Chapter 1

I could hardly believe it had been a year since that disaster with Sid Meir. Heard he had a stroke, poor bastard. He was an ass, but I didn’t want him really hurt.

His downfall had been the political tradesmanship, swapping favors under the table. One favor that he hadn’t looked into close enough had linked him to the slavers and the rest, as they say, was history. He had let his power, granted by both his position in the government and the secrets he knew, go to his head.

I, well, Jake, but at my insistence, had forced him into retirement with no possibility of making a comeback. Now ... now he was wheelchair bound and had a dim future.

The death of Madeleine Mercier had been sad, but the death of her husband Charles shortly after was an even bigger blow. I think he just didn’t want to go on without her. He was a man I considered a friend and someone who always seemed to be glad to hear from me. His funeral had been surprisingly well attended for someone whose life was spent in the shadows. Judge Ramirez had jokingly said they were there to make sure his secrets were buried with him.

He might not have been wrong.

Jake was back in Dallas with Liz, he had asked her to marry him, believe it or not. I never thought I would see the day. I haven’t heard of any wedding plans yet, but they wouldn’t be in a hurry in any case, too damn many financial strings had to be pulled, tied, cut or otherwise untangled. Liz wasn’t poor by anyone’s estimation, though next to Jake we both looked like paupers.

Steph had finally given in and married her on-again, off-again boyfriend back in Dallas. She swore she had decided before she got pregnant, but we can count as well as anyone. Still, she seemed happy, especially when Deb quit to go work for Liz. Deb had been hired for Cam but stayed on with me. She and Steph had an ongoing FWB hookup based as much on convenience as it was attraction.

Steph swung both ways but Deb was pretty much solidly in the DC camp. Now Steph had her cake and could eat it too! I would miss having Deb around, but she had been right when she explained why she was leaving. I really didn’t need two keepers all the time and at least there, she had a chance, through Steph, of finding someone special. With me, we would be too much on the move. As Liz’s primary, and with Liz’s more sedentary lifestyle, Deb had some stability.

My self-appointed guardian and godfather, Judge Arturo Ramirez, retired from the bench just last month, though he made sure to lay a finger aside his nose and tell me that his replacement had also been his protégé. I had a feeling I would still have a friend on the bench, even after Judge Ramirez’s buddy, Judge William Kenney, retired someday. Considering I was only twenty, I have needed help from the courts more than I care to think about!

Amelia Palmer, one of my Caribbean rescues, is now Mrs. Colin Chattenham and is due to have her first child in the fall. She had two of her fellow rescued friends, Rosa De La Lune and Estrellita Iglesias, as her co-maids of honor. I had been a groomsman, her husband-to-be seemingly happy to have me in his wedding party if it pleased his bride-to-be. Amelia had paired me up with Eimear Byrne as had been promised, though it had been for naught. Eimear had found a nice fellow from Glasgow to give her heart to. An Irish lass, in London, fell in love with a Scot! You can’t make this shit up.

As for me, I have been going absolutely fucking stir-crazy. After the shit with the lawsuit against the government settled down, I snuck out of Austin and re-opened the house in the Keys for a while, but that was a bust. Sure, I had my first baby, the Emancipation Key there, but all my friends from school were gone now, off to colleges all over. I hadn’t made a lot of new friends at UT in Austin, but even the acquaintances I had made looked at me oddly when I came back to campus to meet with Marcia Alberghoney, the UTA scholarship coordinator.

The school was concerned that I would pull the scholarships since I was no longer going to take classes there. Far from it, I had already dumped another twenty million into the project and had scholarships going out to thirty colleges across the country. I even had a dozen in London, with more being considered as they found worthy candidates.

That damn reporter. That guy had been tenacious with no give in him. He hadn’t found out everything, not by a long shot, but I think that was mostly because, let’s be honest, a lot of the shit I had gotten into was outright illegal. Most people that helped me, or turned a blind eye, would prefer that it just go away.

He did get the story of the rescue though, plus the aftermath, and he was more than happy to play up the tragic breakup of Cam and me if I wasn’t willing to sit down and let him interview me. Jake told me that I could fight it, file lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who dared print it, but that would just make things more exciting to the public. The best way to handle this was to just roll with it, play it down, try to make it less interesting, less titillating.

