I stabbed the Accept button. “Scott, it’s been a while.”
Scott Bond was a former Navy lieutenant, and like my friend and partner, Deuce Livingston, a SEAL. He’d worked for a couple of years with Deuce’s Caribbean Counterterrorism Command.
“Hi, Jesse. Yes, it has. How are things down in Florida?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied, grinning. “I haven’t been up there in a while. I remarried a few months ago and we’re very content down here in the Keys. What’s up?”
“Congratulations!” he said, sounding genuinely enthusiastic. “Listen, I got a call from a friend up in the Windy City—a PI named Kevin Grainger. He was asking for a referral in the Fort Myers area to do some discreet protection work.”
“Why didn’t you call Deuce?” I asked.
“Well, Fort Myers is your hometown, right? I figured you might be interested, and you’re more likely to know someone there than he would.”
I’d moved away from Fort Myers when I was seventeen and joined the Corps. While it was my hometown-of-record, I’d only returned there a handful of times since I’d left the Marines. But there it was, popping to the surface twice in one day.
“Do you have any details?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t give me much. A former client, a wealthy woman by the sound of it, has a teenage niece who got into a scrape with some gangbangers down there. The rich aunt wants to protect the girl and her family without them knowing it. Can she contact you directly?”
I thought about it for a moment. I disliked giving my number to people I didn’t know. “Yeah,” I said. “Tell him to have her call me at the Rusty Anchor tomorrow evening. You still have the number there?”
“I do. What time’s too late?”
After the charter, Jimmy and I had decided to stay aboard Salty Dog, rather than try to get back to the island in the dark. Lobster season was over, but there were still six weeks left in stone crab season and the traps’ buoys were just as dangerous to a prop as any other.
“Any time after nineteen hundred,” I replied, figuring we’d have the Atlanta bubbas back to the dock before sunset.
“Will do,” Scott said, as we ended the call.
“What was that all about?” Jimmy asked.
“That was Scott Bond,” I replied. “You remember him. He used to be part of Deuce’s team and has a friend who’s in trouble.”
Jimmy looked at me with real concern in his eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just a little protection job, which I never did much of anyway. He was just looking for a referral. But don’t say anything to Savannah about it. Or Florence when she comes home.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re in operational mode, man. You just called Flo by her full name.”
After setting up the bed in the living room, it looked more cluttered than it ever had. My little house was only a thousand square feet or so, and the living room and kitchen were more than half of that. My friend Tank had recently bought a house on Grassy Key that had a master bedroom nearly as big as my whole house.
“Why don’t I move my workbench into the bunkhouse?” I said. “Then we can move the bed up against that wall under the window.”
“I thought you were going to make it a place for Flo,” Jimmy said.
Savannah took my hand. “He was. But now Kim and Marty are house hunting on the mainland. They plan to settle in Everglades City or maybe Goodland.”
“Really?” Jimmy asked. “That’s cool. So, that means the west bunkhouse will be Flo’s permanently?”
I nodded. “At least as permanent as it had been for Kim.”
The west bunkhouse had undergone many changes over the years. Initially, it had been a simple bunkhouse, just like the other one—six sets of bunkbeds and a small desk. It came in handy when Deuce’s counterterrorism team needed a secluded place to stay and train. But his team had included three women, so it’d quickly turned into two rooms, basically overnight, with the smaller half having two sets of bunkbeds, as well as a desk—sort of a command-and-control center for Chyrel Koshinski, the team’s computer and communications tech.
Then Kim came to live with me, and she turned the larger half into a small studio apartment. When Hurricane Irma destroyed it and just about everything else on the island, we’d rebuilt it into a home for her and Marty. But by then, they were working for Fish and Wildlife up on the mainland.
“I have an idea,” Jimmy said. “Let’s leave two sets of bunkbeds for whenever we have people on the island and use the rest of the space as a workshop. Tearing down an outboard in the hot sun is getting old.”
He had an excellent point. I could rebuild a carb or rewire a dash at my workbench but working on one of the many outboards we had meant mounting it to a sawhorse and working outside.
Having a full shop would be great, but it’d be an ambitious project, to say the least. And to what end? I was scheduled to fly over to Bimini in just six days, to take command of Ambrosia.
“I’m leaving next week,” I reminded him.
Savannah’s face went kind of pale. “But what about Alberto?”
“We’re not even sure that’s his name,” I said. “And we don’t even know if the police will be bringing him here. They might have already found his parents.”
She eyed me cautiously. “We should go on the assumption that he’ll be staying with us. What is it you always say? Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”
I hated when she used my own logic against me.
Taking her shoulders, I looked into her eyes. “Yes, we should. But we have obligations. If he does come to stay with us, and it extends beyond next weekend, you may be taking care of him on your own.”
“Me and Naomi will be here, man,” Jimmy added. “If it
