Dead or Alive by T.J. Brearton

Author:T.J. Brearton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller and mystery
Published: 2019-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PURE SPANISH HORSES

Properties found on tax forms. A place out in Big Cypress Swamp owned by Emilio Vasquez. A little girl’s stuffed animal.

He replayed various moments from the past night and considered what he’d seen: a grouping of plywood buildings on a fifty-two-acre plot of land, most of it underwater. There wasn’t much to the place, just the bare minimum of blankets on the beds, some basic crockery in the kitchen. Nothing in the dresser drawer. No clothes. No trash anywhere. No pictures on the walls. Just a shell, a hideout. Maybe. No other sign of the girl besides the stuffed rabbit.

Blythe wanted him to sit tight.

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and gingerly touched one of the bruises from Lupton’s beating. At least they were fading. He was supposed to go back in a few days to have the hospital remove his stitches. He pulled off the bandage and found scissors and tweezers in the medicine cabinet. He cut away the tiny, knotted end and then pulled on the thread. The wound stayed sealed after he’d taken out all twelve stitches. A fresh bandage was still a good idea.

Sit tight. Okay.

After washing up, he left the bathroom and took out the paperwork on Emilio Vasquez that he’d picked up at the Naples office and did just that. He sat tight. Reading.

The previous year, Emilio Vasquez had made just over three hundred grand. He paid little in taxes for someone in that income bracket; there was a robust list of deductions. So he had a place in the swamp? It was plywood, it was nothing, a family heirloom.

He also had a place on Estero Bay and a property in Homestead. A nice horse ranch, in fact.

Tom called Rhodes. “Homestead — that’s near Miami?”

“You’re getting to know your geography. South of the city. Pretty agricultural. Farms and stuff.”

“You get the buggy fixed?”

“Yeah. Nothing can kill that thing.”

“I’m looking at records of income from a horse-boarding stable . . . Everglades Andalusian Farms. I don’t know what it means. ‘Andalusian’ — is that some kind of horse?”

“Those are Pure Spanish horses. Andalusians are what we call Spanish horses in the States.”

If Tom now knew about Emilio Vasquez’s “Pure Spanish” horse ranch, Blythe knew it too. He poked the laptop keys and ran a Google search. Two big barns, five turnout pastures and a full-sized, lighted dressage arena. Boarding, feeding and turnout. À la carte services — bathing, clipping, and tacking.

The sound of Rhodes lighting a cigar came over the line. “So, Emilio Vasquez has a horse-boarding business on the other side of the state. So what? Do the horses know they’re laundering drug money?”

“Probably not. Could also be a way to hemorrhage a few tens of thousands of dollars and keep those pesky tax collectors at bay — I haven’t seen whether they’re operating in the red or in the black. Either way, it makes him even more interesting.”

“A horse ranch in Homestead would be a pretty conspicuous place to hide a girl the entire state is looking for,” Rhodes said.

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