What Lies Beneath: A Florida Action Adventure Novel (Scott Jarvis Private Investigator Book 10)

by Scott Cook

  “Fudge…” I cranked, grateful that the fool couldn’t seem to figure out the latch right away.

  “What do we do?” Pak whispered, sounding panicked.

  I turned to him, made a cup with my two hands and jerked my head at the fence. Pak stepped up into my hands and placed his on the fence as I heaved upward, tossing him over the six-foot slats. As he disappeared, I grasped the top of the fence, placed my foot halfway up and heaved myself, thrusting my body upward and over just as the side gate opened to my right.

  “Yo!” A man shouted. “Yo, Stick! They hopped the fence!”

  “Chase they ass, then!” Another man’s voice floated back from the front lawn. “Where’d they go?”

  “Next door!”

  “Goddammit!” I grumbled.

  The next-door neighbor’s yard was similar to Pak’s. No pool but a small, screened porch. A metal swing set sat in one corner of the lawn and a handful of large plastic kids toys were strewn about. No place to hide, though.

  Pak pointed to the rear fence, which was even higher. An eight-footer. We ran to it and again I cupped my hands.

  “Diesel! Go around to the next street, homey!” The second man shouted, now sounding as if he were near the spot where Pak and I had vaulted out of his yard.

  “Where they goin’?” Man one asked Stick.

  “I dunno, dawg… dis ain’t my fuckin’ hood! Now move yo ass!”

  The men sounded like thugs. Gang bangers again possibly. The mysterious voice on Pak’s phone was right, he certainly wasn’t hiring professional talent. I hoped that’d work in our favor.

  “Hey, Pak!” The second man, identified as Stick, shouted as I hurled the archeologist over the fence. “Don’t run, dude! We ain’t come to do nothin’!”

  Such sincerity. As I ran and leapt up to vault the fence I briefly considered waiting for the men to catch up.

  Yeah right… Christ…

  Pak was already running past this property’s screened-in pool and out toward the street. I wasn’t sure if this would be a good idea, depending on how fast Diesel could bring the car around and if this was the street Stick had referred to. I hurried after the good Doctor, though, not having much choice in the matter.

  “Which way?” The first thug who’d called out shouted from behind us.

  “How the fuck I know, B.B.?” Stick retorted irritably.

  “Let’s split up,” B.B. suggested.

  A pause, long enough for me to catch up to Pak as he was opening the gate to the front lawn.

  “Nah, nigga, over the back one!” Stick finally decided.

  “What’s at the end of this street?” I asked Pak as we slipped out through the gate and moved along toward the driveway.

  “Goes down another four or five houses to the creek,” Pak stated. “There’s a feeder creek behind this neighborhood that meets up with the Caloosahatchee to the north and goes back and narrows into some undeveloped land to our right, if we’re looking down the street.”

  “Any boats down there?”

  “Yeah, there’s a community dock at the end of this street… not sure what’s down there, though…”

  “Let’s go!” I said, taking off down the street toward a light at the end. Sure enough, I could see a small grassy area with mangroves to either side or a dock that jutted out onto black water. It was fifty or sixty yards away.

  Even as we ran, Pak was surprisingly fast for a man his height, about five-foot six, but I knew we wouldn’t make it to the dock before Stick and B.B. came out and spotted us. The sound of a car engine behind us wasn’t reassuring, either.

  The last house on the left side had a large van parked in front along the street. There were two other vehicles in the driveway as well. To the right of this house, where the lot ended, the mangroves along the water’s edge continued beyond what I could see of the side yard. We had maybe two or three seconds before the two bangers spotted us, or Diesel in the car if that were him behind us. I grabbed Pak’s shoulder and angled him behind the van and toward the corner of the house and the mangroves beyond.

  “Down there!” Stick shouted from fifty yards away. “Toward that dock!”

