The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  He took out a large folding knife, punched holes in the empty gas can, then took it out and threw it overboard. I wondered if that was the knife he used to cut Melissa Raines’ throat.

  When he came back, he said, “How have I been stupid?” as if he’d been thinking about it all the time he was outside. “You’re the only one who’s tipped to any of this, and you had to get lucky to do it. Hood was an accident, Meth-heads killed your granddad, Bobby killed Melissa, and his death is a suicide. Tell me where I made a mistake.”

  “The mistake was, you didn’t need to kill Grandfather, Melissa Raines, or Bobby Paige,” I said. “You could have had everything you wanted without that. Now all you’ll get is a table down in Columbia with a needle in your arm. Or does South Carolina still use the electric chair? I forget.”

  At least I had him listening.

  “So what if Melissa Raines did talk?” I said. “She didn’t know anything, did she? So what could she really say? That Barry Beal beat the crap out of her? Jesus Bucky, these days, football stars get charged with murder and go to the Pro Bowl the next year. Okay, so Beal would have taken a body shot to the reputation, but as much as I hate to admit it, he would have survived along with the development project. That’s why God made public relations people. And Grandfather couldn’t have hurt you. He had no proof, regardless of what he may have believed.”

  “I wish you knew what the fuck you were talking about, John David,” Bucky said. “I really do.”

  “Then enlighten me. You just said yourself that the whole world is convinced that Hood’s death was an accident. You’d gotten away with it, Bucky. You didn’t need to kill anybody else.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Melissa knew all about the development. I couldn’t let her go public with that.”

  “Why on earth would that matter? How could that hurt you or Beal?”

  “Because I took money from McDaniel Mills to fund my stake in the development, goddammit. I needed seed money to secure the property with options, and money for start-up operating expenses.”

  He gazed at me as if I should understand and even approve.

  “So you embezzled it.”

  “I borrowed it. I just didn’t let anybody know. The second the banks release the major financing—which will come any day now—I’ll replace every cent and nobody will ever know. But I can’t risk anything coming out before that. If anybody shines a light on me before I’m ready, I’m done. Bailey McDaniel would wonder where I got the money and he ain’t the forgiving sort. He’d be overjoyed to see me as a permanent resident of a gray-bar hotel somewhere.”

  He seemed to reflect on his own words for a minute, then opened a locker beneath the bunk and took out a flare gun. He didn’t plan to use it to signal for help.

  “Bucky, how did you come to this?” I asked. “You’ve killed four people and you’re about to make it five. Did you totally lose your fucking mind?”

  “If you had to live on what some rich bitch and her old man doled out like a fucking allowance, and kiss ass every day of your life, maybe you’d lose your fucking mind too,” he said. “This was my chance to get out from under all that—and finally wash the goddamn red clay off my heels. Nothing that’s happened was part of the plan.”

  There was something new in his voice—or maybe I was just now hearing it. Greed alone wasn’t driving my old friend, or insanity, although he had to be insane to do what he’d done. Another motivator was present, and it was desperation. Desperation not born of the events of the present, but of the past, beginning with the mother who deserted a towheaded kid when he was not yet three years old, and a father whose highest goal in life was to just make ends meet.

  He held the flare gun up and examined it.

  “Think I can shoot this through an open hatch from fifty yards out?” he said.

  “They’ll figure it out, Bucky,” I said. “Forensics is quite the science these days.”

  “You’ve been watching too much TV, old buddy. These yokels around here ain’t all that smart. Besides, I doubt they’ll look into it that far. I’m counting on that sheet burning off, but even if it doesn’t it’ll just look like you were laying in the bunk when it happened . . . if they can find enough to even work that out.”

  He turned a flat gaze on me, his eyes like opaque marbles.

  “Guess it wouldn’t matter if I said I was sorry, would it?” he said.

  He held the gaze a moment longer, then walked through the hatch, pushing it open as far as it would go.

