Gator Country, page 6
“People will get suspicious if they think we’re here for no reason,” Lieutenant Wilson said, nodding toward the house. “So today we’re real estate agents checking out this house while we’re really watching them over there.”
“It’s a real fixer-upper,” Jeff said.
This was Jeff’s next lesson: Use what you already have to craft a backstory. The fewer lies you have to tell, the better.
They watched the house for several days, noting comings and goings. As the day when they would finally make contact with the suspect loomed closer, they began preparing their backstories and accumulating the props that would set the stage. This would be Jeff’s first time playing a character undercover. Lieutenant Wilson scrutinized him as they prepared.
“You backed into that spot,” Lieutenant Wilson noted the next morning upon Jeff’s arrival. They’d met in a parking lot, as poachers often did. “Why’d you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Jeff answered. “Force of habit, I guess.”
“You see anybody else here who backed in?” Lieutenant Wilson asked. “Not many. It’s a law enforcement habit, one you have to break if you don’t want to get burned.”
Burned, meaning discovered, his cover blown.
“Ten–four,” Jeff said, catching himself before the code for yes slipped all the way out of his mouth.
Wilson smiled knowingly. “That, too. The cop lingo? You have to break all of those habits.”
So much of who he was, Jeff began to realize, came down to muscle memory. He had to practice being a civilian, on a deadline, too. The closer they came to the day, the more pressure piled on his shoulders. But he was also excited. This was new, exhilarating. He hadn’t switched up his routines in so long.
Before they set out, they rigged a hidden camera setup, hollowing out the locking mechanism on a toolbox and tucking in a camera smaller than a nickel. Jeff pressed the button to turn the camera on and tucked the box into the front end of his truck bed.
The morning they planned to make contact, Jeff faced off with his mirror again, practicing. He slouched and turned to look at his reflection. Should I stand like this? Jeff straightened up, shoulders back, chest out the way he normally stood. He pulsed with nerves and excitement. Even if the suspect didn’t know why, the way Jeff held his body might telegraph that something was off. His posture made him look like someone with too much respect for authority. He stood like an officer of the law. Have to unlearn that, he thought. He raised and lowered his shoulders, watching them move in the mirror. He shook out his arms. He imagined being the kind of person whom no one had ever called to attention. He had saluted no man. Still, he had respect for himself. Jeff eased into a comfortable stance, straight but loose.
“I’m Jeff,” he said, offering the mirror a handshake. They didn’t have fake names yet. First names only would have to do for now. Do normal people stand like this? Jeff thought, turning to the side.
He started over again, introducing himself to the poacher he imagined standing beyond the mirror. “Who’s buying these turtles?” he asked. He made a sweeping gesture. It looked weird, stiff, like he was trying to sell a used car or get a part in a Shakespeare play. He shook out his shoulders again. Besides, that question was too straightforward. Got to be more subtle. He glanced at his watch, shit, it was time to leave. He pulled on a camouflage shirt, a dirt-cheap one he’d picked up at Walmart. He roughed up his scruff of a goatee, situated a camo baseball cap on his scraggly hair, and slipped on a pair of rounded glasses. He frowned at himself. “Ready or not, it’s time to go.”
Jeff and Lieutenant Wilson had loaded up his unmarked truck with landscaping supplies. Fake real estate agents no longer, they were partners in a landscaping business. That let them go pretty much anywhere. Few people give lawn guys a second thought. Today these props included a new addition, a hundred-quart cooler with a softshell turtle inside.
Their target lived out in the backwoods, several miles from the main drag of that little town. Lieutenant Wilson had already driven by and had a plan for how to make an introduction without raising suspicion. He shared that plan with Jeff before they set out. They needed to make a connection with the turtle seller, preferably a business one. The goal was to get him to buy turtles from them. The rest they’d play by ear.
They pulled into a small clearing of mossy oaks and drove down a sandy semblance of a driveway. The house was concrete block, painted an egg-yolk yellow and backed up by a series of sheds. Kids shouted and laughed somewhere in the back, accompanied by the sound of dogs barking.
