Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10)

by Wayne Stinnett

  “You’re sure strong,” Jenae said, smiling.

  “You’re really small,” Duke said sheepishly, somewhat embarrassed. “I work out with a lot more weight, I bet. How much do you weigh?”

  “Never ask a lady her age or what she weighs,” Jenae replied. Then she bounced in the seat and giggled at the discomfort she saw on Duke’s face. “Just kidding. I’m four-foot-eleven, and weigh ninety-three pounds. You work out with more than that?”

  Duke grinned and walked around the car. Climbing in, he said, “I start out with about four times that.”

  “Wow!” Jenae said, impressed. “I bet you weigh over two hundred.”

  “Six-one and two-eighty,” he said, climbing in. “I’m three times your size.” Emboldened, he added, “Speaking of that, how’d you like to make three times what you already have?”

  Jenae turned in her seat as Duke started the engine. She smiled seductively and twirled her blond hair. “What do you have in mind?”

  “My boat and you, all night.”

  Jenae opened her purse and pulled her phone out. “Let me text my friend.”

  Kevin Montrose fished just about every morning. He’d retired thirty years before from his job as a letter carrier with the post office, and was proud of the fact that in that whole time he’d never missed a day of work. For the next twelve years, he hadn’t missed a day at his part-time job fixing old outboards at the marina. He’d finally fully retired nearly twenty years ago, and had been fishing ever since. He had little else to do but fish and care for June, his wife of fifty-four years, who’d passed away six years before. At eighty-three, his boat and the fishing were about all that he had left that brought him pleasure.

  Kevin fished and lived by the tides. When the tide was high, he fished the mangrove roots for snapper. When it was low, he fished the deep cuts in the back country for grouper. He slept when he was tired and ate when he was hungry. The rest of the time he was fishing, selling his catch, or sleeping. Once the sun came up, he’d motor up and down canals, delivering his catch to some of the older shut-ins.

  Now, in the dark, still hours before dawn, the sturdy little wooden boat with its high stiff bow cut easily through the choppy water near shore. Kevin had built the boat when he returned from the war in Germany, using scrap wood. There was a lot of it available after the 1945 Homestead hurricane. He’d built the boat using plans for a Chesapeake style rowing bay boat, so he could get out to the patch reefs north of his parent’s home on Key Largo, but it was big for a rowboat and he’d built it with the idea of saving up and putting an outboard engine on it. After landing the job as the Vaca Key letter carrier in 1948, he’d moved there, built his own home, and met his wife the same year. The engine on the back of the boat, a brand-spanking-new 1949 Kiekhaefer Mercury twenty-five-horsepower Thunderbolt, had been a wedding gift from his parents. Kevin had meticulously rebuilt the engine six times since then, and kept it in top-notch condition.

  The Thunderbolt purred quietly in the pre-dawn hours. Kevin was heading to a favorite fishing spot not far from the fancy houses on the other side of Overseas Highway. He could have had one of those houses if he wanted, but stayed in the home he’d built sixty years ago. At one time, he could have bought the whole piece of land the fancy houses were on, back when it was still a mosquito-infested mangrove marsh. Instead, he’d saved his money in the bank. The value of that property, which he now wished he’d bought, had now far surpassed his savings account. His only living heir, a twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, would be graduating college in the spring. He’d already told her that the old homestead was hers, if she came back to Marathon to live.

  Dreguez Key was on the Gulf side of the highway, not far from Sugarloaf Marina, where he’d once worked. The engines got to be too sophisticated and the older outboards, like his Thunderbolt, had all but disappeared. A few old-timers stopped by now and then with an engine problem. But it wasn’t enough work to keep him on at the marina. That didn’t matter to Kevin. His social security check was more than enough to pay his bills, and his fishing put food on his table, as well as a few other locals’ tables.

