Murder Key (12 page)

             
“Merc works for me,” said Jeep. “He just don’t know it. Thinks he runs things around here.”

             
“Shiiit,” said Merc. “Go ahead and shoot him.”

             
“What’s the name?” I asked.

             
“Jimmy Wilkerson,”
said Jeep.

             
“Who is he, and where can we find him?” asked Jock.

             
“He’s some c
racker lives over near Duette in Manatee County,” said Jeep. “I think if you ask around some of the bars out east of Bradenton you’ll find him.” His English had suddenly improved substantially.

             
“Who else?” I asked.

             
“Nobody else.
Jimmy is my connection.  I don’t know who he reports to, or where he gets his merchandise.”

             
I removed the gun from under Jeep’s nose. “Wha
t does Jimmy look like?”

             
“I don’t know
.
I’ve never met the gentleman. My only dealing with him was on the phone.”

             
“How do you know where he lives, then?” I
asked
.

             
“For some reason, he mentioned it in the one phone call I had with him.”

             
I said, “He’s your connection, but you only talked to him that one time?”

             
“Yes. Some other dude, a real bad-ass, brings the stuff in. He was the one who brought Peters’ head by.”

             
Jock pointed to Merc. “What in the world are you doing with this idiot?” he asked.

             
Jeep laughed. “He’s so stupid he can’t find his dick in the dark. If he ever gets caught by the feds he’s not going to be able to tell them anything. You probably noticed it doesn’t take long to figure out he’s dumber
than
a Georgia pine stump.”

             
Merc sat quietly, chewing on what he had heard. “You mean I’m not in charge?” he asked.

             
“I don’t think so,” said Jock. “What do we do with these two geniuses?”

             
“Let’s leave them,” I said. “Unhook them and let them go about their business.”

             
I looked at the handcuffed men and said, “If I find out you’ve alerted Jimmy Wilkerson or anybody else that we’re looking for them, I’ll come back and sh
oot your dumb asses dead. Under
stood?”

             
They both nodded, and we took off the handcuf
fs.
Jock pulled a roll of duct tape out of his tool box and we bound their hands in front. By the time they got out of the tape, we’d be out of the gate and gone. If anyone found them in the house tied up, it’d raise too many questions. We were flying under the radar and wanted to keep it that way. It was time for the hunters to become the hunted.

Murder Key

TWENTY

             
We were in the rental, heading
west on I-4
,
chasing the setting sun. Jock had dropped
me off at the mall where we’d left the rental, and I followed him back to the cable company’s parking lot. He wiped down the van, destroying any finge
r
prints, and crawled in beside me.

             
“They’ll probably never know it was missing,” he said.

             
The sun hovered above the road ahead, a giant orange ball starting its daily disappearing act. I pulled down the visor and put on my sunglasses. We were still wearing the gray uniforms.

             
“I want to get home to my own bed tonight,” I said. “This has been one hell of a week.”

             
“That it has, my friend, that it has. Let’s go straight to your condo. I think we’ll be safe for the night. Park the car in a visitor’s spot, and nobody will know you’re home.”

             
I nodded. “If they come, they’ll have to come through the front door. I think we’ve got enough firepower to cover ourselves.”

             
We drove through the slowly descending darkness, not talking, listening to a smooth jazz station on the radio. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we reached Longboat Key. I knew the people trying to kill me hadn’t given up. The chief had told me there were no leads on either the Mexicans’ deaths or Conley’s.

             
I hoped that we could find Jimmy Wilkerson and begin to unravel the thread that would lead us to the senator, whoever he was. The eastern parts of Manatee and
Sarasota counties were full of c
rackers, and that was how Jeep had described Wilke
r
son.

             
More than two thirds of Floridians live in the coastal counties, most of
them
crowd
ed
near the beaches
. The vast interior of Florida
south of Orlando has relatively few people. A little more than a hundred years ago most of the interior was con
trolled by the cow-
catchers, a rough breed of pioneering men and women who pulled wild cattle out of swamps and drove them to Punta Rassa near present day Ft. Myers for shipment to Cuba. The Spanish-American war at the end of the nineteenth century and
the advent of fenced land gutt
ed that industry.

             
There are over ten million acres of working farmland in Florida, producing seven billion dollars a year in revenue. Florida leads the nation in the production of snap beans, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash. Florida ranks twelfth nationa
l
ly in the production of beef products, supplying almost a million head of cattle annually to Midwest feed lots.

             
The great prairies of inland Florida have been chopped up by strip miners digging out the phosphate discovered in the late nineteenth century. There’s still a lot of land given over to cattle, however, with ranches running into the thousands of acres.

             
This is a Florida most tourists never see. The people of the vegetable and cattle growing regions still consider themselves Southerners, and their accents confirm it. Many are the descen
dants of the pioneering cow-
catchers and farmers and have lived on their land for five generations or more.

