Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

“I’m adopted. Milligan in name only. None of their blood. Lucky me.” She faked a smile then let it go.

  “It’s a legal matter now,” Milligan said. “Mother left a will that none of us knew about. She went behind our backs. Our corporate legal office was unaware of the second will, one that superseded the estate plan they helped her draw up. She wrote it up herself, in her own handwriting, created an entirely new structure to her estate.”

  “Did a damn fine job, too,” Mona said. “Dad and Carter tried to tear holes in it for months but couldn’t find a judge who’d turn a trick.”

  Milligan stabbed a finger in her direction. “Shut up, Mona. Just shut the hell up for once.”

  She smiled back at him but complied.

  He fumed for a moment more, then turned to me. I was struck again by his hard-muscled build. Rangy and limber, with long arms, meaty hands. The sinews and tendons rippled beneath his flesh like restive snakes. I shared just enough of that physique to sense the strength he had at his command. Even at his age, he was not a man I wanted to test myself against.

  “She divided her estate into three portions: corporate, cash, and land.”

  “I get cash,” Mona said. “Lots and lots of cash.”

  Once again Milligan’s face darkened, and I thought I might have to seize him before he attacked his daughter. But he caught himself and looked off at the lagoon as though seeking solace in that isolated spot, and in a few seconds the blood seeped from his face and he stepped closer to me.

  “I’ll be running Bates International,” he said. “Chairman of the Board, CEO. The business is a vast and complex enterprise, and I’m grateful Mother saw fit to bestow that kind of trust on me.”

  “But the land is yours, Thorn. That’s the kicker.” Mona gave her father a gloating smile.

  “What land?”

  “What I showed you last night,” said Mona. “The quarter on the map. The land where Daddy played cowboy.”

  “It’s a great deal of property,” Milligan said. “An enormous responsibility. Parcels of immense value and variety. It would present a challenge for even an accomplished businessman to manage competently.”

  “And completely impossible for a fuck-up like you, Thorn.”

  “So that’s why you’re here. Why you booked a trip on the houseboat. To negotiate with me, convince me to give up the land. What? You’re going to dangle a few million dollars in front of me? Is that what’s coming next?”

  “I told you, Daddy-O. He wouldn’t be a pushover. He’s one tough nut. Must be channeling Abigail.”

  Milligan gritted his jaw, smiled out at nothing.

  Mona said, “A good chunk of your land, Thorn, has already been mined. There are problems. Lawsuits. Environmental issues. It’s a mess.”

  I was silent, waiting for this to end.

  “Know what a gyp stack is?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re the proud owner of two dozen gypsum stacks. Mountains twenty stories high, their bases covering a few hundred acres, each one full of toxic leftovers from the strip mines. They emit radon gas, leach sulfuric acid into the aquifer. Now and then they collapse and spill millions of gallons of contaminated sludge. Nobody knows what the hell to do with them long term. You own two dozen of them, Thorn.”

  I watched a school of tarpon flash past, biggest tarpon I’d seen in years.

  “This is why Abigail Bates was killed?”

  “Could be,” Mona said. “She had lots of enemies. One bunch hated her for what she’d already done, like putting gyp stacks in their backyards, and the other bunch despised her for what she was planning to do: stripmine the watershed. Some hated her for both.”

  “That’s enough, Mona,” Milligan snapped. “Quite enough.”

  He aimed a finger at his daughter, but she stared him down, and after a moment, he folded the finger back into a fist. Clearly he was a man bedeviled by strong women. A mother who had set an unmatchable standard. A daughter who dismissed his gruff bluster. A sister who long ago abandoned him to live alone in the shadow of his colossal parents.

  And now a final treachery. His own mother had betrayed him. Passed on the land that was the foundation of the family wealth and status to an outsider. A man who had done nothing to deserve the gift.

  “No, it’s not enough,” Mona said. “Thorn needs an education, and he needs it quick. And you’re sure as hell not going to give it to him.”