  Kevin steered the little boat into the shallow creek mouth separating Dreguez from Upper Sugarloaf. A moment later, he came out into the large shallow bay and turned west, following the shoreline of the little uninhabited island. The interior was impenetrable, covered with a thick tangle of mangrove and buttonwood. The island was mostly underwater right now, with the tide almost full. The prop roots of the mangroves were barely showing along the shoreline. Lots of smaller fish and babies use the mangroves to hide in, and at high tide the predators could usually squeeze in among the roots, too.

  Cutting the motor twenty feet from the mangroves, Kevin picked up a long, slender metal rod and walked up to the bow. Slipping one end through a big eye ring screwed into the bowsprit, he dropped it until it reached the sandy bottom, four feet below. Then he hoisted it and rammed it down as hard as he could.

  The little boat drifted around slowly in the current, like a flag on a pole, until the stern was pointed toward the creek he’d just come through. Satisfied that his makeshift anchor would hold against the light current, he sat down and laid his favorite rod and reel across his knees, removing the hook from the rod’s lower eye.

  Opening the bait box, Kevin reached in and snagged one of the little three-inch mud minnows swimming around inside. He baited his hook and cast his rig toward the mangroves. The trick to getting the bigger fish to come out was to offer them something easier, and no snapper could resist a struggling mud minnow. Once you had a fish hooked, the trick became keeping the snapper out of the roots, which were covered with sharp edged barnacles and oyster shells. The little mud minnow began tugging against the rattle float a foot above it on the fishing line, straining to get to the safety of the roots. The rattle float would get any nearby snapper’s attention. Kevin slowly gave the mud minnow more line, letting it get closer to the mangrove roots.

  Suddenly, the water rolled just beyond the float, and the rod bent. The old man raised the tip and tightened the drag, trying to angle what he figured to be a big snapper away from the roots.

  The fight lasted only a few seconds before the big fish reached the safety of the roots. A second later, the line went slack, and Kevin knew he’d lost another hook. He slowly tried to reel the line in, hoping that he hadn’t lost the rattle float, too. The line hung up, telling him the float was still there and snagged in the roots. He placed the rod in one of the rod holders and pulled the starting cord on his fifty-nine-year-old engine. It started instantly, and Kevin went forward to pull the pole up.

  Idling slowly to where he knew his expensive float was tangled, he reeled the line in as he got close. Easing up to the mangroves, Kevin killed the engine and grabbed a branch to hold the boat steady. A moment later, he had his steel rod firmly planted in the bottom again and stepped over the gunwale into knee deep water.

  Shuffling his feet on the sandy bottom to avoid stepping on a stingray, Kevin walked to the bow and took hold of the fishing line, following it to where the float was caught up in the roots. But the float wasn’t caught on anything. Knowing there were dangers to sticking one’s hand into mangrove roots, he did it anyway, feeling for the fishing line beyond the float. He followed it down and found the swivel with the steel leader still attached.

  “Damned fish musta threw the hook,” he muttered.

  Figuring that it was the hook that was fouled, Kevin eased the tension on the line and felt slowly along the leader, not wanting the hook to pull loose and jab his finger.

  His hand met something soft and yielding instead, and he jerked his hand back. “What the hell?”

  Reaching down cautiously again, he found and ran his hand along whatever it was. It was a lot larger than a snapper, and it was soft and smooth, so he knew it wasn’t a shark. He squeezed it, but the thing didn’t move. Kevin started, as he suddenly realized what he had his hand on. It had been many years since he’d touched the fir
m flesh on a young woman’s bottom, but he remembered it well.

  Kevin jumped away from the mangroves, bumping his little fishing boat, and quickly climbed in—as quickly as an eighty-three-year-old man can, anyway. Fumbling with the seat bottom, he finally got it open and pulled out a powerful spotlight that was connected directly to a twelve-volt battery under the helm.

  Kevin stood at the rail and turned the light on. “Holy Mary, Mother of Christ,” he muttered.

  Caught in the beam of the spotlight, just below the surface of the water and wedged deep behind mangrove branches, a half-naked woman stared vacantly upward at him, her blond hair streaming around a pretty face. Her legs, encased in black nylon stockings, were pulled up to her chest, which was bare. Other than what she was wearing, she looked like a child who’d climbed into the bough of a tree for a nap.

