T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 02 - Southern Poison

by T. Lynn Ocean

  From start to finish, it took six minutes for the container ship to sink, although the underwater explosions continued for another ten minutes. Shore damage was extensive and the Army Corps of Engineers worked around the clock to clear the channel. Under heavy security, teams of specialists worked to recover bodies, the sunken vessel, and its scattered contents. And MOTSU was crawling with uniforms, including a special investigative team from the Department of Defense. They didn’t know details, but Ashton had been obligated to suggest that an attempt to kill the Sec Def had been curtailed.

  “Tell me about the dead man in the lighthouse,” Ashton said. We sat at a corner table in the Block. I picked up on at least two of his people, pretending to be customers. One drank coffee and read the newspaper. Another younger one listened to an iPod, acting like he was waiting for a friend. I didn’t necessarily mind that people were following my every move and possibly listening to my conversations. It made me feel important, even though the bride’s father now had a private security detail that put mine to shame.

  “I thought the fellow in the lighthouse was probably John.”

  “Negative.”

  Crap. John was still out there, madder than ever, and probably planning to take out his anger on me. I drank some Coors Light from the bottle. “Then I don’t know who the man was.”

  “Shot through the head with something big and fast. We’ll probably never find the slug. Was Joan Jackson on the island, by chance?”

  I took another swallow. Ashton should know better than to even ask such a question.

  “Okay, then.” He did a mini cough that wasn’t quite his annoyed clearing-the-throat sound. “Let’s try it this way. Tell me everything you know about the incident.”

  I could have started with, “I told you so,” but that would only serve to piss him off. “As you know, I suspected that a detonator had been planted on one of the containers in the outgoing shipment. Since the exact timing of when the ship would pass by the target house couldn’t have been known, we determined that the device would have to be command detonated.”

  “We?”

  “Just a term I like to use. Me and my alter ego. My hunches,” I couldn’t resist adding. The same hunches that weren’t viable enough for you to stop the outgoing ship to begin with, I thought.

  Ashton did the throat-clearing ritual. “Go on.”

  “So we attended the wedding to take a look around. The container ship was passing by just as we saw a man up in the tower, watching the house and holding a remote-control device. Fortunately, somebody shot him, and the ship passed by without incident. Saving a few hundred lives, by the way.”

  He cleared his throat again, defensive when he should have been thankful. “Unfortunately,” I continued, “that’s when the singer from Feather Heavy made her grand entrance by parachuting in. She was equipped with a long-range wireless microphone. It was tuned to the same frequency as the receiver on the ship. There was a big bang and you know the rest.”

  He let forth a string of cuss words. “The country singer did it?”

  “Freaky, huh?” I said. “But it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

  I drank my beer while Ashton made a brief phone call, hung up, and cussed some more. When he calmed, he revealed that the key card found on the floater—the body that the shrimp boat pulled in—opened a storage unit registered to Mama Jean. It held the makings for explosives, detonators, and some nifty electronics. Most likely, the storage unit was where my car bomb had been built.

  “Well, Mama Jean couldn’t have blown up my car,” I mused. “She was already dead. My money is still on John Mason. Especially since the autopsy photographs will prove he choked her.”

  Ashton didn’t comment on Mason and it occurred to me that there was something about the security worker my handler knew that I didn’t. He was holding out on me.

  “Don’t know what the connection is, but we found a diver tangled in netting at the bottom of the channel,” Ashton said. “A channel marker was drifting away in the current and when divers went down to investigate, they found him. No key card on this body, but his prints are all over the storage unit.”

  “He’s dead?”

  Ashton sighed. “Of course he’s dead.”

  I shivered at the thought of his bloated, dead body sharing the same waters as my boat. “Ick.”

  “Three channel markers were tampered with, apparently to route the ship even closer to the target home. Chances are, there was a second man. Would be nearly impossible for one man to do it alone.”

  “Mason.”

  Ashton shook his head in disagreement. “I’d think it was the man in the tower, but now that they’re both dead, we may never know. As far as John goes, he’s as upset by the explosion as everyone else. I spoke with him earlier this morning. He’s worried that his job is in jeopardy, because something like this happens, people get fired.”

  I wanted to scream, but finished the Coors instead before speaking. “Have forensics take a look at the photographs of the choke marks on Mama Jean’s neck. The same ones you found on the shrimp boat’s body’s neck. They’ll match John’s left hand. A piece of his ring finger is missing. As I already said, it proves he’s their killer.”

  “We’ll take another look, Jersey, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”

  I asked my handler if I was still receiving a paycheck. I’d remain on the payroll until his crew pulled out of Southport, he said, and reminded me once again that I was officially off the case. He also told me not to attempt to evade the surveillance.

  “No argument from me, boss.”

  “Good work, Barnes,” he said and stood to leave. “And pass along my regards to Joan Jackson.”

  I retrieved another beer from behind the bar and returned to the table to drink and contemplate. Why was Ashton so vehemently protecting Mason? It was almost as if he knew the man. I’d barely gotten the screw cap off when Lindsey plopped down across from me.

