Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (8 page)

I closed the doors on the back of the truck, pulled a roll of hundred-dollar bills from my pocket, and handed it to Billy. “Thanks, again. You seriously need to get down to the Keys and do some fishing.” He shoved the roll of bills in his pocket and invited us to sit and have a beer. We sat down in three chairs and talked for a while longer, but Tony and I had a five-hour drive back to Marathon and it would be at the speed limit all the way.

When we were back in the truck, heading east out of LaBelle on Highway 80, Tony asked, “What in the world did you buy a fifty for? I’m not knocking it, they can chew things up in a hurry, but what are you gonna do with it?”

I glanced at Tony and said, “I built storage places under the sofa and settee, false bottoms, really. They can only be accessed from the engine room. The inside of each is the exact dimensions of the M2 and stand. I already had the securing mounts made and installed in each one. Just pull down a panel in the overhead and release the catches, and they both come right out. If anyone is chasing us, they’re gonna find out the
Revenge
can have a tail stinger in about a minute.”

“That’s jacked!” Tony said, slapping the dash a bit too enthusiastically. “Ya know what? I never shot one.”

“Really? We’ll get ’em stowed and mounted tonight and in the morning me and you can take the
Revenge
out, run a couple drills, and see how long it takes to set it up to fire. We can shoot up that box of ammo that Billy included, too.”

We stopped in the little town of Belle Glade, at the southern tip of Lake Okeechobee. After refueling we were back on the road for the long sixty-mile stretch across the Everglades to Miami. Once on the interstate, I moved to the far left lane and tried to keep to a sedate speed. The big truck, with its monster tires and brush guard, was more than imposing enough to get slower commuters to move out of the way without having to get too close behind them. But it still took over an hour to travel forty miles to Homestead. Once we got on US-1 out of Homestead, the traffic thinned out quite a bit. It was a weekday in early fall so the next seventy miles went by quickly.

We arrived back at the
Anchor
and I backed the truck up close to the
Revenge
. It only took a few minutes to move our cargo aboard. Both the stand and the machine gun fit the recesses and securing brackets perfectly.
Thanks, Pap
, I said to myself. My grandparents had raised me from the age of eight and my grandfather had been an architect. I never realized how much I’d learned just watching him work at his drafting table. I drew the plans myself for the individual brackets and the recessed compartments. I designed each compartment in two pieces and had separate carpenters build them. The brackets were aluminum, coated with rubber anywhere they came in contact with metal. Once they were secured and the panel closed, you’d have to know they were there to find them.

When we finished putting the machine gun and stand away, Charity had arrived and Julie was satisfied enough with the condition of the
James Caird
that she released Deuce to have a beer while the two women caught up.

“Are you serious?” Deuce asked in a hushed whisper. “You bought a fifty caliber machine gun? What the hell are you afraid of, Jesse?”

“Not a damned thing,” I said with a lopsided grin, then drained my bottle. Rusty had another one in front of me before I set the empty on the bar. “It’s just in case. Somebody who knows these waters really well once told me you can never have enough firepower.”

“Actually,” Rusty said, wiping down the bar, “I think I said the more the better, not the bigger the better.”

“Tony and I are going out in the morning to try it out—you guys wanna go?”

“Yeah,” Deuce said. “Julie and Charity are going shopping in the morning.”

“Count me out,” Rusty said, reaching for the phone that was ringing below the bar. “Gotta stay by the phone. Waiting for a call from Nassau about the onshore salvage permit. They’re balking because I won’t give them the exact location.” Then into the phone he said, “
Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill
.” After listening for a minute he said, “Yeah, he’s right here in front of me, hang on.”

When Rusty extended the phone to me he said, “It’s Pam, at the bank. Wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone from him and, stretching the cord, walked to the end of the bar. Pam Lamarre is the manager of the State Bank of the Florida Keys, trustee of my estate, and a close friend.

“Hey, Pam, what’s up?”

“Hi, Jesse. I have a visitor outside my office that’s looking for you. She claims to be your daughter and tracked you to here at the bank. I can’t give out customer information, you know that. I didn’t even know you had a daughter.”

My daughter
, I thought.
Which one?
I’d been sending cards with checks tucked inside for birthdays and Christmas for the last twenty-three years. Until last July, none had ever been cashed. The one to my youngest daughter, Kim, had been cashed at a bank in North Carolina just after her birthday.

“Jesse, are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Is her name Kim?”

“Yes, she’s sitting outside my office right now. Would you like to talk to her?”

