Coastal Disturbance

by Jessica Speart

  Harry folded his hands over his belly, emitting a low rumble that sounded like water gurgling up from deep within a well. It took a moment before I realized that it was laughter.

  “You think your only enemies are poachers and smugglers of wildlife? Take a better look around you, girl. The enemy is much more insidious than that. It’s politics and the damn Service, itself.”

  He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.

  “What did Gary say when he contacted you?” I questioned, curious as to what they’d spoken about.

  Harry sipped his lemonade. “Just that he wanted advice. The problem was, he called too late. Your friend had already faxed his report and test results in to his boss. That was a big mistake. Anything with political overtones is immediately brought to the attention of the Regional Director.”

  “Then what should he have done?” I asked, knowing I would have made the same mistake.

  “Simple. The first lesson is never write anything down. Always memorize your information until you’re fully ready to make your case. That way, the Service is caught by surprise and doesn’t have time to sabotage you.”

  I had to admit, it was sound advice.

  “Wait here,” Harry said.

  Getting up, he walked into the house. A few minutes pased before he emerged with a large manila envelope. Harry handed it to me and I saw that it bore Gary’s address. I took a deep breath, and ripped the package open.

  Inside were copies of reports that Phillips had submitted while working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The records dated back over a period of ten years. They dealt with mercury contamination, and the buildup of PCBs in Purvis Creek. Included were a list of animals, fish, and birds that had been affected.

  Harry nodded as I finished reviewing his notes. “I can only imagine how much mercury must be in that marsh by now. People shouldn’t be eating any fish coming out of there. My guess is that women are probably producing a greater number of babies with birth defects, while kids are more prone to developing leukemia and brain cancer. As for DRG, you can bet your ass there’s a definite tie-in.”

  “What makes you say that?” I questioned, my heart beginning to thump.

  “The fact that I told my boss as much. Funny thing, but my report was squashed, much like your own, by the very same Director—Bob Don’t-Rock-The-Boat Montgomery.”

  I wanted to jump in with both feet, but something stopped me. For all I knew, Phillips was just one more conspiracy nut.

  “I still don’t understand what Montgomery’s interest is in all of this. Why should he care about protecting a chlor-alkali company?”

  “I asked myself that very same question for years. One of the benefits of early retirement is that you have plenty of time to dig around,” Phillips dryly noted. “And it paid off. Let me show you what I found.”

  Harry removed a piece of paper from his wallet and gently unfolded the sheet. Its battered edges and frayed creases revealed how long he’d been carrying it around. Then he handed it to me as carefully as if it were the Holy Grail.

  I held the photocopied page lightly between my fingers and began to read. The cherished document was a list of alumni from Holton University’s graduating class of 1968. Circled in red were two names—Howard Drapkin and Bob Montgomery.

  “Okay. So they attended the same school together,” I remarked, though I couldn’t help but be surprised. However, I still wasn’t ready to make a rush to judgment.

  But Phillips slyly grinned, as he shook his head. “Uh-uh. You don’t get it yet. Montgomery and Drapkin were college roommates.”

  There was no question but that Phillips had made his point, as my mind began to whirl.

  “If there’s something I’ve learned over the years, it’s that old friends remain tight, no matter who they are.”

  “Are you saying that Montgomery is involved in whatever is going on?” I cautiously questioned.

  The Okefenokee began to stealthily close in around me, as I found myself gasping for air.

  But rather than reply, Harry simply chose to shrug, a response that I found to be maddening. Now I knew how Alice must have felt when she’d dealt with the Cheshire Cat.

  “Some things are better left unsaid until you have the evidence to back them up,” he finally offered.

  Damn! If Phillips had something on Montgomery, I sure as hell wanted to know about it. I decided to tackle it from another angle.

  “Okay. Then what’s your take on Clark Williams and how he fits into all this?”

