“Stallion. I like it. Maybe next tat I get will be a stallion.”
“Where the hell would you put it,” Katie asked. Katie was patient. She had known Tats her entire life. They had grown up together in Goodland and had been screwing each other since she was fourteen and he was fifteen. Tats thought that was love; Katie was more practical. He was slow, she knew. She had a high school diploma, he had dropped out. “We been over this, honey-bunny. This is my job. Marryin’ him was my job. For now. In a few weeks you can do your job. Then we’ll both be rich and we’ll be together all the time.”
Tats took another drag and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “Always have been, always will be. Still don’ like you fucking another man.”
“A few more weeks, honey-bunny. Just a few more weeks. Hang in there with me.” She felt around under the spread. “Ooh. Why Tats, you devil. Ready again already?”
There was no ashtray in the nonsmoking motel room and Tats stubbed out the cigarette on the top of the night table, leaving a burn mark. He put the bottle next to the butt. He rolled over on top of Katie. “Toldja. Been a long time.”
Chapter 3
Monday, July 1
The man clutched his ex-wife tightly, her back against his chest, his left arm around her under her breasts, his right hand holding the big hunting knife to her neck. He looked at the other officers and then sideways at Troy.
“Put down the knife,” Troy said. “Nothing is so bad we can’t work something out to help you. You don’t want to hurt her. You love her.”
“I can’t go on like this,” the man said. The woman was weeping silently, her eyes on Troy as if he were her salvation. “I can’t go on without her.”
“You can and you will. We’ll help you.”
The man shook his head. “You’ll just put me in jail. I’ve been to prison before. I’m never going back.”
“At least let her go. You know you don’t really want to do this. Do the right thing here.”
The man shook his head. Troy had his Glock lined up on the man’s right ear, about the only thing he could clearly see behind the terrified woman. “I came this far,” the man said. “I’ll take it all the way.”
The man’s face tightened. His left arm squeezed even harder and the woman let out a grunt from the pressure. The right hand pressed the knife harder against the woman’s throat.
“Don’t do it,” Troy said. “I can’t let you do it.”
The man bent his head to look around the woman’s throat, the better to aim that first deep cut that would sever her trachea and jugular vein. Suddenly Troy was seeing the man’s right eye and part of his skull over the top of the sights on the Glock. Troy started to squeeze the trigger.
“You win,” the man said. “I don’t really want to do this.” He took away the knife. He let the woman go. And Troy’s Glock went off and killed him.
Troy woke up, sweating. He lay there a moment, waiting for his heart to stop pounding, staring up at the darkness. But he knew, from experience, that he had to get up quickly, before the nausea came. The room was an unfamiliar one and he bumped into things getting out to the hall and to the bathroom. He vomited into the toilet, waited there, head down, and then vomited a second time. There was usually a second time; he never knew why. He ran cold water and drank some and splashed more on his face.
He flushed the toilet, put down the lid, and sat on it. He had been seeing a psychologist in Tampa and had a referral for one here in Mangrove Bayou. He wasn’t sure that any of that had helped in the past or would help in the future.
The condo unit was a single bedroom with a living room, bathroom with small washer and dryer, and a kitchen separated from the living room by a counter with two stools. It was plain, but clean, and the view was spectacular. The entire living room end of the unit had glass floor-to-ceiling windows and a sliding glass door.
Troy put on some shorts and went out onto the large balcony. There was a table here and two chairs and room for more if needed. He sat in a chair and looked out at the early morning darkness. The moon was setting and reflected off the quiet water between Barron Key and the small mangrove islands offshore that lay between the town and the Gulf of Mexico. He heard voices and laughter from his left, where the hot tub and swimming pool were, around a corner from him. Who sits around in a hot tub at 3 a.m. he wondered. No matter. He had the moonlight, a silver tunnel direct from his eyes to the sky in the west.
