Palm Beach Nasty (31 page)

In a panic, he turned the whole closet upside down, yanking raincoats and heavy jackets off their big wooden hangers, pulling out a folded-up card table, then grabbing a big cardboard box and dragging it toward him. It was heavy and went crashing to the floor. Nick heard glass shatter inside, but didn’t care.

It was then he realized the Bacon was gone.

FIFTY

D
onnie jammed the accelerator to the floor and was doing sixty down Worth Avenue. Thing was, Worth Avenue was a one-way street, going the other way. Fulbright watched as they blurred past a red-faced guy pointing frantically in the other direction. He looked back and saw a big white car two blocks behind them.

“Shit, they’re comin’,” Fulbright said.

“I see ’em,” Donnie said, totally cool, as he yanked the wheel hard to his right and skidded onto South County Road. “We’re gonna be fine.”

That was the soldier side of Donnie that Fulbright loved. Solid ice.

Ott was behind the wheel two hundred yards back and Crawford was on the radio. He had alerted the dispatcher about their pursuit; problem was that the three other cops on duty were all up at the north end in Zone Four, five miles away. He told the dispatcher to get them down to the north bridge and block it.

BOLO for a black Navigator, he said.

Then he got a call from Misty.

“You okay?” he asked.

Dominica’s coded warning to Misty had been the signal for Misty to slip over the far side of the drug boat and swim to safety at the south end of the docks.

“Yeah,” she said, “never swam so fast in my life. Wrapped my phone in a baggy I found on the reefer boat.”

“Good girl. Call you later.” He clicked off.

The Navigator, after hanging a hard, tire-burning right, was going in the direction of the Southern and Lake Worth bridges.

“This is 322, headed down South Flagler,” Crawford heard the voice on the radio say.

Ott glanced over. Shit, it was Dominica.

“Three minutes north of Southern,” she said.

“McCarthy,” Crawford shouted into the radio, “don’t get anywhere near the Southern bridge. You saw what they did to the boat—”

“Blew it into another zip code,” Ott mumbled.

But there was no response from Dominica.

“McCarthy?”

Nothing.

Crawford turned to Ott. “I know damn well she heard me.”

“Girl wants to join in the fun,” Ott said, pedal to the metal.

They flashed by the Everglades golf course off to their right. Ott had the Crown Vic up over eighty now, but wasn’t gaining.

“Dispatch,” Crawford said into his radio, “try to get West Palm to block the Southern bridge. If we got anyone down south, same for Lake Worth.”

“Got it,” the dispatcher said.

Crawford doubted whether dispatch would be able to get anyone there in time.

The Navigator blew through a stop sign on South Ocean, barely missing a gray Porsche it would have T-boned into the ocean.

“Son–of–a–bitch can drive,” Ott said, eyes wide, sweat glistening on his face.

He slowed at the stop sign on South Ocean—barely—then gunned it. Ott kept the pedal down and within ten seconds had it back up to eighty, then ninety. Fifty-five miles over the speed limit, still not gaining.

The Navigator was at Mar-a-Lago now. Its brake lights flashed, a hard right ahead, a choice whether to go through the roundabout and due south or straight across Southern bridge into West Palm.

Crawford looked up and saw the chopper he’d phoned in for. A moment later the Navigator disappeared around the corner—going close to sixty.

A few seconds later they were going into the hard right turn.

“Hang on, man,” Ott said.

Crawford knew that Crown Vics were too fat for good cornering even with their Police Interceptor suspensions. It went into a big slide. He hoped like hell nobody was coming the other way.

A midnight blue Audi 8 was.

It was halfway through the roundabout. Ott had to cut the turn even tighter. Crawford prayed they wouldn’t flip. The tires squealed and the Vic clipped the Audi’s bumper. Then, as if nothing had happened, Ott stomped on the pedal again.

“Hammer time,” he yelled.

“Crazy bastard,” Crawford said, looking back.

He hoped the Audi driver hadn’t gone into cardiac arrest. Then, he turned back and saw the Navigator roar up over the top of the Southern bridge.

Crawford knew if the driver got to West Palm, he could be gone. At least the helicopter was on him. But the hitters had a hundred options. Their best play was probably to go onto a side street. Ditch the car and disappear.

