Broken Stern_An Ellie O'Conner Novel

by Jack Hardin

“I donated some wheelchairs to some kids in need, so they want me to come get my face in the middle of them when they give them away.”

  Ellie took his pole while he got behind the wheel. “You’re a good man, Warren Hall.” She grinned. “I don’t care what Fu Wang says about you.”

  〜〜〜〜〜

  A half hour later Ellie stepped off the end of the boardwalk’s ramp and back into the parking lot. She’d left her fish for Major to clean and to serve to someone for dinner at the grill. She walked past her truck, up Oleander Street, and turned east onto Fourth Avenue before heading south onto Lime Street. It was early enough in the day that she would eventually make her way back to the bar. She would bring her truck back then. The breeze blew softly into the palm trees, and their lazy fronds generated a rustling sound like dry wheat. A gull squawked overhead before turning right and coasting toward Monroe Canal. Her house was the fourth one on the right. It was a narrow cottage that she had purchased from a couple who had rented it out to vacationers for the previous fifteen years. Like many of the cottages on the island, the exterior had been painted with a bright, eye-numbing blue. Ellie had decided early on that she preferred softer, less intrusive colors. She re-painted it herself, opting for a kinder gray instead.

  Ellie walked down her driveway and punched her code into the keypad on the side of the garage. It beeped, accepting her code, and the door rattled open onto a 1968 El Camino. Its royal blue color gave it the appearance of being painted with ocean water, and the two white racing stripes down the hood made it look more powerful than it really was.

  The car had belonged to her father. Ellie could remember the day he brought it home. He had taken both his daughters for a drive all the way up the island to Bokeelia then back down to St. James City. She had loved the vehicle as a child, but now she wasn’t as sure. El Caminos were polarizing vehicles that left one either mocking or adoring them. They looked like the poor genetic offspring of a car and a truck, each donating a faulty chromosome that produced something almost unnatural. Next to his daughters, the El Camino had been Frank O’Conner’s baby.

  Ellie could hear a high-pitched whine on the other side of the pedestrian door that led into the house. “Hold on, I’m coming,” she said. She opened the door, and her Jack Russell Terrier shot out, ran twice around the car, then vaulted off a Rubbermaid box and into her arms. Ellie laughed and let the dog lick her neck. “Hey, Citrus.” She bent over and set the dog down then walked into the house.

  The cottage was only two bedrooms, and the front door opened onto a living room with a vaulted ceiling boasting exposed rafters that Ellie had stained a walnut brown. A small kitchen table sat near the rear sliding door at the end of a shotgun kitchen.

  “You want a milkbone?”

  Citrus barked and sat up on his hind feet. She reached above the fridge, grabbed a treat from the box, and teased him with it before he snatched it from her hand. Ellie moved over to the rear glass door and slid it down its metal track. Citrus darted out into the small backyard. “I’ll be right out,” she called after him. She stepped into the kitchen, pulled the small knife that Major had given her from her pocket, and placed it next to the coffee pot. The copper samovar Vida Murad had gifted her sat in the corner of the kitchen counter. It stood there silently, yet screaming. Vida had used it dozens of times to fill Ellie’s cup with Kahwa, a tea made from a combination of green tea, cardamom pods, cinnamon bark, and saffron strands. In Kabul, sharing a meal together, even a cup of tea, was an indication of friendship. It was termed “the right of salt,” a cultural practice that placed great responsibility on the guest to be faithful and honest with his host. Vida had gifted the serving pot to Ellie the night that Assam had provided Ellie the information she had moved there to attain. It had been Vida’s way of telling her American friend that she trusted her with what they had just revealed. There had been a deep sense of soberness in the apartment that evening. Assam had given up his murderous cousin at tremendous risk to his family, and they all knew there would be no turning back from such a decision. Vida had washed the samovar - a family relic that her mother had passed down to her - wrapped it, and given it to Ellie the night Assam gave up his cousin to her, two days before the extraction. Two days before Vida died.

