Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  Mood swings all around. John’s bullyboy gleam had dulled, and Annette, our poised social director from the night before, seemed shrunken and a little lost. I’d seen that happen before with urban hotshots out for their first tour of the Everglades. All their jaded world-weariness struck a hollow note in that vast, trackless place. The best of them were humbled into silence. The worst, like Holland, buzzed along with callow disregard for their surroundings as if nothing short of a gunshot to the brain could break the grip of their narcissism.

  “Last summer I worked out a deal.” Mona met my eyes, searching them for a long moment, then resuming her speech. “I proposed a solution to the Horse Creek issue. Bates had applied for permits to strip-mine land in the Horse Creek basin, twenty-one thousand acres of virgin forest and grass-land. There was fierce resistance, meetings, DEP hearings. Lots of protests. It looked like the deal was tanking. So I talked Grandmother into cutting the acreage in half, donat-ing ten thousand to the county for a wildlife refuge, and that swung it. Protestors backed off, the project revived. Permits on the verge of approval. It pissed off extremists on both sides of the issue. That’s when she drowned.”

  Holland continued to slink around the galley shooting more film.

  “Annette,” I said. “You and Holland go to your cabins.”

  “No, way, dickweed,” Holland said. “No tinhorn fish guide is sending me to my room. We’re under attack. We got a right to know what the fuck’s going on.”

  “Nobody’s under attack,” I said.

  Annette said, “I’m with Holland. Given the uncertain cir-cumstances, it’s vital we’re all on the same page.” She thrust out her jaw at a plucky angle.

  “All right,” I said. “But keep camera boy on a tighter leash or he’ll be swimming with the crocs.”

  Annette wrinkled her nose at my crudity.

  Standing at the kitchen counter, Mona finished her pitch on Horse Creek, how some of the land I’d inherited surrounded the headwaters of that pristine stream, which supplied a vital fifteen percent of the freshwater supply of the Peace River. If that land was ripped open and mined, it would ruin the natural groundwater flow, and if Horse Creek died, the Peace River would follow. Then downstream, Charlotte Harbor, on the Gulf, would lose its crucial dose of freshwa-ter, and the snook and redfish that depended on that would die, the region’s fishing industry and tourism would lose mil-lions, and the whole fragile ecosystem of the region would be in peril. A grim cascade of small disasters leading to a full-scale crisis, until a lot of people lost their jobs and a lot of creatures would die off, fly off, or disappear.

  It was a story I’d heard a hundred times. Some version or another. Florida’s story. Knee bone connected to the thigh bone. The wobbly dominoes clicking against one another until the whole structure collapsed.

  I’d watched it happen since I was a kid. People with cash and power who respected nothing except more cash and power were busy poking their drinking straws into the juicy earth and sucking out the marrow. Grave robbers with giant shovels or derricks and mile-long drills, tapping into the black veins of coal, underground oceans of crude, exhuming those formations of white fossilized bones that were hidden be-neath the crust of Florida.

  At fifteen my high school biology teacher showed us maps of Pangea, the supercontinent. North and South Amer-ica fused with Africa. I was frozen at my desk. Two hundred million years ago when the tectonic split happened, great plates buckling against each other, mountains erupting from the sea, Florida was dragged off into the northern hemisphere where it promptly sank beneath the ocean onto the continen-tal platform.

  For most of earth’s history, Florida remained underwater. Limestone deposits built up, fine-grained shale, mudstone, sandy strips, and a few rare layers of phosphate. For brief in-tervals it rose above the sea, but every time the polar ice caps melted, Florida was submerged, and more sediments were deposited over the peninsula. The biology guy was passion-ate, and that afternoon I caught a touch of his fever because it all made wonderful sense. Florida was a land with its roots in three continents, and its taproot in the sea itself.

  All that dunking in the sea had turned our state into a vast plain of corpses, layer upon layer. The remains of marine creatures drifted to the ocean floor and combined with sand and marl, hardening over the ages into rich gray mineral. Century after century more carcasses floated down on top of those, and more and more and more.

