Tampa Star (Blackfox Chronicles Book 1) (11 page)

“I would consider a name change” said Michael.

“What do you mean? “ Asked an old man

“Given the fact that all of you just jumped me, I don’t think the Friendly Tavern is an appropriate name for this place” replied Michael. 

The old man cackled, loudly and then coughed. “Well, Hell son, you got the better of the three of us, so maybe we were just being friendly and letting you win.” 

Michael laughed a little and then felt his lip, one of them, the big guy, caught him a good one in the mouth.
For that privilege Michael laid him out with a Marine Corps Martial Arts move called the reap, Michael was going to follow with a finishing move—perhaps a strike to the nose or chin, but the man was already out.  MC-MAP was part Brazilian ju-jitsu, part Muy Thai with other Asian Martial Arts thrown in. 

“O
kay, the fights over,” Michael announced to no one in particular. He and the old man were the only ones left standing anyways—the other two had been successfully put out of commission for the present time. The old man had called the other two to action and for that, Michael had bitch slapped him, which definitely got his attention.

“Why did you jump me?” he asked. 

“You said you were looking for Char Blackfox and the last guys looking for him ended up trying to kill him, so we were just being careful.” said the old man.

Shit, any more careful and they would be slipping at least one of these guys into a body bag; and me into a jail cell
, thought Michael.

The return address corresponded to the Gulf Breeze Trailer Park and no one there admitted to knowing his father.  He had walked the beach thinking about how to find his old man and it occurred to him that his father was a man of habits
—he smoked and he drank, so Michael sought out all nearby bars and found this place; the Friendly Tavern. 

He inquired and was told to come back at closing time as the night bartender probably knew the guy Michael was looking for.  The old coot was behind the bar when he got there, the other guy that he reaped grabbed him from behind and the third guy tried to slug him, but hit the guy holding him when Michael slipped his grip. He hadn’t actively trained in six months, but muscle memory apparently saved him as Recon used to practice MC-MAP every duty day as part of their physical fitness regime. 

“I’m his son,” said Michael, pulling the letter from his pocket and handing it to the old man.  The old man pursued the letter in the manner of a scholar studying hieroglyphics and then stared skeptically at Michael.  “What’s the address on the letter?”

“It’s my unit at Lejeune; 2nd Recon Battalion, here is my ID Card.” Michael held his Common Access Card with his name and picture on it for the man to see.  Somehow, he had forgotten to turn it in when he out-processed. 

“Well, shit, son, why didn’t you say so.” The old man turned around and reached for a bottle that Michael recognized immediately as Blanton’s Bourbon, then reached under the bar and produced two tumblers. He filled both with three fingers of very fine bourbon and handed one to Michael.

“Here is to your old man!”

Michael drank because he had a sore lip, needed to befriend this old coot, but mostly because you never passed up an opportunity to drink Blanton’s, if you could help it. 

One of the bodies on the floor started to stir and make noise and then the other one did the same.  They might have been playing possum waiting to see how the whole thing turned out as Michael felt he didn’t hit them that hard, but it could have been the ancillary effects of hitting their heads on the tile floor. In any case, they seemed to be okay and he felt grudgingly relieved.

The old man produced two more glasses and poured them full.

“Boys, meet Michael Blackfox, Char’s son!”  Both men, now standing, managed a nod and a mumbled greeting before taking and downing the glass of bourbon.  Michael drank with the trio for another hour and learned very little. Char used to come into the pub off and on for years, but they hadn’t seen him in
almost six months and didn’t know where he might be. They said that he liked to camp when he was visiting and that he still had an old trailer. 

He learned that the old man, Ben, had unintentionally helped two thugs locate Char when he was living at the Gulf Breeze and Char came into the pub a week later with visible evidence of a beating. It was a bad debt that he owed someone, explained Char.  From that point forward, the bartenders at the tavern were very cautious when anyone asked about Char. 

Michael left the tavern with more questions than answers. The one useful piece of information he got from Ben is that there was an old guy that lived on a house boat over in St. Pete Beach who might know where his father had gotten to.

The following morning, he awoke hung-over and a bit sore. After a greasy breakfast of bacon, eggs and hash browns from the diner next to his motel, he headed south down the beach looking for the Manatee Marina right across John’s Pass. He found the marina easy enough and the boat was right where Ben said it would be. Ben told him to look for a mid-1970s vintage catamaran houseboat about 45 feet in length with a metal plate on the side that said “
Carri-Craft.”

He found another crusty old guy who looked at him quizzically when Michael asked if it was OK to come on board.

“That depends. Are you a bill collector, a criminal, or from the government?”

“None of the above” said Michael. “Ben from the Friendly Tavern said you might be able to help me. I’m Char’s son.”   

“Char?” he said rubbing his chin as if trying to remember the man.  Michael stepped on board and the man welcomed him into the main living area. He introduced himself as Bob Couflin.

The place was immaculately maintained; plush blue grey carpeting surrounded by dark wood paneling, on one wall sat a Bose entertainment system with speakers strategically located throughout the cabin. Soft jazz played in the background.  Michael introduced himself and the man offered him a seat, indicating a Scandinavian designed leather chair.  “Nice place you have here.”

