Miami's Forgotten Read online

  Miami’s Forgotten

  Coastal Vigilante book 2

  Matt Lincoln

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  2. LaShawn

  3. Jake

  4. LaShawn

  5. Jake

  6. Jake

  7. Jake

  8. LaShawn

  9. Jake

  10. Jake

  11. Jake

  12. Jake

  13. Jake

  14. Jake

  15. Jake

  16. Jake

  17. Jake

  18. Jake

  19. LaShawn

  20. Jake

  21. LaShawn

  22. Jake

  23. Jake

  24. Jake

  25. Jake

  26. Jake

  27. Jake

  28. Jake

  29. LaShawn

  30. Jake

  31. Jake

  32. Jake

  33. Jake

  34. Jake

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  The name of the club was Sadie’s, and by the looks of it, it had been many things in its time. Once I slipped inside, I was transported to a distinctly different world. The air was smoky, and it would take a whole team of aerologists to identify all the components. To me, it just smelled like people having a good time, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  The place had several levels, the largest being the area in front of me that was sunken. Off to the right were private booths and tables, a foot or two above the rest. Each area was provided with heavy, velvet looking drapes that could be pulled for privacy. The booths were all empty now, and a curvy red-haired woman was wiping down the closest table to me. She was too busy to notice that I’d entered.

  Off to the right was a crowded table in the middle of the sunken floor with two guys, a girl, some bottles, and a pile of sandwiches on a plate. The rest of the tables had been cleared and cleaned for the night. Another man was up on the stage in the back, and I would have never noticed him if he hadn't lit a cigarette. The lighter flared for an instant, but I didn’t see him long enough to know anything about him.

  That stage still had all the musical gear and equipment settled on it, and it looked like it didn’t move around much. There was a full-sized piano, a drum set with a mic, a bass set up next to the amp, and another tall mic stand with a genuinely nice Seagull guitar propped nearby. The smoker guy was walking forward, stepping down, and he almost tripped over his own two feet.

  This made the three at the table clap, and they laughed at him good-naturedly. He caught sight of me and waved. “Sorry pal, but this place is closed for the night. But hey, come back tomorrow at nine. We’d love to have ya!” He wore a tee-shirt and jeans combo that was very out of place with the other three seated at the table. They were all dressed rather… flamboyantly.

  His statement got the attention of the others, including the lady cleaning tables. One of the men at the table got up when he saw me and rushed forward. He had a giant grin on his face, and he looked so much like his dad just then.

  “Hope that I’m not interrupting?” I announced myself before Nory got to me. “And I’m sorry that I’m late. I had stopped to help a couple with a blown-out tire a few miles back, and I’ve been trying to make up the time since.”

  Nory grabbed me in a loose hug, happy to see me, thankfully. “No problem, man. Always the good Samaritan, hey?” That was meant as a compliment. Nory had too much respect in him for it to be anything else. His mother and father had both instilled those lessons into him and his sister, Celia.

  We looked each other over, just because we could. Nory had on tight black jeans with some fancy stitching running up the legs. He wore a rather fashionable shirt with offset snaps and the sleeves rolled up. His hair was dark, short, and styled in a very old-fashioned, retro way. His skin was lighter than his father’s, and he had started working on a beard. It was going to take some time, apparently.

  Then Nory turned to the table of people and introduced me to them. “This is Jake Header. He was one of my dad’s best friends. Back before I was even a glimmer in my old man’s eye.”

  Nory had an outmoded yet quaint edge to his speech, style, and mannerisms. It may just have been the image for the band, but it was hard to be sure. All the pictures I had seen recently had been promo photos or touring shots with the other three individuals here tonight. Nothing natural or spontaneous.

  “Come on and sit down, man. The bar’s closed, but we have a chicken salad if you’re peckish.” This came from a tall, skinny guy with blueish-black hair and wearing an ill-fitting scarlet-colored suit. It was a few sizes too large, but again, that may be for the image thing.

  Nory and I joined the table, and he proceeded with the introductions. “This is Pagano,” he pointed out the suited man, “he’s the bass. Then there’s Soha. She’s our vocals and ax.” She was a sweet-looking girl with a little too much makeup on and an elaborate hairdo that would not have been out of place at a sock-hop. She was wearing a polka-dotted tank dress. “And lastly, That’s Urias.” He pointed out the clumsy fellow from earlier. “He manages the drums and does some vocals.”

  “And I,” Nory motioned to himself in a grandiose manner, “am the man on the piano. The one and only.” He even bowed a little in his chair. This made the others jeer and throw bits of crust at him. Again, it all seemed very familiar and cheerful.

  That’s when the well-endowed, red-haired lady saw them and gave them a look. They were quick to react to it. Soha jumped up from her chair and scurried over to pick up the crumbs off of the floor. Urias joined her. “Sorry, Opal. We’ve got it.” I looked back over at her and nodded. I could admire a woman with that kind of raw fear and respect.

