Just after 2:00 a.m. my phone rang. I shook the sleep out of my eyes and picked up, expecting a wrong number, but the caller ID showed Beecham.
“Yeah?”
“Frank,” he said, his words slightly slurred. “Frank. My ship has come in. I’m flush and I need some help.”
I didn’t have the faintest clue what he meant. “So tell me,” I said.
“Five grand,” he said. “Five grand for you to pick me up, take me to an airport, and put me on a plane to Charleston.”
“Legal?”
Beecham didn’t wave five grand around for nothing.
“All legal. I’m at the Seminole Casino Immokalee. I won big but I think someone has ideas.”
“So take a cashier’s cheque, mail it, and drive away.”
He laughed. “They want that money. Think how they’ll react if they don’t get it.”
Jack Beecham stood six foot one, with all the muscles twenty years on the offshore rigs as a roughneck could build. Not a good man. Too quick with his fists for friends or family. He had broken everything that meant something to him. That’s the type on whom God’s good fortune falls out of the heavens.
I looked at my watch. Lake Worth to Miami and along Alligator Alley. Call it two hours. “I’ll be there in three. Stay where you’ll be safe. And stop drinking.” I hung up before he could start yammering at me.
I didn’t like Jack Beecham. I respected the hardness of his fists and the way he’d laugh if you gave him a hard shot, but I didn’t like his angry destructive race to the end. Still. Five grand.
Augie was up for a ride in the middle of the night, for a big one. He’d been in the Marines and Semper Fi was tattooed into his soul. I could trust him to keep his head when things got hairy. Besides, he had a car and knew how to drive.
After I dressed, I slipped into a little spot in my boat, the Pelican, a place under this and behind that and pulled out a sealed plastic box. Inside was a Colt Police Positive with a short barrel and chambered for .38 calibre. The Colt is for needful times. It’s small, light, and doesn’t toss brass all over the place.
I put on a jacket and slipped the gun into a pocket. I walked out of the marina into the parking lot, where Augie picked me up.
Ten minutes later we were onto I-75 heading south at seventy miles per hour, in the black of the night.
“Beecham,” I said as he answered. “We’re in the parking lot. Red Ford Taurus.”
“We?”
“I can’t drive and protect you at the same time. We’ll pull up to the front. You walk out the doors and into the car as I step past you. Understand?”
He did. Beecham had four inches on me, but he knew when I put my mind to it, I am like that Natalie Grant song. I will not be moved.
Augie pulled into the sweeping driveway before the casino and rolled up to the entrance. I stepped out of the car and put a ten spot in the doorman’s hand and told him to open the rear door. Next, I started for the entrance.
Beecham saw us and came out at a fast walk, not a panicked run. Behind him trailed a couple of hard boys, just getting ready. I was walking slowly. The thugs didn’t even notice me. I kicked one in the balls and thumped the other with the roll of nickels in my fist. I turned and sprinted back to the car. Augie pulled out sharply, making the tires squeal.
Beecham was shaking in the back. The adrenaline in his system had him so wired he practically bounced out of the car.
I turned. “Money.”
He handed me an envelope. Hundreds. I peeled ten off and shoved them into Augie’s breast pocket. I put the envelope inside my jacket.
“Smooth,” Beecham said. “You made that smooth. I’ll bet we’re home free.”
“Frank,” Augie said. “Lights behind us, coming up fast.”
“Lose them.”
His Taurus wasn’t exactly factory and Augie liked nothing better than speed, except cooking. He just pushed the pedal down and it felt like we were in a rocket on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
We left them behind but not as quickly as I would have liked. We flew down FL-29 toward I-75. Should we go along 75 through the big cypress swamp to Miami, hook back into Fort Myers on 75 North, or drop down to the Tamiami Trail and head for Miami? I didn’t like any of these routes.
“Can you lose them?” I asked Augie.
“I have an idea,” he said.
He killed the car’s lights. Now we were flying blind. Then he put the car into neutral and turned off the engine. Now we were flying in a rapidly slowing car without power for the breaks. In a newer car this would have locked the steering.
He pulled hard to the right and slid us off the road into a little fruit-stand lot. He stood on the brakes and pulled us into some bushes coming to a stop, with the green waving around our windows.
Thirty seconds later the pursuing car raced by.
We waited. We waited some more. Ten minutes later the same car roared by on the far side of the road. After they had passed, Augie started his car and we headed off once more.
“Route?” Augie asked.
“You’re driving. You choose,” I replied.
“There’s a non-stop flight from MIA to CHS on American Airlines at 2:45 p.m.,” I said to Beecham. “Unless you want to fly charter.”
“No,” Beecham answered after a second. “I don’t think we’ll need that.” How wrong he was.
