Waiting for Sherry to come home, I had the same stupid smile on my face, as I imagined her seeing the Gran Fury sitting in her driveway.
While I sat poolside, I sipped a beer and took out my copy of the list of names and descriptions of the men Andres had met, and the menu of drugs he’d seen at the warehouse. When I’d asked him who the man was who greeted him outside the warehouse before our chase began, Andres told me, “That was Carlyle. They call him Brown.”
“Carlyle” was the real name of the Brown Man. A few years back, he’d been running a lucrative drug corner in Northwest Fort Lauderdale. I’d run into him trying to find the notorious Eddie the Junkman, the ghostly but all too real serial killer Sherry had saved me from by putting a bullet in his head. Eddie was a mentally challenged drug user who roamed the neighborhood in the guise of being homeless. He had needs, the most prevalent being sex and drugs. Prostitutes and young women in his hunting area had learned to turn down his sexual advances after he shared his crack cocaine with them. But Eddie had learned, too.
A huge and thickly muscled man, he entrapped the women with his bulk, then put a broad hand over their mouths while he satisfied his sexual needs. The fact that the women suffocated in the process did not bother him. During Billy’s and my investigation of elderly women being similarly suffocated in a life insurance scam gone ugly, I’d swung a deal with the Brown Man. He’d given up Eddie for the exchange of his own business survival. It was time I revisited Carlyle.
Considering the foot dragging of any governmental agency like the sheriff’s office, Hammonds’s investigators would move slowly on the warehouse address. I might get a chance at the Brown Man before they spooked him.
The other names Andres had given us were probably a.k.a.’s as well. There were two guys known as the Marlin brothers, who may or may not be brothers at all; a so-called supervisor known as Anthony Monroe; and a computer tech everyone called Joey “the code writer” Porter. According to Andres, Carlyle was the man who did most of the drug movement, a line of products considered a sideline by the others, who seemed to tolerate it, but kept their hands off unless there was some reason to party- like when some big government check came in, and everyone was flush.
When asked to list the drugs, Andres had written down mostly prescription drugs like painkillers: oxycodone and Percocet, over-the-counter amphetamines like Dexedrine and Adderall, and opiates like buprenophine, as well as boxes of Xanax and anabolic steroids.
Though the kid’s spelling was atrocious, Billy had been impressed by Andres’s recall of the supply. The kid simply said, “I keep my eyes down when I’m in there, like I don’t want to know nothing, or I’m afraid to look them in the eye. Instead I’m looking at the boxes, you know, the labels and stuff. They pay me to do what I do, not to know what I know.”
I’d asked him if he knew where the drugs went after they left the warehouse. “I don’t do drugs. I don’t know nothing about them, man,” he said, lifting his chin, as if this was a point of pride for him. “My money ain’t drug money.”
Billy’s face had tightened as he’d read through the list of drugs. He knew that every one of them had been on the A-list of adolescent abused prescription drugs for years. “Feeding the children,” he’d simply said, staring into Andres’s eyes.
Andres put his head down, eyes again on the tabletop. “I don’t use them, you know.”
It was the mantra of every low-level drug runner I’d ever arrested or known: Take the money and don’t get involved. Get what you can, do what you’re told, and don’t be ambitious.
It’s ambition that gets the runners and couriers and corner boys shot, left for dead in an alley after they’d try to skim or short, or peddle a little on their own. Andres probably wasn’t ambitious. He probably never put his fingers on the real money in an operation like this. But his sister’s dreams for him had put him in someone’s gun sights now.
The list of drugs somehow made sense: The Medicare scam had to touch the medical community-doctors’ offices, pharmacies, nursing homes-at least on the edges. Hell, Billy had pulled up a story that showed how a hospital in California had been running a similar billing scam, bringing in “patients” off the street, and then billing for expensive equipment and testing that was never used or done. It would not be too slippery a slope to find out that someone also had their fingers in the prescription drug till.
I was running the possibilities through my head when I heard the jiggling of the gate door leading in from the drive. After a few seconds, I heard the door clack shut, the familiar sound of Sherry returning from a day at the office. She rolled in dressed in her business attire: a conservative short-sleeved blouse and a dark skirt. She had adamantly stated while still in rehab that she would never wear a “pinned-up pair of pants” in public. If she wanted to show her incredibly taut and muscled single leg, she would.
“Let them use their imagination,” she’d said. “I don’t give a shit.”
I greeted her as she made it up the ramp.
“Hi.”
“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were going to be with Billy all day.”
“Didn’t take that long,” I said. “We found the sister and her brother. Made sure the sister was safe, and Billy’s going to see if he can put some leverage together to get the feds in on busting the Medicare scam and get her into a protection program while they do it.”
I gave her a quick rundown on the case. Sherry and I tried not to get too deep into the ongoing investigations in which each of us was involved. It could get dicey sometimes.
“And was that car sitting in my driveway any kind of recompense for making a deal with the brother,” she said, a playful look in her eyes, one that I rarely saw these days.
“Uh, nope, that would be the loaner that Billy gave me while the truck is being fixed,” I said, unable to keep from matching her smile.
“Nice. Reminds me of my daddy’s old prowl car,” she said and rolled up next to me in the wheelchair. “I like the side lights. I used to hear old stories of the boys spotlighting deer along the roadside with those things up in Apopka.”
Sherry rarely talked about her family. Her father had been an old-time sheriff up in Central Florida. She called herself an original Florida cracker, born and raised in an area that thirty years ago was more open field and cattle range than the Disney World spillover it now represents.
“Those old spotlights would catch the deer right in the eyes, and they’d freeze up like statues-easy killing.”
“Cheating,” I said. Spotting game was illegal throughout most of the country. Some considered it an unfair advantage. But then the same folks thought nothing of feeding deer for eleven months out of the year under a tree stand. Then on the first legal day of hunting season, they’ll sit up there with a high-powered rifle and blast away- fish in a barrel. I could never see the challenge in it.
“You didn’t personally know any of these spotters?” I said.
“Considering who my daddy was, I probably kissed one every night after the family dinner,” she said, looking out into the light of the pool. “The law gets interpreted in different ways, even by lawmen.”
There was something on her mind and it didn’t have anything to do with deer hunting. She finally looked over at me and asked, “Could you get me a beer?”
“Sure,” I said, getting up and kissing her on the forehead as I headed for the kitchen.
When I got back with two cold beers, Sherry had gotten out of her wheelchair and moved to the side of the pool. Her foot was in the water, lazily kicking up a soft boil. Her stump was on the edge. It looked uncomfortable, but I suppressed the urge to ask if she wanted a cushion or pillow to put underneath. If she wanted that, she’d ask.
I sat down on the deck behind her, looking in the opposite direction, and matched up my back to hers, and leaned into it. I felt her give her weight back into mine, and we adjusted the balance until it was just so.
“So what did you find out?” I asked.
“About?” was her answer.
“Booker.”
I felt her head turn just a bit.
“Did I tell you I was going to look into him?”
“No. But you did.”