Crawford had his Sig Sauer out and was bracing himself with his left hand on the dashboard. They got to the top of the bridge, then saw the Navigator, a Christmas tree of red brake lights in front of them. Past it, Crawford saw a Chevy Caprice sideways on the far side of the bridge, blocking the road. It was Dominica’s Caprice.

“What the hell’s she thinking?” he yelled.

He stuck his head out the window and aimed his Sig. The driver of the Navigator suddenly accelerated hard. Tires screaming, it was headed for a spot between the Caprice’s ass-end bumper and the north side of the bridge. Crawford didn’t shoot, worried a ricochet could hit Dominica.

“Fucker ain’t gonna make it through,” said Ott.

Then Crawford saw Dominica’s head pop up from behind her Caprice. She ducked down fast as he heard a burst of automatic gunfire come from the Navigator. He saw the windows on the Caprice get blown out like ice falling off a roof. He couldn’t see Dominica. The Navigator flew past the tail of the Caprice with no more than six inches to spare. Crawford suddenly heard loud pops, and saw the Navigator fishtail and go into a slide, heading straight toward a telephone pole. There was nothing the driver could do and Crawford heard the crash, then saw a shower of sparks. The pops were the Navigator’s tires getting blown out. Somehow Dominica had managed to throw down tire-puncturing stop sticks. The big spikes probably blew out all four tires.

Ott flashed through the same space the Navigator had just gone through. Crawford was looking everywhere for Dominica. He didn’t see her, then checked the rearview. Nothing. Ott stood on the brakes with all his 220 pounds and skidded to a stop fifty feet behind the Navigator.

Then in a sudden screeching cacophony of steel wheels on pavement, the Navigator started coming at them, jammed into reverse. Crawford and Ott, leaning out their windows, started firing and in seconds the Navigator’s back window was a fringe of glass shards. It stopped dead twenty-five feet from them.

Through the blown-out back window, Crawford could see the bloody, unmoving head of the man in the passenger seat. He didn’t see the driver and thought maybe he was hit, slumped down on the seat.

Ott reached in his pocket for another clip for his Glock, when suddenly the driver’s side door swung open and a skinny guy staggered out. An RPG Stinger was pressed up against his shoulder.

Crawford had counted three bullets left in his clip. He sighted the guy in and fired three times.

Two in the chest, one in his forehead. The man stumbled, then fell forward.

Crawford looked over and saw the other guy’s head, wire rim glasses dangling from one ear. He was behind an inflated air bag, white powder splotched all over his clothes.

He heard the dispatcher say in his earpiece that they’d have a roadblock set up on the Southern bridge in five minutes.

“We won’t be needing it,” Crawford said. “Just send a couple body bags.”

Crawford jumped out of the car and ran back toward Dominica’s Caprice.

He got to within ten feet of the Caprice and bent down to see if she was under the car. But all he saw was shattered glass.

He heard sirens in the distance and smelled burnt rubber and gas. He walked up to the Caprice and looked inside. Dominica was facedown in the backseat.

He yanked the door open and crouched over her, not sure he should touch her. He didn’t see any sign of a wound.

Then he saw her move imperceptibly, like she was exhaling.

“Dominica? You okay?”

“Oh, thank God,” she said, turning to him and sitting up. She hugged him. “I thought you were one of the bad guys.”

He stroked the back of her head gently.

“You mean . . . the former bad guys.”

FIFTY-ONE

O
tt had a grin as wide as the Crown Vic as he and Crawford walked up to Ward Jaynes’s house. It was five forty-five on the damp, humid morning and the sun had just poked up over the ocean. He and Crawford had covered a lot of ground since the shoot-out. Crawford was on his cell phone.

“—tell you what, Barrett, old buddy, if you make the headline big enough, maybe the lawsuit’ll just go away,” Crawford said, then clicked off.

“Jesus, Charlie, how many reporters you got comin’?” Ott asked.

“As many as I could scare up,” Crawford said, walking up the steps. “Wonder who gets this place after Jaynes moves his operation to a cell at Starke?”

Ott thought for a second.

“One of those poor girls in Bangkok, maybe?”

They hadn’t been to sleep yet and were in that zone somewhere between punchy and wired, partly because of the Box O’ Joe they had shared with a man named Dan Rumbough. Rumbough was Jaynes’s subcontractor, meaning the guy who had hired Fulbright and Donnie. They had gotten his number from Fulbright’s cell phone, looked up his address, and had gone there to take him in. They found him zonked out and wild-eyed, leaning over a small mountain of crystal meth. He was sharing it with a woman who claimed she didn’t know him and had no recollection of how she got there. They turned her loose, pumped a quart of Dunkin’ Donuts into Rumbough and sobered him up. Last thing they wanted was the charge overturned because Rumbough was too high to know what he was saying.

