Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6)

by Wayne Stinnett

  After setting down and climbing out of the chopper, Deuce and I each grabbed one of the gangbangers and dragged them out, standing them up in the ankle-deep water.

  The confusion and fear on their faces was palpable as Deuce roughly shoved them in the back toward the bay. I set off ahead of them with O’Hare and Bender. Tony and Kumar brought up the rear, chattering in both Arabic and whatever it was Tony was speaking. I was starting to believe it really was some strange dialect, because he’d break off into Arabic at times, as if teaching Kumar to speak his language.

  I reached the narrow beach inside the bay and followed it into the interior. It wasn’t really a bay, more like a place where rain and tide water had slowly run off of the tiny island, taking away some of the sand. I finally broke through a tangle of mangroves into a small clearing. There, leaning against a fallen palm tree, were the skeletal remains of Lester Antonio. At least, what bones were left. The intervening fifteen months since I’d last seen him had taken its toll. Some of the bones were scattered over the area, but the spine and rib cage were propped up by the dead log, with the skull leaning back, its jawbone hanging open in a grotesque and silent scream. Crabs and buzzards, I thought. Plus fire ants and maybe even a feral hog.

  The two captives stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the skeleton. Deuce shouldered between them and approached the remains of his father’s killer. He did what I’d told Lester I wouldn’t that day when I found him. He pissed on the bones. Tony and Kumar shoved the two men into the clearing, where they fell to their knees in the sand, facing the skeleton.

  Tony said something unintelligible and Kumar turned toward Deuce. “We will give you ten thousand American dollars for both of them. Can we build the cooking fire here?”

  Deuce ignored him and turned to face the trembling hoodlums. He took one step closer and said over his shoulder, “If I don’t get the information I want, you got a deal.”

  From that point, the interrogation went very well. Deuce asked each man a series of questions, getting an answer from the smaller one in English first and O’Hare translating afterward for the other man to confirm what the first had said. The information from both was pretty much the same, both wanting to be as helpful as possible.

  The gang leader, Jean-Claude Lavolier, had taken a trip to Orlando several weeks earlier and when he returned, he had a very beautiful light-skinned mulatto woman with him. Everything the gang did after his return changed, as if the woman had some kind of control over Lavolier. He no longer made decisions unless consulting her first. Their drug pipeline was in disarray and in danger of collapsing, according to the smaller man. The gang members had been sent out in stolen boats to blow up reefs to draw me out in the open where I could be kidnapped.

  Bender had a smug look on his face when that revelation came out. Neither man knew anything about the mulatto woman, except that she was very beautiful and thought to be very dangerous. Lavolier and the woman, known only as Erzulie, were never seen apart and it was she, not him, who’d actually done the beheading of the subordinate several weeks ago. All the gang members feared Lavolier, but those in the upper echelon feared her more.

  When pressed more about the woman, the first man stammered that Erzulie was the voodoo spirit of love.

  “Yeah,” O’Hare said, “Nothing says romance like chopping off some guy’s head.”

  “A mulatto spirit of love?” Charity asked, as she stepped through the narrow opening in the mangroves without a sound. Looking at Deuce she said, “Had to set the anchor, the tide is coming up. I could hear you talking all the way out by the bird.”

  Brushing past the two men still kneeling on the ground, she stopped next to me. “An olive-skinned beauty with smoky dark eyes that controls men using sex? Ring any bells, Jesse?”

  “Can’t be,” I replied. “If she had half a brain she’d be back in Croatia.” Ettaleigh? I thought. Or whatever else she’s calling herself now. When we were in the Bahamas looking for that treasure last fall, there was a woman who’d drugged me. She’d said her name was Ettaleigh Bonamy and her family were the early settlers in the northern Bahamas, just after the American Revolution. It turned out her real name was Tena Horvac and she worked for a Croatian mobster in Miami.

  “That would make sense,” Deuce said. “In a twisted sort of way.”

  “You know who the woman is?” Bender asked.

