Rising Fury: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 12)

by Wayne Stinnett

  Black had been right, though. If they could keep the labs inside the boats a little cleaner, with better ventilation, they could push the price up. The shit was already good, but if Black said he could do better, Cedric had to believe it. The guy was a brain.

  He thought about the dead woman and Ballinger’s reaction. Cedric had only met her a few times. Black was right on that count, too. One of the times he’d met her was on Ballinger’s boat when Cedric had delivered some party supplies. She’d been wearing a black, long-sleeved, skin-tight dress that barely covered her hips. That, plus the shiny, raven-colored hair, made her skin look very pale, almost translucent. About the sexiest looking woman he’d ever laid eyes on. And Ballinger barely gave her death a second thought.

  She’d gone out on the boat, pretending to be the skipper’s girlfriend. Which wasn’t hard for them to pull off, since he was screwing her, too. Ballinger thought the cooks were skimming him. The product they made didn’t quite add up to the weight of the supplies and the methylamine and acetone weren’t cheap.

  Driving, Cedric thought about what might have caused the boat to blow up. He’d advised Ballinger against having more supplies on board than each boat needed for its daily cook, and the boss had decided to do just that, once they came back in. Besides giving the cooks the opportunity to overproduce and skim a few ounces, the shit was just too volatile. A cigarette or open flame near the exhaust port while they were cooking would be all it’d take.

  Cedric pulled into the parking lot of Ballinger’s warehouse. It was the weekend, so there weren’t any cars in the lot. This time, he didn’t park by the front door, but pulled around the side to the gate, which was controlled from inside the building. The heavy chain began pulling the gate open almost immediately.

  Driving the car around to the back of the building, Cedric saw the large overhead door already going up, Ballinger himself was standing next to it, finger on the controller.

  Cedric pulled in and stopped. He shut off the engine and popped the trunk before getting out.

  “You’re late,” Ballinger said.

  “Couldn’t be helped, Mister B,” Cedric said, lifting the first crate out of the trunk and placing it on a nearby cart. “Towing the wrecked boat took longer than anyone figured on. Had to wait on that pickup.”

  He fished into his pocket and handed Ballinger the scrap of paper the shrimp boat captain had given him. “The spot where he dropped the wreck.”

  Ballinger looked at the information on the paper. “He’s sure about the GPS numbers?”

  “Yeah,” Cedric replied. “Said he dragged it two miles from where it went down.”

  “What’s El Cazador mean?”

  “Huh,” Cedric said, lifting the second crate out and placing it beside the first. “Spanish for hunter, I think.”

  “But why’s it written on here with the GPS coordinates?”

  Cedric opened the containers. Inside each were five plastic bags, each marked with the weight that the bag contained in grams. All fifteen were close to four hundred and fifty-four grams, or one pound each. Inside the bags were hundreds of oddly shaped, milky white crystals. A total of roughly fifteen pounds.

  Cedric turned around and looked at the slip of paper. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Taylor mentioned that a boat was hanging around close to them. That’s why it took longer; he had to tow it farther out. He told me he wrote the name down. I guess Cazador must be the name of the boat.”

  Jimmy and Angie thanked me for the invitation to stay for supper, but said they needed to get back. Angie was working the evening shift at Brass Monkey and Jimmy had picked up a last-minute gig with Rusty, who suddenly needed all the help he could get.

  “Carl and Charlie are going to move in just a couple of weeks,” I told him, as they got into Angie’s skiff. “Rather than move everything by boat, I offered to buy all the furniture in their house at cost. It’s like new anyway.”

  “Makes good sense,” Jimmy said.

  “And it means you don’t have to move much of anything in.”

  “I like that,” Angie said. “Thanks, again, Jesse. Jimmy and I won’t let you down.”

  “Drop by a few times before they move,” I said. “Carl and I can go over what needs to be done.”

