by Jack Kerley
“You’re getting somewhere, I take it?” Harry said.
“Halfway. I’ve got the current-drift models in place. Now we run things in reverse. The boat was spotted here, right?” Larry tapped my stretch of beach on Dauphin Island.
I nodded. “Just outside the sandbar, a couple hundred feet.”
Larry ticked numbers into the computer, lost in an ebb and flow of time and tide. Ten seconds passed and the computer made a bong! sound. I saw a section of coastline change from dark brown to vibrant pulsing orange.
Larry jabbed a finger at the highlighted section. “The craft was most likely launched from somewhere within three hundred yards of beach centered here. Sorry to be imprecise, but there are a lot of variables.”
Harry leaned close to study the marshes and estuaries and patches of sand abutting the blue Gulf. I looked over his shoulder.
“Where are you pointing, Doc?” Harry asked.
“A bit southwest of Coden. A marshy estuarine with a few small inlets from the Gulf. Not much there any more – the area got redesigned by Katrina.”
I said, “I’ll pass the info to Jimmy Gentry. He can do with it what he will.”
Harry studied the monitor again. Turned to me. “I’m up for a nice little drive. Somewhere a bit south of Coden. How ’bout you, Carson?”
I shook my head. “It’s not our case. We’ve already got two deskloads of death and weirdness.”
“It might be a chance to do some good.”
I started to respond, but found no words. I shrugged and stared at the ragged stretch of coast, feeling a strange chill at the base of my spine.
Chapter 5
Harry and I picked up chow at a po’boy joint on the DI Expressway before we turned west. Harry ate as he drove, brushing crumbs and lettuce from his chest to the floorboards. We pulled off I-10 and dropped southwest toward the coast, not the white sand shores of tourist Alabama, but land with dense expanses of brush and sea grasses. The road was an armadillo graveyard, the car-struck beasts studding the tarmac like scaley mines.
I heard a passing vehicle at our backs and saw Harry shoot a glance into the rear-view mirror as his hand tensed on the wheel.
“Check this out,” he said quietly.
I looked up as a large black pickup truck passed, three males jammed in the front, another in the bed. They were in their twenties and thirties, shirtless, heavily tatted, crosses and swastikas and lightning bolts. The driver was wearing a plastic Nazi-style helmet and drinking from a can of Miller. They stared at us as they passed, not a happy look. A Harley-Davidson logo filled the rear window. Celtic runes decorated the bumper, book-ended by Confederate battle flags.
Though no one was in the oncoming lane, the truck swerved in front of us. Harry jammed the brake as I slapped my hand to the dash. The pudgy guy in the bed grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern, turned for a one-handed grab of the chrome light bar atop the cab, and dropped his pants, showing us his hairy white ass.
The driver hit the accelerator and I heard the roar of a V-8 as the truck blew away at what had to be a hundred ten.
“Man,” Harry said, “I can smell the ugly.”
We drove another few miles, turned hard south. The Merman had printed out a satellite shot of the area in question. We angled down a few sand-and-shell roads that led to shattered boats and the mason-block foundations of houses reduced to driftwood and termite fodder.
“I don’t see anything,” Harry said, staring into scrub pine and land as flat as a billiard table. “Not that I know what I’m looking for.”
“Check over there,” I pointed. “A dune where a stretch of pine got blown away.”
We stopped and got out. The sun was climbing toward noon and the air was close enough to induce claustrophobia. Insect sounds rose in waves from the stunted trees. We swatted biting flies from our faces. Harry ramped a hand over his eyes and studied the trees.
“There. Something’s not right.”
I followed to a sand-drifted stretch of road. Uprooted brush covered a metal gate. The gate blocked a slender lane, barely more than a scattering of broken shells in the hard sand. Since storm-uprooted trees were everywhere, the camouflage was effective.
We tugged away brush, sweating like stevedores, then drove down the lane, branches screeching against the car doors. Six hundred feet later the lane terminated in a webwork of marshy channels. I saw the hulks of shrimp boats in the sand, prows pointing upward like they were sailing out of hell. In the distance were a few tumbled houses, once home to shrimpers, now rotting wood and rusting metal. We saw a house trailer half-flattened and blown over on its side. It looked like a shoebox someone had kicked down the road.
