The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset)

by Doug Richardson

  Logic and past experience informed Lucky he could count on his report of the juvenile sex cargo in transit going wide. Gonzo had already connected with the Los Angeles Port Police, the independent agency that covered all harbor crime from San Pedro to Long Beach. Import/export taxes made for a well-funded maritime PD with copious equipment and officers. Plenty of manpower to take down a large party boat engaged in underage sex trafficking.

  Yet Lucky, who preferred leaving little to chance, chose to add fuel to the fire by hijacking a sixteen-foot outboard from the Cabrillo Beach boat launch. The small rental boat was one of two marina runabouts waiting to be winched onto a trailer by a crew of one. The curly-mopped Guatemalan man who by Lucky’s guess, spoke little to no English, put up zero resistance as the ex-cop parked the blue Nissan’s front wheels in the ocean water at the bottom of the ramp. Haltingly, but still forthright, he waded to the boat, climbed in, found the electric starter and engaged the rather weak, sub-fifteen-horsepower engine. It whined and frothed just below the surface.

  “Call the police!” shouted Lucky, then recalling his lousy, C-graded high school Spanish. “Llame, llame!” he said, making a phone gesture at his ear. “Llame a la policia!”

  Lucky reversed the little engine, backing the boat out another twenty feet before switching gears and throttling the outboard fully forward. He was soon charging full speed at about nineteen knots—barely twenty-three miles per hour. Hardly the speed he was accustomed to from back in the day when he owned a twenty-one-foot ski boat. That twin six-cylinder Evinrudes could skim him along the smooth top of Kern County’s Lake Isabella at fifty-plus miles per hour.

  Swell, he thought. He’d just stolen the pokiest watercraft short of a paddleboat. It would entirely defeat his purpose if he were grabbed by the Harbor cops just short of his destination, the luxury superyacht Gonzo had reported was named Lost Enigma.

  All he had to do was find it first.

  There was an annoying chop in the harbor. The slow runabout would slap about every third swell. The shock of each impact was painful—wincingly so. Lucky’s eyes would slam shut and the wind and mist stung his eyelids. He would reopen them and repeat, every so often checking his trajectory. Gonzo’s last message indicated that the yacht was slow-going it up the harbor channel near the World War II relic and museum, the battleship USS Iowa, and headed toward the Vincent Thomas Bridge. The channel would be smoother going than the open water. And faster. He controlled his breathing, flexed his knees, and eventually steered the outboard between the two container cranes which flanked the nearly half-mile-wide channel.

  It was close to 11:40 P.M. when Lucky finally caught up with the Lost Enigma, nearly a full mile beyond the bridge and easing along at a scant six knots. The massive yacht was splitting the channel, its wake rippling behind it in triangular precision. To say Lucky was disappointed to have neither seen nor heard the faintest whisper of police presence would be a gross understatement. The pain in his low back had crawled up his spine, pooled between his shoulder blades and was shooting spikes into the base of his skull. He would view the apprehension of the yacht as a victory as long as the end result involved him ending up horizontal and connected to a morphine drip.

  Yet here he was. Hours into a chase. Having reported the dispatch and transportation of thirteen underage girls to what would appear to be a high-class sex cruise. Lucky had even stolen a boat in his pursuit. However, the superyacht in his sights remained unmolested and sans any detention.

  Shit.

  For a brief moment, the sinking disappointment acted as a nerve block. It wasn’t quite rage he felt. More so that he’d seen this gambit more than once before. Ahead of him and displacing hundreds of tons of sea water with entitled grace was a maritime masterpiece that must have cost its owner tens of millions of dollars. Sure. It was still just a boat. But were it parked on local terra firma it would have borne an address such as Bel-Air or Beverly Hills or San Marino. Lost Enigma was a rich man’s plaything. And rich men who partook in tabooed behavior often did so under the protection of authority.

  The fuckers.

  As Lucky sped the outboard forward, he kept left and in the shadows of the channel wall. This gave him a side view of the yacht. In the ambient light it looked nearly ice blue with every glassed porthole aglow with inner warmth. Over the whine of the outboard he could hear the unsophisticated thump of hip-hop music. He also made out shapes along the upper decks, mingling silhouettes and the occasional squeal and manly belly laugh.

