by Jack Hardin
But Mike didn’t hear him. He had already slipped his massive headphones back over his head and started tapping away again, his head bobbing up and down to the beat of some techno-rock music.
Darren retreated downstairs and saw the cat on the kitchen island, nosing around for something to eat.
“Hungry, little fella?”
The cat looked at him expectantly and meowed.
“Hold on, let me see what I can find.” Darren rummaged around in the sparsely filled pantry looking for anything resembling dry or wet cat food. All he found was some peanut butter, a box of mac and cheese, and two packs of microwave popcorn. There wasn’t even a can of tuna. “You’d think he was in college,” he murmured.
He shut the pantry door, then leaned down and scratched the cat’s head. He threw a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder before addressing the skinny animal in a low tone. “Tell you what, let’s get through the weekend and we’ll see if I can convince Mike to let me have you. This is no way for you to live.”
The cat lifted his chin and gave a quick purr as Darren scratched underneath it.
“Hang tight. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Darren drove his Saturn a mile west to Broward Boulevard and pulled into a cracked parking space at the front of a run-down strip mall. He went into Giovanni’s and put in an order for two medium-sized pizzas before walking to the corner store and purchasing a case of Coors Lite and a bag of Friskies.
By the time the pizzas were ready, the sun had dipped below the horizon and dusk was in full swing, the shadows having disappeared until morning and the street lights casting their artificial orange glow across the city.
Darren returned to his car and started back to his brother’s house, parking behind the truck once again. The stench assaulted him afresh as he reentered the house, nearly rendering his appetite inert. The back door was still open, and he finally caught a pleasant whiff of fresh air as he arrived at the kitchen island. He set the pizzas down and removed the bag of cat food from under his arm, setting it on the counter.
Where was the cat? He would have expected it to be on the counter salivating over a long-overdue dinner.
A sound came from upstairs.
Darren frowned and stepped to the base of the stairs, listened.
Voices.
Angry voices.
One belonged to Mike; there were at least two others.
“I’m only going to ask you one more time,” a voice said. It was smooth like oil and taunting, as if the owner of the voice enjoyed being in control.
Darren proceeded quietly up the stairs, spreading his feet so that they pressed into the rafters on the edges. He’d never had any reason to pay attention to which steps creaked, if any.
Reaching the landing, he heard his brother speak. Mike sounded like he was in pain, his words coming in quick, ragged gasps. “I said… I’m not telling… you. And you can… drop… dead.”
Darren quietly crept up the final section of the steps. Keeping his body low, his head crowned above the floor of the garage apartment just enough for him to capture the scene.
Mike was still sitting in his chair, turned toward the doorway. The bodies of two average-sized men blocked his view of his brother. One was black with a bald head and thick arms. The other was white with tight curly hair that was cut short and dyed blond.
The black man took a step back and extended his arm. He couldn’t see what the man was holding, but he had a good enough guess. Before Darren could even think to react, two unsuppressed gunshots erupted. Their sounds were defending, echoing off the ceiling and the walls.
The man with the blond hair suddenly began to turn around. Darren ducked and slithered back down to the landing.
Upstairs: “You got the server?”
“I got it.”
“Let’s get outta here.”
The subfloor creaked in the apartment. Darren, having no weapon and nowhere else to go, held his breath and slid down the remaining stairs on his stomach. Reaching the kitchen floor, he jumped to his feet, opened the pantry door, and quickly wedged himself beneath the lower shelf. He shut the door.
Proud and heavy footfalls sounded on the steps and then moments later touched down on the dirty linoleum. Darren watched the shadows move past the narrow opening under the door and then stop. He cursed himself. The men would walk right by the pizza. Why hadn’t he just run out the back door? He had a decent pair of legs on him and could have been two houses away by now. Now, all it would take was one stroke of bad luck.
As he silently pleaded for them to leave, one of them said something that caused Darren’s eyes to widen. He was beginning to think that he’d heard them wrong when one of them repeated it. His entire body, already tense,
“Hey, wait a minute.” The footsteps stopped.
Darren held his breath.
“Were these pizzas here when we showed up?”
“Hell if I know. I was scanning the place from behind my iron sights.”
Darren heard a rustle, and then, “Olives. Gross. Who gets olives on their pizza?”
“I do.”
The box rustled again. “Hmm… not bad. Where’s this from? Giovanni's? Man, we should stop by there on our way out.”
“We don’t have to stop by, you moron. Just take it with you.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Another gunshot rang out.
“What the hell was that? You about made me piss my pants!”
“Freaking cat, man. Tried to rub his hairy self against my leg.”
Darren’s hands clenched into tight fists. He had half a mind to bust out of the pantry and just take his chances. But he quickly thought the better of it. If there was any chance that Mike was still alive…
“Yo, we’d better go. Neighbors gonna be calling the cops.”
The footsteps moved toward the open back door and into the yard. Darren released his breath and sucked in a hungry lungful of stale air. Several seconds later he cautiously opened the door and ejected himself from the cramped space. Slowly, he stood up.
Skittles was lying on the floor at the foot of the island, the fur around his stomach a bloody mess. Both pizza boxes were gone. The sound of an engine rumbled down the back alley.
