No Right Turn
A Miami Jones Florida Mystery
AJ Stewart
Jacaranda Drive
For Yvonne Jennings. As beautiful a person as I ever had the privilege to know.
* * *
And Heather and Evan. Home is wherever you are.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
If You Enjoyed This Book
Also by AJ Stewart
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter One
They don’t make them like they used to. When it comes to houses in South Florida, they generally build them better now. Especially when you’re talking about taking a battering from a hurricane. All the McMansions on my street had fared pretty well. I could hear the sounds of generators and industrial pumps and wet-dry vacuums clearing the floodwater from marble tile patios and polished concrete garage floors. There was a convoy of trucks from various cleanup companies outside the homes along the Intracoastal, crews hard at work making it as though Mother Nature had never dared spew her angry tirade across their travertine patios and Brazilian cherry outdoor settings, and doing it all before the homeowners had to cast their eyes upon it.
The odds were that my old seventies rancher would not have fared well at all, but once again it had proven the bookmakers wrong. The king tide that had surged down the Intracoastal had taken over my back lawn and patio, and the sandbags we had placed around the rear sliding door had fought the mighty fight but eventually succumbed. As had the old sliding door. After the water had retreated I was left with a sunken living room that resembled a tide pool in a children’s museum, and unlike many of my waterfront neighbors, I didn’t have the number of a disaster recovery team on speed dial.
What I did have was a rag-tag team of my own. We undertook our efforts on a triage basis. My fiancée, Danielle, had been given leave from her stint at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Training Academy in Tallahassee to help with the post-hurricane relief effort. My business partner, Ron, arrived in his beat-up Camry. The apartment he shared with the Lady Cassandra was opposite the ocean in Palm Beach so it had taken a pounding but other than a flooded underground parking area and a disheveled balcony, it had survived more or less unscathed. They had a homeowners association to take care of their cleanup so Ron had clearly decided that the quicker we got my place tidy, the sooner we would get onto fixing up Longboard Kelly’s, and the quicker we got that done, the sooner we would again be enjoying a beer under Longboard’s palapa bar.
The three of us removed the strewn sandbags away from the patio and piled them along the side of the yard. We worked around the speedboat that had parked itself in my backyard. My buddy Lucas dropped off a bilge pump from the marina he managed in Miami, and Ron attached it to a garden hose to drain out my living room. Danielle and I collected clothes and other bits and pieces and loaded them into the pickup she had bought while in Tallahassee. I wasn’t sure if the truck was a cop thing or if she just liked the high ride, but either way, it proved useful. Although most of my furniture had gotten water damaged, none of it appeared beyond repair, which meant once it dried out, I would go on using it as if nothing had happened, so we tossed the truly deceased items in the back of the truck and mopped up the rest. The electricity was out and I didn’t have a generator, so the fridge was pretty ripe, but I figured I could eat out until regular service resumed. Other than that, a fresh set of sheets on the bed gave us a place to sleep, even if we did have to dry our feet after lifting them from the sodden carpet.
I dropped a box of old baseball gear into the back of my Cadillac SUV and looked up at the Greek wedding cake of a home next to mine. I had never seen the owners. I often saw the maintenance staff. Cleaners, gardeners. After the disaster recovery team had sucked all the water off the property, I was sure the staff would descend en masse to sweep the floors and polish the andirons. A guy wandered out through the large wrought-iron gates and dumped an armful of palm fronds in the gutter. He looked up at me and nodded.
I nodded back and then turned to watch a car drive down my street. It wasn’t a street that went anywhere. You came in off Blue Heron and then hit the houses on the Intracoastal and then followed the road right on back out again. But we often got lost tourists just trying to get a glimpse of the water. Sometimes folks stopped and asked where they could see the water. Some of my neighbors got rather put out by them, but I just recommended they drive north up to McDonald State Park, where they could see mangroves and lagoons and an almost empty beach, with not a Margaritaville in sight.
Ron wandered out, mopping his tanned brow, and we watched the car slowly cruise by and come to a stop at a house three doors down. It was such a vanilla vehicle I couldn’t tell what the make was. If asked by the police to describe the getaway car, I would have provided the following details: Sedan. Whitish. That’s all I could say. We watched a guy in suit pants and a polo shirt get out with a briefcase and walk to the door. He waited for the door to open and went inside.
“Insurance guy,” said Ron.
I didn’t argue. Ron had worked years in the insurance game, so he knew the species. We wandered back inside. I collected more of my belongings that had spent time below the water line and put stuff to keep in plastic tubs and stuff to discard in plastic bags. Danielle took the job of donning gloves and emptying the refrigerator. She was a trouper. I carried my saxophone out to my SUV and found the bland sedan had migrated. The guy in the polo was looking up at my house. He consulted a clipboard and then looked up again.
