Saving an Innocent Man Read online

  Saving an Innocent Man is a work of fiction.

  Characters, places, names, businesses, organizations, incidents and events

  are products of the author’s imagination. They are used fictitiously and

  not to be regarded as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead,

  or to actual events or locations, is coincidental.

  Copyright  2017 by Robert E. B. Wright

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be scanned, reproduced or distributed in any electronic or printed form whatsoever without the written permission of the author. If you would like to use any parts of the book, other than for review purposes, prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at the author’s official website at RobertWrightThrillers.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-950312-02-3

  ASIN:

  Cover design by Hilton Graphics, Lindy Leftwich, Jed Leftwich, Robert E. B. Wright and Valerie Cardarelli-Wright. Stock photography from various sources, rights obtained.

  Manuscript typing, all editing, interior book design and formatting by Valerie Cardarelli-Wright.

  For

  all armchair adventurers, weekend explorers,

  and everyone who loves, preserves and protects the Everglades.

  Table Of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  He’s running for his life.

  From a thousand bullets…

  and a thousand teeth!

  One

  The small plane was in a spiraling dive six hundred feet above the most isolated, most impenetrable part of the vast Everglades. The American Jungle.

  The thirty-six-year-old pilot, sitting in the left seat, saw only black smoke in front of him. In the back of the plane, twenty-two-year-old Malcolm Farmer sat bolt upright behind the third row in the six-seat high wing airplane. His back was pressed hard against the rear wall, his body terror-frozen, his eyes unblinking, staring straight ahead.

  They were the only two people on board.

  The whine of the engine became a wailing siren. The smoke cleared away from the windshield, blowing to the side. The pilot and Malcolm could both see what lay before them. Nothing but a blur of green coming up at them as if they were on a rocket sled.

  The pilot tightened his grip on the yoke, hunched his shoulders, locked his arms straight forward and clenched his teeth.

  Malcolm's large body rose up slightly as his legs straightened, struggling to get as far back as possible. He turned his head slightly to the right, trying not to look. But his eyes were locked in their sockets. His pupils were mere pinpoints of black. His face was contorted in horror.

  The pilot and Malcolm simultaneously released hair-raising screams, but all that was heard was the wail of the death plane.

  Moments before the impact, a collection of birds fluttered out of the mangrove trees. The last small bird had just cleared when the plane hurtled past it with tremendous speed and force. A blur to anything looking from the ground.

  The plane smashed into a network of mangroves, splintering branches, limbs and trunks, creating confetti out of small, bright green leaves that windmilled down through the air. The mangroves, with their intricate, closely knit roots, acted somewhat like a net to lessen the impact of the crash. But with such speed and force, the fuselage dug deep into the soft, moist earth. The front of the plane was flattened, with nothing ahead of the windshield visible. Smoke and steam poured out and drifted upward.

  The right wing was loosely attached, the strut broken away from the bottom of the fuselage. The left wing had snapped backward, close against the fuselage, but was still attached, its leading edge lying against the ground. Fuel ran out of severed lines into a swampy depression of brown water, now turning iridescent on the surface.

  The impact was crushing. Final. The velocity of the plane had been stopped in an instant. And every part of the plane – every rivet, bolt and piece of sheet metal, the engine, the wheels, the seats – all tried to keep going forward. The two things that kept going for a few milliseconds, after everything else had stopped, were the two human beings inside. It all happened with almost immeasurable speed. But to the pilot and Malcolm, like everyone who has ever looked imminent death in the face, those milliseconds were an eternity of slow-motion horror.

  The pilot was thrust forward and was speared through the chest by the shaft of the steering yoke. The bloody end of the three-quarter inch rod poked out through a hole in his back.

  Malcolm was launched forward. His huge three hundred and sixty-five-pound body, like a plunger in a tube, mowed down the seat backs of the three rows ahead of him. His face, still with his eyeglasses on his nose, smashed into the center of the control panel. A sheared piece of sheet metal, razor sharp, followed right behind Malcolm and, just like a slicing machine, cut through his shirt and removed a seven-inch wide strip of skin and fat all the way up his back directly over his spine, kidneys and lungs. He lay there bleeding from the long rectangular wound on his back. Blood ran from his face, which was flat up against the black-turned-red control panel.

  The only thing that moved was the rising smoke.

  The air was thick and humid. The sun moved an inch higher in the sky and the shadows shifted two feet on the ground. An hour had passed since the crash. Katydids buzzed in the thickets and bushes. Dragonflies swooped over the surfaces of brown puddles and mud holes. Lizards darted in sudden bursts of speed on rotten logs and dead leaves.

