by J B Black
“Really, Reb, I’m doing just fine,” Honey said. “The way I look at it, those people all got just what they deserved. They attacked us and we defended ourselves. Simple as that. Hell, I’ve been putting up with crazy ass fanatic stalkers all of my modeling career and I had to shoot one once when he wouldn’t take no for an answer. By the way, I wasn’t the only one who shot the assassin, if I remember correctly.”
“Did I tell you how proud I was of the way you took out Megan?”
Honey smiled. “Yes, you did. Several times.”
“Did you enjoy the going away party we threw for you last night?”
“I did. Thank you for throwing it for me.”
“Do you remember embarrassing Rusty in front of his date?”
“I did nothing of the sort.”
Reb laughed and said, “All of those margaritas must have clouded your memory.”
Hoping she hadn’t done anything to really embarrass Rusty—someone she really cared for a lot—Honey thought back to last night’s events.
* * *
Honey remembered hearing the doorbell ring and going to the front door to see who else was coming to her party. She was still cautious after the incident with Megan and looked out the peep hole to see who was there. When she saw it was Rusty on the other side of the door, she quickly opened the door, threw her arms around him, and gave him a long, lingering full-on-the-lips kiss.
When she released Rusty from her embrace, Honey noticed the very attractive, middle-aged woman standing next to Rusty and said, “Hi, I’m Honey Brown. You must be Rusty’s date. I’m so embarrassed. I want you to know I definitely don’t usually do that kind of thing, but did you know that, a few weeks ago, this wonderful man saved me, my boyfriend Reb, and Reb’s friend, Jake, from an assassin and got himself shot in the process?”
Rusty—who had turned bright crimson—said, “Honey, I’d like you to meet Donna Martin. Donna, this is Honey Brown.”
Donna shook Honey’s hand and said, “It’s a pleasure meeting you, Honey. Rusty’s told me what good neighbors you and Reb have been.”
Donna winked at Rusty before saying, “Honey, you’ll have to tell me all about Rusty saving you from the assassin.”
Honey vaguely remembered doing just that sometime later in the evening.
* * *
Honey had a look of concern on her face when she asked, “Rusty’s not upset with me, is he?”
“Not by a long shot, sweetheart. That old cuss thinks the world of you. Before he and his date took off from the party last night, Rusty took me aside and told me that whatever it was you told his date about him, he had a really good feeling he was going to get lucky with the lady.”
“Good, Rusty deserves to get laid every now and then at his age,” Honey remarked.
“Don’t we all,” Reb said. “Speaking of which, why don’t we take advantage of the next few hours, before you have to leave, by spending some quality time in the bedroom?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
Reb and Honey were in Reb’s SUV headed west on Perdido Beach Boulevard on their way to Jack Edwards Airport in nearby Gulf Shores where Honey would board the private business jet that had been chartered to fly her to Cancun. Reb was driving.
Since moving to Seaside Beach and starting his charter fishing business, Reb had taken to wearing brightly colored Hawaiian style shirts, loose fitting blue jeans, deck shoes, and a ball cap most of the time. Today was no exception.
Honey was sitting next to Reb wearing a brightly colored tropical pattern sundress that showed off her abundant cleavage to good advantage. Honey was a firm believer in the old saying ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it.’ Furthermore, it didn’t hurt that Reb really liked seeing her in that dress.
They were in the left lane sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change when a vehicle pulled up alongside them with its sound system playing so loudly it could be heard in the next county. The vehicle’s bass speakers were making a constant teeth-rattling boom, boom, boom and Honey could tell that Reb was fast approaching his breaking point with the noise.
“Let me handle this, darling,” Honey said as she pressed the button and lowered the tinted window on her door. She leaned out slightly, put on her best and sexiest smile, and yelled out to the scruffy looking man—somewhere in his late 20s or early 30s—with the unusual looking haircut—his hair looked like spikes sticking straight out from his head—who was driving a late model Camaro convertible, “Excuse me, sir, but would you mind turning down the volume on your car’s stereo, please?”
