark got back in her truck. As they were pulling onto Collier Boulevard, Ellie said, “Strange, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How two people can basically have the same upbringing—the same rules, parents, and experiences—and yet turn out completely different from each other.”

  “Yeah. After what you relayed to me what Ronnie said about Eli, I half expected his brother to be some weirdo. Seemed like a pretty normal guy though.”

  They compared notes during the half hour drive back to the office. As they were pulling in Tyler had called and informed her that his swag for Mango Mania had come in, and asked her to come up later that afternoon so they could open the boxes together. After she dropped Mark off Ellie went home and took Citrus on a five mile run to clear her head and work through the conversation she had with Eli Oswald's brother. When she got back to the house she had just enough time to make herself a green smoothie and take a quick shower before leaving again to meet Tyler.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Silverado’s engine ticked as Ellie walked away from it. She made her way across the earthen parking lot and over to the cinder block building that contained Reticle’s offices. Tyler was up front near the stalls talking with his range boss and, by the sound of the conversation, a patron in
terested in a monthly membership. Ellie dipped inside and walked down the hall to the gunsmithing shop at the back. The room was broad and boasted several tables and tools: a mini-milling machine, belt sander, bolted table-top vice, and a grinder. A 14" x 40" gunsmithing lathe sat on the rear wall, Reticle’s newest piece of equipment. Rifles of all types were racked on tables, ready to be to custom altered or cleaned by a pro. Two cardboard boxes sat on the table in the center of the room, one large, one small. A blue and yellow logo was stamped across the sides: “Genius Print.” She walked over to them and resisted the urge to open them. She thought it was cute that Tyler already had a successful business but could get so excited about a couple boxes of trinkets with Reticle’s logo on them.

  The sound of boot heels echoed down the hallway. Tyler asked as he walked in, “You didn’t open them, did you?”

  “Of course.”

  He slipped a pocket knife from his jeans, flipped the blade out, and it clicked as it locked into place. He looked at Ellie with bright, anticipatory eyes. “Ready?”

  “No. Can we build the suspense a little more?”

  “No...we can’t,” and with a few quick motions Tyler had severed the clear tape. He closed the blade and returned the knife to his pocket. Ellie slid the small box closer, and Tyler grabbed the large one, both of them peeling back the flaps and looking inside. Ellie’s box was filled with metal keychains bearing Reticle’s logo, available, it seemed, in three different colors: blue, red, and black. She pulled a red one out and examined it. It was circular, a little smaller than a half dollar. It was dense, heavier than Ellie had anticipated.

  “These are great,” she said.

  Next to her, Tyler sighed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head, said nothing, and handed her a koozie.

  She gave it a once over before a laugh slipped out that she couldn’t suppress. She set her fingers to her mouth to stifle the next one. “Oh, Tyler.” Tragedy and hilarity had coalesced into a koozie. She laughed again.

  “This is funny?” he asked.

  Ellie looked back down on the koozie. Genius Print, as it was, had misspelled Reticle’s name, replacing the “R” with a “T”: “Teticle.”

  “Do you know what that word looks like?” he said.

  “Certainly,” she snickered. “And everyone else will too.”

  “Unbelievable.” He reached into the box and dug through the rest of them. “They’re all like this. Every one of them. What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “You could donate them to that guy who has his billboards all over Fort Myers. That doctor who claims to have done over ten thousand vasectomies.”

  “How do they get the keychains right and get the koozies wrong?”

  “Genius Print,” Ellie said slowly, and then laughed.

  “Genius Print, my butt,” Tyler said. “I’m not going to be able to get them to fix this in time.”

  “A lot of places do overnight.”

  “I don’t want to pay the extra,” he said. “I’ll just get these folks to refund me.”

  “At least the keychains are nice.” She handed him one.

  “Yeah. At least these aren’t named after a body part.”

  “I want that one,” she said.

  He gave it back and sighed again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He kept his eyes closed as the waking nightmare descended onto him once again. He thought that this must be how people feel the morning after they wake up in the slammer with a pounding headache and a charge hanging over them for vehicular manslaughter, all because they had left the party too late and told Dougy they didn’t need a designated driver and then drove away, swerving down the street with a BAC of .23.

  But Kyle Armstrong wasn’t drinking last night—he was tonight though, oh boy, was he—and he hadn’t hit anyone with his car. No, but what he had done was wait until Yo-lan-da left the office this afternoon and then booted up her laptop. He knew the password; Laurie was the one who had created it. It was a company computer after all, and Kyle had every right to access it. He spent the next two hours looking at spreadsheets and document revisions, digging through accounting software, each passing moment growing more and more paranoid, until Carlene had called him, mildly frustrated that he wasn’t home yet and informing him that dinner was on its way to getting cold.

