Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) (14 page)

Carl was standing on the dock as I paddled up. “Whoa, man! That’s some big black.”

“Caught him in Cudjoe Channel,” I replied as Charlie and the kids walked out onto the pier, with Pescador trotting alongside the kids. Though he was my dog, he spent a lot more time with little Carl and Patty, playing tag in the clearing or swimming in the lagoon.

We exchanged good mornings, then Charlie had to hustle off to get the kids to the bus stop on time. As always, Pescador went along with them. She was planning to do some grocery shopping while in town and Pescador would wait for her at the marina.

Carrying the big fish by the gills with both hands, Carl ducked into the dock area under the house while I took my gear up and rinsed everything at the shower under the cistern before putting it away. By the time I got down to the cleaning station, Carl had already filleted the big fish and cut the fillets into portion-sized steaks.

“This’ll make a fine meal when Eve comes tomorrow,” Carl said. “You’re sure her husband will be here this time?”

Eve had come down from Miami with little Jesse twice in the last few months, always with the intent of bringing her husband for me to meet. Each time, he’d gotten wrapped up in a legal case in the city and couldn’t make it.

What Eve didn’t know, nor Carl, for that matter, was that I’d already met Nicholas Maggio. Last winter, he and his father had sent some local muscle to Elbow Cay to try to steal the treasure when we found it. They’d failed, and Deuce had made arrangements with his boss for Nick and his father, Alfredo, to avoid prosecution. He’d said it was mostly due to the fact that Nick was married to my daughter.

However, I knew that they were both well-connected attorneys and it’s always good to have a lawyer in your pocket. In exchange, the Maggios had to cut ties with the crime scene and start taking pro bono cases for the poor Cubans in Little Havana. They quickly gained a much better reputation for championing those without a voice and actually gained more paying clients because of it.

“I sure hope so,” I replied to Carl. “But you know how busy those hotshot lawyers are.”

“Yeah, you mean a tee time at Fisher Island.”

“You got room in your fridge?” I asked, nodding to the grouper steaks. “Mine’s about full of lobster and crab claws, left over from last season.”

“Yeah, Charlie cleared a spot when she heard you paddling out,” Carl replied with a grin. “The woman has a sixth sense.”

When he left with the fish, I told him I’d be down in a few minutes, I needed to make a call. Remembering that I’d left my cell phone on the bridge, I boarded the
Revenge
and climbed up to get it. A moment later, I sat down in one of the rockers on the south part of the deck and pulled up Kim’s number.

She answered on the first ring. “Hey, Daddy, what’s up?”

“A chicken’s butt when he eats,” I replied, which never failed to get a chuckle out of my youngest.

“You get me with that every time. Hey, I was just leaving to meet a friend for coffee before chemistry class, so I only have a few minutes. How’s things on the island?”

I told her about the new boat and how it handled, then we chatted for a few minutes about Eve and Nick’s visit tomorrow and how her summer classes were going. She planned to do the same thing next year and get her bachelor’s degree in just three years. I didn’t mention the drug dealers at the
Anchor
. She had to go, so we said our goodbyes and she promised to come down for a week before Labor Day.

Shoving the phone in my pocket, I caught up with Carl at the temporary shack where the runabout rested. I told him about my idea of hoisting Kim’s skiff and parking mine under it to make room for the new boat.

“Yeah, I think we can do that. Probably won’t take more than a couple of hours.”

“We’ll go take a look at what we might need,” I said. “Once we’re done inspecting the wood boat.”

“It needs a name,” Carl said. “Bad juju to go around in a boat without a name, man. We can’t just keep calling it the wood boat, or the runabout.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I don’t know. Something that goes with the old barrel-back racing design.”

“Most of those racing boats back in the day had numbers for names, like fighter planes,” I said.

Carl grinned. “Not late.”

“Knot like the speed?”

“Yeah, and a capital-ell-dash-eight for late. Not late.”

I had to admit, it certainly fit the boat’s character. “Okay, from now on, she’s called
Knot L-8
.”

We spent the rest of the morning, crawling over every inch of
Knot L-8
, using bright flashlights to search for any cracks or stress points in her gelcoat finish, above and below the waterline, inside and out.

I raised the engine cover and leaned over the backseat, crawling head first between the engines and down both sides, examining every joint in the sturdy oak ribs, spars, beams, and hull strips.

Carl did the same under the foredeck, which was too small for my frame. He spent nearly an hour under there, examining all the electrical connections and running a new power cable to a spot in the dash where we decided to install a touch screen GPS.

Finishing the engine bay, I pulled up the deck hatch in the aft cockpit to check the bilges while Carl cursed and groaned, squirming around in the confines of the small storage area under the foredeck. Charlie brought out sandwiches a little before noon, just as we were finishing up and climbing out of
Knot L-8
.

“I didn’t see a problem anywhere,” Carl said, wiping his hands on a towel before sitting down at one of the large picnic tables.

“Me neither,” I said, stuffing a huge bite of lobster salad sandwich in my mouth. After swallowing it and washing it down with a gulp from a water bottle, I added, “Not a drop of water in the bilges.”

After lunch, we spent an hour in the hot sun, checking the irrigation system and tanks for the aquaculture system. There were now four tanks to the system, doubling what we had originally built.

The two growing tanks are barely tanks at all. Long and wide, but only eighteen inches deep, they’re more like ponds, resting on a raised bed of sand inside a cinder block base. Each plant grows in its own square basket, made of a strong synthetic mesh, filled with crushed coral and partially submerged in the flowing water.

