Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) Read online

  FALLEN

  KING

  A Jesse McDermitt Novel

  Wayne Stinnett

  Published by Down Island Press, 2015

  Travelers Rest, SC

  Copyright © 2015 by Wayne Stinnett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed, or electronic form without express written permission. Please do not participate in, or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication Data

  Stinnett, Wayne/Wayne Stinnett

  p. cm. - (A Jesse McDermott novel)

  ISBN-13: 978-0692380239 (Down Island Press)

  ISBN-10: 069238023X

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  on upcoming books, please sign up at my website: www.waynestinnett.com

  Books by the author:

  Fallen Out

  Fallen Palm

  Fallen Hunter

  Fallen Pride

  Fallen Mangrove

  Fallen King

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Authors Note

  Most of the locations herein are fictional, or used fictitiously. However, I took great pains to depict the location and description of the many islands, locales, beaches, reefs, bars, and restaurants in the Keys, and the Caribbean, to the best of my ability. The Rusty Anchor is not a real place, but if I were to open a bar in the Florida Keys, it would probably be a lot like depicted here. I’ve tried my best to convey the island attitude in this work.

  Some of this book takes place on the southwest coast of Florida, a wild and desolate frontier. Only accessible by boat for many miles, this area from the tiny town of Flamingo, at the southern tip of the mainland, all the way around to Marco Island, eighty some miles to the north, looks very much like it did a hundred or even a thousand years ago. Cape Sable and the Ten Thousand Islands are in this area on the edge of the great river of grass, the Everglades. I’ve visited the Cape a number of times and consider it one of the greatest of all of Florida’s treasures.

  Foreword

  I’d like to take a moment to thank the many people who have helped me to write my sixth novel. As always, my wife Greta, is by far my biggest fan. She helped nurse me through medical problems while writing this book and I gave her complete control of my diet. I lost twenty pounds and feel like a young man again. Guys, listen to your wives.

  My youngest daughter, Jordy, became a teenager about the time I started writing this. God help us. She’s always the source of a lot of laughs while I’m writing. I wouldn’t trade the interruptions for the world.

  I drew on my relationship with my older daughter, Laura, in writing parts of this book. She’s a strong-willed, independent woman, who is a fantastic mommy to three of my grandkids. My wife’s two older kids are always encouraging and advising me, as well. Thank you all.

  Tim Ebaugh, of Tim Ebaugh Photography and Design created yet another great cover, the photo was shot on Cape Sable, during a beautiful Florida sunset. A good bit of Fallen King takes place there and I’d love to one day return and show my wife and kids the wild Florida. It’s still pretty much untouched there. You can see more of Tim’s work at www.timebaughdesigns.com.

  Lastly, where would a writer be without a great editorial and proofreading team? The story’s mine, but it’s Eliza Dee and Clio Editing Services who make it make sense. After that, Donna Rich has final eyes on all of my books, before they get to you.

  Thanks go also to my beta readers, Michael Reisig, Chuck Hofbauer, Marc Lowe, Mike Ramsey, Thomas Crisp, Sergeant Major, USMC (Retired), Alan Fader, Technical Sergeant, USAF (Retired), Debbie Kocol, and Timothy Artus. Your help in cleaning up the story was invaluable.

  Much thanks to Tripp Wacker of Ryan Aviation Seaplanes Inc. in Palm Coast, FL, for his knowledgeable assistance with the deHavilland Beaver DHC-2 amphibian.

  In the tropics and sub-tropics, when conditions are just right, right as the last of the sun disappears into the ocean, you can sometimes see a green flash. It's been captured a few times on camera. I've only seen it twice myself and made a point out of watching the sunset just about every day, when I lived on the boat.

  Dedications

  I’d like to dedicate this book to the many wonderful writers I’ve met in the Writers’ Café forum on KBoards. Joe, Hugh, HM, Rosalind, and dozens of others helped me out with patient answers to newbie questions. Without a doubt, this online group of writers has had more to do with my success than my writing alone. Many of them, I now call my friend.

  Thanks, guys.

  Mostly, to Michael Reisig, author of the Road to Key West series and the Caribbean Gold series. Michael was the first author that I know of who read one of my books. He helped me polish my writing style and gave me a lot of very valuable tips. Through reading one another’s books and emailing, we discovered a lot of similar events and characters in our writing. Having both lived in the Keys about the same time, we likely bumped elbows in a bar, a time or two.

  I consider the man my friend and mentor.

  “As a child of North Florida, even the whisper of its name would send my imagination reeling. Conjuring fanciful lands of verdant forests teeming with orchids, aviaries, predatory cats, and prehistoric reptiles, the Everglades seemed more like a dreamscape than an actual place in my home state.”

  Mac Stone - Photographer

  Everglades: America’s Wetland

  The Florida Keys

  Jesse’s Island

  Chapter One

  I woke to the gentle sound of a soft rain falling on my tin roof. It’s not all that unusual for winter in the Florida Keys, though it is considered the dry season. We really only have three seasons here. Dry from September to June and wet the rest of the time. Somewhere in there, there’s supposed to be a tourist season, but since they’re here more or less all year round, I’ve never been real clear on just when that is.

