I couldn’t help it and grinned over at her. “I felt recoil.”
She punched me in the shoulder. “You know what I mean.”
I gazed into her eyes. “How did you feel on Hoffman’s Cay?”
“It made me physically ill,” she replied. “Not at the moment, but later.”
“Me too,” I admitted, gazing into the flames. “The first time was on my second deployment to Lebanon. I killed a terrorist from five hundred yards away. That night in the barracks, I threw up thinking about it.”
“Did it get easier?”
I thought about it for a moment. Taking a life was something that should never become easy. At least not for a person with morals. I considered what we’d done the previous night as saving innocent lives more than the taking of lives.
“Some,” I said, searching for words. “But not a whole lot. People like those we killed last night aren’t like you and me. Yes, I feel some remorse for what we did, but I’d do it all over again. People like them kill without remorse and there’s only one way to stop them.”
“I don’t fault you,” she said softly. “Or DJ and Tony. I just worry how it will affect you.”
“Well, you won’t have to worry about that after next week. This old cowboy’s hanging up his guns.”
“Somehow, I don’t think so,” she said.
“Being captain of a ship like Ambrosia will be a full-time job and then some.”
“Well, I know you, Jesse McDermitt. You’re a hands-on kind of man.”
“I promise I’ll—”
“Please don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” she interrupted.
“I’ll do my best,” I said, realizing she was probably right.
She looked up at the sky. “It’s a beautiful night. Let’s go down to the pier.”
“I like that idea,” I said with a grin, knowing her penchant for making love under the stars.
We walked hand-in-hand toward the pier extending past our house on the south side of the island. After grabbing a couple of big beach towels from the locker under the stairs, I spread them at the end of the pier, and we sat with our feet dangling in the water, then lay back to look up at the stars. By then, our night vision had returned, and we could see millions of them.
Savannah sighed contentedly. “Every time I look up at the night sky, I’m reminded how small and insignificant we are.”
“Two people, out of more than seven billion Earth inhabitants,” I said. “And it’s just one planet in a vast solar system that’s a miniscule part of a galaxy twirling through infinite space with millions of other galaxies.”
She turned her head toward me. “Does anything we do really make a difference?”
I thought back to an event that had happened right before my parents died and I’d gone to live with Mam and Pap.
“When I was little,” I began, looking up at the stars, “Mom and Dad took me sailing in a boat he and Pap had built. It was Christmas and Dad was leaving for Vietnam shortly after that. We’d gone ashore at Cape Sable to walk the beach, and we came across thousands of sand dollars. Some were alive and piled up at the water’s edge, but the tide was going out and many were dying on the beach. Mom used her shirt as a basket and carried dozens at a time out to deeper water. Me and Dad helped, though he’d said it was impossible to save them all. I’ll never forget what Mom told him. She stood facing Dad, in water up to her waist, picked one sand dollar out of her shirt and held it up to us, saying, ‘What we do can’t save the world. But it means the world to this one sand dollar.’ Then she put it in the water, along with dozens more in her shirt.”
“I would have loved knowing them,” Savannah said, then rolled onto her side and kissed me.
Carlos Santiago leaned back in his recliner, holding a cell phone to his ear. Another man sat across from him on a luxurious sofa. The atmosphere was tense.
“Bring her here,” Santiago told the man on the phone.
“To Miami?” he asked.
“Yes,” Santiago replied. “Do you know the warehouse on the river?”
“Si, Jefe,” the man said. “But why?”
Santiago sat forward and glared at the man sitting on his couch. He wasn’t the object of his ire, but being the only one in the room, he was the recipient. The man on the couch was used to it.
“Because I said to, cabron!” he shouted into the phone. “I personally sent Enrique—the Razor—over there. Now you tell me he is dead, along with those he has recruited. It makes me wonder how you are still alive.”
“Just lucky, jefe. Besides the dead, three other camellos are in jail and our putas have disappeared.”
“Bring the piruja negra to me,” Santiago growled. “I will find out who did this.”
“Si, Jefe. I will be there by morning.”
“No,” Santiago said, suddenly anxious. “Take her to the airstrip where we bring the coca. I will alert the pilot.”
He ended the call and turned toward his friend and the number two man in their organization. “Take Gabriel. Go out to Opa-locka field and bring the girl to the warehouse.”
“Si, Santiago,” Manuel Ortolano replied. “Would you like me to call the pilot there and alert him?”
“Si, Manuel. Gracias. I will be at the warehouse at midnight.”
Ortolano left without another word.
At the bar, Santiago poured a double shot of Corralejo, a sipping tequila, and tossed it down, grimacing as the clear liquid burned his throat.
An hour later, he had one of his men drive him to the warehouse on the Miami River. The flight from Fort Myers should only have taken thirty minutes, but when
