Gaylord Dold | The Nickle Jolt – Free Sample Chapter One

Introduction

Having done three tours in Afghanistan, Marine Captain Jack Kilgore (Stanford Law) is burned out. After moving to Miami and working for a genetics tech lab, he gives the glamorous world of corporate security up for a quiet job as night watchman at a yacht harbor in Key West. He wants to fish, play poker and be left alone. Lester Dodge, a lawyer from Key Largo and poker buddy, interests Kilgore in the case of Reece Deveraux, a condemned man who is at Florida’s Starke Penitentiary, awaiting execution. When Kilgore agrees to see Maryann Deveraux, Reece’s young sister, he is moved, and begins to investigate the circumstances of the murder of Ray Puckett, whom Reece was convicted of killing eight years before. At the same time, Kilgore meets Monika Crockett, a mysterious young woman on a yacht with whom he begins a brief but tempestuous affair. Kilgore has just begun to investigate the murder of Puckett when Monika Crockett is found murdered, her body mutilated and dismembered at a condo in Key West. Because of their adulterous affair, Kilgore becomes the main suspect. Then, Kilgore must race time to defend himself against a capital murder charge while at the same time trying to clear Reece Deveraux, or to at least produce new evidence before the man is executed. Kilgore discovers uncomfortable facts about Reece’s brother Del, about Del’s relationship to Eddie Puckett, a punk drug dealer in Key Wet and Miami, who was Ray Puckett’s brother. And he finds out a lot about Monika Crockett and her wealthy evangelist husband. Will he solve both crimes in time to save both himself and a condemned man on death row?

The Nickle Jolt – Chapter One

At first light Jack Kilgore was on the road to Islamadora. He headed out of Key West on A-1A, two lanes of asphalt built largely by work squads of Florida Civilian Conservation Corpsmen, many of whom died in the great 1935 hurricane, unable to evacuate and eventually drowned in a massive tidal surge that swept the Keys, destroying everything in its path after a two-day downpour of rain. Crossing Palm Avenue where there was a single disused boat ramp and two rotting docks at the eastern edge of the city, he watched a huge red sun rise from the sea and devour the water with color, a first shower of pink spreading as slowly as blood on the bayside of the highway, then a thin trickle of rawhide and magenta color limning dual rows of coconut palms that lined the road on both sides, where now rusted hulks of fishing vessels stood abandoned. Ten miles down the road at Big Coppit, he bought fresh coffee to-go from a McDonald’s and nursed it all the way to Big Pine, where the sun finally gained height above the palms and windblown key pines, off to his right shoulder where it burned yellow on water not ten feet deep and glowing as if it had been doused with gasoline and set on fire.

Suddenly he remembered Herat, his recon-group stumbling onto a poppy field in the mountains just outside a bivouac for suspected Taliban, where a thousand red flowers were like bullet wounds against the black granite background of the hills. The colors of Afghanistan were gray and red, sometimes black shaded with orange, and you could stumble onto a dense blanket of green date palms being cultivated in slash-valleys and oases, or, more spectacularly, a poppy field where two old men in white caftans stooped, digging weeds against the backdrop of fifteen-thousand foot peaks. Unlike western Afghanistan where the earth was black and gray, all the Keys were white crushed limestone surrounded by miles of turquoise water, and there were no minefields at the river crossings and nobody shooting at you from arcs of cliff at eight thousand feet, no shadowy squads skipping up through snowfields, pushing a cave-to-cave warfare in your face, only to disappear into a blush of nothingness at sunset. War was color, Kilgore decided, which was another way of thinking that truth had disappeared in the day-to-day grind seek-and-destroy, leaving Marines like him with nothing but his buddies and his ammo. He was a Marine and he was not a Marine, and on the long 70-mile journey to Islamadora to go fishing, he found himself studying the roadsides for Improvised Explosive Devices, as if suddenly a postbox might burst open like some alien Being and brush the world with burning shrapnel hurtling his way at the speed of sound. They said you never heard the one that killed you.

