Revenge Inc - at Golden Grotto
Chapter 4

Copyright© 2010 by Stultus

With the tropical storm, which had wimpy winds but some decent rain downpour along its fast moving wake, I didn't think that anyone would be expecting our boys back in Miami anytime soon. No one would probably think twice if they remained down here out of contact for several extra hours or maybe even a day. The roads down here were bad enough when dry and now were even worse when flooded. This wouldn't have been the first time that weather had kept the party going for an extra day. Realistically, no one should be the slightest concerned about them until at least noon tomorrow, even later if I was lucky. This left tomorrow morning, actually now early this morning, now that it was just past 1 a.m., as the best and safest time to make a local 911 call.

For now, it was best that the poor girl just relaxed, if chemically possible, and take a long nap until some friendlies arrived. A search of a traditional doctors bag on the right bedside lamp table next to the bloody knife revealed several bottles of injectable drugs, some pills and a couple of syringes. I vaguely knew what a couple of them were for, especially the one marked Rohypnol, aka roofies. In the end I decided to play it safe and give her a Valium, a Tylenol 3 with codeine, a Prozac and a roofie. She'd probably already had been given some of each earlier, but it would suit me just fine if she never remembered the conversation we were about to have.

"Belinda." I whispered in a low growling voice into her ear as I gave her the pills and all of the cool water that she could drink. She was almost coherent and trying to focus her eyes on me. Fortunately I'd left the black sky mask on and I hoped that the dark cammo jacket would cover the shape of my tits. Still this was going to be a dangerous risk.

"You're going to need to rest now but when you wake up some good guys will be here to rescue you and take you home. You're going to be ok, they didn't hurt you too badly but you're going to need to be careful. Very very careful about what you say tomorrow and afterwards. The guys who did this to you have been punished or they soon will be, but they all have rich and powerful families that will be afraid of you and what you might say about their boys. Justice for you and your friend has been done ... and it won't help anyone to spread the stories of what they did to you both. Try to forget, or if you can't just pretend and say nothing. What you might say to anyone, even the police, especially the police, will get back to those boy's families and then you could be in danger once again, even safely back home in Ohio. They're rich and they have long arms. Stay silent ... and stay safe and you should be ok."

I'd tried to keep my voice low, in a growled whisper as close to a male voice as I could manage, but they didn't cover that trick in Weapons School either. I just tried to emulate the male grunting sounds I often heard late at night in a dark tent, with a friend, or a friend of a friend, thrusting away on top of me. Yeah I was a bit of a camp slut back in those days and I had a lot of friends on the SpecOps side of our camp. At the time I thought it was a fair trade, I'd willingly spread or give a blowjob for any operator that was willing to spend at least an equal amount of time teaching me any weapons and operational tricks I didn't already know. Heck, even now I still think it was a more than fair trade. Otherwise in my normal career MOS job in supply I didn't get a lot of opportunities to go on recon patrols as an observer or fire sniper rifles at bad guys ... and hit them. That part I don't regret at all.

Still tied to the bed, I left her and her late friend there, where I assumed they would remain safe while I could finish what needed to be done next. I took one last look around the cabin to see if I had left even the slightest clue to my presence but I didn't see any. No hair fibers, no fingerprints, and a few minutes with a mop cleared away all of the muddy bootprints that I could find. In my professional opinion this looked to my eyes like a more than professional hit. Maybe rogue feds or perhaps gangland competition knocking off some low-hanging fruit. I just didn't want it to scream 'revenge killing', especially done by a woman with a few SpecOps skills. Even in the Keys with a lot of retired military around that description doesn't fit too many ladies and it wouldn't take any serious investigator long to come knocking at my door.

Regrets aside, it was time to go on a hopefully short sailing trip. Wally-boy liked his little voyages into the Gulf, but I had a certain familiar and rather ironic place that I wanted to show him rather badly. It would be quite poetic justice in more ways than just one to take Wally out for one last memorable sailing trip!


