Chapter 3

My brain was dead certain that this trip was going to be a complete waste of time. I was being too impatient, I kept thinking, and I should have stayed on post watching Wallace's car, for days if necessary. Probably he and his buddies were just having a private drinking session and wouldn't grab their car for a bit of the old fashioned ultra-violence until late, maybe even not until the wee hours of the morning. Right now during the peak of summer the parties often didn't quit until dawn and drunk unwary coeds could be found for easy pickings at virtually every beachfront dive. Normally on a stakeout I had the patience to sit and wait out my quarry, but not tonight for some reason. My gut just wouldn't let me sit still and do nothing and my nerves just became worse the further south towards the Southern Glades I drove.

The rain, which started to drizzle about the time I reach Kendall began to fall harder and harder still until by the time I reached Homestead I could barely see the highway in front of me. This storm, a rather lazy and ill-motivated band of heavy rain clouds named Tropical Depression #9, had been drifting north for days after forming just off of the coast of Cancun and then crossing Cuba to reach us. The storm hadn't bothered to get itself organized into anything resembling a properly named tropical storm and it really didn't pack much for wind, but it did have rain – and lots of it.

PI's are supposed to have a love/hate relationship with rain. It certainly helps hide you when you're on surveillance, but on the other hand it also helps hide the bad guys too. Personally, I love the sun and spend altogether too much of my time sunning out on the local clothing-optional beach when I should have been in my office waiting for customers or out trying to drum up some work. I was one of the few people in my unit in Iraq that didn't mind being out in the desert, but then again more than a few people suggested, not always altogether kindly, that I was a reptile by nature anyway. I don't necessarily disagree. Besides, I'm not a PI, I'm just a private security consultant who has taken a few too many wrong turns in life.

Another good reason to curse the rain was that it was getting increasingly harder to compare my location on my laptop map with what I was actually seeing outside of my car windows. The moment I was off of Highway 1 the trappings of civilization began to disappear quickly. Being only a few feet above sea level, this area usually get scoured by at least one hurricane or tropical storm each hurricane season, and at some point the residents begin to just give up and move to some place both dryer and safer. Flood insurance and storm coverage rates tripling in the last few years certainly didn't help either. This was definitely not prime real estate, even for Florida.

In short, I was now just about utterly lost in a marshy sort of no-man's land somewhere inbetween civilization and the Southern Everglades, where every other house was either wrecked by an old storm, being flooded by the current storm, or already abandoned and sinking into marshgrass or swamp. I read once in the newspaper that the Everglades were said to be shrinking, but that writer had never traveled down these roads!

About three blocks from where I guesstimated the Curtiss house was, right smack on the squishy edge of the Southern Glades, I entirely lost track of where the
dirt street was as it flooded over to the point where it was hard to tell where the road ended and marsh began. Not a good idea to drive through that, especially since I hadn't seen a working street light in about half a mile. Even I've got enough sense not to try swimming my way through that! Unlike Wally-boy, I don't have a four-wheel drive car. My Honda is a twelve year old clunker, it's cheap and it's reliable ... but it doesn't float well or sit very high above the ground. In high water it was going to get stuck, then stall and then flood ... all of which were very bad things, especially since I didn't think I could even afford the cost of a tow truck now, let alone some serious repair work at a mechanic.

My options were now very limited. If I had any sense I would have just turned around and gotten back on the highway north, to return to staking out the produce yard. If I'd had even more sense, I'd have given up and gone south instead, home to Key Largo, a warm bed, and an inbox full of bills that I couldn't pay.

Having less than no sense, I pulled into the very first concrete driveway that I could see. The pavement was raised up a good bit, maybe nearly two feet above street level, and that gave me as good of a place to park and wait out the storm as one could hope for or expect down here. Squinting at the building sign through the heavy rain, I could just make something like Ike's Garage, and there seemed to be something like an auto junkyard sprawling across the neighboring lots around the building. This was worth a closer look and staying on the pavement I was able to drive around in back and park next to some other junked cars.

