Broken Stern_An Ellie O'Conner Novel

by Jack Hardin

  The Salty Mangrove was the island’s favorite restaurant and watering hole and had been owned by Ellie’s uncle Warren for the last nineteen years. The small wood-lapped building had a kitchen squeezed in between a tiki hut that faced the full service marina and an indoor seating area for the restaurant that was encircled by a wooden railing with rolled patio curtains that would be lowered when it rained. The Norma Jean Pier, like a long pointy finger, began just south of the bar, jutting eighty yards into the southern waters of Pine Island Sound.

  When Ellie wasn’t having fun at the range, sleeping in at her house, or out fishing on a boat, she could be found here. She spent half her week helping her uncle take orders, pour drinks, and clean up, sometimes helping scrub boats and fill out order slips for boat and tackle rentals. She had yet to get what Tyler called a ‘real job.’ The truth was, she didn’t need one. Not yet anyway. Her work at the CIA had her crisscrossing Europe, South America, and the Middle East for the better part of a decade. All her assignments had been fully funded by the Agency. Ellie rarely needed to spend her own money on anything, which meant that, between her salary and a few worthy investments she had made, she had enough to live on cruise control for the foreseeable future. For now, her new life of relaxation and ease was fully funded.

  Ellie stepped behind the bar and poured herself a glass of water over ice then tossed in a lime and planted herself on a barstool.

  “There she is,” a woman said. “You went shooting this morning?”

  “I did,” Ellie answered. “Just got back.”

  The woman was Gloria Wang, and she sat under the edge of palm frond roof perched next to her husband on their usual bar stools, their backs to the marina. They were permanent fixtures at The Salty Mangrove and, in some strange way, contributed to its charm. They were as unlikely a pair as one would could find. Fu was a small man, just over five feet, and had a flat face, flat nose, and a neck that was too thick for his small frame. He had a leg and a third, his left possessing nothing but a nub four inches above where his knee should have been. The prosthetic leg attached to the stump never seemed to fit right, making him waggle from side to side like a reverse pendulum when he walked. The original leg God had given him had been unwillingly donated to the hungry teeth of a Chinese rice harvester when Fu was eight. He hadn’t seen the machine, the driver hadn’t seen him, and his leg was promptly surrendered to Yunnan’s fertile soil.

  Gloria was a wide woman with thick bones and a double chin that looked like it might be entertaining a third. Her only attire appeared to be a straw sun hat that was redundant underneath the outer shaded edge of the tiki hut and a black one-piece swimsuit which barely contained her heavy, flaccid breasts. Her thick brows hung low over deep set eyes, and she wore an unfortunate nose that would have looked better on a bird of prey than someone made in God’s image. Fu had been stateside on a visitor’s visa five years ago when he and Gloria were seated next to each other during a boating tour of the Keys. Struck by a surge of lust, he was immediately taken with her; she with him. They married soon after, bought a Gibson houseboat fitted for salt water, and slid around the coasts of Florida for a year until they experienced the slow, secluded Old Florida way of life that was Pine Island. Their houseboat was the only home they had and for the last three years had been tethered to a slip in the marina, making them the only liveaboards at the south end of the island.

  “Did you best Tyler again today?” Gloria asked.

  Ellie sighed. “Not today. He’s a natural at it. I’ll get him next time.” In a subtle way, Tyler getting the best of her at the range really did bug her. She had been trained by the world’s most advanced government agency; Tyler had taught himself in the dry, windswept grasslands of West Texas. Ellie had been one of the CIA’s best marksmen for the six years she was in her role as a covert operative. Tyler had never been formally trained, nor had he ever tried his trigger finger at any competitions, local or otherwise.

  Gloria wagged her eyebrows. “Tyler...he’s a hottie, Ellie. Are you going places with him? You really should snag him up.”

  “No, Gloria. He’s a friend, and I think we’ll be keeping it that way.” It all sounded quite high schoolish, but, at least for now, it was true. “Have you seen Major this morning?”