At Marathon he bought a case of Heineken, stowing the beer in the back, then rolled down the windows in his old Chevy Bronco, a car he’d purchased in Miami from a divorced taxi-driver, and let a warm October sun stream inside. It was Sunday morning, traffic was light, with just a few cars full of day-trippers heading south for some snorkeling or picnicking, trucks here and there hurrying down to Key West making deliveries. A curt onshore wind broke then, leaning against the palms and making a steady clicking sound. Kilgore relaxed and drove, trying to ignore his presentiment of roadside bombs, and as he’d done so many times before in the past four years, letting the memories of his mother and father drift away like smoke. Settling in at forty-five mph behind a flat-bed truck hauling sacks of cement, Kilgore froze himself in time at age six, a tow-headed kid riding a paint horse up through acres of avocado groves to where local citrus farmers had constructed two small reservoirs to water their groves. Colors again, this time a sere brown broom of classic chaparral framed by a glittering blue southern California sky, an utterly cloudless blue, and Kilgore remembered turning his horse due south and from a hillside being able to see his mother half a mile away standing under the shade of an Australian monkey puzzle, hands-on-hips. A deep well of angry sickness that was half lonely fear passed quickly through him as he recalled his mother, like a vein of electricity slipping inside his heart. On his last day at Pendleton, standing outside the gate in civilian clothes, one of his buddies had said, “You’ll never be nothing but a Marine.” Alone now in the world, Kilgore thought, it could be worse.

He passed the Upper Matacombes and turned left off the highway at a faded wooden sign that read: DISMAL BONEFISHERS.

A rutted limestone lane not ten feet wide led off into pine barrens and sawgrass hammocks where in summer swales of mosquitoes drifted like humming clouds. Now, in October, a steady morning sun streamed down through the pines, and once Kilgore thought he caught a glimpse of an elusive Keys deer, a tiny creature brought almost to extinction by the relentless press of concrete. A mile in, the pines broke to where a clearing revealed the existence of one large cedar-frame fishing shack and tackle shop, an outbuilding made of limestone and pine, and a line of small skiffs tied to a single rotting dock. The skipping-south sun cast shadows on the water northward, turning it dark green.

An old man named Jake Liamsson stood on the sagging porch of the bait shop wearing painter’s coveralls and an undershirt. Kilgore parked under a pine and off-loaded the beer, a cooler full of bologna and crab sandwiches, his fishing gear, and a leather pouch containing four Dominican cigars. Liammson presented Kilgore with a cup of Cuban coffee. They sat for a time together on the veranda, enjoying the shriek of pied crows and the vaudeville-like pantomime of some wandering mockingbirds.

“You still working as a night-watchman?” Liammson asked finally, a man of few words.

Kilgore had picked the Dismal Bonefishers camp on account of its obvious stench of failure. He had wanted no part of glad-handing fishing guides dressed in two-thousand-dollar Back Bay pants and vests, with their Abercrombie seventeen-hundred-dollar bamboo rods and flashy Orvis sunglasses. He’d found Liammson the way he’d found the Taliban, by walking out into the bush. As a matter of habit now, he drove up to Dismal camp on Sunday morning, not due back in Key West until Monday night at eleven o’clock, when his gig at the marina began.

“I’ve had the job only six weeks,” Kilgore said, knowing that Liamsson considered anything short of bonefishing a waste of time. He liked Liammson, who knew at age eighty the prospect of death. Kilgore had learned a lot about bonefishing from Liammson, who’d taken him out on the water every morning for weeks. Liammson had not been a Marine, but he had fought in the Norse underground.

After a breakfast of eggs and bacon, the two men skiffed over to Dismal Key, a seven-mile glide that took no longer than forty-five minutes, keeping their speed down by using a trolling motor only. They fished all day and spent the night at a rustic cabin on the south side of Dismal Key, a structure erected by Liammson himself consisting of one large room, a propane stove and handmade cabinets, a sink, two cane chairs, a rattan sofa, and two single-metal-frame beds with thin mattresses.

