Bitter Tide

by Jack Hardin

  “I don’t think they are dragging their feet at all. As I said, they’re flying in a team to help.”

  “In two days,” she snapped.

  “Ellie,” Garrett said, “you’ve got to let Quantico do this their way.”

  Sheila scribbled a few notes on her pad, tore the page off, and handed it to Garrett. “Ms. O’Conner,” she said curtly, and left the office.

  “What a jewel,” Ellie said, and then asked the question still weighing on her the most.

  “What about Ringo? He’s out there somewhere.”

  “Ellie...I just don’t have any answers right now. What I do have is a conference room full of Sheilas who won’t be getting off my tail anytime soon.”

  Ellie walked over to the window. From here she could see the north part of the city: strip malls, George H. Walker Elementary School, Scott’s Scuba Shop, Putt-Putt Palace. This community was so full of life. She thought back to her initial reluctance to jump on board with Garrett's offer to come work for the DEA. Now, she wished she would have started sooner. “I’m glad you brought me on,” she said, still staring out the glass. This was all surreal. It would pass, she knew, but for now this entire conversation felt like some kind of warped dream. “We got some things accomplished.”

  “Me too, Ellie. I’m still hopeful that I can get a role like yours back on the budget come early next year. You’ll be the first person I come to when that happens.” He stood up, and Ellie turned around. She stepped in and gave her old friend a hug.

  “If it’s all right, I’ll go get everything sorted out on my desk and computer. There’s still a few mental loose ends I’d like to tie up before I shut this down.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll have Sandra stop by your desk with your exit paperwork. I may need you to come back in over the next week or so to answer a few more questions from team FUN in the conference room. Turn in your laptop to Glitch when you’re done and drop your badge off with security on your way out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ellie.”

  She looked over at him.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  She tried to smile. “No worries.”

  When Ellie got back to her desk, she slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes, replaying the conversation over and over. It didn’t really matter where you were—CIA, DEA, Washington, Wall Street—politics and bureaucracy were sure to follow. It was the way of the world. So that wasn’t what was really bothering her. What was making her fidget with her pen, what was causing her to gnaw hard on her bottom lip, was that she was leaving here with so much left undone. Where had Eli Oswald and Curtis Smith run off to? Who had been supplying their drugs? Who exactly was Ringo? And currently the most pressing, where was Dawson Montgomery?

  She had not yet found Adam Stark’s killer. With everything she had accomplished up to this point, she had still come up empty on that. She’d be damned if she was going to let Dawson Montgomery elude her too.

  Chapter Forty

  “I can’t believe I came back a week before a major hurricane,” Katie grumbled. She zipped up the suitcase and slid it against the wall. “We just finished unpacking these. Chloe! You about ready?”

  “Just a minute, Mommy!” Chloe called from her room down the hall.

  Ellie had come over to see her family off. Katie was meeting Sharla and Gary Potter in North Fort Myers where she would park her car further away from the effects of a possible storm surge. From there she and Chloe would ride with the Potters to a vacation home they kept up in Jacksonville.

  Hurricane Josephine was now a Category 4 storm, with sustained winds hovering at one hundred and thirty-two miles an hour and was set to start bludgeoning the Keys within the next few hours. A second U.S. landfall had been forecasted for Lee County less than twenty-four hours from now.

  “I probably don’t need to tell you this,” Ellie said, “but don’t expect Major to join you. I know he said he would, but he’ll be securing boats until the last second.”

  “I know. I hate that he does that. That’s what insurance is for.” Katie set a hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” An ice chest sat on the kitchen table. She turned around and started organizing the food inside it. “This whole thing about the DEA letting you go. It’s ridiculous.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “What about Garrett? He can’t work some magic or something?”

  “He already did that just bringing me on. I’m not going to worry about it. It is what it is, as Major likes to say.”

  Katie shut the lid and looked around the kitchen, making sure they weren’t forgetting something. “Well, speaking of Major, I’m going to be helping out at The Salty Mangrove, if it’s even there after this storm.”