  Now we were harvesting them, the fossils of unimagin-able fish that had turned to stone in their million-year sleep. We were feeding off the dead to maintain our insatiable cravings. To grow lusher crops, faster and taller, more fruit-ful. To keep the cities bright and throbbing. The cars running at full bore. Maintain the delirious drumbeat of what passed for civilization.

  There was a sharp silence in the galley. All four of them were waiting for me to rejoin. Mona cleared her throat, brushed some crumbs from the countertop.

  I went over to the galley windows that looked out at the bay. The perfect blue sky from earlier in the day was thick-ening with clouds as the next front approached. Cardiac Bay was turning to lead, and the sky was dull brushed silver. Egrets and herons scattered south in a hurry.

  Out the starboard window I watched the V of a wake spread across the surface, probably a big tarpon sweeping past or a bull shark chasing a school of mullet. The cove was quiet again. No doubt the croc was lurking nearby, half sub-merged, spying on us with its high-set eyes.

  I felt a faint shift in the Mothership, heard a creak I didn’t recognize. I moved to the window and peered out but saw nothing. Water flat and gray, a great blue heron standing knee-deep just off the crocodile’s nesting spot.

  “So Abigail Bates was murdered because of this mitiga-tion thing. Somebody thought she didn’t go far enough, or somebody from the other side believed she went too far.”

  “Exactly,” Mona said. “She dies. Her killer thinks the problem’s solved, then out of nowhere, you pop up.”

  I turned around. “That makes it pretty simple. Who else knows about the lockbox? Who else knows my full name? I assume it wasn’t public knowledge.”

  With a bitter smile, John shook his head.

  “Come on, John. Who else? Lawyers? People at Bates In-ternational?”

  He pushed himself out of the booth and came over to stand beside me. Holland snapped the two of us together. Trigger-happy for an action shot.

  “My lawyer, Carter Mosley. He’s the only one. And he’s well aware of the sensitivity of the issue. Under no circum-stances would Mosley spread your name or any other private family matters.”

  “Well, good. That narrows it some. So if I’m dead, who gets that land?”

  John turned his back on the question.

  “Uncle John, that’s who,” Holland said. “Yeah, yeah, bingo.”

  John’s shoulders tightened, but he said nothing.

  “Holy shit,” Holland said. “Look who’s walking among us. Uncle Johnny is Colonel Mustard with the dagger in the parlor.”

  Milligan growled and heaved toward Holland, took a swipe at the camera, but the kid shimmied away, all the while snapping shot after shot. I clapped a hand on John’s meaty shoul-der and spun him around. Milligan froze.

  “The woman in the boat is the backup plan,” Holland jeered while watching through his viewfinder. “If Uncle Johnny can’t convince big-dog fishing guide to sign away his land, then whammo, he switches to Plan B : Mystery woman takes out fishing guide. Badda-bing.”

  “Holland watches a lot of crime trash on TV,” Annette said.

  Holland flicked his camera, eager as a rat in heat.

  “Is that true, John?” I asked. “If I’m dead, you control the land?”

  “That’s outrageous. I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Answer the question, John. What happens to the land if I die?”

  “I have no idea. Carter and I never discussed that possi-bility.”

  “Never came up, not once?”

  Milligan b
ackhanded the thought away. Nothing more to say.

  “And you, Mona? What do you want from me? You and your dad in this together? If I sign away the land, does that make you happy?”

  Milligan snorted and stalked past me toward the bar.

  “Dad and I are on opposing sides. I was pushing Grand-mother to move in an entirely different direction when she died.”

  “And what direction is that?”

  “Mitigation isn’t enough. The only solution is to stop all mining, shut down everything. Just stop. Let the Chinese find their fertilizer somewhere else. Bates cleans up their mess, restores the wetlands, and pays restitution to citizens whose health has been compromised by the gyp stacks or the air quality around the mines of the fertilizer factories. We can-cel all future proposals in the Horse Creek watershed and put things right, including Pine Tree School.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a school, a county school, built near a gyp stack. There’s been some health issues among the kids and teach-ers there.”

  “So shut everything down. That’s your plan?”

