Breaking Creed (26 page)

“I want the police called.” Still on his knees and cradling his wounded fingers, Mike was still giving orders.

That’s all Jason needed, a police report. The military would never give him a new hand now.

“Did you four come over to buy these veterans a drink and thank them for their service?” the old guy asked, surprising all of them with his casual tone.

“What? What the hell are you talking about, old man? He broke my hand!” Mike pointed at Creed.

“I may look like an old man, son, but I own this establishment. If you’d like to file a police report, you’re welcome to do that. You might want to put some ice on that hand.” He shook his head as he looked at it for the first time. “Probably should be soon. That doesn’t look too good.”

Then he turned to one of the bartenders. “Help these fellas find a place out on the patio, Carl.”

“Wait! You’re kicking us out?”

“Just putting you outside to get some fresh air.”

“But you’re kicking them out, right?” Mike asked.

Jason watched the old man’s eyes go from Creed to Colfax and Benny, and then they stopped at his. Something told Jason the old guy knew he deserved to be thrown out. But then he said something that floored Jason: “Hell no, I’m buying these veterans a round on the
house.”

Saturday

62

O’D
ELL
WALKED
ACROSS
P
ENSACOLA
B
EACH
from her hotel room to Howard’s Deep Sea Fishing Marina. It was still early and the beach was already crowded and the sun already hot. She carried her flip-flops in her hand for the part of her trek that was sand. It reminded her that she could use a few days of sand between her toes and the sound of breaking waves. Maybe when all this was over, she’d come back.

The two-story shop was whitewashed with a marlin painted on the sign below the orange and blue letters. A boardwalk ran the width of the shop and connected to a long pier where boats of all sizes occupied some of the slips. On the boardwalk were bistro tables with umbrellas and chairs. She noticed the small oyster shack attached to the far side of the shop. It had its own sign:
BOBBYE’S OYSTER BAR
. It was closed but the chalkboard out front already advertised that night’s specials.

O’Dell stopped and watched the pelican sitting on one of the posts. Seagulls screeched overhead in a blue sky that didn’t show a hint of clouds. From somewhere she could smell the heavenly aroma of food on an open grill, and her eyes started looking for the café or restaurant before she reminded herself why she was here.

The man behind the counter had to be six-foot-five. His broad shoulders and chest filled the lime-green and yellow boat shirt with a marlin across the front that matched his sign out front. He wore white linen pants, as white as his mustache and the thick mass of hair on his head.

The first thing she noticed was the shelf that ran along the walls, about a foot from the ceiling. Miniature model boats were displayed, tightly packed end-to-end. There had to be hundreds of them.

“A hobby that has become an obsession,” the man said in a rich baritone that could have been intimidating if it wasn’t accompanied by the crinkles around his brilliant blue eyes.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Thanks. What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Ellie Delanor sent me.”

She watched his smile come slow and easy as he said, “I’ll get something cold to drink.” Without hesitation, he flipped the sign in the window to
CLOSED
.

They spent the next hour at one of the bistro tables on the boardwalk. O’Dell sipped raspberry tea and listened to Howard Johnson tell her what he knew. It was hard to believe that this mild-mannered gentleman had once been a top drug dealer for the Gulf cartel back in the 1990s. When Senator Delanor had asked O’Dell to talk to Howard, she said that he knew more about George Ramos than anyone. The two had been best friends twenty years ago, before they both decided to go straight and clean. Only, Howard didn’t realize at the time that George wasn’t serious, never even attempted it.

“George was convinced,” Howard said, “that I had kept millions
of dollars of the cartel’s money. He even told the DEA. I had one agent hounding me for years. The guy started out in immigration as an ICE agent. That’s how George got his ear in the first place. Tried hard to destroy me. I always figured he tried to destroy George, too.”

“And Senator Delanor?”

“Oh jeez, we were all in love with Ellie. But she chose George.” He looked at O’Dell, waited for her eyes. “And now George is going to destroy her completely, isn’t he?”

