by Matthew Rief
I shook my head. “You urged me to fly all the way here just to apologize?”
He thought for a moment, then took in a deep breath, let it out, and said, “No. The truth is, we believe that your father’s death may not have been an accident.”
My heart nearly stopped at that. Not an accident? I tried to remain calm but could feel the anger swelling deep inside me. I thought back to the detectives and coroners I’d spoken to years ago, who’d assured me that he’d died of heart complications while scuba diving.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice growing stern. “You mean somebody killed him?”
The man stared into my eyes and nodded softly. “Someone dug up your father’s corpse.” He took in a deep breath and added, “Look, we’re trying to piece everything together, but we’ve hit a roadblock,” the detective said. “It appears as though your father knew he was in trouble and left a clue in order to let someone know what happened to him. But none of us can figure it out.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I felt as though I’d stepped into a nightmare that just kept getting worse.
“What’s the clue?”
He dug into the front pocket of his dress pants, pulled out an all-black wristwatch and set it on the bench beside me. I recognized it instantly as a Suunto Core military watch. It had been my favorite watch for years and had a built-in altimeter, barometer and depth meter display up to one hundred feet. It was also incredibly durable and rugged; I’d used it in some of the most dangerous environments on Earth without ever having a glitch. It only took me a second to realize that it was the exact same model and color as the watch I’d given my dad for his last birthday present.
“We found that strapped to the wrist of your father’s dead body.”
I shook my head, wondering what in the hell was going on. “But if that was with my dad, why did whoever desecrated the gravesite leave it there?”
He shrugged. “We don’t know. Maybe they were looking for something in particular. But look on the back,” he said, turning the watch over. “There’s a few words carved into the metal backing.”
Grabbing the watch, I flipped it over and examined the inscription he was referring to. “NEVER LOSE TIME” it said, and it looked like it had been carved using the tip of a knife.
I went quiet for a moment, lost in thought. None of it made sense, and I was starting to grow more and more suspicious of these guys. Who in the hell would dig up a dead body and leave a valuable watch? No, the story had more holes than a fucking cheese grater. Also, the main reason I’d come to Curacao was to see what had happened and to try and find the deadbeats who had done it, but the more time I spent talking to the detectives, the more I felt that they had their own agenda.
“I want to see the body,” I said, my tone shifting from calm to stern in an instant.
I strode towards my dad’s gravesite, but as I did, Detective Millis reached for the 9mm holstered to his waist. In my peripherals, I noticed the two other guys reaching for their weapons as well, and in the blink of an eye, I gripped my Sig, pulled it out from the back of my waistline and aimed it straight at Millis.
We stayed like that for a few seconds, my barrel locked onto his contorted face while three barrels stared back at me.
“Drop your fucking piece, now!” Millis shouted.
I spent a few seconds thinking over all the possible outcomes. I took a quick glance at the top of the hillside and the radio tower high above our position, then decided to do as he said and loosened my grip on my Sig.
As it hit the brown grass at my feet, Millis said, “And that knife you got as well.”
I reached slowly for my dive knife, which was sheathed and strapped horizontally to the back of my black leather belt. Pulling it out, I dropped it onto the grass as well.
“Good boy,” he said, lowering his pistol. “Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. But I promise you this, you’ll be a whole lot happier if we do it the easy way. Got it?” I didn’t reply, but he continued anyway. “Now, about this watch.”
He pointed to my dad’s wristwatch, which was still resting on the table.
I looked over the inscription one more time, then gritted my teeth and said with a cocky tone, “I think I’d prefer the hard way.”
Without a word, the two muscle heads holstered their weapons and moved in on me. Clearly, these were the guys whose job it was to beat information out of people, and they looked like they enjoyed their work. But before they swung at me, Millis stopped them by raising his hand. Then, as the two guys froze in place, he stepped closer to me, bent down and grabbed my Sig from the grass.
Staring at me with an evil smile, Millis said, “You wanna know how your dad died, punk? The truth? Well, I was there that night. I saw the whole damn thing, and you know what? He was shot. That’s right. He was murdered in cold blood. Riddled with hot lead and left to squirm. His body was entombed in a yacht a thousand miles northwest of here in over three hundred feet of water. It took us two years to find that damn wreck, and this watch was the only thing he had on him. Now, unless you want to end up just like him you’ll tell me what this inscription means.”
My mind ran wild. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For two years I thought I knew the truth about what happened to my dad, but it turned out it had all been a lie. All of the hours I’d spent at that cemetery I’d been standing over nothing but dirt.
After a moment, I looked up at him with a fierce gaze and said, “What are you looking for that’s so important?”
“None of your fucking business. Just tell us what it means!” he barked. He was starting to get really frustrated and was breathing heavily.
I didn’t reply. Instead, I just stared down at the watch for a moment, then looked off into the distance.
Millis grunted. “Grab him and throw him in the car. We have plenty of methods we can use to make him talk.”
As the two henchmen moved in and grabbed me with gorilla-tight grips, I said, “Wait!” Then I took a few quick breaths, trying to appear flustered. “I’ll tell you.”
