J.D. Trafford - Michael Collins 02 - No Time to Die (4 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Michael and Kermit arrived at Jane’s office the next morning with a large container of Joe-To-Go from Cosmic Coffee in Fort Myers and a box of
Krispy-Kremes.  Good coffee was essential and worth the drive.

Jane sat alone at her desk. All the lights were off.

Kermit raised the box of doughnuts above his head with one hand.

“
Breakfast of champions,” he said while Michael turned on the lights.

Kermit put the box of doughnuts and coffee down on one of the tables in the center of the room.

“Please turn the lights back off and stop talking.” Jane swiveled around in her chair. She slouched low. “And please take a few steps back. You’re making me sick.” Jane wore jeans, no make-up, flat hair, and large sunglasses. “Your voice hurts my head.”

“
Just part of life.” Michael unscrewed the top of the coffee container. “You actually get used to Kermit’s sound and smell after awhile.” He poured Jane a cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Now we have to find Tommy.”

“
Seriously?” Jane asked.

“
Seriously,” Michael said. “So what’s the plan?”

###

They pulled off to the side of the road. Michael looked out across the field and saw about 50 heads bobbing up and down between the rows of tomato plants. He had no plan of his own, but this one hadn’t sounded particularly good. In fact, it sounded a lot like he and Kermit would end up being visited by Deputy
Maus again and spend the next few nights in jail.

“
I’m not thinking that any of them are going to talk to us,” Michael said.

“
I know one who will talk to me.” Jane unlocked the door and got out. She was three steps into the field before Michael and Kermit caught up to her. Jane still had her sunglasses on, but the coffee and sugar had kicked in. Her fight was back.

“
I’m just not sure this is,” Michael dodged a hole in the dirt, “particularly subtle.”

Kermit had the same doubts as Michael.

“Are we going to end up back in lock-up? I’m not an animal that does well in a caged environment.” Kermit took a step around a tomato plant. “Plus the jail’s fluorescent lights mess with my brain, yo.”

Jane stopped, turned, and her two followers almost collided into her.

Jane looked Kermit in the eye. Mischief washed across her face.

“
I don’t know if we’re going to end up in jail or not, but at this point in my career, I don’t really care. Do you two want to find Tommy or not?”

###

Subtlety may be many things, but it has never been defined as two white lawyers and a dreadlocked stoner standing in a field of migrant farm workers.

Jane’s “friend” was immediately spooked by her presence.

“
Trying to get me fired?” He looked around. Then he picked up his basket and started walking away, waiving them off.  “Leave me.”

“
I need to talk to you about Tommy.”

“
He’s gone.” The man continued walking, but Jane kept after him. “You harass me. You keep calling me. You keep coming here. I got nothing for you.”

“
That’s not true.” Jane caught up to the man and grabbed his arm. The basket that he was holding shook. A few hard, green tomatoes fell to the ground. “I want to know where he is.”

“
Let go of my arm.” The man pulled free, knelt, and picked the tomatoes up off the ground. He put them back in the basket. He started to walk away, again.

“
I’m not in the mood, Roberto.” Jane followed. “You owe me.”

Michael and Kermit watched from a short distance. To the extent that someone had overlooked their presence before, everyone noticed them now. The workers around them stopped picking. They stood, stared, and listened.

Michael figured that they had about five minutes before Deputy Maus found them and hauled them back to jail.

“
Roberto, don’t walk away from me.” Jane took three fast steps and caught his arm. With a deliberate swipe, she knocked his basket of tomatoes to the ground.

“
What are you doing?” Roberto looked at two hours of work scattered in the dirt.

“
I’m trying to help your cousin.”

“
Help?” Roberto shook his head. “You got him killed.”

“
He was dying anyway and you know it.” Jane looked around. She didn’t care who heard her. “These fields – the chemicals that you’re breathing right now – the fields were killing him.”

“
You’re crazy.” Roberto knelt again to pick up the scattered tomatoes. This time Jane knelt next to him.

“
Listen, Roberto, I know everything about you.” Her voice was soft, but sharp. She had Roberto’s attention. “I know
everything
. You know what that means? Do you really understand what that means for you?” She held up a finger. “One phone call and you’re going to prison. Just one.”

