by Mike Stewart
“How close is that to St. George?” I asked.
Susan said, “It’s just northeast of St. George. Less than a mile. It’s about half as big, and it doesn’t have a causeway. You’ve got to either take the ferry or take a plane. They’ve got a little landing strip in the middle of the island. Or, of course, you could always go by boat if the chop’s not too bad and you watch out for oyster beds.
“It’s a lot less developed than St. George, too, because it’s harder to get to. The last couple of years, though, a few people with big money have started building some major houses out there. Still, for the most part, it’s pretty undeveloped. There’s just one small motel and mostly a lot of old-fashioned, wooden beach houses.”
“And our friend Tommy Bobby Haycock is in one of ‘em.” Joey added, “This ferry he got on ain’t exactly the Staten Island Ferry. It’s a little pissant boat, where everybody sees everybody else. So I waited for the next one and went over. Like Susan says, there’s not much on Dog Island, so I was able to find him pretty quick.
“Last night, I tailed Haycock when he went out on a little adventure. And, Tom, if you got a few days to kill, I think I can show you where those Cuban cigars come from.”
chapter nine
Seasons never change smoothly along the coast.
By Thursday morning, winter had stuttered forward again into March and dropped the temperature on the Panhandle from high seventies to low fifties. A steady rain fell from gray cloud cover, drenching the morning in melancholy tones.
I reached over and clicked off the high beams as a scattering of weekend houses began to transition into boat shops and real estate offices. Joey directed me through downtown Carrabelle, over a curving bridge, and into a marina that looked like a transplant from Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts. Row upon row of oversized yachts lined a maze of concrete docks, and, everywhere, gray-haired couples roamed about, sipping coffee and talking boats.
We were expected at the marina office, and, after dropping ten twenties on the counter, my Jeep got the one vehicle slot on the seven-o’clock ferry. Back out in the morning drizzle, I drove around a bunker and down a concrete incline to the ferry. One of the less promising delegates from Generation X stood on deck and waved us forward. I rolled onto the boat and stopped next to a guy with three gold hoops piercing one eyebrow and a large blue dot tattooed across the bridge of his nose.
Joey said, “You don’t see that every day.”
I smiled and poured some coffee from a steel thermos into a plastic cup. And we waited. The FSU station out of Tallahassee was rerunning a segment from “Car Talk.” Joey and I listened to middle-age guys in New England act silly until the ferry left the dock and moved toward the mouth of the harbor; then Joey reached over and turned off the radio. Enough was enough.
The view began to open up, and smooth water turned choppy as the ferry beneath us moved out of the harbor and into Apalachicola Bay. I flipped up the hood on my windbreaker and stepped out into the morning mist to get a feel for the place. I guess Joey got out because I did.
Bumpy, steel-gray water reflected the rain-filled sky. Diesel fumes swirled in the air, raising whispers of nausea in my stomach and making me wish I had eaten breakfast. We climbed back in the Jeep.
An hour later we chugged into a wide, sandy inlet on the bay side of Dog Island. The ferry ploughed a straight line through a jumble of anchored sailing yachts and docked alongside one of two wooden docks. According to a carefully painted sign on shore, we had arrived at the Dog Island Yacht Club. There was no building or facilities; just the sign.
Near the docks, a collection of plywood rectangles on two-by-four stakes held a laminated assortment of maps and charts and set out a list of island rules. Joey poked me and pointed to one. Do not clean fish on the dock. Alligator Hazard Area.
I turned the key in the ignition and looked for the off-ramp. There wasn’t one. Cost or environmental concerns, or maybe ambivalence, had kept the shoreline unblemished by concrete or asphalt. If you wanted a car on Dog Island, you drove it off the ferry, down into a foot or two of salt water, and up onto the beach. I guess it kept out the riffraff. It also seemed to have a startling effect on the kind of vehicles people brought over. The sandy ruts leading away from the ephemeral Dog Island Yacht Club led us between rows of junkyard Americana. On each side, thirty or forty decrepit, rusted-out vehicles formed precise queues of mobile scrap metal. Ancient VW vans sat next to geriatric Jeeps with winches bolted to their front bumpers, and those sat beside Brady-Bunch station wagons with faded-plastic wood grain peeling from their doors. A dozen boxy Fords and about as many tail-finned Plymouths were mixed in. Several had been hand painted with rainbows and flowers.