  Milligan was about to bark at her again when the VHF radio squawked.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

  Teeter’s voice came in a rush, quivering with fright.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

  I snatched up the mike, punched the button.

  “Teeter? Teeter, what’s going on?”

  “Mayday,” he said. Then chanted again, with a forlorn pause between each word. “Mayday . . . Mayday . . . Mayday.”

  A second later I heard the electronic snap of his radio going dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Sheriff’s on a call. Won’t be back till this afternoon.”

  Nine A.M., Sugarman stood in the front office of the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department. He was wearing black jeans and a blue oxford shirt and his best boat shoes. Picking the wardrobe carefully, he’d tried to split the difference between city slicker and shit kicker. Even in a supposedly broadminded age, a black man in rural Florida had to be prudent.

  Sheriff Timmy Whalen’s gatekeeper was a plump woman in her seventies named Nina, who wore a purple blouse that clashed with the valentine red of her froth of hair. And the heavy slash of crimson on her lips clashed with both. On the metal file cabinet beside her was a vase of plastic flowers and a collection of gift-shop figurines, mostly brightly colored tropical fish, but none as gaudy as Nina.

  She eyed Sugarman from his boat shoes to his courteous smile, then picked up her notepad, studied it for a few seconds, and set it down.

  “You’re the one from Key Largo. Rachel’s friend.”

  “You know Rachel?”

  “I do now. Talked to her for most of an hour. Got the goods on you, that’s for sure.” She picked up an emery board that lay beside her ancient Selectric typewriter and took one pass across a nail. “The sheriff’s supervising a crime-scene investigation. Says to send you over when you arrive.”

  Nina tapped her emery board against her desktop, lifting her nose as though trying to catch a whiff of him.

  “Rachel tells me you’re a private eye.”

  Sugarman nodded.

  “And you’re poking around into Abigail Bates’s death?”

  “Poking isn’t the word I’d use.”

  “The granddaughter,” Nina said. “Mona Milligan. She hired you.”

  “I really can’t say,” Sugar said.

  “That girl made a lot of noise after her granny died. Nearly every day she was in here huffing and puffing at the sheriff. Calling us bunglers, a bunch of backwater idiots. A little snot, if you ask me.”

  “I can’t disclose my client,” Sugarman said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Got to keep it hush-hush.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, good luck on keeping anything hush-hush in this town.”

  Nina was a gabber. No doubt she had tried to wheedle juicy bits from Rachel, but he trusted his friend’s savvy. She would’ve spotted Nina as a gossip and given her just enough to chum the waters, prime her for Sugar.

  “I take it the sheriff officially closed the Bates investigation?”

  “Drowning,” Nina said. “Medical examiner ruled on it, not a shred of doubt. The way her lungs were, I forget all that scientific mumbo jumbo.”

  “And what became of the young man who had the violent encounter with Ms. Bates, this guy Kipling?”

  She waved the thought away.

  “A wuss,” Nina said. “Charlie Kipling couldn’t swat a mosquito. He’s still renting canoes just where he’s been for years. Out on Hig
hway 70.1 marked his place on the map.”

  Nina picked up a sheet of paper from her desk and held it out for Sugar. He took it, thanked her, and looked it over.

  It was a hand-drawn diagram. The sheriff’s department on East Cypress was marked with a star, the crime scene the sheriff was working was marked with an X, and the canoe-rental place was assigned a C. All the streets had been rulered out, their names printed alongside each one. Compulsive Nina.

  “And were there any other suspects? Anyone might’ve had a grudge against Abigail Bates?”

  Nina laughed. “Suspects?” She set her emery board aside and straightened a stack of papers that lay on her ink blotter. She chortled again, then looked up at him with the grin still in her eyes. “Mr. Sugarman, there’s more than thirty-five thousand residents in unincorporated DeSoto County. The county covers six hundred and eighty-four square miles, and I guarantee you there’s only a handful of folks in all that area who didn’t celebrate Abigail Bates’s death.”

  “The wicked witch?”