I tried. I was so ready. I wore glasses with a chip in one lens and tape on the ear piece. I wore a shirt with a coffee stain on the front and high water corduroy pants. I didn’t bathe for three days (Dean made me sleep outside, the pussy) and I didn’t even bother to comb the grass out of my hair before the reporter arrived. I was a total sad sack, not someone you would want to write a story about.

It should have worked, I had thought of everything!

Only it hadn’t. See, the girls had all given interviews when they came home, except Cam, of course and she was out there now flapping her gums like they were paying her by the syllable. Hmm ... maybe they were! Anyway, in the interviews I was a dashing figure, larger than life. I was strong and fast, a deadly fighter and blah blah blah. I almost believed it myself between bouts with Dean, you know, when the bruises stopped hurting.

Even worse, he had somehow gotten video of Dean and me, as I was about to find out.

He arrived right on time and knocked on the door. Dean had made himself scarce in another room of the low-budget hotel room. I let him in and he spent a full minute staring at me incredulously before bursting into gales of laughter.

“This ... I ... I don’t even know what to say. You worked hard at this! What, did you think this would make you less appealing, less of a news story?” he gasped out in between bouts of laughter.

Well, yes. That is exactly what I had hoped.

When he was done, he was sitting on the floor, holding his ribs and groaning. I gave him a bottle of water and asked him to wait for a few minutes. Man, let me tell you, that shower felt awesome. I probably spent longer than the five minutes I had told him, but it was totally worth it. If I was getting screwed anyway, I might as well be clean.

“I shouldn’t have laughed, really, that might have worked if I had not been writing this story for two months now. I have photos, interviews, surveillance footage from the apron at Ronald Regan airport and even videos of you and Ex-Gunnery Sergeant Dean Miller beating the hell out of each other in your back yard.”

He held up a tablet computer and hit the play button on the screen. Someone had taken video of us working out. It started with us just doing the final moves in our morning Tai Chi, then it showed us squaring off and joking back and forth before Dean launched a lightning-fast knee towards my gonads.

Even the audio was decent, and we could hear Dean calling out instructions in Arabic. Dean had been teaching me conversational Arabic, as well as military terms, since my junior year in high school. I had decided that Fayed was probably not the only Middle Eastern slaver I would run in to, and I wanted to know more. Dean was a good instructor, using pain as an effective tool to sharpen my concentration! Getting smacked for messing up a word is guaranteed to keep your mind on topic!

In the end, I gave him an interview and managed, somehow, not to implicate myself in any crimes. We stuck to the topic at hand, the rescues in the Bahamas, and I refused to speak about anything else.

For a couple of months, I got into real estate. I had one of Terry’s people find me a realtor who knew high end property, and promptly hired Ms. Erin Sung to manage my new Real Estate holdings company. I put her to work finding desirable lake property, ocean front property and small, desirable islands ... the kinds of places it takes good money to own and makes investment attractive. In only nine months, I was the proud owner of more than a dozen new homes spread across the country. I amused myself for a month and a half going from house to house, never sleeping in the same house for more than two or three nights in a row.

If it wasn’t for Dean, I probably would have gone completely around the bend instead of just being mostly loony.

“Jack, you need to pull your head out of your ass.”

What the hell?!

Dean was ... more than just security. He was my friend, my mentor, my teacher. Not a father figure, I had skipped that whole thing and chosen Jake as a grandfather figure instead. Dean was an older brother. He was someone whose advice I listened to because I trusted him with literally everything.

“Whoa! Chill, old man!” I quipped, grinning at him as I stepped over his leg sweep and launched a fake snap kick at his chin. He easily shuffled the kick to the side, deflecting it on the outside of his wrist and letting my heel slide past his chin. His other fist flashed out, trying to pound the extended knee, but I was already moving, driving forward, pushing off the other leg and twisting, trying to bring the extended knee up to his temple.