On Monday they were up at dawn, skiffing to a stand of red mangrove about six miles off the mainland. In dawn-light the water was turquoise to ten feet, egrets prowling the shore of the key in middle distances. In the shallows, bonefish tailed for shrimp and crab, but the clarity of the water and an east breeze made casting to their noses impossible. Like the Taliban, these bonefish were elusive predators, unafraid, but stealthy in their instincts and able to elude big men weighted down by technology. At nine o’clock, the two men rested in a lee of mangrove and drank some coffee that Liammson had brought. Not long after, they ate some crab and bologna sandwiches, having lunch at ten because they’d been up so long and fishing had made them hungry. Their plan was to circle the key, fishing away from the wind and in the lee of the island where they thought the fish would be moving toward shoaling shrimp at six feet. They chased the sun off their backs, and fished into the shadows. Kilgore caught two, Liammson caught a big one that might have weighed two pounds and looked like a lozenge of pure silver, and then they hooked six or seven, losing count of the ones they failed to hook. The sun rose and the wind picked up to six knots and at noon a cold front crossed Dismal Key and killed the fishing.

Kilgore poled them due east where they anchored off the point of Dismal Key under an umbrella of sunlight.

“It’s over,” Kilgore said referring to the fishing, biting into a second crab and bologna sandwich on stale French bread. Liammson looked at the sky, now grey, a fleece over the sun. Liammson studied the brandy bottle as though contemplating a dark universal secret. He said nothing, merely nodding in agreement.

The temperature had dropped ten degrees in five minutes. Florida Bay was the color of iron. Kilgore felt a sudden chill, and put on a cable-knit sweater and studied the cloud patterns for a sign of changes in weather. Kilgore stowed the skiff-pole and tossed what remained of his sandwich into the shallow water for turtles to eat. Dismal Key was off to the south now, a hump of sand and limestone covered by stooped cedars and a few hammocks. Liammson was stripping in line. The old man produced a bottle of cheap brandy from a waterproof pouch and drank directly from it, a sure sign that the fishing was killed.

Kilgore caught the gaze of a brown pelican perched on the lower branch of a lone mahogany tree nearby. He thought back to that brilliant September day in Palo Alto when he’d seen Diane sitting in the front row of Contracts class at Law School. Jack had been somewhere in the middle of the two hundred students, and like them, felt lost and anonymous, but Diane had sat in the front row. She’d entered the huge classroom with its banked rows of seats and looked up at two hundred faces as though she were the Queen of England. It impressed Jack then, and the memory of it impressed him now. Somehow in his mind, he associated this memory of Diane with the memory of his mother that October Sunday when he’d ridden up to the two reservoirs on his paint horse named Annie, when he’d turned the horse and seen his mother under the monkey puzzle with her hands on her hips. Brown, the color of his mother’s skin, his mother who’d been a champion swimmer at Stanford. Blonde, the color of Diane’s hair. You’re nothing but a Marine, somebody telling him from the other side of the world.

From Stanford Law, Jack Kilgore had joined the Marines to follow in the footsteps of his father, who’d enlisted directly off the farm in South Dakota. Kilgore had served ten years, a decade which had passed like a dream, starting with a few years on standard JAG duty in San Diego where he and Diane lived hand-to-mouth in tolerably shabby rental property near the University, then two years on counter-intelligence work before going to Afghanistan after 9/11. People often asked him in those days, “What’s your wife doing, Jack?” Kilgore sitting in a crummy post-bar nursing a beer. He might have answered, if he’d known: She’s falling out of love with me, asshole. Another question: “For God’s sake, you’re a damn lawyer, what are you doing walking around with some CIA shitheel, burning poppy fields and taking enemy fire?”

It took Kilgore a year to leave the Marines. He joined Halliburton, where he thought he’d forget about Diane and drown himself in money. The money was there but so was Diane, his ex-wife stealing his dreams until one day he found himself divorced not only from Diane but from Halliburton too, Kilgore living in an expensive Bayside apartment building in Miami, working as chief of security for a biotech firm in Miami Beach, a full continent away from his old life. He’d sit in his apartment above the bay and drink mojitos and watch sunsets ripping fire across the city, which he imagined being napalmed. And then one August day Jack Kilgore packed up his used Chevy Bronco and headed to Key West, which was, as much as anywhere else on this over-used and crowded planet, the end of things.

He thought he’d find himself by losing himself.

