Mortal Dilemma Read online

  “It’s fine, Matt. I owe Jock a lot. My life, probably. I’ll do everything I can.”

  “I appreciate it. Can you put him on the phone?”

  I heard Paul in the background telling Jock I wanted to speak with him. “Hey, podna,” Jock said, “how’re they hanging?”

  His voice sounded fine, just like the old Jock. “Loose, Jock. How’re you doing?”

  “I’m okay. I think spending a little time here with Paul is just what the doctor ordered.” His voice had changed quickly, now carrying a hint of resignation. “Are you and J.D. okay?”

  “Yes.” It was time to tell him. See what kind of reaction I got. “I killed three of Youssef’s men yesterday before I left Key West.”

  “Including the one you told me about yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many does Youssef have with him? Do you know?” Suddenly, his voice was back to normal, his cadence businesslike, a professional marshaling the facts he needed in order to put a plan into operation.

  “Five altogether. Plus Tariq, the one you met yesterday. He’s in isolation in the Monroe County jail. That leaves Youssef and one more. I have their names and Dave Kendall is trying to find out what he can about them.”

  “Have you talked to Dave?”

  “Several times,” I said. “Have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  He sighed. “I’ll call him today. I ought to come join you guys in Longboat.”

  “Jock, promise me you’ll stay where you are for now. If you come here, I’ll just worry about you, and I don’t have time for that.”

  “I’m better, podna. Maybe I can help up there.”

  “Are you ready to kill Youssef?”

  “No. I don’t think I‘ll ever be ready for that,” he said. “I’m done with killing anybody. Ever.”

  “I’m ready,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. You stay put until I do.”

  “What are you doing, Matt?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll let you know when it’s over. Do I have your word that you’ll stay with Paul until then?”

  “Yes, but you be careful. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I don’t have a choice, Jock. If I don’t take care of Youssef and his guys, they’ll get J.D. or me, and then you. I’ve got things under control.” I hung up thinking I had badly overstated my situation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2

  WE WERE TRAVELING north on the Intracoastal, maintaining an idle speed, enjoying the sun and the lack of humidity. I told J.D. about my conversations with Jock and Paul. “One minute he sounds like the old Jock, and the next minute there’s a change. He sounds tentative, not sure of himself, depressed, maybe. He wanted to come up here, but I talked him into staying in the Keys until I can sort things out. I asked him if he was ready to kill Youssef and he said he might never be ready for that.”

  “As soon as we can get this mess straightened out, we need to get him up here. Maybe get one of Dave Kendall’s shrinks to come down and work with him.”

  “What did Ken say?” I asked.

  “He did a lot of work overnight, but the results are a bit confusing. There was one connection that has some interesting possibilities. There were several big checks made payable to Wayfarer, Inc.”

  “That’s the name of Bates’ boat.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But that makes everything a little too neat. I doubt it’s related. When we get back to your house, I’ll go online and find out what the secretary of state’s office can tell us about the corporation.”

  We were nearing the Tide Tables restaurant on the south side of the mainland end of the Cortez Bridge, across Cortez Road from the Seafood Shack. We decided to go under the bridge and cruise the Shack’s marina on the off chance that Bates’ boat was moored there.

  Just as we cleared the bridge, J.D. said, “It’s there. On the first pier.”

  And there she sat, the hull coated with the residue of salt left from a rough crossing. The boat looked as sloppy as its owner, a pigsty that I thought probably smelled like a couple of hogs had died in there.

  We reversed course and motored back under the bridge and tied up at a dock next to the restaurant. We sat on the patio and ate while watching the boats go by on the Intracoastal and the commercial fishing boats as they headed up the channel to sell their catches at the fish houses that lined the shore and still operated on weekends. A twenty-eight foot Coast Guard boat idled by us, coming from the Coast Guard station just up the channel, probably on its way to a safety patrol among the large number of pleasure boats that ply our waters on beautiful Sunday afternoons. It was an idyllic setting in which to enjoy a shrimp po-boy sandwich and a cold beer on a pleasant fall day.

  * * *

  When we got back to my house, J.D. called the dockmaster at the Seafood Shack and found out that Wayfarer had checked in on Thursday morning. The captain said he’d sailed in from Campeche, Mexico on the Yucatan peninsula. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t come from Mexico,” J.D. told me. “He must have come directly from Carrabelle. How long would that have taken him?”

  “Probably close to twenty-four hours. If the weather was bad, maybe longer.”

  “That means he would have left Carrabelle early Wednesday morning. The dockmaster said the captain was around the marina most of the day. That means he couldn’t have had anything to do with my being shot at on Thursday afternoon.”

  “Sounds right to me.”

  J.D. booted up my computer and went to the Florida secretary of state’s website and looked up Wayfarer, Inc. It was a corporation that had been formed almost four years before and listed the address of its principal place of business in an office building in Tallahassee. It had a three-member board of directors. Their names meant nothing to me. Neither the president’s nor the corporate secretary’s names rang any bells.