  Kevin looked around quickly. The marina was only half a mile away, but he knew the office wouldn’t be open yet. He decided he didn’t want to risk going to one of the live-aboard people in the marina, or the few scattered at anchor in the shallow bay. There were only a handful, and any one of them might have been the one that did this.

  Or she might have just come out here to drown herself, he thought. Or maybe got drunk and fell off a boat.

  He looked down at the body again. On her feet were a pair of black shoes with impossibly high heels. No, he decided, she didn’t come out here on her own or fall off a boat. Not in those shoes.

  West of the marina, Kevin heard an airplane engine crank, spit, and come to life. He realized he was close to the little Sugarloaf Shores Airport where skydivers took off from. They sometimes did a morning jump right at sunrise, still more than an hour away. He knew there was a small beach there, and a path to the airport gate.

  Kevin quickly retrieved a bright yellow float from his tackle box and peeled a few more feet of fishing line from his reel. Using his pocketknife, he cut the line and tied the yellow float to it, draping it over a branch so he could find it again. Then he started the engine and pulled up the anchor pole.

  A few minutes later, he rounded the end of the island where the runway thrust out into the water. He knew the water was shallow here, but he also knew he could get within a few feet of shore at high tide, right near the airport gate. Kevin slowed as he neared shore, pointing the bow at the lone streetlight by the gate. When he felt the keel touch bottom, he shut off the engine and set his anchor pole firmly in the soft sand.

  An airplane sat idling in front of the hangar as Kevin hurried across the road. He went through the gate and approached the office, where several people were milling around.

  It didn’t take long for the police to get there. A Monroe County deputy was the first to arrive, and Kevin explained to the young man what he’d found. A few minutes later, an unmarked car pulled through the gate and a man and woman got out.

  Kevin explained again to the two sheriff’s detectives about the woman whose body he’d found stuffed into the mangrove roots. They began asking questions about what he’d been doing out there at this hour and how he’d found the body.

  The sun was just lighting the eastern sky when a sheriff’s boat arrived, and Kevin recognized the young deputy on the sleek center console. “Marty, tell these detectives I’m just a fisherman.”

  “Sergeant Evans,” Martin Phillips said, nodding at the female detective and then at her partner. “Detective Clark, dispatch said you needed a boat.”

  “You came all the way from Key West?” Evans said.

  “No, ma’am,” Marty replied. “I was assigned there temporarily, while Randy Quail was out with his wife in the hospital having a baby. I usually work out of Marathon, but I live on Ramrod and take the boat home.”

  “Do you know Mister Montrose, Deputy?” Clark asked.

  “Yeah,” Marty replied. “He’s delivered our mail and fixed my dad’s outboards since before I was born. He’s harmless, except to the fish he stalks every morning.”

  “We’ll need you to come with us, Mister Montrose,” Detective Evans told the old man. “To show us where you found the body.”

  Kevin turned to Marty, his eyes pleading. “You can’t miss it, Marty. I tied a yella float to the line that she’s snagged on. I’d like to get my tackle back, though. If it ain’t too much trouble.”

  “I think the detectives kinda want you to stick around, Kev,” Marty said, winking at the old man. “At least until they get the body out of the water, okay?”

  “Ah, there goes a day of fishin’.”

  The two detectives climbed into Marty’s boat with the old man. Marty had tied up to the dock of a vacant vacation home just outside the airport’s gate.

  “Go up around Dreguez,” Kevin said. “Waves filled the cut with sand during the storm. You’ll have to use the creek to get into the bay.”

  Marty nodded, steered the boat out of the dredged canal, and turned north, bringing the boat up on plane. Several minutes later, with the powerful outboards burbling at an idle, Marty navigated through the creek mouth.

  “Can’t stay here long,” Marty said. “Tide’s falling and it’ll be too shallow for my boat soon.”

  “Over there,” Kevin said, shining Marty’s flashlight. “See the yella float in the tree branch I told ya about?”

