by Matthew Rief
After four and a half grueling hours of writing and answering question after question, Wilkes patted me on the shoulder and said that they’d gotten everything they needed and that he would be in contact with me if anything else came up.
“You know,” he said as he walked me through the front door of the police station. “I spoke to Dave Tillman, the owner of that shrimping boat the Jean Louise and he said he saw your boat cruising out past Dry Tortugas yesterday.” Then he grinned at me and added, “That’s a long way from Fort Zachary Taylor.”
I smiled back at him and patted him on the shoulder. “I think that old sea dog needs to get his eyes checked. I’ll see you around, sheriff.”
“Hey, Logan,” he said before I reached the door of my Tacoma. Stepping closer to me, he said, “I know you and I don’t know each other too well yet. But please, call me Charles.”
I gave him a slow and friendly nod. “Ok, Charles,” I said, feeling like we were finally getting to know each other’s character, at least a little bit. As he turned around, I remembered that I’d wanted to ask him something and thought that it was an appropriate time. “Say, do you think you could tell me where Anne Cody lives? I wanted to speak with her yesterday but figured I should wait.”
“Sure,” he replied. “She’s renting one of the cottages over on Mangrove street. Hers is number four.”
I thanked him, then hopped into the driver’s seat, started up the engine and pulled out of the lot. On my way over to Anne’s cottage, I made a quick stop at Flowers by Gilda and bought a large bouquet of assorted flowers which included pink roses, purple iris, blue hydrangea, white orchids and orange snapdragons with their stems in a fancy, crystal vase. Setting the bouquet on the passenger seat beside me, I turned onto Mangrove street and saw the cottages Charles had been referring to, lined up in a row along the street.
Parking my truck against the curb, I grabbed the flowers and walked along the sidewalk until I saw the number four stenciled on the side of a cottage in white paint. The cottages were nice, each painted sky blue with white picket fences surrounding their small front yards. As I stepped towards the front porch of Anne’s cottage, I tried to think about what I should say. I’d hoped that the right words would come to me during the drive over but they hadn’t.
Holding the bouquet in my right hand, I pressed my finger against the small button beside the door and heard the doorbell ring inside. I waited for about fifteen seconds then, having not heard any movement inside, I turned around, set the bouquet on the top of the stairs and headed back towards my truck. When I reached the bottom step of her front porch, I heard the door open behind me. Turning around, I saw Anne standing in the doorway, staring at me behind the screen door. She was wearing sweatpants and a gray tee shirt, and she looked like she’d just woken up.
“Yes?” she said softly as we made eye contact. Then she glanced down at the flowers, wiped the bottom of her nose and added, “Thank you.” Slowly, I went up the stairs and stood a few feet away from her on the other side of the screen. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t recognize you. Did you know Ryan?”
My heart started to pound rapidly in my chest. I calmed myself, taking in a slow breath and said, “Yes, mam. I… I was on the island when he crashed.”
Her eyes grew wide as she stared into mine, hearing the seriousness in my voice. “You must be Logan. He spoke about you before. Said he met you in the Everglades.”
I nodded. “Yea. Look, for whatever it’s worth, mam-”
She shook her head and held up a finger. “Call me Anne.”
“Right. For whatever it’s worth, Anne, I’m very sorry for what happened.”
She waved a hand at me. “No. Don’t be sorry, Logan. He did his job and what happened was nobody’s fault but those damn gang members.” She paused a moment and I saw her eyes start to water. “The news stations say that the hunt is still on for the man responsible.”
“Don’t worry about him,” I said, and without thinking I added, “He’s hundreds of feet beneath the waves and probably eaten to nothing but bare bones by now.”
Her eyes narrowed and her mouth dropped open. “You, you killed him?”
I nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you kept that between us.”
She smiled faintly. “I understand.”
Glancing into the house I said, “Are you planning to stay in Key West for long?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re heading back to Colorado. It’s where Ryan and I are from. It’s where we grew up and went to high school together. He always wanted to serve. He’d wanted to join the Army but bless his heart I’d talked him out of it. I never wanted him to be in danger, so we compromised and he joined the Coast Guard.” Her eyes filled up with tears and she buried her face in her hands. “I never thought that…” she struggled with the words. “I never thought something like this would happen.”
“I’m so sorry, Anne,” I said, pulling open the screen door and wrapping an arm around her.
After a few moments of crying, she wiped her face with the tops of her hands and sniffled a few times.
“Anne,” I said, looking into her eyes, “I was with Ryan when he died and he wanted me to tell you that he loved you very much. He also asked me to look after your son for him. I’m not talking about just monetarily either, though I’ll be sending checks whether you like it or not. I’m talking about being there for him or for you if you ever need anything.”
I gave her a hug then loosened my grip and headed back towards the stairs. “Thank you, Logan,” she said before I reached the top step. “And I’m not just talking about for the flowers either.”
Turning back, I looked at her, smiled and said, “Your husband was a great man. He would want you to be strong. Whatever you do don’t give up. No matter how hard it gets, you never give up, alright?”
