Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers)) (3 page)

“I've never been to college. Look, I appreciate your generosity. I can tell you’re a nice guy. But I'm gonna be okay. I just need some space away from people. Your dog's cute.”

“I can understand how you need space, but there are better places to find quiet time. I’m Sean O'Brien. What's your name?”

“Courtney Burke.”

“Nice to meet you Courtney. I live near here in an old house by the river. I've been sanding, painting, and working in a boatyard at Ponce Marina all day. Let me take you into town. There's a Waffle House open all night. Do you need money to catch a bus?”

She rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and said, “No thanks.” She coughed, reached into her pocket and removed an asthma inhaler—taking a long hit from it.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, breathing deeply now through her nose, her eyes moist. “Yes.”

“Look, Courtney, I'm too tired to hang out here on a dark road about five miles from where police found a body last month, less than fifty feet off the highway. A runaway teenage girl. She'd been dumped like trash. Now, please, get in the Jeep.”

She leaned closer to the open window and looked at me, studying my face for a long moment, a small gold Celtic cross hanging from her long neck. “You said your name's Sean O'Brien, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“No reason. You lived here all your life?”

“Part of my life. The important part. Why?”

“It's nothing. Look, I …”

Light raked across the left side of her face. I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw headlights approaching. I said, “Car's coming. Step back, I'm pulling off the road.” I turned the Jeep's emergency flashers on and eased off the road directly behind the girl. Within seconds we were passed by a pickup truck. And three seconds later I saw the brake lights pop on.

Not a good sign.

I thought about my Glock. Thought about how I’d left it in the house after cleaning and oiling the pistol when I took it out of the Jeep two days ago. I glanced down at Max. Since she couldn’t see over the dashboard, she followed the movement of the truck with her head and ears.

And then she growled. Another bad sign.

The truck slowly backed up, coming parallel to my Jeep. Two men inside. There was enough light from their dashboard and the ambient glow from my Jeep to see their faces. Both wore cut-off black T-shirts. Tats on beefy forearms. Hard faces with a week’s growth of whiskers. The man on the passenger side had hooded, red-rimmed eyes that didn't blink, like a drunk at a bar staring at condensation rolling down his beer bottle. He wore a baseball hat turned backwards. The driver locked his thin lips on a bottle of Crown Royal in a wrinkled paper bag, turned it up, and took one long gulp, his face shining from sweat, cheeks blooming a shade of crimson. He stared at me through moist eyes and said, “Ya'll look like you need some help.”

I could smell diesel fumes mixed with burning weed. I said, “Thanks for stopping. Everything's okay. She just got a carsick. She wanted to get some fresh air.”

The man closest to me said, “Ya'll got all your windows down. Plenty of air in a Jeep. Maybe you and your girlfriend got into a ruckus. Maybe she don't want you no more and she's lookin' to hitch a ride.”

I said nothing. Max growled again.

The man looked at Max, grinned, and turned to the driver. “He's got a fuckin' muskrat on the seat next to him. One of 'em wiener dogs.”

“No wonder the bitch walked.” They laughed and then the guy on the passenger side gazed at the girl, like he was seeing her for the first time. He said, “Hey, sweet thing. That right? This dude botherin' you? We can make him go away. You just say the word. C'mon darlin,' get in the truck and we'll take you home.”

The girl said, “No thanks.”

The man sneered and touched the tip of his nose with a thick finger. The driver gunned the truck and quickly pulled off the road in front of my Jeep. “Get in!” I yelled to the girl. She hesitated a moment and then reached for the door handle.

Too late. The man on the passenger side moved fast, not even waiting for the truck to stop before flinging open the door and running toward the girl. He grabbed her by the forearm.

“Don't touch me!” she shouted. The man laughed and wrapped his arms, fur, ink, and muscle around her.

“She's a fighter!” he shouted, dragging her toward the truck. “This bitch got some spunk. She's gonna be real good.”

The driver, carrying a Billy club, approached me. I got out of the Jeep. He grinned, slapped the wood in the palm of his big bear paw hand and said, “Weiner dog dude, you ready for the whoppin' your daddy shoulda done years ago?” His belly hung over a belt that I couldn't see because of the girth. I guessed he was more than 290 pounds of muscles and fat, mostly fat. Plus he was stoned, very stoned. Each body movement was telegraphed before it happened.

