Pine Island Coast Florida Box Set, page 52
part #1 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
“Does he have any favorite hangouts that you know of?”
“I don’t.”
“This address is on your brother’s driver’s license.” Ellie left the question implied.
“My home is a constant in Eli’s life. He knows he’s always welcome, and from time to time he sticks his head in for a few weeks.”
“Did he say anything out of the ordinary or look any different the last time you saw him?”
“So something you need to know about Eli is that he’s always saying things out the ordinary. Like ‘I do wish it would snow tonight,’ or ‘When the saints come marching in heads are gonna roll.’ I know it sounds like he’s nuts, but he’s speaking to himself in his own vernacular. He just says and does random things all the time. Last time I saw him he had just gotten a tattoo of a parrot on his shoulder. A purple parrot.” He shook his head. “Big eyes, deep purple feathers. I don’t get it, but then that’s Eli.”
“Does any mail come for him?”
“Oh sure. But I just toss it out. He’d never open them.” He lifted the lid again and poked at the meat. “I don’t know if someone else pays his bills or if he just doesn't pay them. He just never gives attention to it. He’ll leave after staying a month or so, and a thin stack of envelopes with his name on them will still be sitting on my kitchen counter, untouched.”
“Would you hold onto anything that comes in?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
Ellie stood, and Mark followed suit. They thanked Drew for his time.
“Look, I don’t know what he’s into,” Drew said. “I wish I could say you’re barking up the wrong tree, but you may very well not be. If I hear from him, you’ll be the first to know.”
They said their goodbyes, and Ellie and Mark got back in her truck. As they were pulling onto Collier Boulevard, Ellie said, “Strange, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“How two people can basically have the same upbringing—the same rules, parents, and experiences—and yet turn out completely different from each other.”
“Yeah. After what you relayed to me what Ronnie said about Eli, I half expected his brother to be some weirdo. Seemed like a pretty normal guy though.”
They compared notes during the half hour drive back to the office. As they were pulling in Tyler had called and informed her that his swag for Mango Mania had come in, and asked her to come up later that afternoon so they could open the boxes together. After she dropped Mark off Ellie went home and took Citrus on a five mile run to clear her head and work through the conversation she had with Eli Oswald's brother. When she got back to the house she had just enough time to make herself a green smoothie and take a quick shower before leaving again to meet Tyler.
Chapter Sixteen
The Silverado’s engine ticked as Ellie walked away from it. She made her way across the earthen parking lot and over to the cinder block building that contained Reticle’s offices. Tyler was up front near the stalls talking with his range boss and, by the sound of the conversation, a patron interested in a monthly membership. Ellie dipped inside and walked down the hall to the gunsmithing shop at the back. The room was broad and boasted several tables and tools: a mini-milling machine, belt sander, bolted table-top vice, and a grinder. A 14" x 40" gunsmithing lathe sat on the rear wall, Reticle’s newest piece of equipment. Rifles of all types were racked on tables, ready to be to custom altered or cleaned by a pro. Two cardboard boxes sat on the table in the center of the room, one large, one small. A blue and yellow logo was stamped across the sides: “Genius Print.” She walked over to them and resisted the urge to open them. She thought it was cute that Tyler already had a successful business but could get so excited about a couple boxes of trinkets with Reticle’s logo on them.
The sound of boot heels echoed down the hallway. Tyler asked as he walked in, “You didn’t open them, did you?”
“Of course.”
He slipped a pocket knife from his jeans, flipped the blade out, and it clicked as it locked into place. He looked at Ellie with bright, anticipatory eyes. “Ready?”
“No. Can we build the suspense a little more?”
“No...we can’t,” and with a few quick motions Tyler had severed the clear tape. He closed the blade and returned the knife to his pocket. Ellie slid the small box closer, and Tyler grabbed the large one, both of them peeling back the flaps and looking inside. Ellie’s box was filled with metal keychains bearing Reticle’s logo, available, it seemed, in three different colors: blue, red, and black. She pulled a red one out and examined it. It was circular, a little smaller than a half dollar. It was dense, heavier than Ellie had anticipated.