As I started up my small ship of death, I uttered one last bemoaning grunt as I sailed down the canal away from the cabin, still intact and quite unburned to the ground. I was regretting it already. With my luck if I tried to torch the place, even with all of the available gasoline, the driving rain would only get harder and suppress the fire, only ending up doing half of the job anyway. Alright, I admit that I'd brought along a little bit of explosive as well in my backpack, but that was strictly for emergency 'scorched earth' measures. I'd learned to make and handle the stuff pretty safely, another side benefit skill learned from my selective late evening romancing, but this was strictly emergency use only stuff. Sometimes you just can't cover every base perfectly and have to trust to careful training, cool thinking (again not my best trait) and sometimes just luck ... or overwhelming firepower.

My gut was dead certain that the pair of both official and private armies of investigators was going to be combing the entire area with a fine toothed comb and I just had to pray that someone smarter than me wouldn't find something from the crime scene or our living witness to incriminate me.

Speeding ever faster down the canal, I now had to trust to chance and that alone told me that I was pretty much screwed. She's a very fickle bitch and she doesn't much like me at all. My only hope was to so carefully cover my tracks that no one in the end could end up proving anything against me. Not that the Watters crime family would give up at that!

It wasn't like any choice. Even if I had to rehabilitate Wallace in front of a hundred living witnesses, it still needed to be done. After seeing their wall of trophies stapled to their bathroom wall, I was more certain than ever that getting rid of Wally-boy was probably the most useful and important thing that I'll ever do in my life. Even if they all came gunning for me tomorrow, I was going to go down shooting with a big shit-eating smile.

Wally-boy gave me a grunt as he started to wake up from the pistol whipping I had given him earlier. I gave him a kick and told him to shut the fuck up while I sped up the small boat some more until it was nearly flying across the choppy waters. Wallace had picked the perfect getaway craft, both fast and low draft. I even tested out the whisper trolling mode which did cut the noise (and the speed) down significantly, but with the heavy rain I didn't need it and I wanted to get to the boathouse fast. I was going to run out of darkness pretty soon, even sooner if I ran into troubles getting the bigger boat going.

I kept the throttle going and aimed the craft right down the center of the canal and didn't glimpse another living creature. Even the alligators were taking the night off, and that suited me fine. I only had one more spare mag left for my Glock.

Fifteen minutes later I was at the edge of the canal as it entered Joe Bay. I had no trouble finding the right boathouse, there weren't all that many to choose from. The big key ring I'd found in the cabin on a nail right by the back door next to the steps down to the dock had the key for this outboard, also had the key for the boathouse door, and another larger key fit inside the big catamaran's ignition. Yet another key went to something else I hadn't yet found a use for, but I had a few other things to do first before I worried about that.

After giving Wally-boy another few kicks for good measure, I dragged his nude ass onto the boat into the aft passenger area and tie-wrapped him down tight to a handy and sturdy piece of metal more or less out of sight. His late unlamented friends soon joined him onboard but I stuck them into the two huge fish storage bins aft on both the port and starboard sides of the craft, after first laying down some plastic tarps over everything first. Brains and heart shots are messy, and I didn't want to take the chase of having any blood on the deck, even at night.

There was a good bit of blood pooling in the bottom of the small fishing boat and my first instinct was to first purify it with fire and the poke some holes into the bottom and sink her somewhere. Unfortunately, I thought I might need this boat again if I returned back here. I didn't really have any other better ideas and I sure wasn't going to wade through the swamp or swim the canal back up to the cabin. I needed to get back to my car as soon as possible.

Fuck, now I was really kicking myself for not burning down the cabin with everyone in it. By now I could have been home in the Keys eating a pint or two of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. My local 24 hour convenience store carried a stock just for me, and kept an emergency pint or two in the back freezer in case they ran out in the normal display cooler. I don't think they liked the look in my eyes when they told me that one time that they were sold out.

