Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay (32 page)

I impulsively jumped from my car. “Watts, let her go,” I shouted.

Still holding onto Erin’s arm, he half turned and in one motion raised the pistol and fired. It felt like a slow motion sequence in a movie, but as his arm came up I dove through the open door of the vehicle. The bullet passed through the driver’s window where I’d been standing only a moment before. Just a lucky shot, I told myself, but I knew I was the lucky one.

With my head on the car seat, I stared directly at the dashboard panel and noted the clock. For the first time since I chased after Watts, I thought about the deadline Kurtis Laurance gave me. He said I needed to respond to his offer by 9:00 p.m. I only had ten minutes left to give him an answer. At the moment, his offer and the $200,000 per year salary sounded more tempting than ever. But in life, timing was everything, and I had more important matters to think about. Like saving my ass, and, hopefully, Erin Marrano’s.

I slowly sat up, sneaking a look over the dash. Watts was dragging Erin up a leaf-strewn hillock to the left of the visitor’s center. She wasn’t going easily, struggling, slapping at her brother. One strap of her pink tank top slipped from her shoulder. In a panic, she turned to look in my direction.

A rush of adrenalin coursed through my bloodstream. My heart rate jumped and I felt beads of sweat on the back of my neck. A saner person would drive away. Find the nearest telephone. Call Sergeant Marrano and let him deal with Watts. The next call should be to Laurance, telling him to save me a seat on the plane.

Even while those thoughts thrashed through my head, I knew it wouldn’t go down like that. Not after the way Erin looked at me. Her wild blue eyes glowed with a feral fear so intense I felt it pass between us.

“Help me,” she screamed as Watts dragged her over the top of the little hill.

Images bombarded me. Images of William Marrano’s corpse. Of Jeffrey Poe on suicide watch. Of Henderson’s body lying at the foot of the lighthouse, broken and bleeding. I saw again the look of horror on Serena’s face when she first saw my injuries.

There would be no call to Laurance tonight. He’d have to fly to Tallahassee without me. Sucking down a deep gulp of air, I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my belt and leaped from the car. I folowed the path to the top of the grassy hillock, careful not to slip on the slick, leaf-covered grass. As Watts and Erin disappeared over the other side, I ducked behind the trunk of a huge oak, yelling, “Jarrod, don’t do this. We can talk it out.”

He stopped near the bottom of the hill leading to the inlet and turned to face me. He held Erin in front of him with one arm, and with his gun hand gestured at me to turn back. A slash of moonlight cut diagonally across one side of his face giving his cheek the appearance of bleached bone.

“Get out of here while you can, Mitchell. This is no concern of yours.”

“I know that Henderson was your father, and Erin your sister.”

“You think you have it all figured out, don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he raised the pistol and fired.

The round thwacked into the tree, sending chips of bark flying. I stayed hidden behind the oak for a minute and waited while my pulse decelerated to something closer to normal. Cautiously, I peered around the tree and spotted them at the bottom of the hill. Nearby, a narrow walkway extended over the inlet to a dock where several small boats were tied up. From a previous visit, I knew these boats were used to ferry people across Matanzas Inlet to the barrier island housing the fort. Watts stood staring at the boats as if weighing his chances of using one of them to get away.

“Watts, listen to me,” I shouted. “Rindale did terrible things to you, but don’t take it out on Erin. She’s your sister, for God’s sake. Let her go.”

He whirled around, still using her as a shield. “Yes, she’s my sister, and we’re more alike than you’ll ever know.” His arm tightened around her throat.

“Show yourself or I’ll put a bullet through her head.” He raised the pistol, which I now recognized as a Glock 22, which takes a hefty 40 caliber round. He placed the barrel to her head.

Without a clear shot I didn’t have much choice. I tucked the .38 into my waistband in the small of my back, stepped out from behind the tree and raised my hands. “Okay, Watts, I’m coming down. Don’t hurt her.”

With the Glock still pressed against Erin’s right temple, he watched me approach.

“You tossed Henderson off the lighthouse, didn’t you?” I hoped to get him talking, distract him until I was close enough to disarm him.