  Once order and cleanliness had been restored, we started to sit and chat. I didn’t want to interfere with any of their after-show plans, though. “If she needs to close up, I understand. We can catch up tomorrow or head to an all-night spot. There’s got to be one here in this town, right?” It just felt like a small city with a twenty-four-hour diner.

  “Nah, Opal’ll let us chill here,” Nory whispered from the back of his hand, which hid or disguised nothing. “Besides, I rent one of the rooms upstairs. We’re all fine for a while now.”

  “Well then,” I grabbed one of the chicken salad sandwiches to chew on. “Tell me what’s been going on with you.” I bit into it, and it wasn’t half bad. I had definitely eaten worse. I then took a look at all that was around me. To my left was a raised setup for smokes, drinks, and further down, what may have been a snack counter. It was hard to tell from the smoky atmosphere and the dimmed lights. Taking two steps down would lead to the main floor, a big section with wooden floors that would no doubt squeak heavily when anyone walked over it.

  I saw maybe a dozen repurposed tables with chairs all stained a dark, earthy color. None of them matched in design, but at least they were the same color. Eclectic chic, someone in the know had explained to me. I had to take her word for it, as I didn’t really care all that much. I turned my attention back to Nory as he answered me.

  “Just been touring up a storm, landed here for a month’s worth of shows,” Nory informed me. “Good company, good chow, and steady money is nothing to sneeze at.” I watched him, and I could hear the reflections of his dad in him. That made me smile.

  LaShawn Spindle had been a good friend of mine and a fellow SEAL. Unfortunately, that career had been cut short with a lymphoma cancer diagnosis not long after earning his Trident. He transitioned well into a job as a counselor at a community center down in Miami. There, he helped former addicts and others to recover their lives or even start over. It was a good fit for him.
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  “So, Header,” one of Nory’s friends, Pagano, called me out, and it felt odd to hear my surname said so freely without a ‘Mister,’ before it, “what brings you all this way? I thought that you were a special force, gun-ho type of man. You do not strike me as the sort of gentleman to travel all this way only to catch a road band’s performance.”

  I’d been found out. “Nory’s mom mentioned that you all were playing around here, and I thought that I owed it not only to myself but to Nory to hear him play. Simple as that.” I looked at him and nodded, hoping that answered it.

  “That’s either exceptionally cute or drastically heartbreaking, Nory. Your mom asked him to come.” Soha was only teasing, but I could tell that Nory was a little embarrassed by it. Then she perked up and added, “But don’t fret! If it wasn’t for my dad, we wouldn’t have all that gear up there.” She gestured to the stage. “At least our parents still like us, no?”

  Nory got another sandwich and agreed with her. “Mom’s just pleased as punch that I put all those piano lessons to good use finally. To this day, my sister still won’t pick up a violin.” That must have been an inside joke, so I smiled and ignored it.

  The smoke was thinning a bit inside, as I saw that Opal had pulled out a box fan and placed it on the smokes bar. It was circulating the air just a little. Urias leaned forward to get my attention when I looked back around. “You were a Rambo? Like Nory’s dad? That’s pretty nifty.”

  “Rambo was in the Army, you goof. SEALs are Navy. Sheesh!” Nory said this with great pride and reverence toward both me and his father’s memory. “You wanna go GI Jane and Under Siege for the Navy bit.” That seemed to explain it all, as Urias nodded at me in understanding.

  “Not quite like it is in the movies. Especially not those types. But we all have our own stories about that kind of life that we lived.” I didn’t want to get too far into this right now. I was hoping for a nice little visit and a walk down memory lane. But not that particular lane. “Nory’s dad was hardcore from day one. A real fine man and a live wire.”

  “I wish that I could have met him.” Pagano mused. “But I didn’t join this lot until afterward. Was he as cool as they all say he was?” Of course, there could only be one answer. He wasn’t looking for confirmation, though. He was asking something else for Nory’s sake, and I could appreciate that.

  That was kind of why I was here, in truth. Next week was the five-year anniversary of LaShawn’s death, and Nory’s mom was worried about him being so far from home around this time. He may not have been alone, but it could still hit a person hard once they got to thinking about it. She had just wanted a friendly face from LaShawn’s past to be around if Nory needed it.

  Once Cecily had asked me to drop by, I dropped everything and headed out to Kentucky. I knew that it was something that LaShawn would have done had the places and circumstances been swapped. Besides, I liked this kid. He was a good one, and it mattered to me that I stayed connected with the Spindle family.

  I answered completely honestly. “He was the coolest.” No lie there. “He had more integrity and more stamina for life’s trials than anyone else that I have ever known.” As I thought back, his clear, smiling face rose into my mind’s eye and stayed there. “And he wouldn’t back down for anything. Once he saw what needed to be done, God help you if you got in his way.”

  “Mom used to say that kind of stuff, too.” Nory grinned at his own memories of LaShawn. “She would say, ‘Your father is a walking testament to perseverance. I just buy him new shoes every now and again and stay out of his way.’” This got a laugh from the table in general.

