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

seeming to just leap up out of the water. On plane, we continued to gather speed. I started the stopwatch function on my dive watch to measure the time to the lobster traps we had set up exactly two miles from the entrance to my channel.
    Responding like a rocket sled on rails, we negotiated the two sweeping curves in the channel. It only took a few seconds to again reach top speed. Looking back, there wasn’t much of a wake off the stern at all, but the twin propellers created two distinct bulges in the water, culminating fifty feet astern with a pair of small rooster tails. Very little of the hull was in contact with the water, just enough to create drag and let the thrust of the props keep the rest of boat up out of the water.
    As we roared past the trap’s floats, I stopped the watch and looked at it as Carl slowly brought the speed down. “A hundred and eight seconds!”
    “That’s almost seventy miles an hour!” Carl shouted. “From an idle, no less!”
    “We need to mount a GPS. We must’ve been going close to eighty-five there at the end.”
    “Let’s keep that to ourselves, if Charlie asks.”
    He looked at me and I grinned, arching an eyebrow. “A lie of omission?”
    We both laughed, knowing that he never kept anything from his wife. “Maybe she won’t ask,” he said, as we idled in the wide part of the channel, just before the curve north to the open Gulf.
    Switching seats, I piloted the boat back the way we came at a more sedate speed, planing and weaving back and forth across the channel. Even at half throttle it seemed like we were going as fast as my charter boat, Gaspar’s Revenge.
    Charlie, the kids, and Pescador met us at the south pier. “We heard you all the way to the end of Harbor Channel,” Charlie said as she took the line Carl tossed her. “How fast is it?”
    “Not sure exactly,” he replied, being somewhat truthful. “We’ll have to put a speedometer in the dash. It’s pretty fast, though.”
    “Well, keep it at a slower speed when the kids and I go out with you.”
    Once tied off, Carl and I checked the bilge and engines again. Putting on a scuba mask, I got in the water and checked the underside of the hull for any visible stress fractures in the clear-coat finish. We’d added two short stabilizing fins extending two feet back to the prop shafts, with small rudders aft the props. The stabilizers were an afterthought, once we’d calculated that the high speed the powerful engines might produce would be too much for the nearly flat-bottomed hull to allow it to turn at high speed. Declaring the boat to be sound, we decided to go to Marathon for lunch.
    Twenty minutes later, after we’d all rinsed off again and put on clean clothes, we idled away from the pier. I let Charlie sit up front with Carl Junior and Carl at the helm and I sat in back with Patty and Pescador.
    As Carl started down the channel, I said, “Know what we forgot? To measure the draft.”
    Carl turned east into Harbor Channel. “We’ll take the deeper route until we’re sure it can navigate the cuts at idle.” When Carl gassed the engines to get up on plane, little Carl and Patty both covered their ears.
    We hadn’t had any kind of wind in days and the water lay as calm and still as the heavy air. Carl followed the cut south of Turtlecrawl Bank, then turned due south into Big Spanish Channel. Cruising along at what I guessed to be forty knots, the boat performed really well as Carl slalomed a few crab traps, the boat barely heeling at all. With the Seven Mile Bridge in sight to the southeast, Carl put his son on his lap and let him pilot the boat for a while. Carl Junior was no stranger to running a boat, even at eight years old. Carl had earned a living from the sea all his life, as had his father and his grandfather before him.
    Leaning back and looking over the engine compartment and sloped transom, I could nearly see the waterline, the swim platform now about three inches above the water