  Angie took her phone out of her pocket and tapped a few times on the screen. “I’m off all day Monday and Jimmy doesn’t have a class, but he has to open the Anchor that morning. Rusty won’t be back until about noon or so.”

  “Monday afternoon, then,” I said, as Jimmy started the engine.

  A minute later they turned east into Harbor Channel and Jimmy pushed the flats boat up onto plane. After a moment, he turned south, crossed the sand flats east of Howe Key, and disappeared.

  I went up to the deck and looked out across the interior of the island. I thought about how different things were going to be. Carl and I got along exceedingly well and enjoyed a lot of the same things. We’d built a little wooden runabout together, enjoying the building process about as much as we did the finished product.

  He should have Knot L-8, I thought, as I went down the back steps.

  Kim walked toward me, a nervous look on her face. “Marty said you invited him to stay over if he wanted to.”

  I thought the conversation with him had been uncomfortable. Though she was my own flesh-and-blood daughter, Kim and I were more than a generation apart in our social views. That’s all on me, though. I was raised from age eight by my grandparents.

  “You’re gonna be twenty years old next summer,” I said, deciding that ripping the bandage off was the easier way. “I’m not gonna force my morals on you two. He’s welcome to stay with you whenever you’re here on the island.”

  “Did he come to you about this?” she asked, suddenly agitated. “I told him that I’d be the one to talk to you. When the time was right.”

  “No,” I replied, a little confused. “I was the one who brought up the subject.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah,” I said, throwing an arm around her shoulder, and guiding her toward the aquaculture system. “I was born in the sixties, but I was raised by a man and woman born at the turn of the last century.”

  “I know that,” she said, picking up a basket and absently picking little cherry tomatoes from a bush. “You’ve told me all about grandma and grandpa dying and you being raised by Mam and Pap.”

  “Social norms change from generation to generation,” I said, adding spinach leaves to her basket. “The attitude I have, I got from them. So I’m a little more old-fashioned than what most of your friends’ dads might be.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with old-fashioned ideals, Dad.”

  I turned my daughter toward me and looked deep into her bright, clear eyes. “You’re a grown woman, Kim. That bunkhouse is your domain. You can decide for yourself when and with whom you want to share it. It’s none of my business.”

  “It’s also Chyrel’s office.”

  “I doubt there will be much need of that anymore.”

  “I want the other half,” she said. “I want to make it up the way I want. With its own bathroom and a little kitchen.”

  The other half of the western bunkhouse was barely seven hundred square feet. The whole thing was only a thousand. Same as the other bunkhouse and my house. I suddenly recalled the first house Sandy and I lived in when we got married. It was a sixty-foot, one-bedroom mobile home, which wasn’t any bigger than the partial bunkhouse.

  I smiled at Kim. “The first home me and your mom had was probably smaller. That’ll be my and Jimmy’s first project.”

  “And I want to help remodel it,” she said. “I have sixteen days off for Christmas, starting in two weeks.”

  “Then we need a materials list,” I said. “I’ll have everything delivered before you come back down.”

  “Really?” she asked. “I can design it myself?”

  “Yeah, just give me a list of what you want, and we’ll make it happen.”

  Addin
g a few banana peppers to the basket, she lifted it. “I’ll take this to Charlie. Then I’m going to start planning.”

  “I’ll be back down in a minute,” I called after her. “I gotta call Rusty.”

  I went up the steps and into my house. My phone was where I’d left it, on the table. I pulled up Rusty’s number and called him.

  “Will wonders never cease,” my old friend said, instead of the usual hello. “Jesse McDermitt actually making a phone call.”

  I could hear music and a lot of people talking.

  “Can it, assbite. What’s got you in such a jolly mood?”

  “You hear all that noise in the background?” Rusty said. “We’re making money hand over fist, bro.”

  “You hear anything back about those shrimp boats?”

  “Matter of fact, I just got off the phone. The guy who bought all three boats is a big-time manufacturer. Throws a lot of money around up there in your hometown. Fast boats, fast cars, and fast women. He likes to be seen with stars and big-name athletes. Name of Eugene Ballinger.”

