by Tom Lowe
Suddenly, out of the west, a breeze started, picked up, and kicked with a strong gust. “Max, looks like we’re heading to Bimini!”
I made my way back to the cockpit. I stood behind the wheel, the wind steady, the sails expanding, leading the boat toward the east. I reset the GPS for Buccaneer Point on Bimini. In less than thirty seconds we were doing ten knots.
I reached down into the ice in the cooler and retrieved a Corona. I turned to Max. “All right, first mate, we’re heading across some blue water to an island I visited a few yeas ago. Enjoy!”
We had the sun to our backs, and the islands somewhere over the horizon. Max quickly became used to the movements of the boat. She made it all the way up to the bowsprit, adjusting her balance by spreading her front and hind legs a little farther apart. She watched the spray off the bow and sniffed the salty air.
I listened to the boat cut through the water, felt the wind on my face, sipped the beer, put a Jack Johnson CD in the player, sat down, and steered the wheel with my toes. It felt good to be sailing again. I’d forgotten how much I’d missed it.
Max started to walk back to the cockpit when something caught her eye. Two porpoises loped alongside the boat easily keeping up with us. Max barked and scurried around the boat keeping her eyes on the strange creatures. They swam less than twenty feet off the starboard side.
I remembered Sherri saying, “I love it when they join us. I believe it’s the same pair we saw yesterday.”
“How can you tell?”
“Their attitude. Maybe it’s those smiles. I don’t know. But they seem to want to travel with us.”
These two did travel with Max and me for another two miles and then left us. They left us with their attitude, their smiles, and their sense of adventure.
“Keep an eye out for pirates!” I yelled to Max. “That’s the mate’s job, growl at ‘em.”
She turned and looked at me, her face animated in a swashbuckling dachshund kind of way. I grinned, watching Max stand near the bowsprit, her ears flapping in the breeze, her wet nose sniffing the trade winds.
Maybe I didn’t need the GPS. I had my little watchdog to point the way.
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We hope you have enjoyed the first novel in the Sean O'Brien series. The following is an excerpt from the second book in the series,
The 24th Letter.
ONE
U.S. Marshal Deputy Bill Fisher had never done it before, and after that morning he swore to God he’d never do it again. Never had he let a prisoner have a cigarette before entering a courthouse to testify. Sam Spelling, though, had been cooperative and polite on the long ride from Florida State Prison to the U.S. district court in Orlando. And they were early. The news media were on the other side of the building, out front. Maybe, thought Deputy Fisher, it wouldn’t hurt if Spelling smoked half a cigarette.
Spelling was to be the star witness in the government’s case against a bank robber turned cocaine trafficker. Since Spelling was helping the government, at a possible risk to himself, what harm could a quick cigarette do? Might calm the boy down, help his testimony. Marshal Fisher and a second marshal escorted Spelling up the worn steps leading to the courthouse’s back entrance.
At the top of the steps, Spelling looked around, eyes searching the adjacent alley, the delivery trucks and sheriff’s cars parked along the perimeter. His dark hair gelled and combed straight back. Two white scars ran jagged above his left eyebrow like lighting bolts—leftovers from a diet of violence. He had a haggard, bird-like face, beak nose with feral eyes, red-rimmed, and irises the shade of blue turquoise. He squinted in the morning sun and said, “I’d really appreciate that smoke, sir. Just a quick one to relax my nerves. I gotta go in there and say things that are gonna send Larry to where I am for a hellava long time. State’s promised me he’ll go to some other prison. If he don’t, it’ll be a matter of time before he shanks me, or has somebody do it. Right now a smoke would make my time in the witness stand a whole lot easier.”
THE RIFLE'S CROSSHAIRS SWEPT up Sam Spelling’s back as he reached the top step. The sniper looked through the scope. Patient. Waiting for the right second. He knew the .303 would make an entrance hole no larger than the width of a child’s pencil on the back of Spelling’s head. The exit wound would plaster Spelling’s face into mortar supporting the century-old granite blocks.
At the rear entrance to the courthouse, the shooter didn’t anticipate Spelling turning around at the top of the steps. Much better. He breathed easy, slowing his heartbeat. Now he could put one between the eyes. Through the powerful scope, he saw the flame of a cigarette lighter. Magnified, it looked like a tiny fire in the marshal’s hand. He watched as Spelling used both his cuffed hands to hold the cigarette, bluish-white smoke drifting in the crosshairs. Spelling took a deep drag off the cigarette. The sniper started to squeeze the trigger.
Then Spelling nodded and coughed, turning his head, stepping backward.
He lowered the crosshairs to Spelling’s chest and pulled the trigger.
