“Deke, you there?” Casper said, his voice laced with worry.
“I’m here.”
“What am I supposed to do, Deke? I’m stuck out here, living off scraps that I stole. I need you to help me out of here.”
Lynch thought for a moment. The foundation of a plan entered his mind, and Casper Nix wasn’t a vital part of it. He could care less what the backstabbing marina worker did next.
“Just stay hidden for now,” Lynch said. Then he added a lie. “I’ll come up with something to get you out.”
“That’s what Jake said. Then that something he came up with got him killed.”
“I said, stay hidden.”
Lynch ended the call, flipped the phone shut and hurled it onto his recliner in frustration.
“What happened?” the young man asked.
Lynch snarled. “The bastard killed Jake.”
The young man’s jaw dropped. “What does this mean, Deke?”
Lynch paused a moment, his hands squeezing into tight fists. “It means that you’re promoted, Titus.”
“No, I mean what are we gonna do about this?”
Lynch knew what he had to do, and he didn’t like it. With his numbers so low, he couldn’t take the fight to this stranger’s turf or go looking for the gold. He needed to run and replenish his numbers.
“We’re going to the farm,” Lynch said.
Titus shuddered. “I hate that place. It’s creepy as hell.”
“Everyone hates that place. That’s why it’s perfect for our purposes. Contact the others, make sure that they know where we are. We need to regroup. Have the northern faction sell their on-hand supply of heroin and come down.” Lynch strode down the hall, then looked over his shoulder and added, “Pack up the truck. We’re leaving. Tonight.”
The young man did as his leader instructed. He and the other two remaining local members of the Aryan Order loaded up all their stuff, including crates of guns, ammunition, and explosives.
Lynch stepped out with a bag over his right shoulder and a shotgun in his left hand. He paused a moment, watching as his men finished loading up. He figured that later that evening, police would realize where they’d been hiding out, but no one would ever find them where they were going.
His enemies took him for an idiot, but Deacon Lynch was much smarter than people thought. He was far from the brainless white trash trailer park hillbilly the press made him out to be.
I can use that to my advantage. Solidify in their minds that I’m not to be worried about.
But Lynch was to be worried about. And he vowed that sooner or later, the local who’d screwed up his plans would learn that the hard way.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I awoke early the next morning following the relaxing evening and a restful night’s sleep. To shake the morning fog away and get my blood pumping, I liked to start each day off with a run. I rolled out of bed just after 0400. Forcing myself to wake up early and run was more of a mental battle than a physical one. The last thing my mind and body wanted me to do was to slip out from underneath the blanket, rise up from the soft bed, and willingly step away from the warmth of Ange’s body.
“Doing things that are good for you, especially when you don’t feel like it, builds mental toughness,” my dad always used to say. “And those little things add up to make all the difference in a person’s life.”
So I slid on my shorts, threw on a cutoff T-shirt, then laced up my running shoes and kissed Ange on the forehead. I slipped out the door to the balcony and stretched while looking out over the backyard and channel. It was still dark, but the clouds overhead left the moon alone, so the scene was tinged with a silver glow.
I did my usual run, taking off south until I hit ocean, then cutting west through the edge of downtown. I passed by the famous buoy marking the southernmost point, cut inland, then caught my breath when I reached my halfway point at the Key West Amphitheater.
I gazed out over Fort Zachary Taylor, its fifty-foot brick walls rising up from its limestone-and-granite foundation. The fort and surrounding landscape looked nothing like it had during its heyday. In old pictures I’d seen, the fort had originally jutted up from the ocean, making it an intimidating presence for passing ships. In its early days, it had been connected to mainland Key West by a twelve-hundred-foot causeway.
I tried to imagine Union captain John Brannan rounding up his forty-four men in the dead of night and sneaking across town to take control of the fort. It’d been a bold move. No doubt viewed as a seemingly reckless move at the time. Brannan had taken the initiative, followed his gut, and secured a vital asset for the Union cause.
I liked to think that if I’d been in Brannan’s shoes, I’d have done the same. It was admirable. The kind of behavior to aspire to.
While performing a few more stretches, I also tried to picture a boat full of Confederate Key Westers sneaking into the fort in the dead of night. I did my best to imagine them slipping into the fort somehow and loading up gold bar after gold bar, then creeping away as fast as they could.
How had they managed to get close without being spotted? How had they snuck into what had to have been the fort’s most protected area? And how had they loaded up the bars and hightailed it out of there without being pummeled by one of the fort’s cannons?
It was a crazy story. But I’d learned over the years that just because a story was crazy, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true. And if it was true, that gold was still out there.
