Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  “For one thing, there’s conflicting science. Two sides to every coin. You know that old game.”

  “Experts contradicting each other.”

  “Yeah, and for another thing, this isn’t Miami or Sarasota. The county’s dirt poor. We’re talking tens of millions for a new school, land, construction costs, which means a major bump in property taxes unless the state kicks in, which it refuses to do. A couple of years back, Olsen did a petition drive and got a bond issue on the ballot, but the good citizens of the county said no thanks. Fixing something like this, it’s not as easy as snapping your damn fingers.”

  “Hey, calm down. I’m not the enemy.”

  She gave him a long look like she wasn’t so sure.

  “Watch the video,” she said. “Get an education. You want some suspects, you’ll see a few hundred of them.”

  The sheriff handed him the TV remote and walked to the door.

  “One more thing,” he said. “You got a time line? How Abigail Bates spent the hours before she went canoeing?”

  Her jaw muscled up, then relaxed. She traced a finger along the curve of her right eyebrow as if buying a moment to get her face under control.

  “She drove from her condo on Longboat Key to the canoe rental place.”

  “No stops along the way?”

  She heaved a sigh. A woman not used to being cross-examined.

  Sugarman waited while her eyes roamed the wall above the window.

  “You know I’ll find out,” he said. “One way or the other.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m beginning to see how you work.”

  “Where’d she stop, Sheriff?”

  She shook her head and showed him a rueful smile.

  “According to Ms. Bates’s secretary, she was scheduled to swing by her lawyer’s office in downtown Sarasota. Drop off some papers.”

  “Carter Mosley?”

  Her lips parted a fraction, then she caught herself and closed her mouth.

  “My, my, you’re such a sharpie. Hard to believe you’ve only been here since breakfast.”

  “I met Mosley last night in Islamorada. He flew the Milligans down.”

  She was silent, looking out the window at the steep green hill.

  “So Ms. Bates stopped by Mosley’s office,” Sugar said, “which means he may have known she was headed off on her canoe adventure.”

  “Apparently she changed her mind. She never made it to Mosley’s.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “You double-check his story? Interview his secretary, his staff?”

  Sheriff Whalen stared at him, her eyes flickering with shadows and her lips moving distractedly.

  “Listen, Timmy, I’m sorry, maybe I’m out of line.”

  “More than likely.”

  “But I have this sense you need somebody to open up to. That’s how you’re coming across.”

  “And I bet you’re volunteering.”

  “I’m a fairly good listener.”

  She chuckled at his audacity. Reaching out to the window, she ran a finger down the edge of the pane as if checking its seal.

  “Let me ask you something, Sugarman. Philosophical question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is everything always black and white to you? Justice, I mean. You ever find yourself puzzled, struggling to sort out right from wrong?”

  “It’s happened, sure. More than I’d like.”

  “For instance?”

  “Okay. I have this friend down in the Keys, he’s a good guy, but shades of gray are his specialty. He’s spent his life slogging through one moral muddle after another. So, yeah, from all the bullshit Thorn dragged me into over the years, I know things aren’t always as clear-cut as we’d like them to be.”

  Her body hardened, head lifting.

  “Your friend’s name is what?”

  “Thorn.”

  She blinked. All the shadows were gone from her eyes.

  “He’s a longtime buddy. Why, you’ve heard of him?”

  “The name came up recently. Long-lost relative of the Milligans.”

  “I didn’t realize it was public knowledge.”

  “Not public, no,” she said. “But I’m a cop. We have our sources.”

  She looked out at the green slope blazing with sunlight.

  “Look, I’ve got some rounds to make,” she said. “Watch the videos. I’ll be interested in your take on things.”

  When she was out the door, Sugarman stared out the window for a while. The woman was gaming him, but he still couldn’t decide just how. He shook his head, then pulled out his phone and redialed the cell number Thorn had been using but got the same woman’s robotic voice: “This number is not available . . .”