  “You got it,” Nina said. “When I was a girl, this was God’s green acre. Clean air, pure water, rivers flowing, birds and trees and possums and people all getting along. Then that Bates woman inherits her daddy’s empire and, Lord have mercy, single-handed she spends the last forty years trying to trash every square mile from here all the way up to Tampa. And if that wasn’t enough, she decided to work her way down to the Gulf, where all the rich folks dock their yachts. That’s when her unfortunate drowning occurred.”

  “Phosphate mining, that’s what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, sir. Gray gold. It’s making somebody rich, but nobody I know. And next to coal it’s the dirtiest business there is.”

  “Hires a lot of people, though. Must affect the local economy.”

  “Hires a few, and even some of those are celebrating her death. You want suspects, I’d take a gander at the school videos. Cast of thousands.”

  “School videos?”

  “Protest speeches. Tearing into Abigail Bates and her gang. They stood there at the podium, said the awfulest things right to the faces of Bates people. I think there were four meetings. All of them recorded.”

  “Maybe I’ll check it out.”

  Nina cut a glance toward the sheriff’s office door. “Maybe you should.”

  Sugar took his leave and drove his Honda through Summerlanďs historical district: a brick courthouse, a mom-and-pop drugstore, a hardware store, a diner, a dress shop, lawyers’ offices, then a main-street stretch of antebellum mansions with big generous wraparound porches. He worked his way down a few potholed backstreets until he found the intersection for Highway 70, then turned north and followed Nina’s drawing, passing the canoe-rental shop along the way.

  A few minutes later he pulled into the lot of a small cement-block building seven miles from downtown Summerland. The crime scene.

  The shop was squat and unpainted with a Confederate flag fluttering from a pole on its roof. Sugar heard the tune echo in some sound chamber of memory. The land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten.

  The billboard out front identified the business as Hankinson’s Army Surplus and Gun Shop. Parked in the gravel lot were two police cruisers, white with green accents, and a white DeSoto County crime-scene van.

  Rammed through the security bars and double front doors was a blue Ford pickup truck. The entire length of the truck’s hood was lodged inside the store, its windshield shattered, a corner of the air bag hanging out of the driver’s window. Must’ve been rolling at least forty miles an hour to crash that far inside those reinforced doors. Hell of a collision.

  Kneeling down beside the deflated flap of air bag, a black woman in khaki trousers and a dark blue shirt was clipping part of the material free. Only African American on the scene.

  Sugarman came up behind her and watched for a moment over her shoulder. The section of material she was snipping loose was smeared with red. She wore latex gloves, and when the fabric was free, she pinched an edge of it and dropped it into a plastic evidence bag.

  “Nice scissors,” he said.

  The woman rose and turned to face him. She was a few inches shorter than he, slender, with none of the Caucasian ancestry Sugarman had inherited. Dark-skinned, with large lips, widely spaced eyes that were caramel-colored with a hint of gold, she had a fine, high forehead and wore her short hair in a finger wave. A couple of curly strands dangled across her forehead.

  “Buck ninety-five at Wal-Mart. Nothing special, but they do the job.”

  “Somebody had a sudden urge for guns.”

  “Ten years in law enforcement, I’m still waiting for my first criminal mastermind.”

  “Truck was stolen, I suppose.”

  She squinted at him, hesitating a moment. He tried for a harmless smile.

  “Stolen, yes,” she said. “Dealership in Sarasota. They didn’t know it was missing till we called.”

  “Well, you got the bad guy’s DNA, that’s a start. You been an ID tech long?”

  She shook her head and held up the plastic bag.

  “That look like blood to you?”

  He was leaning close to see the specimen when a man came huffing up. Five-six, five-seven, close to three hundred pounds. Ratty jeans, grease-stained white T-shirt with a Harley logo on it, a melon-belly. His face was red and bloated, and he’d braided his chin hair into a three-inch pigtail.

  “I got the inventory,” he said. “Sheriff Whalen.”

  He spoke her title with such blatant scorn that Sugar felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. But the sheriff just smiled, apparently used to these peckerheads. Probably took this level of shit every day. Sugar looked at her again. Sheriff Timmy.

