Assassin's Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  PRAISE FOR RANDY WAYNE WHITE AND HIS NOVELS

  “What James Lee Burke has done for Louisiana, Tony Hillerman for the Southwest, John Sandford for Minnesota, and Joe R. Lansdale for east Texas, Randy Wayne White does for his own little acre.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “White takes us places that no other Florida mystery writer can hope to find.”

  —Carl Hiaasen

  “White brings vivid imagination to his fight scenes. Think Mickey Spillane meets The Matrix.”

  —People

  “A major new talent . . . hits the ground running . . . a virtually perfect piece of work. He’s the best new writer we’ve encountered since Carl Hiaasen.”

  —The Denver Post

  “White is the rightful heir to joining John D. Mac-Donald, Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Geoffrey Norman. . . . His precise prose is as fresh and pungent as a salty breeze.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “White doesn’t just use Florida as a backdrop, but he also makes the smell, sound, and physicality of the state leap off the page.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “This satisfying madcap fare could go seismic on the regional bestseller lists.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “He describes southwestern Florida so well it’s easy to smell the salt tang in the air and feel the cool Gulf breeze.”

  —Mansfield News Journal

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, December 1981

  First Printing (Author Introduction), April 2008

  Copyright © New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 1981 Introduction copyright © Randy Wayne White, 2006

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  eISBN : 978-1-101-53059-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  For the fish stalkers:

  Steve, Hervey, Fize,

  Wes, Marsh, and Cajun

  Introduction

  In the winter of 1980, I received a surprising phone call from an editor at Signet Books—surprising because, as a Florida fishing guide, the only time New Yorkers called me was to charter my boat. And if any of my clients were editors, they were savvy enough not to admit it.

  The editor said she’d read a story by me in Outside Magazine and was impressed. Did I have time to talk?

  As a mediocre high school jock, my idols were writers, not ball players. I had a dream job as a lighttackle guide, yet I was still obsessed with my own dream of writing for a living. For years, before and after charters, I’d worked hard at the craft. Selling a story to Outside, one of the country’s finest publications, was a huge break. I was about to finish a novel, but this was the first time New York had called.

  Yes, I had time to talk.

  The editor, whose name was Joanie, told me Signet wanted to launch a paperback thriller series that featured a recurring he-man hero. “We want at least four writers on the project because we want to keep the books coming, publishing one right after the other, to create momentum.”

  Four writers producing books with the same character?

  “Characters,” Joanie corrected. “Once we get going, the cast will become standard.”

  Signet already had a template for the hero. He was a Vietnam vet turned Key West fishing guide, she said, talking as if the man existed. He was surfer-boy blond, and he’d been friends with Hemingway.

  I am not a literary historian, but all my instincts told me the timetable seemed problematic. I said nothing.

  “He has a shark scar,” Joanie added, “and he’s freakishly strong. Like a man who lifts weights all the time.”

  The guys I knew who lifted weights were also freakishly clumsy, so . . . maybe the hero, while visiting a local aquarium, tripped during feeding time?

  My brain was already problem-solving.

  “He lives in Key West,” she said, “so, of course, he has to be an expert on the area. That’s why I’m calling. You live in Key West, and I liked your magazine story a lot. It seems like a natural fit.”

  Actually, I fished out of Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, a six-hour drive from Sloppy Joe’s, but this was no time for petty details.

  “Have you ever been to Key West?” I asked the editor. “Great sunsets.”

  Editors, I have since learned, can also be cagey. Joanie didn’t offer me the job. She had already settled on three of the four writers, she said, but if I was willing to submit a few sample chapters on speculation, she’d give me serious consideration.

  Money? A contract? That stuff was “all standard,” she told me, and could be discussed later.

  “I’ll warn you right now,” she said, “there are a couple of other writers we’re considering, so you need to get at least three chapters to me within a month. Then I’ll let you know.”

  I hung up the phone, stunned by my good fortune. My firs
t son, Lee, had been born only a few months earlier. My much-adored wife, Debra, and I were desperate for money because the weather that winter had been miserable for fishing. But it was perfect for writing.

  I went to my desk, determined not to let my young family down.

