Fallen Out: Jesse McDermitt Series, The Beginning (17 page)

I thought about it again and said, “See that deadfall, just ahead of us. You paddle up there and use it to steady that Remington. I’m going to paddle over to the far side and come up behind him. I’ll turn on the infrared light on my headset and you’ll be able to see me clearly, but he won’t. I have a set of headphones for this radio and you can keep me informed of anything.
When I’m close enough to see by the firelight, I’ll ditch the headset and wait a few minutes to let my eyes adjust. Then I’ll just walk into his camp, with my Sig and you can cover me.”

“Guess that works as well as anything. Way out here, on a weeknight, he won’t be expecting anyone.”

“It’ll take me a good thirty minutes to get around there,” I said as I pushed away from his canoe. I paddled in what I hoped was total silence and made it to the far side of Butterfly Island in twenty minutes.

I switched on the tiny infrared light on the headset. It was all but invisible more than six inches away, but illuminated my path greatly and subdued the ambient light from the fire. Through Billy’s headset, it would be seen clearly as I crept quietly through the forest toward the camp. The ground was soft and spongy, but I had to go slow to avoid any dead twigs.

“Stop,” Billy’s voice came over the earphones. “He’s looking around. Nod if you stepped on something.” I froze where I was. I hadn’t made the slightest sound and knew there was no way Earl could hear me.

“He looks troubled,” Billy whispered. “I think the bugs might have stopped making noise. Just don’t move for a second and they’ll start again.”

He was right, the chirping near me had stopped. Within a few seconds they started again. “Move slower,” Billy whispered. “Bugs sense pressure changes, not sound.”

I started moving again, ever so slowly, taking several seconds to move one leg forward and take a single step. I could hear Earl now, talking to the woman, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Slowly, I kept moving forward, keeping a large tree between me and the fire.

After what seemed like a really long time, I was close enough to hear him. “Yeah, we’re gonna have us a party tonight, bitch. Just as soon as I finish eating.”

I was close enough now. I switched the infrared light off and on three times then removed the headset and placed it on the ground at my feet.

“Don’t rush,” Billy whispered. “Give your eyes a couple of minutes to adjust. I have him covered and I can see you and her both. You’re in the shadows and there’s no way he can see you.”

I nodded in the darkness. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the near darkness. Only the light from the small fire illuminated the night. What had appeared to be a roaring bonfire in the night vision optics, was actually a very s
mall fire, mostly coals and very little flame.

Earl was eating something straight out of the pan using his fingers and when he finished, just tossed the pan to the side, picked up a beer can and took a long pull.

“Get over here, bitch,” he growled. “Time you earned your keep again.”

I took four quick steps,
coming out from the shadows, leading with my Sig. “You’re gonna have to wait, Earl. If you so much as move a muscle, I’ll shoot you.” Earl froze. He’d been taken completely by surprise and I could tell from his expression that he was thinking about it.

“Pistol in his pants,” Billy shouted, no longer bothering to use the UHF. “Left side, cross draw.”

“Use your left hand, Earl. Real slow. Pull that pistol out and toss it on the ground. You’re covered by a high powered rifle.”

When Billy shouted, he looked toward the sound and I took two more steps. “You!” he growled. “How the fuck?”

“I’m not gonna say it again, Earl. Toss that pistol now, or I’ll blow your damn head off.”

I could see in his eyes that he was calculating his chances. Then resignation came over his face and he moved his left hand very slowly to his side and pulled a
Beretta semiautomatic from his waist band with his thumb and forefinger. Holding it up, he tossed it away.

Unfortunately for Earl, he tossed it near the woman. In a flash, she snatched it up from the ground, leveled it at Hailey,
thumbed the hammer and before I could shout no, she fired. The first round spun Earl half way around where he sat. She fired again and caught him in the neck, blood spraying behind him, as he fell backward off the log. She stepped forward, firing over and over, into Earl’s lifeless body. I ran toward the woman, as she continued pulling the trigger, until the slide locked to the rear.

I could hear Billy splashing through the water, coming toward us, as the woman fell to her knees. She tossed the gun aside and hung her head into her hands, sobbing. I hurried over to where Earl lay on the ground, his lifeless eyes staring up at the cypress canopy.
Billy went to the woman, kneeling down and taking her in his arms, talking to her, telling her she was alright and we’d get her out safely.

I holstered my Sig and walked over to where Billy was helping the woman to her feet. “Are you gonna arrest me?” she managed to croak out between sobs.

We’re not the law,” I said. “You’re safe now. What’s your name?”

“You’re not the police?”

“No ma’am,” Billy said. “Just a couple guys who heard noise and came to see what was going on.”

Between sobs, she said, “I’m Regina Castillo.”

“That’s good, Miss Castillo,” Billy said. “Now, with your permission, I’d like to take that chain off your leg. Will that be alright with you?”

She nodded, then looked at the dead man on the ground. “He
has the key.”