I said, “Looks like the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert from 1978.”
Joey nodded at a shiny new Range Rover parked in among the rust buckets. “That’s embarrassing.”
“What is all this?”
“Most folks with houses out here bring over old clunkers to use while they’re on the island. They’ll keep a heap here until the salt air turns it into a block of rust; then they’ll haul it away and bring over another one. With the ferry just carrying one car at a time and at two hundred a pop, I guess it’s easier and cheaper than trying to bring over the family car every time you wanna come out.”
“Looks like hell.”
“Yeah. Supposed to be some big controversy. The old residents think it’s … I don’t know.”
“Droll?”
“Yeah, I guess. Kind of atmospheric. Some of the new ones who came out here in the last couple of years and built mansions think it looks like shit. That’s probably what the Range Rover’s doing here. Somebody trying to make a point.”
“Or just somebody with more money than sense.”
“It happens.”
I lowered my window and put my hand out with the palm up to feel the rain. “How do you know all this?”
Joey sighed. “I been talking to people. You know, investigating. That’s what I do.”
I pulled my hand back inside. It was wet. “I thought you just beat up people and shot holes in them, that sort of thing.”
“That too.”
Up past the rows of rusted junkers, the sandy road dead-ended into the main island highway, which was nothing but a couple of slightly deeper ruts in the sand. Joey told me to turn left, and we followed the tracks of countless tires past Captain Casey’s Inn and along the backbone of the island before turning off onto an even fainter roadway.
Finally, we parked; we found a spot near our prey; and we waited.
Hours passed. Thomas Bobby Haycock sat warm and dry inside his island bungalow. Not far away, Joey and I sat, wet and cold and miserable, huddled under a few scrawny pine trees and drinking coffee from a steel thermos. My Jeep waited nearby on an undeveloped piece of beach hidden from view by a half dozen sand dunes topped with undulating tufts of sea grass. ‘
“Tell me again why we’re sitting in the rain, staring at his house.”
Joey had a pair of binoculars trained on Haycock’s bungalow. He said, “In case he goes somewhere.”
“And the reason we can’t just wait down the road in my Jeepâwith a heater, out of the rain, maybe listening to a little jazz on the CD playerâand wait for his pickup to drive by is… ?”
“We’re on an island. All he’s gotta do is take a walk on the beach and not come back. In twenty minutes, he could be at the ferry or climbing into a buddy’s boat or just be somewhere on the island where we aren’t.”
“That explains why you’re doing it. Why does a highly trained attorney like myself have to sit out here with you?”
“The bonds of friendship.”
“I knew there was a good reason.”
“And Susan and Carli.”
“Even better.”
Joey leaned back against the trunk of a wind-tortured pine and squirmed his butt in the sand to try to get comfortable. “That little girl’s got herself fixated on yo
u, you know? All that wet undershirt stuff and waving her tits around.”
“Fixated?”
“Fuck you. You know what I mean. It’s just something to watch out for is all. Loutie says it’s kinda sweet. Says she’s glad it’s you and not some asshole who’d take advantage of her.”
I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and let the light rain sting my face. I said, “I’ll say one thing. You can’t bullshit her. She’s going to need some counseling or something when this is over, but she’s not stupid. If we can give her the chance, she’s going to be okay. And Susan says she’s got some talent. Draws and paints a little. Knows the difference in good art and bad.”
“Something there worth saving.”
I said, “Everybody’s worth saving,” but thought better of it and added, “Almost everybody.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
A little after noon, I hiked over dune and dale to fetch Cokes, sandwiches, and Oreos from a cooler in the Jeep. Around six, I made the same trip.
These were the highlights of my day.