Upon hearing someone tell Honey to ‘shut the fuck up, bitch,’ Reb slammed the SUV’s gear selector into park, set the emergency brake, opened his door, vaulted out of the SUV, sprinted to the rear, ran around the back of the SUV, and dashed over to the driver’s side door of the Camaro convertible where he grabbed a handful of hair on the top of the driver’s head with his right hand, lifted the driver about six inches off the car seat, and screamed in his ear, “Turn the car off and set the emergency brake.”
As Honey watched in amusement, as soon as the driver turned the car off and set the emergency brake, Reb jerked him, by the hair, up out of the driver’s seat, over the door, and held him in a standing position out in the road between the two vehicles.
When the man said, “Get the fuck off me, man,” and took a swing at Reb, Reb bitch-slapped him a few times until he settled down.
Still holding the now docile man by the hair, Reb guided him up to the front passenger side door of the SUV where Honey was sitting with her window still down.
Reb growled through clinched teeth, “Now I know your momma must have taught you some manners, so I better hear you apologize to the lady for being such an asshole, otherwise I will beat you to within an inch of your life, do you understand me, punk?”
Knowing he had crossed the line, fearing for his life, and embarrassed at feeling something warm and wet running down his leg, the man said, “Ma’am I am so truuuuly sorry for what I said to you and for disturbing you with my music. I swear to you I will never ever do that again.”
“Well, bless your heart. I almost believe you meant that,” Honey said to the man as he stood there pissing himself in the middle of the road. “Listen to me you foul-mouthed little piss ant. If I ever see or hear tell of you being around here again, you’ll be swimming with the sharks out at one of the offshore oil rigs. You got that shit-for-brains?”
“Yuh, yuh, yuh, yes ma’am,” the punk managed to stammer in response.
“Well then, stop pissing your pants and get the hell out of here. Reb, let him go. We’ve got a plane to catch,” Honey said.
As soon as Reb released his hold on him, the man looked down and saw he was standing in a puddle of his own urine. He shook his head in disgust before bolting for his car.
When Reb walked back around the rear of his SUV to return to the driver’s seat, he noticed, for the first time, the other cars lined up behind his SUV and the Camaro that had been waiting for the light to change before the altercation had occurred.
Seeing the shocked looks on the faces of the people in the cars, Reb shrugged and said, “Sorry you had to see that, folks.”
When he got back into the SUV, Reb put the transmission in Drive, released the emergency brake, and, seeing that the traffic light was green, proceeded on the way to the airport.
Honey looked at him and smiled. “Thank you for being my knight in shining armor back there, darling.”
“No problem, my warrior goddess. Anybody disrespects you gets their ass kicked. You okay with that?”
“Darling, anytime someone wants to disrespect me, please feel free to kick their sorry ass.”
Reb grinned. “It will be my pleasure. By the way, what is it with you and throwing the bad guys to the sharks?”
“Have you noticed how it gets their attention?”
“I’ll grant you you’ve got a point there,” Reb acknowledged.
* * *
After kissing Honey goodbye at the airfield and watching her chartered business jet takeoff, Reb had an uneventful drive back home.
CHAPTER 8
Reb Rogers’ Condo
Seaside Tower Condos
Seaside Beach, Alabama
Monday, May 3, 2010
7:00 a.m. CDT
Reb was in the kitchen of his condo unit pouring himself his second cup of coffee of the morning, thinking about running up to The Farm later in the morning, when he heard the doorbell ring. He set the coffee pot back on the coffee maker’s warming plate and walked down the hallway to see who was at his door this time of morning.
After glancing out the peephole, Reb opened the door to find his friend Billy Morris, Seaside Beach’s Chief of Police, standing out on the breezeway. Billy was wearing his official police uniform—a comfortable pair of chukka boots, a well-worn pair of faded blue jeans, a tan cotton half-sleeve shirt with a button-down collar and pockets on both sides with button-down flaps to keep important items from falling out, and a white ball cap that had Chief, Seaside Beach PD embroidered on the front of it.
