…continued from The Cruise.

“You stupid ass!” Special Agent Sherman hoovered over the thin young black man. “How could you miss your fucking preliminary hearing?” Despite several tours through charm school, the FBI Agent had more temper than tact, and after a run-in with a Senator’s son, he was reassigned from DC to a drug task force in South Carolina.

“I thought you were supposed to take care of that,” retorted Bartholomew Lumpkin defensively. “That was the deal.”

“Yeah. After you went to the fucking preliminary hearing and charges were fucking filed,” the Agent argued. “How are we supposed to fix the fucking charges before we know what the fuck they are.” Both men knew Sherman was full of shit. The FBI dropped the ball. “Lost in the holiday shuffle,” a perfunctory explained to Sherman’s superior. “Make it go away,” was the order from above.

“Now we have to fix the fucking drug charges, and a failure to fucking appear,” the Agent complained, still offensively, as if he had to type up the paperwork himself, when in fact one phone call from the U.S. District Attorney to the local prosecutor would make the whole matter go away.

Bartholomew Lumpkin was not a drug dealer, he did not do drugs, he had never worked at a jet ski rental, and he never sailed for any cruise lines. The FBI knew all of this. Unfortunately Lumpy’s life-long friend Spike started peddling drugs when he was 12. He got the idea after his parents sent him to a youth entrepreneur summer camp. Sell the People What They Want, was the camp’s motto.

In fact, Lumpy was an aviation technology student at Trident College with aspirations of working for Boeing. His only crime was by way of association. The Police arrested Spike and Lumpy after a routine traffic stop, when they found a KFC box full of pot in the trunk of Spike’s car. When Spike wouldn’t rat out his associates, the FBI stepped in and took up the matter with Lumpy, He had two things Spike didn’t – a brain and a future. And the Feds exploited both.

And so it was at the end of the year that Bartholomew Lumpkin was on the Dean’s list at Trident College, the top of Clinton Hayes’ bounty list, and a newly minted informant for the FBI.

***

While the hunch Clinton Hayes had regarding Rita Montgomery came to fruition, the New Year’s Eve cruise provided no connections to Bartholomew Lumpkin, so Hayes pulled the file and looked for new leads. The bond report showed bail was posted by a Mrs. John Sherman of Summerville, having an address not a mile from Clinton’s own.

Shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, on the first Saturday of the new year, Clinton Hayes was knocking on the door of Mrs. John Sherman. Hayes usually liked to start a little earlier, but it was the weekend, and this morning Rita had persuaded him to stay in bed a little longer than usual.

Fishing for fugitives was always most lucrative in the early AM when criminals were still in bed dreaming of their previous night’s crimes. Even the most clever and violent offenders were easy to nab in the confusion of a dawn raid. As he walked up the steps of the condominium, that was not all that dissimilar from his own, Clinton wondered if Mrs. Sherman was Lumpkin’s girlfriend and if this roust would end with him chasing the man through the quiet neighborhood, before most of its inhabitants were even awake.

Hayes was expecting Mrs. Sherman to be a thirty-something black woman, but it was a middle aged white man in tighty-whities that answered the door, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the early light rising over the complex. Clinton couldn’t see the man’s right arm, with which he appeared to be scratching his back. It was holding a nine millimeter automatic pistol.

“I am looking for a Mrs. John Sherman,” Hayes announced in his official bondsman voice.

“Who the fuck are you?” Fruit-of-the-Looms demanded in reply.

At this point, Hayes could not imagine his fugitive springing from this man’s bed and sprinting down the street of the subdivision, so he decided to play it straight. “I am Clinton Hayes, a registered bondsman and I am looking for a Mr. Bartholomew Lumpkin on a failure-to-appear.” He held out the bond report for underwear to see. “It says here a Mrs. John Sherman, at this address, posted the bail.”

Shit, Sherman thought to himself,how could this Lumpkin thing get any more fucked up. He should never have used his own address. “Mrs. Sherman lives in Arlington. Virginia. Goes by her fucking maiden name – Leary. Haven’t seen her in five fucking years and I don’t know any fucking Lumpkin.”

And with that, the front door of the condo slammed shut.

Hayes had one further question for the man in the briefs, but decided it could wait.

###

This story continues with New York, coming soon.

2016 Kirt Van Buren