Cuban Dagger

By Ken McKea

Book Two in the series of Jim Dallas thrillers, Cuban Dagger finds Dallas's friend Sam Lyons interested in the problem of Judy Hampton, who vanished while celebrating her eighteenth birthday with friends on Aruba.

Runaway-daughter cases, Dallas knows, seldom have happy endings. Still, he had no reason to think that looking for the girl would lead to a tangled web of crime, treachery, and deceit...and a deadly encounter with the mysterious assassin called the Cuban Dagger.

Taut, fast-paced, and tinged with dark humor, Cuban Dagger is a Florida thriller that will be impossible to put down. As Gary Kim Hayes wrote in A Sense of Wonder, "The style is right on the money. Think of John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiassen, and the easy wry style of Nelson Demille. Jim Dallas is my new favorite detective."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brad Strickland
• Release date: Aug 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452483078

Ken McKea

Ken McKea is the pseudonym of a widely published author.

Book preview

Cuban Dagger

By Ken McKea

Cover illustration by Brad Strickland

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Brad Strickland.

All rights reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this document may be copied or distributed without the written consent of the copyright holder.

Thank you for purchasing this ebook. It is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

This novel is a work of fiction. Many of the locations and all of characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to those who read and corrected and questioned and prodded me to do better: Lawrence Barker, Ron Butler, Gary Kim Hayes, Kimberly Hays, Doug Kaye, Bill Ritch, Barbara Strickland, Wendy Webb, and Caran Wilbanks.

In memoriam: Thomas E. Fuller and Thomas F. Deitz

Jim Dallas novels:

Atlanta Bones

Cuban Dagger

Table of Contents

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

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 1

Runaway-daughter cases never have happy endings.

I had told my tall, amiable, and bulky neighbor Sam Lyons as much when he first raised the issue of the missing girl, and I thought that ended the matter. However, Lyons, who retired before fifty as the head of a major insurance company’s investigations division, has both an investigator’s instincts and his own devious streak, and he determined not to let the matter drop.

Near the end of November he volunteered to cook Thanksgiving dinner at his place. Our sliver of north Florida contains perhaps a somewhat above-average number of people bereft of immediate families with whom to celebrate the holidays.

Our population runs to widowers and widows, the divorced, the loners, the ones who trekked down from the snow belt to live and work here and who just can’t get away for a long cross-country trip, all the outsiders, the exiled, the disconnected. We also have a few people like me, fugitives from past memories, who have found here a measure of peace. Lyons alluded to all that as he led up to his point.

So, Sam had finally proposed, for the occasion we shall form an ad-hoc and temporary family, gathering a few souls in need of togetherness for this one day of the year. You and I, for example, have no one to call family, and without family there is no cheer. I’ll invite just a few friends, we’ll treat them like family, and together we’ll feast and celebrate.

At first I was leery and hesitant to go along with Sam’s plan. Even with ongoing therapy sometimes I still don’t function all that well in group scenes.

Not a problem, Sam assured me. We won’t make it a crowd.

You’ll go overboard, I told him. You always do.

He raised his right hand as if preparing to take an oath. Not this time. He considered for a few minutes and then made his final pitch: he would invite no more than six, total, including the two of us.

Even better, he said, all of them would be low-keyed enough so that no one would rasp anyone else’s nerves. Despite his casual air, I understood that all this consideration was aimed primarily at me.

After six, going on seven years, it was still tough for me to face any holiday without Susan. Sam’s Thanksgiving feast was designed to take my mind off my murdered wife, and it would give me a few other people to spend a couple of hours with. I finally decided that I could deal with such a small number and gave up.

To lubricate the wheels of social interaction, Lyons decreed that we would make everything truly home-like by informality. Dress would be extreme casual, he said firmly, and so when the day came around, I accordingly wore a loose, soft long-sleeved knit shirt with collar, light blue, plus a presentably crisp pair of khakis, but I stuck with my comfortably well-worn dark-brown Merrell sandals.

I showed up on Lyons’s front porch at noon with the obligatory bottles of wine, a pricey Tuscan red called Masseto, bought at my tall friend’s suggestion and paid for by part of the reward we’d split for undertaking a peculiar investigation for a beautiful Atlanta widow.

