Tampa Star (Blackfox Chronicles Book 1) (17 page)

They sat his Ford Pick-up about one hundred meters down the street from the warehouse trying to decide what to do.  They were parked on the street as it provided an unobstructed view of the building, but they realized they would be easily spotted should anyone be looking for them.

They watched Boris exit the warehouse and Michael cursed under his breath. “I thought that asshole was dead!”  He had heard Boris was doing the same thing for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan when a supposed confidential information blew him up with a suicide vest in a targeted assassination attempt.

“If he is here, Jimmy’s shit is in the wind, we have to move fast,” said Michael.

In Michael’s mind, if Boris was here, that also meant that Thompson was probably involved. Tell the truth, he had never trusted Thompson—it wasn’t just intra-service rivalry between aviators and grunts, the former being used to the easy life in air conditioned trailers and crew rest requirements that mandated at least seven hours of sleep before flying while Michael and his mates lived in the hot muck, dust and filth. In Thompson’s case, it was something much more nefarious—he had served with Thompson on a task force that spirited suspected Iraqi terrorists to other countries, in this case, they flew them to Jordan and Kuwait, where extraordinary means were normally employed and the terrorists were executed when no longer deemed viable.  

Michael treated all the C.I.A. contract interrogators with caution and suspicion. They did dirty work; terrorizing, degrading and executing unarmed captives— he was satisfied with just shooting the armed ones—as they were trying to do the same to him.  So much for morality in war, he thought sadly. 

Thompson was a little too much into the rendition mission— becoming friends and drinking buddies with some of the more notorious members of the contract interrogators and Boris was one of the most notorious as he really seemed to enjoy his work— breaking men down, forcing them to talk and then dispatching them with a bullet in the back of the head.  Michael heard Thompson even participated in a few water boarding sessions.

At the time, he just figured Thompson was buddying up with Boris and his fellow torturers to get access to booze and get an extra
dose of freedom from regulation. Now he knew that Thompson was corrupt and had abducted Jimmy to get to the gold. 

Michael still had the spring loaded baton he took from the hood a few days ago.  It was early Sunday evening and the industrial area was all but deserted.  Boris stood leisurely smoking and slowly walking back and forth in front of the roll-up garage door in the front of the warehouse.  He would be hard to approach from the front, but sneaking up behind him would be no problem, if he was distracted. “Give me two minutes and then drive up and ask him for directions,” Michael instructed his father.

Char, sporting a bewildered expression drove over to where the man stood finishing his cigarette.

“Hi friend,” he started, but could tell by the look on Boris’s face, that Char was being viewed with a high level of suspicion.

“What do you want?” replied Boris.

“I’m looking for a strip club, by the name of the Landing Strip,” he winked, “Ever heard of it?”

“No, now go away from here,” replied Boris.

“You sure?
  ‘Cuz, in my opinion, going to a strip club would be the only way an ugly son of a bitch like you could get any action!”

Boris never got a chance to reply as Michael smacked him across the top of the head with the spring loaded baton from behind—Boris crumpled to the ground like his skeleton had suddenly disappeared.  

“Shit, I think you killed him!”

“No, trust me this Russian has got a thick skull. Now help me throw him in the back of the truck before someone sees us
,” said Michael.  They quickly wrestled the burly Russian into the covered back of the pick-up and locked the tailgate.     

Michael was in full combat mode. He walked into the warehouse with a .45 caliber
Glock in one hand and a baton in the other. Char followed close behind with a Mossberg pump twelve gauge, loaded with Double-ought buck shot.

The RV sat unoccupied in the front portion of the warehouse, which had once been an auto body shop.  Jimmy was being held in the paint room, to the back of the shop. They heard murmured voices and followed the sound.

“Hello counselor, what a surprise to see you here!” deadpanned Michael as he leveled the Glock at Thompson. If Thompson was surprised, it was only for a moment; he quickly withdrew a Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter from the small of his back and pointed it at Jimmy.

“Shoot me and Jimmy gets one in the head; no one gets to find the gold, but if we partner up, we can split it,” said the attorney.

“OK, Gus, don’t do anything foolish, we can talk about this,” responded Michael.

“Sure, put down the weapons and we will talk. Otherwise, Jimmy takes his secrets to the grave.”

Michael knew enough about Thompson to figure he wasn’t bluffing—that if they didn’t do as he instructed, he would kill Jimmy.  More likely still would be that once he and his dad were disarmed, Thompson would eliminate the threat and kill them both, leaving Jimmy to be dispatched later after he had shown Thompson the location of the gold.

