Dead Fast Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Get Your Next eBook Free

  If You Enjoyed This Book...

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  DEAD FAST

  AJ Stewart

  For Heather, and Jamaicans everywhere.

  And for Mak Ganim. Keep reading, dude.

  Chapter One

  “FREEZE!”

  I HAD planned to say the word, or some variation on it, and even processed it through the old gray matter. But it came out a register higher than mine, and I realized that it was my girlfriend Danielle who had called out the order. She dropped her arm from mine and stepped toward the alley. We had often had long conversations about doing stupid things like walking down dark alleys where fights were taking place, but those conversations were usually the result of my actions. But as a sheriff’s deputy, Danielle considered herself a protector of people as much if not more than a law enforcement officer. So the fact that we weren’t on her patch in Palm Beach but well off it in Montego Bay, Jamaica, didn’t even cross her mind. I took a couple quick steps and came alongside her.

  We walked shoulder to shoulder down the alley. The three guys doing the beating had stopped at Danielle’s call. A fourth person lay on the ground. They all watched us edging our way down the tight lane. The figures were silhouetted against a white wall behind them that appeared to glow. As we got closer I realized there was ambient light coming from the other end of the alley, and it got easier to see as we got further in.

  “What you wan, mon?” said the guy closest to us. He was a big, dark unit with close-cropped hair. “You go now.”

  Danielle didn’t stop walking toward him.

  “Step away from the person on the ground,” she said, in her deputy voice I had heard before, but only when I, or a perp, was in big trouble.

  “You a lady?”

  I saw the big guy smile. His teeth shone like a full moon. He turned to his two accomplices.

  “It’s a woman,” he said, slapping his thigh.

  I watched the person on the ground out of the corner of my eye. I noted he looked to be a young man, and he crawled back against the wall. The three guys on their feet were giggling, which I didn’t take to be a good thing. Grown men don’t giggle. They laugh or they snort or they sneer, but they don’t giggle. Unless they are on something, in which case they are usually not all that rational.

  Danielle stopped just out of range of the first guy. She kept her eye on him, but spoke to the one on the ground.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. The guy looked younger than I had first thought, maybe a teenager, and he looked up at Danielle with a mixture of fear and confusion.

  The first guy looked me up and down. “Tell your woman to get lost,” he said in his singsong Jamaican accent. He still wore the smile, but it wasn’t so beaming anymore.

  “Pal, I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I want to walk out of this alley with all my bits present and accounted for. And if you do too, I’d suggest you listen to the lady real hard.” My voice was strong and determined, despite the churning in my guts. When I played professional baseball, I learned a thing or two about putting on a performance, about faking it until you made it, about delivering the goods even when the nerves were doing cartwheels in your belly. I sounded convincing enough, but it didn’t faze the big guy.

  “This ain’t your problem, mon.”

  “Three on one?” I said. “Yeah, it’s my problem.”

  The big guy nodded, almost imperceptibly in the darkness, but the sound of a switchblade opening was heard by all of us. It wasn’t a happy sound, and for a moment I wondered how I got myself into these situations. I wasn’t in Jamaica to die in a knife fight. The sound of the switchblade bounced around the hard surfaces of the alley. I couldn’t see the knife, but I could tell by the way the guy held himself it was in his right hand. We stood in silence for a moment, them waiting to see if the sound would drive us away, us waiting to see if he was prepared to use it. The answer to their query was no, the answer to ours was yes.

  The big guy lunged at me and parried the knife at my chest. It was a long, loping move, clumsy in its execution, like a team mascot winding up and pretending to throw a fastball. All drama and no substance. He turned side on as he lunged, so I turned as well. But not where he was expecting. My former partner and mentor, the late, great Lenny Cox, had always told me that the human brain works in patterns. We search them out, even when we don’t mean to, and once we have hold of them, they are difficult to dispel. Traffic lights was the perfect example, he said. He had spent time in some Asian countries where the traffic lights were just red and green, no yellow. The GIs tasked with driving couldn’t get their heads around it, and at every traffic light there was either a sudden stop that sent the troops in the back flying, or there was an accident. Lenny said if you could disrupt the pattern, the enemy could be confused long enough for you to gain the advantage, as long as you didn’t also follow the patterns ingrained in you.

  I coupled this advice with some basic sports science I had picked up in ball club training rooms over the years. The big unit lunged with the knife on the right and the pattern of things told him that I would do the same, move to my right, so as to keep the knife furthest away from me, and to keep him face on. Like a dance move. So I didn’t. I stepped in on my left, straight at the knife, which had slowed at the end of his parry so I could easily grab hold on his arm and keep the knife away from me. I held his arm and cocked my left leg and rocked back on my right leg like I was winding up on the mound, then I kicked out my left foot and cracked the big guy in the side of the knee. It was basic human physiology. Some guys are big, some guys are small, but knees are knees. His kneecap slid sideways, his leg buckled under his bodyweight, and the big guy crumpled in a most unbecoming fashion. As he hit the dirty alley I thrust out my heel and landed on his wrist. He yelped with pain, perhaps at the wrist but just as likely from the knee, but either way his hand opened and the knife spilled to the ground.

