Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  “Holland, let’s get this clear. Next time your asshole alter ego opens his mouth, this thing goes in the drink. Got it?”

  “All right, all right. I got it, I got it.”

  “Not even a joke. Not even a lighthearted jest. Clear?”

  He nodded morosely.

  I held up his camera to examine it. “You have other lenses for this thing?”

  “What? I’m a professional. You think I have only one lens?”

  “What about a telephoto?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I got one, yeah. In my case.”

  “Put it on. Stand right here at the salon door and keep looking through the telephoto at that creek mouth over to the southeast. You see it?”

  Holland came over and looked.

  “Where those birds are in the branches?”

  “Just to the left of the egrets, yeah. Twenty, thirty yards left.”

  “Why?”

  I turned back to the group.

  “Teeter’s dead,” I said. “The woman out there shot him in the back when he was swimming away, trying to escape.”

  Mona groaned and closed her eyes.

  Even Holland shut his mouth. He cradled his camera with both hands as though he might drop it otherwise.

  “What’s going on here?” Annette said. “What the hell is this about?”

  “All we know for sure,” I said, “is that the woman’s got a rifle, probably with a telescopic sight. She’s a good shot. She’s got a handgun, too. But she doesn’t know what weapons we have. That’s why she’s being cautious.”

  Annette was standing up now, an uncertain smile playing on her lips.

  “What weapons do we have?” Milligan said.

  “What you see on the coffee table. Some flares, a saw. The tools.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Holland said. “A saw?”

  “So there it is,” Milligan said to the others. “She can do anything she wants. She could sit out there and plink away, fill the houseboat full of lead, cut us down one by one.”

  “Not if we play this right,” I said. “She’s been careful so far. We can use that to our advantage.”

  “Use it how?” Holland said.

  “If we don’t give her a clear target, we might steal enough time to get the motors up and running.”

  “And what then?” Milligan said. “Outrun her in this barge?”

  “When we get closer to land, our cell phones should work.”

  Milligan snorted. “That’s it? That’s the plan?”

  No one would look at me. Not even Rusty.

  “Hell, if that’s all you’ve got,” Milligan said, “I’ll have to fix this myself.”

  “And your fix is what, John?”

  Milligan stood his ground behind the bar, staring at me with a look he must have acquired from Abigail, a mingling of disgust and triumph—the human race once again confirming his low opinion. The luster in his eyes was dulled by the booze, and his tone had taken on a bleak, stony edge. Through the starboard windows the harsh sunlight illuminated his face and the dark sweep of hair, revealing every enlarged pore in his cheek, the glossy welts of scar tissue on the bridge of his nose and another seam at the edge of his eye probably from a hard right hand he hadn’t seen coming. The slant of light also exposed the reddish shimmer of dye he used to darken his roots.

  With his eyes hard on mine, he said, “What the hell are you staring at?”

  My uncle stepped away from the glare of sunlight, and picked up his glass and swigged the remains.

  Mona said, “When we were coming back across the bay, I heard at least a dozen shots. Is that the sign of a good marks-man?”

  A valid point, though I had no answer. I’d seen no evidence of gunfire anywhere on the houseboat. And Teeter had only the single wound.

  “Holland,” I said. “Put on your telephoto, keep it working across those mangroves. First move you see, sing out. John and Annette can take the west and north windows. Head on a swivel. You see any sign of her, yell.”

  “Teeter’s not dead,” Annette said. “You’re kidding us. This is all staged, a big production for my benefit. The crocodile gag, all that stuff. The woman taking our boats, she’s an actor. It’s a practical joke so I’ll write up this fantastic, exciting story, and people will be flocking to go out with you guys.”

  I looked over at Rusty. Her tanned face had gone pale.

  “Tell the truth,” Annette said. “Teeter’s not dead.”

  “Annette.” There was an ache in Rusty’s voice. “You and Holland come with me, have a look at my brother. Just so you know.”

  Annette flattened her lips and gave her head a bratty shake.

  “It’s true,” Holland said. “We’re all going to fucking die out here.”

