The Crime Beat Boxed Set

by A. C. Fuller

  He dunked back under the water, moving swiftly to the bottom of the rowboat. He held the light up to the spot where the package was attached. A makeshift loop of duct tape had been hooked to a short length of rope tied to a metal ring on the bottom of the boat. Extra protection. The men who’d hired him were cautious.

  With a swipe, he cut the loop. The package fell free, floating down into his arms.

  He swam back to his boat and, treading water, hoisted the package over his head. It weighed about fifteen pounds, just what he’d expected. All U.S. bills weigh roughly one gram. So 2,500 hundred dollar bills would weigh five and a half pounds. The rifle, assuming it was the same model he’d used in D.C., weighed another six. The ammo and the case, another two. All the waterproof bags and tape added another pound. He tossed it into the well of his boat and climbed aboard.

  The other boat was moving toward his. It was a small fishing yacht, maybe twenty-five feet, and it had already covered half the distance between him and the shore. He looked to a wooden dock jutting from the center of the crescent island. He allowed himself to hope that the boat was heading for the dock.

  If the boat didn’t get any closer, he wouldn’t have to do it.

  The boat kept coming. “Damn,” he said quietly. Judging by its speed, he had a minute until it reached him. Using the exacto knife, he slit open four layers of heavy-duty plastic bags. Inside the fifth bag, in shrink-wrapped plastic, he found the money. Always find the money first. Without it, nothing else matters.

  Next, he unwrapped the black rifle bag. Since coming to America, he’d had a policy: always make the customer provide the weapon and ammo. The process of acquiring these was one more way to get caught. He only worked for top-tier customers who knew the best weapon for the job, and how to get it. This job had been unusual. The men had the weapons before contacting him. He couldn’t complain. The custom fifty-calibre rifles were the finest he’d ever seen. He stowed the weapon and the money and pulled a beretta from the duffel bag, placing it under his hamstring as he sat.

  The boat pulled alongside his. A handsome man around his age waved, smiling. He wore white shorts and an unbuttoned pastel blue shirt, his large round belly leading the way as he waddled to the edge of the boat. “You alright?”

  De Santis waved toward the rowboat. “Fine. Saw this old boat tied up and thought I’d check it out. That’s all. It’s anchored.”

  “Odd. Abandoned, you think?”

  The Beretta pressed into Marco’s hamstring. “Guessing so.”

  Two fishing poles were propped in their holders off the back of the man’s boat, which had the words Marlin’s Tomb stenciled on its side. He gestured at the poles. “Fishing?”

  A woman appeared from a small cabin. She was younger, maybe late thirties. Black hair, with a pretty round face. “Let’s go, papi.” She stood next to the man on the side of the boat, wrapping an arm around his waist.

  Marco felt a twitch of conscience. She was pregnant.

  The man said, “Alright then. Wanted to make sure you weren’t stranded.”

  “Thank you,” Marco said.

  As the man turned, Marco stood, sliding the Beretta from under his leg and disengaging the safety in one deft motion.

  When he was a boy, he’d hated this part. As a teenager he’d resented it. By his early twenties he’d gone numb to it. Now, well, he’d woken up this morning telling himself he had one kill left. Counting the baby, it was four. So be it.

  He squeezed the trigger, striking the man in the back of the head. He crumpled instantly. The woman spun and opened her mouth to scream when she saw the gun. No sound came out. She glanced back at the cabin.

  “Don’t move,” De Santis said cooly.

  She turned back and he met her eyes. She opened her mouth again, stammering, “I…I…a baby…I have a baby.” She ran a hand over her belly, swollen like it contained a perfectly round melon. “Please. You were a baby once.”

  “Once I was a baby, baby Marco. For the last fifty years I’ve been Maiale al Tartufo. Do you speak Italian?”

  She had a slightly Italian look, but spoke without an accent. Miami was diverse enough that she could have been from anywhere.

  She shook her head. “My parents were from Barcelona.”

