End of His Journey (eBook)

Chapter 1

Monday, December 14, 2019

Wes Avery was nursing his first beer at the Tarpon Bar when he found himself fixated on the man with the pale face and a two, maybe three-day stubble six barstools away.

Wes had spent 35 years in the newspaper business in Indiana and never once taken a real vacation. His skin was so pale back then that his fellow reporters used to tease him about having a Vitamin D deficiency. Now, with a tan to show for the few months he’d been in southwest Florida, he was questioning why the fellow at the end of the bar looked so anemic.

Who lives down here and doesn’t get nailed by the sun? Wes mused. Was this guy a visitor seeking a cold one on a hot day? Or a local who didn’t get out much? When the bartender called the man by name, Wes decided the latter must be true.

“This ‘un’s number four, Johnny Boy,” the bartender said as he sat a drink in front of the man. Clear liquid displaced by ice cubes kissed the rim of the drinker’s glass. Anesthetization without olives or a twist.

The man grunted, took a couple of gulps, looked Wes’s direction with unseeing eyes and downed the rest. He threw some bills on the bar and stood up, wavering for a few seconds. When he’d steadied himself, he put on a pair of aviator sunglasses and staggered outside.

The hot air from the outside rushed to meet the air-conditioning inside, creating a draft that caused the red and green tinsel hung around the doorway to shimmy.

“You wanna ‘nother beer?” the bartender asked Wes whose gaze was being held captive by the now closed door, the passing thought that Christmas was only a couple of weeks away and the haunting appearance of a man who had aroused his reporter’s curiosity.

“Yeah. Why not?” Wes turned to the man and flashed a smile. “My name’s Wes Avery. I’m the new reporter at The Island Sun. Now that I’ve tasted your Michelob on draft, I figure we’ll be spending a lot of time together. Like Bogey said to Claude Rains in Casablanca …’Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’”

Wes’s face reddened at the stupidity of his remark. He didn’t even know the guy. Probably wouldn’t be able to place his face in a different setting. “But, then, I’m guessin’ that your name isn’t Louis. Maybe Billy or Bobby?”

The bartender snickered and reached out to shake Wes’s hand. “Fred Norman. My mom used to call me Sunshine. Somewhere along the way it got shortened. Folks been callin’ me Shine ever since – more than 40 years now.”

“Well Shine, happy to know you. Real happy.” Wes gripped the bartender’s hand for a couple of seconds, wondering why it had taken him so long to visit this establishment, then reached for his glass again.

“What’s the story behind this place…this little island in southwest Florida that looks like it got stuck in the 1950s,” Wes asked when the bartender returned with a second beer in a frosty glass. It was as good a conversation starter as any. Wes was sure that Shine would end up being a valued informant; a source that in its early stages needed cultivation.

Shine grabbed a paper napkin and stuck it under Wes’s drink, which was already starting to sweat. “Not much to tell. Lots of rich people. The occasional celebrity. A few poor folks who’ve been here for decades and have land but no money. We’ve been hit by hurricanes a couple of times. Always survived. Just had a bad spell of red tide. Got everyone stirred up about usin’ fertilizer.”

Wes focused his hazel eyes on Shine’s creviced face and shaved head and thought about his voice; it was as mellow as the beer Wes was consuming. Maybe it was his imagination, but it felt like everyone Wes had met since he moved to southwest Florida was fodder for a few paragraphs in his weekly newspaper column. Interesting people who’d lived hard lives and didn’t object to being the topic of a few words in print. Shine was probably one of those. Wes would find out soon enough.

“The town shuts down from July through mid-October. ‘Cept for the handful of people here year-round, you won’t see a dog on these streets in August and September. Some say that’s the best time to be here. Others say that’s the months when bad things happen.”

“Bad things? In this place? Like what? Drug-running? Murders?” Wes chuckled at the irony in his comment.