  The car engine grew louder. Diesel must have guessed right, the prick…

  Pak and I were leaning against the side of the house, trying to catch our breath while simultaneously trying to gasp for air quietly. We listened for a long second or two. I was shocked that nobody in the neighborhood had come out to see what all the shouting was about. Doubtless worried about what they’d find. The cops would probably show up soon, I hoped.

  I pointed at the thick mangroves. Pak met my eyes with surprise showing in his. He shook his head no.

  “Okay, then walk out and let those three gangsters catch you,” I suggested.

  Pak bit his lip and groaned but nodded his head. I moved to the thick patch of trees and began to wiggle into their thin and twisting branches.

  The mangrove tree, found in tropical and sub-tropical regions, is one of the most extraordinary trees in the world. A marvel of nature’s adaptability, mangroves in their many varieties, mostly red, white and black in Florida, have conformed to a high-salt and low-oxygen environment through some rather robust adaptations.

  Their dense roots filter out salt when they’re flooded during high tides and also collect sediment. They produce snorkel-like breathing stalks that extend upward from the soil and the root system to collect oxygen even when the roots are covered by water. The trees can regulate the loss of water through their leaves and some varieties extrude salt through their leaves and stalks as well.

  As for breeding, mangrove trees produce germinated seedlings on the tree so that they’re capable of feeding and living once they fall off. Further, the seedlings float and can remain alive for up to a year, ensuring a wide and rapid distribution of the seeds. When they reach a good spot, the seedlings alter their density so they float vertically and have a better chance of rooting in the tidal and brackish estuary waters they prefer. Even more amazingly, they can change their density again and float someplace else if the environment isn’t right.

  This means that mangrove forests or mangals form rapidly and very thickly. The trees dense roots help to shore up and even expand coastlines. Their roots are well designed for wave attenuation which helps to disperse destructive wave energies during hurricane storm surges and tsunamis.

  What all this means is that mangroves consist of finger and thumb-sized long intertwined branches that make it possible for a couple of dudes on the run to monkey through them. However, their density also makes this process slow and laborious.

  We were already a few feet inside the eight-foot-high trees at the edge of the water by the time the gangsters showed up at the dock. I was leading the way, my greater size helping to clear a path for Pak, who was right behind me. It was slow going, as we were maybe three feet over the water, and the trees were so dense that I could hardly see where we were going. I hoped this would work in our favor. Serving to conceal us in the darkness. We only had to keep quiet, which is no easy task when you’re scrambling through a maze of leafy branches being used by other forms of life, too.

  From their submerged roots to their leafy tops, mangroves were home to a dizzying array of species. From birds to insects to reptiles to shrimps to juvenile fishes, a mangal was an explosion of life, much of it bitey and itchy.

  “Ssshh…” I hissed to Pak, whose movements were creating quite a rustling around us.

  “Dammit!” He barely managed to whisper. “Something bit me…”

  “Where they at?” This was a new man, Diesel I guessed.

  “I don’t know,” Stick said angrily. “We seen them runnin’ this way.”

  “They couldn’ta gone too far,” B.B. put in. “That Pak is a skinny little slant.”

  “Don’t mean he can’t run fast,” Stick said. “What about the other dude?”

  “I didn’t get a good look,” B.B. responded. They were no more than fifty feet away from us a
nd sounded like they were walking out onto the dock. “Bigger than the doc, though.”

  “You think it was that Jarvis mothfuckuh?” Diesel asked. “One what put Stank on the slab?”

  “The fuck should I know?” B.B. asked irritably. “I done told you I only caught a quick look when he went over the fence.”

  “I was just askin’, nigga,” Diesel cranked.

  “Shut up you two!” Stick said. “I’m tryin’ t’think… Carver said he’s a big dude… and we was told to watch out for em’.”

  B.B. scoffed, “Fuck that honky! Let him come out here and try some shit on my ass! I got somethin’ for that bitch! I owe him for Stank.”

  “Yeah…” Diesel commiserated.

