The Black Palmetto (8 page)

“Here's what we're going to do for you,” the new person said. Then he pulled a gun from his pocket and rammed it into Boozler's ear.

Boozler sprang upright in Ellen's bed, his face dripping with sweat.

“What's wrong Rich?” Sleep slurred her speech. “You have a bad dream?”

Boozler stared at her for several beats, then jumped off the bed and put on his clothes.

“Rich?”

“I've got to go,” he said, maybe more to himself than to Ellen.

“But what's wrong?”

He ran out of the house without speaking again, started the car, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The tires screeched as the cruiser left the driveway and entered the blacktop.

****

After searching the roads of Iguana Key for more than an hour, searching for Sean Spanner's car, Sam and Simone had given up and driven to a seafood grill on the beach of Sugarloaf Key. She ordered a shrimp salad with mineral water, and he chose a grilled snapper sandwich and a beer. They both had coffee after the meal. As the waiter brought the check, the phone chirped in Sam's pocket. He took it out and looked at the display. J.T.

“The Black Palmetto stuff I mentioned earlier
might have something to do with your guy after all,” J.T. said.

“What did you find?”

“Spanner's a fake. The information on his job application at the research center belongs to a real person in Scranton, P.A. who went missing about the time your guy came on the scene.”

“How do you know that?”

“I called all the Spanner numbers in Scranton until I found a brother. He said Sean hasn't been seen since leaving his job a few months ago. The police haven't been able to find a trail.”

“You think our Spanner killed him?”

“Yeah, maybe. It's the kind of thing an assassin might do if he needed a solid identity.”

“Which means he got himself hired at the research facility so he could steal something. Anything else?”

“Not much. I did get in touch with a dude who knew one of the operatives back when the Palmetto was piling up the kills. He said the operation fell apart when two of the operatives went nuts and killed everybody in charge. It was at a place somewhere close to Homestead.”

Huh. Maybe the same place as the research facility. Simone hadn't mentioned that.

“My source also said somebody in Congress had a hand in organizing the group, but he didn't know who.”

“That might be important. See if you can find out who it is.”

“Yeah, I planned to do that.” J.T. paused for a moment. “Sounds like you could use me down there. I can research this stuff from anywhere, and leaving here might get me off the Fed’s scope for a few days. You know how it is.”

Sam had mentioned the money Spanner had taken, and J.T. probably thought it would be up for grabs. The money wouldn't matter one way or another if they didn't find it, and they hadn't made much headway. Zeroing in on the cash might lead them to Spanner. Maybe they needed some greed stirred into the pot. If it turned out that the Palmetto group had something to do with this, he might need some extra firepower, and J.T. could handle a gun as well as anyone he knew. Simone wouldn't like it, though. He glanced at her and she shook her head. Could she hear J.T.’s voice from across the table?

She reached and tapped him on the wrist. “Don't do it.”

Guess she could, or could read his mind.

Averting his eyes, Sam said, “Yeah, come on down.” He told J.T. where they were staying, closed the phone, and relayed the conversation.

Simone listened, her arms crossed, eyes narrowed. When he finished, she said, “I warned you about him. If this blows up in our face, you're going to be sorry.”

Maybe she was angry, or maybe she just didn't want to talk about the Black Palmetto.

“This Palmetto business keeps coming up. Why didn't you tell me about their site being in Homestead?”

Shrugging, she said, “What does that have to do with what's going on here?”

“It might have a lot to do with it. If that facility had records lying around that named names in an illegal assassination activity, maybe Spanner took them and tried to use them to blackmail somebody in Iguana Key.”

Shaking her head, Simone said, “There weren't any records lying around. I told you, we got rid of everything.”

“Maybe you missed something.”

“No, we got everything. Computers, servers, books, papers. We torched them inside a government van, then crushed it and dropped the burned metal block in a hole where no one will ever discover it.”

Sam stared for a moment. “Is the research facility where the Black Palmetto was?”

She sighed. “It's in the same building.”

The Palmetto angle sounded more and more plausible.

“What if somebody had another set of books locked away off site, for protection in case something like this happened?”

