Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,67
Voices were muted, low, conspiratorial in the heavy air that presaged rain. I wondered if there was fear in those voices, fear of the coming battle, of the death that some of them would certainly endure on this day. A semblance of death anyway.
I walked through the camp angling toward the command tent. I saw a squat man, five feet eight maybe and 220 pounds of muscle, standing at the entrance sipping coffee from a tin mug and talking to a small group of officers. The man with the coffee wore the three stars of a Confederate colonel on his collar, tall riding boots, a cavalry saber, and a slouch hat favored by horsemen. A small flag fluttered from the top of the tent identifying it as the headquarters of the Fourth Georgia Cavalry.
“Morning, Jimbo,” I said as I approached the knot of officers.
“Matt. What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I called Molly last night. She said you’d be here reenacting the Battle of Olustee. Kind of far south, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Lot of the guys can’t get enough time off to travel all the way to Lake City.”
“I ran into a bunch of Yankees just down the road,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s some of Butler’s troops.”
“Butler? I thought Seymour was the Union General.”
“He was. I’m talking about Billy Butler. He’s a pharmacist at the Walgreens over in North Port. But how did you know that Seymour commanded the Union troops?”
“Well, Colonel,” I said, “I know a lot about the Battle of Olustee. My great-grandfather, Harmon Royal, was a trooper in the Fourth Georgia Cavalry commanded by Duncan Clinch.”
“I’m impressed. But what brings you way out here?”
“I need to talk to you about an old friend. Privately.”
“Would you excuse us, gentlemen?” Jimbo asked the assembled officers.
They saluted and we walked a few yards away from the headquarters tent.
“It’s about Doc Desmond,” I said.
“What’s going on?”
“Do you have any idea why Doc would be sending two hundred grand a year to some guy in Saigon?”
“Wow. No. What’s this all about?”
“A man named John Nguyen, an American apparently of Asian descent, tried to kill me a couple of days ago. Then yesterday, Jock’s agency’s magic computers spit out the information that Doc is using a charity he set up to send money every year to a man named Tuan Nguyen in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City or whatever the hell they call it these days.”
“That’s very strange. How long has it been going on?”
“Five years. I’m wondering if it’s some sort of blackmail scheme.”
Jimbo shook his head. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If it’s tied to the war somehow, you’d think he’d have been paying it long before the past five years.”
“Unless something happened then and the blackmailer just found Doc.”
“I guess that could have happened. The five years coincides with about the time Doc started making the real big bucks.”
“Tell me what you know about that.”
“He had a pretty good business going for a number of years,” Jimbo said. “He had an office in Atlanta and one in Orlando and I think another one in Miami. Then all of a sudden it exploded. He moved into other states and in five years had a really big outfit.”
“That sounds a little odd, don’t you think? All that growth that quickly.”
“I don’t know, Matt. I’ve never understood business and I never wanted to. Doc always seemed on the up-and-up to me.”
“I called a friend last night and asked her to see what she could find on his company. She’s a pretty good hacker. Apparently he owns it by himself. No partners or other stockholders. But I’d think the expansion would have taken a lot of money, and she couldn’t find any specific influx of dollars except for some legitimate loans from banks.”
“Maybe that was enough.”
“Maybe, but then why the payments to some guy in Vietnam? And why would an Asian man with a suspiciously similar name want me dead?”
“I don’t know, Matt, but keep in mind that Doc was one of us.”
“I know, Top. And he saved my ass that day in the grass. I can’t forget that. But I’m afraid it might get in the way of my seeing Doc as he is today, not as he was in Nam.”
“Matt, I know you’ll do what’s right. Now I’ve got to go attack some Yankees.”
“Good luck, Colonel. If you hear anything about Doc, let me know. And keep this conversation under your hat.”