Where I Can See You

by Larry D. Sweazy

  “Like when he shot at us.”

  “If it was him.”

  “You question that?” Moran had to raise her voice over the growl of the engine so Hud could hear her. It was almost a shout.

  “I question everything. Don’t you?”

  She looked away from him, back at the johnboat. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go in as far as I can as fast as I can. Do the same thing he’s going to do.”

  She shook her head. “Burke’s not going to like paying for damages to a boat he didn’t authorize using.”

  “You leave Burke to me. Besides, it won’t matter if we catch Sherman, will it? All of his problems will be solved, and I’ll make sure he gets all the credit. It’d be a win-win for everybody.”

  “How did you feel when you came home?”

  “I had to attend to Gee’s funeral. How do you think I felt?”

  “You don’t seem too grief-stricken.”

  “Me and Gee made our peace a long time ago. Once she understood that staying away was the best thing for me, things changed. She relaxed. Accepted my decision the best she could. Doesn’t mean she liked it, but I think she understood my need to create a life as far away from here as possible.”

  “She never talked about your mother?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “What else was there to say?”

  “She never quit looking for her. I told you that. Not until the day she died, and then only because she had no choice.”

  “Then it was up to you?”

  “Persistence is a family trait. We never give up on something we believe in. Do you?”

  The backwater was almost completely bound up by a thick grove of lily pads. The big round-topped browning water plants stretched out a hundred yards from the shore and surrounded an occasional dead cedar tree that stuck up out of the water like a gray, brittle skeletal hand reaching for the sky. Logs with nowhere to go were stuck in the vegetation, and in the summer they were loaded with turtles, mostly red eared sliders and Midland painted turtles. Their dark shells were nearly black, with beautiful patterned bellies underneath that had always looked like roadmaps to Hud. It was disappointing seeing the logs vacant. But there was hardly any wildlife to be seen at all. Just a flush of mallards that burst into the air as Leo Sherman sped toward the shore.

  The lily pads didn’t slow Sherman down. There was a thin trail cut through them, used over the summer by fishermen, usually after largemouth that hugged the logs and tree trunks for cover and prey, and by duck hunters in the fall, going back and forth from the blinds they’d built in the swampy backwaters.

  “You’re really not going to slow down?” Moran said.

  Hud shook his head again. “You’d better get down on your knees and brace yourself.”

  Moran looked at him oddly. His command had been matter-of-fact, unconcerned. “Are you crazy?”

  “You’re not the first person to ask me that. You’d better do as I tell you, or you’re going to get that swimming lesson, whether you want it or not.” He stared straight ahead and watched Sherman beach the johnboat just like he’d thought he would. The last thing Hud was worried about at the moment was whether or not his own boat had come stocked with life preservers.

  Moran didn’t need to be told twice. She kneeled down, tucked herself into the passenger seat’s leg space the best she could. It was a little fiberglass den that looked to be made for short people. “I hope you don’t get us killed.”

  It was the last thing Hud heard before he slammed the throttle forward, demanding all of the power from the eight cylinders in the engine. The sudden rev sounded like the lion’s roar at the Dip on a midsummer’s night: fierce, loud, and full of threatening intention.

  Ice cold water drops spattered Hud’s face, but didn’t obscure his vision. Leo Sherman had beached the fishing boat at top speed, sending it sliding forward past the thick muck and onto a slice of sand. Sherman didn’t wait until the boat came to a complete stop before he bailed out. It was more of a dive than anything else, as he rolled forward in front of the boat onto the soft ground. It was a graceful move, perfectly calculated, almost as if the CO had done it a million times before.

  Hud had no intention of aping the man’s gymnastic move, nor did he have the confidence in his boat that Sherman had with his own. For all he knew, they’d end up stuck in the mud long before they reached the johnboat.

  Sherman jumped to his feet and immediately disappeared into the tall reeds as Hud’s boat sped toward the shore. He had a fifty yard lead on Hud, and it was likely that the CO knew exactly where he was going.