I waited for him, never taking my eyes off of his. He raised his huge right arm and swung at my head. I easily dodged it, the Billy club missing my forehead by a few inches. The kinetic energy, the torque of the swing, threw him off balance for a half second. That's all the time I needed. I grabbed his right wrist, pulling his arm behind his back and forcing his hand up to his neck. The pop of tendons and bones separating was like the sound of eggs cracking. He screamed and went down on his knees the same time I brought up my knee hard into his nose. He fell backwards, out cold.

The other man had abandoned the girl and was reaching for a shotgun cradled in the window behind the truck seats. His hand was touching the stock when I slammed the truck's door into his legs. He yelled louder than his sleeping partner had screamed, and he tried to turn around—again an opponent losing equilibrium. It gave me a moment to draw far back and deliver a hard hit with my fist into the center of his mouth. I felt my knuckles plow through lips, front teeth and nose. I knew his jaw had dislocated. He stared at me through incredulous dull eyes, now glazed and rolling upward in his small skull. His lips were macerated, blood pouring from what was left of his mouth and nose. He smelled of weed, sour beer, and bacon fat. He tumbled forward, falling into the undergrowth, less than five feet from a canal.

I looked in the truck and lifted a cell phone from the seat and punched three digits.

The dispatcher said, “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“Looks like two men got in a fight. Severe injuries. County road 314. About halfway into the Ocala National Forest. Their Ford pickup is pulled over on the side of the road. Send an ambulance.”

“Are the men breathing?”

“Yes.”

“What is your name, sir?”

I disconnected and threw the phone into the center of the canal.

Then I looked for the girl, the fog growing thicker, rising through the light from the Jeep's headlights, the bellow of bullfrogs coming from the canal. “Are you okay?” I called out to the girl, hoping she would be standing in the shadows. “Courtney!” I felt fatigue growing behind my eyes as I walked back to my Jeep. Little Max stuck her head out the side window and made a slight whimpering sound. “She ran away, Max. The girl's gone.”

The next morning I awoke at sunrise, poured a cup of coffee, and walked onto my screened porch to feed Max. The porch overlooked the St. Johns River, a 310-mile river of history that meandered north from Vero Beach, spilling its heart into the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. My old cabin, built in the 1930's from cypress, pine, and red oak, sat at the mid-way point of the river. My nearest neighbor was a mile away. The Ocala National Forest, with its primordial beauty, bordered the far side of the St. Johns.

I sipped coffee and watched the match-flare of dawn smolder in the horizon behind live oaks and cabbage palms. The sunrise cast the trees in silhouette, their leafy heads and shoulders stitched in the golden threads of morning light. At the base of the old oaks, and deep in the ancient forest, secrets lie buried in folklore and fauna like the watery graves of mastodon skeletons discovered at the bottom of the forest's gin-clear springs.

I thought of the girl I'd found last night, Courtney Burke. I hoped she was on a bus heading to someplace safer than where she came. My thoughts were interrupted by a cardinal, tossing back his head and singing to the new day.

A breeze danced across the river and brought the scent of wood smoke and honeysuckles. A fisherman puttered down the center of the river in a dark green Boston Whaler, a V formation from the boat's wake pitching the surface into a sea of copper pennies winking in the sunlight.

Max barked once. “Patience, little lady,” I said, pouring some food into her bowl. I watched her eat for a few seconds and then looked at the framed picture of my wife, Sherri, which I kept on a small end table next to a rocking chair on the porch. Sherri died a few years ago from ovarian cancer, but her spirit still lived with us, Max and me. When I worked as a homicide detective with Miami-Dade PD, Sherri bought Max when I was on an extended criminal surveillance. She'd named her Maxine, but with the little dachshund's feisty brown eyes and fearless heart of a lion in a ten-pound body, she took on the swagger of a Max.

