by Mark Stone
I wasn’t sure what to think. I had done my best not to trouble myself with the ins and outs of the Storm family or the business they ran. If they didn’t want anything to do with me, then the least I could do was return the favor.
Still, hearing about the struggles my father must have gone through before the end pulled at my heartstrings in a way I wasn’t sure was good for me. What was more, I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe it. If my father really was changing up his will, then it would stand to reason that it any alterations wouldn’t benefit his obvious heir apparent. Otherwise, why do it in the first place. I looked at Peter with suspicious eyes.
“Alright,” I said, keeping myself steady. “Andrew Storm died a week ago though. Why was Mr. Sheets still in town?”
Peter turned back to me, his expression hard. “Because when a man of means dies, there are things that must be taken care of, assets that have to be tended and final wishes that have to be fulfilled in a legal sense.” He swallowed hard. “And he was a friend to Dad. Not that I would expect you to know that.”
“Is there any reason I should?” I asked as a pang of hurt and anger shot through me.
“Absolutely not,” Peter sneered at me. “And I’m relieved to hear you say that. Frankly, when I heard that you were back in town, it concerned me.”
“Really?” I asked, folding my pad up and sticking it back in my pocket. Whatever he was about to hit me with was the reason he was so keen on talking to me today. I could see it all over his face and something told me I wouldn’t need to write it down. “And why on earth would someone like you concern yourself with someone like me?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question for years,” he responded. He walked closer to me, so close, I could smell his overpriced cologne, like musk and aged bourbon. “I’d like to make something clear to you, Dillon.”
“That’s Detective Storm to you,” I answered, my muscles tightening as he bridged the gap between us.
“Of course it is,” Peter chuckled. “You do love to throw that name around, don’t you?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But it’s the only one I’ve got. What I would like to remind you of is that I’m not a kid anymore, Peter. I’m not some dirty secret you can sweep under the rug and pretend doesn’t exist. I’m a grown man who has a job to do, and I’m going to do it. So, if you have something to say to me, do it quickly, because my patience for this crap is running short.”
“Why did you come back here?” he asked, not blinking even once as he stared at me. “Tell me you’re on vacation. Tell me you missed the hovel you grew up in or your trashy friends. Tell me your grandfather is dying and you want to spend his last days together, or just tell me you had an uncontrollable urge to see the gulf again. Just tell me you’re not back in Naples for the reason I’m thinking right now.”
A dawning of realization spread across me. “This is about the funeral,” I muttered. “You don’t want me at the funeral?”
“Of course I don’t want you at the funeral,” he answered, his mouth twisting downward in disgust and judgment. “My father was great man. He built an empire from nothing. He was an inspiration, an institution in this town and — if you’re there — it’s all anybody will talk about. His last mark on this earth will be tainted with you, with what you are.”
I moved closer now, decades of pent up rage practically radiating off me as I got close enough to that arrogant bastard to feel his breath on my face. “And what is that exactly, Peter? What am I?”
“You,” he said, still unblinking. “Are a mistake. You’re a blemish on a man who would otherwise be a legend, and I won’t let that mistake ruin the last day I’ll ever have with my father.”
Though I didn’t remember doing it, I found my hands had balled up into fists at my sides. I was about a half a second away from punching this guy right through that pane glass window, and the last thing I needed was a lawsuit.
“You need to leave,” I said in an enraged whisper.
“And you should have never come back,” he said. “When your mother died—”
“Don’t mention my mother,” I warned. If he did that again, not even the threat of a lawsuit would stop me from beating the privilege right out of him.
“We didn’t come, Dillon. We didn’t descend on her funeral. We gave you your space. We gave you the time you needed. I’m asking you to do the same for us now. This funeral is for people who knew him. You’ve already said you didn’t. “Finally blinking, he added, “There’s no reason for you to be there. Just think it over.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “You think I didn’t know him? Buddy, I knew everything I needed to know about him just from the fact that he wasn’t around. If he thought abandoning his son, leaving him to the ways of the world after one of the only people he had died, was some kind of mercy, then he was as stupid and as cowardly as you are.” I moved my right hand up, placing it against his chest and pushing him just hard enough to let him know I meant business. His eyes widened as he stumbled backward, toward the window. “Have your funeral. Have anything you want. You don’t deserve me there, but trust me, Peter. If any of you had anything to do with what happened to that lawyer, I’m going to find out, and then you’ll have a lot more than me embarrassing you to worry about.” I pointed to the elevator. “Now get the hell out, and leave the key with the front desk.”
Silently, my brother walked toward the elevator, pressing the button and eyeing me wearily as he boarded.
“I’m not a coward,” he said as the doors began to close.
“Whatever,” I muttered.
After the doors closed, I heard footsteps from behind me. Still huffing in anger, I saw Boomer walking out from the bedroom.
“Guess that went about as well as I expected,” he said, shaking his head.
“You have no idea,” I answered, balling my hands into fists and fighting back the urge to run one of them through a wall and taint this crime scene.
“I don’t know. The pissed off look on your face is giving me something of an idea.” He nodded. “Go home. See your grandfather. Get drunk. Let me take care of this, and then I’ll meet you at Rocko’s later.”