Reb said, “Morning Billy, what’s up?”
“You got a minute, Reb?”
“Sure, come on in and you can tell me what’s going on over a cup of coffee.”
Billy followed Reb back down the hallway to the kitchen. Reb opened the door to the cabinet where he kept the coffee cups, took one down for Billy, filled it from the coffee pot, and set it down on the counter next to where Billy was standing.
Reb picked up the cup of coffee he’d poured right before Billy had rung the doorbell and took a drink of the still hot coffee, before saying, “I guess this is about the punk I roughed up on Perdido Beach Boulevard yesterday for mouthing off to Honey when we were on the way to the airport?”
Billy got a quizzical look on his face as he tried to register what Reb had just said to him. Then he started laughing. When he stopped, he said, “Oh, the road rage incident yesterday. I had a sneaking suspicion that was you. We got a couple of calls from eyewitnesses about what happened.”
“I don’t know that I like the sound of that,” Reb replied.
“One of the callers was Reverend Johnson, the preacher at the local Methodist church,” Billy continued, with a smile on his face, obviously enjoying himself. “Apparently the preacher and his wife were in the car right behind the car belonging to the jerk you gave the comeuppance to. After telling the desk sergeant what had happened, Reverend Johnson said, if anything were to come of the incident and charges were filed against the man who had defended the honor of the lady involved, that both he and his wife would be more than happy to come forth as witnesses for him because he had taught some much needed manners to the foul-mouthed driver of the convertible.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Does that sort of thing happen often—people calling in like that to help out?” Reb asked.
“It’s never happened to my knowledge. So, to answer your original question, I’m not here about that. What I did come by for is to see if I could get your help with something,” Billy said.
“Billy, if it hadn’t been for you, those three jihadis would have killed both me and Honey,” Reb said. “I owe you our lives. So, to answer your question, I’m happy to help out in any way I can. What do you need help with?”
“I was hoping you’d feel that way. Remember the night we were playing poker when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and caught fire?”
“Yeah, that was on April 20. We were playing poker at Rusty’s place as usual, it being a Tuesday night. We were waiting for my friend Jake to call and let us know what happened to the rest of those Islamic terrorists we had the run in with.”
“You remember me mentioning something about a charter boat Captain who had reported seeing what he described as a drug submarine heading in from the Gulf toward Perdido Pass?”
Reb shrugged. “Sorta kinda.”
“Well, here’s the deal,” Billy said. “Early Wednesday morning on April 14, around 3 a.m., Captain Charlie Walker saw what looked to him like a drug submarine coming back in from the Gulf heading toward Perdido Pass.
“So, I decided to check it out. After we finished playing poker the night of April 20, I drove over to Perdido Pass Bridge and did a stakeout to see if Captain Charlie’s drug sub would show up again.”
By now, Billy had Reb’s full attention and Reb asked, “Did it?”
Billy grinned. “Sure did. About a quarter past midnight, the drug sub, along with a four-boat escort, came around the western tip of Ono Island and headed for the Pass. As I stood there, unseen on the bridge above them, their little convoy went through the Pass and on out into the Gulf. When they came back, it was a little after 3 a.m.
“Then, after last week’s Tuesday night poker game, at a little past midnight, early Wednesday morning, I was on the bridge again and watched that same convoy go through the Pass headed out to the Gulf. And once again, it returned around three in the morning.
“I’m convinced that early Wednesday morning this week, shortly after midnight, that same drug convoy will once again go out in the Gulf where it’ll meet up with a cargo ship, owned and operated by one of the Mexican drug cartels, and pick up a shipment of illegal drugs.”
“So, what if they do?” Reb asked.
Billy pulled a piece of paper out of his left shirt pocket and handed it to Reb.
“What’s this?” Reb asked.
