Agent Clark Read online

  Hadley Benton

  Agent Clark

  Copyright © 2021 by Hadley Benton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Scott Lewis Benton.

  For Abigayle, Claire Hadley, Lindy, and Karen.

  Contents

  Acknowledgement

  I. PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II. PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  References

  How It All Came Together

  About the Author

  Acknowledgement

  Thank you papa for sharing your life with us and especially for recording the tapes that spurred this book.

  A special thanks to my cousins Virginia Barrett and Julian Clark III, for their invaluable writing and editing advice, their great ideas, and for their encouragement.

  Heartfelt thanks to my mother Linda Clark Benton, Aunt Jeannine Clark Dunlap, Aunt Dawn Clark Hubbell, Uncle Jim Hubbell, Uncle Julian Clark II, sister Ashley Jeannine Benton, cousin Kirsten Clark McIntyre, and Rowan McIntyre for their words of advice, patience, and encouragement.

  My editor, John Paine, for the vital role you played in the writing of this book. Thank you for your thoroughness and attention to detail.

  Jerry Todd for the design of my book cover and for putting up with all of my “suggestions.”

  I am deeply thankful for the countless people that offered advice and encouragement throughout this project — Llew Haden, Merilyn Staats, Ethan L. Staats, Ed Martin, Jeff Herbert, Bryan Pope, Scott Mayfield, Lewis Jones, Jimmie Killingsworth, Rodes and Lindy Fishburne, Torch and Nicole Robinson, Captain Judy Helmey, Gretchen Hirsch, Chris Hart, Ira Pearl, Steve Barnhart, Jim Choate, Mark Dawson, Charlie Fiveash, Parker Hudson, Buddy Parker, John Kiedrowski, Ren Stanley, Charlie Gerakitis, Dick Lea, Blain Allen, Arash Azizi, and Cary Brown for keeping me caffeinated all of those early mornings at The Men’s Grill.

  Thank you Harold Martin for This Happy Isle, John Heitmann & Rebecca Morales for Stealing Cars, The Prohibition Museum of Savannah, Georgia; Ken Burns for his excellent documentary on Prohibition, Daniel Okrent for Last Call, and the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida.

  A special thanks to Nancy Bell who helped me discover my love of reading in 1991 when she handed me an old paperback of Stuart Woods’s White Cargo while living in her beach house in Ponte Vedra, Florida.

  I

  Part One

  Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of Temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which government was found.

  —Abraham Lincoln, 1840

  Chapter 1

  I woke up with the unmistakable metallic taste of blood in my mouth. My head was pounding, and I could feel the searing heat of the sun on my face. I had no idea where I was, and even after I slowly opened one eye, and then the other, I didn’t recognize my surroundings. It was hard to focus at first; everything blurred just enough to be unrecognizable. After a few minutes the incessant thrumming in my ears became clear—grasshoppers. It’s amazing how loud they can be when thousands of them are stridulating in unison. Then the heavy smell of pine brought the events of the morning flooding back into my mind like a tidal wave.

  “Julian, Julian, Julian. When are you gonna learn to keep your nose out of other people’s business?”

  The slow southern cadence of Harold’s voice hit me like a hammer, which was not unlike his fist, as I had learned earlier. He was sitting on the front bumper of a big tobacco truck I had been sent out into the Hammock to find. It was full of cigarettes when it left North Carolina—thirteen hundred cartons, to be exact. Now it sat here deep in the palmetto brush and pine of a remote Florida forest, completely empty. Not a bad haul for a two-bit thug like Harold Hunt. If not for a tip from one of my buddies back in Jacksonville, this would become its rusty grave in a matter of months. Not to mention that I wouldn’t be here.

  “Are you hearing me, son?” asked Harold. “How did you even find me out here?”

  All I could muster was a slight groan as I tried to sit up, before realizing my hands were tied behind my back with a piece of rope. The cobwebs in my head were slowly starting to clear, but not nearly fast enough. I tried to speak, but my mouth and throat were too dry to form words, and I could feel the dried blood and mucus from my nose and lip cracking around my mouth and chin.

  “Julian, what do you say we cut through the bull? I’m running out of time, and I can’t have you talking about what you found out here, and I sure as heck can’t afford to have the owner of that tobacco truck find out who took it. You know how Hugh and Riley can be.”

  Harold was a talker, and I needed to stall long enough to come up with some kind of plan. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, but I knew he would have no problem leaving me out here. He was a bare-knuckle boxer and plenty tough, and with my hands tied up, I didn’t have much chance of getting away. If he left me out here without water in this heat and in this condition, I wouldn’t last long, that’s for sure.