Darren turned and shot back up the stairs and into the upper room.
Mike’s chair was turned toward the back wall. Darren could see the crown of his head leaning limply to one side. He ran to him and swung the chair around. “Mike!”
He stared at his brother.
Mike’s dead eyes were open, staring vacuously above Darren’s head into an undetected void. The front of his white T-shirt was stained a deep red and torn in two places where the bullets had passed into him.
“Mike,” Darren said softly but urgently. He grabbed his brother's hand and was nearly repelled by the limp, lifeless grab of flesh. “Mike!”
Tears stained Darren’s eyes. His voice cracked. “Mike… no. Mike, come on, man. Don’t be gone. Please.” He reached up and set a palm on his brother's cheek. “You’re all I’ve got, man.”
His hand trembled as it slid down to Mike’s neck and felt for a pulse. Darren already knew the truth. But he had to try anyway.
No pulse.
Darren’s face slowly bloomed red, and a vein ascended across his forehead like a plump earthworm crawling just beneath the skin. His lips formed a hard, angry line.
Staring at his brother’s lifeless body, he clenched his fists again and released the blood-curdling scream of a man whose blood pulsed with a poisonous mixture of rage and grief.
He looked around the room. One of the men had said something about making sure they took the server.
The servers had been forcefully removed from their mounts on the rack in the corner. The outer shells of the desktop towers were missing; their hard drives had been removed.
Three years ago Mike had quit his job at Best Buy and started working full time at home, buying, selling, and trading things online.
Most
ly the dark web.
The dark web.
“My God, Mike. What did we do?”
Chapter Two
The evening sun shimmered on the surface of the water like liquid lighting. Water slapped gently against the hull of the flat bottom skiff, and the trolling motor hummed quietly as the boat cut around a small mangrove island. I studied the water and spotted a group of bait fish running out of a narrow creek between the mangroves. The trolling motor was mounted on the bow, humming quietly. I clicked the trolling motor’s remote, and it turned off.
The surface of the water churned at the creek’s mouth, a heavy ripple where a large fish was busting on the bait fish.
“You see that?” a deep voice said from behind me.
I reached for my rod. “Yes, sir.” Squatting down, I opened the lid to the bait well and removed a four-inch mullet. It, along with two dozen others, had been brought up by a casting net not a half-hour before. I worked the mullet onto my hook, stood up, and took a few steps up the forward deck.
The water rippled in the same area again. I cast my line beyond it and let the current carry it toward the school of bait fish. My medium action rod had a 4K size reel with 20lb braid and a 30lb flouro leader. The right setup for bringing in a good-sized snook.
There’s nothing quite like fishing the Florida backcountry. It’s serene, tranquil, and far enough from any whisper of civilization to almost woo you into believing that you’re the last person on earth. In a world where concrete cities keep getting bigger and brighter and asphalt highways keep getting louder and faster, getting out over the shallows with a line in the water is the perfect way to reset and to remember the simple things in life.
I felt a thump on my line and a second later the reel sang like it was possessed as the fish started to run. Thankfully, it didn’t run up the creek but away from the tiny island and toward the open water. I kept the line tight as the fish quit running. The fish wasn’t done. I let the line run some more, and when the fish finally stopped again, I started the fight. The rod bent against the strain, and I reeled in. The snook breached the surface and danced before descending and thrashing like it was on fire.
“That’s a beauty,” Rich said excitedly from behind me.
Rich Wilson is my closest, and really my only, neighbor, living on a catamaran with his wife of forty years at the end of the marina where I keep my houseboat. He has a sturdy frame, silky white hair, and a gentle, booming voice. The water, the sunsets, the fish, and the music were just some of the things that made the Keys paradise. But it was also the people. Rich had spent nearly thirty years as a New York City police officer before he and his wife Edith bought the catamaran last year and tied off at Key Largo.
The fish continued to put up a fight. It’s one of the reasons anglers love going after snook; they don’t come in easy. It’s an average-looking fish with an angled forehead that slopes down to a large mouth. The lower jaw protrudes, and it has a yellow pelvic fin and a high dorsal fin. A distinct black line runs down both its sides, giving the fish its nickname, “linesider.”
It took me almost ten minutes to get the fish up close to the hull. Handing Rich my rod, I grabbed the line, kneeled down, and drew the fish toward me, careful to maintain the tension. Reaching down, I lipped the fish with one hand, supported its body with the other, and brought it out of the water.
“That’s a beauty,” Rich said.
I unhooked it and took it to the ruler near the helm. Thirty-one inches—a keeper. I tossed it in the live well and received my rod back from Rich. There was a bag limit of one snook per angler per day, so I would have to release any more that I caught from here on out. We had drifted away from the creek, so I started up the trolling motor again. The boat didn’t have a power pole to keep it set in the shallow water.
Reaching our former spot, I cut the motor, and Rich cast off. Snook are very skittish by nature, and the sound of a small engine or even a quiet conversation can scare them off. After bringing in the line and recasting a few more times, Rich finally felt a thump on the end. The fight was on.
