Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (9 page)

The second man rose slowly, warily. He looked at Deuce, standing behind and to his right, then me, then at Rusty. He shrugged and stepped forward. Bending down, he got his buddy under the arms and dragged him toward the door.

I motioned Kim and Megan to come over beside me. Kim seemed to be frozen at the door, one hand in her purse, staring at the man lifting his friend. When they finally moved my way, I drew them behind me as the man struggled to get his unconscious friend outside. As he neared the door, he seemed to notice the girls for the first time, glancing at them for a moment, but settling on Kim for longer than necessary. I knew that look. Hell, I’d given that look more than once. But not toward a child. There was something else in his eyes. A sadistic quality that spoke volumes.

Something clicked in my brain. A feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time. It was akin to when my oldest daughter disappeared once in a grocery store as a toddler. The look he gave my daughter made my skin crawl. When the screen door slammed shut, I went over to it and watched as he hoisted the man’s weight easily onto his shoulder. No easy task; the first man probably weighed more than my two hundred and thirty pounds. He carried him to a big brown sedan, where he dumped him unceremoniously into the backseat.

I walked back over to Kim and took her hand. “Are you all right?” She looked me straight in the eye. Though not frightened, she was obviously shaken. I grinned and said, “Your mom wasn’t completely wrong. Just about who we’re dangerous toward. Come. Meet my friends.” She relaxed a little and I saw the fear melt away from her eyes as I pulled her toward the end of the bar.

“What was that all about?” I asked Rusty.

“Coupla loud mouths, I thought at first. Said they were looking for you and Doc. When I asked ‘Jesse who?’ they got belligerent.”

I went behind him and rang the brass ship’s bell to get everyone’s attention. Not that I needed to—everyone’s eyes were on Kim and Megan anyway, wondering who they were.

“Everyone, this is Kim and Megan.” Then I grinned and added, “Kim McDermitt. My youngest daughter.”

Julie was first to get up and came around the bar to where we stood. “Hi, Kim,” she said, giving her a hug. “Jesse’s been like my second dad, so I guess that makes us almost sisters. I’m Julie. These other lunatic gunmen are my father, Rusty, my husband, Russell, and our good friends, Charity and Tony.”

Deuce stepped up to take her hand and said, “I remember when you were born. I was about fourteen and our dads were stationed together. It was just before my dad left the Corps.”

Rusty leaned on the bar and said, “I remember your mom and sister. You favor your mom some. Me and your dad were stationed together a few times. We stood up for one another when we each got married.”

“Really nice to meet you, Kim,” Tony said, shaking her hand. “Your dad saved my life not long ago. Deuce’s too.”

“I’m kind of confused,” Kim said. “You’ve all known each other since before I was born?”

“All but me,” Tony said.

“And me,” added Jimmy, from behind the far end of the bar.

“Rusty and I met on the bus going up to Parris Island for Boot Camp,” I explained. “Being the only two from Florida, we became good friends. When he got married, I was his best man. A couple years later, we were stationed together in Japan and Deuce’s dad was our Platoon Sergeant. I met your mom when I came back to Camp Lejeune the following year. When we got married, Rusty was my best man.”

I pulled the two guns I’d taken from one of the guys out of my pocket and placed them on the bar. “What’d you get, Deuce?”

He pulled out the gun he’d taken from the second man and placed it next to my two. “Looks like we have a pair,” he said.

Rusty picked one up and looked it over. “Looks like a Springfield XD, but it must be some kind of foreign knockoff.”

Deuce picked up the second one and said, “No, this is the real deal, Rusty. Springfield bought the rights to the Croatian-made HS2000. Both of these are authentic Croatian military sidearms. What about the revolver?”

I picked it up and examined it. It was a nasty-looking pistol, the barrel no more than two and a half inches, barely longer than the cylinder. “It’s Serbian,” I said, opening the cylinder and removing one of the rounds. “A Zastava three-fifty-seven magnum. I thought that guy had an accent. Could be a Serb.”

“My guess would be Croatian,” Tony said. “Former military, from the look of them. Their pilots were issued the Zastava.”

“Are you going to see Sherri anytime soon?” I asked Deuce.

Sherri Fallon was one of Deuce’s team members. A former armorer with the Miami-Dade Police Department, she was now his weapons expert.

“Later this week,” he replied.

Rusty produced a small box from under the bar, placed the HS2000 in it, and slid it across the bar to Deuce. He and I placed the other two guns in the box and Deuce closed the lid and set it aside to give to Sherri when he saw her. She’d run ballistic checks on all three to see if they’d been used in any crimes and if so, she’d file a report with a complete description of the two men.

After an hour of everyone talking at once, Megan’s boyfriend arrived and she left with him. I noticed Kim yawn and suggested we go to the boat. I said she could have the master stateroom and I’d bunk with Tony in the guest stateroom.

“There’s someone else on board you’ll have to make friends with,” I said.

