Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  “Somewhere in between,” he said. “Not the ‘poor dumb colored girl’ thing. Just trying to do my job. Same as you.”

  After a few seconds of watching her deputies, she held up the plastic bag and gave him another look at the fabric.

  “Look like blood to you?”

  It came across as part challenge, part something else. Sugarman couldn’t put a finger on the second thing, why she’d engage him like this. Intrigued, he noted it, printing it in bold letters for later consideration.

  “When did the break-in go down?”

  “I put it at around midnight,” she said. “Cut the phone line to disable the alarm, then rammed. Two hours ago a passing cruiser spotted it.”

  “Well, that’s too bright, too red to be blood nine hours old.”

  “So what do you think? What’s your professional analysis?”

  “What it looks like is lipstick.”

  Timmy Whalen smiled again, but the test continued.

  “That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think? A woman puts on her lipstick before she goes off to steal a truck, heist some guns.”

  “Force of habit,” Sugar said. “Ritual. She’s not thinking about it, just going through her routine to keep her nerves steady.”

  Timmy Whalen watched the tow-truck guy amble over to one of the deputies. Both of them lit up smokes, started talking.

  “Not bad. For most guys, trying to decipher the female mind is right up there with cracking the atom.”

  “That’s what you think?” he said. “Person who rammed the truck into the gun shop was a woman?”

  “Either that,” she said, “or one hell of a kinky guy.”

  Sugarman smiled, then took another look at the truck. One of the CSI guys in jeans and a police T-shirt was taking photos.

  “Something I’m wondering.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why doesn’t she throw it in reverse, use the rear bumper to crash the doors? A lot less damage to the truck and to her. If things go right, she drives off after it’s done. This way she’s got to walk away loaded down with her loot. Or she’s had to stash her own vehicle somewhere nearby. Or I guess she could have a partner, and he drives her away.”

  “This one’s a hard-ass,” the sheriff said. “Going in backward? No, I don’t think it ever crossed her mind.”

  “No?”

  “First, if things don’t go right, she’s stuck just the same, so there’s uncertainty. Plus, backing a truck in the dark at thirty miles an hour, I don’t see it. Too tricky. Too many ifs.”

  Sugarman rubbed the back of his hand across the stubble on his cheek.

  “Still, it’s weird,” he said. “The whole deal, headfirst or not. It has desperation written all over it.”

  Sheriff Whalen watched her deputies work.

  “What’re you doing, interviewing for a job?”

  “Just trying to be helpful,” Sugarman said. “Maybe bond a little.”

  She smiled again, meeting his eyes. “Candid, aren’t we?”

  “It’s the only way to go.”

  “All right, Mr. Detective. Anything else pop out?”

  “Not really. Just what the owner said. She goes to all this trouble, steals a truck, rams it into the front, then only steals four or five things, including a camouflage jacket? It’s a weird list. Very short. Very precise.”

  She took a deliberate breath and her eyes blurred again. When she spoke, her voice was flat, a long way from banter.

  “It’s what you said. She took what she needed. She’s going hunting.”

  The solemn tone, her eyes bouncing off his, then fixing on a blue scrap of sky, gave Sugar another thing to jot down on his memory pad.

  Sheriff Timmy was confiding in him. But what and why, he had no idea.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  John and Mona Milligan pressed flat against the deck while I crashed back through the snarl of the overgrown creek. Branches swatted and clawed at my face and bare arms, drew blood more than once, but I wasn’t feeling anything. The second time the engine stalled, I had to tilt it out of the water to clear the tangle of roots and weeds from the prop before I could forge on.

  Finally in the main channel, I flattened the throttle and milked every RPM from the Yamaha, screaming back down the Wood River, knifing around dozens of sharp bends and switchbacks on the Broad and then back into Ponce de Leon Bay. I yelled for the Milligans to stay down, as streamlined as possible, then I huddled behind the console out of the rip and scream of the wind and tried to hail Rusty or Teeter on theVHF.

  But no one was answering.

