Frostburg, and I’m determined to keep losing, for now anyway. As I leave the restaurant, I see stadium lights and decide to take in a game. I drive to Memorial Stadium, home of the Salem Red Sox, Boston’s Class High-A affiliate. They’re playing the Lynchburg Hillcats before a nice crowd. For $6, I get a seat in the bleachers. I buy a beer from a vendor and soak in the sights and sounds of the game.
Nearby is a young father with his two sons, T-ballers, I suspect, no more than six years old and wearing Red Sox jerseys and caps. I think of Bo and all the hours we spent playing catch in the backyard while Dionne sat on the small patio and sipped iced tea. It seems like yesterday that we were all together, a little family with big dreams and a future. Bo was so small and cute, and his father was his hero. I was trying to turn him into a switch-hitter, at the age of five, when the Feds entered my life and wrecked things. What a waste.
And, other than myself, no one really cares anymore. I suppose my father and siblings would like to see my life made whole again, but it’s not a priority. They have their own lives to worry about. Once you go to prison, the world assumes you deserve it, and all pity comes to an end. If you polled my former friends and acquaintances in my hometown, I’m sure they would say something like, “Poor Malcolm, he just crawled in bed with the wrong people. Cut some corners. Got a bit greedy. How tragic.” Everyone is quick to forget because everyone wants to forget. The war on crime needs casualties; poor Malcolm got himself captured.
So it’s just me, Max Reed Baldwin, free but on the run, scheming some way to exact revenge while riding off into the sunset.
CHAPTER 27
For the sixth day in a row, Victor Westlake sipped his early morning coffee while scanning a brief memo on Mr. Max Baldwin. The informant had vanished. The GPS tracker had finally been removed from a Cadillac Seville owned by an elderly Canadian couple as they ate lunch near Savannah, Georgia. They would never know they had been cyber-tracked by the FBI for three hundred miles. Westlake had punished the three field agents assigned to monitor Baldwin’s car. They lost him in Orlando and picked up the wrong scent as the Cadillac headed north.
Baldwin wasn’t using his iPhone, his credit cards, or his initial Internet service provider. The court-approved snooping on those fronts would expire in a week, and there was almost no chance it would be renewed. He was neither a suspect nor a fugitive, and the court was reluctant to allow such extensive eavesdropping on a law-abiding citizen. His checking account at SunCoast had a balance of $4,500. The reward money had been tracked as it was split and bounced around the state of Florida, but the FBI eventually lost its trail. Baldwin had moved the money so fast the FBI lawyers could not keep pace with their requests for search warrants. There were at least eight withdrawals totaling $65,000 in cash. There was one record of a wire transfer of $40,000 to an account in Panama, and Westlake assumed the rest of the money was offshore. He had grudgingly come to respect Baldwin and his ability to disappear. If the FBI couldn’t find him, maybe he was safe after all.
If Baldwin could avoid credit cards, his iPhone, use of his passport, and getting himself arrested, he could remain hidden for a long time. There had been no more chatter from the Rucker clan, and Westlake was still dumbfounded by the fact that a gang of narco-traffickers in D.C. had located Baldwin near Jacksonville. The FBI and the Marshals Service were investigating themselves, but so far not a clue.
Westlake placed the memo in a pile of papers and finished his coffee.
I find the office of Beebe Security in a professional office building not far from my motel. The Yellow Pages ad boasted twenty years of experience, a law enforcement background, state-of-the-art technology, and so on. Almost all of the ads in the Private Investigations section used this same language, and I cannot remember, as I park my car, what attracted me to Beebe. Maybe it is the name. If I don’t like the outfit, I’ll go to the next name on my list.
If I had seen Frank Beebe walk down the street, I could’ve said, “There goes a private detective.” Fifty years old, thick-chested with a gut pressuring his shirt buttons, polyester pants, pointed-toe cowboy boots, full head of gray hair, the obligatory mustache, and the cocky swagger of a man who’s armed and unafraid. He closes the door to his cramped office and says, “What can I do for you, Mr. Baldwin?”
“I need to locate someone.”
“What type of case?” he asks as he lands hard in his oversized executive chair. The wall behind him is covered with large photos and seminar certificates.
“It’s not really a case. I just need to find this guy.”
“What will you do after you find him?”
“Talk to him. That’s all. There’s no cheating husband or delinquent debtor. I’m not looking for money or revenge or anything bad. I just need to meet this guy and find out more about him.”
“Fair enough.” Frank uncaps his pen and is ready to take notes. “Tell me about him.”
“His name is Nathan Cooley. I think he also goes by Nat, too. Thirty years old, single, I think. He’s from a small town called Willow Gap.”
“I’ve been through Willow Gap.”
“Last I knew, his mother still lives there, but I’m not sure where Cooley is now. A few years back, he got busted in a meth sting-”
“What a surprise.”
“And spent a few years in federal prison. His older brother was killed in a shoot-out with the police.”
Frank is scribbling away. “And how do you know this guy?”
“Let’s just say we go way back.”
“Fair enough.” He knows when to ask questions and when to let them pass. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Look, Mr. Beebe-”
“It’s Frank.”
“Okay, Frank, I doubt there are many black folks in and around Willow Gap. That, plus I’m from Miami, and I have Florida tags on my little foreign car. If I show up and start poking around, asking questions, I probably won’t get too far.”
“You’d probably get shot.”
“I’d like to avoid that. So, I figure you can do the job without raising suspicion. I just need his address and phone number if possible. Anything else would be gravy.”
“Have you tried the phone book?”
“Yes, and there are quite a few Cooleys around Willow Gap. No Nathan. I wouldn’t get too far making a bunch of cold calls.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“That’s it. Pretty simple.”
“Okay, I charge a hundred bucks an hour, plus expenses. I’ll drive to Willow Gap this afternoon. It’s about an hour from here, way back in the boondocks.”
“So I’ve heard.”
The first draft of my letter reads:
