by Mark Stone
Lost in the Storm
Coastal Justice Suspense Series Book 1
Mark Stone
Contents
Note
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
27. The Series Continues!
Note
Copyright 2017 by Mark Stone
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written consent from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews.
Lost in the Storm is a work of fiction. All events, dialogue, and characters are a work of the author’s imagination. Therefore, any similarities to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Thanks, and I hope you enjoy it.
Dedication
For my Grandfather
Who only ever saw the good in me.
1
The sun hung brightly over the water as I made my way onto that pier for the first time in a dozen years.
“You sure are a sight,” Boomer yelled at me from the dock of his Cutwater 30 Trawler. Though we had kept in touch, it had been years since my best friend and I had been face to face, and the years were evident on his features as I neared him. We had been barely old enough to drink when I left this place and here we were, creeping up on thirty-five. His dark hair had a little gray in the sides. His formerly angular features had now been softened by time and weight. Still, he cackled like a madman as I boarded the vessel.
Same old Boomer.
He tossed a Corona at me before I even got close enough to shake his hand. It was ice cold and I knew it would do a lot to bring my temperature down. It was strange. I grew up in Naples, and the Florida heat had never bothered me for even a day of it. In fact, I found myself missing the balminess and the afternoon storms you could set your clock by during my first few years up in Chicago.
Things had changed now though. I felt like a snowbird as I opened the bottle, taking a swig, and wiping beads of sweat off my brow.
“How you been, Boom?” I asked, finally shaking my best friend’s hand. His grip was still firm as ever. His thirst and tastes hadn’t changed either, it seemed, seeing as how he had a Corona in his hand as well.
“It’s Tuesday afternoon, and I’m about to head out on the water.” He grinned. “You tell me how I’m doing.” He chuckled again as he looked me up and down. “Food up North must be garbage, man.”
“Some of it,” I admitted, taking another swig. “Why would you say that?”
He shook his head. “Because you look the same damned way you did when you left.”
A smile broke out across my face. I might have been too hot, but there were things about Florida that you just couldn’t replace. The salt smell of the gulf was one of them. My best friend was another. Being around Boomer made me feel like I’d never left, like my twelve years masquerading as a big city boy was nothing more than a dream I’d have after slamming a few too many back at Rocko’s.
“What the hell is wrong with looking the same as I did when I left?” I asked.
“Cause you’ve been gone for a decade, man. A man earns a lot of things in a decade. If he’s living right, a little bit of pudge oughta be one of ‘em,” he said, patting his admittedly bigger belly.
“I don’t think being out of shape is something the chief of police should be bragging about,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Then again, neither is knocking off in the middle of a Tuesday to go dicking around on the water.”
“Look at you, Dilly,” he said, shaking his head. “Same as you ever been.” He leaned in. “You should have stuck around. Lord knows, I’d have taught you to have fun by now.”
Calling me Dilly wasn’t something I’d normally let people get away with. Aside from my mom, Lord rest her, my grandfather, and the first girl whoever broke my heart, I couldn’t think of another person alive or dead who’d called me that and not come away with a black eye for his trouble.
This was Boomer though. I could let him slide just this once. Besides, maybe he had a point.
There were reasons I couldn’t stay though, and those reasons didn’t warrant thinking about right now, even if they were why I was back here in the first place. No. Today was about reuniting with old friends and making the best of a scenery I hadn’t seen in years, a place I had come to miss more than I had ever imagined I might.
“How have you been?” I asked, gently nudging the conversation away from the “way things might have been” topic. “How are the girls? It’s wild that you have two daughters, man. Doesn’t seem like I’ve been gone long enough for something like that to have happened.”
“Only takes a night to make ‘em,” he said, finishing his Corona before I was even half done with mine. He turned, leaning down to his cooler and plucking another one from the icy water that had likely spent the majority of the morning melting. “Hell, I could have had twelve in the time that you’ve been gone, Dilly.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Boom,” I said, downing a big gulp of the light colored liquid to try and catch up, and ignoring the fact that he had either completely forgotten about my dislike of that particular nickname or he had decided it would be my punishment for abandoning him in what we all considered paradise.
Boomer never understood why I had to leave. Sure, he got my reasons, but he never really thought they were important enough to send me away from a place like this. People didn’t run away from Naples. They ran toward it. This was the richest city in the whole damned Union and — while Boomer and I had never been among the wealthy — there were plenty of beaches and beach bodies to keep poor boys like us from ever getting too disenchanted with the place. Also, there was an entire community of servers, small business owners, and fisherman who lived the way we did. The lower middle class of paradise; that was what my grandfather called us.
