SUGAR: A Wade Carver Thriller (Florida Mystery Series) (Volume 2) (The Wade Carver Thrillers) Read online

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  SUGAR

  A Wade Carver Thriller

  Dan Ames

  SUGAR is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  Copyright © 2018 by Dan Ames

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Slogan Books, Inc., New York, NY.

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  Contents

  SUGAR

  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

  About the Author

  Also by Dan Ames

  SUGAR

  A Wade Carver Thriller #2

  by

  Dan Ames

  1

  They came for me in the early morning hours.

  A little bit surprising for a bunch of drug dealers. For them, the early morning hours were usually their prime selling and dealing time. Then again, my uninvited guests probably weren’t the dealers themselves, but their enforcers. It all depended on the size and scope of their businesses. How well they’d managed to staff up.

  Or not.

  The reason I was awake, and the motivation for setting my alarm to silent mode was that I had a strong suspicion my snitch, a weasely little guy nicknamed Hammerhead, had flipped.

  There had been some warning signs. A bit of weird conversation. Some less-than-normal facial expressions.

  Plus, a few things he’d said that were totally out of character for the snide, sniveling, cowardly little addict I’d converted into one of my main street sources in the Delray Beach area.

  I would deal with him later.

  The other thing that surprised me about my early morning intruders, and probably shouldn't have, was the lack of forethought and planning they were displaying.

  They knew me.

  Or, at least, had to know of me.

  If they were who I thought they were, I’d killed two of their coworkers a while back. Granted, they might not have had any actual proof.

  Only suspicions.

  But still.

  They knew I was home. Even though I turned the alarm off, my hidden security cameras were still active and I'd seen them up by the garage, on the pool deck and now, in the back of the house outside my kitchen window.

  There were three of them.

  At first, I thought they would employ some cheap ploy to lure me out.

  Maybe set off my car alarm.

  Knock on the window.

  Call my cell phone and pretend to be a neighbor saying my house was on fire.

  So far, they hadn’t attempted any of those tactics, which showed at least a very small amount of sophistication.

  I figured they might also think a call from somebody close to me would lure me out, but then they probably realized no such person existed.

  My sister, who’d been missing for years and who I had never stopped looking for, was one option.

  But a phone call from her, if she was still alive, so early in the morning would be too obvious even for these ass clowns.

  Ultimately, they resorted to brute force.

  Which I kinda figured they would.

  They opted for the kitchen window and showed at least a little foresight by bringing a glass cutter with a suction cup so they could cut a nice big hole in the glass while making very little noise. Just a long, slow screeching sound that didn’t carry very far.

  The trouble for them was, I had put a thin film of reflective material over those windows.

  For a variety of reasons.

  The film helped block direct sunlight which meant the house stayed cooler and lowered my air conditioning bill. I was also fairly big on privacy, for obvious reasons.

  What it meant was, when you were outside, all you saw was a mirrored reflection. No glimpses of what might be on the other side of the window.

  So it was a calculated risk on their part. Breaking through a window even though you can’t see on the other side is taking a pretty big gamble.

  A fairly big miscalculation because that meant they had no way to see me standing just left of the window with my twelve-gauge Mossberg Defender shotgun, loaded with double-ought buckshot.

  Even worse, earlier I’d racked the slide and one of those shells, the kind that can create horrific damage to the human body, now stood ready to blow the first bastard’s head right off.

  2

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  "Thank you so much," she said.

  Her eyebrow was raised and the corner of her mouth was curved into a smirk. Her thank-you had been as far from sincere as you could get.

  "You fucked up six months of work for me,” she continued.

  She looked totally different to me than when I’d last seen her. Her skin, the color of dark chocolate with a cacao percentage well over 85%, was smooth and flawless.

  Her dark eyes were wide and expressive, even when she was conveying sarcasm, which I judged to be her mode of expression most of the time.

  She had close-cropped hair and was wearing short shorts with a dry-fit T-shirt that hugged every inch of her body that was all muscle and sinew. Her feet were encased in chartreuse Nike cross trainers.

  "Communication is the key," I said. "How was I supposed to have known you were working on a case, too?"

  Her name was Dominique.

