Florida Firefight by Randy Wayne White

Author:Randy Wayne White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504024501
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller

fourteen

Hawker figured it would take about forty-eight hours for Medelli to get his business finished, refuel the yacht, take on provisions and sail for the anonymity of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Colombians, he knew, would be burning the entire time to take revenge on Mahogany Key for the killing of Pedro Cartagena and for the bombing of their plane.

Medelli would condone the retaliation, but he wouldn’t want to be around to see it. People in the diplomatic service don’t mind brutality as long as it can’t be traced back to them.

At least that was what Hawker hoped. He needed the forty-eight hours, desperately needed them. And so did the town. They all had a lot of preparing to do.

Hawker worked at the computer inside his cottage. Outside the townspeople worked at the restoration of the Tarpon Inn. Hammers and lumber whammed, whacked; men shouted orders, and there was the grind and hydraulic whine of a backhoe.

The landscaping was almost done. They had planted a hedge maze of jasmine and little oasis islands of coconut palms with fountains.

The whole parking lot had been screened by yellow-bloomed oleander and red hibiscus.

The new marina manager had replaced all the metal signs with hand-chiseled wooden signs, and he had re-sided the grim cement marina office with cypress planking that had been worn to silver during its years as a fishing shack.

The work was only three-quarters completed, but the Tarpon Inn Lodge had never looked better. The outside had been scraped, sanded and sprayed with bleach and water to kill mildew, then painted a bright sailing-schooner white. The hurricane shutters were green.

Earlier that afternoon, walking from Winnie Tiger’s cottage, Hawker had seen Harley Bates, their fishing guide, returning from an early charter. With him was Peter Barrett, executive editor of Field and Stream. Bates carried a snook in each hand, struggling beneath the weight of them. Barrett was grinning as he took pictures.

Word was getting out about Mahogany Key’s Tarpon Inn. And it was spreading fast. It would take another few seasons before the work they were doing now would really begin to pay off, but it was a start. Winnie had come up with the idea of slipping word to a national feminist group—through an anonymous letter, perhaps—that the owner of the Tarpon Inn had vowed he’d sell the place before he would allow women to enter the sacred confines of his fishing and hunting club bar. They would get national publicity from that, and Winnie guessed—correctly—that the barons of industry and business from all over the country would stand in line to join.

So things were going as planned. So far. Hawker had been a cop too long not to know that just when things seem their smoothest, alarms start going off, and even the best plans can crumble.

Hawker hunched over his computer, damn well determined to make his first assignment from Jacob Montgomery Hayes a success. He had worked too hard to see the plans fall apart. Not now. He liked the people of Mahogany Key too well.

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