As we drove, he told us how God’s fortune had simply fallen into his lap.
“I’d been playing pretty much the whole evening. Blackjack went nowhere. The dice at the craps table were cold, so I wandered over to the roulette. I’m not much for the wheel, but something told me to stay.
“I started with a couple chips. Alternating red and black and the pile began to grow. I was up a thousand when I decided to go for a corner bet. Something or someone must have moved my pile. When the wheel stopped on 24, I saw my entire stack sitting firmly on the number. It paid off thirty-five to one. Even after the 35 percent withholding, I was up more than fifty thousand.”
He paused. The car rolled through AlligatorAlley in the night and silence. Neither Augie nor I spoke. It was his story to tell.
“Well, when you win that type of money people notice. And I guess I was a bit loud. They took me for a dumb red-neck and I could read what they planned in their eyes. If I’d taken a cheque, they would’ve just picked me up immediately and before they’d finished with me, I’d be begging to sign it over to them. No, I thought. This goes to Darlene. So I called you, Frank.”
I nodded. Darlene was the only good thing Beecham had made in his entire life, the only thing he hadn’t ruined. She would be seventeen now. He’d shown me her picture more than once. A shy-looking skinny blonde with her mother’s features and her father’s size. First string in girls’ basketball all through high school.
“She’s in Charleston. I’m going there and I’m giving her this. It’ll pay for four years of college. Darlene’s brighter than me or her mother.”
The flight was scheduled tomorrow afternoon. Where should I stash him until then? Did I believe his story about the roulette wheel? Stranger things had happened. Beecham had spent more time in casinos than in churches. I always thought he was punishing himself for something. Perhaps he just needed to lose every cent before he could go back out to the rigs in the gulf, the one place he really felt at home.
“Lots of hotels near Miami International,” I said to Augie. “Think of anything better?”
“I have some friends from the Corps down there. Might find something further off the radar if you want?”
“Do it.”
He didn’t find us five-star. We spent the night in the car in a garage at the back of a property in Homestead. Around ten we picked up breakfast from a hamburger drive-thru.
“So we drop you off at the entrance?” I asked Beecham.
“No. I want you to take me through to the gate. I want you with me until I walk into the plane.”
“Going to need a ticket to get past security.”
“You have your passport?” he asked.
I could have said no but it didn’t sound like much. Augie could wait for me in the short-term parking until the flight was in the air. I took my pistol out of my pocket, showed it to Augie and slipped it into the glove compartment after he nodded. The TSA wouldn’t approve of it.
Augie pulled up to Departures and I stepped out first and opened the door for Beecham. There are two ways to cover a man. You walk in front of him, but then everyone behind you is the black zone. Alternately you walk behind him, in which case he can walk into trouble. I chose the second. Why? At least I could keep an eye on Beecham.
We strode up to the counter. He bought two refundable tickets from Miami International Airport to Charleston International Airport, nonstop. No baggage. He paid for them with cash. Maybe they see a lot of that in Miami. Nobody blinked.
We walked to security, where they asked questions and scanned us with wands.
Then we waited, drinking bad coffee and thinking our own thoughts. Thirty minutes and I’d be shut of him. When they announced his flight was ready to board, Beecham wanted to use the airport facilities.
“I just don’t fit well into those airplane bathrooms.”
So I let him.
As he entered the bathroom, I noticed something from the side of my eye. I didn’t know what it was but I knew Beecham and I had made a mistake. Whoever wanted the money knew about Darlene and Charleston and this flight.
I raced into the bathroom.
Two of them. Beecham had one by the coat lapels, whapping him in the face with all his might, while the other smashed his fist time and again into Beecham’s kidney. I saw blood.
I took the second one with a straight open-handed blow that caught part of his jaw and rattled the dust out of his attic. He turned to me. He had blood on the shank in his hand. I didn’t wait. I kicked him in the shin, the kneecap, and the groin – bang, bang, bang.
The first fellow was taking the punishment Beecham was handing out and whipping him with a homemade sap. I stepped in, keeping clear of the sap, and rabbit-punched him in the back of the head. As he turned all sloppy eyed, I grabbed the arm with the sap and dislocated his elbow.
Beecham sank to the floor, blood from his back turning the tiles a burgundy red.
“No,” he said. “No. We have to make that plane.”
“They won’t let you on; if they did, you might bleed out before it lands.”
“No. Have to get the money to Darlene. You don’t understand. Have to do the right thing.”
“Dying’s not the right thing.”
Someone walked in.
“Call an ambulance,” I snapped and turned back to Beecham.
He tried to stand but didn’t make it. He looked surprised, as if his body had never betrayed him before.
“Damn,” he said under his breath.
“Here,” he continued, taking off a money belt which was bloody in places. “Here’s her address. Tell her Daddy wanted to give her this stuff himself but he couldn’t make it. Can I trust you, Frank?”