  I heard a short, indecipherable word, the boat rocked, and there was a splash. Bucky had apparently dived into the lake. I tried to roll off the bunk but I was bound to either end of it with strips of torn sheet, leaving me hopelessly immobile. I tried shifting my body feet-first, extending my legs toward the open hatch to try to close it. Shaquille O'Neil might have reached it, but I came up a good two feet short.

  The first wave of panic rolled over me, and I struggled against my restraints with everything I had, pushing the muscles in my shoulders and arms to the snapping point. I tried to gain leverage with my legs against the braces of the bunk to break them, but nothing gave.

  I stared at the open hatch and tried to guess how long it would take Bucky to swim far enough out to shoot a flare through it without frying in the firestorm too. Five minutes? Less? Was that all the life I had left?

  I tore at the top of the sheet with my teeth, flinging my head from side to side like a feeding shark, the taste of gasoline flooding my mouth and burning down my throat.

  Then Carl Hood stepped through the hatch.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “Need a little help?” Carl Hood asked, and grinned. He was dressed in black jeans and a black t-shirt and dripped water from his ponytail to his bare feet. He took out a pocketknife and began sawing away the strips of sheet that fastened me to the bunk.

  “Where’s Bucky?” I asked him.

  “If you’re referring to the gentleman who put you here, I don’t know,” he said. “I hit him pretty good and he went overboard. I lost sight of him in the water.”

  The thought of Bucky drawing a bead on the open hatch with his flare gun sent shivers up my spine and frightened me more than I’d been all night. Maybe it was the thought of dying so close to freedom.

  “Close the hatch!” I shouted.

  Carl Hood looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  “Gas! Flare gun! Bucky!” I shouted in shorthand.

  Understanding swept across his face as he looked at the gas-soaked sheet. He cocked his head toward the open hatch, and sprang up and slammed it shut.

  “Guess it wouldn’t be a good time to have a smoke, would it?” he said, and finished cutting the bindings away.

  He rolled me out of the sheet like someone laying a rug. I hit the cabin floor on all fours, slid the hatch open again and scrambled up on deck, with Hood right behind me. We dove into the water and began putting as much distance between the boat and us as we could. The shoreline was invisible, the night pitch-black, and for all I knew, we were headed toward the middle of the lake. I didn’t care. I’d worry about drowning later. Right now, my only thoughts concerned not getting blown to bits.

  Suddenly Carl Hood was no longer swimming beside me and I turned to find him treading water behind, looking back at the boat. Bucky Streeter was standing on the deck watching us, the light from the cabin behind casting him in silhouette. I stopped and treaded water too, ready to dive under if I suddenly found he’d traded the flare gun for a weapon that dispensed something other than a ball of flaming chemicals.

  I watched as he picked something off the deck, and turned his back to us. He stood there for a moment, shoulders slumped, head bowed, the figure of a man who knows with finality that the game is not only lost, but the season is over. Slowly, he stretched out his arm and pointed at the hatch I’d left open when we made our escape. A streak of red light shot into the cabin, followed by a more brilliant flash of orange and yellow that lit up the night sk
y and sent a rolling ball of fire and thunder across the water to upend me and knock me under. I surfaced a moment later, breathless from the impact of the explosion, coughing and sputtering and blowing water out of my nose. All around me pieces of debris fell burning and smoking into the water, much of it no larger than my hand. I looked back to the spot where the boat had been, and saw only a burning shell.

  From twenty feet away, Carl Hood shouted at me and pointed over my shoulder, toward the shore. I began to swim, forgetting how tired I was, re-energized by a new awareness—that of simply being alive.

  Flat on my back on the muddy bank, I lay staring up at the stars and trying to catch my breath in open-mouthed gulps. Carl Hood was sprawled out beside me, but he didn’t seem to be nearly as winded.

  When I could speak I said, “I guess I need to thank you for saving my life.”

