Lost Gems (Shark Key Adventures Book 4)

by Chris Niles

  “You believe—

  “Hell no, I don’t believe a word of it. But it’s what they believe, and if they hear it from someone with a Cavil Media badge, they’ll eat it up like Bern’s lava cake.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Katherine.”

  “Wouldn’t be investigative journalism if the story wasn’t worth investigating.”

  Kate heard the tap of keys over Nathan’s muffled “Mm hmm.”

  She waited in silence, listening to the keys fly, then finally said, “I really appreciate this.”

  “Don’t thank me ’til you get back home with all your fingers and toes.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.” More clacking. “If these guys get one whiff you’re not writing an apologetic for them, it’s your tail feathers. And then it’s mine. So don’t muck this up, my dear.”

  She heard a little ding, then Nathan’s heavy sigh. “All right, I’ve got a meeting scheduled for you in Boca Raton on Monday afternoon. I’ll FedEx your creds and the details.”

  “Monday?”

  “Patience, grasshopper.”

  “Nathan, I don’t have time to wait for Monday, A woman is missing, and this is my only lead.”

  “Honey, unless you want to storm their castle with a strike team, Monday is all you’re getting. And trust me, that’s not a battle you could ever win.” He tapped a few more keys. “But if you want to do something while you wait, I’ve got the name of a low-level guy who’s doing some time in the Stock Island Detention Center.”

  “You know a guy down here?”

  “Well, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy.”

  Kate started singing, “It’s a small world…”

  “It is. And word gets around. This guy was a good source ’til he got scooped up. Looks like the locals grabbed him to keep him away from the feds and keep him snitching for them. I’ll get word to him you’re doing a piece on bad arrests and unjust incarceration and he’ll talk. I don’t know if he’ll know anything, but it’ll keep you occupied ’til Monday.”

  “Thanks, Nathan. I owe you one.”

  She almost heard his eyebrow raise up. “You owe me a lot more than one, darling. Now go to bed and have sweet dreams of uprisings and coups.”

  “Love to Bern.” Kate made a kissing noise into the phone, then tapped her screen to end the call.

  Tony looked up from the couch. “A coup is his idea of a good time?”

  Kate laughed. “He’s been covering eastern Europe since just after the fall of the Soviet Union. He got a Pulitzer for his work on Euromaidan and the revolution in Ukraine a few years ago, and he’s stayed with the aftermath, focused on the separatists in eastern Ukraine. You know, that’s still going on, right?”

  “Still? I barely knew it was a thing when it was a thing. I was active duty then, but we didn’t get our hands dirty in any of that mess. We had too much work digging in the sand, and there was no winning anything up there, anyway. So, we stayed out. I never walk into an op unless I see three different ways to win it.”

  “If that was my standard for getting in or staying out, I’d never get into anything.”

  “Maybe that would be a good strategy for you to implement, then.”

  “Tony, do you really think we shouldn’t be involved in this? Could you look Eddie in the eye and tell him we’re not looking for his mother?” She leaned over the counter. “Are you willing to go over to Chuck’s right now and tell Eddie we don’t know where his mom is, and we don’t know if she’s coming back, and we don’t know if bad people have her because she was doing illegal things for them and she double-crossed them? Can you tell him all that with a straight face and then tell him he’s gonna be in the foster system until he turns eighteen and then be on his own? If you can tell him all that and be fine with it, then yeah, I’ll drop it all right now. I’ll call Nathan back and tell him not to bother sending the package. Not to set up the meetings. And then you can move back to the mainland and get a real job and a mortgage and—”

  “Kate, stop. You know I can’t do that. You know I wouldn’t do any of that.”

  “Of course I do. That’s my point. This isn’t an op where you have a team of highly trained guys. We’re a ragtag bunch around here, but we have still managed to pull off a couple miracles. I trust this little family with my life, and they trust me with theirs. And right now, Eddie’s future is in our hands, and I can’t trust anyone else with that. He’s our responsibility, and I’m not gonna let him down.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Irishman clutched his rosary, slowly formed the sign of the cross, then rose from the rocky shoreline and turned back toward the house. Without a priest at hand, he was left to confess directly to God and to guess at his penance, but what choice did he have?

  As he always did, Keane prayed for Elaine. The prayer of the hopeless. For a miracle. For her to walk beside him. To squeeze his hand. To flutter her eyelids even once more.

  Then he’d turned his prayers to more practical matters. “That this woman would cooperate. That she would see the virtue of my goal. That she would grant what I need without fear or coercion, Lord, hear my prayer,” he had whispered to the rustling breeze.

  He only hoped that God and all the saints were listening.

  He made his way back through the brush then across the clearing, long shadows stretching toward the east ahead of him, the setting sun reflecting off the reinforced glass panes, their light bright against the house’s wood siding.

  Each of the last couple days had been different, and he wondered what tomorrow would bring. The first day, after she awoke, Miss Ellis had been hostile. Combative, even. Keane had expected to be the aggressor, but instead, he’d spent the day trying to soothe her. To calm her. To convince her they wanted the same thing. He finally resorted to another dose of ketamine to give her some rest and offer him a chance to ask for some guidance.