The huge ice chests were ideal for keeping big deep sea game fish like marlin, not to mention drugs or weapons, but they handled dead sociopaths and gangsters just fine. It's not like I needed the big coolers to hold beer on this trip either. The catamaran was relatively modern, and almost comfortable enough to be a proper yacht, decked out with every high tech toy that could be rigged into her. She had both a set of rather oversized motors and also a pair of central and fore masts for sails, completely computerized. Even if I'd never sailed a pleasure craft before, this baby was so geeked out that even a novice could handle her, even in bad weather.

With a press of a button, I had the ship's GPS and navigation system up on screen and I'd selected my route. I started with Wally's main preprogrammed route, a nice quick run out to Whiptail Reef. The ship had been there often enough that it probably could make the run by itself in its sleep, even selecting the best route out of Joe Bay Channel to miss all of the reefs and cays of the northern Gulf along the way. I'd done this sort of thing five or seven times, although never quite all alone by myself. Still, for a first soloing, this was the right sort of idiot-proof boat to take, perfect for the rich, terminally stupid and probably insensibly drunk mariner. Still I'd need to keep an eye on things and exercise caution.

I was planning on running fast in the night, without running lights, and in the middle of a minor tropical blow. All three of which were idiotic things to do. Next, to compound my stupidity, I was going to disable the ships GPS tracker beacon too. Even if anyone learned of this boat, and/or my presence on it, before I was done, even the Coast Guard trackers should be able to easily find me. As an aside, I casually noticed while dragging over the last thug body, that the sides of the catamaran were fairly stealth shaped. With the main mast down, the radar profile of this dark painted ship was probably fairly reduced. The more I thought about it the more certain I was. This boat did a lot of night running, and of more things than just mangled female flesh, perhaps often deep into the Caribbean or even down to Mexico.

Wally and the Watters (sounds like band name, doesn't it?) were filthy rich and could piss money away, even the few hundred thousand that this nice puppy cost, but knowing them, this was a just another tool for doing business. This baby was probably made of radar absorbent materials too, in addition to its radar reflecting sleek structural profile. I was willing to bet that in the dark this sneaker could glide right past Coast Guard cutters unseen, even a few miles away. Sweet, but I wasn't going to be able to keep this sleek greyhound of the seas much longer than tomorrow morning. Somebody might be looking for her by then!

The boathouse didn't contain much else of interest other than lots of drums of diesel fuel. The ship's fuel tanks showed full, their maximum of eighty gallons, but I manually topped off the tank to the brim and then also tossed onboard a few extra ten-gallon jerry cans of fuel. I thought I had enough fuel to get to where I wanted to go without using the sail to stretch things, and with the help of a siphon and a big funnel I was pretty sure I could manage to refuel at sea if I needed to. There weren't any gas stations out in the Gulf where I was planning to go!

Nothing else in the boathouse seemed of any interest but I did bring along both my newly acquired Remington and Mossburg shotguns. A nice spread of grapeshot has worked wonders again unfriendly boardings for several hundred years and who was I to argue with history?

Inside the catamaran I found the topside interior center cabin to be small and cramped, but I was short enough not to be too discomforted. Just downstairs was a small galley forward and to the aft there was an equally tiny stateroom and head. A place to sleep maybe, but not really a place to enjoy living in my opinion. Unfortunately I didn't have time for a nap.

With my unwilling captive crewmember secure, my other organic ballast secure and the ship nearly ready to unhitch from mooring, I decided that this was really the best time to search carefully below. With the on-board computer the ship could steer itself but I was itching to take a good look around before I departed, just in case I decided something absolutely needed to be left behind.

There was still one last key that needed a lock, and I was willing to bet I'd find it somewhere in the main cabin. Not quite, but I did find a 2-foot square floor safe underneath the tile floor of the galley that matched the key. I was amply rewarded for my efforts with a small gym bag full of cash, bundled twenties and tens mostly on top, but underneath there were more than a few stacks of Franklins and Grants. Emptied the bag to see if there were any other goodies, like a GPS locator stitched into the bottom of the bag, but there was nothing else but the cash.

