Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) (12 page)

One of them looked up at me with venom in his eyes, then seemed to recognize me and smiled.
“N’ a gen kè sere, gwo moun.”

“English, motherfucker!” O’Hare boomed, standing over them and leveling his shotgun at the speaker’s head. “Do you speak it?”

“I have English,” the second boy said, raising his head for the first time. He grinned at me as well, ignoring the shotgun aimed at his head, and said, “You in big trouble, man.”

O’Hare turned to me, lowering his deck sweeper. “You know these clowns?”

“Never seen them before in my life,” I replied honestly. “But, I think I know someone who’d like to get to know them. Come with me, Bender.”

We walked up to the foredeck, leaving O’Hare to watch the two thugs. “We need to call Deuce,” Bender said.

“Just what I was thinking. He’ll need a place to interrogate them, though, and I have a thought. You being new to the team, you might not approve, so I want to go over what’s gonna happen before it does.”

I explained what I had in mind and after a few minutes he surprisingly agreed. “I’m no Boy Scout, McDermitt. If shortcuts can keep people safe, I’m all in.”

I took my sat-phone out of my pocket and called Deuce. After he answered, I said, “We need a dust-off, Deuce. Two of Zoe Pound’s men were caught red-handed near my island by one of the local lobstermen. Do you have access to a chopper with pontoons?”

“Why can’t we land at your island?” he asked.

“We’re not at the island, but close by. My daughter’s there and we’re not going to take these guys to it.”

“What’d you have in mind?”

I explained my plan to him and he chuckled softly. “Yeah, I’d kinda like to go there myself. Where should Charity pick you up?”

“About two hundred yards east of my house, you can’t miss us. And bring Tony and Kumar.” Tony Jacobs used to be part of Deuce’s SEAL team and came over to DHS with him. I remember a different interrogation some time ago, when Tony’s actions really put the fear of God into the subject. Kumar Sayef is also one of Deuce’s team members and a former Delta Force special operator and linguist specializing in many Arabic dialects. Not that his linguistic skills would be needed. It was his appearance that would work.

I ended the call and told Bender to send O’Hare up here and then I called Kim. She answered on the first ring, firing off several questions. I explained that everything was alright and shortly Deuce would arrive by chopper and we were going to take the two guys in, but I’d be back within an hour to help get O’Hare off the sandbar. A partial lie, but I didn’t want her to know our real plans.

She didn’t like it, but I assured her everything was fine, as O’Hare approached. I ended the call and said to O’Hare, “I have someone coming that’s going to take these guys off your hands.”

“Cops?”

“Not exactly,” I said with a grin. “I think you’ll approve of what we have in mind. Your boat’s stuck here for at least three more hours, until the tide comes up enough that I can pull you off that sand. Wanna go with us for the interrogation? It’s not far.”

He thought about it a moment and said, “Boy, I fought in the Second World War, you know. Battle of the Bulge. Never got a scratch. Fought in Korea, too. Still carry a bullet in my shoulder from them Commie bastards. I been all around the Caribbean since then and I know a thing or two about island folks. These two are just trash, nothin’ more.”

“Yeah, you might be right. But, I bet you’d agree that they’re superstitious trash.”

His head came around and looked me straight in the eyes as a slow smile spread across his face. “You got some bad juju for them two?”

I grinned back at him. “That I do. Hope you’re not the squeamish type, O’Hare. Sorry about those splinters, I didn’t know what you were gonna do.”

He chortled as he looked back at the two men trussed up against his gunwale. “Naw, I ain’t squeamish. And these little nicks? Hell, I got worse injuries than that from just screwin’ a Trinidad hooker.”

After explaining the details of my idea, we went back and sat on lobster traps, drinking coffee and basically ignoring the two thugs trussed up on the deck. They whispered a word or two to one another in Haitian Creole. Apparently O’Hare spoke it as well, leaning toward me and whispering, “Bigger guy said he’s scared.”