At first she smirked, but then seemed to remember something. Sam could see the gears turning in her head.

“You know, we grilled the people who worked there and turned up a few things they’d taken home, but there was this one guy who had left a month or so earlier. A psychiatrist. We never talked to him. But if he did have something, I don’t know how it could have gotten back into the research facility for Spanner to steal.”

****

Sam felt sure he had locked the motel door when they'd left, but it now hung ajar. He put his finger to his lips and then pointed at it. With their guns at the ready, he reached inside, flipped the light switch, and kicked the door open. A body lay on the floor next to the far wall. Stepping inside, he scanned the rest of the room, and then eased past the body to the bathroom. His pulse pounded in his ears as he leaned around the corner of the jamb. Nobody there.

“It's clear,” he said, returning to the bedroom where Simone knelt over the body.

“You have some gloves?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’ll get them.”

Stepping outside, he scanned the parking lot for any signs of life. A calico cat lay in a clump of palmetto, chewing on a dead chipmunk. The cat stopped, peered up at him and bared its teeth, as if to say,
This is mine, man. You get your own
.

He got the gloves and stretched on two of them. Back inside, he closed the door and handed a pair to Simone.

It appeared that the man had died quickly. All the blood seemed to be contained on the front of his shirt. A shotgun lay close to his fingers, and a designer ball cap sat askew atop his head. Sam picked up the gun and smelled the end of the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently.

“His name is Morton Bell,” Simone said, examining the dead man’s driver’s license. “Maybe he's Jake Bell's father. He smells like booze. Probably got drunk and came here to kill you.”

“Yeah. Somebody else must’ve had the same idea and was waiting here. He opened the door, came into the dark room, and the killer mistook him for me.”

Standing up, Simone said, “You're a popular guy.”

“Yeah, right. I wonder how they got in.”

“Somebody could have called that clown at the desk and offered him some money to leave it open. He would have done it.”

“We can't call the cops,” Sam said.

Simone’s eyes widened. “No, they’d haul you off, for sure.”

She made two drinks from what remained of the gin and tonic and handed him one.

Sam took a swallow and set the glass down. “I'll check outside for his vehicle. Any keys in his pocket?”

“Maybe. Hold on.” She pulled a set of keys from his right-hand pocket. One had a Mercedes emblem on it.

After scanning over the few vehicles in the lot, Sam spotted the car on the street. Seeing no security cameras in the area, he stepped over to the Mercedes, got inside, and drove it to their motel room door. A large plastic drop cloth lay on the other bucket seat. More evidence that Bell had come there to kill him.

He tore open the drop cloth package, spread the plastic over the passenger seat, and popped the right-side door. Back inside, he took the cap off Bell's head and put it on his own.

“You like the dead man’s cap?” Simone asked.

“Somebody might see me driving his car, and maybe they'll think it's him.”

Glancing at the plump body, Simone said, “Fat chance of that.”

They carried Bell's body out to the car, wrapped the plastic around him, and positioned him so he would ride low in the passenger seat. Sam buckled him in. The trunk would have been a better place for transport, but it would complicate Sam’s plans for later. Simone brought out the shotgun, and he propped it against the center console, its barrel tip on the floor at Bell's feet.

It was deathly quiet as Sam eased the Mercedes out of the parking lot. Simone followed in his car. Driving toward town, he passed Chopin's, which was now closed, its parking lot empty. He was tempted to pull in and leave the car there, but Chopin probably didn't need that kind of grief, either.

As he neared town, he saw the headlights of an approaching vehicle. It got closer and he was reasonably certain it was a police cruiser. His pulse pounded in his ears. If he got caught driving Bell's car with his dead body in it, it would mean a death sentence. Glancing at the corpse, he wondered if any of Bell's dead face might be visible in the headlights of the police car. With his eyes fixed on the road, he reached and found the seat-belt buckle, and popped it. The body fell over, and the plastic-covered head came to rest on the console between the seats. He snugged the cap down as close to his ears as possible, and slid down in the seat to seem more the dead man's height, which he guessed at about five-six.