  As I rounded the last bend and entered Cardiac Bay, I caught sight of the Mothership about a mile off, still anchored in the same position. A light easterly breeze was riffling the bay, pushing silvery scallops out toward the horizon like the pulses of sound waves. The last fumes of elation from our fishing expedition had burned off, and at that moment the landscape looked stark and harsh, its austere beauty a cruel hoax.

  I gave the VHF another try but got no response, then I fixed on the straightest heading to the houseboat, though I knew that course would take us across some risky oyster beds and rocky shoals. I believed the tide was just high enough for us to skim safely across them if I kept us in the narrow trench that cut across the flats.

  Running that fast across such skinny water was always an act of faith and denial. A hypnotic state takes over, as if you were skating across an unbroken layer of solid ice. You tell yourself it’ll all be fine if you stay in the blue water, or settle for the green, avoid the brown and the white. But the sun and clouds can scatter the colors into wildly different tones, producing a devious camouflage that can fool the eye and send even the most experienced boater slamming aground. I’d made my share of errors over the years, failed to see a shoal or coral head, and crashed the lower unit into unyielding boulders. Had to limp home or call for help or spend the night at sea until rescued by a passing boater. But at that moment, skimming the sleek skin of the bay, the skiff seemed to be airborne, riding a slippery cushion of air so insubstantial that I felt for a moment that we were about to break contact entirely with gravity and lift off into the clear atmosphere.

  Halfway into the bay, just as I saw the dark outer rim of the oyster beds twenty yards ahead, something caught my attention in the distance. I rubbed the focus back into my eyes and craned around the console. From behind the Mothership, the yellow bass boat was slowly emerging. It seemed to be nosing around the mangroves that formed the sheltered cove of our anchorage.

  Distracted by the distant boat, I angled out of the head of the channel, and the skeg clipped a rock, knocking the skiff hard to port. Mona yelped, and John was thrown against the bulkhead.

  I tugged the wheel too hard, overcorrecting, and veered beyond the other side of the groove. The props banged another rock and the engine sputtered and died.

  We lurched to a stop, and in the sudden silence, as I was reaching for the ignition key, faint pops of gunfire echoed across the water. Six shots, then six more after that, and a last group of six or seven, like the methodical hammer whacks of a master carpenter.

  John Milligan rose to his feet.

  “Get down, goddammit! I’m not saying it again.”

  Milligan dropped to his knees and I got the engine started, revved it hard, plowing up a furrow of mud and silt behind us, ramming ahead until I had us back up to speed. I steered back into the narrow channel, once again racing flat out, but this time holding precisely to the twisty course.

  I was just exiting the far end of the rocky shoal when the woman in the camouflage jacket turned her head and saw our skiff approaching.

  Without another look our way, she gunned her sluggish boat up onto the gray sheen of the bay, made a wide loop around the mangroves, and roared west toward the maze of channels that led out to the Gulf.

  There was something in the leisurely manner of her getaway that suggested she was trying to lure me into chasing her. But I didn’t bite.

&nb
sp; I streaked across the remaining half mile, my cousin and uncle lying side by side on the deck. A hundred yards from the Mothership I spotted a red object floating near the mangroves. It didn’t belong there, wasn’t right, but I kept my heading straight on the houseboat for those last hundred yards.

  As I was backing down the RPMs, preparing to sweep alongside the rear platform and make fast to the cleats, the red object came into focus.

  Teeter’s chef hat.

  It was waterlogged and about to disappear below the surface, bobbing on the dying wake of the bass boat.

  I swung us in that direction, carved a tight turn around the stern of the Mothership, and tugged the throttle lever back to neutral. The skiff wallowed to a stop, and I cut the engine off.

  “Teeter!”

  I yelled his name twice more but heard nothing.

  The Milligans rose, Mona dusting the last clinging spiders off her T-shirt, John climbing up onto the bow deck, peering ahead into the tangle of limbs and roots that rimmed our mooring spot.

  “Over there,” he said. “Up on the bank.”