  If she had a last name she had yet to share it with me. I had first met her when she was with a low-level drug dealer named the Candyman. I got him arrested and put away for a good number of years on my last case, mainly because he was a piece of crap who had been trying to extort his daughter’s trust fund.

  I’d nearly put Dominique out of commission, but had instead just let her go. Now, it turned out she wasn’t the Candyman’s girlfriend, but a lawyer.

  She’d been trying to recover some stolen jewelry and I’d waltzed in and blown her case apart.

  Still, I wasn’t going to let her know I was taking any kind of blame. Southeast Florida is a wild, weird place. You have to move fast, or the crazy can catch up to you.

  “Communication?” she said. “You came in like a bull chasing a big red flag or in this case, a pair of tight little orange shorts,” she said, referencing the Candyman’s predilection for wearing these obnoxious little orange shorts that had made him look like a Hooters waitress. My guess was t
hat he had a lot of male friends in prison right about now. The Candyman was now a pass-around treat.

  “I was doing a job,” I said. “Not a lot of time for niceties.”

  Now it was my turn to take the initiative.

  “So what can I do for you, Dominique?”

  "I want to hire you."

  Dominique leaned back in her chair, crossed those shapely legs of hers. They were muscular and I watched with fascination as her thighs snapped to attention, a move I instantly replicated.

  If this woman had any body fat, I didn't know where she was hiding it. I wouldn’t mind doing a thorough search. Happy to volunteer, ma’am.

  "Hire me to do what?"

  "I need you to find a boat," she said.

  "Don't you want to find a repossession specialist? Those guys know all the ins and outs of repoing a stolen boat."

  "It’s a little more complicated than that," she said. "There's the boat, and then there's what's inside the boat."

  She smiled a little bit and her teeth were perfectly white. She had full, gorgeous lips and I found myself once again considering a full-body analysis to determine her body fat percentage. Hopefully performed back at my place.

  "Why don’t you tell me the whole story and then we'll talk about my fee? That is, if I choose to accept it."

  She folded her hands across her midsection and stretched her legs out in front of her. I was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose to distract me. It was working.

  "Do you want some water, coffee, anything?" I asked.

  She shook her head.

  "So here's the deal," she said. "My client is a well-known entrepreneur. He's made a lot of money and lost a lot of money but he's still way ahead on the profit side. He runs his businesses a bit chaotically. I'm just one of his lawyers. He's got multiple teams on multiple projects."

  "And what is your specialty within the organization?" I had a feeling I knew the answer. She didn't look like your typical corporate boardroom attorney. The fact that she had gone undercover posing as the Candyman’s girlfriend gave me a clear indication of the kind of cases she would be assigned.

  "Let's just say that he prefers to work with me on high risk, high reward cases."

  "I see."

  "In addition to the various businesses, startups, and industries he's involved in, my client tends to diversify his assets quite a bit."

  She was taking her time with this in choosing her words carefully, although that cautious discourse seemed to be her default mode.

  "In addition to houses, cars, commercial real estate, traditional stock investments, and purchasing other companies, he also collects artwork.” She paused for effect. “And by artwork I don't just mean paintings and sculpture. He also collects jewelry, antique items and other things."

  She left it open-ended for a reason.

  "So he's got a boat full of this shit somewhere? Like a lost treasure ship full of stolen pirate loot? Wow, this is perfect for a Florida PI," I said.

  There was no small amount of enjoyment taken on the blunt quality of my dialogue compared to hers. I smiled letting her know I enjoyed the dichotomy and I think she sort of did too.

  "Yes. And I know your next question is going to be why hasn’t this matter been brought to the attention of the police?”

  “I was wondering about that.”

  “Again, it’s a bit more complicated in that one of his business associates re-appropriated the boat after its sale, claiming that my client’s finances fell through.”

  “Did they?”

  “The money was indeed paid.”

  "So this guy took the boat back and it’s full of all these goodies? What’s he going to do? Sell them online? Hold an auction?”

  Another dazzling smile from Dominique. This was a woman who enjoyed her work and I think I was going to enjoy working with her.

  "Not quite that easy.”

  “No, I didn’t think it would be.”

  “The boat is specially equipped with some custom designs and most of the items aren't on full display.”

  Now this is really getting interesting, I thought.

  "Are we talking hidden compartments on a boat?"

  "To a certain degree," she said.