  At Tarpon Bay Marina, where I was a guide, my friend Ralph Woodring owned a boat with Dusky painted in big blue letters on the side. My friend, Graeme Mellor, lived on a Morgan sailboat named No Mas.

  Dusky MacMorgan was born.

  Every winter, Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus came to town. Their trapeze artists, I realized, were not only freakishly strong, but they were also freakishly nimble.

  Dusky gathered depth.

  One of my best friends was the late Dr. Harold Westervelt, a gifted orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Westervelt became the Edison of Death, and he loved introducing himself that way to new patients. His son, David, became Westy O’Davis, and our spearfishing pal, Billy, became Billy Mack.

  Problems with my hero’s shark scar and his devoted friendship with Hemingway were also solved.

  Working around the clock, pounding away at my old black manual typewriter, I wrote Key West Connection in nine days. On a Monday morning, I waited for the post office to open to send it to New York.

  Joanie sounded a little dazed when she telephoned on Friday. Was I willing to try a second book on spec?

  Hell yes.

  God, I was beginning to love New York’s can-do attitude.

  The other three writers (if they ever existed) were fired, and I became the sole proprietor of Captain Dusky MacMorgan—although Signet owned the copyright and all other rights after I signed Joanie’s “standard” contract. (This injustice was later made right by a willing and steadfast publisher and my brilliant agent.)

  If Joanie (a fine editor) feels badly about that today, she shouldn’t. I would’ve signed for less.

  I wrote seven of what I would come to refer to as “duck and fuck” books because in alternating chapters Dusky would duck a few bullets, then spend much-deserved time alone with a heroine.

  Seldom did a piece of paper go into my old typewriter that was ripped out and thrown away, and I suspect that’s the way the books read. I don’t know. I’ve never reread them. I do remember using obvious clichés, a form of self-loathing, as if to remind myself that I should be doing my own writing, not this jobof-work.

  The book you are now holding, and the other six, constituted a training arena for a young writer who took seriously the discipline demanded by his craft and also the financial imperatives of being a young father.

  For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

  —Randy Wayne White

  Cartagena, Colombia

  1

  I agreed to become an assassin one blustery windleached day in a Florida March.

  Blustery isn’t even the word for it. Those of you who live in America’s northlands don’t hear much about our bad weather—and it’s not because we don’t have our share of it. The Sunshine State’s chambers of commerce become meteorological gestapos when the skies pale and the winds blow foul. It’s not the sort of thing they paste on Indiana billboards, or promote in double-truck ads in the Times. You can even see it on the faces of Florida’s TV weathermen. Their smiles are vaguely apologetic and their eyes dart between storm fronts like unfaithful husbands confessing they have contracted genital herpes. Transplants in Florida consider bad weather an affront, and to fellow tourists they aim silly, accusing barbs like: “Ya musta brought the cold with ya when ya flew down. . . .”

  And as winters go, this had been one of the worst. Cold front after cold front funneled down from the Midwest, roiling the seas with careening winds. The white board shipbuilders’ houses on Duval and Elizabeth Streets stayed shuttered, and the sage of woodsmoke from the rare fireplace drifted across the pirate streets of Key West off and on all winter long. There were the brief winter weeks of eighty-degree temperatures. But just when you thought the bad weather was gone for good, holed up someplace in Ohio where it justly belonged, the blue northers would rage again through the palms and eucalyptus, and those of us on charterboat row would cluster around mugs of hot coffee at the Kangaroo’s Pouch and eye our empty boats sourly.

  As Captain Gainey Maxwell of the Lookout II put it one bleak January morning, “Boys, I’ve come ta believe that the only thing that stands between Key West and the winds o’ Canada is a piddly line of mangroves and a barbed-wire fence someplace in Iowa.”

  It was that kind of winter.

  And when the seas are eight to ten feet outside the reef, there isn’t much for a bluewater fishing guide to do. It didn’t bother me as much as it did some of the others. They had wives and kids and mortgages to worry about. But not me—not any longer. My family, my world, had been wiped out in another lifetime. The drug pirates had seen to that. Balmy summer nights in the tropics are for love and long walks and—for little boys—time to play with their adoring father. Murderers don’t plant ignition bombs in cars when the nights are star-blazed and the winds blow sweet and warm out of Cuba, and explosions don’t scatter bits of the well-loved across lawns and vacation sidewalks.