  Sasha knew it was down to minutes. The invisible filaments joining her heart with Griffin’s told her that his hour had come around at last. His breath was slow and smooth. Beyond the reach of pain, he was smiling quietly, the way she’d seen them on the battlefield. Bodies torn open, limbs blown away, yet the dying soldier flushed with an eerie exhilaration.

  She held him in her arms and savored his scent, his warmth. Imprinting it all, storing it deep. From time to time he opened his eyes and looked at her. He had nothing to say and neither did she. So she cooed to him, a wordless song she’d invented when he was born, half hum, half hymn.

  For years it put him to sleep and it seemed to ease him now, as they lay in the shade, the water rocking the boat in rhythm with Griffin’s departing breath.

  A wind from the north had begun to drive thunderheads before it, the northwest sky turning into a curdle of darkness. Tree limbs flexed, the foliage swelling and heaving as the wind prowled the nearby island.

  She fingered away the bubbles from his lips and looked down into his half-open eyes. It was nearly done.

  So goddamned unjust. She’d never asked for much. Just the simple things. Nothing extravagant, no wild dreams of riches or knights on white horses. All she wanted was the husband she had and the son that came to her.

  That was more than sufficient. Her cup overflowed.

  For years she lived her dream—the uncomplicated routines with C.C. and Griffin. Cooking, doing laundry, a garden out back, a view of the woods, one close friend she loved like a sister, classes at the junior college. Seeing the boy flourish. Watching him become a man, become more than Sasha ever was, smarter, funnier, happier. Watching him embrace his rural life while quietly yearning as his father once had for challenges beyond. An orderly rotation of the planets and the seasons and the moon and all things natural. It was more than Sasha ever expected, more than she believed she deserved. A gentle man who loved her. A boy who made her proud.

  Griffin tapped her on the hand.

  “What, baby? You need water?”

  He motioned behind her, a drowsy wave.

  She swung around, drawing the .45 from her hip holster, bringing the pistol up with both hands, panning back and forth across the empty inlet. Spooked by her own spookiness.

  Griffin patted the deck. She came back around, lowering the weapon.

  He pointed at his blue knapsack. Five feet away near the console.

  She got up, retrieved it, brought it over. The sound of his breath was the rattle of seedpods in a parched desert breeze.

  She held the backpack close and he tucked his hand inside and came out with a can of lighter fluid. Sasha set the backpack aside, feeling the weight of other cans inside.

  She had a vision, a quick gut-kicking memory of C.C. and Griffin lighting up the charcoal for weekend burgers. A pyramid of briquettes, the flicker beginning to take hold, and the two of them, being silly, flaunting good sense, standing side by side taking turns squeezing from a can just like that, trying to outdo the other by shooting streams of fluid at the grill and laughing at the blue-yellow whoosh of flames.

  Griffin pulled himself up against the transom. He drew the can to his chest, and looked past her eyes. His head wavered fr
om side to side like a man drifting off at the wheel. He flicked the red button top loose, raised the can, tipped it on its side and closed one eye as if aiming down the sights of a sniper rifle.

  He squirted a stream onto his sneakers, coated them good.

  Sasha moved aside. The boy knew what he wanted, always had, and it wasn’t her place to manage this. He’d known with some certainty that he wasn’t coming home from this journey and had hauled along the cans. Who was she to say he couldn’t have the end he’d pictured?

  She kept away from the splash of fluid till he’d wet both legs of his jeans and settled the can on his lap. Tired now, breathing heavy, wincing with the effort, his shoulders squeezing forward as if he meant to fold his wings closed across his body.

  She took the can from his shaky hands and set it on the deck and kneeled to him.

  “There’s two more,” he said. “In the bag.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do the rest,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “You promise me. Say it.”

  “I promise you.”

  He held her eyes and she saw their withering light, and behind her own eyes was the flapping and swirling of dark wings, the caws of angry crows.

  “Thank you,” he said and got another breath. “Thank you, Mama.”

