Dead Is Dead (The Jack Bertolino Series Book 3) by John Lansing Page A

hapless fisherman with an empty hold who got skunked by the fickle sea. He’d pick up the F-350 in the morning. In the meantime his brothers—driving the drug-laden van—would head to Sacramento and a major payday.

Eleven
    The Dirk brothers heard the boat before they saw it. The loud thrumming engine of a high-powered ski-boat. It was closing the distance fast, running without lights.
    Terrence had discovered and dismantled the GPS beacon imbedded in one of the waterproofed bales, but that discovery came too late, as the volume of the throaty engine grew nearer.
    Sean had already tied off the marijuana to the rear of Terrence’s Zodiac, ready to roll, while Toby drifted off to the side, lying in wait.
    A twenty-eight-foot Scarab traveling at thirty miles an hour was in danger of plowing into the brothers as it entered the drop-off area. The two men aboard didn’t see the Dirks at first, because their eyes were trained on the onboard GPS screen. At the last moment, the passenger looked up and yelled, “Fuck!”
    The pilot throttled back and cranked the wheel hard to the left, generating a huge wake that threatened to scuttle Sean’s kayak as it pulled alongside the two smaller crafts.
    “It’s about fucking time!” Terrence shouted angrily over the sound of their engines as the two men on the boat eyed them with surprise, then suspicion. Terrence stayed on the offensive, “Let me get this offloaded so we can get the hell out of Dodge.”
    “Who the fuck’re you?” the pilot of the Scarab shouted, his eyes black as ball bearings.
    “Who the fuck am I?” Terrence shot back. “I’m your fucking meal ticket, fucking thirty-minutes-late assholes.”
    The pilot of the Scarab pulled a Glock 9mm and the stocky man in the passenger seat leveled an AK-47 at Terrence in response.
    “I’m gonna ask you only one more time,” the pilot said, “and then I’m done talking. Who the fuck’re you?”
    “You didn’t get the memo, scumbag,” Sean jumped in, not reacting to the hardware pointed at his brother but letting his kayak drift away from the Zodiac, splitting the focus of the men on the boat. Two targets were harder to hit than one.
    Terrence picked up his brother’s thread. “There was Coast Guard up and down the coast. We met the captain five miles out and busted our humps to get here on time.”
    “Here’s how it’s going to play,” the Scarab’s pilot said, not buying it. “You two are going to load the bales onto the back of our craft, and if you do it quick enough, we’ll give you a lift back to shore and you can do your explaining to the Sinaloa boys. They’re good at getting to the meat of a story.”
    The passenger with the AK snorted at the implication.
    “Do it yourself,” Sean hissed, not backing down, still drifting wider.
    The pilot growled, “And did you call me a scumbag?”
    Toby’s first bullet ripped into the pilot’s cheek, shattering his teeth. He screamed in searing pain and blind-fired his 9mm in the direction of the shot.
    Terrance drew his P7 and rapid-fired, hitting the pilot in the neck, and then the shoulder, and then the abdomen. The pilot grabbed for his throat with one hand, his belly with the other, and flopped onto the windshield, bleeding out over the glass before slipping to the deck.
    As Sean fired his Mossberg at the passenger, the kayak rolled dangerously. The first shot flew wide.
    The man with the AK held on to the rocking boat with one hand and arced a spray of high-powered rounds in Sean’s direction with the other. A round punctured the skin of his kayak above the water level.
    The AK-47 drifted toward Terrence and one round connected with the stainless steel tubing that secured the steering wheel housing, sending a shard of metal ripping into Terrence’s shoulder.
    Sean’s shotgun spit flame once again.
    The man’s thick forearm exploded. Body part and automatic weapon pinwheeled into the ocean. Blood spray fountained from his ragged stump as the man