T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril

by T. Lynn Ocean

  Jonathan didn’t smoke, but he bummed a cigarette from a dock-worker. Lighting up to blend in, he spotted a shrimp boat moored to the dock, its crew laboring to secure the boat and unload their haul.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he said to a kid who was tying a rope to a giant cleat. “I’m trying to find a friend of mine. I think he helps you guys out sometimes when you dock.”

  The kid carried another thick rope to a different cleat on the dock. “What’s his name?”

  Jonathan pulled a small square photo out of his pocket. Denny and Theresa were the subjects, the picture taken in an arcade photo booth. Theresa always carried it in her cigarette case, she’d said, and shown it off proudly. Stoned from the injection, she hadn’t noticed when Jonathan kept it. “Depends on what nickname he’s using at the time,” Jonathan said through a chuckle, and held up the photograph. “When we were kids, everybody called him Denny.”

  The kid scanned the parking area and pointed to a white Mazda MX-5. “That’s his car. He’s around here somewhere. Probably on the boat, shootin’ the shit with the guys.”

  “Okay if I go aboard? I’ve got a big surprise for him.”

  The kid checked out Jonathan’s boat shoes. “No difference to me,” he said. “Probably mess up your new treads, though.”

  “They need to be broken in.” Jonathan finished his cigarette and thanked the kid, thinking he should break in the new shoes on Denny. Heading to the ramp, he captured a cell phone picture of both the shrimp boat and Denny’s Mazda. He paused to save all the recent photos in a single file, which he attached to an empty text message. He wasn’t sure if he’d have to send the photographs, much less what to write, but he’d figure that out later.

  Nobody paid much attention to Jonathan as he made his way along the finger dock and stepped aboard the boat, trying not to grimace at the overwhelming stench of fish. He came across a group of wiry men gathered around a cooler, and one instantly caught his attention. Jonathan couldn’t see the man’s face, but he knew instinctively it was Denny. The criminal who’d thrown his life into a tail-spin. The man who had crushed his heart.

  “Why did you have to kill her, Denny?” Jonathan said to the man’s back. “Rosemary was working for you, trying to help me out. She didn’t deserve to die.”

  Denny pivoted, a beer can halfway to his mouth. He was probably nearing fifty, maybe more, but there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. His pores reeked of meanness, Jonathan thought.

  “Well, looky who we’ve got here,” Denny drawled, his voice rough like a smoker’s. “Dr. John, our very own headshrinker. You look a lot older than your photo in the medical journal. Not to mention that pimply-faced runt on your college ID.”

  The blood left his extremities and Jonathan wanted to strangle the asshole. He forced himself to remain detached, like he did when talking to patients. “Honestly, Denny. I’d like to know why you felt it necessary to kill her.”

  Denny’s friends sensed a disturbance and got cocky with their body language. Denny waved them off and finished his beer with one tilt of the can. “Just an old acquaintance,” he told them.

  The men finished their beers with long chugs and went to work to unload their haul, damp shirts clinging to their backs, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Seagulls circled overhead, foraging for discarded scraps. Denny retrieved a smoldering cigarette from atop a rusty ice chest, took a long drag, and flicked it overboard. So he littered, too, Jonathan thought. A murderer, a dope pusher, and a litterbug. The scum that somehow managed to float to the surface of humanity’s pond.

  “Rosemary snorted some nose candy—you know, to experience the product she’d been storing for me,” Denny said. “She did line after line. Of course, I had a knife to her throat at the time. Although I probably didn’t need the blade. Hell, she was already half-wasted.”

  Jonathan suddenly wished he had a gun. He wanted to kill Denny, regardless of the consequences, but the shotgun in his car wasn’t doing him a bit of good. He probably couldn’t have gotten on the commercial boat with it anyway. He should have stopped somewhere to buy a pistol. He gripped the cell phone in his pocket. Whatever happened between him and this monster, he decided, the photos needed to be sent. “Why? Why did you overdose her? You had to know it was too much!”