  “About an hour ago,” Gloria said. “He was behind the dry dock washing down a couple skiffs.”

  Fu nodded, agreeing with his wife. Ellie had never heard Fu speak one word of English besides the word “yes,” “good,” and possibly “sexy,” but she wasn’t sure about the last one. He spoke only Chinese to Gloria who had somehow taken the effort to learn his language and not the other way around. Anyone trying to begin a conversation with Fu without the presence of his wife was doomed to futility and would have him smiling large and nodding politely like he understood. “Yes...yes,” he would say, and his eyes would squint hard, smiling in their own right along with his mouth. If Ellie had ever seen him without a smile, she couldn’t remember. Fu was a happy man, had a disposition that said he was just glad to be here, wherever that happened to be at any given moment.

  “Are you guys still thinking about going up to St. Pete next week?” Ellie asked. The Wangs, or rather, Gloria, were always talking about picking up anchor and visiting somewhere else for a few weeks. So far it had all been planning and talk, and they had not yet gotten around to making the actual trip. They just stuck around Pine Island as if an invisible force field was keeping them in.

  Gloria shook her head. “Fu is thinking he’d rather wait a while. At least until after the upcoming hurricane season.”

  “I think you should do it,” Ellie prodded. “At your age you should be off seeing the world. Besides hurricane season is a good couple months away.”

  “There’s my favorite blonde-haired niece.”

  Ellie smiled at the deep voice behind her then felt two strong hands on her shoulders. Warren Hall leaned in, kissed her on the back of the head, then walked behind the bar.

  She grinned. “Silly man, I’m your only blonde-haired niece. How’s everything going in Marco?”

  He turned his back to the bar, opened the lid to a refrigerated cooler, and rummaged around. “Need more shrimp,” he muttered to himself. He made a jot on a yellow legal pad in front of him. “Good,” he answered. “Slow season is coming to an end. Now that it’s July, we’ll start to see an uptick as the snowbirds come back down from up north. We just added a few more slips, and I hired one more mechanic.”

  Marco Island lay fifty miles to the south, and six years ago Warren had purchased a marina down there. Old Ed Wright had owned the place since around the time boats were invented, and he finally sold it over to Warren before dying three weeks later. Warren hadn’t wanted it when Ed first approached him, said he had enough on his hands managing The Salty Mangrove and the accompanying marina. But Ed was persistent, said he didn’t want to just hand off what he’d spent most his life at to just anybody. Warren finally conceded. He bought the place, made some updates, did some advertising, and brought in a couple charter boats. The acquisition changed his lifestyle, and ever since, like clockwork, he spent two weeks out of every month in Pine Island and the other two at Marco Island. Fourteen days there, fourteen days here. He had just returned from his most recent stint down there.

  By all accounts Warren was a handsome man. At just under six feet, he came in at average height, and broad shoulders and thick forearms gave him a stocky appearance. His face was square, eyes set back under low brows, and his graying auburn hair was kept short. His face held the deep, weathered lines that years near and on the water carved into a man. He wore cargo shorts and a white, short-sleeved, button-down shirt and double-banded Birkenstocks. Without question, he was a long stitch in the fabric of the local community. Warren Hall sponsored Little League teams, chaired the Rotary Club, and contributed both time and money to the local Meals on Wheels. More than once he’d been prodded to take a run at the mayor's chair, but he valued simplicity too much to go along wi
th it. He was a businessman and a philanthropist, he would retort, not a politician.

  Biologically, Ellie and Warren were not related, and yet he stood in all of Ellie’s earliest memories. Warren and her father had been best friends - like blood brothers - going back to their early college days. He had always been her uncle. The years had absorbed the reason Ellie called him Major; she just always had.

  Warren called for his cook, his bartender, and his waiter - all the same man - and handed him the legal pad when he appeared out of the small kitchen. “Ralphie, go ahead and order some more shrimp from Glen. There’s a couple more things on there too.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Warren turned back and pressed both his hands into the edge of the bar. “You ready to get out on the water, kiddo? I’ve got it all ready.”

