The Big Blast Read online

  As usual, Miki was wearing both a hat and sunglasses in an attempt to conceal the fact that she was Japanese.

  The dark glasses hid her big, black, shy almond-shaped eyes, but not the cute oval face and flawless porcelain skin beneath the bangs of her shiny black hair.

  Miki Matsumoto was a beautiful Japanese teen who, after having escaped the Japanese-American internment camp near Manzanar, had been in hiding on Panama City Beach with her family. From there she had been abducted, beaten, and repeatedly raped. I had found her and returned her to her family, but she later ran away from them when they had arranged a marriage for her with an old man because of what they referred to as her shame. She had shown up at my office and, after we had dealt with her family, was now working for me.

  “Morning, boss,” she said in her best Asian-Southern accent, which was getting better.

  It was a big improvement over the Morning Jimmy-san she used to do while bowing.

  She still bounced up out of her seat to greet me, but she didn’t bow.

  “Morning, Judy,” I said, using the American name Lauren had given her.

  “Jimmy,” Clip said.

  “Clip.”

  “Gentleman waiting in your office,” he said.

  Miki shot him a look. She wanted to be the one to tell me.

  “Big guy?” I said. “Metal plate in his head? Answers to Orca?”

  Clip shook his head. “Gary.”

  “Mr. Thomas,” Miki said, shooting him another look.

  He smiled.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You expecting a whale-looking motherfucker?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Tell him I won’t be long.”

  “I will,” Miki said.

  Gary Thomas looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. A long while.

  Dark half-moons beneath bloodshot eyes, onion-paper skin, etched expressions, bone weariness.

  “Where’d she go last night?” he asked the moment I walked in. “Who was she with? What did she do?”

  “Where were you, Mr. Thomas?” I said, taking a seat behind my desk.

  As usual, my desk was cluttered with a variety of books. I kept them close so even if I only had a random free moment here and there, I could read a snippet of something good, attempting to commit to memory that which was very good.

  I slid the stack of books to one side so there were none between us.

  As I did, he looked around my office, taking in all the other books that were piled, shelved, and stacked among the phonograph and records, chess set, filing cabinets, the framed photographs of Lauren, and the commendation I had received from the police department she had hung when I wasn’t here.

  “Who has time to read these days?” he said.

  “I don’t have as much as I would like,” I said.

  “What did you mean?” he asked. “Where was I?”

  “It’s a simple, straightforward question, Mr. Thomas. Where were you last night?”

  “Out looking for her,” he said. “How do you even know I wasn’t home?”

  “I went by your house to make sure she made it home safely,” I said. “She was there. You weren’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “What time was this?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She wasn’t home when I got there. I have no idea where she was and she never came back. I drove by her work this morning and she was there. Where did she go last night?”

  “To the movies, then walking around downtown some.”

  “Who was she with?”

  “She was alone,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Were you with her the whole time?”

  “No.”

  “So she could’ve . . .”

  “She didn’t have enough time.”

  He shook his head again.

  “Mr. Thomas—”

  “Gary, for God’s sakes—you’re involved in the most intimate parts of my life.”

  “Gary . . . there’s no evidence that your wife is cheating on you.”

  “She is. I know she is.”

  “Why don’t you just talk to her?” I said. “If you both still want the relationship . . . I’m sure you can work it out. If either of you doesn’t . . . it’s best to let go and move on.”

  “Never. I’ll never do that. She’s my . . . I will never let her go.”

  “Mr. Thomas, when you say things like that, it makes me question whether I should continue working for you.”

  “You have to.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “I meant . . . I just meant . . . please help me. I need you to—”

  “I’m trying, but you’re not letting me.”

  “I’m . . . I’m just so . . . I can’t think straight, can’t . . .”

  “I’ll help you if you’ll do what I tell you.”

  “Anything.”

  “Listen to me. You can’t do anything until you know something, right? So stop worrying about it. Hell, stop even thinking about it. Just let it all go until you know something for sure. Can you do that? I want you to eat and sleep and occupy your mind with positive things, your body with positive activities, and just wait until I find out for sure what’s going on. Will you do that?”

  “I will,” he said as if he actually intended to.

  Chapter Eight

  “No sign of the whale,” Clip said.

  Gary Thomas had just left and the three of us were standing out on the landing.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten.

  “Would you mind making sure Mr. Thomas gets to work?” I said. “Then pick him back up tonight? See where he goes? What he’s up to?”

  “We following the clients now?” he said.

  “It’s a new service I’m thinking about offering. This is just a trial.”

  “Then I best not fuck it up.”

  After nodding to me and giving Miki a kiss goodbye, Clip eased down the stairs and out the front door to follow Gary Thomas.

  The kiss had obviously embarrassed Miki, and she turned her flushed face away, looking toward her desk for something to do.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Still . . . sore,” she said. “Blood in . . . urine and coughing.”

