J. Dark Prey: A Ryan Weller Thriller Book 9 Paperback

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CHAPTER 1 Tim
Wrightsville Beach
North Carolina

It was the perfect night for thievery.
With no moon, the night was darker than most as the fifteen-foot inflatable boat coasted through the water. Tim Davis sat on the port tube by the transom, one hand on the thirty-horsepower Mercury outboard. It was overkill for this little boat, but when they had to run, it was best to have too much than not enough.
For now, Tim held the throttle just above idle as the boat cut almost noiselessly through the marsh just off the Intracoastal Waterway, what many referred to as the ICW or ‘The Ditch.’ Their target was Motts Channel Marina, where Tim and the two young men with him would steal electronics, outboards, cash, and other items as they vandalized the sportfishers, sailboats, and runabouts tied to the docks.
“Ready, boys?” Tim hissed, just loud enough for the two men to hear over the burbling motor.
John and Patrick Jefferies—otherwise known as John Jeff and P.J.—both nodded. The two looked more like twins than brothers born two years apart. They were both wiry, with long limbs and shoulder-length blond hair. Tonight, they wore black hoodies and cargo pants stuffed with tools to aid in their plundering.
Tim guided the boat into the marina and circled around, dropping John Jeff at the dock closest to shore. P.J. hopped out onto the middle dock, and Tim tied the inflatable to the concrete pier that formed the protective seawall. His first target was a massive Billy Holton Custom Carolina sportfisher.
Tim was up the bridge ladder in a matter of seconds. Using a screwdriver, he made quick work of prying the instruments from the console and overhead mounts then used side-cutting pliers to slash through the wires. Tim piled the depth sounder, chart plotter, GPS, and radar screens into the inflatable, then returned for the VHF, the satellite radio, and the speakers.
It didn’t take long for the inflatable to fill with gear after Tim hit two more boats. He checked his watch and motored into the marina. Holding the boat in place at the end of the middle dock, Tim watched P.J. pile his own assortment of stolen objects in the inflatable.
As they pushed off to collect John Jeff, a spotlight snapped on, centering Tim and his accomplice in its beam, and a voice boomed over a loudspeaker, “Stop! You are under arrest.”
Tim blinked multiple times, looking at John Jeff, silhouetted in the light. A long time ago, the boys had decided that if one of them got caught, the others would run. There was no sense in all of them being swept up by the pigs. Without another thought for his companion, Tim spun the tiny boat around and rolled the throttle open to the stop. The front end leaped up, and P.J. scrambled forward to act as a counterweight. Waves slapped the boat’s hard-plastic bottom as it zipped across the water.
There were only so many places they could hide. Every water channel led back to the Intracoastal, and Tim figured marine units were converging on their position if the cops were already at the docks. His only choice was to hide in the shallow channels that cut through the marsh islands between the mainland and the outer barrier island. The lights of Wrightsville Beach provided scant illumination on the black water.
Cutting the engine as they rounded a spit of land and entered a small tidal creek, Tim hunched low in the boat. P.J. lay on the nose of the inflatable, giving directions. A police boat raced past them, blue and red lights flashing in the light bar mounted on the T-top of the center console. Tim knew they liked to hunt in pairs. Somewhere out there was another patrol boat, searching for them.
Tim craned his neck to see around P.J. and gauge their position in the tidal river. Fortunately, the tide was coming in, providing more clearance between the bottom of the inflatable and the sticky mud and sand. He was thankful they had added a hard-plastic bottom to the boat, otherwise the razor-like oyster shells could slice the PVC hull open like a fat chick opening a bag of potato chips.
Suddenly, P.J. held up a hand in a fist, and Tim jerked the motor’s lanyard, killing it. They drifted forward, the marine patrols racing all around them. Tim felt his heart thundering in his chest, and his hands were damp with sweat despite the cool November air.
From the moment he’d started this venture, Tim had known that he’d get caught. It was just a matter of time.
He considered dumping the electronics overboard and hauling ass south to where they’d left his pickup truck. Screw the duck! He couldn’t get caught now. Not with everything on board. It would mean a long stint in Bertie Correctional Institution up in Windsor. Two strikes. Tim cursed under his breath.
“I think we’re good,” P.J. whispered.
Tim nodded and fitted the lanyard in the outboard and jerked the starter rope. The motor purred in the darkness, but to Tim’s ears, it sounded like a locomotive screaming through the night. He eased the throttle forward. As they approached the mouth of the tidal creek, P.J. stood and looked in both directions, then signaled Tim to go right.
