Dead Reckoning (The Still Waters Suspense Series Book 1) Read online

  A Sweet Tea Press Publication

  First published in the United States by Sweet Tea Press

  ©2017 Dawn Lee McKenna & Axel Blackwell. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Debbie Maxwell Allen

  Cover by Shayne Rutherford

  wickedgoodbookcovers.com

  Interior Design by Colleen Sheehan

  wdrbookdesign.com

  Dead Reckoning 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 publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Thank You For Reading Dead Reckoning

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Plutes

  who is without peer among his species, whichever species that might be

  &

  In loving memory of Vi Hartigan

  Dawn Lee

  For Jo, the light of my life

  Axel

  ONE

  PEOPLE WHO DREAM about quiet country nights have never been in the country after dark.

  Even after their dogs had shut up, Mooney White and Grant Woodburn were surrounded by nothing but noise. The crickets and the frogs were screaming at each other, and there was a decent summer breeze moving through the trees that had been bothersome to the men before they’d finally bagged their fill.

  It was just past three in the morning, and dark-dark. The men were in the ass end of Gulf County, FL, in the woods just north of Wewahitchka and near the Dead Lakes Recreation Area. The low, thick cloud cover made the moon pointless.

  Mooney was a black man in his late forties. He was dressed in an old pair of his blue work pants and a navy windbreaker. The many spots of white in his close-cropped hair looked like a little patch of fireflies in the night. He used his flashlight to guide their steps over rocks and fallen limbs. His .22 rifle was slung over his shoulder, and he held his dog’s leash in the other hand.

  Grant Woodburn, a redheaded man just a bit younger than his best friend, held his dog’s leash in one hand, and a .410 single shot in the other. Their bag of coons was slung around his neck.

  The men’s boots crunched softly atop the thick carpet of pine needles. Ahead of them, the two dogs were almost soundless in their passage.

  It was Mooney who first spotted the dim lights. They rounded a thick copse of shrubs and old cypress, and the two circles of light were just visible through the trees, about a hundred yards ahead.

  “Hey, Woodburn,” he said. “You left the lights on in my truck, I’m gonna kill you.”

  Woodburn stopped and looked at the lights. “Man, I didn’t leave your lights on,” he said. There was a high-pitched buzzing near his right ear, and he brushed at it with the sleeve of his Carharrt jacket. “We ain’t even over there.” He lifted his arm again and pointed off to the right. “We’re over there.”

  Mooney’s dog, a fawn-colored Ladner Black Mouth cur, went to tugging on his leash. Mooney tensed up on the leash and made a sound almost like he was getting something out of his teeth. The dog stopped, and the leash got some slack to it again. Mooney stopped, too.

  “Those lights is about out,” he said. “Somebody’s gonna be pissed when they get back to their vehicle.”

  Woodburn looked over at him as he jerked slightly on his own leash. His brown and white Beagle stood stiffly where he was, looking toward the truck.

  “Reckon we should go shut his lights off for him?” Woodburn asked.

  “If the fool left his doors unlocked,” Mooney answered.

  “Man, this is right around where we heard that shot a while back,” Woodburn said, his voice slightly hushed.

  Mooney stopped walking. His dog and then his friend followed suit.

  “That don’t necessarily mean nothin’,” Mooney said quietly.

  “Maybe we should just go to your truck and call the police or somethin’,” Woodburn whispered.

  “Man, we got two guns,” Mooney said. “Besides, what are we gonna tell ’em? Haul y’all asses out here to shut this fool’s lights off? You watch too much TV.”

  He made a clicking noise with his tongue, and men and dogs veered off their intended path and headed for the lights. When they were about fifty feet out, Mooney squinted at the pickup that sat silently in the clearing. From where they were standing, they were looking at the truck head on. The driver’s side door was standing open. The interior light either didn’t work or had already burned out.

  “I know that truck,” Mooney said quietly.

  It was a black Ford F-150, which in Gulf County was like saying its name was John. But the Gators antenna topper was ringing a bell for Mooney.

  “Whose is it?” Woodburn asked.

  “Hold on, I’m thinking,” Mooney answered. He was quiet for a moment. “That’s Sheriff Hutchins’ truck.”

  “Are you sure?” his friend asked him.

  “Yeah, man, I put a new tranny in it last year,” Mooney answered.

  “Aw, man, I don’t like it,” Woodburn said. His beagle, Trot, had set to whining.

  “I’m not real excited, either,” Mooney said. “But maybe he needs help or somethin’.”

  “Not from us, man,” Grant said. “Maybe from the cops.”

  “Man, pull your pants up,” Mooney said. “Norman, let’s go,” he said to his dog, and started following him slowly into the clearing.

  Mooney and Norman were in the lead, Woodburn and Trot lagging a bit behind, which was definitely Woodburn’s choice and not the dog’s. The beagle strained at his leash.

  As Mooney got closer, he realized that the weird shininess on the driver’s side window wasn’t some trick of the light. It was something on the window, all over it. He stopped walking. A sheen of moisture had suddenly appeared on his onyx skin, and he swiped at it with one huge, calloused hand.

