The Black Bullet so-1

by Tom Lowe

  “What if I showed you pictures of it?”

  “You’ll get a birthday present you’ll remember for a really long time.” She ran her index finger across his lips.

  Jason reached over to the table beside them and picked up his cell phone. “Take a look at these.” He brought the images up on the small screen. “I loaded these off Sean’s camera while he was on the bridge talking with Nick. I’m just glad the Coast Guard didn’t find them.”

  “Is that some kind of engine?” Nicole asked.

  “A German jet, I think. Sean and Nick found crates with jet parts and a small rocket.”

  “What are those things, the ones with the U-235 on them? Are they bombs?”

  “I’m not sure. Sean said they might contain some very dangerous stuff.”

  “And this number?” She touched the screen with a perfect fingernail.

  “It’s the identifying numbers on the outside of the U-boat.”

  She moved her hips, her warmth slowly gyrating against Jason. “So, where are the skeletons, mister boner?”

  He grinned. “Right here.”

  “Ohmygod!”

  “Yeah, Sean only took one. I think Nick would have had a heart attack if Sean kept taking pictures of the skeletons. Nick’s like real weird in that way. I don’t think he’ll ever go down there again?”

  “Would you?”

  “I didn’t go. It’s pretty deep. Sean’s some kind of an expert SCUBA diver from his military days. Nick’s part human and part dolphin. The guy used to free dive, like they do for pearls. Only he did it getting sponges off the ocean floor when he was twelve over in the Greek islands. Guy’s a freakin’ animal. I gotta pee real bad.” He stood, the wine now causing him to be dizzy.

  Nicole smiled. “Looks like you’ve reached your limit, Jason. Try not to get sick in my parent’s bathroom, okay lover?”

  “I’m just gonna pee, c’mon, Nicole.”

  When Jason left the balcony, Nicole held his cell phone, punched up her personal e-mail, attached the pictures and hit the send button.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  O’Brien returned to his home on the banks on the St. Johns River for the night. As much as he enjoyed time on Jupiter and the company of the marina folk, he liked the solitude he found in the place he now called home. He liked his big, antique bed. His house was a seventy-year-old “Florida Cracker” home built on an Indian shell mound overlooking the river. The old home was made from cypress, oak, heart-of-pine, and it had a massive river-rock fireplace, tin roof, and a sprawling screened-in porch. The porch, with a view of the river, was constructed from white oak beams that bent and snapped nails like toothpicks.

  In the kitchen, O’Brien poured some Jameson over ice. As he walked to the porch, he stopped and stared down at a picture of his wife, Sherri. She stood at the helm of their sailboat, wind in her hair, morning light in her eyes, a smile that penetrated O’Brien’s heart like the first time he whispered his love to her. He touched the picture, the glass hard to his touch.

  Max trotted in from the porch. She sat and cocked her head, looking up at O’Brien. He said, “I miss Sherri, Max. I know you do, too. How about I join you back out there for some fresh air, little one?”

  On the porch, he sat in a big whicker rocker and lifted Max onto his lap where she curled into a ball. O’Brien sipped his drink and looked at the reflection of a harvest moon off the river’s dark surface. Frogs and cicadas competed for dominance in the theater of the night. The scent of blooming jasmine and orange blossoms mingled in the air with wood smoke from across the river, somewhere in the national forest. A great horned owl alighted on a thick, crooked limb reaching up from a cypress tree down by the river. Spanish moss hung from the limb, motionless in the still air, the owl’s silhouette caught in the rising moon.

  O’Brien thought about the discovery of the sub, its potential revelations, the media attention, how it might play out. And he thought about Jason Canfield. The kid definitely had his mother’s eyes. He hoped Jason took their conversation to heart. He scratched Max behind her ears and mumbled, “When the past intersects with the present … the future could be in somebody’s crosshairs ….”

