Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) (21 page)

Travis watched as Hinkle slid the door open as the chopper touched lightly down. He quickly jumped to the ground and helped a tall auburn-haired woman to the ground and quickly climbed back in. The woman ran toward the group at the tables. Stockwell gave a thumbs up to Charity when she was clear, and the chopper took off.

Travis stepped away from the rest of the group and extended his hand. “Agent Rosales, I’m Travis Stockwell.”

Stockwell?
Linda thought, taking his outstretched hand.
What’s the head of the whole command doing here?
“Heard a lot about you Director. Where’s Kim?”

“In the bunkhouse with Chyrel. Please, it’s just Travis.”

She nodded. “Linda, then. Any more news?”

The sound of the receding chopper had faded and the silence on the island was deafening. Pescador came trotting across the clearing and sat down in front of her, looking up expectantly.

Linda glanced down at Jesse’s dog. Somehow, she sensed that he knew Jesse was in trouble. “He’ll be alright,” she assured the dog, with a scratch behind his right ear.

Walking into the bunkhouse with Travis, Linda saw Chyrel sitting at her desk, the main computer showing video feeds from half a dozen cameras while a smaller monitor held a satellite image of all of south Florida and the Keys, with dozens of red and green dots in the Gulf and Florida Bay east of their location.

Kim got up from where she was sitting on a disheveled bunk and met Linda halfway across the tiny room. “They’re going to find your dad,” she said as Kim melted into her arms, sobbing. She tilted the girl’s head back. Her eyes were wet and bloodshot. “Jesse’s been up against a lot tougher people than this.”

“Can we go outside?” Kim asked.

“Sure. The night air will do you good.”

The two of them left the bunkhouse, walking without aim and ending up on the north pier. “I saw someone up on the deck when we flew in,” Linda said.

“That was Art. Art Newman, Tony’s partner. He was checking the boats. They plan to get out on the water in the morning, if the helicopters don’t find Dad. It’s a lot of water out there.”

“You said the dive boat you saw was heading east?”

“Yeah, Mister Stockwell said they probably came across the flats underwater and in canoes from a bigger boat. The dive boat me and Marty saw—that’s the sheriff’s deputy I was with. Anyway, it was going east, just outside the Contents.” Kim pointed north, where lumps of blackness rose up slightly higher than the far horizon, lit up with stars.

“Here,” Linda said, pointing to the end of the pier. “Let’s sit down for a minute.”

Sitting there with their legs dangling, Linda looked at Kim. “Let’s try something. I want you to stare out over the water past the islands to the deeper water where you saw the boat.”

Kim looked far out over the water to the north as Linda pointed and swept her hand from the bigger islands northwest of them over to the light flashing at regular intervals on Harbor Key Bank.

“Now, let your eyes follow the deeper water you know is out there. You know the water. Follow it to the lighthouse thing over there. When you get to the light, close your eyes and visualize the boat. Try to let your mind just go blank and see it.” Linda spoke quietly, soothingly.

Kim slowly turned her head, her eyes tracing the deep water she knew to be only half a mile out there. She stopped at the light and closed her eyes. She’d fished and snorkeled all around there many times and was really learning her way through all the small channels and eddies created by the islands themselves as the tide surged in and out of the backcountry twice every day. She could see the boat clearly now in the moonlight her mind recreated. It was all white, with a long roof that extended beyond the foot of the bridge to the transom.

“Damn!” Kim exclaimed suddenly.

“What is it?”

“The boat was inside the light on the Bank, running the narrow channel between the light and Marker Fifty-Five! They don’t know the water! It’s deeper on the outside!”

“How is that significant?”

“The light’s built on a shoal. They thought it was another marker and they had to go between it and the channel marker to get to deeper water. Dad would have called them landlubbers. They don’t know the water! That’s why they were going east. They might not have continued east after that at all. Maybe they turned and went north or west, or anything in between. They could be anywhere and everyone’s searching just to the east.”

“Come on!” Linda said, getting quickly to her feet.

The two ran back to the bunkhouse. When Kim explained what she’d suddenly remembered to Stockwell, he turned to Tony, “You’re the Squid. What do you think?”

“People who don’t know boats and aren’t familiar with local waters and markers do all kinds of stupid stuff, Colonel. What she described, and I’m guessing she knows the waters around this island as well as Jesse himself—well, it makes perfect sense in a completely ignorant way. There’s no reason for them to run between the light and the marker. It’s there to warn, not as a navigation marker. In fact, it’s more dangerous, just like Kim said. Unless they’re inexperienced in these waters and assumed that was the pass to deeper water. We should expand the search area.”

Tony looked at his watch and realized it had been almost seven hours since Jesse had disappeared. “A boat like both she and the deputy described with wide bow flares? It’s meant for open water and is probably capable of at least twenty, maybe thirty knots. It could be more than two hundred miles north or west, just as easy as a hundred miles east. A boat like Jesse’s could be more than three hundred miles away.”

Stockwell visibly winced. He turned to Chyrel and told her to get Kumar on. “He’s already on,” she replied and clicked a few keys on the keyboard. One of the images went to full screen and changed to the inside of the Gulfstream, circling far overhead. Even with its extended range, it had to be getting low on fuel.

“Kumar,” Travis said into the desk mic. “Expand your radar search to three hundred miles in all directions.”

“Okay,” Kumar’s voice came over the desk mounted speakers. “That’s a huge chunk of ocean. Half of Florida, most of Cuba and the northern Bahamas. What do you need?”

“Shit,” was all Travis could come up with. He looked at the laptop screen, and the satellite image zoomed out showing a good portion of the Gulf of Mexico, the northern Caribbean, and most of Florida. It took a moment for the computer to communicate with the radar system on the G-5 and the satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Suddenly hundreds of red dots began to appear on the screen. A box in the corner showed a counter, registering 238 small craft. Dejected, Travis turned to Tony he asked, “Three hundred miles?”

“At wide open throttle, yeah.”

“It didn’t look like a fast boat, not very new,” Kim said. “And it looked heavy, like it was struggling to stay on plane.”

“Fifteen knots?” Tony asked. “Then a hundred miles.”

Travis leaned toward the mic. “Set to one hundred miles and give me a count on watercraft?”

“Goodman wants to know, all watercraft, or just the size range we’re looking for?”

“He can be that specific?” Travis asked.

Goodman leaned into the picture and nodded. “Yes, sir, with experience and practice, the return echoes can be differentiated between sizes and I can program the computer to ignore obviously large echoes. To a degree.”

“Just the size we’re looking for, Ralph.”

Goodman leaned back out of the picture and Kumar shifted his gaze to the side, apparently watching the readout on the computer screen.

Kumar whistled softly. “I never would have thought there’d be so many. Over a hundred, Colonel.” As the laptop screen zoomed back in and displayed the new count, Kumar added, “Most are in the area around the Keys.”

“I’m sure you already thought of it, Travis, but what about his cellphone?” Linda asked.

Tony held up Jesse’s cell. “Art found it in a tackle box on his skiff.”

Travis slowly paced the narrow space between the desk and the bunks. “Linda, this is way too much area and too many boats. They have to land somewhere. I think it’s time to add Jesse’s face to the APB. Maybe a local cop will see them.”

“I’ll get on it,” Linda replied somberly, understanding the meaning and taking out her Blackberry. “I can get it done a lot faster than you or the sheriff.”

“You’re giving up?” Kim asked Travis.

“No! We’ll keep looking. But we have to look from the center outward, regardless of how far outward they might be. We now have six choppers up from the sheriff’s department, Coast Guard, DEA, and Fish and Wildlife. Plus twenty boats from those agencies and I don’t know how it happened, but dozens of civilian boats are hailing the Coast Guard that they’re putting out to join the search.”

