Rising Moon: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 19) Read online

  “I’m almost over the guy’s location,” I said, without preamble.

  “He’s on the move,” she replied. “Northbound on US-1 from the location you have.”

  “There!” Tank said, unable to cover his excitement. “A black Nissan GT-R.”

  The car he was pointing at looked exactly like the one I’d seen the pusher driving at the Rusty Anchor and again later, on the security footage.

  It was midmorning and traffic was light, but the car was stopped at an intersection. Sixty miles per hour was Island Hopper’s stall speed. We couldn’t go any slower.

  “Thanks, Chyrel. Gotta go.” I ended the call as I banked toward the right, increasing power slightly so we didn’t fall out of the sky.

  “There’s a pair of binos under your seat,” I told Tank.

  “Don’t be doing any of that pilot shit for a second,” he said, as he unbuckled his harness and lifted himself off the seat enough to raise the bottom.

  Once he was strapped back in, he looked out the windshield.

  “Over there,” I said, pointing at the black car now accelerating away from the stop light.

  “Got him,” Tank said.

  I started a series of turns, bumping the speed up a little more as we flew out over the north end of Biscayne Bay. I couldn’t go as slowly as the car, but I could zig-zag or do lazy circles to keep it in sight.

  “He’s turning west,” Tank said. “It looks like two people in the car.”

  I glanced over, seeing the car turn onto NE 79th Street. In the opposite direction, it crossed the bay over to North Beach. He was probably headed to the interstate.

  I continued to circle.

  “He’s stopping,” Tank said. “Pulling into a place on the north side of that four-lane.”

  I came out of the circle just above the causeway and lined up with 79th Street. “Where’d he go?”

  “Just ahead,” Tank said. “I see him. He’s parking beside a building with white stripes on the roof.”

  I saw a place about a mile ahead with a dark roof that had white sealant at the seams of the roll-on roofing material.

  “It’s a strip club,” Tank said. “At least there’s a sign showing a girl dancing on a pole. Know a place called Uno?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said. “You’re right—it’s a strip club. Take the yoke.”

  “I don’t know how to fly a damned plane!”

  “Just use the wheel to keep us level,” I said, pointing at the artificial horizon indicator. “I have the pedals. I want to see this guy.”

  He handed me the binos and put his hands hesitantly on the wheel.

  The Beaver is an amazingly easy and forgiving plane to fly. Unless he yanked on the yoke, we’d be all right.

  I trained the glasses ahead and found the car, just as the doors opened. A man got out of the driver’s side and a woman out of the passenger’s. It was the same guy I’d seen at the Rusty Anchor. I was sure of it. He was dressed in white linen pants and a loose-fitting, light blue guayabera shirt. The woman had long, dark hair and wore a tight-fitting, exceptionally short, yellow dress. They were both dark skinned—probably Hispanic.

  My cell phone chirped, just as a big 4x4 pulled in and parked next to the black sportscar. It was Chyrel calling again.

  “I have eyes on the guy,” I told her without a hello. “I’m certain his car is the one on the video and he’s the same guy who was at the Rusty Anchor selling drugs.”

  The door to the truck opened and a large man with long hair and a beard got out. It was Willy Quick.

  “You hung up before I could tell you that he’s meeting the unknown guy from Marco Island.”

  “He’s not unknown anymore,” I said, as I handed the binos back to Tank, and took the wheel. “It’s Willy Quick.”

  I banked to the right to get back out over the bay.

  “The guy from last summer?” she asked. “I thought they arrested the whole Blanc clan?”

  “Same guy,” I said. “Only Kurt Blanc got any serious time.”

  “Looks like a drug deal or something,” Tank said. “Both men and the woman are holding a bag of one kind or another.”

  As I turned, Tank lost sight of them until they reappeared on the other side of the aircraft. “The two men just exchanged bags,” Tank said.

  “The girl seem like a willing participant?” I asked.

  “My guess is yeah,” Tank replied. “The big guy’s taking her around to the passenger side of the truck and she’s being real…friendly, I’d say, with Miss Chyrel on the line.”