  What was it? Something was churning in his gut. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and replayed Maggie’s visit to his boat. What tugged at his thoughts as if weights were in his shoes? What was out of sync? When she’d hugged him, his memory banks registered the scent of her perfume, as if twenty two years was two seconds. He hadn’t smelled that particular brand on any other woman. She’d felt so small in his arms. He remembered that she had a physical presence of strength, a rare combination of athleticism wrapped in feminine sexuality. He sipped his drink and wondered what Maggie was doing tonight. He had a strong urge to pick up the phone and call her. To talk about old times … to just to hear Maggie’s voice tonight.

  The Irish whiskey took the edge off the day. He thought about the events. Sure it was coincidental that he docked Jupiter less than two miles from an old girlfriend he hadn’t seen in what seemed like a few generations. As a detective, he’d learned to be wary of chance because of criminal circumstances. What was mixing in his gut with the whiskey?

  The guy at the Tiki Bar.

  Kim Davis had introduced the man as Eric Hunter, a friend of Frank Canfield, Maggie’s dead husband. Coincidental? Maybe. Maybe not. O’Brien knocked back the rest of his drink and listened to a bull gator grunt at river’s edge. It was the start of mating season. The natives were restless. O’Brien could identify on some primal level. He gently lifted Max and said, “Let’s hit the bed, lady. Maybe you can teach an old dog like me how to sleep like you.” She licked O’Brien on his unshaven face.

  Although he had returned to the comfort of his own bed at home on the banks of the St Johns River, calm was an ephemeral feeling. His sleep had been awakened by silent screams from human skeletons and the punctuated chant from a whippoorwill in an ancient live oak outside his window. He saw Maggie’s face and then a close-up of Jason’s eyes-frightened eyes.

  O’Brien shook the narcotic of sleep’s illusion away and watched early morning light pour through an opening in the curtains on his bedroom window. He replayed the images he and Nick had seen around the sunken U-boat. The human remains, the mystery surrounding the sinking of the sub, the cargo of rockets, jet parts, and two canisters lovingly sealed by Pandora herself. He thought about Maggie Canfield, more than twenty years ago when she was Maggie Greene. And he thought about the telephone call he received from the woman who identified herself as Abby Lawson.

  In his rambling kitchen, O’Brien made a pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, called Max from her roost in his recliner, stepped onto the porch, and walked down the sloping backyard to his dock that extended fifty feet into the river. His property bordered the Ocala National Forest. From the view on his dock, the river made a wide oxbow turn, flowing around live oaks, the limbs draped heavy with beards of pewter-gray Spanish moss.

  It was about a half hour after sunrise and the river looked like hammered copper. The morning light broke through the cypress trees, illuminating water bugs on the surface as they made figure eights and elliptic orbits resembling tiny skaters. A slight breeze carried the scent of honeysuckles, decaying oak leaves, and damp moss.

  O’Brien and Max watched a great blue heron stalk the tannin water, stopping to carefully step over cypress knees that protruded up from the dark mire like giant, gnarled fingers. His thoughts drifted back to the discovery of the U-boat and its cargo.

  Max turned her head, the alarms firing in her brain. O’Brien had noticed that her reaction to human-produced sounds and scents was different from those in nature. Her defense mechanisms ignited faster when approached by intruders walking upright.

  O’Brien scratched her back. “You have hound dog ears, and you can certainly hear things I can’t. What do you hear, Max?”

  She half barked and half whined, paced the dock, and started to run toward the house. “Hold
on, Max. How do those little legs move so fast, huh?”

  A car pulled in at the end of his driveway. Rarely did he ever see a car pull in his long drive. His nearest neighbor was almost a mile away, and lost motorists didn’t need to use his drive to turn around. There were plenty of access roads leading into the national forest. His driveway made a slight bend to the left from the front of his house to the road. Even from his dock, he had a line-of-sight to the end of the drive. But visitors seldom noticed him from that distance.

  He watched a woman get out of the car and start toward his front door. She stopped, hesitated, like she wanted to turn around, and then continued.

