A few minutes later, Charity lifted off and once clear of the low trees, dropped back down close to the water as she headed northeast.
“What exactly are grunts and grits?” Bender asked, as the sound of the chopper faded away. “Sounds painful.”
“It’s a southern thing.”
“Okay, so where do I sleep?”
I jerked my thumb toward the other bunkhouse. “The east bunkhouse. There’s a wood stove if it gets too cold. Supper’s at sunset.”
I walked over to the shed where Carl had disappeared earlier, leaving Bender on his own. What the hell was Deuce doing, anyway, sending a nursemaid down here? Did he know something I didn’t? And why Bender? He’s the new guy on the team and they’re all up in Homestead training. These and many more questions ran through my mind as I walked into the shed.
“Who’s the new guy?” Carl asked as he fitted the king plank down the center of the foredeck.
“Name’s Bender. He used to be with the Secret Service and is part of Deuce’s team now.”
“Secret Service? Like the guys that protect the President?” He removed the king plank and worked the pointed end with a hand planer.
“Yeah, he was the head of the President’s security detail last fall, when we took him fishing.”
Carl handed me the idiot end of the plank and we fit it in place again. I held my end dead center on the deck beams, which were already scribed for the plank, while he eyeballed the fit at the forward end. Pulling it up and sliding it forward, he hit it a few times with a hand sander and pushed it back again.
“There,” he said. “Perfect fit. Tomorrow, we’ll start planking. I just wanted to get the king plank ready. The others will be a lot easier.”
I examined the fit at the bow. “Nice work, Carl.”
“If he’s the new guy on Deuce’s team, how come he’s not up there with them?”
“Because they’re on the pistol range for two days,” Bender said, standing in the doorway.
I turned to face him. “What gives you an out on the range?”
“I’m a lousy instructor. Never could explain to someone how to shoot. I don’t have the patience for it, I guess.”
“Some of those guys are really good shooters, Bender.”
He shrugged. “Not my call. I just do what I’m told.”
“Did he give you any idea why he wanted you down here?”
“Not really,” Bender replied. “But I pick things up. Those two guys you described to Charity? They’re definitely with Zoe Pound, that Haitian gang in Miami. Deuce figures if you got a look at them, then they got a look at you. Something about the murder of that couple, though. It just doesn’t sit right with me.”
“You investigated a lot of murders with the Secret Service?” I asked him.
“Not a one,” he replied. “I was with Chicago PD before being tapped for the Service ten years ago.”
I appraised him with new eyes. “You were a detective in Chicago?”
“Homicide Division. Fifteen years.”
I studied his eyes, noting for the first time the narrow lines at the corners. “You’re older than you look,” I remarked.
“I get that a lot. Twenty years as a Chicago cop and ten with the Service. I’m fifty-one. A little long in the tooth for the job in DC.”
I would have guessed ten years younger. “So what about the murder doesn’t sit right with you?”
“The fact that they committed it,” Bender simply replied.
The same thing Linda and I had surmised. “I’m no investigator,” I said as we walked back out into the yard. “Just an old warrior, but I understand human nature. They should have just hauled ass.”
“But they didn’t,” Bender said as if punctuating the fact as we walked across the yard to the main house. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the aquaculture system. “A vegetable garden?”
“Yeah, something like that. Why do you think those guys attacked the Tolivers?”
“You got any coffee up there?” he asked, nodding toward the house.
“Come on up,” I replied, turning toward the rear steps leading up to the deck.
I gave him the nickel tour of the house and poured a thermos from the fresh pot on the burner. “Mugs are down on the boat.”
“What boat?” he asked as we walked back out onto the deck. “I didn’t see any boat when we flew over.”
At the bottom of the front steps, I opened the door to the dockage area and let him step through ahead of me. The overhead light clicked on automatically with a motion detector and Bender let out a low whistle as he walked along the dock toward the stern of the Revenge. “I wondered where you kept this.” Pointing to the far side of the dockage he asked, “Is that the other boat we took out fishing?”