Millis smiled, then told his men to release me. Staring up at him, I said, “But first, I think you should say goodbye to these two assholes, because they’re gonna be dead in a few seconds.”
The three men laughed, and Millis shook his head. “What in the hell are you talking about? How do you plan to kill them unarmed?”
Staring into his dark eyes, I started counting down. “Three… two… one…”
A split second after I said the word one, blood exploded out from the two guys’ heads, one right after the other, and they both collapsed to the ground.
Millis’s eyes grew wide, and his mouth dropped open. His two men appeared to have been killed by a ghost, as no rifle reports could be heard in the morning air. Before he could level his Smith and Wesson at me, I lunged at him, knocked the weapon out of his hand and forced him to the ground. He tried to fight back, but I blocked his attacks and kicked my right heel into his left knee, breaking his leg and causing him to yell out violently in pain.
Squeezing my hands into fists, I punched him across the face a few times, my knuckles cracking his cheekbones and jaw. Blood splattered out from his mouth as he grunted. All I could think about was my dad. How all this time, I’d been led to believe that he’d died naturally. And now—now I’d come to realize that the truth was much more sinister.
When I stopped, he lay on the grass with blood covering his face, his left leg bent sideways at a ninety-degree angle and a large portion of his facial bones broken. His breathing was loud and labored as I grabbed him by his fancy shirt and slammed his body up against the trunk of the nearest divi-divi tree.
“Now,” I said, staring into his weary, beaten eyes, “you’re gonna tell me who you really are, and who else is responsible for my dad’s murder.”
He coughed spatters of blood over his white dress shirt, then lifted his head slowly. “Your father fucked up,” he said, the words struggling out of his mouth. “T
hat’s why they killed him. And now, they’re gonna do the same to you.”
“I don’t think so,” I shot back at him. Then, gripping my hands tighter around his shirt, I pulled him back and slammed him into the tree trunk a few times. “Who do you work for?”
His response was to reach for a small knife strapped to his ankle and slice it through the air towards my thigh. I stopped it by grabbing his wrist, bending his elbow and using a combination of his momentum and my body weight to redirect its course and stab it forcefully into his chest. He yelled out in pain as the sharpened steel penetrated his heart. I wrapped my left hand around his back and pulled, forcing the blade as deep as it would go. Then his eyes shut, his breathing stopped, and as I slid the blade out from his body, he collapsed onto the grass.
CHAPTER FIVE
The three men lay dead at my feet, their blood soaking the dirt and grass. I took a quick look around the area, just to make sure that no one had seen what had just happened. The place was empty, and the dead guys’ silver SUV was still the only other vehicle parked in the cemetery.
I knelt down and searched Millis’s pockets, finding a cell phone in the front left and a brown leather wallet in the back. Sitting on the old bench, I emptied the wallet, creating a pile of Visa credit cards, business cards, Netherlands Antillean guilders, and his driver’s license.
“Enrique Colon,” I said, reading his name aloud. Then I grabbed his cell phone and navigated through the contacts and glanced over the recent messages. After a few minutes, I pocketed his phone, then grabbed my dad’s watch, which was still resting on the table in front of me, and examined it closely, reading the inscription on the back a few more times.
As I stood to move towards the motorcycle, I saw Ange walking about twenty feet away from me, her footsteps quieter than a ninja in the night. Her blond hair was tied back, and she wore a pair of aviator sunglasses and carried the plastic hard case in her right hand. She looked like an action hero as she approached me and stared at the watch in my hands.
“Can I see that?” she said, reaching out with her free hand. I handed it to her, and she examined it for a few seconds. “Never lose time,” she read, then shrugged. “That’s the clue that they wanted you to help them with? What does it mean?”
“It’s not just about the inscription,” I replied. “It’s about the watch itself.” She looked at me, confused, and I added, “I’ll explain later. We should get out of here.”
We hopped onto the Café Racer and I started up the engine, then accelerated us out of the cemetery gravel parking lot and back onto the main two-lane road leading around and down the hill. Glancing at my watch, I saw that it was almost zero seven thirty. We hadn’t even been on the island for an hour yet, and we’d already killed three bad guys and found out a secret that changed everything I’d thought I knew about how my dad had died.
I had a lot of questions swirling around in my mind, and I knew that I needed answers. As much as I usually hated dealing with law enforcement, I knew that my best option was to talk to the real Curacao police and find out everything I could about my new enemies.
As we were cruising east towards Willemstad at over sixty miles per hour, with the sun beating on our faces and the warm air blowing past us, Ange tapped me on the shoulder.
“Your pocket’s ringing,” she said, loud enough for me to hear over the roar of the engine.
I slowed and pulled over into a dirt driveway that was shaded on both sides with coconut trees and had a great view of Kokomo Beach. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the dead guy’s phone I’d grabbed back at the cemetery, hit the green button and pressed it up to my ear.
“Hello?” I said.
There was a brief moment’s pause, and then a low, rough voice said, “Who is this? Where is Enrique?”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Enrique and those two other assholes are dead.”
