Sugar by Dan Ames

Author:Dan Ames [Ames, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Slogan Books LLC

12

Sugar wasn't at the park.

That conclusion wasn’t reached through any great detective work on my part, because there was no one at the park at all.

South Florida was home to plenty of rain and it looked like the day had become no exception. By the time I left Crush and got to the park, drizzle had started. It would be gone in probably half an hour and the sun would come out. The evening would be hot and steamy before the night’s cooler breeze arrived.

So I pointed the Maverick toward Palm Towers.

I knew of Palm Towers but I had never actually been inside. It was a cool Art Deco-ish apartment building that had probably gone up in the seventies. It was a cylindrical column of white concrete and each unit had a semicircular balcony.

The building looked like a stack of oddly shaped dinner plates.

The more expensive units faced the intercoastal and could see Palm Beach and maybe even glimpse the ocean beyond. The cheap side of Palm Towers faced the freeway and looked over the unsightly sprawl of West Palm.

The views were night and day. The units facing the intercoastal would probably go for 400k or so. The ones facing I-95 would top out at 200k or so. Less, if they needed work.

I parked in a guest spot, locked up the Maverick and went inside through the front doors. There was a small vestibule and the main doors into the tower were locked.

Phone in hand, I waited about ten minutes for a resident to leave. I put the phone to my ear as if I was on a call and when the resident, a tan woman in shorts and a workout tank top with headphones came out, I got the door before it closed.

Once inside, I realized the problem was I didn't really have a good description of Sugar and didn't know which unit he was in. I walked past the elevators, turned left and saw that the doors led outside to the pool deck. I went through them to find a large circular pool that overlooked the intercoastal and the seawall.

There were a couple of older folks sitting around the pool but I knew they wouldn't have the information I needed. There was a slightly younger man on the seawall, fishing. I walked over to him, glanced over the ledge and saw there was about an eight-foot drop.

The current was strong here and there were no boats passing by.

"Catching anything?” I asked.

"Nope. That's why they call it fishing and not catching."

I had a comedian here. He was a little older than I first thought, probably in his late thirties or forties. He had on a Grateful Dead T-shirt along with a wannabe Indiana Jones fedora. He really couldn’t pull the look off though, thanks to his thick legs and fat feet stuffed into some worn out Birkenstocks.

“Hey, I was supposed to pick up my buddy Sugar,” I said. “I was just at Crush and he wasn’t there, either.”

The name drop was a way of implying that I was a druggie.

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