A sudden jarring to my left ribcage woke me up. As I started to struggle against the bindings on my wrists, I heard a hissing sound and drifted back into blackness. Before the inkiness enveloped me completely, I filed something in my memory. As groggy as I was, I knew that I was on a boat. The darkness drifted back over my mind and my head slumped back to the deck.

It seemed like minutes later I woke again. My eyes stung and the back of my throat was dry. I held perfectly still, remembering that I was bound and on a boat. I tried to take stock without moving. Besides my eyes and throat, I had a roaring headache. I didn’t think it was from a blow, though. It felt more like a hangover. At least I couldn’t feel pain anywhere else. My feet were also bound and there was a hood or a bag over my head.

It felt like I was in the open. There was a slight breeze on my lower legs. Whatever was on my head didn’t seem to be a heavy material and if it were light I could have at least seen light through it. So I assumed it was dark. That narrowed the time span I was out to no more than ten or eleven hours.

By the sound of the bow wave and the movement of the boat I didn’t think we weren’t going very fast. Less than twenty knots, I’d guess. The boat seemed to be struggling just to do that. I’ve been on a few boats, and this one was big and sluggish as it wallowed between the waves, sort of top heavy. The steady, low hum and vibration beneath the deck told me I was on a diesel-powered boat. Probably an old trawler or early model sports fisherman, maybe a motor yacht. Sniffing the air, I thought,
No, it smells more like a working boat.

How long was I out?
I wondered. It’d take at least an hour to get to water this deep at the speed the scow was going. The area for quite a few miles in any direction from my island was comparatively shallow. It stayed shallow going east and got shallower in Florida Bay before reaching the mainland. That meant any direction between northwest and northeast. Northwest was the Gulf of Mexico and there’s no way this boat was crossing that much water. We were headed toward the west coast of Florida somewhere.

Muffled voices came from above and forward that I couldn’t make out. I was pretty sure it wasn’t anyone that I knew or had met. One was speaking with a slow drawl, like Texas or Oklahoma. The other had a thick accent. A Creole accent.

Haitians.

But how? The last thing I could remember before waking up on this tub was helping Chyrel set up her equipment in the bunkhouse. When Charlie brought her a plate of food and told me there was a thermos on the table, I’d walked out to where Travis sat and poured a cup. We talked for a few minutes. Tony and Art had just woken from a short nap. They had first watch. I must have blacked out a little before twenty-one hundred.

Kim!

She was supposed to be back by then. I gently tested the bindings on my wrists.

Useless.

Every fiber of my body screamed for me to act. But act against who? And how? I had no idea where I was, how long I’d been out, or how many men were even on this boat. Twenty years ago I would have struggled against the restraints anyway, got knocked out again and struggled more when I came to. Stubbornness is a hard thing to work out of some people. I did have a pretty good idea how many of them would die, if Kim had been hurt in any way.

Every damned one of them.

Lying perfectly still, I waited, biding my time. We’d get where we were going sooner or later and that would be the time to act. Until then, I had to think. There were at least two men on board. I usually don’t worry about two-on-one fights. Strike first and strike hard. Then it becomes a one-on-one fight.

It must have been about twenty-thirty when I blacked out, no later than twenty-forty-five. Then I remembered the hissing sound from when I woke up earlier. A gas? Had to be. Some kind of odorless knockout gas. Assuming they just waltzed ashore after releasing the gas….

Wait
, I thought suddenly.
Tony and Art went all the way around the perimeter of the island, going opposite directions. They’d been all the way out on the north pier and were halfway to the south pier on the return.
I remembered hearing them whispering on their earwigs. Mine was turned off, but I could still hear them.

Nobody had waltzed ashore. They’d have seen or heard something. How did the Haitians release the gas? Did it knock everyone out, or was there a firefight? Considering the boat I was on and the fact I was on it at all, it meant there was no firefight. So I had to have been out since just before twenty-one hundred.