  “Not if we’re smart,” I said.

  “We got a fucking saw, a bunch of fucking flares.”

  Annette was staring out the salon windows into the bleak distances of the bay. In less than a day, she’d lost the poise of the seasoned traveler. The brash city girl’s eyes were dis-solving into haze.

  “Rusty,” I said. “I’m going to the wheelhouse, see what I can do with those ignition wires. You okay with that?”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s go, you two.” Rusty’s voice was hoarse with stifled fury. “Pay your respects to Teeter, then you’re pulling some guard duty.”

  “And you.” I pointed to Mona. “You come with me.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sugarman parked his Accord along the shoulder of Highway 70 a mile upstream from the pullout ramp, then cut through the woods to the Peace River. With the map Dr. Dillard pro-vided, he backtracked one mile along the riverbank between the spot where Abigail’s body washed up and where she was last seen alive by Carla Featherstone, the woman kayaker.

  The shoreline was mostly open, but there were spots where he had to squirm through vines and thick stands of palmetto, and a couple of barbed-wire fences to cross.

  He walked slowly and paid attention, looking down at the ground, surveying the river and the surrounding brush, but not expecting much.

  He came across a pair of ancient sunglasses in some tall grass halfway along his hike. Aviators. He found a single white athletic sock, five soda cans, and a kid’s red plastic pail half buried in the mud beside a cow pasture.

  He paced alongside three gentle curves in the river, find-ing nothing along the shore. At the first hard-angled turn he came to, he halted. It was a narrow spot about half a mile downstream from where the kayaker passed Abigail Bates. He climbed atop one of the boulders that loomed over the turn, then he worked his gaze foot by foot along the bank and shoreline, seeing nothing but mud and grass and a nar-row sandy edge.

  He changed his angle, shaded his eyes, and caught sight of a piece of black cloth peeking from the riverbank mud. He climbed down the boulder, stooped over, and tugged the cloth out of the glop. It was the brim of a cap.

  After rinsing the grime off in the river, he held it up. Mar-lins baseball hat.

  He climbed back onto the large smooth rock that seemed to watch over that narrowed crook in the river. It was early afternoon, sky free of clouds, a warm day for January in cen-tral Florida. He tipped the hat toward the sun and squinted at it. There was a long hair snagged in the metal clasp. It was dark, either brown or black. Hard to tell. His eyes weren’t as sharp as they’d been a few years earlier. But it was a long hair, which meant it was probably a woman’s.

  The drowning had occurred six months earlier, but hu-man hair degraded at different rates depending on exposure to the elements and its own structure, depending on whether the person it came from was healthy or sick, a smoker or ane-mic, a drunk or a teetotaler, or any number of other factors. Sugarman had logged a weekend forensics refresher course a couple of years earlier at Baptist Hospital in Miami. From what he could recall, hair cuticle scale pattern survived even if the internal structure collapsed. Which
meant that even in degraded condition, certain microscopic and DNA analysis was still possible.

  And this hair seemed to have a putrid root at its proximal end, which was a feature of decomposition. Nothing strange there. Hair was tough. Some hair had survived in thousand-year-old tombs. Microbes were the problem, and a hair left out in the elements on the edge of a river was about as ex-posed to microscopic critters as anywhere Sugar could imag-ine. But there were freakish situations. He remembered from the training session—hair that survived for years because it was trapped in clay, or isolated from air or sunlight. But no real ID could be made without the proper lab work. Post-mortem banding, a microscopic strip near the root of the hair, was a clear signal that the hair had been pulled out of a decomposing body. If the hair was alive at the moment of its plucking, it wouldn’t show any banding. That was probably something his buddy Dr. Dillard could answer with one quick peek through the lens.

  If it was Abigail Bates’s hat, it might have come loose in a struggle, or it might have been knocked off when she fell overboard. So the banding wouldn’t prove for certain she’d been the victim of an attack. But if the hair was black or brown as he thought, then probably it wasn’t Ms. Bates’s hair at all. Perhaps it belonged to the attacker, snagged during the melee.