“These are great,” she said.
Next to her, Tyler sighed.
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, said nothing, and handed her a koozie.
She gave it a once over before a laugh slipped out that she couldn’t suppress. She set her fingers to her mouth to stifle the next one. “Oh, Tyler.” Tragedy and hilarity had coalesced into a koozie. She laughed again.
“This is funny?” he asked.
Ellie looked back down on the koozie. Genius Print, as it was, had misspelled Reticle’s name, replacing the “R” with a “T”: “Teticle.”
“Do you know what that word looks like?” he said.
“Certainly,” she snickered. “And everyone else will too.”
“Unbelievable.” He reached into the box and dug through the rest of them. “They’re all like this. Every one of them. What am I supposed to do with these?”
“You could donate them to that guy who has his billboards all over Fort Myers. That doctor who claims to have done over ten thousand vasectomies.”
“How do they get the keychains right and get the koozies wrong?”
“Genius Print,” Ellie said slowly, and then laughed.
“Genius Print, my butt,” Tyler said. “I’m not going to be able to get them to fix this in time.”
“A lot of places do overnight.”
“I don’t want to pay the extra,” he said. “I’ll just get these folks to refund me.”
“At least the keychains are nice.” She handed him one.
“Yeah. At least these aren’t named after a body part.”
“I want that one,” she said.
He gave it back and sighed again.
Chapter Seventeen
He kept his eyes closed as the waking nightmare descended onto him once again. He thought that this must be how people feel the morning after they wake up in the slammer with a pounding headache and a charge hanging over them for vehicular manslaughter, all because they had left the party too late and told Dougy they didn’t need a designated driver and then drove away, swerving down the street with a BAC of .23.
But Kyle Armstrong wasn’t drinking last night—he was tonight though, oh boy, was he—and he hadn’t hit anyone with his car. No, but what he had done was wait until Yo-lan-da left the office this afternoon and then booted up her laptop. He knew the password; Laurie was the one who had created it. It was a company computer after all, and Kyle had every right to access it. He spent the next two hours looking at spreadsheets and document revisions, digging through accounting software, each passing moment growing more and more paranoid, until Carlene had called him, mildly frustrated that he wasn’t home yet and informing him that dinner was on its way to getting cold.
Now, Carlene was inside, the kids asleep, and Kyle sat on his porch swing with a bottle of Evan Williams at his feet and a mason jar a quarter full of the stuff firmly in his grip. His entire adult life, whenever stress got to him, he went for whiskey before rum. He didn’t know why that was. He always woke up feeling about a full barrel worse than he did with the rum.
Early last month, when Ringo approached him about moving his drugs, he thought that would be it. Sliding some of his packages into a few boxes of rum, sending it north, picking the skin off his thumbs until there was no more left, having the product delivered safely; do that three or four times and he would be done with the grimy pollutant that was Ringo. But Kyle had been accused of being myopic more than once before. Yet somehow, in spite of this weakness, he had built a highly successful business in an industry that was quickly becoming oversaturated. Even today, he had gotten an email from California. A chain of liquor stores called Golden Agave wanted his rum. And not just a little bit; more than he had on hand. This stuff didn’t just appear out of thin air. It took time: three, six, twelve, fifteen years, et cetera, et cetera. But Wild Palm had only been cranking along for five years now. He wasn’t one to speed the process or add caramel color to his batches to deceive the very deceivable masses. His father had taught him to do better than that.
His father.
A kindly but strong man’s man who had turned a small hardware store in Kansas into a chain across the Midwest before he sold out to Ace Hardware thirteen years ago for millions. Kyle had inherited his father’s ability to create and sustain something meaningful.