“That’s the official notice of a reward being offered by the DEA for the capture of a drug sub.”
Reb unfolded the paper and quickly read what it had to say.
When Reb looked back up, Billy said, “You did notice the reward is for ten million dollars?”
“It was kind of hard to miss, it being in such large print and bolded like that. I thought the little hands with the finger pointing on both sides of the amount was a nice touch, too,” Reb said. “What have you got in mind, Billy?”
“Tomorrow night, after the poker game, I was hoping you and I could take the Revenge out into the Gulf ahead of the drug convoy, set up an ambush for them, and hijack the drug sub. That ten-million-dollar reward would go a long way to solving the budget problems my little police department has. Hell, I could even hire a new patrol officer full time and hire another part time school crossing guard with that kind of money.”
“We going to get any assistance from other law enforcement?” Reb asked.
“Reb, in all of my years in law enforcement—both military and civilian—there’s two things I’ve learned,” Billy said. “Number one. The people pushing illegal drugs don’t give a damn about all of the lives they ruin with their drugs. All they care about is the money. Number two. There is just so damn much money in the illegal drug racket you just don’t really know who you can trust anymore. Seems like everybody is in the pocket of the cartels. Local cops, DEA agents, prosecutors, judges, and politicians on both sides of the border. So, on this little operation, it’s just you and me, buddy.”
“I don’t see the men on those four boats escorting the drug sub letting us hijack the drug sub without putting up a fight. What are the rules of engagement on this mission?” Reb asked.
“Like I said, those narco-criminals ruin a lot of lives and only care about the money. We’ll probably have to kill most of them if not all of them. I don’t expect it to be a fair fight. You okay with that, Reb?”
“You know, I was thinking about going up to The Farm this morning and getting in some target practice,” Reb said. “My friend, Jake, recently sent me a couple of prototype scopes that can be used both day and night to try out on my Barretts. The Barretts, equipped with night scopes, will be perfect for this hijacking mission of yours. We can pick them off from a distance and they’ll never know what hit them.”
“I didn’t know you had more than one Barrett,” Billy said.
“Yeah, well, Honey liked shooting mine so much I decided to get her one, too. Why don’t you come on up to Th
e Farm with me this morning and we’ll take the Barretts and the new scopes out to my shooting range and get in some target practice while we get familiarized with the new scopes. On the way up there, you can tell me about this plan of yours to ambush that drug convoy.”
“Sounds good to me,” Billy said.
* * *
Once they were on the road in Reb’s SUV, heading north toward Reb’s farm up near Summerdale, Reb glanced over at Billy and said, “So, tell me about this plan of yours to ambush the drug convoy and steal their drug sub.”
“Okay, this is the way I’ve got it figured,” Billy said. “Based on the times involved, I’m thinking there’s a cargo ship sitting about 30 miles off the coast that the convoy meets up with to pick up the drugs. And what I think happens, and, this is just an educated guess mind you, is the cargo ship lifts the drug sub up onto its deck in order to load the drugs onto the sub.”
“What makes you think they load it that way?” Reb asked.
“The only other way I can think of for them to load it would be for the drug sub to pull right up alongside the cargo ship, then the cargo ship would lower a large pallet full of drugs down to it, and offload the drugs right into the cargo hatches of the drug sub,” Billy said. “The only problem with that method is, if there is any rough sea at all, the drug sub is going to be pitching and rolling with the waves and, since the drug sub sits so low in the water—to make it difficult to see—it would take on water through any open hatch during the loading process and risk being swamped and sink.”
“Just thinking outside the box here,” Reb said, “but what if the cargo ship has one of those bottoms like you see in the movies where the doors open up underneath and the drug sub submerges and comes up inside the moonpool and they load the drugs there?”
“Reb, the vessel I saw is what they call a semi-submersible. It’s not a real submarine. It can’t submerge completely and travel underwater. It just rides real low in the water and is difficult to see from a distance,” Billy said.