She closed her eyes, nodding at me as I turned back around and headed for my Tacoma.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
I spent the next few weeks hanging out around town with Jack, helping him with the occasional charter, and going out diving and exploring the islands just about every day. My workout regimen, which had been thrown out of whack by my injuries, was starting to amp up again. I felt my body healing itself as I gradually increased the intensity and duration of my workouts and spent more time than usual stretching and icing my muscles. It wasn’t long before I could run the full eight-mile loop from my house that started south and circled around Fort Zachary Taylor along the waterfront before passing the Conch Marina and finishing back at my house.
Three weeks after the incident in Dry Tortugas, I received a large manila envelope addressed from the Hale family in Miami. I was surprised to see it since I hadn’t spoken to any of them since that morning on Loggerhead. Inside the envelope I found a small stack of letters written to me by various members of the family. They each had their own unique flare and they each thanked me for what I’d done and hoped that I was recovering well. Cynthia wrote me a note explaining how Alex had been assigned a school project to write a paper and do a presentation on someone that she admired and that she’d chosen me. I smiled as I read her paper and it even included a pretty good sketch of me standing in front of the lighthouse back on the island.
Chris wrote saying that if I ever needed anything, whether legal help or personal help, he’d do whatever he could. But it was Cynthia’s letter, which consisted of two lined pages written on both sides of the paper, that caused me to sit down on my couch and feel the most emotion. She explained how great she thought I was and how she admired me in so many ways. She thanked me from the bottom of her heart for saving her family and wrote that she knew that there was no way she’d ever be able to repay me. As I read her words I thought about her, how well she’d handled herself, how she’d saved my life and how beautiful she was. I couldn’t help but think about how our lives might’ve been if we’d met each other as single adults. But I pushed those thoughts aside and stood up from the co
uch. I had a strict no married women policy that I was proud to have adhered to my entire life and I wasn’t looking to break it then or ever.
Moving into the kitchen, I stuck a few of the letters, as well as Alex’s sketch, onto the refrigerator using a couple of I love Key West magnets that were there when I’d bought the place. Then I spent the next couple of days out on the water, enjoying the tropical paradise that I called home and spending my days diving, spearfishing and island hopping and my evenings out with Jack.
Pulling into my driveway after hanging out and drinking at Pete’s place with Jack, Pete and Gus one night, I walked up the steps to the side door of my house and dropped my keys as I fished them out of my front pocket. As I bent down to pick them up, I noticed that the small, black cable leading into one of the motion sensors on my porch had been tampered with. As I moved in and examined it closer, I realized that someone had cut the cable on the small section between where it connected to the sensor and disappeared into the house.
I reached for my Sig instinctively, sliding it free from its concealed position around my waist and under my shirt. Breathing slow and controlled, I ran scenarios through my head, thinking of a plan. Rising slowly from my crouched position, I peered in through the side windows. There were no lights on inside the house or noise or movement of any kind. But someone was there. I could feel it. Someone was in my house and whoever they were, they were very good. Clearly a skilled assassin. Perhaps it was someone still loyal to Salazar. Or, maybe Black Venom had hired a guy to come and take me out. Fortunately, I happened to drop my keys and notice what they’d done to my motion sensor. If I hadn’t, I would have probably walked right into a bullet.
I moved around the porch, keeping my body low and my steps quiet as I surveyed the inside of the house. It was useless. I couldn’t see a thing in the darkness.
Moving for the back door, I slowly stuck my key into the hole and unlocked it. Aiming my Sig chest height, I pushed it open, stepped through the doorway and flipped on the living room lights.
“Don’t shoot, Logan,” a female voice said, coolly and casually. It was a voice I’d recognize anywhere, I thought, as Angelina turned her head to look at me. From first glance, Angelina Fox looked like one of those women you’d see in the Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated. At five-foot-ten and with long, sexy blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes and the tan, lean body of a triathlete; she was sure to turn heads wherever she went. But beneath her easy on the eyes appearance was a badass warrior who’d fought in the Brazilian Special Operations Command, the first woman to ever do so, and was also one of the deadliest mercenaries in the world. We’d been friends, with occasional benefits, ever since we both started out as guns for hire, and she’d saved my ass on more than one occasion.
As I stood across the living room from her, my facial expression contorting from focused to a grin that stretched from ear to ear, she continued, “I heard you had quite the scare during Fay. Could it be that Logan Dodge finally met his match?”
“What kind of crazy person would ever give you an idea like that?” I said, sliding my Sig back into my waist then walking in front of her and placing my hands on my hips.
“Harper Ridley,” she said. Then leaning forward on the couch, she reached for a folded-up newspaper on the table in front of her. “Says here you were inches from death.”
“What the hell?” I said, grabbing the paper from her hands. After taking a second to read the first paragraph I shook my head. “Shit, this isn’t what I told her.”
Ange chuckled as she pointed at the date printed into the top right corner of the Keynoter. “This is from last week. Don’t you ever read the newspaper down here? Hell, I don’t even live in the Keys and I feel like I’ve read it more times than you.”
“I glance at it from time to time,” I said with my most charming smile. “Granted, it’s only when I have a fish to wrap.”