Troy’s unit was on the end of the building. To his right he saw Snake Key, assorted small concrete-block houses faintly visible in the silver light, with an infill-scattering of mobile homes and, beyond them, Snake Key’s big boatyard that doubled as the working waterman’s marina and storage. He had no view of the pool and hot tub. Mrs. Mackenzie didn’t need a police presence so much that she would assign him to one of the larger and pricier units overlooking the pool and garden area. He got the Snake Key view.
After a while he got up and went back inside. He picked up his car keys and went out front, got into his Subaru Forester, and drove slowly around Mangrove Bayou. Anything to take his mind off the dream, and he needed to get more familiar with the town anyway.
Chapter 4
Monday, July 1
Troy woke in the strange bed, momentarily disoriented. The bedside table light was on but daylight was streaming in from a window. His alarm clock was set for 6 a.m. and, as usual, he woke a half-hour earlier than that, dream or no dream. Volume Three of Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples was still open on his chest. He had worked on that after coming back from his tour of the town. He sat up and put the book on the bedside table. Today was his first day on the new job. Troy smiled. He had to admit that he was a little excited by it.
Troy showered and shaved, put on some jeans and a tan back-vented shirt, almost the uniform here among the fishing guides, and let that hang outside his pants. Unlike the guides, his fishing shirts were all heavily starched. It was probably a holdover from the Army, he knew, but he liked starched jeans and shirts. He took his Colt Commander .45-caliber pistol out of his briefcase, slipped it into the horsehide holster and clipped that inside his waistline at his right hip. He put a spare magazine into his left pants pocket, just in case he got into a World War. But if he didn’t take it along then what was the point in having it? From force of habit he checked in the bathroom mirror but the shirt covered the gun with no “print” at all.
Outside, Mrs. Mackenzie was bustling about rearranging the pool patio furniture. She was a short, stout, fiftyish, tanned woman in yellow hair and a yellow sundress—Troy was to learn that Mrs. Mackenzie had an inexhaustible supply of identical yellow sundresses—who bustled around all day seeing that walks were swept, the pool clean, the hot tub de-germed, and the beach in front clear of seaweed, dead fish or anything else that might remind the tourist renting here that the Gulf of Mexico was an actual sea and not just a very big pool.
Troy walked two blocks down 1st Street to the Sandy Shoes Café and had breakfast. The “Shoes” was actually a good-sized restaurant with no walls on three sides, offering a view of the beach to the west across a grassy field named Barron Square, and of the boat ramp to the east. On a July morning, overhead fans and misters did their best to keep the few customers cool.
At eight o’clock Troy walked east past the boat ramps. The town hall was an L-shaped, brick two-story with standing-seam metal roof on 5th Street between Colorado and Connecticut Avenues and the Sunset Bay boat ramp. Most of the rear half of the block was an asphalt parking lot with a low brick wall around it, and one exit. West of the brick wall was Sunset Bay and the boat ramps. There were civilian cars parked casually around the lot, and two rusting skeletons that had once been police cars sat to one side up on concrete blocks.
One of the department’s two working Suburbans was parked beside a metal door upon which someone with a large marker pen had written “POLICE.” The door was locked. Troy walked back and around the town hall to a front door with a froste
d glass upper pane with “P LICE DE T.” in faded gold lettering. There was a doorbell, and a sign beside the door noted that if no one was in the station and the door locked, to call a patrol officer for assistance. There was a phone number to call.
Opening the door jiggled a bell that tinkled. The lobby had several straight back chairs to his left and a low table with some magazines on it. Beyond those was a connecting door that must lead to the town hall offices. There was a door straight ahead that was open and he could see down a corridor with cells on the left and some doors on the right. That corridor ended in the metal door that Troy had tried from the outside.
To Troy’s right as he walked in was a waist-high countertop behind which sat a stern, thin, older woman with white close-cropped hair. Beside her was another corridor leading to some offices. The woman wore a white blouse with collar points out and neatly folded down over a blue sweater-vest, light gray slacks and large glasses. She had been looking at a computer monitor in front of her but now she looked at him over the top of her glasses and asked, “Can I help you?” Her tone suggested that she thought it very unlikely.