It was a good day for a Thanksgiving meal, the air clear and mellow, with a bit of slow surf creaming in from the ocean to break on the beach a few dozen yards away, on the far side of the dunes. Even from Lyons’s front porch I could catch the aromas of roasting meat and fragrant accompaniments.

I opened the door without knocking and noticed that Sam had caught a virulent case of the neats and in the fit had tidied his beach house, normally an eclectic, book-lined clutter. I’m here, I called. Following clattering noises to their source, I found him in the steamy kitchen, doing something with pots and pans.

Thanks, he said, taking the bottles of wine from me. Lyons stands six feet, four inches tall, weighs in at around two-forty, and is one of the few people I know who can make me feel fragile. He doesn’t exactly tower over me, but he somehow gives the impression of greater height and bulk. He attributes the illusion to his housing a great spirit. Me, I think it’s all in his attitude.

Sam Lyons is dark-skinned and black-haired, and most people at first meeting peg him as of Mediterranean descent, but though you could easily take him for a Sicilian or a Greek, he insists his features come from Native American ancestry. He’s not far from fifty but doesn’t look it, and the ladies he escorts tend to be at least a decade younger than he.

For the holiday occasion Lyons had donned a relatively subdued black, burnt-orange, red, and yellow Hawaiian shirt printed with improbable and goofy-looking cartoon turkeys a-dance in rows, though he had also put on a no-nonsense white chef’s apron for kitchen duty, its front already streaked and splotched with grease and juices.

He tilted his head and read aloud the label of one of the three bottles appreciatively and, as far as I could tell, with a passable grasp of Italian. A good year, 2008. Perfect, Dal. He checked the time and added, I’ll decant these before we settle in at the table. You go into the Florida room, put some music on if you want, and just make yourself comfortable and relax. I don’t need help, and the others ought to be along shortly. We’ll plan to eat around one or so.

Just four others, right? I asked before I left him.

He chuckled. Just four others, correct. Grand total of six, as promised, none of them especially talkative or needy. Three nice unattached ladies, one more man. I know you don’t much care for a crowd.

That was an understatement. Though I had come a long way since what everyone perversely insisted on calling my accident—being shot and left for dead in my burning suburban-Atlanta house, where my wife Susan did die despite my frantic efforts to save her—I still harbored a nasty antisocial streak.

That was a major reason why once I was off the force and receiving my pension and disability pay I had relocated to this fairly obscure and lightly-populated barrier island south of Jacksonville, where my wife had inherited a beach house from her semi-crazy uncle. In turn I had inherited it from her, and now instead of renting it out during the tourist season I lived there year round.

On our island the beach is coarse and grainy, the land is unimproved, and it is not much of a tourist mecca. It tended to attract eccentrics and outsiders, and I would not seriously object if either of those labels should be affixed to me.

In Lyons’s Florida room I futzed around with his MP3 setup and put about ten albums into shuffled rotation, including a couple by Katie Melua, a petite woman with an incredible room-filling voice. The scattered Bose speakers did her justice.

As she launched into If You Were a Sailboat, I pulled a random book from Lyons’s crowded and disorganized shelves—The Spy Next Door, by investigative journalists Ann Blackman and Elaine Shannon—and settled onto the sofa in the living room, my feet resting on a hassock. From the kitchen Sam boomed, I like the music. How are you feeling these days?

Good, I called back over Katie’s sweet, swinging voice.

That much was true. The various assorted aches, pains, lacerations, blisters, bone-bruises, and lumps I had obtained in September courtesy of a murderous bastard named Guthry had all healed satisfactorily. My morning two-mile swim—getting chilly now that November was almost gone—kept me toned. Physically I was fine.

And in some ways, I suppose, my mental state might have become somewhat better than it had been the past few years. I slept well, for me, with no more than one or two cold-sweat nightmares in an average week.

Still I usually felt restless, even at rest there in my friend’s comfortable chair. To dilute my vague unease, for a short time I sat reading about Robert Hanssen, family man, trusted FBI agent, and—as it turned out—a spy whose betrayal had cost the lives of at least three American agents and had done significant damage to U.S. intelligence efforts. I got far enough into the book to decide to borrow it from Sam.