“Over there,” Harry pointed. “I see a dock.”
We jogged to a rickety pier extending into the marshy channel. Harry passed me, stepping carefully to the end of the dock, boards creaking beneath his feet. He dropped to his knees and studied one of three old tires nailed to the sideboards of the dock, the bargain version of boat bumpers.
“Check out the tires, brother,” Harry said.
I knelt and studied the surface of the rotting rubber. Saw streaks of paint worn into the now-gray whitewalls. It seemed to match the bilious green of the rowboat. But green was a popular color for boats.
I nodded. “There’s a chance the kid got launched from here.”
“Cars, check behind the trees.”
Harry pointed to the far side of a stand of short trees. I saw truncated pilings, ragged black spikes pointing at the sky. We pushed through brush and found the burned-down house once supported by the short pilings, a tumbled pile of blackened wood and sheet-metal roofing.
“It burned recently,” I said, squatting to puff at a soft pile of soot. “Otherwise rain would have pounded away the softer ash.” I walked the edge of the debris pile, seeing burned and broken supports, a fried chair and couch, a blackened toaster.
“Uh, Cars…” Harry said. “Step over here. Carefully. I’ve got something.”
I walked over and looked down to see several feet of twisted cinder with a bulb on top, a former human being. I’d seen this phenomenon a half-dozen times after structure fires.
“Oh shit, a dead body.” I pulled out my cell. “I’ll call it into the county police.”
Harry tugged my sleeve. “You’re missing the interesting part. Look closer. Down by the belly.”
I crouched close. Details congealed in the shadows and I saw an object emerging from the charred abdominal area: four feet of scorched steel rod entering a blackened shaft of scorched hardwood. What was left of the corpse’s hands were clutching at the shaft.
“That what I think it is?” Harry whispered.
I stared at the pierced corpse. “If you’re thinking harpoon, I’m thinking you’re right.”
Chapter 6
“I ain’t surprised at a dead body. More’n one came outta this neighborhood over the past few years.”
Sergeant Elvin Briscoe of the local constabulary spit tobacco juice on the ground and leaned against his dusty cruiser with thick arms crossed and his mirrored shades low on a gin-blossomed nose. He was a barrel-bodied man in his mid forties with a ruddy face and equine teeth stained with tobacco.
A dozen feet away, two techs from the Medical Examiner’s office photographed the torso prior to pulling it from the debris. Behind them, the forensics team scoured the surrounding land for evidence.
“This was a violent community?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Got worse once the white folks left.”
“White folks?” Harry said.
Briscoe looked at me. “Used to be a shrimper’s community, white people mainly, until a few years back. Then the Vietnamese pushed in and the whites moved out.”
“Why’d they move?” Harry said, knowing the answer, just wanting to hear it confirmed.
Briscoe shrugged and spat a second strand of tobacco juice into the weeds. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at a hawk circling above, a b
lack dot in a blue sky.
I thought maybe Briscoe didn’t hear. “Why’d the Caucasians leave?” I asked.
Briscoe turned his gaze from the sky to my face. “Guess the whites wanted to be with their own kind. Plus most of the, uh, Orientals didn’t speak English. Just jabbered monkey-speak.”
Harry said, “And all these years I thought they spoke Vietnamese.”
Briscoe turned away and spat juice. Rubbed it into the sand with his boot.
“This fire happened recently,” I said. “Since last Friday.”
“No way you can know that,” Briscoe scoffed.
I nodded downward and kicked a pile of ash. Watched a plume float away on the breeze.
“Friday’s when it last rained. The ashes are unsettled.”
Briscoe feigned a yawn. “Guess that’s why you’re a detective, Detective.”
“You know who lived here?”
“We never patrol back here cuz no one lives here any more. Or I didn’t think so.”
“You never got a call about a fire?” Harry asked.
