seven
At the ATF impound lot, Bill Tasker looked over the old Chevy 1500 truck that Bernie Dashett used for his exterminator business and to deliver the Stinger missile. Camy had gone into her office and left him to look through the toolboxes that ran around the entire truck bed walls. The toolboxes had been unlocked, but nothing appeared missing from inside. Anything that had been loose in the truck bed had been thrown into the cab.
He opened the door and had to step back from the stench of tobacco and something else. He couldn’t be sure what caused the musky odor, but felt confident it had to do with Bernie Dashett’s occupation.
A metal cage with springs inside sat on the seat. Tasker lifted it and examined it closely. This had to be the cage Wells said he fixed. He set the large cage outside on the ground. The cab was still a mess. He couldn’t tell if it was always like this or was the result of the search by impounding agents. An empty duffel bag lay crumpled on the floor in front of where the cage had sat. He found a lone sheet of paper that wasn’t stained and wrinkled. An official receipt from Naranja Engineering, for forty dollars, for repairs and alterations on a possum trap. The receipt was dated two days earlier. The day of the arrest.
Inside the office, Tasker told Camy Parks and Jimmy Lail what he had found.
“So,” said Jimmy, “the banger just slid word in with his story.”
Tasker looked at him. “What?”
Camy interpreted. “He knew what happened and used it to fit his story.”
Tasker said, “Was the possum cage in the bed of the truck?”
“We weren’t sure what it was, so we left it in the cab but, yeah, I think it was in the back when we seized the truck.”
“Did you guys seize anything of evidentiary value?”
Camy looked at a sheet on her desk and said, “Nope, just a precaution.” She saw Tasker’s expression and said, “Billy, don’t worry, it’s airtight. With his past connection the FBI has documented, he’s all done.”
Jimmy added, “Yo, my brother, we got that dawg in pound. For true.”
Tasker stared at him, weighing the value in punching an FBI agent.
He made it home after five. The girls were ready to rumble, having been cooped up all day in his town house. His older neighbor, Mrs. Hernandez, who treated Tasker like a relative, always trying to feed him empanadas or some other outstanding Latin dish, watched the girls for him. She enjoyed the two girls and sometimes took them to her daughter’s house to play with her three granddaughters.
Now the girls wanted to roughhouse with him, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept going back in his mind to see if Wells’ story could be true. The key factors were the FBI agent seeing the exchange and the FBI intel report on Wells. But Tasker knew firsthand how FBI allegations could spiral out of control. If he hadn’t jumped to his own defense, he’d be at MCC right now on charges the FBI had dreamed up based on worse info than this.
“Daddy, can we eat at Chili’s?” asked Kelly, the oldest.
“Anything you angels want,” he agreed without thinking.
On the drive over there, he ducked the usual questions about girls and boys and if he was dating. His girls had a good outlook on just about everything, and that included reconciliation with his wife. He’d held that hope for a while. Now he was less confident. He could trace where things had gone wrong. He was in Miami in the first place, instead of the West Palm Beach office where he’d started, because of a shooting incident up there involving a corrupt West Palm cop who had been his friend. For a while, some people had thought he was corrupt, too, maybe even killed the cop to hide his role in it, but that was crazy, and eventually everyone realized it. The case had garnered a good deal of publicity, though, and he had started to drink. More important, he’d changed. He changed from good-natured to gloomy, his marriage had broken up, he’d been transferred to Miami. It had only been the last year that he realized it had been all his fault.
Ironically, it was the recent ordeal with the FBI that had brought him and Donna back together. He now figured that if they were meant to be together, things would work out. Maybe he was going back to good-natured, but he wasn’t sure.
After dinner, instead of heading back north toward his town house, Tasker headed east to US 1, then turned south.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” asked Emily, her bright eyes happy to take in whatever new landscape they passed.
“Just thought we’d drive around a little. You don’t get to see much of this area. That’s all gonna change. I don’t intend to work as much as I have, so we can spend plenty of time together.”
He cut through Pinecrest so the girls could see the nice houses.
“Why don’t you live there, Daddy?” asked Emily.
“Costs way, way, way, way too much.”
Kelly said, “Sarah Colgan at school says you’re rich.”
“How does she figure that?”
“She says no one ever found the money they said you took, and her dad says you still have it.”
Tasker chuckled at that. “You can tell Sarah Colgan she is full of beans.”
As they passed the mall at Cutler Ridge, Kelly asked, “Is that where you got the bad guy?”
He smiled. “Sure is. How’d you know?”
“Mom showed us the news story and said they got the FBI confused with FDLE, but that you were the one who stopped that bad man. She said we should be proud.”
“Did she?” He smiled all the way down to Southwest 264th Street, where he turned right.
“Where are we?” asked Emily.
“They call it Naranja.”
“You know someone here?”
“Sort of,” said Tasker, as he drove past Daniel Wells’ house. The lights were on in the living room and he thought about the kids whose dad wasn’t there.
eight
Early Monday morning, after a good weekend with the girls and a pleasant conversation with his ex-wife when he dropped them off, Tasker found himself again in Naranja. He had already been by Wells’ house twice. Once at six-thirty, then again at seven. Finally he saw movement about seven-fifteen. It was early, but he didn’t have much time. He parked on the street and walked up to the front door over the long, narrow driveway.
A wiry boy about six with a buzz cut showing just a haze of blond hair answered the door. Tasker flashed back to his childhood summers of sunburnt heads from Mom’s buzz cuts the day after school let out.
“I bet they call you Buzz,” said Tasker, leaning over with a smile.
The kid slammed the door. Tasker heard him yell. “Mama, there’s some weird guy at the door.”
After a minute’s wait and some peeking from behind the curtains, a surprisingly beautiful woman answered the door. She seemed different from the other day somehow, more striking. Her blue eyes and light complexion made her look Scandinavian, but her accent marked her as a southerner. Not Florida. Alabama maybe.
“Can I help you?”
Tasker showed his badge and identification. “I’m Bill Tasker.”
“I remember you.” Her tone wasn’t harsh, just cautious.
“Mrs. Wells, I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”
“Daniel says he tried to explain at the jail, but you wouldn’t listen. You don’t understand. My Daniel is a good man. A smart man. He has three years of college. He only left the University of Florida to help his daddy when he got sick. He’d never do nothin’ like you said.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Even in a night-gown with the boy hanging on her leg, this girl exuded grace. The words “southern belle” came to mind. There was something else. Something that didn’t fit with his image of a southern belle.