  Fishermen and deckhands continued to work, minding their own business, making it a point to stay out of hearing distance. Denny let out a cackle and, bending over, reached into a cooler for another beer. Jonathan seized the moment to open his phone and push the menu button. He palmed it by his side when Denny stood back up.

  “She threatened me, and I don’t take well to threats, you know?” Denny continued. “She wanted out. She didn’t want people picking up their meds at the restaurant anymore. And she wanted me to leave you and the other doctors alone. Ain’t that sweet? Her trying to look out for you and all.”

  Jonathan turned his face up to the squawking gulls so he wouldn’t have to look at Denny’s mocking smirk. Both hands behind his back, he felt the phone’s large navigation button and pressed it from memory.

  “So I tell her that’s not going to happen, and she agreed to keep working. But I could see it in her eyes, that she’d made up her mind. She turned on me. Became a liability to the network instead of an asset. Nothing to do at that point but get rid of her.”

  Jonathan thought of his best friend’s last moments and prayed that she’d been too high to realize she was about to die. If there was such a thing as mercy, she’d have passed out first.

  “I hated to drop Argo’s from the network, but I couldn’t chance her talking to the wrong people. I couldn’t chance going back to prison.” Denny seemed to be thinking out loud now, as though he were no longer talking to another person. “Prison gives you a lot of time to think. Month after month and year after year of rotting away … missing out on the life I was supposed to have. All because some punk kids stole my money right out from under me.”

  “Just out of curiosity, how did you get caught?” Suddenly calmed by a sense of purpose, Jonathan really wanted to know. He needed to know. He wanted an answer while he figured out how to get close enough to plunge the needle into Denny’s neck.

  “A deal went sour and a couple of idiots tried to run with my money.” Denny’s mind traveled back in time to a night that remained as fresh in his memory as when it first happened. “I know where they’re headed, right? So I go after them. I’m driving, it’s raining, it’s dark. Then I see that they’ve run off the road. The engine’s still smoking, so I know they just wrecked. I find them both dead, slumped in the front seat. Blood everywhere. Don’t know how it happened and I don’t care. I just want my money, but it’s gone. And I see a car disappearing in the distance and get this real bad feeling, like I’ve been had. I search all around the wreckage, you know? Thinking maybe my bag of money flew out when they crashed against that big oak tree.” Denny lit a cigarette, inhaled, and blew the smoke out his nostrils. “Never found no money. Did find a plastic picture card, though. Covered in vomit.”

  Jonathan’s voice caught in his throat. “My student ID.”

  “So I take the gun out of the driver’s lap. He didn’t have a need for it anymore, right? And I get back in my car to track you down. I’m pulling out to the road, and bam! I’m freakin’ surrounded by pigs.”

  You shouldn’t have taken the gun, Jonathan thought. Greed had put Denny away.

  “They eventually proved that the gun on me was the same gun that shot the two in the car. My lawyer said I’d go in for life, especially after all the charges from my past record added up. I did go in for life. But then, surprise, surprise! He pays me a visit in the clink and tells me that the pigs are willing to make a deal if I rat out some of my old business associates. They’ll drop all charges except the current one, the one where I got accused of poppin’ the two idiots who stole my money. But, it’s not a bad offer, I think. Better than dying behind bars, right? So I gave the badges what they wanted in return for a lighter se
ntence. Damned if I still didn’t get twenty years. Twenty lousy years for a crime I didn’t do.”

  “The newspaper said you were a career criminal.”

  “That’s the good thing about such a career.” Denny took a drag from the cigarette and flicked it overboard, like the other one. “You meet a bunch of others in the same line of work and you can rat them out when the time comes. I talked my freakin’ heart out and still got the twenty. It was a whole lot of time with nothing to think about except coming after you. Lot of time to decide exactly how I’d do it. How someday I’d have you working for me.”

