Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10)

by Wayne Stinnett

  At twenty-seven, Jenny could pretty much have had her choice of guys. She took good care of herself, and it showed. Her long light-brown hair had turned golden blond in the tropical sun, and her skin was deeply tanned by the same sun. Tall and slim, with long legs and a shapely figure, she turned men’s heads wherever she went.

  The man who’d hired James rarely joined them on the dives, preferring to stay in Key West, researching the wreck or working at his regular job. Nearly everyone in Key West had more than one job. Jenny didn’t know him personally, but knew who he was and knew that he took good care of his friends.

  It hadn’t taken long for the excitement of the search for sunken Spanish treasure to turn into a monotonous j-o-b, the very thing she’d come to Key West to get away from in the first place—well, that and a verbally abusive boyfriend.

  Though it was early fall and the days were getting shorter, there were still a good thirteen hours of daylight each day. That, combined with the twice daily boat trip, meant a laborious and boring fifteen-hour day. To date, they’d found some nails, a few beer cans, tons of fishing tackle, and a rusty New Jersey license plate. Considering they were nearly fifteen miles from the nearest road, she wondered how the plate had arrived there.

  The man financing the search was certain this new spot was the one that would finally make them rich. He’d hired James at a fixed daily rate for both boat and crew, with a percentage of the cut, when the treasure was found. James’s crewman had disappeared on him two days before James accepted the job—also a common occurrence with the Key West work force. Desperate for someone reliable, he’d found Jenny through a recommendation from a friend.

  Back home in Galveston, Jenny had worked for an accounting firm, just one of dozens of bean counters employed by the company. She’d paid her way through college at Texas A&M by working nights as a bartender. Bored with the daily grind after only two years, she loaded a few meager possessions into her ten-year-old Nissan and drove to Key West in three days. She’d quickly found work as a bartender at the outdoor Tiki bar at the DoubleTree Resort, and soon added a second job as bartender at The Rum Bar in Old Town.

  Jenny was eager for extra cash, and the hundred and fifty per day James said he could pay was very tempting. Tourist season had dried up, and she hadn’t been getting a lot of shifts at either job. She had no commercial diving experience, and explained that when James had contacted her about the job.

  At first James was skeptical about hiring her. He wanted a more experienced commercial diver. She explained that her dad was a commercial diver on the oil platforms in the Gulf, and she’d been certified as a sports diver before she’d even learned to drive a car. She loved the sport and had continued taking classes, working her way up to divemaster and becoming certified in a number of specialties, including mixed gas diving and equipment repair. Once James learned that, he made her an offer and she told both her employers she was taking some time off and they could give her shifts to the other girls.

  Throughout the last two days, Jenny and James had moved and reassembled the red and white pipe grid from its previous location, just fifty feet away. They were now doing a preliminary survey of each individual two-foot square of the intersecting grid. First, each grid had to be digitally photographed with a high-resolution dive camera. Six hundred and twenty-five individual grids, each with a corresponding digital image, always with north at the top of each image.

  How can this possibly get any more boring? Jenny thought, hovering just above the next grid. James barely seemed to notice her when they were on the boat, and by the end of the day they were both too exhausted to care. Maybe he’s gay, she thought.

  A faint buzzing sound caught Jenny’s attention as she snapped the picture and moved very carefully to her right for the next one. Maintaining neutral buoyancy in the water was critical; any sand or silt she kicked up would have to settle before she could take the next picture. Tiny particles suspended in the water would cause backscatter on the image, appearing huge from the camera’s flash. She wore a belt around her narrow waist, with eight pounds of lead in a pouch at the small of her back. With her buoyancy compensator half-inflated, she was able to move easily while maintaining a partially upright position.

  The buzzing grew louder and Jenny recognized it as the sound of an outboard engine. They heard them all the time; boats were always coming and going and the buzzing sound carried a long way under water. Occasionally, the project’s financier came out on his own boat to check their progress, but that was rare. As the sound grew closer, Jenny took the picture and moved carefully to the next grid. The pitch of the outboard changed, as the boat slowed, approaching James’s big workboat.

