Breakwater

by Jack Hardin

  Both ladies were nearly bent over in laughter. “A real Casanova,” Ellie finally said.

  “I can see why you’ve never told me that one,” Tiffany smirked.

  “Tyler,” Nick said, a warning in his voice, “you’d better watch it. I’ve got plenty on you, my friend.”

  “The pictures are what hold the magic,” Tyler said. “You’ve got stories. You have no pictures.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.”

  Through the laughter, Ellie noted that Nick was smiling, but it wasn’t reaching his eyes.

  Forty-five minutes later Ellie and Tyler said goodbye to their friends and hung back outside the front of the restaurant. Tyler assessed the row of cars hugging the sidewalk. “You park in the back?”

  “No, I rode the boat in. Docked it across the street at the park.”

  Tyler studied her for a moment. “Your boat? You overslept and took your boat? Driving would have taken half the time.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “You know, when Sally mentioned Brett, you seemed caring but not surprised. And I’ve never known you to oversleep anything except maybe an early morning dental appointment.”

  She raised her chin and looked him in the eye. “Your point?”

  Tyler produced a pack of gum from his pocket and tossed a piece in his mouth. He worked it between his teeth as he studied her. “You know, one of these days you could invite me along. Overslept my ass.”

  Ellie looked out toward the Matlacha Pass Bridge where plenty of hopefuls had nearly two dozen lines in the water. “Noted.”

  “How’d you find him?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “All right, Miss I-have-my-ways. What did you do it for, other than your general disdain for low-lives?”

  “I had a hunch, and it paid off. Literally. Sally should be good on money for a little while.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “I am not.”

  His eyes narrowed on her. “You’re not normal. You know that, right?”

  “You like me this way.”

  “I like to side with the honey badger.”

  “You think Nick’s okay?” she asked. “Something’s off with him. I think it’s more than just him being tired.”

  “Not sure,” Tyler said. “He didn’t seem like himself to me either. When he gets back from Miami, I’ll take him fishing out in the Sound, get a few beers in him, and see if I can get him to talk.”

  “Take him fishing? On a boat?” It was a well-known fact that Tyler liked to be on a boat about as much as Ellie liked tolerating drug dealers. That aside, Ellie still loved him, even in the face of such a monumental flaw.

  “Did I say the Sound?” He winked at her. “I sorta meant the pier.” Then he looked at his watch and pulled out his truck keys. “I’ve got to run. Have a handgun class to teach.”

  They said goodbye, and Ellie called over her shoulder as she crossed the empty street. “And find your hat.”

  Chapter Four

  The card reader accepted the magnetic strip and beeped, illuminating a tiny green diode above the handle. Nick Barlow pushed open the door to his downtown Miami hotel room and wheeled his travel suitcase in behind him. The door slapped shut as he jammed a finger behind his collar and loosened his tie, a bright orange tie Tiff had gotten for him just last week. Orange was his favorite color, so it followed that this was now his favorite tie. He sat down on the bed and ran his hands across his face. Even from this side of the balcony door, he could hear the muted sounds of the city—the thin whine of car brakes, a police siren, a child laughing loudly.

  Beads of nervous sweat were popping up along the back of his neck and underarms and forehead. He came back to his feet. Anxiety huddled deep in his abdomen, and he started to pace the floor like a caged animal.

  He wanted to tell Tiff. He had wanted to tell her yesterday. And the day before. He’d wanted to say something all week. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

  It was all getting to be too much.

  Opening the door to the mini bar he reached for the gin. But he stopped midway and withdrew his hand. Alcohol wouldn’t make this go away. He tried swallowing back the dread that had taken up residence in his chest like a malignant tumor.

  He removed his wallet and phone and set them on the desk along with his car keys.

  Nothing would make this go away.