  “Part of that Croat organized crime syndicate in Miami I was telling you about,” Deuce replied.

  “The woman that drugged McDermitt?” he asked, turning to me and trying to hide a grin.

  “Is there anyone you didn’t tell?” I asked.

  “I still don’t think Chyrel told the First Lady yet,” Charity said.

  “Think about it, Jesse,” Deuce said. “She used those drugs to control men and she failed with you. In her mind, she still has a score to settle and it probably doesn’t involve any monetary gain.”

  “And this guy,” O’Hare interrupted, jerking his thumb to the English-speaking gangster, “says this Erzulie woman is controlling Lavolier. What kind of drug was it? An aphrodisiac?”

  That got the attention of everyone. “What do you know about it, O’Hare?” Deuce asked.

  “My late wife was colored. A Creole woman from Montserrat. She knew quite a bit about the voodoo spirits and spells. Mostly, the spells were just a mixture of different herbs found throughout the islands.” He grinned and added, “She knew a couple of herbs that when mixed right could put lead back in the dullest pencil.”

  “Think about it like this,” Charity said. “How many beautiful, dark-eyed women do you know that can control the leader of a gang like Zoe Pound, and would want to kidnap you?”

  “Well,” I responded, realizing they were probably right. “Only one when you put it that way.”

  The two gangbangers were low-level soldiers, so they didn’t know much about the inner workings of the gang, other than what they heard from others. With the obvious threat of being tortured, sodomized, and eaten by what they considered to be two evil Middle Eastern men, they were very eager to tell Deuce everything they knew. And they did.

  After getting all the information from them he could, Deuce took out his cellphone and pulled up a photo of Tena Horvac. Holding it out so the two captives could see it, both nodded, whispering, “Erzulie.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thirty minutes later, Deuce dropped us where we’d left the boats anchored in the shallows south of Harbor Channel, then took off with the two men, headed back to Homestead, where they would be turned over to FDLE and most likely be back on the streets in a day or two.

  I called Kim. She was very worried, but I again assured her everything was fine, that the three of us had to go with Deuce to fill out reports. I told her the tide was almost full now so we were going to get O’Hare’s boat off the sandbar and I’d be home shortly.

  “You can go out on the south pier with Pescador and see us,” I told her.

  “Just hurry,” she said and ended the call.

  The three of us walked around the boat, inspecting the hull as best we could, mostly by feel. O’Hare went aboard and down into the engine room and bilge, while I grabbed a mask from the Cazador and dove down to inspect the prop and shaft. O’Hare was satisfied that the keel was intact and there weren’t any hull breaches. She still sat on the bottom and it would take a lot of pull to get the sand to release its suction-like grip. Fortunately, the propeller and shaft seemed undamaged and the stern was in water deep enough that he could use his own engine.

  He tried that, racing the engine in reverse, sending a torrent of water under the hull in the hope that it would lift the boat clear and allow him to back off. When that didn’t work, I started up Cazador and Bender pulled the anchor. Backing off the sandbar, I was able to use the bow thruster to line up behind the trawler and we tied two lines, crisscrossed, to each boat’s stern cleats.

  The combined thrust of the two big diesel engines did the trick and Constance wa
s once more floating free. I invited O’Hare to the island for lunch and he accepted.

  “Got a few nice lobster in the hold, if you want some,” he offered. “Least I could do for pulling me off that sandbar and entertaining me all morning.”

  The channel to my house wasn’t deep enough for his trawler, so he anchored it in the curve of the channel and stepped over to the Cazador. I started to dock the boat at the south pier, but he said, “Just dock her where you usually do. I can swim out to Constance when I’m ready to leave. Do it all the time.”

  I clicked the button on the fob to release the east door’s latch and it slowly swung open. I saw Kim waiting on the dock. She and O’Hare quickly tied Cazador off to the dock before she jumped aboard, hugging me.

  “Thank God, you’re alright. What happened?”

