Fish On!: A Jesse McDermitt Novel

Book 25: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Sea Adventures; Mystery; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Jesse McDermitt is finally ready to retire. But life has other plans. While diving on a remote reef deep in the backcountry of the Florida Keys with his wife, son and two friends, he discovers of all things, a car.

Not just any car, but a 1928 Duesenberg Model J, the most powerful and stylish automobile of its time. The car was once owned by a Saudi prince who was attempting to develop Johnston Key in the heart of Turkey Basin before Henry Flagler even finished the rail line to Key West.

But that’s not all Jesse discovers and what he finds next will make him the target of one of his own. He’s been mentoring a young operative who then decides to go rogue and now it’s up to Jesse to find the man and, if need be, eliminate him before he can hurt anyone else.

 

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Release date: February 28, 2023

Publisher: Down Island Press

Print pages: 212

Sample

Chapter 1

Saturday, February 18

North Miami, Florida

 

A light rain was falling on the troubled city—not really a rain, but more like the fine mist of a low fog, floating just above ground level. The mist seemed to be dragged along by higher clouds that it couldn’t break free of, as it plodded through the city streets toward the swamp.

To the west, the dull orange glow of the sun angled its rays under the thin cloud layer that extended out to the edge of the Everglades and bathed the cross streets in a golden hue that danced maniacally with the tiny raindrops.

Traffic was light on NE 6^th Avenue, which was mostly in the shadows at that hour. Among the smattering of late-evening commuters in their minivans, economy cars, pickups, and the occasional flashy European sportscar, a dark gray Dodge sedan drove slowly northward.

The throaty rumble of its exhaust echoed off the surrounding buildings, and every few seconds, the car’s wipers swished across the windshield, flinging water away.

The Dodge moved steadily northward with the light traffic until it reached the stoplight at NE 129^th Street. There, the driver signaled and turned left, rounding the corner in no hurry.

The Charger proceeded leisurely toward the west, the sun reflecting off the water droplets on the windshield as the driver’s eyes scanned the opposite side of the road.

Just ahead, a group of men were gathering outside a building. Most wore regular street clothes, some in jeans and others in tailored suits, but a few had robes of some kind hanging from their shoulders. A handful of men stood just off the sidewalk with umbrellas, smoking cigarettes, and more were gathered under a small portico.

The man driving the gray muscle car was young, in his mid-twenties, with short, dark-blond hair and a square jaw, clean-shaven. He wore a black shirt under a gray coat, and gloves on his hands. Not because it was cold. It rarely got cold enough in Miami for that. They were driving gloves, which permitted better control of the steering wheel during high-speed maneuvering.

The car stopped on the street, just across from where the men were gathering. As it sat there with the engine rumbling, the wipers continued to whisper quietly across the windshield, tossing glittering droplets of water in the direction of the men congregated less than a hundred feet away.

Several of them noticed the car idling in the middle of the street and looked over at it.

The driver smiled, but there was no glee in his expression. He knew that he was invisible through the tinted glass and only he could foresee what was about to happen.

Reaching up, he pulled a mask down over his face, covering his features except for his eyes and mouth. Then he pushed the button to lower the window.

Men started shouting and scattering when the barrel of an AK-47 appeared in the open window of the slaughter car.

The masked man opened fire, selecting targets of opportunity at random as the men pushed and shoved one another, trying to get away.

The nearest—those who had turned and looked at him—were the first to die. The masked man continued his deliberate, brutal barrage, shooting his victims in the back with deadly precision as they tried to flee.

When the bolt locked to the rear, the man released the empty magazine, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out another.

With fluid, unhurried movements, he inserted the magazine and released the bolt, then fired twice more, dropping two more of the fleeing men.

More than a dozen souls lay on or near the sidewalk, their blood being washed away by the rain. Some moved, and when they did, the masked man shot them again, until all of them lay still—clearly dead.

Finally, the man pulled the rifle barrel in and placed the weapon in the backseat, along with the empty magazine. Then he closed the window and accelerated hard, the rear tires breaking loose on the wet pavement.

