Death Mark (Mason Dixon Thrillers Book 2) Read online

  “What was weird about it?”

  “Just… nothing like that ever happens here. All the speculation, all the interest, then it just disappeared. Like the local cops were told to keep their mouths shut.”

  “Interesting.”

  “You have anything to do with it?” Frey asked.

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  He looked over, but I wasn’t about to give him details. Not yet. He was a good guy, but he wasn’t a friend and confidante. Depending on how he performed out the gate on this little excursion I might consider throwing him a bone.

  But not yet.

  I watched his brow, furrowing and loosening, a man deep in thought and trying to be perceived as doing the exact opposite. He was a good captain, a capable sailor. Time would tell how capable he’d be when we got into our next scrape.

  Then, and only then, would I be willing to make a judgement call.

  29

  JOEY INTERRUPTED OUR LITTLE MOMENT shortly after, stumbling in and making a racket out of it. “What’s the plan, boss?” he asked. “I noticed we turned north.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Quite the sense of direction you got there, kid.”

  I looked out the left-hand side of the wide, arcing set of windows in front of us and saw the South Carolinian coast in the distance. Frey did as well, then gave me a look.

  “Give him a break,” I said. “He’s new to this.”

  “Not as new as you, captain,” Joey shot back. He shifted and faced Frey’s back. “He tell you I was a Navy man?”

  Frey shook his head. “No, he left that out. So was I, back in the day.”

  “Really?” both of us asked in unison.

  He nodded. “Spent a good chunk of my younger years chasing the tide. Did a few stints near Korea, China, Japan. Some up north in the Bering Sea.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Didn’t know that. Seems like there’s a lot I didn’t know about you, Frey.”

  He laughed. “Likewise. Happy to be here, and let’s hope we can make something of this.”

  “What’s in it for you?” I asked, finally. The words just shot out, as if they had been fired from whatever was controlling the word-cannon in my brain.

  He didn’t flinch. “I told you already. Looking for a little adventure. Distribution is a decent line of work, but I guarantee you it’s not for the faint-of-heart, if things like ‘driving 200 miles a day’ and ‘making lots of phone calls’ is too exciting for you.”

  I wasn’t sure if I bought it or not. At least not as-is. I couldn’t help but feel as though there was something deeper in this guy. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, even though I could feel my subconscious screaming to me about it.

  “And when I heard about Joey’s girlfriend,” he continued, “that sort of sealed the deal.”

  “Yeah?” Joey asked.

  “Yeah. Not a good situation. Figured I was here, ready for whatever it was you two had in mind, so I thought I’d better commit.” He took a hand off the wheel and faced Joey. “Trust me, Joey, I’m going to help you guys however I can. We’ll get her back.”

  Joey nodded solemnly, thanking him. Then he turned back to me. “Never answered my question, boss.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “What’s the plan? Elizondo’s going to still be out on the bigger lanes, coming in hot from the southeast. Are we trying to intercept him, to beat him to Charleston?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “We are trying to beat him to Charleston, but only because whatever’s going to go down is going to be a lot easier to mess with if it’s out on the water. We wait until they’re docked in port and it’s anyone’s game.”

  “Whoever’s got the largest army wins?” Joey asked.

  “Sort of. The guys that talked to me up in Charleston, the fake detective and his two cronies, they’re probably mafia. Or some sort of organized venture. The whole place stank of it, like they’d literally just put out their cigars and rolled up the hundred dollar bills into their suitcoats just before I got there.”

  “Mafia? In Charleston?”

  Frey shrugged. “Not out of the question. I heard about a group making the rounds last year, trying to get a weekly payout from some of the bigger shops downtown.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Seemed strange to me that they would be, but I guess it makes sense.”

  “Sure it does,” Joey said. “There’s money in Charleston. All sorts of it — clean, dirty, laundered, waiting to be laundered. You know that already, and I’d guess with the rise in cost of living in some neighborhoods it’s brought in a lot more of a wealthy crowd.”

  “Yeah,” Frey said, “and it’s an untapped market. Not a whole lot of crime, per capita speaking. And certainly not a whole lot of organized crime.”

  “Okay, makes sense,” I said again. “So that means we’re messing with some big players, at least somewhere out there. Maybe we poked a small bear, but we poked it nonetheless.”

  “Your old man poked it, actually,” Joey said.

  I nodded. “Don’t remind me. Whatever. We’re in it, and we’re in it until the end now. Elizondo’s guys got Shalice, and even though they’re better than the guys that want Elizondo dead, that still pisses me off.”

  Joey nodded along. I took a pause, sipping the last of my rum. “So we move toward Elizondo, but we focus on the guys moving on him.”

  “How do we find them?” Frey asked.

  I smiled. “We don’t have to. They called us off, remember? Whoever they’ve got now to get the job done is closer to Elizondo. That’s why they sent out that little piece of crap to try to take us out. A small price to pay if they lost a guy or two, and if it worked it would have made their jobs way easier.”

  “So we’re trying to beat their other crew?” Frey asked. “The ones gunning for Elizondo?”