  It only took a long second to cut through the lily pads and plow through the muck with the big V-bottom boat. Hud pulled the throttle back and cut the engine. The ride was bumpy and loud, with the propeller underneath churning and moaning louder than the johnboat’s little motor ever could. Hud smelled hot oil, and for a moment he feared the engine was going to blow up. At least they were on land. He glanced down at Moran quickly. She seemed fine as they rode out the plan.

  The boat came to a stop just past Sherman’s, pushing through a wall of reeds and landing in an algae-covered pond that looked shallow because of its size, although it was difficult to know for sure. There had been hits and bangs, like a hammer pounding through the fiberglass. The last thing he was concerned about was any damage to the boat.

  Hud didn’t hesitate. He jumped out of the boat, pulling his .45 out at the same time. Moran was on her own. She knew what to do.

  He immediately sunk to his ankles in the mud and muck. It was black and stinky, like a thousand years of rot and death was being released with every hard step. He couldn’t run until he reached the narrow strip of sand that Sherman had escaped on. As he reached it, he heard Moran jump out of the boat and squish into the mud just as he had.

  The recent rains had left the ground softer than normal, so it was easy to see Sherman’s tracks in the sand. Broken cattails, brown and fragile, also showed Hud the way. Once he was on the sand, Hud was able to run and listen at the same time, hoping to hear something, anything.

  At first, he didn’t hear a sound. The world was silent. Frogs had buried themselves in the ground for the winter, and the air was free of insects, dead or torpid since the cold snap. Any birds that had stayed for the cold season were afraid, frozen to become invisible statues, blending in so they were out of sight; a mesh of brown and gray earthy tones hid them perfectly. Even beyond the backwaters, there was no boat or car traffic noise to be heard, and for a moment Hud felt a tremor of fear, like he was walking into a trap. It was a feeling that he’d had before, and had been proven to have been right about. But he kept running. Sherman was in too big of a hurry to worry about covering his tracks.

  And then he heard it. At first it sounded like a rush of wind, then a slap of two blades of grass together. Big grass, tall grass. When you’re trying to be quiet, you’re louder than you think you are, Hud thought. He stopped, eyed the tops of the reeds, hoping to see movement of some kind, but he didn’t see a thing. He was too far away.

  He had no choice but to go into the thick grass and mucky ground. He hoped Moran would follow him, cover the rear, but he wasn’t taking the time to give the order. He had to take it on faith that she would know what to do.

  Hud dove into the grass with his .45 up, his finger on the trigger, and his eyes and ears as open as they could be. He was in no mood to be smacked down by an oar again, or shot, for that matter, but it was a chance he was willing to take. It was a chance he had to take. He’d made the commitment when he’d shown himself to Moran at the boat company and commandeered the speedboat.

  He pushed through the thick stand of reeds and cattails as quickly as he could and was surprised when he broke free of it sooner than he expected.

  Leo Sherman was on the other side of the opening, on a slope covered in shorter grasses that led down to a pond. The pond edged up to the start of the barren hardwood forest. Sherman was struggl
ing to get over a fallen tree. His face was wrenched in pain. His uniform was dirty from days of use and wear, and his cheeks were nicked and scratched, like he’d run as fast as he could through a thicket of some kind. It looked as if he had twisted his ankle.

  “Stop!” Hud demanded, then drew the man’s chest into his sight. “Police!”

  Sherman didn’t respond. His face went white with fear, then he dropped his head in resignation. He was tired, exhausted from being on the run. The fear vanished and was replaced with a look of relief. He stopped struggling, fleeing, accepting the inevitable conclusion that he had been caught. The jig was up, the game over.

  Then a sudden, familiar sound came out of nowhere. A crack of thunder. An explosion. A sequence of firecrackers. But the sky was clear, and there was no one to be seen anywhere around. Not that Hud had had the opportunity to look around. The sound echoed past Hud. It had come from the north, in the opposite direction from where he and Moran had entered the backwaters.