He had taught me to be a man, to be a fighter, not a runner. He taught me to face my problems head on, not to hide my head in the sand. Part of that was training me, making me see the potential in my own body, in my own head. First it was simple exercise, then Tai Chi, then he showed me what he learned as a Marine and beyond.

Back and forth we went for another twenty, thirty seconds until he caught me, my balance not where it should be, and I ended up flat on my back, his knee firmly in my solar plexus. Had I not tensed the muscles in my core, hardened by countless thousands of sit-ups, I would be puking my morning coffee all over the yard. As it was, it was all I could do to hold up the entire weight of his body, balanced on his knee.

I tapped the ground lightly, but it was enough.

“Old man?” he asked lightly, rolling his eyes.

“Every once in a while, I can catch you off guard.” I said with a smile, shrugging and sitting up.

“What did I do wrong now?” I asked, accepting a hand up.

“This whole bouncing all over the country! What the hell are we doing, Jack? What are you looking for? What are your plans? What about school? I would like to spend more than a night or two in one place this year, you know?” Dean asked, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a hand towel.

I looked at him for a moment. I could see he was serious, and it made me stop and think. I had been avoiding it.

“I guess I am just all fucked up right now. After the bullshit in Mexico, then the cruise and Cam, now the ... I can’t go back to school, it would be a nightmare” I said, hating the whine in my voice, but feeling pretty hemmed in.

“Why?”

Why what? I thought about it for a second, but Dean was not done.

“Why can’t you go back to school. Okay, Austin might be pushing it, but there are a million fucking schools, Jack. You think that TV personalities or child actors don’t go to school. What about that Brit actress, the one from the wizard movies ... Cute face, no tits?”

I knew Dean was teasing me with this, he was a bigger fan of the Harry Potter books than I was. I was positive he knew I knew too, despite his hiding paperback copies in the office instead of reading my hard-covers from the den back in the Keys.

“Yeah, she went to some hippy liberal girl college ... Brown or something, right?” I was picturing her in my head and found I wasn’t as attracted to her as I once was.

“Well, that was a mistake. She turned into a shrill, feminist, spewing twaddle as if she were dispensing wisdom to the masses. Real turn off, but still, she went to college and she was a shitload more famous than you, despite your ego.”

Damn! Dean was being brutal today. Still, he was right.

“Think I could go to school in Europe? Ireland or Scotland, maybe? Not London, too crowded and not France because ... Cam. I speak Spanish, so someplace on the coast of Spain would be good” I mused, my mind imagining sun-kissed beauties on topless beaches of the Spanish Riviera.

“Jack, Jake isn’t getting any younger. How far away do you want to be?” Dean asked, sticking a figurative tack in the balloon of my imagination.

“Yeah, there is that.” I agreed, shaking my head. I really needed focus. I needed a goal, something to be working towards, planning for. This aimless playboy shit was boring me too, if the truth be told.

“Okay, something coastal, at least, so I can get the E Squared back in the water. You are right about one thing, I am kinda tired of this too. I thought it would be fun, but I think I want to have my own room again, you know? I am feeling a little, I don’t know? Rootless? Is that a thing?”

Dean shrugged. “Don’t know. I have been pretty rootless myself since I got out. I had fun in the Keys though, even if it was dull in between battles at sea.” he smirked, wagging his eyebrows at me.

I had a sudden itch on the side of my nose that only my middle finger could scratch.

Rather than going back to the Keys, or back to Austin and holing up in the penthouse, we stayed put and started making lists of colleges that might be fun to attend.

I immediately scratched off the universities in Florida and Texas, even though both had several along the gulf and Florida had some on the far side as well, in waters I was familiar with too! Still, I wanted new, exciting, different! Unlike that old sitcom, I wanted to go where no one knew my name.

There was a college in Massachusetts called Endicott. The campus actually had three private beaches! Still, it was Massachusetts so, yeah, what good were beaches when there was a foot of snow on the sand?

Nope, not happening. I was a summer kind of guy, beaches, open water, lots of sun. That snow bunny shit was for the birds, though I had, admittedly, a blast learning to ski this past winter at my place in Utah. I just couldn’t see trudging through that white shit to get to class!