63

C
REED
HAD
GIVEN
EVERYONE
the weekend off. If Jason was right, Choque Azul’s hit squad would be coming for him either tonight or tomorrow night.

After his friends Colfax and Benny had left the bar last night and it was just the two of them, Jason told Creed about Tony. A guy named Falco had convinced Tony to leave the bananas on Hannah’s kitchen counter. Somehow Falco knew that Tony had been hired to go out and check the electricity at Creed’s facility. He swore he didn’t know about the spiders, and Jason said he believed him.

He also said his friend was still pretending to be interested in doing more work for Falco. That’s how he knew about the raid. From what Tony had shared with Jason, Choque Azul was used to hiring ex-military members to do quite a bit of their dirty work. And unfortunately, many of them were lured in, just like Tony had been, by the large amounts of cash they were paid and the promise
of much more. Jason offered to help. Creed declined. He told him not to take it personally. He simply did not want anyone else to get hurt. The information he had given was more than enough.

Creed took the entire day to prepare, and needed every minute. Then he waited for darkness. He knew they wouldn’t come until they had the cover of night.

In some strange way—and Hannah would probably add “some sick way”—Creed was impressed with the show of force that Choque Azul thought was necessary to bring him down. On his iPad he watched the men approaching—which made it look like he was playing a bad video game. The infrared cameras he had placed on the dogs’ collars jerked a bit more than he’d like, even though the dogs were doing their best stealth tracking of the men who were now invading his property.

All three dogs were war dogs. Two male, one female. Cheyenne was a muscular pit bull mix; Diesel, a sleek, bronze boxer; and Nuru was a blue-eyed husky mix. They had been trained for military work and could track independently behind enemy lines without constant instruction and with little guidance from their master.

The cameras on their collars were accompanied by a GPS and another device that emitted a series of high-pitched signals. Only the dogs could hear and react to the signals. Creed was able to give them directions by punching in commands using special apps on his iPad and his cell phone.

The dogs understood they were to track the intruders while remaining unseen and unheard. It looked like quite the challenge, because from what Creed could see, the men were equipped with infrared goggles. So far, the dogs were following behind or alongside in the trees and brush and keeping low to the ground.

Suddenly one man stopped to listen. He spun around to look behind them.

Creed held his breath as he watched.

The guy called out something to the other two men with him, and they stopped up ahead. Creed couldn’t make out what was said. For all the wonderful technology of the camera, it had a crappy microphone that filled Creed’s ears with only his dog’s sniffs and pants.

The man swung his gun and his bandanna head with goggle eyes from side to side, looking up at the branches and into the trees. For some reason he didn’t bother examining the tall grass or anything closer to the ground. Thank goodness, because from the angle of Cheyenne’s camera, Creed knew the dog had dropped to its belly.

The man decided there wasn’t anything, and he waved to his buddies. They continued to sneak through the trees.

Again, with another app, Creed pulled up a map of his property. Three lights were blinking within the borders—one green, one yellow, and one red. Each light identified a dog and his or her location. Cheyenne was the green light, tracking the group that came in from the road.

Creed could also access the other cameras he had planted around the property. A touch of his iPad screen and he could choose to see in real time what was in each camera’s viewfinder. Of course, he couldn’t monitor the entire acreage, but he had views of almost every possible approach to any of the buildings on the property, especially the one with the dog kennels and his apartment.

In addition to Cheyenne’s team of three that he was following, Diesel had two in his sight coming through the forest behind the main house. Nuru’s group from the west included two more. From the camera up in a tree at the end of his driveway, Creed could see a vehicle parked off the road with its headlights off. Once in a while he saw what he believed was the red-orange tip of a glowing cigarette behind the steering wheel.

None of the other cameras had shown any movement for the last
hour. So Creed put the count at seven, with one outside the perimeter. He wondered if the guy who had run Hannah and Amanda off the road was here tonight. He hoped so.