  “Keep a close eye on him. If he’s still doing that in another day or so let’s take him back to the doctor.”

  “Okie dokie, Jimmy boss-san.”

  “And Miki, I’m glad he kisses you goodbye. I hope he always does.”

  “Just . . . like you . . . and . . . Lady Boss Lauren.”

  “Speaking of . . .” I said.

  I stepped back into my office and called Lauren.

  “How’re you feeling?” I said. “Did I wake you?”

  “Been making some calls about Joan Wynn.”

  “Really? Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Haven’t turned up anything so far. It’s like she just vanished. I’ll keep at it.”

  “Don’t overdo it.”

  “I won’t. I promise. What’s your and Orson’s first move?”

  “My first move is to find Orson. He didn’t show.”

  “Really? That’s surprising.”

  “You have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never known him to be late for anything.”

  “You worried?”

  Orson Ferrell had been raised by his grandmother after his single mom left to buy eggs one day and never came back.

  They lived in a small clapboard house on a dead-end side street in Springfield, not far from a laundromat.

  Mary Francis Ferrell was a nervous, pale older woman with light freckles and a tight, high-pitched voice.

  “Oh, Jimmy, I’m so glad you’re lookin’ for him. Yeah, I just don’t know where that boy could be. No, he just never come home last night. Me, I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  We were standing on her front screened-in porch surrounded by her mostly sandy yard. The rain was gone and the temperature h
ad begun to drop. It still didn’t feel like winter, but it was clearly headed in that direction.

  “Has he been with you the entire time he’s been back?” I asked.

  She shot me a surprised look. “Well, where else would he be? Got nowhere else to go. You know that. He’s too big to fit most places, ain’t he now? Lord, I’m so worried about that boy. My mercy, I am.”

  “How long’s he been back?”

  “Week or so.”

  “And he hasn’t done this before?”

  Again, the same surprised look. “For heaven sakes, no. You know how my Orson is. Always on time. Polite and considerate. He wouldn’t even stay out late for knowin’ how it’d worry me.”

  In addition to the few sprigs of yellowing grass scattered throughout the sand lot, a lone random palm tree stood near the road, its fronds clacking occasionally in the breeze.

  “What all’s he done since he’s been back?”

  “Just look for that girl. Night and day. Worrying himself sick over Ernie’s girl. Doesn’t that just beat all? But ain’t that just like our Orson? No time to get a girl of his own—not that any girl would have the big buffoon—’cause he’s trying to take care of his best friend’s girl.”

  I nodded and thought about it.

  “I’m worried Jimmy,” she said. “Real worried.”

  “I’ll—”

  She lowered her voice even though no one was around and the lots on either side of hers were vacant. “He’s different now. Come back different from over there. Won’t talk about what happened or what he seen, but it changed him. That’s a fact.”

  “How so?”

  “Nightmares every night. Short fuse. Set off by the strangest little things. Sort of not there much of the time. Catch him just staring off. At nothing. He’d do it for hours if I didn’t stop him, bring him back down to earth. Keep waiting for my sweet boy to show up, but so far . . . he’s . . . just . . . gone.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Gary’s at work,” Clip said when I got back to the office. “He walked by his wife’s place and made sure she there first, then strolled his suspicious ass on to his damn job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Henry Mr. Folsom call you,” Miki said.

  “The Mr. go in front,” Clip told her.

  “Mr. Henry Folsom call you,” she said.

  “That’s good,” Clip said, “but no need to call that bastard Mr. at all.”

  She looked confused.

  “Just say Henry Bastard Folsom,” he said.

  “You do realize she’s our receptionist, don’t you?” I asked.

  He smiled.

  “What did Detective Folsom say?” I asked Miki.

  “Say he need ah see you. Possible soonest.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  I walked into my office to call Folsom back and Clip followed me.

  “She say you went out looking for the whale,” he said.

  “Never showed up this morning,” I said. “His grandmother said he never came home last night.”

  “So the person looking for the missing person is missing?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well hell. How about that?”

  I nodded.

  “Want me to go find him?” he asked.

  “Figured that might be something we do together after I call Folsom.”

  “That bastard,” he said.

  I smiled. “A guy tries to kill you once and you hold it against him the rest of your life, don’t you?”

  He laughed as he turned to leave.

  “Hey,” I said, “before you go. Something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

  “Okay,” he said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture, “I’ll quit fuckin’ with Miki’s English.”

  “That’s not English,” I said. “And not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We just sort of fell into this thing,” I said, indicating the offices. “Never really talked about it.”

  “Fine by me we leave it that way.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Didn’t figure you could,” he said.

  “Goes without saying—”

  “Evidently not.”

  I laughed.

  “Read too much,” he said. “Talk too much. Think too much.”

  “So I’ve been told. Thing is . . . I want you workin’ with me not for me.”

