Waiting... On You (Force Recon Marines)

Waiting…
On You

by

S.A.
Monk

Copyright 2013 by S.A. Monk

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, designations, and events are a product of the author’s imagination
and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, and locales are entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form, except in brief review, without permission of
the author.

This book is dedicated in deep gratitude to
God for the blessings he has given me, and to the Marine I married, a special man
who was chosen to be a Marine.

Other works of fiction by
S.A. Monk
include:

The Spymaster’s Protection
(A Templar Tale)

The Assassin’s Redemption
(A Templar Tale)

Rocky Mountain Cowboy

All Around Cowboy

The Bull Rider’s Return

CHAPTER 1

HANNA WALLACE STOPPED to watch the sun
go over the western horizon in a breathtaking wash of vivid color. Though she
had lived in Port George all of her life, she never failed to appreciate such
spectacular sunsets.

On the waterfront, Yancy’s Bar and
Grill faced the east, so it was backlit against the brilliant image.
Reluctantly, Hanna reached for the doorknob of the restaurant and entered its much
darker interior. She walked to a booth at the back of the room, far away from
the busy bar. The high wooden seats on either side of the scarred oak table
provided just the privacy she was seeking. A hurricane lantern with a fat
candle burning inside of it was the only illumination in the dark niche she had
chosen. Shadows from the candle played across the windowless, cedar-planked
wall next to her. She angled her back against it to wait.

It had been only three days since she
had buried her brother Dylan. They felt like the longest, most heart wrenching
of her life. She simply could not get her head around the tragic facts that her
older sibling was never coming home again. They’d been so close, despite their
three-year age difference.

Dylan had only been thirty-seven! Way
too young to die!

The whole family was grief-stricken,
and if asked, frightened as well. The circumstances of Sheriff Deputy Dylan
Wallace’s death were vague and suspicious. He had been in a dangerous
profession, but Port George was a small relatively quiet town. There was very
little crime, other than highway accidents and small store thefts, some
domestic disputes. She couldn’t recall a murder or other such violent crime
occurring in years.

Unfortunately, no one, except Dylan’s
family and their next-door neighbors, the Kellys, believed he’d been murdered. Dylan’s
superior, the county sheriff, and the city’s chief of police believed what the
local coroner had recently concluded; that Dylan’s death had been an accident;
that he had been drinking, fallen off his patrol boat, and drowned.

Their conclusions were nothing but
hogwash, as her grandmother would say. Hanna and her family continued to be
outraged. There was absolutely no way her brother would have been drinking on
the job. It was so completely out of character for him. Dylan rarely drank
anything stronger than an occasional beer. And he was dedicated to his job. He was
a consummate professional.

Hanna couldn’t believe the two heads
of law enforcement in the community actually believed that’s how one of their
highest ranking, most senior officers had died. The open, nearly empty bottle
of whiskey on the deck of his abandoned patrol boat didn’t mean he’d been
drinking from it. While fingerprints on the bottle matched Dylan’s, Hanna would
never believe that he had consumed the contents.

The local coroner, Mr. Brownfield, was
not a medical examiner, and the autopsy had been a sham. Disgusted with the situation,
Hanna had asked a friend from the Seattle Medical Examiner’s Office to come
over and examine her brother’s body at the morgue.

She’d gone to medical school with Dr.
Newell. Sadly, he had not been given full access to Dylan’s body. He’d only been
allowed to look at the official reports and briefly examine the body.

The limited access had infuriated
Hanna, and the fact that local law enforcement would not investigate Dylan’s
death as a possible crime had completely stymied her.

Why was the sheriff so willing to
believe one of his best deputies drank on the job? The coroner’s conclusions
could be attributed to stupidity, but how could her brother’s boss be so quick
to condemn one of his own, especially after the Seattle medical examiner had
given him plausible evidence of an vicious assault.