  “Sure,” Mona said. “The company would take a short-term hit, but in the long run, it’d be a huge PR boost. And it’s the right thing to do. Bates would survive. Phosphate is a tiny fraction of the corporation.”

  Milligan stared at the carpet, shaking his head in disdain.

  “Tiny fraction?” He indulged in a small chuckle. “Thirty years of minerals left in the ground? That’s the big B. Bil-lions of dollars.”

  “And your grandmother was seriously considering this option?”

  “She went on that canoe trip because I kept pestering her to take a firsthand look at what was at stake. I think she was about to do the right thing, though I can’t prove it.”

  “How’d you feel about that, John? Mona’s plan?”

  “It’s ridiculous.” John settled on a stool at the bar. “Mona was exercising an undue influence over Mother. She was ma-nipulating the woman, insinuating herself into corporate af-fairs. Her actions bordered on the illegal.”

  “Boy, oh, boy,” Holland said. “There’s your freaking mo-tive. That’s as good as a confession, Uncle Johnny. Whack Granny ’cause she’s turned tree-hugger and gonna cost you some major bucks.”

  “How about you, Mona?” I said. “You bring anything for me to sign?”

  She smiled dryly.

  Since we’d returned to the Mothership, she’d fastened her auburn hair into a ponytail, which made her eyes seem larger, cheeks more sharply defined. The stubborn glower she’d worn yesterday had softened. In her quiet manner there was still a lingering tragic air, which I took to be the long-term effects of Abigail’s death, a condition her father clearly did not share.

  If love could be described as undue influence, I could see how Mona might be guilty of exercising it, and how even a tough old broad like Abigail Bates might succumb to this young woman’s earnest zeal.

  I’d always been a sucker for certain true believers and the infectious tug of their idealism. As sappy as they sometimes were, so easy to mock, the genuine ones like Mona, whose passion was still pure, who trusted that generations of bad choices could be undone, and fervently believed the world was still worth saving, those were the ones who stirred some-thing in me, and could even inspire a rare upwelling of opti-mism.

  “If that’s what you want, Thorn, papers to sign,” she said, testing out a slender smile, “I could draw something up for you, a week, two weeks.”

  I looked out at the hard silver light bouncing off the bay. Something old and familiar was swimming through my chest, and I felt a flush heat my skin, a stumbling pulse that left me slack and unsure. I closed my eyes and willed it to cease. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong person. I could feel her eyes on me and knew that Mona Milligan in some way sensed my condition.

  I sighed and stalled a moment more, looking out at the riffling bay. Then I turned back to the others and shifted my gaze across each of their faces.

  “Okay, listen up,” I said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. This trip is officially over. We’re heading back as soon as I pull anchor. Until then, no more arguments, no discussions. Just sit there and watch the scenery go by till we’re back in Islamorada.”

  Annette checked her watch, then hunched over her laptop and began to tap beneath the table, probably noting the latest disastrous turn.

  For a long moment the cabin was quiet except for the click of her keys.

  And then the shriek.

  The houseboat’s walls were crammed with high-density soundproofing. It had been Rusty’s last-minute decision when she realized she could hear the jabber of the TV from the crew cabins on the upper deck. I’d overseen its installation and Rusty’s financial backers shelled out an extra five grand for the fix.

  But Rusty’s scream penetrated all that easily, an agonized wail that sent me flying out the back door, scrambling up the ladder toward the crew deck.

  As I was clearing the last rung, over my shoulder I spot-ted movement in the water below and came to a halt.

  The woman in the bass boat was twenty feet off our stern. Perched in the casting seat in the bow, she was using the silent electric motor to glide away to the east. Behind her were our two skiffs, tethered to her stern cleat.

  “Thorn! Help me, God, help me.”

  Rusty stumbled through the crew quarters doorway. Her hands were outstretched, dark with blood.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Teeter’s face was ghastly white. His butt was planted on the deck, back against the side of his bunk. He was naked, his hands folded modestly over his genitals.