I went over to the body, searched his pockets and found a key ring. I handed it to Billy, who seemed to
have begun to build a trust with the young woman. Up close, she was older than I first thought, maybe late twenties.

Billy bent down and gently tried several keys from the key ring until he finally unsnapped the padlock that secured the chain to her ankle and stood up.

“There ya go, Miss Castillo,” he said. “Is there anything here that belongs to you that you want to take with you? We’re going to take you to safety now.”

“Who, who are you guys?” she asked. Looking at me she said, “You called that man by name.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Billy lied. We came out here looking for that man, but we aren’t the law. We served in the Marines together.”

“Is he…. dead?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Billy said. “Are you going to be okay? Is there anything you need to bring with you?”

“No,” she said. “He took everything I had. Kept my money and credit cards and threw everything else away.”

“Then let’s get out of here,” Billy said. “Jesse, I’ll take Miss Castillo in my canoe, while you tend to things here. Once we get around to where your canoe is, we’ll pick up our gear and get out of here.”

I nodded
. “Are you sure there’s nothing here that belongs to you, ma’am? Anything at all that might tie you to this place?”

That seemed to frighten her for a second
, the thought that we might be more of the same. “What Jesse means is, you were never here. You don’t know anything about how that man died. Hunting accidents happen all the time.” He grinned and looked at me, “Right Kemosabe?”

I nodded, “Absolutely, Tonto.”

She laughed then and it sounded good. “No, there’s absolutely nothing here that’s mine.”

“Good,” I said. “You g
o with Billy, he’ll bring you around to where my canoe is. Our camp is only a mile from here. We’ll get our stuff and it’s less than half a mile from there to where our truck is. We’ll have you back in civilization by dawn. Where do you live, anyway?”

“
Coral Springs,” she said. “Where are we anyway? He put me in the trunk of my car and we drove for hours.”

“This is a state park,” I said. “We’re just outside Fort Myers. Do you know where your car is?”

“That animal burned it,” she said as we walked her toward Billy’s canoe. “He kidnapped me while I was getting gas, um, four days ago, I think. My husband’s probably worried to death.”

“You can call him from my house,” Billy said. “My wife’s about the same size, you can borrow some clean clothes
, get cleaned up and rest a little, before your husband gets there. Or would you prefer to go to the police?”

She stopped and looked back at Earl’s camp. “No,” she said to me. “If you can make this nightmare disappear,
we can leave the police out of it.”

“I can do that,” I said.

I turned and went back to the camp, while they sloshed through the water to Billy’s canoe. I searched Earl’s pockets, but didn’t find much. I pocketed three credit cards and a small wad of cash to give to the woman. I stripped his clothes off, wadded them up and tossed them on the fire. I went to the tent and looked inside. There was a single sleeping bag and a nearly empty cooler. I took the water and beer, poured them out then crushed the cans and bottles, before tossing them in the fire. Throwing a couple more pieces of dead wood on, it began blazing. I tore down the tent, rolled it up with the sleeping bag still inside and tossed it on the fire. When it was roaring good, I up-ended the cooler and put it on the fire, before adding even more wood. Within a few hours there’d be nothing left of any of it, not even the aluminum cans.

With all the plastic and nylon,
the fire was soon very hot. I went over to Earl’s body and taking it by the arms, I dragged it over near the canoe and wedged it between two cypress trees, then piled some dead palm fronds around it. I picked up my night vision head set, put it on and looked out over the water. Several pairs of flickering red eyes looked back. Within an hour, the gators would take care of Earl. Anything left, the panthers would carry off. By dawn, there wouldn’t be anything left.

Keeping my back to the fire, I walked around the camp, looking for anything else
through the night vision. I picked up the chain and lock and flung them both out into the water, then returned to my canoe. Several gators had moved in closer and one was swimming straight toward the body. Maybe it wouldn’t even take until dawn.

Putting one foot in the canoe, I shoved off. Within minutes, I was a hundred feet from shore and looking off to my left, I saw Billy and the woman in his canoe heading toward me. As they pulled alongside, several splashes could be heard from shore.
The gators would make short work of their grizzly task.

“What’s that?” Regina asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Billy replied. “Let’s get you out of here, Miss Castillo.”

Billy and I got Regina Castillo to his house before sunrise. After spending ten minutes on the phone with her husband and convincing him she was safe, she hung up and told us that she’d told her husband she’d been abducted but managed to get away. Billy’s wife, Hanna, gave her some clean clothes and showed her to the bathroom, so she could get cleaned up.

I took Billy outside and said, “I’m going home. Tell Regina that I never existed, okay. She wandered out of the swamp and found you and Hanna sitting on the porch. Whoever snatched her, left her to die and she never saw his face.”

“I’ll take care of it, Jesse. Don’t worry. Just leave the keys to the truck in it, nobody’ll bother it.”

I took his outstretched forearm in mine then leaned in and embraced my old friend. “Come down to Marathon, we’ll go fishing.”

“I’ll do that,” he said as I walked toward the truck.