  Must be the money man, Jenny thought. Or a Coast Guard skiff, come to harass us.

  Hovering over the next grid, Jenny paused and looked up. The water was clear enough that she could easily make out the underside of James’s workboat, and the smaller boat as it came alongside.

  Not the Coast Guard, she thought. Their boats were bigger and she imagined the bottoms were just as clean as the rest of their equipment. The boat pulling alongside looked to be about the same size as the boss’s, but she’d been the one out of the water the two times he’d visited, so she had no idea if the dirty, barnacle-covered hull above her was his or somebody else’s.

  Assuming it was him, Jenny went back to work, taking the next picture and moving slowly to the next grid. The man had sunk an awful lot of money into this project already, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Last week, when they’d found the nails, they’d thought the discovery might be significant. The nails had been scattered over an area covering more than two dozen grid squares.

  But the nails had turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of fifty-year-old carpentry nails, not the seventeenth century shipbuilding nails they’d all hoped they were. Probably a bucket of nails that fell off a passing workboat.

  Jenny was slowly moving to the next grid when she heard a splash and noticed a shadow pass over her. She started to turn and look up, and something hit her hard in the middle of her lower back and tugged viciously at her weight belt, yanking her upward.

  Her first thought was that she’d been surprised by a shark. They’d seen quite a few over the last three weeks. She immediately began twisting her body to get free, thankful the shark had grabbed the single pouch full of tiny lead shot.

  But suddenly her mask was violently ripped from her face, a clump of hair from her right temple going with it. Something wrapped around the outside of both her thighs and locked around her lower legs, as a large mass pressed against her bottom.

  The man’s legs, wrapped around hers like a boa constrictor, prevented Jenny from kicking with her fins. She grabbed wildly for her second stage, which should be dangling on her right side, but it wasn’t there.

  The man’s arms encircled her, trapping her right arm in a tight grasp, leaving only her left hand, flailing uselessly. The bulk of Jenny’s scuba tank prevented the man’s arms from reaching all the way around and locking together for a full bear hug. As usual, Jenny was wearing only a bikini, since the ninety-degree water was more than warm enough to work without a wetsuit. The man’s large hands instead grabbed both her breasts, the fingers sinking deeply into the tender flesh; pain shot through her body.

  Slashing with her left hand, Jenny pawed at the water, trying to get free. But the man was too strong, and he held her breasts in a vice-like grip and began thrusting against her. She could feel the bulge in his groin as he drove himself into her, using her own legs for leverage.

  Reaching back as far as she could with her free hand, she tried to grab the man’s mask, but there wasn’t one on his face. When she tried to gouge at his eyes, he twisted his head and she raked her long nails across his cheek.

  With her right arm trapped, she could grab her octopus, the backup second stage of her regulator, though it did little good with her arm trapped. She pushed the button on the front of it anyway, releasing a purge of air i
n a free flow.

  This seemed to distract the man for a moment, but then he squeezed harder. Jenny distinctly heard the cracking sound when her right arm broke, and a sharp pain shot up her arm. She heard the muffled sound of the man laughing, as he began thrusting his pelvis against her again.

  Through her distorted vision, she made out a large hand as it flashed in front of her. The second stage of her regulator was yanked violently from her mouth and Jenny went into full panic mode, thrashing wildly and struggling to get to the surface.

  A lucid part of her mind grasped that this wasn’t a sexual act. She wasn’t being raped by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. She felt a pull on her regulator hose, where it was attached to her buoyancy compensator. Too late, Jenny realized that the man attacking her wasn’t wearing his own scuba gear, but was now breathing from her second stage. He also wasn’t wearing fins, but was instead using his legs to power her fins, driving both of them toward the bottom.

