Riders in the Sky - [Millennium Quartet 04]

by Charles L. Grant

  For working out, lately, the details of his retirement.

  It was not, by God and first thing after a big leisurely lunch and his monthly attempt to charm the apron off Gloria Nazario, for seeing the likes of for God’s sake Dub Neely.

  Y’know, he thought, still unable to bring himself to step over the threshold; you know, it’s not like you couldn’t squash him if you wanted. I mean, it’s not like you couldn’t pound the jerk through the floor.

  Oakman was a man of average height who seemed to be constructed out of nothing but spheres and cylinders, head to torso, arms to legs, with a loose-fitting tan uniform that made him appear even larger. But only strangers and tourists ever considered him overweight; everyone else knew that most of that round was muscle, not fat. At least it was something they liked to believe. And for the most part, it was true.

  Thinning black hair barely long enough to lie down, greying black eyebrows, and a small sharp smile that barely moved his cheeks at all. A twinge in his left knee now and again when the damp settled in, especially in winter; his night vision when driving not quite up to par; a tendency to be short of breath when he climbed too many stairs or walked for too long.

  But Jesus, Vale, you can still squash the little creep.

  Or get the hell away.

  From where he stood in the recess, no one could see him from either of the high-back benches set along the walls left and right. Beyond a waist-high gated railing were four blondwood desks, the first and largest facing the doorway—Verna Dewitt’s, and it was her job to give him any one of a number of signals they had developed over the past dozen years, most of them warnings to turn around and get gone, trouble’s brewing and you’re not gonna like it.

  Usually it was Mayor Cribbs on his high political horse, or some agitated outraged tourist, or, on occasion, some joker reporter from the mainland who wanted to know, like they all wanted to know, what the real scoop was, the real deal, what it was really like to be the sheriff in charge of a whole damn island.

  Once in a great while it was Norville Cutler, looking for a sly favor or uncirculated news or just a few minutes alone to pass the time of day ... and to remind him, mayor or no mayor, law or no law, who was really in charge of the way things went.

  On Mondays it was never Dub Neely.

  The world, he decided sourly, is coming to a goddamn end.

  So, resigning himself to the inevitable, he lowered his head, blew out a slow breath to keep his temper in check, and finally stepped inside.

  * * * *

  “Morning, Sheriff.”

  Verna greeted him brightly, too loudly, with a big old smile only he knew was mocking. She was a thin woman, close enough to skinny not to make much difference, whose uniform was never without unnervingly sharp creases. She wore black-frame glasses attached to an elastic cord, a different color every day, and today her hair was bundled into a clumsy chignon that only served to accentuate the hard angles of her face and the length of her neck.

  Her desk was the largest because it also held the dispatch radio connecting the office to Vale and his three deputies. And when she kept it turned down, like it was now, the faint static buzz sounded like summer flies endlessly batting themselves against a window pane. A lazy sound. For Vale, the perfect description of the way things ought to be.

  Except, apparently, today.

  Verna hadn’t warned him about Dub because Dub was already waiting impatiently at the gate, leaning hard against the waist-high railing. His clothes were a direct contrast to Verna’s uniform, especially where his belly pushed against a shirt that might once have been white and obviously hadn’t seen an iron in a couple of weeks. A water-stained suede vest, a sloppily knotted tie yanked away from his neck, and sand-and-mud smeared clodhoppers that always seemed to want tying.

  If you didn’t know him by sight, you definitely knew him by smell—personal hygiene wasn’t his strong point, but liquor or beer on his breath was. Neither was so overpowering that you couldn’t stand to be near him; the smell was more subtle than that, and therefore more unsettling. Oakman knew that half the time you couldn’t help wondering if maybe it was actually you who desperately needed the wash or the toothpaste.

  “Dub,” he greeted flatly, taking off his Stetson, nodding as he wiped a thumb across his brow.

  Neely nodded back sharply, his pallid face mottled, brow and cheeks red with anger. “Sheriff. About damn time you got here. I want to report a crime.”

  “Hey, we all got to eat sometime, Dub.” Oakman patted his stomach. “Some of us more than others.”

  The small joke didn’t work.

  Neely sneered. “Place could go to hell and you wouldn’t know it. I’m a taxpayer, you know. My hard-earned money pays your salary. And your goddamn food bills.”

  “Then I want a raise.”

  That didn’t work either.

  “Damnit, Sheriff, I’m here to report a crime and you’re making fun of me.”

  “No,” Vale told him patiently, “I’m not, and I’m truly sorry if I come across that way. I’m still shaking off the weekend, you know how it goes.” He shifted his stance, hat at his waist, an attitude of respectful, serious listening. “Go ahead, Dub. What’s the problem?”

  “Not a problem, it’s a crime, damnit, ain’t you listening? She,”—Neely swept a grime-streaked hand toward the deputy receptionist—”insisted I had to wait on you. Wouldn’t do it herself.”

