Escape From Cemetery Island--Scene 2

Here is the second scene from the story I started last time. I used the prompt-- ‘That wet-dog smell.’ Thanks ya’ll for bearing with me--Dixie

Escape From Cemetery Island--Scene 2

James Cook was desperate. He had been hiding from Juan Garcia and his thugs for three days now. He didn’t know which was worse. The wet-dog smell emanating from his un-washed body, the throbbing bullet wound in his leg, or the rumbling in his stomach. At least the sudden rain squall had alleviated his thirst, he thought dejectedly.

Above the thunder, he could hear the steady drip, drip of water into an old pot he’d scrounged out of a pile rubble in the hovel. Hearing the splashing made him thirsty again. Leaky roofs were good for something, he mused, as he hobbled over to the pot and slaked his thirst with another long drink from the battered pot, causing his leg to start bleeding again.

Setting the pot back under the leak, he limped over to the dry corner where he’d made a bed of sorts and lay down. Fresh blood was soaking through his makeshift bandage. It was a red bandana. He’d found it draped over one of the tilting headstones in the graveyard behind the shack. He hated being a grave robber, but was the cleanest thing he’d yet found on this miserable island.

This was the worst predicament he’d been in for a long time, he reflected, as he lay there in the gloom. Escaping from The Sea Robin, a drug smuggling boat disguised as an ordinary shrimp boat, had been hard enough; and not without cost--the loss of his weapon and badge, the two most important things he had lost. They paled in comparison with his life, however.

James laid his hand gently over his wounded leg and counted himself lucky to be alive. But, for how much longer, he wondered. Even to his uneducated touch, he could tell the wound was fevered. If he didn’t get help soon, the proof he had worked so hard under-cover for the past eight months to obtain, would die with him--and Juan Garcia would still be free to peddle his poison all along Florida’s gulf coast.

He would find a way out of this situation, he promised himself, as he lay there in the gloom, listening to the storm outside, until finally, the steady dripping of precious raindrops into the pot, lulled James to sleep.

The sound of voices, muffled by the storm, outside the door to the shack, awoke James with a start. Ignoring the sudden, sharp, pain in his leg; James leaped up off his bed, and limped over to stand behind the door. Silently, he picked up the broken timber he had placed there, to use as a weapon should the need arise, and awaited the intruders.


To be continued….