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

by Wayne Stinnett

  “Jimmy called Rusty about the same time, Jesse. Emailed him this picture of Duke Rafferty on the docks at Boot Key Harbor this morning. Half a dozen other people from Boot Key Harbor called him this morning, too. They all describe a guy who looks just like this asking about Gaspar’s Revenge. Robin said he’s driving one of those jacked-up Jeep Wranglers, red, with big off-road tires. He knew your boat’s name, but not yours.”

  “I got the warehouse location,” Chyrel said. “Owned by Bill Rafferty since nineteen-sixty-four. It’s on the south side of Stock Island, on Front Street.”

  “How’d you come up with that so fast?” Morgan asked. “Never mind. Evans, you’re with me.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, putting a hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “Who’s the old guy Harley sent Duke after?”

  “Oh God,” Devon mumbled. “Kevin Montrose. Remember he called and said he knew who the killer is and had seen him?”

  “Call him back,” I said. “Find out where he is and let Travis know. We’re headed for the old railroad bridge.” I turned to Devon. “Be careful and good luck.”

  She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and whispered, “Get some!”

  “Oorah!” I shouted, halfway to the back porch and the Cigarette.

  Morgan got in his sedan and started the engine. Evans got in the passenger side. “Get Jefferson on the radio, and tell him to meet us at the curve on Front Street. Then call Judge Hargrave and tell him what we heard. Ask for the warrant to be extended to cover Delgado and searching any other properties owned by the Rafferty clan.”

  Evans relayed the message through dispatch as Morgan hit the gas and turned onto Palm Avenue Causeway. He turned on the lights and siren as they approached North Roosevelt and slowed for the left turn.

  Evans was on her phone, pleading her case to the judge, as Morgan turned off the siren and accelerated. He left the blue light on the dash turned on, for all the good it did.

  Evans ended the call and scrolled through her recent calls to find Kevin. “Judge said okay on the warrant,” she said, putting the phone to her ear. “We’ll have it in ten minutes.”

  Morgan turned left again and crossed the short bridge from Key West to Stock Island.

  When Kevin answered, Evans asked him where he was precisely.

  “Fishin’ Bahia Honda Channel,” he replied. “I gave the other detective the guy’s description and where the boat is that he lives on. Did ya catch him?”

  “Not yet, Mister Montrose,” Evans replied. “We think he might be looking for you and he knows you’re fishing there.”

  “Yeah, well, out here on the water, his muscles ain’t much good. I carry a pistol in my boat, all legal and registered. That freak comes out here, I’ll shoot his ass before he gets on my boat.”

  A click told Evans he’d hung up, and a look at her screen confirmed it. “Stubborn ass, old fool,” she grumbled, as Morgan turned onto Front Street.

  “He hang up?”

  “Yeah,” Evans replied, as Morgan pulled up behind Jefferson’s car.

  Evans’s phone rang as she started to get out of the car. She answered it without looking, hoping it was Montrose. She listened for a minute, then got back in the car, before ending the call.

  Seconds seemed like hours as she waited for the mobile fax to print out the new warrant. It finally started whirring and then spit out a sheet of paper. Evans grabbed it and got out of the car.

  “We have the warrant,” she shouted to Ben.

  “Try to get Montrose again,” Morgan said, looking around the area. The warehouse was around the curve and another fifty or sixty yards down Front Street. “Pull the cars in there,” he said, pointing to a boat repair yard. “Maybe we can get two birds.”

  Evans looked at him. “Ben, that girl could be dying.”

  “Chance we gotta take,” Morgan replied. “They seemed bent on keeping her alive and if Delgado’s gonna be here and we can catch him delivering drugs, we can put him away forever.”

  They got back into the cars and pulled them into the boatyard to wait. The wait wasn’t long. Five minutes after they parked, Jefferson’s voice came over the radio. “That’s Delgado’s car approaching. There’s a panel van following it.”

  “How far out is uniformed backup?” Morgan asked Evans.

  “Five minutes,” she replied.

