Apparent Wind (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 7)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Your phone’s dead.”

  “I know. What’s up?” She put the phone on speaker so Dwight could hear.

  “The cigarette butt you got off of Mann. It’s a match for the other butts from the dock. Still gonna have to send them off to Tallahassee for DNA—”

  “Mike, I have to go, but thank you,” Maggie said hurriedly, then hung up and handed Dwight his phone. “Go to Scipio. If you find the boat, you call it in and wait for back up, you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” Dwight said, and turned to leave.

  “Dwight!”

  “Back up,” Dwight said over his shoulder.

  Maggie backed out before picking up her dash radio. “Franklin 100 to Franklin,” she said.

  “Go ahead, Franklin 100,” the dispatcher said.

  “I need a BOLO for a boat,” Maggie answered. A Bertram Mark 3, boat’s name is Rapture. Registration number Foxtrot-Lima-five-seven-nine-three-Alpha-Foxtrot. Boat belongs to homicide suspect Tobias Mann.” Maggie didn’t need to specify which homicide; they only had the one.

  “10-4, Franklin 100,” the dispatcher responded.

  “Franklin 106 is on his way to Scipio Creek and I’m headed over to Ten Foot Hole,” Maggie continued.

  “10-4 Franklin 100.”

  Maggie hung up her handset and pulled onto Market Street.

  TEN FOOT HOLE WAS a small city marina located across the street from Battery Park, just beneath the John Gorrie Bridge. The boat launch was popular with locals taking their small craft out for the day, and cruisers headed south frequently moored for the day to go exploring downtown. It had also been Maggie’s husband David’s home for the last year of his life.

  Maggie had sold his old, 38-foot Burns Craft houseboat for a few thousand less than she could have, only because the couple planned to have it hauled over to Port St. Joe. Not having to see the boat every time she drove by was worth a few thousand to Maggie. She’d added the money she did get to the small life insurance policy she’d split between the two kids’ college funds.

  Maggie pulled around to the large gravel parking area near the boat launch on the Water Street side. As she did, she saw Mel Drummond walking to his old Nissan pickup. Mel had been living on his sailboat there for at least a few years. He and David had frequently played gin rummy on one deck or the other.

  Maggie rolled down her window. “Hey, Mel!”

  Mel looked over at her and smiled, his dentures whiter than his hair, his round cheeks permanently reddened by salt and sun. “Hey there, Maggie,” he said. “I’m heading over to Lynn’s to get some oysters. Wanna eat?”

  Maggie got out of the car and glanced around the L-shaped marina. There were quite a few boats in, people headed south for warmer waters. They made it hard to look for one boat in particular, especially one she didn’t know.

  “No, thanks, Mel,” she said. “Hey, I’m looking for a boat. A cruiser.”

  “What kind?” he asked as he opened his door. It screamed a protest on its rusty hinges.

  “A Bertram Mark 3,” she answered. She was going to try to explain what that was, but Mel smiled widely.

  “Yeah, I know it,” he said. “Fella pulled it in last week. Been here ever since with a busted hose, but Wadley’s finally came out yesterday and fixed her up.”

  Maggie’s heartbeat quickened “Is it still here?”

  “Yeah, right over there,” he answered. He turned and pointed across the marina to the long dock on the Bay Avenue side. “Right there. The one over there in Slip 9, with the flybridge.”

  “Okay, thanks, Mel,” Maggie said, and closed the door of the Jeep.

  “Everything okay?” Mel called. Maggie smiled and waved him off, and he carefully climbed into his truck and started it up. Maggie walked a little bit closer to the boat ramp and squinted across the water. It was dusk, the marina wasn’t particularly well-lit, and she was too far away to tell if anyone was on the deck of the Bertram.

  She was about to walk back to the Cherokee and call in when movement on the far dock caught her eye. She took a few steps to the side to get a clearer view around a small ketch. It took a moment for her to be sure, but it was Mann, headed for the Bertram. She hurried back to the Jeep, reached through the open window, and keyed her handset.

  “Franklin 100 to Franklin.”