  The plane lay twisted and broken at a forty-five-degree angle in the mangroves. Smoke still filtered up through the trees, rising skyward. A mockingbird alighted atop the plane's jutting rudder, as if to claim the wreck for the denizens of this primitive place where life has been untouched and uncontrolled by man since time itself began. In the crash, the pilot’s door had opened slightly and the pilot’s left arm hung out, as lifeless as a length of rope. An endless line of small fire ants were marching single file across the jungle floor. Having received their orders from some insect authority, they were marching intently toward their objective. The poisonous and very aggressive ants used a flattened weed to bridge the gap over a watery crevice. When they got to the pilot's dangling hand, they climbed on the dead flesh and continued their march under the sleeve of his suit. Inside the thin-skinned aluminum tomb, he hung like a marionette pierced by a nail, impaled by the steel rod of the yoke.

  Malcolm looked as dead as the pilot. His body was head down, feet up, matching the forty-five-degree tilt of the plane, as if some evil force wanted to drain away every ounce of blood from his body through the wounds in his fac
e. Blood still trickled out from under his face and dripped off the obliterated instrument panel. His smashed eyeglasses were hooked over his left ear, hanging loose at the side of his head.

  Malcolm lay there, still, for many minutes. Then the fingers of Malcolm's right hand twitched once in a spasm. And again. His hand opened slightly. Then closed. Malcolm bent his arm at the elbow very slowly, back and forth. His hand and arm were the only things that moved. He tried his right leg and drew it up close to his body, very, very slowly. With great difficulty, and without moving his head, he extracted his left arm from under him. He sighed and grunted with each effort. He drew his left leg up next to his right as best as he could. He pushed his palms against the instrument panel and lifted his face slowly away from it. His mangled eyeglasses, still hooked over his left ear, fell to the floor of the plane. The lenses had shattered into a million pieces. His eyes were closed and the shards and bits of glass had pierced both his eyes right through the lids. Spikes and points and bits of broken glass were still sticking into the lids of both eyes. Blood ran from his eyes, nose and mouth. Dazed, disoriented, he tumbled out of the open door onto the soft wet earth, which was, because of the impact, about even with the door of the plane. Malcolm came to rest sitting upright. With his mouth gaping open, gasping for breath, Malcolm slowly opened his eyes. As he did, the bits and pieces of sharp glass that had pierced his eyes fell away. As Malcolm's eyes opened into slits, rivulets of blood ran down his cheeks. He used all his will to draw his eyelids up across the most sensitive part of the human body. In agonizing, inscrutable, indescribable pain, Malcolm forced his eyes open wide. They were two pools of blood overflowing, running down his face. All the air he had gasped in was now let out in a loud, blood-curdling, hair-raising scream.

  A scream that sounded like it would go on forever.

  Malcolm sat there motionless. Then his body started to sway slightly. His eyes were closed now but they kept bleeding down his cheeks, red droplets dripping from his chin and down his double-chin.

  In this state of torpor, barely conscious, near shock, his brain was slow. Dark. But then, a spark. Blurry, out-of-sequence images started to emerge from the haze in his head. The out-of-focus ‘snapshots’ came in intermittent flashes as his brain struggled to make sense of them. He had to remember. He needed to remember how he got here.

  He was only able to piece together snippets.

  He could see himself in the plane, crouching way in the back. He could hear the propeller chopping through the air like a machete in slow-motion. He could see two men, the pilot and a man in the right front seat. The man on the right had a shiny aluminum suitcase on his lap. They were talking into headsets, so Malcolm could barely hear the conversation. But he could make out some words here and there. Struggling to clarify the fuzzy image in his dulled memory, Malcolm's eyes moved beneath his lids and he winced in pain. But he kept trying to focus on the images, to force his brain to make sense of it all.

  The hazy picture cleared.

  The pilot turned his head to the left, looking out his side window.

  The man in the right seat secretly held a large hypodermic syringe in his left hand. He held it like a dagger. The long needle was unmistakable. The amber fluid inside the glass tube leaked out of the sharp tip and hung there.

  The pilot's head was still turned away, craning almost, looking downward through his side window.

  Then! Like a wading egret spearing a fish with its beak, the killer stabbed the needle deep into the pilot's neck below his right ear. The pilot spun around and put his right hand up to the sudden pain in his neck. He let go of the controls and rose up out of his seat over the killer, his body taut from head to toe. But it was too late. The killer pressed the plunger down forcing all the curare – a powerful poison used on the blow gun darts of South American Indians – as close to the pilot's jugular vein as possible. It would work in seconds causing muscular paralysis. The killer let go of the death injection and used both hands in an attempt to grab the pilot's wrists. The syringe stuck out of the pilot's neck and moved every-which-way with the upheavals and contortions of his body. The plane rocked to the left. It pitched up, then down.

  Then Malcolm's brain went dark again.

  He drifted off to sleep.