After they double-teamed him for over an hour, telling Rumbough about the various bad options available to him, the assistant district attorney, who they had rousted out of bed, offered Rumbough a deal. Faced with a long prison stretch, Rumbough agreed to cop to an accessory charge and, promptly, gave up a guy he called “the lawyer.” Turned out the lawyer, a man named John Rhodes, was an old friend of Ward Jaynes’s.

When they brought him in, Rhodes acted all innocent and told them all he had done was make a few phone calls. The ADA informed him that those phone calls—conspiring to commission two murders—were going to cost him twenty years unless he fingered his “client.” After weighing that option for about ten seconds, Rhodes suddenly got very loquacious. Said how he used to be a lawyer, but was disbarred for life eight years before. Something to do with a major insider trading charge and—as Rhodes explained it—him “taking a bullet” for Ward Jaynes. Ended up losing his license but said Jaynes owed him big time. Not only that, trusted him, too. So much so that Rhodes became Jaynes’s confidant. The ADA said, “That’s a very nice story, John, but you’re still looking at twenty years at Marion County, unless you give us something big.”

John Rhodes apparently had heard of Marion County correctional, because it took him about three seconds to flip. He ID’ed Jaynes as the man who not only ordered the murder of “the sisters,” but then, he gave them the really big prize: how Ward Jaynes had boasted to him on several occasions about strangling the “greedy little redneck bastard,” Darryl Bill.

Confession signed, Ott and Crawford had gone straight to Jaynes’s house down on South Ocean.

Ott was leaning hard on the doorbell.

A few minutes later a man in his sixties and a bathrobe opened the door. He looked bewildered at the sight of two seemingly sober, but disheveled, men standing there. Crawford had a rip on the left sleeve of his shirt and Ott was a particularly sorry sight. His hair, which normally had a neat swept-back wave in front, was matted down and looked like a deflated mole. His big Windsor tie knot had slipped down to his upper sternum.

“Yes?” the man asked.

“We need to see your boss,” Crawford said.

“Is he expecting you?” the man asked.

“Not exactly.” Crawford flashed him his badge. “Just get him. We got a warrant for his arrest. Might want to tell him it’s Murder One.”

The man reeled back a few steps.

Crawford stuck his foot between the door and the jamb.

The man glared at him.

“I was just going to awaken him,” he said.

“So what are you waiting for, Pops,” Ott said, stepping inside, “ ‘awaken him.’ ”

The man shuffled off toward a circular staircase.

Crawford heard the thumping of a helicopter and shot Ott a smile.

“Here they come,” Crawford said, looking up. “I just love the press.”

Ott flashed him a thumbs-up. “Yeah, me too.”

After a few moments of waiting for the old man, Crawford got twitchy.

“Come on.” He went in and headed toward the staircase, jerking his Maglite out of his pocket.

He shined it upstairs and pulled his Sig Sauer out of his shoulder holster. Ott had his Glock out and his Maglite, too. Their beams of light crisscrossed.

“Jaynes, we got a murder warrant for you,” Crawford yelled up the stairs. “Come on down
now
.”

But there was no response.

Crawford ran upstairs, taking the steps three at a time. He saw the old man coming out of a bedroom. He ran toward it.

“Where the hell is he?” he asked, hearing Ott a step behind him.

“He wasn’t in his bedroom,” the old man said with a shrug.

“Bullshit,” Crawford said, shoving the old man aside, and running into the bedroom. It was twice the size of Crawford’s whole apartment. The covers on the bed were pulled down. There was a huge semicircular porch off the master and the french doors were open.

Crawford ran through the doors out onto the porch, Ott right behind him. He heard two helicopters now.

Crawford looked down to the ground below. It would have been a twenty-foot jump. No way Jaynes was going to make the leap.

He motioned with his Sig to Ott.

“Back inside, Mort,” he said.

Ott nodded and turned.

Crawford ran back in and opened the first door he came to. It was a Gatsby-size walk-in. Ott opened another door. It was the master bath. Crawford opened a third. It was an empty closet, but with steps going down from it.