Dark Scam: A Ryan Weller Short Story (EBOOK)

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CHAPTER 1
September 12, 2017
Marathon, Florida

The salt-stained white fiberglass of the Hatteras GT63 Dark Water glistened in the afternoon sun, causing Ryan Weller to squint through his dark sunglasses at the damage caused by Hurricane Irma.
He stared ahead at the turbid waters of the entrance channel to Boot Key Harbor, the anchorage sandwiched between Vaca and Boot Keys. Ryan had been there twice before, once fifteen years ago when he was eighteen on his voyage to circumnavigate the Earth, and the second occasion was just a year ago while moving his sailboat from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Texas City, Texas before it had been shot out from under him by members of the Aztlán Cartel. On the last trip, he’d had a passenger, Emily Hunt, a stunning woman with cobalt-blue eyes and a thick blonde mane the color of harvest wheat that he’d jokingly called her Viking hair.
Then, the water between the keys had been nearly gin clear. Now, two days after Hurricane Irma had struck, the water beneath the hull of the Hatteras was dirt brown and littered with planks of wood, mangrove branches, palm fronds, and overturned boat hulls. Boats that had once been anchored in the harbor or channel had been blown into the mangroves on Boot Key or jammed under the old Boot Key Bridge, which the locals liked to call “The Bridge to Nowhere” because the city had removed the old drawbridge section.
“You see that boat?” Ryan asked Greg Olsen, his boss at Dark Water Research while pointing to a half-sunken sailboat missing its mast.
Greg silently turned the wheel to port and idled around it, heading for Pancho’s Fuel Dock, where several boats sat tied to the dock with only their fly bridges sticking above the water.
On the stern of an ancient Grand Banks trawler, an old man with long white hair raised his hand to shield his eyes as he watched the Hatteras glide in.
Ryan slid down the ladder from Dark Water’s flybridge, pulled his backpack on his shoulders, and double-checked the straps of the bag carrying his dive gear and the rEvo III rebreather he’d used to escape the sunken freighter, Santo Domingo. He glanced up to see Mango Hulsey clumping down the ladder, jamming his prosthetic foot into the corner of the ladder rail and the step. It took a few moments, but he finally stood beside Ryan as the boat approached the dock.
“You really going to do this, bro?” Mango asked. He was a little shorter than Ryan’s six feet and had blond hair and blue eyes, whereas Ryan had brown and green eyes. Still, they were brothers forged in fire. Since meeting, they’d had a constant competition to see who could train harder either in the weight room or on the shooting range, and their work had paid off in dividends over the last two missions together.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “You and Jennifer are going to hide out on your sailboat. I’m going to help out here with the hurricane cleanup.”
“Good luck.” Mango stuck his fist out, and Ryan bumped it.
They stood at the rail, silently looking at the hurricane’s aftermath. While Pancho’s seemed relatively unscathed, on the next dock over, the small picnic shelters around Burdine’s Waterfront Café were missing their thatched roofs, the gas sign’s plastic inserts had disappeared, and the wind had blown back part of the café’s thatching to expose the interior of the building. The third dock in line had the most damage. Pilings poked out of the water like giant toothpicks devoid of the planks that had made them docks for the once-active marina. The building’s windows were missing, and the entire roof lay flipped over on its peak on the dock.
The crew of the Hatteras had listened to reports over the marine radio on the way to Florida from the Bahamas. Ryan knew the damage would be bad, but what he saw was truly heartbreaking. Marathon had been north of Irma’s eye, which had crossed to the south near Cudjoe Key before turning north and racing along Florida’s western shore.
Greg eased the big Hatteras alongside the dock and goosed the bow and stern thrusters to keep the pristine fiberglass from bumping into the concrete quay. Ryan tossed his dive gear across to the dock, then jumped off the gunnel.
“You sure about this?” Greg shouted when Ryan stood upright on the dock.
Ryan flashed a thumbs-up. “I’ll see you around.”
With a two-million-dollar bounty on his and Mango’s heads, Ryan had no choice but to lay low. Despite this knowledge, he wasn’t entirely thrilled to be on the lam.
Mango waved. “Be safe, bro.”
Greg engaged the drives and backed the Hatteras around to motor back out the channel.
Without the boat-generated wind, the humid air became oppressive, like a hot, wet blanket across the former Navy EOD tech’s shoulders. Immediately, Ryan’s shirt clung to his back under the backpack, and sweat rolled down his forehead. Even in September, the temperature hovered in the nineties.
Ryan glanced at the receding boat. Mango had climbed back to the bridge, and he and Greg were concentrating on the route ahead. The lone figure in the cockpit raised her hand and waved. Joulie Lafitte had begged to come with Ryan, but he needed to be alone, and the storm-ravaged islands were no place to be dragging around a woman when he wasn’t even certain where he’d rest his head or how he’d put food in his belly. Joulie was no stranger to those problems as a native of Haiti, but Ryan didn’t want her along. She needed to find her own way, and he wanted to wallow in self-pity at the loss of his girlfriend, Emily Hunt.
Joulie had seen Ryan as a savior for rescuing her from her Haitian warlord master. Her vodou spirits had foreshadowed her rescue in a vision when she was just a young girl, and she was ready to repay just as they had explained. Joulie had offered him her body on more than one occasion, and while Ryan was positive the sex would be phenomenal, he just wasn’t ready.