  “Let’s do it,” she said, and stood up.

  “But Ellie and I were just getting started on a good conversation,” Gloria said, smiling and feigning frustration.

  “No,” Major corrected. “You were talking. All the good conversations happen out on the water.” He looked at Ellie. “I’ll grab the bait out of the cooler and meet you down at the Contender in a couple.”

  Ellie said goodbye to the Wangs and walked across the open deck and down a strip. She unconsciously frowned when she passed Pete Wellington’s boat, tied up in his regular slip. His NauticStar was found three weeks ago, bobbing anchorless on a sandbar in Buzzard Bay. Everyone feared the worst. It was found on a Friday afternoon, the day of the week Pete would go out in the early morning. Something had happened; that much was clear now. A water-loving seaman didn’t abandon his boat and not show up for nearly a month. An investigation led by the Sheriff's Office had as yet yielded nothing. There were no signs of foul play - no traces of blood or damage to the boat, no note - Pete had simply vanished. Conclusions ran wild as they tend to do in small communities. Some said he may have gone for a swim and ended up a hammerhead’s dinner. Others guessed he had a heart attack, fell overboard, and still ended up a hammerhead’s dinner. Gloria said Fu thought Pete had possibly been abducted by pirates, and Ellie couldn’t tell if Fu was joking or serious. Pete was a good, kind man. Ellie, and the whole island for that matter, still held out hope that he would turn up soon with a rational explanation. Her gut told her not to hold her breath.

  Twenty minutes later Ellie and Warren were nestled between Pine and Sanibel Islands, bobbing in the boat, the anchor set, lines in the water. The heat from the mid-morning sun was tempered by a soft breeze drifting across their skin, its light glinting off the water like tiny flashes of fire escaping from underneath the surface. It was moments like this, when a light breeze rocked the boat and Ellie was out here with one of her favorite people in the world, that she wondered why she had ever left at all.

  “You know,” Major said. “Summer days out here in the Sound make me miss your father. We came out here a thousand times together if we came out here once.”

  The words tore at the loose stitching of a raw and mending heart. “I know,” she said softly and stared at the water where her line disappeared. Two years ago Ellie’s soul was splintered by a phone call from Major, informing her that her father had died in a car accident. Frank O’Conner had been driving back from a game of poker at a friend’s house in Cape Coral when a gas tanker slid into his lane on Veterans Parkway and sent both vehicles into a fireball that incinerated everything, even melted the metal.

  At the time she was entrenched in Kabul, almost a year into her commitment to flip Assam, and was unable to come home for the funeral lest she blow her cover: a journalist with Reuters. In any other situation, she could have taken a military hop out of the city and gotten here in time for the funeral. She didn’t ask to come. She knew the Agency wouldn’t have let her. It was one of the gambles you took within that line of work. And just like that, Frank O’Conner’s death left her without a parent. Ellie was five years old, her sister Katie three, when their mother had died on the table undergoing an emergency appendectomy. Her mother was Russian and met her father when he was on a student internship in Moscow. Now she and Katie were without the man who had raised them and loved them as well as any man who had ever raised two girls alone.

  Katie had yet to forgive Ellie for her absence at the funeral and hadn’t spoken to her older sister since the day their father’s ashes were laid in the ground. Or what was left of them. Katie now lived in Seattle with her five-year-old daughter Chloe. According to Major, her sister couldn’t handle the memories of the island any longer. Chloe was only two years old when Ellie had come for her last visit. It was the first and only time she had ever seen or spent time with her niece. Having just stepped out of her role with TEAM 99 and finished with her training at Langley, Ellie had spent the two months of leisure time back home with those she loved: her father, sister, niece, and Major. Since moving back home, Ellie had regularly sent Katie and Chloe letters, all of them unanswered.

  “I still have to remind myself that he’s gone,” Ellie said. “Like sometimes I think he’s going to come back from a trip or walk up the dock and join us out here on the water.”

  “Me too, kiddo. Me too.”

  Ellie felt a pull on her Intercoastal rod and watched it bow quickly toward the water.