  J.D. Googled the names, but none of the board members showed up. That was a very strange result in this day and age when almost everybody in the world can be found on Google. The president was another matter. He was a licensed private detective in Tallahassee, and although he kept a low profile, there was a little information since he had to be registered with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. He was a fifty-year-old man named Wally Delmer who had held a private investigator’s license for fifteen years. His office address was the same one listed by the secretary of state for Wayfarer, Inc. She could find nothing on the official website that would tell us whether he, or any other PI, had ever suffered any disciplinary action. Wally himself did not have a website.

  “Do you know any Tallahassee cops?” I asked J.D.

  “I just happen to know the chief,” she said. “Very well.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Nothing like that. He was my boss when he was the homicide commander at Miami-Dade PD. He left just after I did and took the job as chief of police in Tallahassee.”

  “Couldn’t do without you?”

  She grinned. “Very likely.”

  “Can you get him to dig into our boy Delmer?”

  “We can find out. I’ve got his home phone number.”

  “It’s Sunday,” I reminded her.

  “Not a problem.”

  “I need to call Dave Kendall,” I said and walked out to the patio.

  “Is Jock okay?” Dave asked as he picked up his phone.

  “Hard to tell. I talked to him this morning. Paul Galis says he just sits and stares at the TV with the sound off.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, but our conversation was kind of strange. It was like I was talking to two different people, the old Jock and the new Jock. He sounded perfectly okay one minute, and then he’d change. Any news on your end?”

  “Yes. We’ve found the other half of Youssef’s bunch. All five of them were holed up in a half-ruined building in Aleppo. Two of them left for some reason early this morning, their time, and one of
our people followed and took them out. We’ve got eyes on the other three, and I’m pretty sure this is their last day on earth.”

  “Any progress on finding your leak?” I asked.

  Dave was silent for a moment, and then said, “Matt, have you noticed anything different about Jock in the last few months? I mean, before he came to Longboat this time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Absent minded, maybe. Not as focused as he usually is.”

  “He’s very tired, Dave, if that’s what you mean. Tired of the traveling, tired of the danger, and most of all, tired of the killing. He keeps talking about retiring, leaving the agency and moving to Longboat. I’ve always thought it was just his way of blowing off steam. But this time, when he came back, he was pretty much at his rope’s end. What’s this got to do with the leaks?”

  “Jock is the leaker,” Dave said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Jock has always been meticulous, a hunter who goes in, does his job, and gets out without leaving a trace. He’s a ghost, and the bad guys have always feared him because they never saw him coming.

  “This time he made a big mistake,” Dave continued. “In Aleppo. It wasn’t even a rookie mistake, because no rookie would ever make it. I wonder if he might have done it on purpose.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard the term ‘suicide by cop’?”

  “Sure. Some yahoo decides he wants to die, but he’s too chicken to kill himself. He uses a gun to confront an armed police officer and the cop kills him.”

  “I think Jock may have done that in this case. Sort of a ‘suicide by terrorist.’ It probably wasn’t even a conscious act on his part, but I know he’s always been haunted by the death of Abdullah al Bashar. Then he meets the bomber and finds out that he was one of the little boys who watched Jock execute his innocent father. On top of that, the other little boy, Youssef, is now grown into a terrorist and tells him their mom’s dead because Jock killed their dad. That might have been enough to throw Jock into some kind of psychological break. At least that’s what our shrinks think.”

  “I still don’t understand what Jock did. What happened, Dave?”

  “Our people in Aleppo interrogated the two they caught up with this morning. They both told the same story when they were questioned separately. Jock told Youssef his real name. Jock Algren. We think they followed him to Longboat Key.”

  I was stunned. “Why would he do that?”

  “That’s the psychological break our shrinks are talking about. They think it was his way of saying the hell with it. ‘I’ve done such bad things that I need to die.’ They think Jock was in so much pain that he couldn’t live with himself and he was arranging his own death in hopes that Youssef would find some peace knowing that he would kill the man who’d destroyed his family.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Jock probably wasn’t thinking those things consciously,” Dave said. “And the consensus is that he would have no memory of telling Youssef his name. The shrinks also think Jock’s reason for going to Longboat Key was to say good-bye. To you and J.D. and a life he dreamed about living. He loved your island and the people on it. He talked about retiring there, starting a new life. After the events in Aleppo, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t have a future. So he went straight from Aleppo to Longboat and, in his way, said goodbye. When he’d done that, his plan was to go somewhere and die. Maybe to make himself available to Youssef so that there would be meaning in his death. At least that’s the shrink’s version.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2

  “WALLY DELMER IS a bad guy,” J.D. said, joining me when she finished her phone call to the Tallahassee police chief. I hadn’t moved from the patio after I’d talked to Dave Kendall. What he said had made some sense, but I wanted to let my mind work through it as I tried to concentrate on my still-unfinished newspaper. I sipped a Diet Coke, enjoying the sun and the cooling breeze that blew from the north, ruffling the bay’s surface.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “The chief says he’s a well-known sleazeball. He works in the shadows and nobody seems to know what he does. His income isn’t large and he lives frugally. His office is in an old run-down office building in downtown Tallahassee, so his rent isn’t very high. The chief said it’s a one-room affair.”

