Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) (11 page)

“We’d both have to retire and sit in a couple of rockers for the rest of our lives to cover that. But the vast majority of them never knew my name and are thousands of miles away.”

He laughed. “Why don’t I find that hard to believe? What about the recent past?”

“Not so long a list,” I replied. “Since I left the Corps, I’ve tried to lead a normal, quiet life.”

“Until your wife was killed. What about before that?”

I turned slightly south to avoid a fishing boat trawling the deeper waters. “A few dust-ups, mostly slight altercations in bars, nothing important.”
Nothing that would have a gang of Miami thugs come looking for me
, I thought.

Off northern Key Largo, I pushed the throttles forward, increasing speed to eighty-five knots now that we had a more following sea. I wanted to get back to the island and my mind was already plotting the fastest route.

A few minutes later, I turned toward the western tip of Long Key and the low bridge over Channel Two. We had plenty of clearance, but I slowed as we neared it anyway. Fishermen used the old bridge, which was closed to vehicles, and divers dove the pilings.

Once clear of the bridge, I pushed the throttles to the stops and roared across the placid waters of Florida Bay at over ninety knots, with a twenty-foot-high rooster tail trailing behind us. The shortcut across Florida Bay cut half an hour, and running flat out cut another half hour.

Less than two hours after fueling up in Miami, we idled into the channel toward my house. I was relieved to see Pescador laying on the pier and breathed a sigh of relief when he stood up, stretched his forelegs and began wagging his big tail. Everything was just as I’d left it.

“You were worried,” Bender said as I backed the boat up to the center dock, next to the
Revenge
. “If my hunch is right, it’s warranted.”

“I’m still not a hundred percent on that,” I said. “But barring another plausible explanation, that’s the way I’m going to play it.”

Later, as Kim and I sat on the north pier with Pescador, watching the sun set once again over a perfectly clear horizon, I explained Bender’s theory to her.

“Want me to call Eve and see if Nick knows anything about this gang?” she asked.

“No,” I replied a bit too quickly. “I mean, I doubt he’d know anything that Deuce wouldn’t be able to dig up.”

“You’re probably right. Can I ask you something?” I nodded and she continued. “Why do you do it?”

“Why do I do what?”

“Going back to when you first joined the Marines. Then after that, getting involved in other people’s fights against bad people. It’s caused you so much pain. Why do you do it?”

I thought about that a moment. Taking on the bullies of the world ever since I was little, I’d never questioned myself as to why. In grade school, I’d stepped between the playground bullies and whoever they were picking on.

As a Marine, I found it natural to fight against those who did harm to others. Since leaving the Corps almost eight years ago, I’d tried to maintain my privacy here on my little piece of paradise, but there was always some schoolyard bully that needed to have his chain yanked. Though it had cost me a lot, personally, I knew I was good at yanking chains.

“Ever hear of an Irishman named Edmund Burke?” I asked.

“I’ve heard the name before.”

“You’re Irish, lass,” I said in my best brogue accent. “You should learn more about your clan. He was a politician in old Britain before and during the Revolutionary War. I don’t remember much about him, can’t recall what his position in government was, but he was for peace above everything else. Not peace by force or capitulation, but true peace where all people lived in harmony. I remember that much from a lesson in grade school. Knowing that true peace was only possible in a world full of good people, he said something along the lines of the only thing needed for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.”

“But why you?”

“What? You don’t think I’m a good man?”

“No, not that. Why does it have to be a certain good man?”

“Not sure if I can answer that, kiddo. When a man sees evil things being done to good people he has two choices. Intercede or ignore. Ignoring evil only makes evil stronger. I guess it just goes against my nature to see good people get walked over.”

We watched as the sun slipped its bond with the sky and sank into the shallows beyond Raccoon Key, leaving Neptune to watch over its retreat.

Waking the next morning, my first thought was that in just three days, I’d be meeting my grandson for the first time. And my oldest daughter. And her husband, who had once tried to have me killed. Not directly, but the men he sent would have done it without a second thought.

Late last summer, Doc and his wife found a clue to a long-buried treasure and we decided to try to locate it. What we didn’t know was that the agent who represented Florida in an earlier and much smaller treasure find, a guy named Chase Conner, had planted a bug on my boat during the sale of some gold bars to the Florida Historical Society. Conner wanted the new treasure find, but didn’t know where to look. He brought in some muscle in the form of a Croatian mobster who was represented by my son-in-law’s father’s law firm. The father and son attorneys, Alfredo and Nick Maggio, sent four people, two men and two women, to try to take the treasure from us. One of the two women was Linda, working undercover. Their plans failed and Deuce’s boss showed the two attorneys the error of their ways, in deference to the younger Maggio being married to my daughter. A few weeks after it happened, I asked Stockwell why he went out on a limb like that. He shrugged it off with a comment about maybe one day needing a legal asset.

Neither Kim nor Eve knew about any of this and I preferred it stay that way.
But how will I deal with someone who wanted me dead being here on my island?
I wondered.