  “We didn’t kill them,” Jonathan said. “Those men in the car.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass who killed them. All I want is my money. All of it. You think that just because I was in the clink I was out of touch? Oh, I followed your career, believe me. You and your friends. I watched you spend my money, opening your fancy medical practice and flying around the country to conferences. Everybody thinking the three of you is heroes when all you really are is petty thieves.” Denny spat on the deck.

  Jonathan wondered how things might be different if he and his friends had gone to the police way back then and told them what really happened. And given back the money. He wondered how life would be if they’d never been driving on that rainy road to begin with. If only they’d never gone to the stupid fraternity party. Or if they’d left at midnight, like they’d originally planned.

  “Getting out of the clink and coming after you was the high point of my life,” Denny drawled. “And after she threatened me, helping the bitch get high enough to kill herself was icing on the brownie, you know?”

  Forgetting about the hypodermic needle in his pocket and the cell phone in his hands, Jonathan scanned the deck for something that would serve as a weapon. He no longer wanted to incapacitate Denny and call the police. He didn’t even care about sending the pictures any longer. He just wanted the man dead. “Rosemary never did anything to you. You should have let her out, let her have her life back.”

  “Aren’t you the one who recruited her, Doc?” Another smirk. “Besides, she dug her grave when she agreed to store the powder for me but then wouldn’t tell me where she hid it. She tried to use that as bargaining power, to make me leave the Divine Group doctors alone. But I don’t take well to threats. Besides, I knew the stuff had to be somewhere at the restaurant or in the house. She won’t tell me where she put it, there are other ways to find it.” He spat again. “I never did find it, though. Had a buyer waiting on that blow, too. Put me in a big jam.”

  “I thought you only deal in prescription drugs.” Jonathan inched closer, telling himself to stay calm. Go with the original plan. Drug Denny and let the law deal with him. He could do it if he stayed focused. He needed to go ahead and send the pictures stored on the cell phone, too, but he couldn’t chance looking at the screen. Not yet. “You’ve expanded into street drugs now?”

  “The stuff Rosemary stored for me was prescription.” Denny displayed a row of tobacco-stained, crooked teeth. “It’s amazing the contacts you can make when you’re incarcerated. Even overseas pharmacists.”

  Jonathan felt himself float out of his physical body and hover above the shrimp boat, as though he were a moviegoer watching a scene unfold. Stacks of buckets were everywhere. He saw a wadded-up fast-food wrapper scuttle across the deck, fueled by a surprise gust of cool wind. He took in all the weathered wood and riggings and railings. A family cruised by on a pleasure boat at idling speed, and Jonathan watched brackish water from their small wake lap against the shrimp boat’s hull. “You know what?” he heard himself say. “I’m glad Rosemary managed to screw you out of some money before she passed on. And just so you know, Theresa screwed you over, too. Before you killed her.”

  Denny’s fingers worked. “Wanna elaborate on that, Doc?”

  “Let’s just say that your brief stint of freedom is coming to a screeching halt.”

  Denny charged at the same moment Jonathan focused on his cell phone’s backlit display. Sweat blurring his vision, he quickly tabbed, finding the file he wanted, recalling from memory that the next feature he needed was two pushes away. Denny’s fist connected with his jaw. Jonathan staggered against a grab rail that surrounded the wheelhouse. He flung himself against a line that ran up the main mast and, using the rope to hold himself upright, hit the green send button on his phone. Another blow knocked him to the deck, and it occurred to him that he had no idea how to fight back. He’d never been in a real fistfight in his life. He’d never even kicked somebody, he realized, thinking that his new shoes weren’t doing him a bit of good.

  A semicircle of men watched the altercation, but nobody stepped in to break it up. Still clutching his phone, Jonathan covered his head with his arms and took more blows without fighting back.

  The phone was yanked from his hand.

  “What do we have here?” Denny threw the phone into the water without expecting a reply. Jonathan heard the splash. An instinct to survive told him to throw himself overboard—anything to get away from Denny. But first he needed to accomplish what he’d come to do. With shaking hands, Jonathan managed to get the hypodermic needle out of his pocket and press his thumb against the plunger. He held it back like a knife, poised to stab, waiting for the right moment. But before he could jab it into Denny’s neck, he felt something tighten around his own neck, and his body rose up the mast in jerks, toward the sky.