  Retirement was not unlike an extended summer vacation. Just this morning he had taken two of his grandchildren to the beach. The day before that he had taken another to a movie. He was learning things about the grandkids and even his wife that he hadn’t paid mind to before. Two weeks on three days off meant you didn’t get a lot of time with those you love. It meant you had to tailor your entire life around the job. But now everything was a little surreal. No more spending his nights alone in a sleeper cab while vehicles sped by at eighty-miles-an-hour. No more spending another night away from the lady who’d grabbed his eye and his heart way back at Eagle Mountain High.

  That’s what Walter Bennett was thinking as he held his wife’s hand and strode down the sidewalk with her. After thirty-eight years of driving a big rig for North American, Walter had finally turned the keys in and retired to South Florida. He and Mary were still enjoying the experience of waking up together and realizing that they had all day to do everything or nothing at all. Tonight he was walking her to the Miami Symphony for a performance of Beethoven’s 5th. Walter himself preferred the likes of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard over Beethoven, but he’d learned over the years that keeping a healthy marriage meant doing things for your loved one that you might not choose for yourself.

  They crossed the street and headed east on NW 39th Street. Suddenly, they heard a muted scream from across the street. Muted because at their age everything sounded muted, as if swimming underwater. Scuba divers in a world absent of water. Another scream issued from somewhere behind them just as something tumbled out of the sky and punched into the concrete five feet in front of them. A sickening thud raced down the street, and blood from the man’s head slung against Walter’s pants legs.

  Mary screamed; that rare type of howl that comes out half wild animal and half pure terror. The kind of scream that most people can go through their entire lives and only hear in the movies. Mary’s hand left her husband’s and went to cover her mouth as she stumbled backward. Walter couldn’t move. He just stared bewildered at the man’s body before a vibrating tingle worked a track down his arm and he began to feel a tightening in his chest, as though someone was ratcheting his ribcage in toward his spine. He tried to speak, tried to tell Mary that he was having a heart attack, but before he could open his mouth, he pitched forward, his own head hitting the pavement just inches from the body of the man wearing a bright orange tie.

  Four stories above, the curtains in Nick Barlow’s room danced past the threshold and onto the balcony, stirred by a cool evening breeze.

  Chapter Five

  It wasn’t easy, walking into someone else’s nightmare. Ellie sat behind the wheel of her Silverado holding Tiffany’s hand across the console, staring at the trunk of a palm that stood just off her front bumper. “I don’t want to go in,” Tiffany said resolutely. “This can’t be happening.” She let go of Ellie’s hand and used the inside of her hands to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

  “I know,” Ellie replied softly. It hadn’t been twenty-four hours since she, Tyler, Nick, and Tiffany had breakfast together. No one foresaw that the very next morning both ladies would get up before dawn to drive across the Everglades to sit in the parking lot of the Miami-Dade morgue before they opened at eight o’clock.

  Ellie waited for Tiffany to open the passenger door before turning off the truck and stepping out. The air was cool and moist, the breeze calm, the morning mocking them as they walked toward the building with heavy hearts and damp eyes.

  They entered the lobby, and Ellie gave the receptionist Tiffany’s name. A row of chairs lined the
entrance hallway, and they were asked to take a seat while they waited.

  Five minutes later an older gentleman with bowed shoulders and a receding silver hairline came down the hall and stopped in front of them. He introduced himself as Harold Wilson, one of the medical examiners. His facial features were sharp and handsome, his gray-blue eyes kind. He reminded Ellie a little of her father, and for a brief moment, she was overcome by how much she missed him.

  Harold shook hands with both ladies and asked them to follow him. He led them to the end of the hall where they turned and entered a small space that looked a little like an interrogation room. A table sat in the center of the linoleum with two chairs on each side. Harold pulled out one for Tiffany and then took the chair beside her and brought out an iPad that had been tucked under his arm.

  Ellie stood behind Tiffany and remained silent.

  Tiffany turned toward the older man. “Do we not view the body in person? I’m sorry. All I know about this kind of thing is what I’ve seen on television.”