  He closed his brown eyes on that thought, his cracked lips smiling. She watched the air torture him. His spindly chest rose and fell, and he managed it again, using all his concentration, and yet again another breath filled him and let him go.

  Sasha Olsen was no more. Whatever she’d been was lost. She was out of body, out of mind, out of humanity.

  She rocked her boy in her arms and looked out at the gray paradise of the Everglades. Her mission now was simple. Good death, noble death, useful death, taking as many with her as possible. Find out whose side God was on.

  She crooned the song she’d made up long ago. A hum, a hymn, and now a dirge.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sugar clicked off, and then tried Deputy Rachel Pike. Got her, first ring.

  “So what’s my new assignment?”

  “I realize this is a lot to ask,” Sugar said.

  “Ask it.”

  “Pull some phone records.”

  “You got a warrant or subpoena by any chance? Know a federal judge?”

  Sugarman was silent. He knew the law and knew what could be done to get around it.

  “No, I didn’t think so. Good God, Sugar, this isn’t Homeland Security; we can’t go data-mining when the mood strikes.”

  After a moment more, Rachel sighed and said, “Just out of curiosity, where’re these phone records from?”

  “Sarasota. Law office of Carter Mosley, Esquire. Got a particular day. July eighteenth, anytime between nine and noon. Either incoming or outgoing. Or if he’s got a cell, it could be that.”

  “I have a full-time job, honey. I can’t put that at risk. There’s some strings I just can’t pull. Even for you.”

  “I understand.”

  The line went quiet long enough for Sugar to ask if she was still there. When she came back, the last of the teasing tone was gone.

  “You give any thought to that job offer? We’re interviewing some applicants, nobody in your league, but I can’t hold it open forever.”

  Sugar looked out at the grassy berm. Not really debating it, just trying to find some polite words.

  “I take it that’s a no?”

  “Sorry, Rachel. I’ve gotten used to the footloose thing.”

  She was quiet for a long moment.

  “Maybe it’s not my place, Sugar.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She sighed another time. He knew what was coming and suspected it had been brewing for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had given him the advice.

  “I care about you, Sugar. As a friend. It’s just that I think you’d be a lot further along in your career, and maybe in your personal life, too, if you stopped letting Thorn drag you into these shit-storms he’s so fond of.”

  “Thorn’s my friend. He’d do the same for me.”

  “Think about it, Sugar. Think what that friendship costs you.”

  Sugar was silent, collecting himself, his face growing warm.

  “You’re right, Rachel,” he said. ”Maybe it isn’t your place.”

  They listened to each other breathe for a few seconds, then Rachel clicked off without a good-bye and Sugar slipped his cell into his pocket. Another bridge burned. Shit, shit, shit.

  He fumbled with the remote for a while before he had the DVD synched with the TV and got the video running.

  It didn’t take him long to get the idea. Over the years he’d attended more public meetings than he cared to recall. Most involved the latest brainstorm of some real-estate scammer. The meetings were usually hopeless displays of earnest citizens failing miserably to stand firm against the hustlers and their bulldozers.

  After watching a few minutes of the general public of DeSoto County, Sugar felt the same sense of doom.

  Fast-forwarding over several rambling rants, he was about to shut the whole thing down when C.C. Olsen climbed onstage. Olsen was a rangy man with long swept-back hair, a hawk nose, and a Pancho Villa mustache, like some renegade biker from the 1960s.

  His voice was subdued, almost shy as he introduced himself to any who might not know him. The hubbub died away and the room stayed silent until he finished his talk. In the dozen rows the camera captured, nearly every person was leaning forward to catch Olsen’s words.

  First, he roll-called the names of eighteen locals who’d died of various diseases within the last few years, mostly cancer, a few respiratory ailments Sugar had never heard of. After Olsen pronounced each person’s name, their age at death, he gave the number of years they’d spent in the classrooms and hallways of Pine Tree School.

  Only two of the eighteen were cigarette smokers.