“What the hell?” Tim muttered. His truck was south, not north. Then he saw the fast-approaching patrol boat. He rolled the throttle open and the inflatable jumped forward, knocking P.J. off balance and dumping him on top of the electronics.
They shot north along the ICW, heading toward the C. Heide Trask Bridge and the cop cars lying in wait on it. Tim’s heart sank, knowing they were being boxed in by the police.
He had to fight. He wasn’t going back to jail.
With the marine patrol gaining on him from behind, his hand involuntarily tried to open the throttle farther, but it was already at its stop. The extra weight of the stolen goods helped keep the boat stable, but it was still a choppy ride as the PVC tubes flexed under speed.
The bridge was just ahead. If he could get under it, maybe he could disappear into the islands again. If he stayed on the main channel, it was a run of over four miles to the Mason Inlet and the Middle Sound marsh. His optimistic side loved a good chase, but in his heart, Tim knew they would never make it.
“P.J.,” Tim called over the rush of wind. “Get ready to roll off.”
From the bow, P.J. gave a thumbs-up, then spread himself out along the port side tube. Tim fought to bleed the last few horsepower from the outboard as he maneuvered toward the left side of the channel, closer to the docks and marinas that lined the Intracoastal Waterway just south of the bridge. He chopped the throttle, and P.J. rolled off, his arms crossed over his chest and his back absorbing the shock caused by hitting the cold, black water at speed.
Tim didn’t hang around to see if his friend surfaced. He immediately twisted the throttle to its stop.
He raced under the Heide Trask Bridge, made a hard left into a narrow creek, and roared through the twisting channel. The boat barely fit under the bridge on Summer Rest Road as he entered a shallow slough. Keeping the power at maximum, he zoomed through the dark until he could go no farther, and the boat beached itself on a mudflat.
Tim jumped out of the boat and ran.
With each step, he sank ankle-deep into the sticky, foul-smelling mud. Splashing water had soaked his pant legs, and he’d lost a shoe by the time he made it to a stand of trees. He was on foot, in a residential neighborhood, and could flee in any direction. The police boats couldn’t follow him past Summer Rest Road, and the cop cars would have to spread out to search the winding streets.
Tim flipped the hood of his black jacket over his head, shoved his hands into his pockets, and started walking.
A smile crept across his face. He’d escaped again.


CHAPTER 2
Wrightsville Beach Marina

Ryan Weller awoke with a start as his Fountaine Pajot Saba 50 catamaran, Huntress, rocked in the wake left by the speeding boats. He jumped out of bed, stepped to the rectangular window, and saw the receding marine patrol boats silhouetted against the flashing lights of the police cars on the Heide Trask Bridge.
Pulling on shorts and a T-shirt, Ryan ran up to the salon and stepped onto the aft deck. He’d forgotten how chilly an early November night could get in North Carolina. Goose pimples rippled across his flesh and he shivered. He retreated to the salon and watched through the wide windows as the police cars sped across the bridge toward Wilmington and the patrol boats congregated on what he knew to be a small channel, heading inland.
“What’s going on?”
Ryan turned to see his fiancée, Emily Hunt, coming up the steps, wrapping a robe around her waist. She looked beautiful, even with her tousled blonde hair. “The police are chasing a boater,” he said.
“What time is it?”
Glancing at his Citizen dive watch, he said, “It’s four a.m.”
Emily yawned. “It’s too early to be up. Let’s go back to bed.”
Ryan followed her to their stateroom and stretched out on the bed beside her. Emily nestled into the crook of his arm and laid her head on his chest. He smoothed her hair down so it wasn’t in his mouth, closed his eyes, and forced himself to relax.
Try as he might, he couldn’t slip off to sleep. His mind zeroed in on the same two questions: why were there cops everywhere, and who were they chasing? His adrenaline had spiked, and his need-to-know instincts had kicked in, making him restless as more questions bubbled to the surface.
The questions led his thoughts to a familiar place: examining faces from the past. Ryan opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, willing them to go away. There were only two things in life he hated more than dreams of the dead men that haunted his sleep: snakes and self-doubt.
Self-doubt was far from a new entry, but, more recently, it had never felt more prevalent. Asking Emily to marry him had been the best move he could have ever made—in his and many others’ opinions—and there was no doubt of their future together. What plagued him was the thought of what to do next with his life.
He had come full circle.
Ryan had grown up in Wrightsville Beach, learning the construction trade at his father’s firm before taking a job at Wrightsville Beach Marina, where he worked with the owner, Henry O’Shannassy. Instead of going to college, Ryan had refurbished an old Sabre 36 sailboat and left home the day after high school graduation for a trip around the world. He’d spent time in the Caribbean and crossed the Panama Canal before diving into the Pacific. There were so many places to see and so many reefs to dive that Ryan felt like he’d barely scratched the surface during his two years under sail.