  “Look at you,” Major said. “Got one already.”

  Ellie flicked her wrists up to set the hook in the fish’s mouth then used her left hand to spin the reel. She pulled back on the rod and reeled in again, repeating the motions three more times before the snapper broke the surface. Its scales sparkled like tiny diamonds against the sunlight. Ellie brought it into the boat and unhooked it. “It’s over a foot. A keeper,” she said, and tossed it into the live well.

  “Not bad,” Major said. “I got a twenty incher last week inside Gullivan Bay.”

  “I bow to you, O, Great One.”

  Major smiled. “And I let you.”

  She worked a fresh shrimp onto her jig and cast it back across the water. Major brought his line back in, checked it, and sent it back out.

  Ellie loved these times on the water with Major. There would always be long stretches of silence where no one felt the need to speak and it didn’t feel awkward. Some days they might be on the water for an hour and say ten sentences the entire time. It wasn’t about the conversation. It was about being with a person that you were free to be yourself around and felt no obligations to please.

  Over the next half hour, Ellie snagged four more fish, and Major brought up three of his own. After baiting his hook again and casting back out, he dug into the side pocket of his shorts.

  “Almost forgot,” he said. “Here. I want you to have this.” He pulled out a switchblade with a black rubber grip and flicked it open and shut a few times before handing it to her.

  “What’s this?” she asked, taking it.

  “It was your father’s. Probably not anything special or super sentimental, but you should have it. I was going through some boxes of his in my closet a few weeks ago and found it. He probably got it at the hardware store or some random tackle shop.”

  She looked it over and flicked the blade out. The sound - that quick metallic click - was one of the most distinct and recognizable sounds in the world; like the pump of a shotgun or the yearning call of a seagull. She slowly ran a finger down the side of the blade and was rushed back to the first time she had ever taken sometime’s life with a knife. It was in Mauritania, one of the largest countries in West Africa. Her entire team had been sent in to grab Yahya Azid, a virulent man connected to the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan. They snuck into the courtyard of his two-story compound under the shroud of darkness. Ellie had been the first one in and snuck in behind a guard armed with an AK. Her thigh holster lightly scraped the wall, and he, hearing it, started to turn. But action is always faster than reaction, and her knife was already clenched in her fingers. She stepped up behind him and brought the knife around, puncturing his larynx and unlacing his throat. Killing w
ith a knife was fully unlike shooting someone. With a knife, you had to be up close - it was rare that a blade was thrown in the midst of combat. It looked good in the movies but was impractical, rare that a throwing knife would find such a mark on someone's body that they would make no noise of pain or protest as they fell to the ground. Killing someone with a knife was an intensely personal experience...feeling the slice of the blade through their skin and muscles, feeling their body tense and then relax as their life ebbed away. Ellie preferred killing with a gun every time.

  She returned to the present. The knife was four inches long and razor sharp. It bore no nicks or scratching showing wear. She folded it back. “Thanks, Major.” After her father died, Major and Katie split up his possessions - he took whatever she didn’t want and bartered with Katie for items he knew her older sister would want to have. When Ellie arrived back home six months ago, Major had her come over to his garage and work through the boxes. Of everything that remained, three things were her favorites, one of them a pink, soft plastic My Little Pony that Ellie had given her father when her mother died. Five-year-old Ellie had woken up to her father's sobs one night. She took the doll off her bed, walked down the hall, and pressed it into his wet hands. For the last twenty-some years, that pony had sat on top of his clothes dresser, next to a small framed picture of her mother. Her second favorite item was the white fedora that he wore anytime he was off work. It gave him a relaxed, distinguished look that went well with his personality. The third had been an old edition of Hemingway’s collected short stories, a volume that her father had passed through cover-to-cover many times. It had been healing, working through the memories her father's possessions divined back up. Ellie slipped the knife into her pocket with the intent of making it a permanent fixture in her tackle box.

  “You know, Cindy Gershwin lost her mother two years ago and still has an entire storage unit she hasn’t gone through.”