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

  “Came in early this week,” Doc said. “Maxed out the hold in four days.” Carl grinned as Doc handed him a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Got a good price for ’em, too.”

  “How’s Nikki?” Carl asked, stuffing the roll, uncounted, into the pocket of his trousers. That’s how business is done here.

  “Really starting to show now. She said to say hi,” he replied as he walked along the side of the hull, gently caressing the gunwale. “This looks really nice. What are you gonna use for power?”

  “Haven’t decided yet,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Carl wants a big block Chevy engine and I say we should go with diesel.”

  “Mind if I make a suggestion?” We both nodded. “How about twin engines?”

  I looked at Carl and we both scoffed at the idea. “It’s barely beamy enough for a single big block or diesel,” Carl replied.

  “Yeah,” Doc said running a hand along the gunwale again, “but it’s plenty wide enough for a couple of Harley engines.”

  “Motorcycle engines?” I asked. Doc rode an Indian Chief and was always going on about how powerful the engine was.

  “Think about it,” he went on. “My bike’s got an eighty-eight-cubic-inch air-cooled engine. It produces seventy-five horses and only weighs a hundred and fifty pounds. A company called S&S builds a one-hundred-and-twenty-four-cube engine that’ll give you a hundred and sixty horses.”

  “Yeah, but all those chains and sprockets,” Carl said. “Plus those motors can’t be cheap.”

  “Belt drive,” Doc said. “Connected to a pair of two-to-one marine transmissions. Just think, no water intake strainer to clog, no rusty manifold coolers and over three hundred horses, with a throaty rumble at half the weight.”

  “That much power on a motorcycle?” I asked. “I had no idea. You just might be on to something. We could put an air intake right behind the rear seats with an electric fan below it to suck in cool air.”

  Carl and I both looked down into the empty engine bay, visualizing it in our minds. It was definitely feasible. Motorcycle engines were plenty narrow enough and we had yet to cut the through-hulls for the prop shaft. An air-cooled engine would eliminate a lot of the problems usually associated with inboards.

  “Did you guys hear about the dynamite fishing going on up in Florida Bay?” Doc asked, peering down into the engine bay. Carl and I both looked up at him.

  “Y’all need to get off this rock on occasion,” Doc said, standing up straight. “There’ve been reports of people using explosives to kill fish all up and down the Gulf side. When the Coast Guard or Marine Patrol gets there, the people are long gone and there’s dozens of tropical fish and inedible fish floating dead on the surface above big blast holes in the bottom. The last incident wasn’t far from here, on Bullard Bank.”

  “Bullard Bank?” Carl asked. “That’s Charlie’s favorite grouper spot. She’s gonna be pissed.”

  “Doesn’t Vince O’Hare run a trap line there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Doc replied. “He’s fuming. What I heard, he took four of his nearly destroyed traps to the Fish and Wildlife office, half full of dead and rotting lobster. Just dumped all four of ’em in the station’s lobby and demanded that they do something.”

  “There’s a guy I wouldn’t want pissed at me,” Carl said.

  O’Hare is a rough and ready lobsterman whose roots in the Keys go back to the days of the early wreckers. A big and sometimes mean guy who keeps pretty much to himself. He owns an acre on Grassy Key with a deep-water dock on the Gulf side. He lives in a little tin shack with his lobster boat at the dock and the yard littered with lobster traps, floats, old boats, and cars. Thought to be in his early eighties, though you’d never know it by his demeanor. He lives alone and as far as I knew nobody ever visited his shack.

  In this case, I’d go along with whatever he did. Sure, using explosives is a fast and easy way to catch food fish. Using it to pull teeth has the same effect. It gets the job done, but with a lot of unnecessary collateral damage. Explosives kill everything in the water, including the reef.