They parked beside a pickup truck with a dog box, a mobile kennel used to transport hunting dogs, in the bed.
“Follow my lead,” Lieutenant Wilson said as they got out. They slammed their doors. Dogs bayed at the sound. Jeff’s adrenaline soared.
While they were walking up, a middle-aged man with brown hair and a mustache emerged from the house. He appraised them as he approached. “Can I help you guys?” he drawled.
“We own a nursery up around the Tampa area,” Lieutenant Wilson said. “And we noticed your dog box here. You wouldn’t happen to be catching hogs, would you?”
“That’s all I do,” he answered. “I love catching hogs.”
“Do you have any hog meat we can buy?” Lieutenant Wilson asked. “Preferably a whole hog. We’re feeding a lot of people.” He went on to explain that they owned a landscaping company, and they were throwing a barbecue for their employees and their families. It would be a big crowd, so a pig roast would surely take care of them and be something to remember.
“Yeah, let me get your name and number,” the hunter answered. “My name is Alonso, by the way.”
Jeff felt awkward, like his nerves were getting the best of him. He wanted to be the best, to show Lieutenant Wilson he was ready for the big show, but here he was, not doing anything.
As if on cue, the turtle scrabbled loudly in their truck bed. “What was that?” Alonso asked.
“I’ll show you,” Lieutenant Wilson said. He lifted the lid of the cooler to reveal the softshell turtle inside.
“Where’d you get this?” Alonso asked.
“I caught this at our nursery,” Jeff said.
“There’s a canal out back, and we see these things all the time,” Lieutenant Wilson said.
Reading the interest on Alonso’s face, Jeff added, “You want this thing?”
“Hell, yeah, I want it,” Alonso answered.
“What are you gonna do with it?” Jeff asked, playing dumb, a valuable tool in his investigative arsenal, as he would learn. It seemed like a realistic enough question. What the hell do people want with these things anyway?
“I’ve got some Chinese guys who are interested in buying some turtle meat.” Alonso pulled out his phone and showed Jeff and Lieutenant Wilson pictures of large softshell turtles and a huge snapping turtle. Men posed around them, showing off their prehistoric size. These are the buyers! Jeff realized. Their recognizable blue van was parked in the background.
It can’t be this easy, Jeff thought, amazed but wary. Don’t stop now, he told himself. Keep going.
“Man, if you show me how to really catch these things, will you buy them from me?” Jeff asked. “I’m always trying to make extra money myself. I mean, cutting lawns gets old after a while.”
“Sure!” Alonso said. “Follow me into my backyard.”
While they talked, Jeff glanced around. This guy wouldn’t be keeping turtles back here, would he? Outside the shed, there were several tubs covered in palm fronds. “What’s in here?” he asked.
“Come see,” said Alonso. He crossed to the closest tub, lifted up its makeshift lid, and nodded for them to come over.
Jeff and Lieutenant Wilson peered over the edge. And there it was. The guy had shown them right to it. An enormous softshell turtle, so big it took up the whole width of the tub. Its claws scrabbled against the bottom as it tried to get away from the light.
Next, Alonso showed them the large hooks he used to catch them. He went on to explain the types of fishing line they needed.
Jeff already knew how to catch turtles. Just play the game, he told himself. Make him comfortable. Make him like you.
“For bait, you can use chicken or gizzards or whatever,” Alonso continued. As Alonso spoke, his voice tightened. Why? Jeff wondered.
Jeff considered himself a perceptive person. He could read people. It seemed to him that Alonso knew what he was doing was illegal. Jeff needed to ease that tension so they could strike up a partnership and he could figure out where all of these turtles were going. Usually, Jeff would cut tense moments by cracking jokes, but this didn’t seem like the right time for a zinger.
He nodded along and acted excited, hoping his high spirits would affect Alonso. Gradually, Alonso loosened up and began to smile, too. They agreed on a price for Jeff’s future turtles and shook hands. Then Jeff and Lieutenant Wilson got going. They’d hardly made it out of the driveway when a blue van turned the corner and headed toward Alonso’s house. Too easy, Jeff thought. He whipped out his phone and snapped a picture of the license plate.