  She power-chugged a glass of water. “Man, is it hot today. Seems hotter here than in California. And the people wear more clothes, you know? Like there’s a dress code or something. Weird.”

  I laughed at her assessment, which was probably true. Skimpy is the fashion of choice on the West Coast. Or maybe they just prefer to be more comfortable. “How are you liking your job?”

  “It’s okay. I mean, I like the money. But seating people and running food is kind of boring. And some of your customers are weird. Like that guy over there?” She pointed to the young fellow with the iPod. “He hasn’t ordered anything but a glass of tea, and he’s been sitting there for an hour.”

  The same amount of time I’d been in the bar. “Go over there and tell him that if he’s going to pretend to be listening to music, he should at least make sure the earphone cord is plugged into the unit.”

  I nodded at the kid’s shirt pocket, which held the iPod. The cord had fallen out, and was hanging straight down. Lindsey laughed. “What a doofus. Is he an agent or something?”

  “Yep. Bring him another tea and a bowl of peanuts when you go.”

  I watched Lindsey deliver the tea. The guy realized she was right about the earphone, blushed, and gave me a stupid little wave as though we were playing a game of hide-and-seek, and he’d been found. I wondered if I’d ever been that green, when I first went to work for Ashton.

  Lindsey returned and said she wanted to ask me about something. Hoping like crazy it wouldn’t be a sex talk, I led her outside to the riverwalk. We continued along the path for a few blocks and stopped at a shaded bench that overlooks the river. The iPod kid followed at a distance. It took some prompting, but finally Lindsey blurted it out.

  “I think I could be pregnant.”

  Crap. It was going to be a sex talk. My mother never spoke to me about sex or boys and the bulk of my early education came from television movies. “Why?” I finally said. It was all I could think of on such short notice.

  “Well, my period is late. And my sto
mach kind of hurts. Like nausea, maybe.”

  I’ve never been pregnant, but the symptoms sounded right on target. “So you’ve been having sex? I didn’t think you had a serious boyfriend.”

  “I don’t. I hate boys. And I’m still a virgin, I guess.”

  I closed my eyes to enjoy the feeling of sunshine on my face for a few seconds, while I decided how to plow on. I took the direct approach. “Lindsey, either you have had sexual intercourse, or you haven’t. You’re either a virgin or you aren’t. There’s no such thing as maybe when it comes to that.”

  “We kind of played around a little, before I broke it off with him. My boyfriend in California, I’m talking about. That’s like all he ever wanted to do was get his hands under my clothes, you know? He kept pressuring me to go all the way. I never did. But he … you know … well. We, like, fooled around a little bit.”

  “But you never actually had intercourse, right?”

  “Right,” she said in a small voice.

  We people-watched in silence and it struck me again how much of Ox was in Lindsey. Both physical features and characteristics, such as being content to appreciate a good silence without trying to fill the gaps in conversation.

  “Okay, then,” I said after some time. “I’d say it’s virtually impossible for you to be pregnant. Sometimes your period is just late. The nausea could be from bad food. But just to be on the safe side, let’s get you to the doctor and find out what’s going on.”

  “Okay. Can we go today?”

  She must have been fretting over the late period for days. “I’ll make a phone call and see when they can work you in.”

  “Thanks, Jerz,” she said with a hug. “You won’t tell Dad?”

  “About this conversation? No. But he has a right to know that you’re going to the doctor.”

  Her face fell.

  “We’ll tell him that it’s just for a checkup, okay?”

  She brightened. “Deal.”

  Since it wasn’t an emergency, the receptionist at Daisy Obstetrics&Gynecology asked if she could work Lindsey in later in the week. I told her that would be fine. At least I had something scheduled on my to-do list, other than worry about a madman with a penchant for explosives.

  THIRTY

  Forgetting about discipline, John Mason threw a lamp against the wall. The faux Tiffany shade burst into pieces, but that didn’t make him feel any better. The Jill Burns bitch was like a golden child, untouchable, mocking. Somehow, somebody got to the man he’d sent to Bald Head Island and picked him off, disrupting the entire plan. It had to have been her. Loyal to the end, Joe must have struggled to activate the detonator, even while dying, and managed to do so before he went unconscious. It’s the only thing John could figure. But the fact that the container ship eventually blew up was of little consolation. It missed the mark.

  Years and years of waiting for precisely the right opportunity, hours and hours of creating a strategy, suddenly worthless. A brilliant plan of action, wasted. He should have done the damn job himself. He would have known better than to take up position in such a visible place. People gazed at lighthouses all the time. They took lighthouse pictures and collected lighthouse figurines. The idiot deserved to die. John scooped up the mangled lamp and threw it at another wall. He should have done the job himself, he thought again. Joe didn’t know that he would kill himself, along with the entire wedding party. But John wouldn’t have minded doing the job, even knowing that one push of a button would sign his own death certificate. At least he would have died happy, blissful in the knowledge that he’d accomplished the mission.