  Checking the current and his depth sounder, Marty aimed the bow of his patrol boat at a spot twenty feet to the left of the float. With the bow a few feet from the overhanging mangroves, Marty stopped the boat and flipped the switch to release the anchor. The splash seemed unusually loud in the still predawn air.

  The boat drifted sideways in the current, turning slowly into it. When they neared the float, hanging in the tree, Marty flipped the switch the other way, locking the windlass. The Danforth dragged a little, then dug into the sand, stopping the boat just a few feet from the marker.

  “How long before Doc Fredric gets here?” Marty asked, noting the two feet of depth the sounder displayed.

  “An hour,” Evans replied. “Maybe longer.”

  “We’ll be sitting on the bottom in an hour,” Marty said. “This bay will be six inches in two hours and we won’t be able to get the boat out for ten.”

  Both detectives were shining lights down into the water on the starboard side, where the body was. “What do you think?” Clark asked Evans. “I don’t see any blood or obvious trauma. Maybe she fell off a boat.”

  “No boater I know would let a floozy prance around on his deck in those shoes,” Kevin said.

  “We should wait for the ME,” Evans said, looking around.

  “The way we came in is the deepest,” Marty said. “If we can’t get out, Doc won’t be able to enter in another boat and it’ll be afternoon before he can.”

  “We’ll have to get the body out of the water ourselves,” Evans said.

  Marty quickly unbuckled his holster and stored it in the overhead compartment, locking it. He never carried anything in his pockets when he was on the water.

  “Hand me the backboard when I get in,” Marty said, stripping off his uniform shirt and tee-shirt. He quickly swung his legs over the gunwale and slid into the water. Moving toward the body, he noted the blond hair and the top of her head above the water. He took the backboard Clark handed him and moved closer.

  “Tie the line off to the bow cleat,” Marty said. “The board’ll float alongside while I get her out.”

  Approaching the body, he examined the roots. The woman looked like she’d contorted herself through an opening a few feet to the left and wedged herself in a sitting position with her legs drawn up to her chest and leaning slightly.

  Or someone stuffed her in there, Marty thought.

  It took some work, but he managed to unfold the body and pull it toward the opening. When he finally had her floating free, he quickly placed the board on her back and reached around to buckle the straps, which were hanging off the sides.

  With little time to spare, Marty did the same with the woman’s feet, then turned the board over, so t
he woman was floating on it. Clark hauled on the line and Marty pushed, bringing the board to a standing position. The woman’s head hung down, her hair covering most of her exposed breasts.

  Marty scrambled to the stern and boarded the boat. The two men lifted the body and backboard out of the water and placed it face up on the foredeck. She wore only black nylons, black high heels, and a red-and-black garter belt.

  Hooker underwear, Marty thought, though he didn’t recognize her. Most hookers worked the tourists in Key West. There were a few in the Middle Keys, but he knew who most of them were.

  “Looks like a working girl,” Clark said, shaking out a blanket to cover the body from onlookers.

  “Not from around here,” Marty said. “Unless she’s new, or a call girl from up island. We better get out of here while we still have water.” Trimming the engine up a little higher, he started it and eased the boat forward as the windlass took up the anchor line.

  When the anchor broke from the bottom, Marty spun the wheel away from the mangroves and put the boat in reverse. He waited until the bow would clear the branches, put the engines in forward and idled toward the creek mouth. The engine bumped the sandy bottom twice, but they made it through.

  Clark’s phone rang and he answered it. He said where they were and that they were headed in, then ended the call. “Tim’s at the airport.”

  “Good,” Evans said. “Ben and I are covered up with two murders, you guys can take this one.”

  “You don’t think they’re related?” Marty asked, bringing the center console up on plane in deeper water. “We don’t get a lot of bodies here, and Isaksson’s boat was found only a mile and a half away.”

  “I doubt it,” Evans said, standing next to him, trying to send a text with one hand while hanging onto the T-top frame with the other. “We’re working on the theory that Isaksson and Marshall were killed on a salvage site, somewhere out in the Gulf. That doesn’t fit in with a prostitute.”