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

“What are you doing here?” I said. “Get back up to the camp and take cover!”

“He’s my dog, too,” was her only response. I was only seventy feet from them now. Still a long distance for a handgun.

“Drop your weapons!” I shouted, stepping between Kim and the two men by my plane.

The guy in the water took aim and fired again. I started quickly forward, firing with each footfall in the shallow water. I hit him high in the shoulder with my third shot, barely noticing that Kim was also firing. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a splinter of gelcoat fly off their boat.
Good girl
, I thought,
keep firing at their boat
. The man I shot spun and nearly went down. His friend jumped down from the pontoon and grabbed him as they both splashed their way back toward their boat. I changed my aim and joined Kim in firing at their boat, a steady barrage that hit I know hit it quite a few times. Maybe we damaged it, no way to tell. The two men struggled on through the water and a moment later one man helped his injured friend into it and began pushing on the bow, trying to get it into deeper water. Finally, it broke free and the injured man started the engine. He helped pull his buddy aboard and reversed the engine, throwing too much throttle to it.

Hit a rock
, I thought,
or a shallow spot, or a log, anything
.

Willing it to happen was unsuccessful and the boat was soon in water deep enough to put the engine in forward and turn away from us, just as Linda and then Rusty came splashing up beside us, guns also drawn. The guy hit the throttle too hard, and the prop churned up the sandy bottom as the stern sank lower. It didn’t stop them and they were soon up on plane, rocketing away to the south, heading out into Florida Bay.

I turned and took Kim in my arms for a second, then held her out at arm’s length. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“What the hell were you thinking? You could have been killed!”

I could see the sting in her eyes. “My bad, bro,” Rusty interjected. “She jumped out before I could stop her.”

“She’s not your responsibility!” I shouted. Then it dawned on me.
She’s my responsibility.
My first instinct was to advance toward the sound of trouble. It’s what I was trained to do. What I should have done was protect my kid.

“What did they want?” Kim asked.

Rusty looked from me to Kim and said, “To rob the plane or maybe even steal it.” Turning and still breathing hard, he trudged back toward camp.

“Don’t ever do anything like that again!” I said to Kim.

“None of us were in range, Dad. And I can outshoot a couple of thugs.”

I hugged her to me, again realizing that it was my actions that had put her in danger. “All it takes is one lucky shot. I’m just glad you’re alright.”

“They’re turning!” Linda shouted.

I looked where she was pointing and saw that the boat had turned and was heading straight for East Cape Sable.

The men in the boat reached East Cape before we could reach the plane and untie the anchor lines from the pontoons. A couple of minutes later, we heard a single gunshot as we were climbing aboard. I skipped the preflight, and a few precious minutes later we were skimming the glassy surface as Rusty called the Coast Guard on the emergency channel. I could see the boat’s wake as it headed due south, away from the Tolivers’ camp. A part of me wanted to give chase, but we had to stop and check on the Tolivers. The flight lasted only a few minutes and I brought the
Hopper
down smoothly on the water, then turned toward shore.

“Coasties are putting a bird up out of Boca Chica,” Rusty shouted. “They’ll be here in thirty minutes. They said to stay put.”

I came in a little too fast and was still at planing speed when I felt the port pontoon skip off the bottom. As I quickly cut the throttle to idle, the plane jerked to the left and the other pontoon grounded.

Great
, I thought,
run aground in shallow water with an outgoing tide
.

I climbed out of the pilot’s seat and splashed into the water, yelling back over my shoulder, “Stay in the plane, Kim!”

Linda was already halfway to the Tolivers’ camp as I splashed through the water behind her. She had her own handgun out, held straight out with both hands as she moved toward the camp. She came up short at the water’s edge and I was beside her a moment later. Gene Toliver lay face down in the sand fifty feet beyond their camp, a pool of brown sand around his head.

Linda had grabbed a blanket from the Tolivers’ tent and covered Gene’s body after first checking his pulse. Both were futile gestures. She told us to be careful and not disturb the crime scene. Rusty took Kim down the beach, away from the carnage, but she’d already seen him lying there in a pool of his own blood.

I followed Linda’s lead. After covering the body, we walked wide around the camp back to the water, following the shoreline until we found the footprints coming out of the water. From there, it was easy to see what had happened.

There were two sets of tracks that came out of the water, where the two shooters had probably beached their boat. Following the tracks, Linda pointed out where they went from a walk to a dead run around the curve of the cape.

Passing the Tolivers’ tent, she pointed again. “There’s where Gene and Nancy tried to make a run for it. Running inland might have been a better idea. Maybe he was trying to get to the creek.”

It was obvious the Tolivers had run from their camp as the two men approached. Knowing there was strength in numbers and we would be coming back out on the tide, maybe they were trying to get to us, not knowing it was me doing most of the shooting. Having heard the gunshots and being unarmed themselves, it was hide or seek help. Gene chose wrong.

“If they’d bolted into the brush, they might have been able to hide long enough for us to get here.”

Linda looked at me for a moment. “It happens most of the time,” she said. “Victims in a panic rarely make good choices.”

Same with trained Marines
, I thought.

We arrived to where Gene’s body lay about halfway between their camp and the first creek. We kept to the water, reading the tracks. I was good at following tracks. In the Corps it wasn’t “what is the quarry doing and thinking?” as much as “where is he?”

Linda pointed to a patch of sand just past the body that was churned up with many prints. “This is where they split up. Gene stopped to face his attackers. Nancy realized it and stopped as well. He must have told her to keep running and hide in the mangroves around the creek mouth, before walking toward the shooters.”