  As I watched it tumble from his grasp I heard a guttural scream, and the second of the guys charged. The thing was, as he came at me I realized from his motion and the sound he was making that he wasn’t a he at all. It was a girl, maybe twenty years old, with shoulder-length dreadlocks and a thin, chocolate-colored frame. There was a
cluster of tattooed stars on her chest above the tank top she wore. I generally have a life rule against hitting women. True, I tried to extend that rule to all people as often as I could, but I rarely broke it with women. I’m sure at some college in the Northeast they would call me sexist for not hitting a woman, and a misogynist if I did, but I was okay with my position on it on a day-to-day basis. Today, however, I would likely disappoint them all, because despite my feelings on the matter, if a woman charged at me possibly armed with a knife, she was going down. No sexism. I just hate knives.

  It didn’t matter either way. The girl came at me, shrieking, but didn’t quite make it. Danielle took two quick steps forward and thrust an open palm into the girl’s chest. The heel of her palm hit the girl in the breastplate, just below the neck, and she almost flipped right over, landing in the dirt with a thump that belied her light frame. She was sucking hard for air, the wind knocked out of her as I grabbed the first guy’s knife off the ground. I stood and moved shoulder to shoulder with Danielle, and we faced off with the third guy. This one was definitely a male, tall and thin, more dreads, with limbs that waved in the breeze. He took a moment to consider us, and his buddies lying in the dirt, and then he turned and ran. The kid who had been copping the beating reached up off the ground toward the running guy, and let out a deflated moan, then dropped back against the wall. Danielle and I went to the kid. His facial expression was not one of eternal thanks.

  “You let him get away,” he said, in his thick Jamaican lilt.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Danielle.

  “Don’t worry? What are you, Bobby Darin? He has my shoes, mon.”

  I looked down and indeed the kid had bare feet. But it was his bleeding head I was more concerned with. Danielle told him to stay still, that he might have a concussion, but he brushed her off and said he could sit his own damn self up. I turned and cast my eye on the two attackers, but they were both still lying on the ground in considerable distress.

  “We should call the cops,” I said.

  Danielle smiled. “I’m glad you think so.”

  The kid laughed. “Yeah, mon. That gonna happen.”

  “Why?” said Danielle.

  “Tourist like you get tonked, maybe dey come, but not for me.” The kid put his hand to the back of his head and it came away bloody. He had split it when he fell, and although it didn’t look too bad, it did warrant attention.

  “Then we should get you to a hospital,” said Danielle. Her voice was soft and caring, and I wanted to go to the hospital with her, even though there was nothing wrong with me. But the kid wasn’t feeling it.

  “I ain’t going to no hospital. And I don need no more help from you.” He tried pushing himself up, got halfway and wobbled like he was going to fall. I caught him before he did, which earned me another dirty look. I could just as easily be done with the grumpy kid, but I had suffered my share of beatings here and there, and they almost always put me in a bad mood, so I was prepared to write off some of his attitude to that.

  “Then at least let us help you home,” I said. “You’ve had a bad knock on the head.”

  The kid tried to hold himself up but couldn’t, so he let Danielle take one side, and me take the other. The girl Danielle had hit was regaining normal breathing, and the big guy propped himself against the cinderblock wall, holding his knee and no doubt wondering how he was going to get home with only this bird-framed girl to use as a crutch.

  “Don’t come back here, mon,” said the guy, through gritted teeth.

  I looked around the alley, the trash and patches of hardy weeds.

  “Yeah, because it really demands a repeat visit,” I said. I turned and like competitors in a three-legged race we hobbled out of the alley.

  “My name’s Miami,” I said. “Miami Jones. This is Danielle. You got a name, kid?”

  “Markus. Markus Swan,” he pouted.

  “Well let’s get you home, Markus. Someone’s probably worried about you.”

  “Yeah, I’m worried about me.”

  I nodded back to the alley. “You worried about those guys?”

  “No, mon. I’m worried ‘bout my momma. When she finds out I lost my shoes, she gonna kill me. Tanks to you.”

  As we helped the kid out onto the dark street I wondered what I had done to deserve him, and why I had bothered to get out of my beach lounger in the first place.