“Mr. Jones?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Great Southeast Permanent,” he said.
“Morning,” I said.
The man walked up the path to my house. It was still damp, but so were his feet.
“You put in a call to our claim center?” he asked, as if this was a mysterious thing to do after a hurricane had passed through.
“I did. You want to come inside?”
“Surely.”
He followed me in, stopping in the living room just before it became a primordial swamp. He made some notes on his clipboard.
“She’s held up rather well,” he said. “Do you mind if I take some pictures?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He wandered around the place taking photographs with his phone before stepping out the back. I stayed inside and watched Danielle handle sodden produce that seemed to be breaking off onto a new branch on the evolutionary tree. The insurance guy came back in and asked me to sign a document on his clipboard that confirmed that he had visited and he had assessed.
“What now?” I asked.
“Your roof looks remarkably good, considering. I think your neigh
bor might have sheltered you from the wind.”
“I’ll be sure to thank them if I ever see them.”
“Most of your damage looks flood-related. We’re trying to expedite processing, but obviously there are a lot of clients to get around to. Expect a confirmation letter from us in a day or two.” He slipped his clipboard under his sweaty armpit and offered his hand to shake.
“I’d try and get a quote for the work ASAP, if I were you. Contractors are going to be up to their noses in work so it might take a while. Best of luck.”
I walked the guy out, and he got in his car and drove back up toward Blue Heron, about halfway, where he stopped and did it all again. He was stepping inside the next client’s house when another car drove by him.
This car was one of those glossy electric sedans that imply that the driver never goes far from home. It slowed as it reached the end of the road and came to a stop outside my house. It seemed like my place was Mardi Gras central today. There was a moment of pause, as if the driver was summing me up, standing there as I was in a sweat-soaked University of Miami t-shirt and board shorts. I waited by my front door for the tinted window to roll down, but it didn’t. The door opened instead. That was the first hint that I wasn’t dealing with a lost tourist. The second hint was the guy who got out. He was middle-aged and tanned like a hide, and he wore an expensive-looking black suit that sat perfectly across his shoulders. He closed the door with a dense thunk and then tugged at his cufflink.
Then he looked up at me. He didn’t smile or make any kind of facial expression. His hair was slicked back and he had the nose of a hawk, and everything on him stayed perfectly in place. I wondered if Madam Tussauds in Orlando was missing anyone.
“Mr. Jones,” he said, with an accent so heavy he sounded like he was pretending to be Latino.
I said nothing.
He took a couple steps up the damp concrete path toward the house.
“Mr. Jones,” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard the first time.
I said nothing. It wasn’t how I usually handled myself, at least I liked to think not. I was generally a more friendly guy to strangers. But my Spidey senses were tingling with this guy. As my father used to say, I didn’t like the cut of his jib. The neighborhood looked like a hurricane had recently ripped through because that was exactly what had happened. At best, it looked untidy; at worst, homes had been lifted up and deposited in a new city, and in a million pieces. There were palm fronds everywhere, and sea debris and trash, and all the lawns were bogs. This guy in his sharp suit didn’t fit at all. He sure as hell wasn’t an insurance agent.
The guy got halfway up the path to my door and stopped where it was starting to dry out. That’s what alligators do. On dry land, they are clumsy and too long for their own good, but in the shallows, there is nothing more deadly. The metaphor just popped into my head and I knew it wasn’t fair to the guy, but my mind worked like that.
“Help you?” I finally asked him.
He gave me a smile with no teeth. “Such a mess,” he said.
“Aha.”
“Lots of damages,” he said.
“Plenty.”
“Expensive,” he said.
I had no more words. I was sweating where I stood. My living room was a swamp and some poor soul’s speedboat had decided to stop off in my backyard. Standing in my front yard listening to Captain Obvious was not part of my plan.
“Let me cut to the chase,” he said.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’d like to turn this disaster into an opportunity for you.”
What a swell guy. I wondered if he was going to offer me a set of steak knives just for listening to his pitch.
“This whole mess will be expensive,” he said.
“That’s why we have insurance.”
“If the insurance covers you. This might have been a hurricane, might have been a flood. Whatever makes it harder to get a claim.”
“Your point?”
“Even if you are covered, it will take years to claim and then rebuild, and I have no doubt you’ll need to rebuild.” He looked over my house like it was a car wreck. But not just any car wreck. A cheap Chinese import of a car wreck. The kind of car that wasn’t worth that much less after the accident than it was before.
“I can make that all go away,” he said, looking back to me. “I’d like to buy your house.”
I nodded like I might be considering the offer, but in fact I was thinking about what the nearest weapon was and how I might use it to chase this lowlife off my island.