  “Go ahead, Franklin 100,” the dispatcher answered.

  “I’ve located the boat at Ten Foot Hole, Bay Avenue side. Homicide suspect Toby Mann is on site. Have all units looking for subject meet me at this location. Standing by for back-up.”

  “10-4. All units, subject boat and suspect have been located at Ten Foot Hole in Zone 1,” the dispatcher said. “All available units please be 10-51 to Franklin 100’s 10-20.”

  Maggie heard Dwight respond immediately. “Franklin 104 10-51,” he said.

  A few seconds later, Maggie heard Wyatt’s voice. “Franklin 102 10-51.”

  This was followed immediately by a response from Apalach PD. “607 10-51 to that location.” Maggie recognized Richard Chase, a young patrolman who lived down the road from her parents.

  Her radio still crackling with responses, Maggie replaced the hand set and headed for the grassy area that fronted the marina. She’d love to take the Jeep and have her radio with her since her phone was dead, but Toby Mann knew her vehicle.

  She stopped about halfway across the front of the marina, at a small picnic shelter, and looked toward the boat again. She couldn’t see Toby. He’d gone aboard while she was on the radio. She huffed out a sigh and walked over to the foot of the dock, then looked all the way down.

  The boat was docked with the bow facing Maggie, and after a moment, she saw Toby come out a side door from the salon and walk toward the bow. Listening below and beyond traffic noise and the tinny racket of a little outboard heading in, Maggie could now discern the sound of a much more powerful diesel engine. Mann jumped onto the dock and bent to loosen his bow line. He was leaving.

  “Crap,” Maggie whispered to herself, and was withdrawing her service weapon when Mann jumped back aboard, dropped his line sloppily onto the deck, and straightened up. Then something else caused her heart to slam against her ribs.

  There was someone rising up on the flybridge above Mann. Maggie held her Glock 23 at her side and started down the dock. As Mann turned his back to Maggie, the figure on the flybridge jumped down on top of him. It was fast, very fast, and both men landed hard on the deck, but Maggie knew who it was. She started running.

  Maggie was halfway to the boat when she heard a metallic rattling, and saw Axel stand up, pulling Toby to his knees from behind.

  “Axel!” Maggie yelled, but he didn’t even turn to look. “Axel!”

  As she ran, Axel dragged Toby toward the portside gunwale. Axel had something around the other man’s neck, and when Toby splayed his legs and spun halfway around, struggling to get free, Maggie saw that it was a length of chain. Two seconds later, Axel tossed Toby over the side. Toby’s feet kicked at the water as Axel, and the chain, held him up against the boat by his bulging neck.

  Maggie had a good ten yards left to go. She called Axel’s name again, but he either ignored her or didn’t hear. Her voice was probably drowned out by the sirens of the cruisers that were screaming into the parking area. Maggie wanted to look, but didn’t take her eyes from Axel.

  He was focused on Toby, who was grabbing at the chain around his neck and kicking his legs.

  “How does that feel, buddy?” Axel asked, his voice strained. His biceps bulged beneath his worn blue tee shirt. “What’s it like?”

  Maggie stumbled to a stop just a few feet away. “Axel, stop it! Let him go!”

  Axel looked up at her and said something, but his voice was low, and she couldn’t make it out. Toby was making all kinds of noise; wet, strangled noises from his throat, and the dull thud of his feet against the boat.

  “Axel, I need you to let him go or pull him up!” she said, raising her weapon without any inclination to use it. She co
uld hear hard soles thumping up the dock, more than one pair of them. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Richard, followed closely by Dwight. There were more men further back on the dock, but she didn’t take the time to see who.

  She looked back at Axel, and saw that he’d seen the officers, too. He didn’t seem to care; he just looked back down at Toby, his face almost as red as Toby’s from the effort of holding him there. Shrimpers were some of the strongest men Maggie knew, but Toby had to weight about one-sixty, and Axel wasn’t just letting him dangle; he was tightening the chain as well.