Several days ago, Emily had dumped him unceremoniously through his DHS handler, Floyd Landis, and he’d spent their days in Dunmore Town, Bahamas, completely drunk and acting like an ass while waiting out the hurricane. Ryan had thought he’d finally found the woman he wanted to marry, but Emily didn’t like the danger his job placed either of them in, so she’d called it quits before anything else could happen. What pissed Ryan off the most was that she hadn’t had the guts to call him herself.
Ryan missed her, and he hoped that helping with the hurricane cleanup would take my mind off his problems, but standing on the dock, he had vivid memories of the two of them sailing into Marathon. He could still see the glint in her eye after he’d kissed her for the first time in Boot Key Harbor.
“Stop it,” he chastised himself as he cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. In the distance, the Hatteras accelerated away from the channel, heading for the high-arched span of Seven Mile Bridge. A ghost of a breeze wafted the smoke away and cooled his hot body. Hefting the dive gear bag in his right hand, Ryan turned and walked inland.
On their way across the Grand Bahama Bank, Greg had called a guy he knew on Vaca Key who owned a construction company. How Greg knew Joe Green he never told Ryan, but Joe had gladly accepted Ryan’s offer to have help and agreed to pick Ryan up at Pancho’s.
Before he’d made it more than a few steps, Ryan heard a voice call out, “Hey, man.”
The same old guy who’d been watching them from the Grand Banks trawler now stood warily on the dock. He lifted a cigarette to his lips with his right hand while a short-barreled shotgun hung loose in his left. The man wore faded and frayed shorts and flip-flops with no shirt. He had loose skin over knobby knees and elbows and would be considered skinny if not for a slight beer belly. His stringy, white hair lay shoulder-length across his wrinkled, bronze skin.
“How’re you?” Ryan asked.
“What’re you doing here?” Shotgun Geezer’s tone was hostile—a man guarding his property.
“I’m supposed to meet a guy named Joe Green. You know him?” Ryan asked.
The man nodded, his demeanor changing as he dragged on his cigarette. “Yeah. I know Joe.”
“I’m supposed to help him with the cleanup,” Ryan informed him.
They both heard the rumble of a motor and tires crunching over gravel. Ryan turned to see a dented and battered 1990s-era Chevrolet crew cab pickup navigating along the crushed shell road leading to the marina.
“That’d be Joe, now,” Shotgun Geezer said.
The Chevy rolled to a stop, its path blocked by a fallen palm tree. The diesel engine switched off, and a short, stocky man with unruly blond hair slid out of the driver’s seat. He wore tan cargo shorts, a white T-shirt with the logo J.F. Green Builders above the left breast pocket, and tan combat boots. He stepped over the palm tree as he approached the standoff.
“You, Ryan?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
“Yeah.” Ryan extended his hand.
Joe shook it, turned to Shotgun Geezer, and nodded to Ryan. “What do you think?”
“He seems a little sketchy, but I won’t shoot him today because he’s a friend of yours.”
The contractor laughed. “Thanks for not shooting him, Carl.” Turning to Ryan, Joe asked, “Can you run a chainsaw?”
Ryan shrugged. “Sure.”
“Get one out of the back of my truck and chunk up that palm tree,” Joe ordered.
Ryan carried his bag to the rear of the truck and set it and his backpack in the bed before removing a Stihl chainsaw. After checking to ensure the gasoline and bar oil tanks were full, he started it with three pulls. Ryan spotted a hard hat with a scratched face shield and attached earmuffs beside another saw and pulled it on. Fifteen minutes later, he had the palm cut into manageable pieces and stacked beside the road while Joe drank beers with Carl and several other boat owners who had come out to watch.
Wiping sweat from my brow, Ryan stowed the saw and walked over to the small knot of people. Joe tossed him a cold can of beer from a cooler near Carl’s feet. As Ryan relished his first beer in the Keys, he shook hands with the other men in the huddle. They had all weathered the storm in their boats. Fred had holed up in the storage container behind the gas station after his sailboat had broken free of its moorings. Watching the waves batter it and fearful of losing the only home he had, Fred had thrown caution to the wind and swum out to catch her, eventually getting the boat tied down during the lull of the hurricane’s eye.
Another family’s boat had sunk during the worst of the blow, and they’d taken refuge on a neighbor’s vessel. What made the aftermath tolerable for them was that all the boats had generators on board, and the boaters had ensured they had full loads of fuel to last until Florida Keys Electric Cooperative repaired the damaged electrical lines.
Everyone seemed to have a story about riding out a hurricane, be it Irma or one’s past. Ryan wasn’t sure he would have ridden out the storm in Boot Key Harbor. Usually, a boat would be relatively safe at anchor or on one of the mooring balls, but Irma had proven the norm was not always the case by sinking or destroying a vast majority of the boats in the anchorage.
Joe finished his third beer, motioned for Ryan to follow, and they climbed into the truck with a wave goodbye. Joe started the engine, turned the Chevy around, and headed for the highway. “Good work back there.”
“Glad to help,” Ryan said.
“We have a lot more work to do before we’re over this storm,” Joe said. “Just because the wind stopped blowing doesn’t mean the worst is over. Now comes the cleanup and the government bullshit.”
Ryan sipped from a water bottle one of the girls in the family with the sunken boat had given him and gazed out the window at the destruction. Shell-shocked faces stared back as they cleaned up storm debris.
There was so much work to do that he didn’t know where they would begin or that the work would lead to a mission that he couldn’t turn down.