  “Sheriff?” he called out, flicking his flashlight on and off against the windshield. The flashlight wasn’t a particularly powerful one. Its light bounced off the glass, revealing nothing. “Hey, Sheriff? It’s Mooney White!”

  The crickets and frogs went silent. For a few moments, there was just the wind in the trees and the quiet keening of the dogs.

  “Shut up, Norman!” Mooney snapped, and both dogs quieted. A new sound, a faint one, reached Mooney’s ears. “You hear that?”

  Both men listened for a moment. “Radio,” Woodburn whispered finally.

  “Hell’s up in here?” Mooney asked himself mostly.

  He flicked the flashlight on again, trained it at the open door. In the edge of the light, he saw something, a
nd dropped the beam lower. Beneath the door, he saw pants. Knees of pants. And one hand just hanging there.

  “Aw hell, man,” Woodburn whispered. “This ain’t right at all.”

  Mooney slid his rifle down his arm, released the safety with his flashlight hand. The light bobbed off to the side of the truck.

  “Sheriff?” Mooney called again. “Scarin’ Mooney just a little bit here.”

  There was no answer. Norman gave out a couple of barks, higher-pitched than some people would expect from such a sturdy dog. Mooney gave him his lead, and followed Norman as he pulled toward the truck. Mooney tugged him off to the side, made him circle wide, about eight or ten feet from the old Ford. He could hear Woodburn several yards behind him, whispering to himself.

  When Mooney had gotten round to the back side of the open door, he pointed the flashlight at it.

  “Oh, hellfire,” Mooney said to himself.

  Sheriff Hutchins was slumped forward on his knees, his upper body hung up on the open door. Closer up, the black on the window wasn’t black at all, but a deep red, and there was a lot more of it on the inside of the door.

  Mooney stood there staring, barely hearing his best friend gagging behind him, or Lynyrd Skynrd on the Sheriff’s truck radio, singing about going home.

  TWO

  THE CELL PHONE BLEATED, vibrated, and did a little jig on the built-in teak nightstand. Evan Caldwell reached over and thumbed the answer button without looking at it.

  “This is Vi,” a deep voice intoned before he had a chance to speak.

  “So it would seem,” Evan answered. She always said it like that, deliberately and with brevity, like a newscaster introducing himself.

  “You need to get out to Wewa,” she said. “It’s very serious.”

  “I’m off today, Vi,” he said.

  “Not anymore,” she said, her voice like gravel that had been soaked in lye. “We need you to get out there immediately.”

  “I don’t think that I actually know where it is,” he said.

  “You may not know how to pronounce Wewahitchka, but certainly you can recognize it on a map,” she replied. “Take 71 straight to Wewa. Go to the Shell station at the intersection of 71 and 22. You’ll be met by Chief Beckett.”

  “Is he an Indian chief?”

  He heard Vi try to sigh quietly. She was Sheriff Hutchins’ assistant, and had apparently been with the Sheriff’s Office since law enforcement was invented. Evan had only been there a few weeks, and had yet to make a good impression on her. Granted, he hadn’t put forth much effort. It seemed rather pointless, considering he was from “out of town” and would probably be gone again before she could decide if she liked him.

  “He is the Chief of Police in Wewa,” she said. “Lt. Caldwell, this is a very grave matter, which I don’t want to explain over the phone. Chief Beckett will fill you in, then lead you to the scene.”

  Evan was mostly awake at this point, and her voice told him that his sarcasm would be unappreciated and possibly inappropriate.

  “Did the Sheriff ask you to call me?” he asked her as he sat up.

  There was silence on her end for a moment. When she finally spoke, he thought maybe her voice cracked just a little. “Please just go, as quickly as possible,” she said, and hung up.

  Evan looked at his phone for a moment, then checked the time. It was just after four in the morning. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and rubbed at his face as the teak sole of the master stateroom chilled his feet.

  Evan was just shy of forty-two, and starting to collect tiny lines at the corners of his eyes and crease lines along the sides of his mouth. His eyes were a bright, clear green that was surprising beneath his black hair and thick eyelashes. The very narrow, white scar that ran from the left corner of his mouth down to his chin kept him from being too pretty, or so his wife Hannah liked to say.

  He stood up, took two steps over to the hanging locker beside his bed. One of the many reasons he’d chosen the 1986 Chris-Craft Corinthian over some of the other boats he’d seen was that it had a master stateroom with an actual bed and some halfway decent storage. Evan hadn’t kept much when he’d emptied the Cocoa Beach house and moved aboard the boat, but he liked everything to have a place, and to be there when he expected it to be.

  He opened the locker, pulled a pair of black trousers from their hanger and slipped them on. Three identical pairs remained in the locker, next to five identical white button-down shirts. As he bent to step into his pants, he swore he could smell cat urine. His upper lip twitched as he leaned into the locker and sniffed. The only light in the room came from the lights on the dock, shining vague and gray through the curtains over the portholes.

