Mangrove Bayou

by Stephen Morrill

  Bubba chuckled. “That would do it. Chief Redmond wrecked the last chief’s car and the town council never bought another one.”

  June went on. “Airfield Key people are mostly rich Yankees. They call us if the trash truck is late, or the postman, like, for God’s sake, we have anything to do with mail delivery. Let one raccoon stroll out of the swamp and they act like a fucking Sasquatch is going to eat them.”

  “We got a wildlife trapper here in town?” Troy asked. “What do we do with gators and snakes and all that?”

  “Bert Frey has the state trapper license here,” Bubba said. “His number’s in the phone too. Snakes he kills. Gators he skins and also turns the tails into lunch for the tourists.” Bubba grinned. “Bert also owns Bert’s Crab Shack, south end of 7th Street at the water. All other wildlife he takes out Barron Road and dumps someplace in a new home. Or so he claims. Locals don’t eat much at Bert’s.”

  “Breakfast sausage a little…gamey?” Troy asked.

  “Kinda depends on the season.”

  “Very funny,” June said. “Besides the airport and that Indian mound and museum, the rest of Airfield Key is big houses full of bigger egos. We get half our nuisance calls from them.”

  “Don’t forget the yacht club,” Bubba said.

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a yacht club.”

  “I know,” Troy said. “Seen it, from the river and from the other side, when I was using the little boat ramp next to the Guide Club on Snake Key.”

  “Right. Well, the director of public safety,” June’s eye darted to the door and back, “is automatically an honorary member of the Osprey Yacht Club. Wait until they get a load of you.”

  “Is the yacht club crowd a little…ah…bigoted?”

  For once June didn’t say anything. Finally Bubba spoke. “You’re not…you know…Jewish, are you?”

  They all laughed. “The main island is this one, Barron Key,” June said. “We got your middle-class people here and some wealthy ones on the north end. They even got their own yuppie shopping mall, across the street from the grocery.”

  “Crime? Citizen interaction?” Troy asked.

  “This time of year it’s mostly just locals with a few tourists,” Bubba said. “Not much in the way of crime. Some burglaries, lot of too-much drinking. That stuff. In the winter, December through early May, the tourists outnumber us two to one. We get a lot of cars ticketed or towed, drunks, grab-ass by the younger ones, the older ones mostly sit in chairs on their motel balconies and stare at the sunsets. Don’t they have sunsets where they come from?”

  Troy smiled. He picked up the Glock on his desk, locked back the slide and looked into the chamber. He stuck a little fingernail into the chamber to reflect the overhead light and looked down the barrel. “Dirty,” he said. “Let’s see yours.” He held out his hand and Bubba pulled his own gun out, dropped the magazine and ejected the round in the chamber, and handed it across. “This one’s dirty too,” Troy said after a moment. He handed Bubba back his gun. Bubba looked like he wanted to say something but he swallowed it.

  “OK,” Troy said. “The trucks look good. We can clean the guns. I will never again see an empty pizza box on the table in the break room, and keep that place cleaner. Buy some roach motels. Get a cat. Something. There will be changes. I hope to make those changes later, after I see how things roll here. I’ll try not to be obnoxious about it. But if nobody else likes them I honestly won’t give a damn. I’ll like them and that’s what counts.”

  “Do you want me to call everyone in now? Let them all meet you at once?” June asked. “You can tell us about your changes that you don’t give a damn if we like or not.”

  “Not now. Let’s get me settled in for a few weeks and then we’ll see. I do want to at least meet everyone right away. But the people off-duty deserve to be off-duty. I can talk one-on-one with each person, as they come in for shift changes.”

  “Two people come on at midnight,” Bubba said. “Midnight-to-eight shift.”

  “Then I’ll be here at midnight. Who’s on duty right now?”

  “Me and Milo Binder,” Bubba said. “Milo always gets the day shift. He’s out patrolling.”

  Troy was putting his Glock and the two magazines into a desk drawer and something in Bubba’s voice made him look up.

  “Don’t we rotate the shifts here?”