  “Born here, then?”

  She nodded.

  “You live in Miami?”

  She nodded again.

  “Where would you recommend a new resident live?”

  Her eyes flicked left and right. Desperate. Confused. She began to shake.

  “No recommendations? I hear Coral Gables is nice, but I might move to Little Havana just for the food. Last night I had chorizo croquetas and…what do you think a two-bedroom on the beach costs these days?”

  She didn’t respond, just hugged herself tightly, shaking.

  Marco sat, holding the Beretta by his side. He started the engine and let the runabout drift toward the side of the fishing boat. As one boat glided past the other, he stood and shot the woman in the heart. Leaning forward slightly, he put another bullet in the man’s head—just to be sure—and one in the woman’s belly.

  The echoes faded. The morning was silent, and Marco aimed the boat at the shore.

  2

  Jane Cole floated above a rocky mountain in Afghanistan, watching Matt navigate a Jeep over a dusty road. He wore his Desert Sand Cammies, the light tan of the uniform setting off his dark brown hair. She’d always loved him in uniform.

  Two fellow Marines sat in the back seat, watching as Matt maneuvered the Jeep around twists and turns up a one-lane mountain road, then down the other side. The ride seemed to go on forever. His hair blew in the wind, dust circled behind the Jeep. No one spoke.

  He stopped at a small town, where children played around a stone well. He waved at a child, who ran up to the Jeep. Matt reached out to the boy.

  Suddenly, one of the men jerked forward violently, wrapping a cord around Matt’s throat.

  “Remember the video I showed you?” Warren’s voice entered her dream, drowning out her husband’s choked gasps. “Back in New York?”

  Her eyes shot open. She drew a sharp breath, as though she were the one desperate for air.

  Warren placed a hand on her shoulder gently. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you were still sleeping. You okay?”

  She blinked, trying to erase the dream. She’d had it at least one other time. Maybe the night in the hotel in D.C. Maybe her last night in New York. She wasn't sure. “I’m okay. Bad dream. What were you asking?”

  “The video I showed you.”

  She scooched up in her seat. “I’ll never forget it, or what you told me you saw in that guy’s house.”

  “I haven’t followed the guy’s case since I was put on leave, but chances are he’ll get ten to twenty for what he did. He…” Warren trailed off and stared out the train window.

  His face was pinched—the look he got when he wanted to say more, but couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  They’d boarded the train while D.C. was still dark, and Cole had fallen asleep soon after. Now the bright sun sliced through the windows and glimmered off the snow-covered branches that flashed by outside.

  Cole rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”

  “Georgia.”

  “We passed through North and South Carolina?”

  “You nodded off somewhere in Virginia.”

  She was beginning to realize that Warren had a well of emotion and thoughtfulness just under the surface. But it was as though he tightened his face and the rest of him to keep it at bay. “Rob, what’s up?”

  “Just thinking. Raj Ambani donated to Alvin Meyers, right? To his campaigns?”

  Cole had learned this with a simple Google search. “Multiple times, why?”

  “As a cop, I took down guys like that sick pedophile. That’s an easy one. That guy deserves something worse than death. You believe in hell?”

  Cole considered this. Matt had been religious, but she never had. “I think hell is t
he suffering we create for ourselves on earth. Hell is thinking we shouldn’t be locked in these bodies, but knowing we are. And I believe locking guys like that pedophile away makes our hell a couple degrees cooler while we’re living in it.”

  Warren studied her, taking it in. She knew he disagreed, and was relieved he didn’t push back too hard. “I think hell’s a place. A place people go for the stuff they do on earth. That guy will end up there, to be sure. But I wonder, will Alvin Meyers and Raj Ambani be there with him?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “While you were sleeping, I looked them up. Both are upstanding citizens, pillars of their communities. At the same time, Meyers was VP as the U.S. expanded its drone program. At the president’s direction, he oversaw the program. We took out tens of thousands of people with machines from the sky, all on his watch. Don’t get me wrong, I believe our cause is just, but...”