  He grunted, brushing it off as lightly as if I’d thanked him for the use of a ballpoint pen.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you are, but how did you just show up in the nick of time and save the day like something out of a B-movie?”

  “I was following you, obviously. Have been all day. I was watching from the trees when he hit you with that pipe wrench.”

  “Pipe wrench. So that’s what it was.”

  “But before I could make it to the dock, he pulled you aboard and cast off the lines and motored off. I followed around the shoreline keeping the boat in sight until he finally anchored. Then I swam out.”

  Hood stopped talking and stared at me across the darkness. “This guy was a friend of yours?” he finally asked.

  “Lifelong,” I said.

  He stared at me a moment longer, as if trying hard to understand my criteria for friends.

  “He kill my daddy?”

  I returned his look. “He killed them all.”

  Hood’s gaze turned to the lake. The few remaining embers of Bucky’s boat were fading and blinking out as the water finally engulfed them.

  “I don’t suppose you’d leave me out of this?” Hood said. “Like I was never here?”

  “What on earth for? I’d be soggy toast now if not for you. You’re a hero for Christ’s sake. They ought to give you a parade.”

  He turned back to me, unsmiling. “I got what I want.”

  I was shaking my head. “I don’t see how I can get away with it. How would I explain it?”

  He stood up and looked down at me. Our eyes locked. “You’re a writer,” he said. “Make something up.”

  “I thought I was an investigative reporter,” I said.

  “That too,” he said. “And not a bad one, either.”

  A compliment from Carl Hood.

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said.

  He gave me a short parting nod and disappeared through the trees. I went back to Bucky’s lake house and called 911. My cell phone, which Bucky took from me, was probably blown to bits or at the bottom of the lake.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  A week after the firestorm aboard Bucky’s boat, things began to calm down. Sheriff Bagwell and other law enforcement officials grilled me long and hard, and I talked myself hoarse telling them the story. But it was the discovery of Bucky’s theft from McDaniel Mills that did more than anything to make them believe me. After that, everything Bucky did fell into place like tumblers on a combination lock.

  They ruled Bucky’s death a suicide, and closed the books on the murders of Cecil Hood, Grandfather, Melissa Raines, and Bobby Paige. But I didn’t tell them the whole story. I kept my promise to Carl Hood and omitted the part where he came to the rescue at the last minute. I didn’t even tell Eloise or Kelly about that. I spun a tale that portrayed me as inconsequential to the outcome of the events, saying that all I did was pick an opportune moment to roll out of the sheet, jump in the lake, and swim away like a man with hungry crocodiles snapping at his heels. Which, if you removed Carl Hood and the crocodiles from the picture, was basically what I did. Carl Hood’s part would forever remain a secret between Carl and me. And I would forever remain in his debt.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about Bucky, and probably always would. There was a sickness in my old friend that I didn’t see, something magma-like that lay beneath the surface and bubbled and boiled until it finally erupted. It made me wonder if I really knew anyone.

  The two meth-head bikers, still in jail, pled to grand larceny and a dope charge. A well-meaning but insensitive member of the District Attorney’s Office told us cheerily that we’d get Grandfather’s camera back in a couple of days. It was a thoroughly underwhelming consolation for all that had happened.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t add Barry Beal’s assault on Melissa Raines to the tally of crimes solved. Without her, proving it was impossible. And without Bucky, there was no one to say how much or how little Beal knew about things. Which meant that he managed to skirt justice entirely, and there was little I could do about it. Beal might not have been directly responsible for anything that Bucky did, but he was a catalyst for it. He set things in motion and then turned his back on them, without the slightest display of guilt or responsibility. He must have known something. He couldn’t have been oblivious to everything that transpired. He was also an abuser of women, and in general, a foul and disingenuous human being. Maybe he wouldn’t go to jail for any of that, but I wanted desperately to believe that justice was waiting for him . . . if in no other form than exposure someday of the man he is. At least that was my naïve hope.