She swallowed her last bite and stepped to the screened door, glancing over her shoulder at me with the look that asked,
what are
you waiting for?
We walked toward the dock, under the limbs of live oaks. Spanish moss, streaked and damp with dew, hung from the limbs like gray lamb's wool left in the rain. From the top of a huge cypress tree near the shore, a curlew called out to the rising sun. The bird's river song echoed across the St. Johns in a haunting tune of rhythmic chants. Its symphony skipped over the water with the beat of smooth stones cast in the alluring harmony of sad and sweet notes long ago sung by the Sirens of Homer's Greece.

As we walked toward my dock on the river, my thoughts again drifted to the brave but frightened face of Courtney Burke. Even though I was exhausted when I first saw her, I remembered seeing a cue in her eyes that alluded to something long ago lost, maybe partially buried. What was it?

“You lived here all your life?”

“Part of my life. The important part. Why?”

“It's nothing. Look, I …”

I sat on one of two Adirondack chairs at the end of my dock, the girl's face, the blood on her T-shirt, her compelling and scared eyes swirling in my mind like moths circling a light source. Her eyes, with their sea green-golden irises enclosed in dark circles around the mesmerizing color, reminded me of the iconic picture of a young Afghan girl captured years ago by a National Geographic photographer. It was the eyes, the haunting image of the girl seen and felt around the world. I hoped Courtney Burke didn't make the morning news. I reached for my cell to check local news sources, but paused, not wanting to confirm that she'd become a runaway statistic.

Max leaned over the edge of the dock. She watched an eight-foot alligator swimming from dark water surrounding knobby cypress knees protruding out of the river less than thirty feet from where Max stood. She growled. The gator stopped moving, its yellow eyes and snout visible from our perch above the river. Max lifted her front foot, like a little hunting dog, a pointer. The gator dropped below the surface, and Max whined, looking over her shoulder at me. I said, “Leave well enough alone, kiddo.”

Watching the river dress in the colors of the morning, I tried to remove the girl's face from my thoughts. An osprey dropped straight down out of the hard blue sky, plunging into the center of the river and hooking something in its talons. Within seconds, the bird was beating its massive wings, gaining altitude, its claws deep in the back of a wriggling bass.

My cell buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket and read the text message. It was from an old friend, Dave Collins.

I just heard your voice on the morning TV news report, at least I think it was you. Police released a recording from someone who called 911 to report a fight last night. The caller used the phone of the guys he beat up to call 911. Could be mistaken, but the voice on the phone … it remotely sounded like you, Sean. Are you OK? What’s going on?

By noon, I’d made the half-hour drive from my place on the river to Ponce Marina south of Daytona Beach. I’d called the marina boatyard before I left, and they’d begun the process of lowering
Jupiter
back into her slip. Max and I pulled into the gravel and oyster shell parking lot, the popcorn crack of shells snapping under the tires. The teasing smells of blackened grouper, garlic shrimp, and mesquite greeted us from the Tiki Bar, an open-air restaurant adjacent to the marina office. Max's eyes ignited. She was now more Pavlov's dog than mine, her eyes wide, pacing in her seat, her nostrils sucking in molecules of food scents. She uttered one of her half barks, now more of a command.

“Chill,” I said, lifting Max up, tucking her under one arm and carrying a bag of groceries in the other arm. “You mind your manners in the restaurant. No begging. If not, the board of health will hunt you down, the county will pass anti-dog laws, and it'll be plain dog food forevermore.” She glanced up at me, her brown eyes suspicious.

I was being generous referring to the Tiki Bar as a restaurant. They served food, but it was a secondary item on a menu that featured thirty different craft beers and twenty brands of rum, along with all the other adult beverages.

The restaurant was somewhere between rustic and rundown, but it had character. The rough-hewn wooden floors, made with railroad crossties, and long-since worn into a smooth finish, were stained with twenty-five years of bar graffiti, mixed from a palette of spilled beer, blood, sweat, and a few tears. The Tiki Bar was built on stilts, fifteen feet above the harbor water at high tide. It had no real windows. Most of the year its plastic isinglass siding was rolled up and tied off. The result was a cross-breeze that kept the flies to a minimum and allowed a maximum opportunity for the scent of grilled seafood to drift over a marina community of at least two hundred boats. That's marketing using all the senses. And it worked because the place was usually packed.