MOLLY

by Dan Ames

  Deerfield gave way to Boca Raton, which didn’t really have a beach strip, per se. There was a downtown, with a small public parking area. I cruised through that, didn’t see anything, and moved on.

  When I hit Delray Beach, the hunter in me kicked into high gear. This would be the heart of his territory and the most likely spot for me to find Lonzo. Suddenly, I saw the telltale shape of a G-Wagon and leaned forward, until I pulled alongside it and saw it was painted a jet black, with an older white couple occupying the front seats, arguing with each other.

  The rest of Delray showed no signs of my quarry and I made it all the way to Boynton Beach, where traffic picked up once again. There were a lot more users here, and many of them in much rougher shape than their counterparts in Delray. Which was funny because Delray had more rehab centers than anywhere else. Maybe they left rehab in Delray and landed in Boynton to score.

  After a thorough canvas of the beach vehicles, and another G-Wagon, this one silver, I turned around and started the whole process over again. I figured it might take me two or three trips before it got too dark and then I would have to start again the next day.

  It was on the third round-trip that a G-Wagon passed me. It was behind a Range Rover and I almost missed it, but there was no doubt.

  It was Lonzo in all of his glittery glory.

  A quick turn took me off the A1A where I did a quick U-turn, barreled back onto the road, and caught up to him as he was parking. At this time of day, there were quite a few parking spaces available.

  I pulled past him and parked the Scout, then got out and walked back to him.

  A quick glance told me there were no police nearby, and traffic was slow. The Range Rover had gone on ahead.

  Traffic had subsided.

  Lonzo was already out of the G-Wagon, and along with another man, was standing on the sidewalk, both looking at their phones.

  That’s one of the things I loved about cell phones. Oh, people complain about them all the time. How everyone is driving or texting. Or no one talks anymore. The art of conversation is dead, thanks to the phones.

  Me, I loved them.

  People everywhere just weren’t paying attention.

  They were staring at their phones.

  It made classic assault & battery so simple.

  The bodyguard had his back to me and I threw a right hook from my waist, everything behind it and caught him just under the ear, where the jaw connects to the back of the skull. I swung through the punch and the man dropped to the sidewalk, his head bouncing off the cement. He was probably out from the punch, but the head slam into the concrete sidewalk made sure of it.

  I let the punch carry me through and directly into Lonzo.

  “What the f…” he started to say.

  My left hand came up under my right and I caught Lonzo by the wrist. I brought my right arm back, elbow pointed out and simultaneously pulled him toward me. He leaned his head back and my elbow caught him on the temple. It was more of a glancing blow, though, and he staggered back, reaching for a gun.

  Although kicks to the groin are overdone in Hollywood movies, it was the right choice at the moment. My right arm had swung through, my left arm was still pulling Lonzo toward me and that meant my balance was perfect to launch a good, hard kick into the drug dealer’s balls.

  He immediately shrunk into himself, like a balloon being popped. I finished pulling him into me, reached around, got the gun he was going for and then “helped” him to the G-Wagon. I pulled open the passenger side door and pushed him in, like he was a buddy who’d gotten drunk at the beach and now needed help getting into the car.

  However, I had no intention of keeping him with me. I head-butted him a really nasty blow on the bridge of his nose and his eyes rolled back into his head and his phone clattered to the ground.

  He didn’t weigh much so I hoisted him over my shoulder and carried him over to a bench meant for beachgoers who wanted to sit and adjust their gear before or after their day in the sun. His bodyguard soon joined him and it looked like they were slumped back, chilling. I’d retrieved sunglasses from the G-Wagon and fitted them onto Lonzo. A cop might notice their lack of movement, but that would take awhile.

  The G-Wagon’s keys were now in my possession, along with Lonzo’s and his bodyguard’s cell phones.

  I fired up the big vehicle and pointed it toward my favorite beachfront compound.

  It was time to find the Chief.

  And get some answers.

  28

  The G-Wagon featured a neat little brush guard on the front that I planned to use to help me bash through the gates of the Chief’s compound. I also shifted the big vehicle into four-wheel drive low for additional torque. Not really a good idea to do that on pavement, but I was just borrowing the SUV. Long-term damage wasn’t really my concern.

  Of course, it also occurred to me that the G-Wagon would most likely be equipped with a remote control or a built-in sensor that could cause the gate to open automatically. There were even some additional buttons near the dome lights that I knew could be pre-programmed.

  Guessing that would be the case, I approached the gates slowly and waited a beat.

  The gate did not open.

  I glanced up at the buttons. There were three in a row near the interior light above the rearview mirror. Upon closer inspection, the one in the middle looked like it was slightly more worn than the other two.

  I pressed it.

  The gate opened.

  A circular driveway welcomed me and my glittery ride into the realm of the Chief. There was a Rolls-Royce already parked near what appeared to be the main entrance to the home. The middle of the circular drive was home to fruit trees. Oranges and maybe a star fruit. Lights illuminated the winding drive.

  The security guard I’d seen earlier emerged from the shadows of an arched structured covered in bougainvillea. He had the requisite black T-shirt, black shorts, and a gun belt.

  He glanced out, saw the G-Wagon, and then stepped back and was lost in the shadows.

  I slid across the front seat and exited the vehicle from the passenger side, blocking any clear views of me as I walked along the circular path toward the spot where the security guard was.

  Just before I got to the entrance, I shuffled my feet so he could hear me. He stepped out again and I punched him in the throat, just above the top of his bulletproof vest, just below his double chin. He gasped and his hands went to his throat. I grabbed him by the vest, did a leg sweep, and dropped him to the ground.

  He started writhing, so I took out his ridiculously long flashlight and clobbered him over the head with it.

