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  Vacant Shore

  Pine Island Florida Suspense: Book 4

  Jack Hardin

  First Published in the United States by The Salty Mangrove Press

  Copyright © 2018 by Jack Hardin. All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Collier Vinson (http://www.collier.co/)

  Vacant Shore is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and all characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to any person, living or dead, is merely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This one’s for Dad

  Contents

  Note to the Reader

  Pine Island Area

  St. James City

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Get ready for Book 5...

  Get Notified

  What to Read Next

  Note to the Reader

  The first four books in the Pine Island Coast Florida Suspense Series all form one larger story arc, which begins with Broken Stern.

  If you are only entering the series now with Vacant Shore, it is recommended (by author and reader alike) that you begin first with Broken Stern in order to enjoy the fullest spectrum of the characters and the overall plot.

  For those of you have been anxiously awaiting Vacant Shore, thank you for your patience. This one is my favorite in the series so far. I hope you feel the same.

  Enjoy!

  Pine Island Area

  St. James City

  Chapter One

  I saw the long line of the vacant shore,

  The seaweed and the shells upon the sand,

  And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,

  As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  He had already thrown up twice. Once at the dock and once here, in the boat.

  The rum hadn’t helped. It was supposed to take the edge off—dull the senses—and, he had thought, make it so that taking your own life wasn’t so hard to do.

  The bucket was full of concrete, and he shuffled it along the deck toward the transom. His heart was knocking hard behind his sternum. Maybe he would just have a heart attack and wouldn’t have to go through with this.

  Kyle Armstrong grabbed the bucket handle and checked the straight link chain attached to it. It ran around his waist and knotted at the front. Everything was secure.

  His mouth was dry now and his thighs were shaking. His hands were cold. He looked out over the water. From here he could just see Bokeelia, the north end of Pine Island, and he was reminded of when he had asked Carlene to marry him nine years ago. They had eaten at Suzie's Crab Shack, walked out across Bokeelia Fishing Pier, and, as the fiery orange sun faded below Cayo Costa, he got down on a knee and asked her to be his forever. She had stepped back, said yes through surprised fingers, and as he stood up she reached in to hug him, overstepped, and they both joined the fish. They’d come up laughing and had never really stopped.

  That is, until a couple of months ago, when Ringo decided to use Wild Palm as a distribution hub for his cocaine.

  Kyle sighed. Then he closed his eyes and said a quick and silent prayer.

  There was no coming back from this. He knew that. Once he went over the side, he couldn’t put it in reverse. Images of his children—Sophia, five; Chase, three—ghosted across his vision. Maybe it was his biology’s final effort to save itself, leveraging the psychological to turn things around, to get him to stop this nonsense. With a quick shake of his head, Kyle blinked his children away and heaved the bucket over the transom.

  The water displaced around him as he fell through the surface. He let go of the bucket, and the extra eighty pounds of concrete swiftly pulled him eighteen feet to the bottom. The pressure gathered around his head like a vice, and he thought that before he could die of drowning the water would rush in past his eardrums and explode his brain from the inside.

  He had made a mistake.

  Panic clutched at his chest and he struggled against the chain. He pulled, yanked, and tore at it. The lock held. The key to the small lock was at the surface, on the boat. Furious bubbles escaped through his nose and wobbled toward the surface, as if they wanted no part of what he was doing. He worked the bucket handle, trying to break it free from the plastic, trying to undo his decision. But he couldn’t. The bucket handles weren't made to slide out.

  His lungs burned as he ran out of oxygen, and tiny stars shot across his vision like runaway comets. Kyle closed his eyes, tried to calm himself, and gave himself over to the inevitable.

  He hoped that Carlene would find love again.

  Chapter Two

  The wide arc of the horizon held a muted orange that would soon give way to a desert darkness, turning the sky into a spyglass that looked out into a universe dazzled with a billion fires of distant starlight. Joe Ferguson went back into the cabin and watched the coffee drip into the pot, waiting for it to finish. It was decaf. At his age, caffeine consumed after lunch meant spending half the night staring at the ceiling or reading a book by lamplight, waiting for a drowsiness uneager to come.

  Joe would head back home to Scottsdale in the morning. He had spent the last two days tracking antelope accompanied by his compound bow. It was the tail end of August—the beginning of mating season—which meant that rutting bucks were territorial, busy trying to gather a harem of does; a temporary endeavor that made them lose much of the natural wariness that protected them the rest of the year.