An hour to get in and out after the gas was released and another hour to get to where we were now, in deep water.
In deep shit, McDermitt
, I chastised myself.
You were trained by the best for many years to anticipate and adapt to unconventional happenings on the battlefield!

But my home’s not supposed to be a battlefield. “Head on a swivel!” I could hear Deuce’s dad yell inside my head. I’d wanted to believe I could live out my days in peace just a few years ago.

I’d love it if people would just leave me alone.

Didn’t matter.

What mattered was getting out of this. I was out cold for at least two hours and awake now for fifteen minutes, making it at least twenty-three hundred, but not yet dawn. I calculated we would have come at least twenty to twenty-five miles and no more than two hundred. We were somewhere between Cape Sable and my hometown of Fort Myers.

Yeah
, I said to myself,
or the middle of the freaking Gulf.

As if by my own will, I heard and felt a change in the pitch of the engine. We were slowing and the wave action was decreasing. We were nearing shore. Somewhere on the southwest coast of the Florida.

Good for me
, I thought.
For them? Not so good. They’ll come for me soon.

In the distance, I heard more voices. Though I couldn’t make out what they were saying, the tone of at least one seemed annoyed. The engine came down to an idle and two heavy thumps came from forward, near the bow, as the sound of the engine died.

“Fend her off, you stupid pricks,” the Texan shouted.

I heard a stomping sound from directly above where I was lying. “Hey, wake up down there! You’re here, bring him up.”

I sensed movement just a few feet away and slightly above me. Someone groaned and springs creaked as though they were lying on a bunk and sat up.

A sharp kick in the lower back from a bare foot cleared the last cobwebs from my mind.
Wait for the opening
, I reminded myself.

“
Kanpe sou de pye ou, kochon!
On you feet!”

“Untie his feet, dumbass,” the Texan drawled, his voice full of scorn and sarcasm. “That dude’s gotta weigh two twenty. You two skinnies ain’t gonna lift his ass up there.”

The ladder from the bridge creaked and someone jumped from it to the deck where I lay. “You dumb shit! You stepped on my finger!”

More voices from close by. Orders were given in Creole as the boat bumped what sounded like a bare wood dock for the second time.

Snugging her up
, I thought, feeling someone tugging at the bindings on my ankles, and suddenly they were free.

“Pick his ass up,” Tex said. “If he ain’t awake yet, maybe a quick swim will do the trick.”

Hands grabbed me under the arms and two men jerked me to my feet. I pretended to collapse and they jerked me upright, where I wobbled for a moment, waiting. The dock grew silent and I sensed rather than felt the people out there all step away from the boat as one unit.

“Remove the bag from his head. I want to know you brought the right one.” A woman’s voice, one that I did recognize.

The hood was quickly pulled off and I let my head drop, but my eyes were open and my mind clear. It was dark. I knew that as soon as I looked up, I could learn at least two things and I might only have a few seconds to figure them out. First, how many people I was up against and second, how long I’d been out.

I’d stopped wearing a watch some time ago, except to dive. I found little use for it these days. The sun, moon and stars were my clock, along with the rise and fall of the tides.

The deck of the boat I could see was wood, the gunwales fiberglass, both stained from time and neglect. The bright work was tarnished and green, with more stains streaking the fiberglass from the mounts. Not a trawler. A really old and worn-out sports fisherman.

A hand grabbed my hair and yanked my head back, where I could finally see the stars. As fate would have it, my first glimpse of the night sky was to the north.

Polaris wasn’t in the right place. I’ve seen it every night for the last seven years from my island or nearby. Always in exactly the same spot in the night sky, never moving. As my friend Rusty would say, “Timeless and predictable.” It was just slightly higher now, confirming I was north of my island. By the position of the stars around it, I realized I’d been out for five hours and it was another three or four hours before dawn. I was somewhere about seventy-five miles north of my island. The Ten Thousand Islands.