By noon, I was tied up at
Dockside
again, like nothing had ever happened. Jimmy was able to rework the schedule and we managed to get all our charters in for the week. Even those that had to reschedule were happy with the outcome.

Summer wore on and before we knew it, fall had arrived again.
Billy never did come down, but with a wife, four kids, a job, and his four wheeling hobby, I wasn’t counting on it.

In early September,
I finally got around to changing my driver’s license. I was sitting in the DMV office, waiting for my number to be called, looking out at a clear blue sky. There was a commotion in one of the offices behind the counter and several of the clerks crowded around the door. I walked over to see what the commotion was about and they were watching a small TV in the office. On the screen I could see there was a news report covering a high rise fire.

I was starting to get impatient and was about to say something, when I watched on the screen as a jumbo jet flew into a different building
, exploding on impact.
How could an airline pilot hit a building?
I thought. Then the camera panned out and I saw two buildings on fire. I recognized the landmark immediately. The World Trade Centers.

Later, at the
Anchor
, we watched it on the news over and over, along with footage of a burning Pentagon. Within a few days we learned that terrorists had hijacked four airliners and flown them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Some gutsy passengers tried to take control of the fourth and it went down in a field in Pennsylvania.

Everyone was in shock for days, it seemed. We all stumbled
around, not sure what to do or say. Saturday morning, I borrowed Rusty’s pickup and drove to Miami. By 0900, I was sitting in a Marine Corps Recruiter’s office on US-1, in Cutler Bay, just south of the city. I had my retirement papers in hand and was talking to a prior service recruiter.

“Gunny,” the young Staff Sergeant said, “I wish there was something I could do, but right now HQMC is saying no prior service, that have been out for more than two years
, regardless of rank. Let’s leave this one to the young guns.”

I left the office feeling more dejected than ever in my life. There was no doubt in my mind our country was going to war and apparently
it didn’t need me anymore. I felt even older than when Julie calls me ‘uncle’.

When I got back home, I made a few phone calls to some high ranking Officers I used to know. A couple of them owed me. I called in every marker, to no
avail. I wasn’t even forty years old and I was already a washed up has-been.

I spent hours watching the news, an armchair quarterback. As winter wore on, I lost interest in doing any charter fishing at all.
The new President seemed to have everything in hand and the American military machine began to spool up for the coming conflict. By early October, President Bush’s catch phrase was the ‘War on Terror’.

By spring, I’d come to grips with the fact that
I was an old warrior, like one of the guys that sat around the VFW and reminisced about their glory days. My friends pumped me up every chance they could and Jimmy kept coming to me with offers to charter. I finally started easing my way back into my new career and by April we were back to three charters a week.

Julie celebrated her
twentieth birthday and was constantly pushing me to ‘get back in the saddle’, as she called it. I hadn’t been on a date since before the attacks and hadn’t even met a woman that interested me.

One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on the bridge enjoying the first cold beer of the day and watching the goings on in the Marina. A yellow Jeep Cherokee pulled into the parking lot, towing a nice looking blue and white flats skiff, with a 170 horse Mercury hanging on the back. What caught my eye was the license tag on both the trailer and the car. Oregon tags.

I watched as the driver turned around in front of the boat ramp and started backing up. Sometimes, people do the stupidest things when launching their boats, so the boat ramp was always fun to watch. This guy backed up straight and true, without pulling up once. When the driver’s door opened, I sat up straight in my chair and leaned forward.

It was a woman. Not just any woman, either. She was tall, with broad shoulders like a professional swimmer and a slim waist. She had
thick, wavy, blonde hair past her shoulders. As she walked back to the trailer, she pulled her hair back and put one of those elastic bands around it, then pulled a long billed fishing cap out of the pocket of her cargo shorts and put it on.

I watched as she pulled a line from the front of the skiff
and tied it to the front of the trailer. She released the crank, turned out a little slack and unhooked the cable from the skiff. As she walked back to the car, she looked around the marina and saw me staring at her. She smiled and waved. I stood up and waved back.

She backed the boat down the ramp, stopping at just the right moment and the little skiff slid off the trailer, floating just behind it. The safety line never even tightened up. She pulled forward slightly, so the front of the trailer was out of the water then got out again. After untying the safety line and tying it off to a cleat on the dock, she parked the car and trailer. A few minutes later, she walked down to the ramp with two fly rod cases in one hand and a tackle box in the other. Moments
after that, she disappeared past the old bridge. I realized I’d been staring the whole time, sat back down and finished my beer.

Aaron came out the back door of his office and I whistled to get his attention then motioned him over. I climbed down and stepped up to the dock as he walked up.

“Say, Aaron,” I said. “Did you see that yellow Cherokee that just launched?”

“Of course,” he replied. “People have to pay to use our ramp.”

“I don’t suppose you got her name, did you?”

He grinned and said, “Yeah, her name’s Alex. Alex DuBois
. From Oregon.”

“Alex DuBois,” I said as I turned and looked toward the bridge where she’d just disappeared.

The End