“Yeah, it’s all the wife left me; never marry a much younger woman Michael, they will drive you to drink.  Speaking of which, he said with a nod to indicate the bar in the corner, care for a little eye opener?” Michael figured it would probably get the guy talking so he agreed to the offer and was soon presented with a tall glass containing Bob’s secret Bloody Mary concoction. “The key is the horseradish,” he confided.

“To your father, said Bob as he clicked his glass with Michael’s.
Your dad was a maintenance man here for a while and we used to drink beer and fish together, but mostly drink beer.” Bob hadn’t seen Char in over a year and he confirmed the beating that Char had suffered.

“One day he showed up to work with two black eyes and a gash down the side of his face.” He failed to show up for work a day or so later.  The marina GM took him for a no-show and fired him. I just assumed he moved on,” said Bob.

It was lunch time by the time he finished so Michael invited Bob to lunch—they crossed the bridge and went to Hooter’s for some beer and chicken wings. Bob was well-known there as evidenced by the hugs he got from most of the servers.

He was kind enough to introduce Michael to some of the girls as a “genuine war-hero and son of a friend of mine.”  Michael asked for the phone number of a petite, but large breasted college student named Aimee, but was surprised when she said, well, shoot Marine, just tell me where you are staying and I will come over to service the troops!”

Bob laughed and slapped Michael on the back almost causing him to snort out a mouthful of beer.  “I haven’t checked into my room yet, but just ask for Michael Blackfox and they will direct you to my room.”

The manager had been hovering around, intent on “
comping” the war hero’s meal as that was his standard procedure, hell they deserved it, he thought. It was an ugly war with kids his son’s age coming back missing a limb or worse.  But, he heard the last name and froze, then quietly slipped off to his office to make a call.

Lunch turned out to be on the house as everyone seemed to love veterans these days
, thought Michael. He dropped Bob back at the marina and returned to his motel for a nap. Michael hadn’t seen his father since he was eighteen or nineteen, but one thing he knew about the man is that he always seemed to be looking over his shoulder. If the same people his old man was running from when Michael was a teen were still chasing him, then they had amazing staying power. Only money or murder causes such dwell time, he thought as he nodded off to sleep.  The phone rang and awoke him from a dream. 

“Hi Sweetie, would you like some company?”
said Aimee.

“Sure would,” said Michael.” What time is it?”

“Around six, I am off in five minutes and can guarantee you’ll be getting off shortly after that.  I also have some left over wings and fries,” she said, invitingly.

“Great, pick up a six pack of beer on the way over and you will be the perfect woman,” he said without thinking.

“As long as I am not expected to disappear in a puff of smoke at midnight, you have yourself a deal” she replied with a laugh.

She had just left, after perfuming the bed, as the Boss was known to remark.  What a freak! How someone so young could be that good at sex gave him pause. Lots of practice, Michael guessed, as he reclined on the bed, balancing a cup of coffee on his chest while watching television. 

He made the coffee from the coffeemaker in the room.  It tasted like crap, but what the heck, it was convenient and free.  It reminded him of the movie,
The Usual Suspects
. Verbal Kint, the character played by Kevin Spacey, remarks “back when I was picking beans in Guatemala, we used to make fresh coffee, right off the trees.  That was good. This is shit but, hey, I'm in a police station.”  Michael loved that line. 

The local news was on the
forty inch flat screen that sat on the white dresser; some woman had discovered a five foot alligator on her porch and the story covered Animal Control’s removal of the beast. Michael would just have shot it and skinned it then taken it to a local shoemaker and had a nice pair of boots made.

There was a knock at the door and he figured Aimee got halfway home and decided on going another round, such was the libido of your average
twenty one year old.  Michael opened the door wide fully expecting to see his little Hooters Hottie, but instead was surprised to see a tall, lanky grey haired sheriff’s deputy standing on the threshold.

His face had the leathery appearance of a Florida fisherman and he looked to be in decent physical shape for a man that appeared old enough to be collecting a social security check.  He sported a crew cut, but had long sideburns, perhaps meant to partially disguise a jagged
six inch long scar that ran diagonally under his cheek bone on the right side of his face.  

“Are you Michael Blackfox?  He asked.  Michael nodded, the officer stepped into the room, causing Michael to retreat a few
steps. “Got some ID?”  He wordlessly handed the cop his Common Access Card. The cop examined both sides, scrutinized the photo and then looked at Michael as if comparing the two.  “Marines, huh?”

“Yeah, Marine Recon
—what is this all about?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” said the cop. Michael nodded.

“You armed?”

“Well, I would like to think my charm is certainly disarming,” quipped Michael. 

“Funny!” Replied the cop. “We have lots of funny guys in the Pinellas County jail, I’ll bet I could have you there in time for a dinner of green baloney sandwiches and Kool-Aid; how does that sound funny guy?”

“No, I
’m not armed,” he lied. 

“Good,” said the cop. He smiled at Michael and then walked over to the TV and shut it off.