  Sometimes a storm will come up in late afternoon during the dry months. Something about a warm air mass colliding with cold air. I try not to watch the TV weather guy unless there’s a hurricane. Where I live, you can see a storm coming from a long way off and watch it as it either bears down on you or passes you by. Unless you’re out on the blue, it doesn’t matter much. The storm will pour down big fat raindrops for thirty minutes, then the sun will come back out and transform it into humidity.

  This wasn’t that kind of rain, though. It was a light, quiet rain, gently drumming a laid-back rhythm on the tin roof of my little stilt house. I’d caught the NOAA radio broadcast yesterday and knew this was a cold front that had been slowly pushing its way south. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration runs continuous weather updates all along the coast. The front was rolling down the whole Florida peninsula to the long island chain at the southern tip simply called the Keys. This kind of front might take hours, or even days, to slowly pass on through or dissipate.

  I live in the Content Keys, a few miles north of Big Pine. I’d built my little stilt house several years ago, mostly out of scrap wood I’d salvaged in several of Miami’s smaller, but very busy, shipyards. I have a few friends up there and they used to let me know whenever there was enough of the good stuff that needed to be carted away. Carg
o out of South America is usually loaded on pallets made of what to them are local hardwoods. While some of the varieties of wood they use are considered exotic here in the States, they’re plentiful south of the equator, which is why they’re used for pallets.

  The floorboards and beams are made from lignum vitae, or palo santo, as it’s called around the Caribbean basin where it grows. It’s one of the densest woods on the planet. A board cut from this tree will sink in water, even saltwater. The bigger beams were cut from a huge lignum vitae that was blown down in a friend’s yard in Islamorada. I had to hire a crane and two tractor trailer rigs to haul it up to a mill in Homestead, then two more to return with the finished beams—it was that heavy. The siding is mahogany, another dense hardwood. Both woods are virtually impervious to the ravages of weather and insects. Really rough on saw blades and drill bits, too. I must have gone through dozens of each in building my home.

  Rising from the big king-sized bed in my tiny bedroom, I put on a pair of khaki cargo pants and a faded Gaspar’s Revenge Charter Services tee shirt and padded barefoot to the head to relieve the pressure in my bladder before going into the combination living room, dining room, and galley.

  Gaspar’s Revenge is my charter boat. It’s actually the second one to carry the name. The first one was six years older, a nearly identical forty-five-foot Rampage convertible. It was destroyed in an explosion a few months ago that was meant to kill me.

  After several days of online searching, I found the new one in Galveston, Texas. Aside from its dark blue hull, it’s alike in nearly every way. Like the first, it had twin 1015-horsepower engines, but the previous owner of this one had added superchargers, which bumped the power and top speed up just a bit. She could do fifty knots, wide open, in calm seas.

  My house is small, only fifty feet by twenty feet, with the bedroom and head taking up the eastern third of it. The front room has a small, little used dining table and chairs in front of a smaller window in the northwest corner. The galley is in the southwest corner, with another small window over the sink. Between them is the hatch going outside to the wraparound deck. Small, simple, and functional.

  The rest of the main room is sparsely furnished. A pair of recliners sit against the south bulkhead with a table and lamp between them, in front of a large window that provides a great view of the flats to the south. A small workbench takes up the opposite bulkhead, with another large window above it looking out over the interior of the island. A small fly-tying bench and an old potbellied wood stove fill the bulkhead space between the bedroom hatch and the one to the head. Various parts of outboard motors, storage boxes and other fishing, diving, and boating detritus fill much of the empty space in the room.

  As I entered the galley, the aroma from the coffeemaker I’d programmed last night, drew me. It had finished doing its magic and I poured myself a cup of Costa Rican brew. A longtime friend of mine in Marathon by the name of Rusty Thurman found this Costa Rican coffee farm called La Minita and we’d both become hooked on the smell and flavor of their coffee.

  Looking through the south window, it was just beginning to turn gray with what little light was able to pierce the low clouds. Light rain was falling on the water out over the flats. Just another day in paradise, I thought and stepped through the hatch and out into the rain. It was cool, but not cold. If the front pushed on through, the drier air behind it would be cold, maybe into the low fifties. While people in Montana might think that ridiculous, down here, where even the Walmart doesn’t stock jackets, that’s cold weather.

  I walked over to the north side of the deck by the raised two-thousand-gallon rain cistern that provided our drinking water and looked out over my little island community as the shoulders of my tee shirt slowly dampened from the mist. Rain’s never been a problem for me. I’d learned as a kid growing up in Fort Myers that the human body is pretty much waterproof and you could always dry off in the sun. Later, as a young Marine Lance Corporal, I had a Platoon Sergeant who drilled into us the phrase, “If it ain’t rainin’, you ain’t trainin.” He later became a close friend, but was killed a little over a year ago. His killer met justice in a very hard way.