The crime was almost nonexistent here too. Naples had one of the lowest averages in the country. I used that as an excuse when I left. Boomer and I had both gone headlong into law enforcement but, while he stayed here, drinking beer and boating on Tuesday afternoons, I wound up in a city with the largest homicide rate in America. I told him I needed the action and, while that was partly true, we both knew it wasn’t the only reason. .
“Just as well,” Boomer said, popping open a second bottle. “I don’t get paid enough for any more rug rats, anyhow.”
“With your work ethic? I’m shocked,” I said sarcastically, clanking my bottle against his and looking out onto the water. It was a nice day out here. The blue Gulf waters were so crystalline you could almost see clear to the floor. It was one of those picturesque scenes you always see on postcards that the people here learn to take for granted. I had taken them for granted too, but a dozen snow-filled winters knocked that right out of me. Now, staring at the absolute perfection of God’s handiwork stretched out around me, it took all I could do not to gasp.
“It’s not exactly Chicago, but we get by,” Boomer said, snapping me out of my awe filled examination.
I shook my head. “It’s not the same,” I admitted, looking out at the water and thinking of younger days when standing out on a boat and looking down at something like this was second nature instead.
“Then get out of there,” he answered, all the playfulness dropping from his voice. “I’ve told you, it’d take one phone call for me to get you a position down here. I’m the damned chief of police and you’re a good cop. Come home.”
“I’m a great cop,” I answered, smiling over at my friend. It wasn’t bragging, just truth. In the twelve years that I’d been gone, I worked my way up to detective in record breaking time. Since then, my cases had been closed at a rate twice the city average. I was good at what I did, but that didn’t mean I could stay here. “You know I can’t do that,” I answered, finishing off the bottle and setting it down.
Boomer winced, real pain, old pain, dancing across his features. “You gonna let your last name dictate everything you do for the rest of your life?”
I sighed. We had had this conversation too many times. “It’s just not a last name, Boom,” I answered, my eyes still plastered on that beautiful blue water.
“I know that Dillon,” he said, finally dropping the “Dilly” thing. “I see it plastered all over town. It’s every other bench, bus, and billboard in the city. Storm Realty.” He shook his head in disgust. “I’d like to give that family of yours a piece of my mind.”
“They’re not my family,” I answered quickly. It was a refrain I hadn’t used since I’d left this place, but it was still so ingrained in me, I didn’t even need to think to will the words out of my mouth.
“Damned straight,” he answered bitterly. “They never did a thing for you, expect deny you while we were growing up, except call your mother a liar and worse.” His jaw tightened, as though he was reliving every slight the Storm family had ever perpetrated on me all over again in real time. “You’d think a family with as much money as them could afford to take on an extra son.”
“You mean a bastard son,” I said, and a harsh chuckle escaped my lips. Boomer looked over at me harshly. He’d always hated when I laughed at myself when we were kids and it didn’t seem like he’d changed his mind much about it in the time since.
“Don’t do that,” he said in a firm tone more suited for the chief of police than the guy I used to get drunk with on his father’s houseboat. “You’re better than that, and you’re better than them.” He nodded. “You know, I didn’t like it and I might not have reacted well, but I do understand why you left here. Everywhere you turn in this town, you run into something to do with the Storm family. I knew it couldn’t have been easy for you, to be lost in all that. I don’t blame you for wanting to be somebody else.”
“I’m still me, Boom,” I answered. “I’m still Dillon Storm.”
“The only good Storm this place ever saw if you ask me,” he responded. “All I’m saying is, you don’t have to give those people anything. Stay, leave, do whatever you want, but do it because it’s what you want to do.” He shook his head. “Not because you feel like you have to.”
“I’m not a kid anymore, Boom,” I reminded him. “I made a life for myself, just like you.”
“I know that,” he said, his voice softening along with his expression. “Maybe I just miss you, is all.” He leaned against the side of the boat. “I hate that it takes something like this for us to get together.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
“You know, word around the water cooler is that your old man was in the process of changing things up. I heard he was altering his will.”
“Where on earth would you hear something like that?” I asked, scoffing at what was more than likely beach gossip. “Nobody the Storms talk to would even look at you twice, let alone divulge secrets.” My eyes fell to his gut. “And judging by that beet belly of yours, the only cooler you’ve been snuggling up to has got something a lot stronger than water in it.”
Boomer laughed. “You’re a son of a bitch, but I’ve missed the hell out of you.” He took another swig. “Why the hell would you even go to his funeral?” he asked, his eyes sliding over to meet me.
“Because he’s my father,” I said simply.