California was looking good, but I honestly didn’t care much for San Diego and LA, well, Los Angeles was Los Angeles and there was no way I was going to subject myself to that traffic any more than I had to. It was cool to visit, but I would have to be chauffeured everywhere or I would shoot someone on the 405.

Hmm ... there was the University of California (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC) Cal State, LA City College, Loyola Marymount, Occidental College, and a dozen trade schools, all in the greater Los Angeles area. Surely one of them would allow me to commute by helicopter, right? An endowment for a new stadium would surely get me a private helicopter pad.

And I would be the target of every gold-digger, environmental nutcase, social climber and run-of-the-mill wacko in the state.

PASS!

The Central Coast area was looking good though. UC Santa Barbara had nice beaches but it was a surfer college. Nothing at all against surfers, I was ... okay on a board, though no maestro. Still, ocean science was not what I needed and UCSB did not have a business school.

Cal Poly San Luis looked pretty nice. Huge campus, close to beaches just a couple of miles south in Pismo or north in Morro Bay. No idea how good the boating was there, but it might be worth checking out. They were a huge engineering school which I liked a lot, but they didn’t have a business program either!

At the top of the state were the uber liberal colleges, like UCF, Berkeley and Stanford, and there was no way I would fit in there. They had their ways, I had mine, and never the twain would meet. I could just imagine the shit show if I was going to Berkeley and they found out I was in the 1% of the 1%.

Further up the coast was ... yep, cold and wet and even snow. Portland? Seattle? Nope, not doing it. I also wanted to visit Alaska, but I would skip actually living there too!

Hawaii! Dean suggested it when he noticed it was not on my list. Hawaii was a shitload further away than I had considered. Going there, I could just as well go to school in Europe so living there was out of the questions, but I did put it on the list of places to go and visit.

It would be a hell of an adventure on the E², but she was made specifically for that journey, after all! It’s half sad and half funny that she made the trip sitting in a cradle aboard an even bigger boat, crossing as cargo. She had been designed as a pleasure boat that, incidentally, was smuggling gold in her hull. Built in Hawaii, she had been confiscated before she could set sail.

How was I going to choose? The online brochures and guides all showed the good sides, I wanted to see the real shit. Maybe it wasn’t time to settle down, not just yet. Maybe, instead, it was time to move with a purpose. Time to stop bounding around aimlessly and, well, aim!

“Dean, I think it is time to unpickle the E Squared. We got a nice trip to take.”

I made a call to Dennis in Galveston, he would make sure clean sheets were on the bed for us when we arrived. Then I called the storage facility where the E² had been pickled for the last two years and gave the order to bringing her out and back up to sailing shape. A third phone call went to my secure, climate-controlled storage unit in Austin.

The storage unit had been the answer to what to do with all the stuff we pulled off the E² before storing her. The spare firearms, the ammo, the contents of the bars, papers, manuals, anything that might be damaged while it sat in dry dock, had to come off of her. At first, we had stuffed it all in a spare room in the Austin penthouse, but it was an eyesore and I eventually wanted the space for guests.

One nice thing about being filthy rich? You can spend what you need to get shit done now. I had a licensed and bonded moving company, accompanied by a couple of veterans from the Mexican ‘campaign’, pack up the gear and load it on a truck. They would be in Galveston in two days, driving it out from Austin. I probably could have flown it, but the boat storage company wanted a week to get my baby in the water and running anyway.

Dennis said there was plenty of room in the boathouse apartment for anything I needed to store temporarily and it was secure enough, what with staff on the premises, for the short time we had to worry.

We were at one of my new houses on Lake Tahoe, near what was inexplicably called Slaughterhouse Canyon, though there was no canyon and if there had been a slaughterhouse near here, it was long gone. The house was a six-thousand square foot rambling ranch-style and didn’t have a boat dock, something I had already arranged to correct. It did have a big, four-acre lot though and a nice, unobstructed view of the lake. It also had lifetime membership in the country club and its golf course though, just a five-minute cart drive down the road.