Where he took his stand was where his body was lying. Even I could tell that they’d forced him to his knees and shot him in the back of the head, while barely breaking stride.

Following Nancy was easy for them. Hers were the only tracks in the sand. They found her in the first, narrow creek mouth. The tracks returned closer to the waterline, occasionally washed away by the small waves.

“Here, they were dragging her,” Linda said as we followed the footprints back toward the camp. “One on either side. She struggled to get free right there.”

Linda stepped closer to the tracks, where only two sets continued back to the boat, one much deeper than the other.

“She got free for a second,” I said, pointing to where a scuffle had occurred. “One of the men probably knocked her out and carried her. See how one set of tracks is deeper?”

Linda nodded and looked all around at the southern horizon.

Nancy was gone.

We heard the heavy whump-whump of an approaching helicopter and looked southwest. The unmistakable orange and white markings identified the Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk as being a Coast Guard bird.

The chopper landed on the beach, just to the north of the Tolivers’ camp and two men jumped out. Both were armed. Linda approached them, holding up her badge to identify herself as an FDLE Agent, and explained what had happened. There was nothing they could do for Gene. The two Coasties stayed with us, asking more questions as the chopper lifted off and headed south, looking for the boat.

Within an hour, more choppers had joined in the search and two small boats had arrived, one a launch from a Coast Guard Cutter lying offshore and another from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Rusty knew one of the sheriff’s investigators and went over everything that had happened with him. The investigator said the sheriff’s office also had a chopper in the air and they were doing everything they could to find the missing woman.

They found her another hour later. She was floating in Florida Bay near Sand Key, ten miles southeast of Cape Sable. She was wearing only a tee shirt, a hole in the back of her head.

After making the plane secure and setting the big Danforth up near the beach, we walked back to our camp. The next high tide wouldn’t be until an hour before sunset and there was no chance of getting the
Hopper
off the bottom until the tide floated her.

We portaged the canoes across from the lake and began taking down the camp, loading everything into them. It took a while, but we found the four smaller Danforths we’d anchored the plane with yesterday. We’d untied them from the plane in a hurry to get to the Tolivers’ camp.

What the two men did made no sense at all. I know I shot one of them and he was injured. The smart thing would have been to get far away as fast as possible. Why had they taken the time to kill Gene, then kidnap and rape his wife, before killing her?

We were in knee-deep water, pulling the canoes toward the plane two miles away. Rusty and Kim following along behind us. I’d so wanted this trip to be special for Kim. A trip full of the wonder and beauty that is south Florida. Instead, it turned into something a teenager might experience in Miami, or Chicago.

“It’s not logical,” Linda said, as if reading my mind. “They should have hightailed it right back to where they came from.” Then thinking out loud, she muttered “Why stop and kill the Tolivers?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I replied as we trudged along, doing the stingray shuffle. “It’s almost like they were targeted for some reason.”

“I’ll dig into his background when I get back to my office. Remember, he said he was a pilot, too. Whoever those men were, they might have thought your plane was his.”

Except they escaped southeast
, I thought. Instead of saying that, I said, “If they came hunting the Tolivers, they probably would have started in the Tampa area.”

Linda looked over at me, her face conveying the serious cop look. Still beautiful in the late afternoon sun, but with a totally different purpose now. She came to the same conclusion I did.

“You’re right. They went south. I’ll check into his business dealings anyway. Maybe he has something going on in Miami.”

When we got to the plane, I asked Linda to go up and check with the investigators to see if they’d learned anything else and the three of us started loading the plane. Linda returned as we were strapping the last canoe in place on the struts.

“They found a shell casing,” she said. “A forty-five ACP, with one good print on it. The lead investigator thinks it was a retribution murder, but now I’m just not buying it.”

“What’s your cop instinct tell you?” Rusty asked.

She looked back up to where the body still lay, covered with the blanket. “It’s a statement.”

Then she turned to me. “They said we can take off any time we want.”

I checked my watch. It was still an hour before high tide. I leaned against the starboard pontoon and tried to shove it with my knee. It didn’t budge. “We’re here for another hour.”

We walked up the beach a little way so Gene’s body was out of Kim’s sight. She’d been quiet since we landed, hardly saying anything. I blamed myself. I’d have gladly given up the plane and everything in it, if I could only turn back time to spare her the trauma she’d experienced seeing him lying on the beach like that.

Sitting in the sand, we waited for the tide to float the
Island Hopper
so we could go home again. I thought about a book I’d read once by Thomas Wolfe. Published after his death, it was called
You Can’t Go Home Again
. A single passage in that book haunted me for years. “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.” I’d seen death many times and experienced the pain of losing people who I was very close to. This was my daughter’s first experience with death and I was finally seeing it for the first time.

I hung my head. “I’m sorry I brought you here,” I whispered.

Kim leaned on my shoulder. “Don’t be, Dad. It’s a beautiful place that can only be marred by evil.”

I looked into my daughter’s eyes and wondered how a child could become so wise in only seventeen years. I put my arm around her and pulled her close as a small wave reached up and touched our toes. The tide was full. It was time to go home.

Rusty pulled the heavy anchor out of the sand and all four of us pushed on the pontoons and struts, until the sand finally released its grasp and the
Hopper
floated free. As Rusty and I continued pushing her to deeper water, Linda and Kim climbed aboard. We slowly turned her toward deeper water and continued pushing until the water was up to Rusty’s waist.

I ran through a quick preflight and started the big radial engine. Idling further out, I turned her into the light west wind and a moment later we were in the air, banking south toward Marathon as the sun neared the horizon. We arrived a half hour before sunset, talking very little during the thirty-minute flight.