  As I entered the cabin, with Rusty a step behind, Teeter’s eyes tracked lazily across my face as if he were trying to recall my name. His mouth was open, his face loose, and he was breathing in ragged intervals.

  “What is this? What’s happened?”

  “I took a bullet.” Teeter’s mouth twisted into a tortured grin.

  He bent halfway around to display a ragged wound a few inches to the right of his spine. An ooze of blood, dark and oily, escaped. The carpet was stained beneath him.

  “Teeter, leave it alone.”

  Rusty dragged a blanket from his bunk and dropped to his side. She draped it across his shoulders, wrapped it around him, and tucked it tight.

  Teeter’s legs glistened with water. A smear of blood stretched across the carpet between the tiny bathroom and the place where he slumped.

  “He collapsed in the shower. I dragged him out and discovered this. She must have shot him while he was swimming away. The mud from the shoreline concealed it.”

  “That woman shot me.” Teeter’s voice was airy, drifting. “I called Mayday on the radio then jumped overboard and she shot me. The water slowed the bullet, that’s why it’s still inside me. Happened before I got tangled up with the croc. It doesn’t hurt. Not much. I’m okay.”

  “I’ll hail the park rangers, get a helicopter.” I started for the door.

  Teeter called out for me to wait. The sharp authority in his voice brought me to a halt. He worked his blue eyes across my face with such intensity, it was clear a fierce resolve had risen through the layers of his suffering and taken possession of him.

  “You need to know this,” he said. “When the woman came on the boat, she pointed her pistol at me and asked where our guns were.”

  “She was looking for guns?”

  “I didn’t tell her a thing. Didn’t say a damn word to her. She started tearing through the closets and drawers. But she didn’t get a chance to finish looking ’cause I jumped over the side.”

  “Hush, sweetie. Thorn’s going to call for help. You just relax.”

  “See what I’m saying, Thorn? She doesn’t know what we got, whether we’re armed or not. So she can’t just come flying back. You need to know, Thorn. That’s why I stayed alive, so I could tell you.”

  It was important information and I told him so.

  “I did good,” he said, staring up
at me.

  “You did great, Teeter. Now relax, just relax. I’m getting help.”

  He smiled, then without a flinch or flutter, his face firmed up, his eyes closed, and he passed beyond our reach.

  Rusty groaned and grabbed him around the shoulders, cradling his head against her chest, hugging him hard.

  I went over and kneeled beside her, put my arm around her. Rusty’s flesh was icy and she was shivering. Tears streaked her cheeks, but she was biting back the sobs. Years of training had switched on. It was a survival skill in her profession”staying cool around the other guides, the tough, stoic gang on the dock.

  She lifted her head, her face empty. She seemed entranced by a slash of light angling through the starboard window.

  “Listen to me, Rusty. She came back. She’s out there off our stern.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who did this. She’s towing our skiffs away.”

  Rusty tugged away from me.

  “And you let her?”

  “Wasn’t anything I could do.”

  She eased Teeter onto the deck, covered him with the blanket, and rose.

  I followed her outside to the narrow walkaround deck. The bass boat was two hundred yards east. The woman had switched off her trolling motor, and she’d moved behind the wheel and was using the outboard, idling away toward the mouth of a distant creek. A large bundle lay beside her on the deck. It might have been a body, but I couldn’t imagine whose.

  Rusty ducked into the bridge and grabbed the mike for the VHF to hail the park rangers. They monitored channel 18 and there was a remote chance our power-boosted antenna could deliver a signal to their station back at Flamingo. But when she held the mike to her mouth, we both saw the spiral radio cord dangling loose beneath it.

  “Pull the anchor, Thorn. We’re getting out of here.”

  Rusty reached for the ignition, but the keys were gone. I’d already seen they were missing and moved to the drawer where we kept the backups. I rifled through the jumble of tools and notepads and pens, but couldn’t find the other set of keys. Then I saw the ignition wires hanging below the console. The intruder had slashed the wiring harness. I knelt down and flipped open the circuit box that controlled the twin outboards. She’d smashed the fuses, stolen the box of replacements, hacked up the contacts. With that much damage, a hot-wire would be a major challenge.