  “Well, she,” Vale reminded him curtly, “is Miz Dewitt to you, Dub.” He edged the shorter man aside with a well-placed hip, unlatched the gate, and was through and had it closed before the shorter man could follow. As he glared down at an uncontrite, fighting-hard-not-to-giggle Verna, he said, “What kind of crime we talking about here?”

  “Murder,” Neely answered, his voice low.

  Vale closed his eyes, sighed, turned, and said, “Whose murder, Dub? Where?”

  “Don’t remember his name. The guy who came here a summer or two ago. The giant. He’s on the beach.” Neely frowned, moistening his lips as he concentrated. “Wasn’t breathing, best I could figure, and there was blood all over the place.” He shuddered. “Awful stuff, Sheriff. Awful. You should have seen it.” He lowered his voice again. “I think a gang got him, you know? They’re hiding in the marsh. I told you about that a hundred times. They’re hiding in the marsh, and now they done us murder.”

  Vale made his way around the desks to the back of the room, where a large area map hung on the wall between the two windows whose blinds were at half-staff. From a distance, Camoret Island resembled a large blunted arrow pointing toward Spain, its somewhat crooked shaft aimed toward the Georgia coast just north of Savannah. He traced its curved outline without speaking. Nodded thoughtfully. Grunted softly. Looked over his shoulder and said, “Dub, we got umpteen miles of beach here, not counting the marina and the wetlands. You want to tell me just where you found this alleged body?”

  Neely frowned as he squinted across the room before, at last, he shrugged helplessly. “Don’t remember.”

  Of course not, Oakman thought; that would be too easy.

  “Think you can show me?”

  Neely shrugged again and began to fuss with his tie. “Think so. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Verna, anyone else report a one-man massacre this morning?”

  “No, sir, Sheriff.”

  “I ain’t lying, Sheriff,” Neely snapped. “I know what I saw.”

  “I know, Dub, I know. Like the camels you saw around South Hook last June.”

  “Well—”

  “And the UFO over North Beach. They was fixin’ on an invasion, as I recall.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I won’t bother to remind you about the giant.”

  “Well, damnit, Sheriff, you know that one is true. I was lying down, and he is damn big, scared the living hell outta me, coming up on me like that. How the hell was I to know he was just looking for work?” He patted his chest gingerly with two fingers. “My heart a
in’t been the same since, you know. Least little thing gets it racing so bad I see spots and nearly fall over. His fault. All his fault.”

  The sheriff nodded. “And now you say he’s murdered.”

  “Blood, too. Don’t forget the blood.”

  “Aw, Jesus, Dub.” Vale shook his head, slapped his hat back on, and told Verna he was taking Dub and the Jeep for a ride on the beach. Then he shoved Neely through the doorway none too gently, and said over his shoulder, “And if by some miracle Chisholm drops by, tell him he was murdered last night and would he have the decency to stick around so Mr. Neely here can make an ID when we get back.”

  As Verna sputtered into high-pitched laughter, he squinted at the late September sun and sighed yet again.

  Mondays.

  Son of a bitch, he didn’t even have his Mondays anymore.

  * * * *

  3

  Midway Road wasn’t exactly the most imaginative name in the world for a street, but Vale was glad it at least wasn’t called something like Rising Surf Avenue or Wafting Breeze Boulevard. That sort of nonsense was prevalent enough in the coastal towns; the one thing he didn’t need here was what Gloria called cutesy-poo for the tourists. There was plenty of that already in the dumbass names of some of the shops, half of which start with “Ye” or had es at the end of words that never had them in the first place.

  Still, he didn’t half love this town, and a good part of that had to do with the drive.

  A half mile from his office the shops and trees gave way to houses and trees, and lawns still green, gardens still blooming. Few of the buildings were big this close to town center, but none were ramshackle, none in desperate need of repair or paint. Enough shade speckling the road to keep the temperature at a decent level, a decent breeze to cool the sweat when the shade didn’t work.

  It was the same in the other direction, and a good enough excuse to keep him out of the office as much as he could.

  “Where we going, Dub? Come on, you gotta give me a hint, okay?”

  “The whales, I think. Yeah, I think it was at the whales.”

  “You sure?”

  “I guess.”

  “And you’re sure it was Casey Chisholm.”

  Neely didn’t answer, and Vale didn’t press him. The man might be a royal pain in the ass, but somewhere inside those mismatched clothes and under those streaks of dirt and God only knew what else was a man who used to be a teacher, or a college professor. At least that’s what the word was, and once in a while Vale heard something that made him believe it. Why he’d come to Camoret, why he was what he was now, no one knew and no one asked. His business if he wanted to drown; even Lyman Baylor, pain-in-the-butt preacher that he was, had stopped trying to save him.

