Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) (6 page)

“Well, thanks,” I said again. Rufus was rarely so talkative, preferring his seclusion at the back of the property. “I’ll try some of these out.”

“Yuh do dat, Cap’n. Time be a vengeful demon.” He went back inside the kitchen and I headed back to the bar, flipping through the book. Each page held a different recipe, probably a hundred in all, each one with a professional-looking color picture of the finished dish.
Must have cost a small fortune to have them printed
, I thought.

Reentering the bar, I saw Charlie by the door, yelling at some guy. “Take that crap on back to Key Weird!”

I tucked the book into the back pocket of my pants and took my stool at the end of the bar. “What’s going on?”

“Some crack monster was trying to sell his shit to Charlie,” Carl replied, calmly eating his soup.

Charlie isn’t a very big woman, shorter than Rusty and about a third his weight. However, she at least matched the big man in heart and grit.

“What the hell makes those idiots think I smoke crack?” Charlie mumbled as she came back to sit beside her husband.

“Who was he?” I asked Rusty.

“Never seen him before,” he replied. With him having grown up here, as had his family for many generations, that meant the drug dealer wasn’t from anywhere around here. There weren’t many people in the Keys he didn’t either know or know about. “He came in about a half hour ago for lunch and a beer. Ugly little guy. I made him for a crackhead as soon as he sat down. Rotten teeth, pimples, and you can smell it on ’em.”

I walked to the door and watched as the little man scurried along the driveway. He was dressed like he’d slept in his clothes for at least a couple of days and his black hair was stringy and greasy looking.

When I sat back down, Rusty pulled a credit card receipt from the box under the bar. “Name’s Michal Grabowski. Ain’t never heard of him, neither.”

R
ipping off the coke dealer on the bus was easy, but didn’t produce much gain. There wasn’t any cash in the guy’s wallet, and two of the three credit cards he found in it were maxed out. No telling what he could do with the third card. It had already been two days since Will Byers had pinched the guy’s wallet while standing in the crowded queue at the bus station in Miami. Byers had boarded the bus in Orlando, nearly broke and recently evicted from yet another roach-infested furnished apartment. He had spotted the dealer right away. The telltale white flakes clinging to his mustache hairs were a dead giveaway.

The guy’s coke was good, but not exactly Byers’s drug of choice. Though he was down to less than four hundred bucks, he sprang for an eight ball anyway, not wanting to dip into his own stash of crack. The price was right and the shit was primo. Byers knew he could always lift another wallet. He was good at it.

Byers had assumed the dealer kept his cash in his wallet and was disappointed he didn’t. The guy was careful. Byers had persuaded the dealer to give him a sample on the bus, but when he offered to buy an eighth of an ounce, the guy said he’d have to wait until the bus stopped again. He’d finally made the buy at the last stop before Miami. Both men got off the bus and walked into the parking lot, making the deal between two parked cars.

Aside from the bus they came in on, the next one out of the little redneck town on the shore of Lake Okeechobee wasn’t until the next day. Byers tried to get close to the guy at the ticket counter there, but some fat lady with two kids managed to beat him to the next spot in line.

On the trip out of Belle Glade, Byers offered the dealer a hit from his stash, as repayment for the sample the dealer had given him earlier. The guy didn’t want anything to do with the crack, so Byers went back to the bus’s lavatory and lit up a small rock.

Finally, after wolfing down a greasy cheeseburger and fries at the downtown Miami bus station, Will Byers saw another opportunity as the coke dealer was waiting to board another bus. In the jostling crowd, Byers managed to get close enough to lift the dealer’s wallet. He disappeared into the crowd and, after the bus left, used the guy’s card to buy a ticket to the end of the line in Key West.

Byers got into an argument with the bus driver as they entered the town of Marathon. The driver smelled the crack Byers was smoking in the bus’s lavatory and pulled over to the shoulder, waiting outside the lavatory when Byers came out. Byers was ejected from the bus in front of a small strip mall on the north side of the highway. Seeing a couple of sports bars, he started that way. Suddenly, he caught a whiff of something on the breeze coming off the ocean to the south. It smelled good. Looking up and down the highway, he didn’t see any restaurants, only a crushed-shell driveway that disappeared through the trees.

Sweating heavily only minutes after getting off the bus, Byers crossed the busy highway. He figured that if someone was grilling, he might be able to sneak through the woods to the backyard and grab something off the grill when the homeowner went inside for something. Barring that, he could always go to one of the sports bars and use the dealer’s credit card.

Staying close to the edge of the brush that lined the driveway, just in case he was spotted, Byers quickly reached the end and realized it wasn’t someone’s home. There was a parking lot with a few old pickups ahead. To the right was a long canal where nearly a dozen boats were tied up. Byers shrugged and walked toward the door of what looked like a hole-in-the-wall type bar. The smell was surely coming from there and he was hungry.

