Burn Notice: A Key West Thriller (Kelly Maclean Book 2)

by Nate Hawk

  But at the time Kelly was not concerned with the details of their agreement. He still had a decent buzz and he had just jumped in the sack with a woman whom he’d dreamed of doing just such a thing with for some time now. He figured she was the type that would want to take it slow at first but that’s not how it happened. Maybe it was the edge that the wine had taken off or maybe it was the emotional rollercoaster of envisioning just such an opportunity for some time, seeing that it was headed in the right direction over dinner and then knowing there was no way for it to happen, as soon as Owen had arrived holding a congressman at gun point. Then what had happened? After a few awkward moments and a few more spent planning, Megan and Kelly had exited the limo and were back together in the romantic atmosphere of the old city. Somehow the cold and hot anticipation had added volumes to their entire experience. It seemed that the satisfaction of each other’s desires were just destined to happen. Who wanted to fight destiny? They ripped each other’s clothes off in a fit of passion. Kelly lost his patience as he was undoing the buttons on Megan’s blouse and the last three flew across the room in different directions as he tore her shirt off. Then as Megan was removing Kelly’s trousers he lost his footing and they both crashed to the floor. They spent the next ten minutes exploring each other’s bodies in a fit of perspiration and various bodily fluid transfers. They never did make it to the bed.

  After the moment had passed they remained on the floor, interlocked in an unbreakable web of arms and legs and fingers. It would have taken something very important to break up the moment and that was ultimately what happened. Kelly didn’t have to remind Megan that he needed to go; she was a pragmatic women and she was actually the one who proposed it.

  “The sooner you go the sooner you’ll be back,” she offered.

  In a less pragmatic way he said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been wrapped up with someone special. I don’t want it to end.”

  “It doesn’t have to. We can get right back to it when you return,” she said with a look of anticipation.

  Kelly just smiled. He didn’t want to ruin the moment. He knew it always ended. It always ended with him heading off to war to kill people in an effort of balancing the scales of justice in the eye of his own mind. Or it ended in the death of his loved ones, torn to pieces before his very eyes. Age and gender were insignificant considerations when it came to fate taking those from him. Young, old, women, men; he’d lost his entire family. Nobody was left. He knew he couldn’t stay with Megan. Kelly would not have claimed to know-for-sure many things but there was one thing he was very confident about. A relationship with Megan would only end in death; probably hers. But he chose not to ruin the moment by bringing up his extreme level of skepticism towards any enjoyable future between them both.

  “I guess we’ll have to see how our troubles get resolved. We’ve got a pretty good plan so let’s just see how it goes,” Kelly said. “One hour at a time.”

  Megan didn’t think too much about her feelings. Instead she said, “Ok. Do you have everything that you need?”

  “Let’s see: radio, check… fishing line, check… Here take this,” he said as he handed Megan back her 9mm Glock. “I don’t want to get salt water in it when I go for a swim in a few minutes.”

  Megan took her firearm back. With all of the people that wanted the three of them dead, she was happy to have some assurance that she could be persuasive if one of them came for her in the meantime. They shared a brief kiss, the type that every set of new lovers know. It was short but there was a lot of emotion and unspoken thoughts behind it. Then, like Kelly always did, he disappeared from sight as he slipped out of the Artist House B&B on Eaton. He walked casually with a crowd of people when he could so that he wouldn’t stick out. He wasn’t sure where exactly Quinn and the CIA kill team had set up shop but he figured at least some of them were keeping eyes on his boat. He was right.

  As he neared the harbor, he saw that two of the men were sitting in the Ford Expedition and watching the dock entrance. One of them did have his seat reclined like the boredom had taken its toll and he was making an effort to catch some shut-eye. The other operator seemed to still be quite aware as he carefully studied those that walked by. Kelly figured as long as Rick Quinn and the other operator didn’t see him walking down Duval Street, then he could pull this off.

  Kelly’s boat dock was just north of the intersection of Garrison Bight Causeway and North Roosevelt Boulevard. The Black Ford SUV was parked across the street but the men couldn’t actually see Kelly’s boat. There was some jungle scrub growing up in the area where the boat dock entrance was. Kelly’s boat was two thirds of the way down the dock so the underbrush and the other boats that were between the shore and Kelly’s boat blocked the men’s view. Kelly walked east through the alleyways behind the businesses that fronted North Roosevelt Boulevard. Once he was far enough east where the men’s prying eyes wouldn’t be able to see him, he crossed North Roosevelt and quickly sat on the edge of the seawall. It was late and there was an occasional car but no one took interest. If they had, surely Kelly would have appeared to be just another wino who had given up on working and decided to park his ass in paradise. Sitting down and hidden mostly from view behind the palm trees that lined the road there, Kelly slipped his pants off. Then he tossed his shirt on top and quickly slid into the water of Garrison Bight.