  A few minutes later Dub began to squirm a little in the passenger seat, and Vale grinned. The pudgy little man didn’t care for not having much but roll bars and struts between him and the blacktop; more than once he’d declared Jeeps and their cousins dangerously unnatural, quite possibly demonic. But a mile down the road he settled himself, squinting into the wind that slipped past the sun visors Vale had snapped up over the windshield’s top frame.

  “Funny, ain’t it,” Neely said, rubbing the side of his nose with a finger.

  “What? Your murder?”

  “No.” A hand waved west, toward the unseen mainland. “You know. All that shit going on.” He sniffed, and rubbed his nose again. “We been lucky, you know? Camoret ain’t had none of that sickness went around last year, had pretty much plenty of food. Only a few of them bastards coming out to raise a little hell.” He squinted at the brick school-house as they sped by. “Like we was blessed or something, you know what I mean?”

  Vale looked at him, surprised the dope had even noticed. Any other day, he would swear nothing ever got through the man’s alcoholic haze but the price of his next drink. “Good a word as any,” he agreed.

  Dub nodded solemnly. “Like them kangaroo folks.”

  “The what?”

  “You know, them people that live with the kangaroos?”

  “You mean Australians?”

  “Well, who’d you think I meant? The Chinese? Jeez, Sheriff, pay attention here. They got no kangaroos in China, you oughta know that.”

  “Right,” Vale said. “Right.”

  “They ain’t blessed is what I’m talking about. What I read, they’s getting ready for a shooting war pretty soon.”

  Now that the sheriff already knew. Sometime around midsummer, some drunken and drugged-up Indonesian sailors had hijacked a patrol boat and shot up a small cruise ship tooling around the water near someplace called Queensland; he never heard of it but that didn’t matter. When it was over, a dozen or so Australians and New Zealanders had been killed, a couple dozen more badly wounded. Words had been exchanged. Diplomats recalled. Fuss and bluster in the UN. Maneuvers and high-visibility training on both sides.

  “ ‘Course, it’s no skin off my nose,” Dub said, bracing a hand against the dashboard as Vale swerved to avoid a gull squatting insolently in the middle of the road. “You just get tired of hearing of it, you know what I mean? If it ain’t the kangaroos, it’s them guys over in Africa beating the crap out of each other.” He shook his head sadly, scratched through his hair, then used the end of his tie to dab some sweat off his neck.

  “We had lots of killing before,” Vale reminded him. “That year, remember? Seemed like half the country was going up in smoke.”

  Dub shook his head again. “That was killing, Sheriff. This time we’re talking war.”

  * * * *

  The houses were fewer, the trees thicker, live oak and pine, willows house-tall and taller. Not long before the road began a long and slow curve to the west, they passed a clutch of undistinguished homes flanking the blacktop, and Vale squinted over to the left, hunting for signs of Chisholm at his house. The smart thing would be to stop, knock on the door, look around the place, but Neely had gotten under his skin, and he decided to go on, he could always check the house later.

  Less than a mile farther north, sidewalks and houses ended. Sand drifted across the blacktop. Reeds and weeds. Just before the road straightened again, Vale swung the Jeep hard to the right and followed a wide sandy trail through the trees, marked by a sign that told him he was heading for North Beach, No Dogs, No Bicycles, Bonfires by Permit Only.

  Ten minutes later they reached the sea.

  And the whales.

  * * * *

  4

  As far as anyone knew, there had been no Indian population on Camoret when the Spanish discovered it on their way to Florida; as far as anyone knew, they stayed only long enough to build a few huts and some graves before moving on, without leaving any recorded reason why they had abandoned their find. It wasn’t for lack of fresh water, good soil, protection from the elements, or proximity to the coast for trade and military purposes; Camoret had all of that, but the English didn’t stay either, their records just as brief and puzzling as their predecessors’.

  No one knew, then, who had given it its name.

  No one knew, then, who first stood on the clean wide beach and looked back across the Atlantic toward home.

  Or who first discovered the whales:

  Six huge boulders in three pairs worn smooth and grooved by wind and sea, white-streaked grey, so deeply set that no one had ever been able to dig beneath them to measure their actual size. The three largest resembled the great heads and humps of whales about to sound, behind each a smaller boulder, nearly flat on the back side, one of them split on top to give imagination reason enough to call them flukes, the tails up and ready to slap at the surface.

  The lead whale’s head was eight feet high, twelve feet long, with a nine foot tail; the others, each slightly behind and inland of the one in front, weren’t quite so imposing, but all were taller than a tall man.

  A family it was: Daddy the largest, Baby the smallest, Momma firmly planted in the middle, holding the group together.

 
By the time Camoret town was firmly, permanently established, no laws were needed to protect the site. It was a given: do your mischief elsewhere if you need to let off steam, but vandalize the whales at your peril.

  They were climbed, of course, and played on and around; there were picnics and trysts, games invented that used the boulders as bases, photographs taken and a magazine layout about ten years ago, but the only damage done was by the wind, and the sea.