At ten that night, I found a slab of my left buttock and thigh with no feeling in it. Nothing, not even needles. Two hours later, our quarry emerged from his house in darkness. We saw him when he opened the driver’s door on his pickup and stepped inside.
Joey said, “Let’s go,” and my dead hindquarters and I humped along behind Joey as he sprinted to the Jeep. I unlocked the doors with the remote, jumped in, and got the thing cranked and turned around in time to see Haycock’s truck zoom by on the dirt roadway. Joey had pulled the fuse responsible for lighting the Jeep’s interior. It was my job to remember not to turn on the headlights and, of course, to drive that way down a curving dirt road at midnight without crashing and without losing sight of Haycock. All of which I somehow did.
Haycock led us to a deserted stretch of beach, where he drove across the sand, pointed his front bumper at the water, and killed the headlights. I hid the Jeep in a pine thicket diagonally across the road, and we circled around to the beach on foot. My reward for my first successful tail was another forty minutes cramped against a rain-soaked dune, watching Haycock’s motionless pickup.
Finally, Joey tapped my back with a knuckle, pointed out at the ocean, and said, “Look.”
“What?”
“Straight out from here. Don’t look at the horizon. It’s about halfway between the horizon and the beach.”
I still hadn’t seen anything when Haycock flashed his low beams three times. Almost immediately, a single blue light flashed three times on the water. If we hadn’t been looking for the signal and we had noticed it at all, it would have looked like nothing more than a reflected star.
I whispered, “You saw this before?”
“Yeah. It’s what we came down here to see. Now watch. If it’s like the other night, a boat’s gonna pull up here in a few minutes with a couple of men and some boxes.” I moved up on the dune for a better look. Joey said, “Keep your head down. The men on the boat the other night were carrying what looked like AK-47s.”
I put my head down.
An outboard motor rumbled in the distance. Minutes passed. Twice there was a triple flash on the water that Haycock answered with his headlights. I said, “The guy in the boat is checking his course on the way in.”
Joey said, “Looks like it.”
Thirteen minutes after the first set of blue flashes, an arrowhead-shaped pontoon boat puttered onto the sand. A figure in the bow jumped out to pull the boat up onto the beach. Haycock stepped out of the truck’s cab and walked down the beach to help.
Joey whispered, “I count three left in the boat. And two on the beach, including Haycock.”
“Four and two. There’s a kid in the boat.”
“I’ll be damned.”
With a quarter moon and cloud cover, the passengers’ features were impossible to see. But we could plainly make out the dark outlines of Haycock, two armed men, a plump, unarmed man, a woman, and a small child. Voices floated on the night air. The plump man helped the woman and child out of the boat, and the woman led the child to Haycock’s pickup and climbed inside, placing the child on her lap. When the interior light came on, we could see them both plainly. She had straight dark hair and black eyes. The child had her coloring and his father’s pudgy buildâassuming the unarmed man was his father.
While this was going on, the armed man in the stern sat still with a rifle across his lap. When mother and child were safe inside the truck, he stepped over the gunwale and stationed himself halfway between the truck and boat, holding a serious-looking firearm at the ready. The other three men formed a fire line. Pudgy Poppa knelt inside the boat and handed large cardboard boxes and small wooden crates to the second, formerly armed man, who, in turn, stacked the cargo above the high-tide mark and out of the surf’s reach. Haycock carried the boxes and crates to his truck and stacked them in the bed. This was not the first time Haycock and friends had done this. In less than fifteen minutes and with minimal communication, they had filled the truck bed with cargo and the two armed men had departed in the pontoon boat.
Haycock secured a tarp over his truckload as Poppa climbed in the cab with his family. Illuminated by the overhead bulb, Poppa’s coloring was, if anything, darker than his wife’s. The kid hadn’t gotten anything from Mom. He was a curly-headed clone of his father.
