Tonton
Page 1
TONTON
TONTON
A Hunter Kincaid Mystery
By
Billy Kring
Copyright 2015 by Billy Kring
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover by:
Elizabeth Mackey Graphic Design: www.elizabethmackey.com
Books by Billy Kring:
The Hunter Kincaid Mystery Series
QUICK
OUTLAW ROAD
THE EMPTY LAND
TONTON
The Ronny Baca Mystery Series
BACA
L.A. WOMAN
Short stories
THE DEVIL’S FOOTPRINTS–A HUNTER KINCAID SHORT STORY
JORNADA
AS B.G. KRING
WHERE EVIL CANNOT ENTER
COWRITTEN WITH GEORGE WIER
1889: JOURNEY TO THE MOON
1899: JOURNEY TO THE MOON
You can find these books and more at my website: www.billykring.com
Want to know when my next novel is available? You can sign up for my new release e-mail list here:
Click me!
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Hunter’s Moon (excerpt)
When shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain?
~Macbeth~
Chapter 1
The rusty freighter was twenty-four hours out of Port-de-Paix when the smugglers threw the first Haitian to the sharks.
Wails and desperate shouts came from the open cargo hold as the Haitians yelled up at the square of sunlight and tried to climb out of the steaming, fetid reek of the ship’s interior. Filthy bilge water was calf-deep, and with every movement of the ship it sloshed around their legs, carrying the urine and feces of three-hundred-twenty-four men, women, and children crammed into an area that, at normal capacity, might fit seventy-five. Heat, humidity, and the smell made the hold like a steam room drenched in sewage and diesel. When a crewman closed the hatch lid, people screamed as darkness added to their sense of suffocation.
During the next hours, several children and old ones slipped into unconsciousness. Those related or simply near them helped to keep their heads from sinking below the water’s surface.
A dozen people fought to push open the hold. Two large men finally succeeded and shoved it aside, scrambling onto the deck only to be knocked down by men wielding wooden clubs. Others crawled out and the crewmen attacked immediately. Women who escaped the hold dropped to their knees and huddled together, and were not beaten.
The pilothouse door opened and a loud voice barked across the deck, “Enough!” The Captain was short, stocky, and very dark, even for a black man. His eyes were terrifying. The black irises were larger than normal by half, and he had no whites, only a dark, muddy brown color on the rest of the eyeball.
He turned his attention to the battered Haitians on the deck and told his men, “Leave the women to watch. Any male who comes on deck is unwelcome. They are to be considered trash. Toss the trash overboard.” Two teenage males clambered on deck when he finished talking. The crewmen pounced on them, then drug the two struggling youths to the rear of the ship. One at time, they tossed the boys over the gunwale, into the froth above the propellers.
One made it to the surface, one did not, and the frothy bubbles turned pink. Another woman crawled from the hold, yelling and screaming at the crew, calling them devils. A crewman behind her grabbed a fistful of hair and dragged the woman kicking and crying to the stern where he flipped her over the railing like a sack of garbage. She screamed until she hit the water and went under, then bobbed to the surface like a cork.
There were not enough crewmen to work the ship and guard the hold, so others escaped the bowels of the vessel as it continued to sail. Each one was thrown overboard. In the next eleven hours the crewmen threw forty-six people into the sea. Twelve of them hit the propellers. By sundown the next day, they averaged three an hour, and by then the fins never left the wake of the ship...
~*~
Hunter Kincaid adjusted her bikini bottom as she jumped to a standing position in the Glastron boat, whooping, “I’ve got another one!” Her rod bent into a hard U as the line whirred off the Penn reel, and she arched her back, fighting to keep the tip high.
“How does she do that?” Randall Ishtee asked. “That’s the fourth one.”
“I know. We’re using the same bait and fishing from the same boat.” John Quick said.
“It’s not fair. We are the Floridians here; we should be catching.”
“Will you quit whining and get the net?”
John picked up the net and slid beside her, watching as she worked the powerful ling until it was tired, and then reeling it alongside the boat. John slid the net under it and brought the big fish on board. “That’s a twenty pounder,” he said.
Randall said, “I can’t believe she’s catching ling right here at the mouth of the New River. Have you ever caught ling here? Neither have I. She’s using spells or something.”
Hunter laughed, “Maybe if we eat this one, you’ll feel better?”
“Word on that.”
John unhooked the ling and tossed it into the ice filled Yeti cooler. When he straightened he saw an old, rusty freighter coming their direction from the open sea, and coming fast. “Hey.”
Randall and Hunter looked as John pointed, “That one’s not slowing down.”
Randall said, “Pull the anchor, I’ll start us up.” He started the engine as John pulled in the anchor line. “Might want to hurry, John.”
The freighter listed at fifteen degrees, and the engine belched black smoke, but it came on, with the prow pushing wakes of white foam along its sides. There were far too many people crowded and milling about on the ship. “I think its Haitians,” Randall said. “How are you coming with that anchor? I need to move us, like right now.”
