Free Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) by Wayne Stinnett Page A

It’d take a few minutes to charge enough for a short call, and the only place it gets a signal is on the deck directly above where I was sitting. Not far above , I thought, powering the phone on and standing up.
    With the phone at head level a few inches below the overhead, and it having a clearance to the deck beams of two feet, that meant the only spot I’d ever gotten a signal on the whole island was only about nine feet above where I was now holding the phone. The signal meter showed one bar for a second and then it disappeared. I dropped the phone into a drink-holder on the console.
    I could use the satellite phone Deuce had given me. It was fully charged and turned off down in my cabin. After learning from Deuce’s predecessor that the sat-phones the team used could be tracked by the DHS, since they technically owned them, I left it off all the time.
    “What the hell?” I said to nobody. “Where else would they expect me to be?”
    Retrieving the sat-phone from its spot under my bunk in the forward stateroom, I powered it up as I left the boat and returned to the deck above the docks.
    Linda answered on the first ring. “I miss you. I miss the island. And I miss the water.”
    “I miss you too, babe,” I said. “But is that how you always answer the phone?”
    “You’re calling from your satellite phone. The number’s stored on mine, but it’s always turned off when I call it. Where are you?”
    I sat back in one of the four rockers Carl had built so we could watch the sunsets. Sometimes the mosquitoes were too bad on the pier or the beach in front of Carl’s house. “I’m at home.”
    “Battery’s dead in your regular phone, right?”
    It was a statement, not a question. The woman knew me too well. Linda and I had met almost a year ago on an island in the Bahamas. She had been working undercover as a professional call girl and helped put together the pieces when some bad guys were trying to kill us. Us being a group that had gone over there to locate the treasure of the Nuestra Señora de Magdalena y las Angustias , a seventeenth-century carrack that had been driven onto the reef by a hurricane. Another former first mate, Doc Talbot and his wife Nikki had found a clue to its location and brought in a few people to help find it, mostly from Deuce’s team. Doc had been a Navy Corpsman many years ago and more recently a member of Deuce’s team.
    “Yeah, left it in the fighting chair when I called you a couple nights ago. Why all the missing?”
    “Sorry, I’m just venting. I hate it up here. It’s a frigging college town and even the government is run like a damned fraternity.”
    “Ahh,” I said. “The big brick wall of chauvinism didn’t fall with your first kick, huh? Know what Pap used to tell me?”
    She laughed, knowing I liked to quote Papisms. I liked her laugh. “That’s pretty much it. A bunch of good ole boys here in Tallahassee, and they consider it their own little boys’ club, no girls allowed unless you’re serving drinks or blowjobs. So, what sage words of wisdom would your Pap have given me?”
    I’d become accustomed to her occasional cop talk. I guess being a woman who excels in a job held mostly by men would tend to make one a little jaded.
    “He applied this to all facets of life,” I replied with a smile, remembering the many different ways I’d used this one little piece of advice. Russ’s comment about the easiest way out of something being to go through it meant pretty much the same thing, and I’d employed the advice of both men a few times. “He’d say, ‘If that don’t work, get a bigger hammer.’”
    Linda laughed again. The kind of laugh that made me feel good hearing it, no matter the circumstances. “You should run for the Florida senate, Jesse. You’d sure shake these fools up here in the capitol.”
    I laughed with her. “No, sometimes I think using a sledge on delicate balsa wouldn’t work out in anyone’s favor.”
    We talked for twenty