Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) (9 page)

“You’re jumping around. I thought we were talking about an agenda.”

“An agenda resulting from motivation,” he corrected me. “Motivation resulting in specific actions that causes a specific reaction. If we’re talking an emotional motivation, like love or hate, which can be interchangeable at times, then the agenda would be designed to get a specific reaction, usually from one certain individual. Like when a father raises his voice and the child stops instantly.”

“Who?” I asked.

“If whoever is pulling the strings wanted to find someone down here, it wouldn’t be that hard, would it?” Bender asked, as I slowly brought the
Cazador
down off plane in Harbor Channel.

“Island people are tight,” I replied. “But with the right resources and connections, I guess anything’s possible.”

“What if they don’t have those resources and connections? What if they are comfortable with a more predatory means of finding someone?”

“Like a hunter?” I asked.

“Or a trapper,” he replied. “Set a trap and wait.”

“Ah, you think what they’re doing is meant to draw someone out? Seriously, there are easier ways to find someone down here.”

“There is one person down here that would be a little harder to find. One that’s known for his love of the sea and the environment.”

My southern dock came into view, jutting out from the mangroves ahead of us. It’s a low dock built on the spoils from dredging my little channel, so really only the posts were visible from more than a hundred yards away and only when approaching from this direction. We came to the southerly curve in Harbor Channel and I made the tighter turn to the north into my narrow channel. That’s when my deck railing and the upper part of my house came into view above the trees, to starboard. Only the big doors to the dock area were partly visible through a tunnel of mangroves.

As we idled up the short channel along the dock, I pressed the fob on the key chain, and the eastern door below the house started to slowly swing open. One of the giant spring-loaded hinges squeaked in protest and I made a mental note to spray it with some WD-40.

“Me?” I asked with a laugh, reversing the engine. “There’s harder people to find down here. Besides, who would want to find me?”

I brought the
Cazador
to a stop alongside the turning basin and toggled the bow thruster to spin her around, before backing under the house to the docks.

Bender stepped up to the dock with the bowline in his hand and looked down at me while tying it off. “Sonny Beech.”

“What do you mean he escaped?” I asked Deuce over the satellite video connection on my laptop. “Nobody’s ever escaped from Gitmo.”

“He had help from the outside,” Deuce replied. “A diversionary attack by a group of radicals on the west side, near the detainee barracks. He was being moved, along with another American detainee. One Marine killed and another injured.”

Damn
, I thought.

“Radicals? Can you be a little less vague?”

“We think it was Haitian nationals.”

“You gotta be kidding,” I said. “Zoe Pound?”

“It doesn’t sound like it,” Deuce replied. “These people were trained militants. It was a coordinated attack carried out with precision. They were in and out in a matter of minutes. Cuban forces turned a blind eye and Beech disappeared into the jungle with the militants. Witnesses said he didn’t appear to be going voluntarily.”

“Haitian militants kidnapped a Gitmo detainee,” I mumbled. “Story at eleven.”

“There won’t be a story,” Deuce said flatly.

“Well, at least there’s that.”

“I gotta go,” Deuce said. “If I learn any more, I’ll let you know.”

The screen went blank and I closed the laptop. Stepping down into the cockpit and up to the dock, I heard the sound of an outboard approaching. The noise was muffled somewhat by the big doors, but I recognized it as the Grady-White. Charlie and Kim returning from their fishing excursion.

I went down to the dock to meet them. As Charlie idled the twenty-foot center console up toward the dock, Kim stood in the bow, ready to toss me a line. My daughter had melded naturally to the island lifestyle. Her hair was lighter, streaked by the salt and sun. Her skin was darker even though she took great care to not overdo the exposure, like what she was wearing now, a long-sleeved lightweight denim shirt and long-billed fishing cap. She was a natural boat handler, preferring the skiff and fishing the backcountry, but could handle the
Revenge
almost as well as me.

“How’d it go?” I asked as Kim tossed me the line and I tied it off to a dock cleat.

“Half filled the cooler,” Kim replied.

“She caught most of them,” Charlie chimed in, opening the cooler.

Carl came up behind me and peered down. “Now that’s a good day’s catch. Hand it up, honey. I’ll clean ’em.”

Carl Junior and Patty scampered past us with Pescador bounding after them, barking. Charlie followed behind them, all headed to the other dock on the far side of the island to swim and clean up before supper.

“Do we have time for a swim, Dad?” Kim asked.

I glanced toward the sky, raising my head so that the sun shone fully on my face from the southwest. “Yeah, a short one. Half a mile?”

“Would you like to go, Mister Bender?” she asked over my shoulder.
I must be losing it
, I thought, having not heard him approach.