  Most people think of a reef as a pile of rocks, but it’s really a colony of tiny animals that filter the water for microscopic food. I’d seen firsthand the results of blasting one. Fallen, crushed, and broken piles of white calcium skeleton that took centuries to grow. It also ruptures the swim bladders of fish, causing them to float to the surface. Not just grouper and snapper, but thousands of brightly colored tropical fish, as well. Even invertebrates like shrimp, crab and lobster are killed by the shock of the underwater blast.

  “Does Fish and Wildlife have any leads?” I asked.

  “Nothing I heard about,” Doc replied. “I gotta get going, promised Nikki we’d go shopping for some baby stuff. I just wanted to drop by and let y’all know that the survey crew on Elbow Cay finished up their work. They should be cutting us a check any day now.”

  Last fall, Doc and Nikki came across a clue to a lost Spanish treasure while cleaning out her parents’ attic. Rusty is a licensed salvor, so a bunch of us headed over to the northern Bahamas after solving the riddle. It took three days, but we located it, along with the skeletal remains of the survivors. What we located turned out to be only a portion of the whole treasure, though. Just what the survivors of the 1566 Spanish wreck were able to recover and bury. We were due a ten percent cut of the value and had been waiting for months for the final tally.

  “They give you any idea how much it’s going to be?” Carl asked.

  “The total worth of the find has been calculated at sixty-four million dollars,” Doc replied with a crooked grin. “Between the twelve of us, we’ll each get about half a million.”

  “Twelve of you?” Carl asked. “I thought it was just nine of you that went over there.” Then grinning at me, he added, “And ten of ya came back.”

  He was referring to an undercover Florida Department of Law Enforcement Officer by the name of Linda Rosales. She’d been coming down here on the weekends lately and the two of us would sometimes run or swim. A few times we’d gone fishing, taking my daughter along as chaperone.

  “Twelve of us,” Doc replied, grinning again. “Nikki and I agreed that Linda should get an equal cut. Then Charlie and Chyrel were just as big a part of finding it as any of us that went over there and they get an equal cut, too.”

  “You’re kidding,” Carl said in disbelief.

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for Charlie’s riddle-solving ability, we’d still be twiddling our thumbs.”

  “Well,” he said, looking down into the engine bay with a wry grin, “if she’ll let me, motorcycle engines it is, then.”

  “Agreed,” I said, reaching my hand across the narrow stern to take his. When we shook, I winked and said, “But, Charlie doesn’t have to know.”

  I walked with Doc back to the main house. The sky was a slightly paler gray and off to the north, I could just make out a blue horizon. Damn, I thought. The front’s gonna push through and it’ll be a cold night.

  “What were you not telling us, Doc?” I asked as we climbed the steps to the deck.

  “They’re not using dynamite,” he replied. “Nikki said I shouldn’t even tell you.”

  “Why? What are they using?”

  Doc seemed to think it over, as we walked down the back steps to the pier next to my channel where he’d tied his skiff. “She’s worried you’ll try to do something about it. Says it’s probably teenagers and you could get into trouble with the law. You do have a tendency to piss badges off.”

  “What are these teenagers using, Doc?”

  “What I heard on the coconut telegraph was that they’re using grenades.”

  The coconut telegraph is usually faster and more accurate than the local news. Living on a small chain of islands, anything worth knowing is told by one person to another very quickly.

  “Sure. A bunch of kids using frags to kill fish? How do you suppose these kids got their hands on grenades, anyway?”


  “See?” he said, untying his skiff and stepping aboard as he pushed it away from the dock. He hit the starter and the big Yamaha outboard sprang to life, burbling quietly with a steady stream from the piss hole. “She was right. You always get too involved in shit that ain’t your business.”

  “Who said I was getting involved?” I shouted as he turned the skiff smartly inside the narrow channel.

  “There’s been twenty incidents in the last month,” he shouted back. “They use chum and several grenades at each spot.”

  Damn, I thought, that’s a whole lot of grenades.

  I was almost to the top of the steps when the rain stopped and I heard the faint sound of not just Doc’s outboard heading south, but another one heading north. Turning on the top step, I could see a familiar twenty-foot Grady-White headed this way. Charlie and Kim were coming back from dropping Carl and Charlie’s kids off at school and shopping. My dog, Pescador, was standing in the bow, his shaggy head in the wind.