  Two

  She lay there, practically naked in the white-hot sun. Her long beautiful body was deeply tanned and heavily basted in SPF 30. She was tummy down on the chaise lounge near the shimmering turquoise pool of the tall apartment building. She looked like a spread from a ‘men’s’ magazine. Her right cheek was resting on the tops of her hands and her long, bleached hair hung off the side of the chair. Wayward strands of her hair stuck to her buttery back. The top of her small bikini was untied and her breasts pressed out like balloons against the pale pink towel. The bottom of her small black bikini tried to contain her full round rear end as it arched toward the sky in a sensual curve. Her legs were perfect, all the way down to the red painted toenails.

  Slowly, like a cat awakening from its nap, gently stretching, she raised her head and reached behind herself to fasten her bikini top. She purred a sigh, reached over her head with her left hand and threw her hair onto her back. She did a little push up and sat on the edge of the chaise lounge.

  "I've had enough, you gonna stay?"

  An equally gorgeous creature was lying on her back on a chaise lounge right next to her. She had her top on. Her bikini was white with diagonal aqua stripes. Her tan was just as dark as the other woman’s. Her hair was almost as blonde.

  "No, I'll go up, too. Gotta take a shower and see what kinda trouble I can get into tonight. Mike won't be back 'til tomorrow."

  "That's what he said, but you never know. You'd better watch your ass."

  That's exactly what the men at the pool were doing as the two tempting women slipped on their sandals and white gauze see-through tops, grabbed their sun block, room key, book, magazine, sunglasses and towels and sashayed into the thirty-two-story rainbow colored building on Brickell Avenue in Miami. In the elevator, one of the women pressed twenty-three.

  Two men in their mid-thirties, dressed in Miami Beach chic, got into the elevator just after them. The men pressed nothing. The elevator doors closed. The men just stood there in their white pants, tropical shirts and light-colored jackets, hands clasped in front. Everyone watched the floor numbers change at the top of the elevator.

  "I'm really wasted,” the blonde in the black bikini said to the other one. "The sun is really strong."

  "I love it. I could lay out there all day long."

  "You do lay out there all day long."

  "No, I go shopping once in a while, too!" A little giggle.

  A chime sounded and the doors opened. One of the gentlemen held the door for the ladies who turned right after leaving the elevator. The men turned left and walked down the hall. As the women entered the apartment, the two men stopped walking, turned to see which apartment they went into and pulled guns from shoulder holsters beneath their jackets.

  "That's the apartment."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'm tellin' you, that's the apartment."

  The two clean-cut young men walked toward the door. They spoke in whispers.

  "23-H, that's it!"

  “You have the warrant?”

  “In my pocket.”

  "We should have more backup for this."

  “Yeah, sure, that’s the way Hector got shot. Too many assholes going through a little door. Let's hit it!"

  "OK, OK, I'll kick, you front."

  The taller of the two men, a good-looking all-American type about five nine, stood on the side of the door, back against the wall, both hands on his black automatic pistol held down below his belt. The other man, Hispanic, held his matte black gun in his right hand. He confronted the door like a fullback who was about to kick to a fifty-yard field goal.

  In one beautifully executed martial-arts kick, the ivory painted metal door flew open as if blasted by an explosion. The
brass striker plate and assorted screws and hardware showered into the room. Diaz recoiled from the furious kick as Mulholland stormed in, gun leading the way. Rushing in from the dark hall into rooms flooded with window light made it hard to see. But Mulholland’s eyes adjusted rapidly. Diaz followed fast.

  A woman screamed at the top of her lungs. The girl in the black bikini was still wearing the black bikini bottoms, but nothing else. She crossed her arms over her breasts and reflexively forced her legs together as she stiffly took little baby steps backward away from Mulholland.

  "Police! Don't move! Police! Don’t move!" Mulholland darted into the other rooms. "Walk to the middle of the room," Diaz said, his gun pointed at the beautiful body. His eyes frantically searched right and left.

  As Mulholland entered a bedroom, there was blonde number two, completely naked, pulling at a bed spread for cover, finally grabbing a sky-blue pillow to put in front of herself.

  "Drop it!" yelled Mulholland. She was frozen. "Drop it!" he screamed, "Or you're dead!"

  She didn't. He took more careful aim. "Do it! Now!" She let the pillow fall to the floor, her face a picture of fear. Mulholland's eyes instinctively drifted over her body, but only for an instant. That's all he could allow himself.

  "Who else is here?"

  "N-n-no-no one." She stuttered as Mulholland opened closet doors carefully and quickly, always standing to the side of the door. He tried the bathroom door. It was locked. Mulholland yelled at the locked door. "Police! Come out or we're coming in! Now!"

  A female voice came through the door. "OK, don't hurt me, please!" She was crying. The door handle turned, the door opened and a pretty young black woman wearing a white halter top and shorts cautiously inched out. "Please don't shoot, please! I'll do anything you want, please!"

  "My God! This guy's got his own harem!" Mulholland said out loud to himself.

  "You OK, bro?" Diaz called out.