  “I kinda thought you’s workin’ for me,” he said.

  The smile that flashed on his face made him look like a kid.

  “I want you to have the other office,” I said.

  “Ray’s office?”

  “You’ve always been far more a partner to me than he ever was,” I said.

  He nodded and something flickered in his eyes that said more than any words ever could.

  “But damn, Jimmy,” he said, “the hell I gonna do with a office?”

  “Call Miki in for dictation,” I said, careful to keep my voice and face serious.

  He smiled an even bigger smile than before. “Guess maybe I do need a office.”

  He walked out, shaking his head to himself. “Dictation,” he said under his breath. “Shee-it.”

  As he reached the door, Henry Folsom was standing there.

  “Clip,” he said.

  Clip didn’t say anything.

  Miki stepped around Folsom and said, “Folsom Mr. Bastard here see you.”

  Ignoring them both, Folsom stepped into my office.

  “Jimmy,” he said.

  Henry Folsom and I had history.

  He had been my boss for a while when I was a cop. He had been more like a father to me than a boss. He had been a good man and a righteous cop until, compromised by his wife’s poor health, he had turned a blind eye to war profiteering and a robust black market, and had actually conspired to get me, Clip, and Lauren killed.

  Lauren understood and had forgiven him. I didn’t understand and would never trust him again, but was trying to let it go. Clip never would.

  He was a tall, thick middle-aged man with big, thick hands—one of which was holding something that looked like a chunk of coal.

  Chapter Ten

  “You’re a little late for Christmas,” I said.

  He looked down at the coal in his hand and smiled.

  “Or is that what you got?”

  He let out a deep sigh and shook his head.

  “Yeah, Jimmy, it’s what I got,” he said in his most world-weary voice. “I’m a bad guy for trying to take care of my wife.”

  “What can I do for you, Henry?”

  “I came to ask for your help—not for me, but for your country—but I can see it was a mistake.”

  “You give up awful easy,” I said.

  “I’m old and tired. Don’t have the stamina I used to.”

  He looked old and tired. Shoulders hunched in and back bent ever so slightly, perpetually furrowed forehead, deep lines on his face that looked more like scars than wrinkles.

  “Turn that around,” I said, nodding to the coal. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “I wondered if you’d remember,” he said.

  He placed the brick of coal on the front edge of my desk, turning it so I could see the other side.

  Explosives had been pressed into a hollowed-out section of the fake coal—something that could only be seen from the side that now faced me.

  Back in June of ’42, four German men floated to shore at Ponte Vedra Beach on a rubber raft from a U-boat off the coast. They quickly unloaded and buried four boxes containing explosives and nearly two hundred thousand dollars in US currency.

  In civilian clothes and with American money, the four men made their way to an isolated grocery store and purchased bus tickets to Jacksonville. In Jacksonville, they bought train tickets to New York and Chicago and set off in pairs to those destinations.

  The four men, who spoke nearly perfect English and had actually lived in the US before
, were recruited to sabotage American industries, not only to slow the war effort but to strike terror in the hearts of American citizens.

  The explosives disguised as pieces of coal were to be put in trains to explode when they reached the right temperature.

  The plot, which was designed by the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency, never went off because one of the saboteurs, the main mission leader, in fact, a man named Georg Johann Dacsh, turned himself in to the FBI and revealed the plan after only thirty hours in the US.

  I was a still a cop at the time, and Folsom and I had been alerted to be on the lookout for similar operations coming ashore on our beaches.

  “They’re at it again,” Folsom said. “Beach patrol in St. Petersburg intercepted men attempting to carry out a very similar plan. Under interrogation, one of the men said that other teams were coming ashore on other beaches around Florida, including ours. Said this time their plan is to blow up shipyards, and air force and naval bases, and train lines in and around the beaches where they land. Said their mistake last time had been asking the men to travel so far—gave ’em too much time to think about what they were doing. This time they plan to carry out the plot close to where they come ashore.”

  I nodded. “It’s a better plan.”

  “If there was a massive attack on Wainwright Shipyard or Tyndall Field or the Naval Section Base,” he said, “it’d be devastating to both our community and the war effort. If they successfully carried out several across the state or even the country, we could lose the war.”

  He was right.

  “I’m shorthanded,” he said. “Plus my men look like cops. You and Clip, Lauren and Judy—or whatever her name is—don’t. Y’all might be able to find out things we can’t. Figured you might ask for additional help from some of your and Clip’s, ah, acquaintances.”

  I thought about it. He meant the marginalized of our town, the lower class and even criminal element.

  “I’m not asking for me,” he said. “I’m asking for our country.”

  “And,” I said, “that’s exactly who we’ll do it for.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Don’t tell me you trust him,” Clip said.

  “Hell no.”

  “Bet it some kinda setup.”

  “Could be,” I said. “But I can’t find the angle in it if it is. I worked the previous plot. It was legit.”