Pouring a cup of coffee and heading toward the door, I heard a muffled boom to the east. I dashed out the door, leaving the mug on the counter in the galley. Racing around the deck toward the south side of the house, I heard heavy footfalls on the rear steps. I stopped and looked back as Bender bounded up the last few steps, gun drawn.

“It came from the east,” I said and continued around the front of the house, to the east end of the deck. The same trees that blocked the view of the house partially blocked the view of Harbor Channel angling away to the northeast. It did nothing to stop the sound of the voices and the outboard motor. They were close. Too close.

“Where are they?” Bender whispered.

“Out near the end of Harbor Channel. We can catch them, if you’re game.” I started back to the door to get my Sig.

“No,” Bender said forcefully. “A defensive perimeter only.”

I stopped in my tracks and turned around, furious. “Defense? Are you outta your fucking mind?”

“You have innocent people here!”

Kim
, I thought, calming and thinking rationally in an instant. “You’re right, Bender. What the hell was I thinking?”

“You weren’t. You were reacting.”

“Come on,” I said. “We need more firepower than that Beretta and my Sig.”

As we rounded the corner of the house, Kim was coming up the steps, with Carl not far behind.

“Kim, get in the house,” I ordered. “Carl, go get Charlie and the kids and join her.”

Carl raced back down the steps and Kim joined me at the front steps leading down to the dock area. “What’s going on, Dad?”

“Get inside. My Sig’s on the nightstand by my bed. Bad people are close.”

“You’re not going to—”

“No,” I interrupted her. “We’re going to go down where we can see them better and just watch. With luck, they won’t come up the channel and see the house.”

“And if they do?”

“We’ll heed Mister Burke’s advice,” I replied. “But only as a last resort.”

With that, Bender and I went down the steps and I leaped aboard the
Revenge
, making my way forward, with Bender right behind me.

“You any good with a rifle?” I asked him.

“Better with a pistol, but okay.”

I punched in the code on the digital lock below the end of the bunk in my stateroom and it raised up with a hiss from the hydraulic arms. I grabbed two long fly rod cases and lowered the bunk back down. Stepping around the bunk, I opened the small dresser beside it and took out Pap’s old Colt 1911, checked the magazine and racked the slide, chambering the first of eight .45 caliber rounds.

Flipping open the first case, I took out one of my M-40 sniper rifles and inserted a fully loaded magazine. Handing it to Bender, I said, “The scope’s zeroed at two hundred yards. At that distance, a man’s body will fill it.” I opened the second case and slapped a loaded magazine in its twin and said, “Head through the mangroves beside the vegetable tanks. There’s a trail that leads to a dead palm tree near the water that you can use for cover. I’ll be at the south side of the house, down by the turning basin.”

We met Kim and Carl and his family at the top of the steps. I handed Pap’s Colt to Carl and said, “There’s only one way into the bedroom. Defend your family if you have to.”

Carl took the gun and pulled the slide back a little, ensuring that a round was already chambered. He did this with practiced ease, but I’d never known him to carry a gun.

“Be careful, Dad,” Kim said.

“Open the window above the headboard. You won’t be able to see much from there, but you can hear and the deck doesn’t go around to that side.”

When they were inside and the door was locked, Bender and I went down the rear steps and split up. I worked my way through the tangled undergrowth along the east side of the house, my bedroom window directly above and Pescador at my heels. Reaching the water, we slogged as quietly as possible through the shallows at the edge of the small turning basin toward a spit that stuck out into the water just east of it.

Reaching the narrow spit, I crouched low and made my way up to a few ancient coral rocks that I’d piled there while digging the basin. Peering over the crack between two rocks, I could see not one, but two boats. The nearest was an eighteen-foot bowrider that was adrift on the south side of Harbor Channel with two men on board. It was the other boat that caught my attention, though. A shrimp trawler just coming into the channel at full speed, Vince O’Hare’s unmistakable skull and bones flying from the antenna mast.

Flipping open the covers on the Unertl scope, I rested my left arm on the top of the rocks and looked through the scope, just as one of the men on the bowrider threw something overboard. A second later, a geyser of water shot up from where he’d thrown it, followed by the same muffled boom a second after that.

I looked beyond them at the trawler. O’Hare was at the helm inside the small wheelhouse, his shotgun protruding from the open windscreen.
You idiot
, I thought as I watched his ancient trawler charging like a decrepit elephant toward the two men on the boat, who hadn’t yet seen him.

The two men looked out of place on the water. Their boat was in danger of grounding on the shallows and they seemed oblivious to the fact. Both were young black men, dressed like they were from the city. Gang clothes. They didn’t look like the same two who’d murdered the Tolivers, though.

They suddenly looked up toward the trawler as the boom of O’Hare’s shotgun got their attention. I chambered a round.

O’Hare’s trawler was bearing down on them at its top speed of about twelve knots. The men could easily have started their engine and outrun the old trawler, but instead they both pulled out handguns and started shooting toward it.