Joey tapped my leg and started to move away. I closed a hand on his arm to stop him. “Wait.” I motioned for Joey to stay put and then crawled to a point ten yards behind and a few paces to the left of Haycock’s pickup. Something was going on inside the cab. Haycock had a highway map unfolded and propped against the steering wheel. Poppa craned his neck and leaned across his wife and child to see. Haycock held a metal cigarette lighter to illuminate and trace a path across the map.
The lighter snapped shut. Haycock flashed his low beams twice and then twice more. The same pattern repeated in blue on the water, and he turned the ignition key. Tires spun in the sand, and the back bumper arced backward, thumping into the small dune I was hiding behind. Haycock changed gears and dusted me with a cloud of sand as he drove off the beach and turned left onto the dirt road.
Scrambling to my feet, I sprinted to the Jeep. Joey met me there. By the time we were back on the road. Haycock was out of sight. I pointed the Jeep in his direction, flipped on the headlights, and floored it.
Joey sounded a tad judgmental. “That was interesting.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“He’s gone.”
“Maybe.”
Parallel white ruts stretched out in front. Sand and dark thickets and an occasional vacation home whirred by in the night. Joey said, “We lost him.”
“You said that.”
“Where are we going?”
“The motel.”
“Why?”
“Haycock’s got to do something with that family. The ferry doesn’t run at night, and he’s headed away from his house. And I’m guessing they’re not going to another boat. If they had planned to reach the mainland tonight by water, they would have just landed there to start with. It doesn’t make sense to risk two landings when one would do. So, that leaves two possible destinationsâa private home or the only motel on the island. And I think it’s going to be the motel.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because,” I said, “if they’re going to a private home, I lost them.”
Vapor lights bathed the roadside ahead in ugly light. I slowed and cruised past Captain Casey’s Inn. There in the parking lot, big as life and butt ugly, was Thomas Bobby Haycock striding toward his truck. Mom, Poppa, and junior were gone. We cruised on past and, a hundred yards down, hung a “U.” I waited for Haycock’s red taillights to disappear around a curve so we would be out of view and switched off my headlights. We were able to tail him back to his bungalow, unnoticed.
I turned to Joey. “Is that it?”
“That’s
pretty much it. In the morningâif he does the same thing he did a few days agoâhe’s gonna catch the early ferry and transport his truck to the mainland. Where he goes from there, I have no idea.”
“And even if we could get on the same ferry without being noticed, the Dog Island Ferry only hauls one car at a time.”
Joey nodded. “Yep.”
“So, there’s not much else we can do for now.”
“Not much. If you think it’s worth it, I’ll hang around a few more days and try to catch him coming off the ferry one morning with a truckload of stuff. He knows my Expedition, but I can rent a car and follow him. Try to see where he’s taking it.”
“Yeah. I think it’s worth it. I’ll double-check with Susan to make sure she thinks it’s worth the money, but it looks like the next step to me.” My mind wandered over what we had seen and formed a picture of a chubby little boy crossing the Gulf at night in an open boat. I asked, “What was the deal with the kid in the boat? You told me Haycock was involved in what looks like a smuggling operation. You didn’t say anything about smuggling people.”
“That’s cause I didn’t know it. The other night, it was just “On. Okay. What now?”
Joey said, “We go get some sleep. I’ve got a room at Captain Casey’s.”
I turned the Jeep around and, a quarter mile down the road, clicked the headlights back on. I said, “How did you know Haycock was going to meet that boat tonight? Don’t tell me he does that every night.”
“Nope. That’s just the second time in a week. We got lucky.” My backside hurt. I had been drenched, chilled to the bone, and nearly run over. I said, “Yeah. I guess we were.”
Captain Casey had thoughtfully placed a clock radio on the chipped Formica nightstand in lieu of providing wake-up service. I set the alarm, and Joey clicked off the lamp at 2:56 a.m.
Having caught up on missed sleep at Loutie’s, I was back to my usual three hours. I woke Joey a few minutes after six, stumbling to the bathroom to brush my teeth and rinse with motel mouthwash. The first ferry from the island to the mainland was at eight. Joey turned over. I pulled on yesterday’s damp jeans and a windbreaker and went out for a walk on the beach.