While he loved diving and exploring, Ryan had always felt there was more to life than just whiling away his days at sea, drifting from one tropical paradise to another. Partway through his voyage, he’d put in at Darwin on the northern coast of Australia. While waiting on a spare part for the Sabre’s engine, he happened upon a bar crowded with personnel from the Royal Australian Army Ordnance Corps, who were making the most of their downtime after completing a day of training exercises at the air force base. Ryan had started chatting with one of the blokes about scuba diving, and soon he was being regaled with drunken stories of disarming ordnance and blowing up IEDs in Iraq.
After returning home, Ryan had joined the U.S. Navy and made it through the Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD, school on the first try, then spent the next ten years working all over the globe, serving multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deploying on both aircraft carriers and amphibious ships. On his last trip to Afghanistan, a group of Taliban had attacked the convoy of EOD vehicles Ryan had been traveling in as they headed out to dispose of a large cache of confiscated weapons. During the ambush, Ryan had dragged his injured lieutenant from the lead Humvee and helped stabilize his spinal cord injuries before leading a counter assault.
With two Purple Hearts pinned to his chest, the Navy had sent Ryan home to recuperate. It wasn’t long after his return to active duty that he found he no longer had a passion for being a cog in the military industrial machine, and he had gotten out.
Since then, he’d drifted between jobs as a carpenter for his father and as a commercial diver for Dark Water Research, one of the largest commercial diving and salvage concerns in the world, with whom he’d helped stop terror attacks and raised sunken gold. Now no longer officially affiliated with DWR, he was struggling to build a life with Emily and move forward, but the siren song of the deep was tugging him back in, and he had promised himself that he would no longer put his body in harm’s way.
But it was a promise that he knew he would break.
Tucking one hand behind his head, Ryan ran the other along Emily’s side, treasuring the feeling of her body against his. When he was a young man, his father had given him some advice. He’d said that life had an order to it, and while Ryan was single, that order should be: God, his job, and then himself. The Navy had clarified it with: God, country, service, self. They left no room for family, and the old joke was that if the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued her with your seabag.
His father had also said that when Ryan got married, the order would change, becoming: God, family, job, self. With that in mind, Ryan now had to figure out how to reorder his priorities, because for the last twenty-plus years, it had always been job and self.
Emily rolled away and snuggled under the blankets. Ryan slipped out of bed and pulled on his shorts and T-shirt again, this time remembering to add a layer of hooded sweatshirt to ward off the chill. In the galley, he started a pot of coffee before stepping off the boat and going for a run in the predawn.
He remembered traveling this same route on the evening that Greg Olsen’s grandfather had offered him a job as a liaison between Dark Water Research and Homeland Security, working cases the government wanted handled with discretion. He had craved the action then, just as he craved it now.
Yep, his life had come full circle. Or maybe it was a figure eight, with the center being Wrightsville Beach. All his new ventures seemed to emanate from there.
Sprinting along the beach toward Johnnie Mercer’s Fishing Pier, he knew he had to tamp down those cravings and concentrate on his future. How long would it be before Emily started talking about children? Had he thought this through? Was getting married the right thing to do?
Emily was the right woman, of that he was certain, and now that he had her in his life again, he wasn’t letting go. He had put a ring on her finger and committed himself to something that was far greater than anything else he had done in his brief life.
The sun was just rising above the ocean when he reached the pier, and Ryan stopped to watch the day arrive in shades of orange and yellow. Gradually, the ocean lightened and took on its glossy blue hue. Waves rushed from thousands of miles away to wash onto the sandy beach. The waves rolled in, dragged the sand out, and rolled in again. It was always the same water that ran up on the beach and back out. He tried to find a metaphor for life in those waves—but it was lost on him.
After watching the sun clear the horizon, he turned and ran along the street back to the marina.
When he arrived at Huntress, Emily was sitting on the aft deck, her knees pulled up to her chest and tucked under an oversized sweatshirt as she sipped coffee from her mug.
Ryan kissed her on the forehead and slid open the salon door.
“I would have gone with you,” she said.
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
She followed him down to the bedroom and stepped into the shower with him. With a grin, she said, “I guess I’ll get my exercise another way.”
An hour later, they emerged from the bedroom. Ryan wasn’t sure how clean he’d gotten in the shower because the stall was a tight fit with two bodies in it, but at least there had been lots of soap suds. When the hot water gave out, they’d moved to the bed. Now, dressed in cargo pants and a sweatshirt, he poured himself a coffee and stepped outside.
