Twice the Heist

By Mark Cotton

Buddy Griffin's search for a missing man puts him squarely in the middle of a murder investigation related to a drug heist gone wrong with the parties on both ends of the deal looking for the stolen goods and money.

After private investigator Buddy Griffin agrees to help find Courtney Ramey’s missing husband Justin, things take a turn when he learns that Justin is the nephew of recently murdered local crook Benny Shanks. And, when Buddy gets a cold reception from the people Justin was working for he digs deeper and uncovers a drug-trafficking operation that was hit with a violent interruption from outsiders.

Buddy must walk a line between helping the local cops solve Benny Shanks murder and cozying up to drug runners to try to find Justin Ramey and save his life before it’s too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Cotton
• Release date: Oct 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463114445

Mark Cotton

Mark Cotton was born in Texas and grew up in southeastern New Mexico in the middle of the Permian Basin, one of the richest oil-producing regions in the country. With a background in business, he enjoys constructing stories with interesting characters and complex plot twists. When he's not writing, Mark enjoys researching and documenting local history, traveling and collecting gaming chips from casinos and long-closed illegal gambling clubs.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Justin Ramey cursed and slammed his hand on the steering wheel. He knew immediately that turning off the highway and onto the dirt road was a bad mistake, one that might get him killed. For a few seconds he held onto a slim hope that the men in the black Ford Crown Victoria wouldn’t follow on the rough graded caliche of the oil lease road. But, that hope disappeared when Justin saw the twin cones of the Crown Vic’s headlights behind him, cutting through the cloud of dust he was leaving as he gunned the engine of the welding truck.

Justin didn’t know who the men in the Crown Vic were, but the car itself had an ominous look and he didn’t care to find out more about its occupants. He’d gotten a pretty good look at the car when it pulled up and parked a couple dozen feet away when he stopped at the Kwik-Pic in Van Horn for a mega-sized cup of iced Dr. Pepper and pack of cigarettes. The spotlight mounted just in front of the driver’s door, the black wall tires, and plain black wheels with no hubcaps made it look like an undercover cop car. But, the windows were tinted darker than any police car, so Justin was pretty sure it wasn’t the law when it parked and sat idling as he walked into the store. He had tried to look nonchalant as he made his purchases, aware that there might be someone watching his movements through the store’s big plate glass windows.

The clerk was the same pretty blonde that he’d seen working the counter a couple of times before, but Justin was too distracted to think of a response when she made an obvious attempt to flirt with him.

Things hadn’t gone quite right from the very beginning tonight, even before the black Crown Vic showed up. As he paid the cashier his focus was on getting back into the truck and making it back home to find out if he had screwed things up by not taking the time to find a pay phone and call somebody when the situation first started looking hinky.

It was a good job, even if Justin wasn’t completely certain why he was being paid so much to drive a welding truck to a place three hours away and then turn around and drive a different welding truck back. All of the trips before this one had gone like clockwork. The other truck and its driver were always there waiting for him, inside a dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The other driver never spoke, just stood there waiting beside the other truck as Justin exited the identical truck that he had driven down from Andrews. Normally, they would do a quick exchange of keys and vehicles, and the other driver was out of the yard before Justin could even climb into the cab of the other welding truck. That always left the responsibility of closing and locking the gate to Justin, which seemed fair since the other driver always got there first and had the gate unlocked and open.

The odd rendezvous routine was the only part of the job that was uncomfortable, made so mainly by the fact that Justin and the other driver never spoke. Justin had tried to strike up a conversation one time and the other driver just looked at him blankly, as if talking to another human being was a completely foreign concept. Justin figured the man, who had a Hispanic appearance, might not understand English, so he never tried talking to him again.