  “Come on Max, let’s go see who has come calling. If it’s the Avon lady, boy did she get the wrong house … that is unless you want something for your nails.” Max scampered up the backyard, climbed the steps leading to the porch, and waited for O’Brien to open the screen door. He heard a knock.

  “Be with you in a second,” O’Brien said, checking the drawer for his Glock. He wedged the pistol under his belt, beneath his shirt, and opened the door.

  The woman was frightened. O’Brien cut his eyes from her to the car. A small gray head barely protruded over the console. The woman at his door was about one hundred and ten pounds, mid-thirties, auburn hair pulled back, and hazel eyes that were filled with fright and fervor. She wore blue jeans and a blouse open enough on her shoulders to show a powder sprinkling of freckles.

  “Mr. O’Brien?” she asked.

  “That’s me.”

  “I apologize for coming to your home unannounced. But ….” She bit her lower lip and said nothing.

  “I’m the one who called you-the one who talked about her grandfather being murdered.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  There was a strong gust of wind for a moment causing acorns to rain down from a live oak, beating against the tin roof before falling into O’Brien’s yard.

  The woman bit her lower lip and tried to smile.

  “You said your name is Abby Lawson?” O’Brien asked.

  “Yes … and I’m sorry I had to hang up before I could explain further. My grandmother, she’s in her late eighties, I was visiting her, bringing some dinner over, when we watched the story on TV. I saw the expression on her face when they reported about the submarine. It was like she’d seen a ghost. I told her I was going to find you.”

  “I assume that’s your grandmother in the car.”

  “I talked her into coming. She’s not well … lymphoma.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. How’d you know where I live?”

  “I used to work for the Volusia County Sheriff’s office. You’d helped Detective Leslie Moore with one of her cases before she was killed. She and I were friends. One day she mentioned how much respect she had for you, and how good you were at seeking justice for the families of victims … murder victims. Leslie said you had a natural-born talent for it, a sixth sense. Anyway, she had mentioned you lived off Highway 46 near the Ocala National Forest. I grew up in DeLand so this wasn’t too hard for me to find.”

  “Would you and your grandmother like to come in?”

  Max wedged out the door and trotted over to the Abby Lawson. “Your dog’s so cute. Now I remember Leslie telling me you had a little dachshund, too.”

  “She’s my watchdog.”

  “I can tell by the rambunctious wag of the tail. Look, I don’t want to impose. I’m prepared to pay you.”

  “To do what?” O’Brien studied her face, the eyes that evaded his, a red patch appearing on her lower neck. “Would you like some water, soft drink, or something?”

  “No, I’ll get right to the point. If you want to talk further, I’ll come inside. If not, I’ll turn away and never bother you again.”

  O’Brien was silent.

  “My grandfather was twenty-one when he was shot and killed off Matanzas Beach. The year was 1945, the nineteenth of May. The war in Europe had just ended. My grandfather had fought in the Army overseas where he was wounded and lost some of the function in his left leg. He was shipped back home, recuperating, and on active-reserve. One night he was surf-casting, trying to put food on the table, when he spotted something out in the ocean. Then he saw six men row to shore in a life raft. My grandfather hid, watched them bury something. Before they started back to their boat, he saw someone else, a man, walk down from the road to meet the men. Mr. O’Brien, four of those men were German soldiers, two were Japanese. The man they met, my grandfather said, looked American. They buried something in the sand that night. My grandfather saw it … he saw one of the Germans shoot and kill another one. Granddaddy managed to get to a phone booth to call my grandmother. He told her everything and said for her to call the Navy in Jacksonville and tell them what he saw.”

  “Why the Navy?”

