Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) (9 page)

“How tall are you?” he asked.

“You mean how short? I’m just under five feet, handsome.” Coral waved goodbye to the new bartender and turned back to Michal. “I do have some six-inch stilettoes if you prefer women tall like her.”

Michal blushed slightly, which caused Coral to giggle for a moment. As they left the bar and headed down Duval Street toward the docks, he felt like he was walking on air. She quickened her pace and grabbed his hand, nearly dragging him along.

“We have to hurry, or we’ll miss it,” Coral said.

“Miss what?”

“Sunset! When it goes down here, it’s a reason to party.”

They quickly made their way across Duval at the next corner and walked hurriedly down Greene Street a block, then cut through a couple more side streets, before arriving at Mallory Square.

Michal had never seen anything like it. The dock area was about five hundred feet long and a hundred feet deep, with all kinds of temporary vendor carts and displays set up. Everywhere he looked, street performers crowded the space, playing music, juggling cats, selling cookies, and just a whole lot of weirdness all in one little place. It was sensory overload.

It’s like a circus
, he thought. People were crammed into nearly every spot, watching the street performers and gazing out over the water as the sun sank toward the horizon.

Coral led him by the hand to the edge of the docks, near where a man was walking a tight rope, which wasn’t very tight, and juggling bowling pins at the same time.

To his left, a huge cruise ship was docked about a hundred yards further down. Aside from the craziness all around, the dock in front of him was empty.

Michal looked around in wonder. “This happen often?”

“Every evening! Crazy, huh?” Coral leaned against the rail, her short dress riding up the back of her shapely, tanned legs. Michal stepped up beside her and looked toward the setting sun. Coral turned and considered the side of his face. “They say that when the last of the sun disappears below the sea, if you make a wish and see a green flash, it’ll come true.”

“A green flash?” Michal asked.

“It’s rare, but it does happen. At the very moment the last of the sun disappears.”

They stood at the large concrete barrier and looked out over the water. The sun was barely above the horizon now and as they watched, a stately old schooner sailed by, the deck crowded with people. There were a number of other boats on the water, mostly sailboats, but the schooner dwarfed most of them.

Looking down, Michal saw a number of brightly colored fish of various sizes swimming just below the surface, attracted to some kind of food that kids were tossing in the water. The breeze blowing off the sea was cooler and seemed to suck the heat of the day away from this spot. Looking back out over the water, he was mesmerized by the sheer beauty. Low clouds near the far horizon looked as though they were ablaze as the sun sank lower, the clouds tinged bright orange at the end nearest the sun and fading to red and pink to the north.

Coral reached down and took his hand. “Watch closely, or you’ll miss it. The ocean is about to reach up and grab the sun.”

She’d no more than said the words, when it seemed as though the water actually did rise up and take the sun in its grasp, pulling it lower and lower. Coral felt his hand tighten in hers and heard his sharp intake of breath, as she watched him watch the sea.

Stepping closer to Michal then, she pulled his hand around her narrow waist before releasing it and leaning against him, slipping her arm around him.

Just as the last of the sun was about to disappear, he closed his eyes for just a second, his lips moving with a silent wish. When he reopened them, the sun quietly slipped below the sea and disappeared, but he didn’t see any green flash.

All around him, people started clapping their hands, cheering and whistling. “Did I miss it?” he asked, looking down at Coral’s upturned face.

“Like I said, it’s rare. They’re just cheering Mother Ocean’s show. Make the same wish tomorrow and it might come true.” Then she reached a hand up and twirled one of her dreads, cocking her head and smiling seductively. “Who knows? You might get your wish anyway. But not before you feed me. Come on.”

W
hen we got back to the island, Carl and I pulled the boat up onto the trolleys and then, with a lot of grunting, swearing, and tugging, we pulled it back into the little cover to give it a good inspection in the morning.

“Sure was a lot easier going in than coming out,” Carl gasped, dropping to the sand.

I knelt on one knee next to him, breathing hard from the exertion. “Always the case, bro. I used to know a guy who always said, ‘Sometimes the easiest way out is go straight through.’”

“I think maybe you should start drinking again,” Carl said. “That makes no sense at all.”

“No, but what you said reminded me of him. Maybe you’re right, though. I haven’t had a beer all week.”

“Humph, more like a month. Unwind, man. There’s not a bad guy with an Uzi at the wheel of every boat.”

Once we’d caught our breath, we went out to the north pier, where Charlie and the kids were rinsing under the freshwater shower after cleaning up in the lagoon. Pescador was jumping back and forth with the kids, biting at the steam of water, and they were trying to mimic him.

As Charlie hurried the kids toward shore, Pescador stopped for a quick ear scratch and Charlie said, “I’ll get dinner started while you two get cleaned up.” She smiled at her husband and added, “I brought home a big pot of Rufus’s janga soup.”

Carl and I each grabbed a bar of soap from a box mounted at the end of the pier and dove into the warm, clear water. Minutes later, we were toweling off while walking toward the shoreward end of the pier.

“What’d you make of that today?” I asked Carl. “I mean the two dope pushers arriving at the
Anchor
about the same time?”

We sat down at the table nearest the big stone grill. Carl opened the cooler and took out two Red Stripes and a bottle of water, offering me either. I took the beer and opened it with a bottle opener laying on the table. The first pull on the beer was delicious and cold, with just a bit of the grainy texture I like.

