Savage Truth

by Jack Hardin

  I silently pulled myself out of the water and onto the deck of the boat.

  I couldn’t get a visual on the second shooter, but I assumed he had boarded my houseboat to finish hunting me down. They must not have heard me enter the water.

  Peeling off my soaking wet sneakers, I removed my socks and quietly stepped off the boat and on to the dock.

  My .45 was set firmly in my grip, leveled directly at the man thirty feet ahead of me. It was the bald, black man Darren had seen in his brother’s house. As I advanced, I watched in disbelief as he tucked his weapon under an arm and reached into a back pocket. He brought out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and after plucking out a cigarette, he set it to his lips.

  I quickened my pace, scanning the grass and the parking lot beyond for any movement.

  When I was fifteen feet away, I stopped: “Psst.”

  The man’s head snapped toward me, his eyes wide, the cigarette tumbling from his lips as he reached for his weapon.

  He didn’t stand a chance.

  Without stopping, I fired three rounds into his chest and watched his eyes roll back into his head as he rocked backward and collapsed unmoving onto the dock. I approached him, kicked his gun from his fingers, and then returned my attention to my boat.

  The floor lamps in the salon had been blown to bits; the only light inside was coming from the range hood in the galley. The counters, the bulkheads, and the deck were riddled with bullet holes. An angry heat flushed into my face as I stood silently on the edge of the dock and listened for any sound coming from inside, watching for any movement.

  Just as I was about to step onto the foredeck, my was blood chilled by the sound of a gun being racked directly behind me.

  I froze.

  “Toss the gun onto the boat.” The voice was thin, weak. But it held no fear.

  I did as I was told. My gun clambered onto the deck where it came to rest beside Darren’s body and shards of broken glass.

  “Turn around.”

  I raised my hands into a defensive position and turned around to face the business end of a pistol’s suppressor.

  The white man with bleached hair and a sleeve of tattoos down his right arm studied me in the hazy light, as though he were comparing my features against an image in his head. “You’re Ryan Savage.”

  I didn’t recognize him, nor his darker colleague who lay dead near his feet. “Who are you?” I said calmly. “What’s your problem with me?”

  “I got no beef with you. We just do what we’re told.” He looked at me with a half-cocked smirk.

  “Who put the hit out?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They don’t tell me that.”

  “Why kill Darren and his brother?”

  “Who’s Darren?”

  “The guy behind me.”

  “Oh.” He frowned as though he were trying to piece together people and events that forced him beyond his mental capabilities. “Who—who’s his brother?”

  “The guy you killed in Fort Lauderdale earlier tonight. You know, the guy who owned the servers you stole. You also killed his cat.”

  Strangely enough, it was the mention of the cat that brought understanding into his eyes. “Oh...yeah.” He glanced behind me. “That’s the other guy's brother?”

  This guy was a first-rate idiot. I’ve been in law enforcement for my entire adult life, first as a military MP and now as a special investigator with a federal agency. I had been in dozens of situations where I was being shot at and didn’t know if I would make it out alive. But this was the first time I thought I might get killed by a complete moron.

  I really didn’t want to be killed by a moron. Brad would never let me live it down.

  “Yes,” I replied. “And I served in the Army with him. Which means that you just killed a fellow soldier.” My jaw tensed as my eyes bored into his.

  He shrugged again. “Why should I care about that?”

  “Who sent you?” I asked again. “Why do they want me dead?”

  “Look, like I said, they don’t tell me anything. I do what I’m told and they pay me. No questions. All I know is you really pissed someone off.”

  I slowly shifted my weight and slid my front foot up a couple of inches. My only way out of this was getting to the gun before he pressed the trigger.

  “You’re about to kill a federal investigator,” I said. “You sure you want to handle that fallout? You’ll end up worse than your friend here before the sun rises.”

  “They haven’t caught up to me yet.” He shot a quick glance around as though checking to make sure we were still alone. “So...sorry for this.” He tightened his grip on the gun and elevated it until it was aimed directly at my forehead. “Whatever you did, you sure pissed somebody off.”

  I shifted my weight to the balls of my feet and was just about to pounce forward when his head whipped violently toward his shoulder, a bullet passing through his temple and bursting out the other side. Another round hit him in the neck and yet another in his arm. He toppled over like a smacked bowling pin and lay unmoving on the dock, a dark pool of blood quickly staining the pine and dripping through the slats to the water below.

  I leaned over his body and quickly snatched his pistol from his hand. I stepped back and through the darkness saw a figure pass under the cone of yellow light in the small parking lot.

  “Ryan!”

  I relaxed. It was Rich Wilson. The former career police officer had his concealed carry extended. He swept his gaze, looking for more threats as he made his way toward me.

  “Any more?” he asked.

  “I think he’s the last.” I looked back toward the parking lot. Other than Edith’s Cadillac and my Silverado, the only other vehicle was a black Grand Marquis, parked in the shadow at the far end.