Ryan had just sat down when Henry O’Shannassy came strolling down the dock. Despite there being three generations between Henry and his relatives who had immigrated from Ireland, the old man still liked to talk with a brogue, although he generally let it fade when discussing important topics. “Hey, laddie. You hear all that commotion last night?”
“Yeah. The marine patrol was chasing someone.”
“Aye. It was another bloody thief. They struck over at Motts Channel Marina and took a bunch of electronics. The cops caught one of them, but the other two escaped.”
Ryan nodded and Henry continued. “Them boys left their boat over in the slough behind the Grand View Apartments. The kid they caught’s name is John Jefferies. John Jeff, they call him. If he was there, so was his brother P.J. and that no-good Tim Davis.”
“Did the police recover any of the stolen gear?” Ryan asked.
“Some.”
“Good for them. You want a cup of coffee?”
Henry grinned. “Black like my soul, laddie.”
“Aye, and black it is,” Ryan replied.
They stepped inside and Ryan poured the older man a fresh cup of Black Rifle Coffee Company’s Silencer Smooth blend, a favorite of Ryan’s. He had picked up the ‘black like my soul’ line from Henry and used it often, and, sometimes, his soul felt as black as the coffee he liked to drink.
Emily came up the steps from the stateroom and refreshed her own cup before sitting with the men at the table. Ryan filled her in on the previous night’s events.
“The thieves have been hittin’ marinas up and down the Carolina coasts,” Henry said. “I think it’s a ring of ’em workin’ together.”
“What makes you say that?” Emily asked.
“They all operate in much the same way, usin’ a small boat or comin’ in with scuba gear. All they take are electronics or loose valuables that haven’t been locked up.”
“No motors or whole vessels?” Ryan asked.
“Oh, they take them, too,” Henry said.
“Have they stolen from here?” Emily asked.
Henry nodded solemnly before sipping his coffee. “Twice. I’ve put up video cameras and alarms, but many of the boats don’t have any security measures other than a lock on the door, an’ you know how flimsy they are.”
Ryan nodded, remembering all the times that thieves had broken into his sailboats over the years.
“Your buddy Chad Yeager had his place broken into. He lost ten outboards in one night.”
“What place does Chad have?” Ryan asked, perplexed that he hadn’t heard of this before.
“He’s got a boat repair and sales facility off Oleander Drive. Yeager Marine. Started it about the time you left to work for DWR.”
“Who’s Chad Yeager?” Emily asked.
“He and Ryan used to be runnin’ mates in high school,” Henry said. “Them boys was inseparable. Thick as thieves, with nothing on their minds but wine, women, and song.” Henry’s face reddened slightly as he remembered who he was talking to. “Forgive me, Miss Emily.”
She smiled and glanced at Ryan. “He’s still that way.”
“Well, if he be chasin’ any women around but you, ya let me know an’ I’ll straighten him out.” Henry slid his sleeves up like he was about to box with Ryan.
“Thanks, Henry,” Emily said, “but I’ll keep him too busy to worry about other women.”
Henry raised a thick eyebrow. “A man might take that as a threat.”
She winked at Henry. “It’s more of a promise.”
“Uh … About Chad,” Ryan broke in. “You said he had some stuff stolen?”
“Yeah. They hit him good. The second time they came through, they took a boat. Police found it half-sunk up by Ocracoke.”
“That’s a shame,” Emily said.
“Yeah. Some people say it was an inside job, but I don’t know.” Henry shrugged. “Chad was always a decent enough lad.”
“Why do they think it was an inside job?” Ryan asked, intrigued that his old friend might be into something shady.
“You know how it is. There’s always scuttlebutt about the docks.” Henry took a sip of coffee and changed the subject. “How’s your one-legged friend?”
“Mango? He’s good,” Ryan said. “He and his wife are running a sailboat charter business in the British Virgin Islands.”
“Is that where you’re headed?” Henry asked.
“We haven’t decided,” Ryan replied with a glance at Emily. “I think the plan is to stick around here until Christmas, then head south.”
“I know you’ll figure it out, laddie. Ya always have.” Henry stood. “Thank you for the coffee. I could spin yarns with ya all day, but I need to be gettin’ back to work.”
Ryan walked Henry out to the dock. When Ryan stepped back into the salon, Emily said, “I know that look. This doesn’t have to do with your friend Chad does it?”
She’d pegged him dead to rights because he had to know whether his old friend was involved in something shady. And if he was? Well, Ryan would be there to lend a helping hand to get him out of trouble, just like old times.