  “I understand. No, we don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Most counties don’t. The floor in the morgue is hard, and I’m afraid we had too many people pass out over the years. Some were injured in the process.” He smiled kindly. “A few years back we started taking pictures and just show them to you here on the iPad.” He pressed the home button on the device and swiped a finger across the screen several times. “If I may prepare you, Mrs. Barlow. When your husband fell, he landed predominately on his right side. His head hit just before his body. So the right side of his face is, well…” He drifted off before continuing. “We’ve laid a cloth over the crown of his head and taken the picture of the left side of his face.”

  “I see,” Tiffany said. Then she steeled her jaw before nodding to indicate she was ready.

  Howard tapped the screen a final time and slid the device in front of her. From behind, Ellie watched Tiffany’s body stiffen as she looked over the image. Ellie leaned in, and her stomach fell as she saw Nick resting on a cold metal table.

  “Mrs. Barlow?” Howard finally asked.

  “That’s him,” Tiffany choked out.

  Howard nodded respectively, the way a funeral director might. “I’m very sorry,” he said. Then he tapped the glass a couple more times and asked Tiffany to use her finger to provide a digital signature identifying the body as belonging to Nick.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “We’ll turn his body over to the mortician, and I believe he’ll have your husband’s ashes ready by the end of the week. You can come pick them up, or we can ship them to you.”

  “What about an investigation or something?”

  Howard gave a small shrug, and Ellie laid a hand on her friend’s shoulder as he spoke. “A detective will be assigned to your husband’s death and will look at all the possibilities involved. They should be in communication with you as early as today.”

  “All right. Thank you.” Tiffany nodded pensively and stood up.

  The entire ordeal was over in less than ten minutes.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Ellie said as they arrived back at the truck and got in.

  Tiffany buckled and leaned against the door. Her fingers were busy picking nervously at each other as they lay in her lap.

  “What happened, Ellie? Since Kayla was born, I haven’t seen Nick get drunk. There’s no other explanation for him falling off that balcony. Other than someone…pushing him.” Her voice trailed off.

  “They’ll look at all the angles,” Ellie replied, “and see if they can locate any video footage.”

  “He was acting strange the last few days. I even asked him about it, but he said it was nothing. But he wasn’t himself.”

  Ellie started the truck. “I know. Let’s see what the investigation turns up, alright? It was probably just a freak accident.” She hated that term. Freak accident. It sounded like a clown had gotten in a car wreck. But she couldn’t think of anything better off the top of her head.

  “Yeah, okay,” Tiffany said. “Ellie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m scared. And I don’t know how to do this.”

  “I know.” Ellie reached over and gave her hand another squeeze. “We’ll do it together.”

  Chapter Six

  The darkness incumbent in the human heart, the raw lust to achieve selfish ends at the cost of another human’s blood or dignity or life, still astounded him. Even now as he entered his sixth decade of life.

  He held a printout of the teenage girl’s photo in the palm of his hand. Her hair, the color of night, reached nearly to her waist. She looked past the camera, expressionless, her hands at her side. She was pretty—full lips, small nose, and high cheeks. A face which, in that single moment of time, reflected a simple beauty. It was her eyes that harbored the pain. Two dark pools of sadness.

  Jet Jahner laid the photo in the center of his desk and drummed his fingers across the wood. He sighed, and his gaze drifted to the framed quote hanging on the wall near the front door.

  “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” In its more popular form, the quote read, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” a faulty rendering that even John F. Kennedy had once mistakenly attributed to Edmund Burke. But Jet had chosen to display the quote as it stood in history, penned by John Stuart Mill. It summed up not only Jet’s entire career but his personal view on life. Evil men, as it were, never slept, always scheming fresh ways to get ahead on the backs and blood of others.

  They needed to be stopped.