  Now, Carlene was inside, the kids asleep, and Kyle sat on his porch swing with a bottle of Evan Williams at his feet and a mason jar a quarter full of the stuff firmly in his grip. His entire adult life, whenever stress got to him, he went for whiskey before rum. He didn’t know why that was. He always woke up feeling about a full barrel worse than he did with the rum.

  Early last month, when Ringo approached him about moving his drugs, he thought that would be it. Sliding some of his packages into a few boxes of rum, sending it north, picking the skin off his thumbs until there was no more left, having the product delivered safely; do that three or four times and he would be done with the grimy pollutant that was Ringo. But Kyle had been accused of being myopic more than once before. Yet somehow, in spite of this weakness, he had built a highly successful business in an industry that was quickly becoming oversaturated. Even today, he had gotten an email from California. A chain of liquor stores called Golden Agave wanted his rum. And not just a little bit; more than he had on hand. This stuff didn’t just appear out of thin air. It took time: three, six, twelve, fifteen years, et cetera, et cetera. But Wild Palm had only been cranking along for five years now. He wasn’t one to speed the process or add caramel color to his batches to deceive the very deceivable masses. His father had taught him to do better than that.

  His father.

  A kindly but strong man’s man who had turned a small hardware store in Kansas into a chain across the Midwest before he sold out to Ace Hardware thirteen years ago for millions. Kyle had inherited his father’s ability to create and sustain something meaningful.

  Kyle had taken the family home to Kansas for the holidays last year, and after presents had been opened and all the wives and kids went into the kitchen for hot chocolate, Kyle's father looked over at him from his high back chair near the fireplace and said, “I’m so proud of you, son.”

  Kyle had never been the soft type, and, like his old man, he never cried. Ever. But in that moment—one of those moments that a young man seems to yearn for and forms the basis of all his work on—after his father had said those words, his emotional furniture was rearranged, and he swallowed the rock in his esophagus, turned his head, and blinked four times. He was successful. The tears never came.

  “Thanks, Dad.” In those eight words a full conversation had elapsed, one that sent Kyle back home to Florida with the energy and self confidence of a high school quarterback in front of the cheerleading squad.

  But all that had changed after Ringo showed up and forced Kyle’s hand. Kyle was now using this business as a means to move cocaine into the heart cavities of his country. And as of three days ago he was laundering money too. Laurie was going to ask questions. She had already started after Andrés and Chewy left, after Yolanda stayed and he had to tell her someone else was now handling the accounting.

  “But I handle that,” Laurie had said. “And what I can't do Vic Hapner handles. He’s the best accountant in the county, you know that, Kyle. What’d you go and hire someone else to do it for?”

  And all Kyle could say was that they were growing and he wanted to bring it in-house. That seemed to satisfy her. Except Yolanda was not the most genial of people. Yolanda was all business. Flat expression, didn’t say much, got her work done, and left. Laurie liked to talk—grandkids, Florida State football, local gossip—and soon she would figure out little Yolanda wasn’t interested in being her friend or yapping about why Tina Caldwell didn't make it to the Silver Ladies luncheon. Once Laurie got stale about all that, she would start poking her nose into things. It was all a little too much.

  The words reverberated through the air, j
ust as they had when Kyle’s father had spoken them eight months ago.

  I’m proud of you, son.

  The happy tears did eventually come; they had come later that evening as Kyle sat alone on his father’s front porch with a glass of Glenlivet. They were the kind of tears that you could quickly wipe away if your wife opens the front door and comes out to ask you if you had brushed the kids’ teeth. Still though, they were true tears. His dad had told him he was proud of him, and now Kyle was nipple deep in the dark underworld of drugs and dirty money. And that didn’t happen to be the worst of it. No, the worst of it was that Kyle let Ringo threaten his family, let Ringo wiggle his mangy hands down his crotch, down past his belt line, and grab him tight by the balls. Kyle had the resources to hide if needed. Somewhere far away even. He could have called the cops and told them who it was that was blackmailing him and what other product Wild Palm had been distributing. Sure, they may not have believed him at first, but they would have come around. Until then Kyle could have taken the family and driven up to the Finger Lakes and disappeared, waiting for it all to blow over.

  But he didn’t.

  It would have been nothing to get in Ringo’s face that Sunday when he came over and told Kyle he would be using Wild Palm to move some of his blow.

  But he didn’t.

  He could have given Andrés and Chewy the finger two days ago, told Yo-lan-da to scram, and then hauled tail to New York.

  But he didn’t do that either.

  And the most afflicting thing about it was not that he had failed to stop it before it started. No, the worst part about all of this was that Kyle Armstrong was a coward. His spine was made of papier-mâché. No one could be proud of a coward, and wasn’t it Shakespeare or Julius Caesar who said that cowards die many times before their deaths; that the valiant taste death but once?