Collateral Damage Page 8

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I called Logan and asked if he and Marie wanted to join us at Pattigeorge’s for drinks and dinner. They agreed and were pulling into the parking lot just as we arrived. Marie was a blonde in her late thirties with short hair, sky-blue eyes, long legs, and a slender body.

  Logan Hamilton was my best friend on the island. He stood five feet eight, weighed about one sixty, and was beginning to lose his hair. What was left was mostly gray. He had retired early from the financial services industry after making a lot of money. He moved to the key about the same time I did, and we became fast friends. I think the fact that both of us had served in Vietnam was the initial attraction. Logan had been an infantryman on his first tour and, after flight school, did a second tour as a helicopter pilot.

  We went into the restaurant and were greeted by the bartender, Sam Lastinger, an island legend. Sammy knew all his customers and made sure that any newcomer was immediately introduced to all the others at the bar. He was an institution on the island, a man of cheerful verbosity, a friend, confidant, and ladies’ man. He was about forty, a slender, dark-haired guy with a ready grin who seemed to never have a bad day, unless his beloved Florida Gators lost. Women took to him like flies to honey and he always treated them well. He had a lot of ex-lovers who were all still his friends. I never could figure out how he managed that.

  The bar was full. We knew everybody there and spent a little time talking before we took our seats at a nearby high-top table. Sam brought our drinks and a menu. We all ordered salads.

  Logan looked at J.D. “What’s this I hear about you bringing on a junior detective to help sort out the murder on the beach?”

  “Just trying to keep him honest,” she said. “Find some work to keep him busy.”

  “Any luck?” asked Logan.

  “Not so far,” I said. “We’ve developed some stuff, but I don’t know that you can call it a lead.” I filled Logan and Marie in on what we’d found out about the Laotian connection, if there was such a thing, and that we were pretty sure there had been a hit team of at least two people who took Jim Desmond down.

  Logan sipped his Dewar’s. “Any way to run down anything on this Soupy guy?”

  “I called Jock,” I said. “He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Great,” Logan said. “Things always get interesting when Jock shows up.”

  Marie grinned. “I hope not too interesting. You boys seem to draw trouble.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “Jock’s just going to use his contacts to get us some information.”

  “What can I do to help?” Logan asked.

  “Nothing right now,” I said. “We’re just trying to connect dots.”

  “Let me know if you need anything.”

  Our conversation moved on to the things that friends discuss, one of those kinds of evenings when the next day you can’t remember just what you did talk about, because the conversations were without substance. Just another quiet evening among friends.

  I was up early the next morning intending to jog on the beach. I looked outside to a drizzling rain. It was overcast as far as I could see across the bay. It looked as if the weather was settling in for a wet spell. I decided to head for the beach anyway. A little water wouldn’t hurt me, and I hadn’t gotten much exercise in the last couple of days.

  The beach was deserted. I began my run south, trying to stay on the flatter surfaces. The tide the night before had been higher than usual and there were little hummocks of sand where the water had eroded parts of the beach. I had to be careful not to turn an ankle.

  I made it to my turnaround point and headed back north, keeping a steady pace on the sand. The rain was coming a little harder now, and I was soaked. Even in the July heat, I was beginning to feel a little chilled, the sweat mingling with the rain to cause my skin to lose warmth.

  I neared the North Shore Road access and slowed to a walk, letting some of the energy drain off. I came to the boardwalk ramp that would take me over the dunes and into the parking lot where I’d left my Explorer.

  I mounted the ramp and walked east. I saw a man coming toward me, a plastic poncho covering his head and upper torso. Another inveterate beachcomber, I thought. But the hairs were standing at attention on the back of my neck, an electric tingle moving up into my scalp. Something was wrong. My gut was sending me signals, a recognition of danger that hadn’t yet made its way into my consciousness. The man was dressed in jeans and work boots, not the clothes of a runner or a beachcomber. He kept his head down, eyes to the ground. I stopped, waiting for him to pass, every muscle tensed, alert for the unexpected, not sure that the signals my gut was sending to my brain were valid. I wasn’t even sure if he saw me and as he closed on the spot where I was standing, I said, “Good morning.”

  The man looked up as if surprised and then lunged at me. I saw his hand coming out of the pocket of the poncho. He was grasping something. It took me a nanosecond to recognize the knife, a big one, like the KA-BARS the Marines had in Vietnam. His eyes were boring into me, his face a grimace of concentration. He was moving in for the kill.

  I reacted without thought, a muscle memory left over from my days as a soldier, honed by my regular martial arts classes in Bradenton. I did just what he didn’t expect. I moved into him, sidestepping his thrust, turning my back to him, using my left arm to grasp his knife arm as it slid past me. I caught a bit of the blade in my side. I was aware of it, but the pain had not yet registered. I brought my right arm across my body, clasped his wrist in my right hand, twisted and pushed down hard while using my left arm as a lever to push his upper arm forward. I heard the knife drop to the boards of the crosswalk and at the same instant I heard his elbow snap.