“
You can’t do that,” Roberto said. “It’s confidential.”

“
It’s actually called attorney-client privilege.” Jane jabbed Roberto’s chest with her finger. “And I’m at the end. I’ve got no other options.” She got even closer to Roberto, quietly pleading. “Give me a name. Give me something to go on. Anything.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

They waited until dusk to meet again. Jane had work at the office, and Michael and Kermit needed to call Pace and his family. It wasn’t an easy phone call and there wasn’t much to say. Tommy was still missing.

The only lead they had gotten was from Tommy’s cousin, Roberto. But calling it a “lead” was a stretch. Michael didn’t want to unnecessarily raise their hopes. 

He had also thought about telling the family about the protest and about Tommy’s cancer, but Michael held the information back. That’s what lawyers did.

A lawyer should never give a client bad news without having something else to offer. Michael had been trained to tell people bad news, and then paid to tell them how it was going to be fixed. If he hadn’t known how to fix it at the time, he waited until he did know. If he couldn’t fix it, then he’d spend his time thinking about how to blame the problem on somebody else.
That’s what lawyers did
, Michael thought. They held information back. It was usually better that way.

The bottom line was that making the family wait a few hours or a day to get the full picture wasn’t going to hurt them or hurt Tommy.

Michael and Kermit pulled in front of Jane’s office on Main Street. He parked the rental SUV. Michael got out, leaving Kermit inside with the engine running. He waved at Jane.

Jane was in the back of the office at her desk. She saw Michael wave through the front window, put her file away and came out the door.

As she locked the office, Michael looked at the large front window.

“
Nice and shiny.” The contents of the paper bag thrown from the pickup truck had been cleaned off. Its remnants were gone. “Kermit and I could’ve done that for you … or maybe just Kermit.”

“
Very gentlemanly.” Jane laughed.

Michael opened the door of the SUV.

“That’s me, a complete gentleman,” he said. “Been washing windows all afternoon?”

“
Not all afternoon. Got most of the poop off with one spray, and then worked on some green card applications.” She shrugged. “I’m still a lawyer, sort of.”

“
Me too.” Michael shut the door. “But not really.”

As he walked around the front of the SUV, Michael ran his hand through his hair. As he did it, Michael looked down the street. Behind them, just around the corner, he saw the front of a blue Taurus. It was parked with two people sitting inside. He was being watched.

###

The trailer complex sat about two miles off of Gopher Ridge. It was a bigger cluster than the one where Tommy had lived. This one had about 20 trailers. They were all white and beaten. Rust crept up their metal seams. Every window screen was either torn or missing, and garbage bags filled the spaces between each unit.

Michael parked the SUV, and the three ventured into the complex. As they walked, Michael noticed a few people in the trailers sneaking peeks through the windows.

“Any ideas about where to start?” Michael didn’t want to knock on a door again. The last time he had done that he and Kermit had been arrested.

“
Where there’s smoke; there’s fire,
mi amigo
.” Kermit pointed to a small stream of smoke tracing up into the air a short distance behind the trailers. “Looks like the party is back there.”

They walked past the trailers and a handful of dented garbage cans and dumpsters, and into a clearing.

There were about 20 men sitting around a bonfire. Foil packets filled with food lined the edge of the fire, reflecting the orange flames and absorbing the heat. In the middle of the fire, there was a metal coffee pot. When Michael saw the coffee pot, he couldn’t help himself from smiling.

He remembered an infamous case he had read in law school. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had held that immigration agents were justified in checking the papers of men sitting around a fire with a metal coffee pot in the middle. The court opined, “The agent’s investigation and detention of the men was reasonable under the Constitution, because only illegal immigrants brew coffee in metal coffee pots in the middle of an outdoor fire.”

Michael, Kermit, and Jane continued to walk up to the group of men, and then stopped. The men looked up. A few whispered, “
immigracion
,” but none ran.

Jane stepped forward.

“I’m from the Community Immigrant Legal Services in town. I think I know some of you. I’m looking for my client, Tommy Estrada. He’s missing.” They sat in silence, staring at her. Nobody said a word, and then Jane repeated herself in Spanish.