  There was a moment of silence before Stick, who was evidently in charge, spoke again: “Shit… we been here way too long. Diesel, take the car and split. B.B., go back to the Doc’s place and see if you can get his keys. You drive out to the spot. Diesel, you go out and hang at the 7-11 near the entrance to this place and wait for me.”

  “Whatchu gonna do, homey?” Diesel asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Stick said. “Them two mothuhfuckuhs gotta be around here someplace. I’m gonna wait. But one of these folks might have called in 5-O, so let’s ghost.”

  Quite a bit of information in that unwise exchange. These men were associated with Stank and Carver, and they were associated with the other men who took Rick. Further, they must be associated with the voice on Pak’s phone, because they’re arriving only minutes after the phone call would be a whopper of a coincidence. One I couldn’t buy.

  Silence fell as Diesel drove off. I could imagine Stick standing under the streetlight near the foot of the dock, gun in hand, listening intently and peering around him. He couldn’t stand out in the open long though, if he was right about the cops.

  “What kind of boats are tied up at that dock?” I whispered into Pak’s ear.

  “Mostly small stuff,” The Archeologist whispered back. “A pontoon, couple of jon boats, a few kayaks and canoes.”

  “Kept in the water?” I asked. “Probably covered in barnies, then.”

  “Not really,” Pak stated. “This creek is fed by a spring, I’ve heard. It’s somewhat tidal, so brackish but the salt content here is pretty low.”

  “Okay…” I said, thinking. I slowly repositioned myself in my impromptu branch web and extracted my phone and audio enhancer from my jeans pockets. I handed them to Pak.

  “Keep these,” I said. “Keep them dry.”

  “What…? Why?”

  I heard a sound then. A thumping and sliding sort of sound. The sound of a man climbing into and getting comfortable in an aluminum boat. In the quiet evening and with only eight or ten feet of mangrove branches and leaves between us and the sound, it was loud and clear.

  “Where I’m going is going to be a bit moist and I don’t want to ruin my electronics,” I told Pak. “Stay here until you hear from me. If you don’t hear anything from me in the next… ten minutes or so, call the police.”

  “Why not just call them now?” Pak asked.

  I sighed, “Doctor Pak, who was that man you were talking to?”

  “I…”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “He sent these men to kill you. You served him and now that he’s got what he wants, you’re a liability. Get it? Now I want to talk with Stick and try and get some information out of him. I’m the best chance you have, Pak. Both for survival and for keeping you out of prison. Play it right, and I’ll see that you don’t even lose your job, capisce? Now who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Pak admitted. “He only calls himself Gaspar.”

  I muffled a chuff, “Cute… okay, we don’t have time for this now. But I’m about to do something stupid and uncomfortable entirely for your well-being, Pak. So please consider that and what you’re going to tell me after. And if you’re thinking about trying to get away, I remind you of why we’re here in the first place.”

  “Okay…”

  I began to move toward the water again. Toward the edge of the mangrove trees. It was slow going, as I was trying to move silently and that was no small feat. There was, thankfully, a mild breeze blowing across the creek with an occasional gust to maybe seven or eight knots. This would rustle the leaves in the mangroves and help to disguise my own movements.

  After what seemed like hours but was probably no more than five minutes, I could see the hundred-foot-wide creek through the leaves and branches. I was almost there and could now begin to descend into the water. There were a few lights on the other side, to my left, but to the right the black surface of the water met only the amorphous black shapes of more mangroves on the other side. The night was clear, and a handful of stars and a gibbous moon cast their pale reflections on the creek’s surface. It wasn’t much, but enough light to help me distinguish sky from land and land from water.

  “Come on, fuckers…” I heard Stick whisper as he shifted his weight in his commandeered boat. The craft, obviously aluminum and obviously small, rocked slightly, created audible ripples and sloshes as he did so.

  “Oh, I’m on the way…” I muttered to myself as my feet made contact with the creek and I eased myself down into thigh-deep water that was bitingly cold.