Kyle had taken the family home to Kansas for the holidays last year, and after presents had been opened and all the wives and kids went into the kitchen for hot chocolate, Kyle's father looked over at him from his high back chair near the fireplace and said, “I’m so proud of you, son.”
Kyle had never been the soft type, and, like his old man, he never cried. Ever. But in that moment—one of those moments that a young man seems to yearn for and forms the basis of all his work on—after his father had said those words, his emotional furniture was rearranged, and he swallowed the rock in his esophagus, turned his head, and blinked four times. He was successful. The tears never came.
“Thanks, Dad.” In those eight words a full conversation had elapsed, one that sent Kyle back home to Florida with the energy and self confidence of a high school quarterback in front of the cheerleading squad.
But all that had changed after Ringo showed up and forced Kyle’s hand. Kyle was now using this business as a means to move cocaine into the heart cavities of his country. And as of three days ago he was laundering money too. Laurie was going to ask questions. She had already started after Andrés and Chewy left, after Yolanda stayed and he had to tell her someone else was now handling the accounting.
“But I handle that,” Laurie had said. “And what I can't do Vic Hapner handles. He’s the best accountant in the county, you know that, Kyle. What’d you go and hire someone else to do it for?”
And all Kyle could say was that they were growing and he wanted to bring it in-house. That seemed to satisfy her. Except Yolanda was not the most genial of people. Yolanda was all business. Flat expression, didn’t say much, got her work done, and left. Laurie liked to talk—grandkids, Florida State football, local gossip—and soon she would figure out little Yolanda wasn’t interested in being her friend or yapping about why Tina Caldwell didn't make it to the Silver Ladies luncheon. Once Laurie got stale about all that, she would start poking her nose into things. It was all a little too much.
The words reverberated through the air, just as they had when Kyle’s father had spoken them eight months ago.
I’m proud of you, son.
The happy tears did eventually come; they had come later that evening as Kyle sat alone on his father’s front porch with a glass of Glenlivet. They were the kind of tears that you could quickly wipe away if your wife opens the front door and comes out to ask you if you had brushed the kids’ teeth. Still though, they were true tears. His dad had told him he was proud of him, and now Kyle was nipple-deep in the dark underworld of drugs and dirty money. And that didn’t happen to be the worst of it. No, the worst of it was that Kyle let Ringo threaten his family, let Ringo wiggle his mangy hands down his crotch, down past his belt line, and grab him tight by the balls. Kyle had the resources to hide if needed. Somewhere far away even. He could have called the cops and told them who it was that was blackmailing him and what other product Wild Palm had been distributing. Sure, they may not have believed him at first, but they would have come around. Until then Kyle could have taken the family and driven up to the Finger Lakes and disappeared, waiting for it all to blow over.
But he didn’t.
It would have been nothing to get in Ringo’s face that Sunday when he came over and told Kyle he would be using Wild Palm to move some of his blow.
But he didn’t.
He could have given Andrés and Chewy the finger two days ago, told Yo-lan-da to scram, and then hauled tail to New York.
But he didn’t do that either.
And the most afflicting thing about it was not that he had failed to stop it before it started. No, the worst part about all of this was that Kyle Armstrong was a coward. His spine was made of papier-mâché. No one could be proud of a coward, and wasn’t it Shakespeare or Julius Caesar who said that cowards die many times before their deaths; that the valiant taste death but once?
Kyle felt dead.
It would be the first of many.
His wife, with whom he shared all, was inside checking email on her laptop, maybe watching reruns of Parenthood. Her husband was a drug dealer.
His son and daughter were in their beds asleep, dreaming of whatever innocent kids dream about—Optimus Prime and Elsa? Their father was a drug dealer.
Worse, even. He was the guy who made sure the drug dealers’ businesses thrived. Without men like Kyle their operations simply limped along, no wind in their sails.