  The plates of sandwiches were gone, and Opal was trying to lock the place down, but Nory had other ideas. “Please, Opal? I’ll do all the bathrooms for a week if you let us hang out for a tad bit more. What do you say?” I got the feeling this was a recurring thing he did.

  Opal didn’t say anything, and I got the impression that was pretty normal, too. She sighed and left the room, exiting out of an area shrouded in the hazy darkness, over in the corner. Once she was gone, Nory turned to me with an impish gleam in his eyes.

  “You should tell them about dad’s life in Miami. Celia and I would sit and listen for hours when they’d talk about that place. It was like the wild, wild west, only in Florida! Shootouts and fistfights and narco strings like every night! It was ferocious!” Nory’s tone was animated and energized, like from when he was a kid.

  “I think that was a different Miami than the one I lived in,” I joked. I shook my head at the table’s occupants. “Only the occasional shootouts and the fistfights were few and seldom deadly. And the… narco stings, you called them? Yeah, not exactly what you’d expect. Didn’t happen all that much.” Then I grinned to myself, thinking back. “Well, except for that one time… but that was a very particular circumstance and a very extraordinary drug.”

  But I wasn’t going to let Nory or his friends go away without a sharper vision of how LaShawn had been. Times like these required good memories and true events that were always better than the tall tales from childhood. “The best way to describe LaShawn is to tell you why he did what he did and who he did it for. And it just so happens that this was around the time your mother came into his life, all because your dad was worried about other people. That was a good time for all of us, though.” No, I shouldn’t mislead them, even about that. “It was an insanely serious and dangerous time for all of us. That’s what makes it interesting, right?”

  1

  The little guy with the funny accent told Nohemi to meet him here, and so here he was. The place smelled like piss and mice, and Nohemi’d seen cleaner dumpsters and port-a-potties than this pickup spot. He should have said no, not tonight. But the money for these extra runs didn’t come up too often, and Nohemi felt like he needed to show that he wanted to be a part of all this. They needed to know that he wanted into the business and that he was willing to be whatever they asked of him. No matter what.

  Nohemi could see a couple of junkies digging around in a trash bag on the other side of the street from where he waited. They had better be careful, he thought to himself. People will knife each other over a moldy apple these days. He had seen it before. Crazy people do crazy things in crazy times.

  More time had passed. Where was this guy? Nohemi could only hope that this guy hadn’t bailed on him. After all, he was doing my part. He was there and waiting. The little guy needed to do his part for this type of thing to work out. There were a lot of places that Nohemi would have rather been tonight if he’d known that this was the way it was going to go.

  Nohemi heard the sounds of someone coughing up what sounded like a lung down the alley a few feet from him. Then he heard someone call out, “Help me, please.”

  Maybe he should look in on them. They might have something on them that he could pawn later on. If they were going to die anyway, they weren’t going to be using it any longer, were they?

  He carefully used the shadows and dark areas of the street to follow the sounds that came out of the alley. That part of the place smelled even worse. Somebody had really puked up a lot over this way. It made Nohemi want to gag, but he stopped himself.

  He glanced down the alley, just barely ducking his head around to see what was going on. He saw three people all standing around this one guy in a bright green shirt. The guy was falling all over himself as if he was having a seizure or something. Nohemi thought that perhaps those other three people had assaulted him or done something bad to him. It was hard to tell from where he stood. And it was a very dark, secluded area, as well. But it looked bad for the one man. He was still asking for help, too.

  They were keeping the man in the green shirt in between the three of them, but not letting him touch them at all. It was as if they were surrounding him, to keep him in that one place. He was having a hard time as he tried to stand up because he had begun to vomit all over himself.

  Nohemi heard one of them speaking from where he was hiding in the da
rk, over by the corner of the building. He listened very closely to the voices and sounds, and he heard someone that was familiar. Yes, that was his contact, the little guy with the weird accent that Nohemi couldn’t place. He was not American, at least not a long time citizen. Nohemi had never been good with placing accents or anything like that, but he sounded… European, maybe? But that was all Nohemi could tell at that point.

  It was very dark down there, and Nohemi found it hard to see anything. But he made out my little guy who was wearing an unseasonable long coat, the sick man with the green shirt in the middle, another bigger guy dressed in slacks and a white shirt, and… maybe a woman. It was difficult to tell in the low light of the dirty alley. It wasn’t until Nohemi turned around that he saw that, yes, it was a woman. She was holding something shiny and small in her hands. From the size and the grip that she had on it, it was probably not a gun.

  She wore a suit-like outfit that blended into the blackness all around her. It took Nohemi a moment to realize that she was holding a metal syringe. She soon placed that into her pocket and retrieved a small note pad and pen. She then began to record something onto it.

  The man in the green shirt started to scream, no longer asking for help. He just clawed at them, shrieking in total agony. My contact guy with the accent pushed something into his mouth to muffle the sound, or maybe to smother him in his own vomit. Nohemi didn’t know that he was into murdering people, and he felt sick over this new information. He just thought the little guy was the one that made the drugs.