  “But?”

  “We took out civilians, too. Kids.” He closed his eyes. “Maybe I’m not as convinced of our righteousness as I used to be, as I wish I was.”

  “What about Ambani? Helluva guy, by all accounts.”

  “Not to everyone. You been on Reddit?”

  She nodded. She’d used the online message board community for research a few times. Like most of the internet, it was a great resource that was also riddled with misinformation and toxic craziness.

  “Hundreds of threads about Ambani’s death there,” Warren said. “Talking about globalization, sovereignty, identitarianism, corporate overreach, and so on.”

  “Racists?”

  “Some, sure. There are some straight up white supremacists there, and they hated Ambani. But—and this was weird—I found myself agreeing with some of the other commenters. The ones who talked about the way companies like Ambani’s are taking over everything. Guys like him are powerful, maybe even more powerful than governments and…”

  He didn’t finish the thought, but it was clear where he’d been headed. “You think the world is better off without him?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  Cole wasn’t comfortable with where this was headed. As a journalist, she faced a tension between reporting the world as it was, and judging the world for what it should be. As much as possible, she tried to report the facts and leave her beliefs out of it. She wasn’t prepared to consider whether the men who’d killed Ambani and Meyers had legitimate grievances. All she cared about was cracking the case, breaking the story. “Speaking of donations. That reminds me.”

  Warren leaned in close as she tapped her phone. He didn’t resist her attempt to change the subject, so she continued. “The only certain connection are the donations Ambani made to Meyers. Where my mind wants to go next is connections between those two and prominent Miami residents.”

  Starting with “Ambani” + “Meyers” + “Miami,” Cole ran a series of Google searches. Nothing came up. Next she tried searches with only one of the names, plus “Miami.” This led her to a series of dead ends. Both men had Miami connections—from political fundraisers to board meetings to well-publicized vacations. Ambani’s wife had even done a special performance at the Miami opera house.

  Cole set her phone on her lap. “Rob, I…” Pieces of the dream still clung to her. Her mind was foggy. She wanted to tell him about it, but something didn’t let her.

  She dreamed about Matt often. Usually the scenes were connected to digital photographs he’d emailed her. Her favorite was the shot of him in the Jeep, which had been taken sometime during his first week in country. In the image, there was a man in the passenger seat. His buddy Bryce. In her dreams, she’d often seen them driving peacefully around the countryside in Afghanistan. That wasn’t how war was, but her therapist had encouraged her to simply enjoy the dreams, that they were just her mind taking something real—the image—and using it to create a pleasant, harmless fantasy.

  The dream this morning hadn’t been pleasant. She banished it from her mind. “Rob, gut instinct, where do we start when we get to Miami?”

  “You know, before your story about me, I was set to become a detective.”

  A wave of guilt hit her. “I know.”

  “Already studying for the exam.”

  “Something in your study prepared you for this?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Far as I know, there’s never been anything like this.”

  “You’re not making me feel any better.”

  “Not trying to. At first, I thought we needed to look at this like a serial killing, but it’s more like a terrorist attack. In either case, we have two threads. When we get to Miami, I think I should pull one. You pull the other.”

  “Two threads?” Cole asked.

  “The killer and the next victim.”

  Cole nodded. “Go on.”

  “I have an old CI in Miami. One of my best sources while I was NYPD. Kind of guy who might have heard if something was gonna go down in Miami. Maybe he knows something about the rifle. About Maiale al Tartufo, if he came to Miami after D.C.” He sighed. “It’s a long shot, but it’s the best thing I can think of.”

  “He did come to Miami. I know he did.”

  Warren offered a weak nod, but didn’t seem as convinced as she was. “The other thread is the next victim,” he went on, “and that’s where you come in. You know research better than me. I’ve known that since that first afternoon in my apartment.”

  “You think I can magically figure out who the next victim will be?”

