Page 83 of The Right to Remain
“Your Honor, I’ve been informed that our next witness, Austen Pollard, is in the building.”
“Very well. In line with my earlier ruling, since this witness is a child, we will move to a smaller courtroom. There will be far fewer seats for the general public, but I believe a more intimate setting is in the best interest. We shall be in recess for fifteen minutes and reconvene in courtroom four.”
The bailiff gave the command on the crack of the judge’s gavel. Jack rose alongside his client, speaking softly as Judge Garrison walked to his chambers.
“Fifteen more minutes, Elliott. Speak now, or never get released.”
Chapter 29
Theo was at Cy’s Club, getting ready for the lunch crowd. He wasn’t expecting a phone call from the manager of his “Uncle Cy’s” warehouse space in the Miami Foreign Trade Zone, and the news wasn’t good. The rent was two months past due. Theo’s space was padlocked, and nothing could be received or removed until payment was made. Theo was certain that the manager’s records were wrong and that he hadn’t missed a rent payment, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. A shipment of empty whiskey barrels was arriving from Scotland any day. To his knowledge, no one had ever aged bespoke gin in genuine scotch whiskey barrels. Bourbon or rye was standard. Uncle Cy’s was poised to be the first.
“That padlock needs to come offtoday,” Theo said into the phone.
The argument continued, back and forth. Finally, the manager offered to meet him at the warehouse. With proof of payment from Theo, the manager would personally remove the padlock on the spot.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” said Theo. He grabbed his laptop computer and hurried out the door.
Foreign Trade Zones covered thousands of warehouses all over South Florida. Theo rented two thousand square feet in the southernmost portion of Zone 231, an industrial area near the seaport. Operating in the zone was a strategic business move. It allowed Theo to defer payment of duties on imported gin and the scotch whiskey barrels he needed to age it until “Uncle Cy’s Speakeasy Bespoke Gin” was fully aged, bottled, and ready for distribution, however long it took. Even better, U.S. duties applied only to products meant for U.S. consumption, so he could export finished product directly from his warehouse and avoid duties altogether. And the foreign market wasripe. Brazil alone consumed 82 million bottles of scotch annually, ahead of Japan and right behind the United States. Not one of the six Scotch gin distillers aged their gin in whiskey casks, so Theo was already ahead of the competition. Uncle Cy probably thought it was a nice tribute to an old jazzman, nothing more. Others might have called it a pipe dream. To Theo, bespoke gin in scotch whiskey barrels was the opportunity of a lifetime—if he could get the stupid landlord off his back and the padlocks off his door.
Theo parked in the space outside his warehouse, climbed out of the car, and walked toward the building. Theo’s warehouse was one of about a dozen identical buildings that were side by side, each with a large garage door in front and a narrow side alley that separated one building from the next. Theo checked the garage door first, but he didn’t see a padlock. Maybe the property manager had come by and removed it already. He started down the alley to check the side entrance. He was about to reach for his key, then froze. There was no padlock. There was no lock at all. Someone had drilled out the dead bolt and left a gaping hole in the door.
“You son of a bitch,” said Theo, assuming it had been the landlord’s doing.
He pushed open the door and went inside. In addition to storage space for whiskey barrels and distilled gin, his unit came with a small office. It would be useful when he went into distribution, but for now it was empty except for a metal filing cabinet. He switched on the lights, walked through the office to the storage area, and stopped.
“Hello?” he called out.
His warehouse was silent as a tomb, but it was far from empty. He’d been importing whiskey barrels and filling them with gin for almost three years. The oldest were in Row 1, stacked four-high and filled with aged gin. Those were almost ready for bottling. The latest shipment was in Row 33 and still empty.
“Don’t move,” he heard a man say, as the muzzle of a pistol probed the base of his skull.
“Raise your hands very slowly,” the man said.
The island accent was familiar. Very familiar. It was the guy on the phone call—“Baptiste,” he’d called himself—who obviously was not the property manager. This wasn’t about rent collection.
“Arms up, now!”
As Theo’s hands reached shoulder level, two other men stepped out from behind a row of whiskey barrels. Both were Black, and based on the gunman’s accent, Theo assumed they were Haitian.
“Getting pretty chummy with Mr. C. J. Vandermeer, aren’t you?” said Baptiste.
Theo assumed he meant the training session at the company. “Not really.”
“Don’t bullshit me, cousin. I know what you up to. You and your Foreign Trade Zone warehouse full of empty barrels. Gettin’ nice and cozy with a gun destruction company that doesn’t really destroy guns. Yeah, you stealin’ my supplier. I don’t like that.”
Theo felt a chill. It was one of the unanswered questions from his tour of the VanPoll plant with Jack: What happened to the gun parts that weren’t destroyed?
“You got this wrong. I’m making gin.”
“Oh yeah?” he said with a gangster’s chuckle. “You be Mr. Bacardi or Mr. Seagram?”
“Bacardi doesn’t make gin. Maybe they’ll buy from me.”
Baptiste punched him in the kidney with the force of a trained boxer, and Theo tried not to show how much it hurt.
“Don’t be a smart-ass. An ex-con with a warehouse full of barrels in Miami’s import-export zone isn’t selling booze to Bacardi.”
Theo saw no upside in pointing out that his time at Florida State Prison was for a murder he didn’t commit. “I’m serious. I really am just making gin.”