I stomped hard on the instep of the man holding my hair and pivoted. I’d put on a pair of heavy boots after supper and the combination of crushing and twisting on the top of the man’s bare foot with my heavy rubber sole was more than he could bear.

As he screamed in pain, he released his grip on both my hair and shoulder, I continued the pivot, sweeping the legs out from under the other man. As he crashed to the deck on his head, I put my shoulder squarely into the first man’s gut and shoved hard.

One-on-one, here. Five more on the dock.

Before I could move, Tex grabbed my hair again and I felt cold, flat steel against my throat as my head was jerked back. “You so much as move, and I’ll mix your blood with a thousand fishes’ in the bilge.” I stopped struggling. He could kill me with just a twitch of his wrist.

“Know what this knife is, dip wad? It’s called a Ka-Bar, a Marine fighting knife, and I can kill you a thousand different ways with it. You understand me?” I nodded my head slightly. Whether or not this man really was a Marine didn’t matter. The steel mattered.

Tena Horvac stepped forward to the edge of the deck. “Don’t kill him yet.”

The moon was full on her face now. I’d met her briefly many months earlier and had been quite taken with how beautiful she was then. That was in full daylight. By the light of the moon she was even more so. But her beauty was tainted by the knowledge that she was one sick, deranged bitch.

“Put him in the shack,” Horvac said. “Make sure he’s tied securely and it’s locked. I’ll deal with him in the morning.”

A man stepped up next to her. He was dressed a little better than the others, but still he wore gang colors. He had a gold front tooth and what looked like a Mr. T starter kit around his neck. I recognized him from the pictures I’d found on the Internet.

“Why not just kill him here and now, Erzulie?”

“That would be too easy,” Horvac cooed, caressing Lavolier’s arm. The man became visibly weak in the knees and started breathing heavily at the touch of her hand. I noticed even under his baggy pants he had an erection.
Poor son of a bitch
, I thought.
You’re dead and don’t even know it yet.

Two of the gangbangers held semi-autos leveled at my belly as two others reached for me and dragged me up onto the makeshift pier. It was little more than posts sunk into the muck with a floating deck attached to them. It appeared to be made of wood pallets and thirty-gallon plastic drums, lashed underneath, half filled with water. I’d seen this construction technique in a lot of third-world countries.

One of the guns prodded me in the back, shoving me down the pier toward shore. The two men with the guns behind me were joined by a few of the others, while Horvac and Lavolier led the way. On shore, I was forced up a path cutting diagonally up a small limestone cliff to high ground.

Reaching the top, no more than ten or twelve feet above the water, I heard the boat’s engine start up and it begin idling back out to deeper water.

“Pleasure doing business with ya!” I heard Tex yell.

The limestone was a dead giveaway. I knew there was a cove just to the north of here where snook came by the hundreds at high tide to feed on the smaller fish every fall. They were hiding out on Panther Key in the Ten Thousand Islands. Just across Gullivan Bay from here is the resort town of Marco Island. I could just see the faint glow from the town on the horizon.

The procession wound along a path inland through the pine forest for a couple hundred yards. Soon, we came into a clearing where there were a number of simple wooden structures. I could hear a generator running and there were lights in two of the buildings. More people were there, milling about, but none looked at Horvac.

They’re afraid of her
,
I thought. What was it Gabriel had called her? The voodoo spirit of love? Spirits are highly feared among voodoo practitioners, especially the uneducated ones. The men here at this camp weren’t gangbangers, like Lavolier and Gabriel. These were the poorest of the poor, Haitian refugees. The mere mention of a spirit would cow them into submission. Mix that with what I knew about the woman’s affinity for herbs and pharmaceuticals and it was no wonder they trembled in her presence. Zoe Pound was probably using them for slave labor, to harvest pot in the surrounding forest.