After three blocks, the car braked hard, drifted sideways as it powered around the next right onto Griffing Boulevard. As cartridge casings rolled across the dash and floor, the gunman pulled his mask off, tossed it in the backseat with the AK, and stomped the gas again.

A quarter mile farther, he slowed, casually turned left onto NE 135^th and crossed the C-8 canal. A few blocks later, the car turned right onto NW 6^th Ave., and then merged onto I-95, headed north.

There was no pursuit.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a cheap burner phone that only had one number stored in its recent call list. He tapped the screen and held the phone to his ear, cruising northward at the speed limit in light traffic.

“Is it done?” a deep, smooth-sounding voice asked.

“It is,” the shooter replied. “At least a dozen packages on their way to wherever the hell they go.”

“Good,” the man on the other end said. “You made the right choice, Anthony.”

“I told you before,” the shooter said, his voice low. “It’s Tony. Anthony was my dad.”

The man on the other end of the call laughed. “You did good, kid. Now, proceed as planned to the pickup point. You know what to do with the car.”

“Roger that,” Tony said, and ended the call.

There was a chop shop on the outskirts of Miami, where he was to take the car. It seemed an extreme measure to Tony. He could police the brass—he’d been careful to make sure he’d sat far enough back that all the casings were still in the car. But he guessed stripping the car of all it was worth and crushing the rest, along with the brass or any strands of hair of skin cells, was a more permanent solution, and his new employer didn’t seem to take any unnecessary risks.

Not a bad day’s haul, he thought, as he began stripping the phone apart. Thirty grand and all expenses paid, for just a few seconds of wet work.

The rain suddenly stopped, and Tony laughed at the irony of his thought as he put the windows down and threw the phone parts out, one by one.

He had another similar job to do for his new employer in two days, then another next week. Both would be another thirty grand each, and a $10,000 bonus for getting all three done in a week.

“Not a bad week, either,” Tony said, a bloodthirsty smile crossing his face.

 

 Chapter 2

Tuesday, February 28

The Backcountry, Florida Keys

 

It’d been unseasonably cold in the Florida Keys for over a week. Normally, the final days of February brought the end to high temperatures in the sixties. But a high-pressure system had pushed down from the north and stalled, bringing cold, northerly winds.

On this last day of February, it was just barely in the sixties, and already close to noon. But the wind had shifted more easterly as the morning wore on, and we were anticipating a warming trend to kick off March.

While sixty-two degrees might feel like the first blast of warm summer air in some places, it rarely got that cold in the Keys, even at night. We were quite literally surrounded by a thermal blanket of water that never got below seventy degrees.

I was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Rusty Anchor T-shirt with a jacket over it, but was still shivering. Getting away from the

cold was the reason I’d come to the Keys so many years ago.

I found a sure-fire way to offset the chill, at least mentally, was for me to think back to a time when I’d experienced extreme cold. For me, that was the winter of 1980. I’d grown up in South Florida and went through boot camp just the summer before that. I was a seventeen-year-old PFC, fresh out of the School of Infantry at Camp Geiger in November of 1979, when I’d been assigned to Weapons Company, 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines, which was getting ready to deploy to Fort Drum, New York for cold weather survival training. For three weeks in January and February, we trained in sub-freezing temperatures, lived in quickly constructed snow caves, or shelter halves, never entering any heated environment or lighting a fire. For a skinny Florida kid, that stood out as the coldest weather I’d ever experienced.

“How long we known each other, Jesse?” my fishing partner asked, intruding on my thoughts.

The cobia bite was on, and we were fishing in the backcountry north and west of Big Pine Key. Cobia are large gamefish often mistaken for sharks when viewed from above, due to their thick bodies and large, horizontal pectoral fins. The limit on cobia was one per person or two per vessel, and we’d already caught and released a few shorts throughout the morning—under three feet—plus a keeper I’d caught, that measured forty inches.

“I don’t know, Dink,” I replied, turning the crank slowly. “How long have you been here?”

“Twenty-six years, come next month,” he replied.