His fish darted toward the mangroves that were flanking the creek. Rich immediately pulled back, keeping the line tight and reeling him in. If the fish tangled up in the mangrove roots, it was a goner, no two ways about it. Slowly and steadily, Rich forced it closer to the boat before he let it run again. Fortunately, it ran toward open water this time and stopped fifty feet off the stern. Keeping tension on the line, Rich started to reel.
Fifteen minutes later, the fish was tired out and gave up the fight. I held Rich’s rod while he kneeled down and brought it out of the water. It was thirty inches—another keeper. “Thanks for a great workout,” Rich told the fish, and then dropped him in the live well with mine. He turned back to me. “You want to stay here or do you want to try for snapper and some red grouper? There’s a narrow key about two miles from here that I haven’t fished in a while. The snapper always hit over there this time of night.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
I brought up the trolling motor, and Rich started the outboard as I slid our rods into the rod holders near the transom. He turned the boat around and headed for a narrow channel in between two islands.
“Working any interesting cases right now?” he asked above the wind.
“Not since I grabbed The Drifter last week.”
The Drifter’s real name was Isaac Cross. The thirty-year-old had spent a three-week period breaking into military installations along the lower east coast, setting multiple fires to officers’ quarters and a shoppette. I finally caught up to him as he was leaving a seaside motel on Big Coppitt Key, on his way to sneak onto Naval Air Station Key West.
“What about that Fagan character?” Rich asked. “Did they ever find him?”
Joel Fagan.
The name stirred a caldron of sordid memories. My jaw tensed, and I rubbed at it with a knuckle.
Two months ago, a case involving a murdered ICE agent off the coast of Islamorada brought me to Costa Rica, where I spent several days crisscrossing the country, following a string of cryptic clues. My search finally brought me face to face with Frank Blackwell’s killer. Joel Fagan had single-handedly masterminded a scheme that redirected dispossessed immigrants into a labor camp deep in the Costa Rican jungle. The laborers—men, women, and children—were forced to mine gold; breaking rock in deep underground mines, hauling the rocks up, breaking them and crushing them before putting them through a mill before sending them through a makeshift sluice. And that was only half the process. The other half entailed the workers being exposed to toxic chemicals such as mercury, cyanide, and sulfuric acid as they sifted, panned, and separated the gold from the silt and sludge.
The level of human suffering in the camp was unsettling. Workers were killed outright if they did not meet the quota or could not find the strength to carry on. Women were raped, and sick children were left to die. Remembering it all now sent my blood pressure racing in the wrong direction.
Joel Fagan held the trophy for the most diabolical and degenerate man I have ever met. He carried on as if the world were his oyster, and he a divinely appointed scourge to rip it open and harvest the pearl. And all the while he carried on with a puckish grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye.
When I questioned him over the reasons he could justify such an abominable operation, he had simply shrugged and said that he had owed someone a great deal of money and that the gold the hidden mine had produced over the last year had finally brought him square.
That was it. And when he was brought back to San Jose for questioning, he offered no other word about it. Not to his lawyer, nor the dozen U.S. federal and local agents who tried their hands at interrogating him.
And then, two weeks after I arrested him, and the day before he was set to be extradited to the United States, Fagan escaped from a local prison. The Justice Department had requested that the local authorities intern him in a maximum security facility just outside the city. The request was
granted and Fagan spent five days in solitary confinement in a prison reserved for drug kingpins and corrupt politicians, an institution where he could be under close surveillance for twenty-four hours a day. But then, without alerting Homeland, the Justice Department, or the U.S. Embassy, Fagan was transferred to a prison on the other side of the Guanacaste Mountains. Eight days later, he wasn’t there.
He had gone undetected by every Western government since.
Adding a level of complexity to the narrative was that Kathleen Rose, my boss at the Federal Intelligence Directorate, had dated Fagan some twenty years prior when they both worked at the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Fagan had eventually ditched the Agency for a life of easy money and organized crime. The United States had been looking for him in various capacities for over a decade, but he was a master at disappearing, at living and moving under creative aliases, and evading detection. His go-to trade seemed to be primarily black market arms, but his actions did not seem limited to that. If there was good money in it, Fagan was willing to deal.
After hearing of his escape, I had repeatedly petitioned Kathleen for the chance to hunt him down. But I was denied. Kathleen was as eager to see Fagan put back behind solid bars as I was. But without the backing of Homeland, without its network of connections and resources, there was no way I would be able to find him. The case had been given to another team and so far they had turned up empty. The only file the U.S. intelligence community had on him was slim and involved Fagan knee-deep in the sale of illegal arms, operating mostly in North Africa and South America. But even that information was years out of date.
For all anyone knew, Joel Fagan was sipping piña coladas on a beach in the Maldives while dreaming up his next foul scheme.
“No,” I answered Rich. “He’s still a ghost as far as I know.”
We stayed on the water for another two hours, fishing around several small keys and inlets. I did, and we spent the rest of our time fishing for Finally, as the sun disappeared into the Gulf, I reeled my line in for a final time.
“What do you say we call it a day and head over to The Reef for a few beers?” I said. “We need to get these snooks over to Roscoe anyhow.”
