Blood Orchid

54

Holly insisted on sleeping on the living room sofa. They had had dinner and talked, and Ham and Ginny respected her reluctance to talk about what had happened in the past few days. Holly’s response to any conversation was desultory, and they finally gave up and went to bed.

Holly made up her bed on the sofa and got into it, and Daisy lay down beside her. Holly was tired from the stress of the day’s events, but she did not sleep for a long time. Then, in the middle of the night, she came wide awake and sat up. Had she been dreaming, or just thinking? Somehow, she had answered a question in her sleep, then another. Pieces slid toward one another, and if they did not seamlessly interlock, at least there was a logic present. She found her cellphone in the dark and called Grant’s number.

“Hello?” He sounded sleepy.

“It’s Holly,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I won’t know that until I talk to you,” she replied. “I’m at Ham’s. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

She gave him directions. “I want you to come and get me.”

“Now?”

“Now. I think I can put this thing together, with your help.”

“What thing?”

“Come get me.” She hung up.

Holly dressed and waited for Grant at the gate, so as not to wake Ham and Ginny. When he came, she waited for him to turn around, then put Daisy in the backseat and got into the car. It was a warm Florida night, and the top was down.

Grant found his way back to the bridge before he said anything. “What’s going on?”

“Listen to me carefully,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me until I’m finished.”

“All right.”

“I’ve been staying in a guest cottage at Blood Orchid, courtesy of my friend Ed Shine. I’ve been kind of stunned, I guess, since the bomb went off in the cemetery. Mostly I’ve been watching TV-old movies, sitcoms, anything I could find. I tried not to think, but I believe a part of my mind was working, because I began to think of things.

“Yesterday, Ginny called me on my cellphone and invited me to go flying, said it would be good for me. I asked her to pick me up at the Blood Orchid airfield, and while I was waiting for her, a business jet landed and offloaded a bunch of heavy boxes into a Blood Orchid van. The guys flying the airplane noticed me, and before they took off, one of them made a cellphone call. I think it was about me.

“Ginny came, and we took off; I was flying left seat. We went around the pattern once and did a touch-and-go, and as we started to lift off, somebody opened fire on the airplane. The windshield exploded, and we took some rounds in other parts of the airplane. Ginny flew us to a disused field not far from there, and we landed safely, and Ham came to get us. Got all that?”

“Yes.”

“Does any of that tell you anything?”

Grant hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

“Did I mention the boxes the jet unloaded were heavy?”

“Yes.”

“What weighs a lot?”

“Metal… liquid… paper.”

“Yes, paper.”

“You know about what was going on at Blood Orchid when it was Palmetto Gardens, before the Feds went in and broke it up?”

“Yes, they were shipping money out of the country, money from drug sales in the U.S. They were flying it out of their own airstrip to wherever they wanted, in South or Central America.”

“Do you think they’re doing that again? Is that your idea?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“The Pellegrinos are taking in huge amounts of money from their offshore banking operations and putting it into their own offshore bank, right?”

“Right. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Yeah, sure. So they can send as much money as they like to any bank in the world, right?”

“Right.”

“Now, say you’re running a drug ring in the U.S. Say you’re associated with other people who’re in the same business. It’s a cash business; you don’t take checks or credit cards, and you don’t put the money in the bank, right?”

“Right; it would be noticed by the bank examiners if huge amounts of cash were being deposited, and they’d notify Treasury or the Bureau.”

“Right. So they’ve got to get the money out of the country.”

“Right.”

“You know about this network of informal banks that people from the Middle East use to send money to relatives? They don’t actually wire-transfer it; somebody deposits it with a bank in the sending country, then a phone call is made and the relatives go and collect it from a so-called bank in the receiving country. There’s no paper trail, as with a wire transfer.”

“Yes, it’s thought that some terrorism operations may have been funded that way. It’s very difficult to stop.”

“Right. Now, the Pellegrinos are sitting on large sums of cash in Saint Marks that they can’t send back to the U.S., right?”

“Right.”

“And the drug dealers in the States are sitting on large sums that they can’t get out of the country, right?”

“Sort of. There are other ways to get money in and out of the country; it’s called money laundering.”

“Yes, but you leave a paper trail that someday might be discovered.”

“Maybe.”

“So, suppose the drug dealers in this country ship their money to a predetermined spot in the United States, where it’s counted and stored in a safe place. Then somebody makes a call to Saint Marks, and an identical amount of money, less a healthy handling fee, of course, is then transferred to someplace else in the world, an account of the drug dealers’ choice.”

“I believe I get the picture.”

“It’s what you’ve been working on, isn’t it?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny that.”

“I think what I saw today was boxes of cash being unloaded and very probably taken to a facility that was built for the purpose back when Blood Orchid was Palmetto Gardens. It’s a building with underground vaults, just like a bank.”

“Possibly.”

“You know that’s what’s happening, don’t you, Grant? It’s what you’ve been working on all this time.”

Grant said nothing.

“Then why haven’t you rolled up the operation? Not enough evidence yet?”

Grant still did not speak.

“All right, then, just answer me one question, just one. Will you do that?”

“If I can,” Grant replied.

“Who is Ed Shine?”