  Forced downward through the grid of interconnecting pipes, Jenny impacted the rough, sandy bottom face first, forcing her lower jaw open and driving sand into her mouth. She pushed against the bottom with her one free hand, again twisting her body and gyrating wildly in a last-ditch effort to get free, each movement causing excruciating pain in her broken right arm. She managed to push hard enough against the bottom to cause them both to slowly rise up out of the grid.

  The man continued thrusting his groin against her ass and she could feel him growing larger, becoming aroused by her twisting movements and his hands on her breasts. Her lungs burned with the need for air as her face was again slammed into the bottom. This time, it wasn’t the coarse, but yielding sand. The man had driven her face into a small piece of rough brain coral.

  The jagged, dome-shaped coral didn’t yield; instead, it gouged out chunks of flesh from her cheek. The wounds burned, competing in intensity with the other pain the man was inflicting. He continued levering her legs, spreading them apart. His swimsuit did little to hide his now hard manhood pressed against her. His hands pawed at her breasts, pulling her bikini top up and allowing him to grip her soft flesh even tighter.

  Her face again buried in the sand, she felt the man release his grip with his right hand, but keep his grip on her left breast, squeezing so hard she thought she would scream.

  Roughly, he continued thrusting with wild abandon. His free hand grabbed her hair and yanked her face up out of the grid. Jenny’s neck was strained backward, and the regulator’s first stage tore another hunk of flesh and hair from her scalp.

  With her body bent backwards, the man seized the dump valve at the top of her BC and pulled it, releasing all the air from her compensator.

  With no air in the BC, the heavy lead weights pulled Jenny to the bottom, the man riding her down as a gray haze seemed to cloud her vision. Her body fell over one of the pipes, and the man grabbed her hair at the back of her skull, smashing her face into the bottom over and over, showing no mercy at all. Her whole body was in agony as he yanked her head sideways and shoved it down hard to the bottom, his hand planted firmly against the side of her face.

  As blackness descended over her mind, Jenny saw James next to her. He had a purplish hole just above his right eye, oozing blood. Somewhere in the back of Jenny’s mind, she knew there was no way of escaping. As the man continued to bash her head against the rocks and coral on the bottom, she took a sharp breath, inhaling water, sand, and bits of seagrass. As she did so, a rough hand pawed at the bottom of her bikini, grabbing it and ripping it away, the cloth cutting deep into the tender skin of her inner thighs before breaking.

  The pain she felt from the numerous gashes on her cheek and head, the broken bone in her right arm, and the vice-like grip kneading and twisting her breast was nothing like the agony in her lungs as seawater flooded them.

  The pain lasted only a second. Jenny convulsed once as everything went black, then once more as the life force left her body. Her attacker continued to slam her face against the rough seabed, then slowed his merciless treatment, taking his time now that her body had stopped twitching. Her blood mixed with the silt that enveloped them both.

  When he was finished, hoping to stage things to look like something else, he inflated Jenny’s BC so he could drag both corpses up to the boat. There, he hooked a tether to one body and let the other drift away.

  “Heard something like a gunshot about twenty minutes ago,” Carl shouted from the south pier, as I idled Pescador into the little basin in front of my house. I’d named the boat for a dog I’d given up nearly a year ago when I found his original owner, adding the name—which is Spanish for fisherman—in big letters on both sides,. “Sounded like it was way off,” Carl added.

  Getting the little Grady-White turned around, I backed in under the house and Carl helped me with the lines. “We heard it too. Sounded like it came from out beyond Snipe Key.”

  Carl frowned. “That is a long way off. But, the barometer is high today, so sound’ll carry further.”

  Carl Trent and his wife, Charlie, are the island’s caretakers. Together with their kids, Carl Junior and Patty, they live on my island and keep things running.

  “Thought it might have been you,” he said, with a wry grin. “I was about to head out to find Finn and retrieve your body.”

  Tying Pescador off, I took Carl’s offered hand and stepped up onto the little dock under my house. “It’d be kinda difficult for someone to get that close to me out there,” I said, grinning back. “But we both appreciate the thought.”