A right turn came up and he decided to take it. The cruiser slowed, reached the intersection a few moments after he did, and stopped, as if waiting to turn in behind him. As Sam spun the wheel, he felt the glare of the headlights in his eyes, and turned and reached for the radio, as if trying to locate a station, hoping the person in the police car wouldn't see much of his face. Once on the side street, he peered in the rear view mirror and watched the cruiser sit there, motionless. Then it accelerated on down the road and out of sight.

Hopefully, Simone noticed the cruiser and hung back. Sam lifted the cap and wiped his perspiring face with his shirtsleeve. He made a couple more turns to get back on the highway and began scanning for a place to ditch the car.

As he entered downtown, he passed a building about the size and shape of a trolley car. The sign out front, almost as big as the structure itself, proclaimed that Madame Zena could read your palm and tell your fortune. A Dumpster sat off to the side, between Madame Zena's and a jewelry store. Spotting no security cameras on either building, Sam turned in next to the Dumpster, cut the engine, and got out.

Leaving the door open, he got back into the seat on his knees, and dragged the body over the console to the driver's side and into a sitting position behind the wheel. He removed the plastic, found the drop-cloth bag he'd taken it from, and stuffed the bloody shroud inside. After closing the door, he strode away, carrying the wadded plastic, watching for any sign that someone might have seen anything he'd done. All quiet. Simone hadn't showed, so he phoned and told her where to pick him up. As he eased past Madame Zena's, the door opened, and he dropped down at the corner of the building.

A seductive voice of indeterminate age called out. “Who's there? Is that you, Morton?”

Sam hadn't expected anyone to be sleeping in such a tiny place, and he certainly hadn't expected anyone who knew Morton Bell. He wondered if that might be an omen.

He crept around the building, then through the shadows for a hundred yards or so until he saw Simone coming down the street. Though reasonably sure Madame Zena hadn't seen him, he did wonder about the extent of her powers, and if she had already viewed the undoing of Morton Bell in her crystal ball.

Chapter Eleven

Sam asked Simone to pull to the side of the road next to a wooded area. Finding a place to ditch the wad of plastic took only a few minutes. A large pine lay on the ground, probably blown over by high winds that left the root system hanging above a four-foot-wide hole in the ground. He stuck the plastic into a crevice in the dirt wall at the bottom of the hole and jammed in a sandstone rock to conceal and hold it in place. It wouldn't be discovered for years, if then.

Back in the car, Simone said, “What about the cap?”

He had forgotten about that. It probably contained his and the dead man’s DNA. Taking it off, he said, “I’ll get rid of it later, along with our gloves. I don't think we should stay in the motel tonight.”

“Yeah, me either. Let's get our stuff and head up the road, maybe to Marathon.”

Remembering their earlier conversation about Homestead, he said, “You mentioned a psychiatrist that had been associated with the Black Palmetto, who wasn't there at the end. Why would they employ a psychiatrist?”

Giving him a sidelong glance, she said, “Because the Palmetto wasn't your normal black ops unit. I was told that those guys were crazy. It's one of the reasons they all crashed and burned.”

“Crazy? You mean insane?”

“Yes. Each of the assassins had killed someone or attempted it before being recruited into the program. Somebody high up, probably the congressman J.T. mentioned, had the bright idea that sociopaths would be more effective as hit men than traditional candidates, the rationale being that it's easier to teach a killer how to use weapons than it is to turn a sharpshooter into a killer.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “That's an interesting idea, but I can't imagine anybody actually thinking it would work.”

“Well, they did, but it didn't last long before self-destructing.”

“What happened to the psychiatrist?”

“I heard he turned sour over the whole concept, after a couple of bad incidents, and the leadership sent him packing.”

“You remember his name?”

She squinted her eyes in the glow of the dash lights. “It was Emerson something. Like Whitehurst. No, Whitehall. That's it, Emerson Whitehall. He lived in Miami.”

“Shouldn't be too hard to find somebody with a name like that.”

****

Harpo didn’t know how long he’d been out this time, but he finally felt like standing and pacing around the little shack. His chest wound had been nothing less than a miracle. Maybe a little sore, but no swelling or pain.