  “Don’t kill the man!” somebody shouted.

  “I need everybody to get out of here.” Denny lowered the body, saw the dropped needle, and threw it overboard just like the phone. Jonathan coughed between moans. “Don’t worry, guys. I’m not going to kill the bastard. I’m just going to scare him, and I don’t want any witnesses, if you know what I mean.”

  The deck cleared in a matter of seconds. With a grunt that turned to laughter, Denny used his full weight to hoist the flailing body back toward the sky.

  The last thoughts that filtered through Jonathan’s oxygen-starved brain were of his partners. Leo and Michael. He hoped they had received the photos he’d sent from his cell phone, right before Denny threw it overboard. He hoped they’d know what to do with them. He hoped they’d forgive him.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I was happy to let Brad drive the inconspicuous Murano, which currently sported a Virginia tag. We found Akel’s Seafood Market without incident and were welcomed as soon as we walked in. Friendly place. We browsed the refrigerated glass counters of fish and shrimp and homemade containers of tuna salad and crab dips. When the other people in the store, a nicely dressed fiftyish couple, made their purchase and left, we made our way to the register.

  “Finding everything you need?” the woman asked.

  “Browsing,” I said. “I bought grouper fillets here before and they were delicious.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Brad produced a badge and a photo of Theresa. She’d been dead when it was taken, but the shot was tight on her face, and from the angle of the camera, you couldn’t tell that her eyes were vacant. Any blood splatters were concealed by the black-and-white print. “This woman is missing, and we’re hoping you can help. A lot of people are worried about her. Do you recognize her?”

  The woman studied the photo. “Sure, this is Theresa. Nice lady. She buys seafood here.”

  “You know her last name?”

  The woman shook her head no. “Just Theresa. She always pays in cash. I think her and her boyfriend bought a vacation house around here. Or maybe they’re renting. Anyway, she’s been coming in for several months. What happened to her?”

  “We’re not sure.” Brad showed his boy-next-door smile. “It may be nothing at all. In any event, we’re looking for Theresa and her boyfriend. Did they ever come in together?”

  The woman scrunched up her mouth to think. “Don’t recall ever seeing her in here with anybody else. Though she always talked like she was married or something. You know, ‘We’re going to grill and hang out
around the house tonight.’ That sort of thing.”

  The front of the market consisted of glass windows, only partially obstructed by sales posters and signage. Whoever worked the cash register could clearly see the coquina-shell parking lot. “Do you know what Theresa drives?” I asked.

  “She used to come in an old van. Last few months, though, she’s been in a little white sports car. Convertible.”

  “You know the make?” Brad said.

  The woman shrugged. “A two-seater, I think. Maybe brown seats? Looked brand new.”

  A couple of teenagers in shorts and bathing suit tops drifted in and handed the woman a piece of notepaper. “Our mom wants to know if you have this kind of fish in. She wants the whole fish, if you do.”

  “But without the head,” the other girl said, and giggled. “That would be totally gross.”

  Brad and I waited while the woman prepared and wrapped a fish. The girls pulled cans of Red Bull from a drink cooler. One of them found a small display of snack foods and added a bag of Fritos to their purchase. Giggling about the fish-head thing, they paid for their purchases and pedaled off on bicycles.

  We found out that the woman owned the market, and we quizzed her further. She didn’t reveal much—not even gossipy tidbits about the residents that most small towns breed. On the flip side, she didn’t appear to be hiding anything. We thanked her and bought a couple of bottled waters on the way out.

  It was a bright, clear day, and the sun’s rays burned hot despite the mild eighty-degree temperature. “A white sporty convertible describes a quarter of the cars around here,” Brad said when we were back on the street.

  “I’ll bet it’s one that takes premium fuel,” I said.