Clint Faraday Collection C: Murder in Motion Collector's Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

complicated.
    Okay. He was set up for delay on the twelfth.
The stuff had been in the warehouse, ready, for six or seven days.
They waited for a time Clint would be occupied while they moved the
stuff. It was loaded in Chiriqui Grande on the twelfth and sailed
later on the twelfth or early the thirteenth.
    This was strange! Why would he even know
about whatever it was – or care?
    It came from the Tolé area. What was there?
Who was the follower working for? Maybe that would give him a hint.
He needed about anything to be able to connect anything else. All
he had was a lot of disjointed anecdotal information in effect.
    He called Manny. Manny couldn’t get anything
more than he had. Taylor seemed to be clean, at least from anything
big. He would check on Santo Santos.
    Clint went back to the pension. He didn’t
have a hint of a direction. He thought for awhile, then decided his
only hope of learning anything was Tolé. He was about to go to the
bus when Manny called to say Santos seemed to be a sort of
semi-wannabe detective with delusions that it was like TV. With him
dead it would be hard to find who he was working for. “They’re
doing a good job of covering their tracks.”
    “ A very
professional kind of job,” Clint agreed. “Makes you wonder. Maybe
they want something and this is a distraction in
layers.”
    They chatted a bit, then Clint went to the
bus.
     
    Clue Search
    Tolé is a tranquil little place near the
Pacific. Clint liked that kind of place. Many of the people here
were Indios, though not Ngobe. Not much was the same in their
language.
    He checked around for quite some time, but
didn’t learn much. L&L&L&L were about six kilometers
away and usually only carried local vegetables and such for friends
or would carry other things when someone moved or bought something
that was delivered to the warehouse. He went to find L&L&L
were working in the finca, but L was there.
    “ It’s
Lopez and Lopez and Lopez and Lopez. We’re three brothers and one
sister. We bought the truck together and run the finca together,”
Esmeralda Mendez Lopez explained. “We don’t do much with that part.
Maybe once or twice a week and local.
    “ I
remember that part, though. A man who has a big finca in Veraguas
brought it and paid us to take it to David when we were going with
something else. He said it wasn’t anything but stuff from a
relative, a cousin, who was moving to Bocas and would have to store
it until he had a house, anyway. No hurry, but as soon as they
could.
    “ We had
some things from Santiago to go to David for the next morning so
took it.
    “ Quentin!
His name was either Martin Quentin or Quentin Martin! I remember
because it was sort of unusual.
    “ It was
real. His cedula said the same thing.”
    “ Oh, then
you have his cedula (national ID card) number?”
    “ Oh,
sure. It’s the law. We have to get your cedula number and
signature.” She went inside and came out with a slip of paper with
the name and number. That might help a lot in finding who he was.
The total weight of five boxes was twenty two kilos. They were
marked fragile, though there was a note that it wasn’t really very
fragile. That was already on the used boxes so they wouldn’t
require insurance and wouldn’t hold L&L&L&L accountable
for any damage.
    Tole was near the coast so it could well be
something brought in, which still didn’t quite make sense to Clint.
Why would it be brought there, then shipped by truck, then
transhipped by truck to be loaded on a ship in Chiriqui Grande? It
was obvious enough that somebody wanted it to be untraceable, but
how and why was Clint Faraday involved to the point he had to be
distracted while they were doing it? It could easily have been set
up to be delivered to David that day – if the stuff from Santiago
was there to be sure the stuff from Veraguas went that day. Clint
didn’t want to appear too absorbed with it so didn’t ask who had
the other part of the delivery set