  The water was warm and Kelly found the process quite soothing. Too bad he wasn’t out for a bit of R&R because he could have floated there in enjoyment for some time. It was late so nobody seemed to be on their boat or otherwise searching the water for felonious activity. The CIA team couldn’t be everywhere at once and since they figured that Owen didn’t even know they were in Key West, they had apparently taken the simplest approach to surveillance and remained in the SUV. But where the hell had Rick Quinn and the third operator gone? Were they back at their hotel for their own version of R&R? Kelly didn’t think so but he also didn’t have any information to the contrary. It was obvious to Kelly though that the group had put it all on the line in an effort to keep his Deep Throat identity separate from his Rick Quinn identity.

  Kelly performed a half float and a half breaststroke, always keeping quiet and staying conscious of anyone else who might be watching (or listening). He finally made it to the dock near his boat and pulled himself up on the floating structure. Before boarding his boat, he looked around for any obvious traps. He was sure the kill team had boarded his boat and sabotaged it. He thought that he even had a good idea of what they had done. But he knew that it would sure be stupid to be anticipating one trap and then get caught up in another. Besides, that’s exactly the type of smoke and mirrors bullshit that had kept him from accepting a position with the Agency several months prior. He’d said no but, even with his foresight, his Agency connections still might well get him killed.

  Seeing no obvious lethal traps Kelly climbed aboard his boat. It swayed some but balanced his weight well. He was very attentive of where he placed his hands and feet. Additionally, he was very careful not to be seen. He could only imagine what would happen if someone saw a man creeping around in the dark in his underwear. Then he took a hard stare through a crack between the curtains of one of his windows. He immediately saw the rigging and the device that he’d anticipated the kill team had set up. There was a trigger on the door that ran to the explosives that had been placed nearby. He removed a cell phone and a small battery powered radio from the Ziploc bag. He made sure all of the connections were solid and attached a piece of fishing line. Satisfied, he’d carefully climbed above his bow cabin and begun prying open a vent/ skylight. When he had enough clearance to drop the homemade radio assembly through, he did. Then he tied off the other end of the fishing line to a bolt on the vent and left the entire device suspended inside the cabin of his boat. One call to the phone and the radio would come on.

  Kelly knew his work had concluded so he carefully climbed down from the boat, down to the dock and finally slid back into
the water of Garrison Bight. As he carefully eyed the approach to where he’d left his clothing some movement caught his eye. Two homeless men were walking parallel to the seawall in a westerly direction. Kelly remained hidden in the shadow of his boat, only his head was exposed above the warm seawater. As the two men walked, Kelly saw that one of them carried a pull behind luggage cart. They were carefully studying the marina and Kelly figured, probably trying to find a place to lay down for the remainder of the night. Shit, Kelly thought to himself as they seemed to take an interest his clothing. Then they picked the articles of clothing up and began looking through the pockets.

  “Whose you think they is?” one scruffy man asked to the other.

  “I look like a psychic to you?” he asked with his whiskey-fueled sense of humor.

  “You look like an old drunk to me,” the first man said. “And you smell like an asshole!” he laughed.

  “Well, you don’t smell no better, Fred.” Both men gave a quick glance around and seeing nobody, put Kelly’s clothing inside of the luggage bag. “They nice clothes too! Finders keepers,” he said as both men began walking a bit faster now, one of them quite satisfied at the nice new khaki pants that he’d acquired.

  Shit, Kelly said to himself again. He looked around for an idea. As he did so he eyed a five-gallon gas can on one of his neighbor’s boats. Forgetting momentarily about his new problem of not having any clothing to wear and putting at bay any thoughts of feeling like a thief, he retrieved the gas can. Then he carefully brought it back over to his boat and secured it in a storage area under one of his seats. He knew that with the can of gas in combination with the large amount of fuel in the boat’s gas tank would be plenty of accelerant for what he had in mind. Afterwards, he repeated the process of slipping back into the salt water.

  Kelly knew that he had to find some clothes fast. Getting picked up by the local police would get him killed. The CIA would be sure to get wind of the arrest at which point they would come and pick him up in the “interests of national security”. Then he was sure that he would neither be seen nor heard from again. Best-case scenario would be a life riding the water board down in Guantanamo Bay. But he knew that wasn’t how it would go. Quinn and his crew would put a bullet behind his ear and put him in a shallow grave somewhere under a clump of mangroves. Or maybe just chop him up and feed him to the sharks.

  Kelly took the same cautious swim back to the seawall but he wasn’t having thoughts of sugarplums dancing in his head this time. He wanted to get out of there and he wanted to do so quickly. It was the middle of the night so traffic was very thin. He watched, half submerged behind the seawall, for several minutes. There were a few taxicabs that drove by but that was about it. The bums had disappeared themselves, into a clump of bushes or a nearby park. Hunting them down for his clothing wasn’t a good option. Not dressed solely in a pair of boxer briefs, anyway. He made sure there was a lull in the traffic and then he climbed up onto the seawall and made a break for the shadows on the other side of Roosevelt. Then he saw her.