“Boom, I—”
“That wasn’t a suggestion, Storm,” he said, smiling at me. “You might be able to kick my ass, what with those grizzled Chicago winters thing you’ve got going on, but don’t forget I still outrank you.”
I shook my head, smiling at him and already starting to feel less angry than I had just seconds before.
“Jackass.”
4
I found my grandfather in the garage, which was about as far from a surprise as I could imagine. For as long as I had been alive, the old man had been a part of my life, a stand in for a father who couldn’t have cared less about the son who lived down a dirt road ten minutes outside of town. In that time, literally half of my memories of the man were set in this very building.
A ramshackle square sitting to the left of the aged white house with the blue shudders where I grew up, my grandfather ran a business out of this place.
Riggs Boat and Auto Repair didn’t have the sort of elite clientele huge outfits out in the city did, but he always managed to keep the lights on, even if it didn’t come that easy some months.
Today, he was elbow deep in a small bow rider, his wrinkled hands pulling at bits of the ship’s motor. Eyes, like those of his daughter (my mother) trained on the machine.
“Don’t you ever stop, old man?” I asked, turning the Merle Haggard blaring from the radio down and setting on the opposite side of the white vessel.
“Stopping’s the same as dying, son,” he answered, without looking up at me. “You ain’t trying to kill me, are you?”
I watched his face crinkle into a smile, his attention still on the boat, outlining more wrinkles into his already worn face. He wore all the signs of a well lived life Boomer had alluded too earlier; a pudgy midsection, rough, bronzed skin earned from
a life out on the water, and a humor that still had bit well into his eighties.
Boomer should be so lucky. For that matter, so should I.
“Would it do any good?” I asked, shaking my head and leaning forward to take in the mess of grease and bolts my grandfather was pulling at like a half made jigsaw puzzle.
“Killing me?” he asked. “Can’t imagine how. Unless you’re jumping at the chance to inherit an old shed, a house that’s falling down, and a dog who never listens to a word that comes out of my mouth.”
“Rusty knows better than that by now,” I answered, alluding to the hound laying lazily against the oil stained concrete floor of the garage. “And if it’s all the same, I’ve just as soon have you around a bit longer.”
“What’s wrong, son?” he asked, finally looking up at me. His hands were still working hard on the engine, free of the eyes. I guess that’s the sort of expertise you come by after fifty years of doing the same thing every day.
“What makes you think anything is wrong, old man?” I asked, pushing off the bow rider, heading to the mini fridge and pulling out a beer. “Is this Miller Lite?” I asked, my face turned down as I popped the top and tried to change the subject. “When the hell did you start drinking light?”
“Since the doctor told me that if I didn’t lose some weight, my heart wouldn’t be healthy enough for sex,” he answered.
“Dammit,” I answered, squinting as I took in the information. “I didn’t need to know that.”
“Serves you right for trying to skirt my question. Now, are you gonna tell me what’s wrong or am I gonna have to tell you what me and Coleen Anderson did in her parlor after church last Sunday.”
I shook my head, balking at the idea of my grandfather even having those kinds of urges, let alone acting on them. “And on the Lord’s day, too.”
“Dillon,” he warned.
I sighed, taking a swig of disgusting diet beer and looking away from him. “A lawyer from up in Chicago was found murdered in a hotel room on the beach earlier this morning.”
“Did you know him?” my grandfather asked, the clank of tools telling me he had stopped what he was doing and was now giving me his undivided attention, a rarity for him.
“I knew of him. He wasn’t a good guy as far as I knew,” I answered, taking another swig of beer, my mouth turning downward in disgust. They shouldn’t be allowed to make light beer. It’s like trying to make healthy chocolate or vegan meatloaf. It just doesn’t make sense.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” my grandfather answered.
“Why’s that?” I mused.
“You said he was a lawyer, right?” my grandfather asked, moving over to the mini fridge and grabbing a cold can of “almost beer” himself. “In my experience, the whole damned lot are bloodsuckers.”
“I know a couple of good ones,” I told him, an amused smile starting on my face. Grandpa was an old school kind of guy. You had a disagreement with somebody, you settled it the way men did. Lawyers and lawsuits were for the soft and the rich, and he had never been either of those.
“You throw yourself into enough stables, you’re bound to find a unicorn one of these days,” he muttered. “Though, I don’t really see why any of this is your business.”
“I’m a cop,” I said in a tone meant to tell him he should already know that because…Well, he should already know that.
“You’re not a cop here, son” he answered. “We’ve got plenty of boys in blue to take care of whatever comes up, including that fat friend of yours who used to eat all our leftovers.”
“Boomer asked me to help, Grandpa,” I said, my half smile turning into a full on grin. “I guess he figured I might have some insight, given the fact that Mr. Sheets was from Chicago.”
“A lot of people are from Chicago,” he answered. “And I’m not letting Mr. Sheets — Lord rest his soul — ruin the first stretch of time I’ve had with my only grandson in a dozen or so years.”