  Morgan picked up the mic and spoke into it. “Jefferson, give them a minute to turn off the road, then you and Clark go park at Fishbusterz Seafood and make your way in on foot to the back of the property. Backup will be here in five minutes. Evans and I will go in with the squad cars and I’ll send a uniform around both sides.”

  “Roger that,” Jefferson said, then backed out and turned down the road toward the warehouse.

  “They know to come in silent?” Morgan asked.

  “Yeah,” Evans replied. “I had dispatch repeat it back.”

  Two minutes later, three squad cars rolled to a stop in front of the boatyard, and five deputies got out of them. Morgan went to the deputies and explained a quick plan, where the two solo deputies would lead and go straight to the front corners of the building. The other squad car, with the other two deputies, would follow him to the front door.

  “If there’s a gate,” Morgan said to the deputy driving the lead car, “crash through it.”

  “Oh yeah,” replied the young deputy, a man by the name of Howell. “Just call me Rubber Duck.”

  They got back into their cars and Evans said, “Jefferson and Clark are in position and under cover at the back of the property.”

  Morgan started the Crown Vic and pulled out of the boatyard, following behind the two solo deputies. The third patrol car fell in behind him. There was a gate, and Howell crashed through it with wild abandon.

  The two lead squad cars split, moving across the littered yard of the warehouse toward the two corners. Morgan hit the gas, driving over the crumpled gate, and accelerated toward the door at the front.

  The two detectives jumped out of Morgan’s sedan and took cover behind their doors, guns drawn. The third squad car slid to a stop beside them, kicking up more dust. Morgan reached in and flipped on the PA, grabbing the mic off the dash.

  “This is the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department,” Morgan announced, his amplified voice reverberating off the old wooden structure. “We have the building surrounded. Come out with your hands on your head.”

  Two more patrol cars came charging through the demolished gate. Morgan turned at the sound and motioned them toward either side of the building.

  Hearing a noise inside, Morgan got down behind his door again. He keyed the mic and said, “This is Detective Morgan, with the Monroe County Sheriff’s office. We have a warrant, and if you don’t come out peacefully, we’re coming in.”

  There was the sound of breaking glass and Jefferson called out on the radio, “They’re coming out the back window! Four men, heading toward the dock.”

  From behind the building, Morgan could hear shouting, as the detectives gave the subjects orders. Then a shot rang out. That one shot was followed by nearly a dozen in rapid succession, as the four police officers at the back of the building opened fire.

  “Breach the door!” Morgan shouted at the two deputies with them at the front. One of the deputies picked up a heavy steel battering ram and ran quickly to the door. His partner and the two detectives were right behind him.

  The deputy didn’t hesitate. He was a big guy and the ram weighed fifty pounds. The door failed with the first blow, the frame splintering and the door falling off its upper hinge to hang crooked inside the building. The four cops stormed quickly through the opening, spreading out with shotguns and handguns up and ready. No more shooting was heard from the back of the building.

  The van and Delgado’s car were in the warehouse, along with a black Cadillac CTS. Behind the van was a small stack of bundles wrapped in black plastic. There were even more in the van. The uniforms quickly cleared the warehouse area and Morgan went over to
the plastic-wrapped packages. If Delgado was involved, he knew what would be wrapped inside them.

  As the two deputies swarmed up the stairs to a mezzanine office, Morgan picked up one of the bricks. It weighed about ten pounds and was tightly wrapped. Taking a pocket knife from his pants pocket, he slit the covering and stuck a finger inside.

  He touched the tip of his finger, covered in white powder, to his tongue and turned to Evans. “Coke. Gotta be five hundred pounds.”

  “Up here, Detectives!” one of the deputies shouted from above.

  Morgan and Evans raced up the steps and into the office. The two deputies were trying to cut through duct tape securing a young woman’s wrists to a metal bar hanging from the ceiling. The woman wore only a bra; a pair of panties lay discarded at her feet. She had hair dyed several bright colors, and splotches all over her body.

  Evans raced over to the girl, Morgan following her. He quickly shrugged out of his jacket and, as the deputies cut the girl free, wrapped the jacket around her shoulders. As he did so, he realized that the splotches were actually hundreds of brightly colored tattoos.