Again, no response.

“Somebody knows where he is. I need your help. We were trying to make your life better, but now he’s gone. I know some of you were in a van. You were going to the fields on the morning he disappeared. You stopped and waited for Tommy, but he didn’t come. I want to know what you saw.”

A young man with a thick black moustache and a barrel chest stood up.

“You are only making things worse.” A few of the men nodded in agreement. “Tommy was making trouble, and whenever there is too much trouble, they just deport us and bring in new people.”

“
They can’t do that. They need you to work the fields,” Jane said.

“
Jolly Boy struck a deal,” another man said, standing. “They come get us, deporting us in waves – not all at once – that way the companies keep going. Fields still get picked.”

Jane looked back at Michael for help. She knew they were right. In fact, the politicians in Florida were incredibly proud of their solution for “orderly” deportation. Everybody wins, except the field workers.

Michael put his hand on Jane’s shoulder, and then took a few steps closer to the men.

“
I think they killed Tommy.” His stomach lurched, unsure whether he should continue. He was just supposed to follow Jane and keep his mouth shut.

Michael looked at the men, and then he looked at Jane. Neither knew what actually happened to Tommy, but she didn’t stop him. So he kept going, hoping somebody would come forward with more information.

“They took him and they killed him. Nobody wants to say it, but it’s obvious. He had a family that I care a lot about. I’d like to hold these people responsible. If you care, call Jane. Go to Jane. If you don’t care, say nothing. It’s your decision. But know that you’re probably going to disappear next.”

As they turned and started to walk away, Kermit smiled.

“You’re always Mr. Happy.” He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “That’s what I like about you.”

Michael laughed, his mind already drifting to the blue Taurus and Agent Frank
Vatch. He wasn’t planning on saying anything, but he needed to make something happen and get out of Jesser. Whoever was in the blue Taurus wasn’t going to wait forever.

CHAPTER NINE

Morning came early. It was a hot day in
Jesser. The temperature already hovered around 92 with no breeze, baking the dirt. Standing in the middle of a field, a person could hear a soft crackle as the earth dried out, moisture evaporating.

The farmer sat atop a shiny green John Deere tractor with a 23-row applicator attachment, meaning it could fertilize 23 rows at one time. The cab was new and soft. A 7-Eleven Big Gulp of Mountain Dew rested in the cup holder. Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Trashy Woman” played loudly on the stereo.

He rumbled across the vast field of soybeans. The sky was clear blue with no obstructions.

It was a good day to be a farmer, he thought. Nobody looking over his shoulder. Nobody telling him what to do.

His wife could deal with the screaming kids and the credit card bills.

He was working. And, more importantly, he was working
his
way – six hours to drive tractor, listen to music, and maybe smoke some weed.

In total, he farmed about 3,000 acres. He owned 1,000 and rented the rest of the acreage from neighbors and absentee landlords who were looking for a tax write-off and a government subsidy.

The farmer drove the land in loops. At the eastern property line, he cranked the wheel and circled back. At the western property line, he cranked the wheel and did it again. The whole thing had a simplicity and rhythm. 

After a few hours, it was time to switch music. He turned the tractor, and then slowed it down to a stop.

He put on AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” and then opened the glove compartment and found his bag of weed. There were a few joints already rolled. He took one out of the bag, put it in his mouth and lit up. He took a big drag and let it settle over him. Then, with new tunes and a new state of mind, he was ready to go.

He put the tractor into gear, moving slowly at first. He was about a quarter-way down the row, about to accelerate, when he saw it.

There were two pale tree branches ahead, one large and one thin. He wondered how pieces of wood that size got into his field and whether he could just roll over them.

Kids, he decided, teenagers partying in the fields again, probably hauling in wood for a fire and a keg. He remembered those days. Good parties. Good memories.  

As he inched closer to the wood, he saw an even larger chunk of the tree. It was dirtier and misshapen.

The sun hit it just right and a light reflected back. Odd.

He stopped.

The farmer stared at the reflected light, and then figured out that it was shining off of a large silver belt buckle.

His eyes followed the edge of the dirty stump as it tapered down. At the end of the stump, he saw a pair of cowboy boots.

“
What the hell?”