Liammson skiffed them back to Dismal camp where both men cleaned and stowed their gear. It was Halloween and the weather was perfect. In another month, snowbirds from Canada would descend on the Keys, filling up the motels and resorts where they’d fly their Maple Leaf Flags and get drunk and watch the Montreal weather on CNN. But for now, Kilgore drove back on A-1A, which was nearly deserted on Monday afternoon. He got to Key West about three o’clock, crossed town on Roosevelt Boulevard, and found a place to park off Angela Street under the boughs of an aging lime tree, just beneath the back veranda of the house where he rented three rooms from an elderly conch and her maiden daughter. From the second story he had a view of the Key West Cemetery just across Angela Street, and beyond that a sea of pastel shotgun houses, coconut palms and narrow lanes all the way to the Caribbean and, ninety miles over, to Cuba, invisible but weighty in the mind. The noise and grit of tourist Key West lay one mile distant to the west along Duval Street. Neighborhood dogs often set up a racket, especially in the morning. But for the most part, Angela Street was peaceful.

Jack Kilgore was a night watchman at Key West’s exclusive Seaport Marina. He was thirty-eight years old and in good health. He was divorced and he had no children. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed two hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. He had an anchor tattoo on his right forearm.

He was a ghost in the looking glass.

Everybody said Lennie Perkin’s wife Karla looked like Andie MacDowell. They’d met at the Fountainbleu in Miami when Lennie had gone up to the city for a conference about forensic profiling put on by the Sheriff’s Association of South Florida. By this time Lennie had been on the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department staff for two years and had worked his way up to assistant investigator to an old conch sheriff set to retire. Karla was a travel agent assigned to hook up conventioneers with rental cars, special tours of Parrot Jungle, and other diversionary what-not. When Lennie caught sight of her in the main lobby of the big hotel, he didn’t think automatically of Andie MacDowell, but he did notice her freckled face and fancy smile, not fifteen seconds before he decided he’d try to make significant contact. She was wearing a polka-dot sundress that was being kicked up by a breeze sweeping through the atrium. Her legs were spectacular.

Perkins slammed the door of his gray Buick, a stripped down police model with lousy tires and no CD player. It was Halloween afternoon, and pretty soon all the freaks in an already freaky city would stalk the streets under a pale gibbous moon. Every Halloween Key West exploded in wild bouts of paranoid splendor, every gay in town putting on a show that was the equivalent to an explosion of ten tons of cultural TNT, outdoing Las Vegas in its wildest dreams. Lennie would try to get home to his cottage on Truman Avenue and spend some time with Karla and the kids, maybe watch a video. He hoped his pager wouldn’t buzz, so he could make the plan work.

But now the sun was casting a lemony light on Angela Street, a scrim of purple clouds on the eastern horizon over the Atlantic. The breeze was turning offshore, clicking through the palms. From his position on the street he could see Jack Kilgore standing in skivvies and a T-shirt on the second story veranda of his house. He was eating something out of a blue bowl.

Lennie was wearing a tan gabardine suit cut in Palm Beach style, and just for a moment he thought he must have looked like a cop, but then decided you could say that about a lot of people. Maybe it was the straw hat with its purple band and the red bow-tie. What a caricature. Jesus it’s cold, he thought to himself, realizing that a cold front had crossed the Keys that day. Am I the only guy in the world who loves his job and his wife and his kids? Lennie was a native of the Keys, his great-grandparents on both sides having come down to work in the cigar factories from the sugar plantations of the Everglades. They were conchs through-and-through, a status that was as dangerous as being gut-shot. Karla had French Cajun blood and their four boys were as wild as hyenas. Well over six feet tall with dark brown skin and black hair, Lennie was the only homicide detective on the sheriff’s staff, a single-handed major crimes unit.

He locked the Buick. At the top of a narrow flight of stairs in the back of the house, Perkins found the back door to Kilgore’s apartment unlocked as always. They played poker there twice a month, Lennie usually winning. Out on the veranda Kilgore was drinking fresh lemonade. Lennie declined an offer of lemonade and sat down on a porch swing while Kilgore continued to stand in his skivvies and stare out at Angela Street, Key West south to the Caribbean, and someplace else Perkins couldn’t fathom. Inside Kilgore there was a core of something impenetrable. Perkins, a natural investigator, was still curious about it.

“How about a beer?” Kilgore offered.

“I’m going home pretty soon,” Perkins told him. “I’ll have one there.”