  The side of Leo Sherman’s head exploded, sending shards of bone and huge chunks of his skull flying upward. A geyser of blood followed, raining to the wet ground just ahead of the man’s body. The Conservation Officer hadn’t known what hit him. Death had come instantly, out of nowhere, at the hand, once more, of an unknown and unseen shooter.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hud dove to the ground before the report of the rifle shot completely echoed away. It felt as if something snapped inside him. Not a tendon or a bone, but something deeper, something in the recesses of his brain and maybe even deeper in his heart. Rage bubbled up inside him just like the black, cold water that oozed to the surface of the muck as soon as his full body weight had settled into a safe spot. Safe for the moment. Just like last time, Hud expected more shots to be fired.

  He waited for silence to completely return, counted to ten, then opened his eyes, hoping that Moran had responded to the gunshot and dropped to the ground like he had. She was about twenty feet from him, prone on the swampy surface, half sunk in. “Are you all right?” Hud whispered. His anger subsided, but not completely.

  Moran nodded. “I need to call for help.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “For us. We’re pinned down like sitting ducks.”

  Hud didn’t respond; he was thinking, working his way through his anger, trying to figure a way out of the moment he was in. If this was the same shooter, then maybe they weren’t targets this time. A pattern was starting to emerge.

  There hadn’t been any other cartridges found at the Pam Sizemore crime scene. Only one shot had been fired, and it had been a direct hit, taken her life. And there had only been one shot through the windshield of the county cruiser as Moran had started to show him the information she’d found on social media. If the shooter, killer, whatever, held true to their MO, then one shot was all it took to accomplish their goal. This time that goal was apparently killing Leo Sherman.

  But how did the shooter know where Sherman would be? And where was the shooter perched? Hud wondered silently. Both were good questions. The first one needed investigating. The second one needed waiting out . . . for the moment, to see if he was right. It was entirely possible that once the shot had been fired, the target hit, then the shooter had an escape plan. It was broad daylight, and regardless of the time of year there were still people around. There was a chance at being seen, at getting caught. Though the backwaters were more secluded than other sites. There were a million places to hide. Sherman had been proof of that. Hud guessed he had planned on escaping back to his hiding place, his safe place. But there would never be any way to know now.

  Emboldened by his deduction, Hud pushed himself to his knees. Both of his hands and the front of his body were covered with the cold, wet muck. He shivered as a slight breeze skipped off the lake and wrapped around him. It looked as if he had fallen face first into a pit of oil. The ground smelled worse than any gas station or engine ever could; rot and decay invaded all of his senses.

  He wasn’t stupid, though. Instead of standing up, he crawled to Sherman, just to make sure the man was dead. It was a short journey, but he took his time getting there. He was not entirely confident of his theory about the shooter, even though it made perfect sense to him. So, his ears were tuned for another gunshot. The shooter was obviously a good shot, a skilled marksman or a very good hunter or both, and Hud knew that every breath he took might be his last. This was not where he wanted to die.

  The right side of Sherman’s head was completely blown off. His brain was exposed to the world, a small gray blob covered in blood and sinew. A few flies had already descended out of nowhere to attend an unexpected feast. Where did they come from? How can they still be alive after a frost? I hope I don’t have to worry about snakes.

  Sherman’s eyes were open, and he smelled rank, like he hadn’t had a bath in days. Which was probably the case. The CO had been on the run since Hud had discovered Timmy Sizemore in the lion’s den at the Dip. A lot had happened since then, including the death of Sherman’s wife, Kaye.

  Hud had to rethink everything from that moment until now. Leo Sherman had been the primary suspect in both murders. It was possible that they had been looking for the wrong man all along.

  He heard Moran rustling behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw her going for her radio but staying as low to the ground as she could. “Can you wait until I’m gone?” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ll face Burke in my own time. I have a few things I want to check out first.”