I stepped over the transom into the cockpit of the Revenge and opened the hatch, switching on the interior lights. “Yeah, that’s El Cazador. Come aboard.”
“You painted this one? It used to be all white.”
“New boat,” I replied. “The first Revenge was blown out of the water last fall.”
Glancing across the cockpit as he stepped down, he asked, “And the Cigarette?”
“Deuce confiscated it in a drug bust,” I replied, getting two mugs from the overhead cabinet. “You were saying about the murder?”
“Criminals usually try to run when they’re caught in the act,” he said, taking a drink of the coffee. “Mmm, that’s good java. Anyway, I don’t recall ever encountering a witness to a crime who said that the bad guys ran and then stopped to commit an even worse crime. Never. Not once. Like you said, they should have hauled ass once you discovered them trying to break into your plane. Hey, where is your plane, anyway?”
“Down in Marathon, at Rusty’s place.”
“Deuce’s father-in-law? The big guy? You guys are tight?”
“I met Julie just a few days after she was born. Rusty and I were best man at each other’s weddings.”
Bender looked into his coffee for a moment as he sat down at the settee. When he looked up, he said, “Both you and Agent Rosales said they headed straight away from the beach for almost a mile, before suddenly turning and making a beeline for the victims’ camp. That strike you as odd? I mean, aside from stopping to commit another crime, the suddenness of the change in direction.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it.”
“Almost like they reported to someone that they’d failed at one thing and were told to do something else. Something worse.”
“Linda thinks the Tolivers were targeted and we were mistaken for them.”
“Linda? Oh, Agent Rosales.” He seemed to mull that over, looking for answers in his coffee mug. “Or maybe you were the target from the get-go and they were told to show you what might happen to you.”
“Me? I don’t have many connections with Miami and none to any gang activity.”
“You’ve never popped up on Zoe Pound’s radar?”
“Never even heard of them until the other day.”
“Like I said, I hear things. A word here, a word there. Little connections are made in this old cop’s brain,” he said, tapping a finger to his temple. “You’re connected somehow and killing that couple was a statement.”
A statement? Directed at who? Me? I had zero connections with any kind of gang or drug activity. How was this connected to Zoe Pound’s recent blowing up of the patch reefs in the backcountry? What did Bender suspect, if anything? A lot of questions. He was a hard one to read, probably a pretty good poker player.
“Want to go for a boat ride?” I asked Bender suddenly.
He grinned. “I think Deuce knows you’ll go poking around and that’s why he sent me down here. Will your kid be alright here?”
I thought about that a moment. If this gang was trying to get my attention, to draw me out for some reason, they didn’t know where I lived. The trees on the sides of the house and all around the whole island shielded the house from view, except from the south, and
then you had to be pretty close to see it from that direction. It was real skinny water down there. Anyone not familiar with the cuts and channels was sure to run aground before they got close enough to see the house.
“Yeah, she’s safe here,” I decided.
“Where we going?”
“To see a lobsterman.”
Chapter Eight
I called Kim’s cell, even though I knew she wouldn’t have a signal over on Raccoon Flats. The Cazador drew too much water to get out there, so I left her a message telling her I’d be back by supper, knowing she’d get it when she got in range of a cell tower when they returned.
While Bender might have been a hotshot detective in the Windy City and would step in front of a bullet for the President if he had to, he wasn’t much of a waterman. I had to tell him which end of the mooring lines to untie while I started the boat’s big diesel engine.
Clicking the button on the fob, I released the catch and the door slowly swung open. As we idled out from under the house, I clicked the other button to pull the door closed again.
Turning into Harbor Channel, I pushed the throttle and the big five-hundred-and-seventy-five-horse Cat engine lifted the thirty-foot boat up on plane with ease.
