Murder Key (19 page)

Murder Key

TWENTY-NINE

             
On Wednesday afternoon, a week later, I was sitting in Bill Lester’s office, a cup of black coffee in my hand. I sipped it, while Bill worked his phone, talking quie
tly to the people he needed to
reach.

             
The key had been quiet during the last week. In a fit of caution, I’d changed my routine again, doing my jogging on the sidewalk that ran along Gulf of Mexico Drive. I hadn’t heard from Anne, and I didn’t think I would.

             
Logan had flown in late on Thursday, and the next evening we had a few at Tiny’s before I headed down the island to the Colony, my regular stop on a Friday evening. The smooth voice of Debbie Keeton, the jazz singer who performed in the Monkey Bar on weekends, was the best way for me to wind down a week.

             
Logan always had some adventure to relate, and the one for this week was worse than most. It seems that he’d been to a barbeque with his boss on Thursday evening, and he’d consumed a lot of baked beans. His flight from Atlanta to Sarasota late that night was in a small regional jet, and he was crammed into a seat next to a fat elderly lady who smelled of gin and moth balls.

             
The beans were doing their dance in Logan’s stomach, causing the usual rise in gaseous pressure. He would quietly release the gas as he pretended to sleep. The old fat lady would grunt every time he let go. Finally, she took to elbowing him, which, according to Logan, only increased the effusion of noxious odors.

             
When they landed, Logan smiled at the lady, and said, “I hope you enjoyed the trip, ma’am.” He left the woman sitting in her seat,
sputtering in her rage and stabbi
ng futilely at the flight atten
dant call button

             
That image brought a chuckle, and the chief looked sharply at me, bringing me back to the present. Finally, he hung up the phone, rousing me from my
revere
.

             
“What’s so funny?” he
asked
.

             
“Nothing. I was just thinking of a story Logan told us Friday night.”

             
“Okay,” Bill said. “The Blue Lightning Strike Force is up and running. We’ll meet here tomorrow afternoon at five. You and Jock are welcome. Logan will be your liaison
with Sheriff Merryman.
”

             
“Tell me about this Strike Force,” I said.

             
Bill told me that some years before, in a rare spirit of co-operation, the U.S. Customs Service had set up a joint co
m
mand structure with local police that could be activated on an ad hoc basis. Each local department would cross-designate a few officers as U.S. Customs agents. After training, in which the locals learned about boarding practices, space accountabi
l
ity, detention on the water, and other duties not normally encountered by them, they were certified as customs officers. This gave local law enforcement agencies jurisdiction in federal and international waters.

             
Bill laughed ruefully. “Most of the time, the feds just leave us out. It’s a money thing,” he said. “If we confiscate a boat or other property used in the crime, we sell it and the money goes into the Asset Forfeiture Fund. That money is then divided among the agencies involved in the take-down. The fewer the agencies, the more money each gets.”

             
“So, crime does pay,” I said.

             
Bill smiled, “Pays us, sometimes,” he said. “They can’t really cut us out when we initiate the bust. Like now.”

* * * * *

             
It was late afternoon when I left the police station. Jock had flown in from Houston, and Logan picked him up at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport. We’d agreed to meet at the Bridge Tender Inn in Bradenton Beach for a drink
.
I pointed the Explorer north.

             
When you cross the Longboat Pass Bridge onto Anna Maria Island, you leave New Florida and pass into Old Florida. The state has changed drastically in the past twenty years, and what’s left of the Florida of my childhood is sequestered in little e
nclaves like Anna Maria Island.

             
The big condos have not yet invaded, and there are still places where working people can afford to live. The bars are not as trendy, and they’re louder, more real somehow. Small motels run by the same owners for a generation cling to the beaches, their guests returning year after year.

             
But taxes keep rising, and the mom and pop places are beginning to dry up. For some reason, not apparent to the average person, Florida mandates that property be taxed at a rate that reflects its highest and best use. If a forty year old motel with twenty rooms could legally b
e turned into a high-rise condo
minium with twenty units, it
’ll be taxed at the condo rate.

