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  Shallow Breeze

  Pine Island Florida Coast Suspense: Book 2

  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/)

  Broken Stern is a work of fiction. All incidents and 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, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To all those who were Franklin W. Dixon

  You made a young boy very happy

  A BRIEF NOTE…

  Hello, dear Reader,

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

  If you are only entering the series now with Shallow Breeze, 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.

  Book 5 in the series will be a standalone, as will all installments thereafter, and can be read in any order.

  Enjoy!

  Chapter One

  The best way to find out if you can trust

  somebody is to trust them.

  - Anonymous

  He rode through the still, quiet blackness that sought to envelop everything in it, his left hand gripping the steering wheel with a casualness that matched his outlook on life, his watch hanging loosely around his wrist and catching the light of an approaching vehicle, splaying flecks of gold light across the inside canopy like a disco ball. The vehicle sped past, leaving him with only the dim light of his car’s old headlights once again. He hated the rank, musty smell of cigarette smoke lingering in the upholstery like a dry, decomposed corpse. He rolled down the window and fresh air blew in, ventilating the car with the tangy and invigorating scent of salt water.

  He tapped the brake and slowly turned off the road onto a thin, unused path that was barely recognizable even in the daylight. The vehicle's old struts groaned like an overburdened mule as the tires rolled over the bumpy, uneven terrain. He stopped a quarter mile in, slid the gear in park, and turned off the headlights. The brake lights were all that were left to illuminate the quiet forest behind and cast it in a soft, eerie red.

  He stared into the darkness before him. He took in a deep breath and smiled. Today had been a good day. It had been a long time since he’d had a day like this. When everything went as planned and everyone did what they were told. He leaned over and felt blindly around his feet for the latch, tugged, and heard an obedient pop as the trunk released. He looked in the rearview mirror, and the red glow disappeared behind the wide trunk lid as it lifted, bouncing against its springs. His took his foot off the brake and then stepped out into the inky darkness.

  The thick canopy of trees blocked any view of the star-studded sky above, and he made his way to the back of the car where the tired trunk light produced a dingy glow that illuminated nothing outside of the trunk space. He reached in and grabbed a pair of worn leather gloves. He slid them on. They were elastic at the cuffs and rested just below his watch.

  Lighting a match, he set it to the end of the cigar nestled between his lips, and his face glowed orange against the flame. He puffed a few times and flicked the match into the trunk.

  “All right, Roger,” he said slowly. “What do you say you and I go for a little stroll?” He lifted his chin, closed his eyes, and breathed in a long, slow breath, his nostrils filling with the warm, humid, Florida air tempered with tendrils of cigar smoke. “Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

  He reached into the trunk and grabbed the large canvas bag. He slid it up and out of the trunk so it landed hard on the grass at his feet. A lifeless head extended from the bag, the zipper resting firmly underneath the chin. Sandy brown hair was matted to the forehead with the help of congealed blood.

  The man grabbed at the long canvas strap, flung it over his thick shoulder, and turned toward the water line. The bag followed behind him, sliding along the ground like a giant slug. Thirty yards later he stopped and caught his breath. “I think this will do. What do you think?” He reached down and unzipped the bag, then pulled the body out and let it drop it onto the soggy, spongy ground near the water’s edge.

  He stared at the body, and the cigar tip glowed red as he pulled fresh smoke into his mouth. Squatting down, he flicked the loose ash into the water and set the fiery tip to the exposed skin of the body’s neck. A searing sound commenced, and he kept it there for several seconds before lifting the brown stick off the seared skin, flicking the ashes, and taking another puff. “It was a real pleasure working with you, Roger. I want to thank you for everything you’ve done.” He unzipped the bag and grabbed the lapel of the suit jacket the body was still in. He stood and lifted hard, twisted on his heels as he spun, and flung Roger’s Peretti’s body into the water.

  Between the current, the tide, and tourism, he guessed that some lucky paddler would find his gift within the next twelve hours.

  Chapter Two

  Ellie O’Conner stood near the end of the Norma Jean pier, her belly button nuzzled against the yellow crime scene tape that prevented curious onlookers from proceeding any further. She ducked beneath it for the third time that morning and took a few steps toward the end of the charred and fractured wood, all that remained of the last thirty feet of the pier. Three strong pilings stood almost naked out of the southern waters of Pine Island Sound, and splintered wood jutted out like broken bones. The last of the Coast Guard’s 32-foot Transportable Port Security Boats were moving away in the distance, leaving the DEA and the Lee County Sheriff's Office to handle the investigation.

  Late last evening, as Ellie was trying to drift into sleep, a heavy sound popped through the still evening air, the vibrations of which were felt two miles up Pine Island. She had slipped on a tank top and a pair of shorts and had run a half mile to the southernmost point of the island. Gloria and Fu Wang were already there, gathered up with a handful of locals that lived a couple streets closer to the pier than Ellie did. As it turned out, an amphibian aircraft carrying a large load of cocaine had crashed into the pier and splintered into thousands of pieces. Its cargo had hurled out to every direction on the compass. One of the plane’s wings had ended up in the bottom floor of the Berensons’ home, the home closest to the pier. Other than that, the debris seemed to be contained to the water. Government boats had trolled the waters for the last seven hours, searching the fringes of the mangroves and shoreline for rogue kilos of cocaine. The pilot’s body was found lying upside down in the water, washed up under the front half of the pier. So far, no identification had been made. No one was optimistic that it would be.