  “Ah! Therein lies the rub.” Harry smirked, turning Shakespearean on me. “That bastard is my old nemesis. He worked in Interior when I was a government employee. Let’s just say, we rarely had a meeting of the minds. Williams is a political animal who’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants. And right now, he wants to be elected to Congress. That takes a whole lotta money.”

  “Then I can already guess what Williams’s stand on chemical plants and pollution standards will be,” I concurred.

  “Now you’re on the right track!” Harry enthused, beginning to knead his hands. “DRG is a hell of a large company, and wants to remain that way.”

  “Which is why Drapkin must be funneling big bucks into Williams’s campaign,” I surmised.

  “When in doubt, always follow the money trail,” Harry gleefully agreed. “Hell, chemical manufacturers have given over five million dollars to presidential and congressional candidates since nineteen-ninety-nine.”

  “Still, the Regional Director can’t be turning a blind eye to all this merely out of friendship,” I reasoned, bringing the subject back around. “Surely he must want something in return.”

  That’s when the fog finally cleared.

  “Ohmigod, now I get it!” I nearly shouted, feeling as though I’d just won the Indy 500. “Williams must have promised to help Montgomery become Director of Fish and Wildlife if he’s elected.”

  Harry sagely nodded his head. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit. Ambition will do funny things to a man.”

  To a woman too, for that matter. After this, any hope I’d had of moving up the career ladder was pretty much doomed. The feeling was bittersweet. Yet it would have been far worse had I been seduced into becoming one more blind cog in a daisy chain of corruption.

  “You’ve gotta hand it to Glynn County. They’ve done one hell of a job of keeping the lid on DRG.”

  A mosquito skidded into a pool of sweat on Harry’s forehead, and he flicked it off.

  “Do you really think they know what the company’s been doing?” I asked.

  Harry’s head bobbed around like a spring-loaded dashboard ornament. “Yes and no. Let’s face it, they haven’t wanted to look too deep. The bottom line is to keep the money flowing. Hell, they’d have to change the name of the area from the Golden Isles to the Mercury Isles, if word ever got out. We can’t have that now, can we?”

  I wondered if Harry wasn’t being just a tad too cynical. But then again, maybe not.

  “Why do you think DRG is discharging mercury into the marsh, anyway? It can’t just be that Drapkin is out to screw up the environment,” I reflected, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Oh, Lord. There could be any number of reasons. First off, mercury-contaminated wastewater is normally pumped into a settling tank and treated. Maybe they didn’t build a tank large enough to begin with, and now don’t want to cough up the money for a new one. So instead, it’s being flushed down pipes and directly into the creek.”

  Harry poured himself another glass of lemonade.

  “Or maybe the plant isn’t being maintained properly. DRG has giant electrolytic cells on the top floor of both cell buildings. Liquid mercury could be leaking from them. Say it mixes with other chemicals. If so, they’d eat through the cement floor, allowing mercury to sink into the groundwater.

  I remembered the man-made lake that Gary and I had stumbled upon near DRG’s second cell building.

  “Could that cau
se a body of water to form, which would need to be contained?”

  “Anything’s possible. Especially if wastewater’s in the mix.”

  No wonder Drapkin had a conniption upon finding us there. We’d been standing right next to the mother lode. It was also where Gary had taken his last sample.

  “The other thing to consider is what’s happening to the poor bastards who work in that place. Breathing in mercury vapors is bound to create a certain amount of brain and neurological damage.”

  “Something else is bothering me,” I now admitted. “I’m not convinced that Gary died of a heart attack.”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed, and his rocker came to an abrupt halt. “Exactly what is it that you’re saying?”

  “It’s just a gut feeling, but his symptoms progressed over a period of several hours.”

  “What were they?”

  “Headache, dizziness, loss of appetite, and then there were tremors. They didn’t just shoot through his arms, but seemed to grip his entire body.”

  Harry pulled a pint of bourbon from his back pocket, and splashed some into his lemonade, after which he offered me a refill. I thought of Santou, and turned it down.