The place looked utterly deserted and abandoned but you just can't always tell about these sorts of places. Junk collectors can be a tad eccentric, and the owner might even live on the premises inside the old garage, so I banged on the back door with a bent piece of rusted tailpipe for about five minutes and then did the same at the front door. No answer. Odds were that this place was indeed abandoned, and seemed a pretty decent place to hide my car.

I was going to have to do those last three blocks in the rain on foot, but I supposed that things could have been worse. I opened the trunk and put on my set of night-ops gear, all black, but not nearly waterproof enough and then grabbed my gun belt and backpack. I was traveling light on this mission. Alright, I had grabbed some stuff from home that I thought might be useful if things got nasty and I'd stuffed them into my backpack in the trunk a few days ago. Ok, by 'stuff' I probably meant enough goodies to start a small war, but then again I don't like going into possible danger unprepared.

Still, I wasn't happy about leaving my car so close to a possible crime scene, one of the few standing structures in the entire area, but with the flooding I was pretty much stuck and out of other options. Besides, my plan was to just look things over for now. Really. I'd be back at the car in half an hour – two hours tops.

What could possibly go wrong?

For this operation to be a success, I needed to be able to do four distinct things. I was going to have infiltrate myself quietly and secretly across three marshy blocks with water up to at least my knees into an unknown residence, gain surreptitious access inside, gather my needed intel, and then egress securely out. None of these things were particularly my forte. I may have been a US Marine (and a good one!) but most of my time I'd worked in a Supply unit. Usually not a whole lot of daring derring-do done there! The operative word being 'usually', but that's another story.

Still, I'd been taught a few deviously twisted things over the years, and by professionals. I more or less even had the proper equipment for the job and this wasn't quite the first time I'd stuck my nose into awkward or dangerous places. Or even the tenth.

My black jeans were fine for this reconnaissance, but I thought my black silk shirt was a bit too shiny and short-sleeved, so I covered it up with a night cammo jacket. It was even a bit rainproof, but I was already utterly soaked to the skin so that didn't matter much anymore. My boots were dark colored as well, and actually of a men's brand, size and model a bit bigger than they needed to be. I've got big feet and with two pairs of socks on the men's tactical boots were a good but loose fit. I was going to leave footprints, but unless I was seen or unusually careless no one would know that they had been left by a woman. Gloves, a black ski mask and a pair of night vision goggles completed the ensemble. All I needed was a big sack to load stolen swag.

The goggles were very good milspec grade, 'borrowed' from my previous employer, Blackhawk Security Services before I'd gone independent. I'd had to leave that job in a big hurry a few years ago and hadn't managed to grab much in the way of goodies on my rather hasty exit out the door. Fair enough, they were shooting at me at the time, but I'd had a few things out on loan already, like the goggles. There was some reckoning coming on that old debt as well. Someday. Some things you can't forgive or forget and I was pretty sure that one day that old account was going to reappear in my life and with a big red 'past due' notice. For once I had done the right thing - but almost too late, and I was lucky to get out with my life. I'd let the situation slide in the years since and had more or less walked away scott-free ... so far. No good deed every goes unpunished, but that was a problem for another day.

With the heavy rain, no visible moon or stars, and definitely no functional streetlights for as far as the eyes could see, the night vision goggles were somewhat less helpful than I had anticipated. About every block I had to stop and clean them dry to make them useable again. I almost gave up put them back into my backpack when I saw a pinprick of light just up ahead and to the left, down a driveway and back behind some trees. With that sudden tiny flash quickly gone I could see nothing there, but I began to exercise greater caution anyway. I hadn't wanted to go crawling through the swampy ground to my left so I had been scurrying along down the flooded street instead, but I was more than suspicious that I'd now be seen sneaking down that flooded dirt driveway towards the Curtiss house. Crawling in the mud and sometimes hip deep water was a lot better than standing out in the open waiting to get shot at!