What Jason had told him appeared to be correct. Most of the men looked like ex-military. But they also looked like a ragtag assortment. Some were dressed in camouflage. A few wore bandannas around their heads. A couple chose ball caps.

No helmets. That was good.

It meant no advanced communication system, and he didn’t see any radios strapped to their arms or any jawbone microphones.

What surprised Creed—and should not have—was the firepower. Two of the men looked like they were carrying AK-47s. The others had serious semiautomatic handguns. One guy wore an ammo belt strapped across his chest. Another had what looked like grenades hanging from a belt.

This seemed like overkill.

Maggie O’Dell had said that Trevor Bagley and the fishing boat captain had been tortured by fire ants and spiders, then dumped into the river. Neither had been shot or stabbed or blown up. They had been killed by the cartel’s hired assassin, a phantom nicknamed the Iceman. He preferred to torture his victims. Creed wondered why they had sent an entire military-style hit squad to kill him.

And then he realized the answer to his question, and he felt a knot twist in his stomach. Suddenly he was questioning his entire strategy. These men had probably been ordered to capture him for the Iceman. The heavy artillery wasn’t for him. It was to take out his dogs.

64

C
REED
’
S
SECOND
CELL
PHONE
started to vibrate. Diesel’s crew had tripped the motion sensor at the back door of the main house.

Creed grabbed his iPad. He punched the app that brought up all the dog collars and their communication devices. He opened Grace’s and tapped three times. She didn’t have a camera—just the communication gadget. He’d be able to watch her from the cameras already in the house. He touched the app for the interior and brought up the camera views from inside. And sure enough, he saw Grace scurrying into position.

The two men entered the kitchen at a crouch. Diesel knew not to follow them inside unless or until Creed gave the command. From Diesel’s camera, he watched the men disappear inside. And from the kitchen camera, he saw them moving in.

The lights were on in the house. In every room, every possible bulb burned bright, so the two men removed their infrared goggles.
From camera to camera Creed watched them sneak from room to room. He adjusted his earbud. The microphones on the cameras in the house were much more sensitive.

“Did you hear that?” the man in the lead asked his partner.

“Sounded like it came from that way.”

Just at that moment, Creed saw Grace peek around the corner, letting the men see her.

“It’s a dog.”

Gunfire blasted in Creed’s ear, sending him to his feet.

Damn it!

Frantically, he punched at icons, bringing up cameras to follow the men when he really just wanted to run to the house. As soon as they got to the hallway that Grace had disappeared down, Creed pulled out the remote from his pocket and began clicking buttons, one after another, sending the entire house into darkness.

“Holy crap! What the hell!”

He could hear the men as he watched them screech to a halt. There were only two doors down this way. He kept a faint light on in the room at the end of the hall, which had been Amanda’s room. But it was difficult to see because the other door halfway down the hall was fully open and obstructed the view of the rest of the hallway.

“This is the way the dog went.”

“Come on, let’s get this little bastard.”

The one in a hurry raced to the open doorway with his friend close behind. He rushed through and the scream and crash stopped his buddy in the threshold.

“Craig, what the hell happened?”

Too late! The heavy metal door swung into the man’s back, sending him down. Creed turned the lights back on in time to see Bolo, with his big front paws still on the door, keeping it closed as Creed hit a button and heard the bolt slide and click into place.

“Sorry, guys. Hannah’s been nagging me forever to put steps down to that storm cellar.”

Then he turned on his microphone for the communication system in the dogs’ collars and said, “Good job, Bolo.”

He saw Grace come from the end of the hallway to join the big dog.

“Good job, Grace.”

He watched their ears go back and he knew they had heard him.

“Grace, Bolo, go hide.”

Both of them stood there a moment, as if they expected him to come into the house. That was the only part of this that he hadn’t perfected—no pats, no rewards. Only audio praise. Not until the end . . . if there was an end.