Fallen Honor: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 7) Read Online Free

“Let’s do this.”
    Climbing out of the boat, Carl went to the bow and crawled under the hull to secure a line to the front trolley. Tying the other end off to the boat’s bow cleat, he threw the loop around one shoulder and across his chest to pull both the trolley and boat at the same time.
    I went to the stern and leaned back across the sloped transom, gripping the swim platform.
    “On three,” Carl called out. “One, two, three!”
    I pushed hard, digging my bare heels into the sand, but it wasn’t really necessary. The fat tires of the two trolleys rolled easily on the packed sand. Once in the water, Carl waded across the narrow cut, keeping the bow centered in the area we’d scraped out, until the stern was clear of the mangroves. Careful to avoid the two trolleys, which had fallen into the deeper water of the cut, we slowly turned the boat so that the bow was facing south, into the current. Floating there like that, with the water moving along the hull, I could tell already that we’d nailed the design. The boat looked just like one of the early racing boats I remember seeing as a kid and the sporty swim platform barely touched the water.
    I moved up along the port side, motioning Carl around to starboard. “You take the helm first.”
    While I held the boat steady, Carl slid over the low gunwale and started the engines. The sound from the exhaust ports burbled up through the water and as he revved the engines, the boat actually surged forward slightly, just from the force of the exhaust.
    He nodded to me, and I climbed over the starboard side and settled into the passenger seat, as Carl put the heavy-duty Velvet Drive transmissions into forward.
    When both transmissions were in either forward or reverse, the throttles for both engines were controlled by the foot pedal. They could also be operated independently with the shift knob to allow the boat to maneuver better at low speed by simply shifting one engine to reverse and the other forward.
    Beyond the narrow cut, the water is less than knee-deep at high tide. As we idled slowly along the shoreline, I had to stand to lift a couple of low-hanging branches over the swept-back windshield.
    To the north and west of my island, the shallows extend all the way past the Contents, before dropping off to the deeper waters of the Gulf. To the southwest is a maze of small islands and shallows all the way to Key West, a jumble of unmarked cuts and channels. There are ways through, but if you didn’t know where to look, you’d end up beached on a sandbar, as evidenced by the many gouges around the fringe of shallow water.
    We idled south toward the other pier I’d built on the spoils of the deeper channel that provides access to my house from Harbor Channel about fifty yards away. Going as far as the end of the south pier, Carl reversed and backed up to the other side where we could tie off. Leaving the engines rumbling at idle to warm up, we checked the bilges. Opening the access in the rear cockpit deck, I noted a little water. In the bottom of the engine compartment we found about the same. Both Carl and I checked thoroughly for any water leaks.
    Satisfied that the only water we found was from where we’d splashed aboard, we untied the lines and idled out to Harbor Channel. Carl made the tight left turn into it using only the transmissions, first spinning the boat to the right almost completely around before shifting both transmissions and spinning the opposite way until we faced the long channel. Everything worked perfectly and he shifted both engines to forward.
    We slowly idled in Harbor Channel, which runs almost straight for four miles to Turtlecrawl Bank. There, it turns north into the deep water of the Gulf.
    Carl grinned. “Ready?”
    I nodded. “Mash it!”
    Carl floored the pedal and the two big motorcycle engines roared simultaneously, launching us forward and accelerating faster than any boat I’d ever been on. She lifted up on plane in a second,