WAYWARD SONS
A JERRY SNYDER NOVEL
Caribbean Mystery Series
Volume 1
WAYNE STINNETT and STEWART MATTHEWS
Copyright © 2021
Published by DOWN ISLAND PRESS, 2021
Beaufort, SC
Copyright © 2021 by Wayne Stinnett and Stewart Matthews
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication Data
Stinnett, Wayne
Matthews, Stewart
Wayward Sons/Wayne Stinnett and Stewart Matthews
p. cm. – (A Jerry Snyder novel)
ISBN: 978-1-7356231-7-7 (eBook)
Cover photograph by Lunamarina
Graphics and Interior Design by Aurora Publicity
Edited by The Write Touch
Final Proofreading by Donna Rich
Audiobook Narration by Nick Sullivan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Most of the locations herein are also fictional or are used fictitiously. However, the author takes great pains to depict the location and description of the many well-known islands, locales, beaches, reefs, bars, and restaurants throughout the Florida Keys and the Caribbean to the best of his ability.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
From Wayne Stinnett & Stewart Matthews
Maps
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Epilogue
Afterword by Wayne Stinnett
Afterword by Stewart Matthews
Dedicated to the voices of the voiceless.
“I am the voice of the voiceless; Through me the dumb shall speak. Till the deaf world’s ears be made to hear. The wrongs of the wordless weak. And I am my brothers keeper, And I will fight his fights; And speak the words for beast and bird. Till the world shall set things right.”
–Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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From Wayne Stinnett
The Charity Styles Caribbean Thriller Series
Merciless Charity
Ruthless Charity
Reckless Charity
Enduring Charity
Vigilant Charity
The Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Adventure Series by Wayne Stinnett
Fallen Out
Fallen Palm
Fallen Hunter
Fallen Pride
Fallen Mangrove
Fallen King
Fallen Honor
Fallen Tide
Fallen Angel
Fallen Hero
Rising Storm
Rising Fury
Rising Force
Rising Charity
Rising Water
Rising Spirit
Rising Thunder
Rising Warrior
Rising Moon
Rising Tide
Coming this fall
Steady as She Goes
From Stewart Matthews
The Detective Shannon Rourke Series
Chicago Blood
Chicago Broken
Chicago Betrayed
Chicago Lies
Chicago Creed
The Barrett Mason Series
Matador
Tyrant
Jackal
Ghosts
Wardogs
Red Star
WEBSITE: https://www.smwrites.com
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Maps
Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands
El Caribe
Living this life, you’ve got to play your part. You can’t bait a man, unless you let him think he set the hook. If he doesn’t believe you’re the ten-foot marlin he’s been angling for all his life—the one he can show to his buddies when his wife is bored and looking the other way—he’ll cut and run.
That’s the game. It’s played the other way. Ain’t no such thing as a fisherwoman. You’re here to get caught, so you can’t let him know you’re actually the one angling him. You get too eager, he’s gone. You try to take too much off him, he’ll know it. But if you act like he caught you, you can slice him right, and you’ll be feeding your family with chunks of him for a good long while. If you’re real good, he won’t even feel the knife slipping through.
Amalis Jules had learned the techniques long before she’d ever sat down at the cabana bar at the Wild Life Resort on Zoni Beach. This was a damned good fishing spot, but not one you came to on your first day out. No, you needed experience. Especially on a day like today, when the fish were out, and she needed a big catch. No baitfish, no broke boys. She wasn’t in for charity. In this world, if you did something good, you didn’t do it for free.
She let her line hang loose. Sipped her rum drink, listening to the waves loving the sand, then sneaking away. Soon enough, a man would come, swearing up and down he was gonna charm this beautiful black girl into bed. He was gonna tempt her with private cabanas and champagne baths, just flapping that tongue deeper onto the hook.
They’d pay for over
stepping. Everybody did.
Mommy, in her own way, had warned Amalis about boys overstepping. When Amalis was a little girl back home, Mommy had told her about those Temple Yard boys smoking herb out back of the artists’ stalls, stashing joints under their arms when the policemen walked by, singeing the few hairs they’d grown. Amalis grinned at the thought of how they’d tried to bait her all the time, their little hands grasping for her skinny-girl body and talking like they were all grown men, and not kids.
If Mommy knew what she did now, she would’ve let them. Then they’d have to repay her before she cut line and let those boys go free.