  It was late January and I was in a brackish estuary partially fed by a spring. The water couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees. I gritted my teeth as I extricated myself from the last of the mangrove branches and roots and lowered myself up to my neck in the frigid water.

  I could see the dock now and the dozen or so small watercraft tied to it or hoisted on it. The pier extended maybe seventy-five feet past the mangroves to either side and was perhaps two feet above the water. Sitting in a small jon boat with a little nine-point-nine horse outboard tilted up on its transom was a dark figure silhouetted against the sky. Just enough illumination from near the foot of the pier showed me a face that was nearly as black as the night and that matched the dark clothing the man wore.

  He was fifty feet away. I slowly began to move away from the shore into deeper water. The bottom dropped off rather quickly and before I’d gone ten feet, I could stand on the bottom with only my eyes above the surface. I began to move toward Stick, using slow and methodical paddles of my hands and feet so as not to make a sound on the surface. No disturbance as I passed and moved steadily closer.

  I’d halved the distance and Stick still hadn’t turned toward me. I was approaching from directly behind him now, and he was sitting sideways in the boat, looking toward the shoreward end of the dock. He probably figured that Pak and I were hiding and would have to come out in his line of sight sooner or later. Or that maybe we’d try to creep out onto the dock and get in a boat and make our escape.

  I took my bearings, tilted my head back and filled my lungs. I’d have to swim submerged the rest of the way or be spotted for sure. I sank below the surface and opened my eyes.

  The water was interstellar black and clouded by tannin and suspended particulates, like most inland estuaries. Even if it were high noon I doubted I could see past my extended hand. Yet I’d kept my feet on the bottom and once underwater, I swam low, almost crawling along the muddy bottom in the direction I knew the boat to be. I only had to go twenty-five or thirty feet. It should be a simple task that took me only a few seconds. However, underwater navigation when you were completely blind was a much trickier thing than most people imagined. From one kick to another, or one thrust of the arms to another, you could turn yourself thirty degrees and not even realize it.

  Thankfully, though, Stick unwittingly assisted me. He was in an aluminum boat. Every shift of his feet, every little bump or every time he moved, the hull transmitted the sound into the water like a homing beacon. I just had to follow the sound and within seconds, I was directly beneath the jon boat, my feet firmly planted on the fairly solid bottom and my hands touching the boat’s flat keel.

  The jon boat was probably ten or twelve feet long and not more than four
feet wide. A back water skiff at best and pretty wobbly if you weren’t sitting still. I stood beneath it, partly bent over because the depth was about my height. I braced the top of my head along the portside and placed my hands to either side, palms up.

  I wonder if this is how the shark in Jaws felt just before doing what I was about to do. Did a maniacal evil laugh sound off in his sharky brain just as one was doing in mine now?

  The water was only five and a half feet deep beneath the boat, so that when I pushed off the bottom with my feet and shoved upward with my hands, it was rather easy for me to shove one side of the small boat upward and spill its unsecured contents, notably a gang banger who probably thought he was one frosty mofo, into the water in front of me.

  Stick was almost certainly more than startled by his sudden plunge, as his wild thrashing seemed to indicate. Yet when he was seized from behind and jerked under water, it was probably only a miracle that his heart didn’t stop or that his jeans didn’t immediately fill with what remained of his lunch.

  Or did they?

  The underwater shriek that accompanied my yanking him down was long and terrified. I actually laughed a little. That was okay though, because although my air supply was running low, Stick had probably exhaled every molecule of air in his lungs and would need to surface immediately.

  I obliged him by hauling us both a little away from the dock and closer to shore. Stick was tall, maybe six feet or more and had a slim but well-muscled body. This body was currently as rigid as a fence post, having seized up in unbridled terror. That made it easy to propel us both into five feet of water where I could stand with my head and shoulders above the surface.

  I yanked Stick around into a half nelson and clamped a hand over his mouth, “Shut the fuck up!”

  He breathed heavily and quaked in my grasp, inhaling deep breaths through his nose. He managed to mumble something after a few seconds.