  When Ellie moved back to Florida and unpacked the very few things that she owned at the time, she chose to leave the pot on display in the kitchen. Its very presence pressed down on something fragile within her and hurt. The pain made her feel less guilty - as if it were a meager atonement for a broken promise and the murder of a beautiful family. A family that should be stateside at this very moment, enjoying each other’s company and laughter somewhere in Idaho or Arizona. Assam could have even started a dental practice under a new identity.

  Ellie walked out onto the back porch and slid the door shut behind her. The backyard consisted of a small, concrete porch slab and a stretch of St. Augustine grass that extended out eight feet to the railroad tie which formed out the top edge of the concrete canal wall. Her 21-foot Bayliner Element hung out of the water, sitting peacefully on the I-beams of the boat lift. Citrus was staring at her as if pleading, like he was asking her a question to which only he could hear the words. Ellie looked down and smiled at him then nodded toward the canal. “Go ahead.” The dog barked, and a second later its body was suspended between water and sky. When God finished making the world at the end of day six, he took whatever energy he had left and stuck it into the DNA of the first pair of Jack Russells. Citrus fell seven feet and hit the water with a splash, and he paddled his way back to the side. Ellie had built a small ramp that ran into the water so the dog could easily get out of the canal and back into the yard.

  Ellie sat at the canal edge and let her feet hang toward the slow-moving sea water that ran through it. Citrus ran and jumped again then yipped when his head came up. On the other side of the canal, a couple houses down, a neighbor came out of her house with a watering can and waved at Ellie. She returned the gesture. She had good neighbors; folks that made you feel like you were family.

  She had grown up in Pineland on the northern end of the island. Over the years, whenever thoughts of coming back home drifted through Ellie’s mind, she knew she would settle down in St. James City. Its interconnected canals brought the sea water inland like generous fingers serving up a utopian paradise. Homes sat on lots often no larger than a quarter acre, most of them, like Ellie’s, half that size. Many mornings, just as the golden rays of sunshine were touching her rear windows, Ellie and Citrus would idle the Bayliner down the canal and out to the Sound and just let the wind whip their hair and the salty breeze wake them up.

  Citrus trotted up to his owner and dug his muzzle underneath her hand. “You hungry?” she asked him. He barked and shook his body free of the water matting his short hair. “All right. I’ll go fix us something.” She stood up, walked to the back door, and stopped to turn on the sprinkler. It squawked to life, and Citrus darted though it, shaking his head and pawing at the stream. He loved the sea water, but the salt drying on his body was bad for his skin. “Rinse off,” Ellie said. “I’ll be right back with some cold cuts.”

  〜〜〜〜〜

  Ellie pulled on the door handle to The Perfect Cup, and the smell of sugary caramel mixed with the astringent scent of coffee hit her senses as she walked in. She located Garrett at a small table in the corner and lifted a hand to him then walked up the the counter and ordered a white chocolate mocha over ice. Two days ago she had called Garrett, and they set up a time to meet and catch up. Ellie gave the barista her name, paid, and made her way to the table that seated only two. Garrett came to his feet as she approached, and Ellie noted that his features were as cool as they had been in high school. He had a high forehead and jet black hair that was finger-combed to the right and blended down into a handsome fade on both sides. His blue eyes were bright and relaxed, his eyebrows thick, and his mouth wide. He was apparently off duty, wearing dark blue shorts, a white v-neck t-shirt, and black lo
afers. She leaned in and hugged him before taking her seat.

  His eyes were sparkling, and he stared at her for a few seconds.

  “What?” she asked, grinning.

  “I can’t believe you’re sitting in front of me. It’s been, what, thirteen years?”

  “Yeah. Seems like it was a just a couple years ago we were all packing into Davie’s car and heading to Fort Lauderdale for the weekend.”

  “You look good,” he said.

  She smiled. “Thanks. You too.”

  They spent a few minutes catching up, broadly filling in the gaps of the previous decade. Garrett married a few years out of college and as yet had no kids. His wife was currently in New York, working to get her own fashion line noticed. She would come down a couple weekends a month to see him and relax from the tyranny that New York imposed upon aspiring fashionistas. Garrett was hopeful that by the end of the year things would take off for her and she would be back down here more often than not.