  Chapter Two

  THAT MORNING WE had been living the full Jamaican vacation experience. We were lying on loungers looking over the tranquil waters of Montego Bay because once again Danielle had beaten me in a bet. This time it had been a run on the beach on Singer Island, a couple months previous, but she hadn’t let me forget the wager. She never did. I had been on the losing end of plenty of bets with Danielle, and had been subjected to alcohol-free months, vegetarian menu weeks and even a series of yoga classes. So a wager where my losing resulted in me taking an island vacation seemed a no-brainer. As a result we found ourselves doing exactly what we did pretty much every evening on our back patio while overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway on Florida’s east coast, only our margaritas had been swapped out for rum drinks of a variety I had no idea existed, and we sat at an all-inclusive resort where it was socially expected to begin drinking before lunch.

  They say relaxing on a beach with a good book is the perfect way to recharge one’s batteries. After a swim, a few hours reading and then passing on lunch for another swim, my batteries were oxidizing from lack of use. I glanced over at Danielle, in a one-piece swimsuit and doing everything for it that the designers envisaged, palm shadows dancing across her as she frowned at a novel. She must have felt me looking at her as she turned to me.

  “You okay?” she said.

  I held up my plastic mug filled with rum and cola. “Can’t complain. You?”

  Danielle glanced around the small cove where the hotel sat, raked sand falling gently into an azure Caribbean Sea, and then out to a reef that kept the deeper emerald water at bay. The sky was clear, one solitary cloud adding some variety to the canvas. A gentle breeze wafted in from Cuba, keeping things pleasant, and the sound of the wind rustling through palm fronds completed the calming effect. It was postcard perfect. I watched Danielle take it all in, and a smile crept into the corner of her mouth as she did. She finished her assessment by coming back to me.

  “Don’t hate me, but I’m bored,” she said. And that was just one of the many reasons I loved her.

  The concierge threw all kinds of tour ideas at us, but traipsing around a rum distillery with a bunch of snowbirds from Michigan wasn’t our idea of a good time. We decided to wander into town and meet some locals, which the doorman thought was a terrible idea.

  “If you must go, you should take a taxi,” he said with a smile. “Walking is not for you.”

  A beat-up minivan took us from the resort and dropped us on Gloucester Road in return for a king’s ransom. The area looked like Bourbon Street. Buildings of bright greens and oranges blocked the view of the water, each offering touristy drinks in a uniquely American atmosphere. I didn’t fly to the Caribbean to sit in an American chain restaurant, so we wandered past a sign that told us we were at Doctor’s Cave beach, and headed for something more authentic. I like authentic. At home on Singer Island, most of the houses have been razed in order to build minimansions on the water. My place was on the water, but it was authentic down to the wood paneling and shag rug.

  We found authentic in the form of a joint called the Pork Pit. It was a rundown-looking place with a view of a barren park proclaiming itself as Dump Up Beach. Neither the bright yellow building nor the park screamed come in and stay a while, but the smell of jerk chicken and pork wafting from outdoor grills was enough to make up our minds. It was my kind of place, offering cold beer, generous smiles and helpings of the most delicious meats. They clearly weren’t trading on their location, and Danielle and I enjoyed a late lunch. I cornered our server and told him we were looking for a local spot to li
sten to some music and enjoy a beer or two, and he directed us to a small place off the Falmouth Road. It reminded me of a few joints I’d visited in Lauderhill, a Jamaican enclave back home, that had some of the best people and music one could hope to while away a few hours with. This place was no different, except that the building looked like it might blow down in a decent breeze. Two guys were in a corner playing acoustic guitar, with a third occasionally joining in on the steel drums. There was some Marley, some Beatles and what I guessed was some original stuff, and the mood was easy and exactly what we were looking for. Except for one guy at the bar who looked like Colonel Sanders, we were the only white people in the place, which earned us a few grins and plenty of high fives. Danielle got me on the floor for a few slow dances, which weren’t a lot different from the fast dances. It was laid-back, and as the afternoon turned to evening a cloud of ganja smoke spread out across the ceiling. I wasn’t feeling the beer, but the atmosphere I was breathing was going to my head. I told Danielle I needed some air, so she paid the check and met me on the steps of the bar.

  “Shall we take a walk?” she said, looping her arm through mine. The sun was in its final throes, dropping with a mystical burst of green into the ocean. We walked away from the water, up through the town that was already more asleep than awake, and then cut back around toward St. James Parish Church. The palm trees and the water didn’t feel so different from Florida, but something about the air was dense and unfamiliar. My head cleared and Danielle stayed tight against me, and I felt good. We crossed a dark section of town, wood shutters closed, lights doused. That’s when Danielle stopped. She tugged me back and her eyes focused my attention down an alley between two crumbling cinderblock buildings. I saw several men, three or four, silhouetted by the whitewashed wall behind. One was separate from the others, the focal point of their geometric wedge. We stood in silence watching, then in a flash, punches were thrown and we ended up helping an ungrateful kid home to his mother, and our Jamaican vacation took a turn onto the pages they don’t put in the tourist brochures.