She laughed and I sat down beside her and kissed her on the cheek, noticing that she smelled really good. Glancing at my dive watch, I saw that it was after eleven at night and I could feel my stomach rumble when I realized that I hadn’t eaten since lunch.
Looking into her fiery blue eyes I said, “Hungry?”
“You read my mind. I’ve been flying for the last two and half hours from Nassau and I’m starving.”
Ange and I had actually gotten our pilots licenses together a few years ago. But she took a liking to it more than I had and continued to pursue more advanced training.
“Is your plane over at Key West International?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Tarpon Cove Marina. It’s a Seaplane.”
We moved outside onto the patio and I cooked up four lobster tails from bugs which I’d kept in a sixty-gallon holding tank. Then, grabbing my bucket of clams, I boiled up about two dozen of them and we feasted, enjoying the fresh seafood and washing it down with a couple of margaritas. It was a nice evening, warm and with a slight breeze coming over the channel from the ocean beyond. When we finished, I plopped myself into my hammock and Ange sat beside me on one of my cushioned, wicker chairs. She grabbed a skinny leather pouch from the table out of curiosity and pulled out a sharpened, silver throwing knife.
“I’ve got a small target on the trunk of that palm tree over there,” I said, motioning to the target about thirty feet away from us. She smiled and nodded as she examined the blade closely.
After a moment’s pause, she said, “You remember that day at Pete’s? When there was that big party for celebrating finding the Aztec treasure?” Before I’d replied she continued, “Well, there was something that I wanted to tell you that day but couldn’t bring myself to.”
My eyes grew wide. “What’s that Ange?”
“It’s about Sam,” she said. “I didn’t see her as your type.”
I smiled and realized that I hadn’t thought about her since I’d been on Loggerhead. “Oh, really?”
“Yea,” she said as she grabbed her margarita and killed the rest of it with a few big gulps. Playing with the knife in her hands, she spun it a few times then gripped the handle, reared it back and flung it in the direction of the target with a strong flick of her wrist. The blade flew through the air so fast that all I could see was a metallic blur until it stabbed straight into the center of my makeshift wooden target. Glancing over at me, she added, “She wasn’t dangerous enough for you.”
After finishing the pitcher of margarita, we were unable to keep our hands off each other as we stumbled into the master bedroom. I’ve had my share of lovers in the past and enjoyed the company of beautiful women as much as any man does. But that night seemed to stand out above the rest as we lay in each other’s arms, our sweat covered bodies calling it a quits just as the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon and bled through the thin curtains covering my bedroom window.
I woke up on my back with Ange sprawled out beside me, her arm draped over me and her head resting softly against my chest. Seeing that it was past noon and unable to believe that I’d slept in so long, I slowly crawled out of bed, kissing Ange on the forehead before heading into the living room. I made a pot of coffee and cut into a couple of mangoes and a banana. I’d never really been one to eat a heavy breakfast, but after going all night, I felt like my body needed it so I also cooked up some eggs and pancakes. As the smell of coffee and warm hotcakes filled the air, Ange appeared, moving with light feet into the kitchen and wearing nothing but one of my old tee shirts. Somehow, she managed to look amazing even in the morning with her blonde hair a mess.
It was well over eighty degrees outside, so we enjoyed breakfast on the dining table, which still had a pretty good view of my backyard and the narrow channel where my twenty-two-foot Robalo center console was stored. After breakfast we showered together then got dressed and headed over to the marina where we took the Baia out for an afternoon on the water.
“Finally named her, huh?” Ange had said, glancing at the black letters stenciled onto the transom as we’d climbed abo
ard. About a week after getting out of the hospital, Jack had hooked me up with a guy who was able to come out and paint the name on that same day. “Dodging Bullets,” she added, “I like it.”
After cruising around the Lower Keys for an hour we anchored down between Looe Key and American Shoal, just southwest of Big Pine Key, then donned Scuba gear and dropped beneath the waves. It had been years since I’d dove the Adolphus Busche wreck, which was a two-hundred-and-ten-foot freighter that had been intentionally sunk back in 1998. Descending seventy feet and hovering just over the main deck, I scanned over the ship and was amazed at how well the ocean had transformed it into an artificial reef in just the ten years since it had been scuttled.
The ship was teeming at every corner with colorful marine life including stingrays, lemon sharks and a massive school of silversides. Finning into the cargo holds, we spotted two resident goliath grouper and one of them looked to be over five hundred pounds. Moving out and along the ship’s hull, we peered into the portholes and saw a few green moray eels swimming mystically in place and staring back at us.
When the oxygen in our tanks started to run low, we headed back up to the surface and relaxed on the sunbed together, watching as the sun dropped down in the western sky.
A week later, as we were lounging in my hammock on the upstairs patio of my house, Ange turned to me and said, “You know, I think I’d like to have a fancy dinner tonight. How does Latitudes sound?”
I smiled and said, “That sounds great.”
Latitudes was one of the nicest restaurants in the Keys and it was world famous because it was located on a small island just off Key West. Usually, guests hopped aboard a small ferry that shuttled wealthy tourists wearing fancy suits and dresses over to the restaurant. But after we got all dressed up I chose to take us over in style, mooring the Baia on the small private dock right beside the restaurant.