When we approached the cockpit of the
Revenge
, Pescador stood and raised his shaggy head above the gunwale. “This is my friend, Pescador. He thinks it’s his boat, so you’ll have to ask his permission to go aboard.”

“What a cute dog,” she said. “Why do you call him Fisherman?”

“You know some Spanish?”

“I’m pretty fluent, took Spanish in school every year for seven years.”

“When I found him a year ago, he was stranded on a sandbar and I watched him catch a fish in the shallows.”

She turned to the dog and asked, “Puedo ir a bordo, Pescador?” To my surprise, he barked once and laid back down in the corner of the cockpit. She turned to me and asked, “You taught him Spanish, too?”

“I never even knew he could speak it,” I said as I stepped over the gunwale and unlocked the hatch to the salon.

When we entered the salon, I switched on the recessed lights and disarmed the alarm system. She exclaimed, “Wow! This is amazing.”

“I didn’t even ask if you’d had anything to eat.”

“You cook, Dad?”

Dad?
I thought.
That’s gonna take some getting used to.

“If need be,” I replied with a grin. “Usually, I eat whatever Rufus has on the menu at the bar, or whatever my caretakers on the island whip up. But, in a pinch, I can make a decent meal.”

“We ate just before we got to the bank,” she replied. “Who’s Rufus and who are your caretakers?”

“Rufus is Rusty’s Jamaican chef. Have a seat. Want something to drink?”

“Water, or juice, if you have it.”

“My caretakers are Carl and Charlie Trent. They take care of everything on my little island.”

I got two large mangoes from the fridge, dropped them in the blender with some ice, and switched it on. After a moment, I switched it off and poured two glasses of mango smoothie.

“Permission to board?” came Tony’s voice from outside, followed by a quick reply from Pescador.

“I just thought of something,” I said as Tony came in through the hatch. “Regardless of whether you believed your mom, you just came onto a boat with two men you don’t even know.”

“I’m not naive, Dad. I’m just a very good judge of people. That, and I have a thirty-eight in my purse.”

Tony laughed as he got a beer from the fridge. “Like father, like daughter.”

“You’re carrying?” I asked.

“Everywhere I go,” she replied. “That’s something else you should know about Mom and Eve. They’re both totally anti-gun. I go to the range every weekend. The lady at the bank seemed really nice,” Kim went on. “She said she’d grown up here and knew everyone. After she called you on the phone and said you were coming over, she told me you were one of the nicest people she’s ever done business with. Does this boat have a bathroom?”

I pointed forward and said, “On a boat, it’s called a head. Forward is the master stateroom, if you want to put your things away. It has a private head to starboard. That means….”

“The right side,” she interrupted. “I don’t have much, just a go bag I always carry on day trips.”

Tony laughed once more, “Yep, like father, like daughter.”

“I’ll take you shopping in the morning, if you want to stay longer. Do you have a phone? You should call Eve if she’s expecting you back in Miami tonight.”

“Yeah, she’s a bit of a drama queen, though. If you hear shouting, it’s not me.”

She went forward to the stateroom and closed the hatch. Tony said, “I guess tomorrow’s activity is canceled?”

I looked at him, puzzled for a moment. Then I remembered. “Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how far the apple fell.”

“What apple?” Kim asked, coming out of the stateroom. “I got Eve’s voicemail and left a message that I’d be staying a few days. Her and Nick were going out with his dad’s partners and their wives.”

“If you can hold off shopping until afternoon,” I explained, “several of us are going shooting in the morning.”

“Can I shoot my gun? I have three speedloaders, all loaded.”

“Apparently, not too far,” Tony said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Do you shoot, too, Tony?” she asked. “I couldn’t help notice your trigger finger is missing.”

“Oh, that,” he replied, holding up his right hand and waggling the stumps of his index and middle fingers. “Luckily, I was trained to shoot with either hand.”

“How’d you lose it?” she asked with child-like innocence.

Tony looked at me and I nodded. While I made another batch of mango smoothies, he went on to tell the whole story about how he was part of an anti-terrorist team for DHS and had gone into Cuba to get intel on a suspected arms merchant, but was captured, beaten, and tortured. He overdramatized the part where Deuce and I, along with several other of Deuce’s team, went in to get him out.

“So, let me get this straight,” Kim said after Tony finished. “You and all the others I met tonight are government agents?”

“No, not all of us,” I replied. “I’m just sort of a ‘transporter on call’ and Jimmy and Rusty aren’t affiliated at all.”

“But, wouldn’t all this be like classified stuff? Like, ‘I can tell you, but I’d have to kill you’ kind of stuff?”

“Our team is still in the training stage, more or less,” Tony replied. “Some things we aren’t allowed to talk about outside the team. What we can talk about is pretty limited, only among family. They have a need to know.”

“So, can I go shooting too?” she asked enthusiastically.

“Sure,” I said. “But you might want to save your ammo for your six-gun. I’ll let you use one of mine.”