“No,” I said. “Keep her there, I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I handed the phone back to Rusty and told him I’d be back soon, then headed out and jumped in
The Beast
. I pulled into the bank parking lot four minutes later. When I walked through the door, I glanced around. Two girls sat in chairs just outside Pam’s office. I hadn’t seen my youngest daughter since she was five months old, but I recognized her immediately. It was almost like looking in a weird mirror and seeing a reflection of yourself, younger and a different gender.

She had sandy brown hair, past her shoulders, and blue eyes. The girl sitting next to her was half a head shorter. As I started walking across the lobby she saw me and our eyes met. She stood up and met me in the middle of the lobby.

“Daddy?”

“Kim? How’d you find me?”

She flung her arms around my neck. “It is you! I knew Momma was lying.”

Pam came out of the office and said, “If you’d like to have some privacy, Jesse, the conference room is available.”

She showed us to a small room with blinds on the windows and door. When Pam left and closed the door, Kim introduced me to her friend, Megan, and we sat down.

“First, what did you mean by ‘your mother was lying to you’?” I asked.

“Growing up, Momma didn’t talk about you very much. Eve told me stories about how big you were and how strong, but when I asked Momma, she’d go on and on about how you were a trained assassin that went all over the world killing women and children. When I was ten, she told us your past had finally caught up to you and you were dead. Just before my last birthday, I found a card from you in the mail and confronted her about it. She tried to take it from me, but I wouldn’t let her have it. I put the money you sent in my own account and have been saving all summer to come down here.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “It’s September. Shouldn’t you be in school? Does your mom know you’re down here?”

“See, Megan,” Kim said to her friend, who looked to be a couple years older. “I was right. If he was as bad as Momma said, he wouldn’t be worried about my not being in school.”

Then she turned to me. “I skipped a year in middle school and graduated last May. I told Momma I wanted to wait a year before college, so I’d be with my own age group again, and I wanted to go to Miami and see Eve.”

“Eve?” I said. “What’s she doing in Miami? Wait, back up. So your mom thinks you’re in Miami?”

Kim went on to tell me that my other daughter, Eve, had graduated from Duke University last winter. A week later, she’d married a man she’d been dating for two years who was in his last year of law school at Duke, and Eve and Nick now lived in Miami. Then she told me I would be a grandfather in two months.
A grandfather?
I thought.
Me?

We talked for another ten minutes and she told me how she had driven to Miami and stayed with Eve and Nick the first night. The next morning she told Eve I wasn’t dead, but I lived in the Keys and she was going to find me. Her friend, Megan, lived nearby and they came down together.

Apparently my ex had continued to express her increasingly liberal notions about me, the Corps, and the military in general as nothing but knuckle-dragging Neanderthal baby killers. She’d taken the kids and left me in ’89, when I was with FAST, the Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team. We were deployed to Panama without even being allowed to make a phone call before departing. That was five days before Kim’s first Christmas. I got to see my daughters a few times over the next few months, but was deployed again the following summer for the run-up to Desert Shield.

Sandy’s parents in Virginia hired a very good lawyer and she divorced me while I was deployed. Since I didn’t show up at the divorce hearing, she got full custody and stayed in Virginia. They’d moved back to North Carolina just three years ago.

Kim went on to describe my ex as having a far-left ideology about nearly everything. She was a member of PETA, Greenpeace, and several other of what Kim called “tree hugger” organizations. She turned vegan and pushed her lifestyle on the girls and continually described me to the girls as having been a very dangerous man. Eve turned out a lot like her, but Kim bucked her at every turn from the way she described the relationship. Both girls did very well in school, Eve graduating college in three and a half years and Kim graduating high school at sixteen.

“I don’t think I ever believed what she said about you,” Kim admitted. “So I decided to come and find out for myself.”

“Where are you staying?” I asked, noting that the lobby was now empty and Pam was standing by the door.

“Actually, Mister McDermitt,” Megan said, “I can’t stay. I live in Miami and we were planning to drive back tonight. My boyfriend already said he’d come get me if Kim decided to stay.”

Before I even knew it I looked at my daughter and said, “That’s ridiculous. You can stay with me and drive back to Miami tomorrow, or whenever you want to go.”

“You’re sure?” Kim said, smiling. Ten minutes later, Megan called her boyfriend and told him where to pick her up as we were pulling into the crushed-shell driveway to the
Anchor
.

“You live in a bar?” Kim asked.

“No, I live on a little island north of here, but for the next couple of days, I’m staying here on my boat.” I pointed to the
Revenge
, tied up at the near end of the dock, the blue overhead lights illuminating the bridge and cockpit.

“Oh, cool,” she squealed. “The really big one?”

“Come on inside,” I said, stepping out of the truck. “You can meet some of my friends.”