  “So what’d our brazen bandit make off with, Mr. Hankinson?”

  “M-fourteen with the Kevlar stock, uses the three-oh-eight rounds. Took the one with the high-capacity magazine. Thing just came in last week. Asshole must be a vet, served in Nam or Iraq. Knew to skip the M-sixteens. Fuckers jam all the time. Only niggers and morons steal those.”

  “The clip is high-capacity?”

  “That’s right. But it’s preban, it’s legal.”

  “How high is the capacity?”

  “Holds twenty rounds.”

  “Anything else missing, Mr. Hankinson?”

  He gave her a lazy sneer that seemed to say, “Don’t push me, I’m getting there.”

  Sugarman forced his hands back open, spread his fingers, took a breath.

  “An HK forty-five handgun, five boxes of shells, one camouflage jacket.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I know my stock, and that’s what he got. Asshole wasted a brand-new fucking pickup truck to rip off a rifle, a handgun, and a jacket. Oh, yeah, and two cheap walkie-talkies.”

  “Somebody’s going hunting,” Sugarman said.

  Hankinson gave him a sour look, then turned back to the sheriff.

  “You got twenty-four hours, Whalen. You don’t slap the cuffs on the fucker, me and the boys kick it into gear. Twenty-four hours.”

  She nodded wearily. Heard it all before. Didn’t bother with a civics lecture, like she knew the guy was all bluster and bullshit.

  “I hear a bass boat got stolen last night, too,” Hankinson said. “Off the lot at Fisherman’s Paradise.”

  The sheriff nodded.

  “This fucking town been going to the dogs ever since you took over.”

  She let Hankinson get halfway across the lot before she called his name. He halted but didn’t turn. Not only was the sheriff a female, but black to boot. The very idea must have tormented his lizard brain.

  “You behave yourself, John. Don’t let me hear about you and your boys harassing our good citizens. Last time I checked you chalked up two strikes. Third fall’s the charm, baby. So you take care now.”

  He turned his head and gave her a red-eyed withering look and stalked back to his gun shop.

  “And you must be Mr. Sugarman of Key L
argo.”

  She peeled off her gloves, then held out her right hand. She had a firm, no-bullshit grip.

  “Welcome to Florida’s heartland, where the glorious Southern traditions live on.”

  “Those guys are everywhere,” Sugar said. “You don’t have a corner on the bubba market.”

  She gave Sugar a brisk look of appraisal as if he might be gaming her. Probably happened a lot to her. This town, these people. A constant struggle to find the proper balance between authority and deference, goodwill and suspicion. Sugar couldn’t tell by the slight softening of her gaze if he’d passed the test or was still on probation. Probably the latter.

  “So you’ve been employed by the Bates family to second-guess my police work. And out of the generosity of my heart and professional courtesy I’m supposed to throw open my books.”

  Sugarman sighed, watched the deputies who were milling around the front of the store trying to look busy. A tow truck pulled into the lot, and a twenty-year-old kid with long hair jumped down, paced around a little, keeping to himself, sizing up the mechanics of the job.

  “For eleven years I was a deputy for the Monroe County sheriff in the Upper Keys. I have nothing but respect for the position. The professionalism required, hard work, the whole deal. Nothing but respect. If you’re inclined to share some information with me, that would be generous, but if you’re not so inclined, I’d certainly understand.”

  “A speechmaker.”

  “I polished it a little on the drive up.”

  She fought off a small smile.

  “You used to be a deputy, but you quit. Went private.”

  “I was bumping against the good-ol’-boy ceiling,” he said. “It was either spend the next twenty years running in place or take a risk on my own.”

  “Has it worked out?”

  “Less paperwork,” he said, “but I sure miss my dental plan.”

  That got a full smile. Good teeth. Very white and straight.

  “You didn’t know I was the sheriff, did you? You walked up, decided to hit on the black woman. Play the race card. Afro to Afro. See what you could trick out of the poor dumb colored girl.”

  Sugarman was silent.

  “True or false?”