“That was sweet.” His frigid blue eyes gleamed unnaturally in the moonlight and he smiled at the memory. “He squealed like a little girl, begging me not to hurt him. To give him another chance. Do you believe that? Now he wanted to be my daddy. After what he did to me, he’s lucky it ended so quickly.”

I took several more steps toward him. “A jury would take your terrible childhood into consideration, and—”

“Don’t try to shit me, Mitchell. We both know there won’t be any jury trial for me. Not after tonight.” He twisted his hand in Erin’s hair and pulled her head back. She gasped and clawed at his hand. “I like you Quint, but if you come any closer I swear I’ll kill you along with this lying bitch.”

I backed up a step and held out my hands to calm him down. “Okay, okay. Tell me something, Jarrod. Why’d you kill William Marrano?”

He seemed to be working through my question. “Henderson showed me his will,” Watts finally said. “He actually told me he was fond of me and wanted to take care of me. What a laugh.”

“But he did like you.”

“The old fart willed his property to my sweet sister. I’d heard him talking on the phone to Laurance and knew it was worth more than a million dollars. When I asked him why he gave so much money and property to Erin Marrano he started blubbering like a baby. He was drunk as usual, and admitted he’d left his twins behind in Alabama. Said his poor son Christopher had died, but he would make it up to his daughter.”

“He didn’t know you were his son?”

“The old fool was blind to everything except my sis here. Of course, I told him who I was before dropping him from the top of the lighthouse.”

“So you didn’t know Erin was your sister?”

He smiled his choirboy smile and shook his head as though I completely missed the point. “I went to see her again that night after Henderson showed me the will to … I don’t know, to be closer to her.” Watts still held Erin’s hair, but he’d relaxed his grip, and she stood quietly as he relived the night her husband died.

“I watched them through the back window. They were arguing. She said something I couldn’t hear and he slapped her. Almost knocked her down.” Watts returned to the present for a moment, gazing at his sister.

“A few minutes later he drove off and I followed him. I knew about Marrano because Henderson and Poe would sit and moan about how the vice mayor was ruining St. Augustine. I didn’t care about any of that crap, but when I saw him slap Erin ...” He stopped, his face softening as he looked at Erin.

“So you followed him to his hunting camp.”

“He made the mistake of putting his hands on me,” Watts said. “Asshole called me a little pussy and laughed at me. I hit him with the handle of the bayonet before sticking it into his ugly heart.”

“So you stole the bayonet from Poe’s house?”

“Poe has a bad habit of leaving his back door open and I slipped in there one day last week and helped myself.”

“You took his hat, too.”

“I was going to keep the hat, but after I killed Marrano, I figured if anyone saw me, they’d remember the hat.”

“Why’d you bury him at the survey site?”

Watts smiled broadly as if I’d praised him for some extraordinary accomplishment.

“Why not? The cops arrested Poe, didn’t they? I planted the shovel in Poe’s shed along with …” He stopped suddenly, and twisted Erin’s hair tighter. “That’s enough reminiscing,” he snapped.

Watts eyed the path cut into the line of scrub oak and red bay leading to the water. Slowly he backed down the path, pulling his sister along with him until they stood on the narrow spit of beach next to the overhead walkway.

I followed him onto the sand. He forced Erin to sit down at his feet. I started to reach for my gun, but he aimed the Glock directly at my chest.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Watts.” I was still five feet from him and needed to close the distance to have any chance of disarming him.

He solved that problem by snarling, “Shut up and get over here.” Watts gestured with the pistol. “Hands behind your head.”

I did as he said.

He backed up, little wavelets lapping at his shoes. Over his shoulder moonlight silhouetted the outline of Ft. Matanzas, its thirty-foot tower standing guard over the ghosts from past massacres.

Watts pushed his sister aside. She stumbled and fell on the beach. He grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me forward. “On your knees,” he commanded, shoving me down at his feet. “I gave you a chance, but you wanted to play hero. Keep your hands behind your head, and put your face in the sand.”

I pressed my forehead into the damp sand listening to the croaky serenade of frogs and insects. The odor of brackish water intermingled with the putrefying remains of dead fish. For some reason, Watts hadn’t shot me. If I played along, I might be able to do something. Not sure what, but I refused to end up on this beach like those Frenchmen the Spanish put to the sword—or like my brother.

