by Jack Hardin
“What’s the matter, Joel? I thought you said it was time to say goodbye.”
He cursed at her and tried to stand up, but she formed a solid fist with her right hand and sent it into his shoulder like a rocket.
Fagan howled through the pain.
Kathleen returned to her seat, her knuckles stained with Fagan’s blood, and observed him like she would a wounded animal at the zoo.
At the other end of the room, the front door opened, and a man's sturdy figure stepped into the foyer. Another man followed behind. One of them stepped into view. He was wearing a contented smile.
Fagan choked and coughed. It was Ryan Savage.
Savage stepped into the room. A customized AR-style rifle was in his hands.
Fagan’s eye grew as large as a saucer. His face pinched into a wince as he tried to sit up straighter. “You?” he screeched. “That—that’s not—not possible!”
CHAPTER
Eight Hours Earlier
Falling out of an airplane without a parachute does not come recommended. Not by me, anyway.
I tumbled out of the plane with nothing on my back but my favorite polo shirt. It flapped mercilessly against my back as gravity pulled me greedily to the earth. Within seconds, I had reached terminal velocity and was plummeting at 120 miles per hour toward the dark mass of the Caribbean Ocean three miles below.
The ground sped toward me at nearly two hundred feet per second. Assuming the plane was at fourteen or fifteen thousand feet altitude when Fagan pushed me out, then I had less than eighty seconds before I met my Maker.
The air temperature grew warmer as I hurtled toward the earth.
My life didn’t exactly flash before my eyes, but the expression is appropriate enough for what happened on my way down.
I thought of my parents, my mother and father. I recalled how my mother would throw a baseball in the back yard with me when my dad was TDY. My father wiping a line of grease down my nose as we tinkered together underneath his ’68 Mustang.
I remembered their faces, their expressions, and the kind tones that were always present in their voices, and then the tears in my grandmother's eyes as she told five-year-old me that they had gotten into a car crash in Paris and had gone on to heaven. Throughout my life, I had racked my earliest memories to try to draw up anything specific that they had said to me. But all I ever got was just one thing from my father. We were changing the oil in his Mustang when he looked over at me and set a hand on my shoulder. “It’s a hard world, son. Fight for what’s right. Always fight for what’s right.”
I don’t know what was going through his mind that day, or what had prompted him to convey that particular nugget of wisdom, but now that I was facing imminent death, I could honestly say that I had done my best to live my life by those words.
The surface of the earth continued to stretch out in front of me, gravity pulling me hungrily toward it.
And now my life was live streaming before my eyes. I recalled having to move in with my grandmother and then the string of rebellious and angry teen years. I remembered hiking Colorado’s 14ers during my high school years, skiing the white slopes of the Rockies in the winter, and fishing the stream behind our house.
I reflected on the man who had gotten me back on track when my grandmother was heartbroken and all out of options with me. At the time, I was angry, lonely, and friendless, a young man filled with a flurry of hormones and a growing anger that my parents weren’t around to help me navigate life.
We lived far away from any city—the rural bus drive to school was nearly half an hour—and I spent the better part of my early childhood roaming the foothills, wading through streams, and camping under the stars. The nearest kid to my age lived over five miles away, so I learned to keep busy with shooting my .22, making traps to catch squirrels and coons, and fishing.
My grandmother had a neighbor who used to stop by and visit at regular intervals. Barnabas Jones had been a decorated investigator with the LAPD for over thirty years before retiring to the mountains of Colorado. My grandmother didn’t allow for much TV time, so Barnabas stopping by was often the highlight of my week.
I would sit for hours on the front porch, listening to Barnabas recount case after case from the old days. My grandmother would shoot him a warning glare when his facts started to venture into gruesome territory. The gritty details, of course, were my favorite, and Barnabas would usually fill me in on them when my grandmother wasn’t around.
It was the old man’s singular influence that developed my mind to see connections and threads that often seemed invisible to others. Had it not been for him and his stories, I would have never considered becoming a military police investigator.
But more than an influence on my future career, Barnabas taught me the value of respect, of working hard and taking responsibility for my own life. He impressed on me that men don’t use an unfortunate hand in life as an excuse for irrepressibility, laziness, and uncontrolled anger. My parents may have been taken early, but how I responded to what life gave me was up to me alone.
Barnabas drifted away, and I saw rapid-fire images of my beautiful wife, who, like my parents, was also taken from me far too early. I saw friends and fugitives alike from the Florida Keys and beyond.
The ground rushed at me now, larger and more menacing with every second.
I would hit the water like it was a slab concrete. My bones would shatter, and my face would be unrecognizable. I pitied the fisherman or law enforcement personnel who would find me.
Below, I thought I could just make out a tiny cay. And then there were more, each no more than a few acres and their surfaces bare of any vegetation. Just sandy cays strung independently from their near neighbors like the simple curve of a pearl necklace.
Awesome. I get to die on land instead of the water.
Fagan hadn’t allowed me the small luxury of tossing me out of his airplane with an altimeter, but I’d jumped out of enough airplanes over Fort Bragg to make a solid guess at my rapidly decreasing altitude.
