Dead Center (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 2)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Knife,” Goff said quietly.

  Evan blinked salty sweat from his left eye, raised his gun in a two-handed grip. He was expecting to hear the door to the Nissan open when Goff spoke again.

  “Go!”

  Evan charged around the corner, Meyers behind him and moving ahead and to Evan’s left. “Gulf County Sheriffs! Drop your weapon!”

  Crenshaw and the other deputies were coming around the north side, all yelling commands for Waller to freeze, drop to his knees, and drop his weapon.

  Evan was on the passenger side of the pickup. Hansen was about a foot from the driver’s door, spinning and pulling her weapon. Behind her, about five feet away, stood Scott Waller, momentarily frozen, his eyes and mouth wide. In his right hand, something narrow glinted in the light from the streetlamp.

  “Get down!” Evan yelled, walking, knees slightly bent, arms stiff and out front, toward the back of the pickup. “Drop your weapon, now!”

  Waller’s right knee bent just a bit. He crouched slowly, lowering the knife almost to the gravel. Then he burst forward, raised blade gleaming in the ambient light. He had taken one running step toward the woman he still might have believed was Kate Randall, when his right knee exploded like a water balloon filled with chili. Half a second later, Evan heard the report from Goff’s rifle.

  He and the deputies had closed the distance to Waller almost before his face hit the ground. The knife skittered out of his hand, and Hansen kicked it away as Evan reached the man. Waller rolled over on to his back, his face twisted in pain, but without making a sound.

  Evan and the other deputies kept their weapons trained on Waller until Crenshaw had jerked him onto his stomach, and zip-tied his wrists. Only then did Waller start screaming.

  Evan looked up as he heard boots in the gravel on his left. Goff stopped beside him, rifle down, and twitched his mustache as he looked down at Waller.

  “Nice,” Evan said.

  “I figure little Tina would probably think so,” Goff said, almost under his breath.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SUNDAY MORNING WAS the warmest they’d had in weeks. It was supposed to be in the sixties by noon, and on his way to Sunset Bay, Evan had been pleased to hear the radio say there’d be a bit of wind and a nice, light chop.

  Evan had decided that, for his physical health and mental function, he needed to stop hiding in his work, and spend more time actually living his life. Now that Scott Waller had been arrested, he really didn’t have an excuse for overwork.

  A search of Scott Waller’s home had produced a good deal of information. His laptop showed hundreds of pictures of him and Elyse during their relationship, and several emails he’d sent and received. The most significant emails were the ones going back months, emails to Elyse that Gmail had returned as undeliverable.

  Also on the laptop were hundreds of emails to organizations that supported or facilitated organ transplants, to people found through news stories who had gotten transplants, and to surgeons who specialized in organ transplantation. It looked like Waller had believed that if he found her a healthy liver, she might take him back. If she hadn’t passed away, Evan and Goff had wondered aloud if Waller would have been crazy enough to actually kill someone for it.

  On the other hand, it might have been her death that moved him from the category of mentally unbalanced to violently mad. The background they’d gotten so far from family members and physicians indicated that Waller had been troubled since his teens, and in therapy. He had also had two other relationships that had ended because he was too clingy, too serious, too invested.

  Whatever Waller’s mental state might be, Evan was pretty sure they’d be able to prove he was sound enough to be held responsible for his crimes. The media was certainly excited about the arrest, and consequently so was James Quillen. Evan was pretty sure they’d drag the story out until they could begin exhaustive reports on the trial.

  Until there was a trial to deal with, Evan was eager to put Waller out of his mind and to get his mind off his work, even if just for a couple of days. However, once he was sitting by Hannah’s bed, he fell right into the habit of talking to her about work. It was something he had almost exclusively avoided before her accident, but now, ironically, it had become habit.

  He sat in the mauve upholstered chair, next to the picture of him and Hannah on their cruise. It had been taken the day they’d stopped at Coco Cay. Evan remembered the water, as clear as bottled and such an unrealistic shade of blue that it looked like Disney had created it. It had been the first time he’d ever managed to float, and Hannah had teased him about that, with all of his surfing and his love for the sea.

  On a side table near the window, a vase held a large bouquet of lilies, Hannah’s favorite flower. They’d been a regular gift to her during their marriage, and if she was hurt that he wasn’t more creative, she hadn’t let him see it.

  Evan had opened Hannah’s blinds, and the sun streaked across her bed in narrow lines the color of store-brand butter. When he’d arrived an hour earlier, and bent to kiss her forehead, her skin had been slightly tacky and smelled of gardenia. Someone had been using the lotion he’d brought a few weeks back, and he was grateful for it. Hannah had used it by the gallon since he’d known her.

  “Anyway,” Evan said, as he leaned forward to stretch his back. “Tina Vicaro’s service is tomorrow. Bellamy’s family took him back to Tallahassee so he could be buried with his parents. I’m not sure what Overstreet’s family is planning.”

  He stood up, arched his back, then straightened and put a hand on her bed rail. “By the way, I’ve changed your cat’s diet, and it appears to have been a worthwhile effort. I’ve been finding much fewer furry black cocktail franks around the boat. I don’t know how a cat can throw up so much and still be so huge.”