  “So you’re mad that I’m out of a job, and you’re going to take the last one I have?” Ellie laughed.

  “Hey, he’s paying me. I need it. He told me he’s offered to pay you a hundred times and you won’t have it.”

  “He has. And I won’t.”

  Chloe came down the hall, struggling with a suitcase she was dragging behind her. She ended her fight in the kitchen. She clutched her aunt by the leg and squeezed. “Are you coming with us, Aunt Ellie?”

  “No, Boo. I hope not to be too far behind. Do you have your teddy?”

  “She’s in my bag.” She looked around the room. “It’s dark in here. I thought it was the morning still.”

  Major had boarded up the southern-facing windows two days ago, before all the stores sold out of plywood. Ellie and Tyler had boarded her own windows up yesterday and filled sandbags, placing them around her back porch.

  “There’s no light coming in from those windows,” her mother replied. “And the clouds are getting darker.”

  Ellie noted the time on the microwave’s digital clock. “I’ve got to get going,” she said.

  Katie reached out and gave her older sister a long hug. “Be careful, all right? I don’t like that you aren’t leaving with us. Don’t get stuck here.”

  “I won’t. I just have a few things I need to finish up.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Mark Palfrey knocked on Ellie’s front door, and the growing winds whipped at him as he waited. The door opened, and a Jack Russell terrier jumped up off all fours, reaching all the way up to his belt line before returning back to earth. It barked in sheer pleasure, either at Mark’s arrival, his existence, or the sub sandwiches he carried in a paper bag. Mark pulled back, and Ellie called out to the dog.

  “Citrus! Citrus, get down.” She looked up at Mark. “Sorry. My uncle says he’s got more energy than a gassed-up speed boat.” Citrus bolted away, jumped across the couch, then ran three circles in the small kitchen before darting back to his owner’s feet. “Come on in. Thanks for bringing lunch.”

  “Of course. Here.” He handed her the bag of sandwiches. “I have to get a box out of the my car.”

  Citrus followed Ellie to the kitchen table. She set the bag out and, digging into it, brought out two wrapped sandwiches. She looked down at the dog. His head was set to vibrate, and his tail was fanning the floor. “No. You’re not getting any.” He whined. She raised her brows, and his head lowered. He looked out the back door, and his ears perked. He looked back at Ellie. “No. You can’t go for a swim. There’s a big storm coming, and I don’t want you getting ripped down the canal.”

  Citrus tilted his head like he didn’t understand—because he didn’t understand. Ellie pulled a box from the pantry and tossed him a dried pig’s ear, and he tore off down the hallway. Mark returned with a cardboard file box. He shut the door with his foot and came into the kitchen. “Here, just set it on the table,” Ellie said. He plopped it down and then took a seat.

  “I think this will get you started,” he said. He sat down and looked at her. “Ellie?” His tone was somber. She knew what he would say. “I could get fired for this. Please, be careful
with it.”

  “I know. I will. Thank you for doing this.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m as upset as you are that they let you go. It’s like, what are we doing, you know?” He looked at the sandwiches. “Here, this one’s yours. Your nasty Reuben.”

  “Nasty?”

  “Sauerkraut? Yuck. And then you put it on a sandwich?”

  “I spent some time in Europe. It grows on you.”

  They ate their sandwiches in relative quiet. Ellie finished, rolled up her wrapper, and sent it sailing into the trash can. “Where are you going to get out of the storm?” she asked.

  “Kissimmee,” he said. “If I can even get there. From what I see on the news, all the roads going north are gridlocked. But I’m going to try. I’m not getting stuck around here.” He tossed his balled-up wrapper toward the trash can. It hit the side and bounced to the floor.

  “Guess I should keep my day job,” he said, and then glanced at Ellie as he stood up to retrieve it. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t worry about what I can’t change,” she said, and then looked over at the box sitting on her table. “So I move on to what I can do.”

