Murder Key by H. Terrell Griffin Read Free Book Online Page B

Key
                 
     
     
     
     
     
    NINE
     
     
     
     
     
                  We went back to my condo and packed up. I grabbed some changes of clothes and my shaving kit. I’d stored my passport in a plastic container in the kit, and I brought it along. Jo ck thought that if the bad guys were using locator beacons, they might have had time to attach one to his rental. We stopped by the Sarasota- Bradenton airport and Jock switched cars with the accommo da t ing Hertz attendant. We drove through downtown Sarasota, taking evasive actions that only Jock understood, to make sure we weren’t being followed. We finally turned east toward I-75 for the two-hour trip to Orlando.
                  Orlando wa s one of those medium-size cities trying to become a metropolis. The construc tion crane had replaced the swan as the city’s bird symbol. Steel and concrete skeletons were poking their way out of the ground, striving for their planned thirty or thirty-five floors. Soon they’d be glassed over and join their brothers on the skyline.
                    The Chamber of Commerce and developer types were glowing at all this tangible evidence of g rowth. Every day the local news papers carried pieces about more new buildings, and this or that national company moving in to occupy them. It meant more employment, more people, more money. The power structure was happy, the developers were happy, and the people from the North looking for the good life were happy in the sunshine with their new jobs.
                  Nobody talked much about the lakes that looked like vats of pea soup; the ones that thirty years before had held clear, clean water, or about the ducks and coots that once lived and loved and procreated there. You didn't read a lot about the neighbo r hood downtown where people had lived for generations in neat clapboard and concrete block houses that were being torn down for the new civic arena. The people of that neighborhood were black and poor and had n o part in the power structure.
                  If you cared about the land, and the water, and the trees, and the sky, and the people, you got sick of it all. I guess that was one of my reasons for bailing out, for resigning from the power structure, selling the house, and moving to Longboat Key. The rats had won the race, and I said the hell with it.
                  We drove out Colonial Drive to my favorite steak house. They pan fry their steaks and somehow turn ou t the best meat in the county. The super T-bone cooked medium rare and smothered in sautéed mu shrooms is impossible to beat.
                  The restaurant itself was housed in one of those old concrete block buildings that were put up all over Florida in the years after World War II. It was small, divided into four separate dining rooms, each having five or six tables crammed close together. The tables were covered with red and white checkered plastic table-cloths, not in an attempt to be trendy, but because for the forty years the proprietors had been serving their steaks, they had always used them and could see no reason to change.
                  The place didn’t take reservations, and there was always a line stretching out the door. They had a liquor license but no lounge. Waitresses would serve drinks outside while the customers waited to get in the door. It was probably technically against the law, but since the Chief of Police and the Sheriff, along with most of the rest of the area's politicians, were regular customers, there was never any trouble. Most of the patrons were locals, and on any given night the waiting line was a bit festive, with old friends gossiping, and not a little business getting done.
                  I’d called my law school classmate, David Parrish, from the car and asked him to meet us for dinner. He’d joined the State Attorney’s office in Orlando