  Karrie was in there. Lucky knew it like he could feel his pain. Only fifteen-years-old. Alone. And probably only existing at the disgusting whim of some insider fat cat or pervert politician.

  The cops weren’t coming either.

  Not to that particular party. There was a class war going on aboard the yacht. The protected versus the disposable. Even if one of those teenage girls were able to get her hands on a phone and dial nine-one-one, the distress call would probably be buried and all records of it destroyed.

  “Stop,” Lucky mouthed to nobody but the wind. “Stop it now.”

  He leaned the steering wheel to the right and eased the outboard back to the center of the channel. The runabout swam over the top of the superyacht’s dual wake and eased into the edge of the spill light from the vessel’s stern. The figures of two suited bodyguards were easy to spot. Both were on the diving deck, a custom tongue at the yacht’s stern, low to the water for easy access after swimming and scuba. One bodyguard stood and the other appeared to be seated on an equipment box, a constant curl of cigarette smoke swirling around him.

  Lucky throttled forward, moving up on the yacht and revealing his presence. As the seated guard found his feet, Lucky threw back a friendly, attention-seeking wave. He eased the boat closer, the outboard’s fiberglass bow only fifty feet from the exposed diving deck. The boil from the superyacht’s propeller fizzed from underneath.

  “I’M LOOKING FOR ZIGGY!” shouted Lucky from the outboard.

  The shorter of the two bodyguards, trench-coated in a long windbreaker, cupped his ear and gestured for Lucky to come again.

  “ZIGGY!” shouted Lucky. “I NEED TO TALK TO HIM.”

  “PRIVATE PARTY!” shouted the taller bodyguard. He was well over six feet, built, slightly thick in the middle, and wore no weather protection. The misty rain was collecting like tiny gems on the worsted wool shoulder pads of his navy Italian jacket.

  “ZIGGY!” reminded Lucky again.

  Both bodyguards began waving Lucky off, demanding he back off.

  Lucky returned with an oversized shrug.

  “JUST GET ZIGGY AND I’LL GO, OKAY?” pressed Lucky.

  It was the taller bodyguard who was first to reveal a weapon. Lucky instantly pegged the pistol as a Sig Sauer 9mm. The casual stance of the bodyguard told Lucky that the bodyguard had no immediate intention to shoot. He was merely brandishing the gun to elevate the warning. The stout guard in the long windbreaker joined in, shouldering a nifty little Beretta ARX assault rifle with an extended clip. No doubt filled with some thirty hot loads of 5.56 mm ammo.

  Lucky kept one hand on the wheel while the other shot up in open apology and surrender.

  “HEY, SORRY!” Lucky shouted. He throttled back into neutral, retarding the outboard’s momentum while the superyacht eased further ahead.

  Then Lucky saw him.

  The man called Ziggy stepped out onto the diving deck. He was shorter than Lucky imagined, in a tuxedo no less, groomed but still carrying the swarthy and overtly cocksure ambiance of an Armenian gangster.

  Lucky shoved the outboard back into gear, waved toward Ziggy, and smiled broadly. His entire appearance calculated to appear friendly and without malice. He could see Ziggy talking to the guards, shrugging broadly. The throttle ticked a notch forward, bringing the outboard fully back into the light. Only Lucky didn’t back off the power this time. He gripped the lever and shoved it fully forward. The outboard whined and the bow pitched upward in a sudden surge of sp
eed.

  Next Lucky crouched.

  Below the useless windshield, lowering his head under the dash. He expected and heard a series of sharp pops as the bodyguards unleashed a volley of bullets at the fast approaching boat. He heard bullets snapping into plexiglass, as well as the sound of the hull being penetrated. Lucky could taste the fiberglass dust.

  Barely two seconds into the gunfire, it stopped as both bodyguards and Ziggy needed to dive out of the way as the bow of the outboard kicked off the slightly elevated diving deck. Teak splinters spun away like bits of shrapnel. The sixteen-foot runabout neatly mounted the stern of the superyacht, force fitting itself into the pleasure spot in a slight sideways cant. The spinning prop of the not-so-mighty outboard engine screamed like a dentist’s drill.