Then I heard the faint chirp of approaching feminine voices and went to open the front door. Lyons and I live on the little spit of barrier real estate called Cady’s Island, me in a quaint brick cottage that in an earlier era was the lighthouse keeper’s home, he down the beach to the south on the other side of the derelict lighthouse.

Sam’s place is a rambling, weathered beach house constructed of beach cypress wood. It had been built early in the previous century by some offshoot of the Flagler family, famous for stitching the Keys to the mainland by building the Florida East Coast Railway.

In those days people constructed houses to last, as Lyons’s overgrown cottage attested. With its gray, splintery, paintless walls, from a short distance away it looked ready to cave in, but so far it had stood firm against wind and tide without any major renovations. The heart-of-pine floors, still in excellent shape, had been original equipment.

There are no cars on the barrier island for the simple reason that there are no bridges or roads, and to set foot on Cady’s Island you either have to have your own boat—I own a thirty-year-old outboard skiff, a dinky little fourteen-footer, like my house inherited from my wife’s uncle, that I wouldn’t trust on the open sea but which gets me to the mainland and back on grocery and beer runs—or else you take Liz Fretty’s broad-beamed ferry. Once on the island, you travel the paths and the beaches by foot or by bike.

The women must have taken the ferry. The three ladies had arrived on foot, and now they strolled down the beach and turned tentatively up toward the house. I watched them from the doorway: a medium-sized blonde, a gangly, leggy, laughing redhead, and an even taller beauty with medium-short black hair and Irish-blue eyes. Is this Sam’s place? the blonde called from the foot of the porch steps.

You’ve got it, I said, holding the door open. Welcome, and come on inside. I’m Dallas. Sam is in the kitchen.

They came in, a giggle-gaggle of gals, and Sam left his pots and pans and bowls long enough to greet them with discreet pecks on the cheek and to make the necessary introductions.

They called him Sam, and he told them I was Dallas or Dal for short. The redhead was Sara, no h, in beach-casual beige top and black slacks, and she was from the West Coast originally but now worked for a Jacksonville legal firm as a secretary.

The sprightly blonde was Ginny, a sometime-actress, sometime-dancer with traces of her native Toronto still in her speech, and she was clad in brighter colors, a pink-and-white-and-red short-sleeved sweater and pants in the identical shade of red. She was the lead giggler of the pack, and she practically fizzed with energy and excitement.

The quieter brunette, whose direct blue gaze appealed to me, was Colleen—I had nailed the Irish ancestry, apparently—and she was the only native Floridian among them, a young widow who worked for WTEV in Jacksonville, not on-the-air, but in public relations.

I didn’t know if her black outfit might signify a gesture toward mourning, but it flattered her figure. I liked her best. She was maybe a year shy of thirty, about two or three years older than the others, and tall enough to come close to looking me in the eye, even wearing flats. That impressed me because I stand just an eyelash under six-two.

The lady callers took some refreshment, thank you. Unsophisticated rum-and-Cokes for Sara and Ginny, and a modest sherry for Colleen. Inevitably one of them noticed my burn-scarred right hand and though they avoided the question direct, they began to ask about my background. Before I could go far enough into it to work up a bout of depression, I heard a heavy tread on the front porch and excused myself to open the door again.

Sam should have warned me. I met José Palacios y Paloma, a swarthy, muscular man with lustrous hair and a bandito mustache the hue of India ink, partnered with sharp, knowing eyes the color of strong black coffee.

He was a couple of years older than I, maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight, and he also happened to be a special agent of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who had given me a medium-hard time twice, once back in June and then again in September.

Dallas, he said amiably, doffing his straw Panama and holding it against his chest in a courtly pose. Otherwise he wore a brown suit just a shade too dark to be called tan and an open-necked pale-green shirt. He carried a hefty paper bag in the crook of his left arm.

He replaced his hat and then offered his right hand and I shook it. By way of greeting I said, So you’re the one who got Lyons interested in that girl’s disappearance.

The policeman gave me one of those apologetic Latin shrugs in reply, and I didn’t pursue the topic, though I felt that Lyons and Palacios had just very competently mousetrapped me. One way or another they were going to hassle me about that missing-daughter case.