  “That’s exactly why I got the hell out of the Service when I did,” he confided. “Eliminate the biologist and nobody can say for certain that DRG is causing any harm. It makes perfect sense to remove the man who’s doing the research.”

  “I was suspicious enough to make the hospital do a postmortem test for mercury poisoning. But it came back negative,” I disclosed. “So a heart attack remains the official cause of death.”

  “Sure. Unless there’s a knife’s sticking out of you, or a gaping bullet hole, death is always written off as resulting from natural causes down here.”

  “Then what else could have caused those tremors?”

  Harry homed in on me as if I were a bug he was about to dissect. “Are you asking what really killed him?”

  I silently nodded.

  He mulled it over while sucking on his bourbon-laced lemonade. “My guess is some kind of organo-phosphate.”

  “Come again?”

  “A pesticide. Who knows? It might have been added to something he ate. Or maybe applied to his skin.”

  Right. Like Gary wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had sprinkled ant poison into his soup, or sprayed him with a can of Raid while his back was turned. For chrissakes, the guy had been a contaminants expert! I stood up to leave.

  “Just remember, choose your target carefully before you go running off half-cocked and get yourself blown to high hell,” Harry cautioned.

  “Thanks,” I drolly replied.

  “And if worse comes to worst, you can always hightail it back here. There’s plenty of room in the swamp to hide.”

  A gator bellowed as if on cue, sounding like an outboard motor on the fritz.

  Harry nodded in the critter’s direction. “They may sound ominous, but gators are a whole lot less dangerous than the folks you’re dealing with.”

  “Which ones in particular might you be talking about?” I inquired, hoping he’d help narrow the list.

  “All of ’em.”

  Terrific. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Then I got in my vehicle and began to pull out. I glanced in the rearview mirror to spy Harry looking more morose than when I’d arrived. He must have known I was watching, because he slowly raised his hand and waved good-bye.

  A band of crickets joined in the farewell, rubbing their legs together in a frenzy. I felt as if I were being sent off on my first day of school. Only the crickets knew better, and tried to warn me.

  Beware! they seemed to cry. For tonight is a good time to die.

  Seventeen

  I couldn’t shake the feeling of gloom that had settled upon me. It hugged tight as cellophane stretched across my skin. To top it off, Jake hadn’t yet called. It wasn’t like him to say he’d ring and then forget. Because of that, I did something I rarely do. I buzzed his boss, John Guidry, in the Savannah office.

  “Agent Guidry speaking,” he answered in that dry, clipped monotone that all FBI agents love to use.

  I secretly suspected recruits were forced to watch hours of Dragnet reruns before they could graduate.

  “Hey, John. It’s Rachel. I’m trying to track down Santou.”

  There was a pause before he responded. “Why?”

  Why? Because I’m his significant other, you tight-assed suit!

  “He said he’d call and I haven’t heard from him. I’m just checking in to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Guidry replied and quickly hung up.

  What in hell was that all about? Had Santou gone off to the Caribbean with some hot babe for a few days? Hmm. What would the gals on Sex in the City do in such a situation? Probably hop a plane, track him down, and torture Jake until he finally confessed.

  Tempting as that might be, I still had a job to do. I put Santou out of my mind and focused on the matter at hand. The one thing I cared about more than anything else right now was discovering what had really happened to Gary.

  Follow the money, Harry had said.

  As I thought about that, Reverend Bayliss sprang to mind. He’d accused Drapkin and Williams of washing each other’s hands. I now wondered if he knew more than he’d originally told me. This seemed as good a time as any to find out. With that in mind, I made tracks for Venus Monroe’s house. If the Reverend wasn’t there, she’d surely know where he might be.

  Once again, the live oaks reached out to me as I drove onto St. Simons Island. Only this time, they weren’t so benign. Their limbs raked against my Ford as a ghostly wind picked up and bent them toward me. Their leaves ominously whispered, it’s a good time to die.