Michael said nothing; he raised the pistol with rapid, but measured alacrity and fired twice, both rounds striking Thompson in the chest. He was dead before he hit the floor. “That was my counter offer,” said Michael as Thompson’s body was thrown back against the wall of the warehouse by the
linear force of round’s impact. Michael walked to the body and out of force of habit, shot him once more in the forehead.   

Char ran to his old friend and running buddy and quickly untied him. “You
okay, Jimmy?” He asked with real concern in his voice. 

“Yeah, fine. Now, where is that bastard who tortured me?”

“In the back of my truck,” replied Michael.

Jimmy nodded, “give me a
piece, I got some rendition of my own to do!” 

“Come on Jimmy, we don’t need this,” pleaded Char.

“No old buddy, you don’t have to do anything, but keep breathing.  This I do on my own. I would have killed a pig better than those two assholes did me and you don’t exactly want to leave that guy around to come after us again, do you?”

For a man who had been so merciless with his captives, Boris died in sobbing cowardice. He fell to his knees crying, lost his

command of English and pissed himself before Jimmy put one round in his gut and another in his forehead. 

“What about the RV?” asked
Jimmy.

“Well, I don’t think any of these guys need it, but you shouldn’t take it without the owner’s permission” said Char. 

Jimmy asked “Guys, mind if we take your nice brand new RV?”  He waited a moment and said with an evil grin, “I didn’t hear anything, you?”

“Nothing at all” answered Char.

They were all hungry and decided that Jimmy’s sudden freedom was worth celebrating.  Char found the keys in Boris’ pocket and drove the behemoth to the trailer park while Michael went to Publix for some steaks and seafood.  

Char grilled steaks while they sipped Blanton’s whiskey liberated from their new R.V. liquor cabinet.  They ate steak and lobster tail washed down with a few bottles of a good Napa Valley Cabernet. Jimmy slept his first night outside prison walls in over thirty five years. He tried to stay awake to contemplate that, but the events of the last two days had taken their toll and he was soon fast asleep in the King Bed of his newly acquired RV.  

It was Tuesday morning at
eight twelve when a salvage crew hired by the building’s owner came by to start the laborious process of clearing out the auto body shop equipment so it could be sold at auction. The two laborers entered the building and immediately noticed the sickly sweet odor of rotting meat.  Both men were from El Salvador and had served in the army during the civil war, one of them with the Parachute Battalion (Batallon de Paracaidistas) and had seen more than his share of combat, so they were accustomed to the smell of decomposing bodies. 

They discovered the bodies in the paint room and one of the crew remarked to the other “dos stiffs;” he was still learning English and often spoken in a mix of both languages. “Si,
jefe, dos muertos,” replied his companion.

Eddie was on the way to work when he got a call from the Sheriff Waller, his regular homicide detective was on vacation and other detective was very junior, having just been transferred from Patrol a few weeks previous.

“Would Eddie mind helping them out,” was how the Sheriff put the order.

He stopped to get coffee and an egg sandwich at a drive thru on the way, figuring they weren’t going to get any deader if he arrived a few minutes later.

The new detective, Marcus Ryerson, was already busily engaged in examining the crime scene.

“Not much in the wallet, a driver’s license from Virginia and identification card both in the name Michael Stanley Peters.  The identification card is for Four Oaks Consulting Services.”

“That’s a front company for the C.I.A,” remarked Eddie offhandedly as he examined several nine millimeter shell casings littered on the cement floor.

“How do you know that? Marcus asked skeptically. 

“Read it somewhere when there were all the media reports about flying suspected terrorists to third countries to torture them.”“Oh yeah, I heard about you. You’re the detective with the photographic memory.” Eddie was sick of correcting people, so he just nodded. 

In truth, there were many cops that did not know about Eddie’s freakish ability to remember every minute detail of all the cases he had investigated, conversations, reports, newspaper articles; if it was said, written or read, it was indelibly etched into Eddie’s head.

This was the first murder that Ryerson had ever investigated. He was a young twenty eight years old, but looked much younger—a real fast burner, as they said in the military.

Eddie stepped over to the body and looked at it closely—one hole in the forehead, and one in the belly and the other body had two in the chest, but the groupings were different. The guy with the ventilated chest had two entrance wounds so close together they could be covered up with a quarter,  leading Eddie to surmise that a trained shooter had fired those rounds. 

The other guy was a truly horrible mess. He was shot twice as well, but once in the forehead, which probably killed him as it took off the back of his head and the next shot was in the stomach as an afterthought or maybe it happened the other way around.  He would leave it to the medical examiner to figure that one out.