  But the Lord was silent, as He so often was these days, and the Irishman was forced to try a new approach. He spent most of the second day experimenting with dosage, unsuccessfully trying to find the perfect level of sedative to make the woman lucid but calm.

  So this morning, she woke free of her restraints and free of sedatives. He’d crept to the tiny attic and watched through the slatted vents as she explored the island. The boat was secured, and she was in no condition to swim miles to the mainland, so what was the risk? It didn’t take long for her to realize she had nowhere to go. And while she explored, he crept down to the shore to pray.

  As he pushed from the thick web of roots and trunks into the clearing, he spotted her small frame curled up in Elaine’s Adirondack chair. Keane felt a heat rise in his chest. His fists clenched, and his carefully trimmed nails dug into the flesh of his palms.

  Any chair but that one.

  The woman’s head snapped his direction. She leapt from the chair, looking wildly from one side of the clearing to the other. Then Tim Keane slowly stretched his hands out wide, and took another step into the clearing. In an instant, the woman bolted down to the dock, sprinted to the end, then launched her body into a shallow dive, knifed through the surface, and began to swim.

  Keane sighed. He made his way to a small shed tucked among the mangroves at the edge of the water and pulled a small rigid-hulled inflatable into the water. He rolled up his slacks, climbed aboard, then shoved away from shore, where he pulled the starter. The dinghy’s little engine sputtered to life.

  Keane piloted the little craft toward the swimmer. When she spotted him heading toward her, she abruptly turned and swam the opposite direction, but she was no match for the boat’s small outboard. He quickly caught up with her. He let the boat drift up to float parallel with her path, then killed the engine and fitted the boat’s paddles into the oarlocks. He rowed along beside her as she continued to swim.

  Finally, he shouted to her. “Nearest inhabited land is two and a half miles away. And the sun will be setting
in about thirty minutes, so unless you’re an Olympic athlete, it’d be easier on you to just climb on in now and save yourself the trouble.”

  Her strokes were weakening, but she swam on. And he knew deep in his soul, as if God himself was directing him, that he was supposed to simply paddle along beside her until she wore out. It didn’t take long.

  The woman’s feet began to drop and her arms slapped against the surface, growing weaker with each stroke. He guided the inflatable toward her and extended a paddle. She drifted along on the current for a few seconds longer, then grabbed it. He pulled her toward the little boat, then tugged her over the side. She lay on the front bench, gasping and sputtering as Tim started the motor.

  But instead of zipping back to the dock, Tim felt another calling. He gave the woman a minute to catch her breath, then he raised his voice above the whine of the little Evinrude. “How about I show you around?”

  He glanced at the western horizon and guessed he had about five minutes before the real show started. He guided the boat toward the eastern shore, then slowly made his way south.

  “See how the color of the water changes? The hard bottom is really shallow there. Too shallow even to run this up to the shore without dragging the prop and destroying it. It’s like this all around the southern shore as well. It’s less than a foot deep at low tide, and barely more than that at high.” He piloted the boat around the southern tip of the island and pointed. “But this.” He pointed at the western horizon, where the sun had just dropped below a bank of high, cottony clouds and lit the water’s ripples with what looked like a field of diamonds. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

  The woman pulled her weary body up and watched as the sunlight danced on the water and a brilliant pink glow illuminated the ceiling formed by the clouds. Keane killed the engine and let the boat drift, barely guiding it with an oar, while they both watched the lightshow as the sun sank into the water. When it finally grew dark, he restarted the engine and piloted the little boat around the west shore and back to the dock.

  “Do you need assistance?” he asked as he secured the thin painter to a cleat on the dock.

  When the woman nodded, he gently pulled her up to the weathered boards, then draped her arm over his shoulders and helped her up to the house. After she’d showered and was dressed in some of Elaine’s oversized clothes, she returned to the dimly lit open living area and dropped into a soft couch.

  “I have a son. Eddie. He’s six.” Her voice was hollow. “For all I know, they have him already.”

  Keane perched on the edge of a recliner across from her, then pulled a phone from his pocket. “I think he’s safe. If they had taken him, every cell phone in the Keys would have gotten the alert.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  He softened as he saw defeat in her eyes. “I need your help.”

  The woman’s brow furrowed.

  “The cartel you’re carrying for? The woman is responsible for so much destruction. So much death. And the package? It belonged to me before she stole it. So I’m only looking to hold her accountable for her actions. I’m only seeking justice.”

  The woman’s eyebrow twitched, but she failed to hold it in place. “If she’s a criminal, why isn’t she in jail?”

  Keane smiled. “We all have our vulnerabilities, now, don’t we, Miss Ellis? Why don’t I simply report her? Why doesn’t she simply report you? Our authorities in Colombia are a little less reliable than yours here in the States, and our matters are a bit more complicated, wouldn’t you say? So things are often best left for us to work out between ourselves.” He leveled his gaze at her. “The real question of the day, though, is why you ran. Why didn’t you simply deliver the package to them?”