Bender declined, so Carl drafted him to help clean what looked to be about fifty grunts and a few red snapper.

“I talked to Eve yesterday,” Kim said after an invigorating swim. When we got back to the pier the sun was near the horizon, so we quickly bathed in seawater, rinsed in the cold-water dock shower and sat huddled under two big heavy towels, watching the sunset.

“That’s good. How are they doing?” Eve was married to a lawyer in Miami and gave birth to my first grandchild just a few weeks ago. Last September, her husband and his father had become involved with some activities that were over the line, legally speaking. He had his chain yanked hard and both he and his father were now following a much better path. And doing better for it I gathered, based on what Kim told me, after the two of them talked.

“She wants to bring the baby to meet his grandfather.”

What the hell! I’m not old enough to be a grandfather.

“Here?” I asked.

“Yeah, here on the island.”

“When?”

“She asked if next weekend would be alright. She sounds anxious to meet you too.”

I’d been blindsided meeting Kim for the first time after not being a part of their lives for so long. I’d received a phone call at the
Anchor
one evening and met her five minutes later. Now I had five days to prepare myself. I wasn’t real sure which was better—slowly peeling the bandage off, or just yanking it.

“This weekend, huh,” I said.

“You’re nervous?”

I shivered a little, wrapped inside the heavy towel. Whether it was just the cold air or something else, I couldn’t be sure.

“Have you thought about what you want him to call you?” Kim asked.

“Who?”

“Your grandson, Dad,” she replied, nudging my shoulder with hers. “It’s the only time in your life that you get to choose what someone else will call you for the rest of your life.”

“Granddad, I guess. I never really thought about it.”

“You don’t look like a ‘Granddad.’ And that’s, like, plain. Maybe Pops?”

I looked over at her and arched an eyebrow.

“What, then?”

“Pappy,” I said without thinking. Gregory Boyington was a WWII Marine ace in the South Pacific. He’d received the Medal of Honor for his actions and his men had called him Gramps. Though he was only in his early thirties at the time, he was ten years older than the most senior pilot under his command. Later, he was popularized by the nickname Pappy in a song, and much later in a TV series starring Robert Conrad. Gramps didn’t suit me, but Pappy did. He was a man I looked up to.

“I like that,” Kim said. “I told her I’d pick them up at Old Wooden Bridge Marina at noon on Saturday.”

After breakfast the next morning, Kim went with Charlie as she always does, to take the kids down to Big Pine to catch their school bus. From there, they were going shopping.

I told Bender we’d be making a run up to Miami—I had some things to pick up. A friend up there by the name of Anthony Schultz has an old-school style cabinet shop and he’d called last night to tell me my storage compartments were ready to pick up.

My old boat, the one blown out of the water on the Bahama Banks, had two secret compartments built into the engine room. They were actually false bottoms under the couch and settee with a hidden panel in the overhead of the engine room. Inside one of the compartments was a specially-built stand that fit into the fighting chair mount in the cockpit. The other held the M-2 .50 caliber machine gun that mounted on the stand, along with a spare barrel. We’d recovered them while diving the wreck and now Anthony had finished the precision-fitted storage lockers based on drawings I’d given him two months ago.

Going down the steps to the dock area after Kim and Charlie had left, I said to Bender, “While we’re up there I want to stop in and see Linda. Maybe you can catch a cab and visit Deuce to see what else he’s turned up.”

“What’s the address where she works? I’ll arrange a car.”

“Arrange a car?” I asked as I opened the door to the dock area.

“Yeah,” he replied. “You’re not the only one with contacts in Miami.”

He started around to the far side of the docks, where the smaller boats were tied up, and I turned up the middle dock, stepping down into the cockpit of the Cigarette boat and placing the cooler I’d brought on the deck behind the right seat.

“We’re taking this one,” I said, clicking the fob to release the big door on the west side.

“Just to the
Rusty Anchor
, right? You’re not planning to fly up there in that old airplane, are you?”

“We’re taking this all the way to Miami,” I replied with a grin. “No speed limits out on the blue.”

While I started the two powerful engines, Bender untied the lines fore and aft and stepped down into the boat, mumbling, “Do you even have a car?” I engaged both gear selectors in forward as he sat down in the contoured custom passenger seat.

“Yeah, I have a car,” I replied. Then, pointing to the eight-gauge cluster in front of him, I said, “Keep an eye on the gauges while we’re underway. The top four are manifold temperature and ammeter for both engines. Below that are oil pressure and oil temperature for both. Those are also displayed on my side.”

He glanced at all the gauges on both his side and my side and nodded, seeing that all eight gauges on his side were also on mine, along with the tach, knot meter, and trim indicators.