The man sighed. “Mr. Dodge?”
“That’s right. And you can tell whoever your boss is that I’m coming for you guys, and I’m going to make you pay for what you did to my dad.”
“You’re a fucking dead ma—”
I hung up the phone before he could finish his sentence. Sliding the phone back into my pocket, I fired up the engine and accelerated back onto the main road, my heart pounding in my chest. Ten minutes later, I took the exit heading to downtown Willemstad, the capital city of Curacao. Willemstad is one of the most unique tropical destinations on Earth, known for its beautiful and colorful buildings that make it resemble a candy-coated version of Amsterdam. Cruising over the Queen Emma Pontoon Bridge, we entered the Punda District along Saint Anne Bay and passed by rows of bright pink, teal, and yellow buildings.
Just across the street from the ocean, we pulled into a small parking lot in front of a large tan building with white trim. Above the main door, Politie was written in small silver letters, the Dutch word for police. It was the same place I’d gone two years earlier, when I’d met with officers and a coroner who had assured me that my dad had died of natural causes and had already been buried.
I backed my motorcycle into a small spot right beside the door and killed the engine, and we both headed inside. For obvious reasons, Ange left her sniper rifle locked up to the bike, but we both carried our concealed pistols as we entered through the door. Inside, we met with a receptionist, and after we told her we wanted to speak with Detective Millis, she dialed a number on her phone, said a few words, then led us past a row of cubicles to an office on the far side wall.
Through the glass, I saw a guy sitting behind a computer, and after the receptionist knocked, she opened the door and ushered us inside. The guy stood up and held out his hand.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Dodge. My name is Dan Millis.” He was a chubby, light-skinned, balding man in his mid-forties, bearing no resemblance to his criminal counterpart.
“Just call me Logan,” I said as I shook his hand. “And this is Angelina Fox.”
After shaking her hand as well, he offered us a seat in the two padded chairs across from him.
“What can I do for you?”
I leaned back in the chair. “It’s about my dad.”
His gaze narrowed and he looked off into the corner. “Your father’s been dead for what, two years now?”
“Yes. He has.” I was a little surprised that he knew about my dad. It almost seemed like he was expecting us, and that made me feel uncomfortable.
The man tilted his head and took in a deep breath. “Well, I think it’s time to move on, don’t you agree?”
This guy was already pissing me off and I’d only known him for about a minute. “I was moving on. That is, until I got a phone call telling me that his gravesite had been desecrated. Then I flew here from Key West this morning, met the guy who called me, and he told me that my father had been murdered. Then he threatened to kill me too.”
His eyes grew wide, and he leaned back in his chair, looking at me with confusion. “Wait, rewind just a little bit. Who was it that contacted you?”
I stared back at him. “A man pretending to be you.”
He shook his head at that. “Then what happened next? After they threatened to kill you.”
I grinned. “I took care of it.”
He looked at me like I was in the principal’s office after getting in trouble. “You took care of it?”
I nodded.
“Alright. And why exactly did the guy who was pretending to be me threaten to kill you?”
I explained to him about the watch, the engraving on the back, and how they were looking for something that only my dad had known the whereabouts of.
After listening to my story he leaned back, paused a moment and said, “I see. Look, Logan, I really hate to be the one to tell you this. Truthfully, we never wanted you to find out about any of this. It’s just unfortunate, it really is.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Were you ever aware of any illegal activity that y
our father was involved in?”
My blood boiled as the words came out of his mouth. “No. And I don’t know what it is you think you might know about him, but he was no criminal. He served thirty years in the Navy and retired as a master diver. He was straight as an arrow. Never got so much as a speeding ticket. He was an honorable man.”
“Look, please calm down. I’m just the messenger here. And good men get sucked into that kind of life all of the time. We see it often. We have strong evidence that your dad was involved in the drug trade. I know it must be hard to accept, but your father was a—”
“Call my dad a criminal one more fucking time and—”
He cut me off by placing a large manila folder on the table in front of me. I grabbed it and, reaching inside, I pulled out a small stack of pictures. They were a little blurry, but in each one, I could see my dad as he worked alongside a few other guys on a yacht moored beside what looked like a warehouse of some kind.
“I’m a detective, Logan. I deal with evidence. That is all.”
I shook my head. “Why are you just now telling me about all this?”
He paused a moment, then sighed. “Look, from what I’ve read about the case, they didn’t want to tarnish an honorable man’s reputation by implying that he was a drug runner. But regardless of what he was involved in, I assure you, your father died of natural causes. There’s a copy of the coroner’s notes there.”
“Well, then, the coroner was paid off, because my dad was murdered.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry, Logan. I really am. It must be hard to hear this. Hard to take it all in. But evidence is evidence, and that’s what we deal with.”
My blood boiled just looking at him. I didn’t know what his deal was, but I was willing to bet that he was making something extra under the table by working with whoever had murdered my dad. It would explain why every time we’d called the station asking for him, the phone had gone to the damn imposter’s phone that was resting in my pocket.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Logan? I have a lot of work to do.”