Chapter SIXTY-EIGHT
Parrish drove us to a small restaurant that sat on an outparcel of a tired shopping center a couple of miles from the safe house. Both establishments had seen better days, but the donuts had not held up and I was hungry. I thought nobody could really screw up a hot dog, but this place proved me wrong.
An elderly waitress brought us menus and then walked to a stool in the corner and sat down. We were the only diners in the place. The waitress was probably a retiree who couldn’t make it on her Social Security check and found herself living out her days in a trailer park and taking whatever job she could get to make ends meet.
There were a lot of people like that in Florida. I wondered if she had a husband, a family. I’d never know, but I always thought about those things when I saw the old people working at menial jobs. They seemed a little sad to me, the epitome of unrealized dreams of retirement in the sunshine. They come to Florida with high hopes and then something happens. They run out of money, or their spouses die, and their children don’t want to be bothered with them. They have no home to return to in the North where they’d lived their whole lives because they’d sold the house to finance their retirements. At their ages, they have no future, and hope disappears like an errant zephyr on a still day.
Reality hits them like a sledgehammer and one day they have to go back to work, waiting tables in dismal restaurants with bad food or greeting customers at Walmart. Their nights are spent in front of the TV, their sleep interrupted by dreams of happy times long gone. Maybe the melancholy that these sad oldsters induce in me is simply the fear that I’ll end up in the same place someday. No spouse, no family, no money, no future.
We nibbled at our food and talked about what we’d learned. “Perez is a strange fellow,” said Parrish.
“I wonder about a guy like him,” J.D. said. “It seemed important for him to establish his bona fides, give us a sense that he came from a good family, whatever that is.”
“I think he doesn’t want to look too closely at what he is,” I said. “He’s caused a lot of grief and the world would probably be a little better off if he’d never been born. Is he married?”
“He was,” said Parrish. “He never had any children and his wife packed it up years ago. Moved to Denver and remarried, cut all ties with the Perez family. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t heard from her in years.”
J.D. frowned. “I still don’t know why he came after me and why he revived the whale tail killings. None of that makes sense.”
“Maybe it will come together this afternoon,” I said. “Jock, are you seeing any connections to the agency here?”
“Maybe. Perez said that Fuentes was killed in a drug deal and then came back to life a couple of years later. That sounds similar to what we know about Escondido. If we can tie Fuentes and Escondido together, that print we found on the flap of one of the envelopes sent to Cantreras will be a pretty good indication that it was Fuentes who ordered the hit on Gene Alexander.”
“That seems like a mighty big coincidence,” I said. “Fuentes is involved in trying to kill J.D. and then just happens to get involved in the killing of a man on Longboat Key who is not related in any way to the whale tail murders or the grudge against J.D.”
Jock cocked his finger and pointed it at me. “Bingo, podna. That’s too neat a package. We’re missing something.”
“Is somebody setting this whole thing up?” I asked. “Pointing the agency at Fuentes, when all he’s guilty of is trying to murder J.D.”
“Did you say ‘all,’ Matt?” J.D. asked. “All he’s guilty of is trying to murder me? Nothing important or anything like that.” She was smiling.
“You know what I mean, precious.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t want to break this up,” said Parrish, “but we’ve got a lot more to get out of Perez. You guys ready to start back?”
We finished our drinks and left the restaurant. I put a generous tip on the table for the waitress who probably needed the money and who was not responsible for the quality of the food.