  “Correct,” I said. “And there’s no way we can beat Elizondo’s ride, but I’d put the Wassamassaw up against any yacht on the eastern seaboard.”

  “Got it,” Joey said. “So we try to get to Elizondo because they’ll be heading for Elizondo. We catch up with them first, try to get them before they get to him.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Sounds like a half-baked plan to me,” Frey said.

  I looked over at Joey, but Joey was already explaining. “He’s not big on plans,” he said. “They scare him, and he knows all plans get changed midstream.”

  “Well I like plans,” Frey said. “So let me know when this one gets cooked. I’d sure love to know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

  Joey laughed, patting Frey on the shoulder. “Sure thing, pal. When he finally comes around and sits down with a pencil and paper and writes out a full-fledged brief, you’ll be the first to know.”

  30

  IT TOOK LESS THAN TWO hours for me to once again realize why I hate plans. Plans are like a disease, slowly killing you from different fronts until you’re completely consumed by it, then you aren’t even yourself anymore. Plans require planning, but as soon as you begin to act out the plan, everything changes. So you go back, try to adjust things to make them make sense once again, and you lose time. You lose the serendipity of the moment, that small flitter of life just before you do something you know you can’t turn back from.

  Sometimes it fails, but most of the time — at least in my experience — it works out. I’ve learned to trust that flitter, that tiny spark of intuition that comes at the right time, somehow already worked out and mushed around into something salvageable by my subconscious.

  That flitter of intuition is why I’m good at what I do. I don’t plan well, and I certainly don’t execute those plans well. But I know the job that needs to be done and I know I can do it. I go into it with those two ideas rock-solid in my mind, the quiet confidence giving me the hope that things will work out the way they’re supposed to.

  I don’t turn back from a fight — I’m usually better at them than most men half my age — and I don’t turn back from an opp
ortunity for justice. I didn’t with any mark that’s ever set foot in my bar, I didn’t with Hannah, and I wasn’t going to with Shalice.

  There was more on the line this time than with a simple mark or a single woman, but those things — just details in the plan I knew I wasn’t going to create — could be dealt with later. My father, for instance.

  I needed to see him, to actually look at his face and into his eyes and watch him react when I told him how I felt about his meddling with my life. But it was much worse than that. He’d dragged Joey and his girlfriend and now Jonathan Frey into it as well. That was crossing a major line, and I meant to share that with him.

  But right now I was realizing we had walked into a trap.

  We had ‘planned’ on there being one or two boats heading for Elizondo’s ship.

  Not ten.

  But there were ten.

  Ten speedboats, some larger than others, all of them tearing through the water about as fast as I was. I had Frey pushing the Wassamassaw as fast as it would allow, and it must have been for our larger frame and profile that we’d caught up with the convoy. The smaller boats had to maintain a slower pace to account for the larger, building waves. It wasn’t much slower, but it was enough.

  “On the horizon!” Frey shouted.

  “Yeah,” I yelled back. “I’m seeing it, too.”

  “Shit, Dixon,” Joey said. “There’s what — ten of them?”

  I nodded. we’d both walked up to the top deck to watch, sharing a set of binoculars between us. Frey had a better set in the bridge, so the three of us had been taking turns eyeing the horizon for the entirety of our trip north. Most of the time we saw a sailboat or a smaller yacht, and sometimes out east a larger contract vessel, but most of the boaters had listened to the weather report and were hunkering down for the rising storm chasing us all up from the southeast.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m counting.”

  Ten boats, all traveling together and in the same direction, is not a normal sight. Not unless you were at a boat show, and I doubted that there was anything like that happening in the middle of the Atlantic. Ten boats, all speeding toward some unknown location, was even more abnormal.

  “We’re screwed,” I said.

  “We can’t turn around.”

  He was right. If we’d spotted them, they’d certainly spotted us. While ten speedboats, heading straight north as fast as physics will allow, is one of the most unusual things I could imagine seeing in this part of the ocean, I also know that a multimillion dollar touring yacht, bearing down on its location away from the coastline and traveling even faster, is a close second.

  They knew who was following them, and they’d planned for it.

  Two of the boats on the flank peeled off and began a long sweep to the right.

  “They’re turning.”

  “They’re coming back here,” I said. “They’ll probably just space out a bit, try to lure us between them.”

  “So what’s our move?” Joey asked.

  “We only have one.” I looked at him, not wanting to go through with it but knowing it was our only option. “They’re going to follow us back in to the coast, so either way we’re getting into a skirmish.”

  “But what’s our move? Do we try to outrun them a bit, maybe hope they’ll run out of gas?”

  “No,” I said. “We play offense. Time to break out the big guns.”

  31

  IT WAS GETTING DARK, AND was thus my absolute favorite time to be out on the water. The colors the sky is able to summon, to mix around with each other and spit out an absolutely stunning collaboration, is one of my favorite features of nature. Early morning on the ocean is my second favorite, but the sunset on a huge yacht, sailing on the open water, takes the cake.

