Devil's Backbone (Miami Jones Florida Mystery Book 15) by A.J. Stewart

Author:A.J. Stewart [Stewart, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Jacaranda Drive
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I wasn’t sure who I was looking for the next morning, and I didn’t know exactly where to find them, but I had just enough information to get by.

I zipped along the dock road in Mrs. Albury’s golf cart, around the yacht haven, and slowed as I reached the docks that lined the banks below Captain Augie’s house. I drove past his boat, tied up and alone, and then three or four piers farther on, I noticed a kid slouched against a piling, scrolling on a phone.

When I pulled in close, I expected him to look up, but he didn’t. Whatever was on screen must have been thoroughly engrossing. I got out of the cart and walked up to him and still got nothing.

“Jimmy?” I asked.

The kid still didn’t look up. “Yeah.” Eventually he stood—with his face still on the screen—and as he unfurled himself, I realized that unlike my summation of the twenty-somethings at Harbour Island as kids, this kid truly fit the bill. He was long and lean, like a balloon that was yet to be blown up. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and not that much muscle, either, and his skin was both tanned and freckled.

When he tore his face from the phone, he looked at me. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I had the right Jimmy. Putting my life in the hands of a screen-obsessed teenager didn’t feel like the prudent thing to do.

“Mrs. Albury spoke to your mom,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Miami Jones.” I didn’t get any response, so I followed up with, “And you’re young Jimmy?”

“Just Jimmy.”

I got the attitude. He was a teen, so the hormones were running riot inside, and if my end of the arrangement had been any guide, he’d been ordered by his mother to shuttle some guy around who probably looked old enough to have been the first thing out of the swamp after the demise of the dinosaurs. But Mrs. Albury had called him entrepreneurial, so I went with that reflex.

“What’s your daily rate?” I asked.

“Huh?” he replied, his eyes suddenly bright.

“Your daily rate. I pay my way.”

Just as quickly the brightness faded. “My mom says I have to do it for free. She says God is watching.”

“What do you say?”

“I say gas isn’t cheap.”

“Got that right. Let’s just say that the charitable thing to do is for me to cover gas money. And since I pay cash, your mother doesn’t need to know what happens between us.”

A smile crept across his face, and he pocketed the phone and led me over to his boat. Although calling it a boat was being generous. It was what Lucas called a tinny, a small aluminum dinghy that was essentially a rowboat with a five-horsepower motor on the back.

We climbed down into it, and he had me sit in the middle facing back. He pulled the cord on the motor and fired it up, then we puttered out along the channel.

“You want to go to the airport, right?” he asked over the whine of the motor.

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