             
The cow
-
catchers were rough men whose exploits rivaled those of the Old West as told in the movies. Most carried long rawhide whips for driving cattle and, on occasion, fighting each other. The loud cracks made by the whips gave
a name to a whole culture; the c
rackers.

             
Some of their descendants had retained their rough ways and their accents. It was probably from this group that Jimmy Wilkerson had sprung. I’d start looking for him the next day.

             
The c
racker bars of
East County
would be running at full blast on a Sunday afternoon, the men letting loose after sitting in church for two hours at their women’s insistence. There was onl
y so much fire and brimstone a c
racker-man could take before he heard the siren call of Jack Daniels or Jim Beam. They knew in their guts that real men d
idn’t drink
s
cotch
.

             
At Tampa, we turned south on I-75 and headed for Lon
g
boat Key. The sun was gone, and I switched on the headlights. An hour later we crossed the Intracoastal on the Cortez Bridge, and I opened the windows to enjoy the subtle scent of the sea. I was home and glad of it.

             
A gibbous moon was hanging over the Gulf as I came to the dead-end of Cortez Road, the beach in front of me. A lumine
s
cent swath seemed to grow out of the moon, spreading ever more widely on the surface of the water as it closed in on the shore, ending abruptly at the parking lot of the Beach House Restaurant.

             
Groups of satisfied diners were ambling out of the resta
u
rant, heading to the parking lot or across the main
road that
ran along the beach. I turned left onto Gulf Drive and drove south, enjoying the sea air and the full moon.

             
I crossed Longboat Pass Bridge and a
couple of
mile
s
further turned into my condo on the bay. We parked in the visitors’ lot and took the elevator to the second floor.

             
We drew our guns as I keyed the lock. Jock went in first, staying low. I stood at the side of the door covering him. He disappeared into a bedroom, called “clear” and went into the other bedroom.

             
He came out, his gun tucked into his belt. I engaged the safety on my nine and relaxed. “Well, at least nobody was waiting for us,” I said.

             
“Got anything to eat?” asked Jock.

             
“No, but we can orde
r a pizza from A Moveable Feast.
”
             
“Do it. No anchovies. Put it in my name, so if anybody’s paying attention they won’t know you’re home.”

             
I called the restaurant and ordered the pizza. Twenty minutes later Jock went to get it.

Murder Key

TWENTY-ONE

             
The land was flat, sere, pocked by strip mines and mounds of phosphogypsum rising five hundred feet above the ground; small mountains of mineral waste that appeared in the distance as desert hillocks. Nothing moved in the
still air. The mid-afternoon s
un was hot, its r
ays reflecting off the moonscap
e l
eft by the raping of the earth.

             
A huge crane sat in the middle of a dug-up field, idle on a Sunday afternoon, waiting for the next work
day to begin wrenching phospha
te out of the earth. White dust covered the equipment and the road, each particle a radioactive speck. Air sniffers sat at the end of the occasional driveway, guarding the modest homes against the minuscule threat of contamination. No tourist brochure ever carried a picture of this part of Florida.

             
Jock and I had come out-east, as the coastal inhabitants called this desolate place. It was near the point where Polk, Hardee and Manatee counties joined, a place where workers daily dug out the minerals that would be turned into fertilizer to sustain the crops of vegetables planted in fields
all over the world.

             
We were in separate cars, Jock running a little ahead of me. We drove a two lane asphalt road running straight as an arrow between the pits from which the miners dug their daily bread. I came to a building surrounded by a gravel parking lot. The structure was old, built long ago, the wood weathered by time and heat, topped by a rusting tin roof. A painted sign advertised it as the Vagabond Bar.

             
The vehicles in the parking lot were mostly pick-ups with a few ancient cars scattered about, their rust-pitted hulks showing the signs of life in a harsh enviro
n
ment. I spotted Jock’s rental and pulled in next to it. We had come looking for Jimmy Wilkerson.

             
I’
d borrowed Logan Hami
lton’s car for our plunge into c
racker country. The Vagabond Bar was our third stop of the day. We‘d driven north on I-75 and east on Highway 62 until we found a narrow two-lane paved road shooting north into the mines.

             
Jock and I had worked out a plan. He’d arrive at one of the local dives about thirty minutes before I did and take a seat at a table with a view of the bar. When I came in, I’d sit at the bar, order a beer, and ask the bartender if he knew Jimmy Wilke
r
son.

             
Jock was there for backup if I needed it. We weren’t sure how Jimmy would react if we found him, nor were we too sanguine about the possible reaction of the rough men who frequented these bars.

             
This was certainly not a scientific approach, but we couldn’t come up with anything better. Bill Lester had gone to the office that mor
ning and run a fruitless comput
er search through the National Crime Information Center for our friend Jimmy. Either he wasn’t in the system, or the man we were looking for was using an alias.