After crawling up just close enough to verify the street address number on the small marker at the end of the driveway, I slunk back over to the left, into the marshy area and stayed down low until I was in the cover of the trees. Now that I was about halfway down towards the house and with a decent sized tree for rain cover, I squeegee'd off my goggles one last time and took a closer look around. My tiny lightpoint was back, but this time now that I was closer and a bit better covered out of the rain I could that there was a man sitting on the porch of the house smoking a cigarette. As I watched him for a few minutes he took out his lighter and lit up another smoke, causing another small light flare similar to what I had seen from the road. In this weather, without his light for a focus, it would have been extremely unlikely that I would have seen him before now, and if I'd gone down that wide open driveway he in fact might have seen me first.

Now that I (hopefully) had the drop on my unsuspecting guard, I began to slowly move myself better into position and I kept down low under cover. The heavy rain and gloom made it extremely unlikely that he could see me, even as I moved closer in towards him from the left side of the house, keeping the porch between us as cover. As for sound, the loud drumming of the rain suppressed every other sound around us. A water buffalo could have been stomping past behind me and I'd have never heard a thing.

This made me nervous too and I kept constantly looking around. When something looks too easy, there's usually something important that you've missed ... or else your opponent is stupid, or just lazy. For the moment, I decided to chalk this one up to lazy but I didn't want to make a habit of this.

In this case, I decided after about twenty minutes of circling around the house looking for a second guard and not finding any trace of one, that my opponent was just a bit too overconfident and lazy, not really doing his job and just trying to stay dry out of the rain. I didn't much blame him really; the weather did suck, and in the darkness of the corner of the front porch of the house he did have an excellent vantage point that covered the whole length of the driveway. To get a look inside the house, which seemed to be dark and quiet, I would first have to do something about the guard.

I know just what you're thinking. One quick rifle shot from the trees or a single pistol shot from in close next to the deck would easily and fairly quietly take care of him, but there was just one slight problem with that ... that would have been cold blooded murder. I don't do that sort of thing anymore. Plus, I hadn't brought along a rifle, or I'd have really strongly considered it.

Sure, I was expecting to find the den of sociopathic serial killers, but there was a possibility, slim but nevertheless existent, that there was a real James Curtiss, and he was entirely an innocent individual. Maybe he was some fringe Everglades nutter whose identity had been borrowed. There was no shortage of those types, but that was hardly a death penalty offense ... even in Florida. Heck, if I lived out here on the ass edge of nowhere, with the swamp just right in back of my house, I'd sit with a shotgun on my own porch too, for the alligators alone, not to mention the alleged 'bigfoot' and-or swamp monster sightings. Swamps are seriously bad craziness and you have to respect them or they will suck you down and go 'nom nom' on your bones instead.

I hate swamps and I'd go back to the Iraq desert in a heartbeat before I'd take an Everglades tour again for fun. At least in the desert you can see them coming for you a long ways away and have lots of time and space to shoot first.

In the end, I decided to wuss out and just taser the guy. I'd about 89% decided that the fellow was a bad-guy but that wasn't quite enough at the moment for me to just pull a trigger on him. Besides, I needed information ... and he was going to give it to me. If I discovered afterwards that I'd fucked up and merely bunged up some local swamp rat, I'd just say 'oopsie' and sidle back off to my car. Maybe pretend that I'd innocently gotten lost trying to find my buddy's methamphetamine brewing trailer. Stuff happens like that down in these parts.

My top-end professional taser gun was supposedly good up to about 40 feet but I wouldn't have tried that long of a shot in this pouring rain, even without all that much of any serious wind. In any case, the north side of the cabin blocked most of the wind anyway, so I just sprang up on the east side of the porch railing and made my shot from about 20 feet, aiming for center mass and pretty much hit it. The prongs penetrated and my gunsel went straight down into a heap jerking as all of the lovely voltage rewired all of his muscle groups into jello. Less than a minute later I had my victim restrained securely with tie-wraps around both his hands and feet and the contents of his pockets laid out on the porch deck while I idly kept him covered with my Glock 32 at his head.