  Several hours ago he had decided not to tag out. In a rare moment of self-honesty he had admitted to himself that he was tired. His doctor had warned him that it was still too soon after his surgery to be tracking and bringing back a heavy animal. “Go out to the cabin,” his doctor had said. “Rest up. Watch a few sunrises; enjoy a few sunsets.” It had not yet been five weeks since his double bypass, but Joe, because he was stubborn and did things his own way, went hunting anyway.

  The buck had been on a natural ledge cut into the center of a high hill. Getting there on foot had been a challenge in itself. He’d finally made it up, and it was then, when he was behind the cover of a conifer and finally had the buck twenty-five yards away and an arrow in the string, that he rea
lized just how tired he really did feel. It was a visceral kind of tired, the kind that tells you that a circuit might be out somewhere or that you were on the verge of falling out four miles from the nearest road. So the buck lived to enjoy his newly-formed harem, and Joe slowly, cautiously returned to the cabin. Had he decided to bring the buck down, his labors would have only just begun. From there he would have had to get back to the cabin five miles east, take out the Mule and drive it back, get the carcass to the bottom of the hill, load it up and bring it back. Not to mention having to string it up and clean it.

  No, he had made the right decision. It wasn’t all about the kill anyway. It was the preparation, the pursuit, evading detection, and rare glimpses into an animal’s natural habitat, and knowing that, even though you didn’t take the buck, you did get the drop on him.

  He would go home and rest up, try again in a couple of weeks. His oldest son, Brian, had offered to come with him the next time. Joe needed to get back home anyway. As it was, his granddaughter’s sweet sixteen was tomorrow night, and he wasn’t going to miss that for all the antelope horns in Coconino County.

  The coffee was done. Joe grabbed a mug —“World’s #1 Grandpa”— and poured the coffee. He walked to the window and looked out over a valley that was spread out like creation’s blanket, untouched as yet by human progress. It used to be that he would get out here at least once a month, if not for hunting of some kind, then just to relax and get out of the suburbs. Cities were getting busier, life more frenetic, technology ubiquitous, and it all had a way, in his opinion, of scattering and overwhelming the mind. This cabin represented a quiet solace that put all that behind him, even if it was for only a few stolen days.

  Here he could breathe in the fresh air encircling Humphreys Peak, walk for miles without seeing anyone, read in quiet, uninterrupted solitude, or gaze thoughtfully at the valley below. And the latter was exactly what he was doing and why he was nearly startled into another heart attack when something crashed hard into the back wall of the cabin directly behind him. When he jerked, hot coffee sloshed onto his shirt and the floor. “What the hell?” Joe set the mug down and grabbed his .30-06 from the corner. He went out the front door. He stepped off the porch and walked past his truck parked on the side of the cabin, then cautiously peered around the corner, expecting to see a mountain lion or a black bear that had lost its footing coming off the steep incline.

  But it wasn’t an animal. It was a man. What was left of him anyway. His T-shirt was soaked with blood, as was one of his legs. That hill reached upward at a fifty degree grade and anything tumbling down from the top would have a merciless trip to the bottom.

  Joe brought the rifle down and stepped toward the man—cautiously at first, then less so when he saw the condition he was in—and leaned over him. “Son. You all right?” He squatted and then realized the man hadn’t simply been torn up by branches and rocks. He had been shot. His left shoulder and neck were bleeding profusely. One of his knees had taken a round too. Joe looked up the hill, into the scattering of trees and brushes, and surveyed the hillside. He saw nothing, heard nothing.

  The man at his feet groaned. His eyes slowly opened, and as they came to focus on Joe’s face they widened with awareness. He tried to sit up.

  “Whoa there, now,” Joe said. “Just hold on a minute.”

  The man didn’t listen. He grunted and sat up, closed his eyes, took two long breaths, opened his eyes, and struggled to come to his feet.

  “Hey now. Just hold on,” Joe repeated more urgently.

  The man murmured something he couldn't hear. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was getting hard of hearing or if the man was just speaking that quietly. Maybe both. “What’s that?” He leaned closer.

  “...out of here,” the man said, and then reached out with his right arm and grabbed the side of the cabin. Putting all his weight on his good leg, he stood up, groaning as he moved, leaving his hand on the cabin wall for balance. It looked as if he’d been butchering animals all day. Except it seemed to Joe that he had been the one getting butchered. He asked, “What’s happening, son?”