“Four eyes are better than two?”

“Yeah,” I replied, idling out into Harbor Channel and turning toward Upper Harbor Key. “These boats are built for racing. Once we get offshore we’ll be running about eighty knots and I’ll be busy watching the water and working the throttles and trim. Both engines should have the same readings on all four sets of gauges. If one is just a little different, you’ll notice it easily and can warn me.”

Nudging the throttles, the stern dropped and the long, narrow bow lifted as the boat slowly came up onto the step. I kept the speed below thirty knots until we were out of Harbor Channel and headed south. Now in deeper water, I shoved the throttles further, bringing the speed up to sixty knots.

The wind and water were calm, barely a ripple on the surface, and the go-fast boat seemed to be running perfectly, her bow sniffing out the open water and a steady, low roar from her powerful engines drifting off astern. A thin line of disturbed water ahead and just to starboard meant another boat had passed through East Bahia Honda Channel in the last twenty or thirty minutes.

“You’re going fishing,” Bender shouted over the wind. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

“This ain’t exactly a fishing boat,” I said, feigning ignorance.

“No, it’s the boat DHS impounded from Sonny Beech.”

I glanced over at him out of the corner of my eye. He was pushed back in the seat, his knees slightly bent and his feet braced against the bulkhead under the gauge console. Every few seconds, he glanced down at the gauges. I shoved the throttles to the stops and the engines responded, shrieking to an ear-splitting roar as the boat surged forward, pinning us both into the seats.

Minutes later, I saw Bender lean over to see the knotmeter as we shot through the gap in the old bridge at ninety knots. A second later, we went under the high arch of the new Seven Mile Bridge and out into the open Atlantic. I throttled back a little. Ninety knots was insane on flat water, but with the low rollers coming in from the east, we’d be taking them on the port bow until we turned east into them.

Bender leaned toward me and said, “This boat’s highly recognizable.”

“Yep.”

“If Beech is in Miami, he’ll find out through the grapevine that his old boat is at the downtown marina?”

“We call it the Coconut Telegraph. Actually, the boat’ll be at the dock right next door to his old warehouse on the Miami River.”

What I didn’t say, but he’d probably already surmised, was that it would be at the same warehouse where I, along with Deuce and his door kickers, had found my wife after she’d been raped and beaten. And where I’d nearly been stabbed to death.

“What are you not telling me?” Bender asked, sensing more to the story.
Maybe he didn’t know everything
, I thought.

“Just going with your hunch, Bender. If someone’s looking for you, the easiest way to find out who it is would be to get found. If the Haitians are looking for me, and Beech was kidnapped out of Gitmo by Haitians, then finding him should tell us why they’re looking for me.”

I began the turn when we reached the ten-fathom line, well outside the reef. Headed due east into the low, well-spaced rollers, I bumped the speed up to just over eighty-five knots and adjusted the trim so we didn’t get too much air under the hull, coming off the tops of the waves.

He took out his cellphone and asked for the name of the place we were going to dock. I gave it to him and he typed it into an email, sent it, and put his phone back in his shirt pocket. Less than two minutes later, he took it out again and, after looking at the screen for a few seconds, put it away once more.

“Where you go, I go,” he said. “A car will be waiting at Trans Global for both of us.”

I glanced over at him and asked, “Who’s supplying the car?”

“Not who you think,” Bender replied. “A private contractor I know.”

I handed him my phone and told him to text Linda with the message, “Meet me for lunch at Area 31?” He sent it and a few minutes later handed it back and said, “She said ‘okay.’”

We rode in silence for the next hour and were soon entering the mouth of the Miami River, downtown Miami’s skyline soaring up from the edge of the water. The river isn’t so much a river anymore, not in the truest sense of the word. Oh, it still has its source, deep in the Everglades, and the mouth of the river is still in the same place, where it was once settled by the Tequesta, but it’s now the home of the bustling Port of Miami. Today, once you pass through the heart of the city and Little Havana, which grew up around it, it’s been dredged, diked, and straightened for most of its six-mile course, following a perfectly straight line northwest alongside US-27.

Go-fast boats aren’t an uncommon sight in Miami, and most are custom painted just like this one and easy to tell one from another. I’d removed the name from the transom a year ago, changing it from
Beech’s Knot Cream
to
Fire in the Hull
, but the distinctive paint scheme was just like it had been when Beech owned it, canary yellow, cerulean blue, and lime green over a fire-engine-red hull. A gaudier boat in Miami would be hard to find.

Arriving at the Trans Global docks, I reversed the engines and backed into a canal on the south side of the river, tying off at their little-used small boat dock under an overhanging bald cypress, one of the few still standing in Miami.