  “What’s he make?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Rusty replied, then he muffled the receiver and spoke to someone else, before removing his hand. “Makes air fresheners; ship’s ’em all over the world.”

  “Air fresheners? And he makes enough for that lifestyle?”

  “Must be a lot of smelly homes in the world,” Rusty said.

  “Anything else?”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then the closing of a door silenced the background noise. “There’s a new boat over in Boot Key Harbor, a Grand Banks trawler called Sea Biscuit.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “Gorgeous boat,” Rusty said. “About as big as the Revenge, but a stately old cruiser. Word on the coconut telegraph is that a single lady owns it, cruising the islands with her eight-year-old daughter.”

  Rusty was obviously telling me this for a reason, but damned if I knew what any of it meant.

  “She involved with those shrimp trawlers somehow?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you could say that. Her sister was killed in the one that blew up.”

  Savannah, I thought, my mind flashing back nine years like it was yesterday. Here already? On a slow-moving trawler, she would have needed to be close by. She’d probably only learned about Charlotte’s death this morning. Could the Richmond sisters be involved in what I was beginning to suspect was going on?

  “You still there?” Rusty asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “It’s Savannah?”

  “And her eight-year-old daughter.”

  What? “She didn’t have any kids,” I said.

  “Not when you knew her,” Rusty said. The numbers tripped in my head like a slot machine. We’d only been together for a couple of weeks when she left. I remember it was just before the Marine Corps birthday that year. It was just a little over nine years ago when I met Savannah. And now she had an eight-year-old daughter.

  Rusty’d made the connection, too. I didn’t see any sense in dodging the obvious. And Rusty wouldn’t withhold anything, either.

  “Did she tell anyone I might be the father?”

  “Not that I know,” he said. “I ain’t talked to her, nor met the child. Are you the girl’s daddy?”

  No way, I thought, remembering the husband. I’d only met him once, and that was very briefly. He was a handsome enough guy, and quite successful, it seemed.

  “She was still married,” I reminded Rusty, while wondering when the girl’s birthday might be.

  “And that’s supposed to mean the kid can’t be yours?”

  “Anything’s possible,” I replied, “but I seriously doubt it.”

  “Well, I thought you oughta have a heads-up, just the same.”

  Devon opened the door and came in. “Thanks for the intel, Rusty,” I said, already feeling guilty. “If you hear anything more, let me know.”

  “What was that about?” Devon asked, when I ended the call.

  I felt like it was all spelled out in big bold letters across my forehead.

  “That was Rusty,” I said. “He gave me the name of the new owner of that shrimp boat that went down.”

  “I did a little back-channel snooping of my own,” she said. “Just a scroll through the coroner’s records. No bodiless head has been brought in. Nor any headless bodies.”

  My eyes came up sharply, meeting hers. “But Marty turned it over early this morning.”

  “Doctor Fredrick is a notorious note taker,” she said, as I opened the door. “He uses a speech-to-text computer program to record his findings, and those notes go straight into the file, unedited. Either the person Marty signed it over to hasn’t turned it in, or Doc’s working on it right at this moment.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Marty said that his supervisor took it and would take care of it. He didn’t mention having him sign for it.”

  “It’s normal procedure,” she said, leading me down the back steps. “I turn in or check out evidence every day. Many times. Signing for it is second nature, so I’m sure he did. Talking to a non-LEO, saying he signed it over might be awkward or require further explanation.”

  As we walked to the tables in silence, my mind drifted to Savannah again. In her letter, she’d said that her husband wanted to try again and that she wanted to as well. I felt certain that her child was the result of her attempt to start things anew with her husband. Her being single now meant the attempt had been a failure, nothing more.

  But she was here. And apparently hadn’t been far away.

  Ancient history, I reminded myself. Get your mind off it, McDermitt. But part of my mind kept wondering how she and her sister were involved.