  “We caught a couple of those guys that have been fishing with explosives,” I replied and then turned to introduce her to O’Hare.

  After shaking the old man’s hand she turned back to me and asked, “So, they’re under arrest and won’t be blowing up any more patch reefs? Are they the same ones from Cape Sable?”

  “There’s a little more to it than that,” I replied as Bender led the way up to the deck. “But no, they aren’t the same ones from Sable. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now we have a guest for lunch.”

  Kim looked down at the burlap bag O’Hare was holding, then glanced out at the trawler anchored in the channel. Turning back toward O’Hare, she asked, “Are those lobster?”

  “Sure are,” he replied.

  “They’re deep now,” she said. “Hard to find, free diving. Be glad to clean them for you, Captain.”

  The old man smiled, the cracks in his leathered face deepening as he extended the bag to her. “That’s kind of ya, Miss McDermitt.”

  Kim quickly disappeared back down the steps to the cleaning table. She was right, lobster get a lot harder to catch this late in the season. We still get a few, but lobster for lunch is a rare treat in winter when you eat what you catch.

  The Trents were coming across the clearing and waved. O’Hare leaned on the rail facing the interior and took it all in. “Y’all are a regular Robinson Crusoe family up here. What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the garden.

  “More than you know, O’Hare,” Bender said. “They grow their own food up here. But not a single steak in sight.”

  I introduced O’Hare to the Trents and Carl proceeded to explain to him how the aquaculture system worked as we went down the steps and over to the garden.

  “You grow fresh tomatoes?” the old man asked, eyeing about a dozen ripe ones on the plants.

  “Try one,” Charlie said.

  O’Hare picked one from a cherry tomato plant and popped it in his mouth, relishing the freshness. He walked around the tanks, where the crawfish and catfish were raised and asked, “What’s in these?” Carl went on to explain how we were raising catfish and crawfish for food, as well as the vegetables.

  After a lunch of lobster and crawfish, I walked O’Hare out to the pier, offering again to take him out to his trawler lying placidly at anchor about a hundred yards down the channel.

  “Like I said, I do it all the time,” he replied and dove headfirst into the water.

  I had to admit, for a guy who was probably in his eighties, he didn’t seem so in the water. O’Hare didn’t surface for a good fifteen yards and then struck out in a fast swim, making it look effortless.

  Still, I waited on the pier until I saw him get aboard and start the old trawler’s engine. His windlass took up the anchor line as he idled forward. The sound of the anchor seating coincided with his turning in the channel and chugging back toward me with the current.

  Kim joined me on the pier as Constance cruised past, O’Hare waving from the wheelhouse. We both waved back and then went back up the steps to the deck, where Bender and Carl were sitting.

  “Pretty spry for a guy his age,” Bender quipped.

  “Yeah, he is,” I replied, sitting down with them.

  Kim went down to the bunkhouse to get her backpack. It was an hour before she and Charlie had to leave to pick up the kids, but they were going in early so they could stop at Skeeter’s to look at some tackle. A moment later, the two of them came up to the deck, told us they’d be back in a couple of hours and headed down to the docks.

  “Doc called while you were pulling that tub off the bar,” Carl said. “Says he found the perfect engines and emailed you the specs and drawings. With those, we should be able to come up with locations for the mounts and cut the through hulls for the shafts.”

  “Let’s go see what he’s got,” I said.

  The three of us went down to the Revenge and I powered up the laptop. I found Doc’s message, downloaded the attachments and sent them to the wireless printer inside the cabinet by the TV. When the printing finished, I took the sheets out and glanced at each one as I sat down at the settee.

  The engines he’d sent the specs on are built by a company called S&S Cycle. I don’t know much about motorcycles, I know boats. But the specs on the engine were impressive.

  “Torque peaks and pretty much maintains from forty-two hundred rpm to fifty-five hundred,” I said, handing the spec sheets to Carl. “Over a hundred and forty pounds all the way.”