  Ellie set her hands on her hips and scanned the water twenty feet below. Mark Palfrey, her partner with the DEA, drew his twenty-foot Angler close and shouted up. “See anything else?”

  Ellie kept her eyes on the water beyond him. “No. I think we got everything that stuck around here. Anything else would be carried out by the current by now.”

  “I’m going to check the perimeter of Cresent Island again,” he said. The Angler’s outboard revved up and carved a wide arc through the water away from the damaged pilings before shooting out through the channel markers.

  “Hello, ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to step back behind the tape, please.” The heavy Texas accent gave him away. Ellie turned to see Tyler Borland grinning at her and holding two cups of
coffee. In the last eight months since Ellie had left her role as a case officer for the CIA, Tyler had become a close friend, with tiny sensations occurring every so often that Ellie thought could be the harbingers of something more. He owned Reticle, a shooting range in North Cape Coral and could generally be expected to make Ellie laugh. After a night of no sleep, his face was a welcome reprieve. She walked toward him and ducked back under the tape.

  “This one’s for you. Straight up,” he said.

  Ellie reached out and took the paper cup. “Thanks, Tyler.”

  “I guess you’ve been out here all night?” he asked.

  She nodded and took a sip. “Yeah. We’re about wrapped up. We have the side of the plane and the engine, so we’ll see if the serial numbers show anything.”

  “Think they will?” he asked.

  “I doubt it. That plane probably came from Cuba, owned by someone far from there.” They started walking down the pier toward The Salty Mangrove bar. “The Coast Guard spotted him on radar coming in from the southwest ten minutes before he crashed. With as much as he was bringing in on that plane, I’m sure he’ll be a ghost where any identification is concerned.”

  “Why would his flight plan include crashing into your uncle’s pier? Sounds goofy if you ask me.”

  Ellie smiled but ignored him. Something else was bothering her. “The fact is, he was flying around here. Here, Tyler. Not Miami or New Orleans. Seems that our miles and miles of coastline have become favorable to the wrong kind of tourists. Gas being stored near the north end of the island, Pete Wellington gone missing, and now a plane loaded with blow crashing into the pier. Folks are already furious about Adam Stark’s murder. This place is known for being laid back and quiet, not for shipments of illegal drugs by the plane load.”

  “Yeah, I can see the brochure now,” Tyler said. “‘Beautiful, iconic pier to crash into. Take advantage of this offer before it’s gone forever.’ How much do you think was on there?”

  “So far we’ve recovered around six hundred kilos. That plane could bear a little over ton. Hopefully, we can find the rest before the wrong citizens do. We’ve shut down this entire area of the Sound until we’re satisfied that there isn’t anything else out there. Some of it was burned up in the crash.”

  “Bet you didn’t expect all this excitement when you signed up, did you?” he asked.

  Six weeks ago Garrett Cage, the head of the Fort Myers division of the Drug Enforcement Agency, had convinced Ellie to come work for him as a part-time contractor to help him find connections to local drug sourcing. Last night one such connection had literally fallen out of the sky.

  “I don’t know that I would call it excitement. More like inciting anger.”

  “Gloria said Fu had gotten up to use the restroom on their houseboat when the plane hit. Said it literally scared the pee right out of him.” Tyler said.

  “Now that’s an image I wanted in my head.”

  “Hey, one-legged men have to pee in the middle of the night sometimes, same as anyone else. Don’t be racist.”

  “Racist?”

  Tyler winked down on her, and Ellie had a sudden urge to nudge him over the edge. “You’re dumb,” she said.

  “I thought we agreed that I was detail-oriented.”

  “Hey guys. Can you come help with this?” Warren Hall, Ellie’s uncle, was standing near the bar in front of several cases of water. As soon as he had received the call about his pier, Warren had come back up to Pine Island in the dark hours of the early morning from the second marina he owned down on Marco Island, forty-five miles south.

  “What’s up?” Tyler asked.

  “I want to get all these bottles into the ice chests over there. With all the government agencies coming and going today, I figure they’re going to get mighty thirsty at some point.” Each of them picked up a case of water and headed toward the ice chests that sat nearer to the bar.

  “Sorry about your pier, Major,” Ellie said, using her nickname for her uncle.

  He shrugged. “It can all be rebuilt. I feel bad for that man in the water, whoever he was. He didn’t look any older than you.” They got to the YETIs and set their burdens down. Major carefully pulled something from his pocket and handed it to Ellie. “You or the Sheriff will want this. I found it floating on a piece of lumber when I went out earlier. Amazing it didn’t get incinerated.”