  “Yep. End of each month,” Bubba said. “Two people per shift and three per shift on Fridays and Saturdays. And you’re on call twenty-four hours. But Milo Binder is the mayor’s nephew. His sister’s kid. He gets his pick of shifts and his pick is always the day shift.”

  Chapter 6

  Sunday, July 21

  John Barrymore looked up from the book he was reading as his wife let herself into the house and came into the den. “Did you find what you needed?” he asked. She had left earlier to get some dirty clothes off their boat so she could take those to the dry cleaners.

  “All set, honey-bunny,” Katie said. “But I think there’s somethin’ wrong on the boat. Heard water splashing in the motor thing, you know, under the back bedroom.”

  “The aft cabin, we call that,” Barrymore explained. “The engine space is under that.” He had tried, patiently, to teach Kathleen about boats, to get her to help him run the big trawler yacht. She never seemed to pick up any of the terminology and never wanted to do any work on the boat. That was all right, he told himself. He loved her and she was just a little slow to come around. She needed time.

  “Whatever, honey-bunny. Maybe you need to run take a look at it.”

  “I’ll do that.” John rose from his chair and headed for the door. They lived on Airport Road just a short distance east of the Osprey Yacht Club where he had the boat docked. He wasn’t too worried; the boat had excellent bilge pumps. Still, on a boat, splashing water was not something you looked at the next morning.

  Tats Michaels waited in the darkness in the forward cabin aboard the boat. He had parked his pickup truck up the road and, wearing his black wetsuit, had swum around the yacht club fence. Katie had lowered the swim ladder for him to climb aboard. He had laid his trap in the engine space and Katie had handed him the electric drill.

  “Did you use gloves, like I tole you?” he had asked. She nodded. He was wearing his wetsuit neoprene gloves himself.

  He had plugged the drill into a convenient outlet and then hid it under a folded towel. “Good girl. Now go get him.”

  “OK, honey-bunny. Might be a half-hour or so. You be patient, now.”

  “I know what I’m doing. This is my part of the job, remember.”

  She kissed him. He felt her rear end, which was not so effective with quarter-inch-thick neoprene gloves. “Soon. Soon we can be together all the time.”

  She giggled. “You’re my guy. Always have been. Always will be.”

  “Always,” Tats had said. “I like the sound of that. Go get him.”

  It was a half-hour before he felt the boat rock slightly and heard the door open from the deck to the main salon. He waited. He heard footsteps going aft. When he heard the hatch cover being lifted to the engine space under the aft cabin, he crept out of the front cabin and moved silently aft too, his wet suit “booties” making no sound on the carpet covering the salon deck.

  John Barrymore was in the engine space, in salt water up to his knees. He had found the leak and stopped that and now was trying to figure out why the bilge pump in the engine space wasn’t working. He was leaning on the big diesel engine when he heard a splash beside him and looked down. He felt a paralyzing shock shoot through his body and his world turned to blackness.

  Chapter 7

  Monday, July 22

  Troy was doing paperwork in his office and listening to the morning news on the small television set on top of one of the filing cabinets. A major low-pressure area had formed in the western Caribbean and was slowly headed their way. Forecasters thought it might strengthen into a tropical storm.

  June Dundee looked in the open o
ffice door that he rarely closed. She didn’t usually work Mondays, but she had asked for the previous Saturday off and Troy had filled in for her. She said nothing, just looked at him. He had already learned that this was her way of interrupting him. He laid aside the monthly expense report and looked up and to his left. “Yes?”

  “Got a customer.” June was wearing her sweater vest again today, against the chill in the building. The officers, in their long-sleeve uniforms, liked it cold. It occurred to Troy that once they switched to the new lighter-weight uniforms he had ordered for them, maybe he could turn up the air conditioner a little. That would make both June and Mortimer Potem, the town manager, happy. And if Potem was happy, Lester Groud, the mayor, was happy.

  June motioned to someone in the hallway and then came in and stood by the file cabinets to Troy’s left. June glanced at the television. “You know,” she said, “you can call up the damn weather on your computer any time you want. And they have better information.”