4000 feet…
3000 feet…
2000 feet…
Instinctively, my body tensed.
Lord, please don't let me feel anything before the lights go out.
Suddenly, something heavy plowed into my right side from above. My body twisted hard from the impact, nearly sending me into a full-on spin. I felt strong arms encircle my chest, and a wide strap being pulled across it and under my arms.
My approach to the earth’s surface hadn’t slowed in the slightest, and I grimaced as I braced for an imminent impact.
And that was the moment I heard the familiar snap of a parachute as it unfurled and filled with air.
We were still coming in fast—too fast—and the strap dug hard underneath my armpits as it took the weight of several Gs and my body slumped into it. The pressure was immense, and I thought that should I actually touch down safely on the earth, it was going to be with a handful of snapped ribs.
I heard the distinct sound of a knife slicing through fabric. The tension around my chest vanished as the strap gave way. Free once again from any constraints, I plummeted the final fifteen feet into the sandy cay below, trying to roll with as much agility as I could, but landing more in a flop than anything that might pass for professional finesse.
I looked to my left to see the man who had grabbed me touch down. His body was swallowed up in a red squirrel suit that now hung about his body like loose skin. He quickly gathered his chute lines into his arms and then the chute itself before dropping the bundle into the sand.
I still couldn’t see his face. His back was toward me, and I started toward him as he shimmied out of the parachute harness. He turned around and slipped his goggles off his face.
It was Brad.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Surely the trauma of my fall was messing with my eyesight, bringing on the beginnings of a panic attack or a complete mental breakdown. But, oddly enough, I didn’t feel panicked. R
ubbing my eyes in the harsh glare, I looked back at him as I tried to catch my breath. “Brad…? What in the—”
“I think what you’re trying to say is, ‘thank you,’” Brad grinned. “That’s what you’re trying to say, right? ‘Thanks, Brad, for that incredible feat of strength and prowess.’” Brad unzipped the squirrel suit and somewhat awkwardly extricated himself from it. “Didn’t think I was going to catch up to you there for a while.”
“Where in the hell did you come from? How did you do that?”
“Dude, I just told you. Strength and prowess. By the way, you just used up eight of your nine lives, pal. And I think I just qualified for a Red Bull extreme sports sponsorship.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I just did that. I seriously didn’t think it would work.”
My heart was still thumping like a jackhammer. It took a few more seconds to catch my breath. “Seriously,” I finally said. “What just happened?”
“My flight into St. Lucia landed on the airstrip just as Fagan was loading you into the plane. After my plane cleared the runway, yours was the next to go. We were only halfway to the hangar when I told the pilot to stop. I bolted off that thing like someone had just told me that happy hour was free. It only took me a minute to find a guy who does skydiving charters. He was about to take a couple of folks up when I told him your predicament and handed him a few hundred bucks.”
“You followed Fagan’s plane all the way out here?”
“Yeah. But barely. The skydiving plane had a max altitude of sixteen thousand feet. Fagan’s cargo plane had another 10K on us for most of the trip. But when I saw them descend to our level, I had a pretty good idea what Fagan was going to do. There was no other reason for it. So I suited up and told the pilot to move off course a little and get even lower.”
I clapped my best friend on the shoulder. “Thanks. I owe you one big time. That was a helluva save.”
“And I won’t let you forget it.”
I could feel the adrenaline starting to wear off, and I turned my attention to our newest dilemma. I looked around the tiny cay. The entire area couldn't have been more than five acres. Other than a few other cays in the tiny chain, we were completely surrounded by dark blue water as far as the eye could see.
“Any idea where we are?” I asked.
“Right before I jumped, the pilot told me we were near a chain of unmarked cays at the southern end of the West Indies. For whatever that’s worth.”
I looked around the small island, having no desire to end up like a heavily bearded and hopeless Tom Hanks.
Brad seemed to read my mind. “Shoot,” he said. “I didn’t even bring a volleyball.”
“So,” I said. “You saved me from becoming a human slurry. Now what do we do?”
Brad rested his hands on his hips and looked west across the water. “Guess we, uh, start swimming.”
CHAPTER
Joel Fagan squirmed on his former fiance’s couch like a salted slug.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Never been shot before?”
“Personally,” Kathleen said, “it’s been my experience that the most ruthless are the biggest cowards.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I took your eye twenty years ago. Today I take your dignity. You’re going to spend the last of your days in a concrete room. No one on this entire planet will miss you. No one will even think of you.”
Brad had come in behind me. We exchanged a glance. Kathleen was a rock star.
“You know,” I said. “The irony here is that I wanted to send that bullet between your eyes. It’s Kathleen who saved your life. She told me we had to do this the right way. By the book.”
Kathleen crossed her legs and folded her hands across her lap. She had known all along that we had her back, but either way you look at it, an operation like this is not for the faint of heart. She looked like she had just spent the last hour at a seaside bar sipping margaritas. “You’re going to pay for your many crimes, Joel. Killing you would just let you off the hook.”
“Thanks for telling me that you planned on having a drink with her tonight,” I said.
“How—how did you—”
“I saved him,” Brad said proudly. “Yep. It was me. All me.”