She remembered one little boy, Ras-Under. He looked older than the rest, but he must have been a year or two younger than Amalis. Had a shine in his face nobody could snatch out. Always getting into trouble, the way boys that age did.
One morning before school, when she was helping Grandmama stock her spot in Cheapside, she saw a policeman get Ras-Under. Grabbed him by the shirt collar. Yelled at him about smoking on the street, said he was gonna scare the tourists, but everybody from Temple Yard smoked there—even Amalis, and she lived in Whitepark. Ras-Under was a skinny boy with a ball of dreads bigger than his head. He talked back. Them dreads didn’t do nothing when that policeman’s baton cracked him. He screamed. Blood came down his face.
All day at school, Amalis had thought on Ras-Under, his white teeth flashing against his lips, red with his own blood. She knew Grandmama saw, but she didn’t speak on it. Supposing she hadn’t seen it, she had to have heard it.
“Why did that policeman bust Ras-Under’s head?” she’d asked Grandmama later that day, when Amalis was sitting in the hot, sticky kitchen, helping Mommy cut up Grandmama’s mangoes for frying.
“He overstepped,” was all Grandmama said.
But that didn’t seem no answer. Yet, when Mommy spoke, her knife tapping the cutting board, she’d nodded. “He overstepped.”
For ten years, Amalis peeled at Grandmama’s words in her head, hoping some sense would come out.
Sense came when a white tourist boy got her pregnant. He promised her the whole world. Said she could leave Bridgetown on his pretty white sloop, and they’d be together on the seas that she loved, with their baby rocked by the waves all night and day. They’d love each other under moonlight, and they’d come back this way whenever she wanted to see Mommy and Grandmama. A month before baby Lawrence came, that white boy sailed to Miami.
Amalis’s baby boy was five now, and he ain’t never seen his white papa. He only ever been as far away from Bridgetown as they were today, living on Culebra.
Hard not to be mad at Lawrence’s papa all the time. But when Amalis wanted to scream northward, hoping that scared boy would hear it, she remembered the two gifts he gave her. First being Lawrence, and second, helping her understand what Grandmama meant. He overstepped.
From that lesson, she learned how the white tourist men would chase her if she looked right, if she wore her hair like a white girl, and how she could catch them for overstepping.
Before the last catch went back to San Juan, then to his job and his family in Indianapolis, Amalis got enough to feed her and Lawrence. Some rent money from the man, a finder’s fee out of the pocket of a charter captain she brought her men to, and she re-sold the jewels he gave her to a Japanese couple on the street for twice what them stones was worth.
A few years back, a catch that size would’ve kept her and Lawrence going about a month, but she’d taught herself how to survive better than most—which she found her pride in.
On this night at the resort bar, that money would be gone in three weeks, which put Amalis out angling.
Coral eyeliner was a good lure. Caught a certain type of man’s eye. Rich man. Tired of his boring wife. Man looking for a slender, big-eyed, dark-skinned black girl, filling out a bikini the way his woman never did.
Like Amalis.
And just like Ras-Under, they’d overstepped. Wanting something they never should’ve had.
At that resort bar in Culebra, Amalis felt one swimming up beside her. He was a cool old man, with white, thinning hair parted near the side of his head, blue eyes, dancing and sort of wild. His spine hunched near his neck, and when he reached into his pocket and slid a few bills to the bartender, his crooked fingers bent the money around his thumb.
He wore a diamond-encrusted wedding band, and he was tall, even with his hooked spine. Flashed a handsome smile when the bartender took his money. If that man was forty years younger, she might reel him in and let him keep her company for free. But, no, all the kindness she had for strangers was gutted from her.
She was what she was. No apologizing.
“Why would anyone come to a bar alone?” His voice was like the leather on her favorite pair of sandals, the thong worked and worn soft against the insides of her toes, and the soles massaged her heels.
“For the drinks.” Amalis wrapped her lips around the straw and sucked up a ball of rum and pineapple juice from her painkiller. His pupils widened as he watched her. “Ain’t no other reason why.”
“Oh, no,” he said with a grin. The bartender slid a chilled glass of rum into his hand, the ice cubes chattering. “You can get a drink at home. You could kick your feet up on the coffee table, maybe sit in your underwear if you please—with nobody around to stop you from smoking a joint. Sounds far more relaxing than sitting at a bar if all you want is a drink.”