  Evans helped support the girl and walked her to the only piece of furniture in the room, a bare mattress on a worn-out bed.

  Morgan took his handheld radio off his belt and called Jefferson.

  “We got ’em, Lieutenant,” Jefferson said. “All of them were armed and one fired on us. Delgado’s hit, but he’ll live. His driver and the van driver are both dead. The fourth man is alive, but probably not gonna make it.”

  “Come with me,” Morgan said to the two deputies. They went quickly down the steps to the warehouse, leaving Evans to take care of the girl.

  “Secure those packages,” Morgan said, pointing to the coke. “Both of you count them separately. If your numbers don’t match both of you do it again.”

  Seeing no back door except a big rollup door, and figuring Rafferty would have used that if it opened, Morgan went out the front and around the left side of the building. Delgado was sitting up, a red stain on the front of his right shoulder. Morgan went over to where Harley Rafferty lay in the dust, two large blood stains on his midsection and pink foam at his mouth.

  Morgan knelt beside the man. “You’re not gonna make it, Rafferty. One bullet went through your lung and the other one’s in your belly. Why don’t you tell me about the French girl? Did your brother kill her?”

  Harley’s eyes squeezed shut, “Fuck you, asshole!” he snarled, spitting frothy foam on Morgan’s pants leg.”

  The older detective only knelt there, watching the man die. There wasn’t anything he could do to help him, anyway. Rafferty’s breathing became more shallow.

  “James Isaksson and Jennifer Marshall?” Morgan asked. The two divers? Did you kill them, or your brother?”

  Rafferty opened his eyes and looked up at Morgan. He seemed to come to a decision and moaned, “Duke killed ’em, man. A few others, too.” He gulped three quick breaths and added, “My brother’s a sick fuck. I shoulda put him down myself.”

  Rafferty’s head rolled to the side and his chest quit heaving. His lifeless eyes stared up at the azure sky, no longer seeing it.

  Making no pretense at observing normal safe boating practices, I brought the go-fast up on plane as soon as we left the bight, pointing the bow toward Fleming Key Cut. By the time we went under the bridge, we were going over sixty knots and accelerating through the turn into the main shipping channel.

  Roaring past Mallory Square and a docked cruise ship at nearly ninety knots just an hour before sunset on a Saturday, I knew that there would be hundreds of pictures of us going by. Tourists would be turning to one another wondering if we were part of the show, or a scene from Cops. Welcome to Key West, Bob and Martha from Waukegan. The next strange scene will be starting shortly.

  The throttles were against the stops as I turned east around the tip of Key West and into the Atlantic Ocean. Bahia Honda was thirty miles dead ahead. I kept the boat in the deep sandy trough just inside the barrier reef. Wave action was minimal, but I still had to throttle back to ninety-five

  “How did this old fisherman figure out who the killer is?” I asked nobody in particular.

  “Y’all’s coconut telegraph,” Chyrel said over my earwig. “A few locals hanging out at a bar, each with different sides of the same story. Folks down here can put things together, and they’re tight with each other. I doubt anyone that guy talked to in Boot Key Harbor told him anything.”

  “Be interesting to find out,” Travis said. “You learn anything on Montrose, Chyrel?”

  “A little,” she answered. “He’s never been arrested, which is saying a lot for an eighty-three-year-old Conch. He served with the Army in Germany and Italy during World War Two, retired from the postal service in seventy-eight, and worked as an outboard mechanic until he fully retired at sixty-five, back in nineteen-ninety. Wife, June Montrose, never worked outside the home, died six years ago. Two sons, both killed in action in Vietnam. The oldest son was married and they had a daughter. His wife committed suicide right after he was killed, and the daughter went to live with Kevin and June.”

  “Sounds like a lot of those guys,” I said. “Living through the Depression built resilience in people. Something comes up in their life, they just dealt with it and continued the march forward.”

  “Sounds a lot like your grandfather, Jesse,” Andrew said.

  Yeah, I thought, a lot like Pap.