  Gulf Hammock was twenty-five thousand acres of pine forest and cypress swamps about forty miles southwest of Gainesville, almost to Cedar Key. There was no reason for anyone to come out here unless they were hunting white-tailed deer, hogs, or turkeys. If there ever was a place in Florida where you could get lost and never be seen again, besides the Glades, this was it. Most of the logging roads were grown over and there weren’t any signs. There was not even a marked entrance or exit. The only reason I found it is because Sheriff Karel’s clerk Delores over in Bronson told me how to find it. The sheriff was supposed to come out here with me.

  “Do you have any idea how pissed off my brother was when you and that Detective Jones fella uncovered all that rum we brought up from Bimini in the back of those stolen cars?” Harold said as he paced around in circles behind the truck.

  “Honestly, though, what are you doin’ out here?”

  “I could ask you the same, Harold.”

  “Well, seeing as this is probably the last day of your sorry existence, I’ll tell ya. Riley got wind of this here shipment of tobacco coming down from North Carolina, and we decided to commandeer it for ourselves. We needed a little help stealing the truck—”

  “I can only imagine who you went to for help,” I interrupted.

  “Shut up, Julian, you don’t know shit. We h
ad the tobacco sold before we even stole it. That was the easy part. Riley told me about this place, so I brought the truck out here to dump it.”

  Partially obstructed by the truck, I could see the remains of a small campfire in a little area he had cleared free of brush. I could also see the corner of a tarp tied to a tree he was probably using for shade and a couple pots and pans alongside a few pieces of clothing he had hung up to dry.

  Still trying to keep him talking while I worked on loosening my hands, I said, “From the looks of this place, you’ve been out here a few days.”

  Harold looked at me suspiciously. “I needed to lay low for a few days until the heat settled. I been camping out here waiting for Riley to send word it’s okay to come out.”

  Harold disappeared around the side of the truck. I could hear him messing around in some stuff when a subtle movement in the brush caught my attention. I kicked a stick to see if whatever I heard would move again. Sure enough, it did. The snake’s camouflage blended in perfectly with the brush, so it was practically invisible. I needed to move – fast. Still disoriented, I slowly made my way to a standing position, using a small pine for balance. Harold came back carrying some rope before finally saying, “Sorry, Julian, but I warned you before to stay out of our business. Now I’m going have to leave you out here for the buzzards.”

  “Harold, you can’t just leave me out here in the middle of this godforsaken forest,” I said. He hadn’t noticed I wasn’t sitting in the brush anymore. I slowly started trying to move away from the snake, while also adding a little distance between the two of us, when I had an idea.

  “Says who?” Harold said. “Are you that shit-off stupid you can’t see what’s going on here? You know, if Riley were here, you’d already be dead. Julian, you should have stuck to finding stolen Studebakers. I have no idea how you ended up out here, but boy, I’ll bet you wish you never heard of Gulf Hammock about right now.”

  While Harold was running his mouth, I was slowly moving to my left. By the time Harold started toward me with the rope, the snake was in between us. Before he made it half the distance, it moved in the brush beneath him. The sound of a rattle told us both what it was. Florida was well known for big diamondback rattlesnakes, and the Hammock was no exception. Before I could yell freeze, Harold stumbled forward and that rattler shot up from the brush and hit him right on the inside of his upper thigh. It must have gotten its fangs hung up in his pants or else in his leg because it remained hanging there, whipping its tail around, trying to get free.

  His reaction was to grab the snake and pull it off. He screamed as the snake’s fangs came free from his pants and curled up toward his hands and tried to bite him again. Just as he was about to fling it away, that rattlesnake bit him a second time on the wrist and then fell to the ground with a heavy thud. As the snake slithered off into the brush, Harold started yelling.

  “He got me! Julian, he got me! That damn rattlesnake bit me right in the crotch!”

  Grabbing his inner thigh, Harold fell back on his backside all the while screaming, “He got me!” over and over. I noticed a dark stain growing on his pants as he rolled around in the dirt before I realized that snake probably got his femoral artery. Not good. I’m not even sure he realized it bit him on the wrist too, but that was probably just a dry bite.

  I said, “You better cut that screaming out and calm down. The more you thrash around like a two-year-old, the faster that rattlesnake venom is going to circulate.”

  Harold clearly wasn’t listening and kept thrashing around. I took a step closer when he cried, “Don’t come near me, Julian. I swear I’ll kill you!”

  “Harold, listen to me,” I began. “Diamondback venom works in two ways. The hemotoxin causes tissue damage and it affects your circulatory system by destroying blood cells, which leads to internal bleeding. That’s the good part. It also has a neurotoxin in it.”

  “What the hell is that?” he yelled.

  “That’s the part that paralyzes your nervous system,” I replied.

  “You mean, I’m not going to be able to walk again?” he asked.

  “No, I mean it’s going to get harder and harder to breathe until you suffocate. That’s if you don’t bleed to death first. It looks like he got that big artery in your leg. If you don’t stop that bleeding, the rattlesnake venom is the least of your problems.”