  He pointed toward a hump of marl and muck that jutted out of the stand of mangroves. The water thinned out quickly in that direction, going from three feet where we were to only inches near the bank. So I tilted up the engine, undipped the fiberglass pole, and climbed onto the engine platform.

  “Stay forward,” I told them. “Both of you. Up front.”

  Mona stepped up onto the bow beside her dad, and when the boat leveled out, I got us gliding toward the bulge of mud and sand and rotting vegetation.

  I saw Teeter’s shoes first, old black basketball high-tops that he must have owned for thirty years. Then his white chef’s pants, spattered with mud and debris. He was lying on the marl, propped up on his elbows, watching us approach. Chest heaving, mouth open, eyes dazed.

  “Oh, shit,” Milligan said.

  “How the hell did that happen?” said Mona.

  I shushed them both.

  A crocodile was sunning, half submerged in the mud of the bank. Teeter’s back was propped against its midsection. The only scenario I could imagine was that in some panicked state he’d scooted backward out of the water and pushed himself atop the creature, then went rigid when he realized what he was pressed against.

  The croc’s hide was a dark olive green, and he had a row of horny plates running down his back and tail like the jagged peaks of a mountain range. Long narrow snout, fourth tooth on the bottom jaw overlapping the upper lip, giving the creature a toothy smirk. His outer eyelids were drawn closed. He was around fourteen feet long, large for an American croc. Probably weighed four hundred pounds—most of it muscle and teeth.

  It was long past mating season, well into the dry months of the year, when the few crocodiles that inhabited this area slept through the day and plied the silty waters at night. They were far less fierce than gators, shy creatures, rarely seen. Usually only aggressive in protecting their nest or their hatchlings. Late summer, when the water was at its highest, that was nesting and hatching time. So, in that regard, at least, things were tipped slightly in our favor.

  I drew the pole out silently and slipped it forward, planted it in the soft mud, and leaned my weight against it, nudging us ahead another few yards.

  “No noise,” I whispered.

  Teeter was gagging on his sobs, stopping every few seconds to draw a ragged breath, then giving out a husky groan of doom.

  I kept my voice low and called to him to quiet down. It was going to be all right. No sweat.

  He turned his head, his right cheek just inches from the left eye of the croc. He raised his hands in helpless pleading. What was he to do?

  “Don’t move. Just stay cool.”

  Mona turned to me and rolled her eyes. Yeah, right.

  In the distance I heard the drone of an outboard engine. Whether it was approaching our position or passing by was impossible to tell. I poled into shallower water, coasting forward till we were only ten feet off the bank where Teeter lay paralyzed. I was so focused on him and the sleeping croc, I didn’t notice the submerged log in our path. When the chunk of timber scraped the starboard hull, the screech it made was as piercing as a startled parrot.

  And that’s what woke the croc.

  The eyelids slid open, the creature’s eyes reflecting an orange light. It lifted its snout a few inches.

  I reset the push pole and shoved us forward till the bow was only a yard offshore. The crunch of the sandy bottom grinding against the keel turned the croc’s head in our direction. Crocs, like gators, have a limited area of high-resolution vision. I just didn’t know exactly how limited.

  “Don’t move, Teeter. It doesn’t know you’re there.”

  I wasn’t sure of that either. The croc’s eyes were impossible to read. It might be looking directly at the approaching boat, or in its peripheral vision, it might have noticed the large human lying against its back.

  I tried to work out the reptile’s age. He could be a young buck full of reckless energy, or might be sixty years old, a seasoned veteran whose long survival had depended on avoidance not confrontation. The only certain way to know the age of a croc was to study a cross-section of its teeth, which had growth rings like trees. But from my limited vantage point, I was pretty sure this one had to be fully mature. Based on his size and a couple of dings and broken plates on his tail, I judged him to be on the downhill side of middle-age. An aging warrior. Even less likely to attack.

  With the bow now touching the shore only a couple of feet from Teeter’s outstretched shoes, we were in the red zone. Whatever happened was going down in seconds.

  I drew the tip of the eighteen-foot push pole from the suck of mud behind me and swiveled it around slowly from the opposite side of the skiff, keeping it level to the water and out of the view of the croc.