I didn't take the time to give it an accurate accounting, but Wallace had stashed away a decent amount here, maybe about half a million dollars, or even a bit more. Enough to fund a quick getaway to a nice friendly Caribbean island and with more than enough pocket money to handle significant unexpected expenses for a month or two. Add in a couple of fake passports, each with Wally-boys cheerful smirking mug on them and it was more than an adequate haul.

No secret Grand Cayman bank account numbers or a laptop computer chock full of every single Watters' family secrets, but one can't wish for everything. Well, you can wish for everything, but you'll be damned lucky to get it! This little goodie bag was already way above and beyond any treat the dour bitch Lady Luck had recently offered so I wasn't about to complain. My credit card problems incurred while being devoured by this case suddenly seemed a lot more manageable.

With the gym bag taken upstairs into the small top cabin and tie-wrapped secure onto the covered deck table next to the controls, I opened the boathouse door to reveal the angry surf, cast off the mooring lines and before starting the engines I gave a whining Wally-boy another kick and a final reminder to shut his pie hole or I'd cut out his tongue with my Ka-Bar. And he could tell that I meant it. Really, he didn't have one thing to say to me that I needed or wanted to hear!

I resisted the near overpowering urge to set the boathouse on fire before I left. That would just draw attention, and besides, I might just need that sturdy fast little fishing boat again. I didn't really have a foolproof plan for anything once the catamaran launched itself off into the mercies of the Gulf. I'd been out in higher waves, and in a smaller boat too, but shit can and does happen ... especially around me.

Already it looked like most of the storm had blown inland and while the waves were fairly high and choppy, definitely within the danger range of weather service small craft warnings, this boat looked large enough to handle some big swells pretty easily, but I soon realized it wouldn't be making top speed. Still it didn't take long to make it to where I wanted to go first, and from the looks of the descending fuel gauge, I'd have enough juice to finish my trip and have plenty enough left over to spare.

That was good, I really had other plans for all of the extra fuel in the ten-gallon porta-cans.


With vaguely angry seas and a late start, not to mention an early official sunrise sometime just after 6 a.m. it was already hinting at dawn when we reached our first official tour stop, Whiptail Reef. It was a large curved hunk of sand covered coral with a drop-off that my map indicated was nearly two hundred and fifty feet deep. A really good diver with proper gear could do that dive, but not your typical sun and sea traveler. Besides, there were far better places to fish or hunt for shells. Still I stopped the engines and lifted over Wally-boy for an almost clear look at his surroundings. Most of the storm clouds had now blown north and there was enough moon and sky now to give some limited visibility, especially with the still sunken sun now casting weak light upon the upper clouds in the distance.

Wally-boy was no idiot. I'd confirmed that notion long ago. Still he couldn't now help but to notice exactly where he was. Most rational persons would come to same conclusion he did, that I was doing to deep-six him right there, at the exact same spot that he, or his buddies or his flunkies, disposed of all of their other unwanted bodies. Literally probably hundreds of them over the years, or at least since he screwed up and broke Tori Alverson beyond repair about three years ago. Bones, not to mention meaty parts, break down fast in salt water, with lots of swimming critters and sand crawling things happy for their free meal. Maybe some bones would still be down there, preserved enough for a forensic diver to locate and retrieve, but I wasn't counting on it.

Someday it might be safe to send a notice to all of those missing loved ones giving them some closure, that young and happy Brenda Lou and her gal-pal Skippy picked the wrong guy or guys to buy them a drink or offer them a cold (drugged) soda or bottle of water out on the beach or in a bar and that their bones now graced the sea bed at Whiptail Reef. Maybe someday this relatively thin sandy cay would get some sort of memorial stone, one that the capricious tides and storms of the Gulf would probably soon scour away far too soon. Perhaps someday, but it wasn't likely to be real soon.