They were within easy range and I’d have no problem putting both of them down.
Not my circus, not my monkeys
,
I thought. In the Corps, I taught my snipers that there would be times when they’d be tempted to take a shot to stop something from happening. It had happened to me. Once. Sure, it stopped the immediate action that my spotter and I were witnessing, a young boy being beaten by a Somali warlord, but it gave away our approximate location and drew the attention of the dead warlord’s men. The boy’s body was found an hour later, mutilated and discarded by the new warlord. Another one always steps up. I taught my Marines that unless it had a direct impact on the mission, it was usually better to let it play out than risk giving away their position.

This wasn’t Mogadishu, and this was my circus. I ignored my own advice. As I sighted in carefully, my mind picked up on subtle variances and changes in the air. I looked through the scope with my right eye, and my left, having noted wind direction and speed on the water, slowly closed. I took another breath and slowly released it as my right index fingertip found the trigger and slowly squeezed, reaching the three pounds of pressure required to release the firing pin. The resulting explosion inside the casing of the round created over sixty thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in a microsecond, forcing the steel-jacketed projectile from the barrel.

Spiraling as it flew through the air, the bullet was affected all along its path by both air and temperature, all of which my mind took into account in an instant, before pulling the trigger. Covering the two hundred yards to the target in a quarter of a second, the steel jacketed projectile penetrated and destroyed everything in its path upon impact.

My first shot hit the engine on the bowrider about where I expected the aluminum block to be. I quickly chambered a second round and sighted in again. The heavy boom of my rifle’s first shot got the attention of the two men on the bowrider, who both turned away from the immediate threat of the approaching trawler. I watched as they scanned the water between them and me, not knowing where the shot had come from.

I fired again, giving away my position. Their handguns were useless at this range, yet they started shooting at me anyway, their rounds falling well short and hitting the water a hundred feet in front of me. My second shot shattered the casing of the shifter and throttle handles, mounted on the gunwale. If the first round hadn’t disabled the engine, there’d be no way they could control it now. I chambered a third round.

Just then, O’Hare’s trawler rode up onto the shallows on its own bow wave and crashed into the starboard bow of the much smaller boat. The impact and the wall of water the trawler pushed ahead of it rolled the small boat, sending the two occupants flying into the shallows and swamping the bowrider. O’Hare’s boat stumbled and lurched forward, grounding on the shallow sandbar, its prop churning up a foamy froth at the stern.

I watched as O’Hare shut down the engines and came out of the wheelhouse with his shotgun, moving faster than a man of his age ought to be able. He ran out onto the pulpit and shouldered the shotgun. I was sure he’d shoot both men if given the chance.

My third shot impacted the leading edge of the pulpit, sending shards of wood into O’Hare’s lower legs. He looked up and scanned the horizon in my direction.

“Don’t shoot them!” I heard Bender yell from his position just a few yards to my north.

The two men slowly stood up in the shallow water as O’Hare covered them. I could see him saying something, but the distance was too great for the words to carry. He motioned them to the port rail of his trawler, now hard aground and listing to that side.

With the two men moving toward the far side of O’Hare’s boat and him covering them with his shotgun, I quickly made my way back to the house.

I met Bender there and we went up the rear steps two at a time, Pescador bounding ahead of us. I banged on the door and hollered, “All clear!”

A second later, Carl cracked the door a little, Pap’s old Colt clearly visible. He breathed a sigh of relief and said, “What’s happening?”

“Looks like a couple of Zoe Pound thugs had a run in with O’Hare. He’s got them aboard his trawler.” I turned to Bender and said, “Let’s go see what we can do.”

Kim took the rifle from Bender, but I kept mine with me. I told Pescador to stay with Kim and a few minutes later, we were idling out from under the house aboard the
Cazador
, headed to where the big trawler was stuck on the sand. The tide was rising, so if her back wasn’t broken from the impact or her hull wasn’t holed, we should be able to get her off in just a few hours. If she was holed, the tide would fill the hull almost to the decks, flooding the engine room. If that happened, recovery and repair would cost more than the old tub was worth.
Hope he’s got insurance
, I thought, bringing
Cazador
up on plane.

A few minutes later, I eased the
Cazador
up onto the sandbar next to the trawler and tossed an anchor as far as I could. Leaving a good twenty feet of line dangling from the bow, I tied it off and jumped from the bow into the knee-deep water. Pulling the line tight, I jammed the flukes into the sand before retrieving my rifle from the bow.

O’Hare had thrown a rope ladder off the starboard side and when I climbed up I found him sitting on a lobster trap on the trawler’s work deck. The two thugs, hands tied behind them, sat uncomfortably on the deck, their backs against the rough planks of the gunwale.

“You fuckin’ shot me,” O’Hare said flatly, pulling bloody wood splinters out of his right calf.

“No, if I’d shot you, you’d be dead.”

He looked over the two captives’ heads at their boat, with the ruined control box and engine, then looked at the rifle I held cradled in my left arm. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I wasn’t gonna kill ’em, though.”

I looked at the two men—boys, really, as neither looked to be more than twenty. “Who are you and what are you doing up here?”