  Though Duke Rafferty had a ten-minute head start and we had considerably farther to go, having to loop all the way around Key West, I felt sure we’d get there at about the same time. One of the great things about living in the Keys is the lack of traffic on the water, compared to snaking your way up or down that two lane ribbon of asphalt, the Overseas Highway.

  In the corner of my eye, I saw Travis lean forward and tap on one of the gauges. “What is it?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the water ahead.

  “Port engine is running a little hotter than the starboard.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, my subconscious already moving my hand to the throttles. “How hot? And what’s the oil pressure?”

  “Port engine’s at two-thirty. Oil pressure on both engines are at sixty-five pounds.”

  I took my hand off the throttle and put it back on the wheel. “Just keep an eye on it. Thirty pounds is safe.”

  We soon approached the marker at Big Pine Shoal, and I turned northeast toward the old bridge with the sun at our backs. Still a mile away, I could see a small boat, just beyond the removed section of the ancient bridge on the left side of the channel. It was white and had a high bow, like old boats I’d seen as a kid on Chesapeake Bay when Dad was stationed at Quantico. I’d seen it around a few times, usually fishing the back country.

  “A red Jeep in the parking lot,” I heard Tony say.

  “Port engine temperature is redlining,” Travis said, coolly. “Pressure’s down to forty pounds.”

  “Screw it,” I said, keeping both throttles wide-open. We shot through the gap in the bridge at seventy knots. I was going for a distraction, if the old man was still alive.

  Pulling back hard on the throttles, I waited a second before cutting the wheel hard to port, bringing the sleek racing boat roaring into a tight turn, kicking up spray in a huge arcing circle, before coming to a stop.

  The unmistakable sound of a shot rang out, but the old man was more concerned with our sudden appearance, standing and waving both arms while he shouted at us.

  Scanning the fishing pier, which was once the foot of the bridge, I spotted Duke Rafferty easily. Not just because of his size, but also because he was the only one on the pier not running away. Instead, he was resting his huge forearms on the pier railing and pointing a gun. The distance wasn’t great, maybe eighty feet. A difficult shot for a handgun, with the target bobbing on a boat.

  Another shot rang out and I saw the old man go down in his boat.

  The port engine suddenly froze up, and I shut off the fuel and
ignition to it. “Tony, take the wheel!” I shouted, stripping off my harness and kicking my shoes off under the dash. “Crash it on the beach if you have to, but get there before that asshole gets away.”

  I didn’t wait for a response, but dove headlong into the gin-clear water. My shirt and jeans slowed me a little, but swimming is as natural as walking for me. I struck out toward the old man’s boat, swimming as hard as I could.

  When I reached it, I grabbed the gunwale near the stern and started to hoist myself in. Another shot rang out, much closer, and wood splinters cut into my left hand and wrist. I dropped back into the water.

  “Mister Montrose!” I shouted. “I’m not the guy trying to kill you. He’s on the pier and my friends are after him. My name’s Jesse McDermitt. May I come aboard?”

  “I know who you are,” the old man croaked. “Recognition didn’t get from my eyes to my brain quick enough, is all. Come aboard.”

  Levering myself up cautiously, I saw Montrose lying on the deck in a puddle of blood, a revolver laying at his side. I rolled into the boat and scrambled to get to him. Just as I reached his side, I heard a terrible crunching sound, one of the worst sounds a waterman can hear: fiberglass breaking.

  When I looked over the gunnel, I saw the Cigarette on the rocky beach, a huge hole in the starboard side. Travis, Andrew, and Tony were scrambling up the embankment to get to the pier.

  “You have a first-aid kit on board?” I asked the old Conch. His face was etched deep with lines, his skin dark brown from the sun with a coarse, leathery look. His eyes were bright blue and clear. For just one instant, I thought I was looking into Pap’s face. He’d have been about the same age, if he were still alive.

  “Starboard side,” Montrose grunted. “In the console.”

  Leaning back, I opened the compartment and pulled the white case out. I tore his shirt open. There was a hole in his chest, just above and to the left of the sternum. Blood pulsed out of it at regular intervals. I gently rolled him onto his side. No exit wound.