  Shelby gave a weak shrug. “I didn’t plan to run. I just got scared and didn’t know what else to do. It was stupid, really. I missed the drop. Got in the wrong cab, and by the time I realized, it was too late. And if you know the Rojas — forgiveness is not their forte.”

  The Irishman smiled. “No, it is not.” He drifted to the kitchen, pulled two bottles of water from the refrigerator, then handed one to his captive. “But neither is it mine anymore.”

  His mind drifted to the jungle outside of Bogota.

  “Her father had been stealing from me for years. Small amounts, but it added up. He stole from all the producers, though. We tried to increase security, but the cost was higher than the losses. Old man Rojas is nothing if not strategic. So, we’d all settled into a bit of a rhythm. Then his health began to decline.”

  The woman shivered, then tucked her feet under her and lay her head against the arm of the couch, her gaze fixed on him.

  “His daughter felt that she deserved to take over the business, but he began grooming another man for the job. She was enraged that her father would choose to hand their operations over to an outsider over his own daughter, so she developed a plan for a coup. She pulled together the men in the operation who were loyal to her and started escalating their raids. She hit my safe houses more and more often, and took more product each time. Losses were high, and it became cost-effective to hire tougher security agents. Everyone started paying in blood.”

  He dropped his gaze to his lap, his fingers twisting like an octopus’ tentacles.

  “One night, she sent her top lieutenant to raid my warehouse. Rumor is they were lovers. He didn’t make it out.”

  He paused without looking up. “I do not lose sleep over her loss. He knew the risk when he went in, and I’ve made my peace with it. But she made it personal. One night not long after, my wife and I were out to dinner. Elaine excused herself from the table and never came back. The maître d’ found her in the alley, beaten and barely breathing. She’s still on life support, and the doctors say it’s unlikely she’ll ever regain consciousness. So I go and hold her hand, and I pray the Rosary with her.” His hand touched the beads in his pocket.

  “She was never a part of this war. I will never forgive Gloria Rojas for making her one. And since our authorities won’t make her pay, I will.”

  He looked up from his fighting hands to see Shelby curled in the corner of the sofa, fast asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The next morning brought with it an early shower, then oppressive heat, burning every puddle into the steam that hung across the island like a thick, wet blanket. Kate started her coffeemaker, then threw on an old one-piece swimsuit and stumbled through the salon and out onto the deck. She stepped over the rail and onto the lip of Serenity’s bow, ready to dive, before she realized she was staring at the seawall and a thick hedge of waxy leaves.

  “Sweet cheeseballs!” The previous evening’s docking fiasco flooded back as she wiped the sleep from her eyes, then turned and made her way to her stern deck and dove into the warm water. Her body sliced through the surface, but when she rotated her head for her first breath, a heavy wake rocked her on her side as Whiskey splashed in beside her. Then to her shock, he began to paddle across the channel.

  A wide grin spread across her face. Kate rolled facedown and began to count her long, even strokes. She swam until her fingers scraped the sand of Horseshoe Key, where she flipped and opened her eyes just long enough to be sure the channel was clear and aim for her dock.

  Swimming was a meditation for Kate. Her steady strokes became her mantra, the warm water a blanket around her. And with Whiskey by her side, the only thing she had to think about was the sound of the water lapping against her ears.

  But a few strokes short of the dock, she heard a commotion ashore. Snapping from her trance, she lifted her head from the water to see Whiskey ahead of her scrambling up the shore past Serenity’s port hull. She twitched at seeing the transom instead of her bow, then pulled herself up the dock ladder and grabbed a towel.

  When she opened her eyes, Whiskey was in the parking lot in a pile of yips and barks. Kate made her way up the dock and through the break in the hedge to find her dog in a pile with Steve’s two cockapoos and the Jenki
ns’ Shih Tzu, Muffin. Whiskey’s wet, salty fur was white with dust from the crushed coral parking lot.

  “Welcome home, guys!” Kate paused at the edge of the lot. “I’d come help, but…” she waved one bare foot toward the sharp chips of stone covering the lot.

  “No worries, we don’t have much.” Michelle Jenkins called from the back of their SUV.

  Kate jogged down the dock, grabbed a green wagon, then met them at the break in the hedge. William pulled several bags of groceries from his forearm before returning to the truck for their luggage.

  “How was Austin?”

  Michelle shrugged. “It’s good to be home. Funny, you know, it feels like we live on vacation, and then our time “away” is spent meeting with lawyers and bankers and venture capitalists. But the meetings went well. Deal should close in a couple of weeks.”

  Michelle had been working on a deal to sell an app she had developed. Her last deal had enabled them to retire aboard the Knot Dead Yet and had bought William a six-passenger turboprop plane that he still looked at like a little kid with a lollipop as big as his head.

  “I’ll be glad when it closes. It’s been so distracting. It’s hard to write code when my brain is stuck in contract terms and indemnification and risk profiles. It’ll be nice to get back to pure creativity.”

  Kate shook her head. “I can’t comprehend how coding can feel the same as writing a story or painting a watercolor.”