But, tonight’s meeting had been different. Tonight, the other driver had someone else with him, the two of them waiting together when Justin drove in through the gate and parked beside the other truck. They stood almost motionless next to the truck’s front fender, and the driver seemed nervous and reluctant to look directly at Justin. The other man stood behind the driver watching, not speaking and only giving Justin a slight nod when their eyes met. After they exchanged keys, the driver stood where he was and waited as Justin got into the other welding truck and started it up. As he circled around the lot to leave, Justin glanced at the two men, who remained frozen and watching him. They were still standing there as he pulled out onto the street and drove away.

Justin wasn’t supposed to stop at the convenience store that night, or anywhere else for that matter. That was one of the rules. But, after making the run a few times and being pretty certain that nobody would find out, he made it part of his routine to stop at the Kwik-Pik and grab something to eat and a package of smokes to kill the monotony of the long stretches of empty Texas highway between Van Horn and Mentone. But this time, when he had pulled out of the parking lot at the Kwik-Pik and glanced over at the outside rearview mirror of the welding truck to see that black Crown Vic fall in line behind him, Justin began to wish he’d followed the no-stopping rule a little closer.

But, it wasn’t until a few blocks later, when he turned onto Farm-to-Market Road 2185, and the Crown Vic turned right along with him, that he really began to worry. Traffic on the old highway that ran past the Culberson County Airport was almost nonexistent at night since the interstate provided a much faster and more direct way to get anywhere east or west of Van Horn. The two-lane state road had narrow shoulders, twists and turns every few miles and a lower speed limit than I-10, which Justin would have preferred to take. But, regretting his forbidden stop at the Kwik-Pik he was determined to follow the rules as closely as possible for the rest of the night, which meant staying off of any main roads on the return trip.

FM 2185 was the first leg in a complicated and circuitous route home that Justin had driven each time he’d made the welding truck run, and one he’d committed to memory. He was familiar with the landmarks and knew which turns to take by heart. So, each time the route forked and the Crown Vic followed, it reinforced the notion that whoever was in the car was following him. He thought about using his cell phone to call somebody to ask them what to do, but that would mean letting his boss know that he’d broken another rule by bringing his cell phone along for the trip. No stops, no cell phones and always take the back roads on the way back. Well, at least he could say he’d followed one out of three of the rules.

The Crown Vic was running a steady quarter-mile behind him until they neared the town of Mentone, at which time the distance closed to less than a few car lengths. Justin felt some relief, sure whoever was in the car had simply gotten tired of trailing the welding truck and was getting positioned to pass. But, the car stayed on his tail all the way through Mentone, which was nothing more than a highway intersection with a few buildings scattered along six or eight short streets laid out in a grid pattern.

And then, once they were away from the lights of the little community, the Crown Vic pulled abreast of him on the two-lane road. Instead of passing, though, it matched Justin’s speed and stayed there, as if they were on a four-lane interstate with no chance of meeting any oncoming traffic. Justin glanced over just as both blackened windows on the passenger side of the Crown Vic rolled down simultaneously. The glow of the car’s interior lights allowed him to determine that there were four men in the car, two in front and two in back. He looked forward again, checking to make sure there were no headlights pointed in their direction, and when he looked back over again, the two men on the passenger side were each holding guns, pointed directly at him.

Panic gripped him immediately and his first impulse was to punch the accelerator pedal and try to pull ahead of the car. But the welding truck was no match for the Crown Vic, which easily maintained its position as the needle on the speedometer climbed higher and Justin searched his mind for a way out of the situation. The man in the car’s front seat was shouting something, which would have been impossible to hear at sixty-five miles an hour, even if Justin’s window had been down. No badges had been flashed, and that’s what the law always did when they pulled up beside you on TV, so Justin wasn’t about to comply with what the man was yelling for him to do, even if he could have understood it. But then the shooting started.