I kept close to Turtlecrawl Bank, then turned south into East Bahia Honda Channel toward Marathon. Approaching John Sawyer Bank, I turned east, following the coastline of Vaca Key.
I’d never been to Vince O’Hare’s house, but I knew his boat and figured it’d be easy enough to find on Grassy Key. Angling closer to shore, I scanned the few structures along the bay side and finally spotted the antenna mast of his boat above the mangroves. He flew a tattered Jolly Roger on the mast, thumbing his nose at society.
As I idled up to his dock, it was obvious this was the place. I’d heard others describe it as a cross between a junkyard and a slum. The dock didn’t look all that promising, leaning slightly toward the east, with a number of planks missing in the deck. The rusted hulks of a half dozen old cars, trucks and boats, along with broken lobster traps, floats, and other detritus, littered the yard. The house just beyond the dock didn’t even look habitable. It too was leaning a little, but the other way from the dock. The whole scene looked like a painting by Salvador Dali. The roof was corrugated metal, but looked to be almost completely covered with surface rust. A window in the middle was open, with tattered and yellowing drapes hanging out of it.
As I shut down the engine and started to tie up to the dock, I heard a screen door slam. “What the hell you think you’re doing, boy?” a loud baritone voice shouted with menace.
Before I could answer, O’Hare was striding down the dock. The shotgun in his hands had my full attention. Seeing it, Bender started to reach for the pistol I’d noticed earlier was holstered at the small of his back.
“Stand down,” I whispered, as I continued to tie off.
“I asked you a question, boy!”
Snubbing the line to the rotting piling, I leaped quickly up to the dock. O’Hare leveled the deck sweeper at my midsection.
“Name’s McDermitt,” I said. “Come to talk to you about what happened on Bullard Bank.”
He studied me a second then glanced at Bender. “You a cop?”
“No,” I replied, before Bender could say anything. “I run a charter business.”
“Wasn’t talking to you, McDermitt,” the old man spat. “I know who the hell you are.”
“This is Paul Bender,” I said, my eyes never leaving his. “He’s a friend of mine. We just wanted to talk to you about what happened to your traps.”
He looked back at me and finally lowered the shotgun. “Step over,” he said as he dropped easily to the deck of his lobster boat and opened a cooler. Taking three cans of Budweiser out, he tossed one to me and another to Bender, who now stood on the dock with me. I dropped down to the deck of the boat and cracked open the cold beer, drinking down half of it, as Bender clumsily stepped down into the boat beside me.
“What you wanna know?” O’Hare asked as he leaned the shotgun against the starboard rail.
“How close to the bank do you run your traps?” I asked.
“Not close. Five to eight feet of water on the west side. Why?”
I’d fished Bullard Bank quite a few times. The bottom on the west side was mostly turtle grass, with a few small patch reefs on the east side.
“How many traps were destroyed?”
“Six,” O’Hare replied. “Spaced out ten or twelve feet and every one blown the fuck apart.”
A line of traps sixty to seventy feet long on a grassy bottom?
“You see many greens when you pull?” I had an idea.
“Sometimes,” he replied. “Them turtles mostly eat grass. Lobsters like the grass for the turtle shit. What the hell’s all this about? Why’s a charter man interested in some busted-up lobster pots?”
I ignored his questions. “Ever see anyone around there?”
“All the time. Good grouper spot.”
“I mean people that look out of place.”
O’Hare leaned on the gunwale and scratched at his beard. I’d only met the man a couple times. His face was tanned and wrinkled like old leather, his wild and scraggly shoulder-length hair almost all white, as was the quarter-inch stubble of beard on his face.
He was at least in his seventies, probably older. But his pale blue eyes were bright and clear, moving quickly, seeing everything. Probably a powerful man in his youth, he still had a look of menace. Nearly six feet tall, broad shouldered and lean. He hadn’t survived all these years by being soft.
“Seen some colored boys cruising by there not long ago,” he said thoughtfully. “Not that it’s strange seeing colored folks, but they weren’t dressed like most you see around here.”