My young guard didn't look like much. A punk just barely of legal drinking age with a South Miami address on his driver's license. The photo looked like him so it was probably legit. My best initial guess was that he was low ranking muscle for the Watters who did what he was told and didn't ask much in the way of questions. His wallet contained four hundred dollars in crisp new sequential bills and I relieved him of the burden of carrying them around any further. This didn't begin to cover my expenses of the last few weeks but it would let me fill up my gas tank and buy some ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next week or two until I could earn some real money again. I did let him keep the two unused condoms but he wasn't likely to need them where he was going.

I looked over the rest of his pocket contents and didn't find much of interest except for a pocketful of 12 gauge shotgun shells and the Glock 19 he had stuffed in the back of his jeans. I muttered to myself that keeping a Glock shoved down flossing your asscheeks was just asking for them to get shot off, but like the hypocrite that I was I did the exact same thing. Glocks don't have a hard safety switch but instead used a safe action trigger with three internal safeties. I love Glocks too, but I missed having a safety ... but not enough to not nuzzle this backup piece down my crack where the sun did quite often shine. The issue of toting a lame ass 9mm on a regular basis was another matter.

In my not particularly humble opinion, 9mm ammo rounds are only suitable for plinking at targets at the gun range. I had to carry the Beretta M9 in the big sandbox, but the moment I went into the private security business afterwards I ditched the 9mm for something more vigorous. I never had the wrists for handling (and loving) the venerable .45, but after a lot of testing dozens of guns at the firing range I fell in love with my Glock 32, which shoots the beefed up .357 SIG round. It fires about the same weight slug as the pea shooting 9mm, usually about 124 grams, and zips merrily towards its target even faster than the 9mm, depending if you buy the good stuff like Speer Gold Dots or the cheap crap on sale to use for range fodder.

Mass + Velocity = Ouch! 502 ft/lbs. energy vs the 9mm's wimpy 384 ft/lbs. energy.

The math says my Glock 32 hits way harder than a .45. but the ballistics jello tests I've seen rank them pretty close, but in any case the .357 SIG works works out nicely for me. Even with the bigger boom, it doesn't rock my hands too much when fired in my smaller hands, or maybe I'm just used to it. It's also a very common ammo used by local law enforcement in the area, especially preferred by the local Everglades National Park rangers and other local feds. If I ever needed to accidentally leave behind an incriminating shell casing or two, the finder might automatically assume the shooter was a fed or local PD – and that's not a bad thing.

Up against the side of the house was a shotgun, a pretty decent Remington 870 Super Marine that I immediately coveted. The barrel was a lovely new nickel-plated steel that wouldn't rust or corrode in this or any other lifetime, had a night-sight that could have spotted me back on the street if he'd used it, and SpecOps stock. This baby was going to go right into the trunk of my car and home with me and I was going to polish it and hug it and hold it and call it 'George'. This beat the heck out of my old Remington 700 that I'd left in my trunk. It had been an ok shotgun for a weapon probably older than my father, but this baby was just too sweet to leave behind in unfriendly hands. If I'd been really clever, I should have just rushed that baby back to my car right then and there, but I decided to tote it along with me for now.

"Now..." I told my rather dejected looking captive, "you are going to talk and I am going to listen, and you're going to tell me everything I want to know or I will become extremely annoyed with you, and trust me ... you do not want that."

It helped quite a bit that I exchanged my Glock for a Ka-Bar in my hand and held the knife about two inches away from his left eye while smiling. I've been told that I have a rather evil sort of smile, as if I was plotting mayhem, mischief and severe bodily harm. In this particular case, spot on accurate!

Actually, my captive gunsel was extraordinarily helpful, or at least he became so after I effortlessly cut off two of his fingers with my razor sharp combat knife as if they were softened butter, or maybe a chicken wing. He worked for the Watters family alright, usually as a driver/bodyguard for one of the bosses, a guy named 'Chesty' McArthur, just like the old Marine hero "Chesty" Puller and probably also a remembrance to Douglas McArthur as well. I doubted if either comparison was either accurate or at all warranted.

