Clint Faraday Mysteries Collection B :This Job is Murder Collector's Edition

Clint Faraday Mysteries collection B

This Job is Murder

5 books

Collector’s edition

Storm Front

Comedy of
Terrors

Omen

Follow the
Blood

... Or So the Gods Said

© 2014 by C. D. Moulton

Smashwords edition
© 2014

all rights reserved: no part of this
publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or
any other information retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the copyright holder/publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. any resemblances
to persons or events is purely coincidental unless otherwise
stated

About the author

CD Moulton has traveled extensively over much
of the world both in the music business, where he was a rock
guitarist, songwriter and arranger and in an import/export
business. He has been everything from a bar owner to auto salvage
(junkyard) manager, longshoreman to high steel worker, orchid
grower to landscaper, tropical fish farmer to commercial fisherman.
He started writing books in 1983 and has published more than 200
books as of January 1, 2014. His most popular books to date are
about research with orchids, though much of his science fiction and
fantasy work has proven popular. He wrote the CD Grimes, PI series
and the Det. Nick Storie series, Clint Faraday series and many
other works.

He now resides in Puerto Armuelles, Panamá,
where he writes books, plays music with friends, does research with
orchids and medicinal plants – and pursues his favorite ways to
spend his time: beach bum and roaming the mountain jungles doing
his botanical research. He has lately become involved in fighting
for the rights of the indigenous people, who are among his closest
friends, and in fighting the extreme corruption in the courts and
police in Panamá.

He offers the free e-book,
Fading Paradise
, that explains what
he has been through because of the corruption.

Clint Faraday Mysteries

Book six

Storm Front

(c)2010 & 2013 by C. D. Moulton

There is a storm front approaching from the
southeast. A boatload of cocaine is forced in to near Bocas. There
is a torture-murder. Everyone except Clint believes that the two
things are connected. At first.

Contents

Approaching
Weatherfront

No Time for
Torture

Assumptions

Neighborly
Visit

Stupid Treasure
Hunters

Facts and
Suspicions

Good Life

Storm Front

Approaching Weatherfront

“
Clint, do you have the TV on?” Judi
Lum, Clint’s neighbor in Bocas del Toro called from her deck on
Saigon Bay to Clint Faraday, retired PI from Florida, who was on
his own deck. He called back that he didn’t turn the thing on
unless he expected something special.

“
On the news. There’s a storm front
coming in from the southeast. It seems to be a pretty bad one.
They’re trying to call all the boats in to port. Nasty.”

“
Bad enough for us to worry about?” he
asked. She didn’t know. She would watch it.

Clint finished his coffee and hojaldres and
flipped on the radio to the emergency channel to be sure there was
no call that he should respond to. There was a lot of chatter, but
of very short duration. People were calling to say they were
alright, then would leave the channel clear for emergency and
m’aidez calls. He heard the police break that said for all officers
to monitor channel ess2. That meant that it came from the US Coast
guard so someone was in trouble or there was some illegal activity
they observed. They would call for the Panamanian police to respond
in those cases.

This was that a very fast cigarette boat was
headed inward at the Zapatillas. It was suspected of being a drug
carrier. One passenger. Male. Had automatic weapon(s). Fifteen
minutes later the police chopper coming back from searching to warn
boaters radioed that the boat was between Bastimentos and Solarte
and had run up on a piece of reef. The police boats were dispatched
and ordered to take no chances. If they were fired on they were to
return fire and were to shoot to kill in all instances.

Ten minutes later a boat reported that the
boat had no one aboard. There were several large packages wrapped
in plastic. There were four synchronized two hundred fifty
horsepower outboards that had been running it. The bottom was
holed, but would not sink further as the coral head would hold it
where it was. There was a plastic cover for an inflatable dingy on
board so the passenger had apparently gone ashore somewhere in it.
The other boats were to fan out and search the shoreline on both of
the islands. No such craft had come anywhere close to either end of
the bay between the islands so it was there.

Almost an hour later, as the wind was kicking
up very strongly, they found the inflatable near the shore of
Solarte under the mangroves. No one was in it. It was being
processed. The passenger could not go far there because it was as
much as impenetrable. There was no evidence of a path being chopped
onto the island at the shoreline, but the passenger could have made
his way inland past the mangroves that fringed the island and could
move a good distance. He was trapped. They would find him.

Fifteen minutes later a body was discovered a
short distance from the inflatable. The man had been shot in the
back of the head. There was no identification on him. There were
signs he had been tortured before being shot.

That seemed a bit strange to Clint. There
wouldn’t have been time to torture anyone. There was only one
passenger on that boat so the body would have to be the pilot or
someone who chanced on him – which made torture ridiculous.

He had to finish battening down his stuff so
he didn’t think much about it.

Then.

No Time for Torture

The storm was coming onshore strongly now.
Clint rode his Ducatti to the police station to be there if they
needed help. People could act like idiots with a storm coming.
Already, Sergio had arrested four surfers who were headed out for a
thrill ride. The raging surf would grind them to hamburger on the
reefs. Idiots!

Sergio told Clint what they knew. It wasn’t a
lot and it was. It would depend on which angle you chose to view
it. Clint could see Sergio’s point that there was little reason to
investigate a drug killing because you either caught them in the
act or there would be no prosecution of the case due to lack of
evidence. It wasted the time and resources of the police
department.