  Hannah’s monitors beeped and clicked beside him, marking the time for him, in case he forgot how long he’d been having one-sided conversations with his wife.

  “I’m also conducting some experiments on the little jerk,” Evan went on. “I have a project, which I can’t disclose to you at this time, but to that end, I tried getting him to wear a halter. Unfortunately, he just laid there like a roped calf, but I tried something new last night and I think I might be onto something. I’ll let you know how it works out.”

  He stared down at Hannah, at the square line of her jaw, which he’d always thought so elegant, the curve of the chin that she’d complained was too pointy.

  “I should go,” he said after a few minutes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He leaned over the rail and kissed her cheek.

  “I hope you like the lilies.”

  From the helm, Evan smiled over at Sarah, who was standing on the dock on his port side, waiting for his word to free the Sea Fox’s stern line. She shook her head at him and raised her voice to be heard over the outboards.

  “He’s not gonna go for it, dude. It’s just not…natural for him to be like that.”

  Evan smiled at her. “I’m telling you, we practiced it for two hours last night. It’s cool.”

  “Yeah, I see all the scratches up and down your arms, man.”

  Evan grabbed the kill switch and clipped it to his belt loop. “Look, either come with us or don’t. Either way, shut up and get the stern line.”

  She licked at her bottom lip. “I’m coming with you, dude. If he freaks out, somebody’s gotta grab him.” She frowned at him, her finely designed black eyebrows edging toward her little nose. “His tail. Make sure he’s not on his tail. It’ll hurt his little…tailbones or whatever.”

  “He knows how to operate his own tail, Sarah.”

  He shook his head at her, then turned back around as he heard her hit the deck with a light thump. He eased the bow further to starboard, then pulled out and around the Chris-Craft.

  Sarah came to stand on his left, her hand on the back of the captain’s seat he almost never used. He preferred to stand, to feel the vibration travel upward from the soles o
f his feet. It was the closest thing to surfing that he could manage without a board.

  As they made their way out of the no-wake zone, he could feel her eyes on him. He glanced over at her. She was staring at his chest.

  “Chill out, kid.”

  The night before, he’d dug out an old canvas knapsack that he’d hung onto since college. After the first few attempts to stuff Plutes into it, he’d understood how dramatic a statement ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ really was. On the fifth or sixth try, Plutes had gone in under protest, but not before ripping him to shreds trying to get out. Putting him into the knapsack while Evan was wearing it backwards, on his chest, was a little more of a production.

  “I’m like seriously concerned that you’ve just found some new way to torture this cat because he pees in your shoes.”

  “Relax.”

  They passed out of the marina and into the bay, and Evan opened it up just a little. He felt a shuffling against his stomach and looked down. The flap of his knapsack was twitching. Evan looked back up to make sure the way was still clear, though the closest other boat was fifty yards to port and on the hook.

  He eased around the northern end of the peninsula and gave the boat a bit more throttle.

  “Don’t go too fast,” Sarah yelled into the wind.

  “Stop whining,” he yelled back.

  His pack shifted again, and he glanced down. Plutes had stuck his head out from under the flap and was squinting into the wind. His ears were flattened, and his whiskers were pinned back to his cheeks. His fur rippled and danced like black water.

  Evan grinned. He might not be a cat lady, but he was pretty sure he could find his way around this particular cat. Plutes shifted around in the canvas bag, then stretched his neck like he was doing his best cormorant impression.

  “He’s freaking out!” Sarah yelled.

  Evan looked back down and smiled, and he realized it was the first time in a long time that he’d smiled so hard it almost hurt his cheeks.

  Evan cut the wheel a bit and started steering in an easy, graceful slalom.

  “No, he’s not,” Evan said. “He’s surfing.”

  THE END

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  DEAD CENTER

  THANK YOU FOR READING, and we hope you had fun with the second book in the Still Waters Suspense series. If you missed the first book, Dead Reckoning, you can find it here.

  To get a heads-up for each new release, and to find out about discounts, free books, and public appearances, you can sign up for the mailing list here.

  You might also enjoy Dawn Lee McKenna’s original series, the Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense series, which is set in Apalachicola, FL, and which introduces the character of Evan Caldwell. You can find that series, as well as Dawn Lee’s Southern fiction novel, See You, here. All are available on Kindle Unlimited.

  If you are interested in something a little out of the mainstream, have a look at Axel Blackwell’s paranormal thrillers here.

  You can also visit the Dawn Lee McKenna Facebook page, where you’ll find pictures of locations and people used in both series, updates on new books, news about author events, and a lot of odd people, including Dawn Lee.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  DAWN LEE MCKENNA is the author of the novel See You, and the bestselling Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense series. A native of Florida, she now lives in northeastern Tennessee with her five children and one domineering cat.

  AXEL BLACKWELL grew up in one of those small Indiana towns where the only fun is the kind you make yourself. Many ghost and UFO sightings in central Indiana between 1985 and 1990 can be attributed to Axel and his brothers attempting to escape boredom. Axel now lives with his family and an assortment of animals in the Pacific Northwest.