  Kim’s been staying with me since September and we’ve been getting to know one another. Her mother left me seventeen years ago, just before Christmas. Hard to blame her. She was two months pregnant with my older daughter, Eve, when we got married in May of ’83. Two weeks later, I reenlisted and two weeks after that, I was deployed for six months to Beirut, Lebanon. Her due date and our date of rotation were only a week apart. Then terrorists blew up our barracks and we rotated out early. I was in a funk for weeks after getting back home. But I was there when Eve was born.

  Three and a half years later, I reenlisted for my third tour and was promptly deployed again. This time on a four-month West Pacific float, leaving when Sandy was six months pregnant with Kim. I missed the birth of our second child. Four months after returning from the cruise and without being able to even make a phone call to tell her the Corps was deploying us again, I was in Panama. Sandy packed the kids up and left the next day, right after the CO’s wife told her.

  Kim was only five months old then. Over the years, Sandy told the girls I was a bad man and finally told them I was dead. My older daughter believed the lies. Kim somehow didn’t accept any of it. I’d sent a check every Christmas and on birthdays, but my ex intercepted them and the checks were never cashed. That is, until last July, when Kim picked up the mail one day and found the card and check inside.

  She confronted her mother, who insisted she’d told the girls I was dead for their own good. By then, my ex had become an extreme liberal and hated all things military. Kim had skipped her freshman year and had just graduated from high school a year early. She told her mom she wasn’t going to go to college right away, so she could be with her own age group when she did. After saving up her money for six more weeks, she found the website for my charter business and came down here to find out for herself if what my ex had said was true.

  What she’d told them was only partially true. I can be a very dangerous man. To the enemies of the country I love and its people, or to anyone that threatens a friend. I was chosen early in my career in the Corps to be a Scout/Sniper. When I ended my career, I’d been a Sniper Instructor for over a year, teaching other young Warriors how to be dangerous.

  I walked back down to the pier and caught the line Kim deftly tossed as they idled up. She’d really taken to life on the water and was filling in as First Mate whenever I took charters out until I could find a permanent one. She was good with people and the men didn’t seem to mind at all having a pretty teenage girl help them land their catches. I made it real clear she was my daughter and my view of the cockpit from the helm was all encompassing. Not that I had to worry, most of our clients were gentlemen. One guy got a little too drunk once and touched her inappropriately. Before I was halfway down the ladder, she had the guy face down on the deck, the offending hand chicken-winged behind his back, while he howled in pain. She’d calmly asked him if there were other activities he liked using the hand for. The man sobered quickly and apologized profusely. Instantly, she released him and resumed her First Mate duties as if nothing had happened. Even wiped the guy’s brow with a wet towel an hour later when he’d hooked a really big bull dolphin and was fighting it. He left her a very generous tip.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, stepping onto the dock and hugging me. “Was that Doc leaving?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “He and Nikki got in early, so he stopped by to give the owner’s take of the trawl to Carl.”

  Kim and Charlie were dressed nearly identically. Lightweight khaki fishing pants and long-sleeved work shirts, the standard garb of watermen all over the Keys. They managed to stay dry behind the Grady’s wraparound clear plastic screen, which surrounds the Bimini top and can be rolled all the way down to the deck, just for days like this.

  As Charlie handed me the boxes of groceries and I stacked them on the deck, Pescador jumped from the cockpit, shook the water from his coat and sat next to me, waiting for an ear scratch. Since school started, he rode with Charlie and the kids every day to where they caught the bus at Old Wooden Bridge Marina and again to pick them up in the afternoon.

  “He also brought news from Elbow Cay,” I said to Charlie. “He told Carl that you and Chyrel would receive an equal cut for all your help in solving the riddle.”