  “You’re just going to get up and walk out of this swamp with an active shooter still on the loose?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You are crazy.”

  Hud forced a smile, then let it fade as he watched Moran key her walkie-talkie.

  “D-3 to base,” she said, with a defiant look on her muddy face. “Be advised that assistance is needed at the current backwater location, one hundred yards in from the cove on the east side, longitude W 85, latitude N 45. Detective Matthews and I have taken shots. Repeat shots have been fired. The suspect is down.” The look didn’t disappear from Moran’s face as she flashed Hud the screen of her smartphone, and the GPS on it. Modern technology never ceased to amaze him.

  “D-3, this is Burke. Please restate your location.”

  She hesitated and looked to Hud for clarification. All she got was a glare in return. He stood up, stepped over Sherman’s body, and pushed his way into the closest stand of cattails, his eyes on the ground in search of a game trail that led out of the swamp.

  “You went with Gee when she’d go out looking for your mother?”

  “When I could.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “The usual places. By Johnny Long’s, the Hotel, sometimes she’d check the Shamrocks, but not very often. She held that place in low esteem. In the off-season the little cottages were rented out by the hour, encouraging behavior and a type of business that she didn’t approve of.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “Most likely. The place was closed down by the time I got around to asking any questions, and not surprisingly nobody was talking. Gee was confident my mother would never have anything to do with that kind of trash. Her words, not mine.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m sorry, but what are you suggesting?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking. You don’t think your mother had anything to do with what Gee thought was going on at the Shams? Relax. I wouldn’t desecrate the memory of your mother like that.”

  “Unless you had some kind of proof.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All right. I suppose it’s a fair question.”

  “So you have considered it?”

  “Look, I was a kid. I didn’t know what prostitution was then, and I certainly couldn’t conceive of the idea that my mother might have been involved in something like that. We sold T-shirts and snow globes with summer scenes in them. It was innocent
stuff that we sold to kids mostly, and the things adults needed for a perfect weekend. Whatever the nightlife was beyond that, what adults did for fun, was pretty much invisible to me.”

  “But you had to think about it when you got older, became a cop, that it might be a possibility?”

  “No. I could never consider it. But I did look into the ownership of the Shams.”

  “And who owned it?”

  “Hard to say. A real estate company based out of Chicago. But it didn’t physically exist at the address it was supposed to be at, and I couldn’t track down any of the officers listed in the corporation. It was like they didn’t exist. It seemed like a shell game, a place to hide money, or something. I ran into dead ends at every turn. Somebody knew what they were doing. I think they hoped it would collapse on its own and sink into the ground.”

  “You never found out who the real owners were?”

  “I gave up.”

  “That doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”

  “A detective from Detroit can only do so much in Chicago.”

  The air was full of sirens. All of the sounds bounced off the lake, using it as an amplifier, but the blast and horns, along with all of the other expected wavering screams and howls, made it seem like World War III had just started. Hud tried to ignore the sirens, listening instead for anything that he needed to be concerned about. He wasn’t totally confident that the shooter had hightailed it after the one and only shot, but he hoped he was right.

  A game trail was easy to follow out of the swamp. At certain points, his shoes sunk up to his ankles. He was already wet and cold, so it didn’t matter if he splashed water up on himself or not. He was numb, and certain that he wasn’t ready to face Burke just yet. If he felt anything, it was remorse for leaving Moran to face the chief on her own. He wouldn’t blame her if she never forgave him for running off.

  About a hundred yards into the backwaters, the ground began to slope upward, and tall trees began to replace cattails. The trail became clearer, and so did the sounds from the road. Hud saw an ambulance buzz past in the distance, its lights pulsing, sirens throbbing with hope and reassurance, neither of which were needed. The coroner, Bill Flowers, was most assuredly close behind, or at least had been alerted to the latest murder.