The first shot came from the shotgun the man in the backseat was holding, and the brunt of the blast made impact with the back corner of the truck’s cab, just a few inches behind Justin’s head, with stray pellets shattering the back window of the truck and creating a spider web of cracks in the driver’s door window. The sound was deafening when the buckshot hit the cab, and startled Justin so badly that he almost lost control of the steering. He swiveled his head between the road and the shooter, trying to see through the crackled glass of the window to tell if another shot was coming so he would know when to duck. That’s when he realized that the shotgun wasn’t pointed at him, but at the area just behind the truck cab, where the large steel bottles of acetylene and oxygen were mounted in the custom-made welding bed. The shooter was taking aim as the man in the front seat continued to yell and gesture with his own gun, which looked like one of those military machine guns Justin had seen so many times when playing Nintendo, making it feel like he was trapped inside some kind of nightmare video game.

Justin didn’t know enough about welding to know what might happen if the shooter happened to hit the gas bottles, but he wasn’t about to find out. So, when the next shot hit and there was no ensuing explosion, Justin slammed on the truck’s brakes and let the Crown Vic rocket ahead, then veered off the left side of the highway and onto a dirt oilfield lease road. He knew the area was dotted with well locations, each location marked by a solitary pumpjack, and all of them linked by a network of dirt roads constructed for the sole purpose of providing access to the wells. Leaving the highway was a desperate move, but he’d done it more on instinct than anything else.

And now, tearing down the rutted dirt road with the gas pedal floored and the Crown Vic looming larger in the rearview mirror, he strained to see beyond the reach of the welding truck’s headlights, watching in case the road took a sudden turn to the left or right. There was no moon, and at the speed he was driving a half-second delay in response to a curve up ahead would mean the difference between keeping the truck on the road and sliding into a ditch and rolling over. But, it wasn’t the fear of rolling the truck that scared him so much as the thought of what the men in the Crown Vic might do if they found him alive after a crash.

As it happened, he didn’t have to wait long to find out. He negotiated the sudden curve in the lease road with no problem, but when he saw he’d turned into the short drive that led to the graded square of an isolated well location he knew there was nowhere else to go. He had driven right into a dead end. A slowly cycling pumpjack lay dead ahead in the center of the dirt square like a giant rocking horse. A pair rusted silver holding tanks stood to one side, and the flat, graded area was surrounded by sand dunes that would stop any vehicle within a few feet. He braked hard and turned the wheel of the truck, praying its tires wouldn’t bite the rough caliche surface and cause it to flip. Before the truck stopped completely he was out the driver’s door and scrambling towards the safety of the dunes. But, the Crown Vic was there immediately, its skidding stop adding to the cloud of dust created by the truck. As Justin ran blindly into the dark through the sand and mesquite, he heard angry voices shouting and the paralyzing metallic rattle of weapons being readied for firing.

sunday morning

Downtown Elmore, Texas was quiet and the sidewalks empty, as they always were on Sunday morning. None of the half-dozen antique stores that lined the streets surrounding the Starcher County Courthouse would be open until Monday, and another half-dozen vacant buildings that had once seen life as dress shops or video rental stores, wouldn’t open at all. The courthouse itself was deserted for the weekend now that the county jail, formerly located in the basement, had been moved to a new facility north of town. Opposite one corner of the courthouse square, the Derrick Theater, a movie house where I spent Saturday afternoons as a kid, sat abandoned as it had been for at least fifteen years. The tapered vertical facade, built to resemble an oil derrick, had once held enough neon tubing to rival a Las Vegas casino. But the tubes were gone now, the victim of generations of late-night rock throwers and summertime hailstorms.

I parked my pickup in the parking lot of the Daze Gone Bye Antique Mall and walked to Lita’s Little Mexico Restaurant on the opposite end of the block. As I walked, I studied the classic lines of the old theater building. I had always wanted to see it reopen, and at least once a month since moving back to Elmore I got the urge to track down the owners and attempt to rescue the building from them. There was another theater in Elmore, a four-screen complex housed in an ugly stucco box south of town, and it was barely breaking even, according to the local rumor mill. If the Derrick had been located in Austin or Dallas, it would have been re-opened long ago as a hip place to screen classic old black & white films alongside newer edgy art flicks, with craft beer and wine replacing the sugary off-brand colas that were dispensed in paper cups from a vending machine in the lobby when I was a kid.