“Wish I’d been inside to see old Rufus in action,” Carl said. “There’s a lot of rumors about him, nothing substantiated. All kinds of mystical stuff he was supposed to be involved in here, a long time ago. The two pushers? I don’t know, man. It seems to just get worse and worse around here.”

“Mysticism, huh? If I believed in any of that, it’d make sense of what I saw. You’re right about it getting worse, though. But I don’t think we have any kind of drug problem here on the island.”

Carl laughed. “No, definitely not here. Charlie’d kick my ass if I even smoked pot.”

“You ever tried it?”

Carl looked at me, questioningly. “Yeah, I used to smoke quite a bit. That was before I met Charlie, though. You?”

“Nope, never had the occasion or desire to try it. Wonder how that big guy was able to track the other guy all the way from Pittsburgh?”

“I dunno, maybe he’s part bloodhound. What exactly did he say after Rufus cleaned their clocks?”

I thought it over a minute. “Credit card! The big guy said that the guy’s name was something Grabowski and he paid with a credit card. He was specific about that, but how would he know?”

“Wouldn’t be hard for a computer hacker to get that information,” Carl said. “Why’s it important?”

I just shrugged. “I don’t know, just curious, I guess. I wouldn’t think an ex-jock-turned-dealer would be all that great at computer hacking.”

“Maybe he has help. Like Chyrel does for you guys.”

Chyrel Koshinski is a part of Deuce’s CCC team. A former CIA computer analyst, she’s able to hack just about any security system in the world, including the CIA’s.

“I’m gonna go make a call before supper,” I said as I got up and headed toward my little stilt-house on the other side of the island. It wasn’t a long walk. The clearing in the middle of my little island is barely more than an acre, with the two houses and two bunkhouses nestled into the tree line along the shore. The whole island is hardly two acres at high tide.

In the house, I checked the table in the corner of the small galley before looking around the tiny living room. Going back to the bedroom, I searched the nightstand and dresser.

The boat!
I thought. I’d called Linda the night before last, while anchored in Jewfish Basin about fifteen miles southwest of here. I made my way outside and down to the south pier, opening the door to the dockage area under the house. Vaulting over the gunwale, I found my phone in the drink-holder of the fighting chair. The battery was dead.

I plopped down in the chair to think. I’ve lost quite a few chargers and more than one cell phone over the last seven years since moving to the Keys. I just never make a lot of phone calls.

I jumped up from the chair, remembering that when I called Linda, the battery had been dead that time also, and I’d called her from the bridge, where I could plug it in.

Finding the charger where I’d left it at the console, I connected it to my phone again. It’d take a few minutes to charge enough for a short call, and the only place it gets a signal is on the deck directly above where I was sitting.
Not far above
, I thought, powering the phone on and standing up.

With the phone at head level a few inches below the overhead, and it having a clearance to the deck beams of two feet, that meant the only spot I’d ever gotten a signal on the whole island was only about nine feet above where I was now holding the phone. The signal meter showed one bar for a second and then it disappeared. I dropped the phone into a drink-holder on the console.

I could use the satellite phone Deuce had given me. It was fully charged and turned off down in my cabin. After learning from Deuce’s predecessor that the sat-phones the team used could be tracked by the DHS, since they technically owned them, I left it off all the time.

“What the hell?” I said to nobody. “Where else would they expect me to be?”

Retrieving the sat-phone from its spot under my bunk in the forward stateroom, I powered it up as I left the boat and returned to the deck above the docks.

Linda answered on the first ring. “I miss you. I miss the island. And I miss the water.”

“I miss you too, babe,” I said. “But is that how you always answer the phone?”

“You’re calling from your satellite phone. The number’s stored on mine, but it’s always turned off when I call it. Where are you?”

I sat back in one of the four rockers Carl had built so we could watch the sunsets. Sometimes the mosquitoes were too bad on the pier or the beach in front of Carl’s house. “I’m at home.”

“Battery’s dead in your regular phone, right?”

It was a statement, not a question. The woman knew me too well. Linda and I had met almost a year ago on an island in the Bahamas. She had been working undercover as a professional call girl and helped put together the pieces when some bad guys were trying to kill us.
Us
being a group that had gone over there to locate the treasure of the
Nuestra Señora de Magdalena y las Angustias
, a seventeenth-century carrack that had been driven onto the reef by a hurricane. Another former first mate, Doc Talbot and his wife Nikki had found a clue to its location and brought in a few people to help find it, mostly from Deuce’s team. Doc had been a Navy Corpsman many years ago and more recently a member of Deuce’s team.

“Yeah, left it in the fighting chair when I called you a couple nights ago. Why all the missing?”

“Sorry, I’m just venting. I hate it up here. It’s a frigging college town and even the government is run like a damned fraternity.”

“Ahh,” I said. “The big brick wall of chauvinism didn’t fall with your first kick, huh? Know what Pap used to tell me?”

She laughed, knowing I liked to quote Papisms. I liked her laugh. “That’s pretty much it. A bunch of good ole boys here in Tallahassee, and they consider it their own little boys’ club, no girls allowed unless you’re serving drinks or blowjobs. So, what sage words of wisdom would your Pap have given me?”