It was only a forty-minute ride to the airport, so I chartered a flight to Galveston for the next day. There was no big rush and I still hadn’t gone water skiing since we arrived. Erin, my Real Estate guru, assured me that Tahoe was the place to waterski.

The flight to Galveston was on a little Lear. Small, but quick, the small business jet had us there in half the time it would have taken had we gone commercial. It was also small enough to land at Scholes International Airport, practically around the corner from the house. Or, more accurately, around the bay!

Dennis LaRou and his wife Elsa live at, and run, Pelican’s Rest, the historic old house in Galveston. It was used by employees of the trusts and of the Deckhouse Designs firm in Houston, as a holiday getaway. It was very popular and often in use, as was the forty-five-foot-long party catamaran in the boathouse. Dennis had hired on a few of his nieces and a pair of nephews to act as staff and help, both in the big house and on the boat.

“Mister McCoy, a great pleasure to see you again!” Dennis stepped down off the wide steps to greet us, his hand out and a big smile on his face. “I want to thank you again for that generous raise you gave me and Elsa, I confess it had been a while and it was much appreciated.”

“Dennis, I am just sorry it took me so long to review the records and see you hadn’t had one in ten years! Ten years!” I shook my head, and his hand, then accepted a hug from his always smiling wife.

“Elsa, I swear, you look younger every time I see you.”

“Sure, and next year, I am going to compete in the Miss Galveston pageant too,” she said with a smirk, rolling her eyes. “Are you sure you aren’t Irish? ‘Course, back home on the bayou where I was raised, we called it something a mite less genteel than blarney, but you sure are full of it.”

The two had always been nice, but they had been a bit reserved the first time I showed up here. They had been unsure of their future since the house had been in a trust for five years. The previous owner, my one-time kidnapper Everett Reilly, had been in prison for multiple murders, among other crimes.

I had shown up trailing Everett’s father, Jake Reilly, and they had been worried. It had only taken a couple of visits, and us opening up the place to employees, for them to see we were serious about keeping the place, and them. A review of the records by Terry had turned up the fact they hadn’t had a raise in a decade, so I took care of that quickly, along with a hefty bonus for the pair, and authorized them to hire whatever help they felt they needed to handle the new traffic.

“Come inside, young man, I got something special on the stove, just for you!” Elsa said, pausing to give Dean a kiss on the cheek before wrapping one of her arms around one of mine and marching me towards the house.

They had been relaxed the last time I visited, but this was them being happy now and it was nice to see. Just before we entered the house, Dennis tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to cobalt blue Cadillac sitting off to the side of the house, under a carport. When he pointed to Elsa and winked, I just grinned and shrugged in return. Good for her.

Dinner was a jambalaya so hot I cried as I dished up a second helping. An ice-cold longneck helped it go down, but I was sure I was going to regret that tomorrow. Dennis just laughed at me as he watched me eat, sweat pouring down my face and mixing with the tears. He looked as cool as a cucumber. The man was a demon or something!

Afterwards, Dennis made us a drink he called a Sazerac. I have no idea what was in it, but it was mighty smooth going down and, when the third, or maybe the fifth, landed all warm and happy in your stomach, it hit you in the back of the head with a big ol’ mallet.

I was not a drinker, that much was made perfectly clear to me. You would have though I learned my lesson with Jake’s whiskey off the coast of Portugal, but oh no ... not me. Thankfully I didn’t have to deal with a bobbing, pitching, and rolling boat at sea this time. Nope, just the feeling of that smoking-hot jambalaya coming back up again.

I think I fired Dean at least twice. Some crappy bodyguard he turned out to be. I was dying over here, poisoned twice, and he was sitting with Dennis, smacking his lips as he ate crab legs and bit the heads off crawfish ... both activities guaranteed to be something a hungover teen should avoid being exposed to for any reason.

I lived though, and the following day we took the catamaran out, mostly because I missed being on the water. I hadn’t wanted to drop the E-Key into the water in Key West. We were only there for a week and she would have had to be professionally pickled again when we left. Other than a couple of rentals at the new properties I had visited, and a ski boat that came with the house in Nags Head, North Carolina, I had been landlocked for almost a year.