  “Julian, you son of a bitch! You get over here and help me or I swear, you are a dead man!” he yelled.

  The sobering realization that we were miles from any civilization, not to mention a doctor, reminded me that I wasn’t even sure where my automobile was. Even if I could stop the bleeding, how in the heck were we going to get out of those woods? Harold couldn’t walk and there was no way I could carry him.

  Harold finally stopped thrashing around and lay still. He was sweating profusely and his legs were covered in blood. His breathing was irregular, and I could tell he was taking big gulps and probably hyperventilating. I told him to calm down and try to relax, but he didn’t say anything. As he lay there on his side, I went back to work on my knots. I tried using a small pine for friction to rub through the rope, but it was no use. I finally figured out how to lie on the ground and stretch my hands down the back of my legs and around my feet so that I could get my hands in front of me. Then all I had to do was use my teeth to work on the knots. After about five minutes my hands were free.

  I sat there massaging my wrists as the blood began to flow back in them. After a few minutes I could feel the tips of my fingers again. Then I took out my handkerchief and tried wiping the dried blood off my face. I could tell the swelling was pretty bad, and my right eye was almost completely closed. My wife Frances was going to be really impressed.

  “Harold. Harold,” I said, trying to get his attention. “Harold!”

  Harold didn’t budge, so I got to my feet, trying not to lose my balance. I eased over toward Harold, but stayed ready in case he came at me. Once I realized that he was unconscious, I couldn’t help but think about one of the last things he asked me. “Julian, what in the hell are you doin’ out here?”

  * * *

  The previous night I received a call from a buddy named Harry Mega. Harry owned a used auto lot in Jacksonville, and he knew everybody in the business. He’d helped us recover more than a few stolen automobiles over the years.

  “Julian, I assume your office heard about the tobacco truck that was stolen up in North Carolina not long ago?” Harry asked.

  “As a matter of fact, Tomlinson and Jones were here just the other day asking about that truck. Sounds like one of our local auto thieves may have bitten off a little more than he could chew.”

  “Well I don’t doubt that,” Harry replied. “Tell the cops they’ll never see those cigarettes again. But if you’re interested in that truck, there are some rumors going around that it made its way down here last week.”

  “Is that so?” I asked. “And where might a truck that size end up without somebody seeing it and reporting it?”

  “You didn’t hear this from me, but if I were you, I’d be looking out in the Hammock.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said.

  “A lot of things disappear out there, Julian, even a few people. You watch yourself if you go out there looking for that truck. Take the sheriff with you.”

  Something in his voice made me sit up. “Thanks for the tip, Harry, I’ll be careful.”

  After I hung up, I sat there a few minutes thinking about what Harry said when Frances walked in.

  “Who was that?” she asked. “I know that look on your face. What is it this time?”

  “Harry Mega. Just a rumor, that’s all,” I said.

  “Julian, the last time Harry called about a rumor, you almost got shot, and Mr. Coonts just about fired you.”

  “It’s probably nothing, but I need to go over to Bronson tomorrow and see Sheriff Karel. I should only be gone for the day. If I leave early in the morning, I can probably be back by suppertime.” r />
  “Well, don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she replied as she walked out.

  After I was sure Frances was out of earshot, I called our office clerk, Gwyneth Lovewell, to ask her for a favor. Gwyneth ran the office, and nothing happened without her knowing about it. She also handled all of our travel plans. If you planned to be out of the office, you better let her know. Technically, she was Director Coonts’s secretary and sat right outside his office, but when he wasn’t in, we basically reported to Gwyneth.

  When she answered, I said, “Gwyneth, it’s Julian. Sorry to bother you at home this late, but I need a favor.”

  “Well, thanks for asking, Julian. I’m just fine, and how are you?”

  “Sorry, Gwyneth, it’s just that I—”

  She interrupted, “Oh, it’s fine, Julian, I just like giving you a hard time. Now, what’s on your mind, sweetie?”

  “I need to go over to Bronson first thing in the morning and check out a lead. Would you please call Sheriff Karel’s office first thing, and tell him to expect me by eight-thirty? He’s usually there before eight o’clock anyway.”

  Gwyneth asked, “What’s this about?”

  “Tell him I got a lead on a stolen Autotruck tobacco truck, and I need his help to identify it. I’ll fill him once I get there.”

  “Okay, I’ll let him know. You stay out of trouble, Julian,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about me, Gwyneth. I’ll be just fine.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I walked into the Levy County Sheriff’s Department at eight-thirty to find Sheriff Karel and a few of his deputies sitting around, having coffee. The sheriff and his boys had helped us locate a few stolen automobiles in addition to breaking up a few theft rings. He was a good man and he ran a solid operation.

  “Mornin’, Sheriff,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “Something tells me I was going be fine until you showed up. Ms. Lovewell didn’t tell me much about your visit. What can we do for you, Julian? I haven’t heard about any stolen autos around here lately.”