Clint said he agreed one hundred percent, but
there was no evidence this killing had anything to do with drugs
and druggies.

Sergio said they had scoured the parts of
Solarte where the runner could have gone and he wasn’t there. The
body was probably the runner. He was supposed to meet someone
there. The someone didn’t care to take the chance of being
identified and took care of that little problem.

Clint said that left the torture bit. There
was definitely no time for anyone to torture anyone. Sergio
shrugged and said Clint could look into it if he wanted. Clint had
little else to do so he would look into it.

The calls started coming in about the storm
damage. Nothing too serious. Clint waited it out at the station
with the police. He knew most of them. When it was fairly certain
the storm would stay under anything that could cause particularly
bad effects on the island Clint went home. It was just minutes
after three AM so he slept until almost nine. Extremely late for
him. The main part of the storm had passed. It was a drizzly
morning with little patches of sunlight here and there.

His battery went dead on his boat sometime
during the night and the pump stopped. There were almost two feet
of water in it he had to bail. He put the battery on the charger.
It was totally discharged from being under water. He used the
backup hand pump to finish bailing. The rain wouldn’t completely
stop for the day. There would be small heavy rains for a couple of
minutes, then it would drop back to the way it was at present. He
would have it to do again until he had the battery charged. He
thought about it and went into town to buy another battery. It
would be smart to have a backup. He usually thought of that kind of
thing before it was needed.

He stopped at the station, but there was
nothing new. The autopsy wouldn’t be done until the next day. The
lab had suffered a bit of water damage and had to be repaired.

Clint went to the Golden Grill to listen to
the local gossip. There wasn’t much. Everybody was talking about
the storm and how it wasn’t anything to the one back in etc. etc.
etc. There was a little talk about the drug boat. More than half a
ton of fully processed cocaine. Worth more than fifteen million
even before it was cut like it would have been. Clint figured it at
the going wholesale price. About eight hundred thousand. Two
million on the streets. There was some talk about someone trying to
get some land on Isla Popa by killing off some people, brought out
because of Wild Bill having done that. Somebody was missing. That
kind of thing was still around, but less than there was a few years
ago. They talked a little about the body and what was going to
happen to all that dope.

He asked if they had any idea who the body
might have been. Jim said he was sure it wasn’t the runner like the
cops said. They just didn’t want to be bothered. The runner was
alone on the boat so who would have killed him?

“
Maybe a rival drug dealer,” Tom
suggested. Jim said that made even less sense.

Clint left before the argument started. He
went across to The Pirate and chatted with a few people. Same
general ideas. No one knew of anyone who had gone missing from
Solarte. It was noticed very quickly when anyone was missing now
that Wild Bill’s exploits and murders were known.

There was nothing more to be done now so he
went home to relax a bit and call all the people he knew the storm
might have affected. It appeared the front was a series of waves
that would come in about one every ten hours for two more so it
wouldn’t be very smart to relax. The up side was that it wasn’t one
broad band like the innundation two years past. There would be
damage to the roads and things on the river banks, but not
extensive like before.

Clint then went to the morgue to talk with
Dr. Avanzas, who was presently doing the autopsies. He said the
body’s time of death couldn’t be established within more than six
hours because of the sudden cooling from the storm. It was so long
before the body was brought in that lividity couldn’t determine
much. The torture was with cuts and crushing the finger bones and
burns and was over a period of at least an hour. Probably closer to
two hours. That ruled out the drug boat having anything to do with
it. Clint went to the station and reported on the information from
Doc. He said that meant the runner had someone there to pick him
up. He left the inflatable to make them concentrate on searching
Solarte for a bit of time to allow him to escape. If the person who
picked him up had tried to exit the alley by either end he surely
would have been seen. It was someone on either Solarte or
Bastimentos. No one had any idea who it might have been.

The wind was picking up strongly as Clint
headed back home. The next band was coming in.

Clint called a friend who was a secret agent
for Interpol so knew much of what was going on in the area,
particularly concerning drugs. He said the shipment was probably
from the Peruvian connection going out of Medillin. He didn’t have
much information except that a large shipment was supposed to go or
have gone. Clint thanked him and decided to forget it until the
fronts were past. He had a lot to occupy him simply keeping his
stuff secure. This was supposed to be a little worse than the
first. The next one was back to about what the first was if it
didn’t increase in the time it would take to reach Panamá.

The night was a bit noisier than the previous
night, but there was no more damage of a major proportion. Clint
checked with Judi and Ben, two neighbors who were also close
friends. They didn’t have any damage to report. Bocas could take a
hell of a lot of wind and rain. Only the tourists worried much
about it. He called Manny, a friend (who was an ex-mafia don who
moved to Bocas to escape his past and raise a family who wouldn’t
be ashamed of how Pops made his) on Isla San Cristóbal, but he
didn’t have any damage to report either, though he had spent most
of the last two nights at the Indio village helping to move the
ones living in the lower parts onto higher ground. Miguel had come
from Panamá City and had opened a building on his property for them
and had slaughtered a pig so they would have plenty of food. Manny
took over a hundred pounds of rice. They grew onions, peppers, and
such right there. There were tons of yuca. Bananas and cocoa, yampi
– it was all right there. Things were suave and tranquilo at the
moment.