“Your father who never did anything for you,” he said. “Your father who never gave you as much as a phone call when your mother died.”
“I know all that, Boom,” I answered. “But this isn’t about him. It’s about me, about who I want to be. My father’s only going to die once and, whether he deserves it or not, I’m not going to be the kind of man who misses his own dad’s funeral.”
He sighed and looked over at me, smiling just a little. “It ain’t easy being a good Storm, is it?”
“No, Boom,” I chuckled. “It most certainly is not.”
Just then, his phone rang. Boomer lazily reached into his pocket and pulled it out.
“Anderson Boomer,” he said, using his Christian name as he answered. His muscles tensed and his face dropped. “You sure about that?” he asked, his eyes narrowing. “Alright. Rope it off. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Ending the call and shoving his phone back into his pocket, he looked over at me.
“Work?” I asked, though it wasn’t really a question. I had been a detective long enough to recognize the look on his face. Something had just happened, and it wasn’t good.
“For both of us maybe,” he answered. “They just found a body in one of the fancy hotels near Vanderbelt. The dead man’s car has Chicago license plates.” He leaned forward. “How do you feel about taking a drive?”
2
As I rode shotgun in the beat up red Chevy Boomer always used instead of a squad car, I looked around this city for the first time in a long time. If possible, Naples was even more built up than when I’d left. It was fancier, richer than I remembered. Instantly, I felt out of place among the skyscraper buildings and streets filled with luxury cars. There had always been two Naples, just like there had always been two kinds of people who lived there. There was the fancy Naples, full of posh snowbirds and well-to-do retirees who had parlayed their successes into a life of leisure in what was, by anyone’s definition, one of the most gorgeous spots on the globe. Then there were us; the people who worked for the posh and the upper crust. We were the waitresses, like my mom had been, the mechanics, like my grandfather still was just a few miles outside of town, and even the public servants like Boomer and me. The Naples we lived in was a different place than where I traveled now. Sure, it wasn’t exactly a coal mine and — even on its worst days — it had ninety-nine percent of the rest of this spinning blue rock beat by a mile, but there were differences all the same.
Money made the world go ‘round. That sentiment was twice as true down here, where you couldn’t throw a seashell without cracking a millionaire across the skull with it.
Growing up, none of my friends had ever been in any of the skyscraper buildings that littered downtown on even the beachside resorts like the La Playa (where I was headed now). We never ate at restaurants owned by celebrity chefs or walked into country clubs where the men wore five-hundred-dollar shoes and the woman sported twelve-hundred-dollar purses.
We had our own versions of paradise. We had Rocko’s and De Kemp’s Oyster Bar. We had back roads and beaches that the tourists never seemed to find.
And we had the water.
“Look at that,” Boomer said as we pulled up to the front doors of the La Playa, just a few steps away off of Vanderbilt Beach and some of the crispest Gulf waters you could ask for.
The beach was crowded today, not unusual for June. Still, I knew that was what Boomer was talking about.
“You think if they knew there was a body in one of these rooms, it would slow ‘em down even a little?” he asked as he spied a volleyball game in the distance.
“Would it stop you?” I asked, arching dark eyebrows at hi
m. The beach had always been our favorite place in the world, save for out there in the middle of the water. Those girls out there, tanned and skimpily dressed in bikinis would have been enough to get Boomer to feed his own mother to the gators if it came down to it.
“Probably not,” he admitted.
Boomer flashed his badge to the doorman, who stepped out of the way quickly and allowed us to pass. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the tinted front windows as I entered. Sharp cheekbones, black hair that was just short enough for me to get away with not having to do much to it, and a decidedly firm frame built from a mixture of active police work and what Boomer had described as “crappy Northern food.” I wasn’t a bad looking guy. Still, I looked tired and — now that I was in the midst of all these blessed beach bums — I looked pale too. Twelve years had passed and I had become one of the suits Boomer and I used to make fun of as we drank from beer cans on empty piers.
“You ever been in this place before?” I asked Boomer, looking up at the swanky lobby studded with hanging chandeliers and manufactured art beach deco. It always seemed strange to me. Why spend five hundred dollars on a ceramic seashell when the beach outside is littered with them? I guess it was a good thing my rich daddy never took a shine to me, because Lord knows I’d have probably fit in with the Storm family like a skunk in a henhouse.
“A time or two,” he answered, less affected by the grandeur of this place than I was. “When I was still a beat cop. Every once in a while, you get somebody trying to skip out on their bill or a drunk guy on spring break looking to see how the other half lives.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t have to tell you how these guys react to something like that.”