Briscoe gazed with amusement at the surrounding desolation. “Who would call one in?” he said, like talking to himself. He belched and looked at me. “You were saying something about a kid found in a boat?”
“Launched from here, maybe. That pier.”
“How about you move your ass a couple feet?” someone said behind us.
“How about you fuck yourself?” came the response.
We turned our heads to the voices. A chunky, fiftyish guy from the Alabama Bureau of Forensics was jabbing a finger at the deputy who’d arrived with Briscoe, a hard-muscled man in his early thirties wearing a too-tight uniform shirt to emphasize the swollen biceps. The deputy slapped the finger away.
“Whoa,” I yelled, spinning from Briscoe and running to the altercation. “What’s the beef?”
The red-faced guy from forensics, Al Bustamente, pointed at the deputy’s spit-shined black Wellingtons. “Bubba here’s standing in the middle of what appear to be footprints. I guess no one told him that professionals don’t put their feet in evidence.”
I saw the county cop’s eyes tighten. “What are you saying?”
The cop was a collection of granite muscles, but Bustamente had a fast fuse and hot mouth. And as a member of the state’s department of forensics, he also had jurisdiction. “I’m saying I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re ignorant, all I want is to make a cast of the prints. Is that too tough to understand, you hick moron?”
I saw the deputy’s jaw clench and his arms ripple, the punch cock. I jumped in front of him, knocked the punch aside with my forearm, like blocking an incoming missile. I was left staring into the deputy’s eyes from a foot away.
“Get outta my way,” he snarled. His words smelled like unwashed teeth. His breathing was shallow. Veins bulged on his forehead and he seemed dangerously close to unhinged.
“Get hold of yourself,” I said. “A man’s been killed here.”
“I don’t give a fuck if –”
“Baker!” Briscoe’s voice from behind me. “Git to the car and you git calm. Now!”
I stepped aside, made an effort to keep from massaging my forearm, aching from the deputy’s sledgehammer blow. The guy mouthed something at Bustamente, turned and walked to the cruiser like a programmed robot. Bustamente shook his head, knelt, commenced pouring compound into one of the footprints he’d spotted. Crisis averted. I returned to Briscoe. He was picking his teeth with a thumbnail.
“Your man always such a pain in the ass?” I asked.
Briscoe nodded toward Bustamente. “Seems lardass over there called Baker ignorant, a hick and a moron. You take that kind of talk yourself?”
“If I’m an ignorant hick moron,” Harry interrupted from a dozen feet distant. “But since I’m a professional, I don’t generally plant my shoes in the middle of evidence.”
Briscoe looked into the distance. I saw his jaw clench, his eyes tighten. He turned them to me.
“Looks like we got everything under control here. See you.”
I said, “You’re planning on checking ownership of this house, right, Sheriff? Track down whoever was inside?”
“Sure. Have a nice drive back to the city, Detective.” He winked. “Hope you get that lost pup returned to its kennel.”
Briscoe ambled away to talk to his deputy. The festivities seemingly over, Harry and I climbed back into our car and left the scene to the medical and forensics teams. We could drop the case back into the arms of Jimmy Gentry, since it was in Dauphin Island’s jurisdiction. Jimmy, unfortunately, would have to deal with Briscoe.
We drove a couple miles, Harry strangely silent. Usually he wanted to kick around details while a scene was still fresh in his head even if it wasn’t our jurisdiction or case.
“Can you believe Briscoe?” I shook my head. “A pity Jimmy’ll have to coordinate an investigation with that rube.”
“Besides the banter about monkey chatter and pups,” Harry said quietly, “what did you notice about Sheriff Briscoe?”
I ran the interaction through my head. “He was semi-literate, a heavy tobacco user and probably a heavy drinker…”
“Did you notice he never looked at me when I spoke?”
“What?”
“Just like I wasn’t there. The invisible man.”
“Briscoe did that?” I said, looking at Harry.
“During the introduction phase, he shook hands with everyone but me. He turned away, faked a sneeze and moved to the next guy.”
I recalled Briscoe’s big howling a-choo. Pretending to wipe his hands, moving to me with a big hand but a wet-rag shake. I replayed the scene and only in retrospect saw the slight.