  In his calm, deep voice C.C. Olsen said, ”If these eigh-teen folks, all of them friends and neighbors of people in this room, if these eighteen human beings don’t count as a cancer cluster, then I don’t know what would.”

  Then he read off the EPA’s official report on radon in that region. How government investigators found that concentrations of uranium and radium in gypsum samples taken locally were ten times the average background levels in soil for uranium and sixty times the background levels in soil for naturally occurring radium-238.

  Radium-238 decayed into radon gas, which was colorless and odorless. In about four days radon decayed into polonium-218, which gave off alpha particles. These high-energy specks could penetrate to the nucleus of a cell and permanently change DNA. So if radon gas was inhaled into the sensitive tissues of the airways and lungs, over time the cells could be permanently damaged and the chances of contracting lung cancer or other respiratory ailments were greatly increased.

  Sugarman saw how challenging it was to make the science clear to such ordinary folks. But C.C. was patient and slow and kept things mostly to one and two syllables. A teacher teaching.

  Radium showed up in high strengths in the waste of phosphate mining. And when that radioactive clay and sludge was stacked two hundred feet high, it didn’t take a genius to see how easy it was for particles to be kicked up by prevailing winds. Those particles settled onto nearby ponds and trees and agricultural areas, and got trapped inside buildings, where they built up the way grease will film the walls of a restaurant from years of deep-fat frying.

  On the upper crust of the gypsum stacks the radioactive clay collected rainwater that grew into scummy ponds. That standing water evaporated and the fumes spilled down the sides of the harmless-looking mountain same as fog descended hillsides and gathered in valleys. But you couldn’t see radon like you could see fog. The only means to measure the stuff was with detection meters that monitored exposure over extended periods.

  And in the first video, that’s all C.C. was asking for. Funding from Bates International to pay fo
r a few dozen radon detectors. Sounded like a no-brainer to Sugarman.

  When C.C. Olsen was done, Carter Mosley stepped to the podium amid scattered catcalls. With a half-smile, he waited till the noise died away. Though Sugarman had met him the night before, he hadn’t paid much attention. He took him to be a quiet, unassuming man.

  The Mosley he saw on the TV screen was something else. In denim shirt, khakis, and scruffy moccasins, he’d dressed the part of some disheveled poet just back from a ramble through a fairy-tale forest. But his expression was anything but blithe.

  Sugarman froze the video, then advanced frame by frame till he got a focused image of Mosley’s face.

  Black reading glasses were perched on the tip of his nose and Mosley’s sharp blue eyes squinted above them at the audience. White Scandinavian skin, expertly barbered silver hair, eyes a deep blue. On first glance his smile had a bemused air, but the longer Sugar looked, the more it resembled a sneer.

  Sugarman punched the play button and watched Mosley continue to smile as the hoots and grumbling subsided. When the room was completely hushed, Mosley seemed to count off a whole minute before he began, as if letting the air clear of the fumes of their childishness.

  When he spoke, he echoed Olsen’s slow delivery and folksy manner and seemed perfectly at ease before the crowd. After only a sentence or two, though, Sugarman’s bullshit-detector was jiggling fulltilt.

  “I want to compliment Mr. Olsen on his skillful presentation. I can certainly see where he came by his fine reputation as a teacher. I’m sorry to admit I’m not in the same league as C.C. when it comes to eloquence. So bear with me, please.

  “He paints a gloomy picture, and to be honest it gives me the shivers. I’d be terrified for us all if what Olsen claims turns out to be true. That’s why Bates International has decided to commit substantial resources to examine these accusations of Mr. Olsen.

  “Starting this week we’re bringing to Summerland the best scientific minds available, men and women from all over the United States, and they’ll be setting up their monitors around the perimeter of the gypsum stack, examining the data and statistics these devices capture. Bates International, and in particular Abigail Bates, is fully committed to tracking the source of any airborne migration of radon gas. Absolutely committed to being good citizens in this community where we live.”