John cleared the anchor from the water and said, “Go!” Randall roared the engines and the rear of the boat humped down in the water for a moment as its bow rose like a rearing horse, then they shot diagonally across the river mouth toward the south shore just as the freighter lumbered and groaned by them. Wide-eyed, desperate looking black people stared at them as the boat passed.
John said, “Another five seconds and we would have been underneath that thing.” He pulled his phone and dialed, “We just had a freighter full of possible Haitian refugees steam into the mouth of the New River. Yes, in Fort Lauderdale. Would you contact the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol about this? What’s it look like? Believe me, they’ll recognize it when they see it.” He hung up and said, “Let’s see where it goes.”
As Randall pulled onto the freighter’s wake, Hunter saw a large, dark shape pass under them in the water. Her scalp prickled and she sucked in a breath. “That’s a shark.”
“Big one.” John said, “Eight, nine feet. A bull shark.”
“In the river?”
“Uh-huh. They like areas where fresh water meets the ocean, but usually they wait offshore, not come upstream.”
Randall said, “They’ve been caught miles upstream in rivers, too. The incident in Matawan Creek where several people were killed by a shark was probably a bull shark, although it was first reported to be a great white.”
“Uh-huh,” Randall said, “This one’s zeroing in on something; see how fast, and in a straight line? It’s after food. So don’t fall overboard.”
Hunter asked, “Are they in here all the time?”
“More than people think,” John said, “Those, and tiger sharks sometimes. But sharks aren’t really that dangerous.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t pet it.”
“I only meant that they aren’t always looking for humans to eat. People get bit, but if you knew how many people were in the ocean and sharks like that were within twenty, thirty yards of them, and the people didn’t get bit, that’s what I meant.”
Hunter said, “My logical mind understands that, but my desert living, self-preservation mind says you’re crazy, and that if I’m in the water and a shark is in the water, it’s going to eat me.”
John said, “That freighter’s deliberately grounding.”
They watched as the rusty ship lurched to a stop in the shallower water, with the bow two feet from dry land. People poured off the ship on all sides into the water, with a few jumping from the bow onto dry land. Those on land ran in haphazard directions, while many of the ones in the water struggled as if exhausted as they waded ashore to the small strip of sand. One person in deeper water floundered and splashed in an effort not to drown. Randall nosed the boat toward him as John and Hunter leaned over the gunwales to grab him.
He suddenly disappeared below the surface.
Hunter heard sirens coming from several directions, and behind them, she could see Coast Guard ships coming fast up the New River. She started to say something when the man erupted from the water, screaming at the top of his lungs.
She saw the shark’s head, as wide as a small oil drum, clamp on the man’s side and shake him so violently his screams cut off with each jerk of the shark’s head, starting and stopping again and again. The water turned red, and other people in the water screamed as another fin appeared. Hunter leaned far over the side, reaching for the man’s flailing arm.
John jerked her back on the boat so hard it made her teeth click. A shark’s open mouth clacked shut on empty air where she had been an instant before.
“God-o-mighty!” Hunter said, and she looked wide-eyed at John.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, then, lazybones.” He winked at her, and they returned to the gunwale as Randall inched the boat close enough for them to grab the man and pull him on board.
His right side was in shreds, and he was already dead. They turned to the others still in the water and pulled out three more who were unhurt.
Sharks were still there among the people. Randall cut the motor and used a boathook like a harpoon. He hit a bull shark in the gills. The fish slashed its tail, throwing water on Randall, and left the area trailing a red, two-inch wide stream fluttering in the water like a rose colored ribbon.
Hunter looked at the ship’s deck, where people still emerged from the hold and hurried off the vessel. How many people were on there? She thought.
A stocky black man, wearing finer clothing than the others on the ship, talked on a phone as he walked toward the bow. She pointed at him and said, “That’s a smuggler. Can you get me to shore?”
Randall steered the boat and said, “I’ll try, but its tricky here.” He inched forward several feet, then felt the boat’s bottom slide on sand. “That’s it.”
“Okay,” Hunter said, and hopped out of the boat into the waist-deep water. John followed her and they pushed through the water to the bank, climbing out by grabbing handfuls of grass to pull them up the four-foot high ledge. She looked for the short man, but didn’t see him.
John touched her arm and pointed, “There.” Hunter took off like a shot.
A midnight blue Lincoln stopped on the nearby street and the stocky man reached it in a quick jog. He opened the back door and turned to look at Hunter and John as they ran across the grass.
His eyes were black holes.
Hunter broke stride when she saw them. Then he was in the car and it sped away with a squeal of tires.
John said, “Did you get the plates?”
“No. Did you see his eyes?”
“Scared the crap out of me.”
“Me, too. He won’t be hard to describe to the police.”
Randall trotted to them and said, “I don’t know about you two, but that’s about all the adventure I want for today.”