Leaving Wallace to worry about his fate for a few minutes, I dumped most of the rest of my morbid now decaying cargo giving my brooding victim quite a bit to worry about. I'd stab the body a few times in the guts to allow the decomposition gasses to escape and then tie a big twenty pound hollow cinder block around their ankles and then shove them overboard. With no mess (well not much) and no fuss, the three thug guards and poor unfortunate Chesty all went down into the drink in the deepest water on the east side of the reef. I had no bets that a deep diver would someday find hundreds of similar cinder blocks resting on the sand bottom. Back at the boathouse there was a half-empty pallet of them and I'd grabbed a few for this trip. I hoped that the rest of the blocks someday went to a more constructive purpose other than ballast, weighting down a dead corpse, but the cynical side of me doubted it.

I was saving Wally and his pal Steve for a slightly more appropriate fate, about another fifty or so miles further out into the gulf. This was an increasingly bad idea, and already the two or three smarter brain cells in my head were begging me to just quit and take care of Wally-boy right here and now. If I hurried, I could be back at the boathouse before dawn, torch the place, take the fishing boat back, torch it too and be at my car really before the light came over the trees. I could even call 911 from the cabin (preferably before I torched it) or maybe leave Belinda someplace close to the regional hospital, like next to the old Circle-K store right on the feeder road next to Highway 1. I still had time!

The blood splattered pretty nudie-boy bastard didn't help my decision making with any pleading or begging for mercy, and I gave him bonus points for that. As pissed as I was feeling, I really wasn't in the mood to deal with him pulling the groveling for mercy act. I think he knew that would only earn him another pistol-whipping and probably a pair of head caps. He did let out an obvious moan of relief when I did restart the engines and headed further out into the Gulf, off to my planned final destination.

I knew the timetable was already screwed up, but my gut convinced me to continue this further trip. It was just too poetic and ironic a means of justice for me to chicken out and quit now, even though my gut was telling me that this was going to cost me dearly later.


Once the course was programmed in and activated, I decided to catch up on some other housekeeping duties and make sure that Wallace stayed out of my hair for the next few hours. The sun was going to be up long before I hit my destination and that meant potential witnesses, probably just other pleasure boats but I hoped the storm kept nearly everyone at home. Now at the dawn of this Saturday morning it looked like it would later be a clear bright and nice day, now that the clouds were gone. If I stuck to the final revised plan and schedule I'd made, I'd probably hit my final destination about noon, Fort Jefferson, in the Dry Tortugas and getting a clean departure without too many unfriendly eyes was going to be challenging.

Wally-boy wouldn't be around by then to worry about that not so little problem.

At best I'd be dangerously late in retrieving my car out of the area as it was. At worst, this whole affair was going to blow up hard in my face and make the rest of my life a living hell. Who was I fooling? My life was already a living hell! But that was all alright ... watching the Monroe Masher being put out of business for good was still going to be the crowning jewel of my entire sordid life. Not enough for redemption maybe, but these were some justifiable killings that I could hold my head high about and never, ever regret.

Actually, since my unhappy passenger had stayed quiet and not even peed himself at our last stop, I was almost feeling a little merciful.

"Why?" He asked. Right as I was securing him once again down out of sight in the bow. "You've never once asked 'why'? Don't you want to know why we did what we did?" He asked fairly quietly, with genuine curiosity.

"Nope." I replied, rather honestly. "I know why. You and your pals were sick fucks and preyed upon women that were unlikely to be missed. Lots of them. Two hundred? More? Can you even count them? What the fuck did you assholes think you were doing, collecting women for slaves in the afterlife or some other insane bullshit? Nope, you just liked raping scared frightened girls and discovered that snuffing the poor defenseless cunts made your tiny pricks even harder. Did your old juvie crime buddy Steve Morrison rack up a few extra kills of his own, just like you? Did you keep some sort of score and the loser bought dinner at your great-uncles country club? How many did your new bud Chesty get to pop? Don't answer – really, I don't care and I don't want to really know the sordid details. I have enough trouble sleeping at night as it is. Let's just say I don't like the cut of your jibe and that's more than enough reason to cull you from the herd!"