  “I hope Carl told him no,” Charlie said, taking my hand as she stepped up to the pier. Charlie’s short for Charlotte. Just a wisp of a woman, but big in heart and attitude, like most Conch women.

  “Doc wouldn’t take no for an answer,” I said as the three of us picked up boxes and headed up the steps to the deck.

  Charlie’s brow furrowed, deep in thought. A quiet woman most of the time, she measured her words carefully. Finally she said, “I don’t like it.”

  “Then put it in the bank,” I said. “That way, when Carl Junior and Patty get older, you won’t have to worry about college.”

  After helping put away the weeks’ worth of groceries in the large pantry in the Trents’ little house, I went up to the deck to make a phone call. Cell service on the island is sketchy at best. The only place where you can get any reception at all is on the southwest corner of the deck, and even there you have to hold your tongue in your cheek just right.

  Linda answered on the second ring. “Hi, Jesse. I was going to call you later today. Are we still on for this weekend?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking we might do something a little different, though.”

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked huskily.

  “How about we catch some grunts out on Bullard Bank and do some snorkeling?” She didn’t say anything for a moment and I thought I’d lost my signal. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Who have you been talking to?” she asked, all business now.

  “Talking to?”

  “Come on, Jesse. You’re not a very good liar.”

  “Are you part of the investigation?” I asked.

  “Your position with Homeland Security notwithstanding, I really can’t talk about it,” she said. A friend of mine, Deuce Livingston, heads a counterterrorism team for DHS, based out of Homestead, and I sometimes provide transportation for his operatives.

  “You’re saying Bullard is off limits?”

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t know how you heard, but I’m assuming you’ve learned about the illegal fishing practices.”

  “That’s Fish and Wildlife. How’s FDLE involved?”

  “I said I can’t talk about it,” she replied.

  I thought for a moment, then said, “It’s no longer just about taking fish, is it?”

  “You didn’t hear that from me,” she said. “In fact, I think I better hang up now.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I didn’t mean to piss you off. I really would like to see you this weekend.”

  “No talk about the investigation?”

  “If that’s what you want,” I said. “Maybe we can get a few people together and fly up to Cape Sable for a campout and backcountry fly fishing.”

  “Yeah,” she said, her vo
ice taking on its usual cheery tone. “That sounds like it’d be a lot of fun. I really do have to go, though. See you tomorrow night?”

  “Pick you up at the Anchor?”

  “I’ll be there by six,” she said. “Bye now.”

  I said goodbye and ended the call.

  Chapter Two

  Headed south in my skiff the next afternoon, I called Doc. He picked up almost instantly as I threaded my way through the narrow channel east of Big Pine Key. “You hear anything else about that thing we were talking about yesterday?” I asked.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let it rest,” he replied, then sighed and added, “Yeah, a girl Nikki works with overheard a couple of local cops talking about it at Hog’s Breath last night. Seems a tourist couple were out in the backcountry two days ago in a rental and came across another boat near Monkey Bank after hearing an explosion. When they came alongside the boat, thinking they might be in trouble, three guys on board pulled guns and robbed them. Cut their fuel line and left them adrift among hundreds of dead fish.”

  “So, that’s why Linda’s involved,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “She’s investigating it?”

  “She didn’t come right out and say so,” I replied. “I’m picking her up in an hour.”

  “Let me know if you hear anything,” he said.

  I told him I would and ended the call. Passing Porpoise Key, I turned east and skimmed the skinny water into Big Spanish Channel and the deeper water east of there and north of the Seven Mile Bridge.

  The front had passed on through and left behind a cloudless cobalt-blue sky and cold temperatures. Being built over the water, my house rarely gets uncomfortable in summer or winter. Even if the temperature drops into the fifties like this morning, the water temperature rarely gets below seventy-two.

  However, with no insulation, last night was still a cold night by Keys standards. So I’d tossed a few pieces of driftwood in the wood stove and lit it just before going to bed. The coals had still been hot this morning, allowing me to toss on another couple of pieces to take the early morning chill off.