  “Gallantry in a situation like this isn’t warranted,” Chyrel said.

  “Okay, she’s gettin’ all slutty with the ugly guy, then. The little guy is heading to the back door of the building. Looks like the girl is going with the guy in the truck.”

  “Can you read the tag number on the car?” Chyrel asked.

  “Hang on,” I said, turning to line up with the club again. “We’re too far away.”

  When we were closer, Tank gave her the number and I could hear her fingers flying across her keyboard.

  “Give me just a minute,” she said. “There! His name is Benito Moreno. Thirty-one years old, Cuban national, feet dry at age five during the ’94 Balsero crisis. He’s got a lot of prior arrests, mostly drug-related, but only one conviction. That was when he was a teen. He was tried as an adult and did four years for involuntary manslaughter. What are you going to do, Jesse?”

  “We don’t have any idea what was in the bags they exchanged,” I replied. “My guess is drugs and money. And my gut tells me to follow Quick.”

  Tank broke in. “The truck’s going north on the main road now.”

  “I agree,” Chyrel said. “I can find out a lot about Moreno and add that to the file you already have. Remember, Quick made two calls to burner phones in North Miami and Fort Lauderdale.”

  “He’s a supply mule,” Tank offered. “I bet we see close to the same scenario at those two places.”

  “You might be right,” Chyrel said. “Quick is calling the same North Miami burner right now.”

  “Give me the location,” I said, clearing the first way point from my phone. “It can’t be far and if we’re lucky, we might be able to ID more players.”

  Chyrel read the latitude and longitude numbers to me and I punched them into the phone. A blue dot appeared about three miles to the north.

  “I’m going to fly on ahead, toward Haulover, at the north end of the bay,” I said. “Is the phone located at a strip club like the first?”

  “Good call,” Chyrel replied. “Yes, it is. A place called Don’s.”

  I pointed Island Hopper’s nose toward the man-made inlet, where the barrier island was very narrow.

  “They call that Haulover?” Tank asked, pointing to the inlet dead ahead.

  “About a hundred and fifty years ago, way before the inlet was built, local sponge and turtle fishermen in this part of Biscayne Bay cut a trail through the narrow part of the island. It allowed them to carry small skiffs over to reach the fishing grounds to the north a lot faster than going way down to the end of the barrier island.”

  Minutes later, I flew Island Hopper directly over the blue dot, as Tank and I studied the place. Unlike the first one, this location was in a cluster of businesses with cars parked in close proximity to many of them. But few were parked around the club itself, which was on a corner. It had a large parking lot behind it and what looked like a couple of drive-throughs.

  I started circling over the water treatment plant and out over the north end of Biscayne Bay. Tank watched the club and the highway, looking for Quick’s big 4x4.

  “There he is,” he said, pointing.

  Glancing over, I saw Quick approaching the light at the corner just before Don’s. The cars in front of him started moving and he barely had to slow down. Just past the intersection, he turned into the entrance to the men’s club. But instead of circling around the south side, he continued straight down what loo
ked like a service drive on the north side of the club. We lost him for a second, but the truck finally emerged in the back of the lot and parked next to a red car.

  “Is Quick side by side with the guy now, Chyrel?” I asked.

  “Yes. Less than thirty feet apart.”

  “See if you can get the tag number of the red car,” I said to Tank.

  “We’ll have to wait until he leaves,” Tank said. “He’s backed up against some bushes.

  As we circled, Tank described what he was seeing through the binoculars. Two men got out of the car and Quick met them at the back of his truck, where they exchanged briefcases. It was over in seconds and the red car left first.

  “He’s pulling out,” Tank said. “Get closer.”

  I turned and followed the car for a moment.

  “Got it,” Tank said. “Florida tag, KRP-J40. That’s Kilo, Romeo, Papa, Juliet, four, zero. Or it might be an O at the end.”

  “It’s a zero,” Chyrel said. “Florida doesn’t use the letter O on license plates.”