* * *
“Now how the hell am I going to get all these turtles?” Jeff said as they drove through the woods back toward Tampa.
“I know a guy,” Lieutenant Wilson answered.
That guy, a fellow named Mike, was a commercial fisherman who’d found Jesus and turned his life around. Now he was eager to Bible-thump and, luckily for FWC, eager to give back and make amends for his own past transgressions. For three months, Jeff got up before dawn about once a week and drove to Auburndale—a little town between Orlando and Tampa that was made more of lakes than it was dry land. Jeff and Mike baited hooks, sometimes as many as eight hundred, strung their lines clear across lakes, and caught the turtles he would later give to Alonso.
In those quiet hours just this side of daybreak, the morning light seemed awash with memories. As they worked baiting hooks, their hands slick with juices from the gizzards, Mike looked up at the fading sunrise, a somber expression on his face. “In my day, we would be able to catch sixty or seventy turtles with one line like this,” he said. “Now I’m lucky if we catch four. Nobody was thinking about the future.”
Jeff hadn’t expected Mike to say something like that. It floored him. Mike knew that he was a plainclothes officer, vaguely understood his purpose there. Still, he kept up a neutral friendliness toward Jeff that acted like a wall. He hadn’t trusted Jeff. Their shared moment over the quiet morning water had broken that. Mike’s words had given Jeff a glimpse into the fisherman’s hidden depths. Mike regretted so much. Most of all, it seemed, he regretted the greed he’d been caught up in. It had been so ubiquitous, they hadn’t recognized it for what it was.
Usually talkative, Jeff just nodded and listened. The truth was that somehow he’d seen this epiphany through Mike’s eyes. He already knew humans exploited nature to its breaking point. Understanding that was his job. But to have this fisherman suddenly give voice to his part in the careless destruction of his own livelihood and home opened Jeff’s eyes again and reminded him of his purpose, of why he was wading into the unknown, bearing all that secrecy, to go undercover in the first place: to protect the wild from threats most people would never see.
* * *
Each morning before he made a delivery, Jeff would go through his routine, practicing what he would say in the mirror. He couldn’t seem like he knew too much. In this scenario, he was just some fella who cut grass for a living, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have an inner life. If Jeff the landscaper didn’t know too much, perhaps he wanted to know more. Jeff mused that his character was a curious fellow, asking questions not to lead to any particular place, but because he had recently realized that he had lived too long without a sense of wonder, and now he wanted answers to all of life’s small mysteries. He just wanted to know how things ticked. Jeff made the last delivery to Alonso alone. Before he set off, he situated the hidden camera in the back of his truck so it would pick up everything Alonso said as they unloaded. He drove around back, and Alonso sauntered out of his screen door to meet him. The dogs bayed.
The landscapers hadn’t seen as many of the turtles this month. That was Jeff’s excuse for his delivery being smaller.
“Can you use this?” he said, opening a burlap sack to show Alonso the turtle. It was about the size of a dinner plate, a small one at that.
“I’d have to ask him,” Alonso said, meaning his buyer, the one with the blue van from the pictures Jeff had seen before. Other agents could track that van to see where it was going. Jeff needed to gather intel that would keep them on its trail.
Don’t be too forward, he thought. You had to meander toward your questioning, just chewing the fat like a regular person. He mentioned the cold front they’d been having. “Maybe that’s why there are so few,” Jeff said. “I think it’s because they like hot weather, right?” It was right. Jeff knew that. But his character shouldn’t, he scolded himself, watching nervously for a reaction from Alonso. Knowing too much might arouse suspicion.
“Yeah, they’re more active in the sun,” said Alonso.
They kept talking casually while they unpacked the turtles, carefully removing them from their sacks. Once they had freed a turtle from its pouch, Alonso placed it in a laundry basket that hung from a nearby tree limb by a spring scale. All the while, his dogs created a ruckus, barking and shouting and whining. Alonso stuck two fingers into his mouth and let out a loud whistle. “Quit!” he yelled at the dogs, and their chaos momentarily dwindled. He called out to his kids in softer-toned Spanish, and Jeff switched the conversation to hog hunting, slowly meandering his way toward the information he wanted to know. He was a hunter himself. He knew how to walk softly in the forest. This was much the same but with words.