  He had to be careful not to jump to conclusions, but also had to treat the hat as evidence. He realized he should have brought along some surgical gloves and a plastic bag for such a situation. But the truth was, he hadn’t expected to find anything. He was just going through the motions, killing time before his three o’clock at the Pine Tree School. Sher-iff Timmy had agreed to walk him through the four video-tapes shot during county-sponsored meetings, where local citizens faced off with bosses from Bates International.

  Sugarman wasn’t expecting much from that either. He had no idea what Nina and the medical examiner were trying to steer him toward. Even though he felt like he was wasting his time, it was his duty to follow the lead. It’s what Thorn would’ve wanted, what Thorn himself would’ve done.

  As he was setting the Marlins hat on the rock beside him, a young couple in a red canoe came ripping around the bend.

  Sugarman waved hello and watched them work to swing the craft around the turn. It was a sharper angle than he’d no-ticed at first. The kids seemed proficient enough at paddling, but they struggled a bit to make that corner without drifting to the side where he sat.

  “Nice day,” the boy called, when they’d straightened the canoe and were back in the middle of the river.

  Sugar gave them a half wave, half salute as they slid away downstream.

  He rose to his feet and looked down the river, then turned and walked inland from his position. There were no clearly marked paths through the brambles, but he found a few bro-ken branches about ten feet in, maybe an infrequently used trail, and when he pushed through an oleander shrub that blocked his view, he saw a narrow paved road about fifty yards off. Easy access from the road to the spot where he stood. Shorter distance between road and river than most places he’d noted.

  He walked back to the rock. He studied the angles again as another kayaker shot past. This guy was an expert. Had the headgear, a nifty aluminum paddle, some kind of high-tech gloves, but even he had to take an extra dip of his pad-dle to fend off the current that thrust him toward the rock where Sugarman stood.

  When the guy was gone, Sugarman climbed back down the boulder to the narrow band of mud at its base. This time the place he jumped onto wasn’t solid, and he sunk to his an-kles in the glop. By the time he made it to firmer ground, his shoes were waterlogged.

  He leaned out and peered into the water to check the depth. Some roots protruded from the bank directly beneath him, and there were some fairly large fish hanging steady in the current, waiting for bait to come tumbling into their faces. The river was at least twenty feet deep, with steep sides, a hard place to climb ashore if you went overboard.

  He was turning to climb back up the rock when he spot-ted an odd color off to one edge of the crook in the river. Something was lodged about ten feet below the surface in a crevice or shelf of rock.

  Something pink. Beyond that, he couldn’t say.

  Probably another soda can.

  He climbed back upon the rock and sat in the sun for a few minutes. Another two canoes passed. The woman waved, but the guy was clearly suspicious of Sugarman and made a few extra strokes to get by faster.

  Sugar took off his boat shoes and laid them on the rock beside him to dry. Pink soda can? Had he ever seen a pink soda can before?

  After visiting Dr. Dillard, he’d swung by the sheriff’s of-fice, and Timmy Whalen told him that he was welcome to poke around the Peace River all he wanted, though she assured him that she and her deputies had searched every inch of river-bank from the canoe rental place to the location where the body was found and beyond. They’d done it a half-dozen times in teams of two, looking for any sign that somebody might have lain in wait for Abigail Bates. They found a few camping spots where overnighters had illegally pitched tents. They found some used condoms, some whiskey bottles, and a pair of swim goggles, but nothing suspicious.

  Sugarman took off his shirt, folded it, and placed it on the rock beside his shoes. He leaned forward and squinted at the pink thing ten feet down. Hell if he could bring it into focus. Was it worth getting his jeans soaked, diving down to re-trieve a pair of panties or some old swim cap from twenty years ago?

  But this spot intrigued him. It was the only piece of ter-rain in the entire two miles he’d tramped through that seemed like it might work as an ambush point. Most of the river was forty or fifty feet across. Hard to imagine anyone diving from the bank and being able to outswim a canoe going down-stream. Even if the paddler was eighty-six.

