Retired Naval crime investigator, Jack Murphy, just wants to sit on his boat, drink beer, and not be bothered.
After a series of senseless murders have terrorized a small town on the island of Hawaii, Jack sets out to get justice when none is forthcoming after the DA refuses to file charges against the wealthy man who murdered his friend.
After years of watching the rich and powerful walk free and not held to account for their crimes, a building rage is about to be unleashed. With no other choice, Jack Murphy must take the law into his own hands to make them pay.
Payback Jack is available at these online bookstores. Click here.
Read the first chapter below.
After I fueled the boat, I put it back inside its slip at the harbor and went into the salon with coffee in one hand and the Sunday paper in the other.
Usually, I liked to sit in the fighting chair in the cockpit and read the paper, but it was windy and sprinkling. The forecast was to drop an inch of rain. From the looks of the dark sky, it wouldn’t be long before it poured. Warm rain was ok, I loved the smell of it, just not when outside trying to read the paper.
I sat on the couch and glanced at the headline. It read, Another homeless man found stabbed to death in the village. I shook my head in disbelief. The crime was so heinous and the act so foreign to my little slice of heaven. One or two murders a year on the Kona side of the island was typical, but this was the fourth one in a month. Someone was out to solve the island’s homeless problem–one murder at a time.
I continued to read the paper and sip my coffee. I don’t know why, but coffee always seemed to taste better on Sunday.
Unfortunately, the news wasn’t better. Story after story of nothing but bad news and bad things that happened to good people. I sighed and muttered to myself, “Something’s got to change.” After a while, I folded the paper and threw it down in disgust.
It’s usually quiet out at the harbor. That’s why I lived there on a boat named the Holo-Holo. It’s the perfect home for a sworn bachelor. And forty-two feet of Cabo fishing yacht nirvana. It used to be named the Hui-Hou. I changed it because I hated saying goodbye and because holo-holo meant cruising or vacation in Hawaiian; it was more in line with how I liked to spend my time.
Most apartments weren’t as nice inside. What I liked most about it was if I got sick of the neighbors, I could untie and move to a different harbor or island if I chose to. I had no desire to, but I enjoyed having options. Living in the same house in the same neighborhood for twenty years was not my idea of living anymore.
Later that afternoon, Kathy dropped by to work on her book while I laid on the couch and studied the weather report from Kona to Honolulu. I had business over there that would take about a month, and I wanted to avoid staying in a hotel for that length of time.
It would’ve been a nice occasion to exercise the Holo-Holo, since it wasn’t good to let 800 horsepower diesel engines sit idle for long periods of time.
Kathy sat at the table across from the couch. Her right hand appeared to be permanently attached to her forehead as she leaned forward with her elbow on the table. She was on the third rewrite of her first novel.
According to her, it’s a love story that happened on the high seas. She said my boat was the only place she could write it because it was on water and she needed to feel a connection to the ocean to make her words authentic–whatever that meant.
When she wasn’t working at the Ugly Omelette, I used her part-time when I had a charter. Fish shivered at the mere mention of her name. That’s how good she was with a fishing pole.
Kathy had a red hibiscus flower in her long black hair. It was tied up into a messy bun with tendrils that streaked down the side of her face. She wore a teal bikini top with white denim shorts that contrasted her golden brown skin. She traded off chewing her hair and a pencil intermittently as she regarded the paper version of her manuscript.
The stack of pages was a sea of red and blue ink over, under, and around the printed words. If there was one thing she’d convinced me of, it was that I never wanted to be a writer; especially not after watching her write and rewrite the same story over a period of months.
I’d never been the type to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time and would definitely have thrown it overboard after the first hour. Never mind the fact that I’d sit in the boat’s fighting chair with a fishing line in the water, drink beer for hours, and stare at the ocean with nothing to show for it. I wish I was a better angler. To each his own, I guess. W. C. Fields once said, “Everyone’s got to believe in something, and I believe I’ll have another beer.” It worked for him, it worked for me.
I didn’t mind Kathy coming over to write, since her perfume always improved the smell of the place.
“Crap!” she said as she stared at the manuscript.
I looked over and said, “Problem?”
“I have a plot hole big enough to drive a boat through.”
I watched for a moment as she spit her hair out from between her front teeth and started scribbling wildly in the margins on the paper in front of her. The more she wrote, the more unwrinkled her face got. I nodded and went back to reading the weather report, since I wanted to avoid crossing the channel between the Big Island and Maui in twenty-foot seas.
When I saw that three tropical storms had formed off Baja, Mexico, and were headed straight toward Hawaii, it was a straightforward decision to postpone my trip to Honolulu until after hurricane season.
I was about to tell Kathy when a loud woman’s voice out on the dock disrupted the evening silence. It was one of the drawbacks of not having a doorbell.
“Kathy, are you in there?”
Startled, Kathy said, “I’m sorry Jack, I told her not to come here. I’ll get rid of her.”
“No worries, she’s fine. There will come a day when you’ll miss her interrupting you. Trust me.”
Kathy bounced from the table out the salon door toward the dock.
“Mom! I told you not to come here,” she whispered so as not to draw the eyes of any nearby boat dwellers.
“I know honey, I’m sorry and just afraid of what I found in the backyard, and I remembered your friend Jack being in law enforcement, and–”
Kathy interrupted, “He’s retired. What did you find that is so important?”
Her mother looked down the dock and at the two boats on each side of the Holo-Holo and whispered, “Bones.”
Now really annoyed because her mother had interrupted her writing, Kathy said in a low tone of voice, “They’re probably from some animal.”
Her mother shook her head. “That’s what I thought until I found the skull,” she said as she pulled it out of her oversized purse.
“Oh my gosh, put that back and come with me,” Kathy whisper yelled as she checked to see if anyone was looking as she pulled her mother by the arm down from the dock onto the boat.
Payback Jack is available at these online bookstores. Click here.