I remembered the stories about O’Hare’s Creole wife, Constance.
Of course he speaks the language
,
I thought. All the more reason for him to come along.

“That’s good,” I said with a grin, looking up to the northeast, where I was just beginning to hear the heavy whump of a helicopter’s blades beating the dense air at low altitude.

“Let’s get ’em up and in the water,” I said loudly as I stood up.

“How you want to do this?” Bender asked.

“Like this,” I replied, grabbing the smaller young man by the collar of his shirt and yanking him to his feet. He seemed to be the leader of the two. I took two long strides toward the transom, dragging him stumbling along behind me, then I heaved him over the transom head first. His legs kicked frantically as he screamed, splashing into the shallow water on his side.

Bender and O’Hare did the same thing with the other guy and both quickly struggled to their feet in the knee-deep water, spitting and shouting obscenities in two languages.

The chopper came in low and fast. I looked up at the Jolly Roger on the antenna mount and knew that Charity would fly over and execute her signature climbing turn to burn off speed and land into the easterly breeze.

The chopper was a black Bell 206L Long Ranger, with dark tinted windows, no markings at all, and black pontoons in place of the normal skids. Charity landed it in the shallower water just south of where we stood by the stern of O’Hare’s boat, which I saw for the first time was named
Constance
. There was no need for Charity to anchor the bird. Once it settled it was in contact with the bottom.

As the engine shut down and the blades slowed, three doors opened and Deuce got out of the copilot’s side and came around the nose, sloshing through the water in jeans, combat boots and tropical khaki shirt. Tony and Kumar stepped down onto the float from the back seat on the near side. The way they were dressed didn’t escape the attention of the two prisoners. Tony and Kumar both wore the traditional Islamic men’s hijab and all three wore full beards, which was something new. Then I remembered Deuce’s boss saying that the team should appear less military and blend in more.

Tony and Kumar stood off to the side of the chopper as Deuce came forward. He shook my hand and I introduced him to O’Hare. Deuce walked over to the wrecked bowrider and looked in the cockpit area. There was a wooden box on the deck and he lifted the lid. Inside were a half dozen American-made hand grenades.

Deuce walked over to the two captives and said, “Where did you get these?”

The smaller man looked at Deuce and spat out, “
Zafè ou!”

O’Hare stepped toward the man and in a menacing growl surprised him by saying in Creole,
“Nonm lan reponn!”

The shock was evident in both thugs’ faces.

“How much for the little one?” Kumar shouted in thickly accented English.

I’d seen this before and barely suppressed a grin. Kumar spoke with almost no accent at all, unless need be. By cursing Deuce in his native language, the smaller thug started their little improv skit. Deuce and his tight-knit team of former Special Ops, police, and intelligence people worked on extracting information through the perceived notion that something worse than death might be in store for the subject. One of his people, the team’s weapons handler, was once a stage actress and worked with the other members on how to improvise and create a perceived notion to cause an emotional response by any means necessary.

I’d told Deuce that the kid could speak English, and I was certain he in turn had given this information to his people to use against the two gangbangers if a chance presented itself.

The notion Kumar created with that simple question had exactly the hoped-for effect. It was further exacerbated when Tony turned to Kumar and began chattering in words, whistles, and clicks. The first time I’d seen this I thought it was a put-on. Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe Tony did speak some kind of Amazon pygmy language. It sounded convincing enough to me.

Kumar turned back toward us and shouted, “Five thousand American dollars if we can eat them after playing with them.”

Deuce is a big man, almost as tall as me, but probably twenty pounds heavier, most of it in his wide shoulders and thick chest. His dad was Norwegian, but Deuce got more of the Viking genes than his dad. He spun around, his neck muscles bulging, and shouted through clenched teeth, “I said we’d discuss price later!”

Deuce’s fierce appearance, with scraggly dark red hair and beard, and the idea now forming in the young man’s mind created a bleak uncertainty and was completely evident in his face. His voice cracked as he said, “
Manje nou
?”