  A young lady dressed like a waitress who seemed to be heading home from a night working pulled out of a quiet side street and on to Roosevelt Boulevard. Kelly hadn’t quite made it all the way across the four-lane road as the young lady, in a hurry to get home after a long evening, failed to stop completely at the stop sign. As she blasted out onto Roosevelt she saw a mostly naked man jump in surprise as he attempted to dive out of her way. Scared that someone might be attacked by a half-crazed drunk, she immediately picked up her phone and called the police, as she continued putting distance between herself and the half-naked pervert that she had seen.

  After what had seemed like an eternity, a frustrated Kelly finally made it to the relative safety of the shadows just south of North Roosevelt Boulevard. There was no doubt that he’d been seen as he had seen the look of surprise and disgust on the young woman’s face. He knew he had to hurry. He couldn’t just stroll back to the busiest part of the island without clothing but he also couldn’t just dilly-dally around either. He kept to the alleyways and the heavily landscaped areas. Then he saw someone coming for him.

  A Key West patrol car had been dispatched in an effort to locate the naked man that had apparently attempted an assault on a very scared young lady. The officer was determined to catch the pervert and lock him up himself. That’d be great for his own bragging rights and could only help to propel his sleepy career towards the rank of detective that he so badly desired. The patrolman flipped on his spotlight and began searching the area. Kelly, naked and doing his best to move slowly had no other option than to hide until the Barney Fife wannabe drove by. Just as soon as he did, Kelly was back up and moving. Then the car with its spotlight was coming back! Kelly found himself a better hiding place this time, behind a landscape wall with vegetation. He saw that there were now at least two patrol cars involved in the search. They were patrolling in a grid pattern with a growing interest in capturing the suspect. This just gets better and better, Kelly discouragingly thought to himself.

  Then he spotted a parked minivan with what appeared to be a basket of laundry on its seat. Kelly just hoped there was something in it that would fit. He waited for the patrol cars to make their momentary disappearance and then he picked up a landscape block. He threw it with force at the minivan’s window, shattering it instantly. Then he began rummaging through the clothing. He found a pair of women’s capri beach pants and quickly discarded them. There was a similar sized dark colored shirt that was thrown on the ground just as quickly. The next article of clothing was a woman’s swimsuit and as he picked it up and began to toss it, its owner stuck her head out of the doorway.

  “Pervert! Rapist!” she shrieked in terror at the nearly naked man holding her swimsuit. “Get the hell outta here! I’m calling the cops!”

  Kelly knew his night was about to get a lot worse. He grabbed the capris and the tight shirt off of the ground and ran down the alley at a full pace. He quickly put a block between him and the shrieking woman. Then two blocks. He paused for a couple of seconds as he attempted to pull on the extremely tight and rather short pants. Then he put on the dark colored woman’s t-shirt that was at least three sizes too small. Better than nothing, he thought. Not much though. He saw some neon lights ahead and people walking the other way. As he stood in the shadows and looked closely at the people he thought he recognized them. Was it Rick Quinn and one of his operators? Shit! The men were coming from the direction that he wanted to go to get back to the B&B. He was sure it was Quinn. Kelly quickly sprinted in the shadows towards the neon lights. Could he find some sort of sanctuary from the madness ahead? Then he could hear moving sirens blaring, presumably headed towards the house that he had just come from. Better keep moving, he thought. As he neared the neon light he could see that it was a bar’s sign. It read: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and he suddenly realized that it must be a gay bar. Next, two patrol cars appeared on either end of the street and began driving toward each other in Kelly’s direction. He looked himself up and down one time and, realizing he was just plain out of options, he decided what the hell? He pulled the bar’s purple door open and disappeared inside.

  ***

  Chapter 14

  Owen heard the police activity in the background and had noticed its fevered pitch. Then a few minutes later a police helicopter with a spotlight had made an appearance and it looked and sounded to Owen as if a real manhunt had been kicked up. It sure sounded like something interesting was going on and Owen thought to himself, I hope the asshole that caused all of the trouble gets what he has coming to him. Then he mumbled, keep those cops busy over there until I’m done here! Just then Southern Florida Import and Export’s box truck appeared. Owen was surprised that there weren’t any motorcycles forming a caravan this time. And then he was surprised again. The back door was rolled up as well as one of the garage doors. An irritable Deluca and Franco climbed out of the cab as three motorcycles were unloaded from the back of the truck. Deluca wa
s proudly carrying a large container in his hand and Owen could tell that its contents were valuable.

  Three motorcyclists disappeared into the warm night air and Owen made his move. He slipped unnoticed into the lot through the gate that the bikers had just exited through. Franco was hobbling around on one crutch and his brother Deluca was closing the box truck’s rear door.

  “Hands up gentlemen,” Owen said with the seriousness of a robber pointing a gun at two unprepared victims in the still of the night. “Deluca, set down the suitcase,” he said as he lowered the garage door to the import building.

  “You’re making a big mistake, asshole,” Franco said with one hand in the air and the other stabilizing himself on his crutch. “We’ve killed for a lot less than what’s in that suitcase.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Owen said eyeing some packing tape by some empty boxes. “I’m CIA. You gonna come after us all? Deluca, grab that tape and have your cripple brother secure you to that post.” Owen pointed. “Nice and tight.”

  “You’re in deep shit,” Franco said. “CIA or not!”