  Mark took the cover off the box. He reached in and removed a short stack of papers. “It’s not very organized,” he said. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to find. We went through most of this a couple weeks ago.” Mark slid the stack over to Ellie. “Here’s what I have on Oswald,” he said. He reached in again and removed another handful. “And this is Smith. The rest of it is stuff on their associates who were killed in the blast.” He shook his head. “I was at the office until one o’clock this morning printing all this off. Had to change the ink cartridge halfway through. I told them I wanted to work through it while I was out of town these next few days so I could focus on something else when I got back.” Ellie didn’t need to thank him. He was as bought in on this investigation as she was. Garrett’s office was under undue media scrutiny for how the operation was run and why they hadn’t known that hot explosives were on site at the time of the raid. Yesterday, the Department of Justice, the parent agency of the DEA, had officially relegated the case over to the FBI. The explosion at the compound had made national news, and finding Oswald and Smith was now priority. But after the storm, it seemed.

  What was clearly missing from the conversation was any kind of zeal to find Dawson Montgomery. The man had no family to speak of, so no one to grease the wheel and step up for him. Oswald had blown his own people to bits, and the media outlets had vilified him. And so they should. But that meant that simply catching Oswald seemed to be the thing that would quench everyone’s thirst. Ellie did want him to be caught. And she wanted him to pay. But more than anything she wanted to find Ronnie’s friend, and the two escapees were the only trail to him.

  After being released by the DEA yesterday, Ellie had driven to The Salty Mangrove, poured a beer into a plastic cup, and walked down the Norma Jean pier to process what had just transpired.

  The beer had relaxed her. But it was the breeze, the tangy scent of salt water infused with the cool air from the coming storm, that whipped the confused clouds from her mind and allowed clarity to descend. And so it came to her, snapping in her mind like a mainsail that finds a fresh wind on open water.

  She had finished her beer and called Mark, asked for a face-to-face. They met later that evening at The Rocky Road, and over a couple cones of ice cream and after Mark spent the first ten minutes venting his anger over why Ellie had been let go, Ellie proposed that she and Mark find the fugitives before anyone else. It had been, after all, their investigation, and the explosion was not due to any incompetence on their part. It was just sheer bad luck.

  It had taken her several minutes of patient massaging to convince him to keep going hard after Oswald, even if priority had been given to another agency, and to let her do it with him, behind the scenes.

  Now, they both combed through small stacks of paperwork, trying to find a breadcrumb, a tiny scent that would lead them closer to the man who was prone to remove small appendages and blow up his own crew.

  Citrus’s nails clicked back down the hallway, and he returned with a pleading whine.

  “No. One is enough,” she said.

  His ears perked, and he tilted his head again.

  “I said no. Now go lay down.” She pointed to his cushion. His head fell, and he obeyed.

  Mark laughed. “You run a tight ship.”

  Ellie returned back to the paperwork, and for the next ten minutes they worked through the information until Mark’s phone buzzed. He looked at a text. “Ah, I have to go. I’m riding with a friend up to Kissimmee. He’s leaving in a half hour.” Self-admittedly, Mark possessed a visceral fear of hurricanes and didn’t plan on being anywhere around Lee County for the next couple days. “If you find anything, you’ll wait until I get back to move on it, right?”

  She stared blankly at him. She didn’t want to lie.

  “Ellie! Come on. There is a massive storm heading this way. The outer bands are nearly on us. Don’t go all cowgirl on me now. Wait until I get back if you find anything. It’s just a couple days.”

  “I probably won’t find anything,” she deflected.

  “Just look through what you can and secure it in your safe. But you have to get out of the area. It will all be...” He started to say that it would be here when they got back, but as the words came out he realized that, depending on what the storm did, it might not be. “Forget the safe. When you leave can you lock the paperwork in your truck’s toolbox or something like that?”

  She smiled. “Of course. Don’t worry. I know how to handle sensitive information. This won’t come back to you.”