  It just doesn’t happen. Not on balmy summer nights, it doesn’t.

  And the winters in Florida are never, ever cold.

  Right . . .

  So I was alone, alone in a volatile winter—my first in the little house built on stilts a mile from the nearest land in the shallow water off Calda Bank. The house had been built to ice-store fish until the lighter boats could get around and pick them up for transport into Key West. Now, fifty years later, I had converted it to a bachelor home—as close as I could get to living in the sea that I loved, and as far away from the memories of Key West as I could manage without leaving altogether.

  On that blustery March day I was suffering a case of the blahs. Too much wind and too much cold weather, and much too little exercise. I had awakened as always just before first light. A black north wind was rattling the windows and seeping through the cracks in the floor. Beneath my double bed I could hear a nasty cross chop washing around the pilings, and the strange gray light beyond the window told me it would be another rainy dawn. I shook off the urge to crawl back under the covers and sleep the morning away.

  I had been sleeping too many mornings away. When the winds blow foul, you don’t charter. And lately, with charters canceled, I had been doing a damn good impression of the typical suburban male animal who thinks boredom can be cured by eating too much and drinking too much, and wallowing in the gray confines of his own despair.

  It’s a cycle as easy to fall into as it is vicious. The longer you put off the training program, the diet, and the mental discipline, the easier it is to forget how the human machine is supposed to feel—how brain and body are supposed to harmonize in the fail-safe routine of hard work tempered with such well-deserved luxuries as cold beer.

  And the moment you forget is the moment you are lost. You become only a dull brain governing the flabby remnant of your own humanity. The only place those two chubby legs are going to carry you is toward a rest-home rendezvous.

  And I wasn’t about to let it go that far.

  I threw back the brace of wool Navy-issue blankets. The boards of the stilthouse floor were cold against my bare feet. In the weak dawn light, I nursed the squat Franklin stove to flame, then put coffee on to boil. Outside, March clouds scudded beneath stars in the waning darkness. Across Florida Bay, beyond Miami, the coming sun was a leached white, and slate waves feathered beyond my dock.

  I urinated and then walked down the rickety stairs to where my thirty-four foot charterboat, Sniper, was moored. Dammit, if it was going to be another nasty day in Florida, for once I was going to face it head-on. Naked, I forced myself not to shiver. This was the day I would jerk myself out of the rut. How long had I been letting myself go? My Irish friend Westy O’Davis had left months ago for the Caymans, where—when he wasn’t playing secret service agent for the United Kingd
om—he passed the days teaching pretty tourist ladies how to scuba dive. And then that beautiful woman, that fine person, Saxan Benton had finally written me off as a hopeless loner and returned north to pursue her botany studies. It was what the soap-opera people might term an inadequate parting scene....

  “Dusky, you know why I’m leaving. I have my own life to think about. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “And I have the feeling that no matter how much you might come to love me, you would still be tied to your past.”

  “I know.”

  The lovely model’s face had twisted, her composure shattered, and a trembling hand had brushed auburn hair away. “Dammit, don’t just stand there like a dumb hulk! You know I care for you. You know I’d rather stay, if you could just . . . just . . . dammit, Dusky, do you understand what I’m trying to say!”

  “I understand, Saxan. The boat’s ready. I’ll take you back to Key West now.”

  So I had spent the winter alone. People call it boredom, but it’s really self-pity. I had taken some strange masochistic joy in eating too much and drinking too much, watching myself get slack and slow. When the damnable wind settled enough, I chartered, as always, out of Garrison Bight. And when the northers set in, I retreated to my stilthouse upon the sea to read and listen to night voices around the world on my Transoceanic shortwave . . . and mope.

  I had made some false starts getting back into shape. Those are danger signals—when you start, then allow yourself to stop. A Texas friend of mine named Treadwell has a saying: If you can’t profit from adversity, then you damn well deserve to suffer.