  His shoes, two pairs of black dress shoes, one pair of Docksiders, and a pair of running shoes, were lined up neatly on a shelf at the bottom of the locker. He bent lower, and the scent magnified. He picked up a shoe from the middle, a left dress shoe. The inside was shinier than it ought to be. He brought it to his nose and jerked back.

  He managed to stop himself from throwing the shoe across the room, distributing cat pee throughout his cabin, but just barely. Instead, he carefully set it down on the floor, and pulled a shirt from the locker.

  Once he had dressed, he walked in his sock feet into the boat’s one head, which the previous owner had fortuitously remodeled just before he got divorced and had to sell. The guy had expanded it into the space that had been a closet, which gave him room to put in a real shower, and a space for a stacking washer and dryer. It only fit the type that people used in RVs, but it was enough for Evan, who had trouble using public appliances and would prefer buying new clothes every week to going to a laundromat.

  Evan grabbed his cleaning tote from the top of the small dryer, wet a cloth with a mixture of warm water and the expensive wood soap, and thoroughly cleaned and dried the small, sloped shelf on which he kept his shoes. Then he carried the wet shoe up to the galley, tied it up in a trash bag, and set the trash bag just outside the French door to the large sun deck.

  When he came back inside, he spotted the cat sitting on the built-in teak cabinet between the steps down to the V-berth Evan used for storage and the steps down to the galley. Plutes was as black as ebony, and weighed at least fifteen pounds. Hannah had brought him home just a few weeks before her accident, and said she’d named him Pluto. Plutes for short.

  Evan had thought she’d named him after the idiot dog from Disney. In fact, she’d taken the name from a Poe story. Evan didn’t read Poe’s stories, although he liked The Raven quite a bit, so he could never remember which story it was, but he thought the name was probably appropriate anyway.

  The cat had never made a sound in all the time Evan had been burdened with him; at least none that Evan had been there to hear. He was a shiny, black statue of seething disdain and discontent. He turned away from one of the windows that wrapped around the entire salon and stared at Evan over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and dismissive.

  “Was that you?” Evan asked the cat, then cringed at the realization that he had become one of those people who asked cats questions. It was also a stupid question, since Plutes was the only cat aboard.

  Plutes blinked at Evan, just once, slowly. Then he looked back out the window. If he could sigh, he clearly would have.

  “Do it again and you’ll go to the pound,” Evan said, then went down the three steps that led to the eat-in galley. It was small, but got good light from the windows in the salon, and it suited Evan’s needs. To one side was the U-shaped galley itself, with fairly new stainless appliances and two feet of gray Corian countertop that was just enough. On the other side, a built-in dinette booth with blue striped upholstery and a small window.

  Evan poured a cup of milk two thirds full and set it in the microwave to heat, then loaded up his espresso machine and turned it on. Vi had sounded distressed, and no doubt the call was urgent, but Evan had only had three hours of sleep. He wouldn’t get to We-whatever any faster by crashing.<
br />
  While the espresso brewed, Evan walked back to his stateroom and retrieved the undefiled dress shoes from the locker. He slipped these on, then opened a side table drawer, and pulled out his holster, his badge and his Sheriff’s Office ID. He dropped the ID wallet into his pocket, clipped the holster over his belt on the right side, and fastened his badge to the front of his belt on the left.

  There was a decent breeze coming through the open windows, and the air smelled briny and clean simultaneously. Evan took a deep lungful of it and mourned the day out on the water that he’d had planned. Then he went back to the galley, poured the milk and espresso into his travel mug, and took three swallows before he headed back up to the salon.

  He returned Plutes’ look of disgust as he crossed the salon, then stepped out onto the sun deck. It was Evan’s favorite part of the boat, large enough for a rattan table and chairs and a decent stainless BBQ. He picked up the trash bag containing the stinking shoe and walked it out to a garbage can on the dock. Then he headed down the long dock toward the main marina building, now mostly dark, and the lights of Port St. Joe, FL. It was mostly dark, too.

  Aside from the creaking of fenders against the dock and the clinking of mast rigging on the few sailboats nearby, the sound of Evan’s footfalls was the only noise that disturbed the infant morning.

  Evan’s tires hummed over course asphalt, rolling through the predawn haze. The air thickened as he moved inland, humid and heavy with the fragrance of cypress, brackish water and silt. Evan counted eighty-seven bug strikes on his windshield during the twenty-three-mile drive, mostly small white moths drawn into his path by yesterday’s heat slowly rising from the blacktop.

  As he neared the intersection of State Highways 71 and 22, the first blush of dawn added a pinkish tint to the thickening fog. Light too artificially white to be anything but the fluorescents of a gas station bloomed and spread just past the intersection, where a traffic light seemed to hover untethered over the street. High above the service station and the slowly dissipating fog, the gas station’s sign’s illuminated letters blazed bright red: H-E-L-L.

  “Perfect,” Evan muttered.