Come on in, Joe, I said, standing aside to let him come through the doorway. He had asked me to call him that when we first met in the Keys.

It was hard not to call him sir instead. Palacios carried an air of calm authority, he knew his stuff, and I respected him. Moving with the kind of grace that in a certain size of man seems to come with no effort, he gave the impression of competence wired to steel-spring strength.

As a gift for the host he had brought three bottles and three flavors of Kahlúa, cinnamon, hazelnut, and peppermint mocha. After dropping these off in the kitchen and greeting Sam, Palacios joined the ladies and me, and like me he elected to take coffee instead of alcohol.

Instantly he became a charming conversationalist, diverting the women’s attention from my scars. I had no objection to that, and absolutely no desire to go through the explanations again, the story of how I had wound up with scar tissue over nearly thirty per cent of my carcass.

Joe began by being very funny about his long drive up from Key Largo and his encounter with the formidable Liz Fretty, who had recalled him from his only other visit back in September and who complained all the way across the bay that he always, always showed up to interrupt her lunch, every single time.

Palacios had no hint of an accent unless he chose to turn it on, and now he did, putting just a suspicion of Cuba into his easy talk. The laughter level bumped up a notch, though he told no jokes. Palacios simply had a wry way of saying little things with a dry twist of wit that caught people by surprise and made them chuckle.

When rewarded with giggles and titters, he raised his black eyebrows and wore a mock-stupid Sancho Panza did I say something funny? expression that the ladies seemed to appreciate. So did I on this occasion. I sat back, laughed along, and let Joe carry the conversational burden.

After a while Lyons announced that everything was ready and we moved to the dining room and settled in at his big round table in an order he chose: Palacios between Sara and Ginny, me between Ginny and Colleen, Sam between Colleen and Sara.

Then Sam began our meal with an unorthodox grace: To whomever or whatever makes gathering together something that upholds and sustains us, thanks very much. As for the food, I’ll take responsibility for that myself, amen. First one to guess the secret of the dinner wins the prize. Lyons grinned as he picked up the knife and serving fork and began to carve.

He served an amazingly tasty and tender herb-crusted venison roast—the expensive Masseto was bold enough to set it off very well—with a somewhat coarse, nutty, pleasantly bitter bread, a spicy and sweet home-made cranberry relish, a kind of succotash with butternut squash added to the corn and beans, baked potatoes, and an enormous pumpkin pie, aromatic with allspice.

I couldn’t work out what all this had in common, but the ladies got into Sam’s guessing game at once: The foods were exotic? Perhaps true, but that wasn’t it.

Lyons himself had killed the deer that provided the roast? No, he hadn’t been hunting or even fired a gun in twenty years or more, and the venison had been the gift of a friend.

Lyons had learned to cook all this from his mother? No, Lyons said, grinning, but that’s a little warmer.

Palacios suddenly asked what was in the savory, still-warm bread, aside from the usual flour, yeast, eggs, and so on. Acorns, Lyons replied, surprisingly. I had a hard time finding the right variety, but I finally did. That’s the secret ingredient that gives the bread that buttery, slightly bitter taste.

Then I think I have it, Palacios said with a smile. He took an appreciative sip of wine and then asked, Shall I guess?

The blonde dancer Ginny, who had scooted a little closer to him during the meal, said, Go ahead, I’m dying to know.

It is a feast our friend Mr. Lyons has prepared in honor of his ancestors, Palacios said, gesturing with his wine glass to take in everything on the table. All the foods are native to America, and he is a Seminole. Normally a Thanksgiving meal remembers the Pilgrims of Plymouth, but this one memorializes their guests, the Native Americans.

"You’ve got it, but I’m only part Seminole, Lyons corrected, waggling a finger. That let me sneak in this wine. My dad was half-Seminole, my mother Welsh-Irish-German, and I think a smidge of Italian might have been in the mix somewhere on his side or hers. In honor of this excellent wine, we’ll say so for the sake of the day, anyway. To Thanksgiving."