  Ellie excused herself when she heard her name called and walked over to the counter to pick up her drink. She returned to the table, sat back down, took a sip, and closed her eyes as the cool, sugary liquid slid down her throat.

  “So, DEA, huh? Don’t I remember our yearbook pinning you as most likely to polish door knobs? What gives?” She asked.

  “What? Hey, come on.”

  She laughed. “Come on? You were the biggest toker in school. Now you’re DEA? You were the Pig-Pen of the school, except your cloud was a very specific kind of smoke, not dirt.”

  He shrugged defensively. “People change, I guess.” His face slowly clouded over. “My cousin up in Tampa had gotten me into the green when I was thirteen. He paused our game of Street Fighter, escorted me to the alley behind his house, and lit a roll for me. You’re right. I did get heavy into the green after that, but that’s all I ever did. Over time he moved on into the harder stuff. The year after we graduated high school, he started on gremmies.”

  She curled her brow. “Gremmies? Geez.”

  “Yeah. A year after I saw you last, he moved on to heroin, and it was lights out after that. My aunt found him dead in the bathtub with the needle still in his arm. I mean, poor lady. She had gone out of town and didn’t find him until day three. That whole thing freaked me out so bad I quit cold turkey. I don’t think I’m the kind of guy who would do the hard drugs. I went eight years without them just smoking the green. But it scared me anyway, and I left it all behind.”

  “That’s hard,” she said. “About your cousin.”

  He sighed. “He was a good guy. Just hung out with the wrong people. I needed a change and decided on the Army. I couldn’t stand the thought of being on the threshold of the rest of my life with no clear path ahead. I’d been cleaning boats for four years in Fort Myers and knew I could do better. After basic I ended up with the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg. I got out after four years, joined the DEA, finished my degree, and moved up to Special Agent before ending up on a FAST team.”

  Ellie had met several men in the DEA’s Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Teams as they circled in and out of Afghanistan. As a part of FAST, Garrett would have been trained by Navy Seals, outfitted by the Pentagon, and gone into countries to conduct drug raids on stashes that could potentially end up in the United States via the black market. FAST had recently been decommissioned and replaced with SRT units - Special Response Teams - to address higher risk tactical operations in the field.

  “Airborne and FAST. Impressive. So how did you end up back down here?”

  “I finished my time with FAST and got out as First Lieutenant four years ago. They sent me to work at headquarters in Springfield until they offered me my own local division down here.”

  “Wait a minute...you’re at the helm down here?”

  His smile was humble. “Yeah.”

  “Well, good for you, Garrett. That’s a big deal.”

  “Thanks.” He nodded toward Ellie. “So, enough about me. What about you?” he asked. “You left the CIA just to come back to sunny Florida?”

  Ellie’s eyes narrowed.

  He raised his hands in defense. “Okay, okay. I made a few guesses and went out on a limb. Made a few deductions and poked my nose around.”

  “What kind of deductions?”

  “You major in linguistics at Florida State, then I hear you’ve moved to Virginia after you graduate. Then I see you the other day, and you tell me you’ve been ‘abroad.’ No one who lives overseas for years on end comes back home and speaks in generalities about where they’ve been. My sister, she goes to Madrid for three years, comes home, and can’t stop yapping on about the food and the culture and the men. Anyway…” Garrett smiled like he knew he was about to be in trouble. “I took the liberty of typing your name into JWICS.” When pronounced out loud, JWICS sounded like ‘JayWicks’ and was the acronym for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.

  Ellie looked on him cautiously. JWICS was a top secret network run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and used to transmit sensitive data across agencies.