  He had been in his early thirties when he stood over Pablo Escobar’s bullet-riddled body on that red tile rooftop in Medellín. Watching members of the Search Bloc huddled in front of Escobar’s cooling body, Jet had learned what many never do: even the worst of men are still, in the end, just men. And as men, they die and leave everything they have acquired behind for someone else to possess. Jet understood that day that even the worst of humanity—men like Escobar—were not invincible. They were not gods hailing from Mount Olympus. No, what set them apart was their ability to skirt the law and bribe those enforcing it. They were simply wise in the doing of evil, and the world remained full of men and women who woke up each morning and decided afresh to wipe their dark brush over the canvas of the world all over again.

  Jet’s hair was gray now, nearly silver, decades away from the chestnut brown of his youth. This time last year he had been quietly entertaining the idea of stepping away from the agency, considering whether or not it was time to turn in his badge and put the DEA behind him. But when Garrett Cage, Special Agent in Charge of the Fort Myers office, had brought on Ellie O’Conner as outside support to assist in finding local drug dealers, Jet had been all in. Over the course of the next several months, they found success, taking down three separate drug operations as well as a smaller syndicate that dealt in illegal arms. With those victories behind him, and knowing that the county in which his grandkids were growing up was a little safer, he decided to hand over his badge. He had put in his time fighting drugs, and it was time to step aside so the next generation could take their place in a war with ever-changing faces and foes.

  But leaving the DEA had not been an invitation to retirement. Not yet, anyway. Spending most of his time between the putting green and his fishing boat was still a few years out. He had spent his entire professional career acquiring an extensive repository of skills, and he wasn’t quite ready to shelve them.

  After whittling down his options, Jet had, with certain parameters, decided to step into private investigation. He had no plans to stare down cheating spouses with his camera or assist defense attorneys in helping to exonerate potentially guilty people. Defense attorneys had to operate on the assumption that their clients were innocent. Jet did not. He had spent his former career putting people behind bars. He wasn’t about to cross the aisle to work for the defense.

  The deci
sion to become a PI had not been made in a vacuum. Florida’s new governor, Judy Ratcliffe, had recently campaigned on a promise to raise clearance rates across the state. The clearance rate was the percentage of cases in which a suspect was arrested and charged for a particular crime. Over the last decade, violent crimes had seen clearance rates of just over fifty percent, a number that was slowly declining on a year-by-year basis. Simply put, of all the murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults across the state of Florida, half of them never laid a charge to anyone for the crime; no one was ever arrested.

  Police departments countered these statistics with a legitimate argument: standards for charging someone had become too high, with many prosecutors demanding that detectives deliver "open-and-shut cases" that would lead to quick plea bargains. Cases, however, tended not to wrap themselves in pretty little bows. Alibis were checked and rechecked, witnesses questioned, evidence examined, indicators followed and pursued. Still, in the end, you handed the DA the best you had, even if that translated into more work on their end to get a conviction.

  Eight years ago, Governor Ratcliffe’s own daughter had been murdered in Orlando as she walked home from her job at Altamonte Mall. Her killer was never caught. After taking office, Ratcliffe had followed through on her promise and devised the Closure Act, a unique solution intended to drive up clearance rates by ten percent over the next five years. Often times, all a case needed was a fresh perspective. Somebody along the line missed a connection or didn’t think a lead serious enough to follow up. So a team of independent investigators would be assembled to get fresh eyes on certain cases, cases that had been worked properly but hit dead ends.

  Naturally, the decision had been unpopular among most in the law enforcement community. No one was interested in someone from the outside nosing around their case, even if they were supposedly on the same team. But when protocols were defined to ensure that outside help would not lead to detectives getting their toes stepped on or their cases mishandled, tempers settled and optimism rose. The new team would only handle cases flagged as suspended by the assigned detective. Only then could the case get picked up—only when the investigation had been exhausted and was still lacking enough evidence for an arrest. If the case was revived by an investigator and an arrest made, it would be the detective who received the credit.