  Finn jumped onto the dock and streaked past us, heading for the open door on the west side of the dock area.

  “He still hasn’t learned to relieve himself in the water?” Carl asked, as we followed Finn up to the deck.

  “He will, sooner or later. We were out there for five hours.”

  We both sat down at the table on the corner of the deck overlooking the interior of my island. Below and to the east, the pump came on in our little aquaponics system, moving water from the reservoir on the vegetable tank back up to the fish tank—we grow an assortment of vegetables in one, and raise crawfish and tilapia in the other. After a moment, it shut off.

  Carl reached into a cooler and took out two Red Stripes, placing them on the table between us. “You see that big bone out there again?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, picking up the metal bottle opener and opening both our beers. “We stopped by Cudjoe Basin on the way back. Saw him twice before he disappeared.”

  “I take it you didn’t catch him,” Carl said. “Mac stopped by a little while ago.”

  “He say what he wanted?”

  “Spoke about as many words as he usually does. Said he was just stopping by to say hi.”

  Mac Travis lives in Marathon, on Boot Key. He runs a small salvage business from the workshop under his house and sets a string of lobster traps during the season. He used to work for Bill Woodson, who built or repaired a good many of the bridges that connect the Keys from Islamorada to Key West, before Wood was killed up island some time back.

  “Mac’s not the social type,” I offered.

  “No, he sure isn’t. Seemed worried about something.”

  “He is the worrying type, though.” I said, taking a long pull from the ice-cold beer.

  “He only stayed a few minutes. Not even long enough to shut down his outboard. Said he’d catch up with you later. You catch anything?”

  I couldn’t help but wonder what it was Mac had wanted. He was sort of a loner and kept pretty much to himself, since his girlfriend, and late boss’s daughter, Mel had gone back up north. He was the opposite of his Cajun crewman, Trufant. Anywhere there was trouble, Tru and his polished ivories weren’t far away.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “There’s about thirty or so grunts in the live-well. They’ll keep until we finish these beers.”

  “You ever give your buddy down in Key Weird an answer?” Carl asked, referring to an offer I’d gotten to do some treasure hunting.

>   “Yeah, told him I was too busy and wasn’t interested.”

  “Too busy?” Carl scoffed, as his wife Charlie came up the rear steps to the deck. “Hell, man, you haven’t chartered since Kim went back up to Gainesville last month.”

  “I’m taking off to pick up the kids,” Charlie said. “Hey, Jesse.”

  “Hey, yourself,” I said, looking at the angle of the sun. “I thought they’d be back from school already.”

  “They had a play date with friends. The other kids’ momma was taking them to Big Pine Key Park, to burn off some energy.”

  She leaned in and kissed Carl, then headed down the steps to the docks. We have a whole fleet of boats below the house, ranging in size from Pescador, a seventeen-and-a-half-foot Grady, to Gaspar’s Revenge, my forty-five-foot charter fishing and dive boat. With Kim gone, her flats skiff was now stored up on slings, making room for Pescador.

  “Kim’s the one that runs things,” I told Carl, after Charlie left. “She’s a lot more organized than me.”

  Kim’s my youngest daughter. She’d spent the last two summers here, much to the chagrin of her mother, my first wife. She’d returned to her studies at University of Florida, where she was majoring in Criminology, much to my own chagrin. She had a good head for business and I felt she was wasting her talent, wanting to be a cop. But she was a grown woman, and I wasn’t going to stand in the way of her doing what she felt she needed to do.

  As we enjoyed our beers, I heard the engine on Carl and Charlie’s own Grady-White start up, and a minute later Charlie idled out the short channel to deeper water. Knowing it was high tide, she continued straight south in Harbor Channel, bringing the twenty-footer up on plane, zig-zagging her way toward Big Pine Key, seven miles south of here.

  “So, why’d ya really turn down the chance to get in on the big treasure hunt?” Carl asked, taking the last pull from his bottle and standing up.