“That’s longer than me,” I said. “I was still in the Marines then.”

“I was a wet-behind-the-ears high-school dropout, and Rusty gave me a job and introduced me to some of the guides. I think I first met you right around the time you started your offshore charter business.”

Brian “Dink” Wilcox was the exception to the rule. Most who try to make a go of living in paradise end up broke and hitchhiking north pretty quickly.

Dink had arrived a couple years ahead of me with few possessions, from what Rusty’d told me, but he had a sharp mind

and a willingness to work. Sometimes, that’s all it took.

In the Keys, people come and go—visitors, tourists, and those desiring to live there. But surviving in the Keys is tough, and most paradise seekers find it’s not at all like the romantic notion they thought it would be.

My old buddy, Rusty Thurman, could probably rattle off the names of a hundred people who’d tried and failed, and thousands more whose names he couldn’t remember. He often hired people who were down to pocket change. And for a few, his generosity was a turning point in their lives.

“Then, I’d say we’ve known each other almost twenty-four years,” I replied softly, feeling a slight bump on my line as I slowly reeled it in. It wasn’t a hit, but something big had passed close to the lure and disturbed the water.

“So, why is it this is the first time me and you ever been fishin’ together?” Dink asked.

Whatever had nudged my lure had disappeared, so I finished retrieving the line and cast beyond the spot where I’d felt movement.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “You’re a pretty busy guy and I guess it’d be sort of unbecoming if either of us were to hire the other for a day.”

“Yeah, I suppose that’s true,” he said with a chuckle, as he removed his lure and put a different one on the swivel. He cast toward the shoal, far to the left of my line.

“It’s a damn shame, ya know,” he offered. “One of my favorite things to do, but I hardly ever get to do it just for fun with anyone I know.”

“I know just what you—”

There was an explosion of water as my rod tip bent toward the surface and the reel began to sing. The fish had taken my lure and dived for the bottom.

“Fish on!” Dink shouted, as he quickly cranked his line in.

Cobia are a migratory species and can be found in all oceans around the globe, but they don’t like water below sixty-five degrees. So, in winter, the beasties head south just like the snowbirds. And anglers are there waiting for them.

Dink put his rod in a holder and was already maneuvering the boat with the electric trolling motor.

I tightened the drag a little as my rod bent almost double with the weight and strength of what I knew to be a big fish—at least a fifty-pounder.

“Work him steady,” Dink coached, out of habit. Using foot pedals, he was able to move the boat so that the fish was out in front of us. “He’s comin’ up, he’s comin’ up!”

I’d only seen a glimpse of the fish but knew it was either a big cobia or a lemon shark. He turned and started another run, shaking his big head, which told me it probably wasn’t a shark.

“It’s a cobia!” Dink shouted, seeing the line shake. “A big one!”

I managed to turn the fish around and cranked furiously as he got nearer the boat. Then he sounded again. "

Don’t let him go deep, Jesse! There’s a rusted-out old car and a ton of coral down there.”

“A car?” I asked, as I pulled back, muscling the fish away from the bottom.

“Yeah, a car,” Dink said. “Don’t let him go under the boat.”

“He’s not,” I growled, pulling hard.

“My cousin up in Miami is a geomancer,” he said, as I continued fighting the fish. “She says the car was left out here by some rich Arabian sheik."

"Get the gaff! He’s coming up again.”

A moment later, Dink gaffed the fish and pulled it aboard in one fluid movement. Out here on the water, Dink was as graceful as a swan, even though he was six feet tall and a gangly, clumsy mess on shore.

He said he had a rare disorder, though I wasn’t even sure it was ever diagnosed. On land, he was as ungainly as the proverbial bull in a china shop, but the moment he stepped onto a boat, his awkwardness went away. He said he’d just spent so much time on the water that he had perpetual sea legs.

“Whoa!” Dink shouted, standing in the back of the boat and looking down at the great fish flopping on the deck. “That thing’s gotta be sixty pounds!”

The cobia thrashed violently, lifting its entire body off the deck, which was clear of any gear for just that reason.

