At the end of our picnic table discussion, Billy laid down the law to Andres, who assured him that the enforcers he’d told us about had no knowledge of his girlfriend’s home. Billy and I both knew that the criminal grapevine would lead there eventually. Some guy would ask some guy who would know Andres’s girlfriend, or a girlfriend who knew his girlfriend, and they would track the location down.
I offered to let Andres hide out at my shack in the Glades. My quick description of the place seemed to the scare the shit out of the kid, but Billy convinced me that ethically we didn’t want to get in the business of trying to hide him from the authorities.
Instead, Billy left him with orders: “Don’t use your car and stay put right here until I get in touch with you. That’s for your sake, and your sister’s.”
Luz Carmen was another matter. After leaving Andres, we took her home to pack up enough belongings to last a week. While the two of them were inside, I drove Billy’s car around the neighborhood, watching for any kind of surveillance by either the so-called enforcers or the now-alerted cops. We doubted whether the sheriff’s office would jump on an investigation so quickly, but Billy didn’t want to take a chance.
When Luz was packed and ready to go, we drove south to Deer-field Beach, where Billy had a safe house on the sand where he kept out-of-state clients or witnesses when trial dates were close. The Royal Flamingo Villas was a perfect, low-key, unobtrusive collection of one- and two-room bungalows that straddled either side of A1A. Billy’s place was given to him as payment by a client whose ass he’d saved in a lawsuit. The small stucco building sat directly on the oceanfront, out of sight to any traffic. Luz Carmen objected the entire trip to the house until she saw the accommodations, and then agreed: “Yes, this will work.”
When we got back to Billy’s, I told him that I would rent a car while my truck was being fixed so I could take the descriptions of the dealers Andres had given us, and do some tracking. Billy just winked at me as we pulled into the parking area of his building.
“Already t-taken care of,” he said. “I m-made a call while we were at Luz Carmen’s house.” He stopped his Lexus in the outside parking lot in front of a glossy black 1989 Plymouth Gran Fury and tossed me a key ring.
“It’s the p-police pursuit model,” he said. “The client who gave it to me p-put a 360, four-barrel engine in when he restored it. I’m told it is very fast, and very heavy, and can take quite a b-beating without doing damage to the occupant.”
I just looked at him in amazement, and then got out, walking around the Gran Fury like a kid seeing his first Hot Wheels. It was vintage, replete with the old police black-wall tires and small hubcaps. The spotlights were still mounted in front of the side windows, a handle and trigger on the inside. I opened the driver-side door and got in. The interior was pristine and had even been sprayed with that stuff that gave it the smell of new carpet and vinyl. I hit the ignition and felt the rumble as much as heard it when I gassed the motor. When I looked up, Billy had already gone-no doubt with a smile on his face.
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.