  The Jeep was in the driveway packed and ready to roll back to Atlanta. I sat on the front steps waiting for Eloise and Mackenzie to come out so we could say our goodbyes. They were still out back feeding breakfast to the animals, which in this household took precedence over my leaving.

  Bucky’s madness was no longer front-page news, but I knew people would continue to talk about the bloody wake he left for years to come. It was a sordid and sensational story of embezzlement and murder involving the wealthiest family in the county, a beautiful valley made vacant with houses crumbling, and fields and pastures giving way to weeds and erosion—but still a valuable chunk of real estate awaiting a developer’s next steps.

  The good news, at least for me, was that whoever would eventually develop Eastatoe Valley—which was inevitable—it wouldn’t be Barry Beal. Amidst unsettled legal complexities concerning the ownership and division of properties, Beale had turned his share over to Arthur Pitt to sell. Under the flood of bad publicity and unanswered questions, Beal dropped out of the remaining PGA schedule and went to his native South Africa to play a few tournaments.

  Kelly and I have spent a lot of our waking (and sleeping) time together. Without either of us speaking of it, we seem to have mutually concluded that nothing significant will come of it unless one of us pulls up stakes and moves. She knows not to ask me to stay, and I know she wouldn’t give up the Clarion to come to Atlanta. So, are we realistic enough to see that we are probably on paths too divergent to likely merge. Time will answer that question. All I know is that I won’t be the one to break it off. I’ll settle for a long-distance relationship before I do that. It’s the new me.

  Kelly and I are also joined in a professional way. We’ll soon be partners in the Clarion, albeit my role will be strictly hands off. She and Eloise will run the paper. I agreed to sell her forty-nine percent of the company, and in a miraculous act of feminine fortitude, she and Eloise descended upon the bank with plans and projections, and along with Kelly’s new cash infusion, convinced them to renew all loans. They managed to save both the paper and Still Hollow without my help at all.

  However, the Clarion was their dream, not mine. The need for employment was taking me back to Atlanta; I had a couple of job interviews set for the following week.

  As to Bucky, no matter how much I try, I can’t make myself hate him. I knew that once, he was not an evil person. The memory that I choose to carry of him is from our youth, when neither of us would ever belie
ve it possible to one day become a monster. But I can’t forgive him, either. Somewhere along the way he stepped over a line. Maybe he didn’t see it, or perhaps he didn’t think about it. Maybe he didn’t realize how hard it would be to get back, once crossed; or that most paths on that side of the line lead in only one direction—into the abyss. The choice was his, and no one else’s. He chose to believe that what he wanted was more important than what he had to do to get it.

  I’ve come to realize that the sanctity of that line was Grandfather’s philosophy and religion, and he, its evangelist. He tried to teach me that the choices we make chart the course of our lives, and that there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, which determine whether we become worthy citizens of the human tribe, or vile predators who roam the darkness beyond the cook-fires. As a boy, I could only see his antiquated dogma as that of a harsh, judgmental old man. Now, I know that all he ever wanted was for me to recognize the fatefulness of my choices, view them with clarity, and understand the treacherous landscape that may lie on the other side of the lines we cross. And he did it because he cared for me.

  Eloise and Mackenzie came out and sat down on either side of me. Eloise was holding something that looked like a hatbox wrapped in tinfoil. I suspected it was one of her gargantuan pound cakes that she’d baked for me as a going-home gift.

  “It’s going to be lonesome around here without you, little brother,” she said.

  “You’ll be so busy with the paper you won’t miss me.”

  “I’m going to work there too,” Mackenzie chimed in, a wide, excited smile on her face. “Kelly said I could be a reporter and cover high school stuff and youth activities—part time, of course. I’m even thinking that I might major in journalism when I go to college. What do you think, Uncle J.D.?”

  “I think that you have plenty of time to decide that, and working at the paper will help you with the decision. But if that’s what you choose to do, I know you’ll be good at it. It’s in your genes.