The baskets are supported by stands made of PVC pipe wider at the bottom, and equally spaced in perfect unison, with the bottoms all touching. We have six rows of plants and twenty plants in each row. A lot of the plants have root tendrils trailing out of the baskets in the gentle current to soak up the nutrients in the warm water.

The other two tanks hold crawfish and catfish separately, with dividers to keep the mature from preying on the young. These tanks are deeper and don’t have as much surface area. They sit a few feet from the ends of the vegetable tanks, water feeding from them to the fish tanks by gravity through large pipes connecting them.

From the fish tanks, the water cascades from the end over six stacked beds of broken coral, where bacteria flourish in the wet environment and break the dissolved fish waste down into nutrients which the plants thrive on. The racks are inside large collection tanks, the bottom half submerged in the ground. Each of these tanks is connected to a pair of pumps that push the water back up to the vegetable tanks through a series of sand filters to further clean the water. The pumps are activated periodically by float switches in the bottom of the collection tank, coming on when they get full and shutting off after pumping most of the water out.

Although everything is partially in the shade of the surrounding mangroves, gumbo limbos, banyan, and lignum vitae trees, we lose a lot of water to evaporation and irrigating the many fruit trees surrounding the edge of the clearing. The evaporated water is replaced by a reverse-osmosis unit on the east side of the island, turning sea water into nonpotable fresh water for the garden, the drip irrigators around the fruit trees, and the showers in both houses and the end of the north pier. Drinking water comes from two rain cisterns, one mounted above the back of my deck and the other at the end of Carl and Charlie’s house.

And they said you couldn’t grow food on a mangrove-covered coral rock with an elevation only two feet above sea level.

Carl was right, it only took two hours to remove and rehang all the hardware at the far end of the dock area. Originally, it was used to lift my skiff out of the water and up into an enclosure that could be covered on the bottom. I’d only used it once, during Hurricane Wilma, and it had worked perfectly. Now it was above the center pier and pretty much useless.

After moving the hardware to the east side of the dock area, I stood on the center pier and looked up into the recess. “Hey, Carl, you know what’s right above this spot?”

Carl looked up, then looked around the underside of my house, seeing where the light spilled through from the surrounding deck. “Looks like it’s near the back living room wall.”

“Right about where my workbench is, between the bedroom and head hatches.”

Carl looked at me quizzically. “You just did it. Switched straight from island time to tactical mode.”

I just shrugged. “Old habits, man. If this is where I think it is, maybe I can use it.”

“Lemme guess. A storage spot for some kinda high-tech weapons?”

“You misjudge me. I was thinking it could be used for the frame around a ladder well. When Rusty and I first visited here, he said how cool it’d be to come down to where the boat was docked through the floor.”

Carl looked back up into the heavy oak-framed recess. “It’s way bigger than a stairwell, but yeah, we could use that big oak to build a strong frame. You’re thinking spring-loaded steps and a pop-up trap door?”

I laughed. “Let’s take some measurements. But no, I was thinking more like a regular ladder, with a rail around it up above.”

“Okay, maybe you’re not switching gears.”

By late afternoon, the kids were back from school, playing with Pescador in the lagoon, while Carl and I enjoyed a beer on the deck, relaxing in the rockers after a hard day’s work.

We’d completely removed the heavy oak planks and cut what we needed from the two smaller ones. Storing the twenty-foot planks for something else, we built an enclosure where I wanted it, using it to reinforce the floor we were going to cut away. I’d get the pipe and fittings later to build a simple ladder, descending from the back living room wall to the center pier.

A sudden vibration against my leg startled me before I realized it was my cell phone. I’d left it in my pocket all day and was surprised I hadn’t lost it somewhere.

The number on the display was local, in Key West, but not one I recognized. Feeling relaxed, I answered it anyway. “McDermitt.”

“Hi, Mister McDermitt,” a woman’s cheery voice said. “We met a year ago. My name’s Dawn. Dawn McKenna.”

It took a moment for me to remember. “Oh, yeah. Dawn McKenna, Nikki’s friend.” Carl glanced over quickly. “Um, hold on a second, will ya?”

Without waiting for an answer, I muted the call and looked over at Carl. “You know her?”

“For quite a few years. Nice lady. Makes a living as a fortuneteller and actually does have a gift for it.”

I don’t believe much in fortunetellers. Each of us makes our own destiny and can change it over and over. I’d only met the woman once, very briefly. A friend of Doc’s wife, Nikki, she’d said she was a tarot card reader, or palm reader or something. A small and quiet woman, with light brown hair.

I clicked the mute button again. “I’m sorry, Dawn. You were saying?”

“That’s right, Nikki’s friend. I asked around to some people down here and your name kept coming up. Nikki mentioned you as well, and gave me your number. Hope you don’t mind.”

Nikki should have known better
, I thought. Privacy had become more and more important to me lately and I didn’t like it being interrupted or intruded upon.

But I was polite. “My name kept coming up?”

“Yeah. A friend of my niece is having a problem and asked me if I knew anyone that might be able to help him.”

“Maybe he should go to the police?” I suggested.

“Well, it’s kind of a sensitive matter,” Dawn replied.

“Can you sum it up in a few short sentences?”

Apparently she couldn’t and began to explain how her niece’s boyfriend had gotten himself involved with a drug dealer from up north and now the guy was in Key West looking for him. I was just about to tell her that people had given her the wrong impression about me and hang up, when she mentioned the drug dealer’s name, GT Bradley.