“You’ve been up to Chicago at least ten times,” I said, walking over and looking at the rider engine. My grandfather had practically taken the thing apart. Still, one look at the ’97 Larson told me where at least one of the problems were. The transom was rotten. Of course, that probably wasn’t the only issue. If somebody had left things go that far, then it probably meant there were a lot more issues with the boat.
“I told you, if you’re cold the whole time, it don’t count as a vacation,” Granddad barked back at me.
“Whatever you say, old man,” I said, looking at his worn face and seeing an echo of my mother’s. They had the same chin, the same long nose, and the same sea green eyes. I swallowed hard, pushing thoughts of her into the back of my mind — where they always stayed, more or less — as he continued.
“Either way, it’s not your baby to rock, son.” He took an absurdly long drink of the “almost beer”. “You’ve got to learn to enjoy yourself more. Not that I’d have any idea how you’d do that up in Chicago.” He shook his head again. “No water, no beach to amount to anything. What the hell do you do up there anyway?”
“Why don’t you move up with me and find out,” I said, only half joking. Granddad was getting older and, though he’d rather take a wrench to the family jewels than admit it, it wasn’t as easy for him to get around anymore. I had floated the idea of him moving up with me a time or two, only to have him look at me like I was about to put mustard on an oyster. Still, he wasn’t getting any younger, and the situation was only going to get worse. Sooner or later, we were going to have to do something about it.
“And why would I do that, you idiot?”
I guess it was going to be later then.
“This is where I live,” he said. “It’s where everybody with the sense the good Lord gave them oughta live, if you ask me.”
“Granddad—” I started, choosing to ignore that (only thinly veiled) insult.
“This place is in my bones, Dilly. It’s in my soul.” He cleared his throat. “I couldn’t leave it. I’d miss it like an arm.”
Something about that last sentence and the way he said it, his voice breaking as he muffled his emotion with another swig of beer, stuck out to me.
“Like an arm?” I asked.
“That’s how you know it’s serious,” he said.
“He knew him,” I said, looking down at the can in my hands and letting my eyes lose focus as the idea that this lawyer knew more about the Storms than I did lay on my brain. “The lawyer, he knew my father. He was working for the Storms.”
“Put it down,” Granddad said quickly.
“What?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Put that can down. We’re drinking something stronger.”
“But the doctor—”
“What the hell,” he said, shrugging. “Coleen could use the week off anyway.” Moving about a third as quickly as he could when I left home twelve years ago, my grandfather edged himself over to the closet in the far end of garage.
“That where you been hiding the good stuff, old man?” I smiled.
“You know better than that,” he said, pulling open the closet and grabbing a pair of fishing poles that took me right back to my childhood, back to afternoons that would melt away while I listened to him talk about the war and complain about how the bass weren’t biting. “Good drink deserves good times. You’ve been here almost a day now. Well past time to get our behinds out in the water if you ask me.”
I could not have agreed more.
Before I could tell him that though, my cell phone rang. Picking it up, I saw it was Boomer.
“What’s up, Boom?” I asked. “About to go fishing with the old man.”
“You might have to put that on hold, Dillon,” he said. His voice was heavy and it immediately set the hairs at the back of my neck on edge. “We found the lawyer’s cell phone.”
“And?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“It was under the bed. Turns out he was about to make a call when he got clobbered.” I could pr
actically hear Boomer wiping the sweat from his brow. “I’d like to know what you think about it.”
“Okay,” I said, tightening the grip on my phone. “Though, I guess what I think about it depends on who he was calling.”
“That’s the thing, Dil” he answered. “It was you.”
5
I walked into Rocko’s like I had a gator chasing me, my mind spinning with so many questions, I didn’t even stop to think about how big a deal walking into this place for the first time in over ten years was.
Rocko’s had been as much a part of my life as my bedroom was back in the day. Boomer and I used to spend hours here, slurping up oysters, watching girls come in all wet from the beach, and trying every way in the world to score drinks.
I had carved my name into more than one booth in this place. I even had my first kiss back at the far table, when Debbie Donohue came to live with her aunt for the summer.
There were a thousand memories tied to this old shack of an oyster bar, a thousand moments spent under the red glow of it’s light or over the pool table in the back with friends. I made friends here, felt immortal here. I got my heart broken here and made promises I had no business ever trying to keep here.
Of course, I didn’t have the time or luxury to let any of it sink in, not with my number on a dead man’s phone. A thousand pinpricks seemed to drive into my head along with the idea. I didn’t want to be involved in any of this, in anything my father might have had going with this lawyer. If Peter was telling the truth, and Sheets was here to execute a change in Power of Attorney, then I had no idea what any of that had to do with me. If he was lying, and Boomer’s rumors about my father changing his will held up, then I was still at a loss. My father never cared enough about me to even say my name out loud. He certainly wouldn’t have left me anything when he died. Not that I’d have wanted it.
Boomer had no such qualms. He was halfway through a basket of fried fresh Gulf snapper, his hands slick with grease, when I came upon him.
“What the hell, Boom?” I said, throwing my hands and sliding into the booth next to him. “You drop a bomb on me like that, and now you’re stuffing your face?”