  The man screamed in pain. I let go of his wrist, pivoted, and punched him in the solar plexus, using all my strength, aiming for his spine, knowing it would take his breath away. I thought for a second that my fist had gone all the way through him and bounced off his vertebrae, but that was only wishful thinking. He went down, and I stomped his broken elbow. He screamed again. I kicked him in the face, once, twice, backed up, stooped, and picked up the knife. I was going to carve him up like a Christmas turkey. I was filled with rage. The thought that somebody would think nothing of killing me on a rain-cloaked beach on my home island blotted out all my civilized instincts.

  I held the knife, dropped back onto the man now writhing on the boardwalk, put my knee in his stomach and the point of the knife under his chin. “Who are you?” I said, my voice sounding in my own ears like a roar. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t kill me.”

  I pushed the point of the knife in farther. He was a dead man. I was going to stick the knife into his brain. Then, like a curtain lifting, the rage dissipated, leaving me, as it always does, emotionally limp and drained. I asked again, this time in a quiet voice, “Who are you?”

  “Get off him,” I heard a feminine voice say. “Get off or so help me I’ll shoot.”

  I looked up. A woman was standing near the parking lot end of the boardwalk, a large pistol held in both hands, pointing at me.

  I didn’t move. “If I let him up, you’ll still shoot me.”

  “No,” she said. “This is over.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You put the pistol down on the boards, and I’ll let your friend up. He’s not going to be using his left arm for a while, so I don’t think he’s much of a threat. He and I will walk toward you, and you turn around and walk toward the parking lot. You can pick up the pistol when your back is turned to me. If you try to turn around, I’ll stab your friend to death.”

  “How do I know you won’t kill him when I put the gun down?”

  “If I do, you’ll have time to pick it up and shoot me. When you start walking, if I stab him, you’ll have time to turn around and shoot me. I think this will work.”

  She stooped slowly and placed the pistol on the boardwalk. I noticed that she’d been holding the gun in
her right hand. “Turn around,” I said, “and pick up the pistol with your left hand.”

  She did as I told her. “Start walking,” I said. I prodded the man with the tip of the knife next to his carotid artery and we began to follow.

  The woman walked to a small sedan parked next to my Explorer. She stopped. “This is my car,” she said. “What now?”

  “Get in the driver’s side,” I said. “And don’t point the pistol at me.” She did as I said, keeping the weapon in her left hand. When she was under the steering wheel, I walked toward the passenger side of my Explorer. I used the electronic key fob to unlock the door. I kept the man in a hammerlock with the knife at his throat. “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to release him so that he can get into the car with you. I’ll be ducking down as soon as I let him go, so you won’t have a shot at me. I’ve got a nine millimeter in the Explorer and I’ll have it in my hand before he gets to your car. We’ll have a standoff. You drive off, and I won’t shoot.”

  And that’s the way it went down. They were gone in an instant, roaring out of the parking lot and toward the Longboat Pass Bridge about a quarter of a mile away. I memorized the tag number, but knew that by the time the police were alerted, the couple would be across Anna Maria Island and over the Cortez Bridge onto the mainland. There’d be almost no chance of spotting them in the traffic. I called 911 anyway. Told them who I was and what had happened. Said I’d be at my house if they needed to talk to me.

  I got into the Explorer and drove out of the lot, across Gulf of Mexico Drive, and headed east on Broadway. My phone rang. J.D.

  “I just heard. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Shook up, a minor cut on my rib cage. Nothing else.”

  “I’ll meet you at your house.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” But I knew she’d come and that thought put me right with the world.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I peeled off my clothes as I went through the house toward the bathroom. I showered with water as hot as I could stand it. I looked at the laceration on my side. It was a clean cut, not deep, but it had ruined a good T-shirt.

  There was little pain, but I knew I’d taken a hit.

  I toweled off and put on a pair of shorts. I could hear someone rattling around in the kitchen and assumed it was J.D. I joined her. She had the coffeemaker on and the smell was starting to permeate my senses.

  “Let me see where you’re cut,” she said.

  She peered at it, felt around the edges and said, “I don’t think you’ll need stitches, but we need to get some antiseptic on it and get it bandaged properly.”

  “You know how to do that? I don’t want you to kill me.”

  “I’m an EMT. I know what I’m doing.”

  All the Longboat cops had been through the Emergency Medical Technician training and could fill in until the Fire Department paramedics arrived on the scene of an accident or something worse.

  “Do you have an antiseptic here? Bandages?”

  “In the bathroom. The cabinet under the sink.”

  She came back bringing the first-aid kit with her. “Lie back on the sofa,” she ordered.

  I did so and she spread the antiseptic cream on the cut and bandaged it professionally. She ran her hand over the scars on my stomach where the docs in an Army field hospital had pulled shrapnel out of my belly before sending me back to the States for more intensive treatment.

  “This isn’t your first scrape, is it?” There was a timbre to her voice, sadness maybe, or compassion.

  “No,” I said. “That’s a little reminder of my year abroad when I was nineteen.”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Yes.”

  “You never talk about it.”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever want to?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m a pretty good listener if you ever feel the need.”