Until that moment, the taller of the two had been standing quietly defiant, sure that these people were the authorities and the gang leader would get them out of jail. His face went blank hearing those words and he looked to the other for guidance.

O’Hare caught onto the charade immediately and stepped up to the smaller man’s face and snarled, “Yeah, they want to eat you. But not until after they have a little fun.” To emphasize the point, he moved his fist to his mouth, like he was holding a turkey leg and mimicked gnawing off a huge bite.

“Get ’em on the chopper,” Deuce said.

Bender and I shoved the two punks toward the chopper as Deuce walked ahead with O’Hare, talking.

I was less worried how they’d react on reaching the tiny island of Crane Key than how Deuce would. It’s a couple of miles southwest of my island and I’d left a man there to die some time ago. He probably would have died anyway—he’d been stranded there for weeks and was near death when I found him. He’d murdered Deuce’s dad and was the one responsible for putting the wheels in motion that had caused my wife to be murdered.

Charity landed the chopper in the skinny water on the north side of Crane Key, about a hundred feet from the little bay entrance I remembered. The chopper only had seven seats, so the two captives were just tossed on the floor and we all held them in place with our feet for the short ride.

After setting down and climbing out of the chopper, Deuce and I each grabbed one of the gangbangers and dragged them out, standing them up in the ankle-deep water.

The confusion and fear on their faces was palpable as Deuce roughly shoved them in the back toward the bay. I set off ahead of them with O’Hare and Bender. Tony and Kumar brought up the rear, chattering in both Arabic and whatever it was Tony was speaking. I was starting to believe it really was some strange dialect, because he’d break off into Arabic at times, as if teaching Kumar to speak his language.

I reached the narrow beach inside the bay and followed it into the interior. It wasn’t really a bay, more like a place where rain and tide water had slowly run off of the tiny island, taking away some of the sand. I finally broke through a tangle of mangroves into a small clearing. There, leaning against a fallen palm tree, were the skeletal remains of Lester Antonio. At least, what bones were left. The intervening fifteen months since I’d last seen him had taken its toll. Some of the bones were scattered over the area, but the spine and rib cage were propped up by the dead log, with the skull leaning back, its jawbone hanging open in a grotesque and silent scream.
Crabs and buzzards
, I thought.
Plus fire ants and maybe even a feral hog.

The two captives stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the skeleton. Deuce shouldered between them and approached the remains of his father’s killer. He did what I’d told Lester I wouldn’t that day when I found him. He pissed on the bones. Tony and Kumar shoved the two men into the clearing, where they fell to their knees in the sand, facing the skeleton.

Tony said something unintelligible and Kumar turned toward Deuce. “We will give you ten thousand American dollars for both of them. Can we build the cooking fire here?”

Deuce ignored him and turned to face the trembling hoodlums. He took one step closer and said over his shoulder, “If I don’t get the information I want, you got a deal.”

From that point, the interrogation went very well. Deuce asked each man a series of questions, getting an answer from the smaller one in English first and O’Hare translating afterward for the other man to confirm what the first had said. The information from both was pretty much the same, both wanting to be as helpful as possible.

The gang leader, Jean-Claude Lavolier, had taken a trip to Orlando several weeks earlier and when he returned, he had a very beautiful light-skinned mulatto woman with him. Everything the gang did after his return changed, as if the woman had some kind of control over Lavolier. He no longer made decisions unless consulting her first. Their drug pipeline was in disarray and in danger of collapsing, according to the smaller man. The gang members had been sent out in stolen boats to blow up reefs to draw me out in the open where I could be kidnapped.

Bender had a smug look on his face when that revelation came out. Neither man knew anything about the mulatto woman, except that she was very beautiful and thought to be very dangerous. Lavolier and the woman, known only as Erzulie, were never seen apart and it was she, not him, who’d actually done the beheading of the subordinate several weeks ago. All the gang members feared Lavolier, but those in the upper echelon feared her more.