Fallen Angel: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 9) (20 page)

A
fter taking Nick’s money, Swimp waited a few minutes, watching Nick motor off to the south, toward Parris Island Spit. When the lights from Nick’s boat disappeared around the island and into Broad River, Swimp started his engine and hoisted anchor.

Swimp went the opposite direction on Beaufort River and just let the old boat idle along, while he considered what Nick had asked him to do and just how he’d go about it. This was a lot different than the hookers he’d disposed of for the man. A whole lot different. He wasn’t sure in what way it was different, since he hadn’t asked specifics.

Swimp was sure of one thing. The two white women on the boat with the Jamaicans weren’t going to be tortured, half-dead hookers. That left rivals in either business or politics. The Jamaican drug runners being involved probably meant it wasn’t politics. Not that who they were would carry any weight with Swimp and his cousins. It also didn’t matter what Nick said. If the women were still alive, he and his cousins would take turns with them.

Nick had said the Jamaicans were drug runners of some kind. If Swimp and his cousins made the murders look like it was a rival gang, that’d be the end of it. He’d said the important part was that the two women not be seen, and to get his money back. When Swimp asked what the boat looked like, Nick had said he didn’t know.

“With the number of cousins you have,” Nick had said, “you can have one watch the dock, identify the boat, and then you and the others can stop it down past Spanish Point. It’ll probably move downriver right away. Just get my money any way you can, and make sure those women never see the sun set.”

As Swimp’s boat slowly moved up the river, he wondered who the two women might be and what connection they had to the Jamaicans. Nick said he’d paid the black men to do a job and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the job was. They were supposed to kill the two women and had instead held out for more money. Not a smart thing to do, dealing with a man like Nick Cross. Especially if you were a black man.

Swimp had grown up among the Gullah people. He’d been one of only a handful of white kids on the island. As a boy, he’d been picked on by them and the few other white kids, pretty much equally. His family having been on the islands for over two hundred years, there was a little Gullah blood in him and a little Ross blood in some of the Gullah.

Nick Cross, on the other hand, hated anyone that wasn’t white and privileged. He was smart enough to hide that fact in his public life, but with a few people, he let his racist side show. Mostly, it was people like Swimp. The poor working-stiff whites of the Lowcountry, who Nick assumed were just as bigoted as him.

Swimp and his cousins didn’t care about what color a person’s skin was. They’d grown up among the Gullah, gone to church and to school with them and developed close ties. The Ross cousins also knew that all people bled the same color.

Where were the Jamaicans from?
Swimp wondered. He’d met a few, but not around the Sea Islands. Swimp had seen a good bit of the world, unlike his cousins. The Jamaicans were probably from Savannah or Jacksonville, he decided.

Swimp angled the old workboat northeast, out of the river and into Cowen Creek. Throttling up a little, for no other reason than to rock the rich assholes’ docks and yachts on Cat Island, he motored north toward Capers Creek. His property was on the north bank of Capers, near where it joined Cowen Creek. The Ross dock extended several hundred feet out over the pluff mud, now exposed on the banks. The channel itself was the only water left in the creek, and it was barely a hundred feet wide. At high tide, Cowen Creek was nearly a quarter mile across, the pluff mud covered by three to five feet of water, right up and into the reeds. Just a little past the low tide now, only the deepest part of the channel had enough water to maneuver the big boat.

The rising tide was already beginning to cover the pluff mud, and Swimp had the current astern. He normally tied up with the bow facing up the creek, regardless of whether it was rising or falling. But he thought he might need to move quickly and decided to turn the boat around before docking.

Passing his pier, where one of his cousins’ boat was tied up to the end of the tee, Swimp turned the big salvage boat toward the mud on the left bank and shifted to neutral, intentionally letting the boat run aground in the soft, yielding mud. Once the bow caught, the current began to slowly push the stern around. When the boat swung perpendicular to the creek, Swimp reversed the engine, backing the boat out of the mud. A few yards clear, he shifted to forward and spun the wheel, gunning the engine to bring the stern around, moving slowly into the current in the middle of the channel.