  But sailing at sunset while preparing for an open water battle against ten other speedboats is not my favorite time. I’d never done it before, so I guess I couldn’t be terribly specific about my feelings toward it, but I knew I wasn’t excited about it.

  Joey wasn’t, either. “What do you mean, big guns? I thought you had the AR and a bunch of pistols?”

  I smiled. “Well I may have understated things a bit.”

  “Wait, really? Why?” he asked.

  “Two reasons,” I said. “First, the element of surprise. They know who we are, they probably know how many of us there are, and they know we’re at least armed well enough to take out a boat or two, because we already did.”

  “Second?”

  “Second,” I continued. “Second reason is Frey.”

  “Why Frey?”

  “Because I don’t trust him.”

  “You don’t trust anybody.”

  “Fair point, but that’s only because I don’t know them. I know Frey, at least a little bit now, and I don’t trust him.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” Joey said.

  “Never said he wasn’t. And you can nice and untrustworthy at the same time, Joey. Ever met a politician?”

  He chuckled. “Still, I’m not sure what you’re seeing in him.”

  “I know,” I said. “Me either. But it’s a feeling, not really something I can put a finger on just yet. But I know.”

  “You know what, exactly?”

  “That’s just it — I don’t know, but I know there’s something about him.”

  “Could be that he’s a dead shot with a pistol and we’ll have no trouble at all taking out these boats.”

  “Could be. Or it could be that he’s someone they sent to us, to try to get us on his side, and he’s just going to kill us as soon as he can.”

  Joey looked out to the left, toward the sunset, and smiled again. He shook his head, an expression of disbelief on his face. For the first time that day we didn’t have drinks in our hands, and I believe it was an unspoken acknowledgment of what we were about to get ourselves into.

  “You disagree?” I asked.

  “I do, man,” Joey said. “I really do. I think you’re wrong about him. I think he’s a good guy, and I mean ‘good guy.’ Like us.”

  “We’re good?”

  “We’re better than those guys,” he said, pointing.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t trust him yet,” I said.

  “So you didn’t tell him you were packing more heat than just the pistol? What good would that do?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Escalate things before they needed to escalate. Scare him? Force his hand?”

  “You’re crazy, Dixon,” Joey said.

  “You’re just as crazy for going along with it.”

  “I’m not going along with any of your opinions on the guy. We need all the help we can get, and he’s all we’ve got.” Joey spit, clearing the edge of the yacht and watching as the tiny blob danced through the wind until it smacked into the surface of the ocean. “He’s on our side, and we need him. You and I can argue all day about that, but it’s the truth.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have to give him any of the big guns.”

  He looked at me. “What, exactly, do you have?”

  I smiled again, a wide, cocky thing that had never worked on anyone in my entire life yet still felt completely natural. “Remember that buddy of mine? The one in the FBI who helped out with Hannah’s case?”

  “Truman? How could I forget?” Joey asked. “He’s the reason you got the Wassamassaw.”

  I served with a guy named Truman who ended up flying up the ranks of government-style power. Not the political, whimsical kind, but real, bureaucratic power. The power of the pen. He’d helped me out of a few scrapes way back when, and he’d also helped after my stint with Hannah, ending with her foray into European travel with an unspecified end date and with my ownership of her late father’s gorgeous yacht.

  “Hannah’s the reason I got her,” I corrected, “but he pushed the paperwork through.”

  “He did you another favor, I presume?”

  “A few, and I’m sure it was no small task, either. Lots of paper
work for this sort of thing, and most of the time it’s so strictly enforced and tracked there’s no sense even trying it.”

  Joey gave me an odd look. “What did you do?”

  “I went back for that money. My father gave it to me, but I didn’t want it, you know? It seemed tainted. Or dirty in some way.”

  “So you spent it on weapons? Jesus, Dixon, you’re going to be America’s Most Wanted.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, except that’s where Truman comes in.”

  32

  “HURRY,” I CALLED BACK TO Joey, running down the stairs behind me. “We’re going to be within range of them in a few minutes.”

  “Our range? Or theirs?” Joey asked.

  We were heading to my private quarters, where I kept a couple of gun cases in the closet and another safe under the bed. The room was immaculate, as I wasn’t much for clutter or mess, and I liked the feeling it gave me to keep at least one thing in my life in order.

  I hadn’t changed out the sheets or decor since Hannah Rayburn’s father had owned the Wassamassaw, which Joey always thought was weird and a bit creepy. Thing is, I don’t think the guy slept in the room much, and even if he had it wasn’t like I hadn’t cleaned the place. I’d gone over the entire boat with a fine-toothed comb, but that was after the FBI cleaning teams and upholsterers had finished with it. It wasn’t easy to clean blood off carpet or walls, nor was it easy to fill bullet holes and dents from blunt-force impacts, so they’d done a fine job of essentially rebuilding the entire yacht’s interior.

  The comforter on the huge bed was brown, and the accents within the room were brown, too, giving the room a sort of feel that an interior designer had done some work here, making everything look nice, but stopped just before the point of applying real color. I liked the look of it, actually, since the white cleanliness of the space was offset by just a pop of not-white. It had an order to it.