With a little more effort, and another lost finger or two, I was given a pretty accurate (I hoped) rundown of the evening's fun ... and the cast members. Wallace and Steve Morrison were the main players and they'd been coming here for fun for years. Sometimes other crime family friends showed up to play, but not regularly. My gunsel worked for Chesty, and that player only recently started to enjoy the fun here regularly, visiting every couple of weeks or so. Wally and Steve came down here about once a week, sometimes even more often during prime tourist season during spring break or the summer. Once, my captive thug recalled, they'd handled a string of eight different girls in a period of five straight days. By any definition, the Monroe Masher and his best buddy were serious world-class serial killers.

Tonight they had gone to Chesty's house for a business meeting, done some drinking and then they had all driven down here a couple of hours ago before the storm hit. They'd all arrived together in one of the produce vans, and couple of their flunkies had come separately in a dark sedan bearing the evening's entertainment.

Apparently Wally-boy was a bit too much of a big shot these days to wrangle his own babes for an evening of non-consensual fun, and had a couple of flunkies from 'the family' he could apparently trust to do his cherry picking for him. No wonder half of the police in Florida couldn't catch Wallace doing a snatch or drugging a girl in a bar ... he had other low-life scumbags to do this menial work for him! Like this particular scumbag whining at my feet.

Upon reflection, this was actually pretty clever. They probably even made these kidnappings part of the initiation of new gang members, just the way the meaner city street gangs use robbery-homicides to bind their new recruits permanently into their little happy families. Nothing like being guilty of multiple kidnappings and accessory to their murders to keep the foot soldiers loyal to the family ... and their mouths quiet if caught by the police. This seemed to be the carrot and the stick of how the Watters family operated; the rank and file thugs were well paid and guilty of far too many felonies to ever squeal a word to outsiders. Even if someone tried to talk to the police or even just run, the Watters owned local law enforcement and the loose lips would be gator-bait within hours.

Like him or not, old Watters ran a tight ship and a frighteningly efficient criminal organization.

I'd never heard of Chesty before now and I didn't have the guy noted on my scorecard at all. I was wanting to hear about Wally-boy and his play-pal Steve and I kept steering the interrogation of my captive in that direction. In retrospect, this was somewhat of a mistake.

Tonight, the entertainment was two girls ensnared and drugged from some party place near the beach where their disappearance wouldn't be noticed. A pair of out-of-state tourists, he'd heard, probably just down here on a lark enjoying the last days of summer before school started again in a few weeks.

Then I made the dreadful mistake of asking how often Wallace and Steve conducted these little male-bonding or stress-relief exercises, and just how many girls had been brought down here these last three years on one-way visits.

I really didn't like the answer at all.

I'm the first one to admit that I never think clearly when I'm angry, which is admittedly too much of the time, so I willed myself to breathe slowly and keep my cool, all the meantime while carving off another finger or three to take the edge of my fury off. My captive gunsel cum part-time kidnapper and procurator had informed me in-between screams that 'the party' was being held about a half mile further down a swampy dirt road in a large wood cabin next to the canal. The cabin was very deserted and lonely, out on the edge of the swamp, and with a boat right there for disposing of their playmates when they completely run out of fun.

The guard had some good lungs but with the heavy rain no one was going hear anything, even after he ran out of fingers and I then started to work on toes ... and then finally his testicles and cock.

By that point, my blubbering victim had confessed to every crime that he could think of just so that he could draw another moment of air. It was almost embarrassing really. I learned quite a few things about various Watters operations and where quite a few bodies had been buried, but nothing much else that was useful to me right now.

Once I'd heard about everything I thought I wanted, I decided to make sure my now digit-less captive was tied up tight and do a little more checking around, in case I came up with any more questions, or had some more anger that I needed to channel. Now that I'd castrated him he'd eventually bleed out, but that thought didn't bother me much. One way or another, his usefulness was going to be over and done with in the next few minutes anyway.