  Rich’s truck wasn’t in the parking lot. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  “Edith called me and said there was an active shooter at the other end of the marina, that it looked like it was going down at your slip. I parked my truck a couple streets over and ran the rest of the way here. Didn’t want to attract attention coming in.”

  “I’ll clear my boat,” I said. “Why don’t you sweep the area and check out that Marquis?”

  He moved off, and I stepped over the man who nearly killed me and onto the foredeck of my houseboat. Moving past Darren’s body, I winced as my bare foot pressed into a thin shard of glass. I ignored it and remained focused on the interior as I glanced down to evade the shards. Within a minute I had the galley, all three staterooms, both heads, and the salon cleared. I went back out the aft entrance and cautiously worked my way up the steps to the upper deck. After clearing the companionways and giving the interior a final sweep, I was satisfied that no one else was hiding inside. I was standing in the galley, fuming over the destruction when Rich returned with his gun lowered at his side.

  He shook his head. “No one else in the car. No sign of anyone else around.”

  I nodded. He looked around the place. Debris was scattered across the floor—glass, sections of countertop, flooring, and even the fruit bowl. The aft bulkhead looked like an advertisement for a training range target.

  “I’m sorry, Ryan. I know The MacGyver means a lot to you.”

  “Yeah...thanks.”

  He was right. When I was a boy, I was nearly convinced that MacGyver was a god hailing from Mount Olympus. There was nothing he couldn't fix, no situation he couldn't get himself out of with a paperclip, a piece of gum, or a strip of duct tape. He also lived on a houseboat—albeit with no engine—on a lake. Growing up in the mountains of Colorado didn’t give me any hope of ever living on one. But when I moved to Key Largo two years ago, I fulfilled my childhood dream and bought a 55-foot Gibson houseboat off an older couple looking to spend the next few years in Spain. The MacGyver was an unofficial name for her until just a few weeks ago when I was out of town and Roscoe and Brad spent an afternoon stenciling the name on the hull, just above the waterline.

  The right
boat for the right person can almost feel like a family member. Seeing her like this made me want to go back outside and kill those two guys all over again.

  “It’s nothing some money and elbow grease can’t fix,” I replied.

  “What were those guys after?” Rich asked.

  “Someone paid them to take me out.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “No.” I recalled what Darren said about the servers at his brother’s house. “You checked the entire car? Including the trunk space?”

  “Of course.”

  “Was there anything that looked like computer servers or parts?”

  “No. Nothing but empty bottles of Pepsi and a couple of magazines. The trunk was clean.” Muted red and blue lights strobed across his face. “I’m going to check on Edith. She was pretty shaken up over the phone.”

  He returned his gun to the holster on his hip and turned to leave.

  “Hey, Rich.”

  He stopped and looked over his shoulder.

  “Thanks for saving my life.”

  “Fishing and a gunfight. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.” He winked at me and stepped off the boat, hurrying off to check on his wife.

  I returned to the dock to greet the first responding deputy. It was John Hammond, a long-standing deputy with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, and a good friend. We had recently started to play racquetball once a week, as our schedules allowed; the loser would buy lunch.

  John had yet to buy a single one.

  He was coming down the dock with his sidearm raised. I brought up my hands. “John, it’s me. Ryan. Everything’s clear.”

  He lowered his weapon and stopped in front of me. “Savage, what happened?” He looked at my shoeless feet. My clothes were still soaking wet, my hair matted to my head. “You look like a half-drowned rat.”

  “Someone put a hit on me. There’s three bodies behind me. The two men who were sent to kill me and the guest of mine that they killed as he was leaving my boat. I got one of them, and Rich got the other. He’s gone to check on Edith.”

  Hammond was tall and broad-shouldered and sported a full mustache that put Tom Selleck’s to shame. He rubbed his mustache and surveyed the scene behind me. “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Your ear is bleeding.”

  I reached up. My right ear was warm and sticky.

  “Come on,” I said, turning back to my boat. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Chapter Four

  I spent that night at Brad’s place. I had the whole place to myself; he and Lisa were on their final week of a fourteen-day cruise around the Mediterranean. Between Crime Scene having my boat under their authority and the time it would take for repairs, it was going to be a while before I could return to it. Brad’s spare bedroom had an exterior door that opened up into the driveway, so I could come and go without getting in their way.

  By the time I finally got in bed, it was well after midnight.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  Watching someone get gunned down on your doorstep, then taking out their killer just before getting a gun stuck in your face, convinced that you were mere seconds away from your own death....it all goes a hell of a long way to rattle the nerves.

  I stared up at the ceiling, watching the wood-bladed ceiling fan spin as I pondered what Darren relayed to me about his and his brother’s forays into the dark web. They had hacked an ultra-secure digital file that could have put a lot of powerful people into hot water. Had they carried through with their threats to post that information on a public-facing website, the owner of that file would have been exposed for holding dirt on his colleagues or enemies. And then there would be the matter of those individuals’ dirty laundry being hung out for all to see.

  It would have been an outright smear campaign for everyone involved.