  He dropped to the ground and grunted out fifty push-ups to calm himself before going out to the root cellar. John would miss his house, he thought, especially the huge yard and all the trees. But mostly, he’d miss his secret place. An hour later, the dirt cellar was stripped bare, except for the bricks lining the walls. He carried bags of supplies and gear to the trunk of his car and planned to dispose of most of it later, at the landfill.

  Back inside, he packed a canvas duffel bag: clothes, razor, soap, toothbrush, weapons, and banded stacks of twenty and fifty dollar bills. Surveying the house, John did a mental check to make sure nothing important or telling was left behind. Earlier that morning, he’d listed the property for sale and told the real estate agent to give all the furniture and his clothes to a charity. He lived sparsely to begin with, and now, he wouldn’t need material things.

  Deflated, John fell into a chair and rolled himself up to a small wood desk that would soon be in another’s house, a poor family perhaps who needed it for their child’s schoolwork, and scripted a resignation letter. Addressed to his AJAT supervisor, he stated that the stress of the recent situation was bearing on him so he decided it was time to retire. As one of the people who oversaw the loading of the sunken container ship, he felt a certain responsibility, he wrote, even though nobody knew what caused the explosion. It could have been a freak accident, caused by a careless crew member and a discarded cigar, or faulty wiring, or any number of causes. What made up his mind, John continued writing, was that he had put in enough time with the company to become fully vested in the 401(k) plan and collect retirement benefits when he turned sixty-five. He no longer felt as though he could be an effective security contractor. John signed the letter and wrote a forwarding address and phone number at the bottom. They belonged to a furnished apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’d paid the six-month lease in advance, in cash, even though he never planned to use it. He wasn’t going to bother hooking up an answering machine to the phone line. The military police—and everyone else in line behind them—would want to question him further, John knew. Over the next months, they would question every Sunny Point employee and contractor, and every supplier whose products moved through the facility. But he was low on the totem pole, in the overall scheme of things. And they couldn’t question him if they couldn’t find him. Even if they were to locate him, there was no way they could pin anything on him. Of that, John was certain. Even Mama Jean’s warehouse rental would point to the dead men, but not him. She’d rented it with plans to open a small café and had started collecting used restaurant equipment. When she changed her mind, he helped her out by selling the equipment, but he’d kept the garage-sized storage space. He paid a year’s rent in advance by mail, with a money order and he never visited the place without first putting on gloves. He’d even disabled the storage facility’s one security camera, and the on-site manager hadn’t bothered to repair it. John’s tracks weren’t just covered, they were nonexistent.

  Nonetheless, the failure of his mission overwhelmingly frustrated him. A spent man, John made up his mind to leave the whole godforsaken country behind. He hated America’s leaders and the weak people who elected them. He no longer cared to live on U.S. soil and couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge. His twin brother would have to understand that he’d tried. He’d done his best to avenge the senseless death, but it wasn’t good enough. Somebody outsmarted him. Before he boarded his other boat, a thirty-eight-foot sailboat, and navigated to the Caribbean Islands, he planned to track down the bitch, and kill her.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Living on Incognito felt like a vacation, except for the fact that I was always looking over my shoulder. Not only was a dangerous lunatic most likely after me, but I continued to get the impression that I was being followed. Probably Ashton’s surveillance. If so, I hoped it was an agent with street smarts. Somebody who could take out John Mason before he got to me.

  Ashton had threatened to freeze my future retirement money if I didn’t follow his orders, which included keeping my government-issued cell phone charged up and powered on so they could locate me through the built-in GPS tracking device. And I had to periodically report in. Overall though, if I didn’t think too much about my handler, green agents with iPods stuck in their ears, or John, I could enjoy my leisurely time on the water.

  I was eating a late breakfast of honey-soaked buttermilk biscuits a
nd fresh cantaloupe, reading a juicy novel, when the boat’s satellite phone beeped.

  “Hello?”

  “Jersey, you’ve got to quit playing on that boat of yours and get home. Spud has done it again.”

  “Dirk? How did you get this phone number? What is this phone number?”

  “Your daddy and his pals went to the outdoor firing range—get this—to shoot up their alligator. It’s on fire.”

  “The alligator?”

  “The clubhouse. Fire engines are already here.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “No, but that could change at any second if you don’t get over here and shut him up.”

  “The alligator?”

  “Very funny.” Dirk told me which firing range my father was in the process of destroying and hung up without laughing.

  Incognito was already tied up at the marina, so all I had to do was lock her up and figure out a way to get myself to the shooting range. Luckily one of the dockhands was in a benevolent mood and let me borrow his Honda CBR 1000 motorcycle. It was a crotch rocket, the kind that is ferociously fast and versatile, but designed so that you have to practically lie on your chest to grip the forward, low-placed handlebars. In shorts and athletic shoes, I sped through traffic, unwittingly giving everyone I passed a nice view of my jacked-up backside, and made it to the shooting range in ten minutes.