“Hope so,” Troy said. “You must be June Dundee, the dispatcher. I’m Troy Adam, Adam with no s on the end. And I’m your new boss.”
“Oh. Shit!” She jumped up and came around the counter to shake his hand, shouting “Bubba!” at the same time. Troy was a little startled until a uniformed cop came down the hallway. Apparently, he, not Troy, was Bubba. Bubba took one long look at Troy and said, “You got a carry permit for that weapon?” His hand hovered near his holstered Glock.
“He’s the new chief, you dumb shit,” June Dundee said.
“You say.” Bubba didn’t take his eyes off of Troy. “You got some I.D. fella?”
Troy smiled and turned around, hands out to his sides. “Hip pocket.”
Bubba reached under Troy’s shirt and took out the gun first and then Troy’s wallet. “Damn nineteen-eleven,” he said, looking at the gun. He backed away and flipped through Troy’s wallet, read Troy’s concealed weapon permit, checked that against Troy’s driver license, and handed the gun and wallet back. “Sorry. I knew you were coming but had to be sure.”
“No problemo. Good police work. Can’t believe you made the gun. What’s your real name?” Bubba was two inches shorter than Troy’s six feet but thicker in all directions with that hard fat that men and women acquire from too much fried food combined with too much hard work in too much sun. Though a white man, Bubba’s skin was the color, and probably the texture, of Troy’s shoe sole. He was actually darker than Troy.
“Real name is Bubba. Bubba Johns. Spent a lot of my life bouncing in bars. I can smell gun oil at ten feet.”
“I admire your nose, Bubba. What’s with the dead cars out back?”
“Chief Redmond insisted we keep them. For parts,” June said.
“I see. Can you or Bubba show me around?”
Bubba gave Troy the tour. The station was what he had expected, and actually pretty good for a small town. One of the corridors from the lobby ran back past four offices to the right. The office sharing a wall with Troy’s corner office had been converted into an evidence storage room with a locked door and barred window. To the left were a shower and toilet and also a break room.
The corridor ended at a door with “Fire Exit” and “Director of Pub ic Safety” stenciled on the glass top half of the door. Someone had scraped the l off the sign. Troy smiled. His office was a large corner space with, oddly, a red-painted metal fire door in the back wall. There were windows behind the desk that looked out onto the dead end of Connecticut Avenue, with the visitor parking there on one side, and, beside the fire exit, across Sunset Bay to the public boat ramps on the other. In the distance, across Sunset Bay, Troy could see the parking lot and front of the Sea Grape Inn.
“What’s with the fire door?” he asked.
“The corridor used to run straight back to the fire exit. Chief Redmond knocked out the wall and expanded his office to include that part of the corridor. But we still had to have the fire exit.” Bubba grinned. “Any fire, you’ll be the first out.”
There were two visitor chairs and Bubba sat in one. The desk was a battered wood affair with one short leg broken off and replaced with a stack of old telephone books. Troy hadn’t actually seen a telephone book in years. The desktop had a telephone and a charger with a radio in it. There was a lapel mike and an earpiece.
“I was told at my interview that you’ve been running the department since Bob Redmond left,” Troy said to Bubba. “How do you feel about me taking over?”
“Good. I can do it, but the paperwork, well, I’m no good at paperwork. And the responsibility. Well, I’m glad to see you.”
“Glad to be here.” Troy had run across people in the Army, good people, who were simply terrified at the thought of being responsible for making decisions, and who would turn down promotions. He had never understood it, just knew it existed.
“I’m on the job as of a few minutes ago,” Troy said. “I’d like to go over the roster with you, Bubba. Get your take on each person’s strengths and weaknesses, help me come up to speed quicker.”
Bubba stared at Troy. “You want me to rat out my friends and coworkers? I don’t think I want to do that. You can come up to speed on your own, fella.”
