Still waving, he called back a gruff, “Howdy!”
My second assessment: He was trying to disguise his voice.
I watched the man duck slightly, keeping the truck between us and himself. He didn’t rush, kept it calm, but he didn’t waste any time opening the driver’s-side door and getting in.
Billie was walking fast toward the access road. Then she began to trot as the truck pulled away. I jogged along with her, for no other reason than the man’s behavior did not seem appropriate for the situation.
She was motioning at the driver, calling for him to stop. But he didn’t. When he passed within fifteen yards or so of us, he waved again, palm open-shielding his face once more.
“Asshole,” Billie said. She was looking at the truck as it bounced away. “And wouldn’t you know: There’s mud on his license plate.”
A few minutes later, the four of us were going over the area where the truck had been parked.
Yes, it was an abandoned limestone quarry, or “barrow pit”; limestone dredged to built roads. The pit was rocky, honeycombed with holes.
I know enough about Florida geology to recognize that this area would be described as a karst formation. A karst is a limestone area that consists of sinkholes and abrupt ridges-some as high as fifteen or twenty feet above sea level.
For millions of years, naturally acidic rain and groundwater flowed through these limestone karsts, dissolving conduits and caverns out of rock. Some plates of limestone fell, some rose. Thus the unusual elevation.
This quarry had been dug into the side of a high ridge. Searching around at the bottom of it, we found a couple of daubs of white goo that smelled like fuel oil-insecticide, DeAntoni suggested. Nothing more until Billie held up a large, empty fertilizer bag, and said, “Look at this. He must be one of the golf course maintenance guys. Probably came out here to get away from his supervisor, sneaking in a nap.”
She told us her primary worry was that the guy had been dumping trash. She said the Sawgrass staff did that a lot-dumped their junk on Indian property. Old refrigerators, air conditioners, broken bedding and wallboard-anything too bulky or heavy to drive to the county dump.
She said she’d complained to Jerry Singh, but got a sense of indifference behind his promise to speak with his staff. Plus, it didn’t stop. They kept right on dumping.
She told us she thought Singh was secretly encouraging the dumping for the same reason he was encouraging his staff to bully the local Indians. If the Egret Seminoles agreed to Shiva’s terms, the Seminole corporate board would have the power to hire and fire. It would be a way for the Indians to rid the area of the Ashram’s thugs.
Tomlinson asked, “Then why would you want to go into the casino business with someone like Shiva? I’ve got to be right up front with you. I think the guy’s a slime.”
She answered. “I don’t want to go into the casino business with him. With Geoff involved, it might’ve been a different story. I doubt it, but at least there was a possibility. Now there’s not a chance-as far as I’m concerned, anyway.”
“Then why deal with him?”
She thought for a moment, perhaps calculating how honest she should be. Finally, she said, “I’m dealing with him for a real simple reason. We want his land. I want his land. Not for a housing development or anything like that. I want to replant it. Make it part of our home again. But just because I was elected tribal chair, that doesn’t mean I make the final decision.”
She explained that the Egret Seminoles as a tribe were still considering the casino proposal because Shiva had, in her opinion, conned her five older aunts and uncles. Billie said that, as chairman, she could vote only in the event of a tie. So Shiva had effectively captured the interests of a majority of corporate members on a voting board of eight.
She told us, “A year back, Singh sent a limo and drove us all to his Palm Beach Ashram. He gave us the red-carpet treatment; anything we wanted. What impressed my aunts and uncles, though, was his office. On his office walls, he’s got these carvings of pre-Columbian masks and totems. They were copies of Calusa masks. Masks that almost no one knows about.
“Singh acted surprised when my uncle identified them. It was like Jerry had no idea what they were. He claimed to have carved the masks himself because the images kept coming to him night after night in his dreams. Jerry told us he was a mystic, and sometimes received messages that he didn’t always understand right away. Then he told my aunts and uncles that maybe the masks-the fact that he saw them in his dreams-were a positive sign about the casino. ”
DeAntoni said, “Did they believe him?”
“I think they’d like to believe him. I love my relatives, but they grew up in poverty. I think they’d like a reason to justify voting for the casinos, and have some money for once. So, they’re still waiting to decide.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Shiva promised them another sign. A more powerful sign. Maybe someday I’ll tell you what he promised them he’d do-it’s actually kind of funny. It’ll never happen, of course. So what I’ve got to do is figure out how to get Shiva’s land without agreeing to let him build casinos.”
As she said that, she handed the bag she’d found to Tomlinson, and he held it up for me to see. It was the industrial variety; triple-thick brown paper. Printing on the outside said that it had contained fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate commercial-grade fertilizer, manufactured by Chem-A-World Products, Bucyrus, Ohio.
As I looked at the bag, I said, “Is anyone doing any blasting around here?”
She said, “No. In the Everglades? They’d never allow it. They used to back when they were digging barrow pits, but not now.”
As I asked Billie if ammonium nitrate was a fertilizer commonly used by golf courses, DeAntoni’s cell phone began to ring.
She shrugged- I don’t know -as Frank put the phone to his ear and, after listening a moment, said, “Speak of the devil.”
A minute later, he closed the phone, putting it away, and said, “That was our Scotch-drinking pal, Eugene McRae. Jerry Singh already contacted him and asked about our little visit. He’s there right now. The Bhagwan, I mean. Mr. McRae said that Singh would be happy to answer any questions we had about Geoff Minster.”
chapter twenty
Why did I get the impression that the black-haired man with the dimpled chin and scar beneath his right eye had come into the room for no other reason than to initiate visual contact with us?
In the world of espionage fieldcraft, an individual who is a target for any reason is “made” when the assigned agent contrives a reason to view the target in the flesh. Even a brief, firsthand visual confirmation is more reliable than a photograph.
I had the feeling dimple-chin wanted to be able to recognize us down the road.
Or maybe he did it because he wanted to see if we’d recognize him.
The image of the man in coveralls climbing into the pickup truck, hiding his face behind an open palm, came to mind. The hair was similar. The size was about right.
But why go to such extremes?
He was a lean man, medium height, dressed in expensive slacks and a black, short-sleeved Polo sweater, patent-leather shoes, his hair razor cut, stylish. He carried himself with a kind of easy grace; had the looks and athleticism that most women find attractive. Something else I noticed: He had a pale, quarter-sized scar on his right arm that had probably once been a tattoo.
I found the diminutive size of the tattoo interesting.
We were in the Sawgrass corporate office, which was not far from the main gate, where, this time, security guards waited in golf carts, expecting us. They did a poor job of cloaking their hostility-word that we’d hurt a couple of their brethren had obviously gotten around-but they followed orders. They offered us bottled water, and drove us to meet their leader.