  Ellie took the small piece of paper and turned it over. It was a picture, charred at the edges, soggy with seawater. The image was clear: a young woman and a teenage boy. Both with olive skin and black hair. They were smiling, the boy near to laughter.

  Tyler leaned in, giving it a long once over. “Man, that’s awful,” he said. “There’s no way to find the pilot’s family and tell them the news?”

  Ellie shook her head. “They don’t typically let these guys do the runs if they’re in the system. That way if they get caught they can’t be traced to any particular drug network. Whoever he worked for will get the news, if they haven’t already. That’s a lot of cocaine he lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever’s in that picture will be made to work it off.” Ellie shuddered.

  Major looked at Ellie. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, thanks. Angry, I suppose.” She shook her head. “This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen around here.”

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m glad you’re working with the DEA now. If anyone can help find the fools trying to stop all this nonsense, it’s you, Ellie.”

  “Thanks, Major.”

  “I’m going to put up some surveillance cameras around the marina once I’m done rebuilding the pier,” he said. “Maybe it could deter this kind of thing. Of course, the plane crash is a fluke, I know, but who knows what they’re doing right under our noses?”

  “Let me know when you do that, and I’ll come help,” Tyler said.

  “Will do.”

  Ellie sighed and took a sip of her coffee. “I’m going to head back home, you guys.”

  “Rest up,” Major said “I’ll be doing the same thing in a little while.”

  “You want me to walk you back?” Tyler asked. “You look pretty washed up.”

  She tried to smile. “I’m all right. I just need a shower and some sleep.”

  “Okay. It’s your loss. I’m a good walking companion. Even better than a dog.”

  “Surely that’s debatable.”

  “Hey…” Tyler lowered his brows like he was hurt.

  Ellie laughed and threw up a goodbye wave as she walked away.

  * * *

  Ellie took the half mile walk back home slowly and finished the last of her coffee. She wasn’t going to sleep. She knew that. The events of the crash had kept her up all night, and, while her eyes were heavy and her feet tired, her mind still felt sharp. She wouldn’t have slept anyway. Not after what Ryan Wilcox had given her. The previous evening, a few hours before the crash, her former boss at the CIA had given her an envelope that left her mind and heart racing with questions she never imagined she would ask.

  Ellie arrived at her front door and unlocked it. It hadn’t moved a foot before her Jack Russell shot through it, out across the yard, and darted down the street. She waited, and like she could set her clock to it, he came blazing back into the yard thirty seconds later and leapt into her arms. She lifted her chin away from his lathering tongue. “Hey Citrus...all right, boy...get down. Come on. Want to go jump in the water?” The dog yipped, then yipped again. Ellie walked through the small living room. She stopped just past the kitchen table and slid the rear door back on its aluminum track. Citrus darted out into the narrow patch of Saint Augustine grass and leapt off into the waters of the canal as might a flying squirrel intent on switching trees.

  Ellie set her keys on the table and stared down at the large picture Ryan had left with her. She sat down and focused in on every detail. Just like she had done on and off for an hour last night. She studied every line, every shadow, every h
ue. The photo left no doubt that she was looking at a recent picture of her father. It had been almost three years since she’d last seen him, and even in the poor quality of the surveillance camera he looked older, his face seamed with deeper lines and set against tired eyes.

  Frank O’Conner was supposed to be dead. A gas tanker had crashed into his car two years ago, not three miles east of here, and incinerated everything within forty feet of it. Her sister Katie was so angry with Ellie for missing the funeral that she still wouldn’t speak with her, still wouldn’t respond to Ellie’s emails or voicemails. At the time Ellie was already entrenched as an undercover journalist in Kabul and couldn’t get out without risking the entire operation. That was not something Langley would let her do. The last time Ellie had seen her father was the night he drove her home from Judge Stanton’s home. She had gone there to pick up the Judge for a surprise party to be held in his honor on Sanibel Island. Instead she had come across four goons who had picked that evening, of all evenings, to make the Judge a prisoner in his own home and ransack his belongings. Ellie had spent the next hour strategically subduing them. She had left early the next morning to board a flight for the Middle East where her next, and what ended up being her last, stint with the CIA would begin.

  Citrus ran up the small ramp Ellie had built for him and stood in the grass and barked. He chased his tail. He barked again. If Ellie didn’t know better, she would have thought that her dog had found some of that missing cocaine and helped himself to a fair measure. Citrus chased his tail again, spinning like a top, and then ran and made another spread-eagle plunge into the canal’s slow-moving water.

  The picture continued to sit there staring at Ellie like an alien. As if a creature had come from another world and was sitting silently at her table. She blinked underneath the unbelief that blanketed her. I went to your grave last week. I’ve seen pictures of them setting the urn into the ground. I have your death certificate filed in my office down the hall. You have a headstone. The perplexity that came with trying to believe he was alive almost made her dizzy. Thinking that all the grief and the emptiness she had felt over the last two years was for naught. That all this time she was grieving a father that had never left this world. He had only left her life.