  The impact sent a shudder all the way up to the superyacht’s bridge. The captain instinctively cut the engines and ran down the emergency checklist, the first of which was to deploy crew to visually inspect for damage. He couldn’t imagine what could have caused the vibration. By his book, the superyacht was riding the center stripe of the channel. The only logical explanation was that they had run over some kind of debris floating just below the surface.

  As for the party participants, nary a one seemed to notice a disruption in forward progress. Down below, it was game on: the team of middle-aged sex predators versus the forsaken underage girls. The later the hour, the more those fifteen staterooms were occupied by middle-aged men taking their Viagra-fueled turns on the Christmas carousel.

  Karrie wanted a shower. The silver-haired man with the mustache had been kind enough. Not to mention mercifully quick and apologetic.

  For what? Raping me? Or finishing on my thigh?

  Her first instinct was to ask if she could use the bathroom for a shower. But something about needing the pervert’s permission repulsed her. As if she had no self-respect left to her soul. So without inquiring, she faked a smile and crawled out from underneath him, escaping into the bathroom of walled marble. The fixtures gleamed chrome and stainless and the water was instantly hot. Karrie scrubbed herself from head to foot, dried off, and brushed her hair back into a slicked mane.

  “Next?” she mouthed to the mirror.

  She asked herself if she regretted not partaking in the capsule. Maybe it would have numbed her or helped flush any memory of the sick ordeal. The night was young. How many more rapes would she be able to endure before finding a heavy object and bashing in some old bastard’s skull?

  While slipping back into the bedroom, she first noticed the door was open and there was a commotion in the corridor. The man with the mustache had somehow already dressed and disappeared from sight. It took seconds for Karrie to pull on her nothing-sized garb. She was just about to step into her heels when the door filled with a uniformed crewman bearing an armload of neon-orange life vests.

  “Are we sinking?” was Karrie’s first thought-turned-into-words.

  “Just a precautionary,” said the baby-faced crewman. His leaden, Baltic accent sounded like he had marbles in his cheeks.

  Damning her heels, she hurried ahead and accepted one of the yoke-styled vests, putting it over her head and slipping past him into the corridor, where she nearly ran headlong into another, more senior crewman. This one looked equally young, but was red-faced and shouting a string of angry Slavic. Karrie couldn’t understand a single syllable, but could tell the baby-faced crewman had made some sort of error because his superior was gathering up the few life vests that had been handed out. Fearing the vest might be taken away, Karrie hustled up the first set of steps she saw, not knowing where they led or what might be at the other end. That’s because the floatation device had somehow injected her with hope. Maybe if she could make a surreptitious leap overboard she might actually fashion some sort of survival.

  That’s right, Karrie. Jump!

  But from where? And to where?

  Lucky was no longer trying to ignore the pain and the stiffness of his movement. The adrenalin coursing through his veins had pulled off another miracle. The naturally occurring drug was shielding him from the feeling of hot blades cutting through his core from the shock when the little outboard had impaled itself into the superyacht. Once forward momentum had fully stopped, he uncurled himself from his impact position and climbed over the gunwale. The uneven ground his feet found was actually the taller of the two bodyguards, pinned and in a death spiral underneath the outboard’s skewed hull. Expecting the other guard to have met a similar fate, Lucky edged forward and crouched under the skiff’s bow. Ahead, in the rich glow of incandescence, he could see the man called Ziggy on hands and knees, trying to climb the stairs.

  His .45 unsheathed, Lucky approached until he was able to place the muzzle on the back of Ziggy’s skull.

  “Roll over,” coughed Lucky, already having frisked Ziggy from behind. Ziggy rolled mostly to his back. Lucky checked his tuxedo jacket, discovering a sleek, hammerless five-shot .38 revolver in the inside pocket. Satisfied, Lucky took the lengthy snout of his pistol and jammed it deep down Ziggy’s tailored waistband.

  “What the fuck—”

  “Call it a testicle tickler,” hissed Lucky. “And I will blow holes in your junk if you don’t get up right now and do exactly as I say.”

  It was awkward for Ziggy to find his feet while Lucky kept most of the pistol shoved inside his pants. But both men managed and began the ascent up the stairs.

