Crystal Blue (Buck Reilly Adventure Series Book 3) by John Cunningham (novels for beginners txt) 📕

I thinking? God knows what’s inside my plane, aside from one of the most notorious drug smugglers in the Virgin Islands. And I’m going to pick a fight with a dirty cop in the middle of it all?

We stared at each other, my tongue burning with the acid of constraint.

“You got it, Officer. I’ll be on my way now.” I gave him a two-finger salute off my temple, then turned and walked as casually as I could back toward my plane. I damned sure didn’t want him following me back there.

“I mean it Reilly! Get out of my islands, or you’ll wish you had!”

I kept walking. As I turned toward the Beast’s open hatch, I glanced back. Sure enough, Bramble stood with his fists on his hips, watching me.

I peeked inside the plane. Three burlap bales, each the size of a steamer trunk, were piled high behind the back seats.

Had to be weed.

Crystal gave me a pinched-lip stare from the back seat. I couldn’t blame her. Boom-Boom sat up front, the shotgun pointed toward us.

“What was that about?” she said. “And what’s in these burlap bundles?”

“It’s a long story.” If I shared my concerns about Bramble with them now, Boom-Boom might jump out and shoot him.

I glanced back at the bales—and the smell hit me, hard. Had to be five hundred pounds of the stuff.

“Let’s go,” Boom-Boom said.

Multiple deep breaths did nothing to check the speed of my heart.

“Crystal, I’m going to get you to Jost Van Dyke, but first we need to make another stop, okay?”

She just looked at me with the same expression that had crossed her face when I barked at Bramble. I strapped in up front.

“Christiansted, brudda. Chop-chop,” Boom-Boom said.

I pulled the chokes, primed the engines, and fired them up.

And to think I could have been camping out in the Marquesas all this time.

I taxied out into traffic and waited for a Delta 737 to amble its way up to the head of the runway. The roar was deafening when it started forward, even though I had my headphones on. Once it was airborne ATC told me to proceed, and within a minute the Beast lifted off over Beef Island.

We lit out over Marina Cay and I banked to the south. Christiansted, St. Croix, was about a thirty-minute flight, dead ahead.

But that’s not where I planned to go.

Once up to 1,000 feet, I banked hard to port. Boom-Boom grabbed the instrument panel in surprise.

“Hey, what the hell’re you doing? St. Croix’s that way.” He pointed with his thumb to the right.

“That’s the next stop. Right now I need to follow up on the lead Diego Francis gave me.”

“That piece of shit? The hell you talking to him for?”

Guana Island was ahead. It looked like a giant triangular insect with big pincers on the top. The mountains that filled the southern land mass dropped down to a flat area with beaches on both sides and a saltwater pond in the middle. Brass Knuckles had said there was a small private beach on the northwest inside edge of what I envisioned as the top pincer. Were he and Diego were still alive, or had they too disappeared at the hands of the Russian cartel?

There was a person—no, two people below on the small beach, a man and a woman.

My palms got clammy. After everything Crystal and I had been through, all that mattered now was the truth. And there was only one way to find out.

I banked again and added flaps. We set down in the two-foot waves, just north of the far tip of the island. I hoped the hill above the private beach would muffle the sound of the Beast on our approach so the people at the villa didn’t have time to react.

“This better not take long,” Boom-Boom said.

“This is probably nothing,” I said, “but there’s a chance it could be either of the missing people, John Thedford or—”

“Stud Mahoney? Motherfucka’s the baddest-ass in movies, man. Makes those old timers like Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis seem like pussies.” Boom-Boom sat up in the seat and was now staring out the windshield. “Plus there’s a big reward out for him.”

“This should be the private villa up here. At least that’s what Diego Francis told me.” I sighed. “Only thing is, it could also be where the Russian mob is holed up.”

Boom-Boom scowled. “If they’re here…”

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “When we go around this point, I’m going to turn in toward shore and get as close as I can. There’s no pier here, so I need you to jump out and scope the beach and villa out while I set the anchors. Can you do that?”

“Stud Mahoney was kidnapped, man. If it was by the same Russians fucking with me, these dudes’ll have guns.”

I nodded down toward his lap.

He held up his shotgun. “I only got four shells.”

We rounded the point, and thank God the water remained dark blue. I checked the trees and the spray on the water for wind, taxied a little further south, then pressed down on the left pedal. A moment later we were pointed toward the white sand beach. The chairs that had been occupied when we flew over a minute ago were now empty.

“Get in the back and pop the hatch.”

Boom-Boom dragged his shotgun through the cabin. I heard a click, and a rush of salt air blew through the plane. I added manifold power and jockeyed the rudder to turn the port hatch toward the shore.

“Go!” I yelled.

To my surprise, he was out the door in a flash and up to his chest in water with the gun over his head. Then again, the guy was a smuggler. He’d probably flown into worse situations.

I didn’t want to take time setting the anchors, so I revved the power and beached the Beast in soft sand. Crystal jumped into the water, I followed after her. Her expression was hard—she knew what we might face, but she was