Amalis turned her shoulders more his way, then leaned forward a touch, letting him take a look at the goods. This bikini halter top set her girls just right, made a man feel like he was getting a sneak peek before the real show.
“Suppose it’s the idea of meeting someone new, then,” she said. “Even if I don’t, sitting out here alone is better scenery than sitting at home.” She nodded to her right, away from him and toward the surf, where the water broke the reflections of the bar’s lights into glimmering schools.
He smiled. He knew the game. Then, with a look, he motioned behind her. “Some scenery.”
She looked over her shoulder. At a table outside the cabana, a man about twice Amalis’s age, dipped in the orange glow of tiki torches, was letting it all hang out. His flabby belly touched the tops of his thighs and his chest jiggled as he used a credit card to chop out a line of coke.
The topless lady sitting across from him squealed in delight and clapped her hands, her tits like a pair of old basketballs. She bent over the table and snorted the whole damned thing.
Amalis shook her head and laughed, then took a drink.
“See what I mean?” the old man said. “It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than Jimmy Fallon.”
“I guess I come here for more than looking at the water.”
“It’s a fine place,” he said. “People here aren’t afraid to be honest. Unlike folks walking around most places, nobody here pretends that they’ve got some code, some morality, that they’ll die following—when they know, and I know, and you probably know, their morality comes off like a wedding ring when it suits them.”
He looked at her like he wanted an answer.
Rich man acted like he wanted to hear what a girl like Amalis had to say, but he didn’t. She’d open her mouth and overstep. He’d get mad and pull himself free, and all that time she spent wouldn’t get her nothing. What he really wanted was a pretty girl to be that wife he never had—the one who don’t spend his money, who’s sweet and rubs his feet while he talking about how hard a rich man got it.
“You right,” she said in agreement. Then, took a sip. “People lying all day, every day.”
“Liars, all of ’em.” He took a drink from his rum and curled his lip back like a stray dog. “You shouldn’t ever let some Puritan asshole tell you how to feel, Miss—”
“Amalis.” She offered her hand to him. He scooped it up, then kissed her knuckles, leaving a wet spot behind.
“Jacob Sherman,” he said, looking her up and down. She felt his eyes prodding her bare shoulde
rs, her stomach, her naked thighs, the tops of her feet. “God, if you aren’t the finest creature I’ve laid eyes on in years. Would you do me the favor of accompanying me back to my villa?”
She laughed.
“I’ve got a bottle of champagne being chilled as we speak. Vintage 1918—the last year of The Great War. It was liberated from Marshal Philippe Pétain’s personal stock in Vichy at the end of World War II. I’ve been looking for someone unique to share it with.”
“What about your wife?” She touched his wedding band with a look.
“What about her? After what I said, you think I’d enter a marriage where the both of us were expected to hold up some medieval idea of honor? Marriage is financial. She and I both understand and respect that.”
Not that Jacob being a kept man would have stopped Amalis, anyway.
“I’m not going to your villa,” she said. “But I don’t want to stay here. Buy me a new drink.” Her painkiller was half-finished.
“Bartender,” Jacob said without breaking eye contact. “Bring my new friend a fresh drink.”
“Right away, Mr. Sherman.” The bartender got to work.
“I’m not doing you,” Amalis said with a grin. She held Jacob’s eye contact.
He wasn’t shook. “There’s little point in getting physical with a man my age. I’ve learned to get everything I need through good conversation.” He finished his rum and smacked his glass on the bar.
A few minutes later, they walked onto the beach together, toward the water. Amalis held onto the pit of his elbow with one hand, her drink in the other. He didn’t lean on her for support. Didn’t tilt side to side like some old folks. He walked like a man about to get laid, but she didn’t slap him back for it. Amalis knew that was just the way this cocky old bastard walked.
They came to a cabana topped with palm fronds; the frame draped in a linen that was tied back around each of the four posts. One of a couple dozen on the beach. Under the canopy, a bed with a few pillows, which might as well have condoms sitting on them.
Amalis fell back, her drink sloshing over the cup’s rim and dribbling off the Scotchgarded fabric covering the bed. She stretched out, then propped herself up on one elbow. Jacob slumped down in the moonlight, sitting halfway on the bed, and halfway off.