  “We...have to get out of here. I’m being...hunted.”

  Joe tensed. “Hunted? I hear that right?”

  “We...need to go. Now.” The man winced. “I...can’t walk. My...knee.”

  A rock the size of a fist tumbled off the hill and slammed into the cabin with a thud. Joe squinted up the hill as the pieces came together. “Up there? Someone is after you from up there?”

  A nod.

  “Oh, hell. Come on then. Let’s get you to the truck.”

  “Hur...hurry.”

  The wounded man’s left shoulder was still oozing fresh blood. Joe came around on his right and slipped beneath him, grabbed his arm and brought the man’s weight into him. Joe helped him around the cabin to where an old single-cab Chevy was parked. After opening the door, he helped the man in. He glanced apprehensively up the hill. “I’ll be right back. I have to get the keys.”

  While he waited Virgil slowly and painfully grabbed the seatbelt with his right hand and brought it around his body, clicked it in.

  The truck was parked facing the hillside, the foot of which lay less than twenty feet off the truck’s front bumper. His adrenaline was pumping overtime. He knew it was the only reason he was still conscious, the only reason the blurriness and the weariness remained at bay. A couple more rocks and pinecones tumbled down the hill. If this old man didn’t move quickly they would both be dead in under a minute. He’d lost his gun on the way down. Stupid. He had been trained better than that, wounded or not.

  The driver’s side door opened, the older man got in, and the door shut with a hollow thud. He put the keys in the ignition, took his hand away, and looked over at Virgil, eyeing him suspiciously. “Son, who are you?” He motioned past the windshield to the hill. “Who’s after you?”

  Virgil couldn’t explain. Not right now. He was going into shock, and it was taking every bit of focus to stay awake and not slip into the ether. It was a struggle in endurance just to breathe, and he was beginning to feel cold. All he could think to say was, “I’m not the bad guy. Please. We have to go. Now. I don’t...want you to get hurt.”

  Joe sighed, shook his head, and turned the engine over with a quick flick of his wrist. He backed up quickly, then shot down the dirt road, leaving a high rooster tail of dust behind them. The road was on a gradual slant downward and wouldn’t enter a slight curve for another hundred yards. Joe accelerated and motioned toward the glove box. “There’s a .45 there,” he said. “Grab it. Now who’s behind us?”

  “Weave,” Virgil strained out.

  “What’s that?”

  “Weave...the truck. He’ll shoo—”

  A bullet ripped through the back window and tore through Joe Ferguson’s gray matter before cutting a hole through the windshield and spidering the glass. His limp body lurched into the steering wheel and the truck swung left. Virgil tried to reach his hand out and grab the wheel, but his left shoulder had been ripped apart by two bullets, keeping him from lifting his arm. Before he could swivel and try with his right hand, Joe’s body slid toward the driver’s door and the steering went with him. The front tires caught on the road as they turned sharply, and the old Chevy left the road and entered a hard spin.

  Virgil braced himself with his right arm and tumbled down the road until the back edge of the truck grabbed the trunk of a pine tree, spun hard to the side, and finally came to rest back in the middle of the road. All was silent save for the ticking of the truck’s engine and a solitary groan as twisted metal rested further into twisted metal.

  The truck was upside down, the roof crumpled in like a beat up soda can, the windows shattered out. Virgil’s face was littered with tiny cuts and his entire body was on fire. He knew he didn’t have long. He slowly, and with great effort, reached across and pressed the buckle mechanism. It gave, and as soon as he fell into the underside of the truck canopy he gave out a muffled scream as
the impact jolted his bad shoulder and leg. His vision blurred, as though someone had poured a thick, transparent gel across the window pane of the world. He paused, closed his eyes, and focused. His body was screaming at him from every joint, every socket. He felt that he only wanted to sleep.

  Then he heard it.

  Soft but urgent steps padding quickly down the road. He concentrated on his breathing and opened his eyes. His vision was clear again, for now.

  Clutching a handgun, the assassin approached the wreck with caution. After leaning down and assessing the two passengers, one dead, one nearly dead, the assassin came in closer and got down on a knee, now leaning over Virgil, whose head was protruding out of the truck, past where the window had been.

  Virgil smiled over a bloody mouth. “Well...you got me,” he said.

  The assassin was female. She wore a wooded balaclava and matching TDUs. It was her smaller bone structure and long, natural lashes that gave away her gender.