~*~
They stayed as the Border Patrol, Fort Lauderdale Police, and Coast Guard went over the scene. Bob Redus, the Border Patrol Assistant Chief that John and Randall knew from a previous case, said hello, then said to Hunter, “Hey, Kincaid. How are you doing? You down here on vacation?”
“Yeah, these guys wanted to show me how to relax in Florida.”
“Some relaxing, huh?”
John asked, “You two know each other?”
Bob said, “We worked a couple of details together about five, six years ago. The last one was in Arizona, I think.”
“Yeah. That was a good one. Is ICE coming in on this?”
“Yep, they should be here in a few. A fellow named Bob Wallis is lead.”
“How’s he?”
“As good as they get. We’ve worked with him before.”
Redus looked over his shoulder and said, “Our guys have on their Hazmat suits, so I guess I’ll go board the freighter. You all want to come?”
“Sure,” Hunter said. “Why Hazmat suits?”
“Hunter, the interior of that hold is so full of bacteria and diseases it would almost be better to drop napalm on this thing. I’m not kidding.”
“Those people were in there for the entire trip?”
“Uh-huh. I know what you’re thinking, and it’s a crying shame, too, because most of them ran off and they’re going to become very sick. Some will die from it. If we’d caught them, they would have received medical attention. Come on.” Bob led them to an area ten feet from the hold opening.
The breeze changed and blew across the open hold to Hunter’s face. She felt her stomach lurch, “Oh, my gosh.”
“Want some Vicks?” Bob handed the small, cobalt blue glass container to her. She put a daub of it under her nose, and then handed the container to John and Randall. One of the Hazmat men in the hold emerged and handed a crude painting in a frame to one of the other men wearing Hazmat gloves. Bob said to him, “Check the back of the painting.”
The man did, and said, “It’s got writing on it.”
“Show it to Andre Benton.” The man waved at a Border Patrol Agent who resembled the actor, Don Cheadle. He walked to them and looked at the writing.
Andre said, “It’s Creole, talking about a voodoo spell to hide the freighter from the Coast Guard as they cross, even if they pass within inches of each other.”
Bob said, “I thought that might be it.”
Andre said, “One of the Haitians I talked to a few minutes ago swore that he felt them turn invisible when they saw a Coast Guard ship on the horizon, then they re-materialized when the Guard was gone.”
Another Hazmat suit popped up from the hold and said to Redus, “We’ve got four bodies down here. They were under the bilge water. I didn’t find them until I stepped on the first one. Two women, an old man, and an infant, maybe six months, so now there are four murders to go with everything else.” He added, “I’m gonna need a stiff drink after this shift.”
Randall said, “John and I know the Lauderdale Homicide Detectives. We can give them a call, if you want. Get them started this way.”
“That would help, thanks.” John and Randall moved away several steps for less noise when they called, and Bob said to Hunter, “You want to help out? You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, I’ll hang around. Thanks.”
“If you’re going to work on this, are you carrying?”
Hunter put her hands on her hips. “I’m wearing a bi
kini.”
Bob looked at the sky and bit his lower lip to keep from grinning, “Why, so you are.”
“Do I need a weapon? There are a dozen armed Agents around here.”
“I guess not. I’ll put you with Andre.”
“Works for me.”
Another Agent came to Bob and said, “Just came through dispatch, you need to land-line the Chief.”
“What’s going on?”
“There were two other boatloads of Haitians that landed at different places farther up the coast since midnight, and another one that the Coast Guard just found capsized off the Cay Sal Banks in the Bahamas. Thirty, forty drowned on that one, and another hundred or so are clinging to the half-submerged ship.”
Bob said, “Let me find a phone. Hunter, get with Andre and tell him you’ll be working with him.”
~*~
Andre and Hunter talked to the refugees one at a time, allowing them to sit in a tree-shaded grassy area beside the Border Patrol Suburban. One of the women spoke English. Hunter said to her, “I saw one man, dressed nice, and he was short and stocky.”
The woman said, “I do not know that one.”
“He had unusual eyes, very black.”
The woman shook her head, “No, no, no, I will not talk of him.”
Andre spoke to her in Creole for several minutes. She finally nodded and wiped her eyes, “He is the Captain of the ship, and an evil man. He threw my husband to the sharks.”
“He did what?”
“He had his men grab my husband and throw him overboard. Sharks were behind the ship. They were always behind the ship after our fist day.”
“And you saw this?”
“They told me to stay on the deck and watch. I saw all of it.”
Andre and Hunter looked at each other. Andre said to her, “Will you tell us about the journey?” She nodded as a tear slid down her cheek. “Leave nothing out,” Andre said. She didn’t.
Later, Andre and Hunter told the woman’s story to John, Randall, and two Lauderdale homicide detectives named Bustamante and Rahinsky. “Jesus Christ,” Rahinsky said.