A different killer shot the second stiff and going by his dental work, his original name wasn’t Peters—it was more likely something like
Petrov or Putin, thought Eddie, but he kept his opinion to himself for the time being.  Then there was the whole matter of the adjustable table—someone had elevated one of the shop’s metal tables so it was on an angle and it appeared that someone was tied to it.  Several empty buckets stood scattered around the table. 

The District Six Medical Examiner was in route and Eddie did not want to do anything to contaminate the crime scene.  He was curious however, as to the identity of the other man.  The wallet had a membership card for the Louisiana State Bar Association—a lawyer, thought Eddie, and not just any lawyer, but Gus Thompson Jr. from the firm who represented one Jimmy O’Brien whose last known address was the Angola State Prison; current whereabouts unknown.

Welcome back to Pinellas County Jimmy,” said Eddie quietly.  

After the medical examiner arrived, Eddie called the law firm of Thompson, Antoine & Henri and notified one of the other
partners, Andre Henri, of Thompson’s probable death. He asked for a next of kin and found that to be his father as Thompson was divorced.  The father, however, was an invalid and so Eddie asked Henri to fly to St. Pete and identify the body.

“You know what he was doing here?” he asked. 

“He had taken a few days off to go fishing,” the man told Eddie. 

Henri agreed to fly down the following day and Eddie gave him the address of the ME’s office.

In more normal times, Eddie probably would have picked him up at the airport and picked his brain about why Thompson was here, but Eddie already knew that Thompson had to have been involved in Jimmy’s escape—it was not something a con that had been on the inside for thirty five years could coordinate from inside. Nope, the lawyer wanted to win the lottery and decided to enter the name “Jimmy O’Brien” in the drawing.

Back at the office, Eddie did a search on the law firm and brought up their website.  Lawyers normally want you to know how damn good they are, so they like to post grandiose bios.  Eddie found Thompson’s biography, beneath a picture taken in better times.  The picture was a dead-on match for the corpse in the warehouse.

Eddie started reading and stopped when he got to the second paragraph detailing his military exploits during Operation Iraqi Freedom. If you weren’t the pilot of the bird that picked up Jimmy, I’ll bet you knew the guy, he thought. 

Eddie headed over to the offices of the Tampa Bay Beacon. Most of their older archives weren’t on line. He was directed to a musty archival room and with the assistance of a clerk quickly found what he was looking for—microfiche detailing the list of passenger on the ill-fated voyage.  It seemed that it was difficult to ascertain who was among the passengers even up to a week after the disaster. Various articles mentioned that one million dollars in gold
coins went down with the ship. Perhaps not, thought Eddie. There was no problem finding a crew list—they were all carried on the roles of the now defunct company owned by Simon Block, the immodestly named Block Shipbuilding & Cruise Lines. 

There was a passenger list drawn from a handwritten manifest that was compiled as the passengers boarded.  Most of the names belonged to some of the better heeled residents of the Greater Tampa Bay area—Tampa, St. Pete and Clearwater.  Presumably, all
of the wealthy had been accounted as their heirs rapidly clamored for any inheritance.  Eddie wondered about the others—the less well-heeled had property as well and presumably next of kin that would wonder what had happened to them. What happens when your average working stiff goes missing? 

Every once in  a while, a corpse will be discovered decayed or mummified in a house because the man or woman had no close personal relations and so, no one to look in on them should they fail to show up for some appointment or job. Eddie felt in danger of being one of those, but he figured that the Sherriff would at least care enough to come by if one day he didn’t show up for work.
But what happens when the person simply vanishes and nothing remains?  A loved one notifies the authorities, they fill out a missing persons report and that usually gets reported in the local news sometime after the fact.  What if there are no loved ones?  And if that missing person was a man or woman of means, they would have beaten a fast path back to Tampa—at the very least to avoid being declared dead and having their assets surrendered to the state. 

He checked archival copies of the paper for the next ten days and two cases of local residents reported as missing and speculating that they might have been among the passengers on the ill-fated voyage of the Star.  One detailed the case of T.J Mulroney and wife, the owner of a large sporting goods store in Clearwater. The other a November 5th 1974 edition of the Tribune detailed the strange case of one Carla Rodgers, owner and general manager of the Happy Dolphin Trailer Park in Madeira Beach.

It seemed that the trailer park had been without its owner for the last six days and the residents had finally taken it upon themselves to notify the police.  There was some speculation that a former boyfriend and resident of the trailer park were being sought for questioning.  There was no speculation that she might be among the passengers of the Star. 

Eddie had driven by the Happy Dolphin Trailer Park many times—it was still in business after all these years. He wasn’t sure what the current owners would be able to tell him about the demise of Carla Rodgers, but he figured he would never know until he asked.