BooksBarbecue
Back We Were Killers Once Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty–one
  25. Twenty–two
  26. Twenty–three
  27. Twenty–four
  28. Twenty–five
  29. Twenty–six
  30. Twenty–seven
  31. Twenty–eight
  32. Twenty–nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty–one
  35. Thirty–two
  36. Thirty–three
  37. Thirty–four
  38. Thirty–five
  39. Thirty–six
  40. Thirty–seven
  41. Thirty–eight
  42. Thirty–nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty–one
  45. Forty–two
  46. Forty–three
  47. Forty–four
  48. Forty–five
  49. Forty–six
  50. Forty–seven
  51. Forty–eight
  52. Forty–nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty–one
  55. Fifty–two
  56. Fifty–three
  57. Fifty–four
  58. Fifty–five
  59. Fifty–six
  60. Fifty–seven
  61. Author’s Note
  62. Acknowledgments
  63. Also by Becky Masterman
  64. About the Author
  65. Newsletter Sign-up

Only the last drug charge was brought in Mississippi. The first two were in Florida, before the drug wars started in earnest and the entire Florida coastline was open for business. When things got hot there he must have moved up the coast before he was snagged the third time and put in for what everyone would have assumed was life. As far as any violent crimes were concerned, he was clean.

Jeremiah Beaufort may have been good in the drug racket. Maybe he thought he was smart, because he managed to avoid the greater charges for which he was guilty. The investigative report had him as a suspect for running cocaine from Nicaragua by boat to the Florida Keys. He was in charge of the operation after the lead guy, a Guatemalan, was “lost in a boating accident,” and Beaufort could have amassed a tidy fortune that nobody was ever able to locate in any offshore account. But in actuality it was no harder, and maybe it was easier, to ply this trade in the seventies. Millions of tons got through, hundreds of dealers were never caught. The investigators could never prove the major deals, and settled for getting him twice on possession and once on selling a couple of ounces. But in the end it didn’t matter, he still got life.

So Jeremiah Beaufort would consider himself a criminal mastermind. But here’s the thing that doesn’t take a professional profiler to deduce:

A smart guy doesn’t get caught three times.

Hunting a smart professional is like playing chess. There are certain prescribed moves you can predict more often than not. But dealing with someone who thinks he’s smarter than he is, well, that guy is more like sitting down with someone to play chess, and he starts playing Candy Land, and you can’t call him a jerk and walk away, because he’ll kill you. He doesn’t know that killing someone in law enforcement, retired or not, is a stupid move, and should be avoided.

No, of all the possible chess moves you might expect from a seasoned pro, all you can be certain of is that the stupid criminal will do something else because he doesn’t know any better. And that is liable to get you dead, or someone else who you really don’t want dead.

But all that said, just because someone is a crook doesn’t mean they’re after me, necessarily. Could be he was a scumbag low-life, a mooch, and an abuser, but that didn’t mean he was after me. Him running into us, that could just be a co-inky-dink.