  I let all this information percolate in my mind.

  “So whoever has the boat, may not actually know what’s inside.”

  “Precisely.”

  "What was the last known location of the boat?"

  "A marina in Boynton Beach," she said. “But, obviously, it’s gone now. And no one seems to have any idea of where it went.”

  I tried to hide it but that would work out very well for me because the drug dealer I had just permanently put out of commission had told me, on his death bed, that my sister was in Boynton Beach. And that she was now called Sugar.

  "Give me a description of the boat."

  She laid out the make, model, size, color and various specifications of the vessel.

  In turn, I gave her my fee rate and she agreed to it immediately. There was one last piece of information I needed.

  "What's the name of the boat?"

  A smile appeared and she said the name with a delicious sense of irony.

  "Brown Sugar."

  3

  Now I was looking for two kinds of sugar.

  ‘Sugar,’ my sister.

  And ‘Brown Sugar,’ a stolen boat full of probably illegal items.

  And both of them were supposedly somewhere around Boynton Beach, Ocean Ridge, West Palm Beach, or least likely of all, Palm Beach itself.

  After Dominique left with the signed contract and a receipt for her initial payment, along with an agreement to meet within one week for a status update (I was hoping for a little bit more than just a business meeting) I immediately went to work on the computer.

  For obvious reasons Florida has one of the highest boat owner percentages in the country.

  Everyone's got a boat.

  And if you don't have your own boat you certainly know somebody who does. Which is really the best way to go, because your friends invite you out on their boat, you enjoy it and then they're stuck with the payments, insurance, and maintenance costs while you’re back at your pool relaxing after a day on the water.

  The first place I went was a backdoor entrance into the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. The access had been set up for me by a friend of mine and former client. I went into the boat registration and typed in the boat details Dominique had given me. Apparently it was a Sea Ray.

  Naturally, the boats were listed by name. It was organized by owner registration numbers, names and addresses.

  Dominique had provided most of that information for me. But there were still a few missing links.

  Of course, the bigger the boat, the wealthier the owner. And the wealthier people are, the more often they make one of their businesses the owner of the boat. It’s more beneficial from a tax standpoint.

  In this case it was called Bosso, Inc.

  The computer came back with nothing.

  That made things much more difficult. It could be the boat wasn't registered in Florida. Maybe it was a European boat registered in a European or foreign country. Or, even worse, perhaps forged documents for the registration had lapsed.

  This happens often, especially if the boat’s owners aren’t going to use the vessel and they simply put it in storage somewhere.

  People also do that if they never actually take the boat away from the dock. Some of these big luxury yachts are nothing more than a pied-a-terre, a secret apartment for extramarital liaisons.

  If a wealthy guy wants to have affairs with his secretary and can't go back to his mansion or his luxury apartment because his wife might be there, he picks up his lady friend and sneaks out to the marina where he can bang the daylights out of her and not worry about interruptions.

  Dominique did not give me a photo of the boat, so I definitely had my work cut out for me.

  The job of finding my sister was ground
I had already well traversed. All the usual searching had turned up nothing the last couple of years. I was down to looking for her on the street.

  Since it was close to sunset I closed down the computer, went into my little office kitchen and grabbed a beer. The office consisted of a top floor of a funky, cool building that had elements of chic Florida from the 1950s.

  The sliding glass doors opened up onto a balcony that overlooked Delray Beach.

  I sat down, took a nice long drink of beer and thought about the next steps.

  As usual, I couldn’t help but go back and think about how I wound up here.

  And what had happened with my sister.

  4

  What happened to Jenny was my fault.

  As is so often the case, at the time I thought I was doing the right thing.

  My father, a Detroit cop, had been ambushed by apparent drug dealers. Gunned down along with his partner in their squad car.

  Even though I was still young, I was already a fighter and it seemed like from the day I had been born God had gifted me with a never-ending supply of people more than happy to test me.

  It seemed every time I turned around someone was coming at me, trying to take me down. It was fear that drove them. I was already bigger and stronger than anyone my age.

  So after my father was murdered, some of his cop buddies had unofficially taken me in as his replacement and I had one mission: to find the men who killed my father and make them pay. They were a rough group of men who sometimes bent the law as they saw fit. It was a philosophy I grew to embrace.