It had been an awful thing to listen
to her brother’s death being discussed so clinically, but being a doctor, she
understood the need for such analysis. After hearing Dr. Newell’s conclusions, Hanna
was firmly convinced that someone had attacked her brother on his boat, knocked
him out, and then thrown him overboard. The small amount of alcohol in his
blood stream was baffling, but she was going to find out what happened to her
brother, even if she had to investigate his death all on her own. One way or
the other, she’d get to the truth and clear his name and reputation.

To that end, she had made plans to
meet Dylan’s best friend at the bar and grill after work. She’d bicycled over
from the hospital after her shift. It was only a few blocks from the downtown
waterfront, and while she had little appetite, she was determined to come up
with a plan to find her brother’s murderer.

HANNA HAD HER EYES CLOSED and was
resting her head back against the high wooden back of the booth, when someone
tapped her shoulder. She looked up and found Lance Kelly standing beside her.

“Been waiting long?” he asked her.

Lance and her brother had been best
friends since she and Dylan had first come to Port George twenty-eight years
ago. Lance was just as torn up about her brother’s tragic death as she was. He
was also just as outraged with the local coroner’s conclusions. At the funeral,
he’d promised Hanna that he would help her discover what exactly had happened
to Dylan.

After reaching for her hand and giving
it a reassuring squeeze, he slid into the booth, across from her.

Lance worked farther down on the
waterfront. He owned Kellys’ Boat and Salvage Shop. He built boats, repaired
them, and did some deep sea salvage diving. His specialty was restoring wooden
boats, and he’d done one for Hanna that was her pride and joy.

“No, not long. It’s just been another
long day.”

His smile commiserated with her. “Me,
too. It’s always godawful busy at the beginning of summer.”

“Everyone wants to get out on the
water in this great weather.”

He nodded. “Did you order yet?” He
scanned the empty table and frowned. “Hasn’t someone been around to even offer you
a glass of water? No place settings yet?”

Hanna shook her head no. She glanced
around the restaurant. It wasn’t her favorite place, but it was convenient to
both Lance and her. As a result, they met here for lunch occasionally. It had
good seafood and wasn’t too expensive. But after nine, it wasn’t the safest
place on the waterfront. Once the dinner crowd left, the bar’s clientele got a
little rough. She was very familiar with the reputation the bar had for fights.
She’d patched up enough of the brawlers in ER over the years, including a
special friend three years ago. But that wasn’t a memory she wanted to revisit
at the moment.

Hanna knew the menu well, so she
didn’t pull one from the holder by the hurricane lamp, at the end of the table.
“I think I’ll just have a bowl of clam chowder and a salad.”

“Umm...” Lance studied the menu he had
taken and laid out on the lacquered tabletop. “I worked too hard all day for
chick food.”

Hanna clicked her tongue in reproof.
While her companion studied his menu, she studied him. Lance Kelly was a
good-looking man. He had shaggy dark blonde hair that fell casually over his
forehead and was long enough in back to fall over the collar of his knit shirt.
He was tall, over six feet, broad-shouldered, lean-waisted, and long-legged. He
was the same age as Dylan, thirty-seven, and he wasn’t married any longer,
although he did have a ten-year-old son. Most of the single women in Port
George flirted with him, and a few of the married ones, as well. The Kelly
brothers had always attracted lots of female attention.

Hanna had been friends with Lance as
long as her brother had. Together with his older brother, Nick, the three of
them had been paling around since childhood. As kids, then as teenagers, the
four of them had done everything together. They lived next door to one another,
and had stayed close as adults, although Nick had been away from home since high
school.

Of the two Kelly brothers, Lance was the
less serious one. Like Dylan, he loved to tease and clown around. He was
out-going and talkative, whereas Nick had always been more quiet, more serious
and single-minded. Growing up, Dylan and Lance had been the instigators; the
ones to initiate all of their adventures and escapades.

While Nick had chosen to lead a life
far away from home, Lance had returned home after college to help his
stepfather operate his business. Sean Price had died a couple of years ago, and
Lance had inherited his boatyard, then renamed it
Kellys’ Boat and Salvage
,
in the hope that someday his older brother would become his partner. He was a
fantastic carpenter and marine mechanic, as well as a very skilled diver. The
latter was one thing he had in common with Nick.