Byers sat near an open window, wondering why they didn’t have them closed and the air conditioning cranked up. The heat and humidity was stifling. A big fat man with a bald head and reddish beard asked what he wanted and he ordered his usual cheeseburger, fries, and two cold beers.

Byers was low on cash, but he had a pretty good stash of crack and half the eight ball of coke left. He could probably sell a rock or two, just to have a little more walking around cash. He started watching the other patrons as he ate. There weren’t many people in the place. One old man at the end of the bar was nursing a beer, and a couple of stools down, a long-haired guy was talking to the fat bartender while drinking water.

Neither looked like a crack smoker. The old guy was obviously not into anything other than his beer and the long-haired guy looked like one of those health types. Byers had met a few of them before. They drank nothing but water and smoked nothing but weed.

About to leave, Byers heard a sound outside the window. The throaty exhaust from an old wooden boat burbled as it approached. He watched as several people went outside to meet the boat. There were two men and a woman with two kids on it, along with a shaggy brown dog. One guy he dismissed immediately, an obvious jock type, tall with broad shoulders and hair barely over his ears. The other guy was a possible customer, but he felt pretty sure about the woman. With two kids, she probably needed something to calm her down and he had just the thing.

G
T Bradley leaned menacingly on the ticket counter in the Miami Greyhound station. The guy on the other side hadn’t touched the twenty-dollar bill he’d placed on the fake wood between them.

One of GT’s employees in Pittsburgh was a computer gamer that had some serious hacking skills. Give the guy a name and address and within an hour he’d give you all the guy’s credit card activity. Staying in touch with his guy for the last two days, GT had followed Michal Grabowski’s card all the way to the Florida Keys.

Grabowski had used it mostly to buy bus tickets, always headed south, but only to the next stop.
The kid’s careful,
GT thought. Erik had driven fast from one Greyhound station to another, all the way from Pittsburgh. Now he was out of road.

The ticket agents were usually eager to pull up the ticket sale on their computer after GT passed them a folded twenty. He fully intended to take the additional expense money out of Grabowski’s hide when he caught up to him.

GT growled in a low and menacing voice, “Pick up the bill, numbnuts. Then give me the destination and what time the bus left. Your options here are limited, man. A free lunch or a trip to the ER and eat through a straw for a few months.”

The ticket agent glanced around and quickly palmed the twenty. “I’m really not supposed to do this.”

“Just give me the information.”

The man typed in the card number GT had given him on a piece of paper and then punched a few keys. “The card number you gave me was used to buy a one-way ticket, Miami to Key West, left yesterday evening and arrived at midnight. That’s really all I can tell ya, mister.”

GT turned away from the counter and strode quickly to the exit. Erik Lowery waited in the idling Escalade next to the curb in front of the station. Climbing in the passenger side, GT said, “He bought a ticket to Key West last night. Arrived at midnight.”

“Key West? What’s after that?” Erik asked, pulling the big SUV away from the curb and joining the traffic headed south on Highway 953, then merging onto US-1.

“Ain’t nothing after that but the ocean. We’ll find him in Key West. It ain’t that big a town.”

An hour later, GT’s cell phone rang as they were leaving Tavernier on the Overseas Highway. He answered it and listened for a minute, jotting something on a small notepad. “We’re less’n an hour from there now,” he said before ending the call. Riding in silence for the next forty miles, GT thought about all the ways he was going to hurt Grabowski.

Finally, as they entered the town of Marathon, GT read Erik the address and said, “It should be coming up pretty quick now. That last sign said this is the town.” The Escalade slowed as the numbers got smaller, nearing the destination GT had jotted on the notepad.

“You passed it!” GT shouted at Erik. “It’s on the other side of the road, back there.”

Erik turned the Escalade into the next storefront parking lot, a marine electronics store called Sea Wiz. “Sorry, boss. I didn’t see no sign for a bar.”

Going slower now, GT pointed to a leaning mailbox next to a crushed-shell driveway. “There. That’s the address.”

“Don’t look like no bar to me, boss.” The big tires crunched on the driveway as Erik turned off the main road and they were enveloped by the tropical foliage.

Parking the big Escalade next to a couple of rusty pickups, the two men strode toward what looked like a run-down old bar from some past era. There were no signs saying it was a bar, but the hacker had called GT just an hour earlier, saying that Grabowski had bought lunch and a couple beers at a place called the
Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill
twenty minutes before that and giving GT this address. Even though there weren’t any signs, not even beer signs in the windows, GT recognized a dive when he saw one.

As the two approached, GT noted very little activity outside. The quiet hum of a few air conditioners drifted up from several boats tied up in the canal. A small, sporty brown one at the end of the canal caught GT’s eye. It was different from the other small boats. It was wood and looked faster.

Opening the door, GT let his eyes adjust for a moment before entering the dimly lit bar.