  “I’m old-fashioned,” Troy said. He clicked a remote to shut off the television.

  “I’ll say.” She looked at his desk. “You’re the only guy I know uses a fountain pen. Might be the only person in town who owns a fountain pen.”

  “I like my fountain pen.”

  A small woman, mid-twenties, slightly pudgy, white with minimal tan, brown hair shoulder-length, came into the office. June motioned for her to sit in one of the chairs. The woman sat and looked down at her shoes. She wore a shapeless polyester dress, blue with white polka dots, and cheap white tennis shoes.

  “This is Wanda Frister,” June said. “She says she’s being stalked.”

  “Is that so?” Troy said.

  Wanda nodded. She looked even harder at her sneakers. “Sorry to bother you,” she told her sneakers. “I know it’s not important. But I’m scared.”

  “My name is Troy. May I call you Wanda?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Troy.”

  “Troy,” Wanda said.

  “Well, Wanda, you are important to me. Tell me about this.” He picked up the fountain pen and pulled a yellow legal pad in front of him. “Who is the stalker?” Troy knew that most people, even if a stalker was secretive, knew who it was. The trick was deciding if, in fact, any law had been broken and then proving anything.

  “My ex-boyfriend. I stopped seeing him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Billy…William Poteet. He lives on Snake Key, same as me. He works a crab boat, has a string of traps. Helps in the boatyard too. He’s mean.”

  “I see. Why did you dump him?” A better question would have been, Why did you take up with him in the first place if he’s mean, but Troy had long since given up on understanding why women fell in love with bad men, or vice-versa.

  Wanda burst into tears. June sat in the other chair beside Wanda and glared at Troy. “You might try a little fucking compassion.”

  Troy nodded. “Got the compassion. Not showing it too well, I guess.” He opened a drawer and took out a small box of tissues and pushed that across. Wanda took one and blew her nose. She looked up at Troy for the first time. She had wide-spaced dark blue eyes. “He kept hitting me. Now he’s bothering me.”

  “How so?”

  Wanda stared at Troy. A line from an Edwin Markham poem came to him. Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? He rephrased. “What does he do that bothers you?”

  “Calls me. Lots. Thirty times yesterday.” Wanda felt in a pocket of the dress and produced a crumpled sheet torn from a small spiral notebook and handed that to Troy.

  He smoothed it out on his desk. “Each mark here is a phone call?”

  “Yes sir. I was at work but that’s how many calls he left on my voicemail. And some later, when I was at home. I don’t answer when he calls. Does this most every day.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Most times just nothing. Sometimes he swears at me. Calls me names. After a minute or so he hangs up.”

  “Did you happen to get the number? Do you have caller I.D.?”

  “Yes sir. But it wasn’t his home number. And he ain’t got no cell phone. Me neither.”

  “So how do you know it was Billy?”

  “Who else would it be, right after we broke up?”

  “Good point.”

  “’Sides, I know his voice. When he does talk.”

  “Of course. What kind of car does Billy drive?”

  “He’s got an old red F-150 pickup truck. Usually the back’s fulla crab traps.”

  “Where does Billy live?”

  “Other side of Snake Key.” Wanda recited an address and Troy wrote that down.

  “Good. Anyone else in your life right now?”

  Wanda stared.

  “Do you have a new boyfriend, anyone else after Billy?”

  “Oh. No sir.”

  “Got any family local? Anyone you could stay with if you needed to?”

  “No sir.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes sir. Got me a single-wide out on Snake Key.”

  “May I have the address? And your phone number.” He handed Wanda the legal pad and a ballpoint pen from his desk drawer and she wrote those down. He had learned not to hand his fountain pen to people who didn’t know how to use one. Replacement platinum nibs were too expensive. “Good. Now, where do you work?”

  “At the yacht club. I wait tables there.”

  “Pretty good tips there?”

  Wanda smiled. “Sometimes.”