I took a brief look inside this house, but like my captive guard said, it wasn't really used for anything other than a mailing address. Inside the furniture was old and sparse, quite dust covered and obviously unused. No food in the battered unplugged 1960's-era fridge and no stacks of drugs or cash just sitting around unwanted or unloved on the dining room table. Just lots of nothing. Again, according to my captive gunsel, all of the interesting stuff happened at the privacy of the cabin or at the boathouse at the Gulf coast dock, a few miles away down the canal.

The swamp cabin was supposed to be right on the edge of the Southern Everglades and next to a small canal that ran nearly due south into Joe Bay about five miles away. There was, my captive said, a decent sized flat bottomed fishing boat they used to travel down the canal to the boathouse right on the Gulf. At the boathouse, Wallace kept a 38' racing Catamaran Sport Cruiser that could (and often did) make late night visits to a deep little basin just off of Whiptail Reef. An excellent choice for body disposal - too much reef there for shrimp trawling and deep enough blue water to deter sport divers, and it was only about a twenty mile round trip away, less than an hour for a fast shallow-draft boat. Sometimes, the Watters also used this route to smuggle especially sensitive cargo, like major drug deals or weapons. No wonder that Wally-boy was an especially trusted and valued lieutenant, and was to be protected at all costs.

Toting along my newly acquired shotgun, I stuck to the trees shadowing the muddy dirt road. The cabin was supposed to be only about half a mile down the road, but in the knee deep semi-swamp and mud it seemed like a lot further. With the aid of the night vision goggles I was able to see the light of the cabin long before it actually came into direct view.

Yep, tonight was party central alright. Two vehicles were parked out in front, if you call being sunk in mud up to the car body being parked. One was the produce van and the other a large dark sedan. Two more guards out in front on patrol, sort of. Like my lazy captive friend back up at the house, these two were both taking long breaks under the porch to stay out of the rain. Lights were on inside the cabin which seemed to be good sized, suggested at least two large main rooms, and flickered with moving shadows that confirmed that multiple people were moving about inside. Probably three, by my captive thug's count.

So far so good – just like I had been told. Now I needed a plan – somehow my original idea of just spying on the place and then sneaking back to my car and going home didn't seem like a practical solution. I'd found my serial killer, or rather killers, and I just couldn't face the idea of backing off to plan another assault on another night. Ok, I wasn't really armed for a serious combat assault, but then again I didn't have an assault rifle in my closet at home to go retrieve for better firepower. I had one shot left in my taser and I had my Glock, along with a couple of extra thirteen round magazines for it. There was also the thug's 9mm pistol for an emergency backup. I had the tools and I had the training ... what else did I fucking need? An engraved invitation?

There would be at least five targets. This was going to be a bitch to do quickly and silently. Fortunately I didn't need most of them alive. Heck, the more I thought about it the more I decided that I didn't really need any of them alive. That cheerful thought brightened my mood significantly. I wanted Wally-boy alive and kicking, but not if it meant operational failure and/or risked my own safety unduly. If I had to, I could pull that trigger on him with little or no regret.

I still needed to think of a plan and since I didn't have any more questions for my captive gunsel I quickly decided that he had outlived his usefulness and was now an operational liability.

Returning back up the firmer parts of the roadside in a bit of a trot and without much preamble, I decided it was time to give my digit-less moaning former gangster a quick but utterly efficient rehabilitation. I grabbed his shirt collar and dragged him along with me out into the muddy driveway and gave him two .357 SIG rounds right into the back of his head. The shell casings sank into the muddy water and it was a bitch to find them both. That's why mobsters usually use revolvers for that sort of thing, but I didn't own one. The blood pool and oozing liquid brains washed away nicely out here in the almost knee deep water and his body was now much easier for me to drag along now back down the roadway closer towards the cabin. Things were started to get interesting and I'm sure my late thug would have lots of company soon.