“Shit,” I said. “It went by me.”
“Briscoe was having a great time fucking with me, him knowing it, me knowing it, the muscle-bound deputy knowing it. I got the impression Briscoe was showing off for his deputy.”
“I’m sorry, bro,” I said. “I didn’t see what was happening.”
“You weren’t meant to.”
We moved down the road another mile, me thinking about the small and ugly drama that had sullied the air at the crime scene, a display of racial condescension I’d missed totally.
“How much do they piss you off, Harry?” I finally asked. “People like Briscoe?”
Harry was silent for so long I thought he hadn’t heard my question. After a mile of farm fields, hawks and watermelons our only audience, Harry turned my way.
“Pull over.”
“You mean now? What are you –”
“Pull over, Carson. Right here.”
I braked to the sandy berm. Harry pushed open his door. By the time I got out, my partner was striding into the field. He appraised a head-sized sugar-baby melon, knelt, snapped it from the vine. He balanced the melon on a rotting fencepost and returned to the car.
“Harry?” I asked.
In one sweeping motion, Harry snatched his nine millimeter from the shoulder rig, pointed one-handed at the target, snapped off three shots. I saw a spray of pink from the rear of the melon, and it toppled to the ground, cracking open to reveal red innards.
Harry replaced his gun and got back in the car. I pulled back on to the road. He thumbed replacement rounds into his clip and returned the weapon to the holster, staring out the window at the cotton fields.
Chapter 7
Come Monday, the Homicide Division was its usual kick-off-the-week self, a dozen overworked dicks sucking caffeine and yapping on phones, checking what snitches might have dredged up over the weekend. Lieutenant Tom Mason, our hound-faced commander, was in his windowed office staring down at the weekend reports. He had his mouth open and was drumming his flues with his fingertips, making music inside his head.
Harry arrived at eight and sat across from me. We worked with desks butted together to converse face to face. Plus it gave us a bigger space to hold about twenty pounds of homicide files and paperwork, though overflow aval
anched to the floor daily. Harry was wearing an orange blazer over lime-green pants, his polo shirt was plum, his shoes burgundy. If environmentalists figured how to convert the color wavelengths in Harry’s wardrobe into electricity, the polar bears would be safe forever.
I coughed and sniffed, the summer pollen counts high. Harry shot me the narrow eye. “You breathed down sea water, right? When you were racing the baby to shore?”
Aspirated sea water could lead to some hellacious infections. I shrugged it off, mumbling about something in the air.
Harry said, “You haven’t been looking real healthy the past couple of weeks, Carson. Maybe your resistance is down.”
“I’m fine.”
“The hospital’s a ten-minute drive. You can get a shot or whatever.”
“Earth to Harry: I feel fine.”
Harry sighed and pitched his pencil to the desk. “Come on. We’re going to the hospital. It’s closer and insurance pays, right? We can get you a shot and…” he paused as if having a sudden thought, “see how the kid’s doing, health-wise.”
Harry had segued from the first rationale to the second so smoothly I realized the whole conversation had been an excuse to visit the boat baby. I’d pretty much pushed the incident to the back of my mind, wanting nothing more to do with the kid. The case belonged to the DI police.
“Do you really want to know how it’s doing?” I challenged. “The kid could be terminally ill. Or brain-dead.”
Harry closed his eyes, conflict tightening his face. He sighed.
“I have to know, Carson. I held the kid. I breathed into her.”
Minutes later we were at the hospital. An emergency room resident I knew shot me up with a syringe full of antibiotic and wrote script for some pills. Rolling my sleeve down, I looked for Harry, didn’t see him. I found him on the fourth floor in paediatric intensive care, peering through the window separating the sterile unit from the hall and waiting area.
I walked tentatively to Harry and peeked in the window. Machines and monitors owned the real estate inside the unit. Our rescue was third in a line of five babies in Plexiglas boxes. Two kids were squalling, two were twitching or stretching. Ours was as still as clay. I felt myself staring. But it seemed as if I was watching from a vast distance, like the child was an image on a screen.