  “Doesn’t sound like very grand digs for Wayfarer, Inc. How big were the checks from Peter Fortson to Wayfarer?”

  “Ken said they were all six-figure checks. I didn’t ask for the exact amount.”

  “How many checks in all?”

  “Five,” she said. The first one was written by Peter Fortson a month or so after Rachel’s death. The other four were spaced out about six months apart. The last one was fairly recent.”

  “That’s a lot of money going to a corporation that doesn’t seem to do anything and shares a one-room office in a run-down building.”

  “There may be another connection. Reuben found that connection between Fortson and Wally on Fortson’s computer. Fortson and D. Wesley Gilbert emailed each other regularly. The lawyer didn’t seem to represent Fortson or either of the trusts or anything, but Gilbert told Fortson at one point that Wally wasn’t happy with him; Fortson, that is. I’ll bet the Wally mentioned in those emails is Wally Delmer.”

  “That would make sense,” I said. “Fortson was sending some big checks to Delmer. It sounds like Gilbert might be some sort of go-between.”

  “Ken’s going to keep digging. Maybe Parrish can move quickly and we can hear something tomorrow. The fact that Peter’s dead might make things move more smoothly in Orlando. I’ll see if Glenn knows anything about Gilbert. If not, maybe he can dig up some information on him.”

  “I called Dave Kendall while you were on the phone with the chief.” I told her about my conversation and the shrink’s thoughts on Jock’s actions.

  “That can’t be true. Jock wouldn’t do that. He’d face this thing head-on.”

  “They think Jock had some sort of psychological break with reality. That would certainly explain his recent actions. The more I think about it, the more I can see the signs leading up to it.”

  “How so?”

  I told her what I’d told Dave about Jock’s concerns about his way of life. “And he hasn’t been himself since he arrived here almost two weeks ago.”

  “No. He hasn’t. I hope the shrinks are wrong. If Jock truly has a death wish, I’m afraid there’s nothing much we can do.”

  “We’ve got to try,” I said. “I want to get Youssef and his buddies and then start thinking about how to get Jock well.”

  “There’s something I still don’t understand. Even if Jock gave Youssef his name, how did they track him? There are over three hundred million Americans. That’s a lot of people to sort through to find one man.”

  “I asked Dave about that. His people are trying to run it down. They think it may have been as simple as following Jock back to Longboat Key. He made his way from Aleppo to Beirut, and took a flight from there to London, another from London to Atlanta, and another one to Tampa. There aren’t many airports in the Middle East that have direct flights. It wouldn’t have been too big a deal to have each of those airports watched for a man with Jock’s description. Once he got on the plane to London, somebody would have called ahead and had that plane met and Jock followed to his next gate and so on. Jock rented a car at the Tampa airport. No big deal to follow him right to my house.”

  “I can’t believe Jock wouldn’t have spotted that kind of surveil-lance. He’s been doing it for years.”

  “The old Jock would have spotted them and taken some action,” I said. “But we have to remember that we’re dealing with a broken and very fragile Jock right now.”

  I watched as two men in a center console boat idled up the lagoon on which my cottage sat. One of the men was looking through a pair of binoculars, scanning the shoreline. He swept over
us and continued his sweep.

  “Let’s go inside,” I said. “I don’t like the looks of the boat coming this way.”

  J.D. didn’t hesitate. We went inside and closed the sliding glass doors. I picked up my own binoculars and trained them on the boat. As it got closer, I saw the fishing gear, two rods and reels stowed in the rod-holders on the gunwales. I recognized the men in the boat. They were locals, a couple of older guys whom I’d see occasionally at one of the restaurants or bars on the key. Just a couple of friends out for a day of fishing.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “They’re locals.” But I’d been spooked. I didn’t like the idea of my island, my little refuge from the world, becoming a place where I had to be on guard all the time.

  “Let’s go to Orlando tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’ve got to work.”

  “This is work. We can talk to Ken Brown and Glenn Howell, have lunch with my old law partner and maybe get a line on what’s going on with D. Wesley these days.”

  “I think I can swing that.”

  “I’ll call Ken and tell him we’ll be at his office in early afternoon. Can you set us up with the detective for midmorning?”

  “Sure,” J.D. said. “It’s almost four o’clock. What do you want to do with the rest of our day?”

  I tried for my Groucho Marx imitation, an exaggerated wiggling of my eyebrows, a bit of a leer.

  “Besides that,” she said.

  “How about drinks and a light dinner at the Haye Loft? Sammy’s working tonight and I’d like to spend a little time talking to him. He always lightens my mood.”

  * * *

  Apparently my Groucho impression worked and we didn’t get to the Haye Loft until almost seven. The place was full and both Sammy and Eric Bell, the bartender who’d worked there for thirty years, were busy. Eddie Tobin was at the piano, playing and singing. J.D. and I took two seats at the end of the bar, the only two left.

  “They’re back,” J.D. said.

  “Who’s back?” I asked.

  “The snowbirds. I’m glad. I like the island during the summer when it’s so quiet, but by October, I start missing all those Yankees.”