After his wife had left him ten years
ago, Lance had moved back in with his mother so that his disabled son would
have a mother figure around. The three of them lived next door to Hanna and her
grandmother. With the addition of Dylan’s wife and baby daughter, all the families
lived within walking distance of one another.

“Okay, I’ve decided,” he finally
announced. “Now where’s the waiter?”

“I think it’s Yancy himself tonight,”
Hanna informed him as she saw the owner of the bar and grill approach their
booth.

Yancy Masters looked like an aging
biker. He was a big man, stocky and medium height, in his mid-fifties. His hair
was thick, nearly all white and combed back into a long ponytail. Sometimes,
Hanna had the impression he had smoked a little too much pot over the years.
His conversations could be a bit loopy. But he was generally a good-humored
guy, though he was definitely capable of breaking a few heads if the fights in
his bar got out of hand. And he welcomed everyone into his place— from the
prosperous and prominent to the seedy and suspect.

Yancy had owned the bar and grill for
five years. Rumor had it that he had bought it after winning some big money at
one of the Indian casinos. He owned a sleek speedboat, docked permanently in
the harbor marina, a big classic Harley motorcycle, a Cadillac, and a
turn-of-the-century house on a small unpopulated island just a few miles off
McHenry Point. His bar and grill did a brisk business, but many people in Port
George thought he must also have made a few other profitable investments hidden
somewhere. Though he didn’t look like it, the man was reputed to be quite well
off.

Most of the town’s businesses did well
during tourist season, about five months out of the year, but had a tough time
hanging on during the slow off-season. The seasonal nature of the town’s
attraction for tourists didn’t seem to adversely affect Yancy’s prosperity,
though.

“Hey, Lance... Dr. Wallace,” Yancy
greeted them with a broad grin. “How’s it going?” When neither of them returned
his greeting with much enthusiasm, he immediately sobered. “Oh, geez, I’m
sorry. I forgot you just had a death in the family.” Flustered, he straightened
the big white apron he was wearing over his extended belly. Beneath it he was
dressed in faded jeans and a dark t-shirt. “That was an awful thing that
happened to your brother, Dr. Wallace. He was so young, with a wife and new
baby and all. And he’d just finished building that new house out by the point.”

Hanna nodded. A lot of people in town
preferred to call her Dr. Wallace, out of respect, she supposed. Because she
was so reserved, not many knew her well. But she treated a lot of the locals,
had lived here most all her life, and knew, by sight, at least half the town.

“It’s hard to believe he drowned,”
Yancy continued. “You’d think a man who worked on the water all the time could
swim.”

“He was a good swimmer,” Hanna
corrected him.

“Well, guess accidents can happen to
anyone.”

“Dylan’s death was no accident,” she
insisted.

“It wasn’t?”

As far as everyone had read in the newspaper,
that’s what the deputy’s death was— an accidental drowning as a result of a
fall off his boat. Much to Hanna’s relief, the paper had said nothing about
Dylan being drunk at the time. Rumor had circulated that piece of dishonesty,
but nothing official had been let out. And maybe out of respect for her, no one
had asked her about the rumors.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Could you take our order now, Yancy?”
Lance interrupted, giving Hanna a pointed look. “It’s getting late, and I’m
hungry.”

After Yancy left, Hanna gave Lance a
puzzled frown. “Why didn’t you want me to tell him that I didn’t think Dylan’s
death was an accident? I don’t want people thinking Dylan was drinking on the
job.”

“I don’t either, but we have to prove
our suspicions first. We don’t know who might have been involved in Dylan’s
death. Hell, we don’t know Yancy that well. I’ve heard some rumors about how he
makes his money.”

Hanna raised an interested eyebrow.
“What have you heard?”

“That he deals on the side.”

“Deals what?”

Lance shook his blonde head and
chuckled. “Drugs, my naive Doctor.”

“Do you think he does?”

“I don’t know. Dylan was a little
suspicious of him, and he certainly came in here often enough to break up
fights among Yancy’s biker friends, many of whom had criminal records.”