"Whom then? Which one was the one you cared about? The one victim that keeps you awake at night whose face you see in the dark? You're a professional and have confidence and know exactly what you're doing. You've done this before, maybe often. How many kills do you have sweetie? Almost as many as me I'd bet, I've seen your eyes, there's not a speck of life in them. You don't work for any of the local families but you're local – this isn't business for you, this is personal. What stupid cunt should I have never laid eyes on to incur your revenge?"

I ought to have kept quiet. It was the smart move to make, keeping this business professional and as impersonal as possible. He was just a hunk of diseased meat to me, almost ready for proper disposal where no one else would ever be poisoned by him again ... but some small part of me really wanted him to know for whom I was acting. So I told him.

"Tori. Tori Alverson. Your very first, or probably one of your very first victims, when just rape and a good beating wasn't enough to give your tiny prick a thrill anymore. She was my best friend and the only woman or man for that matter that I ever trusted enough in my entire life to tell my secrets and ask her for advice on dealing with my fucked up life. She was also sometimes my lover. She was engaged to be married to a Navy SEAL we'd both met while in Afghanistan. In fact he was an old boyfriend of mine that I'd introduced to her. I was going to be her Maid of Honor at their wedding. Every weekend for months they took me out on their boat and taught me, a desert loving girl, how to enjoy the water ... sort of. Sometimes if the mood was right, the three of us even made love together and Tori was never once jealous. She knew that she was hooked to the one great love of her life and they'd never be apart. After she disappeared and was later found dead on the beach, Phil, her fiancée, and I both lost all of the joy out of our lives. Phil died in a deep water training accident about six months later. He'd lost his mental focus and he screwed up ... and was probably happy to rejoin his lover in death. They're buried together, their ashes intermingled and scattered over the waters of their favorite diving place. It's a beautiful place - you'll like it there too ... so much so that I doubt you'll ever want to leave it again."

Wallace remained silent. He knew anything that he could possibly say would be entirely the wrong thing.

"I need to do this, for her." I muttered, and not for the first or even the one thousandth time. I see lots of dead people in my dreams, but I hoped and I prayed that after today I would never again see her face pleading to me for justice ... or at least revenge. Tori and Phil had both done long tours in the Big Sandbox and knew all about revenge, and exactly how it differentiated from justice. I knew and loved Tori and Phil ... and they'd both settle happily for just plain simple revenge.


Wallace kept his fuckholes shut and I didn't hear a peep out of him for the next three hours. In smooth weather and with the sails also engaged we probably could have made the run in much less time, but I was happy and gratified that our entire trip had been a solitary one. Not another sail or vessel in sight, all the way to the grotto.

Getting close enough to the small sand covered cay was a bit of a trick. Reefs covered the grotto here on three shallow coral covered sides, leaving a deep grotto or lagoon in the blue water center of the horseshoe. Anyone else would name this place Horseshoe Cove or Cay or Reef or something, but the proper true name of this small tiny islet near the Dry Tortugas had a much older and more exotic vintage title, something like Gruta de Oro, in Spanish.

Now parked gently as close to the sand as I could get on the reef, I unfettered the tie-wraps once again that held Wallace down on the aft deck. I pulled him up now onto his feet and after a few hops shoved him up to the bow of the ship where I could push him overboard and mostly landing onto the sandy tops of the dried reef exposed during low tide. I'd timed my trip actually pretty darned good! At high tide, the reef was almost entirely covered by water and trickier to carefully land a boat.

Wally, his arms still tied behind and his legs hobbled really didn't have anywhere to go. He tried squirming against the sharp coral a good try but that tore his back up more than it did the tough thick plastic tie-wraps. A worth attempt though. He was a fighter and was going to die trying right to the very end. That suited me fine. Revenge is sometimes sweeter when just slightly delayed.

Once I'd dragged Wally closer to the sand covered reef edge of the deep grotto, I gave him some final bits of wisdom to ponder.

"Wally, look down around the sides of the reef and nearby you on the sands. What do you see?"

"Crabs. Lots of small ones here on the sand and maybe some bigger ones along the edge of the water by the sides of the grotto. Yellow colored, like gold, sort of."

 
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