  Maggie raised her weapon higher as Richard ran behind her and stopped a few feet to her right, assumed a shooting stance, and levelled his weapon. She could see Dwight do the same on her left, but she didn’t look.

  “Axel, drop him, man!” Dwight shouted.

  Axel looked up at them, his cheeks puffing outward, his neck turning red, but he didn’t say anything back.

  “Blackwell, come on!” Richard yelled, sounding very worried that he might have to follow through with something he had no desire to do at all.

  “Axel, look at me!” Maggie yelled. He did. “Somebody is going to shoot you, and if you make it me I will never forgive you! Do you hear me?”

  Axel looked at her for a moment, as Toby’s eyes wandered off in the direction of his frontal lobe. Then he let go with both hands, and Toby and the chain fell the foot or so into the water. Maggie took her first breath in what felt like minutes, as Richard laid down on the dock, reached out, and grabbed Toby, who was torn between sinking and struggling.

  Maggie heard heavy footfalls behind her, then Wyatt appeared next to Richard and helped him haul Toby into the dock. Dwight holstered his weapon and pulled out a pair of cuffs. Maggie looked back at Axel, as he stepped lightly onto the dock in front of her, breathing hard. She stared at him as he got his breath.

  She barely heard Dwight reading Toby his rights, or Richard calling for a paramedic unit. She only vaguely saw Wyatt jump aboard to shut off the engine. She grabbed the sleeve of Axel’s shirt and pulled him toward her as she walked a few feet back up the dock. She stopped just beyond the bow and turned to face him.

  “How did you find him?”

  “I followed you. Then I followed him.”

  “You should have called me,” she said.

  He looked fairly apologetic, but he looked even more sad. “If it had been the guy that killed David, would you have called it in?”

  Maggie felt heat rising in her chest, coating the surface of her eyes. She blinked, was about to say something then, without knowing she would do it, lifted her foot to his belly and pushed him off the dock

  It was full dark by the time the paramedics had given Toby a quick once-over, then hauled him off to the ER. Sheriff Curtis Bledsoe had appeared on the scene, hoping the news would show up eventually. They hadn’t.

  He’d heard about Axel’s involvement over the police radio, and had announced his intention to charge him with assault and obstruction and who knew what else, until Maggie mentioned that Toby had attacked Axel, not the other way around. She didn’t look at Axel when she said it, but she felt him looking at her. She felt Wyatt looking, too.

  With no photo opps available, Bledsoe had just taken his leave. Maggie sat at the picnic shelter, downing the last of a bottle of water. Across the street, Axel was smoking as he leaned against Dwight’s cruiser. Dwight was still telling him how pissed his mama would have been at him if he’d shot Axel, who was her favorite pupil in the fourth grade.

  Wyatt walked over to Maggie and sat down heavily beside her on the bench, mammoth Mountain Dew in hand. She glanced over at him, then looked at the ground.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Wyatt said. “Once he can speak again, I think this guy will be hesitant to accuse Axel of anything. Clearly, Axel is a hometown boy.”

  Maggie looked over at him. “It just came out,” she said quietly.

  “Well, it’s said. Can’t unsay it.”

  Maggie sighed and thumped her empty water bottle against her knee. “I’m becoming a lousy cop.”

  Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “No. It’s just that Maggie is your dominant side, not Lt. Redmond.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  He frowned down at her, but his look was more concern than reproach. “It’s both.”

  Maggie looked back down at the dirt, heard Wyatt take a swallow of his soda.

  “For the record, if it had been you, if I had been in Axel’s shoes, I would have done the same,” he said finally. Maggie looked up at him. “But I’d have let him get the boat out on the water first.” Maggie stared at him as he screwed the cap back on his bottle. “Genius, my ass.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, Maggie walked out of The Shop, on the corner of Avenue D and Commerce, just a block from Water Street and Riverfront Park. She tucked a small bag into her purse, pulled out her keys, and squinted into the morning light as she took a drink of her coffee. Extra shot, no cardboard.

  A familiar truck turned the corner from Water Street and stopped. “Hey,” Axel called out his window.