Troy was seated and brushing some dust off the desktop. Now he looked up at Bubba. “Let’s all start off on the right foot here. You can call me Troy in private or you can call me Chief at any time. As for my request, I suppose you could see it that way. The way I see it is you’re the last guy to sit in this seat. You don’t want to do it any more or the town council would have hired you, not me. We both know that. But I’m here now. I need to know as much as possible and you know what I need to know. Outgoing guy briefs incoming guy. Always. Everywhere. In any job.”
“You gonna fire me if I refuse?”
“Of course not. I’ll just stumble along making dumb mistakes I could have avoided had you helped me.”
Bubba thought a moment, staring at the front of Troy’s desk. He nodded. “I’ll help you…Chief.”
“Good. Thanks.”
Chapter 5
Monday, July 1
June Dundee came in carrying a cell phone, a .40-caliber pistol with two full magazines, a badge and an I.D. card. “These are all for you,” she said, laying them on the desk. She sat in the other visitor chair.
Troy checked the pistol. “Glock 22. Good enough for the FBI,” he said. When he leaned on the desk it wobbled. He made a mental note to add something thin to the stack of phone books.
“You gonna use the gun?” Bubba asked. “There’s a holster for it, fits on a duty belt.”
“I like my Colt.”
“Shee-it.”
“Good point.” Troy looked at the I.D. They had taken the photo after his job interview. He looked like someone he would arrest on sight on general principles. Troy put the I.D. into his wallet and the badge into his shirt pocket. As of this morning, he thought, he wouldn’t need the permit for the concealed gun. He was an official law enforcement officer once more.
“What’s with the cell phone?” Troy asked.
“We got two of them,” June said. “I mean, well, we all got cell phones of our own. These are the same number, department phones. We got landlines, both emergency and business numbers, and radios too, of course. Basically, when the landline rings on my desk, so do both cell phones if they’re turned on. This way when I’m not here one of the officers on duty can answer the department cell even if he or she is out driving around.”
Troy nodded. “Makes sense. Saw the sign out by the front door. I keep one of these all the time?”
“Yes. Even the 9-1-1 forwards. They each have all the staff numbers already programmed in. Don’t use it for any personal calls or I have to kill you.”
“Wow. You guys are tough down here.”
“Damn right. Now, I work eight to five Tuesdays through Saturdays…
.”
“It’s Monday,” Troy said. “You’re here now.”
“I get bored. I mean, I’m retired. Took this job to have something to do.”
“So at the moment you’re off the clock. Not being paid to be here.”
“Who gives a shit? Here, I’m somebody. Home, I’m Bob’s wife. Bob retired a couple years ago too. Love him to death but he drives me crazy. Anyway, nights and my days off, one of the officers carries the other department cell phone ’case anyone wants to bitch to the Mangrove Bayou po-leece about some fucking disaster.”
“What kind of fucking disasters do we get around here?”
Bubba grinned and nodded toward June. “She handles most of ’em. Between her mouth and her scaring the crap outta folks, we actual officers of the law don’t have much to do.”
“It depends on which island we’re talking about,” June said. “Snake Key folks—we call ’em “Snakers”—keep to themselves. They’re the old Florida folks, crabbers, fishermen, used to be they hunted gators for the skins. Some still poach out of the national park if they can get away with it. ’While back they all got into smuggling marijuana. Them was good times in this town, goddamn. Everyone had a new Cadillac or a jacked-up pick-em-up truck, or a new flats boat with a two-fifty outboard. Don’t think they do much of that anymore ’cause the Coast Guard stops it all farther out. Damn shame.”
“I believe we in law enforcement are supposed to be sort of opposed to drug smuggling,” Troy said. “I’m almost certain I’ve read that somewhere.”
“Shit,” June said. “Anyway, Snakers figure if other people let them get away with whatever it is they’re getting away with, then the least they can do is return the favor.”
“They’re mostly good people,” Bubba said. “I’m related to probably half of ’em. Just don’t expect folks there to get all smiley sappy over you when you come cruising by in your shiny chief’s car and shiny chief’s badge.”
“Actually, I don’t have a shiny chief’s car. Maybe I need a bigger badge.”
Mangrove Bayou Page 2