“How?”
“I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of knowing,” I said.
Before jumping out of the airplane, Brad had shoved his satellite phone down the leg of his squirrel suit. A quick call to Kathleen once we landed on the cay, and we were back in the Keys in less than three hours.
Fagan’s face was white, drained of all color. The shock of the bullet wound and the reality that this wasn’t something that he would be getting out of was settling in.
“Imagine my surprise,” I said, “when I got a call from a customs official at the Martinique port thirty minutes ago informing me that they discovered a container full of guns on a freighter about to raise anchor and begin its journey to Mexico.”
Fagan swore under his breath. Red and blue lights pulsed across Kathleen’s face as a line of squad cars rolled down her drive.
I stepped closer to him. “This is what checkmate looks like, you sonofabitch.” Then I grabbed the back of his head and sent my knee into his face. His head snapped back, and he crumbled onto the couch. We all stared at him for a while, relishing in the realization that the Fagan saga was finally over.
Finally, Kathleen stood up. She crossed the floor into the dining room and retrieved her wine glass. “Anyone want a beer?”
CHAPTER
I slept in until noon the next day. I generally hate getting up late, but the high-octane events of the last week had apparently worn me out more than I realized.
Lisa made me breakfast for lunch—eggs, bacon, and cheesy grits—and then Brad and I sat on his back porch and debriefed for the next two hours. He filled me in on his vacation, and I brought him up to speed on the details of the investigation, starting with Darren Reddick showing up at my boat and ending with Fagan grabbing me on Saint Lucia.
“I’m disappointed that he got the drop on you,” Brad said. “You’re losing your touch.”
“Maybe.”
My phone buzzed with a text notification. I picked up and read it.
“Is that her?” Brad asked.
“Yeah,” I said, reading the screen and standing up. “Let’s get going.”
We went out front and hopped into Brad’s bright red Jeep Gladiator. He cranked it up and pulled out of the driveway. Five minutes later, he pulled into the only vacant parking space in front of The Wayward Reef. The building was formed of unpainted clapboard that had grown gray from years under the Florida sun. The simple tin roof was starting to rust in places, and along the front eave were mounted a couple of plastic dolphins that, oddly enough, looked right at home where they were. The door squeaked a familiar tone as I pulled it open, and we walked inside to the loud clamor of happy conversation and the jukebox blaring Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World.”
It was good to be back.
Scenery, people, drink, food, and music; that’s what made this paradise. Take one of those away, and it messed with your inner ear and turned everything upside down. I had to agree with the song: if I was in charge of the world, I'd toss away the cars and—well, maybe not the bars—but certainly the wars.
We crossed the floor to a table in the back, where Ellie and Kathleen were in conversation and enjoying a couple of beers. I introduced Brad to Ellie, and we sat down next to them, taking a seat across from each other.
Ellie had just returned stateside from Saint Lucia, having remained there yesterday to make sure Rory got safely onto the plane that would take him back to his mother in England.
“How is Rory?” I asked her.
“The local doctors got him stitched up and rehydrated. They wanted to wait another day to clear him to fly, but I told them the boy needed his mother more than anything.”
I could see the anger glowing in her eyes.
�
�I’m not sure how you get over something like that as a kid,” she said. “But he’s safe now.”
I hated that I didn’t get to Edward in time. No one deserves to go like he did. But I didn’t say anything about it.
A slender man with a trimmed white beard and a deeply seamed face appeared at the end of the table. A dishrag was draped over a shoulder, and he was holding a plate filled with food.
I met Denny three months ago at the local homeless shelter that I volunteer at. He was an intermittent resident there, but drug free, a hard worker, and a Vietnam Vet. I maneuvered a few things around to help him get back on his feet, and Roscoe offered him a job as cook. Ever since, Roscoe was keen to say that Denny was the best hire he ever made.
Looking at me, Denny said, “These two pretty ladies told Roscoe that you were on your way over. So I made this special for you all.” Denny set the plate in the center of the table. It was piled high with conch fritters. “The remoulade sauce is my own concoction. A little Cajun spice to give it some kick.”
Brad’s eyes bugged out, and he grabbed a fritter, dunked it in the remoulade, and stuffed it in his mouth. Before the vacation, Lisa had put Brad on a diet of sorts, restricting his consumption of alcohol and keeping him off processed foods. But the two-week cruise, with its ever-flowing bars, 24-hour buffets, and half a dozen restaurants, seemed to have upset any previous trend in the weight loss department.
“Hmmm…” Brad smiled around the food and gave Denny a thumbs up. “Well done, sir.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” Denny headed back to the kitchen, and Amy dropped off beers for Brad and me before running off to another table.
“Ellie and I were having a nice chat before you showed up,” Kathleen said. “I’m trying to convince her to move over to my team. You boys wear me out sometimes.”
“I think you’re going to be on the losing end of that conversation,” I said. “As far as I can tell, Pine Island has some mystical hold on her. She’ll never leave.”
Ellie smiled. “Well said.”
“So, Fagan,” Brad said. “Do you think he’ll talk?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. At this point, he’s got nothing else to lose.”