I was really looking forward to this trip. We were going to take my baby down, through the Panama Canal, and then up the coast again. We would check out San Diego, LA, Santa Barbara, San Luis, Monterey, San Francisco and then up to Seattle, though I really doubted I would choose anything that far north.

If nothing made me fall in love, then it was Hawaii, here we come! I did want to go back to school, get a business degree so I would understand what Terry and his folks were doing with my money. What I didn’t want to do was rush it. There was no rule saying I had to hurry, right?

I finally got a look at the Eternity, that one-hundred and fifty-foot rental yacht down at Pelican Rest Marina. She was extra cool because while she had a motor that could push her along at about fifteen knots, she was a three-masted sailing ship, the kind that conquered the seven seas!

Maybe those were bigger, but the point remains, it was a real sailing ship! Her Captain was aboard and, after a word from the Marina manager, he was very friendly. He walked me through the riggings and the absolutely amazing automation that had been put in place to make life easier on her crew.

Sails could be raised, lowered, turned, and angled all by computer control from the sea bridge like the controls on the E². She would easily do twenty knots at full sail, he told me proudly, his hand caressing the controls. I might have laughed, once, but I knew how he felt. I was the same when I got behind the controls of my big baby!

He had a charter leaving that evening, so no joy rides for me, but I vowed to get some real sailing time in, to learn what it took to control a big bitch like the Eternity!

The morning of the eighth day in Galveston found me out on the roof of the boathouse, perched on a folding chair with a cup of coffee balanced on my knee. I was scanning Offut’s Bayou inlet, watching for my boat to arrive. The storage docks were about twenty miles south and they promised to be at my dock by nine in the morning. It was now eight thirty and ... YES!

She looked fantastic coming around Teichman Point. I could see whoever was piloting the boat gave her some juice and threw up a rooster tail behind her as she squatted and picked up speed. Man, she was moving!

Thankfully, they didn’t push it and throttled back before they got near traffic. I would have been more than a little upset if they had been hotdogging and hurt someone. Or my boat. Mostly my boat.

I swallowed the last of the lukewarm coffee in my mug and stood, turning to yell back at the house. I was going to let them know that the E² was almost here but, it turned out, there was no need.

Dean, Dennis, and Elsa were sitting in folding chairs down at the foot of the dock, watching me! I could see them laughing and I knew I must have seemed like a little kid at Christmas, but I didn’t care.

I made sure to police up my chair and the binoculars too, taking them down the ladder into the apartment over the boat bay. Then it was down the stairs and to the end of the dock where, by this time, the E² was slowly edging her way in. Those bow and stern thrusters were amazingly helpful with a boat that big!

Dean and I ended up spending another day there at Pelican’s Rest. By the time we got the gear all re-loaded on to the E², we still had to go and get provisions and all the amenities like toilet paper and the what have you. The lists I had put together when we stripped her down for storage came in really handy in reversing the effort.

One of the things that almost managed to put me in a funk was the discovery that we had stored away clothing. Specifically, Deb and Cam’s clothing that had been left aboard. Bathing suits, bikinis, shorts, shirts ... everything a woman would need on a boat was there.

Dean was the smart one, he insisted that we stow it all away in Deb’s old cabin. You never know when stuff like that would come in handy, he said. He could have left out the smart-ass remarks about damsels in distress and Don Quixote.

It was almost lunchtime the following day before I thought we were ready to shake her down. I wanted to check out everything to make sure she was sound before I headed south. It might be harder to get repairs done, electronics serviced and so on in places like Mexico and Panama, so it was better to just not need it in the first place.

With a fond farewell (I like that term, it rolls off the tongue) we bid adieu to Dennis and Elsa. He just grinned at my enthusiasm and waved, but Elsa handed me a Tupperware bowl and told me to just stick it in the cooler, I would want it later! A quick sniff confirmed my suspicion, jambalaya!

No Sazeracs this time though, they are just plain evil.

It was a quick exit of Offut’s Bayou into West Bay. From there, it was an hour and half, what with the speed limits and traffic, before we hit San Luis Pass, our gateway back into the Gulf of Mexico.

Chapter 2 »