“Take that one to Rufus,” I told him. “The other one will already be more than Savannah can fit into the freezer.”

He opened the fish box and slid the great fish in alongside another, slightly smaller cobia. “You sure?”

Dink was like a lot of the guides in the Middle Keys; he lived hand- to-mouth, paying the rent with client money, usually in cash, and subsisting off what he could catch during his off time. Not that he or any of the other guides were destitute. I imagine like many others, Dink had a stash of cash, or maybe even gold, that he was saving up for when he got too old to fish.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I told him, and grinned. “I’ll get some of it back from Rufus’s grill.”

Dink had an arrangement with Rufus, the Jamaican chef at the Rusty Anchor. He’d give the old man a part of his catch each day and sell the rest, and in exchange, Rufus would pack him a lunch and feed him dinner. Rusty and Rufus had arrangements like that with a few guides and as a result, rarely had to buy fish. Fifty pounds of whole fish, minus four or five pounds that a guide could eat in a week, was a profitable arrangement for Rusty. And it made life easy for the single guides.

“Much appreciated,” he said, looking around the flats. “Can’t believe an offshore guy skunked me in my own backcountry fishin’ hole.”

Dink had told me earlier that the spot we were fishing was one of his favorites, a deep hole surrounded by the skinny waters of Turkey Basin, just southeast of Marvin Key. I didn’t get this far out into the backcountry often—it was a good ten miles from my tiny island, southeast of the Content Keys. But I was no stranger to the backcountry.

It was my backyard.

“I do live out here,” I replied. “But I don’t think I’ve ever fished this exact spot; it’s a little far from the house. I take tourists offshore because they pay more for the experience. Personally, I prefer fishing the backcountry, but I don’t bring clients out here.”

While he was busy securing his own gear, I pulled my phone out, opened the Navionics app, and dropped a pin on our location. I fully intended to come back and fish Dink’s spot again.

“Well, judgin’ by those two in the fish box,” he said, taking a seat at the helm, “and the other two little ones you caught to my one, me and the other backcountry guides appreciate that.”

The two fish in the box probably had a combined weight of over a hundred pounds and would provide a good forty or fifty pounds of meat, and two being the limit, our day of cobia fishing was finished.

I put my rod in a holder and started getting my gear together. “Is there really a car down there?” I asked, then looked up at him. “And just what the hell is a geomancer? Some new slang term for a person in a long-distance relationship?”

He laughed heartily and started the outboard. “Nothin’ like that,” he replied, dropping the boat into gear as I hauled the trolling motor up.

Once I’d secured it, Dink turned north toward the natural cuts between the shoals. “The car’s there—I seen it,” he replied, carefully following a well-used trail on his small chart plotter. “Back during the Renaissance age, they considered geomancy to be one of the seven ‘forbidden arts.’”

“What exactly is it?” I asked.

“You probably heard of one of the other six—hydromancy, or water divination.”

“Divining rods?”

He nodded. “Findin’ water is just one thing a hydromancer does. What a geomancer does is they interpret markin’s on the ground or patterns you make when you toss a handful of sand or dirt or rocks on the ground.”

“And your cousin up in Miami? She charges people to what? Read their dirt?”

He shrugged. “Somethin’ like that. It’s more of a hobby for her. She waits tables for a livin’.”

“And she told you that some Arab sheik dropped a car off his boat or something?”

He glanced up for a second. Not at the water ahead of us, but at me. Then he turned his attention back to the plotter. “Look around,” he said, carefully following the breadcrumbs on the screen. “This cut we’re in is all of three feet deep and in some places, only six wide. Ain’t no boat big enough to haul a car ever gonna get to this spot. That’s why I asked my cousin about it.”

“Good point,” I said. “And you’re sure it’s a car?”

“It’s a car, alright,” he insisted. “I dove down and checked it out with a scuba mask. The thing’s all covered with coral, but it definitely looks like a car to me. A big one, like one of those long, low Dousies or maybe a Rolls—you know, a real long hood and little trunk. I got no idea how it got there. But it wasn’t on no boat, I can promise ya that.”