“How do you mean?” Bender asked.
O’Hare looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re a cop, ain’t you boy?”
Bender once more started to say something, but I interrupted him again. “He used to be. Way up in Chicago a long time ago.”
“Folks round here, if they got any sense, keep their skin covered in the sun. Even colored folks. These boys weren’t from round here. They wore city clothes.”
“City clothes?” Bender asked once we were heading away from O’Hare’s dock. “Colored boys? What’s he, some kind of inbred hillbilly transplanted to the tropics?”
“You’re wearing city clothes,” I said, pointing out his running shoes and polo shirt.
He looked down at what he was wearing and what I was wearing, which was my usual khaki cargo pants, denim work shirt, and bare feet, now that it had warmed up.
“So what was all that racist crap about? Don’t tell me you condone that?”
“Colored? Have you ever left the States, Bender? I mean aside from protecting the President?”
“What’s your point?”
“Black people are only called African-American here in the States. In most of the Caribbean, people are mixed ancestry. He wasn’t talking about black men. In the Basin, the accepted term for mixed race is colored. And he called both you and me a boy. The guy’s probably in his eighties—everyone’s a boy to him.”
“You’re saying that guy’s not racist?”
“His late wife was a Creole woman from the Antilles. Very beautiful, I heard. Ebony skin and bright green eyes. It was after she died that he started hitting the bottle. That was twenty some years ago as the story goes. By all accounts, he stays pretty sober these days. It’s just that without her, he’s rudderless, nothing to work for. Just an old guy marking his days.”
I thought about my little island as we made our way through Vaca Cut and into the Atlantic. Would that be me sometime in the future? A wrinkled, drunk hermit, sitting on a trash-covered island and counting the days? I turned into the channel to the Rusty Anchor and we were soon tied off in Deuce and Julie’s slip.
“You talked to Vince O’Hare?” Rusty asked over a beer after I told him about our visit to Gr
assy Key.
“He’s not so bad,” I said.
“Tell that to the three tourists he put in Fisherman’s Hospital a month ago. Yeah, they had a beat down coming, but O’Hare damned near killed ’em.”
“What’s the latest you heard locally?” I asked.
“Heard from a guy I know up on Matecumbe,” Rusty said. “There was two more reefs hit just yesterday. Arsenic and Pontoon Banks. He said the explosions could be heard from his dock at Caloosa Cove and another boater, who was untying his dink when he heard it, took off to see what was going on and got shot at for his trouble.”
“How’d you hear about that?” Bender asked. “That information hasn’t been released to the press.”
“We have our own press down here,” Rusty said, glancing sideways at the former cop.
“You mean the media does know?”
“A different kind of press, Bender,” I said. “Neighbors talking to one another. I guess you never lived in a small town, either.”
“Anyway,” Rusty began, “Folks are starting to wise up and arm themselves while on the water. The guy in the dink started shooting back and suddenly a half dozen boats took off outta the marina, guns blazing. The bad guys hauled ass.” Then as he picked up a glass and started polishing it, he added, “One of ’em’s arm was in a sling.” Rusty looked up from his polishing and grinned.
I showed him copies of the sketches Charity had done. “Think you can get one of these up there and see if the guy in the dinghy recognizes these guys?”
“Sure, I can scan ’em and email ’em to the marina right now. Won’t take but a sec.” Rusty took the two printouts and stepped into his office behind the bar.
“You can?” I asked through the open door.
“You ever visited a place called the twenty-first century?” Bender asked me with a cockeyed grin, jabbing me back for my comments on his lack of experience down here. “Almost all business is done online.”
The machine in Rusty’s office continued to make a whirring sound for a few minutes then Rusty came back out. “Emailed those to every marina, boat ramp, bar, and dock from Key West to Key Largo.” Handing me a stack of about twenty copies, he added, “Thought you might want a few yourself.”
Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) Page 8