  The others were sitting at the table. The hogfish I’d speared the night before, plus a few more from the freezer, had been grilled to perfection and everyone ate well.

  “I want you to keep Knot L-8,” Carl said when we’d finished.

  “I was going to say you should have it,” I said.

  “Just one more thing to carry up to Louisiana. No, you should keep it. I had more fun building it than riding in it anyway.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “To buy out your half, let me pay for your move. How’s that?”

  Carl reached across the table and with the shake of a hand, the deal was made. After dinner, he led the kids into the house to get ready for bed, and Kim offered to help Charlie with the dishes.

  “Jesse told me what you guys found on the shrimp trawler,” Devon said to Marty, once the others were out of earshot.

  “There was something in that boat’s hold that shouldn’t have been there,” Marty said. “Some sort of huge, pressure-cooker thing.”

  “He didn’t say anything about that,” Devon said, looking at me.

  “A round cylinder,” I said, with a shrug. “About two feet in diameter with a lid that was pressure sealed and had a bunch of dogs or screw clamps around the top. There were gauges attached to it. The whole thing was mounted to the inside of the shrimp hold.”

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s what makes you think they were cooking meth out there.” She looked back at Marty. “Was that part of the evidence you turned in?”

  “No,” he replied, looking from Devon to me, then back again. “We didn’t have any tools to unbolt it from the bottom of the hold. We found a head that was impaled on a metal pipe with another pressure gauge on it. It was the head and the pipe that I turned in.”

  “Who signed for it? Your shift supervisor?”

  Marty’s eyes widened. “Signed? Oh, my gosh! I was so keyed up from the chewing out and being suspended, I forgot to have him sign the evidence log. Great! Now, I’ll probably get fired.”

  “He didn’t sign?” Devon said. “Who was it?”

  “Sergeant Steve Brady,” Marty said. “What should I do? Should I call him? Or the coroner maybe?”

  “I checked the morgue records,” Devon said. “It hasn’t been logged in there, b
ut it’s Saturday. It could be sitting in a cooler at the morgue and Doctor Fredrick just hasn’t gotten to it yet.”

  “You think I should call Sergeant Brady?”

  Devon looked at me, and I could read the suspicion in her eyes.

  “Maybe not just yet,” I said.

  Devon nodded. “Let’s wait and see what Monday brings. I know Steve; he’s a bit of a tight-ass, but he’s a good cop. I can check the morgue records tomorrow; maybe Doc will come in. He’s always fascinated by strange cases.”

  The others returned, and Carl said he and Charlie were going to turn in early. Kim was carrying a bowl of scraps for Finn, which she put on the ground for him. He wolfed it down quickly.

  “Come with me,” Kim said to Marty, taking him by the hand. “I want to show you what I have in mind for my new house.”

  She led Marty away, and I watched them leave with some misgivings.

  “Your little girl is a woman now,” Devon said, taking my hand and pulling me up.

  The mention of her being a little girl made me think about Savannah and her daughter. She couldn’t be mine. I think I’d somehow know if she was.

  Hand in hand, we crossed the clearing toward the house. “I’m going to do a little more digging tomorrow,” she said. “Marty’s inexperienced and probably doesn’t handle a lot of evidence. But Steve’s been a deputy for more than ten years and handles evidence daily. He shouldn’t have forgotten.”

  Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the lights come on in the larger side of Kim’s house. That’s what it was going to be called from now on, Kim’s house.

  “While you’re snooping,” I said, “can you find out if the Coast Guard has the new coordinates? Even from up there on the deck, the wreck would be beyond the horizon.”

  “How do you know that, without looking on a computer or something?”

  “One of many things boaters should know, but most don’t,” I said. “The distance in nautical miles to the horizon is one-point-one-seven times the square root of your eye height in feet. The deck’s fourteen feet above the water, and standing on it, my eyes are about twenty feet up. So the horizon is a little over five miles away.”