Sam Spelling fell like a disjointed string-puppet. The gunshot sprayed tissue, bits of lung and muscle against the courthouse wall. Blood trickled in a finger pattern down the white granite, leaving a crimson trail that glistened in the morning sun.
TWO
Sean O’Brien stood on the worn cypress wood of his screened-in back porch and watched lightning pop through the low-lying clouds above the Ocala National Forest. Each burst hung in the bellies of the clouds for a few seconds, the charges exploding and fading like fireflies hiding in clusters of purple grapes. He could smell rain falling in the forest and coming toward the St. Johns River as the breeze delivered the scent of jasmine, wet oak, and honeysuckle.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rolling noise, the burst and fade of light reminded O’Brien of the times he witnessed night bombing in the first Gulf War, but that was many miles and years in the past. He deeply inhaled the cool, rain-drenched air. The sound of frogs reached a competing crescendo when the first drops began to hit the oak leaves. The river was like black ink, white caps rolling across its dark surface
The temperature dropped and the wind picked up, bringing a wall of rain across the river and through the thick limbs of old live oaks, soaking the gray beards of Spanish moss. Within a few seconds, moss hung from the limbs like the wet fleece of lamb’s wool caught in the rain and stained the shade of tarnished armor.
O’Brien sipped a cup of black coffee and listened to the rain tap the tin roof over the porch. The old house was built in 1945, constructed from river rock, Florida cypress, and pine. Wood too tough for termites, nails or even hurricanes. The house sat high above the river on the shoulder of an ancient Indian mound. O’Brien bought the home after his wife died from ovarian cancer fifteen months ago. Following her death, he had a fleeting romance with the bottle and the genies it released in his subconscious.
O’Brien looked at Sherri’s framed photograph standing on a wicker table near his porch chair. Her smile was still as intoxicating as a summer night, fresh, vibrant and so full of life. So full of hope. He deeply missed her. He set his cell phone by her picture.
Max barked.
O’Brien looked down at Max, his miniature dachshund. “I know you have to pee. We have two options, I can let you go out by yourself and risk an owl flying off with you, or I can grab an umbrella and try to keep us both dry while you do your thing.”
Max sniffed and cracked a half bark. She trotted over to the screen door and looked back at O’Brien through eager brown eyes.
“Okay, never delay a lady from her trip to the bathroom.” O’Brien reached for an umbrella in the corner, lifted Max under his arm like a football, and walked out the door. He set her down near the base of a large live oak in this yard. Sherri had bought the dog as a puppy when O’Brien was spending long days and nights on a particularly extreme murder investigation. She named the dog Maxine and allowed her to sleep in their bed, something O’Brien discovered after he had returne
d home one night, exhausted, awakening before dawn to find Maxine lying on her back, snuggled next to his side, snoring. In a dream-like stupor, he sat up, momentarily thinking a big rodent had climbed onto the bed. But Max had looked at him too lovingly through chestnut brown eyes. They’d made their peace. And now it was only the two of them.
He had sometimes wondered if Sherri had known she was ill before she was officially diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she had bought Max for him. Maybe she knew a ten pound dachshund could show a six-two, two hundred pound man a softer, more compassionate side of his own self. Sherri had that kind of wisdom, he thought.
O’Brien held the large umbrella over Max as she squatted, the rain thumping the umbrella, the frogs chanting competing choruses.
A foreign sound sliced through the air like a bad note.
O’Brien could hear his cell phone ringing from the table on his back porch. “Ignore it, Max,” he said. “Go with the flow. No need getting a bladder infection. If it’s important, they’ll call back.”
Max bolted from underneath the umbrella and sniffed fresh tracks left in the dirt near an orange tree O’Brien had recently planted. He watched rain pooling in the tracks. O’Brien knelt down and placed his hand over one imprint. He let out a low whistle. “Florida panther, Max, looks like it was running.” O’Brien’s eyes followed the tracks until they were lost in the black. Max growled.
“That tough dog growl would certainly scare a panther. Not many of them left. But boy do we have the black bears in that old forest. That’s why you, young lady, have to eat the leftovers. We don’t need bears rummaging through the garbage cans. Coons are bad enough.”
The cell phone rang again.
O’Brien stood and looked up towards the house and porch. “Come on, Max, let’s see who is it that needs our immediate attention.”
Max sniffed the damp air, sneezed and followed O’Brien up the sloping yard. She climbed the wet steps and stood on the porch to shake the rainwater out of her fur.
O’Brien picked up has cell at the last ring. “Hello.”
Nothing.
“Maybe it went to voice-mail, Max.” O’Brien looked at the caller ID.
Not a good sign.
The caller was a close friend of his. Father Callahan had been there for him when Sherri died.
And now maybe the priest needed him.