“Sit down,” he ordered.  Michael pulled a chair out from the circular faux wood table in front of the window and sat down.  The cop sat down on the dresser next to the TV and smiled at Michael. “I am looking for your dad” he said, attempting to project some warmth. 

“I am an old friend of his and when I heard you were in town, I thought I would come by and say hello.”

Funny way to say hello, Michael thought, but he just nodded and explained that he too was looking for his father, had not seen him in years and was frankly a little worried about his welfare. The deputy seemed to take him at his word, handed him a business card with the logo of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department in one corner and asked him to call him should he find Char.

“He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

“No, I just haven’t seen him in quite a while and think he may have some information about an unsolved crime that happened some years ago about the time of the hurricane in 74.  I can’t really get into the details, but I’m fairly certain your old man can help us out. Just don’t say a word to him, I want it to be a surprise,” he smiled unconvincingly. 

Michael closed the door behind the man, waited until he was out of earshot and locked the deadbolt, then attached the
security chain. 
Friend my ass
. Michael decided he was leaving, but not sure where he should go.  He opened his Sony laptop and decided to go to Google maps to search for a more benign area

as
a base of operations. On a whim, he typed in “hurricane” and “Pinellas County” and was presented with over one hundred thousand hits for Hurricane Gamila, the Halloween Hurricane of 1974.

It seems that the thirty-year anniversary was pending and the website was detailing information about the storm. The article detailed the sinking of a casino ship, the
Star of Tampa
, allegedly carrying over one million in gold coins and the loss of over 100 people on board as well as several deaths along the shore from tidal surge.  Several people were reported missing, including one Charles Blackfox and Thomas Finnegan, both employees of a local yacht brokerage, Olsen’s Boatyard.  Michael googled it, and found it was still in business.  He wrote down the address and began packing his suitcase.

Commodore Olsen had died in 1993 at the ripe old age of
ninety four. He passed ownership to his son, Mark about twenty years prior to his death.  Mark was a beefy balding man who wore a blue Nike golf shirt with Olsen’s Yacht Brokerage embroidered crest sewn over the right breast.

Michael sat in a dark leather club chair in front of the Commodore’s ancient mahogany desk and waited for Mark to finish a phone call. He hung up the phone and looked at Michael.

“Sure, I was just a kid, but I remember your dad. He used to take me fishing with him and Tommy.  As far as I know both of those guys died during the storm in 1974 when they took one of our customer’s boats out, without my old man’s permission.  My old man took a lot of heat for that from the customer and had to do a lot of repair work on the cuff to keep from getting sued.”

“Sorry about that Mr. Olsen, but I am evidence my dad lived through the storm as I was born in 1984.”  

“Well, let me rephrase that then; neither one of those guys ever showed their face around here after that. And it’s a good thing they didn’t because my old man was mad enough about what happened to that Hatteras they took that he probably would have shot them himself.”

The guy was displaying a mercurial temperament and Michael figured that there would be better sources of information now that he knew what he was looking for. He left the boatyard and headed for a public library in Tampa, wanting to put some distance between him and the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department.

Michael looked up all references to the hurricane and the
Star of Tampa
in the archives of the Tampa Bay times and several other papers.  All the newspaper articles detailed a history of the ship, the owner, Simon Block and one mentioned that the ship was rumored to

be
carrying a surprise jackpot of one million dollars in gold, but that had never been proven.   The ship was thought to have sunk in very deep water as it has never been located. 

One of the articles speculated that perhaps the wreck had never been found because it had sunk in the
DeSoto Canyon, the second deepest ravine in the Gulf—surpassed in depth by only the Sigsbee Deep, a 300 mile long trough that is known as the Grand Canyon of the Gulf.  The actual maximum depth of the DeSoto Canyon was unknown, but was estimated to range between 12,300 and 14,383 feet.  

There were fewer details of his father and the other man, Finnegan. The boat they occupied,
the
Bull Market
, was recovered beached with heavy damage on shore at Fort DeSoto, a local historical site. There was no sign of either man at the site and it was assumed that they both drowned. Michael continued searching for them and found a later issue of the paper talked about two badly decomposed bodies that were recovered on the shore near Sarasota in early December. Originally, they were thought to be victims of the hurricane, but it was later determined that some of the decomposition was actually numerous bullet holes that littered the torsos of both bodies. 

He typed in words Finnegan and hurricane hoping to learn more about the man who accompanied his father and an artic
le on Tommy Finnegan turned up. He was found walking along the causeway to St. Pete Beach during the morning of the hurricane. The article was notable for two reasons; one, he was found to have suffered a gunshot wound to the shoulder and two, he was discovered to be an escaped bank robber from the state of Louisiana with the real name of James O’Brien who had been on the lam for several years. The article speculated that he would be extradited back to where he committed his crimes. 

Michael hadn’t seen his old man in years, but he doubted that he had changed. He was always looking for the next big thing
—something that was a short-cut to riches. He remembered his dad gambling on horses, football and Jai alai, just about anything with odds and a point spread. Therefore, there never was enough to properly provide for his family.  One day he just gave up and left.

“
So Char, was this your next big thing?” he asked aloud.