Nuclear Winter First Strike by Bobby Akart (top ten books of all time .TXT) 📕

few cubes of ice. The young man had been preoccupied with a group of pretty girls sitting at the other end of the U-shaped outdoor bar overlooking the Atlantic. They were knocking back pineapple-looking drinks full of rum and juice and all kinds of sweet things skewered by an extra-long toothpick. Of course, a tiny paper umbrella had been plunged into the pineapple slice adorning the rim of the glass.

Typical, he thought to himself.

Mike wanted a quiet moment to gather his thoughts, and he hoped Havana Jack’s might give him a place of respite. Mike was not much of a drinker. None of the Albrights were. Hank had gone through a period of escape after his wife died but eventually returned to nothing more than a social drink with his guests in the evening.

For Mike, however, today was different. A special occasion, if you will. He’d worked all day at the grisly murder scene, and technically, this was the end of his tour. A Jack on the rocks or three just might help him cope with what he’d just seen in the hammocks.

A female voice entered his solemn consciousness. “Can I buy you a drink, sailor?” Cliché, but real. It was also familiar.

To confirm it wasn’t all in his head, he felt the woman run her fingers across his broad shoulders, briefly touching the nape of his neck, causing the tiny hairs to rise in response.

More familiar.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he inhaled her scent.

Even more familiar.

Not perfumy. Salt water.

“How’d you know I was here?” he asked without taking his eyes away from the last swig of bourbon.

She set her phone next to his on the bar, drawing his eyes to study its display. On the map, there were two red dots blinking nearly on top of one another.

“I used the where’s my husband app,” she replied as she hoisted herself onto a barstool.

Jessica Albright, Mike’s wife of fifteen years, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, savoring the slightly scruffy feel of his five-o’clock shadow on her lips.

With Jessica’s arrival, the bartender managed to pull himself away from the vacationing college girls to take her drink order.

“I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic with a splash of Nellie & Joe’s,” she said, pointing at the yellow plastic bottle with the green flip-top. The Florida-bottled lime juice was an essential ingredient in many recipes and a favorite complement to a gin and tonic.

Mike pushed his empty glass toward the bartender. “I’ll have another, and don’t be a stranger next time. Okay?” His demeanor was slightly surly.

“Um, yes, sir,” the young man replied sheepishly.

Mike and Jessica sat in silence until the bartender returned with their drinks and a mango wood bowl full of fortune cookies.

Mike leaned back on his stool and glanced at Jessica before addressing the young man. He pointed at the bowl of cellophane-wrapped treats usually found in Chinese restaurants.

“Seriously?” he asked.

“Um, yes, sir. The Sysco salesman dropped off a case this morning. I guess China Garden ordered way too many or something like that. He gave it to us for nothing.” He reached for the bowl to remove it from the bar, but Mike raised his hand.

“Nah. Leave it. It fits right in with the screwy day I’m havin’.”

They each took a sip of their drink and opened a fortune cookie.

“Me first,” said Jessica as she broke open the packaging and cracked the fortune cookie in two. “‘Luck helps those who help themselves.’ I like it. Time to play the Mega Millions Powerball game.”

Mike smiled as his wife tried to drag him out of his melancholy mood. She knew they both thought the lottery was a way to tax the poor. He opened his fortune cookie and read it.

“Your life is a dashing and bold adventure,” he read aloud. He shook his head. “No thanks.” He slid the small piece of paper in front of Jessica and took hers instead.

She immediately protested. “Hey! Fortune cookies don’t work like that. You can’t just pick and choose your good fortune.”

“I need luck, and you like adventure. Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

“Mike, you can’t trade fortunes.”

“Why not?”

“Um. Well, it’s against the rules or the laws of good fortune or something.”

Mike started to laugh and immediately felt better. He reached over and squeezed her hand before kissing her on the lips.

“Why can’t you just let me be miserable?” he asked jokingly.

“Because, Detective Albright, that’s not who you are,” she replied. “I heard about it on the radio. Was it that bad?”

Jess also worked for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department as a member of their WET team, an acronym for Water Emergency Team. She was a trained scuba diver as well as a paramedic.

Mike nodded. “Much worse than the first one, Jess. I just don’t understand people.”

“Same MO?” she asked, hoping that by talking about it, Mike would feel better.

“Yeah. Vic was a young male. Stabbed to death. The first murder weapon was a butcher knife. This time, the killer used a spring-assisted knife.”

“Like a switchblade?”

“Sort of, but shorter by law. The max length is three and a half inches, I think.”

Mike and Jessica had met in 2017 when he was investigating several brutal murders in the Middle Keys. In the spring of that year, a woman lost control during her birthday party and went on a bloody rampage, stabbing her boyfriend to death. The couple’s four children were in the house at the time. A month later, a man was arrested for stabbing his friend to death after the victim made unwanted sexual advances in a trailer they shared. In late summer that year, a man got into a dispute with his landlord over an eviction notice. Four lethal stab wounds later, the landlord was dead, and the killer had dumped the body in the brackish water off the Upper Keys. Jessica’s team had recovered the corpse, and Mike had been assigned to investigate the murder.

A murder a year was the norm, and they almost