  “John, Mona, kneel down. Flat on the deck. Slow.”

  As they lowered themselves, the croc huffed and arched its back, which jolted Teeter upright into a sitting position. Then it slapped its snout twice against the muddy bank in warning.

  The geometry of the situation was delicate. The direction the creature faced led off toward a narrow break in the mangroves, maybe a creek, definitely a tempting getaway. Behind him along the shoreline was more sand and marl and a deep burrow that looked like the remnants of the croc’s nest. Best outcome: The croc shoots forward, Teeter rolls away behind him. Worst case: The creature makes a Uturn and flees back toward the familiarity of his burrow, sending Teeter sprawling right into his path.

  I brought the tip of the push pole down to the water’s edge, inching it slowly toward the croc’s snout. A poke in the neck was what I had in mind. Startle it into motion and direct it, as much as possible, forward, away from the prodding pole.

  It didn’t work that way.

  I had the pole positioned for my first jab when the outboard engine I’d heard earlier roared around the Mothership and headed straight into our cove.

  I took a quick look over my shoulder. Rusty was at the wheel, Annette and Holland standing beside her at the edge of the console. When she was twenty yards off our stern, she cut the engine back and coasted up fast.

  “Thorn! What the hell’s going on? Teeter was calling Mayday.”

  Her arrival sent the croc into action. It lunged at the pole, a move so quick and crushing, I was hurled backward against the engine and poling platform. Before I could draw the pole away, his jaw clamped three feet up its length and he gave it a vicious shake, wrenching it from my grip.

  As the croc shook his head, he bucked Teeter off his perch and threw him several feet. He landed hard and lay spread-eagled on his back, motionless, staring up at the empty sky.

  Rusty had seen enough. She revved her engine and blew past my skiff, crashing ashore between the croc and Teeter. As her bow slammed the hump of marl, Annette pitched toward the bow deck, Holland onto his side, shooting pictures the whole way down.

  The croc shot straight ahead toward
the overhanging branches and splashed into the shadowy waters of the narrow creek, swishing away into the thicket. I jumped overboard and slogged through the deep mud to the beach. I was hauling Teeter to his feet when Rusty arrived beside me.

  Teeter blubbered, trying and failing to shape words.

  Embracing him, Rusty smoothed her hand across his wet hair and cooed to him: “Hush, hush, it’s all right. The alligator’s gone, it’s gone now, Teeter. Everything’s fine.”

  “It was a crocodile,” Mona called.

  Rusty pulled away from Teeter and turned on Mona. I’d known Rusty for more than twenty years and had seen her in more taxing situations than nearly anyone I’d ever met, but I’d never seen her lose her cool, much less witnessed the look that hardened on her face just then—both stricken and dark with fury.

  Mona recognized it as well and turned away under its glare.

  “I told her a lie,” Teeter said.

  “Hush, hush, sweetheart. Everything’s okay.”

  Teeter pried himself out of Rusty’s embrace. He dragged in a breath and looked at his sister, then at me.

  “She asked my name, and I lied.”

  “Who?” Rusty took Teeter’s hand in hers. “Who, Teeter?”

  “The woman in the yellow bass boat,” I said.

  Teeter nodded.

  “Bass boat?” Rusty dropped Teeter’s hand and closed in on me. “What happened here, Thorn?”

  “I don’t know. This morning, about a mile up the Wood, we had a brush with a woman in a bass boat. She came at us headon, missed by a few inches. Few hours later I heard Teeter’s Mayday, and came running. Halfway across the bay I spotted the same yellow boat near the Mothership. When she saw us, she ran.”

  Teeter clenched his eyes tight, determined to stop crying.

  “I lied to her. I don’t know why.”

  “Enough,” Rusty said. “Let’s get back to the ship. We can talk about this inside.”

  “No,” Teeter said. “I have to tell you. It’s important.” He was fetching for breath. A wet gargle in his throat.

  With a gentle finger Rusty steered a loop of hair out of Teeter’s eyes.