  “Because the boat my grandfather saw that night was a U-boat. I think you may have found it. They killed my grandfather because he saw them and the submarine. Before grandfather was shot, my grandmother said he told her he’d seen the two Japanese men leave the Germans and walk toward Highway A1A. Don’t know what happened to the guy that came out of the bushes. Maybe he shot granddaddy. Maybe one of the Germans did. The U.S. Government never even acknowledged what he reported that night. He was the first and only American soldier in World War II killed on U.S. soil. His murder has gone unsolved for more than sixty-seven years. There’s not a day that goes by that my grandmother doesn’t think about him. She was pregnant with my mother when he was killed. My mother and father were killed in a car accident when I was twelve. Grandmother raised me. Maybe, before she passes, you could help her … help her by finding out who killed him. It would bring closure to a patriotic, old woman.”

  O’Brien was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the gray head in the car, eyes peeking above the console. “Please, you and your grandmother, come inside.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Susan Schulman stood from behind her desk in an alcove of the Channel Nine newsroom and walked toward the restroom. Nicole Bradley looked up from the computer on her desk, her first assignment as an intern-searching through digitally-stored stock footage-and watched Susan disappear down the hallway.

  “How are you coming?” asked the five o’ clock news producer, a no-nonsense, prematurely balding veteran of television news.

  “Oh, fine,” Nicole said. “I found some shots of alligators for the story Rod’s doing on habitat destruction.”

  “Good, punch in the reference numbers for Sam to pull them in. He’s in editing.”

  “Okay.”

  The producer looked at his watch. “I’ve got a story rundown meeting now.” He crossed the newsroom to sit with the executive producer.

  Nicole walked down the hall to the restroom. She entered and saw Susan Schulman applying lip gloss. “I’m Nicole Bradley. I just want to tell you I’ve always thought you did great work. I watched you a lot before heading up to UF. Still watch you when I come home. You’re one of the reasons I’m studying journalism.”

  Schulman didn’t miss a beat applying lip gloss. “You’re the new intern, right?”

  “Third day.”

  “So you want to get in the news biz?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Lots of people do now. It looks like a sweet job, but you’ve got to work hard at it. To get to a larger market, the networks, CNN or Fox, you’ve got to really stand out, and that usually comes by finding a breakout, killer story.”

  “Have you ever found that story?”

  “Close, but no Emmy yet.” Susan picked up her purse and started for the door.

  Nicole said, “Wait a sec. What if I had that killer story for you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The kind of story you could ride to the network.”

  “This is your third day as an intern and you think you have a story of national significance?”

  “I think it’s of international significance, and I’ll share it … if-”

  “
If what?”

  “If, wherever you’re going, you promise to get me hired, too.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  O’Brien sipped a cup of coffee on his back porch and listened to Abby Lawson. She said, “My grandmother used to talk about what Florida was like in the days before, during and after the war. She said it was in the summer of ‘42 when the man who would become my grandfather decided to join the Army. He made the decision when he and my grandmother, and dozens of other people, witnessed a German U-boat blow up an American tanker a few miles off the coast of Jacksonville Beach. Right, grandma?”

  Glenda Lawson smiled. “Right, honey. I’ll never forget that night.” Her white hair was combed neatly, parted off center and pulled back. Her face was pale, eyes the color of a budding leaf, pastel skin smooth for a woman in her eighties. She wore a trace of rose-colored lipstick. O’Brien thought she possessed a quiet dignity, and yet a sadness as faint as the small blue veins beneath her opaque forehead.

  “Grandma told me it was horrible, bodies floated in with the oil slicks, right here on Florida beaches. It wasn’t long after Pearl Harbor was bombed. A lot of people don’t even know that kind of thing was going on so close to our shores until the Navy put a stop to it. The irony is that my grandfather went to war in Europe because of what he saw close to American shores. It infuriated him that the Germans had taken out some of our ships. He went over there, fought them, got shot, and came back here to see a U-boat in the summer of ‘45.”

  O’Brien asked, “Why’d the authorities think he’d been killed in a mugging?”

  “We don’t know,” Abby said. “They say they found him with his wallet scattered. What little money he had, gone. Or so their reports said. And this was after my grandmother told them everything he told her before his death.”

  “If it was some kind of cover up, what would have been the reason?”