  “You have a pretty smile, Wanda. You’re having a bad patch in life right now. Let’s see if we can work together to get that smile back.”

  Wanda nodded. She did not seem convinced. “Hope so sir.” Troy felt that he was swimming through glue in some dream. Wanda lacked staying power in the conversation department.

  He looked at June. “Who’s on duty?”

  “Bubba’s out on patrol. Milo’s in the break room eating his doughnuts.”

  “Get Milo in here.”

  June turned her head toward the open door and yelled, “Milo! Get your ass in here!” Wanda jumped and looked startled.

  “That’s our intercom system,” Troy said. “Modern technology.”

  “Yes sir.”

  They heard a distant yell. “Whattya want? I’m eating breakfast.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Troy said. He walked the few feet down the hall to the opening into the break room. Milo was at the long table there, slouched back in a chair and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, a Krispy Kreme box in front of him. “Officer Binder,” Troy said. “If you could spare a few moments from the carbo-loading for actual police work, I’d appreciate your presence in my office.”

  “Oh. Well, OK.” Milo wiped his lips with a paper napkin, dropped that on the floor, and took a sip of coffee. “Be there in a minute.”

  Troy stared at Milo as if he could not believe what he was hearing, which he couldn’t. He walked back to the office and sat behind his desk. “Wanda, here is what I would like to do. I’ll send an officer out to your house to look at the phone and listen to the calls…”

  “I erased them.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t do that any more until we hear them too.”

  “There’s prob’ly more by now today. But they fill up my voicemail.”

  “Sure they do. Let’s put up with that for a few days while we investigate. Go home now and wait for the officer. I’ll also have a patrol car swing by your house a few times each shift. If you see Billy hanging around, call us at once.”

  “I don’t want the neighbors to see no police car stopping at my house.”

  “I’ll send him in a private car. Would that be all right with you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Troy. Call me Troy.”

  “Troy. Sir.”

  “June will show you out. June, get Wanda’s car description and plate for the file. Wanda, remember, if anything or anyone bothers you, anything at all, you pick up a p
hone and call us.”

  “Thank you sir.” Wanda and June left. Troy swiveled his chair and stared out the west windows toward the boat ramp. The town had, years back, dredged out what was then Snake Bayou, renamed it Sunset Bay, and installed four boat ramps, two piers to service those and a parking lot with the long slots for vehicles with boat trailers. It was popular now with the sport-fishing crowd and occasionally hosted tournaments. Beyond Sunset Bay he saw a flash of yellow moving around the front of the Sea Grape Inn. Mrs. Mackenzie was on the job. In a few moments he heard someone walking in the hallway with squeaky shoes. Milo Binder strolled in, a cup of coffee in one hand. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Sit down.”

  Milo sat. He put his Styrofoam cup on Troy’s desk. Milo was twenty and cocky, five-feet-eight and a sturdy build. Despite the doughnuts, he wasn’t fat. He parted his brown hair in the center so that it swept down over his ears on both sides. He was trying to grow a moustache and not having much luck with it. To match the moustache he had a two-day beard, which, in his case, was light.

  Troy was leaned back in his chair with one foot up on an open desk drawer. He folded his hands across his stomach, turned his head to his left, and stared at Milo, deadpan. Milo stared back for a moment out of blue eyes and some confusion, then looked out the window to his left. He took another sip of his coffee and put the cup back down. He looked back at Troy. “Whattya want?”

  “Pick up the coffee cup. I didn’t give you permission to use my desk for your goddamn dining table.”

  Milo grabbed the cup. “Geez, Louise,” he said.

  “Just curious, Officer Binder. Your mom or dad ever read Catch-22?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Book. Novel by Joseph Heller.”

  Milo thought about that for a moment. Troy let him.

  “Don’t think so,” Milo said at last. “Never heard of it. Why?”

  “Never mind. I’m guessing one of them did but it doesn’t matter. New rule. When June, me or anyone else connected with this department yells, ‘Milo! Get your ass in here,’ you will move your ass instantly and swiftly to the sound of the voice. Is that clear, Officer Binder?”