  “The truck’s leaving,” Tank said. “He’s turning north on the main highway again.”

  “When you get the name, Chyrel, add it and anything else you can tell me about the person to the file for me to go over later. My bet is, Quick is heading to a strip club in Fort Lauderdale next.”

  “It’s like you had one of my buds in your ear,” she said.

  I could picture her at her console, no less than five monitors in front of her. “He’s telling the Lauderdale contact to meet him at a place called Le Bear at one o’clock,” she said. “I’m checking…yes, it’s a club all right, but the strippers are male and Quick is talking to a woman. Sending you the GPS numbers.”

  “A gay strip club?” I asked, not really meaning to say it out loud.

  “What’ve I told you about being a Neanderthal, Jesse?” Chyrel scolded, garnering a chuckle from Tank. “It’s a nightclub for ladies.”

  When I put the numbers into the phone, a blue dot appeared, less than a mile from the beach, and a good fifteen or twenty miles up the coast from our location. I banked right toward the northeast and headed out over the Atlantic.

  So far, Miami Approach hadn’t questioned my maneuvers. I hoped I was vague enough that the guy assumed we were looking at multiple properties, which we apparently were.

  “He’s turning west,” Tank said.

  “Probably heading toward the interstate. Chyrel, let me know if he doesn’t go north on 95. We’re going to have to kill about ten minutes, even flying slow.”

  When we were a mile out over the water, Chyrel told us that Quick was turning north on the interstate. “Jesse, the woman with him is the same woman with Moreno when Sampson called him yesterday—Vanessa Ramos.”

  “Maybe she’s more than just a hooker,” I said. “It could be that she’s Moreno’s partner.”

  I turned north until we reached a point just east of the target. Then I started a series of elongated figure eights, taking us up and down the coast, five miles to the north and south of the location.

  A few minutes before the scheduled rendezvous, I checked with Chyrel, who said it looked like he was still five minutes away.

  I turned due west, heading straight up the road the club was on, Oakland Park Boulevard.

  I’d been thinking that Quick had a penchant for strip clubs, but this one being a club for women, maybe I was wrong. What else did they have in common?

  Again, the parking lot was nearly empty, save for a few cars parked in front of adjoining businesses. There was a single car parked in front of Le Bear, a gray luxury sedan, maybe a Caddy or Chrysler.

  I circled to the north, keeping within a mile of the club, so Tank could keep an eye on it while staying to the east of US-1. There were airports all up and down the coast, and some had seven miles of controlled airspace around them, which I needed to avoid.

  “There he is,” Tank said, as if voicing a cat’s thoughts when it spied a mouse pop out of a hole.

  “Chyrel, did Quick use his burner any more yesterday after the calls to Moreno and these other two?” I asked.

  “None until he called Moreno today.”

  “My guess is he only had these three stops,” Tank offered. “The bags and briefcases they’re exchanging are small. None would hold more than ten kilos of coke.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “I told you,” he replied, lowering the binos and grinning. “I been doing a lot of reading.”

  “And a standard-sized briefcase can hold a million dollars in hundred dollar bills,” Chyrel said. “That’s about the price for that much coke. And coincidentally, a million in large bills would weigh about the same as ten kilos of coke.”

  “He just parked next to a gray Chrysler 300,” Tank said. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re kinda out in the open there. Traffic is passing by no more than fifty feet away. These guys are bold.”

  “Now I get it!” I said. “During my first year at Lejeune, I worked as a bouncer at a club in Jacksonville. Every day, just before the place opened, a cash drop was made, so the club could make change for the patrons to put in the dancers’ G-strings.”

  “Eww,” Chyrel said, “talk about dirty money.”

  “Sorry, Chyrel. But I remember it always being a really intimidating guy who made the drops, and it was always in the open.”

  Tank laughed. “Remember that night at the Thunderbird? You blew through a month’s pay—hang on. The guy’s getting out of the truck, but there’s nobody around. Wait! Someone just came out of the club, a blond woman wearing business clothes. She just opened the trunk of the 300. Okay, now the Quick guy is putting one briefcase in her trunk and taking another out.”