Lennie Perkins knew he gave off smoke. He and Kilgore admired one another, if for no other reason than basic decency and a willingness to suspend questions. In many ways they were alike, and in many ways different, Kilgore alone and Perkins surrounded by wife and children. But they knew they could defend their foxhole. Kilgore excused himself to go inside and put on some jeans and a sweater. When he got back he was carrying another lemonade.

“Do any good over there?” Perkins asked, referring to bonefishing on Dismal Key, the entire irresponsible enterprise of fishing on Sunday morning.

Kilgore talked about the big ones they’d caught, the half-a-dozen escapees. “When the weather changed we got into brandy,” Kilgore admitted.

Lennie was watching a Bahamian family in the cemetery, one adult with a guitar and four kids dressed in Star Wars costumes. One of the parents was costumed as a ghost. The grass was green and the tombstones gray and the kids were climbing over the tombstones making noise. Long shadows played in the palms and some mockingbirds were grace-noting the wind.

“You’re asking yourself, ‘what is Lennie doing here'”?, Perkins said, leaning on a veranda rail. A lime tree in the front yard rustled. He glanced at Kilgore, who was watching the Bahamian family too. Kilgore noticed and shrugged like a man who’d just found his front tires going flat.

“I’m not asking myself anything,” Kilgore said.

Perkins sat down on the porch swing. “I know a girl,” he said. “She has mucho trouble, frere.”

“How’s Karla?” Kilgore asked.

“Karla is fine. The kids are fine. I’m fine.”

Kilgore smiled ruefully. “You’ve gone and said it,” he offered. “You’ve used the words girl and trouble in the same sentence.”

“Two sentences,” Perkins said.

“All right, two sentences.”

Perkins was rarely non-plussed. He sat enjoying the scent of lemon blossoms from somewhere down the street. The Bahamian kids were screeching with delight at being offered candy by an adult wearing a white ghost costume. Sometimes—not often—Perkins tried to add up Jack Kilgore and get a total. He’d sum up Stanford Law, the Marine Corps and terrorism investigation, put it together with combat in Afghanistan and security for Halliburton. What would he get? He’d get nothing. What was missing? Well, for one thing, Diane was missing, and the other man was missing, and when you put it all together none of it equalled a night security job down at the Seaport Marina, an ex-Marine big-shot like Jack Kilgore walking circles around fancy yachts.

Well, of course, yachts don’t shoot back. But Perkins knew Kilgore was no coward.

“You may as well tell me,” Kilgore was saying, waking Perkins from a mini-daydream involving Karla’s long luscious legs and a moon spidering light onto the surface of Florida Bay. Every life was half-dark, poised to disappear. When Perkins woke from his mini-dream, Kilgore was regarding him the way a robin might regard a worm.

“The girl is named Maryann Deveraux,” Perkins said. “She’s fifteen years old. She lives with her mother in a trailer court called Summerland south of Islamadora about two miles. You go right past it on your way to Dismal Bonefishers camp.”

“She’s a conch, isn’t she?” Kilgore asked. Natives of the Keys referred to themselves as conchs, setting their kind off from the tourists and Gays who’d flooded Key West, and from the developers and charter-boaters who’d gobbled all the best properties from Key Largo south. “You know her family?” Kilgore concluded.

“I know her uncle who shrimped out of Cedar Key until he lost an arm,” Perkins said.

Kilgore sat on the balustrade looking down through a veil of lime leaves at the cemetery where the Bahamian family was packing up to leave. Soon the kids would be going door to door amid the shotgun houses and stately mansions. He envied their mental freedom.

“So what’s her problem?” Kilgore asked Perkins, the two men bathed in a cold setting-sun glow.

“Her brother is on death row at Starke,” Perkins said deadpan, his voice a deep basso profundo that hinted at thunder. People called the Flordia Correctional Facility simply Starke, a term that seemed to set it apart from its own semantic roots, a low-slung concrete hothouse surrounded by barbed wire and fields of cotton.

Kilgore had seen Starke once, taking back roads so he could admire the oaks bearded by Spanish moss and lose himself on the Blue Highways. Perkins handed Kilgore the black and white photograph of an attractive schoolgirl whose bright smile was framed by a halo of frizzy golden hair. She looked like anybody’s happy daughter on her way home from a swim meet, one more teenager carrying a pair of flippers in her right hand. In the deep background was ocean and horizon. Kilgore forced himself to study the photograph, his better judgment deferring to another kind of instinct altogether.