  She raised a hand, and he backed up a little, then pulled into a space across the street. When he got out and started crossing the street toward her, she had to blink once or twice.

  He was wearing khaki pants and a navy blazer. A maroon and gold striped tie hung untied from the collar of a white button-down shirt. The clothes were enough of an anomaly, but the strangest thing was seeing him without a ball cap. The morning breeze was a strong one, and it blew his brown hair straight up and then down into his eyes. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, she resisted the urge to fix it for him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “It’s Mari’s memorial today?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. He eyed her coffee cup. “Can I get a sip of that?”

  Maggie handed him the cup and watched him drink. “Is that David’s tie?” she asked softly.

  He nodded, his eyes darting to the sidewalk. “I borrowed it for that Seafood Workers’ banquet a couple years ago,” he said, and she saw him swallow hard. “I’ve forgotten how to operate the damn thing.”

  Maggie stepped closer and pulled the two ends into place, started tying it for him. They were quiet for a moment.

  Every day of her young life, there had been the three of them. She and her best friend David and David and his best friend Axel. There had seldom been two of them without the third. Now, every time she and Axel were together, there was a David-shaped hole there with them. It sucked unspoken words into itself like a vacuum.

  “I’m off today,” she said. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Axel shrugged one shoulder and shook his head. “I got it.”

  She finished his knot, then took back her coffee and sipped it, just for something to do besides feel awkward and unhelpful.

  When she looked up, he was staring over at Riverfront Park. The place where they’d both watched David die. The breeze ruffled his hair again, and there was something sweet and soft about the way it made him appear. She left it alone.

  “I love you, Axel,” she said

  He met her eye for just a moment, then focused somewhere beyond her. “Ditto, Mag-lite.”

  Maggie hadn’t heard him call her that in decades. She couldn’t even remember why he’d started.

  Then he grabbed her hand, quickly squeezed the tips of her fingers, and walked away. She watched him go, watched him turn left toward 98 and Tampa and regret. Once he was gone, she was alone on the small block. It was just her, the wind, and one lone pelican perched on a piling at the park.

  She hadn’t been there in months, not since David had died. She had even changed coffee places, because Café con Leche looked out on the park, and she couldn’t bear to see it every day. There was a time when it had been one of her favorite places in town, with its small strip of grass, iron benches, and two or three old shrimp boats at a time.

  She found herself standing on the grass before she�
��d noticed she was walking. She took a deep breath in through her nose, smelled the briny sharpness of Scipio Creek, felt the cool air calm and soothe her. The pelican regarded her for a moment, then flapped his great wings and flew off in that slow motion only pelicans and cranes seem able to employ.

  She watched him go, and smiled.

  Maggie pulled open the glass door of the Sheriff’s Office, waved at Vera the receptionist, and started down the hall. Terry Coyle, the other investigator for the department, stopped short outside the break room when he saw her.

  “Hey, Mags, what are you doing here?”

  “Nothing,” she said, shrugging, and hurried past him.

  She rounded the corner to the back hall and almost walked in to Dwight.

  “Hey, uh, Maggie,” he said as she passed him. “I thought you were off.”

  “Nothing,” she said over her shoulder. She was starting to feel nervous, and she waited for Dwight to round the corner, then she stopped, took a deep breath, and continued on to Wyatt’s door, which was open, as usual. She walked in and shut the door behind her, leaned against it.

  Wyatt was sitting at his computer, poking away at some public relations document or another. He looked up and smiled, then started to stand.

  She held up a hand. “Don’t move,” she said, and was annoyed when her voice broke.

  He stopped mid-stand and looked at her, then sat back down. “Ok. Aren’t you off today?”

  “Don’t speak,” Maggie said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Can I just say ‘okay’?”

  “Please shut up,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  He waited, his brows knitting together over his nose. Maggie took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Are you being chased?” he asked her.

  “Shut up,” she said quietly. He did, and waited. It took Maggie a moment to speak. “I have been really blessed. To have two best friends in my life. David was my best friend. You’re my best friend.”

  He looked like he might speak, so she held her hand up again. He stopped looking like that.