“I’m prepared to make a more than reasonable offer, given the condition. Cash. You can start again fresh. Somewhere new. Maybe on a golf course.”
Vultures aren’t bad birds. They have a PR problem. In many ways they are necessary. Dead animals spread disease, and the scavengers clean them up. It’s the circle of life. Which was why calling this guy a vulture was unfair to the bird. This guy didn’t care about the cleanup, or my imaginary new condo overlooking a nine-hole executive course out in Wellington. He and his ilk were in town to make a killing, not clean one up. When people had their lives torn apart before their very eyes, they became susceptible to the charms of snake oil salesmen. Make the pain go away, sell your house for pennies on the dollar.
“I don’t play golf,” I said. It wasn’t strictly speaking true. I had played golf. I didn’t know many professional baseball players who hadn’t. I had even caddied in a tour tournament once. I wasn’t that good at it, though, and I didn’t care much for the artificial nature of golf courses. They reminded me of French gardens. Free to grow in whatever way we humans deemed acceptable. I liked my nature a touch more organic. Like mangroves. I liked the randomness of mangroves. A mangrove had saved my life, but I had liked them even before that. I wasn’t a fan of the idea of cutting back mangroves to put in a manicured sand trap on the back nine.
“Your choice,” said the guy.
I nodded. “Well, my choice is to stay here. Have a nice day.” I didn’t move, but I felt like the have a nice day was fairly definitive. I was wrong.
“Don’t be hasty, Mr. Jones. I understand the emotional attachment to a home.” He gave it the Chinese car wreck look again. I don’t think he could help himself. “But you don’t want to end up in financial ruin because of it.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “You know your way back off the island?”
He gave me the toothless smile once more. “I’ll be in touch.” He turned and stepped back to his car, his fine leather shoes slapping in the water on the path, and then he slipped in behind the wheel. He didn’t drop the window or say goodbye. He didn’t seem to start the engine. The vehicle just pulled away and headed back from where it had come. I watched it until it turned onto Blue Heron. Mine was not the only house on the island in a state of disrepair, but it seemed to be the only one catching the guy’s eye.
Chapter Two
My house hadn’t fared as well as the neighboring McMansions, but Longboard Kelly’s had fared worse still. The courtyard was like an Everglades exhibit at the natural history museum. There was kelp and seagrass and dead purple sailor jellyfish everywhere. The palapa over the outdoor bar had been blown away, leaving a framework that reminded me of a dinosaur carcass. Mick had gotten most of the water out of the courtyard and was using a shovel to scoop up the kelp and the jellies into a wheelbarrow. The sun was out and the sky was blue and Florida was pretending that nothing bad had ever happened. The smell of rapidly rotting marine life harshed the effect.
Danielle swept out the indoor bar and Ron climbed a ladder that was the mortal enemy of men his age and stretched a plastic tarp over the naked roof. Muriel, Mick’s longtime bartender, arrived to take an inventory of damaged bottles and glasses. I helped Mick with the jellies.
“Insurance guy come yet?” I asked.
Mick shook his head. “It’s the city I need.”
“How so?”
He held up a shovel full of sea debris up. We
were wheeling it out into the parking lot and dumping it in the garbage hopper, but that was really only shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. If the city didn’t get by soon to pick it up, the stench was going to become a force of nature itself.
“I can’t open until the health guy inspects.”
“You can’t open?”
“Technically.” He plopped some more jellies into the wheelbarrow.
“What about the palapa? How do we fix that?” I asked.
Mick grunted. “Thinking about ditching it, going with shiplap.”
“You’re gonna get rid of the palapa? Say it ain’t so, Mick. That thatching is Longboard’s.”
“It’s expensive is what it is. Every time we get a flippin’ hurricane, it’s the first thing to blow away. It didn’t even make it through the afternoon. Besides, there’s not many guys who do it. Every guy with a hammer can put up shiplap.”
“You’re making me want to weep, Mick.”
He grunted again. “How’s your place coming?”
“Getting there. The insides are a mess. I’ll need new carpet, that’s for damned sure. The rest I can’t say until I get a contractor in there, and they all seem to be busy right now.”
We scooped up all the marine debris and then swept out the courtyard. Then we collected the outdoor furniture from inside the bar and put it back where it belonged. Once the umbrellas with beer brand logos on them were back in place, the joint started to look right again. Ron found an electric drill, and we took the surfboard with the bite out of it that had been ripped from the back wall and we fixed it back in place. Longboard’s was close to being Longboard’s once more. Except for the palm thatching over the outdoor bar. I had never realized how much I loved that until it was gone. Ron’s tarp flapped in the breeze to remind me.
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