“You let a little fat man take you down?” Tena Horvac shouted at the two bodyguards. “And you let him take your guns? Imbeciles!”

“There were eight of them,” Borislav Varga retorted, perhaps a bit too assertively.

“When Ivo carried you in here,” the woman hissed, “he said it was only the short, fat one that took you down.”

Tena Horvac was a strikingly beautiful woman on the outside, but inside, she was colder than ice and her eyes reflected that now. She was born just south of the small fishing village of Punat, on the island of Krk, an island in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Croatia. Her father was a poor fisherman, but he was also a Chavano, a sorcerer, of the once nomadic Romani people that settled there. He used his spells and concoctions for good, to help others. Tena recognized her own powers early in life and knew instinctually that they were greater than her father’s. She also knew her powers were darker. At the age of twelve, she sought out a local Borsaki woman, an evil witch of the gypsy people. The woman instantly recognized that Tena was a powerful young girl, but unfocused. Dusanka Tadic agreed to teach the girl all she knew of gadjo magic, and before she turned sixteen and had blossomed into a beautiful woman, Tena had become a Mamuna, or Night Hag, a person capable of inflicting total paralysis or even death with a simple incantation.

Borislav looked down at his feet. He was a brute of a man, powerfully built with a cruel nature. In Croatia, he’d already shot and killed a man before he was thirteen. At sixteen, he was bigger than most men, heavily muscled and quick on his feet. It was then that he first killed a man with his bare hands and found that he enjoyed watching the life go out of a person’s eyes, face to face. He’d also killed women barehanded. Prostitutes in Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb, where he was raised, were more than plentiful and usually very cheap. They were never missed. He found that he received greater satisfaction when strangling a prostitute during climax, watching her face as the life drained from her eyes. He’d come to the United States just five years earlier and made his way to Miami, where a sizable Croat population existed. That was where he met Valentin Madic.

The fat man had surprised him, that’s all. But he dared not contradict Tena Horvac. The woman standing before him scared him more than any man. He knew of her past and her training as a Romani witch. He also knew what had happened to the gang that had defiled her as a young woman.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, not wishing to anger her further. “It was just the one. It will not happen again.”

“This group?” she said. “They seem to be trained somewhat and well-armed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned and walked across the darkened room and stood looking out the window overlooking Biscayne Bay. Her lithe frame was silhouetted by the bright lights of South Beach. The two men couldn’t help but notice the light shined through the flimsy material of her blouse and skirt, accentuating the curves of her body. “We will have to try a different approach, then. It was wrong to assume these men would be soft and compliant like Conner and Bradbury. Conner said his latest recording revealed they would be going to Elbow Cay in the Bahamas soon. We’ll set up as near there as we can without drawing attention. If we can’t find the location of the treasure and get to it before them, we’ll take it from them afterward.”

She turned and glided across the office to her desk, where she opened her ledger and took out a company credit card. She handed it to Borislav. “Put together a team. The two of you and two women, preferably. That way you won’t stand out. Secure four rooms at the best hotel you can find on Elbow Cay. The two of you will go there also, but the two women will work in the field. One room will be for Mister Madic and one will be for me. Also, make arrangements to have a boat at our disposal, a large and fast boat.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Borislav replied as he took the card and put it in a pocket inside his jacket. He was already wondering how expensive an island prostitute was.

Tena turned to the other man. “Ivo, you will fly me there tomorrow morning. Then come back here to bring the others over, once Borislav has put them together.”

Ivo Novosel had served in the Croatian Air Force from 1991 to 1994, during the country’s war for independence from Yugoslavia. At only twenty-two, he was considered too young for combat flying and had flown the Canadian-built Bombardier Challenger CL-600 passenger jet, transporting Officers and other dignitaries to and from negotiations in Belgrade and around to the different bases in Croatia. He was removed from the military when his superiors discovered he’d raped a fifteen-year-old girl. But she wasn’t the first, nor the last. He came to the United States with Borislav five years earlier and while eating in a Serbian restaurant, the two of them had met Valentin Madic. When Madic had learned Ivo was a pilot, he’d hired both of them on the spot. A month later, Madic bought a two-year-old CL-604, the newer version of the plane Ivo had flown in Croatia.

“I will have the plane ready before sunrise,” Ivo replied, and the two men left the office.

Tena sat down at her desk and made a number of phone calls, the first of which was to Madic, who was in his own office just down the hall. She told him about the incident down in the Keys with the two bodyguards and the information Conner had called her with just an hour ago.

“It seems these men aren’t the type to be intimidated,” Madic told her. “How do you suggest we proceed?”

“I’ve already ordered Borislav to assemble a team, two men and two women. I will go over to this island tomorrow to look around. If you are able, you should join me there as soon as possible. If we are able to get the location from the Americans, we can try to get to the spot before them. If not, we can take the treasure from them by force.”

“I will be tied up here for three days. Handle it for me.”

Before she could respond, he ended the call.