Denny is washing windows, sweating profusely, lost in his work. I tap him on the shoulder, startle him, and say, "Look, Denny, nice work and all, but something's come up. I need to hit the road." I'm peeling off cash and hand him three $100 bills. He's confused, but I don't care.
"Whatever you say, man," he mumbles, staring at the money.
"Gotta run."
He pulls a towel off the top of the car. "Good luck with the divorce, man."
"Thanks."
West of Orlando, I take Interstate 75 north, through Ocala, then Gainesville, then into Georgia, where I stop in Valdosta for the night.
Over the next five days, my wanderings take me as far south as New Orleans, as far west as Wichita Falls, Texas, and as far north as Kansas City. I use interstate highways, state routes, country roads, and national parkways. All expenses are paid in cash, so, to my knowledge, there is no trail. I double back a dozen times and become convinced there is no one behind me. My journey ends in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I roll in just after midnight and once again pay cash for a motel room. So far, only one place has refused to do business because I claim to have no ID. Then again, I'm not lodging at Marriotts or Hiltons. I'm tired of the road and eager to get down to business.
I sleep late into the next morning, then drive an hour to Roanoke, the last place anyone who knows Max Baldwin would expect to find him. Fortified with that knowledge, and a new face, I am confident I can move around with anonymity in a metro area of 200,000 people. The only troublesome part of my package is the Florida license plates on my car, and I contemplate renting another one. I decide against this because of the paperwork. Plus, the Florida angle will pay off later.
I drive around the city for a while, checking out the landscape, downtown, the old sections, and the inevitable sprawl. Malcolm Bannister visited Roanoke on several occasions, including once as a seventeen-year-old high school football player. Winchester is just three hours north, on Interstate 81. As a young lawyer there, Malcolm drove down twice to take depositions. The town of Salem adjoins Roanoke, and Malcolm spent a weekend there once at a friend's wedding.
That marriage ended in divorce, same as Malcolm's. The friend was never heard from again after Malcolm went to prison.
So I sort of know the area. The first motel I try belongs to a national chain and has rather strict rules about registration. The old lost-wallet ruse fails me, and I am denied a room when I cannot produce an ID. No problem - there is an abundance of inexpensive motels in the area. I drift to the southern edge of Roanoke and find myself in a less than affluent part of Salem where I spot a motel that probably offers rooms by the hour. Cash will be welcomed. I opt for the daily rate of $40 and tell the old woman at the front desk I will be around for a few days. She's not too friendly, and it dawns on me that she might have owned the place back in the good ole days when blacks were turned away. It's ninety degrees, and I ask if the air-conditioning is working. Brand-new units, she says proudly. I park around back, directly in front of my room and far away from the street. The bed linens and floors are clean. The bathroom is spotless. The new window unit hums along nicely, and by the time I unload my car, the temperature is below seventy. I stretch out on the bed and wonder how many illicit hookups have occurred here. I think of Eva from Puerto Rico and how nice it would be to hold her again. And I think of Vanessa Young and what it will be like to finally touch her.
At dark, I walk down the street and eat a salad at a fast-food place. I'm down twenty pounds since I left Frostburg, and I'm determined to keep losing, for now anyway. As I leave the restaurant, I see stadium lights and decide to take in a game. I drive to Memorial Stadium, home of the Salem Red Sox, Boston's Class High-A affiliate. They're playing the Lynchburg Hillcats before a nice crowd. For $6, I get a seat in the bleachers. I buy a beer from a vendor and soak in the sights and sounds of the game.
Nearby is a young father with his two sons, T-ballers, I suspect, no more than six years old and wearing Red Sox jerseys and caps. I think of Bo and all the hours we spent playing catch in the backyard while Dionne sat on the small patio and sipped iced tea. It seems like yesterday that we were all together, a little family with big dreams and a future. Bo was so small and cute, and his father was his hero. I was trying to turn him into a switch-hitter, at the age of five, when the Feds entered my life and wrecked things. What a waste.
And, other than myself, no one really cares anymore. I suppose my father and siblings would like to see my life made whole again, but it's not a priority. They have their own lives to worry about. Once you go to prison, the world assumes you deserve it, and all pity comes to an end. If you polled my former friends and acquaintances in my hometown, I'm sure they would say something like, "Poor Malcolm, he just crawled in bed with the wrong people. Cut some corners. Got a bit greedy. How tragic." Everyone is quick to forget because everyone wants to forget. The war on crime needs casualties; poor Malcolm got himself captured.
So it's just me, Max Reed Baldwin, free but on the run, scheming some way to exact revenge while riding off into the sunset.
Chapter 27
For the sixth day in a row, Victor Westlake sipped his early morning coffee while scanning a brief memo on Mr. Max Baldwin. The informant had vanished. The GPS tracker had finally been removed from a Cadillac Seville owned by an elderly Canadian couple as they ate lunch near Savannah, Georgia. They would never know they had been cyber-tracked by the FBI for three hundred miles. Westlake had punished the three field agents assigned to monitor Baldwin's car. They lost him in Orlando and picked up the wrong scent as the Cadillac headed north.
Baldwin wasn't using his iPhone, his credit cards, or his initial Internet service provider. The court-approved snooping on those fronts would expire in a week, and there was almost no chance it would be renewed. He was neither a suspect nor a fugitive, and the court was reluctant to allow such extensive eavesdropping on a law-abiding citizen. His checking account at SunCoast had a balance of $4,500. The reward money had been tracked as it was split and bounced around the state of Florida, but the FBI eventually lost its trail. Baldwin had moved the money so fast the FBI lawyers could not keep pace with their requests for search warrants. There were at least eight withdrawals totaling $65,000 in cash. There was one record of a wire transfer of $40,000 to an account in Panama, and Westlake assumed the rest of the money was offshore. He had grudgingly come to respect Baldwin and his ability to disappear. If the FBI couldn't find him, maybe he was safe after all.
If Baldwin could avoid credit cards, his iPhone, use of his passport, and getting himself arrested, he could remain hidden for a long time. There had been no more chatter from the Rucker clan, and Westlake was still dumbfounded by the fact that a gang of narco-traffickers in D.C. had located Baldwin near Jacksonville. The FBI and the Marshals Service were investigating themselves, but so far not a clue.
Westlake placed the memo in a pile of papers and finished his coffee.
I find the office of Beebe Security in a professional office building not far from my motel. The Yellow Pages ad boasted twenty years of experience, a law enforcement background, state-of-the-art technology, and so on. Almost all of the ads in the Private Investigations section used this same language, and I cannot remember, as I park my car, what attracted me to Beebe. Maybe it is the name. If I don't like the outfit, I'll go to the next name on my list.
If I had seen Frank Beebe walk down the street, I could've said, "There goes a private detective." Fifty years old, thick-chested with a gut pressuring his shirt buttons, polyester pants, pointed-toe cowboy boots, full head of gray hair, the obligatory mustache, and the cocky swagger of a man who's armed and unafraid. He closes the door to his cramped office and says, "What can I do for you, Mr. Baldwin?"