  But this spot, no, it was a bottleneck that required a little backpaddling and quick maneuvering. Not a lot, nothing that could be deemed dangerous. But it was a kink in an other-wise smooth course.

  If someone had taken a position where Sugarman was sit-ting, then as the paddler came around the bend just twenty feet upstream, she’d have only a few seconds to react before she was alongside the rock. The boy and his girlfriend had been surprised to see him there and had faltered for a heart-beat. Even the high-tech kayaker who’d sailed on by was carefully focused on his stroke. So it was plainly a spot that gave the advantage to the rock-sitter.

  Sugarman unbuckled his belt and skinned it out of the loops and set it beside his shirt. He’d brought a change of clothes and some overnight shaving stuff, but that was back in his car parked a couple of miles downstream. If he stripped to his Jockeys, would that qualify as indecent exposure? A black man in underwear in this backwoods spot? Probably would. With the right eyewitness and the wrong judge, Sugar might be looking at thirty days in jail.

  In his jeans, he hopped down to the mud bank again and squatted as close to the water as he could get. But the pink thing wasn’t any clearer.

  What the hell. It was a hot day.

  He hopped forward and dropped feetfirst into the river and was immediately swept forward by the current, banging a knee into the rock wall. He found a hold on the ledge and positioned himself directly above the pink object, then took a long breath and pushed himself straight down.

  He opened his eyes for a few seconds and glimpsed the object, but his buoyancy was drawing him away from it. He snatched at a root and held on. Nice thick wood, bowed out from the riverbank ledge like a handle for stand-up riders on a bus. He gripped the root with one hand and bent lower and plucked the pink thing from its cranny. Then he stayed there a moment more, feeling the cool current wash over him. When he let go, he bobbed back to the surface, let the river carry him toward the bend, then kicked his feet and swam a few strokes to a small muddy ledge. He dragged himself out, his jeans weighing about fifty pounds.

  The pink thing was a shoe. A Keds tennis shoe.

  He climbed back to his rock, then lay down in the sun and examined the shoe. Torn at the toe, som
e scraping in the rub-ber rim. Shoelaces were green-and-red plaid. Nice identifier. Sugar set the shoe beside the hat.

  He lay in the sun for fifteen minutes until his jeans were a little drier. Then he put on his damp boat shoes, picked up his loot, pinching the sneaker and cap by the edges, and hiked back through the brush to his car.

  A little scene was playing in his head. An old woman wearing pink Keds, held by someone beneath the water. Maybe her attacker used that convenient root to stay station-ary while the old lady drowned. While the old lady, Thorn’s grandmother, kicked and fought, and in the process wedged the toe of her tennis shoe into a crevice in the rock.

  Goose chills washed across his back. Then another wave.

  The chills were probably triggered by his wet jeans. Yeah, probably that.

  He’d never been one to trust gut reactions or telepathic prickles on the skin. Most of the cases he’d solved over the years were accomplished through thoughtful consideration. Boring but effective logical steps and rational, orderly rea-soning. Goose chills weren’t evidence. Goose chills were just the body’s attempt at raising its hairs to increase their loft. Some evolutionary leftover from when man was cov-ered in monkey fur and fluffing it could keep him warm and make him appear larger and more threatening. That’s all it was. Invisible monkey fur trying to fluff.

  Sasha unfolded the Bimini top to put Griffin in the shade. He lay on top of the bedroll, staring up at the canvas straps and aluminum poles. She wet a cloth and brought it to his fore-head, but he pushed her hand away.

  Though it was hard to imagine his breathing could grow worse, it had. More mud-sucking gasps. Spasms in his throat, airways rattling. But he brought his eyes to hers, bearing down on her like she was the one suffering.

  “You still strong? You still stone cold, Mama?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “When I get well, you know what I want? I want to get a tattoo. Mom inside a heart. Put it on my forearm.”

  “With flowers,” Sasha said.

  “No, keep it simple, just Mom and a heart.” He drew a breath and let it out. “And you know what else? I want to learn to play the electric guitar. And something else. Maybe I’ll write a book. Tell our complete story. Start to finish.”