  He stopped moving.

  From his gun belt I took a Taser, a Glock pistol, and his walkie talkie. I checked that the Glock was loaded, and held it in front of me, along with the walkie talkie. The Taser I’d slipped into my pocket.

  The first surprise was that the main doors into the house were unguarded. They were oversized wood doors, elaborately carved with a pattern that seemed to me to indicate a South Pacific style.

  Samoan, no doubt.

  A few theories went through my head regarding why the main door was left alone. They’d seen me coming. Video cameras saw me take down the perimeter guard.

  Those guesses were all wrong.

  Because once I was inside, I heard voices. A shout or two. I passed silently through a foyer, a great room with a towering fireplace and twenty-foot high ceilings, then into the kitchen. It, too, was massive. Big enough for a staff of ten. But the real draw was a stairwell at the back of the room.

  Another black T-shirted big guy stood with his back to the kitchen, facing the commotion downstairs. I pulled the Taser from my pocket, stepped up, and blasted him in the neck with fifty thousand volts. I chose the neck to make sure he didn’t scream. He started to fall forward so I let go of the Taser, caught him and pulled him back into the kitchen and dropped him to the floor.

  Slowly, I descended the stairs, stepping into a well-lit
room with tile floors and industrial sinks on one side of the room, a pegboard with various tools on the other.

  In the middle stood the Chief. He had a big knife in his hand and there were two men on the floor, bound and covered in blood.

  They looked dead.

  Flanking the Chief was one of his men. He had a shotgun in his hand, and had caught some of the blood splatter.

  Off to the side was another person, also bound.

  Molly.

  29

  The room exploded as soon as the Chief saw me. He swung his big head around and started walking toward me.

  “You,” he said, his voice flat and without surprise.

  His assistant torturer started to lift the shotgun so I shot him first with the Glock. A double-tap, center mass. It knocked him backward and the shotgun fired into the air, knocking off chunks of plaster.

  The Chief never slowed. He showed no signs of fear or hesitation. He was five feet away when I shot out his left kneecap. He tottered to his right to compensate, and I destroyed his other knee with a second shot.

  He fell forward, still holding onto the knife. I aimed at the arm holding the knife and shot out his elbow. The knife clattered to the ground. I quickly stepped around him and picked it up.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. It was like a machete, but with a weird curl of metal at the end.

  “His fire knife,” Molly said from the side of the room. “He loves that thing. A family heirloom or something stupid.”

  “No escape,” the Chief said. “You’re not going to–”

  I used the butt of the knife and drove it into his temple so hard it sounded like a meat cleaver hitting bone, which I guess it sort of was.

  He went face-first into the tile and I walked over to Molly.

  I used the curled tip of the knife to cut her restraints and she got to her feet.

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” she asked.

  From my pocket I took out the G-Wagon’s keys. “How about you take off? Stay away from your Mom and the Candyman. They’re after your inheritance.”

  “I know,” she said, rubbing her wrists. “It’s in a safe place. Divided up and redistributed. Even the cops can’t get at it if they try.”

  She glanced over at the Chief. “He was after it, too, once he found out. Someone must have given him the heads-up because all of a sudden he started looking at me weird. I was going to be the next on the torture block, I think.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said. I took out my phone and clicked on the picture of my sister. “Do you know her? Her name is Jenny. Jenny Carver. Have you ever seen her?”

  She looked and shook her head. “No. Sorry. I would tell you if I had.” She lifted her chin toward the Chief. “He would, though. He makes it a point of knowing every single female who comes to the beach looking for drugs.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You need to leave. Now.”

  Molly ran from the room and I walked over to the Chief. He was groggy, but coming to. Over by the sink I saw a bottle of Dom Perignon. I popped the cork, walked over and poured it onto his face. He sputtered and then his eyes opened.

  I showed him the picture of my sister.

  “Where is she?”

  He gave a smile or a grimace, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  I lined up the fire knife along his right wrist.

  “Try again,” I said.

  “I don’t recognize her without my dick in her mouth,” he said.

  I raised the big knife in my hand and chopped down with it. Hard.

  Thunk.

  The knife easily sliced through the Chief’s wrist and his hand was now severed. Blood gushed from the stump of his arm.

  “Try again.”

  He raised the stump, looked for his hand and started to yell.

  I looked over at his other hand. Raised the knife.

  Thunk.

  Matching stumps now.

  “Hey look, you’re a hands-free device,” I pointed out.

  The yelling continued, and this time, I understood what he said.

  It took him ten minutes to bleed out. I wiped my prints from the knife and placed it in the hand of the Chief’s sidekick, who I’d shot in the chest.

  The two dead men in the center of the room who the Chief had been torturing were probably rival drug dealers.

  I pulled their bodies next to the Chief’s. I wiped off the Glock and put it in the Chief’s hand, then did the same with the Taser and left it in the third man’s hand.

  Nothing else had been touched, so I left the room, walked back out the way I had come in and left through the door by the side of the entrance gate.

  The Scout was a ten-minute walk and as I put one foot in front of the other, the Chief’s final words had echoed in my head.

  “She’s bad. Bad,” he’d screamed.

  There were a lot of ways to take that. To my right, I could hear the ocean’s waves pounding into the sand. The night stars were out and the warm breeze from the water began to cleanse me of the scene in the basement.

  Still, the Chief’s last words swirled in my brain, ignorant to the breeze.

  “They call her–” he’d gasped, blood streaming from his arms.

  “Call her what?” I’d asked.

  And with the last word he would ever utter, the Chief died with my sister’s new name on his lips.

  “Sugar.”

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  About the Author

  Dan Ames is a USA TODAY Bestselling Author and winner of the Independent Book Award for Crime Fiction.

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