Once again, an image of Andrew slipped into my head. My brother, slashed and bleeding on a Long Island shore. Jillian bent over him screaming.

Watts pressed the Glock to the back of my head and I instinctively flinched. Keeping the pistol aimed at my head, he ran his other hand over my chest, under my arms and around my waist.

“What’s this?”

He pulled the revolver from my belt.

“Well looky here. The big, bad private eye’s packing.”

Watts swiped the revolver’s snub nose across my scalp, whipping up a froth of blue green stars exploding behind my eyes. Nauseating pain radiated through my skull.

“You won’t need this anymore,” he said and I heard the gun hit the beach twenty feet away.

Lying in the wet sand, head pounding, hands behind my back, I weighed my odds. I might reach out blindly and attempt to trip him, but that was such a long shot it almost guaranteed a bullet to the brain or at least another whack to the skull. I felt as impotent as Henderson must have been when Watts pushed him off the top of the lighthouse.

“You’re a real knight in shining armor, aren’t you, Mitchell? Too bad you stuck your— Shit.”

Watts stumbled backwards. I took a chance and lifted my head. He held a hand to his cheek where Erin had scratched him. He must have hit her with the gun because she was sprawled in the shallows, her legs splayed.

Digging my feet into the sand, I propelled myself toward Watts, using my head as a battering ram. I collided with his crotch and he gasped as my skull smashed his tender parts.

He staggered back with a cry of pain, and I jumped to my feet. Barreling forward and wrapping my arms around him, I drove him backwards. Watts staggered, trying to catch his balance. He pounded the Glock against my kidney as I struggled to hold his arms down. I ignored the blows. A greater fury had taken control of me.

All of my pent-up stress and anger erupted in a vicious frenzy. With a primal scream, I swung a loopy right against Watts’ temple and dragged him into the water.

I grasped his gun hand, digging my thumb into the soft tissue of his wrist. Watts grunted and flailed at me with his other hand. I covered his body with my own. He stopped beating on me and for an instant it looked like he’d given up. Instead, he snatched a fistful of hair and yanked savagely. Stars burst in the periphery of my sight. Still holding his wrist, I grabbed his throat with my right hand and let the black rage carry me away. My fingers compressed his windpipe until he released my hair. I wanted to crush the life out of him, but Watts was strong and slippery.

He gyrated beneath me and we shifted and thrashed together, rolling in the shallow water until we were beneath the walkway. As we struggled, he forced his gun hand upwards, inching closer to my head. I pushed against his arm with every ounce of strength I had. The hand holding the Glock crashed roughly against the side of my head. Tears blurred my vision, but I whipped his gun hand and the gun tumbled into the water.

Jackhammers banged away inside my skull. Dizziness and nausea swept through me. Watts flipped me over until I was face down in the tepid waters of Matanzas Inlet.

One of Watts’ knees pressed into my back, and he pushed my face into the slimy silt of the bay. The water was only two or three inches deep at this point, but deep enough. Salt water oozed into my mouth and nose. I held my breath, chest aching, lungs burning. Reaching back, hoping to find an eye to poke or anything to grab, but he stayed out of reach, and I thrashed helplessly.

My chest ached from lack of oxygen, my lungs felt like they’d explode if I didn’t take a breath. It couldn’t end like this, I told myself. I kicked and bucked in a futile attempt to shake him off, but he stayed on top, holding my head down with one hand while the other snaked around my throat. I jerked violently with my last ounce of energy and his hand tore at my shirt as I twisted away. I felt a sharp tug at the back of my neck and realized Watts had pulled the chain from my neck when he tore my shirt.

The dolphin medallion. My link to Andrew was gone. With a blackness born of desperation, I pulled my knees under me and rocketed my head back into the bridge of his nose.

Screaming obscenities, furious heat pulsating through my cheeks, I turned, ramming my head against his face over and over. A manic howling roared through me as our heads collided. I heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage and pulled back. A bright flume of blood poured from Watts’ broken nose. He sprawled backwards in the water, stunned, eyes glazed.

Still on my knees, I gasped for air, the taste of blood filling my mouth. Watts lay back in the water. Blood poured from his nostrils and he had a nasty gash in his forehead. My hands pushed against my thighs as I struggled to stand. My arms shook uncontrollably and my vision rolled in and out of focus.