  Though I told myself not to listen, the words parked themselves in my vehicle, snapped on a seatbelt, and came along for the ride. I swung onto South Harrington Road, jostling them so hard that they angrily murmured, You’ll die tonight, you’ll die tonight.

  Flooring the accelerator, I flew toward Mamalou Lane, fully determined to outrun their warning. It was soon replaced by the flurry of signs in front of each house that screamed out, DON’T ASK/WON’T SELL!

  I arrived at Venus Monroe’s, where I slammed on the brakes, surprised to find a flotilla of luxury vehicles parked out front. Every kind of dream car was there, from a gold Mercedes to a forest-green Jaguar to a little black Porsche. Eight-Ball’s dog gave each his stamp of approval by running around and peeing on their tires. Either Venus was selling hot autos on the sly, or one of her classes was in progress.

  I received my answer as I was swept up by a chorus of loud voices. This was no gospel choir, but a glee club with a common cause. Their pledge of allegiance was none other than Aretha Franklin’s anthem for downtrodden women—that kick-ass soul tune, “Respect.”

  I approached the blue door and entered, to find a group of middle-aged women wildly dancing around inside. Each matron was toned, bronzed, and blow-dried to perfection. This was clearly the sort of crowd that religiously played tennis, had personal trainers, and ate their meals at exclusive country clubs. Dressed in designer outfits, every woman wore a coon dong around her neck.

  The curls on Venus’s wig shimmied like animated cubes of Jell-O as she scurried over to greet me. “You here to join us today, honey?”

  I’d always wondered what it must feel like to be that rich, that thin, and that pampered. Unfortunately, I was too stressed, broke, and hungry to find out right now.

  “No, thanks. Maybe another time. I stopped by to ask where I can find the Reverend,” I shouted, attempting to be heard above the music.

  Venus took hold of my arm and quickly pulled me aside. “Heaven help us. If it’s not one thing it’s another,” she bemoaned, anxiously clucking her tongue. “Something awful happened today. Eight-Ball went and got himself injured on the job. All I can say is thank the good Lord for the Reverend. He went over in his Chevy and picked Eight
-Ball up from work.”

  “Is he badly hurt?” I asked, starting to worry. Whatever had happened, it couldn’t be good.

  “Nothing the Reverend can’t fix. I tell you, that man’s got the touch of an angel. He and Eight-Ball are holed up in the kitchen until these women leave. But why don’t you head on back and pay them a visit?”

  I found Eight-Ball seated in a chair with his pant leg rolled up. Angry welts ran down the length of one leg, as though his dark chocolate skin had been crying bloody tears. Only these teardrops were burn marks. Jagged and red, the streaks were curled and puckered around the edges, like sheets of parchment singed by hot flames.

  The Reverend knelt beside him, applying salve to each burn. Then he lightly wrapped Eight-Ball’s leg in a protective layer of gauze.

  “Oh my God! What happened, Eight-Ball?”

  The man looked up through eyes that were rheumy from pain. “Oh, I just had a run of bad luck, is all.”

  “Bad luck, my ass. That plant is nothing but a damn booby trap,” the Reverend angrily huffed.

  “And what makes you say that?” I asked, zeroing in on Bayliss.

  The Reverend became momentarily flustered. “’Cause that’s what Eight-Ball told me.”

  But I had the feeling that Bayliss was covering his tracks.

  “It ain’t that bad, really. There’ve been worse accidents over there,” Eight-Ball offered. “I was just doing a little repair work on a motor in cell building two, when some water splashed up over the top of my boots.”

  “That’s what caused those burns?” I asked in astonishment.

  “What he’s not telling you is that caustic soda is in the water. That stuff will melt the skin off a man faster than the devil stoking a fire around him.”

  I wasn’t sure why, but the Reverend was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “Eight-Ball’s just plain lucky he didn’t get electrocuted,” Bayliss continued to grouse.

  “And how is it that you know so much about DRG?” I questioned the good reverend. “Have you ever been there?”