We stepped through the door and I immediately felt the tension. It hung in the air like ozone after a lightning strike. Deuce and Julie were sitting at the far end of the bar with Charity and Tony. A few local fishermen I recognized were scattered around at tables, but it was the two guys standing at the near end of the bar that caught my attention. They both reminded me of coastal oak trees I’d seen in North Carolina, massive limbs hanging to the ground. They were dressed in nearly identical gray sports coats, bulging at the shoulders, with two square heads sitting on top of them. One stood slightly behind and to the side of the other, who was doing all the talking.

“Then I’ll speak with the owner, fat man!”

Although the two men were at least six inches taller than Rusty’s five foot six, the man lacked a reverse gear. He’d never backed down from anyone and a whole lot of tougher-looking men had earned a trip to the hospital for underestimating both his speed and his ability. I caught Deuce’s eye and with a look held him in place. Whatever was going on, Rusty was up to it.

“I
am
the owner, musclehead,” Rusty growled at the taller man. “And I told you, I ain’t serving you.”

I put a hand on Kim’s shoulder, holding her and Megan at the door, as I stepped around the tables to the left, coming into full view of the second man. When he saw me his right hand started to move toward the inside of his jacket, but I was ready for it. Nobody wears a sports coat in the Keys unless they’re hiding something under it. My hand was already on the grip of my own Sig P-226, in a holster at my back under my tee shirt.

I had it out, held solidly in both hands and pointed right at the man’s sizable chest, before he even got his right hand inside his jacket where I presumed a gun would be.

“We don’t allow guns in here, gentlemen,” I said.

The leader saw me in his peripheral vision as I stepped further to the left. He started to reach inside his jacket, but Rusty was well ahead of him and leveled his deck sweeper on the man. It’s a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun with the butt removed. The sudden scraping of chairs as the men at the tables behind the two strangers scrambled to get out of the line of fire covered the sound of Deuce, Julie, Tony, and Charity coming off their stools and leveling more guns at the two intruders. Deuce came up behind the second man. He moved with the silence and speed that only comes from training and was at the second man’s shoulder in a second.

“Very slowly,” Deuce whispered to the man, who looked around at all the guns suddenly pointed at him and his friend. “With just your thumb and middle finger, pull that gun on out of there and hold it up above your head.”

“You heard the man,” Rusty snarled menacingly. “And I mean
real
slow. This sweeper has a hair trigger and I’m just a mite jumpy right now. I’d hate to have to clean brain matter from the wall and ceiling.”

I saw the fight go out of both men’s eyes and they did as they were told. I stepped behind the first man and took his gun as Deuce disarmed the second man. I shoved the man’s gun into the large pocket of my cargo pants and quickly patted him down. I found a small revolver in a holster on his left ankle and shoved it in my other pocket. Deuce had done the same thing and then took the second man by the collar and walked him backwards until he fell into a chair.

“There seems to be a lot of guns for a place that does not allow them,” the first man said with a slight accent I couldn’t place.

“Owner’s friends are exempted from all bar rules,” Rusty said. As quickly as the sweeper appeared, it disappeared. Rusty kept it in a long custom holster mounted under the end of the bar. Loaded with buckshot. Deuce and I both tucked our own guns away.

“Is this where all the locals gang up and beat shit out of interlopers?” the man asked.
East European
, I thought.
Not Germany, maybe one of the Baltic countries.

“No,” Rusty said. “This is where you speak civilly to the owner and air your grievance. I said I ain’t gonna serve you two and then you hadda go all Billy Badass, two against one. Your partner’s sitting this dance out now.”

He looked down at Rusty then over at me. “I don’t like odds. Your friends will come to rescue.”

I laughed lightly. “He doesn’t need any help from us. But, if he says the word, I’ll gladly gather up what pieces are left over and carry you to the hospital in Miami, where I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles you stepped in front of a bus in Coconut Grove.”

The man made a sudden move, his left hand streaking out in a quick, sharp uppercut aimed at Rusty’s jaw. Rusty stepped forward, lifting his shoulder and arm at the same time, so the punch went under his left arm. Spinning quickly, he took the man by the wrist and jerked back, pulling him off balance. As he came around, Rusty’s other hand went up, his big palm slapping the man in the back of the head with a crack, and shoved his face into the massive wooden armrest on the edge of the bar. In a blur, he snatched the man’s coat collar and stood him back up, while sweeping his legs out from under him from behind. As he was going down, Rusty’s left fist hit him squarely in the center of the chest with a thud. He hit the deck flat on his back and didn’t move.

“You!” Rusty roared, pointing at the second man. “Clean this mess up and get out of here. Either of you comes back, I’ll shoot you at the door.”