He downed the last of the bourbon and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He couldn’t speak up now. It was too late. The last six weeks had seen him move hundreds of kilos across state lines. They would cut him a deal for squealing, but Andrés had been correct when he noted that Kyle would still be looking at ten years easy. Maybe twenty. He knew because he had Googled it, and Florida case law in this instance was easy to come by.
Somehow, in just a very short amount of time, Kyle had managed to fall into a nightmare of grand proportions. He was a drug dealer now. Another cog in the grand ol’ machine that kept the cartels high on the hog.
His glass was empty. He needed another drink. He reached for the bottle of Evan Williams and bumped it. It fell out of reach. He stood up, too fast, and felt the space between his ears turn to fuzz. He reached out and grabbed the porch swing for balance, but the swing, as porch swings tend to do, moved beneath his weight. Kyle pitched forward and, with nothing else to grab onto, planted his face into the pine floorboards and saw a spangled flash of tiny starlight before sleep came early.
Chapter Eighteen
The Mango Mania Festival was held the third weekend of August and saw the celebrated fruit being brought in by the truck load, most of it coming straight from the north end of the Island.
Local growers, besides furnishing mangoes, brought along every possible mango dish and fixing. Tables and pop-up tents were filled with dried mango, mango ice cream, mango soup, mango mustards and jams, mango curry, and dozens of other recipes. Trying to list off all of them brought to mind Bubba Blue on the bus, rattling off to Forrest Gump all the possible ways there were to cook shrimp. The festival brought Saint James City its busiest weekend of the year, with nearly all of the island’s ten thousand inhabitants showing up to take part and thousands more pouring in from all over the state.
Fish houses set up tables with fryers, offering up local catches of crab, fish, and shrimp. Merchants selling festival t-shirts, conch shells, and fish were perched all along the southern tip of Oleander Street and halfway down the Norma Jean pier.
Jean Oglesby had a large pop-up tent set up right next to The Salty Mangrove, the most sought after location for merchants on this busy weekend. Jean had once confided in Ellie that every time the festival came around, she made enough money selling her art and merchandise to pay her mortgage for the next twelve months. Judging by the size and location of Jean’s home, that was not a small amount of money.
Tyler and Ellie walked up the ramp that led to the bar. Tyler had driven in from Cape Coral, parked at her house, and they walked down to the marina together, navigating congested parking and whining golf carts. With the crowds came traffic. Cars would line Stringfellow Road for a mile on each shoulder, and the island’s governance ran shuttles all the way from Pine Island Center seven miles north.
Ellie had considered bringing Citrus but had finally decided against it. Citrus didn’t do leashes. He would have gotten down here and been so excited that this many people had come out to see him that he would have run off the end of the pier in sheer, uncontainable excitement. And there was no doggie ramp.
Live trop-rock music greeted them as they walked past The Salty Mangrove and out onto the wider boardwalk. Joel Henderson’s laid-back tunes sounded like a musical marriage between Jimmy Buffett and Glenn Campbell and that, along with the suds being poured freely at the bar behind them, had everyone in a relaxed mood, feeling as if they were in their own slice of paradise. Major was moving at a near-frantic pace behind the bar like a mother trying to feed a gaggle of toddlers at snack time. He beamed when he noticed her and waved just before a patron stole his attention away. Ellie had offered to help him this weekend—his busiest of the year—but he had insisted otherwise.
“Hey, look at this,” Tyler said. Ellie followed him over to a couple children juggling mangoes. A small crowd had gathered and was oohing and aahing over their skills. The children, a boy and a girl, no older than ten, were in a coordinated rhythm, flicking mangoes to each other. Ellie counted nine in the air at a time. “I can do that,” Tyler said.
“Sure you can.”
“I mean, really. I juggled chainsaws in Texas. At spring bluebonnet festivals. People ate it up.”
“You can’t even hold your truck keys without dropping them.”
“I said chainsaws, Ellie. Car keys...those are a whole different beast. Very slippery. Lots of pieces.”