Anthony’s woodworking shop was just a few blocks from here, so after checking in with a friend at Trans Global, we walked out front, where a black Escalade sat idling in the parking lot.

Both front doors opened and two tall black men got out. The driver stayed by the door and the passenger came around the hood and extended his hand to Bender. Bender shook hands and pulled the man into a shoulder bump.

Turning to me, Bender said, “Jesse, I’d like you to meet David Norton, former Chicago narco detective. David, this is Jesse McDermitt.”

At first glance, the man had appeared younger than he did now that he was closer.
And vaguely familiar
, I thought as he removed his dark wraparound sunglasses and turned toward me. Both he and the driver were tall and fit looking. Both with shaved heads, wearing dark slacks and jackets over button-down shirts. Norton, the taller of the two, was just under my six foot three.

“Pleasure to meet you again, Gunny,” he said, showing a perfect set of white teeth. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“You two know each other?” Bender asked.

I shook Norton’s hand and said, “I remember an armorer named David Norton. Three Six?”

He nodded and turned to Bender. “I worked in the armory at Lejeune. Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, must be eleven or twelve years ago. During a weapons inspection, the Gunny here chewed my ass over a speck of dirt on a weapon we rarely employed anymore.”

“So, being an asshole has been a lifetime occupation for you?” Bender asked me.

“Yeah, pretty much,” I replied. “Bet you never got a gig on an inspection after that, did you, Norton?”

“Absolutely not,” he replied, with a wide grin. “You guys have us for as long as you need. Where to?”

Walking to the car, I said, “First stop is just a few blocks away, Northwest Fourteenth Street and Thirty-First Avenue.”

I climbed in the back with Bender, who explained that Norton had helped him out on a case just before he’d left Chicago to join the Secret Service in Washington.

“I didn’t help him out,” Norton corrected. “I was a flatfoot on the south side who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Bender was about to leave and didn’t want to be wrapped up in all the paperwork and testimony. He dumped the whole case on me and made out like I’d solved it all on my own.”

“You had all the answers,” Bender said. “You just didn’t know the questions yet.”

As we backed out of the parking lot and crossed the short bridge where River Drive becomes Delaware Parkway, Norton turned in his seat, placing a beefy arm on the console and said, “So, what’s the case you guys are on?”

Before Bender could say anything, I said, “Case? We’re just picking up a couple of boxes a friend made in his cabinet shop.”

Norton looked at me, then Bender, his mouth widening into a big, toothy grin. “Uh-huh.”

I looked at Bender and got an almost imperceptible nod. Truth is, I know Bender’s a good judge of people. So am I. Which is why I took his nod to mean he trusted Norton.

“What do you know about anything Zoe Pound is involved in lately? Do you know Sonny Beech?”

“Beech?” Norton responded, his curiosity piqued. “He disappeared without a trace about a year ago. Word on the street at the time said there was a shooting. Right back there at what used to be his warehouse. Nobody I know has spoken his name since summer. Zoe Pound has gone to ground lately. About two weeks now, no headlines, no shootings, no heads on pikes. They’re still running drugs and a little prostitution on the side, but for the most part they’ve been really quiet since the beheading thing.”

Just then, the driver, who had yet to say a word, pulled into a small crushed-shell parking lot and said, “Schultz Cabinets?”

“This is the place,” I said, opening the door. “Open the back, would ya?”

Bender and Norton climbed out of the Escalade as well. I made a quick survey of the area. Two empty lots, overgrown and fenced, and a shuttered business on the opposite corner. Though I could hear activity two blocks away on the riverfront, it was quiet here, no cars on the streets or people walking around.

A neighborhood in decline
, I thought. I noticed the other two men made the same quick survey. We walked toward the front door of the business, while the driver opened the back doors of the big SUV and stood by them, also looking around the area. It becomes habit in some occupations, I guess.

“Hey, Jesse,” Anthony said from behind the worn countertop as I stepped in and removed my sunglasses.

The front room was small, with a large window facing the lot that was covered with heavy steel bars. Inside were a few displays of handmade wooden cabinets. Anthony specialized in making odd-size and shape cabinets which couldn’t be found at the big box stores. He had a lot of customers who were amateur boat builders and restorers, as well as the usual kitchen remodelers and builders.

Standing up to his full six-foot-six height, he came around the counter. He always reminded me of an old buzzard, his head cocked forward on narrow shoulders, with a long, hooked nose being the most prominent feature after his height. Though he was three inches taller than me, I probably had sixty pounds on the man. He still wore his hair in a crew cut, the remnants of a past in the Army. He was mostly gray, except for a little around his collar.