  “Exactly the way the cash drops went down,” I said. “What’s the girl doing?”

  “Can’t really see her well, but she’s still in the truck. Quick just got back in and is backing out.”

  Tank read the tag number of the Chrysler to Chyrel. “She’s going back inside, empty-handed.”

  “I need to know who Quick calls next, Chyrel.”

  “Will do,” she replied.

  “Lost him behind some buildings,” Tank said. “He was headed west.”

  “I got him,” Chyrel said. “He’s getting back on the interstate, moving south.”

  “Headed home,” I guessed. “I’m gonna let you go, Chyrel. I’ll be busy with Miami Approach threading through these airspaces. If he deviates from a route back to the west coast, let me know.”

  “Roger that,” Chyrel said. “I’ll get to work on getting background info on all these people and add it to the file.”

  I thanked her and ended the call, then contacted Miami Approach again. They gave me a heading due west, between Fort Lauderdale International and the less-busy Fort Lauderdale Executive Airports, then handed me over to the Lauderdale tower until I was clear of their airspace.

  Once we were out over the Glades, I contacted MIA again and canceled flight following.

  “You think he’s taking her back to Marco Island?” Tank asked, as we flew two thousand feet above the Everglades.

  “It’s Christmas and he’s recently widowed,” I said. “And he’s got money to burn, I’d bet.”

  “Tell me more about this Blanc family.”

  “They live in the Glades, east of Marco Island and Everglades City,” I replied. “They lie low for the most part. That is, when they’re not actively bringing in drugs. From accounts I’ve heard, they supply a good deal of the cocaine and methamphetamine found on the streets from Miami to Orlando.”

  “I always envisioned big-time Miami smugglers as guys who drive fancy cars. Like on that show, Miami Vice.”

  “Not the Blancs,” I said. “The house Willy lives in is old and looks abandoned—like it could fall down any minute. It sits about a mile off the highway, in the middle of the swamp.”

  “So, what do you suppose they do with the money?”

  “The money?” I asked.


  “If those three stops were deliveries of thirty kilos of coke, he’s likely headed home with a half million dollars in profit. How often do you think he does that?”

  “From what I’ve been told, at least once a week,” I replied. “Probably more. You’re right, the whole family—and there’s like forty of them—couldn’t burn through that much money if they tried. And they all seem to keep a low profile.”

  “And they been at this a while?”

  “Since the ’60s, I heard.”

  “They could be sitting on close to a billion dollars in cash.”

  That was mind-boggling, but not likely. “Did you ever watch Breaking Bad?” He nodded. “The scene in the storage unit with the pallet full of cash? If that’d been real money, it was probably less than five million bucks, even if it were all in hundreds. Imagine that pile of cash, times two hundred. I guess if it was stacked neatly and all in one-hundred-dollar bills, it’d probably fill a house.”

  “You got a ton of information,” Tank said. “And it all started with that one phone call.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Just the tip of the iceberg, Tank. And we’re not any closer to finding Cobie.”

  After leaving Benny at Uno, Vanessa rode north with the big brute, as he made similar exchanges at two more clubs, one run by a woman.

  She’d learned the guy’s name was Willy, but he didn’t talk much, so she knew little else about him. Besides his name, all she’d learned was that his wife had recently died. She guessed that’s why he wanted her company. Vanessa had no family, so Christmas was just another day.

  After leaving the woman’s club, they headed south, back toward Miami.

  Vanessa had known johns like him before—lonely guys, who, after picking her up, had second thoughts. They acted the same way, quiet and nervous. She thought about the three bags behind the seat, each filled with money. How could anyone be sad with all that cash?

  She turned in her seat and studied him. To say the man was big was an understatement. He sat, hunched behind the wheel of the big truck, his head almost banging into the roof, and even though the truck was huge, he took up half of the wide bench seat designed for three people.