“Who is she?” Kilgore asked. He was an outsider afraid of being drawn inside. He worried that this photograph would involve him somehow.

“Her brother is down to his final appeals,” Perkins said, ignoring Kilgore’s question. “Word has it that he’s giving up the fight and is going to submit to the execution, even though he has protested his innocence all along.”

“How long has he been up there?”

“Eight years,” Perkins answered.

The failing afternoon light was transporting Kilgore back eight years, an effort to reclaim lost ground. In the mid-90’s he’d been in San Diego sprinting around brigs and courtrooms putting the hammer on deserters and drug smugglers. He’d been in love with Diane, imagining how it would be when they were old together on a beach in Mexico. He looked forward to it then, Captain Kilgore dressed in Marine green and looking smart as hell growing old with his beautiful wife. At the same time somebody else had been on death row for three years.

“Does this have anything to do with Lester Dodge?” Kilgore asked. Dodge was a self made millionaire-lawyer with offices in Key Largo, who represented big-shot land developers, Indian casino operators, pollution lobbyists in Tallahassee who regularly horse-traded credits for affluent rights in the Everglades. “Is Lester representing the inmate?” Kilgore continued, knowing that Dodge, in addition to his business practice, had a vendetta against the death penalty. Once or twice Dodge had met Kilgore at Dismal Bonefishers camp where they both engaged their passion for fishing. After that, Dodge had joined their poker games when he was in town.

“The inmate is this little girl’s brother,” Perkins said, gesturing toward the photograph which was still cradled in Kilgore’s right hand. “And Lester is in the middle of a last round of habeus petitions.”

“So, who is she really?” Kilgore asked, feeling something break inside his head. Maybe it was time to leave himself for someone else, he thought.

“I told you,” Perkins said. “Her name is Maryann. She’s a fine girl. It’s that simple, no tricks.” Lennie laughed an uncharacteristically nervous little laugh and caught himself up short. “Look, Jack,” he said, “I thought a guy like yourself, Stanford Law grad, guy with his days free, guy with a social conscience and a good heart and plenty of smarts might help a little conch girl like Maryann. Lester is doing the paperwork, but you know we like to put people to death in Florida. I don’t think paperwork is going to do the trick. On top of that, I can’t moonlight because it was the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department that originally put the finger on Maryann’s brother. Sheriff Farrell thinks the right man is on death row. For all I know, he’s correct in that. But you never know.”

“And Lester suggested me?”

“You know a thing or two about investigations,” Perkins said.

“I’ve left all that behind.”

“You left everything behind Jack?” Perkins asked. He masked his disappointment behind a smile. “You know best, frere,” he said calmly. “But think it over will you? As a token of our friendship. Whatever you decide, nothing changes between us, fair enough? Maryann has saved two thousand dollars from her work. She’s willing to pay you.”

“I don’t know, Lennie,” Kilgore said.

“Think it over.”

Perkins rose abruptly and disappered through the living room and walked downstairs. Kilgore stood on the veranda and watched as his friend entered a dark gray police Buick, as characterless a car as there could be on the street. The contrast was absolute—a flat gray car without adornment and Lennie Perkins, a tall suave conch wearing a tan Palm Beach gabardine suit with a red bow tie and a straw Panama hat. Kilgore had to hand it to Lennie, he was one of a kind, and his wife had gorgeous legs. He thought she looked a lot like Andie MacDowell, but he’d never said anything to Perkins out of respect. In Afghanistan he used to show his own wife’s picture to the jarheads on patrol, every one of them clutching the photograph as if it were a totem, each saying, “She’s very pretty, sir,”.

A gibbous moon loomed above Key West when Jack Kilgore went inside his apartment. In the dining room he found a manila envelope on an antique oak table. On its cover in red ink were the words “Maryann Deveraux,” and inside were case notes, evidence logs, a thin deposition and a few photos and newspaper clippings, all compiled on the sly by Lennie Perkins. Lester Dodge had included a brief of the habeus petition addressed to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Kilgore showered up and dressed in the dungarees and black work shirt he wore as a night watchman. He heated a bowl of microwavable soup and sat at the oak table with the manila envelope as a companion. When darkness fell, he stripped open the folder and began to read.