I smiled. “You have to decide that yourself.”
“Damn you,” he said. “Always was a hard case. Now go.”
I got out of the bathroom seconds before the airport security arrived. The money belt was stuffed into my armpit, held there by keeping my elbow in tight. I caught the last call for the flight. Inside the cabin, I called Augie and told him what had happened and hung up.
Buckling in, I noticed blood on my hands. The flight attendant noticed too.
“Bad paper cut,” I said and asked for a wipe. She brought one but gave me a disapproving look.
I had one hour and forty minutes to figure out how to stay alive at the other end of the flight.
After the plane was in the air, I used the washroom. I checked the money belt and opened each packet of bills, looking for a homing device. Nothing. The mugs knew Beecham well enough to know where he planned to go. There was more than the big fifty Beecham had mentioned. Enough to kill a man over.
In Charleston, I ducked into a washroom. They knew about the flight to Charleston. Did they know where Darlene lived? I hadn’t seen anyone and I hoped no one had spotted me. Sometimes the bull wins and sometimes the rabbit wins. When the wolves are on your trail, it’s a call you have to make.
A new rush of people into the bathroom meant another plane had landed. Time to exit with the crowd, and I did. Down where the cabs waited I took the next in line.
“Where to, Mac?”
I gave him a fifty. “A FedEx store.”
I bought two boxes and packed them myself. I addressed one to Augie, with a note for him to hold it for me. If I didn’t make it, he might as well have the rest of the five grand. The second went to Darlene with fifty grand in it. I just wrote a note.
“Your father wanted you to have this. Keep it quiet for a while.”
I sealed both packages and paid for three-day deliveries. When I came out, the cab was still waiting. I gave him the address and he took me there. The money belt was still comfortably full.
I had the cab wait as I knocked on the door. When Darlene opened the door, she looked older than her father’s picture. I waved to the taxi and he took off.
In my pocket, I had my phone open, with the speaker turned down to nothing.
“Darlene,” I began. “I had to leave your father in Miami. He wanted to come but he had an accident.”
She led me into the house. Someone pushed the muzzle of a gun against my neck. It felt cold. I didn’t move. My hand in my pocket dialled 911.
“Yes, Jack’s sick. Trouble was he didn’t have the money, did he?” the second thug who stepped from the dining room said. He had a gun as well. “We figured you might be coming here.”
“So you’re robbing us at gunpoint,” I said. “What if I hadn’t come?”
“The ladies would have told us who you were, eventually,” he replied. “Now, where’s the money?”
Slowly, I lifted my shirt and unbuckled the money belt. It fell to the floor.
The nasty one started toward it, looked at me and said to Darlene, “Sweet pea, pick it up and give it to me.”
She picked it up. “There’s blood on it.”
“Damn right, probably your father’s blood. Tough guy. Most guys get a shiv in the kidney and they’re down for the count. Not him.”
He herded us into the living room, where Darlene’s mother sat. “Sit down over there. Bennie, get the car.”
He stood over us, the gun in one hand and the money belt in the other. He was weighing something. He wanted to get clean away but he also hungered for more, to mix his type of fun with this business.
“Mr. Hotshot, let’s see what’s in those pockets.”
Airline ticket stubs, a paperback book. Some tissues. My wallet and, last, my phone. If he checked the call history, I was dead.
“Buddy, Beecham didn’t pay you?”
“When we got here. That was the plan.”
“Sucker.”
With taking his eyes off me he said, “Benny, go and get the car started. I'll be there in a bit.”
Benny went out the door. Suddenly I felt cold. I was sweating. What did this thug want to do that he didn't want Benny to see. Nothing good came to mind.
I waited. He wanted something more. What could I give him? Desperately I said, “Yeah, Beecham never thought you guys would come to his daughter’s place. Didn’t think anyone but him was at risk. Last I saw, he was bleeding like a pig. I wonder if he made it to the ICU.”
Darlene gasped. She clutched her hands together. I turned to her. My left leg was off the couch and under me.
From outside, a loudspeaker began, “This is…”
I didn’t wait. He had turned toward the front door for only a moment but that was enough. I drove in low, my chest at my knees, and came up a little to smash my shoulder into his stomach.
The air burst out of his lungs with the sound of a pricked balloon. I didn’t stop. My left hand hammered blow after blow into his balls. I grabbed the gun and twisted it out of his grasp, breaking a finger. Then I hit him with it three times.
“Darlene, go and open the front door. Keep your hands up and in front of you. Move slowly,”
I dropped the gun. The cops stormed inside in seconds. All helmets and bulletproof vests, with assault rifles. As they forced me to the ground, I relaxed and smiled. No one would die today.