             
This obtuse tax philosophy was driving the mom and pop beach motels out of business. All along the coast, the owners were selling their property to condo developers. Fewer hotel rooms meant fewer tourists, and the gift shops and restaurants that depended on visitors for their livelihood were being forced to close.

             
The reality of this
onerous tax structure is that it signals the imminent death of the Florida of my childhood. It’s turning the state into Baby Boomer Heaven

             
Reality is not something that Florida politicians recognize, so Old Florida is slowly dying, its demise hurried along by developers and the tax man. It’ll all be gone soon, and those of us who love the state will be poorer in spirit.

             
The Bridge Tender Inn takes up space at the foot of Bridge Street, across from the city pier in Bradenton Beach. Jock and Logan were at the bar, Jock sipping a beer from its bottle and Logan nursing a
scotch
and water. I pulled up a stool and ordered a Miller Lite.

             
Jock tipped the bottle toward me. “How did it go?”

             
“We’re in,” I said. “The chief has set something called the Blue Lightning Strike Force in motion. It’ll be a joint effort by Sarasota PD, Customs, DEA, and the Longboat police. We’re going along as observers. Logan, Bill wants you to go to Merrit County and be our contact with the sheriff.”

             
Logan
asked
, “When?”

             
“Tomorrow night. We’re meeting at the Longboat Police station at five tomorrow afternoon. The Blue Lightning people in Miami told Bill that the trawler is moving northeast and should be in position off Longboat by then.”

             
“I hope Emilio’s all right,” said Jock.

             
I raised my glass in silent agreement.

             
Logan pointed to a couple at a corner table. “Isn’t that Marie Phillips?” he asked.

             
I hadn’t seen Marie since the evening at Pattigeorge’s, but there was no mistaking her striking good looks. She was seated across from a man who appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt hanging loose over khaki pants. Marie was in shorts, golf shirt and
sandals. A casual night on the
island.

             
I said to Logan, “Do you know who her date is? He looks familiar.”

             
“I’m not sure, but isn’t he one of the Sarasota County deputies who came to the Hilton the night somebody shot at us?”

             
“That’s it,” I said. “I wonder what he’s doing with a woman whose monthly condo fees are more than he makes.”

             
Nobody had an answer.

             
We ate at the bar, talking quietly about things that had nothing to do with the pending operation. Night had fallen, and we could see the twinkling of mast lights on the sailboats moored in the bay in front of the restaurant
.
N
earby
, the
Cortez Bridge
winked at us with the colored lights mounted on its superstructure
. At some point
,
Marie and her deputy sl
ipped out without our noticing.

             
“Nobody’s tried to kill me in over a week,” I said. “I wonder if I should be insulted.”

             
Jock chuckled. “Probably, you just aren’t worth killing.”

             
I laughed. “That’s a sad state of affairs,” I said.

             
“I’m serious,” said Jock. “Whoever was trying to take you out probably wanted to stop you from talking to the cops. Since they didn’t get you early on, they must have figured you didn’t know anything, or if you did, you already told the police.”

             
“Makes sense, I guess.”

             
“We’re not letting our guard down, though. You never know.”

Murder Key

THIRTY

             
The conference at the Longboat Police station was packed. Rufus Harris and Paul Reich were there
,
drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups with the Starbucks logo. Two uniformed Sarasota police officers, the Longboat Key marine cop dressed in shorts and a golf shirt, a tall thin man in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, and Bill Lester had the other seats. Introdu
c
tions were made by the Longboat chief.

             
Pointing to the black suited man, Bill said, “This is Abe McClintoc from Cu
s
toms. He’ll be in tactical command.”

             
McClintoc nodded. “Let’s get to it, then,” he said. “We’ve got a delicate operation here. We need to get the go-fast boats in and
unloaded
and the immigrants off the premises before we bust the drugs. We’ll have the Coast Guard standing by to intercept the trawler after everything else goes down. We don’t want somebody shooting or dumping the immigrants because they find out we’re onto them. And we’ve got an agent aboard the trawler posing as an illegal.”

             
A Sarasota cop raised his hand. “Do we even know which island they’re going to?” he asked.