The thick bundles of the Midland and Lubbock, Texas Sunday papers were lying on the sidewalk in front of Lita’s entrance, alongside the much thinner Elmore Sentinel. I scooped them all up and continued on around to the side of the building. I stopped at a doorway halfway between the street and the alley. Black vinyl lettering on the door read: Buddy Griffin, Private Investigations. I had toyed with the idea of putting a big magnifying glass underneath the lettering but decided that would be a little bit over the top. As I put my key into the doorknob, I noticed a business card wedged between the door and the jamb. The elaborate seal of the Starcher County Sheriff decorated the visible end of the card. I pulled it out and read the handwritten note on the back: Buddy, call me when you get in. We need to talk.

It was Norris Jackson’s business card. Norris had gone to work as a Sheriff’s deputy in Starcher County a couple of decades earlier, shortly after I joined the Austin Police Department. Norris stuck with it and eventually ran for the office of Sheriff and got elected. Down in Austin, I stuck with the job too, working my way through the APD until I reached the Homicide Division, where I stayed until I got old enough to take early retirement. Norris was a few years younger than me, but we had a lot in common. And, unlike some of the guys with the local Elmore Police Department, he didn’t treat me like I had deserted the law and crossed over to the other side just because I became a private eye.

My office was located next door to Lita’s Little Mexico Restaurant. The truth was, it was actually inside Lita’s building, which came in quite handy when I got hungry. The restaurant was owned and operated by Manuelita and Pete Rascon, having been opened in the 1960’s by Manuelita’s parents. Her father named it after Manuelita when she was still a little girl and handed the place over to her when she was old enough to run it. When the business migration out of downtown Elmore began to affect their revenue, Lita’s husband Pete came up with the idea of partitioning off one of the unused dining rooms and renting out office space. Apparently, nobody ever pointed out to Pete that there were half a dozen vacant buildings within a stone’s throw of Lita’s front door. Office space in downtown Elmore was not in short supply. But, I’d always loved the food at Lita’s, so when I moved back to town and was looking for a place to park my answering machine, drink coffee and read my newspapers each morning, I decided to become the Rascon’s first tenant. Pete Rascon tried to be helpful by sending new clients my way, but none of them had turned out to be paying clients yet. However, helping them out had given me something to do while I waited for more business to develop.

I pushed open the door and glanced around as I came in, walked across the floor and opened a second door, which led from my office into the restaurant. The restaurant was dark and quiet, the chairs still stacked on the tables. Scanning the inside of the restaurant each morning was part of my routine. Old cop habit. It wouldn’t do much for my reputation as an investigator if somebody came in later and discovered a burglary had taken place right under my nose.

One of the drawbacks of having an office inside a Mexican restaurant was the fact that if I spent much time there I ended up smelling like whatever the special was that day. It was often distracting to my underworld sources. It’s hard to remember who shot who over which bad drug deal when your stomach is focused on the scent of cheese enchiladas wafting through the air. Of course, the location had its advantages too. While some of the upper middle class, law abiding types of Elmore had abandoned downtown completely for the new restaurants located out near the Wal-Mart Supercenter, most of the people who were useful to me in my work still ended up eating at Lita’s sooner or later.

The smell of the Saturday night fish special was still pretty strong in my office, and the weather outside was nice, so I propped open the door to the street with one of two guest chairs from in front of my desk. I filled the coffeemaker and sat down at the desk to scan the papers. I subscribe to the Midland paper because the cities of Midland and Odessa are less than an hour away. And, I read the Lubbock paper because my only daughter, Adrienne is attending Texas Tech University Medical School there. Elmore’s newspaper is struggling to stay in business, so I feel an obligation to subscribe, even though the best thing the paper has going for it are lots of pictures of local residents attending social functions.

Before I could get settled in and take the plastic bags off of the newspapers, I heard the sound of a car rounding the corner