             
I walked into the Vagabond Bar and lost half a century. I was sure the place looked just like it did when it was first built, and a sign over the bar announced that it was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The rectangular room was large, with a bar of chipped and dented walnut running the length of one wall, a mirror taking up the entire space behind it. Four pool tables were clustered in one corner. Most of the rest of the space was filled
by
small tables with chairs arranged around them. The air
conditioning unit
cooled the place, and the fans hanging from the ceiling stirred the thick smoke drifting from lighted cigarettes sitting in half-full ashtrays. There were about thirty people in the bar, half of them hard-looking women.

             
I spotted Jock at a table near the center of the room. He was still wearing the gray uniform shirt and pants, washed the night before in my washing machine, and a baseball cap with a Caterpillar Tractor logo. I had on jeans, a white T-shirt and a Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap. I took a seat on a stool at the ba
r about twenty feet from Jock.

             
The bartender took my beer order. When he returned I asked if he knew Jimmy Wilkerson. He shook his head and walked off. I’d had no better luck in the previous places we’d visited. Maybe the only thing I was accomplishing was drinking a little beer. While that wasn’t bad, I’d rather do it on Longboat Key than in this wast
e
land.

             
A body slid onto the stool beside me. I studied him in the mirror, seeing a thin man with a three-day growth of beard and matted dirty brown hair tucked under a baseball cap. A scar ran from his right temple, across his eye and down to his cheek.  Alarm bells were going off in my head.

             
I’d seen this man before, at Taggarts, the bar we visited just before the Vag
a
bond. Was he fol
lowing us or was this just a co
incidence? I didn’t have time to answer my own question before
I heard the nasal twang of the c
racker in my ear.

             
“Heard you been lookin’ for me,” he said.

             
He was sitting close, and I felt the barrel of a gun poking me in the ribs.

             
“Are you Jimmy Wilkerson?” I asked.

             
“That would be me, Mr. Royal.”

             
“You know who I am,” I said.

             
“Yessir, the man who won’t die.” He cackled, a high-pitched sound that remin
d
ed me of a great heron’s mating call. “I think we can fix that now, don’t you?”

             
“Are you the one trying to kill me?” I said.

             
“Sorta.”

             
“What does that mean?”

             
“It means I’m sorta involved. If I’d been in that bar on Longboat Key last week we wouldn’t be having this convers
a
tion.
You’d be dead.”

             
“Why?”

             
“It don’t matter why.”

             
“Do you know?

             
“Nope. Ain’t none of my business. Let’s go,” he said, poking me harder with the gun barrel.

             
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll shoot me here with all these witnesses.”

             
“Mr. Royal, every one of these people will swear you tried to kill me and I had to take you out in
self defense. Now, let’s go.”
He poked harder.

             
I’d seen Jock leave, and hoped he wasn’t just taking a bathroom break. I slid off the stool, and we walked toward the entrance, the pistol boring a hole in my back.

             
I pushed open the heavy oak door that led to the parking lot, the man close behind me. As I stepped down the one step to the concrete pad that served as a porch, I sa
w a flash of gray to my right.
Instantly, Jock had his gun poking my would-be killer in his right ear.

             
“Don’t move, Tonto, or you’re dead,” I heard Jock say in a low rumble. “Drop the piece.”

             
“Whoa, there,” said Jimmy, dropping his weapon. “Careful now.”

             
I turned, grabbed Jimmy by the shirt front and pushed him against the wall. “You son of a bitch, why are you trying to kill me?” I
asked
.

             
“I don’t know,” said the thin man.

             
“Look, Jimmy,” I said, “You’re in deep...”

             
“I ain’t Jimmy,” he broke in.

             
“Right,” I said.

             
“No, look in my pocket. I got ID.”

             
“Let’s go, Jimmy,” I said, taking him by the arm and heading for Jock’s car.

             
“No shit, man, I ain’t Jimmy.”

             
Jock waved the pistol in the man’s direction. “Then, who are you?” he asked.

             
“I’m Byron Hewett. I just followed you when I heard you were looking for Jimmy. Check my ID.”

             
I reached into the hip pocket of his dirty jeans and retrieved his wallet. There was about twenty dollars in small bills, two small notes that meant nothing to me, folded to fit into the wallet, and a Florida drivers’ license that identified the man as Byron J. Hewett of Myakka City.

             
I looked at Jock. “His name
’
s Byron Hewett, according to this license.”

             
Jock said, “Things are sure screwy around here.”

             
I grabbed the man by the shirt again. “Why are you after me And how did you know my name?”

             
“Jimmy and me was in Taggarts when you came in. He told me who you were and to come get you and bring you to him. I wasn’t going to kill you.”

             
“Where are you supposed to take me?” I asked.

             
“Man, he’ll kill me if I tell you.”

             
I gave him my coldest stare. “I’ll kill you if you don’t,” I said.

             
“Okay, okay. We was supposed to meet at a closed-down mine over near Mulberry.”

             
Jock motioned with his pistol. “Let’s go, shithead.”
             
“Where we goin’?” asked Byron.

             
“To meet Jimmy,”
Jock said
.

37