  “God, it better not. I’m putting my entire career on the line here, giving you all this.”

  Ellie walked him to the door. “Relax. I know what I’m doing. Probably won’t find anything but this won’t get back to you. I promise. I just want to try anything we can.”

  He sighed. “I know.” He jabbed a finger toward her. “Don’t stick around. You get out of the area.”

  After he left Ellie returned to the table. So far she had combed through Oswald’s credit card and bank statements going back the last five years. Nothing stuck out that might indicate where he might be holing up.

  It was a half hour later, after Citrus had turned a tennis ball into ribbons and ran a marathon around the living room, that Ellie’s eye landed on something that turned on a circuit behind her eyes. A tiny fragment of information that connected with something Drew Oswald had said in passing when they spoke with him last week.

  Ellie stood up and grabbed her truck keys from the kitchen counter and told Citrus to be good. She returned everything to Mark’s box, grabbed it up, and headed toward the door.

  She was going to get Eli Oswald.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  When he opened the door and stepped out onto the concrete breezeway, an unorganized flock of seagulls were cutting across the sky, no doubt fleeing from the meteorological wrath to come. He pulled out a pack of Pall Malls from the inside of his leather vest, selected a stick, and lit up. He leaned into the rail as he breathed out and set his right foot on the bottom rung. Purple paint was peeling off the scabbed metal rail, revealing a gray primer undercoat that had been sloshed on some twenty years prior. Eli Oswald loosened his neck and bobbed his head to the tune of Pink Floyd's “Comfortably Numb.” He really was, he supposed, comfortably numb himself. The feds had gotten to him; he had underestimated the combined effects of presenting Dawson's extensions to Ronnie’s mother. That, he knew now, was a bad move. And yet it wasn’t all bad. That explosion did what he might have ended up doing himself. Starting over was an adventure, and like those gulls that had just passed on by, the entire orb of the sky was his to fly in.

  But the feds were not the only people he had underestimated.

  Ringo.

  The name made his stomach curl, made him salivate just thinking
of the day when he would get his revenge. Aldrich had dropped off those explosives, claiming that he needed a place to keep them out of his boss's eyesight. But now it was clearer than a bottle of gin that Aldrich had in fact been representing Ringo with that little move, and that they had intended to blow him and his compadres higher than a weather balloon.

  Oswald hocked a thick wad of spit over the railing. He watched it tumble and splash on the pavement below. He sucked on a tooth, thinking of how he would move ahead. He had worked for years to be given the helm when the Enlightened Cowboy, old man Tucker, kicked the bucket. He’d gotten it and for the last two years had whittled away at the organization until only a handful of faithful were left—those who needed Eli Oswald to believe in them and, when he did, would do exactly what he asked. He was a big brother of sorts, he liked to fancy, and now his siblings, everyone but Curtis, were dead. And Curtis would probably get picked up soon enough. Oswald would make sure of it. “Go up to Tennessee and see Janey,” he had told Curtis. Well, he wasn’t going to get very far. Oswald had lifted his wallet off of him as they were negotiating their way through the tunnel. Curtis always kept a lot of cash on him and, boy, did Oswald love him some cash.

  The motel was basically empty. Hurricanes had a way of making people get outta Dodge: “Go north young man, go north.” This storm had everyone scared out of their panties, and the parking lot and most all the rooms of the Purple Parrot Motel were vacant. A rusting Plymouth sat low on balding tires just outside the front office. A gray truck was parked in a bay of the Clean As A Whistle Car Wash across the street where a lady sat in the driver’s seat pecking away at her cell phone. And that was it.

  This is where he would ride out the storm. He wasn’t going anywhere. He was an hour east of the coast as it was. He flicked what was left of his cigarette past the railing, and it sailed off and landed into an oily parking space below. When lady Josephine blazed on past, he would regroup, and the first thing he would do is find out who Ringo was and carry out a bit of good, old fashioned, straight out of the box revenge. Aldrich too.