We clinked glasses. In the aftermath of the banquet, with everyone comfortably sated, we went out onto the porch and drank coffee laced with some of the liqueur Joe had brought. Behind us the music in the Florida room faded to an agreeable background sound. Before us the beach stretched tawny beyond the barrier dunes and the ocean sparkled in the sunshine.

Sam Lyons is a very bright guy. His magic had worked, and even to me everything really did seem homey and like family, in a good, laid-back way. I felt myself resisting the gravitational tug of happiness, though. Damn it, I had a permanently soured disposition, and that was that.

Then when we had finished our coffee we went back inside, where the women helped Sam clear the table and Joe and I helped them load the dishwasher, and afterward we all went out on the beach, got barefoot, and tossed a miniature foam-rubber football around in honor of the second great Thanksgiving tradition. We couldn’t watch an actual game because Lyons refused to own a television, preferring to view any shows in which he was interested on his computer instead.

So out on the warm grainy beach in the bright sunshine we had us some running and tagging fun, some dancing and squealing fun, and some nobody keeping score fun, and somewhat to my surprise—untinged with any guilt that I could identify—I enjoyed it. My therapist has told me several times that she approves of Sam Lyons’s therapeutic techniques. What the hell, maybe they work.

We ended the game when we all felt a little tired and then simply let the afternoon wind down slowly and quietly. The gentle time slipped away as Sara admired Sam’s delicate framed watercolors of sandy dunes and soaring gulls, of dew-spangled wildflowers and the old lighthouse, all of which he pshawed as strictly amateur efforts.

I liked the fact that Sara completely ignored the photos on the wall near his computer cubbyhole, the ones in which Sam posed with Presidents, Florida politicos, costumed characters from a theme park, and two medium-famous movie stars who had at one time been married to each other. None of them seemed to impress her, though Ginny had instantly squealed over the movie-star photo.

As Sara and Sam wandered from painting to painting, on the sofa Ginny earnestly explained to a sympathetic, nodding Palacios the woes of being an actress when pickings in the local theatrical scene were so dismally slim and tried to get him to help her decide whether she should go to New York or Hollywood to see if a girl could catch a break. He assisted immensely by listening to her and nodding thoughtfully as she totted up the advantages and disadvantages of each, occasionally murmuring, "Ah, sí."

After a while Colleen and I drifted outside again into the pleasantly warm late afternoon, and she asked where I lived. I told her, You came in from the ferry just beside it. It’s just up the beach, past the lighthouse. I offered to show it to her and she accepted.

She kicked off her shoes again and carried them, walking barefoot through the sand, toward the scaly old Cady Island light. I noticed the neat, pretty, wasp-waisted footprints she left behind her on the damp beach.

We paused in the breeze while she craned her neck to look up at the lighthouse, its flaking white western side looking nearly bronze in the lowering sunlight. Can people go up in there? she asked, gesturing toward the platform surrounding the lantern room.

No, I told her. It’s pretty much a hollow shell. The stairs have mostly rusted out, and there’s no light up there anymore. A local preservation society keeps trying to scare up the money to restore it, the way the people over on St. George Island did with the one that collapsed, but you know how it is.

The fact that my five-room-plus-bathroom-and-attic brick cottage used to be the home of the lighthouse keeper, his wife, and their three daughters delighted her. I gave her the tour.

Colleen tactfully did not comment on the stark and Spartan look of my place—Lyons calls it a monk’s cell. She knew the names of the two exercise machines I keep in the smallest room, and she said they looked like they were good quality. Got them used, I told her. I couldn’t afford full retail.

I can see you use them, though, she commented. Most people hang clothes on them. It seemed to be a mere statement of fact. Colleen was not the coyly flirtatious type. And she was not overly curious, because she did not ask about the significance of the numbers I had jotted on the kitchen calendar as I crossed out every day up through the twenty-fourth of November, though I thought she noticed them.

I broke out some passable Bristol cream sherry, and we each took a small glass out onto the porch, where we sat side by side looking out over the dunes and the bit of ocean we could glimpse beyond them as behind us the sun dipped toward its early setting. After each of us decided the other would not be too commiserative, the conversation changed direction. We talked of loss, as people like us tend to do.

Colleen had lost her husband to an IED in the Middle East about a year earlier. I told her that my wife had died in a house fire six years ago last August. Susan had been just