  “I’m guessing Google isn’t the extent of your research abilities.”

  Cole thought for a moment. Truth was, there were a hundred possible connections between Ambani, Meyers, and various bigwigs in Miami. Through a combination of online research and checking with sources, she could narrow it down. Her guess was there would be dozens of possible victims. “What time do we arrive?”

  “Half an hour. Ten a.m. local time.”

  For the first time since she’d woken up, she looked directly at him. The flesh under his dark eyes was puffy and a small swelling rose from his cheek. “You’ve got a lump from the fight, and you look exhausted. Didn’t sleep?”

  “Nah.”

  “So we check into a hotel, you sleep for a couple hours, I research.”

  “Don’t you need to sleep more?”

  The thought brought her back to the dream. She closed her eyes.

  “Cole?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t want to sleep.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing…bad dream. I’m fine, really. You watched over me while I slept. Once we get to a hotel, I’ll make a list of potential victims while you get a few hours. Then we go from there.”

  3

  A palm frond tickled the glass of the second-story window. Cole looked up from her phone. Outside, the light blue sky was visible through a crack in the turquoise curtains. Over the bed, an elegant watercolor of a silver-blue marlin decorated the pale yellow wall.

  Warren had fallen into a deep sleep moments after shutting the door of their hotel room in Little Havana. His prosthetic leg stuck out from under his pillow. He was barely breathing. Dead to the world.

  She’d made good progress in her search. Using news databases, online searches, and a series of text exchanges with former colleagues, she’d compiled a list of six prominent Miamians with ties to both businessman Raj Ambani and former Vice President Alvin Meyers. They were political donors, business people, bankers, and others who pulled the strings of power in South Florida. They all had connections to Ambani and Meyers, and they all had threads connecting them to other powerful people around the world.

  She’d organized her list using nothing more than instinct. Trying to put herself in the shoes of anti-globalist ultranationalists, she’d asked herself, “Who in Miami would I want to kill next?”

  She’d written her list on a clean sheet of Hotel Marlin stationery:

  1) Alejandro Hernandez, former mayor of Miami.

  2) Frank Johnsto
n, CEO of South Beach Investments, LLC.

  3) Maria Brown, owner of Coastal Exporters.

  4) Ana Diaz, financier, Bank of South Florida.

  5) Bernard Erickson, Chairman of the Board, Gulf Labs, Inc.

  6) Benjamin Patrick Riley, III, Owner and CEO, Tropical Cruises, Intl., and primary shareholder in three local sports franchises.

  At noon she woke Warren with a gentle shake of his shoulder. He sat up quickly and put on his leg. Like Matt and other military men she’d met, he was used to springing into action after too little sleep.

  She handed him a Cuban coffee and a pastelito, which she’d ordered from room service. “I asked for the coffee without sugar and they treated me like a crazy person. The pastry is guava and cheese.”

  Warren took a small sip of the coffee. His eyes shot open like he’d been hit by an electrical current. “Whoa!”

  “I know, right? I’ve had two and I think they should be classified as schedule two narcotics. It’s like my heart is hugging my brain.”

  Warren set the flaky pastry on the nightstand. “What’d you find?”

  “Some potential targets,” she said, taking the opportunity to grab the pastelito, “but nothing I feel solid about. There’s—”

  “Wait.” He downed the rest of the coffee in one swig. “There’s something else we need to talk about first. Mazzalano. The map.”

  Warren had a moral compass, a black-and-white sense of right and wrong. He’d exercised restraint by letting it go this long. She offered a noncommittal shrug and munched on the pastry.

  “You been online yet?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet about the map, about the storage unit.”

  “You said he’d make a thing out of it right away.”

  “I thought he would.” One thing about Mazzalano was that he was hungry for the limelight, and for promotions. If he’d had them followed to Wragg’s storage unit in Jersey, he’d found the map, just as she had. He’d also had the time to go through the rest of the unit. She’d been sure he’d announce the find publicly to bask in the glory.