Several weeks earlier, he’d played a bit part in the arrest of a local realtor who was using the island as a base to sell drugs into Canada. One of the realtor’s cohorts had been murdered. Two others tried to escape, but their private plane had crashed somewhere near the border. A local fisherman – a man named Frank Johnson – was involved but working undercover with drug enforcement officials out of Miami. No confirmation but that was the word on the street.

Wes’s gal pal, Leslie Elliott, uncovered the criminal activity and had her life threatened in the process. Wes and the island’s deputy sheriff, Bruce Webster, helped her bring the realtor to justice.

It was a shocking turn of events for a small community that was known for its fishing and idyllic lifestyle and that seldom dealt with anything more criminal than purloined fishing equipment or a bit of malicious gossip designed to tarnish someone’s reputation.

“Sounds like you know about the drug bust,” Shine said, dumping the glass used by the pale-faced man into a sink of soapy water. “Mostly the bad stuff here has to do with the feeling that settles over the town after the heat and mosquitoes have sucked the life out of it. Late summer I’m always breakin’ up fights in here. And now there’s this crazy December heat wave. Global warming shit.”

Shine nodded as if to agree with his own assessment, and then turned his attention to a man wearing a gray Tampa Bay Buccaneers cap; baseball style with the bill curved down around his face. He’d slipped onto the seat once occupied by the pale-faced man and was staring expectantly at the bartender. The guy looked familiar, but Wes couldn’t place him.

After a few minutes, Wes returned his focus to his half-empty glass. What would his daily intake of beer be now that he’d given up the hard stuff?

He was 59. Sometimes he thought his best years were behind him: given freely to right the wrongs committed by society on the little guy. Every story he’d ever written about problems and heartache in the big city had lined his face and marked his psyche. He was okay with that.

But now unnamed sources and reporter bias ruled the day. The 24-hour news cycle was emphasizing speed over balance and skewing the truth. Cocky TV reporters were using journalism to create personal brands; drawing attention to themselves and not the story.

Colleges were still turning out a new crop of hungry J-school grads every year, making it easier for newspapers to get rid of the old-timers with their higher salaries. Wes, for one, was glad when he was offered a buyout from Gannett. He took their money and told them what they could do with their “piece of shit rag.”

Despite everything, he loved the business and was hoping that old-time journalism still thrived on this small island where the weekly newspaper reported on golf cart parades, the proliferation of iguanas and who attended what party, but wasn’t afraid to tackle the occasional controversy or criminal intrigue.

After all, the paper was named The Island Sun and was intended to shed light on the darkest corners of the community. Or so Wes was told by the publisher Sara Fortune, the woman who hired him. She was smallish with a quirky sense of humor. She once worked for the Detroit Free Press and quit to marry a wealthy auto company executive. When he died, she moved south and bought The Sun.

“What’s the deal with the guy at the end of the bar?” Wes asked when Shine returned to the sink. “He got a problem?”

“The guy in the Bucs hat? Don’t know him,” the bartender responded without glancing up.

“Naw, the one before him. The one that left after drink number four. Your limit or his?”

Shine put down the glass he was drying and gave Wes a skeptical look. Wes wondered if he’d gone too far; asked too many questions too soon.

“John Mason,” Shine finally responded. “My limit. He’s here almost every day. Talk to him. He’ll tell you his story. What he won’t tell you is that his life ended some 20 years ago – on September 23, 2000. Finishing off his body with vodka is takin’ a little longer than he expected.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yep,” Shine said, turning and heading for a second man who’d slipped onto a barstool halfway between Wes and the customer in the Bucs hat.

Wes took that as a sign that the bartender was done handing out information on Johnny Boy – at least for today. He finished his beer, dropped a $20 bill on the bar and gave a nod in Shine’s direction. “See you tomorrow.”

Wes stepped outside, letting the screened-door slam behind him. The thwack of wood against wood reminded him of his childhood in the Midwest, where kids spent their summers playing hide and seek outside and their families didn’t need a video doorbell to feel secure. He hoped this place was as safe. Everyone said it was. But the drug-running events that unfolded shortly after his arrival and a recent surge of golf cart thefts made him wonder.

He started toward his one-bedroom apartment over the bank...