  “Whoa,” he exclaimed, looking at the sheets. “And the horsepower is ridiculous. A hundred and sixty horses each? Do we really want all that power?”

  “My Pap used to say that horsepower was like a specialty tool you rarely use. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

  Carl glanced at the dyno charts again. “Yeah, it has a lot of bottom end, that’s for sure. She’ll lift up on plane at quarter throttle, more than likely.”

  I was looking at the mechanical diagrams and visualized the mounting brackets that would be needed, jotting some numbers on a notepad with a quick sketch. “As small as these are, we can make the cockpit larger and maybe even add some storage on either side by mounting them side by side instead of staggered fore and aft like the Cigarette. But that’d be a lot of power for a right-angle gearbox to handle.”

  “More room’d be nice,” Carl said. “But mounting them too close would hurt maneuverability. Let me see that pad.”

  He took the pad and pencil from me and turned to a clean page where he quickly sketched the approximate size and shape of the boat, then drew the engines right next to one another with the shafts pointing outboard instead of to the rear. “What if we mounted them close together with the transmissions outboard of each?” He quickly drew two more boxes next to where he’d drawn the engines and slightly astern.

  “Right angle gear boxes are notoriously weak,” I said while he was sketching.

  “No, a drive shaft with two constant velocity joints at forty-five degree angles. No belts, no chains, and it puts the output shafts to the props further outboard.”

  Again, I envisioned what he’d said. “Yeah, that could work. Mount a bearing between each joint to prevent any wobble, with each shaft driving a Borg Warner tranny?”

  “Velvet Drive, one to one?”

  I looked at him and grinned. “It’ll sure turn some heads.”

  We worked straight through the afternoon, Bender even helped out. By the time we knocked off for the day, we’d built the engine mounts out of strong oak beams and laid out where the transmissions and shafts would run.

  The whole time I was working, my mind drifted to the Croatian woman. I couldn’t understand why she’d be after me. Sure, I’d been part of spoiling her chance to get the treasure, but she was an underling to Valentin Madic, who was the head of the Croat organization. Perhaps she had some stake in the outcome other than her boss’s recognition for doing a good job. The idea that she’d seek any kind of revenge for anything other than money was something I couldn’t get a grip on.

  I’d contemplated my own inability to understand the criminal mind for some time. The mind of the enemy was much easier, as they op
erated primarily by political or theological ideology. One of Deuce’s team, a crusty Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer by the name of Bourke, said that to understand the criminal meant you had to think like one. I have a long way to go, I thought.

  In the evening, before supper, Kim, Pescador, and I sat on the pier watching the sun set. The cold from the previous days had finally passed through and it was again tee-shirt-and-shorts weather.

  “How many of them are there?” Kim asked.

  She was talking about the Zoe Pound gang. “A lot,” I replied. “I’m not sure exactly how many. A few hundred I guess.”

  “Are all of them involved in destroying the reefs?”

  “Indirectly, yeah, it seems the whole gang’s involved. But I doubt it’s more than a dozen or so actually doing the dirty work.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the infrequency. I guess like any organization, they have people behind the scenes doing all sorts of jobs to support the foot soldiers.”

  “No,” she said. “Why are they doing it?”

  I’d known that one was coming. Kim has such an inquisitive mind. How much should I tell her? I thought. When I first met Carl, he’d advised me that in his relationship with Charlie, they kept no secrets and that was what made their relationship so strong.

  “They’re trying to draw me out in the open,” I finally replied.

  She jerked her head around, now very serious. “What for?”

  She already knew a lot of what had happened on Elbow Cay last fall. I hadn’t told her about the Croatian woman or the drug that she’d given me. And there was no way I was going to tell her about the effect that concoction had had on me. Some things a daughter doesn’t need to know about her father. But she knew basically what had happened.

  She needed to know more. At least some of it. So, I told her about Tena Horvac and her plans to take the treasure once we found it. “Apparently, she blames me for the loss of her job and the treasure and is looking for revenge.”