  “Thanks, J.D., but I put all that behind me a long time ago.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Tell me about today. What happened?”

  I told her, giving her the details. “I was going to kill the man who came after me.”

  “Self-defense.”

  “No. I mean I was going to kill him. After he was disarmed and at my mercy. Before the woman showed up.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “What happened to stop you?”

  “The rage went away.”

  “Rage?”

  “Sometimes when I’m in very stressful situations like today, I’m overcome with a rage that comes out of left field. I don’t see it coming. It’s just there. It turns me into somebody I’m not, or at least don’t want to be. Then it goes away. It’s like the better part of my brain takes over and pushes the rage back into the gutter where it belongs.”

  “Does this happen often?”

  “No. But sometimes I feel like the rage is there, hiding just beneath my skin, ready to break out if I let my guard down. I have to fight it off. I used to drink it away, but that only caused more trouble. Now I exercise like crazy. Get the endorphins flowing and the rage goes away.”

  “Do you think the war caused it?”

  “No. It was there before.”

  I was uneasy talking about this and wanted to change the subject. “What else can I tell you about today’s attack?” I asked.

  “Can you give me a description of the man and woman?”

  I stared at her for a moment. “They were Asian.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My doorbell rang. I looked out the window to see Chief Bill Lester’s unmarked parked in front of my house. “Door’s open,” I called.

  Bill came in, a worried look on his face. “You okay, Matt?”

  “Yeah. A little shook up, but none the worse for wear.”

  “Morning, Chief,” said J.D. “Want some coffee?”

  “I could use a cup. Tell me what happened.”

  I related the facts to him. Including the ethnicity of my attackers.

  He frowned. “Does the fact that they were Asians mean anything to you?”

  J.D. broke in and told him what we had learned about Jim Desmond’s time in Laos, and that we thought there might be an Asian hit team that went after Jim.

  Bill said, “You don’t think they’d still be hanging around almost two months after the murder.”

  “No,” I said, “but it seems a pretty big coincidence that for reasons I don’t understand a couple of Asians tried to take me out.”

  Bill was quiet for a moment, sipping his coffee. “I wonder why they didn’t just shoot you. Why the knife?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “There was nobody on the beach or in the parking lot, but you know those North Shore condos are right next to the boardwalk. It was very quiet out there and a gunshot would have drawn attention.”

  “Not if they’d used a silencer.”

  “True. I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe they didn’t have a silencer.

  Or maybe the guy just likes knives.”

  “What happened to the knife?” J.D. asked.

  “I forgot about it in the rush to get home. It’s on the front seat of my car.”

  “I’ll go get it,” J.D. said and got up and walked out the front door.

  “You know,” the chief said, “those folks on Dulcimer were killed with a knife or knives. Big ones.”

  “Was the M.E. able to come up with the kind of knife that was used?”

  “Only in general terms. It may have been the same knife or it could have been two different ones. Whichever, they were big knives with straight edges. They could have been KA-BARS, like the ones issued to Marines.”

  “That’s what this guy came at me with.”

  J.D. came in with the knife wrapped in a cloth. “Maybe there’ll be prints on this.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “After I took it away from him I would have obliterated hi
s prints with mine.”

  “You said he was hurt,” Lester said.

  “I’m pretty sure I broke his elbow. Probably ripped up all the ten-dons. He’s going to need medical attention. Soon. The pain has got to be terrible.”

  The chief’s cell phone rang. He answered, grunted into it a couple of times, and hung up. “The car they were in was reported stolen yesterday from a Wal-Mart in Sarasota. They haven’t found it yet.”

  “They’re in the wind,” I said. “If they were somehow tied to the Dulcimer killings, why would they be after me? Unless there’s some connection with Jim’s murder.”

  “Even so,” said J.D., “I don’t understand how they even knew about you being involved in the investigation.”

  “It’s a small island,” said the chief. “Word gets around pretty quickly. Maybe Matt tripped over some alarm wires when he was in Georgia.”

  “Can I see the files on the Dulcimer murders?” I asked. “Don’t see why not,” the chief said. “J.D. can bring them around later today.”

  J.D. stood. “I’ve got to get this knife to the crime-scene investigators. I’ll pick up the files and stop back by this afternoon.”

  “Don’t forget that Jock’s coming in,” I said.

  “Shit,” said the chief. “Every time Jock shows up, my island goes to hell.”

  “We’ll be careful, Bill.”

  “Okay. Let’s try to grab a beer while he’s here. Do you need to see a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. Nurse Duncan fixed me up fine.”

  “Nurse Duncan?” asked J.D., raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I met Logan at the Bridgetender Inn in Bradenton Beach for lunch. The rain had stopped, but it was still overcast. We sat in the bar overlooking the bay, a gray and colorless expanse of still water. The sailboats moored in the lagoon were buttoned up against the weather. I could hear the faint sound of generators humming in the distance, the boats keeping the air-conditioning flowing into the cabins. A large schooner was circling slowly out on the Intracoastal, waiting for the Cortez Bridge opening that was scheduled every twenty minutes.