While they chatted, Jeff opened a cooler on his truck bed and offered Alonso a beer. He took one himself, popped the cap, and put it to his lips as if taking a swig. The beer only touched his lips and the tip of his tongue. This was another set piece, another layer of disguise to make him seem believable. Even though Alonso seemed like a friendly enough guy, Jeff needed to stay sharp just in case all these layers of cover fell away and he found himself exposed. If he got “burned,” as Lieutenant Wilson said, he would blow this case and lose the chance at the bigger one. Getting burned would put his life in danger, too. Alonso probably wouldn’t pull a gun on him. Probably, not definitely. If he did, he wouldn’t be the first.
Alonso called out to his wife inside and asked for a saltshaker. She brought one out to him. “I like salt with my beer,” he said.
Weird, Jeff thought. So weird that it signaled Alonso had grown comfortable enough for Jeff to push forward.
“I still have a whole ’nother line of these fellas to take in,” Jeff lied, acting like he’d been catching the turtles on his own instead of enlisting help.
Alonso seemed alarmed that Jeff had left turtles out on a line. It had rained earlier that day, and Alonso said hurriedly that they could have drowned. Money down the drain. Then he slowed down. “As long as they can surface for air, they should be fine.”
Jeff stopped himself from clarifying the lie. He’d just been making chitchat. No point in digging himself in further. Jeff let the conversation settle, and let his nerves settle, too, and then he asked Alonso how much he was going to pay for this batch of turtles.
“I can’t give you nothing right now, ’cause I don’t know what he’s gonna give me,” Alonso said, referring to his buyer again. “Or if he’ll take ’em. Some of ’em are real small.”
They were edging close to something—information Jeff could use. He couldn’t push too hard on this. Alonso was perceptive. But if he knew where the turtles were going—and what the buyers were doing with them—that was the difference between a deliberate crime and an accidental one, and he had the information Jeff needed.
“Oh, they like the big ones?” Jeff asked. “I figured they’d clean it and eat it. You know, get the meat off.”
“I’ll try to get him here so he can look at ’em and tell me.” Alonso was starting to sound annoyed, like he didn’t give a damn what they did with it as long as they paid him.
“Well, what are they doing with it, just selling it at a market?” Jeff asked. He was pushing it, but they were right there. If only he could push a little harder without getting caught, Alonso might tell him something.
“They pick ’em up and take ’em. I don’t know,” Alonso said sharply. “I don’t know more than I want to know. The less you know, the better.”
Jeff felt like he was running up close to the edge. One more push. “What are you sayin’?” Jeff asked, a conspiratorial note to his voice. He leaned in slightly. “I better not get caught with these? This illegal or something?”
Alonso paused for a moment. Sometimes people say more with their silences than they do with their words.
“I don’t know,” Alonso said. He sounded grim, as if he had once been inquisitive, too, and he had asked too many of the right questions, and they had led him down a rabbit hole to a place that he couldn’t unsee.
The other side of the investigation saw that place. At 3 AM, another set of officers placed a tracker in with the turtles. They followed the turtles on their long journey, one set of officers passing the surveillance detail off to the next, out into the Everglades to a farm where the smugglers collected and fattened up their catch. Another tracking device and a fresh set of officers tailed the shipment of turtles up from Florida all the way to New York State, where a crew smuggled them hidden in false bottoms of shipments leaving the port. Eventually, they sold for $65 per pound, up from the $0.75 to $1 per pound that the buyer was paying the poachers.
Other FWC officers made the arrests for that takedown. Alonso only ended up paying fines. His Chinese buyers, on the other hand, had bigger trouble to contend with. By then, Jeff had completely faded out of his uniform, and putting it back on would risk blowing his cover. Nearly three months had passed, and the agency still hadn’t told Jeff what the big undercover operation would be. He had put complete faith in Lieutenant Wilson. Yet he still wondered how much the two jobs had in common.