  Garrett’s smile was charming but guilty, like a teenage boy trying to explain to his mother what the pack of cigarettes under his bed was all about. “Now, before you go getting upset, know that there wasn’t a whole lot on you anyway. Your name popped up, and it showed that you spent your first couple years in Virginia with the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General. After that there’s nothing but a listing for a few years as a case officer, but it doesn’t list the wheres, whens, and whys. All that’s either been redacted or just not there. If it makes you feel any better, I was just curious. So call me a curious cat and kill me now if you need to.”

  Her shoulders relaxed as she realized the information on her was skeletal. “It’s not a big deal, Garrett. You surprised me, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Whew,” Garrett sighed, as if he was thankful he would live another day. “So you’re done with it all?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  He winked at her. “A better job opportunity present itself on Pine Island?”

  “Yeah, you could say that.” Ellie looked into her cup, swirled the last bit of liquid around, and then looked back up. “I hit a point where I needed to live on my own terms, to stop doing the bidding of others. I’m in my mid-thirties now. I’ve worked for the government for my entire adult life.”

  He eyed her, searching her expression. “What really got you back here?”

  She looked out the window. A stray dog lifted its leg on the tire of a car, sniffed at it, and walked off with its head a little higher. “Politics.” She turned back toward Garrett. She couldn’t say where she’d been or what she’d done, but she was free to have an opinion. “We’re fighting this shadow war, this undeclared war that gives us the freedom to do whatever we want all around the world. After 9/11 the CIA migrated from a Cold War espionage service to a paramilitary organization. I did some good; I know that. And I wouldn’t change anything. But the Agency is no longer what it used to be.” Ellie looked around the coffee shop. People were typing on laptops, earbuds in, laughing with a friend, sipping their drinks, reading books. “Whatever the average person thinks of the CIA is probably informed by pre-Cold War tactics and methods. It’s not an espionage organization. It’s a global clandestine killing machine, and it was just time for me to make an exit. We’re on the front lines of a war-mongering enterprise run by Washington’s pimps, and I got tired of doing tricks.”

  Garrett narrowed his eyes on her, intrigued by the sharpness of her words. “You bitter?”

  “Bitter?” She shook her head. “No. I’m not that kind of person. If I were I wouldn’t have made it this far. I stayed the course because I believed what I was doing was good. Once I stopped believing that, I stepped out.” She tried to smile. “I wouldn’t change anything. There are still a lot of good people there doing good in their own way. For all its faults we still need the Agency. I loved what I did, and it will always be a part of
who I am. A bloated bureaucracy and weariness of working for someone else's obtuse agenda...that’s why I’m back here.” She picked up her mug, tilted it up, and finished the last bit of her coffee.

  “You said the other day you’ve been back six months now?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you miss any of it?”

  “Of course. I was good at it. One day I might find a different way to serve my country again.” She felt a sudden urge to move the conversation away from herself. “So tell me about what you’re up to down here. What’s it like being top dog?”

  “It has its perks,” he admitted. “We’ve cleaned up a lot on the streets since I’ve come on. But things keep changing at a rapid rate, and it’s hard to keep up. The whole world of illegal drugs - cocaine especially - is different than most people think.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, nowadays, mostly because of Hollywood, when your average guy thinks of the cocaine trade, they think of Medellín, Escobar, Cali - the drug lords of thirty years ago. Those guys are legend now, but things have changed. Drastically. Cocaine production has become decentralized and typically doesn’t have one or two big men at the top anymore, at least not in Colombia and Bolivia. The Mexican cartels figured out that they could undermine the Colombians by securing the base product then throw it into their own labs and distribute it themselves.” He paused. “Stop me if I’m telling you what you already know.”

  She shook her head. “Narco-terrorism wasn’t my forte.”

  “The big cartels aren’t in South America. They’re in Mexico. Colombia and Bolivia and Peru, if they have any trades routes of their own, are throughout Europe, via African ports, but mostly they just sell to the Mexicans. Mexico is the golden trampoline; whatever drugs end up there are bounced somewhere else for a whole lot of money. These guys, Ellie - they’re as smart as they have ever been. Their networks are so vast that when you make one good bust you might as well have broken a capillary. They’re smart, better funded, and have far more resources than we ever will.”