  I hadn’t known Darren very well during my time in Afghanistan. But my thirty-six years on this blue-green planet endowed me with enough experience to discern the man full of guile from the decent man nudged onto a crooked path. I believed what Darren said about wanting to do the right thing; Mike had clearly been an older brother who had no issues operating on the fringes of the law, exerting a diminishing influence on his younger sibling.

  I meant what I had said to the blond-haired guy who nearly ended my life: Darren was a fellow soldier, and in my world that meant something. Someone may have ordered a hit on his brother, but Darren had been caught in the crossfire, and for that, someone was going to have to pay.

  The million-dollar question, of course, was who owned the file that had been hacked and just what was on it?

  The answer had died with Mike and the men who stole his hardware.

  And for me, an even more pressing concern was who put out a hit on me, and why? It could have been ordered by anyone, for any number of reasons, and I didn’t have the slightest clue to advance on.

  We had the identity of the two men. The white guy was Tony Fry; the Grand Marquis was registered to him. The black guy was Melvin Burkes. Both men had a long and checkered history with the law.

  Burkes had been released from prison last year, after completing a six-year term for assault with a deadly weapon. He recently completed his parole and no longer had a phone or listed address attached to his name.

  Fry, on the other hand, spent three years in the joint for slinging crack and had a stay prior to that for shooting a neighbor’s dog in the street. His registered address was in Overtown, a predominantly African-American neighborhood north of downtown Miami.

  After a solid hour of staring at the ceiling fan and trying to piece together any connections, I finally got out of bed and made my way into the living room. After locating the remote, I turned on the television and settled into the couch as I scanned through Netflix. I finally landed on Die Hard. Movies don’t get much better than that: a streetwise cop who fights against overwhelming odds to protect his wife against a criminal mastermind.

  And for the sake of ruffling a few feathers, you can kick It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and Elf to the curb: Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever made.

  I made it halfway through the movie—the last thing I remember is John McClane getting a chair bomb ready to send down the elevator shaft—waking up during the credit roll only to turn off the TV and fall back into an undisturbed sleep.

  I woke before the sun, returning to the bedroom and digging through my suitcase for a pair of exercise shorts and socks. After lacing up my shoes, I exited out the front door and jogged out of the neighborhood. I could feel the stress from last night’s events burning off with every stride, and I ran three miles without stopping, taking the Overseas Heritage Trail to mile marker 106 before turning around and heading back. Traffic on the Overseas Highway was light at this time of the morning, and there’s nothing like the quiet of the Keys and the invigorating scent of saltwater to clear your head.

  On the way back, I charted a course to my marina. The sun was just starting to smudge faint orange and yellow rays across the eastern horizon, the celestial ball of gas regaining its temporary conquest over the night. A flock of pelicans was diving on a school of bait fish out past the shallows and beyond them, a small pod of dolphins was moving through the water at a leisurely pace, their dorsal fins piercing the surface and disappearing again beneath the water.

  The MacGyver was besieged by yellow crime scene tape. Both her forward deck and the dock were stained with pools of dried blood. In the early sunlight, the damage looked even worse than I recalled as I walked through with Deputy Hammond last night. I couldn't find a single section of fiberglass that wasn’t punctured like swiss cheese. Even my deck chairs on the upper deck were cracked and chipped.

  Out of respect for those who had yet to fully document the damage, I didn’t board. I turned back with a fresh surge of anger and jogged through the parking lot, charting a mental course back to Brad’s place and pumping my legs faster as my mind consolidated a steely resolve to
get to the bottom of everything.

  When I returned to the bungalow, my phone was ringing on the kitchen counter. It was Rich.

  “Was that you down the dock earlier?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I went for a run.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Well enough,” I said. “But I don't think sleep will come easy until I can get my fingers around the throat of whoever wants me dead. How’s Edith?”

  “Shaken but not stirred. She’s more worried about you than anything.” He paused. I could tell there was something else on his mind. “Listen, Ryan. If you need anything from me...Edith and I were planning on going down to Key West this weekend, but I’ll stick around if I can help in some way.”

  “Rich, you saved my life last night. Take your wife to Key West and have a few piña coladas for me. I’m sure the sheriff will have plenty more questions for you when you get back.”

  He sighed. I knew the cop in him wanted to pursue this with me. “Okay. But tell you what, I know a couple of guys who could get The MacGyver fixed up. You focus on figuring out who has an interest in you being dead, and I’ll get some quotes on the boat repair for you.”

  “Great, Rich. I appreciate that.”

  We hung up, and I headed for the shower. Since The MacGyver was a houseboat that I rarely moved, I had the lowest form of insurance on it I could get. That meant I didn’t have coverage for domestic war damage. Repairs weren’t going to come cheap, and I was bracing myself for having to scrap it and get a new one.

  After stepping out of the shower and donning fresh clothes, I cooked up a plate of bacon and eggs, chowed them down, and then headed into the office.

  Kathleen was sitting behind her desk, a cup of coffee steaming in front of her. She wore a white blouse with a blue blazer; between the outfit and her dark-framed glasses, she looked like a classy college professor.