  My island is also really small. At high tide, it covers slightly more than two acres. I bought it seven years ago, right after I was retired from the Marine Corps after twenty years of service. At the time, it was a scrub-and-mangrove-covered thicket on a long-dead coral reef and limestone outcropping covered with sand. It took me the better part of two years to clear it by hand and build my little house on stilts. Since then, I’d added two small bunkhouses on the north end of the island to comply with the County zoning requirement that the island be maintained as a fish camp. Then I helped a friend build a tiny home for him, his wife, and their two small kids on the west side. All four structures combined were about the size of an average home up on the mainland.

  “Morning, Carl,” I called down to my friend and the island’s caretaker, who was tending to some winter vegetables in our aquaculture garden. I’d had a crazy idea when I bought the island of growing my own food, but the soil proved to be too sandy and salty. When I met Carl and Charlie Trent, he was up to his neck in smug drugglers down in Key Weird, where he ran a shrimp trawler. I helped him out of a bad situation by hiding him and his family here and taking on the drug kingpin with the help of a friend who works for the federal government. Carl liked it here so much, he put his trawler up for sale and came to work for me.

  That’s when he told me about growing vegetables in raised beds, supplying them with nutrient-rich water from a fish tank. Or in our case, a crayfish tank. I like Cajun food, so we built it and it worked. We now have two large raised beds and two tanks. The original crayfish tank has supplied several local restaurants with the Cajun delicacy, and a new fish tank would have freshwater catfish ready to harvest in another few weeks.

  Carl looked up as I started down the steps to the clearing. “Hey, Jesse. I thought I heard you stirring around up there. I was just checking the nutrient level in the water. You ready to get to work?”

  I nodded and together we walked across the clearing to a shed we’d built just a couple of months ago next to the battery shack. The island isn’t powered from the mainland. We use a series of wind generators and solar panels with a generator backup to charge a bank of thirty deep-cycle marine batteries. These provide the power for the pumps on the aquaculture system and what little other electricity we use.

  “This weather hasn’t been very good for curing,” he said as we walked into the shed. “But, everything’s ready. I checked it out before checking the garden. We can turn her over today.”

  A small amount of light filtered through the clear acrylic roof panels. It reflected off the newly-finished wood hull before us, which shone with a deep chocolate hue, as if it were wet. Last fall, Carl and I had gotten drunk and talked about designing and building a boat, something we’d both always dreamed of doing. We worked on the plans together, deciding on an antique-looking twenty-four footer.

  My grandfather was an architect and I must have picked up his genes, or my subconscious retained enough of what he tried to teach me. My parents died when I was a kid and I was raised by Mam and Pap. They were my dad’s parents.

  Carl and I soon had a really sharp-looking runabout on paper, complete with cross sections and rib details. Over the last few months, the design in the drawings slowly materialized in front of us in its physical form.

  Yesterday we’d hung wide rollers to the ceiling beams in six places, with strap loops threaded through them to create three slings, which we hung up out of the way. Today, we planned to lift the boat hull enough to get the slings under it, then remove the saw horses that it sat on and flip it upright.

  A sweaty, grunt-filled hour later, we had the hull swinging free in the slings and slowly pulled on one side, rotating the hull until it was upright. Then we heaved again to remove the slings and lower the hull onto new form-fitted supports. She was actually starting to look like a boat
now. She had long, narrow lines, with two rows of seating that were further forward than more modern designs. The forward-sloping transom was gently rounded, with gunwales flaring inboard just aft of the rear seats and a long rear deck covering the engine compartment. Of course, none of that was there yet, but I could see it in my mind’s eye.

  “She’s gonna be a beaut,” Carl said once we had her nestled in the four cradles. “What we gonna use for power again?”

  We’d hashed over this question for weeks and never could agree. I thought it ought to have a small Perkins diesel, with a three-to-one transmission. Carl thought it should be a big, throaty gas-powered V-8 and a direct-drive transmission. We’d been over it so many times we both knew we’d never agree. Before we could rehash the same argument, Doc walked into the shed.

  “Hey, Doc,” I said. “Didn’t even hear you come up. How you been?”

  Doc used to be First Mate for my charter diving and fishing business. He’d served in the Navy as a Corpsman attached to First Battalion, Ninth Marines, not long after I retired. His real name is Bob Talbot, but in the Corps all Corpsmen are called Doc. Before working for me, he was Carl’s First Mate on his shrimp trawler, Miss Charlie, named after Carl’s wife. Doc’s a tall, lanky, easygoing guy with sandy-colored hair nearly to his shoulders and sharp green eyes. He had the typical deep tan of people who make their living from the sea, except around his eyes, where he nearly always wore wraparound shades.

  Working for me got dangerous at times and when he’d learned a few months ago that his wife Nikki was pregnant, he’d approached Carl about hanging on to his old trawler and letting him skipper it. Carl not only made him the Captain, he helped Doc upgrade his license from Mate to Captain. Doc’s wife is the cook on board and de facto First Mate.