             
McClintoc shook his head. “No
. B
ut we know they’ll be coming into Sarasota Bay. At least that’s what they’ve done in the past, and they’re on course for Longboat as we speak
. Once we
find out where they’re going
we’ll be ready to
take
them down
.

             
“We’ll have a P-3 surveillance aircraft out of Jacksonville flying cover
. I
t’ll have the trawler on radar. We also have a tracking device on the trawler that’s being monitored through satellite down
loads to our operations center
in Miami. In case everything else fails, the Florida Marine Patrol platform and its hundred-mile radar will be anchored off Casey Key.

             
“If they surprise us and veer off to Siesta or Casey Keys, we’ll make adjus
t
ments.”
             

             
Th
e platform he was referring to was
a sixty-foot sport fisherman confiscated a couple of years before in a drug bust. It bristled with radar and other electronic gadgets, and was used by the authorities when they didn’t have the P-3. This time, it would be back-up.

             
McClintoc continued.
“We’re pretty sure the go-fast boats
will have outboards. If they’re going up a canal at night, those big inboards with the thru-hull exhausts would make too much noise.”

             
The Customs agent turned to the wall behind him
.
H
e
pointed to a
large
scale
chart of Sarasota Bay and the adjacent coastal waters. “We think they’ll have several b
oats and they’ll come in dif
ferent passes. One will come in here, at Passage Key Inlet.”

             
He pointed to the area just nor
th of Bean Point, the northern-
most end of Anna Maria Island. “He’ll have to come into the channel to get
across the Bulkhead. That’s a
very shallow sandbar across the mouth of Anna Maria Sound. He can then turn in short and run into Bimini Bay.

             
“If he doesn’t do that, he’ll have to cross undern
eath the Manatee Avenue Bridge. He
pointed to a bit of land known to the locals as Gilligan’s Island, that hunkered just above the water near the eastern side of t
he narrow channel over the Bulk
head.
“We’ll station a fully equipped Customs boat there. They’ll let us know if he veers off before getting to the bridge.”

             
“We’ll have a man in the bridge tenders’ shacks on both the Manatee and Cortez bridges. If the go-fast bears off to his left into Palma Sola Bay, we’ll know it when he doesn’t get to the Cortez Bridge. If he goes under Cortez, he’ll have to follow the channel south, inside of Jewfish Key.

             
“We’ll have another boat tied up at Moore’s restaurant to let us know where he heads after he clears Jewfish. This boat will also keep tabs on anybody coming in Longboat Pass. And we’ll have a man in the tender’s shack on that bridge. Any questions, so far?”

             
The Longboat marine cop stirred. “Just to make sure, we’re not to follow them or make any approach to them,” he said.

             
“No,
” said McClintoc.
“It’s impossible to follow somebody on the water without being seen. The Customs boats all have radar and
can
track them without moving.”

             
“Why doesn’t the P-3 just keep tabs on them?” asked one of the Sarasota officers.

             
“Ground clutter,” answered the Customs agent. “The P-3 will probably be able to keep tabs on the boats, but this other is all just back-up in case there’s a problem.”

             
“What about the other passes?” Bill Lester asked.

             
McClintoc took a sip of his coffee. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll have a boat in Big Pass. I’ll be on that one, and Jock and Matt will ride with me. We’ll have to be very careful not to be found out.

             
“If the boat comes in the channel he’ll either have to pass under the Ringling Causeway Bridge, or he can cut off into that little channel that runs between St.
Armands
and Bird Key over by the Sarasota Yacht Club. We can put a man on the Ringling Bridge, but the little bridge just past the Yacht Club has ‘no fishing’ signs posted on it. We don’t want them getting suspicious.

             
“We’ll have to keep tabs on that boat with our radar and heat detecting gear. If one of them goes up the little channel, we’ll move out into Sarasota Bay. He’ll be visible to us when he comes back out into New Pass.

             
“We’ll have a man on the New Pass Bridge, and the Long
boat police boat anchor
ed close into the mainland at mid-bay to keep anything moving that way on radar.”

             
Bill Lester stood up. “Sounds like a plan. Any questions?”

             
There was silence.

             
“Okay,” said Bill, “We’ll see you guys tonight.”