  “You know the girl I’m looking for,” said Lucky. “Blonde. Fifteen. Green eyes. You need to see her picture?”

  “No,” choked Ziggy, shaking his head. “All you want is her?”

  “All I want?” repeated Lucky. “You caught me. Christmas and she’s all I got on my Goddamn list.”

  The stairs emptied into that creamy living space with the plush chairs, pillars and grand piano. The music remained just shy of ear-splitting. There was a couple of teenage girls dancing closely together while a circle of five gray-haired men in five-thousand-dollar suits toasted their sultry moves. Despite Lucky’s attire and his strange conjoined twin, they entered and left unnoticed, steering left and up four steps to one of the side decks.

  “Which way?” pushed Lucky.

  Ziggy had to think about it, appearing to have lost his bearings. With his free hand, Lucky cracked the little revolver into Ziggy’s more-than-sufficient nose. Blood issued from his nostrils in a matter of micro-seconds.

  “Fucker!” whined Ziggy. “You broke my nose!”

  “Where is she?”

  Ziggy hobbled right and forward, crossing by a row of outdoor couches where three more of the powerful party men were ensconced and smoking what Lucky guessed were aged-to-perfection Cuban cigars. Their faces appeared shocked at the site of Ziggy bleeding all over his pressed white tuxedo shirt.

  “Mind your own business,” ordered Lucky.

  The trio of men stood as Lucky and Ziggy passed. With a glance to his rear, Lucky surveyed that none of the men were a threat.

  Lucky shoved Ziggy through a doorway and down another set of steps that led downward into a corridor flanked by staterooms.

  “She in one of these?” asked Lucky. “Open ’em.”

  One by one, Ziggy threw open the bedroom doors. Most were occupied by naked men of various shapes and fitness, positioned above or below some poor teenaged girl. Each scene sickened Lucky deeply—images he’d never be able to unsee. It was all he could do not to pull the trigger on the .45 and forever decapitate what there was of Ziggy’s manhood.

  “Still don’t see her!” angered Lucky.

  “This way.” Ziggy was weakly pointing to another set of steps at the end of the corridor. As they neared, Lucky spied two sets of tactical footwear on a descent.

  More bodyguards.

  Keeping his own pistol shoved into Ziggy’s pants, Lucky used his left hand to extend and level the revolver.

  “Don’t!” shouted Lucky at the beefy duo. Both bodyguards were identically suited like the pair Lucky had smashed into on
the diving deck. Only their training betrayed them, each man uniformly reaching for his weapon.

  The range was close. Maybe fifteen feet. Lucky snapped two quick shots into the face of the bodyguard on the left. Then before the other guard could clear a .40 cal from his shoulder holster, Lucky unleashed three quick trigger pulls on the man’s hard-to-miss body mass.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Both men crumpled down the last two steps.

  “Fuck!” shouted Ziggy.

  “Keep moving,” pressed Lucky, using the muzzle of his own pistol to steer Ziggy around the fallen bodyguards and up the stairs.

  Despite the unremitting music, Lucky could feel a sudden swarm of activity. Gunshots had that kind of magic. Between the pounding beats, Lucky heard screams and scrambling footsteps.

  They cleared the top of the stairs, which opened up to a swanky, outdoor dining area on the forward deck. Twinkling white Christmas lights had been strung, glowing against an ever-mounting mistiness. And underneath them stood a singular girl, wet, cold and barefoot and holding tight to the orange life vest that hung around her neck.

  “Okay,” said Ziggy. “So that’s her, right? She’s the bitch you want?”

  Lucky felt a presence to the right. He swung Ziggy around and saw three more crewmen and another bodyguard armed with a sub-machine gun.

  “Please don’t!” squeaked Ziggy. Lucky couldn’t discern if the begging sound was a plea to the armed bodyguard or another plaintive call to save his cock and balls.

  Then time froze. An old Reaper he knew had once referred to it as a slow-motion requiem. A brief and surreal calm before the final storm of bullets was unleashed. Memory was enhanced as if each and every molecule of air and flesh were being recorded in ultra-high definition. Thoughts were clear; sense of smell, acute.