Quickly tying off to the rickety-looking fixed pier, Swimp shut down the engine and climbed the ladder that extended almost to the mud six feet below the water’s surface. At the shore end of the dock, he saw one of his cousins walking toward him. The two men soon met in the middle of the long pier.

“What’s he want?” Damien Ross asked.

“It’s gonna take a bunch of us,” Swimp replied, relighting the joint he’d stashed in his pocket. “And he’s paying big. A hundred thousand dollars.” Swimp didn’t see any need to tell his cousin about the ten grand in his pocket. “All we gotta do is salvage a few small items from a boat real fast.”

“That much to salvage a boat?” Damien asked, accepting the joint his cousin offered. “Where is it?”

“Depends on where we sink it.”

Damien looked up at his cousin’s features in the moonlight and grinned, blowing the gray-blue smoke up into the night air. “And what’s supposed to happen to whoever’s on the boat?”

“It’ll be crewed by some black guys,” Swimp replied, taking the joint. “They ain’t from these parts, and Cross don’t give a shit what happens to ’em, besides getting dead. S’posed to be drug dealers, so if they get themselves all shot to shit, the cops’ll think it was something to do with that.” A slow grin spread across Swimp’s face. “And there’ll be two white women on the boat that he don’t want to ever be seen or heard from again.”

“Think they’ll be any livelier than them whores he usually gives us to get rid of?”

“Since when do you give a shit?” Swimp scoffed, remembering how the last hooker they’d gang-raped had quit breathing before Damien was finished with her. At the time, he hadn’t let that stop him.

“Fuck you, man,” Damien said. “I didn’t know the whore died. Wasn’t like I was checkin’ her pulse while layin’ pipe.” Then with a bit of pride, he added, “Guess ole Damien’s trouser snake was just too much for her.”

“I’ll have to think on this,” Swimp said as the two turned toward shore and started walking. “If we can stop the boat before killing the crew and blowing it up, the women might be pretty feisty. Then again, them Jamaicans could be pretty well armed. There’s a good chance we’ll have to blow the boat up from a distance. Getting blown up, them women might get pretty dead.”

“He say what the women look like?” Damien asked when they’d reached the footpath to Swimp’s house, where a few other cousins were sitting around a campfire with Uncle Marcel, drinking beer.

Most of the clan had been arrested on various charges, many of them more than once, mostly small stuff like possession and DUI. Not that they’d never committed more serious crimes, they’d just never been caught. Marcel Ross was the only one in the family still alive that had ever served any serious time. Many years ago, he’d been caught screwing an underage tourist girl. He was twenty-eight at the time and she was fifteen. She’d gone along willingly, but when they were caught, she’d screamed rape. He was forty-seven when he got out of prison.

“One’s older,” Swimp replied, reaching into the cooler and grabbing a beer. “Tall and built. The other’s young, short and skinny.”

Marcel had been staring into the fire. He looked up at his oversized nephew. “How young?”

I
t had only taken Chyrel a few minutes to determine that the oath could legally be administered over the phone, so long as there were witnesses at both ends who could hear both sides of the conversation. Within minutes, Deuce had wakened Julie and she’d joined him on the vid-com.

I’ve known Julie all her life. She’s Rusty’s only child. He was just a few months from getting out of the Corps at the end of our first tour when his wife went into labor and died in childbirth. He was there within hours, but not soon enough. Two days later, I arrived for the funeral and met Julie for the first time.

Julie and Deuce met a few years ago in Marathon. Deuce had come down to the Keys to spread his father’s ashes. The reef Russ had wanted his ashes spread on was a favorite of his and mine and few other people knew its location.

