Acts of Nature - By Jonathon King Page 0,16
for their boats. They paid cash, but sometimes the businesses that sold the goods still kept records. One hot, muggy August afternoon more than three dozen DEA and IRS agents backed up by the Collier County Sheriff’s Department and the State Forestry Division swooped in with their hands full of arrest and search warrants and probable cause statements and a fistful of plastic flex cuffs.
Nearly every man in town over the age of eighteen was taken by Department of Corrections buses to the county courthouse. Those who turned state’s evidence and helped the feds make a tighter case cut themselves deals and got county jail time. Others, who simply refused to talk, did eight to ten in the federal penitentiary. Those identified as the leaders, including Buck’s father, weren’t offered much of a choice: lead us to the suppliers or do twenty-five years.
Buck remembers the three men in sweat-stained, button- down shirts coming down to the dock. All of them had holsters tucked up under their arms, the butts of 9mm handguns sticking out where a stitched nameplate might normally show on a man’s work shirt.
His father was sitting in his boat, a fishing line flung out the back where Buck knew you couldn’t catch nothin’ but a lazy longnose garfish at best. But his father’s eyes watched out over the gunwale, focused placidly on the glimmer of early sun on the water. The men asked him several questions to all of which he simply replied, “I’m just a fisherman, boys. I ain’t got the slightest notion what you’re talkin’ about.”
Eight years later Buck’s mother would receive a piece of mail in a long brown envelope with a Department of Justice seal stamped in one corner. She signed for it and slit it open with a kitchen knife, read a few seconds, and then crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash with a look so cold and stoic it even made Buck shiver. He fetched the letter out after she left the room and read the line where “Ernest T. Morris has been pronounced dead of injuries sustained during an inmate- related altercation at the Federal Penitentiary in Hibbsville, Georgia.”
By the time Buck got busted for his own forays into the drug business, then the sale of stolen property business, which mostly involved boats and boat parts, and then the flat-out stupid business of hijacking and delivering semi truck containers of everything from stereos to microwave ovens to, once, a thousand boxes of MP3 players, his name and state records were far too well distributed along the west coast of the state from Orlando south.
Only thing to do was to make some occasional raids on the other side of the state off the Tamiami Trail where those new suburbs had sprouted up like weed pines. But them folks did have some money and did buy some awful nice merchandise to put in them pink box houses that were easy to get into. Making some contacts with inmates who knew people on the outside was probably the only good thing that happened to Buck up in Avon Park. That was how he met Bobby the Fence and even though he knew Bobby was getting too big of a cut on the stuff that Buck stole, he was a line to fast cash. But even with all of the precautions Buck took, he was smart enough to know that the new neighborhoods would eventually get their shit together and hire extra security to patrol and supplement the regular cops. He had to look for other ways to make a living.
“OK, give it to me again, Wayne,” he said, snapping open another beer, this time pushing it over to the kid, not offering any to the other one.
“Yeah, well, like I said,” Wayne started, now not as bold as when he’d just been throwing the idea out there, “this guy I know, a guy who does a bunch of dock work and sinking foundation poles and such to build fishin’ camps out in the Glades, he done a bunch of jobs up in the north round Palm Beach County and Broward.
“There are folks up there spending big dinero on these camps just to come out and stay in because they’re sick of the city or somethin’. Anyways, he says they got all kind of fancy shit they bring out to their places so that on the weekends they can party and have their families with them and fish and shoot.”
“Fancy shit?”