Travis read the oath while I stood with Art and Anthony on my end and recited it back. In my mind, it was kind of redundant, as it wasn’t much different than the oath I’d taken nearly thirty years ago. Nobody ever told me that the oath I took to become a Marine had any kind of expiration date, and I’ve lived by it all my life.

“This is only temporary,” I told Deuce and Julie after Travis had signed off. “There’s only one spot that has a commanding view of the park, the marina, and the other possible hides. I’ll need a badge to gain access. But once this is done, I’m turning it in.”

“Legally speaking, Andrew,” Deuce said, “will this be adequate? Is there a time period after the swearing in, before an agent can become active?”

Andrew was in his last year of law school and had spent weeks in creating and detailing the scope of operations for the Caribbean Counterterrorism Command. More precisely, he’d been in his last year of law school for two years now. His deployments had meant missing too much of some required courses, which he was now retaking.

“Perfectly legal,” Andrew said. “Once Chyrel has him entered into the computer, he becomes a deployable asset.”

“You’re still the AIC, Andrew,” Deuce said. “Everything about the arrest remains the same. Jesse’s only acting as a backup pair of eyes and worst-case scenario protection. Use him well.”

The window winked off, and Chyrel immediately shooed me away from the screen. “It’ll only take me a second to update payroll.”

When I turned around, Sheena was smiling. “Welcome to the Dark Side, Special Agent McDermitt.”

Andrew began digging through his go bag and produced a small case with a badge. “Assign him badge number four fifteen for now, Chyrel.”

“You carry extra badges?” I asked.

Andrew extended the leather case to me. “This was Greg Murray’s badge.”

I took the case and opened it. I hadn’t known Murray, but was there the day he died. He’d been surveilling a gun shop near Homestead when a Pittsburgh coke dealer surprised him.

I ran my thumb over the shield. I’d never looked closely at the badges the team carried. It was gold, with an eagle on the top, wings spread wide over a blue crown. The words Homeland Security Investigations were printed on the blue crown in gold letters. Below that was a sunburst. The DHS emblem at the center of the sunburst was flanked by two large letters, US, in the same royal blue as the crown. At the bottom was a folded blue banner, proclaiming me to be a Special Agent.

“I’ll have an ID to go with that in just a minute,” Chyrel said. “But you’re on payroll and activated now.”

“Greg Murray was a fallen agent?” Sheena asked.

I looked up. “Yeah, he was a new guy with a wife and little boy. Former Army Ranger. Served his country with honor and pride. Several deployments to the sandbox without a scratch, but he was killed in the parking lot of a porn store by a coke dealer last year.”

Sheena looked up at me. “What was it you said about going where others won’t go? The urban battlefield is different, but no less dangerous. Same responsibilities and commitments. I think you guys call it semper fidelis.”

“Always faithful,” I said, looking at the badge again. “To God and country, but mostly to one another.”

Chyrel handed me a card, identifying me as Homeland Security Special Agent Jesse McDermitt. “Put that in the case,” she said. “Deuce will contact the sheriff in the morning, to arrange access.”

“I’ll need a spotter.”

Chyrel thought for a minute. “Think the Marine air station here would have someone?”

“I doubt it,” I replied. “One of the range coaches at Parris Island, maybe. If not, I’m sure the sheriff’s department will have one.”

“I’ll check Parris Island first,” she said and went to her laptop.

“A shooting at the dock is very unlikely,” Sheena said. “Cross wouldn’t want it to happen here. Not publicly.”

“I know,” I replied quietly, putting the ID card in the little case with the badge. “It’s just a precaution. That’d be the only place, though. Unless he has someone watching or following, after the exchange is made. We should go to bed.”

“That’s what I was planning, when you brought all this up,” Sheena whispered.

“Um, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant,” she interrupted. “And I know what I meant as well.”

“Everyone go get some rest,” Andrew said. “Reveille’s at zero five hundred. I’ll relieve Tony and fill him in on everything. The five of us can cover a watch on the bridge, but I doubt anyone even knows we’re here.”